1

It was no longer a time of hunger. Earlier, bread had been spread with pork fat, butter or bacon melted in the warmth of the hearth. Then came olive oil sprinkled with sugar on toasted slices. ‘A blessed glory!’ according to Amadora.

‘A blessed glory, that’s right!’ she would murmur while stirring the contents of the pot.

Elsa never got to try such palatal delicacies. It repulsed her a little to sink her teeth into the crust and feel the soft part soaked with oily currents sliding down the corners of her mouth. Esperanza, her mother, on the other hand, remembered it as a treat from her childhood. Without a doubt, hunger belonged to other times… Now Elsa sweetened her mouth with chocolate, frequently changed her shoes, not only when they were too tight or the leather was worn, but to match a newly bought blouse, although austerity reigned in that household. To be sure, Elsa ignored the feeling of emptiness in her stomach, of cold in her body from a lack of clothes or heaviness in her eyes because of the absence of images with which to nourish a feeling of sleepiness. To say she had never suffered hunger and cold was to affirm an irrevocable reality. Which was why she shouldn’t feel guilty…

‘… because nobody is born with guilt in the cradle, only with sorrow, my daughter,’ Esperanza used to comfort her.

Meanwhile, sitting at the table in silence, Elsa listened to the conversations among the adults, who often spoke of a past in which hunger seemed to have a life of its own, and it struck her as anachronistic to mention this before the food served daily with handcrafted modesty and with generous culinary abandon on days of celebration.

During these conversations of a monotonous bent, hunger would be joined by the word ‘war’. Hunger and war were two words that coincided in the language of her grandparents. Xuliano Contreras pronounced the word ‘war’ with great emphasis because he had actively taken part on the Republican side, and hunger had been relegated to an unimportant second level for the defenders of the cause.

‘There was no time back then to think about rumblings in the stomach, only about the crooks who were set on stealing our ideas,’ he exclaimed with exaltation, sending a mouthful of red wine down his throat, conjuring up anecdotes in which ideals played a pre-eminent role.

In Amadora’s mouth, on the other hand, the word ‘hunger’ appeared like an exhalation and, as she pronounced it, her eyes flicked towards the steaming dish of newly cooked chickpeas, she dipped her spoon in the potage and gobbled up the broth with predatory voraciousness. In her grandmother’s eyes, Elsa discerned a hint of greed where sparks of pain glistened. The hunger of another age had been so devastating that the word ‘war’ was often joined by another – ‘disease’ – often accompanied by a cruel adjective: ‘incurable’. Amadora would cry, as if reciting a litany:

‘War is an accursed female that marries death. She brings along misfortunes and makes scoundrels of people. Few can say they haven’t been carried along by her tyranny and committed acts they later regretted… It takes a lot to lift your head when the memories weigh so much… But I always defended the lives of my people before everything else.’

Included among the ‘people’ she referred to were her children, Fernando and Florinda, as well as a family saga whose members had been extinguished one by one as a result of the aforementioned war, natural diseases, old age and sadness… At that time, Sagrario, her sister, had managed despite the circumstances to survive the lack of encouragement.

2

Elsa grew in an embittered atmosphere of painful evocations of the past. For years, her parents did not add or remove a single comma from the remarks of her grandparents Amadora and Xuliano, who had become the transmitters of an age of conquerors and conquered. That dark world impressed her so much that a seed of anxiety sprouted inside her and, every time she bit into a piece of bread, she felt as if she was betraying her ancestors’ memory, the misery of people who lacked the basic means of survival, and she even questioned to what extent she had the right to plan for the future when there were those who lacked a present. Her mind was an oily pool on which floated contradictory sentiments.

‘You can take everything away from a girl, except for hope,’ Esperanza murmured to herself, disapproving of her mother-in-law’s attitude.

