The Bitter Taste of Time

by Bea Gonzalez

Genres: Sagas; Family Life; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

A richly layered and evocative novel about the lives and loves of a family of remarkable Spanish women

Set in northern Spain from 1920 to the present, The Bitter Taste of Time is the compelling story of the Encarna women, whose lives are both tragic and beautiful. After the death of her husband, the family's gorgeous and imposing matriarch, Maria Encarna, turns her granite house into a pensión, opening it up to strangers with colorful stories and dark pasts. There she lives with her two unmarried sisters, her two daughters, and her granddaughter.

Through the Spanish Civil War, a dictatorship, and the early years of a new democracy, the Encarnas become the wealthiest family in town. Yet despite their success and tenacity, tragedy comes calling, usually in the form of a man—and almost always on a Friday.

By turns funny and moving, The Bitter Taste of Time is a thoroughly entertaining read.

Release date: October 14, 2008

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

Bitter Taste of Time, The

PART ONE
1920-1930
LATER, AFTER YEARS HAD PASSED AND THEY ALL HAD THE benefit of hindsight, they would comment on how truly strange Asunción Encarna had been from the start. A curious bird. As unpredictable as a goat. As peculiar as all those foreigners who arrived on the coasts of Spain dressed in gingham shorts and knee-high socks.
The roots of this peculiarity--the one that years later would have her collecting clocks in all shapes and sizes--they traced back to the events at the train station on a Friday in 1920. It was there that her husband of two short months, Manuel Pousada--a lunatic himself, one was quick to comment, a criminal of the worst kind, another added--aware that gossips loomed all around them and eager to avoid a scene during these, their final moments together, had tried in vain to stem her tears, silence her pleas, keep her from making a public spectacle of herself.
But then, he never loved her, they would say later. No, not for one moment did he seem sad to leave her.
Manuel Pousada and Asunción Encarna were at the station that day so that Manuel could take the train to the coast. From there, he would be boarding the ship to Brazil. Brazil. Howlong he had waited for this. The word rested sensuously on his tongue, the thought of it seemed like heaven. His wife's tears, her adolescent tantrums, jarred him now that the dream seemed so close at hand, now that his mind was already lost in the thought of much better things, on the stories he had heard from all those who had gone before him and had returned with gold and women and especially with the heat--sí, especially the heat, which they captured and brought back with them, and which glinted in their eyes and shone in their hair and glowed in their habit of walking with erect shoulders forever after.
And then one more kiss, one last backward look, a shake of the head, and he was gone, into the train and away from her life. And more tears and more anguish, and the promise--Cariño, he had said, it is only a matter of time now.
It would indeed be a matter of time before Asunción heard news of him, and then only after showering a mountain of abuse on the archaic and inefficient postal system of the region and the half-witted man in charge, who cried real tears of desperation because of it. When the letter finally arrived, she shared its contents with no one, stopping only to fold it neatly into its four parts once it had been read and announcing to all that her husband had now joined the ranks of the dearly departed.
Three months later, in August of 1920, after a long day and an even longer night, their daughter Gloria was born. In the room with Asunción, accompanying her through every heave and every push, were her mother María, her sister Matilde, and her aunts Carmen and Cecilia. There too was Doña Emilia, the town's midwife, and the two old women who accompanied all of the women in Canteira through the mysteries of labour, Doña Teresa and Doña Elena--greatly respected for having delivered eight healthy babies apiece, and eager to tell the storyof each of those births as a way of reminding everyone that childbirth, fraught with so many dangers, could as often as not produce healthy, happy children.
