Neboeiro

Neboeiro is a place like any other, only empty. A lane that was once flanked by eucalyptus trees leads to my grandmother’s house at the end, just before you reach the river.

There are several houses there, all on the right-hand side of the lane, and not one is lived in. In front of them, there’s a huge meadow named O Campiño where dead leaves would pile up and up. Brambles used to smother the vine posts as well as the remnants of the crab apple tree that, towards the end of summer, would produce small fruits carrying enough scent to permeate the whole village. Nothing at all remained of my grandmother’s orchard. Even before the flames, the grape vines would grow enmeshed with berry branches from the blackberry bushes which spread wildly across O Campiño. It’s not a pretty place, that should be obvious from what I’m saying. It wasn’t pretty before the fire either, nor back when my grandmother would look after the plants, the animals and me too.

She took care of me because my parents would leave early in the day for work and not get back until it was dark outside, as I’ve already said. Well, it would be dark during the winter because in June they’d take me back to the flat when the sun was still high in the sky. At my grandmother’s house I’d have a nap, warm my clothes under her blankets and have something for breakfast before going to the bus stop to get to school. I’d also spend my afternoons there, going on walks or doing my homework, waiting for my parents to pick me up.

In terms of my thoughts when I visit Neboeiro, I have to say that even when I try, I can’t remember them. When I’m there, I can’t stop thinking, so much goes through my head. I don’t know, I think about how empty everywhere is, I see my grandma’s house looking so old… and I get bored. It’s an ugly, dead place. There were some bad days when going back to Neboeiro would put a lump in my throat that made it feel like I was drowning, but that’s part of my personality. I was always like that, misspoken, stubborn and a bit naughty, as my grandmother would say.

The last time I went there with my parents was to pick up some clothes and so my mother could ask the builders to prop up the shed so it wouldn’t fall in on itself. It’s true I didn’t want to go back, that I was better off at home without having to relive that time. But my mother thought I couldn’t spend my whole life avoiding Neboeiro and that it wasn’t actually that big a deal to see my grandmother’s house empty, the shed burnt. It wasn’t that big a deal, I know, but I didn’t want to go. My parents sometimes make me do things that I know aren’t good ideas and I don’t know how to convince them it’s better to just leave things as they are. In the end, I do what they say so I don’t have to explain what’s happening to me.

As soon as I arrived and saw the walls of the shed completely bare and ruined, I started to feel an uncomfortable knot in my cheeks. And then that smell. When we opened the door of the house, the rancid smell of everything settled in my stomach and head and made it hard for me to catch my breath. My mum said I had to get over the pain it brought me to go there, I felt obliged to pretend nothing was happening and that made breathing impossible. I felt a drop of sweat slide down my ribcage and then I slowly fell to the floor, as though my legs had lost the strength to keep me up. And what a palaver that caused. I thought I was dying and my parents thought so too. That’s what happened and there was no going back after that. My parents are convinced I went mad and that’s why I had to go to the psychologist. But I think there’s not much to be done about it because I’ve been odd since I was born. I didn’t go mad, I’ve always been a bit unwell in my mind.

You can see it in my legs. I sit on the bed and see my legs trembling. I get up and sit down again to see if they’ve calmed down and I know that if I leave the room, if my thoughts turn to Neboeiro, I’ll die. I fix my eyes on my knees again, put my hands down on top of them to stop the trembling, but the thrumming keeps coming from within. I call my mum at work and tell her I’m not feeling well, I’m not sure what from. I’m drowning. I can’t think or make myself do anything other than stay right where I am, sat on the edge of the bed. And I feel like I’m dying, I swear that if I could know everything in that moment, all it would tell me is that I’m dying.

I’m not going to lie – just thinking about going back to Neboeiro makes a lightning bolt pass through my chest, but I’m not going to solve that writing essays. I know I haven’t been well for a while now – everybody knows there’s something about me, you just have to hear me speak. But, on top of that, I’ve been panicky since I was able to reason, like I’m on a constant swing. I can live like this. But I really can’t think about going back to Neboeiro.

The Swing

It’s like the dizziness I felt right in the top of my stomach when my grandma would push me on the swing my dad had hung from the English walnut, especially when the swing rushed down from the very top. It would make me want to run away – I’m not sure where the feeling came from – and I’d feel the kind of sadness that only comes in certain kinds of light on foggy mornings, when daylight can only be glimpsed and the morning haze feels suffocating. That’s why I say it’s not something new to me.

I think I felt it for the first time when I was five years old and wet myself. Everyone laughed when they saw little droplets were falling from my seat, forming a puddle on the floor. I felt such shame that I didn’t even ask our teacher Eduardo to let me go to the bathroom in case he took it badly. I’m never too sure whether what I do is going to seem good to people, that’s why I stay quiet so much of the time. From that day on they called me ‘pissy pants’ for weeing myself. I could tell the severity of what I’d done by the tone the teacher used to talk to my grandmother when I left school – a five-year-old should have full control of their sphincters, he said with alarm. What he didn’t know is that I’d spent hours controlling them so I didn’t have to speak to him.

The next day I spent the whole morning wanting to run away from school, thinking that at any moment my wee would spill out down my legs and I wouldn’t be able to do anything to have control of my condemned ‘sphincters’, which was a clear symptom of the fact my development was behind schedule. My grandmother threatened me with punishment, ‘God save you’ if you wet your pants again. She called me stupid many times for not having gone to the bathroom, like I was a baby. There was nothing I feared more than my grandmother thinking I was stupid, but that was a fear I developed afterwards. At that time, being stupid simply meant not being clean.

