Little Hands Clapping (5 page)

Whenever the old man heard a visitor speak, he would more often than not know where they had come from, every nuance of their diction bringing forward a place name. For thirty years he had worked in a government linguistics department, doing little besides sitting in what was referred to as
the laboratory,
listening to recordings of speaking voices from around the world. Regardless of the language, as soon as he had heard an accent from a particular region its idiosyncrasies would be locked into his mind, the knowledge ready for retrieval at any moment. Every once in a while somebody would come into the laboratory and play him a bugged telephone conversation or a recording of a ransom demand. He would tell them where the speaker’s accent indicated they came from, and the person with the recording would go away again. Usually he heard no more about it, but sometimes he would find himself being commended for his crucial role in an investigation. As populations became increasingly mobile he was able to peel apart the various layers of accent with considerable accuracy. He was largely indifferent to this talent, but even after so many years he still felt a light thud of satisfaction upon encountering an inflection or an intonation he had not previously heard outside the laboratory. A pin would go in the map that he carried in his mind.

To his disappointment, Pavarotti’s wife’s publicity drive will not be without success, but with the increase in visitors will come new voices, and every once in a while he will feel this light thud. It will happen on hearing the man from Mindanao, and the child from Opobo.

Before the year is out the old man will encounter a voice from Portugal, and he will know at once that it belongs to somebody who has grown up in a small town high in the hills some way to the north of the Rio Douro. The voice will be quiet, and devoid of even the faintest trace of hope, but this will not interest him; all that will matter is the map that flashes in his mind. Within moments any satisfaction will be gone, succeeded by a feeling of irritation at the thought of the inevitable inconvenience of the call to the doctor, and the clearing up, and a sense of impatience as he waits for them to get it over with.

But that is all to come, and for now his eyes widen as Pavarotti’s wife reaches into her bag and pulls out a large silver tin.

A little over twenty-one years earlier, on a cold January night in a small house in a small town in the Portuguese hills, some way to the north of the Rio Douro, a boy was born. When the midwife had gone away the new parents, alone at last, gazed at their first born as he lay sleeping in his crib. After a few minutes they both looked up, and each could tell from the other’s expression that they had noticed the same thing, something which neither had expected. Saying nothing, they both wondered why the midwife had made no mention of it. She had seemed impatient to clear up and go as quickly as she could; maybe she knew that nothing she could say would make any difference, and this was something the parents needed to find out for themselves. They went back to looking at him, and tried to dismiss these thoughts. After all, it had been a long day and sometimes the mind plays tricks, but no matter how long or how hard they looked it was always there. They thought back to long conversations in which they had agreed that they would love their child just the same no matter what, and they told themselves that this was the case, that nothing in the world would have made them love him any more or any less. He blinked open his eyes, and seemed for a moment to be looking straight at them, from one to the other. At last they spoke.

‘Oh,’ said the mother.

‘I know,’ said the father, and he reached into the crib and scooped him up, this little thing that had opened chambers of his heart that he had never known were there.

In the days that followed, people from the town came to visit the boy, who had been named Mauro. As is customary the men stood at the back of the room, blankly nodding their approval as the women got on with the business of leaning over the crib and offering exuberant compliments on the handsomeness of the child, telling the new parents that one day he would be breaking hearts. As they delivered these well-worn speeches they began to feel uneasy, wondering whether it was right for them to be saying such things about this boy. Even the men, who on these occasions would usually notice almost nothing about the baby as they drifted into daydreams, could see that this one was different. They had all been struck by the same quality that his parents had noticed that first night: as he lay there with a length that was sure to translate into height, a head of thick, black hair, flawless skin, and features already well-defined, the women found that for the first time in their life they truly meant the words they were saying, that he really
was
handsome, and that he really
would
break hearts. Whenever he opened his eyes they shone with an irresistible sparkle. Nobody had ever seen anything quite like it, and the visitors began to wonder whether such an incredible boy would ever find a match in this small town.

It didn’t take long for the answer to arrive.

When the boy was a few weeks old, just as it seemed as if the winter was never going to end, another child was born, this time a girl. At the onset of her mother’s labour an icy wind had been blowing through the town, but by the time the baby came into the world the air was still and warm. Everybody who visited in the days that followed was only half joking when they said she had brought the springtime with her. As they looked at her, wriggling and wrapped in a simple blanket, they saw that her nose was delicate and her eyes large, seeming to smile as she looked up at them. Mauro and Madalena were by no means the only new arrivals in the town, but without exception the visitors’ thoughts turned to the beautiful boy. Even the boy’s own mother knew, the moment she saw the baby girl. She held her son over the crib and said, ‘Look, Mauro. Look at Madalena. Isn’t she pretty? Maybe one day you’ll marry her.’ She would have said this anyway, but she found the words ringing true. The boy’s father had been standing at the back of the room, and even from his oblique vantage point he could see this as well. Neither of them said a word about it; they both knew that there was nothing they could do but wait for the story to unfold.

The children began to steal glances at one another at school and in church, and soon afterwards they became playmates, racing through the fields and up into the mountains, at first with the other children and then, as they got older, dashing ahead or dawdling, just the two of them. At first neither really knew why they were drawn together, but this could never last. Words of warning were given and boundaries set, but one day there was a change between them, and from then on they found every opportunity to slip behind rocks and into gulleys, and one summer afternoon, when both were fourteen and the promise of their babyhoods had been confirmed beyond doubt, they were seen together in the town square, sitting in the shade of a tree in such a way that everybody knew that a vow of love had, at last, been exchanged.

