María has her favourite granddaughter sitting on her knees. She’s the one who looks the most like Manuel, her son. Her other granddaughters surround her too, ready to listen to The Good Man, a story she tells them every Sunday evening. This is the time when the three girls’ parents leave them with their grandmother so they can go and watch an adult movie.
The girls know the story by heart, by they don’t mind listening to it again, because Grandma María makes all sorts of funny gestures and she also makes voices for all the different characters.
‘So, which story do you want today? The Black Hand, perhaps?’
‘Yes, yes, please Grandma, yes.’
‘But before that… The Good Man’
‘Once upon a time, there was a man called Tomás who lived at the end of the village. He was tall, handsome and strong. He also rarely spoke to his neighbours, which is why everyone thought he was a bit weird. His house was made of stone and next to it there was a well. People around the village said that’s where he dropped the children who were naughty. Tomás worked every day at the allotment he had at the back of the house. He watered it with the crystalline waters of a nearby stream which sprouted from two rocks semi-hidden in the greenery.
One day, people from the town started getting sick. The teacher stopped giving her lessons. The shop clerk had to close down his shop, the two bakers were not able to bake bread anymore, the priest had to close down the church… Until one morning, Tomás appeared at the doctor’s house with a container full of water.
‘Come on, drink from this, you’ll feel better’
The doctor, who was himself in bed as well, tasted the water and…
‘Where did you get this water from?’ The doctor asked. ‘It tastes a bit funny, but I already feel a bit better.’
‘It’s from the stream near my allotment.’
And so Tomás told the doctor and the people in charge of the village that they could go to this stream to take water if they wanted to, that it didn’t matter that it was on his land. Thanks to this good man, many lives were saved in the village.
‘And so they were all happy ever after.’
After this, the girls always clap, and grandma laughs.
María is a short woman. She’s very old. She always wears black and has her hair pulled in a tight knot. Sometimes, when her daughter Carmela, the spinster, helps her groom every morning, her favourite granddaughter spines on her because she loves to see how patient and loving Carmela is with her grandmother.
But María is also stubborn. She always wants to do things her way, she has a lot of character. Life was harsh on her, perhaps a bit too early. She was only ten years old when her own mother started giving birth in the kitchen. María froze when she heard her howling until she finally came to her senses and ran to the neighbour’s house to ask for help. Even though everything went well in the end, María would never forget this moment.
Many years have passed since. Now María lives with her daughter, Carmela, in the city, faraway from the village where she was born and raised her four children. She only comes back there during the summer to visit her old home, her yard and her fig tree, and that large well in the hall that Manuel built so they’d never run out of water.
Grandma’s flat is quite modest. Her son pays the rent for her. The best thing is the balcony: her granddaughters love it. There is also a small cabinet where she keeps some objects darkened with time. There is a scale with a few small weights made of brass. If Grandma is in a good mood the granddaughters are allowed to play with it.
How many memories come to her mind when she looks at these objects…
The day she inherited her father’s hardware store after she spent so many years there learning the skills of the job. A bit after that she’d meet Germán, a very handsome young man from the neighbouring village. They married and soon enough they had four children. Even though they both worked at the shop, María was the one in charge of the business. Everything went well until he started drinking. On Saturdays, he’d always arrive late at night, always drunk. And in the morning, sometimes, María got out of bed with bruises in her arms and on her face. It didn’t take long until Germán died of cirrhosis. He was only thirty-five. María found herself alone in a very difficult time: the Civil War had just started, an absurd war that would tear apart families, spreading terror and suffering through the village. Like many others, María was forced to close down her shop.
‘How did she manage to survive the war with four little ones to feed as well?’ people from the village whispered as soon as the war was over.
María’s eyes get shiny when she remembers the strange whistle she heard one morning coming from her yard. The first time she got so scared that she hid a knife in her waist pouch before she opened the door and went to look. There was a tall man outside, carrying two big sacks on his shoulders, one containing wheat and another one with rice. She thought she recognised him – he may have been one of his dead husband’s friends. That first day they didn’t even speak to each other. He was the one who saved their lives. He was a good man.
Lucía Labarta Escudero is retired now. She’s been a singer-songwriter and a Literature teacher. After having read so many excellent books, she finds writing a real challenge. Nonetheless, she’s committed to exploring these new lands where pleasure, insomnia, stress and excitement seem to co-exist all together. The journey has already started.
This story was translated from the Spanish by Inés G. Labarta.
This short story is part of a research project on speculative historical fiction in Ireland and Spain funded by the AHRC and the University of Plymouth.
Picture credits: Reidar Tronstad
THE WANDERING BARD 