Anxiety, as you doctors call it, became my companion then or at least that’s the first memory I have of feeling it. I don’t know if something traumatised me or if I carried it with me from before, as though there was something not quite right in my mind. Whatever it was, it got stronger yet again one Sunday in fifth year of primary school when I had to do maths homework. My teacher Elisa spent her Mondays and Thursdays giving us classes. The class consisted of her correcting a pile of homework she’d told us to do the week before, going up to the blackboard and sharing our doubts with fellow classmates. But even if she felt it was a way for us to learn more by helping each other, it was really quite torturous. As my grandmother often said, we’d really test Elisa’s ‘patience’ each time she asked us to find the maximum common denominator or the smallest common multiple, especially me.

During that time I developed such a hatred for maths that it will always be associated with the humiliation and shame I felt stood at the blackboard with the whole class watching, trying hard not to take my eyes off the olive green chalkboard so as not to meet eyes with any of my classmates. There I felt the weight of all those eyes locked on me like drawing pins. The truth really is that when I see an ordinal power (with its base and exponent), I get a shudder through my stomach. They give me diarrhoea.

I never felt at ease in that class, the sickness in my stomach always came back during maths classes. And yes, it became even more intense from the day of the fire – that I recognise. There are moments when I feel like I’m going to drown because of the knot that builds up in my chest. And that’s not to say anything about how hard it is for me to speak on those days. That stone I mentioned, which sometimes sets itself at the back of my throat, becomes more and more present and means I can’t speak, it takes full control over each movement of my tongue. It’s like a rounded pebble in the river, small and smooth, the exact same size as my gullet, which isn’t annoying or physically painful but does drown me.

That stone has been there since before the fire. That’s why I can’t say that all of my fear comes from the fire. In fact, I miss the flames. It’s difficult to understand the fear and nostalgia I feel for the fire and I don’t feel like talking about that day, the day of the fire. All I know is that it frightened me to learn that a sudden gust of wind can send the gentlest bonfire out of control, especially when the leaves on the ground are dry and ready to be consumed by flames in a flash, with not a moment to spare. So violently. The flames can go from bringing you warmth to killing you. And then all that’s left is to let yourself burn, go up in flames, melt, become ash. Like us in the fire.

But I’m not going to talk of that yet. To understand what happened on that day you’d need to know about so many things that happened before. Only then will you understand how we ended up surrounded by flames.

What I wanted to explain to you is that I’ve spent a lot of time living as though I was sat on the swing my dad built for me in the tree and that my grandmother pushed me on all the time; always with my eyes turned to the ground. I live in fear, like Perdida.

Perdida

Perdida was ugly but good, like me, I think. It was months after she arrived in Neboeiro that my grandmother decided to let her sleep in the shed. I remember she had sad eyes and her breasts were so stretched they almost touched the ground. They say that Manolo do Chencho had buried a litter of puppies born that spring on his land. I don’t really remember if he buried them or if he drowned them in the river in a bag filled with rocks. The issue was that he’d killed her babies and kicked her off his land.

At the beginning, Perdida’s sadness didn’t move me. She formed part of the decaying atmosphere in Neboeiro. Stroking her almost made me feel sick because of the colony of flies that lived in her ears. It felt like they’d been stuck there since she was born, slurping up her blood. Even so, I started to hold back a piece of my sandwich from school to give her when I got home. Not to feed her, only to get rid of the snack I wouldn’t be able to finish before my grandma found it still in my bag. That’s how we became friends.

Then I started to find comparisons between Perdida and people. Firstly, she reminded me of the late Dora who had had four sons, each with a different dad, and had always walked around Neboeiro with a note of sadness and disdain in her eyes. Everybody looked at her over their shoulder because, as my grandmother would say, she’d let any of the neighbours sleep with her. The luckless girl – may God protect her – did nothing other than give birth and have abortions. Like Perdida, her breasts were stretched and her body was very thin. I suppose it was the result of having breastfed so much. At that time, Dora’s house had been closed off for a few years because her four sons had gone off to work in Madrid. From time to time my grandmother would take charge of opening windows and doors and of calling Manolo do Chencho to come and deal with the brush and thicket in the meadow.

When we’d go into her house, thoroughly chewed up by flies, I’d imagine Dora’s life, with four sons and without a man who loved her, and I thought it seemed terribly sad. But sometimes my grandmother would say that she’d never had to put up with a man, that even though she lacked many things, she did what she wanted and that’s what my grandmother most wanted in the world. I couldn’t understand why one day she’d be extolling her sadness about Dora’s poor decision-making and the next she’d be saying that at least she could do what she wanted, something that was lacking for all those women who had ‘held onto their pesetas’ so they could marry a decent man. That’s why I didn’t know whether Dora was too promiscuous an example for me to follow. My grandmother’s ambiguity worried me more and more as the years went on, especially when I started to see my own breasts grow and when I’d look in the mirror and see the reflection of a naked girl like those in the porn magazines Brais took to school. But my body was a worse version, covered in hair, with a gap between my breasts, and nipples on each side that were long and pointy rather than round, like those of the women the boys in my class fancied.

And that’s how Perdida started to remind me more and more of myself as I got to know her better. I’d never dare to be like Dora because I was a bit cowardly. Comparing myself to a female dog that walked with her tail between her legs was much easier than doing the same with a woman who had never bowed her head for anything. Dora was always full of pride and arrogance.

Also, I was so tall and gangly, a ‘whippet’ as Brais would call me. That’s how I connected my own weaknesses with Perdida’s, her dirty fur with my messy crop, her dark colour with my tanned skin, my moustache, the hair on my torso and arms and the fur that grew down below too.