Elsa, focusing on the sparks coming out of the stove, wondered why nobody had ever spoken to her clearly about hardly anything at all, certainly not Sagrario. In fact, she wasn’t even aware what Grandma Amadora’s sister represented in the family circle until she passed away. Seeing that sickly body inside the modest coffin, without the slippery expression that, as far as she could remember, had accompanied her in life and had only left her at the moment of her death, impressed Elsa. She noticed a breathlessness in her throat when she understood that, once Sagrario was buried, no relative would wish to alleviate her burning desire to find out about the deceased woman’s guilt. Because if there was one thing she was certain about, it was that a great sense of guilt hung over Sagrario’s coffin, at least in the eyes of her grandparents.

Elsa at once became convinced that the dead woman’s delicate image was the fruit of earlier hunger, but what she couldn’t understand perhaps was why she and her family enjoyed relative well-being, while Sagrario wandered about the house like a ghost, entered the kitchen when everybody had finished their breakfast, lunch or supper, and sat down in the corner, waiting for Amadora to serve her leftovers in a bowl, as if she was a dog. She would remain silent, then get up and shut herself in her room, dragging her feet, avoiding people’s eyes in the corridor, trying not to bump into anybody, especially Grandpa Xuliano.

Elsa’s natural curiosity forced her to conceal herself and spy on her secretly. More than once their eyes met, which sent a shiver down her spine, although they never went so far as to exchange words, despite her suspicion that Sagrario and Aunt Florinda were hiding a secret. The furtive looks both women gave each other caused Elsa’s fervent imagination to travel along unexplored paths.

In Elsa’s mind, Sagrario symbolized all the secrets that her grandparents’ mouths kept quiet, especially when her walking was silent, not just because of the advance of her feeble body and her moderate pace – her geisha’s shuffling gait – but because she walked barefoot. Those naked feet witnessed to the most terrible poverty in the eyes of a girl who couldn’t understand why, when the war had finished so many years earlier, her grandmother’s sister lived in isolation from the rest of the family, on the margins of their lives. In front of the coffin, her doubts increased. For the first time, Elsa received an image that astonished her: Sagrario’s feet were shod in a pair of pretty high heels with a green velvet bow on their uppers, shining so much they hurt the eyes. Elsa wondered what a dead woman needed shoes for if she had walked barefoot all her life. She glanced around at the assembled company – from her grandparents to her parents, passing through her aunt Florinda – but only ever encountered an evasive disposition.

3

Elsa thought a flicker of the eyes, a gesture or significant attitude on the part of her grandparents was enough for her mother to give way before their tacit orders. And yet her father was different. Fernando Contreras did not willingly succumb to impositions. He was an educated man who by dint of circumstances had been forced to support his family with a job that wasn’t on his level. According to Amadora and Xuliano, he had married Esperanza to rescue her from hunger. With a posture that was a little overweening, they claimed they had managed to overcome the miseries of war without needing to sell themselves for a bowl of lentils, while the people in their daughter-in-law’s house had lived like lice – at the expense of others – betraying the only thing that should never be betrayed: their ideals.

With the passing of the years, Esperanza took it upon herself to explain to Elsa that her grandparents’ hatred for her family derived from a time when her family had fought on the side of the Nationalists, some out of conviction, others to banish hunger and fear. Her father had been among the first, and she wasn’t exactly proud of this fact, but nor was she going to disown him… The fact that Fernando had dared to woo and then marry her had been a challenge to the principles of Xuliano Contreras, who, following this confrontation with his son, did not speak to him for years, until she, baby Elsa, his first and only grandchild, was born and he decided, on Amadora’s advice and for the good of the child, to let bygones be bygones.

‘Reds to the core, convinced Republicans, your grandparents’ lot,’ Esperanza had said to Elsa one time, on their way to the cemetery with Fernando, a walk they often undertook with the excuse of changing their dead ancestors’ flowers.

