Mothers and Sons

by Colm Toibin

  ‘Get your father,’ she said.

  When Miquel came back with his father, she was still rocking, as though this were her only way of keeping the pain, whatever it was, from overwhelming her. She did not look up.

  ‘What is it?’ his father asked.

  ‘You know what it is,’ she said calmly, and recoiled when his father made to touch her.

  ‘Was it both of you, or just you?’ she asked.

  ‘Just me,’ his father said.

  ‘What did you do?’ Miquel asked.

  ‘Dumped the containers of wine just delivered, emptied them,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t see any wine,’ Miquel said.

  ‘You could barely call it wine,’ his father said. ‘Acid. You didn’t see it because she hid it. I watched the whole adventure from the top floor of the low barn with those binoculars you brought back from the mili. They were delivering the oil, but it was just an excuse.’

  ‘Spying on me,’ his mother said.

  ‘And what did you do?’ Miquel asked his father.

  ‘I went down,’ his father said, ‘when they had gone and I emptied it, all of it. And I put the containers back where they were, but they were empty now of their poison.’

  ‘You know all about poison,’ she said.

  Miquel was surprised by the suddenness of her anger, her sharpness.

  ‘I’m the one has to sleep with you,’ his father said. ‘And the smell of that stuff rotting you as you sleep.’

  His mother continued to rock back and forth, as though they were not there. They stood close to her, Miquel noticing a look on his father’s face, both sorry and nervous – concerned, it seemed to Miquel, that he had said too much and ready now to be softer with her.

  ‘I am sorry,’ his mother said quietly, ‘that I ever knew any of you.’ Her tone was definite, decisive.

  Miquel’s father looked at her puzzled.

  ‘Any of us?’

  ‘That’s what I said. Did you not hear me?’

  ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘I mean the people in this house.’

  ‘Who? Let us know who you mean.’

  ‘I mean everyone, but especially you.’ She spoke quietly again. ‘That’s who I mean.’

  ‘Well, there’s no point in speaking to you, then, is there?’ he asked.

  ‘Are you going to replace what you threw out?’ she asked.

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Well, that’s the end, then,’ she said and began to cry.

  As his father left the house, Miquel was unsure if he should remain. He watched his father from the window walking down towards the barn they were repairing. Miquel listened as his mother’s crying grew louder, more uncontrolled. He moved closer to her and put his hand on her shoulder. Slowly, she moved her hand towards his, caught one of his fingers and caressed it and then took his whole hand in hers and held it. Her crying now stopped but she was still rocking gently back and forth.

  3

  HIS MOTHER did not move and would eat nothing. When Miquel had lit the fire, and put extra kindling on it until it was blazing, he suggested that she sit near it. She allowed him to lead her there and put her sitting as though she were blind or had no will of her own. She insisted that she was not hungry. Asking her if she wanted something to drink would sound like a bitter joke at her expense so he did not ask her.

  Miquel and his father sat at the table and had the soup left over from the previous day, and then ate some ham and tomatoes and bread. It was not the dinner they normally had, but they did not mention it or complain. When he was about to go to bed and he met his father on the upstairs landing, Miquel spoke quietly to him, proposing that they should go to La Seu in the morning and buy her some wine, better wine than the stuff the grocer had delivered, and tell her now that she could come with them if she wanted. His father put his arm around him before he replied.

  ‘No, it’s better like this. We did that when you were away. She has to stop altogether. That’s what the doctor told us a few months ago, the only way to stop was to stop. Now, since she has no drink, she will stop. It’s the best thing. She’ll be fine in a few days.’

  ‘How long has she been drinking?’ Miquel asked.

  ‘A few years.’

  ‘How is it we never noticed?’

  ‘We all noticed,’ his father said.

  ‘Jordi didn’t,’ Miquel replied.

  ‘He did, son, he did,’ his father said.

  When he went back downstairs, his father followed him; they found his mother still sitting in front of the fire. She was shaking as though with the cold. Miquel left them and went to bed.

  As he lay in bed with the light out, while hearing vague stirrings from the floor below him, he remembered how different Jordi was with him at first when they were alone in the bedroom after he came back from the mili. Before this Jordi and he had been natural and relaxed about undressing in front of each other, but Jordi would now cover himself if Miquel came in, or would sit awkwardly on the side of the bed taking off his shorts and putting on his pyjama-bottoms as modestly as if there were a woman in the room. Jordi and his father took time to get used to his homecoming, disguising the fact that they had managed without him, Jordi loath to hand over some of the jobs which naturally belonged to his older brother. Thus they did not tell him that his mother, while he was away, had become a hopeless drinker. In keeping the secret, they had treated him like a stranger.

  In the night he heard their voices in the room below; his father’s was calm but his mother’s was high and whimpering. Eventually, they came to bed and there was silence for some time until he heard the floorboards creaking and one of them going downstairs again. Soon the other followed and the voices started again. He knew that he would not sleep. It was hard anyway since Jordi was absent from the other bed; it was the no sound coming from there kept him awake, the no snoring or rhythm of breathing, the no turning over which seemed to disturb him more than the wind, which appeared now to have changed direction, blowing fiercely from the north in the few hours before the dawn, rattling the window.

