CHAPTER III. THE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

   Once upon a time there was a woman –He started. The flames, like burning hands massaging my knees, were a pain reliever against the stubborn cold of the harsh winter, already yielding. Protch, who had placed himself so that he did not prevent their warm tongues to lick me, smiled. The clear morning was changing tiresomely into afternoon-... who uttered her first cry, without irreverence, in the presbytery of what is an old cathedral. Thus, sheltered in St. Magnus’ red sandstone of the tears of November which struck with fury outside, when the century was a small child barely weaned, the first beggar arrived at this dingy room of horror, Earth, claiming her right to see the light where she would like to. She was a girl of matter that never neglected energy; a woman like women are: lucid, serene and courageous. She could have emerged in a warm home or on the treacherous streets that were awaiting her, but in her freedom she decided to be born in a temple, as if it were written that only in the most sacred enclosures all explosions must burst, and she was like a creator for those who came later, mother of us all, as the Universe. The erratic souls, which empty and abandoned, ever to her have gone, always saw her woman among women, a lady. When her tiny steps ever bend the arc of any street, the taciturn passer-by stops to contemplate her, with a respectful look. In the view of her venerable way of walking and her wrinkles man is shaken by the weight of the first woman, of every story that mentions her.

- But I'm losing the thread. I don't know whether I will be able to tell it.

   Adam Oakes, her father, then a pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Kirkwall, in the Orkneys, must have been, in the words of his own daughter, seductive as the star perfume, beautiful as the devil. What is known with certainty, he was a smart exceptional speaker who caught your attention with his impeccable argument, an apologist of intricate dogmatic labyrinths. So he winnowed the wheat of incontrovertible certainty from which the sins of men ever stained it, that he earned a reputation for being able to make intelligible the mysteries of divinity, just as he could have chosen to illuminate his proselytes on the truths of alchemy, the lies of time and space or the own inexistence of God; a useful man, a... dangerous man. Perhaps therefore exiled in that distant land.  

  They say, Protch, that when Adam was twenty-seven, in a languid and cold dawn of a rainy and sickly February, a ballet company perhaps disoriented landed as a shipwhreck in the harbour without light of the sleeping city. They say that Adam, who had left recent fevers and headaches and who wandered close to the sea, believed that he was delirious when a profile that the sleepy rays of the East highlighted woke him the image of a star in the moment of blending in with the yellow of the day and evaporating. And surely he was not wrong, because not in vain he had just met the golden reflections of Estella, Estella Frame, one of the emerging suns in dancing at the beginning of the century. 

   That day in February ended up being our beginning. Mr. Oakes had long time ahead and decided to attend the evening performance of the Nutcracker. The theater was almost empty and of all the available space he chose a third-row seat. He had to wait until the second act to see her, because his lady was the fairy of sugar.

   Whenever Estella danced, the proscenium trembled. The wood, to the rhythm of her tiny feet, fluttered without noise; the stage was swaying to the very soft cadence of stretches, twists, and sliding. The Kingdom of Sweets tap-danced mealy to the beat of the uniform celesta. Whenever Estella danced, one's heart was soft and sensitive. Adam’s courage sank to the very sound of her feet, which gave him heartbeats. He knew without a doubt that whenever Estella danced, the proscenium trembled and his virgin feelings, a stage without wood to be opened, oppressed him like Eve should have oppressed in her Eden, in her nakedness of light between apples, trees and snakes.

   Finally the curtain fell, and in the dull silence of the sudden footsteps that were going away, he remembered other feet that clip-clap-clop, clip-clap-clop, rhythmically harmonized the naïve look of the fairy with his heart forever broken. He was going to retire reluctantly when his gaze landed for a second behind the curtains. Was that not Gordon Traves? The usual alcoholic look and hesitant steps across the stage. Bony and sour-faced and of an offensive nature, he doubted to greet him when he realized that Gordon owed him a favor and he had a new idea. He reviewed the list of names in the cast: fairy of sugar-Estella Frame and boldly walked the few meters that separated him from Mr. Traves.

− "Good night, Gordon."

− "Good night, Mr. Oakes. Did you like the show?"

− "I liked the second act so much that I wanted to congratulate Miss Frame. Would it be possible?"

− "She must still be changing. Wait for me here, I will tell her."

   It was a frantic wait, but ephemeral. In a corridor on the right the dressing rooms were.   His shy way of entering was answered by a shining face, so much more shining for being stripped of make-up. First timid greetings. Adam effusively greeting her with a red face. Gordon, discreetly, retires.