Outside, the town of Canteira was as silent as the stars with only the occasional sound rising here and there to punctuate the night--the whelp of a dog, the gasping spasms of a donkey, the odd distant and disembodied voice emerging from the hills which appeared purple and bruised in the encroaching darkness. It was a hot night, one of the hottest of that year. The large windows in the bedroom had been left open, but the warm breeze that drifted in did little to alleviate the oppressive humidity. For months before the birth, Asunción had remained closeted in this room, grieving for her dead husband and praying for the health of her unborn child. There, at least, she was thought to be safe from the many dangers that lurked outside, like the moon--the source of inspiration to many a haunted poet, but which pregnant women avoided, believing that to look at it would be to risk giving birth to an idiot.
As the labour progressed, and Asunción's screams grew shriller, her discomfort greater, Doña Teresa and Doña Elena interrupted their stories to implore the midwife to take some extraordinary measures.
Bring us a pair of her husband's pants or one of his hats, Doña Teresa said between two particularly strong contractions. There is no surer way to calm the pain than with some of the father's clothing. May he rest in peace, she added quickly, crossing herself as she did so.
A prayer to San Ramón will do the trick, Doña Elena said. The prayers I myself uttered can scarcely be counted.
María, Asunción's mother, an imposing woman with little respect for the sayings of the people, for all the crazy ideas thatcirculated through town, the fears of the dead and the superstitions that held so many hostage, dismissed the suggestions of these women with an impatient wave of her hand.
She turned now to her sister Cecilia--a nervous, emotional woman, who would punctuate every contraction and accompanying scream with a furious Dios mío--ordering her to boil some more water in the kitchen--a command she issued more to rid the room of her sister than because any water was actually needed.
Later, it would be Cecilia who would tell the story of the birth, exaggerating and embellishing the details to such an extent that eventually no one who had been there could distinguish between what they could remember and the inventions of Cecilia's feverish mind. What was true, irrefutable because it had become a part of the history of the town itself, was that Gloria had been born into a world full of women. It was not only that her father had perished in an unimaginable and distant land before her birth, but that he had left his wife behind in the care of her mother, two aunts, and a younger sister. What was also true was that Asunción had almost perished from the effort, all the pushing and the pulling, all the tears, all the desperate screams. The screams had been heard, in fact, as far away as the region of Castile--this, again, according to Cecilia, who had held Asunción's hand through most of the ordeal, attempting to ease her pain by forcing almost two full glasses of aguardiente into her mouth, but carefully, one drop at a time, until Asunción had grown drunk and delusional from the devastating combination of liquor, longing and pain.
It is during childbirth that you discover love, Asunción would tell them all afterwards, once the child had been born and she was so overwhelmed with grief that she was sure she had caughta glimpse of Manuel, hovering over her like a dark, unforgiving angel. In her drunken stupor, she had slurred his name so many times and with such a deep feeling that the women had been reduced to a heap of tears and even Edelmiro, the barnyard help, who had never loved and never lost, even he had felt as if there were a hole inside his stomach too, created by the acidic vapours of such an intense and unfulfilled yearning.
At least it is a girl. The child's grandmother was the first to say it. Her two sisters, Cecilia and Carmen, and her daughter Matilde had thought this too but had refrained from uttering what could only have been said by a grandmother. María said this only after her daughter Asunción had ceased crying--only after three weeks of her sobbing did María say this, and then only to bring to the house a well-needed tone of order.
She had always mistrusted the child's father, Manuel Pousada. Insolent eyes; unspeakable desires. No better than a peasant traipsing into their lives, without thought or forewarning, seducing her daughter in one single furtive morning.
But now there was this newborn, his newborn, a girl of white marble. Cabrón she thought uncharitably. Another man lost to the other world where he could walk unencumbered by memory or obligation. Amidst her cursing, though, it occurred to María, not for the first time, that Manuel's death had perhaps not been an altogether bad thing.