‘They are choking on their resentment,’ added Fernando, ‘and with the passing of the years their blood has turned to bile. They martyred your mother as if she was to blame for the errors committed by her family and truth, that ambiguous thing, was only with them. There are always two sides in war, and both suffer because they are right… But in this small territory of guilt and guilty, they tore into Sagrario, who was perhaps the least guilty of them all.’

‘Or not – who knows!’ exclaimed Esperanza, leaving the doubt hanging in the air.

Fernando Contreras had a fishbone of sorrow stuck in his throat because of the contemptuous way his aunt Sagrario had been treated. He remembered her from his childhood as a woman of delicate health and weak will who had taken it upon herself to raise his sister, Florinda, and him at a time when Amadora was seeing to the family’s needs by means of the black market, a mysterious, sonorous word that filled his childhood with fantasies. It took Sagrario’s death for him to give voice to his annoyance and dare to challenge his mother.

‘Aren’t you going to forgive her even now she’s dead? Have a little compassion and don’t send her to the other world with nothing on her feet. The poor woman paid enough while she was alive for a crime she committed in her youth.’

‘She never took pity, not even on the dead!’ declared Xuliano in a fit of pique.

Amadora was disturbed by her husband’s coldness – and her own – and for a moment, in spite of everything, her heart softened like a wet sponge releasing the flow of water contained in its porous consistency. That was how Sagrario’s feet ended up being cushioned by the very shoes that had once led to her condemnation.

Elsa couldn’t forget Fernando’s remark while they were winding a sheet around Sagrario, or Xuliano’s reply, or Amadora’s distorted features, and she clung to them as to a floating piece of wood in her search for easy answers, although she suspected they would be hard to come by.

4

Elsa was no longer prepared to put up with evasive answers, having seen how Fernando Contreras’s words had the desired effect on Amadora so that Sagrario could walk in the world of the dead with shoes on her feet, but of all the people around her she suspected only her parents perhaps would dare to speak, since for her grandparents Sagrario represented a sacrilege to the memory of the fallen and for her Florinda was a stranger who came visiting once in a while.

Amadora, after the burial of her sister, on her return to the house, sat down in the kitchen, slowly and carefully removed the black scarf that had covered her grey hair tied back in a ponytail and, while folding it, making sure the corners met and formed perfect squares that got smaller and smaller until the cloth had been reduced to the size of a handkerchief, she sighed. The final sigh coincided with the last fold. Elsa followed the movement of her hands with hypnotized eyes. Her grandmother’s exhalation disturbed her sense of fascination, and quite spontaneously a question of hers broke the silence being mutilated by the bubbling of the stew that had started boiling on the stove.

‘Will you miss her, Grandma?’

Amadora seemed to wake up from a hallucination. Her lips trembled, but she had no time to answer. Xuliano Contreras came bursting into the sweltering room and arrogantly responded for her:

‘“Once the shame is dead, the wound heals.”’

‘Meaning…’

‘Meaning it would be better not to rummage in the wound in case it ends up bursting and getting worse,’ he declared.

There were no more remarks, except for those of Esperanza.

‘Words are seams,’ she murmured.

Elsa’s mother liked coming out with the odd phrase while tacking up the bottom of a skirt, holding a button in place or darning some socks. For years now, these had been her tasks. Fernando’s had been to head off at sunrise to work in Bieito Nogueira’s wood factory.

Esperanza was another shadow in the house, just like Florinda until she got married and Sagrario before she died. Each in their own way lived under the pressure exerted on them by Amadora’s inquisitive gaze and Xuliano’s imposing presence, consumed by guilt.

Esperanza’s guilt was to have been born under a roof of Fascist thinking; she would redeem her pain by stitching up her mouth and not emitting any word louder than the previous one in front of her in-laws. Florinda’s guilt was to have been forced to marry a man she didn’t love; her affliction, to have turned into a dry female for life. Sagrario’s guilt was to have put on the wrong shoes at the wrong time; her sorrow, to wander like a barefoot shadow about the house.

