Mothers and Sons (29 page)

Manolo rummaged in a small suitcase as Miquel lay in bed. This was, as far as he could make out, the only bag Manolo had brought with him. It had barely space for a change of clothes. When Manolo took off his pullover,
Miquel saw that his shirt was torn at the back and frayed at the cuffs and collar. Downstairs, he had noticed a smell, like something rotting, which became more intense when Manolo took off his shoes. It was only when Manolo had removed his trousers and was putting them over a chair that Miquel realized the smell came from the boy’s socks, which he now began to remove. He put them on the floor under his bed and looked at Miquel for permission to turn off the light.

‘Can you leave your shoes and socks outside the door?’ Miquel asked.

Manolo nodded, showing no sign that he had any objection to doing this. As he bent to collect his socks and then moved across the room to pick up his shoes, Miquel realized that he had brought no pyjamas with him and that he was not wearing any shorts. He was going to sleep wearing his old shirt. When he had put the shoes and socks outside, and closed the door, he turned off the light and crossed the room. Neither of them spoke as they lay in the dark. Miquel guessed that Manolo fell quickly asleep.

He imagined writing to Jordi now with the news. Our mother has disappeared, she is dead, lying encased in ice, we will have to watch the sky for vultures when the thaw comes so that we can find her before they do. Your bed is being slept in by a dark, silent, sad-looking boy who has arrived without many clothes and seems willing to do a woman’s work. He has moved in beside me, I can hear his breathing, which is light and regular. In the morning, I will try and find another place for him to sleep.

5

H
E WALKED
each day as far as he could; the snow was starting to melt along the military road and some stretches of the road to Santa Magdalena were dry. He walked each day at a different time, depending on the work he had to do, but he could often leave his father and Manolo to manage. His father, by this time, had begun to work cutting stones for Josep Bernat and spent some time away from his own house. Manolo worked hard, cooking and washing and cleaning and helping with the animals if he were needed.

As the thaw continued, Miquel’s uncle came from Pallosa, and drove his jeep along the road out of the village as far as Santa Magdalena and then walked with Miquel along the military road, most of which now was clear, even though the land around it was deep in snow. He got out of the jeep several times and surveyed the landscape with Miquel’s binoculars. When Miquel told him what Bernat had said about the vultures, he agreed. They would have to wait, he said, and watch for them, and hope to find her as soon as the temperature rose. He did not think, he said, that any vultures had appeared over Pallosa yet, nor
anywhere higher than Sort. If he saw them hovering, then he would know that the real spring had begun.

When he came face to face with Manolo in the house, Francesc embraced him and greeted him warmly. Miquel stood back as Manolo smiled and asked about people and events in Pallosa; he was more animated than he had been since he came to their house.

Outside, before he left, his uncle told him that Manolo’s father had been taken into custody and shot at the end of the war when his mother was still pregnant. His mother had lived only for another year, dying of tuberculosis, but dying too, he thought, because of the loss. Manolo was brought up by his father’s cousins until he could work and then moved to various houses around Pallosa, some of whom treated him badly. It was a very sad story, his uncle said, because Manolo’s father had been hardly involved in the war at all, he was just unlucky. He hoped Manolo would be happier here than he had been in some other quarters. Miquel knew by the way his uncle spoke that it was obvious that he and Manolo had not become friends. That evening, Manolo seemed grateful and surprised when he was given some of Jordi’s clothes by Miquel, some shirts and shorts and a pair of old boots. He promised that he would look after them carefully.

The weather grew worse; fresh snow fell and there were two days and nights of wind which blew the surface snow into the air and whirled it about as though it were dust. Miquel’s father disappeared to Bernat’s barn as soon as he and Miquel had taken care of the animals. He returned for lunch and then left again. His new work seemed to make
him happy; he was full of jokes and good cheer as soon as he sat down at the table.