   She saw a bright and attractive face like a summer afternoon must be, an insecure gentleman, hesitant but with a warm voice that kept touching his hair. Mr. Traves does not know what happened in the dressing room, but knows that Mr. Oakes took almost an hour to get out. But surely inside there must have been a space-time singularity that originated our big bang.

   The priest emerged at last with an illuminated face and an aching heart. He could never forget her. It was vain his decision not to go to the harbour to say goodbye to her. Impossible to say goodbye to whom has got inside forever. He spent long days of troubles and sorrows. It made him wonder whether she would be feeling the same. His anguish was reflected in his sermons: everything in Christ's life was passion and hopes were the latest Calvary. But he spoke more about death than about resurrection. Whoever heard him those days should know a lot about nails and thorns, sandy hills, prominent crosses and impregnable graves. It seemed impossible that way to resurrect from the dead.

  And February went by as a diamond broomstick in his soul. And long were for him the seasons. Spring of winds, summer of shadows. Autumn had become cold and rainy and the dancer would forever be dancing in his life because whenever Estella danced, she captured the pulse; and blood was young again and dressed as a girl. Even the downpour of that damp November started to prance. And the rhythmic rain of that November 7 harmonized with his cold tears while he walked among chalices in that sacred place.

   The mass had finished more than one hour ago. The Temple was in those times of peace as a traveler inside of a boat was with sea in calm but lashed by rain. But suddenly he sharpened his ears. There sounded a few determined steps advancing by the aisle, discrete, rhythmic, musical, trotting, as if the ground was rising so that whoever stepped on it would not have to make efforts. His heart almost stopped: they looked like ballet steps. There she was, up to the presbytery, Estella illuminated by a light perhaps fragile but imperishable. But he could not help but notice the more singular: the goddess Moon was full, Selene had been completed with a creature, who surely also danced in her womb as her mother had danced for nine months in his heart. He wished ardently that the child was his. And at that moment a star shone strongly on her face when he heard her say:

− "I love you, Adam. I have spent these months making efforts so that it wasn't like that and when I decided to make the trip, perhaps it is too late. It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t tell you: the child is yours."

   And then he felt the need to utter the same words to express what he felt, so that the soft echo of what he wanted to say caressed his heart the rest of his life:

− "I love you, Estella. For nine months I've loved you, but without making any efforts to avoid it, efforts that I knew were useless."

− "Then, for Christ’s sake, take me to a hospital. I feel it is imminent..."

   But at that time it happened. It was no longer possible to go down the staircase of the presbytery. Mars Ultor, the Avenger Mars, hurried to be born on that Olympus. His mother hardly had to make efforts while Adam helped more with his hope than with his strength. He broke completely when he saw how his daughter came to life, because a girl she was, like the Universe. Adam was also sitting on the floor of that sacred place to accompany the mother, who didn't take long to recover; and their daughter, who came with so much will to this temple of life that she hardly cried. He had to prolong that eternity:

− "Estella, look at me. I want to take care of the girl and spend the rest of my life with you. I promise to love you and respect you all the days of my life. If you want to make me the happiest man in the world, answer yes."

− "Adam... This girl is as yours as she is mine. If you want to take care of her, I will always let you. But I also love you. I just need some security: to know that you will never separate from me."

− "When you're recovered, you will enter my house, which will be now our house. Whatever it is what life has in store for me, I want to live it at your side."

− “I will enter your house. I mean our house −and looking tenderly at the fragile heart that was beating in her arms, she added−: What shall we call her?

   It took them almost half an hour there, in the presbytery of St. Magnus, deciding names, with the disturbing security that they already belonged to each other. And finally they agreed in one name, when he, in his faithfulness to his love for Christ and the characters that had surrounded him, suggested:

− 'Madeleine'.

  Madeleine. We have never called her like that, but thus she was named. Two hours after childbirth, Estella thought she was able to enter her new home. Because a beggar also tells you, Protch, that you can never consider that a home is yours until you know that you've definitely entered the heart of whomsoever also dwells there. It wasn't very far, but they went on a taxi, for in that time the first taxis began to appear in Kirkwall. And her new home she found comfortable and safe, her daughter in her arms, the man she loved sitting beside her. Only then they started to kiss, frantically trying to recover the lost months. And in those moments he spoke of marriage. She accepted and not before that time she felt protected, protected for the future, as if she had the advance that one day she would need protection.