No one witnessed the sense of anguish that settled in Esperanza’s heart when she crossed the threshold of that building. No complaint ever left her mouth, although her in-laws took every opportunity to remind her of her origins. She succeeded in silently enduring that lynching that was carried out behind Fernando’s back to avoid further warfare in the family, because of the great love she felt for her husband and to save Elsa any unpleasantries. Nor did anyone notice the stomach ache that burst Florinda’s insides when she lost her only love. The obligation to marry a man who repelled her etched a bitter expression on her face when she realized with her aunt Sagrario’s death her own decline had just begun. Meanwhile, everyone had taken part in Sagrario’s suffering – nobody had openly taken pity on her. And yet, when she retired to her room that last night, only Elsa noticed the enigmatic smile bordering her lips, unaware this was a sign of her definitive farewell.

5

In little more than a month after Sagrario’s death, Elsa turned sixteen, at the start of the eighties. Fernando Contreras thought the time had come to share with his daughter the secret that tormented her adolescent nights. He took her by the shoulders, and they directed their footsteps towards the path that led to the cemetery. They kept up a normal walking pace. Behind them, several pairs of eyes and the same number of thoughts met in the air while watching them leave from different windows in the house.

Esperanza tried to thread a needle, but couldn’t get the strand through the hole. Xuliano, who’d grown old in recent months, rolled a cigarette and muttered oaths. Amadora let the flow of water wash away the lettuce’s impurities. Meanwhile the three of them handed Fernando the power of revealing the family’s greatest secret to Elsa, which wasn’t his own marriage to a Fascist’s daughter, nor the business about Florinda, but Sagrario’s guilt… He assumed the role and thought it best done in front of her gravestone by talking slowly:

‘She was condemned by the rage of all those years of misery, Elsa, not by events. Your grandparents were cruel because other people took it out on their family and they unleashed their anger on a defenceless being that shared their blood. Sometimes human beings respond like that, without thinking, the animal they carry inside pulls at them and… In short, one shouldn’t judge them too harshly. My parents’ response was the result of pain…’

‘And hatred and resentment?’ inquired Elsa.

‘No. Pain, I think. Hatred and resentment turn people into stakes, pain turns them into erupting volcanoes. Your grandparents allowed their lava to overflow and after that they couldn’t hold it back.’

On the morning when the windows of the Contreras Soler family misted up with the breath of an expectant Amadora, Esperanza and Xuliano, as they watched Fernando and Elsa leave for the cemetery, the three of them hoped in the bottom of their hearts that with this gesture of consent, from now onwards, they would cease to avoid each other’s gaze and start to forgive each other for past affronts. By their actions or omissions, all of them had contributed to keeping Sagrario’s punishment alive, and that was a burden they would have to assume. They remained inactive while father and daughter were out, and only when they saw them reappear on the track did they take up their tasks with a sense of relief in their chests, not knowing what awaited them.

Esperanza succeeded in threading the needle. Xuliano rolled his cigarette and inhaled a large mouthful of smoke that invaded his lungs, only to let it out and release part of his own pride. Amadora let the water wash away the lettuce’s impurities and also the remains of the anger that still nestled deep inside her. But none of them could have suspected that the Elsa coming back along the track was not the same as the one who had set out. For that reason, Fernando’s words took them aback:

‘She wants you to do the talking, not me.’

His eyes fixed on Amadora and Xuliano’s tense bodies.

‘What did Sagrario do that makes you so ashamed and hurts you so much?’ spat their defiant granddaughter.

Although Xuliano wanted to take to his heels, Esperanza held him back with her voice, for the first time in all those years of silence succumbing to her wish to express an opinion.

‘Elsa’s not a child anymore and I don’t want to live in this house for another day unless the truth comes out. Enough of mysteries! I hope Fernando can understand and agree with me…’

The aforesaid simply nodded, making it clear he was on Esperanza’s side.