Many days passed after the baby's birth before the rhythm of the house was restored to its proper order--before the women could return to the work that fed and clothed them in a world where money was always an uncertain prospect. For years the women had survived by providing room and board to the many travellers who passed through town on their way to the coast.
In those days Canteira bustled and boomed with the machinations of illegal commerce. Situated in the heart of the Spanish region of Galicia, between the Atlantic coast and the border with León, the town was the resting stop for the endless stream of contrabandistas who travelled through at first on horseback and later inside Renaults and Peugeots, on their way to the coast to retrieve the goods that would be peddled in the dark cities of the Spanish interior.
The country as a whole had by then fully declined into a slothful decay. One by one, the colonies that remained in the Americas had reclaimed their independence from the incompetent central government of Spain. After 1898, all that remained were bitter words scribbled by a generation of writers bleeding their shame into the gaping wound the colonies left in their wake. All Spain could boast of now were greedy landowners, fattened Jesuits, disgruntled miners biding their time till they could stand up against the owners of the fetid hellholes where they worked themselves into an early grave.
In Galicia things were worse. Long forgotten by the central powers of Spain, no easy path led people to this remote region of the country, no reason existed to travel to this poverty-ridden chunk of the world. In this northwest bit of the Iberian peninsula, the only constant visitor was the rain, which made lettuce flourish and pastures unbearably beautiful, but delivered interminable nights of darkness so that depression was more common here than in all of Spain. More green than Ireland, more melancholic than a thousand Romantic poets, the region was lauded for its otherworldly beauty. Her people, though, were more often than not dismissed as illiterate peasants by their fellow countrymen and by the odd visitor from other lands, who arrived brandishing Bibles and preaching conversion from the sins of popery--only to find that it was not the Church of Rome that reigned supreme in the small towns and even smaller villages here, but superstitious beliefs of forest gods, black witches, and lascivious wolfmen, a legacy, like the bagpipes and stone hilltop forts, of the region's Celtic ancestry.
Canteira itself was a beautiful town even then--long before concrete and hotels had turned it into a vibrant, bustling affair, in the days before emigrant remittances, miniature cathedrals and five-day fiestas with virgins decked in gold and pearls--even then the town was an astounding sight, surrounded by the most beautiful natural scenery in all of the region, framed in summer by a night sky of infinite stars and a moon that gleamed like brittle porcelain.
It was María who had conceived of the idea of turning their house into a pensión. It was an enormous house, built by their uncle Ignacio who had left for Mexico when barely a boy and returned a decade later, a man straight and true, tall, handsome, and richer than he had ever imagined in his childhood dreams. He had built the house with the intention of marrying quickly and filling it with ten joyful children who would shower him with devotion and love. He was a happy man--perhaps the last happy man to be born to that family--and his infectious optimism blinded him to the climatic limitations of this corner of Spain, so that he built a house more appropriate to Andalucía, where the sun shines uninterrupted for months on end. The Galician workmen--ordinarily taciturn and sombre, suspicious of anyone who thought of the world as anything other than a vat of pain--were instantly seduced by Don Ignacio's enthusiasm, and grew to believe that the house he had designed in his head, complete with giant courtyard and a stone fountain decorated with cherubim carved in thesouth of Spain, would somehow defy the dreariness of Galicia's dark winter days. When the house was finally finished, Don Ignacio stood back and sighed in contentment. What he saw was a handsome rectangular mansion made from granite carved by the talented masons of the town, with eight bedrooms, four on the west wing of the house, four on the east, a sizable kitchen decorated with Portuguese blue and white tile, and at the front, the room he loved most of all, a parlour large enough to accommodate twenty people or more, heated in winter by a handsome wood-burning stove that radiated enough warmth to reach the many rooms that lay behind it on either side. Built on the outskirts of town, on a beautiful piece of land covered with apple, fig, and cherry trees, framed in the west by a bubbling creek and in the north by the splendour of Canteira's rolling hills, the house would soon become the envy of all who passed by on their way through town.