In the days when Miquel could not work outside because of the weather, he remained in the kitchen, and tried to talk to Manolo about where he had learned to cook, and how he was feeding the hens, but the replies were merely polite and restrained. It was clear that Manolo did not want to talk. He worked quietly, moving about the house, his expression solemn, dutiful. Slowly, under his care, they began to have eggs from the hens again and the rabbits began to thrive. Despite their invitation, he did not eat with them, but ate standing at the stove, usually beginning when they had finished. And despite Miquel’s telling him that he did not need to do so, he placed his shoes and socks outside the bedroom door each night before he turned off the light. He made sure that Clua was fed, but several times Miquel noticed him stopping the dog following him or jumping up on him affectionately.

Miquel’s father joked with Manolo that he would make a great wife for a man; all Manolo would need was a skirt, his father said, and he could travel to all the festas in the summer and by the autumn he would be walking down the aisle. Manolo never smiled when this, or one of the many varieties of it, was said, but continued whatever he was doing. Slowly, it became one of Miquel’s father’s constant themes.

‘Oh, we’ll have to get a skirt for you,’ he would say. ‘You’re the best housewife in the whole country. Better than any young girl of your age. You know, I think they might have sent us a girl. Maybe you’re only pretending to be a boy.’

One day, when these comments had been made more than once in the course of a meal and had begun to sound like taunts, Manolo approached the table and stood in front of Miquel’s father.

‘If you say that again, I will leave.’

His father pushed his chair back and gazed up at Manolo, who had grown much paler than usual.

‘I didn’t mean …’ his father began.

‘I know what you meant,’ Manolo said. ‘And if you say it again, I will leave.’

‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

‘Don’t say it again, then.’

‘You’ve become very cheeky, haven’t you?’ Miquel’s father said.

Manolo returned to the stove and kept his back to them. Miquel watched his father battling with his own face, trying to find a way to make a joke of this, and realizing, it seemed to Miquel, that Manolo had left him no opening.

‘Are you not happy here?’ his father asked Manolo, who did not turn or speak.

‘I’m asking you a question,’ his father said.

‘Stop saying I’m a girl,’ Manolo said without turning.

‘I never actually said you were a girl. When did I say you were a girl? When did I actually say that?’ his father said.

Manolo did not respond.

‘Are you deaf?’ his father asked. ‘When did I say you were a girl?’

Miquel could see Manolo’s shoulders hunching as though he were going to cry. His own feeling of powerlessness, his not finding a way to intervene, brought back to him the scene on the day before his mother had left. As his father
stood up, he realized that he could not allow this cruel version of the earlier event to continue.

‘Leave him alone,’ he said to his father, ‘and sit down!’

His father, he knew, would have no idea how to behave now. Miquel had been on the point of adding that his father had already caused enough trouble in the house, but was happy that he had restrained himself. His father stood with his eyes on the floor as Manolo crossed the room and gathered plates as though nothing had happened. Miquel did not move and made sure that his father could not even hear his breathing. He tried to do nothing. In the end, having heaved a long sigh, his father left the kitchen and returned to his work at Bernat’s. Miquel smiled at Manolo when he returned to the table. The smile Manolo managed in return was all the more powerful for being half-hidden and quick to disappear.

For the first time that night Manolo spoke to Miquel in the bedroom. Having left his shoes and socks outside the door, he turned off the light and crossed the room and got into bed.

‘The winds won’t keep up like this,’ he said.

‘It’s getting worse every day,’ Miquel replied.

‘You often cry in the night,’ Manolo said. ‘It’s not loud or anything, but I hear you sometimes.’

‘I didn’t know I did that,’ Miquel said.

‘Do you have bad dreams?’ Manolo asked him.

‘Not really. I often dream that my brother is here and we are much younger.’

‘You don’t shout, but you cry, never for long,’ Manolo said.

‘I will try to keep quiet.’

‘Don’t worry.’

They began to talk about Miquel’s mother’s disappearance and how she might be found. Manolo kept his voice low and seemed to consider everything very carefully. Miquel told him that Jordi did not know anything about her disappearance. They had received a letter from him, saying he was in Valladolid, to which his father had replied saying there was no news. When Manolo did not respond to this, Miquel knew that he was not asleep but weighing up what he had just been told.

