The Winterlings Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the Basque country, they set off in a ship called Havana. They had never seen the sea; the first time they saw it was from that boat. The girls were sure the boat was taking them to Cuba, where they could pick gold coins that grew on the trees like bunches of grapes.
    But after forty-eight hours of travelling, among toddlers who cried and vomited, they arrived at the port of Southampton. There were flags everywhere, and it wasn’t warm at all. The day before had been the coronation of King Edward VIII of England, but they preferred to think that the flags had been put up to celebrate their arrival in Havana. All each child had were two sets of clothes and a piece of cardboard with their personal details on it. A man met them and took them to a camp. This wasn’t at all how they had described it around the hearth. It rained, it was cold, and there were no talking parrots or mulattos to be seen. Nor was there gold hanging from trees. The man who had met them corrected them with a half-smile, telling them they weren’t in Cuba but in Eastleigh.
    They stayed at this camp for several months. They sang, danced, and were educated in the English language. They were never treated badly — or particularly well, either. When summer was over, they were separated and put to work.
    One of the girls went to a house with many children. For seven pounds a month, she took care of everything around her: she washed up using polished stones in the washtub, peeled potatoes, aired out the sheets, carried trays of clothing on her head, and scrubbed the floors on her knees. She worked hard, and the lady who hired her never had reason for complaint, but she was only there for a few months before they moved her, without explanation, to a different house. For one reason or another, they always ended up moving her to a different house.
    The other sister worked first in a hotel making up beds and cleaning rooms, then in a restaurant, and finally in a hospital. On Sundays, the two sisters would meet up in a park, under a grey sky cleft with seagulls. They’d eat a mashed-banana sandwich, and tell each other everything that had happened that week.
    This was their favourite time, because they also spoke to each other about the village. They remembered the times they would go to bathe at the river; the bitter smell of freshly cut gorse; the brilliance of the undergrowth dampened by the rain; that wolf they had found, struck by lightning; the oak groves, the fields, the voices of the Galician women; the birds in Tierra de Chá, and a madman they called the Taragoña Express because he’d run forty kilometres a day, thinking he was a bus on that route.
    When it got dark, they would go to the hotel where one of them slept, and continue talking in the shadows of the room until dawn broke. The smells of the earth and the deep mystery of the forest stayed with them. Heavy breathing, the trembling of their hands, eyes fixed anywhere but on the other’s; united, they were defeated, but each found the body they sought, and the two became one. Just let it flourish , they thought, then lie .
    The years went by easily, more or less in this way — after a while, a war broke out there as well — until one day when they had reached their twenties, having lived for eight or nine years in England.
    Then, just when they had begun to speak the language with some fluency and had begun to take a fancy to this dull life, they were told that the war in Spain had ended some time ago, and that it was high time to return home, to get married, and find a profession.
    And that’s what the other women most liked hearing in the story: to get married and find a profession .
    It comforts them and makes them feel good because, in the end, there’s no need to travel so far to live the good life.
    A family and a profession is exactly what they already have.

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    A profession?
    A little worried, the women of Tierra de Chá ask if they, too,