LOBOSANDAUS

I

September 15th

My dear Uncle,

In accordance with your instructions, I am writing to put you au fait with the details of my arrival in this district of Nigueiroá and, more precisely, in the small town of Lobosandaus, the seat not only of the district capital but also of the local school to which I have been appointed thanks to your paternal protection and munificence.

Situated on the lower slopes of the range known as the Serra Grande, Lobosandaus has a population of one hundred inhabitants and has made a strong impression on me. It lies silent here as the oblique sun of these last days of summer lends it a Mediterranean air, dry and clear. The market place is a field of oaks several centuries old: it forms a terrace and is surrounded by cast-iron railings with two rosettes by Malingre, in the style of those at the Esplanade in Ourense, making an excellent belvedere that overlooks the plains through which meanders the small river known locally as Das Gándaras although in maps it is called Lucenza, as at its highest point it passes through the parish of that name. On the far side of that expanse of broom and brushwood, amongst whose undulations dolmens are not uncommon, looms an immense dark wall crowned by crags in unexpected shapes, like strange sculptures resembling fantasy organ pipes. This is the Serra known as do Crasto, which stands facing the Serra Grande. The boundary stones of Portugal are planted on its highest peaks. Even now, as I write you this letter, moments before I present myself at the school to take up my post, I can see from my room this awe-inspiring expanse of wasteland, on which the cattle belonging to these herdsmen graze and the early blossoms produce the clear, heavy honey that has brought such deserved prestige to the district of Nigueiroá. For the fact of the matter is, Reverend Uncle, that no sooner had I arrived than I was invited to take up my lodgings here at Aparecida’s, and found them highly satisfactory.

I have a spacious room, with a writing desk, leading into a glazed balcony with which other rooms also connect. From here, contemplat­ing the distant border peaks, I shall keep you informed of the little things making up my life in Lobosandaus, which already feels, only an hour after dismounting from the mare that brought me from Bande, following an interminable stagecoach journey, like an end of the known world, a secluded yet sunny, pleasant and hospitable place. Aparecida the inn-keeper and her husband Luís could not have been more attentive, ceremonious and warm in the welcome they gave me. It is they with whom I shall have to dwell, God alone knows how long for, and it is they who will introduce me to the life and the world of the people of Lobosandaus, this town of which I am now a resident, although a privileged one because of the educational and public function that has brought me here.

Wish me, therefore, much good fortune, Reverend Uncle, whose hand I kiss in filial reverence.

II

September 20th

Reverend Uncle,

Following on from my previous one, and without waiting for your reply, I hasten to send you a second letter from Lobosandaus in order to recount an incident of a most unfortunate nature.

This morning the earliest risers in the town found, hanging from the branch of a cedar by means of a slip-knot made in thick rope, the body of a fifty-year-old man which turned out to be that of Señor Nicasio Remuñán, a gelder by trade from the neighbouring parish of Lucenza. “He always wore Mexican silver spurs and was a man of great presence,” the old servant at the inn, Hixinio by name, told me. The event has left its mark on me because just a couple of days ago, the day after I arrived in Lobosandaus, I had occasion to see this man Nicasio come to Aparecida’s wearing a large hat with a turned-down brim and a thigh-length sheepskin jacket, unbuttoned so as to best display his watch-chain with three sovereigns dangling from it. He had an honest laugh in which shone an abundance of gold teeth and he spoke in a loud voice, as if to announce himself by bugle-call. Long brown whiskers adorned his upper lip as though he were wearing two brushes set opposite one another beneath his red, potato-shaped nose.

The truth is that I had taken a liking to the poor gelder. As he shook my hand, he fixed me with an intense gaze and welcomed me to the lands of Nigueiroá. “Through which Jesus Christ did not pass,” he said with a wink which seemed mysterious and something like a warning of danger ahead.

I should also like to inform you that, as you instructed me, I betook myself to the presbytery to visit Don Plácido Mazaira. I handed him your letter of introduction and, to be frank, I did not like the reception he gave me. He seemed a cold and ungiving man. He will not look one in the eye and did not even ask me to sit down or offer me any hot chocolate and cake, his afternoon snack. Nor did he enquire after your health. And so, Reverend Uncle, if you will allow me, I shall make no further advances towards this unpleasant priest who, evidently, shuns all dealings with strangers even if they be nephews of the Canon Penitentiary of Ourense Cathedral. Furthermore, he gave me the impression that he isolates himself from the people of his parish.

With nothing else to report and awaiting your esteemed news, I send you my respectful regards.

III

October 5th

Dear Uncle,

The fact that you happened to be acquainted with Señor Remuñán came as a great surprise to me. I did, indeed, realize that he was a supporter of the agrarian cause but, given that in these parts the ancient institution of fiefdom does not even exist, abolicionismo almost completely lacks relevance here. I was also utterly unaware that Nicasio Remuñán was, as you now inform me, a leading propagandist for “Solidaridad Gallega” and a dearly beloved friend of the parish priest of Beiro. Naturally, the discovery that the unfortunate gelder had, with his jokey talk, brought joy to the delightful gastronomical and literary gatherings which I know you regularly attend in the company of Don Antonio Rey Soto, Don Miguel Ferrín and Don Basilio Álvarez at the Pousa de Vilaseco Inn, made available by Dona Angelita Varela for such innocent pleasures – all this made me react with a strange intensity to the sorrowful event, already recorded as suicide, it seems, by the judge in Bande.

