I stepped through the door. When I turned around, there was only the slope of earth, the brambles, and the faint outline of a stone that looked like a lintel but was only a stone. I walked back to Olmedo in silence. The bar La Espera was still open. Manolo was wiping the counter.
“The rain remembers the Moors,” she continued. “It came during the siege of Toledo, so thick that archers could not see the walls. The king said it was Christian water fighting for him. The imam said it was a test from Allah. The rain said nothing. It simply fell.”
“You are not Spanish,” she said. It was not a question.
“You want to know who I am,” she said. “I am the one who spins the rain. Every drop that falls on the Meseta passes through my hands first. I weigh it. I measure it. I decide whether it will be a soft shower that brings the barley or a flood that sweeps away a bridge.”
I closed the door. The sound of the storm dropped to a murmur. I stood dripping on her stone floor, and she continued to spin.
“You’re wet,” he said.
“You have come for the lluvia ,” said Manolo, the barman, who had the face of a benevolent hawk. He did not ask it as a question.
That was my first mistake: I did not drink the orujo. I left it sweating on the counter, walked out into the calle, and felt the first drop land on the bridge of my nose. It was not a gentle drop. It was the size of a chickpea and cold as a key left overnight in a freezer. I smiled. I love rain. I love the sound of it on corrugated iron, the smell of petrichor, the way it makes the world slow down. But this was different. This was not rain. This was the rain.
“What question?” I whispered.
“Ireland,” she repeated. “Another island of rain. Then you should understand. The rain here is not like your rain. Your rain is soft. It tells stories of fairies and saints. Our rain… our rain remembers.”
She tugged the wool. The wheel hummed.
I did the only sensible thing: I turned back, or tried to. But the track had vanished. The stones I had used as markers were gone. In their place was a shallow, fast-moving stream that was rising by the minute. Panic—a cold, rational panic—began to climb my throat. This is how people die in España, I thought. Not in bullrings or on dusty mountain roads, but here, in a ditch outside Olmedo, drowned by a sky that decided to remember the Flood.
“And what do you decide tonight?” I asked.
“Remembers what?” I asked.
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