Lucia barely believed in all those bullshit that the insane man had explained to her; But now with the pulse of a thousand, lost among those bushes decided to put into practice his theories to try to calm down. She looked at herself like a third person lost in the woods. She tried to react as she would do this fully. Instead, she continued to advance on all fours like a mole through the brambles that came her way. Now the slope was steadily steeper, she could almost see the top when a huge bird with a curved beak lifted the flight before her eyes. She recognized it by the size of its wings, it was undoubtedly a royal eagle: a beautiful specimen. For her the largest and most beautiful bird. From that spot one could see a sky full of stars, like gems surrounded by diamonds and precious stones decorated with their light the sky; Showing an unheard-of spectacle before her eyes.
Once at the top of the hill, she loosened her shoulders, letting her pack fall to the ground. She set up the tent, and soon she got warm, into the feather-bag. Tomorrow she would try to find a contact, to obtain an identity and false papers. Later she would rent a house, detached from the village and start a new life.
5—A place nowhere.
She carefully folded all her clothes, which she placed with a military order in her mountain pack. There she also kept her family memories, the best photos of a shortened childhood due to family problems and the continuous trips without a fixed residence. But none of them could compare to what she was about to do now; A journey to an unknown place, even for the most daring adventurers; A journey to the land of dreams. At least Mireia thought, she didn’t hesitate to abandon everything in the cold winter. Leaving behind her last years of bitter existence, in that horrible and rusty city, in search of a new and exciting horizon.
Chandrexa was called the place to which she was going. Chandrexa de Queixa, a place in the middle of nowhere. Far enough away from the city to forget it completely, to forget the water of the Burgas, as well as the high temperatures in summer; The elaborate shopping at the Mall, which some merciless friend of hers had dubbed as "Posh" and that old Roman Bridge, from which she had watched for years with tense monotony the boring flight of the gulls. Just to her right, the black gate of the school of Salesians stood like a castle. Don Juan Bosco and Mary Help of Christians would always accompany her, guiding her through her prayers to a new frontier that would undoubtedly give the turn that her sad life needed.
She went up to her Freelander, after loading it with her possessions, turned the key of her Ranger with a slight firmness, and this time she did not set sail for the coast as if in search of the healing caress of the marshy wind; Directed towards the mountains, farthest from human civilization, direction Chandrexa de Queixa. In search of the last frontier, loaded with a heap of dreams and the music of Vivaldi in her Robert CD. It was time to put her past behind her forever, she watched as she drove away through the rear view mirror, as she plunged her foot into the accelerator pedal.
She waved her right hand at the long-haired blonde woman planted like a hedge by the zebra crossing: an old acquaintance, an ugly old world face, which she was now about to leave forever. Mireia was five feet seven inches, she weighed sixty-two kilos, her golden mane half covered by a perfectly aligned face, under the shadow of the soles of the car. In a few hours, Mireia left her sixty three square meters flat, without a single piece of furniture to remind her of her recent past. Not even the appliances, which for a time had filled with their tinkling noise of bustle and joy the house and that eventually became essential for her happiness, including the hydro massage cabin, which so many afternoons of pleasure rarely shared, Had given away the other utensils the consumer society.
Meanwhile, in her room, her memories remain on the sheets of so many solitary nights, fleeing the ungainly men's company, insane and unfit for her. A lonely self-sufficient spinster friend of the DVDs. At the beginning of the eighties, hopeful love films, when VHS still prevailed, as "The Girl in the Pink": a low-class girl, dependent on a record store played by Molly Ringwald, the fashionable redhead of Love for teenagers of the time, falls in love with the handsome and wealthy boy of her class; And all that happens for a period of no more than ten seconds, by a simple crossing of eyes.
Mireia wondered why the same thing happened to the post boy, whom she ate with her eyes on several occasions, but before the persistence of her eyes he always ended up bowing his head, maybe he was too shy, like almost all the guys who were worth it in this city. The face of her Land Rover soon appeared on the old road of Ponferrada, sniffing the asphalt with a look of ferocity and completely uncapped; Signs of optimism.
She was waiting for the farmhouse that she intended to restore and which she had inherited from her ancestors, felt the weight of her past on his shoulders as an intriguing crushing burden. Why had she come to this? What was the meaning of her life, everything she had worked hard to get, a good job well paid with three extras, as well as a home with the entire bourgeois lot included, such as dental insurance and the payment of a pension cover. All cancelled suddenly, daring to make a brief parenthesis, to dedicate herself entirely to make an old dream of her childhood come true. To park for a moment her work in the newspaper, rushing like a daring mountain climber ascension to a higher summit: the ever difficult climb to the literary world.
That was her dream, to be a writer, to survive the hard tillage of words intertwined for the sole purpose of getting a story. Her true narrative was about to take off through the symbiotic rural world. Chandrexa de Queixa was the most beautiful place she could ever have imagined. Her new home rested on a hill on the banks of the Edreira River, in front of a bridge of logs that barely covered the width of her Freelander; Six kilometres to the northwest extended the ruins of what had been a village, where the "maquis" took refuge for years after the Civil War broke out.
