The Childhood of Jesus (16 page)

‘Find me a plastic bag,' he tells the boy. ‘Make sure there are no holes in it.'

He fishes up a considerable mass of paper from the blocked pipe, but the water level does not fall. ‘Get dressed and we will go downstairs,' he tells the boy. And to Inés: ‘If there is no one at home in 102 I will try opening the hatch at ground level. If the blockage is beyond that point, I won't be able to do anything about it. It will be the responsibility of the local authority. But let us see.' He pauses. ‘By the way, something like this can happen to anyone. It is no one's fault. It is just bad luck.'

He is trying to make things easier for Inés, and hopes she will recognize that. But she will not meet his eyes. She is embarrassed, she is angry; more than that he cannot guess.

Accompanied by the boy he knocks at the door of flat 102. After a long wait a bolt is withdrawn and the door opens a crack. In the half-light he can make out a dark figure, whether man or woman he cannot tell.

‘Good morning,' he says. ‘I am sorry to intrude. I am from the flat above, where we have a blocked toilet. I wonder whether you are having a similar problem.'

The door opens wider. It is a woman, old and bent, whose eyes are of a glassy greyness that suggests she cannot see.

‘Good morning,' he repeats. ‘Your toilet. Are you having any problems with your toilet? Any blockages,
atascos
?'

No reply. She stands stock-still, her face directed interrogatively towards him. Is she deaf as well as blind?

The boy steps forward. ‘
Abuela
,' he says. The old woman stretches out a hand, strokes his hair, explores his face. For a moment he presses confidingly against her; then he slips past into the apartment. A moment later he is back. ‘It's clean,' he says. ‘Their toilet is clean.'

‘Thank you, señora,' he says, and bows. ‘Thank you for your assistance. I am sorry to have disturbed you.' And to the boy: ‘Their toilet is clean, therefore—therefore what?'

The boy frowns.

‘Here, downstairs, the water flows freely. There, upstairs'—he points up the flight of stairs—‘the water will not flow. Therefore what? Therefore the pipes are blocked where?'

‘Upstairs,' says the boy confidently.

‘Good! So where should we go to fix it: upstairs or downstairs?'

‘Upstairs.'

‘And we go upstairs because water flows which way, up or down?'

‘Down.'

‘Always?'

‘Always. It always flows down. And sometimes up.'

‘No. Never up. Always down. Such is the nature of water. The question is, how does the water get upstairs to our apartment without contradicting its nature? How does it happen that when we turn the tap or flush the toilet, water flows for us?'

‘Because for us it flows up.'

‘No. That is not a good answer. Let me put the question in a different form. How can water get to our apartment
without
flowing upward?'

‘From the sky. It falls from the sky into the taps.'

True. Water does fall from the sky. ‘But,' he says, and he raises a cautionary finger, ‘but how does the water get into the sky?'

Natural philosophy. Let us see, he thinks, how much natural philosophy there is in this child.

‘Because the sky breathes in,' says the child. ‘The sky breathes in'—he draws a deep breath and holds it, a smile on his face, a smile of pure intellectual delight, then dramatically he breathes out—‘and the sky breathes out.'

The door closes. He hears the snick of the bolt being shot.

‘Did Inés tell you about that—about the breathing of the heavens?'

‘No.'

‘Did you think it up all by yourself?'

‘Yes.'

‘And who is it in the heavens who breathes in and breathes out and makes the rain?'

The boy is silent. He wears a frown of concentration. At last he shakes his head.

‘You don't know?'

‘I can't remember.'

‘Never mind. Let's go and tell your mother our news.'

The tools he has brought are useless. Only the primitive length of wire holds any promise.

‘Why don't the two of you go for a walk,' he suggests to Inés. ‘What I am going to do isn't particularly appetizing. I don't see why our young friend should be exposed to it.'

‘I would prefer to call in a proper plumber,' says Inés.

‘If I can't do the job then I will go and find you a proper plumber, I promise. One way or another your toilet will be fixed.'

‘I don't want to go for a walk,' says the boy. ‘I want to help.'