What can I say, Reverend Uncle? Ever since the day that Nicasio Remuñán hanged himself from the branch of a cedar by the water-mills of the River Lucenza or Das Gándaras, all one ever hears in Lobosandaus is the gelder this, the gelder that, Nicasio was this, Nicasio was that, and there seems to be no other topic of conversation at Aparecida’s, where I spend all my time outside school hours because for a week now I have been living in the middle of a second Flood. A dense, impenetrable rain, immobile like a veil of milky light hanging before one’s eyes, envelops the days, and the nights are a downpour of water chattering on to the roads, a fitful yet constant clamour of slates and thatch weeping out all the solitude of this God-forsaken place on to the paving stones below. And with each new discovery I make – that old Nicasio was a childless widower, that Señor Remuñán came from the Pontevedra area, from Poio to be precise, as the assistant to the blacksmith of Celanova, and that he married in Lucenza – and as you inform me of his life beyond these harsh lands, a strange feeling of danger steals over me time and again whilst in my mind’s eye I see, usually at the instant preceding sleep, the face of the deceased, winking at me the day I arrived here.

Aparecida’s inn and shop boasts an iron kitchen range with a wide marble slab all around it, at which sit the travelling salesmen, when there are any, people coming to market and, on a daily basis, myself, of course, for lunch, supper, and, above all at night, for long conver­sations and endless talk. The centre of attention there is Clamoriñas, a young servant girl with a peach of a face, whose headscarf lies on her shoulders so that the blue light of the acetylene lamp catches her hair, as golden as ripe corn, and who, while she laps up the kale in her broth with a wooden spoon, laughs under her breath and, her half-closed little eyes glinting, gossips about how old Hixinio had a terrible argument with poor dead Nicasio. And this old servant, who brought up Aparecida and her brothers, all now dead or lost in Cuba or up north, starts to say and then unsay, malicious laughter escaping from his toothless mouth, full of large soft pieces of bread, that this happened, that happened, and the other happened. And I reach the conclusion that Nicasio Remuñán was indeed an unrepenting Don Juan who had no respect for either single or married women and who had once been obliged to spend some time in Portugal because of behaviour forbidden by the sixth commandment, and the priest was sick and tired of dropping hints against him at mass. Yet the young people liked him and, after all, he was a welcome daily visitor to the spinning-place, where he had a special gift for worming his way into singing duels and where he was the best dancer of the bolero and the lancers which, as, Reverend Uncle, you are doubtless aware, are the rhythms most enjoyed by the people of this remote place, to the accompaniment of tambourines, triangles and frying pans. I am un­able, however, to refrain from telling you, Reverend Uncle, that a possibly absurd, if persistent, idea is obsessing me. What if Nicasio the gelder did not commit suicide and was murdered as a result of his bad behaviour with women?

Having no further news, your loving nephew bids you farewell.

IV

October 22nd

Reverend Uncle,

In answer to the question that you ask me with regard to the doctor, Luís Lorenzo, I must tell you that he spends much of his time in Bande, that he does not attend the gatherings at Aparecida’s and that he seems to me a townsman and extremely unhappy with his lot in this outpost of civilization. Only once or twice have we exchanged greetings. But I should say that, when we were introduced by the mayor, who I do not remember whether I have told you is Luís, nicknamed the Sparrow, the good-for-nothing, sickly-pale husband of the diligent Aparecida, Luís Lorenzo dismounted from a mare as black as coal, doffed his bowler hat, stood to attention most courteously and held out his hand as he offered me his house and his services. “I am the locum and I can barely survive on what I’m paid in kind,” he told me, his petulant lips puckering in disgust. He looked around and then stared straight at the Sparrow, as if defying a strange and powerful force. I understood nothing. If I may make so bold, Reverend Uncle, I have to say that, in my opinion, the locum is a fop.

As for the details of my life, they are of the simplest. I go from the school – where, as you know, I enjoy my teaching duties as others find pleasure in the forbidden fruits – to the inn, where an amusing, chatty society takes shelter, while outside, in the world, the rain never stops pouring down in violent, ferocious swirls.

And little by little I am becoming acquainted with facts relating to the family that houses me, facts that had not been revealed to me earlier, probably due to extreme reticence. Namely, that the Sparrow and Aparecida have a son and a daughter. The son, who is older, is known as Turelo – although he was baptised Artur – and he is often in Portugal, engaged in the gold and silver trade; he is married to Dorinda, by whom he has no children – she is a splendid woman with a dark complexion and a generous figure who spends long hours at her parents-in-law’s, being on good terms with them. The daughter, ap­parently younger, is confined to bed in a place that I vaguely locate in the southern part of the house. Despite the malady that keeps her bedridden, I have not heard that Luís Lorenzo ever visits her. Clamoriñas has confided to me, with her heavenly little eyes wide open and astonishment on her lips, that the daughter’s body is covered in gaping ulcers. She is called Obdulia, the bedridden woman.

