Books Burn Badly - Manuel Rivas [45]
‘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