6

Amadora served herself a bowl of steaming broth, which she sipped slowly, and ventured to speak. Neither the hoarse engine of the car driven by Bieito Nogueira, Florinda’s husband, nor her daughter’s subsequent entrance into the house, interrupted her:

‘Sagrario was just a girl when this happened… All we had back then were hunger and sorrows… Perhaps the war’s to blame… She was just a girl who performed the role of a woman in my absence…’

Xuliano Contreras remained serious, his eyes fixed on the window that overlooked the cemetery where the remains of his ancestors rested, stroking his ashen beard.

‘Why do you make excuses for her?’ he exclaimed with contorted features, still keeping his eyes on the misted window.

‘In my heart, I forgave her a long time ago, but I preferred to remain quiet so as not to upset you,’ murmured Amadora, suppressing a sob.

Xuliano Contreras turned on the axis of his body. He threw the cigarette end on the floor and stamped on it angrily, crushing it with the toe of his shoe. His icy eyes surveyed the assembled company forming a semi-circle around him and finally settled on Elsa, who like Fernando years earlier had dared to defy him.

‘You have the Contreras’s courage in your blood, and that’s good, but you lack respect for your elders, and humility…’

‘You’re not the one to give lessons on humility,’ Esperanza went on the attack in support of her daughter’s cause, feeling suddenly emboldened. ‘If there’s something you’re guilty of it’s pride, and pride was never a good counsellor in times of war or peace.’

Florinda applauded her sister-in-law’s daring with her eyes, but kept quiet. Xuliano Contreras might have been expecting Amadora to throw him a lifeline, but she lowered her head, or Fernando, despite their obvious differences, to consider Esperanza’s words hurtful or inappropriate. But his son remained silent in the hope that sincerity might enter the house for the first time.

‘All right,’ Xuliano accepted the challenge, filling his chest with air, with his words and attitude bearing down on his granddaughter. ‘You want to know what Sagrario’s sin was? Well, here it is. You can judge for yourself… If after what I’m going to tell you, you think I was cruel to her – I mean, we were cruel to her – that’s your business… All the same, you lack the necessary perspective to understand certain things…’

‘Grandpa, I…’ stammered Elsa indecisively.

‘Be quiet!’ ordered Xuliano and, taking control of the situation, he emptied himself: ‘The day of Sagrario’s twentieth birthday was bad for all of us, but especially for certain people in the village… After midnight, there were knocks on people’s doors… We all knew what that could mean… Some fled, others didn’t have the opportunity… From our house, they took my father and my brother… they never came back… They took them all out, threw them into gullies, abandoned them in ditches or gave them the coup de grâce in the cemetery… Bastards, sons of whores!’

Xuliano Contreras banged his fists on the table. In that mournful silence, there exploded an outburst of impotence that sent a shiver down the spines of his listeners. There was a lot of pain and rage contained in those words, which he hid behind the trembling of his jaw. Elsa wanted to stop him, but the volcano’s burning lava had overflowed and there was no holding back its journey down the side, as it depicted the horror of an age that formed part of its memory.

7

The cooking pot bubbled in the kitchen to the rhythm of panting breath. Amadora groaned with her hands tied up in her apron; Esperanza bit her lips so hard they bled, saddened by the thought her own family had contributed to the massacre of that night in oblivion; Fernando tensed his jaw, anxious to drive away once and for all the ghosts invading the house; Florinda concealed her secrets; and Elsa trembled like a defenceless blade of grass in the middle of a barren field. She needed to seek shelter in her father’s protective arms while her grandfather’s eyes cracked like crystals of ice.

