The Childhood of Jesus (28 page)

‘I don't know. Like gypsies, I suppose. Why don't you help instead of just raising objections?'

‘What are gypsies?' intervenes the boy.

‘Living like gypsies is just a way of speaking,' he says. ‘You and I were gypsies of a kind while we lived in the camp at Belstar. Being a gypsy means that you don't have a proper home, a place to lay your head. It's not much fun being a gypsy.'

‘Will I have to go to school?'

‘No. Gypsy children don't go to school.'

‘Then I want to be a gypsy with Inés and Diego.'

He turns to Inés. ‘I wish you had discussed this with me. Do you really mean to sleep under hedges and eat berries while you hide from the law?'

‘This has nothing to do with you,' replies Inés icily. ‘You don't care if David goes to a reformatory. I do.'

‘Punto Arenas is not a reformatory.'

‘It is a dumping ground for delinquents—delinquents and orphans. My child is not going to that place, never, never, never.'

‘I agree with you. David does not deserve to be sent to Punto Arenas. Not because it is a dumping ground but because he is too young to be separated from his parents.'

‘Then why did you not stand up against those judges? Why did you bow and scrape and say
Sí señor, Sí señor
? Don't you believe in the boy?'

‘Of course I believe in him. I believe he is exceptional and merits exceptional treatment. But those people have the law behind them, and we are in no position to challenge the law.'

‘Even when the law is bad?'

‘It is not a question of good or bad, Inés, it is a question of power. If you run away they will send the police after you and the police will catch you. You will be declared an unfit mother and the child will be taken away from you. He will be sent to Punto Arenas and you will have a battle on your hands ever to regain custody.'

‘They will never take my child away from me. I will die first.' Her breast heaves. ‘Why don't you help me instead of taking their side all the time?'

He reaches out to placate her but she shakes him off, sinks down on the bed. ‘Leave me alone! Don't touch me! You don't really believe in the child. You don't know what it means to believe.'

The boy leans over her, strokes her hair. On his lips there is a smile. ‘Ssh,' he says; ‘ssh.' He lies down beside her; his thumb goes into his mouth; his eyes take on a glassy, absent look; within minutes he is asleep.

CHAPTER 27

ÁLVARO CALLS the stevedores together. ‘Friends,' he says, ‘there is a matter we need to discuss. As you will remember, our comrade Simón proposed that we give up unloading cargoes by hand and resort instead to a mechanical crane.'

The men nod. Some glance in his direction. Eugenio flashes him a smile.

‘Well, today I have news for you. A comrade from Roadworks tells me there is a crane at their depot that has been standing idle for months. If we wish to borrow it for a trial, he says, we are welcome to have it.

‘What shall we do, friends? Shall we accept his offer? Shall we see whether, as Simón claims, a crane will change our lives? Who wants to speak first? Simón, you?'

He is taken completely by surprise. His mind is occupied with Inés and her plans for flight; not in weeks has he given a thought to cranes or rats or the economics of grain transport; indeed, he has come to depend on the unvarying grind of labour to exhaust him and bring him the boon of deep, dreamless sleep.

‘Not me,' he says. ‘I have said my say.'

‘Who else?' says Álvaro.

Eugenio speaks up. ‘I say we should try the crane. Our friend Simón has a wise head on his shoulders. Who knows, he may be right. Maybe we should indeed move with the times. We will never know for sure unless we try.'

There is a murmur of agreement from the men.

‘Shall we try the crane then?' says Álvaro. ‘Shall I tell our comrade in Roadworks to bring it along?'

‘Aye!' says Eugenio, and raises his hand. ‘Aye!' say the stevedores in chorus, raising their hands. Even he, Simón, raises a hand. The vote is unanimous.

The crane arrives the next morning on the back of a truck. It was once painted white, but the paint has flaked and the metal is rusted. It looks as if it has stood outdoors in the rain for a very long time. It is also smaller than he had expected. It runs on clattering steel tracks; the driver sits in a cab over the tracks, operating the controls that rotate the arm and turn the winch.

It takes the best part of an hour to ease the machine off the back of the truck. Álvaro's friend from Roadworks is impatient to leave. ‘Who is going to drive?' he asks. ‘I'll give him a quick tour of the controls, then I must be off.'