With no more news for today, your nephew begs to take his leave of you.

V

October 30th

My dear Uncle,

The rain has all gone and has left the sky clear, so very blue that it seems in its purity to wound one’s eyes. The temperature has plunged and, with it, my soul is growing cold, Reverend Uncle. Lobosandaus is a burden on my shoulders. Do not worry, dear Uncle, about the current of concupiscence that you have doubtless detected in my mention, a little over-adorned, I like to think, of Turelo’s wife Dorinda. Believe me, do, she emanates a harmonious power, as when we are overwhelmed by the sight of a massive crag, but nothing could be further from me than a sensual inclination towards this married woman or towards any other individual of the female sex living in this deadly solitude. The cold has frozen the wells of my desire, of all desires. I find that I am distant, absent; I could not say that I am sad. Just as every morning the sun dawns over the thick frost that turns to white crystal the naked branches of the birch trees, so with every day that passes it is as if a hateful, hard indifference were taking more and more control of my inner being. I feel that the flow of friendliness between me and my pupils has also frozen. I say little and restrict myself to listening to the chatter that is interminably ravelled and unravelled in Aparecida’s kitchen. And what is even stranger, Reverend Uncle, I realise that the people I mix with and whom I most often see are going through the same process. I know, without their saying anything, what they are thinking and I find myself more and more distant from, and with an increasing dislike of, Luís Lorenzo and Don Plácido Mazaira. I believe that they repay me in the same coinage.

I shall not trouble you further with my sombre mood, and respectfully kiss your hand.

VI

November 12th

My respected Uncle,

The lands of Nigueiroá are beginning to show their sullen winter face. The snow came, swirling down in the greyness, burying every­thing beneath its massive layers. It fell, at first, in a storm, with a glacial wind that lashed men’s faces, this morning. They arrived at Apareci­da’s with their eyebrows and moustaches whitened with snow. Later, in the afternoon, the wind abated and the sky, of a dirty hue, sent out a pale yellow glow above us. Everything was saturated with a pallid premonition of terrible things: the rooftops, the fields, the mountains all seemed to vibrate with a strange dead life inside. I had never known Lobosandaus so disturbed, and I was frightened.

Something happened to me, Reverend Uncle, just yesterday, immediately after the snowstorm. I should tell you that at Aparecida’s there is a wooden lavatory for the use, principally, of the customers and the proprietors, for the servants relieve themselves, as I discovered, in the communal cesspit between the rocks behind the yard wall and, if caught short, in the pigsty.

I felt the need to relieve myself and so (forgive me, Uncle, these insistent scatological references) I made my way to the glazed-in loft balcony at the back of the house, at the far end of which is the aforementioned lavatory. It was mid-afternoon, the snow had suddenly stopped falling and the wind had died down at an hour of tranquillity and bearable temperatures.

It was then that I felt a shiver down my back. A tall, thin figure was opening the lavatory door and approaching me along the balcony. Beyond the windows, the needle-like peaks of the Serra do Crasto made my skin creep. I stood to one side, truly afraid, I might even say terrified, Reverend Uncle. I stepped aside to let a woman wearing a white ankle-length nightgown pass by, protecting herself from the cold with a striped blanket pulled tight around her head and shoulders. She looked at me as she passed and I saw her pale face, her dark shrunken eyes enclosed by furrows. A forced, tense smile was directed at me. It was Obdulia, the bedridden woman.

With nothing else to report, your nephew bids you farewell.

VII

November 15th

My dear Uncle,

I have just received your much appreciated letter in which you show your concern about the state of my spirits and very kindly try to comfort me with the advice that I should focus my attention on my pedagogical work.

In all truth it seems as though the grey-brown expanses of broom and wild laburnum, the steely severity of the roof-slates, the terrifying halo of humility and the mists of poverty that cover sheds, houses and maize-garners thatched with the dark, damp straw of winter, the wretched puniness of the dogs, the cattle and even the people – as though everything, everything here had absorbed me, all of me, into its infinite mediocrity. I see the people here as intensely wan and in every face I observe globular eyes, large and protruding, I would even say cow-like, which make them all seem to belong to the same family. Eyes that appear even larger set in the eye-sockets of the charcoal men and herdsmen from Fraga de Mundil, who come down on market-day from the Serra do Crasto with the disquieting look of enigmatic and malevolent gnomes. The same eyes that the inattentive children at my school roll in the void, their tiny hands lacerated by chilblains; incapable of abstract thought and stupefied by the shots of raw brandy that their mothers administer every morning.

Whenever I come across Don Plácido or Luís Lorenzo, they drop their gaze and, after furtively greeting me, they quicken their pace and I know that they shun my company with the same intensity that I shun theirs. They regard me as one more inhabitant of Lobosandaus.

There is, however, one person in whom I do not see these cow-eyes that seem to confer a family air on the inhabitants of this damned place. I should like to make it clear that this person is Dorinda, whose body exudes, for me, the glow of a salubrious and comforting simplicity.

Your nephew kisses your beneficent hand.

