by Colm Toibin
For the past week their mother had not been able to stay still. At times, it seemed to Miquel as if she were searching for something, moving around the kitchen and the long dining room and the storeroom. The great sporadic restlessness of hers had begun, he knew, as soon as he came back from the mili; he noticed it not long after his return. He did not think it had happened while he was away as Jordi had not mentioned it to him, and seemed too preoccupied to notice it now.
Her inability to settle came and went as though governed by the weather. In these last days, as Jordi prepared to go, the jittery, nervous movements had intensified, she seemed to Miquel like a strange, hungry animal who was living with them, barely able to cook or set the table, barely able to feed her hens and rabbits and geese. He wondered why she was so upset about Jordi’s going; she had not behaved like this in the time before he left.
Now, however, as they had breakfast before the journey down to La Seu, she sat still at the table, wearing her good clothes, nervous and not speaking, but more composed than she had been for some weeks.
He had been so charged with happiness at coming home, he thought, that he had not bargained for this, the sitting into the back seat of the jeep with Jordi beside him and his mother and father in front as though they were transporting Jordi to be sold and slaughtered. But once the jeep got going, moving through familiar territory, there were moments when he fooled himself in thinking that this was an ordinary visit to La Seu on a market day with baskets of eggs to sell and a list of things to buy, then the dull fact of Jordi’s departure would hit him again and the old dread would return.
His father was to accompany Jordi to the barber’s, its owner a man known for his solemnity, and understood to be a communist, having served years in prison after the war. Thus he could be guaranteed to make no jokes or gleeful, mocking comments as he cut Jordi’s hair according to army regulation. He would maintain his mournful tone and preserve, as much as he could, Jordi’s dignity.
That day they had no eggs or poultry to sell, but groceries to buy. They would even have to purchase vegetables since their own garden had yielded hardly anything in the past weeks. Miquel and his mother, carrying two shopping baskets each, did not stop at the barber’s, arranging instead to meet Jordi and his father in the body of the market in an hour’s time.
Once they were alone with each other, his mother’s step was lighter, she seemed almost happy as she faced into the market, greeting a number of stall-holders warmly, familiarly, announcing proudly to one of them that she had nothing to sell today, she was here only to buy, and laughing when the woman retorted that if more people did the same then all the stall-holders would become rich.
Then she left him, telling him to wait for her, there was something she needed to buy. It would not take long, she said. Her parting was abrupt, as though she felt that he would argue with her if she stayed a moment longer. He watched her slipping between two stalls, still carrying the baskets.
He wished she had given him something to do. He could easily have gone and bought the oil, or ordered the bottled gas so that it would be ready when they drove by at the end of the day. He watched the flower-sellers, alone among the stall-holders in not having a queue to buy their wares, the two women contented-looking. He wondered who would have the spare money to buy flowers.
Slowly, as he waited, he grew tired and bored. He supposed that his mother had gone to the butcher’s or the poultry shop where there could be long queues, or even to buy something quite private at the pharmacy. After a while, he made his way, as his mother had done, between two of the stalls to the line of shops on the other side of them where he thought he could find her, believing that he could wait with her. If he saw that she was in the pharmacy, he would stay outside. The thought of standing beside her in a line of people, carrying the bags for her, pleased him. She had a way with people – strangers, or shopkeepers – a sort of charm which drew people towards her, and made him enjoy being with her in those moments when she smiled at someone or made a passing remark; it almost made him proud.
She was not in the queue at the butcher’s, which was long. He had decided to walk up the street towards the poultry shop when he suddenly saw her with her back to the plate-glass window of a bar he had never noticed before. He was about to knock on the window, expecting her to turn and smile at him, but the expression on the face of the bar owner made him stop for a moment. Miquel watched as the owner counted out some coins and moved to a row of bottles at the back of the bar. He filled a large glass, the sort normally used for water, with a thin yellow liquid, like pale tea or light sherry, and brought it back to Miquel’s mother. It was, he guessed, a fino, or a cheap wine, or a muscatel. He saw her grip the glass and finish it in two gulps; and, before he turned away, he noticed two empty glasses beside her on the counter, the same type of tumbler that she had just drunk from. He quickly went back to the spot where she had left him earlier, where she soon found him, her face flushed, her eyes bright, and they began the day’s shopping.
He knew what he had seen; he understood now why she had gone alone, leaving him waiting; it was clear to him why she was so happy, almost carefree, as she made her first purchases. He also realized that he had known this vaguely for some time – the smells from her breath, the mood swings, the restlessness, were evidence enough to suggest something – but he had not allowed himself to put a name to it. She had downed the tumbler of wine the way a thirsty person would drain a glass of water. She must have done the same to the other two. There was no other explanation. He wondered if this would be enough for her, how long she could keep going on these tumblers of wine or sherry or whatever it was, if she would need more soon, or something stronger. He wondered if his father knew about this, or if Jordi knew. He supposed that their father must know, since he shared a bed with her every night, knew all her moods and movements. He was not sure, however, of the extent of his mother’s drinking; maybe it merely happened in the early part of market day in La Seu, but he did not think so. And even if it were bad and went back a long time, it would be typical of his father not to mention it, or make anything of it, to store it up instead as another amusing aspect of the world.
