Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop (2 page)

Dr Arturo Aguilar was spending another morning of solitary contemplation in his pristine white clinic. He was enjoying the glimmer of the sun on the whitewashed walls and felt strangely proud of the freshly painted sign at the front, which told the townsfolk that the clinic had been brought to them out of the goodness of the hearts of the people of Japan. Fresh from college and with a keen interest in history, Dr Aguilar had come to see his year's posting in the backwater as a challenge, an opportunity to understand a people whom modernity had seemed to pass by. He was looking forward to trying out the array of cures that he had studied during his history of medicine course, and had been eagerly awaiting a visit from a patient for some weeks.

The doctor was awoken from his reveries by the sound of Nicanora's remonstrations as she dragged her son up the path. By the time his patient reached the threshold of his clinic Dr Aguilar had been able to make his diagnosis. He believed himself to be a liberal and open-minded man. After administering a large shot of the antibiotics supplied to him by the provincial health authority, he covered Ernesto's body in warm jam jars to see whether there was in any truth in the belief that they would suction out the remaining fever, before hanging him upside down by his feet – resisting Doña Nicanora's suggestion to hang him by his
cojones
– as a brief experiment to see whether the force of gravity could draw the lust out of a man's loins. By the end of the visit, the doctor found that he had agreed to Nicanora's request to take her son on as his assistant, partly out of gratitude for having received his only patient and mainly out of fear that Ernesto's mother exuded a presence and strength of personality that suggested she might be adept in the art of witchcraft.

Over the ensuing weeks, the foreigner, who became known to the townsfolk as the Gringito, or little foreigner – a reference not to his height, which was a match for any of the men of the town, but to his pitifully wasted appearance – became a fixture of Doña Nicanora's household. At first, Nicanora, bemused by the Gringito's desire to do nothing all day but sit in her front yard smoking, playing with his unsightly beard and picking his teeth, decided that he had probably had to leave his village because his mother had thrown him out of her house on account of his bad manners and suspect personal hygiene. She worried that the Gringito, who appeared to
be quite harmless, might do something unpredictable in the middle of the night, like suck the fat out of her body while she was sleeping and sell it to a cosmetics factory in the United States to make into lipsticks. She had heard of these things happening, indeed her neighbour's sister-in-law had died of such an affliction after sitting next to a gringo on a bus.

But the arrival of the Gringito had also brought an unexplained tranquillity to her household. Nena, who at twelve years old was always difficult to keep occupied, appeared to have adopted him as a sort of pet and now spent her time when not at school trying to teach him new commands and tricks. She had managed to convince him to stand on his head in the yard for an hour balancing a cup of water on his feet, ‘to make the rains come early'. She had him repeating long lists of fictitious words, made up for his benefit, which were slowly evolving into a secret language between them. She had even tried to teach him to spin cotton backwards, much to Nicanora's amusement. Isabela, whose main occupation over the past year had been teasing the neighbour's son, had shifted some of her flirtatious attention to the Gringito and was consequently spending more time at home helping her mother. For the sheer amusement of seeing the Gringito's cheeks redden as she swept past him, making sure her bare flesh brushed against his, Isabela would spend hours at home helping her mother with the cleaning, cooking and washing. Ernesto, as Nicanora observed to Fidelia, also appeared to have uncharacteristically settled down. However, it was the young doctor to whom she felt indebted for this transformation.

‘Nicanora,' Doña Fidelia warned her as they sat together in the market one day, ‘you're my neighbour and my friend and what
hurts you will also hurt me. You must have heard what people are saying. It's very odd, two strangers suddenly turning up from nowhere in a space of a few weeks, and both seem to have something to do with your Ernesto.'

‘I don't know what you mean,' Nicanora said, feeling the sharp significance of Fidelia's barbs.

‘You must be careful, is all I'm saying,' Fidelia replied. ‘You can't go giving food and shelter to any old foreigner Ernesto decides to drag into your house.'

Doña Nicanora, wary of Fidelia's propensity for jealousy, omitted to tell her friend that the Gringito was now paying her more money a week for his board and lodging than she could possibly earn in months at the market.

‘But Fidelia,' she replied, ‘we must help strangers and then when we come to make a journey someone is bound to help us in return. Besides, what harm can he do? He's a friend of Ernesto's. The boy has calmed down such a lot since he arrived home with this foreigner, you must have seen how he's changed. He's now working for the doctor, and he has his own pickup truck.'

‘Nicanora, don't be fooled,' Fidelia retorted. ‘Your boy is wild, just like his father. He always has been and he always will be, pickup truck or no pickup truck. He has no sense for what trouble he may cause with his goings-on. Remember those disgusting giant lizards he dragged out of the swamp to sell to us as guard dogs – they ate all my chickens and killed your goat. He has no sense and no self-control. Who knows what further trouble he'll bring to this town? I tell you, Nicanora, there are many children running around with his hooked nose. And that doctor must be a simpleton as well, otherwise why would he spend his days hanging around here with your boy rather than making money from the people in the city?
And what do you know about this Gringito anyway? Where does he come from?'