The house was huge, made up of two floors. On the ground floor, the kitchen was available. Provided with a central barbecue, where for years as was customary in all Galician houses at the turn of the century, all the members of the family met as they stalked the night, surrounding a huge fire that kept them warm during the long and bloody winters. Around the old chimney were long conversations. The voices of the elders making themselves known; telling stories that told of events that had long occurred during their youth and which served as entertainment especially for the young. Meanwhile, between story and story, they used to throw some trunk at the fireplace.
The rest of the ground floor, formerly a stable, had been renovated in recent years to be converted into a garage, where the Land Rover would be kept; covered by a small cellar that housed the best wines of the zone, resting in oak barrels to be ingested, in the posterity with the endearing flavour of the old. Now Mireia had decided to use it as a storage room, although she still wondered if she would later reuse it as the wine hall that was once. The upper floor of the house consisted of six rooms, crossed by a long corridor leading to a large window, and Mireia chose one of the rooms whose views overlooked the river, to set up her studio and start writing her first novel.
But about what to write: Intrigue, adventures, sex, politics ...? How about all mixed with a little sauce of incoherence, a nonsense novel?, Why not? Perhaps her life was not a complete nonsense, if that, what was she doing there in that abandoned place of God's hand, rather than guilty of human coherence and sanity. It would be madness to undress herself and in a literary reflex act, to portray her inner self, her perverse and Machiavellian side at the same time, as running naked through a marshy field of sunflowers, whose boundary was the same sky. She ran a thin curtain into her thoughts and went to the bedroom with the intention of grooming her crazy dreams.
Before she fell asleep, she thought of her friends "The Amoebas": they wanted to get information about an intimate friend of both, a Mr. Rodríguez, owner and lord of the multinational dairy producer, "Leite Fría", gutting him alive in the pink press, for which the pair of vipers worked for a few months day and night, without feeling the slightest respect for the privacy of
the staff. They only had to invite her to a couple of tequilas so that her innocent friend sang like a little bird, a certain relationship of the said businessman with a well-known drug trafficker of the area, betraying the trust that Lucia had deposited in her; she told them that Lucia and Carpintero had an affair.
"This is between us," Mireia told them, "but this guy whose successful marriage you are talking about is being ridden with that Lucia." It seems that his modest and demure wife is narrower in bed, than a nun of the convent of Saint Patrick, and that Mr. Rodriguez needs the favours of "the lady of cocaine."
Her confidential confession came out the following week in the magazine Interviú on the front page. "Famous businessman, candidate for mayor of the city, has been caught in act with his new lover, Lucia Marquez in Suite 316 of the Hotel Auriense by our famous reporters known as the Amoebas, Susana and Ruth, while committing premeditated acts of Sadomasochism - as in Sodom and Gomorrah - hidden in their luxurious room.
At least those vipers had the decency not to reveal the source of their information and Mireia was able to keep her job without problems. Days later a denial was published in the newspaper, "El País," in which Rodríguez Carpintero, candidate for the Socialist Party to the mayor of Orense, clarified that he had met with the controversial Lucia, in secret, just to negotiate A possible transfer of a part of its "Cold Milk" actions for the formation of a new company dedicated to the creation of dolls of design, manufactured and moulded to scale respecting the busts and measures of the most famous top models. What they didn’t reveal to the press was that these dolls would be constructed of course with pressed cocaine, that would dissolve immediately in contact with the water.
Perhaps the biggest mistake of Lucia was her secret relationship with Carpintero, unknown even to her closest friends. To her the secret encounters were like one more of her games, to quench her ravenous sexual appetite. Although she used it for her own benefit, apart from being an expert lover. He provided her the legal coverage she needed in her business. His mistake was not to realize the double danger of that political weapon, for, when discovered by the Amoebas, he had thrown himself into the opposition above, even though his relationship was never proven. High positions of the socialist party relegated Carpintero from his position to avoid possible electoral scandals, appointing a new candidate to the orensana mayoralty. This left Carpintero without weight in his own party. The deck of cards that Carpintero had built to gain power had collapsed, leaving Lucía Marquez with her ass in the air, making it an easy target for the myriads of crows, carrion birds and other vultures of the city, in search of fresh meat to fill the pantries of the courts and prisons of the city.
His rivals were eager to seize his kingdom, what better way to do it than help them catch "the Northwest Queen." The police didn’t stop watching their steps after the article was published. The Amoebas, old classmates, had managed, without her realizing it, to complicate her life in a terrible way. In addition, they had succeeded in challenging their alleged fidelity, in the eyes of her boyfriend Alberto and thus seriously weakening his credibility in the aforementioned relationship, a fact that the Secret Police took advantage of to pressure him during interrogations prior to the arrest of the smuggler.
Beside the house, a few meters away, but on the other side of the bridge formed by several wooden logs, right next to the ruins of what had once been the old smithy, stretched a green sea of meadows without cows. These had become wild and they moved freely at their leisure. You could meet them on the roads, a whole platoon marking the way up the cliffs to the top of the mountain, stealing grazing by the shaved mountain burned, dead, lifeless, calcined purposely by the shepherds, so that the cattle Feed on the grass of the meadows and do not look on the tops for the tasty food of the rocks, now surrounded by death and cremation. At dusk the shepherd climbs, forced climber, climbing over the jaws of the killer mountain. It is expressed in a strange language, uttering unintelligible cries: "Cow, beii, blondiee, darkieee", typical topics of an alien language, passed from generation to generation, until our times.