My grandmother used to say that our family had inherited our brown skin from all of the sun she, my mother and her grandmother had bathed in at the riverside. That the constant sunburn on their backs (as they collected corn and potatoes) and the sulphate from the vines had accumulated generation after generation to the point that I too had that slightly burnt skin. Of the swathes of hair that covered my ribs, from my neck down to my bum, she said that the hairs had grown out of hunger from my eating very little.

I hated all those farming, tanned women – my mother, my grandmother and the great-grandmother of my grandmother. I really, really wanted for my skin to be light so I could be like the other little girls and then they’d stop using my moustache to call me a gypsy one day and Portuguese the next. In so many ways, I wanted to put a brake on how my body was changing.

My first foray into this was with wretched hydrogen peroxide. My classmate Sandra had said it was the best way to make your hair lighter. That day at school she’d come to me with a solution to a good number of my problems and I spent the morning counting down the hours until I could go back to my grandmother’s house and for her to go off for a siesta. Her break after lunch was sacred, you had to turn the volume down on the TV and move very slowly through the house to make sure the floorboards creaking didn’t wake her up. Telling my grandmother that I was going to wipe hydrogen peroxide all over my body was a plan doomed to failure because she’d never let me do it and on top of that, when my parents came to pick me up later in the day, she’d tell them everything and surely they’d laugh at my expense. So, I waited until she went to take her siesta. I put a telenovela on and walked with purpose to the bathroom to take a bottle of hydrogen peroxide down from the little cupboard on top of the sink. Then I poured some of it onto some toilet paper and started to cover my body like I was an Egyptian mummy. The mixture made my skin prickly, but Sandra had said that morning that if my skin was itchy, it meant it was working.

I drenched the toilet paper destined for my moustache and my vulva more than the rest to try and mask the hair that grew so thickly in those places. And then, covered by a magic bandage that would free me from all my ugliness, I lay down on the floor to wait for a miracle as I listened to my grandmother snoring in her room. I fell asleep dreaming that my hair was as blonde as that of Baby Spice in the Spice Girls.

I woke up a little later, roused by my skin itching and my grandmother’s loud voice bemoaning how she couldn’t rest for even half an hour after lunch without me causing a fuss. All I wanted to do was look at myself in the mirror and see if my skin was lighter than before and if the hairs on top of my lip were no longer as visible. It seemed the hair on my face was a bit fairer and that my moustache was now the same kind of golden blonde you see on famous actresses. But my eyebrows and the hair on my forehead had ended up somewhere between orange and yellow, and my whole body was bleached and inflamed.

My grandmother and mother laughed so much that night when the latter came to pick me up after work. As if it wasn’t enough to be mocked at school, my misfortune was a source of mockery at home too! The laughing got even worse when I arrived at school and whereas Sandra had beautiful blonde highlights in her silky straight hair after going to the salon with her mum, I was trying to mask my burnt strands of hair with my mother’s mascara.

Over the next few days my grandmother spent her afternoons with me, rubbing aloe vera into my skin from the leaves Nucha had given her. Nucha was my grandmother’s neighbour and for many years they’d always shared fruits and plants. Ever since I was a young girl, Nucha had always given me 100 pesetas each time she saw me. But I didn’t want her or anyone at all to know about my hydrogen peroxide incident. My grandmother promised me she hadn’t said anything, that she’d said the aloe vera was for a burn she’d got while putting a pastry in the oven. I didn’t believe her, I could well imagine her laughing with her neighbour while explaining my ridiculous attempt to be beautiful. A young girl’s going to play around, what in heavens am I meant to do about that? I knew that’s what would have happened, but I preferred not to think about it and in the afternoons I’d give in to my grandmother’s ritual when she’d cover me with that viscous, cold, saliva-like cream.

Even back then Perdida would wait for me each afternoon near the eucalyptus trees because she knew I’d hide what I could from my afternoon snack and give it to her in secret. On one of those days, after my aloe vera bath, I realised that I too was like that easily frightened dog who ran off to seek refuge on the mountain. From then on, I wanted to protect her and look after her so that she couldn’t be taken advantage of, even by flies. Like her, I too was lost, even though nobody really realised it. And on top of that, one week after erasing my moustache with hydrogen peroxide, my hair had started to regain its characteristic black charcoal tone once more. But it’s been a long time since then. I’m not sure why I’m even telling you about it – things still went on to change a lot between then and the day of the fire.

Calyptus Trees

Eucalyptus trees grew on Monte da Xeixeira, on the lane that leads to my grandmother’s house. That’s where I first saw Perdida. With her nipples already sagging and stretched after giving birth, she limped lightly towards me, her head bowed and her tail slowly wagging between her legs. That was one of those days when I couldn’t pity anyone more than myself, which meant that my first impulse was to angrily stamp my foot on the ground and startle her away. But Perdida persisted and followed me for a bit. That’s when I remembered I had a small bit of chorizo sandwich in my backpack that I hadn’t been able to finish at breaktime and it would be the perfect moment to get rid of it. She wolfed it down so quickly that I didn’t even have time to walk away. And, as though that small bit of food had fully revived her spirit, the dog carried on walking behind me with her head a little higher and tail a bit more relaxed.