When they had bought all the vegetables and were walking out of the bread shop, his mother spoke to him, moving her head carefully away, he noticed, so that he would not smell her breath.
‘When you went to the mili,’ she said, ‘I thought you would never come back, but the time was actually short. It won’t seem long at all before Jordi is back too.’
They stood in the queue at the butcher’s, where he had imagined finding her before. It was all different now, even though only fifteen minutes had passed. He listened to her voice and watched her move with a new suspicion. Maybe, he thought, he had drawn conclusions too quickly. Maybe these were her only few glasses of the week, and she was, he thought, entitled to look forward to them, living in a village where there was no bar, no shop, nothing except hostile neighbours and a long winter.
His mother knew the butcher’s wife, having often sold her rabbits. When she informed her now about Jordi going to the mili, the owner’s wife and the women all around commiserated with her and, on noticing Miquel, smiled and said that she was lucky to have this one, so tall and handsome. She would be lucky if he were not married soon, the owner’s wife said. One of the women joined the conversation to say that she had a daughter of the same age and they would make a great match. Miquel smiled and said he had no time for things like that, he would have too much work to do now that Jordi was going.
Jordi was wearing a cap when they met him. He grinned at Miquel and put his arm around him. They walked with their parents past the stalls which sold cheese and olives towards a small bar near the bus station where they ordered bocadillos and soft drinks.
‘You’ll have to take off your cap eventually,’ Miquel said.
‘I’m going to wait until the very last minute,’ Jordi replied.
They ate quietly, the silence interrupted onl
y by their father’s views, spoken almost to himself, on the clientele, or the delays in the service, or the price of things, including communist haircuts. Miquel saw no reason to respond, and was surprised to see Jordi following suit. When he was away, he thought, his father’s comments on all matters was one thing he did not miss, but Jordi was softer, more willing to create harmony, and he would, Miquel knew, miss everything as soon as he left them. He watched his mother gazing happily around her, sipping a glass of water.
Later, they separated, their mother going alone to purchase household goods and the men going to get bottled gas and to look at a saw their father had noticed in a shop window. Miquel was sure that his father did not need a new saw, but, perhaps more than any of them now, he needed something with which to distract himself. Miquel studied him as, suggesting affluence and serious intent, he sought and received the shop assistant’s full attention, and then had the saw removed from the window. He watched his father demand a block of wood so that the saw could be tested; his father stood impatiently, with the air of a master woodcutter, until it was brought. When it came, he knelt and applied the saw, frowning regularly at the assistant and his two sons, ignoring the small audience which had built up around him as he set out to prove, Miquel realized, that the saw’s blade was as good as blunt. Having done so to his own satisfaction, he stood up and wiped the sawdust from his hands.
When they drove to collect their mother, Miquel and Jordi descended to fetch her packages. She told them that the oil was not ready. It would, she said, have to be delivered during the week. When their father suggested that they go to another shop, she said no, they had already paid for it. It was, she said, the best oil and the best price, and the shopkeeper had promised faithfully that it would be delivered in a few days. Miquel noticed that she came close to losing her self-possession as she spoke, explaining what would happen with the oil in too much detail. Their father, already driving out of the town, said that a grocery shop without oil was like a winter without snow, it was not natural. Not natural at all, he laughed to himself.
Jordi would have two more days with them. That night, when they went to their bedroom and in casual silence prepared for bed, Miquel took in everything so that he might remember it in all its detail – the closing of the door so that they were in the room alone together, the creaking of the floorboards, the parcelling out of the small space so that they did not get in one another’s way as they undressed, their soft shadows on the wall. Jordi was slower in his movements than he was, Miquel noted as though for the first time, but tidier also, he loved folding things. He kept his pyjamas folded neatly under his pillow. In the mili, in the long dormitories in a vast barracks somewhere, such habits could be easily mocked.
He watched Jordi who had his back to him quietly taking off his pullover and leaving it on top of the chest of drawers for the morning. Miquel was usually in bed before his brother. He was careful not to look directly at Jordi as he changed into his pyjamas; instead, he put his hands behind his head and studied the ceiling, making comments on things, much as his father did, sometimes doing imitations of his father’s harmless daily grumblings, to Jordi’s shocked delight.
