The Bitter Taste of Time: A Novel

by Béa Gonzalez

Overview

A richly layered and evocative novel about the lives and loves of a family of remarkable Spanish women

Set in northern Spain from 1920 to the present, The Bitter Taste of Time is the compelling story of the Encarna women, whose lives are both tragic and beautiful. After the death of her husband, the family's gorgeous and imposing matriarch, Maria Encarna, turns her granite house into a pensión, opening it up to strangers with colorful stories and dark pasts. There she lives with her two unmarried sisters, her two daughters, and her granddaughter.

Through the Spanish Civil War, a dictatorship, and the early years of a new democracy, the Encarnas become the wealthiest family in town. Yet despite their success and tenacity, tragedy comes calling, usually in the form of a man—and almost always on a Friday.

By turns funny and moving, The Bitter Taste of Time is a thoroughly entertaining read.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429989886
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/14/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	439 KB

About the Author

Bea Gonzalez was born in Vigo, Spain, and immigrated to Canada as a child. She holds her M.A. from the University of London. In addition to writing, she develops tours for Classical Pursuits to Spain and Latin America to study the works of their international poets and writers. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Read an Excerpt

The Bitter Taste of Time

A Novel

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By Béa Gonzalez

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 1998 Béa Gonzalez
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-8988-6

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CHAPTER 1

1920-1930

LATER, AFTER YEARS HAD PASSED AND THEY ALL HAD THE benefit of hindsight, they would comment on how truly strange Asunción Encarna had been from the start. A curious bird. As unpredictable as a goat. As peculiar as all those foreigners who arrived on the coasts of Spain dressed in gingham shorts and knee-high socks.

The roots of this peculiarity — the one that years later would have her collecting clocks in all shapes and sizes — they traced back to the events at the train station on a Friday in 1920. It was there that her husband of two short months, Manuel Pousada — a lunatic himself, one was quick to comment, a criminal of the worst kind, another added — aware that gossips loomed all around them and eager to avoid a scene during these, their final moments together, had tried in vain to stem her tears, silence her pleas, keep her from making a public spectacle of herself.

But then, he never loved her, they would say later. No, not for one moment did he seem sad to leave her.

Manuel Pousada and Asunción Encarna were at the station that day so that Manuel could take the train to the coast. From there, he would be boarding the ship to Brazil. Brazil. How long he had waited for this. The word rested sensuously on his tongue, the thought of it seemed like heaven. His wife's tears, her adolescent tantrums, jarred him now that the dream seemed so close at hand, now that his mind was already lost in the thought of much better things, on the stories he had heard from all those who had gone before him and had returned with gold and women and especially with the heat — sí, especially the heat, which they captured and brought back with them, and which glinted in their eyes and shone in their hair and glowed in their habit of walking with erect shoulders forever after.

And then one more kiss, one last backward look, a shake of the head, and he was gone, into the train and away from her life. And more tears and more anguish, and the promise — Cariño, he had said, it is only a matter of time now.

It would indeed be a matter of time before Asunción heard news of him, and then only after showering a mountain of abuse on the archaic and inefficient postal system of the region and the half-witted man in charge, who cried real tears of desperation because of it. When the letter finally arrived, she shared its contents with no one, stopping only to fold it neatly into its four parts once it had been read and announcing to all that her husband had now joined the ranks of the dearly departed.

Three months later, in August of 1920, after a long day and an even longer night, their daughter Gloria was born. In the room with Asunción, accompanying her through every heave and every push, were her mother María, her sister Matilde, and her aunts Carmen and Cecilia. There too was Doña Emilia, the town's midwife, and the two old women who accompanied all of the women in Canteira through the mysteries of labour, Doña Teresa and Doña Elena — greatly respected for having delivered eight healthy babies apiece, and eager to tell the story of each of those births as a way of reminding everyone that childbirth, fraught with so many dangers, could as often as not produce healthy, happy children.