My grandmother and I would often go to Monte da Xeixeira to find pinecones to fire the oven in the kitchen. But that was a long time ago. The pine trees burnt away many years ago, way before the fire you’re always asking me about. All the pine trees turned to ash and in their place eucalyptus trees grew in abundance. My grandmother would always complain about the ‘calyptus’ trees as a kind of plague because they grew everywhere and meant she had to walk further, to Monte do Rabocabalo, to collect pinecones. I enjoyed it when my grandmother spoke about eucalyptus trees with my parents around because my father found it funny how she’d mispronounce some of her words and then he’d mimic her in the car and we’d all laugh together. He’d look at me and my mother with creases in his eyes, making us accomplices to his joking, and all the while my grandmother would carry on talking without realising anything was going on. My parents didn’t normally have time to laugh with me because they’d always be tired from work and all they’d do would be to take me to my grandmother’s house and pick me up again at night when we had to go to bed. I would long for my grandmother to say ‘calyptus’ even though deep down I knew I was betraying our closeness in laughing about how she spoke. Just as Brais did to me at school.

What I’ve been meaning to talk about is how the eucalyptus mountain of Xeixeira became somewhere I’d catch my breath after my way back from school. Perdida started to wait for me there – for me and my sandwich. She’d do it every day. As she ate, I’d sit underneath a very tall tree and look up at the sky while I listened to the leaves rustling in the wind. The bus would drop me and my classmates off in front of Mucha da Ghalleira’s shop. I’d head off home quickly, ahead of the others who lived nearby, so I didn’t have to talk to them. Then Brais would start running and call me impolite for not waiting for the rest of them. When he reached me, he’d always ask the same question:

‘Haven’t you shaved your moustache yet?’

And everyone would laugh.

‘Could you be half Portuguese?’

And they’d all laugh.

‘No, no. Wait, I know! You’re José María Aznar.’

And they’d all laugh.

I’d try not to say anything because if I did, it would just get worse. Only right before I turned onto the road to Neboeiro, by Brais’s dad’s bar, would my torture come to an end because nobody else would be coming the same way. I’d keep my pace up as though nothing had bothered me until I felt the comfort of the eucalyptus trees embrace me with their rustling. And I’d hope for the wind to pick me up and thrust me into their swirling leaves, for it to thrash me against the tree trunks to shake out the malaise in my body and for it to leave me hanging forever from the highest eucalyptus so I’d never have to go back to school. There I was at peace, on my own, the only girl in Neboeiro, as lonesome as Perdida, sharing my chorizo sandwich with a dog covered in fleas and ticks.

But there were days when the wind and its humming weren’t enough to put a hold on the anger that would boil up inside me. It gets tiring having to put up with people mocking you and sometimes you feel like you want to throw petrol on everything within arm’s reach and set fire to it or kick a door down, maybe throw a plate against the floor and let it smash into a thousand pieces. That’s what my grandmother would do with the frying pans when she overcooked food or when the milk boiled over and her ‘patience’ ran out.

My patience also ran out that day I reached the railway line. I had spent so much time putting up with how everyone laughed at me on the way back home after school. I’m not sure why the jokes on that day offended me so much. Perhaps because it was Monday and I’d spent a horrible day in front of the blackboard trying to find the highest common denominator while our teacher Elisa tried to help me with a tone of voice that got sharper and sharper. On that day Brais decided to take the mickey out of Perdida, who was coming closer and closer to the bus stop each day to be there when the bus dropped me off.

‘But what race is that dog?’

And they all laughed.

‘She’s as skinny as you!’

And they all laughed.

‘Answer, goddammit!’

And they all laughed.

Brais walked towards the dog and kicked his leg out back as though he was building up momentum to kick her. Perdida’s response was full of fear and she ran off to Monte da Xexeira with her head bowed to the ground. And they all laughed.

‘Ugly and scrawny like you!’

And that’s when I ran out of patience. Inside I was completely dry, full of anger and despair, more feral than my grandmother when she blew a fuse and flung the cupboard doors in the kitchen shut as she sang loudly and out of tune – Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. And all I wanted to do in that moment was sing songs from mass while I kicked Brais.

I imagined him on the ground, lying in a pool of his own blood after I’d smashed his teeth out. And in that moment, not really knowing what my arms were doing, I found an enormous strength from who-knows-where. I pushed him against the ground so I could kick him with the ball of my foot with all the strength I had and shout the insult that I hated most, the one that caused me pain in the depths of my being and whirled round and round in my head each night before I went to sleep:

‘Reeetard!’

And they all laughed.

I felt so little that I ran off, like Perdida, frightened and defenceless, with an imaginary tail between my legs. I reached Xeixeira but the thrumming of the eucalyptus leaves didn’t stop me. I kept running and I went past Manolo do Chencho’s house, Dora’s and my grandmother’s. I couldn’t stop at any of them. Perdida was running behind me, with her tail still between her legs, her head and nose perked up, waiting for my sandwich. I didn’t see her because I was concentrating on getting air into my lungs. There wasn’t enough oxygen on that day in Neboeiro. I’d have ripped my ribs and the bones from my chest if it had meant I’d been able to breathe. Beyond the bottom of the hill that sloped down from my grandmother’s house to the river I could see the railway line. My mother had prohibited me from going there alone because it was very dangerous, but I didn’t care about that, I didn’t care about dying. I ran and breathed in until a distant sound grew closer and closer. The train’s whistle brought me back to reality and at that moment I realised that Perdida was running ahead of me, getting dangerously close to the rails.

I stopped abruptly and shouted her name as loud as I could as I hurried to get the sandwich out of my rucksack. Perdiiiida. She was on the tracks and bewildered, but with small steps she came towards me, wagging her tail very slowly, somewhat suspicious of me. I bent down and sat on the ground, on the grass by the edge of the tracks as the train whooshed past. Perdida ate the chorizo sandwich I hadn’t eaten at breaktime by my side. And I started to cry.