   They were married on Saturday, December 8. Estella was radiant. The light that shone on her must be like that of a new star pouring its first energy. Adam's was like a softer light, but equally firm. And St. Magnus had never been more solemn, the girl who was born there attending the wedding of her parents. The whole world was a temple and everything was light, stained glass, hearts, and miracle.

   They were a happy couple as long as they were themselves and small Madeleine grew strong and learning to spill light and beauty. Adam’s sermons spoke now of wonders, of the arrival of God among men when finally the verb had decided to turn into flesh, of teachings and wisdom, of the fact that life had sense, of resurrection and eternity. Madeleine learned to speak before learning to walk, chewing the most difficult pronunciation words without difficulty. The happiness that their parents had had to reach her, and inside her it stayed forever, even in significant moments, because you could smudge a glass but the crystal, if it was quite solid, remained. Her life has been full of gods and the first were the Lares, the gods of the household, home that her parents consecrated with happiness.

   Her education was a road with many twists, but without any potholes, more of letters that of numbers, learning like everyone more easily what you want to learn, but she, to a greater or lesser extent, was interested in almost everything. But one day, when she was hardly six, her life began to change because everything changed in her inside. A friend suggested her to protect from the sun shielding it with her hand. And she repeated the same gesture at night. And then there came the disturbing echo of first words in her mind that would make her wonder forever. Thus, her life, and ours, changed definitely, by a mental image on a moonless night.

− "My hand is greater than the universe" –she never knew where that madness had come from. But she felt certain that it was indeed that way. And she underwent immediate panic. She knew that any logical person, scientist, or somebody with some common sense would be against such idea. She thought that she was going crazy. It wasn't the only time that she thought that.

   Several days later she came to an agreement with herself: her hand was equal to the universe. But this convenience did not satisfy her: "come on, you fool, admit at once that your hand is smaller than the universe, and only then you will recover your sanity." "In addition –she found new arguments for her madness− it also expands or shrinks, warms up or cools, the lines of life orbiting around a core of fire, your crazy heart."

   But she never found the calm that was so close. After several months, she walked away finally of absurd quantities, and finally formulated her turbulent phrase thus: "my hand is another universe". But this pact with her sanity never convinced her at all. And it took her several years to know that indeed this crazy idea would mark her life and her hand would be her universe, even years before she was on the street.

  But if madness was not in her, it was always very close. About to be eight years old, one autumn evening her mother broke the peace of home giving an unexpected shout. First it was a visual hallucination. Only years later they knew that Estella believed firmly having seen the devil in one of the showcases of the dining room. And soon, too soon, she began to hear strange voices inside. She still did not feel persecuted. They immediately went to the doctors. His husband felt perfectly how they did not want to alarm, until one doctor finally took courage. It was an uncertain diagnosis, but he believed what she was experiencing could be, by the symptoms, catatonic schizophrenia. The verdict could not be more dramatic.

− "Adam, my love –she said when they finally were alone−, I don't know how long I will continue being myself, or what will happen to me. But as far as I stay lucid I will repeat every day: I love you, I love you and I love you. And if you think it is not enough I will start again: I love you, I love you and I love you..."

− "Estella, my life, I solemnly promise that I will always be by your side. And I'll not let you be the only one saying it: I love you, I love you and I love you."

   I love you, I love you and I love you. That was always the leitmotiv of their lives. She never got better, but her deterioration was slow and always had at least one moment of lucidity in the day to repeat her three I love you, until he died, 21 years later. They didn’t tell all the truth to their daughter, who only slowly discovered it and learned to live by herself.

   Adam found it much harder to accept. He never lost his faith, but he realized that it was transforming until even open or dimly, you could feel in his sermons a cynical transformation of the Five Solae of the Protestant.

   Sola Scriptura, only the Scriptures explained Christ, finished in accepting any writing that spoke of Him, even against Him, because from Him and for Him the light of truth shone proud in every lie, the beauty of His supreme acts of redemption and I am the way, the truth and the life ended up being for him sola veritas, sola vita, sola via.

   Solus Christus not only meant not having faith in faith, prayers, or in the Church or the institutions but also not to believe in any other god that was not Christ.  He never dared say it in the pulpit, but for him not even the Yahweh of the Old Testament was his father. From that sick and psychotic Father clearly could not have been born God Love. He began to sense that any Christian confession would inevitably lose all sense if it was still considering the first half of the Bible.

