Mothers and Sons (30 page)

When he came back to the kitchen, his father told him that he was almost finished and presently stood up in the bath waiting for Manolo to bring him the towel. Miquel had never watched his father like this before, his long legs, much stronger-looking than he had imagined, his fleshy penis and the pouch underneath larger and more real. His father stood in the firelight drying himself as though he were on display, as Manolo fussed around him, putting a mat under his feet, putting some dry thin wood on the fire and beginning to prepare Miquel’s bath.

When his father left the room, Miquel stripped to his shorts, tested the temperature of the water, and then he slipped off his shorts and sat into the hot bath, half clean water and half the water used by his father. Before Jordi left they had a joke together, that their father had pissed in the water, and that Miquel was going to piss too, or had just done so, and Jordi would be thus left to soak in copious quantities of the family’s urine. Jordi used to cringe, demanding a full bath of clean hot water, being told by Miquel that, since he was the youngest, that would be impossible.

Miquel did not think that Manolo would find this funny. He washed himself as Manolo began to boil more water for his own bath. He had observed Manolo looking at him as he lowered himself into the water. Manolo hovered close to the bath as Miquel washed himself. They could hear Miquel’s father moving around in the room above. Miquel knew that he would not come back into the room until the bathing was finished.

As he stood up in the water, Manolo came towards him with the warm towel. Miquel stood shivering facing the fire as Manolo dried his back and his neck and torso, rubbing hard and then handing him the towel so Miquel could finish drying himself.

Manolo’s own water was hot now; he cleared out some of the old water and then poured more from the saucepans and the big pot into the bath. As Miquel sat and dressed himself, he watched Manolo strip with his back to him, not facing him until he was naked. His shoulders were much broader than Miquel had ever noticed in the bedroom, the muscles on his shoulders and back more developed, his torso and buttocks completely hairless, but his thick, short legs covered in dark hair. He moved slowly, almost gracefully, towards the bath, seeming to be utterly alert to Miquel’s eyes watching him.

7

S
INCE HIS FATHER
was now travelling every day with Josep Bernat, Miquel told Manolo that he could come earlier to meet him if he wanted, if he had time, and thus Miquel would not have to walk back all the distance on his own. He also told him to take food for himself and a bottle of water so they could both find a place in the sun and eat together. At night now, he looked forward to going to the bedroom and being alone with Manolo, talking to him for a while before they went asleep.

On one of these days as they were walking back, examining how the snow lay in ridges and banks, they heard shots being fired from the trees up above Santa Magdalena. The shots, which came in quick succession, echoed against the far hills so that it was impossible to be sure precisely where they had come from. Miquel remembered that a jeepload of men, including Foix and Castellet, had passed him earlier on the road and he had seen their empty jeep with a trailer parked at the hermitage at Santa Magdalena itself.

The shots seemed to disturb everything, the bird life scattered; every living thing, he knew, would have sought
shelter in fright and panic. He and Manolo stopped to listen as more shots, four or five this time, rang out. Suddenly, he began to choke back tears. These men could easily be hunting in the space where his mother had died. She could easily have walked off the road just here, mistaking a blanket of whiteness for the way forward. Miquel did not want them to find her, their dogs smelling and licking her. As more shots sounded, he moved fast, Manolo coming unwillingly behind him. When Manolo asked him why he was going back towards them, Miquel did not answer. For one second he had had a vision of her alive here, running in terror from them, desperate to avoid being shot. As they made their way up the slopes behind the church, they heard shouts and the barking of the dogs and three further shots from the same rifle, a brief and decisive interval between each one. When they heard a shriek and then a cry, Miquel signalled to Manolo to move faster until a sudden shout stopped them.

‘Hey, you!’ It was Foix’s voice. ‘Get away from here! Do you want to get shot?’

‘What are you doing here?’ Miquel shouted back. ‘Why don’t you go and shoot some place else?’