This familiar life was now ending. Jordi would come back eventually, but he would soon have to leave soon afterwards to find work, begin his own life. The house and the land would be left to Miquel, as his father, in turn, had been left the house and farm by his father. Nights like this would not come again. There must be people, he realized, who relished this change, who longed for the first night of a marriage, all the newness and separation, the moving to a new house, the making of large decisions. His mother must have lain at night in her village over the mountain, knowing it would be her last night there. His father must have seen his own brothers go, one by one. Miquel understood that he himself had no interest in change; he wanted things to remain as they were. By the time he had thought this through and begun to puzzle over its implications, Jordi had fallen asleep. Miquel could imagine his innocent white face and his black hair, cut down to the scalp; he could hear his peaceful breathing. He almost wanted to touch him, move towards him and put his hand tenderly for one moment on his face.
Their mother was busy in the kitchen all the following day as she prepared a supper for the four of them, making a terrine with marinated rabbit and carrots and onions that Jordi loved, and roasting a stuffed goose for the main course. As Miquel came in and out of the kitchen, passing her as she worked, he looked for signs of a bottle near the work table or a glass of wine or brandy close to her, but he could see nothing.
That evening, she put a white tablecloth on the good old table, and set it as though her brother and sister-in-law were making a visit from Pallosa over the mountain, or one of her husband’s brothers had come from Lérida. In the late afternoon, Miquel had noticed a bottle of white wine already opened; he supposed she needed it for the cooking, but now when he looked again he saw that it was gone.
Their mother brushed her hair and put on fresh clothes; their father wore his suit and a white shirt. It would have been easier, Miquel thought, if one or two of the neighbours bours had called, or were invited to eat with them, but too much had happened in the village over the years for that. While all the neighbours would know the date of Jordi’s departure, it would not be mentioned, it would remain part of the heavy silence which had gathered since the row about the water. They would eat alone.
On nights like this he saw his parents young, his father attentive, full of sweetness in the way he lit the candles and passed food and poured wine; his mother would be free now to talk about her own mother and the food she made for different occasions and what was said about her, and the parties in the old village, the good neighbours they had there. She would do this carefully, not implying any criticism of the life she lived here, which they were celebrating more than any past life.
2
ONE MORNING after Jordi had left, Miquel surprised his mother by coming silently into the kitchen as she was gulping from a glass. She put it down hurriedly. He tried to get close to her to see what he could smell from her breath, but she seemed to keep away from him deliberately, moving quickly out to the rabbit house and the hen house. As soon as she left, however, he found the glass. It was empty, but the residual smell was of strong wine; to his nostrils that morning the smell was pungent, almost rotten. He left the glass back where he had found it in case she came suddenly back into the room.
His mother had left Jordi’s bed untouched for the first few days. Only the folded pyjamas under the pillow were missing. It was when she took the sheets and blankets from the bed, leaving a bare pillow and a bare mattress, that Miquel dreaded going up to his bedroom at night. A few times in the first days he managed to forget that Jordi was gone; he thought he heard him breathing in the night, and on one of the mornings, when the first sounds could be heard, he found himself looking over at his brother’s bed to see if Jordi was awake yet.
Since the days remained dry and the sun was warm, his father expressed the view that they should keep busy, repair a wall of the barn, work they might never do, he said, but always plan to do until their barns were rubble and the sheep were shivering with the cold out in the fields all night. He mentioned Castellet, one of his neighbours, whose laziness was a constant source of interest. If we don’t repair the barns, we’ll end like Castellet. Saying the name alone appeared to give his father pleasure, made him smile in the calm, amused way to which Miquel had become so accustomed.
The work was tough, with heavy stones to remove and replace and beams to shore up and slates to take down. His father, who had worked as a stone cutter, repointed the stones and cut new ones which he had bought from the owner of a ruined barn in a nearby village and painstakingly transported to his own holding. He gradually made clear that he planned to dismantle one whole side of the barn, using cheap bricks on the inside and facing it with stone. Miquel was doing all the lifting and carrying, his father having found a place in the sun where he could c
hisel and shape and flatten. Each time Miquel passed him with a loaded wheelbarrow, or presented him with a new pile of stones, he had remarks to make, on the habits of the neighbours, or the poorness of the brick, or the durability of the stone, or the shortness of the lambing season, or the lunch which might be waiting for them, or where Jordi might be now and when they might hear from him.
When it went beyond two in the afternoon, and the sun disappeared behind the hills, it would grow bitterly cold, letting them know that, despite the bright days, they were in the depths of winter. Miquel tried to convince his father that they should not work after lunch, except the usual work with the animals and their feed, but his father insisted that another hour each day would make all the difference. Once they started, however, they seldom stayed long, his father nodding and smiling when Miquel stood in front of him announcing that he had carried his last stone of the day.
On one of those days when Miquel returned to the house in the afternoon earlier than expected he found his mother sitting at the kitchen table. She did not look up when he came in. Normally, she sat down in the morning to have a cup of chocolate but otherwise, he knew, she disliked sitting down until after supper. She preferred moving around all day, cooking, washing clothes and looking after her hens, rabbits and geese. He pretended at first not to notice her, filling a glass of water from the tap, but when he turned he saw that she was sitting with her arms wrapped around herself and was rocking back and forth. When he asked her if she was all right, she did not look at him.