‘Eugenio!' Álvaro calls out. ‘You spoke in favour of the crane. Would you like to drive it?'

Eugenio looks around. ‘If no one else wants to, I will.'

‘Good! Then you are the man.'

Eugenio proves a quick learner. In no time at all he is racing the little crane back and forth along the quay and rotating the arm, on which the hook swings gaily.

‘I've taught him what I can,' the operator reports to Álvaro. ‘Let him go carefully for the first few days and he'll be all right.'

The arm of the crane is just long enough to reach up to the ship's deck. The stevedores bring the bags up one by one from the hold, as before; but now, instead of carrying them down the gangplank, they drop them into a canvas sling. When the sling is full for the first time they give Eugenio a shout. The hook catches the sling; the steel rope tightens; the sling rises over the deck rails; and with a flourish Eugenio swings the load around and down in a wide arc. The men give a cheer; but their cheers turn to cries of alarm as the sling bumps the dockside and begins to spin and lurch out of control. The men scatter, all save he, Simón, who is either too self-absorbed to see what is going on or too sluggish to move. He has a glimpse of Eugenio staring down at him from the cab, mouthing words he cannot hear. Then the swinging load strikes him in the midriff and knocks him backwards. He staggers against a stanchion, trips over a rope, and tumbles into the space between the quay and the steel plates of the freighter. For a moment he is held there, gripped so tightly that it hurts to breathe. He is intensely aware that the ship has to drift only an inch and he will be crushed like an insect. Then the pressure slackens and he drops feet first into the water.

‘Help!' he gasps. ‘Help me!'

A lifebuoy slaps into the water beside him, painted in bright red and white bands. From above comes the voice of Álvaro: ‘Simón! Listen! Hold on and we will pull you clear.'

He grips the buoy; like a fish he is drawn along the quayside into open water. Again Álvaro's voice: ‘Hold tight, we are going to pull you up!' But when the buoy begins to rise the pain is suddenly too much. His grip fails and he falls back into the water. There is oil all over him, in his eyes, in his mouth.
Is this then how it ends?
he says to himself.
Like a rat? How ignominious!

But now Álvaro is beside him, bobbing in the water, his hair plastered to his scalp with oil. ‘Relax, old friend,' says Álvaro. ‘I will hold you.' Gratefully he relaxes into Álvaro's arms. ‘Haul!' calls Álvaro; and the two of them, in tight embrace, rise out of the water.

He comes to himself in confusion. He is on his back looking up into an empty sky. There are vague figures around him, and a buzz of talk, but he cannot make out a word. His eyes close and he is gone again.

He wakes again to a thudding noise. The noise seems to be coming from inside him, from inside his head. ‘Wake up,
viejo
!' says a voice. He opens one eye, sees a fat, sweating face above him.
I am awake
, he would like to say, but his voice has gone dead.

‘Look at me!' say the fat lips. ‘Can you hear me? Blink your eyes if you can hear me.'

He blinks.

‘Good. I am going to give you a shot of painkiller, then we will get you out of here.'

Painkiller?
I have no pain
, he wants to say.
Why should I have
pain?
But whatever it is that speaks for him will not speak today.

Because he is a member of the stevedores' union—an affiliation of which he was not aware—he is entitled to a private room in the hospital. He is tended in his room by a team of kindly nurses, to one of whom, a middle-aged woman named Clara with grey eyes and a quiet smile, he grows quite attached in the weeks that follow.

The consensus seems to be that he got off lightly from his accident. He has broken three ribs. A sliver of bone had punctured a lung, and a small surgical operation was needed to remove it (would he like to keep the bone as a memento?—it is in a phial by his bedside). There are cuts and bruises on his face and upper body, and he has lost some skin, but there is no evidence of injury to the brain. A few days under observation, a few weeks more of taking things easy, and he should be himself again. In the meantime, controlling the pain will be the first priority.

His most constant visitor is Eugenio, who is full of remorse for his incompetence with the crane. He tries his best to comfort the younger man—‘How could you be expected to master a new machine in so short a time?'—but Eugenio will not be comforted. When he surfaces from his slumbers it is more often than not Eugenio who swims into his vision, watching over him.