‘We’re killing wild boars, it’s men’s work. You and your little kitchen boy’ll be very sorry if you don’t go back to the road.’

Manolo pulled at Miquel’s jacket, signalling to him to come with him now. They moved slowly down through the snow, walking with a difficulty Miquel had not known when they were climbing, finding ice under the snow, but getting away as fast as they could from the hunters.

They walked back without speaking, Manolo’s hand on
Miquel’s shoulder. There were no more shots. After a time, they heard the jeep approaching and stood out of the way. As it nosed forward, the men inside had a strange, guilty, excited look. They slowed as they passed and Miquel could see the raw thrill in their faces. On the trailer, lying huddled against each other, were four wild boars seeping blood, heavy with death, thrown there, fat, substantial, burrowing creatures, the most powerful animals in the cold dark world just a short time before, but utterly beyond it now, gristle and meat and bone and dead staring eyes, the trailer carrying them leaking blood into the snow in single drops, and then, when the trailer shifted sideways, in a small dense red puddle.

Miquel began to sob as he walked along, allowing Manolo to hold him and comfort him. For the first time in a while he felt the sharp certainty of his mother’s disappearance; the idea that when she was found she would not be alive appeared to him as brutal fact. She would not be returning to them. Finding her, he thought, would mean nothing; looking for her was pointless. He stopped crying after a while and kept close to Manolo, who brushed casually against him as they walked through the slush and muck of the road.

‘You are lucky, you know,’ Manolo said to him.

Miquel did not reply.

‘You are lucky that this has already happened to you, your mother’s going, that it cannot come again.’

‘I wish she was at home, alive,’ Miquel said.

‘Yes, but you would always dread that this blow was going to come, her death, now you are free of it. It has happened. It cannot happen again.’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ Miquel said.

‘In the last house where I stayed,’ Manolo said, ‘the old man died and all his children came, some of them were old themselves. And even though he was old and dying for a long time, all of them cried for days. Weeks later I would find the woman of the house crying. And when her sister came they cried, and when her brother came they cried even more. I knew that no one would ever make me cry. There is no one who could die whose death would make me cry. No one. And I am grateful for that, and that will never change. My parents died before I could remember, my father even before I was born. I have no memory of them. I have no brothers and sisters, and I have no feeling for my uncles and cousins. Every time I watch someone with a person they are connected with, I always feel sorry for them. It is better not to have it. You are lucky now that she cannot be taken from you again.’

Miquel looked around him and knew that he could embrace Manolo for as long as he pleased on this empty road and could hold him as closely as he wished. He put his arms around him and felt the warmth of him as he moved his hands under his jacket. He could feel the sweat on Manolo’s shirt and he could feel his heart thumping. He pulled at the shirt and then placed his hands on the warm skin of Manolo’s back. Manolo hunched towards him, letting their bodies lock, he buried his head in Miquel’s shoulder but he kept his hands by his sides as though they were stones.

8

W
HEN
M
ANOLO
pulled back the shutters the following morning, Miquel saw that the sky was blue and the morning sun was strong enough to have caused the icicles which had hung from the eaves to begin dripping and breaking. In the kitchen, Josep Bernat was sitting with his father, insisting that the weather had turned, that the haze over the far mountains meant the real thaw had begun. That day as he walked, the abiding sound was of ice breaking and unloosening, snow melting and slipping away, and water flowing in channels at the edge of the road. Through the binoculars he could see the whiteness of snow becoming mere patches in the distance.

The following day his uncle came from Pallosa to say that the snow on the slopes between the village and Coll del So had begun to melt. In the villages, he said, they were all watching for the vultures who would surely move upwards to Coll del So as the days got better. The villagers would follow the vultures once they appeared, he said, and Miquel and his father and their neighbours should do the same. It would not be long now, he said, before the snow and the ice covering her body would go. He would like to
find her before the wild boars and the wild dogs and the vultures, he said, but it was the vultures who would come first. It was the vultures they had to watch for.