‘The following day was grey,’ continued Xuliano. ‘We knew at once they had murdered our relatives and others in cold blood for defending their ideals… what horror, what a slaughter, what an atrocious act…! And in the middle of all that impotence Sagrario appeared… She was radiant… The humility of her dress was in stark contrast to the gleam of her feet, she who always wore a pair of clogs, like all the humble women of the village… That morning, she was wearing some new shoes made of green velvet, the most beautiful shoes her eyes had ever seen… Eyes that shone with happiness – or was it sorrow?… Who can be sure?… When we asked her who had given them to her, she said she had found them in the cemetery, she had taken them from a village girl her own age who had been dressed for a party… she wouldn’t need them anymore because she was dead, just like her family… Can you imagine? This gesture horrified us… She had stolen some shoes from an innocent girl who was dead, and along with that her dignity! Can you understand?’ cried Xuliano Contreras in a broken voice.

‘She just wanted to look pretty for one day,’ murmured Florinda, defending her aunt’s memory. ‘She had just turned twenty, and it seems no one had ever given her a present.’

‘A horror and a shame, that’s what it was! With her macabre gesture, Sagrario brought shame on us all,’ reaffirmed Xuliano, who was having difficulty breathing. ‘With this single act, she swept away our sense of pride… You had to be there, to know your own people would never return, to try to understand how some shoes could force you to bow your head for the rest of your life… For that reason, I ordered her to take that blasphemy off her feet, and nobody reproached me for it; they all accepted that the punishment was just; she herself imposed her own penance… Her smile changed, her eyes lost their gleam… She realized any sentence would be light in comparison with that sacrilege… I can still hear her saying:

‘“From now until the day of my death I shall wander about the house like a barefoot shadow.”’

‘And that is what she did,’ continued Amadora, who had lost her strength. ‘Deep down we all thought the punishment had been too great for a sin committed unwittingly in her youth, but we never did anything to correct it… I hope wherever she may be she can forgive us, because we also were her executioners.’

‘That’s right, there are many ways of killing… and of dying…’ murmured Florinda.

The eyes of Xuliano Contreras, Amadora Soler, Esperanza, Fernando and Florinda gazed at Elsa, waiting for some kind of verdict for that liberating confession. All she said was:

‘The truth can hurt.’

But there are scars that never disappear, and the wake Sagrario had left behind her was far too deep to vanish with her death, the seeds of which had begun to put out shoots.

8

The Contreras Soler family wanted a gust of fresh air to enter the house after Sagrario’s death, as when one decides to open the windows on early spring mornings after a lengthy winter of closed doors and windows and rooms that reek of dampness. So the first order that came out of Amadora’s mouth was the following:

‘Florinda, daughter, go up to the attic and open the skylight. It’s time a little sun entered that nest of woodworm and cobwebs.’

She then aimed a diligent look at her daughter-in-law and added:

‘Esperanza, get a move on and open the curtains and the shutters in the rooms, leave the doors wide open so the sun’s rays can reach the landing.’

After that, she gestured with her head in the direction of the basement by way of emphasizing a new command, this time aimed at Xuliano:

‘Go down to the cellar with care and leave the door ajar so the air can circulate. I think that stench of nostalgia must come from some rotting wineskin. Check the barrels are OK, I don’t want us having vinegar instead of wine.’

Fernando patiently awaited his mother’s orders, which normally sounded bitter, but today were full of song.

‘You, son, go to the stables and let the animals out, poor things, they haven’t seen the light of the sun for days.’

After the work had been shared out, Elsa thought it unfortunate to have been excluded from the distribution of tasks.

‘What shall I do, Grandma?’

Amadora balanced her flesh as if carrying a ship’s set of sails and took several steps forwards until she was close to her granddaughter.

‘Go and air that head of yours, creature, you need it.’

Elsa’s head, however, was working like a Ferris wheel that doesn’t stop turning on its axis. She disliked the idea that Sagrario’s death had been a liberation for her grandparents and not a cause of sorrow, as normally happens when you lose a loved one.

‘Who is going to air Sagrario’s room?’ she spat out.