As they glided through the streets and the fields they were almost as unreal as images on a billboard, and life for everybody else in the town was able to go on as normal. Just as the people of Rome continue to hang pictures on the walls of their apartments in spite of the proximity of the Sistine Chapel, so were Mauro and Madalena’s neighbours able to look at their husbands, wives and sweethearts with as much fondness as if these two had not been breathing the same clean mountain air. The other young people formed romances among themselves, each knowing that the other was not technically the most attractive person in town, but never mentioning it and not letting it matter. Sometimes, though, an unfortunate youth would go through a phase of suffering pangs of longing for Madalena or for Mauro, but the pair bore their looks and their love graciously, and whenever one of them caught somebody gazing at them with yearning in their eyes they would smile back, a smile that gave no encouragement but was infused with a warm, benevolent pity. These smiles said,
I know why you’re looking at me in that way, and I’m sorry, but don’t despair
.
You’ll find somebody right for you one day, I just know it
. The unhappy soul would understand this wordless exchange, and take comfort until they found they could at last get on with their lives. At least that was what would usually happen. Not everybody in town was able to shake off their yearning so easily though, and one pair of eyes was the saddest of all.

Every time Madalena saw these eyes they were blazing with a helpless love for her, and this love never faded with time, it only grew, flying at her as the boy gazed across the schoolyard. He left school to begin working at his family’s bakery, and every time she walked past the shop, his love would power its way through the glass before landing, unwanted, in her heart.

The older generations noticed the young baker’s predicament with dismay.
It’s such a shame he won’t be marrying any time soon
, they thought to themselves.
If only his heart hadn’t taken him down a dead end
. From before he was born they had all been looking forward to his wedding day, but now it seemed they had been waiting in vain.

Of all the weddings in a small town, one in a baker’s family is looked forward to more than any other. Guests leave the wedding of a butcher’s child with bellies weighed down with meat, their evening blighted by the knowledge that it will keep them awake and take days to pass through their systems. The marriage of the mortician’s daughter takes place under a cloud of darkness, the congregation seeing the young couple not as they are, but as they will be when the time to let go has finally passed and they lie, still and cold, in wooden boxes. The candlestick maker’s celebration is plagued by constant annoyance as guests singe their arm hair as they reach for condiments, and wax drips on to dresses that had been made for the occasion from a fabric so delicate that they know it will be beyond restoration. The hosts, quite used to being around so many flames, will be unaware of the torment that surrounds them, and will deem the day a great success. A wedding in a baker’s family, though, is a day of sweet tastes, and of pastry flakes that can be brushed to the floor with ease to be licked up by happy dogs. As the children of these families grow up there is a sense of impatience for them to marry so a wedding feast can be held. This pressure is never expressed, but it will be keenly felt, and this is at least partly why they have always married so young, and why the phrase
a baker’s generation
is used in so many languages to denote a period of time slightly shorter than a conventional generation. The family of the sad-eyed boy was no different. For baker’s generation after baker’s generation they had married when they were not long out of school, but as he entered his late teens it was clear to everybody that the boy who loved Madalena so hopelessly was going to depart from the tradition.

The boy’s father had married as expected. A baker’s generation earlier he had barely begun shaving when the church bells had rung out for him and his bride. The whole town had turned out to wish them well, and the celebrations had gone on deep into the night, the couple glowing with the joy of it all. The only discordant note had come when the groom was taken to one side by his great-great-grandmother, who gripped his arm and said, in a voice at once firm and gentle, ‘While you children are away on your honeymoon I shall take every opportunity to pray that your marriage will be a fruitful one. My prayer will, however, contain a simple caveat, namely that you do not conceive a child while you are there,’ she pointed a bony finger diagonally downwards, ‘in your hotel by the sea. When you return, that will be the time.’

He had not asked her to elaborate. He thanked her for her good wishes and her prayers, and went back to dance with his bride, to hold her in his arms and dream of what awaited them in their hotel by the sea.

Shortly after their return home, his wife began to have unusual pains in her belly. A trip to the doctor confirmed that a baby was on its way, and they rushed to tell their families, who met up after hours at the bakery and fell into an impromptu celebration. The festivities were interrupted by the great-great-grandmother of the father-to-be, who had been sitting alone in the corner and refusing all offers of food and wine. She stood up and banged her stick three times on the floor.

The room fell silent.

‘This celebration is all very well,’ she said, ‘and of course we shall welcome the newcomer with all our hearts, but remember this: the child was conceived between the crisp cotton sheets of the honeymoon hotel.’ The young couple blushed, and everybody waited for her to continue. ‘This means,’ she said, looking from blank face to blank face, ‘that the baby is due to enter the world in early March.’ A chill emanated from the aunts and uncles. While some of the women had already estimated the baby’s due date, its significance had not struck them until this moment. The younger members of the party waited for the old woman to continue. ‘If the child arrives when it is due, it will be born under the sign of the fish.’ She drew the sign in the air with the end of her stick. ‘This town has not seen a Piscean child for many decades, and the last one . . . Well, maybe it’s time you young people were told about him.’

The older relatives implored her not to tell. ‘Please,’ they said. ‘Not now. Not tonight.’

But it was too late to stop her, and she told the story of the Piscean boy. He had fulfilled everything that might be expected of somebody with such a birth date: he daydreamed, he wrote poems, he wandered through the streets and fields as though in a daze, he shed tears at the sight of animals in distress, he played the accordion and he fell hopelessly in love with a beautiful girl who could never return his feelings. ‘Once a year he would play his accordion in church. I heard it when I was young, and it was as if the music was coming straight from heaven.’ She closed her eyes and swayed from side to side, her face transformed for a moment into a picture of serenity before she snapped back into the room. ‘But apart from those few minutes each year he was good for nothing. I am afraid to say he died young, at just twenty-two. It was on the day the girl with whom he had been so taken married another man. As the sound of church bells rang through the town he lay on his bed and closed his eyes. The doctor took one look at him and announced that the cause was simple: he had died of a broken heart.’