The house is located in front of the smithy, the Návea river runs between both. Between the mountains of San Mamed and Queixa, there is an enjoyable walk. Through the mud covered with rocks, as if they were diamonds - although nature's schizophrenia insists on the area being slate. At the end of the walk we find an old abandoned farmhouse, far from the cattle traffic. But before you get to it, you have to walk a long way from the old smithy, through a spectacular forest, fighting with the river bed, planted with millenary oaks, confused with huge yews of thorny leaves. "They're awesome, I've never seen them this size," thought Mireia, as a birch flew over her with her reflection to her left. This area was the most beautiful I had seen so far in the whole province. Mireia walked, stealthily, on that marshy road, protected by her Gorotex boots. An impressive ten-meter-high willow rose in front of her, cutting her way, forced to leave the path and walk adrift along the banks of the river, trotting among limestone rocks and a pile of pebbles.
6—The visit.
On the first visit of the Amoebas to Chandrexa de Queixa, Mireia prepared three large steaks of six hundred grams each that would accompany with a Terras Gaudas, fighting with the Spanish custom of drinking red wine with the meat, obviously are the options of a Rioja or a Mencía more advisable at the time of such need. But Mireia and Amoebas always preferred the white, because it made it more digestive and less burdened on the stomach. They dined with parsimony. Between sips and sips of wine they told her their latest journalistic feats and their desire to practice sex with one or more members of a satanic sect. She listened in amazement, not believing to what extent their madness had no limits. Before they arrived, she'd circled the closet looking for a decent dress to wear that night. Among her collection of mountain rags, jeans, old-fashioned plaid shirts, and all kinds of garments that were anything but feminine; at last she found an old garment, but it caught her. She didn’t think they remembered that it was the same dress that had been worn at the prom almost eight years ago.
Susana wore blue jeans very tight on her body, well combined with an orange shirt that showed the beautiful hollow of her navel. From its eighties, it could boast of a stylized body preserved by hours of athleticism and gymnastics. Ruth, however, was not as friendly as mistreating her body with exercise as her friend. Being shorter and broader on the hips, she didn’t see it necessary either; she wore a low-cut pinkish jersey, where her breasts were hidden as a pair of shameful protrusions barely supported by a thin linen bra. None of them knew Lucia's whereabouts; although, they intuited, that she wasn’t far away. It was a matter of time before the Civil Guard finally caught up with her.
—I can’t explain how Lucía could have had the nerve to cheat on her boyfriend with such a low-key politician as Rodriguez Carpintero, —Ruth said.
—As far as it concerns Alberto, he is fond of visiting certain nightclubs, but I doubt that will excuse her relationship with Carpintero, —Susana said.
—Those girls who work in clubs do nothing but earn their living; If you tie a noose around the neck to all the men who had ever frequented that kind of lusty premises, only four pricks would have been saved from three to four.
—Perhaps, —said Mireia—, I think that Lucia's relationship with Carpenter was due to economic reasons; she needed political protection to move larger quantities of drugs through the province, than to a real physical attraction.
Mireia was right, at the age of forty-six, Rodríguez Carpintero still retained some of its appeal. But he wasn’t Robert Redford. If Lucia tried, she could get much more attractive and younger lovers than Carpintero; although on the other hand. Perhaps they didn’t possess the serenity or experience, which gives the caress different skins, slip through a sea of thighs, have tasted a multitude of lips, and delight in tasting a sky of pink nipples, lost among the bodies of dozens of lovers. To the point of confusing their faces in memory, sometimes being unable to associate them with
bodies; In which one way or another had been marked their tracks, surviving the passage of time.
During the dinner the Amoebas eagerly devoured the prawns, scallops and other hors d'oeuvres, which the ostentatious Mireia had prepared for the occasion. When they finished, before serving the second course, some delicious veal steaks sizzling in the frying pan, while filling the glasses of white wine, she told her friends a beautiful story.
Many years ago, so many that no one remembers, lived in Montederramo a very wealthy count, whose only direct descendants were his two daughters. The oldest named Joy, was twenty-four years old and of a cold and reserved character as her mother, while strangely enough, her sister named Sadness, was cheerful, funny and bubbly. Two years younger than her sister, she already possessed twice as many suitors as she was. It should be understood that both girls, because of their high social and economic status, were not within the reach of any impertinent ruffian. Only gentlemen of high lineage or members of the Court, for these were the days of lords and henchmen, all in the service of His Majesty Philip II, the most glorious of our kings. The case was that the two sisters, apart from their kinship, had always shared a great friendship, so strong that to immortalize it one night they decided to take an oath of blood. Ripping the skin of the forearm with a dagger, joining the wounds, swore that no man would ever separate them and would always remain together until death.
The Queen of the Northwest Page 4