Sadly, Don Ignacio would not live long enough to fill the house with children, would not even live long enough to find a suitable wife, succumbing shortly afterwards to the typhus epidemic that took the lives of so many during the long winter of 1881. So it was that the house ended up in the hands of his younger brother, the father of María, Carmen, and Cecilia--a weak man who possessed none of the ebullience that had made Don Ignacio so loved in town, and who, despite all of his earnest efforts, was unable to produce a male heir who would survive the trauma of being brought into the world--a fact that he used to justify his wasted existence and the copious abuse he heaped on his wife. By the time he died, just months after María's marriage to Arturo Pérez Barreiro, the house had fallen into a state of pathetic disrepair, the paint on the walls eaten by the humidity, the wooden floors in various stages of decay.
It would take years of labour to set the house to rights again but María possessed all the determination that her own father had lacked and had a firm hand with her sisters besides. Carmen and Cecilia would remain unmarried, resigning themselves to assuming their respective places in the house, Cecilia taking charge of things in the kitchen and Carmen tending to the animals and managing the work in the fields. Two daughters were born in rapid succession to María-Asunción and then Matilde. Eight years later, her husband, not yet thirty years old, was dead. Faced with the uncertainty of a life without the income Arturo had derived as one of the town's schoolmasters, the sisters opened the house up to strangers a year later, offering beds made with sheets embroidered in Camariñas, wine from the Ribeiro Valley, and regional dishes cooked under the guidance of Cecilia--an enormous woman by then, driven to fat by a feverish, inexplicable hunger that she assuaged with chorizo, loaves of fresh bread, and, during the fall, pound upon pound of roasted chestnuts. Later, once Cecilia had passed away, Gloria made it a habit to take chorizo from the yearly slaughters to her great-aunt's grave where it disappeared shortly thereafter, eaten by the wolves or a graveyard loiterer--but really, Gloria believed, inhaled by Cecilia herself, who lay lonely and hungry inside her kitchenless coffin of black walnut and crushed velvet inlay.
Barely a week had passed after Gloria's birth when three guests arrived on horseback at the doors of the pensión.
Catalanes, Cecilia told the others in her best conspiratorial tone. You can tell by their funny way of talking and because their shirt sleeves hang like curtains.
The Catalanes, three men in their late twenties, perturbed to find themselves in a house full of so many women--A newly arrived one too, one of the men told the others, though youcan't tell yet; it's only when their eyes open up to swallow you whole that you can tell they've finally become women--stayed there nonetheless, too tired to search for other accommodation. Later, once they had downed enough Ribeiro wine to cure themselves of their initial bashfulness, they sang songs, told stories, and hummed to the new baby in a futile attempt to rid her of her sadness.
The following morning, Jordí, the tall Catalan with the eagle eyes--the one whose singing voice they would recall for years after because it was a deep, lush baritone that reminded them of the processions of the dead at midnight--handed the women a bit of Belgian lace, telling them it was for the child, señoras, for her baptismal robe. María, unaccustomed to this sort of generosity from strangers, and especially strangers from a part of the country she disliked for no particular reason, took the lace, smiling for the first time since their arrival. Later, she would comment that it augured well to have these guests--three Catalanes no less--offering gifts to the newborn on this, the longest night of the year, because it was August, and August nights were good only for the tortures of memory.




