There was heard the odd sob in the audience, intense groans that pointed to a favourable predisposition among the public. Señorita Pura, possessed of great psychology or animistic knowledge of human beings, was encouraged by their response and thought she would do well to adorn her speech with even greater grace. She drank a little more water, took a deep breath and, moving her hands in time to her words, continued her account. “He looked at me, I looked at him, he took off the black cap he was wearing and said, ‘This one’s for you, pretty lady.’ The strangest thing enveloped my chest, something like an ardour I couldn’t suppress. I went red, trembled, a shiver coursed down my vertebral column.” “Your what?” shouted somebody who hadn’t understood the expression. “My spine,” she added with an air of authority, feeling grateful for the books Don Blas had given her to read through the years, for the prodigality of words, their significances and signifiers, always attentive to the needs life puts forward with urgency and without warning. The lack of culture, she thought during this interlude, was a fundamental element in the domination of the masses, as claimed by those two gentlemen, Ortega and Gasset, a pair of old sages she read with devotion and commitment, albeit her preferences were always aimed at the reading of dictionaries, a pleasure that provided her with gloriously relaxed afternoons. But she diverted her thoughts from such nonsense and centred on her discourse. “At the end of the bullfight, I was met by a man who had been sent by the bullfighter, a man with a bouquet of flowers who asked me to accompany him. I couldn’t resist the temptation and accepted both his proposal and the bunch of roses. He took me to the exit of the bullring and an enormous, red car, a front-line Mercedes, all luxury, especially designed for the finest bullfighter in all Iberia, with an enormous, multi-pointed star on its bonnet. It didn’t take Tomás long to arrive, and he suddenly spoke to whisper in my ear, without getting too close, the most fervent, ardent declaration of love I could ever have imagined. The tears ran down my cheeks. And without my expecting it, he asked for my hand in marriage. I accepted.”
The public didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, whether to fall silent or to insist with questions that might confirm the fiction or reality of Señorita Pura’s account.
“What’d he say?” asked a courageous lady who’d been listening, wrapped in the gracious shawl of Señorita Pura’s words. “Such things are intimate and private, nothing in the world would make me reveal this secret I keep in the quiet lean-to of my memory.” “I don’t think it’s possible to fall in love just with words, you need other kinds of things,” countered the other woman. “Words are the foundation of love, signs form the base of all feelings.” “And the body,” added the selfsame woman. “The body is just a receptor of language, you yourself should know there are many, manifold types of language and, when I talk of words, I mean looks, caresses, gestures, expulsions of air that push life towards your face, lips that don’t touch, sounds of music, intuitions, essences without presence, form or manner, almost imperceptible vibrations, all that.” “But those aren’t words.” “Oh yes, they are.”
The public, a little tired of this conversation, protested by pointing out that they didn’t care about the argument Señorita Pura and this lady were having, they could sort out their problems at a later date, the discourse should not be interrupted, they were dying to know how the story would end, words have their place and location at other times and in other moments. Señorita Pura, feeling victorious, straightened her blouse, pushed back her hair, lifted her face and resumed her account. “That night, he took me to his hotel, but careful, please,” she shouted, “we slept in different rooms, he in room 113 and me in 115. I do not wish to be superstitious, God save me, but the thirteen in his room must have had a very negative influence on his terrible misfortune, as you will soon find out.” The audience nodded. She continued, “That Monday morning, we hied ourselves to the nearest church and got married.
“We had to travel to Seville and there, embodied in the honeymoon of its sky, we loved each other for the first and last time.” An “ooh!” escaped from the ardent public. “The following day, there was a bullfight at La Maestranza, Tomás Small Tail was wearing a beautiful, green outfit. But he was unlucky. The bull gored him in the groin, right in the groin, the place transited by famous arteries and solid veins containing the liquids that nourish and sustain us, as asserted in many of the manuals I have been able to read all these years thanks to the help of Don Blas. The bull finished him off.” “Finished who off?” shouted someone who hadn’t been paying attention. “Tomás Small Tail, a gentleman and a bullfighter of incomparable grace and a soul as large as time.” “Is time large, Señorita Pura?” asked the selfsame individual. “Time is infinite, my friend, it lasts as long as death.”
“But you still haven’t explained about Libardino!” remarked another. “You don’t have to be very intelligent to work out what happened,” said the lady who had argued with her about the essence and presence of words, “Señorita Pura got pregnant that night, the only night she spent in the enchanting arms of Tomás Romero.” The woman ran and embraced Señorita Pura’s body. The others, aware that they were witnessing a major spectacle, applauded generously.