   Sola Gratia was immediately transformed into what Reform had wanted to avoid. And he understood that if Christ was fair, he should be listening to their children by the ears of grace and good deeds.

   Sola Fide he quickly began to read as the absolute cruelty of the god in which he had always believed, and only with difficulty could move from there, because if he did not transform it, everything that he believed in would not make sense anymore. Only he who has faith can be saved. He looked at his daughter, who was then reading absorbed something at his side. All earthly parent would save his children from any hell, from any torture and would lead them into a path of bliss. But if my daughter one day does not believe in me, I would also try to save her if her eternity would be mine to give. He saw that he was creating a personal religion, but he realized that contrary to everything that he had found in the Scriptures, all faith is finally a use of personal interpretation.

   Soli Deo Gloria was his last transformation. Initially it had been sought to preserve the worship of God from all filthiness, idolatrous or superstitious. But in the end he realized that paganism also talked about reasons to love Him. And as he was finishing his road he was also considering some other things to believe in, mainly experience, all his experience in life; and love, the great creator, the great transformer. And finally you could have read Soli Amori gloria.

   Here's how the Five Solae were finally transformed and perverted but only this way he was able to preserve until his last breath his faith, his Solae, his Christ the great master, and always and only Him love, love in abundance.

   In the transition from her early years to adolescence, Madeleine learned to navigate on the crises of her parents. Estella could only worsen and she remained for several hours motionless and expressionless, but she continued having at least one moment of lucidity during the day when she took the opportunity to reaffirm her love for Adam and for flooding her daughter with words of true love.

   To accompany her father, she began to read the Bible. Once she finished it, but it was frequent that she restarted it and she could read but the first pages of Genesis. He put on her shoulders all his longing for faith and learned to trust the serene right mind of his daughter soon. So, with all that theology it was normal that she started from a child to create her own cosmogony.

   And it wasn't far the day that her hand began to be her universe. But almost always causality is disguised by chance.  She was a hot afternoon with a friend on the terrace of a bar, to whom a few minutes later a wasp stung in the middle finger. Her hand was swelling, especially the fingers, and she had to go to the doctors. Little did she remember of the long explanation given to them by the latter. But she believed that it was a case of allergy. Once she was cured, her friend showed her her hand. Her first reading was to start with a large swelling not hiding, however, the lines of the palm. And then she had, looking at her friend, a strong shaking. She could see clearly what was going to happen, and that first time she uttered out loud what she was seeing:

− "You will find the love of your life much earlier than you expect."

   Her friend looked at her estranged and faithless. And it was only a week later when she found the man that would accompany her the rest of her life. Madeleine learned to always hit the target, but it took her much longer to see that although she never failed in general, sometimes she needed to interpret it. Fearful she decided to read one day her own destiny and she was wrong. She believed that her own lines told her that she would never find love but the truth is, Protch, that she did find it, but she was never able to hold it.

   Among the belongings of her father, who by that time was filling the library with every kind of mystery book, since in all of them he perceived a truth about his Solus Christus, she found some treatise about palmistry, and something more: several books on the Tarot cards. She soon learned about the 22 major arcana. About minor arcana she investigated long after. She soon purchased her first Tarot. And even if she has had more, this first one she has always preserved. She has even read the cards to me with that deck of cards. As initially she was not dependant on it, she used to guess for free.

  But her mother got worse and although the family economy was always solid, she wanted to make a living. At the age of 16, she found her first job in a bakery. And she meditated there, from 9 to 2, handing out loaves without ever tiring of the wonderful scent of the freshly baked bread, what she would do when her education was over, because in those years she knew very well that it wouldn't be possible for a woman to study more. But with some economic troubles, her life had begun to depend on her, and once school time was over, in her spare time she also started to charge for her predictions.

  Next to the harbour, where ferries went to the other islands, there were sometimes stalls and attractions. One warm afternoon, with no more tools than her hand and her ability, she sat down on the pavement and there she began to guess, from the lines of the palm and Tarot. To her one day some kind soul around lent a tent to mount her own business, to which she went in the afternoons daily after leaving the bakery. She used to be right and soon she created a reputation. She was already at 17, Mistress Oakes, seer of the future, and thus, Mistress Oakes, everybody has always known her, even her fellow mates. She never had a husband or children, but perhaps grandchildren, and all of us have been, but she has always been called mistress.