Elsa left the question hanging in the air, provoking different reactions among those present: she read surprise in the faces of Fernando and Esperanza, unease in Amadora, anxiety in Florinda and fury in Grandpa Xuliano, who as he was about to tread on the first step of the stairs that led to the cellar felt his granddaughter’s voice sticking in his back like a dagger. He turned around with contorted features, roaring like a wild bull. His face resembled a lit firework.

‘Repeat that question!’ he boomed.

‘Who is going to air Sagrario’s room?’ replied Elsa defiantly.

‘No one is going to air Sagrario’s room,’ declared Xuliano gravely. ‘As long as I’m alive, it will remain shut.’ His voice sounded like an order.

Amadora dared to suggest:

‘Perhaps Elsa’s right, Xuliano. Ever since that business, it hasn’t been aired. Sagrario kept the shutters closed and didn’t let a trickle of light invade her intimacy.’

‘Better that way. There’s nothing for us in among her belongings.’

‘Are you afraid her ghost is still dancing about the house like a barefoot shadow?’ said Elsa ironically.

Fernando and Esperanza gave her a reproachful look.

‘Elsa, that’s enough!’ commanded her father, who wasn’t used to raising his voice.

In the end, it was Florinda who spoke, rejecting the head of the household’s mandate and surprising everybody with her words. Elsa saw in her eyes a gleam that reminded her of the one that used to paralyze her when she was secretly watching Sagrario, and she again felt a shiver.

‘I will air my aunt’s room. I’m not afraid of ghosts. Are you?’

9

Amadora thought to herself it hadn’t been time for Sagrario to die – she herself was ten years older, and no bodily illness had come to disturb her peace. And yet she got to the conclusion it was ailments of the soul that had relieved her sister of a cruel existence by offering her a premature end. Without Sagrario, her martyrdom would come to an end, she reflected after burying her, feeling happy for the first time, not wanting to show it openly, but with a stab of anxiety rooting around inside, since she suspected Elsa would carry on fiddling with the wounds until they were raw flesh and all the bile came pouring out, as if she wanted to avenge her memory. She hadn’t been expecting Florinda, who always obeyed her father’s will, to step forwards like that. Suddenly she noticed her daughter existed, had her own presence, body and voice, and, most appallingly of all, had inherited the same glint in her eyes that had glowed in Sagrario’s pupils.

The words pronounced by Florinda in the middle of the kitchen cut the air, which had yet to enter the house, although everybody noticed a waft of hot steam that made it difficult for them to breathe.

‘I’m not afraid of ghosts. Are you?’

‘Open that window, Esperanza,’ asked Amadora breathlessly, turning down the stove and unbuttoning the top of her blouse.

Her daughter-in-law obeyed, although she suspected Amadora’s sweats had little to do with climatic conditions. Curiously, the window in the kitchen was the only one that got opened, because despite Amadora’s wish for a little fresh air to enter the rooms, something had broken.

Xuliano went out into the corridor, having first fixed his gaze on Florinda, convinced perhaps his daughter wouldn’t be able to hold it. But that wasn’t how it was, and he felt so unprotected he was overwhelmed by a wave of panic, a sense of terror that came from years back, there had been plenty of time since then for his face to acquire toasted wrinkles and his hair and curly beard a smattering of ash. Suddenly his back bent double in the midst of nothingness, and he felt his strength ebbing away. It was Fernando who realized his cheeks had lost their colour, his hands were trembling, his body had gone soft like a flexible blade of grass, he was shrinking inside his loose clothing and losing height. With a sudden stride he alerted the others, who were still immersed in the contradictory sentiments that had been sown by Elsa and Florinda. Amadora moaned when she saw her husband in Fernando’s arms, all defenceless, a heap of rags.

‘What is it, Xuliano?’ she asked, swiftly going over to him.

The aforesaid, being held by his son, endeavoured to stand up and murmured:

‘Quiet, woman, don’t make a fuss, I just need to rest, that’s all.’