‘Thank you, my boy, I appreciate that. But this is not the kind of work where one needs help.'

‘I can give you ideas.'

He exchanges a glance with Inés. Something unspoken passes between them.
My clever son!
says her look.

‘That's true,' he says. ‘You are good at ideas. But alas, toilets are not receptive to ideas. Toilets are not part of the realm of ideas, they are just brute things, and working with them is nothing but brute work. So go for a walk with your mother while I get on with the job.'

‘Why can't I stay?' says the boy. ‘It's just poo.'

There is a new note in the boy's voice, a note of challenge that he does not like. It is going to his head, all this praise.

‘Toilets are just toilets, but poo is not just poo,' he says. ‘There are certain things that are not just themselves, not all the time. Poo is one of them.'

Inés tugs at the boy's hand. She is blushing furiously. ‘Come!' she says.

The boy shakes his head. ‘It's my poo,' he says. ‘I want to stay!'

‘It was your poo. But you evacuated it. You got rid of it. It's not yours any more. You no longer have a right to it.'

Inés gives a snort and retires to the kitchen.

‘Once it gets into the sewer pipes it is no one's poo,' he goes on. ‘In the sewers it joins all the other people's poo and becomes general poo.'

‘Then why is Inés cross?'

Inés. Is that what he calls her: not
Mummy
, not
Mother
?

‘She is embarrassed. People don't like to talk about poo. Poo is smelly. Poo is full of bacteria. Poo isn't good for you.'

‘Why?'

‘Why what?'

‘It's her poo too. Why is she cross?'

‘She is not cross, she is just sensitive. Some people are sensitive, that is their nature, you can't ask why. But there is no need to be sensitive, because, as I told you, from a certain point it is no one's poo in particular, it is just poo. Talk to any plumber and he will tell you the same. The plumber doesn't look at poo and say to himself,
How interesting, who would have thought that señor X or señora
Y would have poo like that!
It's like an undertaker. An undertaker doesn't say to himself,
How interesting!
…' He stops.
I am getting
carried away,
he thinks,
I am talking too much.

‘What's an undertaker?' asks the boy.

‘An undertaker undertakes the care of dead bodies. He is like a plumber. He sees that dead bodies are sent to the right place.'

And now you are going to ask, What is a dead body?

‘What are dead bodies?' asks the boy.

‘Dead bodies are bodies that have been afflicted with death, that we no longer have a use for. But we don't have to be troubled about death. After death there is always another life. You have seen that. We human beings are fortunate in that respect. We are not like poo that has to stay behind and be mixed again with the earth.'

‘What are we like?'

‘What are we like if we are not like poo? We are like ideas. Ideas never die. You will learn that at school.'

‘But we make poo.'

‘That is true. We partake of the ideal but we also make poo. That is because we have a double nature. I don't know how to put it more simply.'

The boy is silent.
Let him chew on that
, he thinks. He kneels down beside the toilet bowl, rolls his sleeve up as high as it will go. ‘Go for a walk with your mother,' he says. ‘Go on.'

‘And the undertaker?' says the boy.

‘The undertaker? Undertaking is just a job like any other. The undertaker is no different from us. He too has a double nature.'

‘Can I see him?'

‘Not right now. We have other things to do right now. Next time we go to the city I will see if we can find an undertaker's shop. Then you can have a look.'

‘Can we look at dead bodies?'

‘No, certainly not. Death is a private matter. Undertaking is a discreet profession. Undertakers don't show off dead bodies to the public. Now that is enough of that.' He probes with the wire into the back of the bowl. Somehow he must make the wire follow the S of the trap. If the blockage is not in the trap, then it must be at the junction outside. If that is the case, he has no idea how to fix it. He will have to give up and find a plumber. Or the idea of a plumber.

The water, in which clots of Inés's poo still float, closes over his hand, his wrist, his forearm. He forces the wire along the S-bend.
Antibacterial soap
, he thinks:
I will need to wash with antibacterial soap
afterwards, brushing scrupulously under the nails. Because poo is just poo,
because bacteria are just bacteria.

