Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop Read online

  Doña Nicanora’s

  Hat Shop

  Kirstan Hawkins

  HUTCHINSON

  LONDON

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Published by Hutchinson 2010

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  Copyright © Kirstan Hawkins 2010

  Kirstan Hawkins has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Hutchinson Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SWIV 2SA

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780091931704

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  To Stanley and Hilary

  Doña Nicanora’s

  Hat Shop

  Kirstan Hawkins studied anthropology at Edinburgh University and has travelled extensively in her work in Africa, Latin America and Asia. She carried out fieldwork for her degree among the Ashaninka Indians of the Peruvian Amazon, and for her Ph.D. she spent time in the altiplano of Bolivia.

  I, being poor, have only my dreams;

  I have spread my dreams under your feet;

  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

  W.B. Yeats

  One

  The town of Valle de la Virgen lies at the bottom of a deep gorge, which, surrounded by eucalyptus trees on its upper slopes, descends into dark, boggy, luscious forest inhabited by hummingbirds, snakes and howling monkeys. Despite its legendary beauty, the town is largely untroubled by visitors as the buses descending into the valley are in the habit of dropping off the road, making tourism a precarious business for the locals. The church, built by the colonial ancestors of the present-day inhabitants in honour of the Virgin of the Swamp, houses a weeping effigy, and is said to be one of the finest examples of the architecture of its day and an inspiration for the work of the great master, Marrietti.

  Travel books on the area have little to say about Valle de la Virgen, mentioning briefly that, while fabled for its intoxicating charm and historical interest, the town remains an elusive tourist destination, reachable only by treacherous road or through dense forest marsh. One out-of-print guide even suggests that Valle de la Virgen is a creation of local legend retold in occasional travellers’ tales, and that the road simply descends into impenetrable swamp.

  The town’s only foreign visitor arrived one day in the back of Ernesto’s pickup truck and, much to the consternation of Ernesto’s mother, failed to leave. Doña Nicanora was at first less dismayed by the arrival of the dishevelled stranger in her front yard than by the sudden reappearance of her son, who only three months previously had been given a lavish send-off at great expense and relief to the town. It was her youngest daughter, Nena, who first alerted Nicanora to the return of Ernesto and to the presence of the stranger who was about to be mauled by their dog.

  ‘Come quickly,’ Nena shouted breathlessly, running into the kitchen, where her mother was squatting over a basin, peeling potatoes. ‘Ernesto is back, and he’s brought a strange man with him. Lucho is attacking him. I think it’s because he smells.’ Dropping the potatoes, Nicanora ran outside to quell the commotion, calling the dog off whilst trying to find the words with which to begin to admonish her son.

  The uninvited guest was standing in the dry dirt of the tiny bric-a-brac-filled yard, surrounded by squawking chickens and looking bewildered. He was dressed in a stained orange shirt and dirty blue jeans, and had a battered red and black bag hanging from one shoulder. His hair was as long as Nena’s, his beard looked tangled and he gave off an unwashed, milky odour. He needs to be taken straight to Don Bosco, Nicanora thought. The man was holding a small book, which he was flicking through nervously. A crowd of children had gathered nearby and were nudging each other and giggling, pointing at the stranger. Nicanora straightened her stained apron and pushed her hair from her face in an effort to appear respectable in front of the visitor.

  ‘There are plenty more where he came from,’ Ernesto said proudly, presenting the foreigner to his mother as the answer to her financial problems before passing out at her feet.

  Doña Nicanora had not had an easy life, and the furrows she had dug over the years were beginning to show on her once smooth, dark face. At the age of forty, with one dead husband, two children buried, and her three surviving children remaining at home, things were not getting much easier. Ernesto’s desire to build his future in the city had come as a source of great comfort to her. She had begun to despair of his ability to apply himself to anything remotely sensible, and feared that his drunken antics in the town were starting to sully her own reputation.

  Having ridden away on a donkey, with a fire in his belly and a determination to seek his fortune in the city, Ernesto had now returned home in an old truck with a fire in his balls and a determination to seek a cure, having received a sound dose of the clap in Dolores’s Karaoke Bar in Puerta de la Coruña. Ernesto’s ambition to become a city businessm
an had ended on the same drunken night. By the close of the evening he had exchanged his life savings for the battered truck and acquired the foreigner, who at the time had seemed to be a good business proposition. The foreigner, who had been hanging around Puerta de la Coruña for a few months, was apparently seeking a quieter location in which to spend some time and was offering ‘top dollar’ for the privilege of sleeping on a local floor. Ernesto, whose business sense had been sharpened at his mother’s breast, could not let the opportunity pass him by.

  Ernesto had already sought the help of several quacks in Puerta de la Coruña and was now prepared to place his faith in the traditional cures of his hometown. After a day of berating and beating by his mother failed to relieve him of his symptoms, managing only to elicit a confession as to the source of his ailment, he finally agreed to be taken by her to meet the new young doctor who had recently, and inexplicably, turned up in town. Doña Nicanora, who was always ready to try out an innovation, had been anxious to make the doctor’s acquaintance since his arrival. Ernesto’s problem presented itself as an opportunity through which to do so. These are certainly unusual times, Nicanora thought to herself as she marched her son off to the clinic, two strangers arriving in town within a few weeks. It must surely be an omen.

  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 o
f 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.