It was a desperate idyll. Desperate because it could not last, idyllic because they were sharing themselves with each other in ways that most people would never experience.
On the nights they ate at the restaurant, Sergio would drive her home, dropping her in a quiet street just around the corner from the apartment. Always before darkness fell, although already she was struggling to see in the twilight.
Nearly two months of tuition in the basics of tactile signing, and the regular practice she achieved with Sergio, was paying dividends. Already she was quite comfortable with it, spending sometimes hours on end with her eyes closed, the world reaching her only through Sergio’s fingertips. But the summer was coming to an end, and with it the nights were drawing in. There was less and less light, and Sergio was forced to take her home earlier. Soon, as the evenings grew darker, Ana’s father was going to insist on picking her up from the centre, and their idyll must come to an end.
It was a hot evening in mid-September when a thunderstorm rumbling across the Mediterranean from North Africa brought the meal at their little restaurant in Santa Ana to a premature end. They saw the storm approaching across the water, like a giant rolling cloud of mist, blotting out the blue of the evening sky, and finally the sun, before the wind that accompanied it began whipping large stinging drops of rain in under the awning. Day turned to night in the space of only a few minutes.
Sergio took her hand and they ran to where he had parked his car in the narrow Calle Condesa de Arcos. But, still, they were soaked by the time they had thrown themselves into the seats and slammed the doors shut. Rain streamed down the windscreen, and all the windows in the car quickly misted.
Ana was alarmed by how little she could see as they drove up the hill towards Marviña. The storm seemed to be following them, surging up the slope in their wake. The rain hammered out a deafening tattoo on the roof, and even though her hearing was fading, Ana felt it fill the car.
Marviña was deserted as they drove past the police and fire stations before turning down to their right, the view across the valley to the mountains obliterated by the storm. Sergio wanted to take her as close as he could to her apartment. It was almost dark out there, and the rain was obscuring the far end of the street. But Ana told him to stop. She could make it home from here, she said. It would be dangerous to get much closer because it was likely that in this weather her father would head out to meet her off the bus in the square.
Reluctantly, Sergio pulled in. He reached over to brush the wet hair from Ana’s face and leaned in to kiss her. A long, lingering kiss that left the taste of him on her lips. She would have given anything to stay with him, safe and warm in the car. But the threat of an encounter with her father was too great. He would be incandescent if he knew that Ana had continued seeing Sergio, after he had made her promise him that she wouldn’t.
She let her fingers trail gently across the fine stubble on his cheeks. ‘See you Wednesday,’ she said, and slipped out into the night.
She was startled in the rain by a figure that appeared out of nowhere. A shadow disengaging itself from the dark, brushing past her to round the front of Sergio’s car and open the driver’s door.
‘Get out, you pervert!’ It was her father’s voice.
In the rain and the gloom, it was a shadow play that acted itself out before her. Her father dragging the hapless Sergio from his car, a fist swinging through the night to impact with the face she had so recently touched with loving fingers. She screamed as she saw Sergio fall into the road, raindrops hammering the surface of it, bouncing off the tarmac all around him. She saw her father pull back his leg to swing repeated kicks into the chest and stomach of the now foetal curl of the young man who had just kissed her.
‘Stop it!’ she screamed, and tried to intervene, to prevent this madness. But she stumbled on the kerb and fell.
‘Just stay away from my fucking daughter! If I ever see you with her again, I’ll kill you.’ Her father’s words falling, literally, on deaf ears.
He hurried around the car to pick his daughter off the road and drag her away, weeping, into the rain.
By the time he got her back to the apartment, it was impossible to tell the tears from the rain on her face. She pulled herself free of him. ‘I hate you!’ she screamed. ‘I hate you!’ And she fled to her bedroom, slamming the door shut behind her, and collapsing in a sobbing heap on the bed.
*
It was into October before her father let her return to the centre to resume her lessons in touch-signing. But he was leaving nothing to chance, dropping her off and then going to meet friends for a coffee before returning to drive her home again.
In the intervening weeks, the atmosphere in the house had been febrile, simmering tempers and Ana’s bubbling resentment. The tension was palpable, and she could not bring herself even to speak to her father. She would address him only through her mother, and spent most of her days, and quite often evenings too, at the home of her sister, unburdening herself, confiding her secret feelings and deepest fears. Isabella’s husband might have resented her constant presence, but for the fact that Ana would babysit the girls, allowing the couple to go out dancing, or for meals at restaurants down on