He does not feel like a being with a double nature. He feels like a man fishing for an obstruction in a sewage pipe, using primitive tools.

He withdraws his arm, withdraws the wire. The hook at the end has flattened out. He forms the hook again.

‘You can use a fork,' says the boy.

‘A fork is too short.'

‘You can use the long fork in the kitchen. You can bend it.'

‘Show me what you mean.'

The boy trots away, comes back with the long fork that was in the apartment when they arrived, that he has never had a use for. ‘You can bend it if you are strong,' says the boy.

He bends the fork into a hook and forces it along the S-bend until it will go no further. When he tries to withdraw the fork, he feels a tug of resistance. First slowly, then more quickly, the obstruction comes up: a wad of cloth with a plastic lining. The water in the bowl recedes. He pulls the chain. Clean water roars through. He waits, pulls the chain again. The pipe is clear. All is well.

‘I found this,' he says to Inés. He holds out the object, still dripping. ‘Do you recognize it?'

She blushes, standing before him like a guilty thing, not knowing where to look.

‘Is that what you usually do—flush them down the toilet? Has no one told you never to do that?'

She shakes her head. Her cheeks are flushed. The boy tugs at her skirt anxiously. ‘Inés!' he says. She pats his hand distractedly. ‘It's nothing, my darling,' she whispers.

He shuts the bathroom door, strips off his befouled shirt, and washes it in the basin. There is no antibacterial soap, just the soap from the Commissariat that everyone uses. He wrings the shirt out, rinses it, wrings it out again. He is going to have to wear a wet shirt. He washes his arms, washes under his armpits, dries himself. He may not be as clean as he might wish, but at least he does not smell of shit.

Inés is sitting on the bed with the boy clasped to her breast like a baby, rocking back and forth. The boy is drowsing, a string of drool coming from his mouth. ‘I'll go now,' he whispers. ‘Call me again if you need me.'

What strikes him about the visit to Inés, when he reflects afterwards, is how strange it was as an episode in his life, how unpredictable. Who would have thought, at the moment when he first beheld this young woman on the tennis court, so cool, so serene, that a day would come when he would be having to wash her shit off his body! What would they make of it at the Institute? Would the lady with the iron-grey hair have a word for it: the pooness of poo?

CHAPTER 17

‘IF RELIEF is what you are after,' says Elena, ‘if getting relief will make life easier for you, there are places where a man can go. Haven't your friends told you about them, your male friends?'

‘Not a word. What precisely do you mean by relief?'

‘Sexual relief. If sexual relief is what you are after, I need not be your sole port of call.'

‘I am sorry,' he says stiffly. ‘I didn't realize you looked on it that way.'

‘Don't take offence. It's a fact of life: men need relief, we all know that. I am merely telling you what you can do about it. There are places you can go. Ask your friends at the docks, or if you are too embarrassed ask at the Relocation Centre.'

‘Are you talking about bordellos?'

‘Call them bordellos if you like, but from what I hear there is nothing sleazy about them, they are quite clean and pleasant.'

‘Do the girls in attendance wear uniforms?'

She regards him quizzically.

‘I mean, do they wear a standard outfit, like nurses? With standard underwear?'

‘That you will have to find out for yourself.'

‘And is it an accepted profession, working in a bordello?' He knows he is irritating her with his questions, but the mood is on him again, the reckless, bitter mood that has plagued him since he gave up the child. ‘Is it something a girl can do and yet hold her head up in public?'

‘I have no idea,' she says. ‘Go and find out. And now you must excuse me, I am expecting a student.'

He was in fact lying when he told Elena he knew nothing about places where men could go. Álvaro has recently mentioned a club for men not far from the docks called Salón Confort.

From Elena's apartment he goes straight to Salón Confort.
Leisure and Recreational Centre
, reads the engraved plate at the entrance.
Hours of opening 2 PM—2 AM. Closed on Mondays. Right of
admission reserved. Membership on application.
And in smaller letters:
Personal counselling. Stress relief. Physical therapy.