The Years That Followed Read online

  And suddenly it was all right. Everyone relaxed. The other girls looked at Calista with a new respect.

  “Won’t you come in?” Calista could hear the uncertainty in Mrs. Peters’s voice.

  “Thank you. But I won’t disturb. I will come back for Calista around five, and perhaps I can drive all of you girls home, too, no?” María-Luisa was smiling at the other girls and, miraculously, the girls were smiling back. “Would you like that?” María-Luisa asked.

  Three heads nodded; three pink bows dipped and rose again in unison.

  “Good.” The crispness had returned to María-Luisa’s tone. “Then I will see you all later. Thank you again, Mrs. Peters. And, Calista, don’t forget to give Mary her gift.”

  All eyes followed her down the path. Everyone waved as the car pulled away. Calista felt that she could breathe again.

  Mrs. Peters said brightly, “Let’s go inside, girls. Let’s have our party!”

  Calista remembers the ice cream and jelly, the fizzy red lemonade, the Rice Krispie buns, solid and sticky with chocolate. All the food that María-Luisa frowned upon at home. The five girls played pass-the-parcel, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and musical chairs, although Calista noticed that one or other of the pink bows cheated at musical chairs, every time. She wanted to cry out each time it happened; but instead, she heard her mother’s voice inside her head, warning her about breeding, and so she said nothing.

  Over birthday cake and more lemonade, Mary’s four small guests oohed and aahed over Mary’s birthday presents—Calista had given her books, The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey and The Bookshop on the Quay by Patricia Lynch, which María-Luisa had said were appropriate. The others had brought a jigsaw, a Judy annual for 1958—although the year was already half over—and a pencil case stuffed full of coloring pencils. And then it was time to go home.

  When María-Luisa returned, smiling, she handed Mrs. Peters a bunch of long-stemmed lilies. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Peters. I do hope Calista was well behaved?”

  Mrs. Peters appeared flustered, unsure what to do with the flowers. She held them at arm’s length, clutching at their stems through the damp brown paper. She looked as if she feared they might somehow take her by surprise. “Oh! Yes, perfectly. Such a lovely girl. Calista’s welcome anytime. We loved having her, didn’t we, Mary?”

  Mary nodded, her thin, eager face still smeared with chocolate.

  “May I?” María-Luisa took a Polaroid camera out of her bag. “I should like very much to give each of the girls a souvenir of this lovely day. Is that all right?”

  There were squeals and giggles as all five girls posed for the photographs. There was some pushing and shoving as they watched the photos ghosting into life; the pink bows jumped up and down, beside themselves. Calista was fascinated, watching as each of the girls’ faces emerged, one after the other. She saw the way the camera captured their expressions, freezing their sense of mischief, their shyness, their uncertainty forever under the glossy coating of memory. The other girls were awestruck, and Calista felt her stock rise on that day. Like it or not, she knew she owed that to her mother.

  She glances now at her bedroom mirror where several photos congregate, their corners tucked into the wooden frame. Each one jostles the other for space, just like the pink-bowed girls did on the day the pictures were taken. In there somewhere is the fading Mary Peters of eight years ago, with her soft eyes and her sticky face. Calista wonders where she is now, where all those girls are. It is as though they disappeared into some shadowy underworld of hairdressing and shop-assisting and sewing factories. Calista was the only one of her classmates to receive what María-Luisa called a proper secondary education, an education suitable for a young lady.

  Calista now drags a brush through the tangle of her dark hair, smooths the front of her dress, and gets ready to go back downstairs. Her watch tells her it’s almost time. She daren’t be even a moment late. She hesitates for a second, but then decides against the lipstick that she’s tempted to wear: just a faint pink frosting—she’s seventeen, after all—but she judges that given the mood her mother is in, it might be wiser to avoid a row.

  Calista makes her way down the stairs to the hallway just as the clock is chiming one. At the turn, she hears voices, laughter, the sound of animated introductions, her father’s booming voice. “And this is my son, Felipe.” She sees all the heads below her: Philip’s; her father, Timothy’s; her mother’s; and, much taller than all of them, what must be Alexandros’s.