  In the morning he found his father in the kitchen. His mother, he presumed, was in bed. His father began to shave, using the small mirror over the kitchen sink, working with slow concentration.

  ‘Should we not go to La Seu and get her what she wants?’ Miquel asked.

  His father did not reply.

  ‘Replace what was thrown out.’ He raised his voice.

  ‘No,’ his father said, catching Miquel’s eye in the mirror. ‘She has to stop some day. The best day for everything is always today. Anyway, she’s asleep now.’

  He continued shaving even more slowly and carefully, as though this were a more pressing concern of his than any matter his son might care to raise. Miquel found some bread and rubbed some oil and tomato and salt into it, finding also a lump of cheese and cutting off a slice. He ate quickly, hungrily, before going outside to collect the eggs from the hen house, passing his father who did not speak to him.

  Once in the shade, he noticed how intensely cold it had become; the water in the fenced-off piece of ground in front of the hen house was completely frozen. The sky was blue, but it was not the still, calm blue of earlier days, it was more that the clouds had been blown back by the wind, making the blue of the sky seemed exposed and raw. When he looked down towards the barns he saw that his father had found a sheltered spot in the sunlight. Miquel joined him and they spent the morning slowly facing the new brick of the barn with stone.

  Before lunch they went to inspect the sheep, bringing down feed from the upper floor of the barn. They were not sure of the time, but, once they were finished with the sheep, Miquel was surprised that his mother had not called them in to eat. Then he remembered what had happened and wondered if she were still in bed or too distressed to cook for them.

  When they came into the house, he knew that she had not been in the kitchen. Nothing had been touched or cleared away. Clua, he saw, had not been fed. His fathe
r went upstairs and then came down and said that she was not in their bedroom. By the time they had finished their first search of the house and the grounds around the barns and outhouses, Miquel knew that she had gone. Their leaving her all morning, not once going into the house, even to get a glass of water, or check her state of mind, seemed now like an invitation for her to go. As they searched once more, and this search too became futile, Miquel began to consider where she might have gone and how she might have travelled. She could not have taken refuge with any of their neighbours; nobody in the village would have known what to do were she to arrive on their doorstep, she had not been inside any of their houses for some years. There was no transport available out of the village, no bus until the main road ten or eleven kilometres away, and that service was irregular. Nobody would stop and collect her were she to walk towards La Seu, unless a stranger were to be in the area, which was unlikely.

  She had, in any case, left them. When his father suggested searching the inside of the barns, Miquel shook his head. His mother would have had to walk right past them to get to the barns except for the short time they went to inspect the sheep, and even then they would have seen her. Her coat was gone and her good scarf and her boots. His father, even when Miquel had twice shown him the space where the missing coat had hung and the space where the missing boots had lain, went upstairs again and again in search of her, to the top loft, to the store, to the barn directly below them. Miquel sat down at the table, letting his father search for as long as he pleased, knowing that eventually he would have to sit down too and talk about what should be done now.

  There were still ten or twelve houses inhabited in the village; nothing happened that was not noticed, the old people sat by windows watching, the few young men were in the fields or by the barns, the women did their housework checking regularly on the weather. There were no children in any of the houses; most of the young had fled to the cities or bigger towns. Miquel and Jordi were the two youngest left in the place. They had been brought up to depend on no one around them, but it was only in recent years that the hostility between their father and the rest of the village had grown so intense that there was almost no contact with the neighbours. Their father had denounced three families for diverting water in the summer months. He had gone to Tremp and given evidence against them, while the other families, despite having water stolen from them, had spoken in their defence. The judge imposed fines. The feelings about the willingness of Miquel’s father to betray them were sharp and fresh in the households that had to pay the fines. Their father took pleasure, if he could make one of his sons listen, in calling his neighbours liars and thieves. The neighbours, in turn, passed him every day without speaking.

  Now, he and Miquel would have to go from house to house, their search for his mother an admission that all was not well in their home. They could not be sure, Miquel realized, that the neighbours would even tell them what they had seen. But it was the only thing they could do. So once his father had ceased his searching, they put their coats on and set out, being careful to begin with the closest neighbour so that no one would think they had any special friends or favoured household in the village.

  Mateu at the Casa Raúl came to the door slowly, his fat belly in front of him. He was one of the men who had to pay the fine. He screwed his eyes up in distaste as soon as Miquel’s father opened his mouth, giving no sign that he understood a word spoken. Instead, he studied their faces, taking his time to consider what he saw. Miquel believed at first that whether Mateu had seen his mother or not he would be no use to them. The problem would be how quickly they could move away from his door. Miquel nudged his father and nodded his head in the direction of the next house, but his father stood there, resting himself against the doorframe, waiting for something, neither repeating the question nor saying anything else as Mateu cleared his throat. Mateu’s house was the closest to theirs; Mateu, Miquel imagined, had probably not left the house all day, he had good views from his windows and would have seen her easily no matter in what direction she had gone.

