Free The Winterlings by Cristina Sánchez-Andrade

sat in silence. The crickets began chirping. Saladina’s face was shiny with sweat, and she was very agitated.
    â€˜I was talking with Mr Tenderlove,’ she said suddenly.
    â€˜I saw you.’
    Saladina’s throat gurgled like a blocked pipe.
    â€˜You saw me?’
    â€˜I saw you.’
    â€˜I see. Well, listen, Dolores … what if I got some new teeth?’
    Dolores gave her a prolonged and penetrating look. Then she set about folding the sheet back under the mattress. Sitting next to her sister, she felt the welcoming and friendly warmth that her body exuded. It wasn’t love that she felt for her. Affection; tenderness, perhaps. But really, what kind of nonsense was she on about; how could she not love her? Her bad moods exasperated her, her grunting and her shrill voice as well, but it was a gift to have someone to laugh and talk with every day. Saladina needed her, almost like a mother, and Dolores hung on to that need. She needed that need. That was it, plain and simple.
    She would never again confuse her feelings. Once had been enough.
    With a quiver of fear, she remembered that night, two or three days after they had arrived in Tierra de Chá. They had just gone to bed; it was that time of night when the colours in the sky settle and the stars are pulsing. Through an animal or even biblical instinct, they had realised that they needed to feel each other. This instinct was like a deep yearning for them: they tore off their nightdresses, knocked over the night-stand, and pulled the little iron beds together, coming together in a warm embrace.
    They were intimate with each other only once.
    Beneath the crucifix and the smiling portrait of Clark Gable, the mattresses filled with cornhusks creaked away through the night.
    The next day, they were embarrassed. They apologised to each other: ‘Forgive me.’ ‘No, you forgive me.’ ‘Forgive us both, Clark.’
    They didn’t speak to each other again until nightfall the next day.
    It never happened again.
    Now Saladina was waiting for an answer. Aside from the tense expression she had when she was alone — when she sewed or when she threw the feed to the chickens and she thought no one was watching — she had one other expression, which was of patient expectation, in which she pressed her lips together with a horrible noise, her upper dentures hanging between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. This was the expression she wore at that moment.
    â€˜New teeth, you reckon?’
    It wasn’t love she felt; it was fear. Because sometimes fear shows itself in unpredictable ways: it can be monstrous affection. That’s what had happened that night. Fear breeds confusion. When the worst things occur, fear bewilders you. Dolores needed her sister’s obsessions, her ascetic discipline, her way of being in the world, somewhere between madness and the void. There was a mixture of chaos and order in Saladina that fascinated her.
    Greta the cow let out a long moo from the cowshed.
    With so many developments, no one had remembered to milk her.

15
    At the same time, Mr Tenderlove entered his clinic. His house was behind the village, tucked away in the trees of the forest. To get there you had to walk down a road lined with chestnut trees that ended up at a stone building eaten away by moss and silence. Upstairs he had his clinic, a spacious and airy room that he used as a kind of laboratory.
    As soon as he switched on the light, a sense of pleasure took hold of him: the gratifying tingle of knowing that this was his space, his little nest, his home. Just like every other night, he prepared to take stock and clean his equipment. On top of that, he wanted to check if he had all the pieces he had chosen in his mind for the Winterling.
    Saladina the Winterling.
    Next to the revolving chair where the patients sat there was a long table with drawers of different sizes. From one of them he pulled out a brush, some