VIII

November 16th

Reverend Uncle,

In the last few days the weather has turned from freezing cold to moderate and mild, with a fine, continuous rain that is sometimes no more than drizzle or light mist. Everything is grey and damp. And it happened that Obdulia (the woman whose body is covered in gaping ulcers) suddenly arose from her bed and started coming and going throughout the house, laughing and speaking with an unfamiliar stridency. I encounter her on pathways and in passages, in the back corridor and on the balcony. She always gives me a forthright look. She always greets me in a powerful voice that to me seems manly. She drinks wine in abundance, much to the consternation of her parents, who do not know what to make of such a sudden improvement in her health. Indeed, ever since she rose up from the malady that had kept her bedridden, she has often been seen in the company of her sister-in-law Dorinda, the pair of them arm in arm, engaged in endless whispered conversations. As a result I find myself deprived of Dorinda’s company and it is as if she were rationing her smile, on that fresh, dark rose of a mouth. I spend the afternoons in the clutches of melan­choly, staring at the bare oaks in the market place, and I stand there almost hypnotised in contemplation of the cast-iron rosettes. An eerie silence has overcome Lobosandaus of late. Many of my pupils are staying away from my school.

I shall keep you informed, Reverend Uncle.

IX

November 21st

Reverend Uncle,

I insist that you should not entertain suspicions about my feelings for Dorinda. As I have already told you, and as I shall now reiterate, these feelings are quite straightforward and pure. She seems to be one of the few normal people to be found in Lobosandaus. And, if you will allow me the sincerity due to a person who, like yourself, is so familiar with the failings and aberrations of mankind, as much through your long experience of administering the sacrament of confession as through your rigorous study of Ethics, I can inform you that there is at the present time no danger that I am, or shall become, the object of Dorinda’s sinful desire. There is no doubt that the beautiful young wife is in the diabolical power of Obdulia who, ever since she emerged from her sickly seclusion, has been exercising resolute masculine control over her sister-in-law. She loves her, unquestionably, with a nefarious love, with the blind fury of inverted passion. Dorinda, feminine, timid, is drifting into a vice that is perhaps replacing the legitimate love of her spouse, absent in Portugal. She has no eyes for me any more, Dorinda. The scandal exploded throughout the district of Nigueiroá, the news even reaching Bande, when old Hixinio caught them, mounted one atop the other, like calves on heat, in a corner of the straw loft where they (or rather Obdulia, I imagine) had made their nest amongst the oats; and he drove them away, beating them with a broom and screaming like a madman, calling them brutes and swine.

I hope to allay, with the disgusting episode that I have just related to you, your fears for my conduct. And yet my intuition tells me that there is more to this matter than one can see or hear. The gossip soon subsided and an icy silence has taken shape in Lobosandaus, and everyone at Aparecida’s seems indifferent, yet pensive and serious. I think they are worried about deeper, more mysterious issues than a simple if somewhat sordid lesbian outburst, if you will pardon the humanistic reference and the excess of sibilants.

Awaiting your esteemed news, your nephew sends you his respectful regards.

X

November 23rd

Dearest Uncle,

There has been a change in the weather and the laurel-toppling north wind has come, as cold and sharp as a knife, leaving all of us here in Lobosandaus with bursting, stinging lips. The going away of the rains has modified the oppressive situation which we had been suffering here, and the secret, harboured as I had suspected in everyone’s breast, has been revealed. Yesterday, Sunday, some surprising things hap­pened. When everyone returned from mass, the men gathered in groups in the town square – which is, as is well known, the custom here – to chat and discuss their affairs. Suddenly, as I was considering the bulging, bovine eyes of those people who seemed to be in the grip of some strange spell, I saw Obdulia appear, coughing loudly on the wooden balcony at the front of the house. We all noticed that she was wearing a pair of man’s trousers, which hung loosely on her, and that she was sporting a hat that might have been Luís the Sparrow’s. Suddenly, at the top of her voice, Obdulia demanded everyone’s attention, and raised her fists and her eyes. She opened her mouth and began to deliver a brief yet comprehensive harangue on the agrarian cause, speaking on the fundamental principles of the abolition of fiefdom, which you yourself know a great deal about, and even hold in common with Don Basilio. She had the unmistakeable voice of a man, did Obdulia, standing there on the balcony. I felt the shivers down my back.

“It’s Señor Remuñán,” the old servant muttered, gripping my arm.

“It’s him,” answered another man standing next to us.

That was when Clamoriñas burst bareheaded out of the door of Aparecida’s inn shrieking and pointing to the balcony as she shook her head and her blond plait lashed the cold air like a horsewhip.

“It’s old Nicasio! It’s the gelder!” she was crying.

There were those who made the sign of the cross. Women thrust their heads out of openings, emerged on to balconies and at doorways, and leant far out of windows, howling like animals. And Obdulia was soon overwhelmed by her family and locked into the loft.

It was from that moment onwards that the inhabitants of Lobosandaus began to speak clearly to me. Everyone agreed that the spirit of Nicasio Remuñán, the agrarian reformer and gelder, had entered Obdulia’s body, making the most of the fact that it was covered in gaping ulcers, and had taken her over. Everyone supposed that he had done so in order to possess Dorinda, about whom he had been crazy when alive.