The Railway Line

There were many places one could die in Neboeiro. My mother had taken it upon herself to make this clear from when I was little. There was the river – ever since they’d started to take rocks and sand from it, it had become a dangerous and dark place where you couldn’t see the bottom, full of dips and whirlpools, with algae that would wrap up your legs and swallow you down to the depths. Depths that were so dark and murky people drowned there without ever appearing again, losing themselves in those inky black depths. And there was the train which carried with it everything it picked up along the way, breaking it up into tiny pieces and spitting it out again on the tracks.

And that’s why since the day I escaped to the railway tracks with Perdida, I felt scared of going there. I didn’t even want to think about the fact the train passed a few metres away from my grandmother’s house in case I went mad and ran away like I did that day I called Brais a retard. My grandmother realised that something had happened that afternoon and in the end I told her my eyes were red from crying because Antonio’s son, from the bar, had annoyed me after making fun of Perdida. He must like you then, she’d said.

From that day on, my grandmother had let Perdida sleep on the hay in the shed and she’d put used frying pans on the floor so Perdida could eat up the leftover food. I guess it was her way of trying to cheer me up after the bust-up I’d had – for a long time I’d been asking her to let me give Perdida a little bit of ham at snack time. My grandmother never asked me what they said to me at school (though my mother did). She’d be quiet and sit by my side, make rice with milk whenever I came back with teary eyes and sing a song by Antonio Machín with me. He’d been her favourite when she was young and still went to parties to dance. That afternoon she even let Perdida into the main house, pretending she hadn’t spotted her come in.

Often we’d go to the shop and take a shortcut that took us by the railway line. When we did, I couldn’t say anything about it to my parents in case they got angry – they’d say that going that way was dangerous and if they found out, they’d end up shouting at my grandmother. The railway tracks went right along the path parallel to the river and they avoided the winding pathways that crossed Monte da Xeixeira. But bundled up in a corner of my chest, I still felt fear of the train and when I thought of the noises it made, the fear would course through my whole body. Sometimes I’d hear the whistle from my grandmother’s house and I’d jump right on the spot as I imagined the scene if Perdida hadn’t managed to escape the locomotive’s engine. Before I was born, my grandmother’s sheep had escaped from their pen and she’d found them injured and strewn along the tracks, all the way from Neboeiro to beyond the shop, completely torn to shreds.

I don’t know exactly when it was, but I think it was around then, when I was about eleven years old, that I started to have a nightmare where my mother ran ahead of the train to rescue a baby crying on the tracks while I stood by without doing anything. I don’t need a therapist to come and tell me what that dream means because, however dumb I might seem, I can understand it.

I’d never wanted to be alone. Sometimes I imagined that I had an older sister who would stick up for me when Brais laughed at me. A sister who was so pretty, strong and clever that nobody dared cross her. And I was her best friend. Like Sandra. Sandra had an older sister who sometimes took her out at night because she had a driving licence. They’d go to the swimming pool together in the summer and she’d teach her how to use eyeliner. I so wanted to stop being on my own that I’d cry and get cross with my parents because they wouldn’t give me a sister. I know they were trying because sometimes I’d sleep at my grandmother’s house while my mother was at the hospital.

Back then I knew how babies were made, but my grandmother said that my parents had asked a stork from Paris to deliver the baby. Paris was where her friend Nucha lived and that’s why she said she was going to take the ‘poubelle’ out when she took the rubbish out. It’s also why she finished all her sentences with ‘hein’, in an attempt to make them sound more important. I would try not to think of my parents making love, but sometimes the image of my dad on top of my mum would come into my mind, the two of them moving against each other like they do in films, and I’d get nervous and blush. Because that’s how you’d make siblings, however gross it was that your parents would be the ones doing it. They only told me twice that they’d ordered a baby and two times there were problems. That’s how they told me – that I couldn’t have a brother because my mother had got a really big tummy ache and the baby wouldn’t be coming anymore. I supposed that was the same as saying the baby had died before birth so it didn’t seem all that bad to me, but I never dared say that out loud because in the days up to and following their announcement, my parents would act as though something really bad had happened.

At those times I’d sleep at my grandmother’s house because my parents needed to stay at the hospital overnight. I said I was OK, but I’d lie on the floor with my ear glued to the bedroom door so I could hear what my grandmother was saying when my parents rang. I didn’t want my mum to be at the hospital because that’s where everyone went before they died. Like Dora. She’d left in an ambulance one morning, spent three days at the hospital and then got bundled straight off to the cemetery. Had my mum died, I didn’t know what would have become of me. I slept with that thought whirling around my mind as I hugged my pillow close. I’d laid it out on the floor in my bedroom and when my grandmother opened the door, she found me right there. And so, she scooped me up, nestled me on her knees and, half bent from rheumatism and also because she was old, slowly shuffled me back to bed. We lit one candle for Our Lady of Sorrows and another for Santa Marta – my grandmother had effigies of both that sat on her dressing room table. We also turned on a small altar to Our Lady of Fátima which looked like a Christmas decoration to me because of all the colourful lights that framed the woman’s sad face as she stood there with her hands clutched to her heart. Then we prayed ‘Four corners to my bed’ and ‘Little Jesus of my life, you are a child like me’, and my grandmother pulled me in to her bosom which hung down the entire length of her torso below her shirt, soft and so white. And as she did this, she stroked my hair and sang ‘Wake up, my love, wake up, see that it is already dawn’, so I’d fall asleep.