 

   So far Protch had not interrupted, and neither did he now. But I often noticed his urge to tell me something.

−Tell me, Protch.

-I will always call her Mistress Oakes then.

−But you want to tell me something else, isn't it?

−I was thinking... I guess that she ended in Hazington... and what you have told me about her hand and the universe, and that she has some symbolic grandchildren, I don't know why, has made me think. My hand was read a few years ago by a woman beggar, and she told me something incomprehensible but that worries me... Let's see, your fellow mate has more or less your stature, is not thick, and has grey hair?

−She does, Protch. I don't know what she told you or if you want to tell me about it, but if you do, I swear to listen with respect.

−You know that Maude and I have never been parents and what she said was this sentence: "You will be grandparents although you never had any children."

   You will be grandparents although you never had any children. How could I tell Protch that I knew very well that the possibility was in his hands with only wanting to accept it? I did not know that Mistress Oakes had told him that, but I no longer had any doubt that it had been her.

−I believe it was my mate, Protch, and even if you do not know her, I suspect that you know half of us. Have patience. Maybe I know something about that enigmatic phrase and what she meant with it. Her good and bad prophecies always have some truth.  I come to your house and yet I discover something new about my mates. But so it had to be because everything is in everyone. I'm telling you a story and now you're telling me another. It was her, Protch, I'd bet. And you're going to know everything that I know and you want to know. I only ask you to wait a bit.


 

   At the age of 18, her normal life had not changed, but two things came into her story with strength, to twist it. She met Joe Scully and her mother was interned. There was no other solution that making Estella enter a sanatorium. She heard then for the first time of Basin Hall, the best psychiatric hospital, where they would always try to cure her or at least make it so she wouldn't be worse, they would examine her, and if it was possible they would make her improve. She knew that Basin Hall was a small village in the city of Hazington, south from their town, where her father and she went frequently to visit her. She saw in those years our city for the first time and had the desire to stay close to her mother.

  Shortly after having her own tent next to the harbour she met a key man in her life. He visited many cities, this globetrotter, with his attraction: Scully, the mirror maze. It cost her to find her way out the first time she entered, an afternoon that she had enough money, and his owner had to enter to rescue her. Thus, she met Joe. They agreed to talk and immediately became friends.

  Joe Scully did not have a single striking feature but his whole self always made him very attractive for women. Mistress Oakes knew that very well and soon recognized in him the man of her life. They soon talked about love, because as usual, even the most cynical fall in love, and that meeting with her had not left him unscathed. All his life he loved her, but maybe love was not enough. In one of his first conversations with her, he made it clear he was ambitious.

− "You asked me about my projects in life. Well, if I can't find a wealthy woman, I do not think that I ever marry. Do not look at me with those eyes, my life. I love you, but my poor economy and yours together...; we would not go too far."

   Joe told her he had been wandering around the country and that it was not the first time that he came to the Orkneys, but he lived in Hazington. For her he would stay all summer, but he could linger there no more. He would return the following year, but his attraction was not like a merry-go-round. His charm was novelty. But settled in the same place in the same city every day soon would make the public lose all its fascination. Mirrors have no magic when you no longer get lost and the superstition of people leads the person who sought oneself to immediately repel them, lest they attract bad luck.

  In October he went away for the first time, and she learned to manage without him until March. But she knew that Joe only returned to Kirkwall for her and of his love she was always sure, as sure as she was that he was a womanizer. Whenever he came back, he brought in his clothes a perfume that was not his but Mistress Oakes soon learned to appreciate the essential: she was his only love. None of his infidelities was important as long as love remained, and the months they saw each other he had never betrayed her, she was sure.

  Thus they were for several years. Every spring she was lost in the same maze of doubt, until she saw him return like his mirrors. In the end she considered seriously moving to Hazington, for her mother and for Joe. And he who knew her worries, one day told her that she could find a job in a bakery in Templar Village, where she would earn enough to live somewhere she rented. Thus, with 22 years, she came one day to our city. Her father already knew of her impossible love for that Scully, and seeing that she would have a house and a job, he objected nothing.

