The Invisible Guardian. Dolores Redondo

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       12

      Night had fallen when Amaia reached the entrance of the Church of Santiago. She pushed the big door, almost sure that it was closed, and was a little surprised when it opened smoothly and silently. She smiled at the idea that they could still leave the church doors unlocked in her home town. The altar was partially lit and a group of fifty or so children were sitting in the front few pews. She dipped her fingers in the holy water stoup and shivered slightly as the icy drops touched her forehead.

      ‘Have you come to collect a child?’

      She turned towards a woman in her forties with a shawl around her shoulders.

      ‘Excuse me?’

      ‘Oh, sorry, I thought you’d come to collect one of the children.’ It was obvious the woman had recognised her. ‘We were giving the first communion classes,’ she explained.

      ‘This early? We’re still in February.’

      ‘Well, Father Germán likes to do these things properly,’ she said, with an apologetic shrug. Amaia remembered his long-winded speech about the evil that surrounds us during the funeral and wondered how many other things the parish priest of Santiago liked to do properly. ‘In any case, I don’t think we do have that much time left, just March and April, and then the first group are due to make their first communion on the first of May.’ She suddenly stopped.

      ‘Sorry, I’m sure I’m delaying you, you must be here to speak to Father Germán, aren’t you? He’s in the sacristy, I’ll go and let him know you’re here.’

      ‘Oh, no, don’t trouble yourself, the truth is that I’ve come to the church in a personal capacity,’ she said, employing an almost apologetic tone for the last two words, which immediately gained her the sympathy of the catechist, who smiled at her and took a few steps back like a selfless servant withdrawing.

      ‘Of course, may God be with you.’

      Amaia walked up the nave, avoiding the main altar and stopping in front of some of the carvings that occupied the side altars, thinking all the while about those young girls and their washed faces, devoid of make-up and life, that someone had taken it upon himself to present as beautiful works of macabre imagery, beautiful even in that state. She gazed up at the saints and the archangels and the mourning virgins, their tense, pale faces bereft of colour, expressing purity and the ecstasy achieved through agony, a slow torture, desired and feared in equal measure, and accepted with an overwhelming submission and surrender.

      ‘That’s what you’ll never achieve,’ whispered Amaia.

      No, they weren’t saints, they wouldn’t surrender themselves in a submissive and selfless manner; he would have to snatch their lives from them and steal their souls.

      Leaving the Church of Santiago she walked slowly, taking advantage of the fact that the darkness and the intense cold had left the streets empty in spite of the early hour. She crossed the church gardens and admired the beauty of the enormous trees that surrounded the building, their height competing with that of the church spires, conscious of the strange sensation that came over her in those almost deserted streets. The urban centre of Elizondo was spread across the plain at the bottom of the valley and its layout was heavily influenced by the course of the River Baztán. It had three main streets which ran parallel to one another and constituted the town’s historic centre, where the grand buildings and other houses built in the typical local style still stood.

      Calle Braulio Iriarte ran along the northern bank of the River Baztán and was linked to Calle Jaime Urrutia by two bridges. The latter was the old main street until the construction of Calle Santiago, and it ran along the southern bank of the River Baztán. Crammed with spacious town houses, Calle Santiago was the starting point of the area’s urban expansion, along with the construction of the main road from Pamplona to France at the start of the twentieth century.

      Amaia arrived at the main square feeling the wind between the folds of her scarf as she looked at the brightly lit esplanade, which no longer possessed half the charm it must have had in the previous century when it had mostly been used for playing pelota. She went over to the town hall, a noble building dating from the end of the eighteenth century which had taken Juan de Arozamena, a famous local stone mason, two years to build. On its façade was the familiar chequered coat of arms with an inscription reading ‘Baztán Valley and University’, and in front of the building, at the bottom left of the façade, was a stone known as a botil harri which was used for the type of pelota known as laxoa in which the players wore gloves.

      She reached out and touched the stone almost ceremonially, feeling how the cold spread up through her hand. Amaia tried to imagine how the square would have been. The two teams of four pelotaris would have lined up facing each other, a little like a game of tennis with too many players and no net, each with a laxoa, or glove, instead of a racket to pass the ball amongst themselves. In the nineteenth century this game had fallen into decline. Even so, she remembered her father once telling them that one of his grandfathers had been a great fan of the game and ended up gaining a reputation as a glove maker thanks to the quality of the gloves he sewed himself, using leather that he also treated and tanned.

      This was her hometown, the place in which she had lived for most of her life. It was a part of her, like a genetic trace, it was where she returned to in her dreams, when she wasn’t dreaming about the dead bodies, assailants, killers and suicides which mingled obscenely in her nightmares. But when her sleep was calm, she went back to those streets and squares, to those stones, to the place she had always wanted to leave. A place she didn’t know if she loved or not. A place that no longer existed, because what she was starting to miss now was the Elizondo of her childhood. However, now that she had returned almost sure there would be signs of definite change, she found things hadn’t changed that much. Yes, perhaps there were more cars in the streets, more streetlights, flower beds and little gardens which painted the face of the town like fresh make-up. But not so much that it prevented her from seeing that its essence hadn’t changed, that everything was still the same underneath.

      She wondered whether the Alimentación Adela grocery shop or Pedro Galarregui’s shop in Calle Santiago were still open, or the shops like Belzunegui or Mari Carmen where her mother used to buy their clothes, the Baztanesa bakery, Virgilio’s shoe shop, or Garmendia’s junk shop on Calle Jaime Urrutia. And she knew that it wasn’t even this Elizondo that she missed, but rather the older and more visceral one, the place that formed part of her being and that would die in her only when she breathed her last. The Elizondo of harvests ruined by plagues, of children dying in the whooping cough epidemic of 1440. The Elizondo whose people had changed their customs to adapt themselves to a land that was initially hostile, a people determined to stay in that place near the church which had been the origin of the town. The Elizondo of sailors recruited in the square to travel to Venezuela in the employ of the traders belonging to the Royal Gipuzkoan Company of Caracas. The Elizondo of elizondarras who rebuilt the town after the River Baztán’s terrible floods and the times when it burst its banks. In her mind she recreated the image of the altar from one of the side chapels floating down the street along with the bodies of livestock. And of the residents lifting it over their heads, convinced that its presence in the middle of that quagmire could only be a heavenly sign, a sign that God hadn’t abandoned them and that they should endure. Brave men and women, forged thus by necessity, interpreters of signs from nature who always looked to the heavens hoping for pity from a sky that was more threatening than protective.

      She turned back along Calle СКАЧАТЬ