Outside, the town of Canteira was as silent as the stars with only the occasional sound rising here and there to punctuate the night — the whelp of a dog, the gasping spasms of a donkey, the odd distant and disembodied voice emerging from the hills which appeared purple and bruised in the encroaching darkness. It was a hot night, one of the hottest of that year. The large windows in the bedroom had been left open, but the warm breeze that drifted in did little to alleviate the oppressive humidity. For months before the birth, Asunción had remained closeted in this room, grieving for her dead husband and praying for the health of her unborn child. There, at least, she was thought to be safe from the many dangers that lurked outside, like the moon — the source of inspiration to many a haunted poet, but which pregnant women avoided, believing that to look at it would be to risk giving birth to an idiot.

As the labour progressed, and Asunción's screams grew shriller, her discomfort greater, Doña Teresa and Doña Elena interrupted their stories to implore the midwife to take some extraordinary measures.

Bring us a pair of her husband's pants or one of his hats, Doña Teresa said between two particularly strong contractions. There is no surer way to calm the pain than with some of the father's clothing. May he rest in peace, she added quickly, crossing herself as she did so.

A prayer to San Ramón will do the trick, Doña Elena said. The prayers I myself uttered can scarcely be counted.

María, Asunción's mother, an imposing woman with little respect for the sayings of the people, for all the crazy ideas that circulated through town, the fears of the dead and the superstitions that held so many hostage, dismissed the suggestions of these women with an impatient wave of her hand.

She turned now to her sister Cecilia — a nervous, emotional woman, who would punctuate every contraction and accompanying scream with a furious Dios mío — ordering her to boil some more water in the kitchen — a command she issued more to rid the room of her sister than because any water was actually needed.

Later, it would be Cecilia who would tell the story of the birth, exaggerating and embellishing the details to such an extent that eventually no one who had been there could distinguish between what they could remember and the inventions of Cecilia's feverish mind. What was true, irrefutable because it had become a part of the history of the town itself, was that Gloria had been born into a world full of women. It was not only that her father had perished in an unimaginable and distant land before her birth, but that he had left his wife behind in the care of her mother, two aunts, and a younger sister. What was also true was that Asunción had almost perished from the effort, all the pushing and the pulling, all the tears, all the desperate screams. The screams had been heard, in fact, as far away as the region of Castile — this, again, according to Cecilia, who had held Asunción's hand through most of the ordeal, attempting to ease her pain by forcing almost two full glasses of aguardiente into her mouth, but carefully, one drop at a time, until Asunción had grown drunk and delusional from the devastating combination of liquor, longing and pain.

It is during childbirth that you discover love, Asunción would tell them all afterwards, once the child had been born and she was so overwhelmed with grief that she was sure she had caught a glimpse of Manuel, hovering over her like a dark, unforgiving angel. In her drunken stupor, she had slurred his name so many times and with such a deep feeling that the women had been reduced to a heap of tears and even Edelmiro, the barnyard help, who had never loved and never lost, even he had felt as if there were a hole inside his stomach too, created by the acidic vapours of such an intense and unfulfilled yearning.

At least it is a girl. The child's grandmother was the first to say it. Her two sisters, Cecilia and Carmen, and her daughter Matilde had thought this too but had refrained from uttering what could only have been said by a grandmother. María said this only after her daughter Asunción had ceased crying — only after three weeks of her sobbing did María say this, and then only to bring to the house a well-needed tone of order.

She had always mistrusted the child's father, Manuel Pousada. Insolent eyes; unspeakable desires. No better than a peasant traipsing into their lives, without thought or forewarning, seducing her daughter in one single furtive morning.

But now there was this newborn, his newborn, a girl of white marble. Cabrón she thought uncharitably. Another man lost to the other world where he could walk unencumbered by memory or obligation. Amidst her cursing, though, it occurred to María, not for the first time, that Manuel's death had perhaps not been an altogether bad thing.

Many days passed after the baby's birth before the rhythm of the house was restored to its proper order — before the women could return to the work that fed and clothed them in a world where money was always an uncertain prospect. For years the women had survived by providing room and board to the many travellers who passed through town on their way to the coast.