Three months passed before the lace was attached to the linen that became the baptismal robe, three months too long for the parish priest, Don José, who warned the women of the torturous limbo that awaited the child were she to suffer the great misfortune of dying before receiving the touch of God upon her forehead.
That man is an animal in black robes, María told the others one night, as he approached her on his way to evening mass with yet another dire warning. María was still nursing the wounds inflicted by the death of her husband, Arturo Pérez Barreiro, akind, gentle man who had descended slowly into an overwhelming unhappiness until the day he could take no more and, standing on a pine stool in the kitchen, hanged himself next to the salt-cured hams and cloves of garlic. He left a note, his words scribbled in the slanted way of those who know death is imminent, and the words engraved themselves on her heart until the day she died when she too, remembered to repeat them.
The flesh is willing, cariño, but the heart cannot go on.
It was her sister Cecilia who stumbled upon the body, swaying gently from the rafters, propelled by a soft summer breeze, the face grey and drawn from all the effort of a self-inflicted annihilation. The smell of Arturo's dead body would follow her everywhere thereafter, driving her into a fury of culinary experimentation with exotic herbs and spices that she used in copious amounts, hoping that their pungency would overwhelm the persistent and seductive odour of self-destruction.
Don José fought long and hard with María over the issue of a Christian burial for Arturo, arguing that God would not receive this unrepentant sinner into sacred ground, and depicting all manner of natural catastrophes that would be visited upon them should they try such a thing, until María, enraged with grief and longing, finally took the good priest by the collar, saying, Don't think I don't know about those late night meetings with your political enamorados because I do, you bastard wretch. Don Jose--scared more for his future in the tumultuous political climate of the time than of any dire retribution from the Lord--forgave Arturo Pérez Barreiro's sins on the spot, even going so far as to deliver an effusive eulogy at the funeral, never once taking his eyes off the widow, who looked at him fixedly and without emotion for the duration of the mass.
It was only after the baptism of Gloria, held on a coldNovember day, that the house seemed fully restored to its normal order. That very night, Don Miguel, the Andalusian with the green eyes, long black hair, and the bearing of an aristocrat, arrived at their doors seeking accommodation. Dressed head to toe in black and tall--as big as a Scandinavian, Carmen told the others, though in truth she had never seen a Scandinavian--Don Miguel appeared to them in a haze of mystery. Instead of the usual collection of odds and ends carried by the contrabandistas on their way to the coast, the Andalusian carried books and vials and bottles filled with liquids that shone in the candlelight. Instead of the usual chatter of I'm going to Vigo, señoras, and my wife's name is Teresa, just like the virgin of San Roca, instead of the familiar talk of lonely men on the road, Don Miguel said little, issuing only the odd terse instruction to María about dietary preferences--meat cooked rare, fish broiled always with onions. And, por favor, señora, more candles in the bedroom.
The man looks like the devil incarnate, Cecilia commented to the others in a hushed whisper that very night, scared because of his height, the colour of his eyes, and his habit of wearing so much black, a privilege she had always believed belonged exclusively to unhappy women.
After a week had passed and Don Miguel continued to stay at the house, saying little and shunning all contact with anything but his books, which he read until the early hours of the morning, the women began to grow suspicious.
Look here, sisters, Carmen said one day to the others. No one stays in this town longer than a day. After all, what is there to do here? What if this man is a criminal of some kind?
Or worse, a violador--a rapist, Cecilia added, scaring herself so much that her chest heaved unnaturally for the rest of the day whenever the thought surfaced to torment her.
If you ask me, he is a lonely man, no more, said Asunción, who had been released partially from the depression of her husband's death by the distraction provided by Don Miguel, and who was feeling considerably more sympathetic towards him.
It was Cecilia though, tormented by the unhappy thought of an imminent and collective violation, who finally broke down and approached him.
And where is it that you are going, Don Miguel? she asked him, well into his second week at the house, as she served him a dinner of stewed pork and tomatoes.
Why do you assume I am going somewhere? Don Miguel said, not bothering to look at her.
Everybody is on their way to somewhere when they stop in this town, señor.
And I am not, he said, and buried his head in his meal, indicating thus that he would be saying no more.
But that very night, over a glass of aguardiente, as they all came together around the heat of the wood stove, the Andalusian finally broke his vow of silence and began telling them stories--of places he had been and people he had met, such stories that the women's imaginations blazed for weeks and months afterwards--travellers' tales and bits of poetry, recited softly by the light of white candles, words that enthralled the women into sleepless nights and days of endless rumination. Despite their many attempts to glean from these stories even the most minute detail of Don Miguel's own history, the women learned little about him except for a few of his favourite foods, his love for the poetry of Rosalía de Castro, and his strange habit of humming an unfamiliar tune to himself while he disposed of his breakfast in the morning.
For three weeks they repeated this routine, sitting around theheat of the wood stove, the women embroidering--all except for María, whose eyes had always been too weak to distinguish between tulips and camellias--and Don Miguel telling his tales. There, the women learned of faraway lands like Germany, inhabited, Don Miguel would tell them in his slow Andalusian drawl, by blond giants who spoke in grunts and barbaric growls.