  Her mother looks up, sees Calista, and smiles. It is as though that one small movement breaks the thread of whatever binds together all of those standing in the hall. Almost at once, Alexandros moves away from the others, turns, and watches as Calista comes down the stairs. She sees his eyebrow lift; something in his gaze makes her begin to blush, and she wishes she’d risked the lipstick.

  “My daughter, Calista.” Timothy waves his hand in her direction. He sounds satisfied about something. His movements are jaunty, almost arrogant, as though he’s showing off his spoils.

  Alexandros steps forward, gives the smallest of bows, and brings his lips close to the back of Calista’s hand, although he does not kiss it. Calista starts. A jolt courses through her, a tingle not unlike the shock she’d gotten once from a badly wired lamp. As Alexandros raises his head, his clear green eyes look right through her, as though he can see something beyond what she now is, standing there in front of him. He seems reluctant to let go of her hand. When he finally does so, Calista can feel the warmth and the strength of his fingers pressed into her palm like a memory.

  And then she knows; of course she does.

  They move into the dining room, where Maggie is hovering.

  As they sit, Alexandros’s hand brushes against Calista’s. The sudden contact startles her fingers into life all over again. His knee presses against hers under the table from time to time, seeming accidental, although Calista is sure that it is not.

  She still remembers the certainty of that day: that something about her old life was ending. Something new and electrifying was just beginning.

  * * *

  Calista finishes her whiskey and stands up. She tries not to let her eye be drawn back again towards the gallery of black-and-white portraits. She wants to avoid Alexandros’s ancient gaze. She moves quickly towards the window instead, snapping off all the lamps as she goes. Dotted across the inky sky, the stars are small, watchful, light-filled blossoms. They blink at her only occasionally.

  For a moment, Calista stands there looking out, still able to recognize some familiar landmarks despite the blackness.

  Montánchez, away to the south. The distant lights of quietening farms; Calista can name all of their owners now, one by one. They all greet her, and she them, when they meet along the winding back roads. Initial wariness on their side gradually gave way to a respectful, guarded affection. Calista made sure to use only local materials, employed only local labor, in the building of her house. She buys only local produce, from the weekly markets or directly from the farmers themselves. These things are not forgotten, not in a place such as this.

  As Calista enters her bedroom, she knows this will be another sleepless night. Not because of what has already happened, hundreds of kilometers away—she has been ready for that for years—but because the potent force of memory has gripped her, and she must give it its due, must see it through to the end, before it will release her.

  It is difficult, though, to separate memory from all it brings with it: love, pain, loss. Betrayal. A mysterious alchemy sometimes makes the remembering more gentle, more resigned. But not tonight.

  Tonight, Calista feels that every cell is firing, every nerve ending poised. This is it.

  This is what all those years have led her towards: from that first family lunch with Alexandros’s knee pressing against hers to the ending that has always been inevitable.

  pilar


  Torre de Santa Juanita, 1957

  * * *

  Pilar Domínguez couldn’t wait to leave her village.

  Torre de Santa Juanita huddled itself into the countryside beyond Montánchez, its houses crowded into insignificance. The mountains lorded over it, the land withheld itself, and the inhabitants dressed themselves in all the resentments of poverty. When Pilar finally left, she did as her mother, María Dolores, had bid her.

  “Vete, hija,” Mamá had urged her eighteen-year-old daughter. Her tone had been full of an unaccustomed urgency. Go, my girl, she said. Leave this place and shake the dust off your feet. Don’t ever look back. Something in her mother’s eyes terrified Pilar. She knew that, more than this place, her mother meant her to leave this life. She’d watched as Mamá faded away, frail and birdlike, her body barely making a ripple under the thin blanket that covered her that final winter.

  Just before she died, she took Pilar’s hand in hers. There was a surprising strength to her grasp. “Listen to me,” she said. “If you stay until I am gone, you will never escape. You will spend your life serving your father and your brothers.” She paused and drew one shallow, difficult breath. “And no matter what the priest says, there is no nobility in poverty, and even less in servitude. Go.”