And I did sleep. My eyelids started closing not long after as I started to ask myself why the song said I should wake up if my grandmother actually wanted me to sleep. And even now when I’m finding it hard to sleep, I imagine I’m nestled in my grandmother’s pillowy bosom, a place of refuge, and I squeeze my eyes shut and concentrate so I can remember her scent, salty from sweat and bleach. Sometimes I manage to imagine I’m right back there, in my bed with my grandmother, and that brings me so much peace.

But my fear that I’d lose my mother from having a sibling really stuck with me. I still dream about that cursed baby on the tracks wrapped up in a white blanket and how my mother ran to save it as the train approached. And I watch her like a spoilt little girl who only wants a sister because she doesn’t know how to defend herself. I spent more than one night at my grandmother’s house because my mother started to lose blood. She miscarried again, my grandmother said in a low whisper to Nucha, as though I didn’t know what they were talking about. Something had happened during my birth, she added, and this increased the sense of suffocation I felt as I discovered that I’d been responsible for so much pain for my mother, just by the very fact of being born. That happened four times. Maybe five. And my grandmother promised Santa Martiña that she’d walk to her on her knees – scraping them against the ground – if everything went well next time. I felt such deep guilt, as deep as the river. And the panic I felt at being alone forever felt eternal.

The River

My grandfather died in his sleep. I didn’t meet him because I hadn’t yet been born, but my grandmother would always tell me how he’d had a peaceful death and didn’t know what was happening. He got into bed, had a heart attack and that was that. That’s why I would wake my grandmother up from her nap – to go to the river together but also to check that she was still alive. If I learnt anything in Neboeiro, it’s that death can happen at any moment, even right now, as I write my words for today.

I had to wait until five o’clock because my grandmother finished cleaning the kitchen at four and after banishing all the flies from it, she needed half an hour to fall asleep and another half an hour to rest. I hated afternoon naps. I’d watch a telenovela in the lounge with the volume really low so as not to wake her up. Or I’d use the time to do things that I didn’t want anyone to find out about.

Sometimes I’d take my grandmother’s old make-up and put on red lipstick. I wiped it off straightaway so she wouldn’t realise, but there was always a mottled red around my lips that gave me away. You’ve painted your face like a clown, she’d say mockingly as she opened her eyes. They were dry jokes, little punches, and I was sure that though she laughed, it wasn’t very funny for her at all. When my breasts started to grow, I used the time to take my shirt off and as I bent down, I’d touch the tender, round mounds that were growing under my nipples.

My grandmother didn’t like me trying on her bras or her underwear sets which were so pretty they felt like party outfits. I knew, even though nobody told me, that anything to do with breasts or vaginas was bad. Because I was a young girl and I wasn’t old enough to do adult things. My breasts were getting bigger but when I was around my grandmother, I pretended they weren’t there, as though my body wasn’t changing. At ten to five I’d get dressed again and head back to the lounge, to the television, to count down each minute until I could wake my grandmother up and go to the river.

The best time was summer because when I was small, my grandmother would get in the water too and she swam just as well as the fishes. All the women from Neboeiro knew how to swim because they used to carry contraband. My grandmother reminded me about it each time we went down to the river: she’d tie a bag of coffee to her head with her clothes and shoes, stain her knickers with a little chick’s blood so the worst of the guards would think it was her time of the month, then she’d swim across the narrowest part of the river, where there was the least current, at the point where San Francisco is.

As we swam out to the depths where our feet couldn’t touch the ground, she’d tell me all about it while wearing that same black swimsuit my mum had given her. There was an enormous rock that hindered the current of the river and created a calm backwater where you could swim even though you couldn’t see the bottom of the water. Don’t tell your parents, my grandmother would say to me over and over again as she took my hand. Come this way, the water’s rough, she’d shout nervously if I slipped away from her side for a moment.

There’s no longer a beach in Neboeiro because in its place they built a concrete platform to cover the creek that used to run down from Monte da Xeixeira and now flows through a pipe. Since the construction work, we’d only go to the river to dip our toes because there was too much electricity running through it. That said, I could still crouch down and put my bum in the water from time to time to get my whole body wet.

I didn’t go back to the river after the day of the fire. We ended up going less and less because my grandmother’s legs hurt and she’d stopped wanting to walk down the hill that runs below the railway line and leads to the beach. What she found most difficult was going up it. She would drag her feet and support her weight on a cane my father had carved her from rattan. Perdida and I would wait for her, pausing every four steps. The stone washbasin on the left of the path had been completely covered by brambles and you could only hear the drip-drip of the water as it passed through the brush.

I really missed those warm afternoons when my grandmother would head down there to wash our rugs and let me get into the water in my underwear before she filled it with soap. Then she’d give me a chorizo sandwich and I would have my afternoon snack while she washed the rug. Sometimes she’d ask me to help her move it around so she could brush it first on one side and then on the other and we’d both end up covered in water mixed with Lagarto soap. That Neboeiro where I was happy disappeared a long time ago. It wasn’t because of the fire.

Like the village, I too started to get ugly and my grandmother older. When the hair on my legs got thick and black, especially around my knees, I decided to wear long trousers until my parents let me shave. So, my grandmother and I would go down to the river, her with her cane and me with my huge flared jeans, and we’d just dangle our shoeless feet down from the concrete into the water to rest a bit and so my grandmother could pick up energy for the way back. Not even Perdida dared to go into the water to collect the sticks I threw her way. Instead she’d have her tail between her legs and walk away from us as though she knew what I wanted from her, making it clear she’d never get in that water to swim. The three of us were ugly, old and too scared to enjoy the river.