   She spent a long year next to the Umbra Terrae Boulevard. If you do not know it, Protch, I will tell you that it is an earthy area along the river where elms and ash trees live in the harmony of their love, long before their separation. The origin of its name is uncertain, but I have heard that the Templar named it Umbrae Terra, land of shadows, which would be logical in the most shady river area. Perhaps then popular ignorance of Latin moved the diphthong to the second name. Because such as it is, Umbra Terrae would mean the shadow of the Earth, and I don't know if once you've wondered, Protch, why you can’t see half of the moon when it is waxing or waning. And I have been made sure from those who know about these things that the part that is not seen is precisely the shadow of the Earth. In those years lived there some beggars, but still the City Council had not transformed it into a well-kept promenade area, in the park which it became later.

   She learned soon that love, true love, sickened man's heart and crazily it flies at the top with no sanity taking it down. He who is burning wants to continue burning and although circumstances may break a couple, love continues its work of banditry inside until  only time can remove it.

  When she was nearly 23, she couldn't find Joe any longer at the beginning of autumn at his home in Arcade. And it was shortly after it arrived when she found him by chance one day near St Mary, where she used to go to read the fortune. He was in the arms of a blond, tall woman of delicate appearance, but flourishing. He saw her and appointed to meet her an hour later in a bar in the town.

− "Maddie –He told her at last. Only he gave her that name and since then she did not allow anyone more to do it−, I will always love you, I want to start out there, and make you sure of what I feel. Look, we can always be together. But the lady you've seen next to me is my wife, Beatrice” -Mistress Oakes felt that her vision came and went in waves. Broken heart was watering her cheeks−. "We got married a month ago:  On October 27"

  And little else. She had then to stop looking for him. The few moments they continued to love passionately, increasingly more spaced, were useless. Since she came to feel bad about Beatrice and even desired what never happened: that Joe loved his wife. The Scully lived of what little he earned and a low pension that her father gave her, and he took her story so badly that assured his daughter that she would not receive anything after his death. His daughter had run after one Joe Scully, it seems that they were his words, and had chosen a path where his father wasn't willing to follow. Poor wealth. So many times you fall in love with gold and you do not realize that its chips are rotting. Finally Joe hadn’t found it useful to have met a rich girl. And money ruined Mistress Oakes’ life, first of all of us.

  That December was particularly cold and hostile. Bitterness, depression, dry sadness almost defeated her. It was also the year of the great crash of the stock market, which in her case coincided with a downsizing with which she lost her job and barely got to live indoors. But she didn’t feel like returning to her father’s house. The year was almost over when she found places to open her hand for charity. The only indignity would be not to live again by herself one day. She got used to the shame of the streets, but she never stopped helping from the little or much she got, divining the future. She always found matches to light her biggest shades and soon realized that it would be better to also leave the shelter of her room in Umbra Terrae, and finally get down to that home foreseen and feared, a fire in the empty space without roof of the boulevard, with the shelter of trees, the river and the first beggars that she met. But Verôme came also to the first four who did not choose it. Unexpectedly, she started to find areas to sleep more secluded, when on the last night of the year she could see the show of a frost of winter really lit by stars. And eventually she preferred to stay alone with the infinite glass, starred, breathing bluish lights; she was not separated from the universe: there was still a hope. Life had become an opaque stonewall where light did not reach, but liberty would timidly circumvent it.

  I don't know much of her early years on the street, where she used to move or what her fears or hopes were. Somewhere she walked unbreakable when in September a girl was born who, unknowingly, would be her inseparable mate. She had already been reached by some inexplicable eight words, doubting her reason to make her always question her sanity at the time she found also the first libertines.


 

   Nike did not know much about the existence of Shipster and did not say anything to Protch. He could basically be defined as an exploiter of beggars. Mistress Oakes knew him one day and was taught to sell tobacco. It was given her by Shipster and she sold it on any sidewalk in Castle Road. At night the trafficker got 60% of earnings and she knew that she could not protest: it was that or nothing. So she was several years, with enough money to occasionally go to Kirkwall to see her father, whom she always managed to conceal that she was on the streets. With the charity, with the lines of the hand, with cards, with tobacco; also with love never-extinguished but hardly pushed aside, Madeleine Oakes could never be defeated and earned her life as best she could, but every day thanking the light of a new dawn. Life was fencing and she armed herself with swords. The dawn of beauty always caressing her shoulder, her faith in freedom which was even in the hardness of the faces of beggars surrounding her, she lived a learning that years of school would not have given her, a learning that she knew how to transmit to the seven who came after her, or anyone who went to the fire of her heart to warm.