In the certainty that you will find this letter extraordinarily strange, your nephew bids you farewell.

XI

November 30th

My dear Uncle,

You inquire after Dorinda’s husband, familiarly known as Turelo. Well, in my first days here in Lobosandaus I have hardly seen him a couple of times. Clamoriñas, the pretty serving wench, says that he never speaks. He is a short, pallid, weak individual. He is similar in build to the Sparrow. He always carries a wicker basket, the instrument of his trade as a trafficker in gold and silver. He never looks directly at one, yet I still noticed his bulging eyes, the stigma of the peasants up here. It seems that he comes and goes surreptitiously; he appears and disappears without anyone noticing. It is common knowledge that he always crosses the border at Guntumil, in the Serra do Crasto, and that, from Turei onwards, he travels along the main highways, roads and railways that lead to Braga, to Lisbon. I believe that, as yet, he knows nothing about his wife’s misdoings and misfortunes.

Regarding what you tell me about vain observances and superstition, I have to say, with all due respect, that one has to live here throughout a winter such as this winter to be able to understand the gloomy burden of mystery and the presence, which feels almost physical, of things and events that one knows are just ignorance and barbarism, but in the face of which one cannot maintain an attitude of haughty aloofness – fear, really – such as the attitude that the priest and the doctor and, I suppose, the apothecary, to whom I have not yet had occasion to introduce myself, adopt towards the inhabitants of Nigueiroá and even towards me, here, in Lobosandaus.

With nothing further to report, your nephew dutifully kisses your hands.

XII

December 8th

Reverend Uncle,

Something horrible and unexpected has happened. Obdulia, unhappy Obdulia, was discovered yesterday morning hanging by the neck from a branch of one of the cedars that form a copse near the water mills of the River Lucenza, sometimes called Das Gándaras, hard by the wall that encloses the field where Lobosandaus market is held. The weather suddenly took a turn for the better, as it did on the day when Nicasio Remuñán hanged himself at that very same spot.

The Civil Guard went to arrest Turelo in Terrachán, where he was staying, engaged in his trafficking. They took him to their barracks at Lobios, and there they beat him for two days and two nights. Then the judge at Bande released him, without pressing a single charge. Turelo was suspected, it seems, of being the murderer of his sister Obdulia, and they had also wanted to lay upon him the blame for the gelder’s death. It is said that the authorities had heard the rumours spreading through Lobosandaus, Lucenza, Fraga de Mundil, Riomau, Santa Marina de Freixo, Riquiás, in other words throughout all the parishes in the municipality of Nigueiroá as well as the neighbouring areas beyond the Portuguese border in the Couto Mixto, according to which rumours Turelo had hanged those two poor souls out of jealousy at the thought of their being with Dorinda, his radiant, enchanting wife. With his face the colour of a blackberry and his back dark and bloody from the flogging, Turelo returned to his home in Lobosandaus, but he did not stay there long, and he made his way to his parents’ house, where he went to bed, to that same bed in that same room where his sister Obdulia had lain for so long with her body covered in gaping ulcers.

Reverend Uncle: much as it may disgust you, I must tell you what all of us here think, that is to say what all of the townsfolk think: that Turelo did in fact kill Nicasio Remuñán out of jealousy because he was making advances to his wife, and that the gelder’s spirit did in fact enter into Obdulia’s open body in order to satisfy his desires for Dorinda and, finally, that Turelo did in fact kill his persistent rival for a second time by taking the life of his own sister. The judge in Bande naturally inclined towards the suicide theory, and Don Plácido Mazaira made an attempt to refuse the deceased a burial in holy ground, but he immediately changed his mind fearful, it seems, of the popular reaction in Lobosandaus, and he pretended not to know anything about what had happened.

Please accept, Uncle, a fond farewell from your most loyal nephew.

XIII

December 20th

Dearly beloved Uncle and Protector,

Everyone in Lobosandaus and the villages for many leagues around is witnessing with astonishment what is happening here. The days are becoming clearer and colder. The children’s attendance at school gets worse and worse. Those who do come seem to be deep in thought as they follow my lessons, but in reality they just sleep at their desks with their eyes open. Rounded, bulging, bovine eyes, the eyes of this community in which I live, and in which I suffer much anxiety, Reverend Uncle. There are no longer any evening gatherings in the kitchen at Aparecida’s, and one only hears, on occasions, the childish, angelic voice of Clamoriñas who, as she makes the beds, sings with a cadency and a malignant sweetness that I find frightening. And fear was indeed what I felt this morning as I lathered my face prior to shaving. I thought I saw in my own eyes, for a moment, the same dead, cold bulge of the eyes of the people of Lobosandaus. Old Hixinio sits motionless for hours on end, nobody knows what he is looking at, and he has aged many years all at once. No longer does he laugh. The people here hardly stir from their houses because a new occurrence has made them all withdrawn and mistrustful.