  Pilar ran. She still remembers the date: May 17, 1957. Paco took her in the cart as far as their nearest neighbor, fifteen kilometers west of Torre de Santa Juanita. From there, his dark, silent friend Gabriel took her to the bus station in Mérida. When they arrived, Pilar stepped unsteadily off the pillion of Gabriel’s scooter, thinking that she’d never been so happy to feel the ground beneath her feet as a solid, unshifting thing. She caught a slow, grateful bus to Badajoz, and then took the overnight train to Madrid.

  Pilar had her mother’s life savings in her purse: the few pesetas that Mamá had managed to keep back from her weekly lacemaking, saved stealthily in a cloth bag at the bottom of the earthenware jar where the flour was kept. No chance of any man looking there, Mamá had said grimly.

  Pilar had grown up knowing that her mother had “married beneath her.” She’d felt this unspoken knowledge, absorbed it as she grew. Nobody had ever said as much, but the understanding hung in the air, chill and blunt, like trees in winter. Her mother’s way of speaking, the way she walked with her head up, the way she often answered back, her sharpness igniting her husband’s rage: all of these things set her apart from the other village women.

  Never marry, she’d told her only daughter, shaking her head. Her brown eyes were alight with intensity, her fists tightly clenched.

  Answer to no man.

  * * *

  Everything had terrified Pilar on her arrival in Madrid: the traffic, the noise, the enormous scale of the city and its monuments. The Puerta del Sol—all those hurrying people!

  When her mother had pressed the envelope of pesetas into Pilar’s hands, dusting off the ghosting of flour as she did so, she also handed her daughter something else: a scrap of paper, many times folded. When Pilar unpleated it, it felt feathery in her hands, insubstantial. She held on tightly, afraid it might fly away from her. She sat beside her mother on the bed as María Dolores struggled for breath to explain. She laid one trembling forefinger on the faded writing.

  “This man in Madrid will help you. His name is Alfonso Gómez. He is a lawyer, and you can trust him with your life.”

  Pilar looked at her, startled, her eyes full of questions. How did her mother know this man, when she had never, as far as Pilar knew, even left her village? And how did she know that Pilar could trust him?

  María Dolores allowed her gaze to rest somewhere above Pilar’s shoulder. “I know this man. He is from around here.” She turned and looked her daughter in the eye. “He is the man I should have married.”

  Pilar gasped. She couldn’t help herself. Her mother had a past? That was even more astonishing than the fact that there had once been another man in her life. Up until that moment, in Pilar’s young eyes, María Dolores, Mamá, had been simply that: a mother, always present to her four children: three boys and one girl, her youngest. She was a wife, too, of course, but that amounted to almost the same thing. Her life was defined by belonging to other people: to a casually brutal man, to four grown-up children, to some brothers and sisters of her own, carelessly scattered around Asturias and Galicia.

  “I was not good enough for Alfonso’s family,” Pilar’s mother continued. “Never good enough. They were wealthy pig farmers from close to Montánchez; my father and mother owned a few acres here in Santa Juanita. Alfonso asked me to run away with him to Madrid, but I was too afraid. I said no. It is something that I have regretted all my life. I should have gone. I should have had the courage.”

  It was the longest speech Pilar had ever heard her mother make. She did a rapid calculation: Paco, Pilar’s eldest brother, was twenty-­five, so Alfonso had disappeared from her mother’s life at least that many years ago; how did she even know he was still alive? Suddenly, Pilar was struck by a new and astonishing thought: What if Alfonso and Mamá . . . ? What if Paco, gentle Paco—so different from Javier and Carlos . . . ? What if her mother was telling her only half of the truth?

  As though she’d read her daughter’s mind, María Dolores said: “There are some things we will not talk about—there is no time. Just know that Alfonso is alive and well and practicing law in Madrid. I sometimes have news of him.” Pilar didn’t dare ask. María Dolores reached out and took her daughter’s hand. “You must not be like me. You must not be afraid. You must go and make a life for yourself.”