 

   When she had been more than six years on the street, profitting from all the small jobs she did, she went to Kirkwall among the knives of a wintry and treacherous autumn. Her father suddenly began to suffer migraines, or so it seemed. But he was fast to guess that his life was ending. He supposed that it would be in November, in the month when many of the most important things in his life had happened. And one night he took courage to talk face to face with his daughter.

− "Madeleine, my love, leave what you're doing –she was then busy with supper−. Sit next to me and look at me. Not always have I been responsible with you. You know that the threads that weave my life broke when the light from the universe of your mother was shading. But when she still was by my side I always kept the hope to see her dance again one day. The dancer is no longer and also my stage is trembling and I will not live many days. I cannot leave you many things but a home, if that is your wish. You've always been so free that in my last moments I doubt even of what your desires are. Maybe you prefer to continue in Hazington, in the streets."

− "I didn't know that you knew. Forgive me if I've hurt you."

-"You couldn’t always hide it. Friends here, sometimes travelers, informed me. But I would never have reproached you. I'm going to die, but there is still your future. Tell me what you really prefer."

   It was difficult to answer. Despite her many sorrows, in the streets she was finding reasons to fight and be herself. She sensed that she would be more of a woman with fewer amenities. Her father noticed that she didn't know what to answer, but was able to reach an agreement with her. He would leave her the old house in Kirkwall in case one day she needed it; and executors who would be responsible to bequeath her the little money that he owned. She had to live several years in the temptation to go for her inheritance and however, favorite pupil of misery, she never wanted to move away from the double lullabies of the street, the mother, and the street, the whore.

   It was actually when November already agonized. The month that had been her cradle came to also be her father's grave. One morning he did not wake up. St Magnus had dressed for him of wedding and birth, and finally decorated of mourning for the transit to his last trip. Mistress Oakes was really crying her first mournful current but her mind was sailing to her new fertile river. Her mother was not her mother, but still she recognized her. Kirkwall was harbour, but now only Hazington, which she always called City, was a solid pier and this city and its streets were now the lifelong home she wanted to inhabit.

   But the long time in the street would not be exempt from new romantic surprises. A foggy afternoon she read the hand of a gentleman, and she said this enigmatic sentence without knowing she was also reading her fate:

− "When you're about to get what you crave the most, watch out for a day of winds. In it you will get what you don’t expect. But you will always find a way out."

   That gentleman was an unemployed person from a good family, such good family that he had never had to work. He was one of the Bellamy, who along with the Rage, the Wrathfall or the first Rivers had given lineage to the illustrious of the city. Aaron Bellamy the aristocrat was called. He did not pay much attention to the prediction but to the beauty of the palmistry woman. He invited her to dinner and Mistress Oakes agreed. One of her best characteristics was to be a good listener. She did tell him, with the fish and the best wine, the most important facts in her life. Aaron was captivated by her. He wanted to see her more often. He learned of her schedule, quite free, and they saw each other many times.

   It was about two months later when he suggested her to enter his home. By then, he lived alone in a beautiful manor house from Fairfields. She accepted; winter had come that year rigorously to the city, and really hard to the roofless banks of the river. They were not sleeping together; in those years it would have been unthinkable. Mistress Oakes had her own room. And she soon found a job as a maid in some prosperous adjacent home. He reproached her that she had no need, but she didn't want to be her boyfriend’s parasite, because they were already a couple. It wasn't love. Of that illness she had only sickened once. Or at least... because she never doubted how much she cared for him, every day a little more, until she became doubtful whether she really loved him.

   This situation lasted more than two years, until Aaron, deeply in love, proposed marriage. She did not answer yes immediately, but she wasn’t able to tell him no. It was not the security that he gave her to always have a home. It was the happiness of imagined life at his side. Aaron had all the requirements to be the man of her life, but love, that bastard, does not think of those things. And she knew well that Joe was in her heart forever, well in the most incarnate rivers of her blood.

   Days passed and the wedding date approached. It was so close that she felt increasingly more insecure. One afternoon she was wandering along the slums of the east, meditating seriously what to do. Aaron would be very happy with her, but he never could feel her love, because she knew that she would never be able to give it. And there was something else that worried her: her freedom. She preferred always to flutter with the dim light of a candle than lying next to the fire in a home where she would not be herself. She walked back to Fairfields in the confusion of a difficult decision already made, and she didn’t realize that it was an afternoon of rude and harsh winds.