Nicanora, choosing yet again to ignore the various insults that peppered Fidelia's conversation, had to confess to her neighbour that she knew very little about her house guest. The Gringito appeared to lack any ability to converse in an understandable way with anyone except Nena, who had somehow been able to make sense of the sentences he occasionally tried to put together with the aid of the battered little book he kept in his pocket. What was more, she had no interest in knowing anything about him, sticking in this instance to her mother's philosophy of ‘What you don't know can't trouble you.'

‘All I'm saying to you, Nicanora, as a friend and neighbour,' Fidelia continued, ‘is, be on your guard. These foreigners aren't always what they seem. I told you about my poor husband's sister. She went to the city to sell her vegetables and arrived home a mere shadow of herself after sitting next to one of these gringos. During the night she started to piss blood, then she got thinner and thinner and within a month she was dead. The gringo had drained the life out of her, and he took her fat back home with him to make into soap. Nicanora, be careful of this Gringito.' Nicanora had heard this story many times before, and had dismissed it as fanciful nonsense dreamed up by Fidelia's in-laws, but recently the significance of the tale had begun to grow in potency.

Despite her worst fears, life had become immeasurably easier in Nicanora's household since the arrival of the Gringito. The money he supplied was helping to keep food on the table, finally pay off
Ernesto's numerous debts, buy Nena's school books and hold the moneylender at bay. And now she found she had enough left over to begin to refuel her dream of opening Valle de la Virgen's first ever hat shop. In the middle of the night she started to see scenes of the grand opening. She could visualise the queues of anxious people waiting for the latest fashions to arrive from the city, and the sheer beauty of the handmade hats that she would bring to the town. She would wake up with a long-forgotten but familiar voice repeating in her head, ‘Nicanora, it is your destiny,' as if the ancestors were trying to tell her that she finally had a purpose.

Knowing instinctively that location is of the utmost importance to the success of any business, Nicanora had her eye on the small shop on the corner of the plaza, opposite the church and near the mayor's office. It was the only premises suitable for her exclusive merchandise, its interior lending itself perfectly to the display of elegant hats. Being in the main square it was passed by everyone en route to the market, or taking the road out of town. The only obstacle that lay between her and her dream was that the shop was owned by Don Bosco the barber, had been for over twenty years, and the afternoon meetings at Don Bosco's shop to discuss the events of the day were a greater tradition among the men of the town than paying homage to the Virgin herself. She even ventured to discuss the hat shop with a few friends and neighbours, to test out the level of demand that existed for such an establishment. Her idea was met with stupefied derision.

‘You're becoming as bad as that son of yours,' Fidelia warned. ‘Nicanora, you're not a young woman. I notice new wrinkles appearing on your face every day. You can't go gallivanting back and forth to the city to buy ridiculous hats that will only fall into the swamp the first time we wear them. Be content with what you
have, as I am, and, God willing, your children will look after you. Nena studies hard, she'll probably grow up to be a teacher if she doesn't ruin her eyes reading before she's old enough. Isabela, well let's hope she'll marry a rich man, she'll certainly have to get married soon if she carries on the way she is. And Ernesto – of course the less said about him the better, but perhaps he'll finally leave home one day and stop bleeding you dry. Anyway, where would you get the money from to start up such a thing?' And there Fidelia had the last word. Even the moneylender would refuse her any more capital. In her feverish half-sleep, Nicanora worked out that if she could keep the Gringito with her for a few months she would have time to convince Don Bosco to retire and sell the shop, and to save enough for a down payment on her first consignment of hand-made Italian Borsalinos, the finest hats in the city.

Doña Nicanora and Don Bosco had a history, a history that they had both worked hard over the years to forget. Don Bosco had considered Nicanora to be a great beauty in her youth, an idea that Nicanora had dismissed as an illusion created by his poor eyesight. More than twenty years on, he still believed her to be the most beautiful woman he had ever known.

In her early days, Nicanora had enjoyed the attention that Don Pedro Bosco lavished on her. He would walk her to the market every morning, talking with passion of the day he would turn his barber's stall into a respectable business in the plaza. She listened to his plans in apparent awe, laughed at his ridiculous jokes and toyed girlishly with his affections. He waited for her every Sunday afternoon outside the church to walk her round and round the plaza, buying her numerous useless presents from the stalls. His particular favourites were the brightly coloured balloons, which he bought from the old balloon seller who mysteriously appeared every Sunday morning and then vanished at the end of the day back to her unknown village.