In those days Canteira bustled and boomed with the machinations of illegal commerce. Situated in the heart of the Spanish region of Galicia, between the Atlantic coast and the border with León, the town was the resting stop for the endless stream of contrabandistas who travelled through at first on horseback and later inside Renaults and Peugeots, on their way to the coast to retrieve the goods that would be peddled in the dark cities of the Spanish interior.

The country as a whole had by then fully declined into a slothful decay. One by one, the colonies that remained in the Americas had reclaimed their independence from the incompetent central government of Spain. After 1898, all that remained were bitter words scribbled by a generation of writers bleeding their shame into the gaping wound the colonies left in their wake. All Spain could boast of now were greedy landowners, fattened Jesuits, disgruntled miners biding their time till they could stand up against the owners of the fetid hellholes where they worked themselves into an early grave.

In Galicia things were worse. Long forgotten by the central powers of Spain, no easy path led people to this remote region of the country, no reason existed to travel to this poverty-ridden chunk of the world. In this northwest bit of the Iberian peninsula, the only constant visitor was the rain, which made lettuce flourish and pastures unbearably beautiful, but delivered interminable nights of darkness so that depression was more common here than in all of Spain. More green than Ireland, more melancholic than a thousand Romantic poets, the region was lauded for its otherworldly beauty. Her people, though, were more often than not dismissed as illiterate peasants by their fellow countrymen and by the odd visitor from other lands, who arrived brandishing Bibles and preaching conversion from the sins of popery — only to find that it was not the Church of Rome that reigned supreme in the small towns and even smaller villages here, but superstitious beliefs of forest gods, black witches, and lascivious wolfmen, a legacy, like the bagpipes and stone hilltop forts, of the region's Celtic ancestry.

Canteira itself was a beautiful town even then — long before concrete and hotels had turned it into a vibrant, bustling affair, in the days before emigrant remittances, miniature cathedrals and five-day fiestas with virgins decked in gold and pearls — even then the town was an astounding sight, surrounded by the most beautiful natural scenery in all of the region, framed in summer by a night sky of infinite stars and a moon that gleamed like brittle porcelain.

It was María who had conceived of the idea of turning their house into a pensión. It was an enormous house, built by their uncle Ignacio who had left for Mexico when barely a boy and returned a decade later, a man straight and true, tall, handsome, and richer than he had ever imagined in his childhood dreams. He had built the house with the intention of marrying quickly and filling it with ten joyful children who would shower him with devotion and love. He was a happy man — perhaps the last happy man to be born to that family — and his infectious optimism blinded him to the climatic limitations of this corner of Spain, so that he built a house more appropriate to Andalucía, where the sun shines uninterrupted for months on end. The Galician workmen — ordinarily taciturn and sombre, suspicious of anyone who thought of the world as anything other than a vat of pain — were instantly seduced by Don Ignacio's enthusiasm, and grew to believe that the house he had designed in his head, complete with giant courtyard and a stone fountain decorated with cherubim carved in the south of Spain, would somehow defy the dreariness of Galicia's dark winter days. When the house was finally finished, Don Ignacio stood back and sighed in contentment. What he saw was a handsome rectangular mansion made from granite carved by the talented masons of the town, with eight bedrooms, four on the west wing of the house, four on the east, a sizable kitchen decorated with Portuguese blue and white tile, and at the front, the room he loved most of all, a parlour large enough to accommodate twenty people or more, heated in winter by a handsome wood-burning stove that radiated enough warmth to reach the many rooms that lay behind it on either side. Built on the outskirts of town, on a beautiful piece of land covered with apple, fig, and cherry trees, framed in the west by a bubbling creek and in the north by the splendour of Canteira's rolling hills, the house would soon become the envy of all who passed by on their way through town.

Sadly, Don Ignacio would not live long enough to fill the house with children, would not even live long enough to find a suitable wife, succumbing shortly afterwards to the typhus epidemic that took the lives of so many during the long winter of 1881. So it was that the house ended up in the hands of his younger brother, the father of María, Carmen, and Cecilia — a weak man who possessed none of the ebullience that had made Don Ignacio so loved in town, and who, despite all of his earnest efforts, was unable to produce a male heir who would survive the trauma of being brought into the world — a fact that he used to justify his wasted existence and the copious abuse he heaped on his wife. By the time he died, just months after María's marriage to Arturo Pérez Barreiro, the house had fallen into a state of pathetic disrepair, the paint on the walls eaten by the humidity, the wooden floors in various stages of decay.