‘Your father is wrong,’ he said eventually.

‘I know,’ Miquel said, ‘but I can’t write to Jordi myself telling him. It’s not my job. How could I tell him in a letter what has happened?’

Manolo said nothing; by the quality of his silence Miquel could see that he had made a clear judgement. They lay there saying nothing until Miquel knew that Manolo had fallen asleep.

He himself slept for a while, and then was woken by the wind. It felt, in its fierce whistling menace, that it was preparing to lift the house from its foundations or blow the roof off, or cut through the windows and swirl frantically into each room, dragging sleepers from their beds in its wake. He listened to its howling and the flat rhythm of Manolo’s breathing and knew that he would not sleep. Soon, one of the barn doors began to bang; he knew from the sound which one it was, and he knew that he should have put stones against it earlier to secure it in place. He found his clothes in the dark and went downstairs to dress so that he would not disturb Manolo. His boots were in the hall.

It was snowing again, the flakes were being whipped in
every direction by the wind. He held his hand over his eyes to stop the wind blinding him. His torch was useless. He made his way down slowly, moving over the packed ice on which a covering of fresh snow had formed. The door was still banging. He found the stones he had used before and put them in place, holding the door firmly shut, and then he made his way back to the house.

6

T
HE SUN SHONE
during the days that followed, but the wind still blew. Miquel resumed his old route, to Santa Magdalena without any difficulty, and then trying to walk along the military road where snow was banked up in all its new contours. On one of those days as he went back towards the village, with about half an hour left to go, he saw Manolo coming towards him, he had brought him some bread and ham and some biscuits. Miquel was surprised at how changed he was for the rest of the journey, how light he was, and happy that Manolo had thought of meeting him. The next day, as he was setting off, he asked Manolo if he would come again to meet him and Manolo said he would. He was already planning to do so, he said. Miquel found that this picture of Manolo standing by the stove saying these words stayed with him more as he walked than any thoughts about his father or Jordi, or where his mother’s body might be discovered.

His father was making money from his work with Bernat and all the talk now was of expanding the stone-cutting business. He began to pay Manolo a small sum of money every week and this seemed to make him more cheerful
during the time he spent in the kitchen while making no obvious difference to Manolo. On a Saturday night, when Manolo had been a month in the house, Miquel’s father announced that it was bath night. His family, he told Manolo, differed from every other family in the village, as indeed from the beasts in the fields, because they regularly took a bath, usually once every two weeks, but because of what had occurred in the house, they had neglected performing their proper ablutions, a matter he now wished to rectify.

His father showed Manolo where the bright tin bath with the long back was kept, and together they carried it into the kitchen. He explained that Manolo’s job was to fill the large pot and two of the saucepans with water and bring them to the boil, and mix this water with cold water. That would be enough for his bath. Then Manolo was to put more water on to boil, he said, and when the first bath had been taken, some of the water could be removed and replaced by more clean hot water for Miquel and later for Manolo. Then finally, his father explained, amusing himself, it seemed, greatly as he spoke, the water could be thrown out for the dog to drink. And each of them would also need clean clothes and underclothes, he added, to change into once the bathing was over.

Miquel was surprised that his father saw fit to include Manolo in the bath. Before, he and Jordi had boiled the water and changed the water, while their mother had remained out of the room. Finally, they had boiled water for her and filled a new bath for her, leaving her special soap and sponge on the chair, and a special towel, before they and their father had gone upstairs to offer her full privacy.

Manolo put three towels on a frame in front of the roaring fire; he closed the shutters, and, as the water in the saucepans began to boil, he poured the water into the bath and then refilled the saucepans. As the big pot boiled and his father began to undress, Miquel left the room. This was what he had always done, allowing his father as much privacy as he could. It was strange, he thought, leaving Manolo in there with his naked father, ministering to him, but Manolo, he knew, had a way of managing everything, of making sure that nothing he did was ever the cause of complaint.