I wanted to try and fix it, I’d always wanted to be beautiful and after my failed attempt to lighten my skin and erase my black moustache with oxygenated water, I decided to deal with the problem at its root. First I used a depilatory machine my mother kept in a bathroom in the flat. One morning, before I left for school, as I was washing my teeth, I took the machine from the cabinet and put it in my rucksack. I kept it there in secret for the whole morning and I only got it out when I got back to my grandmother’s house, when she had gone off to sleep her siesta. I went down to the shed, where Perdida was, and I sat down on the straw with her so that my grandmother wouldn’t hear the whirring of the machine. I unplugged the corn mill so I could connect the depilatory machine and pulled up my trousers. The machine made an infernal noise that was enough to make anyone frightened, but I was incredibly determined to become a beautiful woman so people would love me, and so I took a breath and moved the mouth of the machine towards my shin. I didn’t last even two seconds because my eyes started to cry due to the incredibly intense pain that was racing through my legs. As well as pulling out hairs, it seemed that it was yanking out my skin too. I turned the machine off, disappointed. I was a coward who would never have soft and beautiful legs.

Hair

I shaved my legs for the first time the summer before starting school. I cried several times because my mother refused to let me use my dad’s razor on my legs and I couldn’t bear to look at my hairy legs. After two weeks, when it was almost 40 degrees each day and I didn’t take off my long trousers, my mother decided to let me shave my legs, but she took it upon herself to remind me that each time I shaved, the hairs would come back thicker and I’d get to twenty years old, when I needed to find a boyfriend and get married, with very hard and black wheatsheafs on my legs. I decided to take a risk and get rid of the hair that caused me so much torment.

But I still didn’t take my clothes off in the river. During the wintertime it was just my grandmother, Perdida and I who went there, but in summer the river beach was filled with people from school who went there to jump off the highest rocks and smoke weed. I would get annoyed when we got there and saw the smooth rock we normally sat on occupied by all those kids who came to take up our space. Because the river was ours all year long and just at the time when it was great to be there, when the warmth meant you could take off your jumper and dip your toes in the water, dozens of young people arrived to disturb the environment.

If we heard young kids on their way down to the river, we wouldn’t go to the beach anymore because my grandmother didn’t want to throw herself into that kind of pandemonium. I didn’t insist either way because I felt ugly and pathetic in front of all those older kids, with my grandmother and Perdida by my side. Even so, summer holidays were the best months of the year. I always played around as though I was Xena, the warrior princess, and I’d use the handle of the weeding hoe to fight make-believe enemies. Perdida always stood with me on the patio and became Gabrielle, the companion to the Greek heroine whose series was on TV every morning, while my grandmother made lunch. My mother said I couldn’t spend all my holidays in front of the TV without doing anything and she’d write me a list of things to do on a piece of paper which my grandmother would throw away as soon as I came through her door in the morning after my parents left me to go to work. We’d spend a little bit of time in bed together and put on Channel 1, where they’d always be showing Baywatch first thing and then Xena: Warrior Princess. During the afternoon we’d play with Perdida on the patio, we’d eat green apples, pull weeds from the tomato plants and go to the meadow to collect grass for the sheep. Or we’d go out on a walk in the mountains so my grandmother could make sure all the boundary markers were in the right place and clear to see. The best thing about summer was there was no school.

The most beautiful and cleverest from my class would all go to Brais’s house, where he had a swimming pool that his dad had built in the garden behind their bar. My grandmother always said that Antonio was a very curious kind of man who never got tired because he worked in the bar and on top of all that, he still had time to make his house look like Falcon Rest. His garden was so pretty that all his neighbours referred to it as Versailles or Moncloa, depending on the day. They did so out of admiration, but also with a bit of envy. My grandmother had called it Falcon Rest because it seemed like an entire ranch: a big house, an impeccable garden, a whole load of sheds that housed geese, hens, turkeys, and a huge piece of fenced land nearby where the animals could wander free. Brais’s father was very proud of his land and didn’t miss a single opportunity to show off the paving, the white and shiny lamps, or the dazzling pool. That’s where Brais would host his birthday parties. I knew he did because I’d gone to some when I was younger, then he stopped inviting me. A high canopy covered the swimming pool, the garden, the barbecue where they’d make churrasco and the huge pink granite table from Porriño where guests would sit to have lunch, shaded by a fig tree. Through the plants you could hear how happy the children Brais had invited to spend the summer afternoons with him were and you could also hear the sound of bodies hitting the water as they jumped into the pool.

Brais’s house had everything. A big, beautiful dog that guarded the patio, paved pathways that his dad would wash every weekend with a pressure hose, blooming hydrangeas that his mother would fertilise and prune carefully, a pool with beautiful blue water, two white cats that would stand like statues on the stone posts of the fenced enclosure and a spotless car that Brais’s dad would often polish with a cloth and buffing liquid. When they cleaned, they’d open the gates to the garden from time to time and the neighbours would all be amazed by how handy Antonio was to be able to build such a Versailles in a place as ugly as Neboeiro.