The child was born five months after her visit to the south, which made a few of the spectators suspicious. They hadn’t heard the whole truth. The same man who had earlier inquired as to the largeness of time put this question forward so that Señorita Pura could answer it, and she replied with resolve and vigour, “The child was born premature because he was exceptionally big, you may remember he weighed seven kilos; if I’d waited another four months for him to come out, I’d have exploded when giving birth.” “Your child is as large as time,” said the selfsame individual in an unsuccessful attempt to be funny. “Libardino is larger than time,” she rejoined curtly and circumspectly.
This response settled the curiosity of some and softened the disdain of others, who, going over events in a low voice, headed for the bar, home, their morning walk, Ébora’s repeated solitude in the asphyxiating heat of August. No more insults were heard, at least this is what Señorita Pura claims. She didn’t hear them because the ghosts and Holy Company that circumnavigate Ébora’s sky continue foolishly to discuss the origins of Libardino Romero, the boy born with excess soul.
At that time, the town cannot have had more than 2,000 inhabitants, most of whom were involved in the black market owing to Ébora’s privileged position six miles away from the border with Portugal. Ébora – with “b” and not “v”, to distinguish it from the Portuguese toponym Évora, a city in Alto Alentejo, prosperous, fine, 15,000 inhabitants at the time, a farmers’ market, textile and food industries, Roman fortifications, Monastery of St Francis, Loios convent, old mansions, as Libardino found out from a basic encyclopedia his mother bought him for one of his birthdays. Ébora, meanwhile, lacked monuments, lacked a sonorous past, lacked even ancestors and heroes that might have glorified its creation with their mighty deeds. All that was found was a stone inscription back in 1970, when there were plans for a lake that desired to be the sea. A lake that would occupy part of a beautiful valley surrounded by mountains, heather and scrub. A lake that desired to be the sea… if we were talking about any other territory, it would sound incredible, but Ébora is infected by the most elusive, unlikely intentions: an epidemic for which no viable therapy has yet been discovered.
Seven letters stood out on the inscription, forming a curious sound, a word that remains in the house of a town inhabitant and, for many reasons, forms part of the collection of extravagances and ravings amassed by Ébora. A word: Dalmara. Dalmara – when pronounced, it’s as if the moon has placed on the speaker’s lips the glow of the entire night, its clarity, its unlimited, happy candour.
Ébora lacked a past, but was inhabited by the strangest beings one could imagine. Don Blas would say the abundance of madmen in that place was due to the telluric currents that set out on their journey from a local spring: the Fountain of Enchantment. He may have been right. In the early evening, the most eccentric people from town would gather there to heal ailments doctors from the capital considered chronic and for which no solution could be found: rheumatism, arthritis, ulcers, impotence, mood swings. When Dr González arrived, days after the first television was installed in the mayor’s house, things changed: she prescribed drinking water from the fountain, a ferment that served to relieve all ills and charms, but that’s a story from another time, not these early postwar years, when the priest, Don Blas, had just arrived in Ébora.
Don Blas would sometimes join those gatherings at the fountain in hopes of befriending the locals and learning about their “woes and disturbances”, a happy, habitual expression on the lips of the priest, who turned up on the back of a greyish, ponderous mule after the war of 1936, fresh out of the seminary. His beatinic, Bethlehemian, angelic face contrasted with the period of scarcity and withdrawal the country was going through. “He was a gift from heaven to mitigate our suffering,” said the women of Ébora, who, either to forget their afflictions or just to enjoy the priest’s singular beauty, turned the church into the town’s de facto social centre, a status it disputed with the Fountain of Enchantment, to which recently only desperadoes would go to seek solace, mostly those of the masculine gender.
From eight in the morning, a large part of Ébora’s inhabitants would go there in procession, mainly children and women – the men could find in Don Blas’s words and face no argument that would occasionally purge their slight hunger or diminish their heavy fate. The priest was obliged to increase the liturgical services and went from three Masses a day to six, coinciding with the hours, three in the morning and three in the afternoon. Don Blas had always been of the opinion that, in order to banish demons and witches and imps and devils that endeavour to sink into the souls of human beings, you had to have three Masses a day; whichever way you looked at it, and despite his fondness of sermons, half a dozen seemed a trifle excessive. And yet he was the shepherd. He mustn’t abandon his flock. If the sheep demanded six Masses, then six there would be and, were it necessary to up the number to twelve, he wouldn’t be the one to block such a sublime decision, the people are wise and rarely wrong about matters concerning their religiosity or need of divine aid, something that was so necessary in this time of emptiness and hate, lack and outings in the light of the impalid moon that announced shots amid the quiet pebbles of night.