After a few days confined to his bed, in his parents’ house, Turelo decided to get up and everybody realised that a remarkable transformation had taken place in him. He began to walk with a firm step, to raise that head of his which had always been bowed. On that day, a Sunday, he appeared as people were leaving mass and, seizing Do­rinda by the arm, he ordered her to go straight home. She meekly did so and husband and wife began to live together again. Turelo made no further plans to cross the border. Dorinda was submissive, humble and passive, like a hen shaking her feathers after the cockerel has mounted her. The two of them would take long winter sestas together, until the sun had set. Then they would have their dinner, and the people of Lobosandaus would hear laughter from behind the kitchen window, as at a festa. Turelo began to wear tight leggings, iron-capped boots made in Vilanova, and spurs, and told everyone that he intended to go down to A Merca and geld piglets when the time came.

I do not need to tell you, Uncle, that here in this God-forsaken land everyone is saying that Turelo has been possessed by the spirit of Nicasio Remuñán, who made the most of the moments when Turelo’s body was open after the Civil Guards’ beating, allowing that old goat to fornicate with his desired Dorinda in total freedom by taking over the body of her own husband.

But it is the case, Reverend Uncle, that, even if all this is true, the spirit of Turelo, who has twice found the courage to kill his enemy, seems unwilling to tolerate the gelder’s invasion, and sometimes we all see Turelo strutting around in the manner of Nicasio, haughty and proud, as brave and smart as anyone, and at other times it seems to us that he returns to himself, with his lowered gaze and furtive walk close to the walls. One day Turelo mutters that he is preparing a trip to Amarante, only to contradict himself the next day by ordering his wife to make a pie with meat from a roebuck that he has killed in the Serra Grande, and take it to be cooked at the bakery, so that the two of them can eat alone, at home. One effect of the struggle taking place in Turelo’s open body is that sometimes he scratches his face and rolls about on the ground as if he wanted to injure himself. Aparecida never stops crying, while Luís the Sparrow has lost his speech and wanders along the lanes like a ghost.

This is what is happening, and I am telling it to you as it is, Reverend Uncle, even though I risk your attributing my narration to such forces as the influence of the milieu or any of the other forces that I keep suggesting to myself as I attempt to put an end to this nightmare.

Hold ever present. Reverend Uncle, my affection and my respect.

XIV

December 25th

Uncle,

Without awaiting your reply, your nephew sends you this letter from the very brink of confusion. This morning I was awoken by Aparecida’s screams of anguish, which were soon joined by the wails of many other women in the kitchen. Turelo had been found, at daybreak, hanging from a tree in the cedar copse by the river. The snow covers everything and muffles people’s voices. The sun glares down, making us screw up our eyes, these bulging, bovine eyes common to all of us in Lobosandaus. All of us here know why this has happened. To free himself from having Nicasio the gelder inside his body, Turelo took his own life. He killed himself to escape from an existence with Dorinda’s lover inside him. My head aches and I have a fever. I do not know why, but I have moved into poor Obdulia’s room. I have just noticed that Dorinda, as she passed me on the balcony on her way back from the lavatory, is not weeping. And she smiled at me, Reverend Uncle. When I offered her my greeting she showed her teeth and her pale gums and she smiled at me in an inviting way that inflamed my blood and aroused my lower parts, Reverend Uncle. I am terrified, I sense that there is somebody else in this room and I crave for Dorinda and I think that misfortune is going to return to Lobosandaus and that more bodies are going to be opened.

Come for me, Reverend Uncle; for the love of God, come and fetch me and take me away from here to Ourense.

ELASTIC BOOTS

“…?”

“Daddy’d decided to dig a cesspit in Auguela. He dug it himself, one summer. That cesspit was a flash of inspiration. Nobody in Auguela had ever seen anything like it.”

Auguela is on the Chaira moors, on the hillside where clumps of bracken mark a damp patch that, further along, develops into a trickle of water, and then into a marsh and stream which, far away, become a river called the Tuño.

“…?”

“No sir, Daddy never dug the cesspit with that idea in mind.”

“…?”

“We found out about it later. I was an eleven-year-old girl at the time. We were living in Vilar, in the parish of Lavadores. Daddy was a building-site foreman in Comesaña, near Vigo. I didn’t know any­thing about it. I found out about it later.”

The plainclothes police had wanted to lay hands on the girl’s daddy because meetings had indeed been held in the site hut. And on several occasions he had been seen entering Xosé Velo’s house, in Rúa das Travesas. Daddy was, beyond question, a member of the organization. The girl, at that time, did not know anything.

“…?”

“Mummy and me left our little house in Vilar, in Lavadores. And we came to the serra. We came to Auguela, our home village. We came back to where we belong, and where Daddy’d built a new house out of brick, and dug a cesspit, too.”

Auguela is ten houses and a few cowsheds and maize-garners. All the roofs are thatched, apart from the roof on the house that the girl’s daddy had built with his own hands. The girl’s grandfather had been arrested by the Falangists in Verín and killed in a ditch on the Alto do Furriolo, along with five other men whom they had marched out of the monastery. The people of Auguela keep some sheep and a couple of cows that graze on the Chaira moors. Mount Penagache, not far away, is a reminder of the Portuguese border.

“…?”

“Only Mummy and me knew that Daddy had come to Auguela too, to lick his wounds.”