I didn’t know what made me panic more – if it was going to the shop along the railway line and shaking in case a train came or if it was going along the road and then wondering if Brais had left the gate open again and was going to call me José María Aznar in front of his cousin from the city, Carlos, who came each summer to spend the holidays with him. But that summer after sixth grade, something happened that was even worse than the train running me over and dropping my fleshy remains on the tracks. My grandmother was in a really happy mood and she wanted to go out on a walk to the shop to buy ice creams since we were already out to take a bit of millet to the two sheep she had left. My shaven legs burnt because they were covered in scratches from the grass in the meadow and they still had some cuts left over from the razor I’d used. Perdida was completely covered in seeds from the grass that had affixed to her fur and there was a smell of shit that had permeated her torso after she’d rubbed herself up against a pile of fertiliser that had been left in a ditch with a sign that read: ‘Horse manure for sale’. We smelt bad and we were ugly, but happy. I had come the whole way sat on the top of the cart while my grandmother pushed me and sang softly, but I stood up when I saw the silhouette of Brais’s house in the distance, Falconcrés, with its Versailles gardens hidden behind the hedgerow of bushes.

When we got a bit closer, I could see that the door of the house was open and Brais’s dad was washing the car with a hose while the radio played at max volume.

Baila, morena, baila, que tú lo bailas como ninguna….

Dance, brunette, dance, you dance like no other…

I fixed my hair as we started to arrive at the gates and my grandmother sang the lyrics to the Julio Iglesias song that was pumping out from a big loudspeaker in the garden of Versailles.

Arrastra la sandalia, llévame en tu locura…

Drag your sandals, take me in your madness…

Without us realising, the hairs on Perdida’s back started to prick up and Brais’s cats responded from the top of their posts by baring their teeth and hissing.

Baila, Morena, baila, que tú lo bailas como ninguna!

Dance, brunette, dance, you dance like no other!

And so, our dog started running, leaving a nasty smell of manure in her wake. She tried to scale the posts without any success. The cats got frightened and ran back into the inner parts of Versailles. With the gate open, in front of Brais’s dad, Perdida let all the smell of manure into Falcon Rest.

La noche es una niña que va pasando, que va creciendo…

The night is a girl who passes by, grows up…

Oh my god, she runs like lightning, that dog!, shouted my grandmother as the music continued to play. The spotless cats climbed to the top of another post. Perdida barked at them from down below.

La música no para, sigue bailando, se va encendiendo…

The music isn’t stopping, keep dancing, it’s warming up…

For god’s sake, come on!, screamed my grandmother. I was stuck there mute, but I knew that everything would take a turn for the worse when I saw Brais’s huge dog start running behind Perdida, wagging its tail from happiness. Because Brais’s house was so perfect that his dog wasn’t even aggressive and didn’t fight, he just wanted to play.

El sudo de su cuerpo le pone brillo a su piel canela….

The sweat on her body sparkles on her cinnamon skin…

But my dog was ugly and fearful like me and when she saw that huge animal, she retreated frightened, with her tail between her legs, getting dangerously close to the swimming pool.

La blusa colorada, la madrugada y esa morena.

The red blouse, the dawn and that brunette.

Before she fell into the water, I could see how Brais, his cousin Carlos and Sandra were laughing wholeheartedly at the scene as they stood below the kiwi canopy, each with a sandwich in their hands. Right in that moment is when I wanted a train to run me over, to break me up into smithereens so small that not one part of me remained. Stop, you blasted thing! Good heavens!

Tiene cosas de blanca, tiene cosas de negra…

She has white things, black things…

Perdida was now swimming in the crystalline waters of the pool and the smell of shit was getting stronger the closer you got to her. It permeated the whole of Versailles. And so stupid was Perdida that she couldn’t even get out of the water, latched onto the wall and scared, while Brais’s dog bent his head down and held up his bottom to invite her to play outside the water.

Baila, Morena, baila, que tú lo bailas como ninguna…

Dance, brunette, dance, you dance like no other…

Hey girl, pick up this blasted dog! Antonio unplugged the radio and the music suddenly stopped, giving way to a silence that made me feel very ashamed. I approached the edge of the swimming pool to pull on Perdida’s fur and yank her out of the water, which had already taken on a brown tinge around her body. The dog was so scared that she kicked me in the mouth for trying to help her. When I was able to get her out, without my grandmother taking a single pause from shouting – oh god, please god, oh good heavens – the animal escaped running in the direction of the Xeixeira mountain with her head bowed and her body so diminutive it looked ridiculous under her sodden coat of fur. Before we left, my grandmother said sorry seven times to Antonio, who couldn’t hide how annoyed he was, despite the fact he repeated over and over again (with a sense of false friendliness) that it was OK. And I hid myself behind the hedge because the mocking looks from Brais, Carlos and Sandra were unbearable for me.

When we got home, my grandmother shouted at Perdida so loudly that I cried. So, I hugged her and her clean fur. She smelt of chlorine like I did when I used to go swimming as a child. When my parents came, we were already worn out so my grandmother had some time to tell them what had happened. They spent more than five minutes laughing at the whole affair before they got everything together and went back to the flat. Our house wasn’t Versailles, but my parents didn’t mind about that. They enjoyed imagining Perdida covered in manure in Brais’s swimming pool as my grandmother kept telling the tale of what had happened, lingering over the funniest details, exaggerating Antonio’s steely face, describing how the dog had smelt of manure.

On the other hand, I was still worried about what my classmates would think. And on top of that, my dog was more subdued than normal after her bath. My grandmother decided to punish her by not giving her any dinner, as though Perdida would understand that she’d gone to sleep hungry because she’d chased Brais’s cats and ended up drenched in the swimming pool. At least that day my parents didn’t threaten to take Perdida off to the dog pound. There weren’t any leftovers for Perdida and we didn’t go to the shop. So, in the end I didn’t get ice cream either.

Text © Sara Vila Alonso

Translation © Harriet Cook