   She did not love him. She couldn't do that to a gentleman like Aaron. Alone with him she told him all her truth, knowing herself evil but not wanting to be a whore with him. He did not take it well. He could never go beyond the idea that she had dumped him. They did not see each other again. And that night she returned to sleep in the shadow of the Earth. There she spent several years in the cruelty of cold and misery, free and alone, among the detritus that the clean body of society got rid of without mercy, surviving to not finding warmth in any nearby chest. My dear, old, beloved, Mistress Oakes! How I love her. It is impossible to express to you how much.


 

   Protch realized that he did not know the man who was sitting in his room that morning. But he sensed that it was going to be vital to know him. He knew that he was a beggar, because he doubted not his word. But one thing is believing and well another thing starting to assimilate it. And meanwhile he was only able to see the last of the Siddeley talking with warmth of a beggar woman, the same heat that would be used for all. He needed his friendship and was meanwhile preparing the warm sheets of respect, the only thing that he could give him, because if it was up to him, friendship would be born and would grow. A respect and friendship naked of properties and fortunes, heated in the fire of the unique feelings that matter, the need to know who you are as you look at yourself in the mirror of a friend.


 

   And little more can I tell you of the long years she spent alone, first of all, first light from a lighthouse that never faded. Weak is the clarity of she who has nothing. But if she ever had shadows, and if I knew them, I will never tell you. Never humiliated, always courageous, she will not lose her strength as long as she has breath and her children can take care of her. She is very old, Protch, but we still have the fortune of seeing her every morning. And if I'm crying, you must know that few people deserve our tears, born from the emotion of anyone who wants to flood gratefully, fertile water going from river to river, rocked by the unsafe currents of the air channel.


 

   Once upon a time there was a woman of high stained-glass windows, who was not always respected by winds. Her light swings from chiaroscuro to a thousand stained glass of color where the clarity of the day penetrates and breaks down in golden sparkles, or sometimes muffled, because her life, between the shadow and the luminescence has been a waning or waxing moon that hasn’t been allowed to fill and radiate the light spectrum that her smile ventured sometimes. But those who live with her know that even fading her light her fire is never put out, and sparks she has always had to light our most elongated shadows, scaring away our cold and bad omens.

  Five generations of Gerald Rivers there had been dealing carefully with the money of unwary or experienced people of the HSB, a veteran savings bank in the prosperous west sidewalk of Avalon Road. There the fifth Gerald, between invoices, revenue, loans, fees and changes projected his life as if it were a transaction. I can't tell you whether he is cold or intriguing, avid or mechanical; he discarded in his path everything that does not fit in a notebook full of many-digit numbers. And with nearly thirty years he had not matched yet.

   But an afternoon of horseback riding amusement he met Linda Hamilton, young and experienced, who however was in a dangerous drift at runaway gallop. He helped stop the reins and avoided her falling from the horse. Speaking with her, looking at her in the eye, he could no longer know where the horizon of the day ended and where her eyes began. He was engaged in her celestial eyes like a swallow in a wire. But the best life project is sometimes reached by an accident: he fell suddenly in love, without any warning signal. That contingency was not in his business, but when he knew who she was he calmed down. The Hamilton family lived, idle most of the time, of large inherited estates. He wouldn’t lose anything for knowing her. Because she seemed to have felt something similar for him. They saw each other frequently and were married a year later. It was love, Protch, they always loved, but it is true that without some monetary securities they wouldn’t have seen each other again.

   Linda Rivers was a forceful, grandiose, dominant woman and a flint where it was very easy for sparks to leap, rather a spirit of the air than of fire, many times a flame for her husband, seldom a burning light for their children, because they had three. Coupled with their inheritances they agreed to transmit them to other Rivers that could hand on the torch of the lineage. A year later they had Gerald, another Gerald, who for many years was called Second, though it could well have been Sixth, sometimes Junior although the boy always hated that name. He had the coldness of his parents mixed with an adventurous spirit not without opposition. Since he was a child it was obvious that he would not be willing to be the sixth Rivers in the HSB or to deal with the lands of the Hamilton, a rebel horse that wouldn't be easy to put in stables. He had his own way of understanding life, not always honest, always at his discretion, but with money from his parents... 


 

   Again I noticed that he wanted to say something.

−Protch, please, stop me whenever you want.

−I think it isn’t very correct to only interrupt you for something you imagine, something I will only know better when you tell me.

− What troubles you?