The Years That Followed by Catherine Dunne Read Free Book Online

occasionally.
    For a moment, Calista stands there looking out, still able to recognize some familiar landmarks despite the blackness.
    Montánchez, away to the south. The distant lights of quietening farms; Calista can name all of their owners now, one by one. They all greet her, and she them, when they meet along the winding back roads. Initial wariness on their side gradually gave way to a respectful, guarded affection. Calista made sure to use only local materials, employed only local labor, in the building of her house. She buys only local produce, from the weekly markets or directly from thefarmers themselves. These things are not forgotten, not in a place such as this.
    As Calista enters her bedroom, she knows this will be another sleepless night. Not because of what has already happened, hundreds of kilometers away—she has been ready for that for years—but because the potent force of memory has gripped her, and she must give it its due, must see it through to the end, before it will release her.
    It is difficult, though, to separate memory from all it brings with it: love, pain, loss. Betrayal. A mysterious alchemy sometimes makes the remembering more gentle, more resigned. But not tonight.
    Tonight, Calista feels that every cell is firing, every nerve ending poised. This is it.
    This is what all those years have led her towards: from that first family lunch with Alexandros’s knee pressing against hers to the ending that has always been inevitable.

pilar
    Torre de Santa Juanita, 1957
    ----
    Pilar Domínguez couldn’t wait to leave her village.
    Torre de Santa Juanita huddled itself into the countryside beyond Montánchez, its houses crowded into insignificance. The mountains lorded over it, the land withheld itself, and the inhabitants dressed themselves in all the resentments of poverty. When Pilar finally left, she did as her mother, María Dolores, had bid her.
    â€œ Vete, hija ,” Mamá had urged her eighteen-year-old daughter. Her tone had been full of an unaccustomed urgency. Go, my girl, she said. Leave this place and shake the dust off your feet. Don’t ever look back. Something in her mother’s eyes terrified Pilar. She knew that, more than this place , her mother meant her to leave this life . She’d watched as Mamá faded away, frail and birdlike, her body barely making a ripple under the thin blanket that covered her that final winter.
    Just before she died, she took Pilar’s hand in hers. There was a surprising strength to her grasp. “Listen to me,” she said. “If you stay until I am gone, you will never escape. You will spend your life serving your father and your brothers.” She paused and drew one shallow, difficult breath. “And no matter what the priest says, there is no nobility in poverty, and even less in servitude. Go.”
    Pilar ran. She still remembers the date: May 17, 1957. Paco took her in the cart as far as their nearest neighbor, fifteen kilometers west of Torre de Santa Juanita. From there, his dark, silent friend Gabriel took her to the bus station in Mérida. When they arrived, Pilar stepped unsteadily off the pillion of Gabriel’s scooter, thinkingthat she’d never been so happy to feel the ground beneath her feet as a solid, unshifting thing. She caught a slow, grateful bus to Badajoz, and then took the overnight train to Madrid.
    Pilar had her mother’s life savings in her purse: the few pesetas that Mamá had managed to keep back from her weekly lacemaking, saved stealthily in a cloth bag at the bottom of the earthenware jar where the flour was kept. No chance of any man looking there, Mamá had said grimly.
    Pilar had grown up knowing that her mother had “married beneath her.” She’d felt this unspoken knowledge, absorbed it as she grew. Nobody had ever said as much, but the understanding hung in the air, chill and blunt, like trees in winter. Her mother’s way of