Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly

‘So it’s Milagres. Well, I’m not exactly the Pope. Call yourself what you like.’

When she arrived, she thought about kicking her out. She seemed more dim-witted than innocent. But soon she realised she was really afraid. Samantha had lost or thought she’d lost the notion of fear some time ago, but Milagres’ arrival made it obvious she hadn’t. A remote, familiar thread linked them. That’s why she’d been sent, with this reference. Which made Samantha furious inside. It was this detail that awoke her fear of the long anaesthesia, as if a ferret had been let loose in the burrow of her mind. There was this girl with a woman’s body. A girl who’d already carried all sorts on top of her head. A girl who’d come from fear of the village to fear of the town. From one form of slavery to another. She needed some time. That was her excuse for not sending her back at the first sign of fear.

‘Yes, madam. I’ve come to fluff up the mattresses.’

‘The mattresses? The mattresses and everything else. You’ll have to work from noon to night. Come on.’

She recalled the attic. Lifted the trap-door and said in the dark, ‘We’ll make a place for you up here. A cave in the sky.’

Here she is, biting a white cloth, exuding a dew that coats the bulb and the candle Pretty Mary, the girl who sometimes sings fados, has put in front of St Raymond Nonnatus with a coloured ribbon. Her fearful eyes are fixed on Samantha’s. Her sweat is cold because she’s giving all her heat to warm the room. Samantha remembers and keeps quiet. Lucky for you you’re here because you’d probably be alone in the village, bleeding to death, while the house blocks its ears, with no one to watch over you, no one to give your body back its heat.

The house beats to Flora’s heels, transmitting a code of dots and lines that echo up the stucco walls, climb the stairs and open the trap-doors. The dance is so close, so intense, it thunders on the roof, as if Flora were dancing in the beams from the lighthouse, which helps Milagres take her mind off the pangs inside, because the body that’s coming, by all that’s holy, is bigger than she is.

Milagres doesn’t know, but Samantha put a key under her pillow to help during the delivery, to help open the door of life, her vagina to be more precise, though she has more faith in the infusion of rue recommended by the midwife. Because that good woman is a midwife today, but three months earlier had come as an abortionist. She couldn’t believe the girl was pregnant. When she found out, when she realised that she wasn’t walking strange, but was pregnant, or both things at once, strange and pregnant, the madame was amazed. Milagres had managed to conceal it under various skirts and a woollen girdle she wrapped around her body several times. Quiet, elusive, working all day, with her back turned, cooking, making the beds and going early to sleep in the attic.

‘Are you cold, girl?’

‘It’s the dampness.’

Samantha made a lavish gesture that incorporated the length of her wardrobe for all seasons: silk dressing gown, necklace, earrings and holder for smoking Egyptians.

‘Find someone who’ll give you a gold necklace. Keeps you very warm.’

No doubt some of the others, those rats, knew about it. If that was so, she didn’t understand the need for secrecy. What favour were they doing her by helping her to hide it? Putting a crown of thorns on her head. Samantha took any kind of disturbance in the house as a personal insult. A conspiracy against her. But she’d grown her nails. This wasn’t the first eye she’d scratched out of a setback. She’d come out on top. She no longer let herself be mounted. She was the one who chose, who did the mounting, for pleasure, for money or for the hell of it. Recently she only did it for all three reasons together. Why had that silly girl done it? Why had Milagres done it?

‘Call the Widow.’

They couldn’t get a word out of her. The Widow, whom in private, only in private, they called the Abortionist, though she was also known as the Good Woman or the Midwife depending on the nature of her errand, well, the Widow said the child was well formed, was at least six months, and the best they could do now was lift the future mother’s spirits, since they were clearly low. One arm longer than the other. By three fingers. And not give her hare to eat, otherwise the child would always sleep with open eyes. She’d said this as a joke. She didn’t often joke. Every remark she addressed to the women was a fathom in length and always meant something it was worth remembering. One day, she told them very seriously that the womb was a ‘sacred chamber’. Infections were the cause of great mortality. So she spoke of hygiene as of a creed.

‘You’ve a surprise coming your way, Samantha.’

‘What surprise?’

‘Ah!’

It was Pombo who said this. He was her confidant, the one who made her laugh, who never engaged in conspiracies and who made a fuss of her, because one thing she could not allow was a drop in her spirits. He also looked after the Academy’s money and kept an eye on things. He liked to say he was their arma mater . He loved crêpe shirts, bracelets and shoes with a raised insole, though his speech was more aesthetic than his dress sense or he dressed his wardrobe up in language, so his shoes always came from the Kingdom of Morocco or the Republic of Dongola, the names he gave the two shoeshops in Orzán. If anyone called him a queen, if it was a friend, he’d correct them by telling them he had both sexes, María Pita’s and Hercules’.

‘You mean you’re a hermaphrodite, like snails?’

‘You don’t know much about snails. Snails are only hermaphrodites when they’re on their own.’

‘Rumpy-Pumpy!’ Samantha said to him in a reproachful tone, a name only she was allowed to use.

Pombo’s eyes and ears were an extension of Samantha’s senses. He swore the same thing had happened to him. He hadn’t known Milagres was pregnant. It was he who then took care of her, following the Widow’s advice. The last days before the delivery, he cooked for her. He went to the Chocolate Factory on San Andrés Street and returned with some bars of Pereiro chocolate and some dried cacao husks for making tea. So he was the one who lifted Milagres’ spirits. Who, on the night of the birth, prepared the concoctions of rue and marshmallow, just when Flora was winding up her clock of intestines, the clack of her heels on the Academy’s stage.

‘You miss out on everything and now you come to me with this nonsense. Tell me, what’s the surprise?’

‘A surprise, Samantha, darling, a surprise.’

She murmured, ‘You exhausted my capacity for surprise.’ And he made off down the corridor, wagging his hips from side to side. ‘They say that tango goes to great lengths, which is why it was forbidden by Pius the Tenth.’

As if the dance enabled her to escape, guided by her chiselling heels, Flora left the stage, crossed the small hall of the Dance Academy and ran up the stairs to the first floor, where the clients’ reception rooms were; then up a narrow staircase to the second floor with Samantha’s suite, Pombo’s room and another two rooms which the eight permanent women shared. At night, when there was a show, Pombo would give way to anyone accompanied by a man and to any on their own whom he called nymphs . Finally up a stepladder. Leading to the attic. The trap-door was open and it reminded Flora of a window into another, more intimate room with the veiled light of lamps and botanical shades, where people confessed to indiscretions, since she could hear laughter and whispers, when what she’d been expecting was torn flesh and fresh lamentation.

Flora goes up to Milagres. She’d tried to help her by dancing. She’s not alone, but her eyes are closed, her eyelids swollen, with bluish rings around them.