It would take years of labour to set the house to rights again but María possessed all the determination that her own father had lacked and had a firm hand with her sisters besides. Carmen and Cecilia would remain unmarried, resigning themselves to assuming their respective places in the house, Cecilia taking charge of things in the kitchen and Carmen tending to the animals and managing the work in the fields. Two daughters were born in rapid succession to María-Asunción and then Matilde. Eight years later, her husband, not yet thirty years old, was dead. Faced with the uncertainty of a life without the income Arturo had derived as one of the town's schoolmasters, the sisters opened the house up to strangers a year later, offering beds made with sheets embroidered in Camariñas, wine from the Ribeiro Valley, and regional dishes cooked under the guidance of Cecilia — an enormous woman by then, driven to fat by a feverish, inexplicable hunger that she assuaged with chorizo, loaves of fresh bread, and, during the fall, pound upon pound of roasted chestnuts. Later, once Cecilia had passed away, Gloria made it a habit to take chorizo from the yearly slaughters to her great-aunt's grave where it disappeared shortly thereafter, eaten by the wolves or a graveyard loiterer — but really, Gloria believed, inhaled by Cecilia herself, who lay lonely and hungry inside her kitchenless coffin of black walnut and crushed velvet inlay.

Barely a week had passed after Gloria's birth when three guests arrived on horseback at the doors of the pensión.

Catalanes, Cecilia told the others in her best conspiratorial tone. You can tell by their funny way of talking and because their shirt sleeves hang like curtains.

The Catalanes, three men in their late twenties, perturbed to find themselves in a house full of so many women — A newly arrived one too, one of the men told the others, though you can't tell yet; it's only when their eyes open up to swallow you whole that you can tell they've finally become women — stayed there nonetheless, too tired to search for other accommodation. Later, once they had downed enough Ribeiro wine to cure themselves of their initial bashfulness, they sang songs, told stories, and hummed to the new baby in a futile attempt to rid her of her sadness.

The following morning, Jordí, the tall Catalan with the eagle eyes — the one whose singing voice they would recall for years after because it was a deep, lush baritone that reminded them of the processions of the dead at midnight — handed the women a bit of Belgian lace, telling them it was for the child, señoras, for her baptismal robe. María, unaccustomed to this sort of generosity from strangers, and especially strangers from a part of the country she disliked for no particular reason, took the lace, smiling for the first time since their arrival. Later, she would comment that it augured well to have these guests — three Catalanes no less — offering gifts to the newborn on this, the longest night of the year, because it was August, and August nights were good only for the tortures of memory.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Bitter Taste of Time by Béa Gonzalez. Copyright © 1998 Béa Gonzalez. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
PROLOGUE,
PART ONE 1920–1930,
PART TWO 1930–1947,
PART THREE 1947–1958,
PART FOUR 1958–1984,
EPILOGUE,
Acknowledgements,
Copyright Page,

Editorial Reviews

Spanning from 1920 to 1997, Gonzalez's second novel follows five generations of a wealthy family in a small Galician town as their fortunes rise and fall with Spain's changing political climate. The six Encarna women, ruled by the harsh and beautiful María, run a successful hotel in Canteira, a picturesque town "long forgotten by the central powers of Spain." As one of the town's wealthiest families whose men either die young or otherwise leave quickly, the Encarnas are the object of much gossip in the community. From jovial Cecilia to austere Carmen, kind Matilde, withdrawn Asunción and ambitious Gloria, the women change little as the country around them is engulfed in war and political upheaval, and the novel lacks a central narrative as the family bounces from one crisis to another. While Gonzalez's descriptions of Canteira's locals and the town's slow slide into modernity can be charming and whimsical, the novel's engaging beginning peters out as the minidramas that follow fail to break out of a repetitive cycle of poor choices in men and family squabbling. (Oct.)

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