The girl’s daddy had built the house and dug the cesspit as an affirmation of faith in human decency. Moving from one safe house to another, in various disguises, the fugitive reached Celanova and, from there, following the mountain trails, he arrived at his home village. He hid in the cesspit.

“…?”

“The cesspit was in the yard. In the house there was a wooden lavatory which was connected with the cesspit by a drain made of cement. The cesspit was about four metres deep. Once we had done our business in the lavatory, we threw buckets of water in, to swill it all down into the cesspit.”

“…?”

“When Daddy went into the cesspit he scraped away at one of the sandy sides and made himself a den, quite high up. He could hardly move, because if he stood up in the cesspit itself, he sank into the slime. All the same, he told Mummy and me to carry on using the lavatory in the normal way.”

“…?”

“Inside the cesspit he had a ladder which he climbed at dead of night, to stretch his legs in the yard and to be with Mummy. I only saw him a few times. At night was when he washed, ate and changed his clothes. That’s how it was, sir. The cesspit was covered with a wooden grating and a pile of firewood on top. He crawled out through a hole the size of a rabbit’s. Nothing happened during the first winter, but it was awful for Daddy.”

In the spring two men arrived in Auguela. Each wore a suit and tie, but their clothes were of poor quality, worn and dirty. Each had a stern look and an insolent stare. They both wore black boots, held tight to their shins with elastic.

“…?”

“No sir. I didn’t know that they were civil guards from the local squad. I just thought that they were strange because they both wore the same kinds of black boots with two pieces of U-shaped elastic to hold them tight to their shins. They must have been very warm boots in the winter.”

“…?”

“Yes. One of them was taller, and younger, with a little blond moustache. He was always smiling. His blue eyes made me feel scared. He often came back by himself, to talk to me.”

The sergeant from the local civil guard squad wanted the girl to tell him where her father was, where he was hiding. He asked her time and time again throughout the spring, as the days grew longer. The sergeant would appear before her in the most unexpected places: from behind a tree stump, even. Like a ghost he would appear, when the girl was on her way home, carrying her little jug of milk from Angoreus.

“…?”

“Yes, me, he only really talked to me. He never talked to my mother after the first time, when the two of them turned up in their elastic boots. In the shop he just asked once how much food my mother bought.”

The amount of sugar and rice that the girl’s mother bought was appropriate for two poor people. In a brief interrogation of the woman who kept the shop in Santa María de Vilar das Las, a league and a half from Auguela, the sergeant extracted the information he wanted, and seemed satisfied. But he knew that they had a vegetable garden and a she-goat.

“…?”

“The first time he came up to me I felt very scared. He gave me a packet of rich tea biscuits, made by Oliveira. I’ll always remember that. I didn’t want my mother to see his present so I ate them all before I got home.”

A certain complicity had tied the girl to the sergeant that day.

“…?”

“No. I didn’t dare tell my mother that I’d spoken to that man.”

“…?”

“No. The second time I spoke to that man I stopped being afraid of him.”

“…?”

“I felt a kind of trust. It might seem crazy, but I’d become…”

“…?”

“Yes, fond of him.”

During the course of their encounters, always in remote places, a bond had become established. A complicity as slimy as the filth that was flushed down the pipe. The girl had grown to like the sergeant with his mild smile and his blue eyes. She felt sad whenever he was away from Auguela for long. Sometimes he brought her lollipops, sometimes biscuits. One day he came with a little square box, dec­orated with sea-shells. She wrapped it up in rags and hid it in the loft.

“…?”

“Whenever that man was with me, he asked where my father was hiding. Whenever he did this, something burnt inside my breast. And then I’d lower my eyes, and what my gaze always, always came to rest on was his feet in their elastic boots. Those boots made me feel sick. And then I’d think about my father. And I’d clench my lips together. ‘I’ll never tell him where Daddy’s hiding,’ I’d think with all my might. And I’d run home.”

“…?”

“I’d be on my way home after catechism, sir, my religious instruction class, walking along the old track that goes to Santa María, picking flowers and making daisy chains with the other girls. He’d be watching me, I don’t know, lying in wait for me until all my classmates had gone their own ways back home. And then he’d appear in front of me and…”

“…?”

“Yes. I was happy to see him but, I don’t know why, I stopped feeling happy and I started feeling sick as soon as I looked at his black elastic boots.”

“…?”

“I think the worst thing for Daddy was the winter.”

Even the slime in the drain that connected the lavatory to the cesspit froze. In his burrow, the girl’s daddy wrapped himself in blankets and his teeth chattered. Chilblains had turned the top of his ears, his hands and his toes into raw flesh. His lips had split. When the snow covered the pile of firewood, the cold below became a little more bearable. For the girl’s daddy, his nightly outing was a trip to Heaven. Those two or three hours in bed with his wife returned him to life and to happiness. Then the cesspit’s exit hole, with daddy inside again, had to be raked over with snow. Before sunrise the girl’s mummy would walk over her husband’s footprints, mixing them in with other tracks that went in different directions across the yard.

“…?”