But then Spanish, señoras, is the only language appropriate for the longings of the Lord.
Amén, the women would utter in unison, proud of their connection to such a holy tongue but unsure of what he really meant, because they had never heard another language except for Catalan and it was their distinct impression that Catalan was an invention of the people of the northeast to exclude them from their world and therefore not a language at all but a form of snobbery. There too, they learned of happenings in all the corners of Europe and stories of their own country, of Andalusian gypsies and Basque pastors and Madrid intellectuals who wrote poetry celebrated in countries they had never heard of.
On the dreariest nights, the nights when the winds blew most fiercely and the rain pelted the roof of the house with an insistence that seemed almost menacing, Don Miguel would take advantage of the women's incipient fear to tell the darkest, most disturbing stories in his repertoire. It was on a night like this that Don Miguel sat down to his customary glass of aguardiente and related one such tale, one they would remember for years, instilling such a fear of cats in the women, that they never allowed one in the house thereafter.
In the heart of Castile, he began, in one of those towns that seem to have been abandoned by God, where even the dogs look like ghosts and where the only people to emerge in the dark are a legion of deformed, miserable beggars, lives JacoboOrtega, a wealthy merchant, one of the wealthiest of the area though one whose wealth has always been rumoured to be founded on many a shady dealing. I always stay with him on my way through town, as did my own father in the days when he himself travelled through there doing his business.
It was my father who noticed their cat--a large, mangy thing with a vicious disposition and the ability to look right into your very soul. My father could remember seeing that cat on the first day he had stayed there, perched on a chair in the parlour, surveying his surroundings with careful attention. When I started travelling with him and we stayed in that house together for the first time, my father pointed the cat out to me. There, he told me, is an animal that has been around at least as long as I have.
I was curious about this creature; after all, it is strange that a cat should live so long, and he looked in excellent shape given what must have been his age. That night, at dinner, I asked the owner of the house about it. "Don Jacobo, how long has this cat been in the family?"
"This cat?" asked Don Jacobo, laughing and pointing to the animal, who seemed to be staring at me now with an even greater dose of his usual malice. "This cat, my dear friend, has been in this family since the days of my own grandfather."
That was impossible, of course! No cat could live so long--unless the strange creature was not a cat at all but something much more sinister. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand on end as I thought of the only one who could have been loitering in this house for so long now. The cat, as if sensing my suspicions, now attempted to intimidate me with an even fiercer gaze.
I asked that some holy water, kept at the front of the house, be brought to me. Don Jacobo laughed at my request, buthumoured me nonetheless. "You're not thinking of conjuring up some of your Andalusian witchery in this house, are you, my dear man? Surely you know what we think of that nonsense in Castile, Don Miguel," he said to me, laughing still.
The people of the house had by now congregated in the parlour and were laughing with Don Jacobo, who handed me a glass of the holy water and introduced me to the company with a dramatic swing of his arms. "Señores and señoras, before you now is the newly appointed court magician."
I took the glass of holy water, ignoring their laughter. The cat seemed poised to strike at me, his body perched and taut, his eyes daring me to attack him. I dipped my fingers into the holy water and sprinkled some of it on the cat's head.
"Stop that!" the cat screamed immediately. "You're burning me!"
I sprinkled some more holy water on him. "I said stop that!" he screeched again, shuddering at the touch of God upon his neck.
"What are you doing here?" I asked him, my hands wrapped tightly around that glass of water. The people of the house were now silent, riveted by our exchange.
The cat laughed malevolently. "Waiting for those in the house to die," he spat out. "Those who have died here before have already joined me."
Satanás! The women dropped their embroidery at this point, their gasps punctuating the night. Only María remained impervious to the drama in this story, though it was she who ordered the women to be silent so that Don Miguel could go on with his tale.
Satanás, of course Satanás, dear ladies. His devious ways are too numerous to count. I took the rest of the holy water and poured it over the cat in one single dose, after which he evaporatedin a billow of smoke but not before promising to return once more.
And then Don Miguel was laughing, telling lighter stories, a comic tale of infidelity from Barcelona, a tale of two thieves from Madrid. But it was the story of the cat that the women would remember, that would keep them awake that night, their eyes searching for signs of the devil in the dark. From then on, no cat would ever be viewed with anything but suspicion and even María would feel uncomfortable in the company of the many strays that roamed the fields around their house.
Every night brought a new story, a new reason to look forward to the after-dinner chats. Sometimes it was poetry he recited. From Bécquer, wondrous words of love--
What is poetry? you say As you fix my eyes with your eyes of blue What is poetry ... you ask me that? Poetry ... it is you!
Words that scorched the hearts of the women, tantalized them with the thought that such feelings could emerge from the minds of men. Words that upset María, though, words that made her uncomfortable, that inevitably led her to complain--Don Miguel, she would ask, shaking her head reproachfully whenever he launched into a stanza or two, are these the words for decent women?
Ay, Doña María, he would respond, laughing, these are