Most of the military road was passable after a few days of higher temperatures. Miquel shifted between the fierce longing which came over him once darkness fell to have her back to them in any guise and the knowledge that the time she was lost to them was nearly ended, the snow was going to yield his mother up. He thought of her face; he hoped he might see it again the way it was, as though she were sleeping or sitting by the kitchen window. As he walked, he thought how much he would like to see her smile.

He could walk for hours now without having his progress impeded by packed snow and ice, and when tired pushed himself to go further, knowing that once he was beyond Santa Magdalena there was nowhere he could rest. When he had walked long distances, he found that his imagination was vivid with images and scenes as though the air itself were a drug that led mild fantasies to seem entirely real. Sometimes, in the unsettling magic of this, he allowed himself to entertain moments where he was not himself, he was not Miquel, he was somebody else and yet she was coming towards him, dazed and wondering what had happened to her in all that time she was sleeping. She would recognize him immediately, crying out, not as her son searching for her, but as her own father when she was a little girl, her father come looking for her. She would run towards him waiting to be lifted, and he would kiss her and lift her up, the girl who had been lost, her small gloves keeping her hands warm, her old green coat with the fur
collar, her snow hat. Only her face was freezing, her eyes were wet with cold, she was trying to smile even though her teeth were chattering.

He would take her down to the old house in Pallosa, to the search party cheering that she had been found, to her brother waiting for her, to the warm fire and the old comfortable bed. Once, he began to imagine Manolo there too, wearing an apron, preparing a hot drink, all pale and anxious. But somehow that image failed him. Manolo did not belong to the scene.

The first vultures appeared in the late morning in the cold blue sky a week after the thaw had begun. Miquel was already walking, they appeared black and hovering over a patch of earth above Pallosa but below the military road, precisely where he and his father and the rest of them imagined his mother might be. As he watched them carefully through the binoculars, he wondered whether he should walk to the village and find his father, who he knew was close by, and come back this way in the jeep, but he trusted that his father, or someone in the village, would have become alert to the birds of prey and would set out immediately. He also had confidence that his uncle would have already seen them. He believed his uncle’s determination that those who had loved her should find her first.

He walked forward, stopping regularly to scrutinize them with the binoculars. Two birds hovered high in the air, not moving. He was not certain how vultures worked, but thought that they needed more than two before they swooped. He did not know how long it would take them
to gather once dead prey had been spotted. He hoped that it would take time because he did not want to have to fend them off alone, he did not know how he would be able to struggle against them if more came.

Soon, he noticed another vulture over Coll del So; he knew that it could be seen for miles. The sky was a clear blue without a single speck of cloud; there was no other movement, no other bird life in the sky. As one of them dipped, Miquel moved faster, wondering if should not cut a stick from one of the trees to strike them with. He calculated that it would take his uncle an hour or more to climb the slopes over which the birds had gathered. His father, if he took the jeep, could move faster. He was afraid now that he would be left to come on the scene alone. The grim, silent, hungry creatures, merciless in the high sky, would hardly be afraid of him. They would do what nature had taught them to do, no matter what Miquel did. He would be no match for them; all he could do was to go rapidly towards the scene over which they flew. Even to be a witness to where they landed would be better than turning now, leaving her to their beaks and claws, leaving her defenceless and helpless.

Two more sailed through the bright air. He stood and fixed them in the binoculars, noting their size and the sheer ugliness of their colour and shape; now there were five of them. He did not know if that would be enough for the ritual of feeding which was built into their dark system, and at what point they would pounce.

Maybe, he thought, their landing might be more ragged in its timing, lazier, less precise. In all the years, he had seen
them gather in a group, but he had never seen them feed; they kept away from the villages, and they had no dealing with a healthy flock of sheep. He wished he knew more about them, how to frighten them, or how long they took at their work.