‘A friend.’ She kissed him on the mouth to stop him asking more. She’d never known her body could feel like this way, or that she could inspire a man to do such things to her.
He kissed her again, and Olive parted her lips and put her hands through his hair, the rusted railings hard against her back. They pushed into each other, kissing, kissing, kissing, as the old woman in the finca began again her plaintive music, and a figure watched them, silhouetted at the door.
9
Olive tried to sit up, but a lightning bolt of agony split her brain. Her mouth was a desert, her neck was lead. Lying in the mussed sheets, befogged, guts addled, scalp stinking of a thousand cigarettes, her hands flew to her body. She wasn’t wearing any clothes. Jesus, where were her clothes? She winced to her left. Someone had folded her dress neatly over a chair; her stockings laddered and bloodstained on the soles, her fox stole swinging off the arm. It looked like a hunter’s trophy, skinned and broached overnight, a dead glass eye in the head, those awful glued teeth. She touched her neck. The emerald necklace was still there, resting on her collarbone.
She heard the gunshot again – the church, the darkness, the fireworks, a rusting gate – had it been a dream? So much, all in one day. Far off, she could hear the telephone ringing. What if the civil guard were waiting outside, ready to take her away?
Isaac. The kiss – how was it possible she had endured life until now without that kiss – how had she lived? He’d dragged her through the darkness to let a pistol off inside a church, and then he’d kissed her. She wanted another kiss from Isaac more than she wanted to breathe.
SHE FELT AUGMENTED, AS IF a door, long hidden inside her, had been opened, revealing a sinuous corridor, and she herself was running through it. Since the moment she met him, this man had clung to her imagination. He had made her feelings enormous, the depths of her horizons doubling. For once in her life, Olive had been made to feel monumental. The nervousness of what might come next went hand in hand with a desire for him so extreme that she wondered whether even being possessed by Isaac would assuage it.
She hadn’t noticed Teresa, at the end of the bed, scanning the peaks and hollows of the sheets. ‘I have made you a bath,’ Teresa said, looking quickly away in the face of Olive’s nakedness.
‘Who was that on the telephone?’
‘No one.’
‘No one? Who was it, Tere?’
Olive saw Teresa hesitate. ‘I do not know.’
‘Are the police here?’
‘No, se?orita.’
‘I’m never drinking again.’
‘There is a glass of goat milk by your head.’
‘I can’t.’
‘There is a bucket by your side.’
Olive leaned over and looked into the bucket. Bits of soil from the garden were scattered in the bottom. She retched into it, wanting to expel the sick feeling, her eyeballs hard as rocks.
‘Se?orita,’ Teresa said, ‘my brother is going to show his painting today.’
‘Today?’ Olive groaned, collapsing back onto the bed. ‘Tere – was there – has there – been any news today, from the village?’
‘Someone broke into the church last night. They shot the statue of the Virgin Mary.’
‘What?’
‘Padre Lorenzo is crazy,’ Teresa went on. ‘He has taken her into the centre of the main square and he’s shouting.’
Olive tried to speed up her thoughts. ‘Taken who?’
‘La Virgen,’ Teresa repeated, in Spanish. ‘She was very old wood, very expensive. She was shot three times. They took her to the office of Doctor Morales. As if he could bring her back to life,’ Teresa added, with a slight sneer. ‘Do you know what the men are asking, se?orita? They are asking, who is the kind of man who puts a bullet through the tit of the Madonna?’
Olive said nothing, and closed her eyes. ‘My brother looks more sick than you today,’ Teresa said.
‘Well, it was a good party.’
‘I know. I have been cleaning for four hours. Come, get into the bathroom before the water is cold.’ Teresa stood at the side of the bed and opened out a huge bath sheet. Olive obeyed; Teresa wrapped her up and shuffled her from the room.
?
Outside, Teresa’s seeds were growing well; tiny leaves emerging from the fertilized furrows, where back in January she and Olive had marched up and down. The cork oaks and sweet chestnuts had turned a deeper green, and the sun was a few degrees warmer. Although the flowers were not in bloom, and the air was still thin, Teresa could smell the departure of winter, the inexplicable awareness the body has of the change to the most hopeful of seasons.
She sat on the tatty green sofa in the front east room. Upstairs, she could hear Olive draining her bath. She thought of Adrián, how it was inconceivable someone so young should be dead. She thought of the Schlosses’ mad party, of Isaac’s anger, their surly father, the shot Madonna. Everything was so uncertain. And yet, with regards to today’s unveiling, Teresa had never felt so sure. She’d asked her brother whether he would miss painting Sarah and Olive, but he’d ignored her, trudging off down the hill to fetch the table and chairs that Doctor Morales said they could borrow for the party.
This morning in the cottage, Teresa put her head round Isaac’s door and told him that if he wanted she would take the portrait over and prepare it for a grand unveiling. ‘I’ll put it on an easel in the front east room,’ she said.