  As they stood in the doorway, the sky darkened suddenly, blue-black clouds appeared over them gathering in a low dense mass. The light became a dark purple and there was no wind. Miquel shivered. He knew that it meant snow; it would be the first of the year, late in coming, and all the more severe on a day as cold as this.

  ‘I saw her going all right,’ Mateu said, ‘but there was no sign of her coming back.’

  ‘Which direction?’ Miquel’s father asked.

  ‘She took the road towards Coll del So.’

  ‘But that leads nowhere,’ his father said.

  Mateu nodded.

  It struck Miquel immediately that it led towards Pallosa, where his mother’s brother still lived in the old family house; it could be reached in four or five hours.

  ‘How long ago did you see her?’ his father asked.

  ‘She’s gone a few hours,’ Mateu said.

  ‘What? Three or four?’

  ‘Yes, three or four, or somewhere in between.’

  The snow came down gently as the air darkened even further. The flakes were thick, they did not melt immediately on the back of Miquel’s hand which he held out to test them. The jeep, he knew, could make its way along the narrow road which led to the small church at Santa Magdalena, and perhaps even further along the military road to Coll del So, but after that, he thought, his mother would make her way down to Pallosa along old tracks and pathways which no jeep could follow and no outsider could find. In three or four hours walking she could be still on the military road, but it was unlikely. More probably, she would have reached Coll del So and then she might even have started along the steeper tracks, and he knew that they must race to the jeep and drive as fast as they could along the winding road to these uplands where they kept their sheep in the summer, territory which remained unvisited in the winter.

  ‘You won’t get far now,’ Mateu said to them as they moved away from his door.

  ‘Are you certain she went that way?’ Miquel called back to him.

  ‘Ask the others, we all saw her.’

  They walked back quickly to the house. As his father turned the jeep, Miquel ran into the house to fetch his binoculars.

  ‘What are you doing with those?’ his father asked.

  Miquel looked down at them resting in his lap.

  ‘I don’t know … I thought …’

  ‘We don’t have time for thinking,’ his father said.

  They drove along the narrow road out of the village; the windscreen wipers were on full, but still the snow impaired their vision and the jeep’s headlights caught sheets of whiteness. Had she been on the road coming towards them, even with her arms outstretched, they would not have seen her. It must have been clear to his father, Miquel knew, that there was little purpose in their journey. The only hope, Miquel thought, was that she had left later than Mateu had said. He considered that for a moment and then the possibility that she had walked slowly, or had turned back at some point, and then he let his mind linger over another possibility – that she had walked quickly and left even earlier than Mateu had said and was within reach of Pallosa, that she was clambering down the old paths as best she could. Moving slowly and carefully, watching each step. It was territory she knew; she was, Miquel thought, unlikely to make mistakes. But he was not sure. Perhaps the paths down the slopes would be all hidden now and every step treacherous.

  His father worked hard to manage the jeep as it began to sway and slide. Even when the snow was not blown hard against the windscreen, they could see it falling in dense waves and building up on the road in front of them so that after a while they were driving on a thick blanket of snow, which was gathering in strength as they moved forward. Soon it was obvious that their way would eventually be impeded, their way back made impossible.

  Miquel knew that it would make sense for him to suggest they stop and turn, that their moving ahead was perhaps pointless and maybe even dangerous, but he kne
w also that if they turned and went home they would be facing into sheer emptiness, with no idea where his mother was and the long night ahead of them.

  When there was a small clearing, his father, without saying anything, tried to turn the jeep, believing, it seemed to Miquel, that the snow covered a level surface. But it merely covered a sharp dip between the road and the verge into which one of the front wheels now sank. His father cursed as Miquel got out of the jeep to see if he could ease the vehicle back onto the road. He watched the wheel revolve frantically, like a spider caught in water. In the end, they had to find stones wherever they could and a short plank from the back of the jeep and settle these under the wheel; they were blinded by the snow as they scampered about the jeep. When he turned to avoid the driving snow, he found that it was blowing and swirling in all directions as though the four winds were competing with each other. They began to push the jeep once the wheel had been stabilized, trying to lift it back onto the road, but the wheels were stuck in the snow and would not easily move. They were, Miquel guessed, half an hour’s walk from the village, maybe more in the snow, and he imagined, as his father revved the engine in one more large effort to move the jeep, that his mother, having avoided the worst of the weather, was now knocking gently on the door of her brother’s house, the house where she was born. They loved her in that house and they would welcome her and in the morning they would find a way of sending a message to say that she was safe.

  He heaved one more time as his father put sudden pressure on the accelerator. The jeep slid sideways; its four wheels were now on the road, still facing away from the village. His father shouted to him to get back in, he was going to try to turn the jeep again. He put it in neutral and let it inch forward as far as it could safely go and then he pulled up the handbrake and put it into reverse. He let the handbrake down and slowly accelerated. At first it did not move, and then the back wheels began to revolve in the snow until his father gave the accelerator fierce pressure and they moved back at speed, sliding on the road. But they were almost facing the village now; they could go back, cutting with difficulty through the settling snow on the ground and the gusts of thick snowflakes gathering on the windscreen as fast as the wipers could remove them.