Álvaro visits too, as do other comrades from the docks. Álvaro has spoken to the doctors, and bears the news that, even though he may expect a full recovery, it would be unwise for him, at his age, to go back to a life of stevedoring.

‘Perhaps I can become a crane operator,' he suggests. ‘I couldn't do worse than Eugenio.'

‘If you want to be a crane operator you will have to transfer to Roadworks,' replies Álvaro. ‘Cranes are too dangerous. They have no future at the docks. Cranes were always a bad idea.'

He hopes that Inés will come visiting, but she does not. He fears the worst: that she has carried out her plan to take the boy and flee.

He mentions his concern to Clara. ‘I have a woman friend,' he says, ‘whose young son I am very fond of. For reasons I won't go into, the education authorities have been threatening to take him away from her and send him to a special school. Could I ask you a favour? Could you telephone her and find out if there have been any developments?'

‘Of course,' says Clara. ‘But wouldn't you like to speak to her yourself? I can bring a telephone to your bed.'

He calls the Blocks. The telephone is answered by a neighbour, who goes off, comes back, and reports that Inés is not at home. He calls later in the day, again without success.

Early the next morning, in the nameless space between sleeping and waking, he has a dream or vision. With uncommon clarity he sees a two-wheeled chariot hovering in the air at the foot of his bed. The chariot is made of ivory or some metal inlaid with ivory, and is drawn by two white horses, neither of whom is El Rey. Grasping the reins in one hand, holding the other hand aloft in a regal gesture, is the boy, naked save for a cotton loincloth.

How the chariot and the two horses fit into the little hospital room is a mystery to him. The chariot seems to hang in the air without any effort on the part of horses or charioteer. Far from being frozen, the horses now and then paw the air or toss their heads and snort. As for the boy, he does not seem to tire of holding his arm up. The look on his face is a familiar one: self-satisfaction, perhaps even triumph.

At one point the boy looks straight at him.
Read my eyes
, he seems to be saying.

The dream, or vision, lasts for two or three minutes. Then it fades, and the room is as it was before.

He tells Clara about it. ‘Do you believe in telepathy?' he asks. ‘I had a feeling David was trying to tell me something.'

‘And what was that?'

‘I am not sure. Perhaps that he and his mother need help. Or perhaps not. The message was—how shall I put it?—dark.'

‘Well, remember that the painkiller you are taking is an opiate. Opiates give us dreams, opium dreams.'

‘It wasn't an opium dream. It was the real thing.'

From then onward he declines the painkillers, and suffers accordingly. The nights are worst: even the slightest movement brings an electric stab of pain in his chest.

He has nothing to distract him, nothing to read. The hospital has no library, offers only old numbers of popular magazines (recipes, hobbies, women's fashions). He complains to Eugenio, who responds by bringing him the textbook from his philosophy course (‘I know you are a serious person'). The book is, as he feared, about tables and chairs. He lays it aside. ‘I'm sorry, it's not my kind of philosophy.'

‘What kind of philosophy would you like instead?' asks Eugenio.

‘The kind that shakes one. That changes one's life.'

Eugenio gives him a puzzled look. ‘Is there something wrong with your life then?' he asks. ‘Aside from your injuries.'

‘Something is missing, Eugenio. I know it should not be so, but it is. The life I have is not enough for me. I wish someone, some saviour, would descend from the skies and wave a magic wand and say,
Behold, read this book and all your questions will be answered
. Or,
Behold, here is an entirely new life for you
. You don't understand that kind of talk, do you?'

‘No, I can't claim that I do.'

‘Never mind. It's just a passing mood. Tomorrow I will be my old self again.'

He should plan for his discharge, his doctor tells him. Does he have somewhere to stay? Is there someone who will cook for him, care for him, help him to get around while he mends? Would he like to speak to a social worker? ‘No social worker,' he replies. ‘Let me discuss the matter with my friends and see what can be arranged.'

Eugenio offers him a room in the apartment that he shares with two comrades. He, Eugenio, will be happy to sleep on the sofa. He thanks Eugenio but declines.