  Even at the time, Pilar knew that she would remember those words forever. Her mother’s intensity, the urgency of her gaze, the cold, grim bareness of her bedroom: the images were seared at once into Pilar’s memory. She watched as the older woman slumped back against her pillow. Talking exhausted her.

  “Rest now, Mamá,” Pilar said. “I will stay with you. Please, you have to rest.”

  María Dolores nodded and closed her eyes. Pilar watched as sleep overtook her. She couldn’t help her sense of disbelief. She tried to find a sign, any sign, of long-ago, youthful passion in her mother’s weary face. Mamá had loved another man, and she, Pilar, had known nothing about that other life, suspected nothing.

  Did Papá know? Surely he must. Santa Juanita was small, a tightly wound, suspicious community, where need and want and envy made everybody scrutinize their neighbors’ every move. This sudden suspicion of Pilar’s made sense of her father’s jibes, the throwaway remarks that he spat around the room when something had, once again, catapulted him into one of his rages. Pilar felt a swelling sorrow for her mother. Mamá had been an educated girl, one of the few in the village who had gone to school until she was eighteen. The nuns in the nearby convent had spotted potential in María Dolores, encouraged her in her studies. Mamá’s own mother, Loló—Pilar’s tiny ­grandmother—had cleaned for those same nuns, making her way on hands and knees up and down the stairways and the parquet floors of the convent, polishing the holy surfaces until they gleamed. Loló adored her only daughter, was determined to give her all the opportunities she herself had never had. And María Dolores had loved school, loved learning.

  Pilar still remembers Mamá’s wails of anguish when, one inexplicable afternoon, Papá had wrenched tumble-loads of books off the olivewood shelves that Paco had just finished crafting. He ripped the spines off each, one by one, tossing them into the already blazing fire. She remembers little else apart from the dark, burnished swirls of the wood and the way the pattern had caught her eye. That and her father batting away her mother’s flailing arms as though they had been made of string. When Papá turned his rage on Pilar, she fled through the door and across the frozen yard, where she hid in the barn until her father’s storm had blown itself out.

  Pilar knew nothing of the circumstances of her parents’ courtship—­not even how they’d met, or how long they’d
known each other before they married. In some of the other village houses, there were one or two awkward, wavery black-and-white photographs on display: the happy couple, snapped outside the door of the village church. The men all looked the same: scrubbed, embarrassed, wearing ill-fitting suits. The women, for the most part, wore pretty dresses—some of them a cut above the rest with a pearl button or two, a little bit of lace, here and there some satin ribbon. But there were no photographs in Pilar’s house.

  All Pilar knew was her mother’s prayer over the years that Pilar’s life must not be as hers had been. She’d insisted on Pilar’s staying at school until she, too, was eighteen—a battle she had managed to win; her weapons were years of tenacity and lacemaking, along with the money she’d earned cleaning for the nuns. Just as her own mother had. “Not for a third generation, though,” María Dolores had warned Pilar, shaking her head, her eyes aflame. “You must break the cycle. You will clean floors for nobody.”

  And so Pilar had left. When she took the overnight train to Madrid, she had two addresses in her pocket: that of the nuns’ hostel where she would live for the next eight years of her life, and that of Señor Don Alfonso Gómez, who would help her transform the rest of it.

  * * *

  He comes out of his office to greet her. Alfonso Gómez is a tall man, an imposing one, with elegantly graying hair and kind eyes. This man might have been my father, Pilar thinks, and that strange possibility fills her with wonder. She gazes at him, searching for some memory of Paco, some shadow of resemblance in the face that is now beaming down at her. She wonders if Señor Don Alfonso has ever suspected. She will probably never know.

  “Pilar. Delighted to meet you at last,” he says, shaking her hand. His grasp is warm and firm. Pilar feels shy, almost tongue-tied. She can’t help but compare him to the man who is her father: Papá’s blunt, wiry frame, his bullish strength. His hands, with their bruised and broken fingernails, their rough skin. A life’s history of burns and cuts traced across their surface, a whole network of roads and pathways of hardship.