“So in spring, that’s right, the man in the elastic boots came back and one day he told me that if I didn’t tell him where Daddy was other men of the Guardia Civil would come and they would take Mummy and beat her until she told them everything. I cried that night and I decided that when the man came again I’d lead him to the cesspit and tell him that my father was in there. I’d do it to stop them beating my mother. That was after the end of winter.”

“…?”

“It was the worst day of my life.”

“…?”

“It breaks my heart just to think of it. Please don’t make me say any more.”

“…?”

“First the sound of horses’ hooves woke me up. I peeped out of the window and I saw eight civil guards each getting off his horse and pulling a rifle out of its wrapping, apart from one of them who was holding a pistol. My soul froze over, sir. At almost the same instant I heard a car engine and suddenly a man appeared wearing a red cap. At his side was the man in the elastic boots. The men in the three­-cornered hats half-destroyed the house with their rifle-butts. They fired at the ceiling-boards and at the doors. They grabbed my mother by the hair and dragged her over to the pile of firewood where Daddy was hiding.”

A civil guard lieutenant had arrived in Auguela with seven men. The case of the ANG cell in Vigo had to be concluded. That bastard was the only one left, and he must be in Auguela. If the local squad hadn’t been capable of discovering anything, he’d do so himself. They had come on horseback from Celanova. The sergeant of the local squad soon joined them in a Baliglia limousine from headquarters. With shouts and curses they searched the entire house, the chest of drawers, the kneading trough, the two wardrobes, the loft. They fired their guns. They ravaged without cease and with pleasure. As agreed, they set about raping the fugitive’s wife, yelling what they were going to do, what they were doing. They wanted the fugitive to hear them. To hear that four men were pulling at her hands and at her feet and that the corporal was lifting her skirt. The lieutenant roared with laughter, his hand on his belly.

“…?”

“I ran to the man who gave me biscuits and who appeared before me in the lanes. For me he was a saviour, a best friend. Tell me where he is, tell me where he is,’ he said. ‘Tell me, me only. If you don’t tell me I can’t make them stop. If they find him they’ll kill him.’ I was opening my mouth to tell him that father was in the cesspit when I lowered my eyes in shame and my gaze fell on his elastic boots. And I kept quiet.”

“…?”

“One of the men in the three-cornered hats grabbed me by the ears and said: ‘Look, look. Look what we’re doing to your whore of a mother.’ I looked round at the man in the elastic boots, who was watching, still as still, his arms folded and a snarl on his snout, his otter-snout, which I’d once thought was a nice mouth. I can remember silly little things: the way a tip of his collar was bent upwards, the Falangist yoke-and-arrows emblem on one of the lapels of his threadbare suit. He nodded his head at me in a strange way, as though to say goodbye. The man in the cap like a plate in a red cloth cover was smiling, enjoying himself. That was when Daddy from inside the cesspit screamed to them to stop, screamed that he was giving himself up.”

“…?”

“No sir. The civil guards were shouting so much that at first nobody heard my father.”

“…?”

“My mother hadn’t made a sound. I know that my mother stopped herself from screaming so as not to make my father give himself away. I’m certain of it. But soon something moved in the pile of firewood and my father appeared, knocking the grate and the branches into the air, with his hands up. As soon as they saw him they all went for him, even the man in the red cap, and they knocked him to the ground. I shut my eyes and put my hands over my ears.”

When the lieutenant saw the girl’s father standing there, in the spring sunshine, as white as sperm, with his hands in the air, he charged at him and smashed the long barrel of his nine-bore Astra pistol into his face. He knocked him to the ground. They all pounced upon the fallen man and began to kick him and to beat him with their rifle butts. All the while they bellowed like animals and cursed and insulted him. The horses took fright and tugged at their reins, tied to the hitching rings. The girl’s mother tried to obstruct the blows and was knocked away with a rifle butt in the belly, which left her writhing on the ground in agony. Only the sergeant from the local squad stood still, staring at the girl, his arms folded and the corners of his mouth set in a grimace of indifference.

“…?”

“They took my father away, his face covered in blood, tied to the tail of the lieutenant’s horse. My mother filled the air with her howls. I went up to the man in the elastic boots. He looked at me in fury and screwed up his mouth and his little blond moustache. For a moment I thought he was going to hit me. I hated him and I still hate him now with all my soul. ‘Why didn’t you tell me where he was, you little bitch?’ he said, with a drop of spittle lodged in each corner of his mouth. And he got into the car, next to the man in the cap like a plate in a red cloth cover. ‘Why didn’t you tell me, you little bitch?’”

As he was getting into the Baliglia limousine, the girl looked at his elastic boots for the last time, and she understood. The sergeant of the local squad had known from the very beginning where her father was hiding. But he had wanted the girl to tell him, so that he could leave her wounded with remorse for the rest of her life. His failure, caused by the irruption of the lieutenant and his men, was a great disappoint­ment for him.

And the girl ran up to the loft, unwrapped the shell-covered box from the Isle of A Toxa, and stood in frozen contemplation of it.

Text © Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín

Translation © John Rutherford, Xelís de Toro and Benigno Fernández Salgado

A selection of Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín’s stories is available to read in English – see the page “Stories”.