But Amadora was unwilling to let destiny take hold of the delicate health that had been affecting Xuliano – who was unused to heeding doctors’ advice – for several months and she started to bark orders:

‘Fernando, take your father to our room. Esperanza, call Dr Aneiros and bring him up to date… As for you,’ she said, fixing her gaze on Elsa and Florinda, ‘get out of my sight! It was a bad decision when you thought of naming the deceased. I don’t want to hear her name mentioned again in this house. Is that clear? Sagrario was a shadow while she lived, but “once the body is dead, so is the picture,” understand?’

Florinda and Elsa understood.

10

Some months earlier, Xuliano Contreras had been diagnosed with a heart condition of some seriousness, which he kept to himself and hid even from Amadora, forbidding Dr Aneiros to talk to her about it, with the promise that he would lead a settled life. Meanwhile, recent events had not helped him to keep his word. After the relevant explorations, the doctor came to the conclusion that Xuliano wasn’t going to be able to survive on his own, without his wife’s assistance, and so he spoke to her behind the patient’s back:

‘His health is very delicate, Amadora. A heart condition like this has repercussions for anybody, but especially for a man of his age.’

‘How can you know this if you haven’t carried out any tests?’

‘Amadora, eight months ago, when we were away for a week, supposedly because we’d gone hunting, well, we didn’t do any such thing… Xuliano underwent an exhaustive examination, and the results were conclusive. He’s been taking medicine behind your back. He needs rest and a lack of excitement… Only time will tell…’

Amadora Soler, who still had the courage of another age drawn on her face, experienced such severe pain it was as if someone had ripped out part of her being. The love she felt for that man was animalistic – if she was left without him, she knew her head would flee to wherever he was.

‘Has he had any unpleasant experiences these days?’ asked the doctor. ‘It’s as if he’s suddenly lost the will to live.’

‘Yes, in fact. Something very unpleasant,’ she replied angrily. ‘He relived some events from the past that set his blood boiling. If only I’d known he was so poorly!’

‘It’s not your fault, woman. Xuliano is stubborn – there’s no contradicting him! In short, now you know what the situation is, make sure he takes his medication every six hours, and I insist – no unpleasant experiences. All the same, should something untoward happen, you know where you can find me.’

Dr Aneiros was almost family. He put his arms around Amadora’s plump body and kissed her on the cheek. She sat down on a stool in the kitchen and wiped away the stream of tears with her apron while watching through the window as the doctor got in his car and disappeared into the distance. She felt empty and alone, unable to tell anyone the great secret that seethed inside her chest. She had always stayed firm in her decision to keep quiet, as if she knew nothing of Xuliano’s past liaisons, but she had promised herself that one day, when the children were sufficiently grown up, she would pluck up the courage to reproach him to his face, despite the blind love she felt for him, or else precisely because of that love that had taken root inside her and she had never been able to pluck out. She had never found the right moment to speak to him and was always putting off the time to regain her woman’s dignity…

Elsa’s birth had given her the perfect excuse to remain silent. She thought it would be cruel for her granddaughter to grow up with a deformed image of her grandfather. And besides, what would she gain by revealing certain details of the past to Fernando and Florinda? She would only sow more pain. In that house, there would never be peace, and all she wanted was peace, even if it was invented and false.

She had finally decided to wait and have a private conversation with Xuliano when the two of them were alone, he smoking a cigarette, as always. She imagined him looking out of the kitchen window, his gaze fixed on the cemetery, while she peeled potatoes, shelled peas or sliced chorizo… But suddenly she realized she wouldn’t get another opportunity, because Dr Aneiros’s warnings had put her in the difficult predicament of having to choose between regaining her own dignity and potentially becoming his murderer, if she added to his suffering, now that Xuliano was convalescent.

Text © An Alfaya

Translation © Jonathan Dunne

This title is available to read in English – see the page “YA Novels”.