Mothers and Sons

by Colm Toibin

  Once home, they went through all the possibilities, how quickly she could walk, at what time she had left, how long it took along the road until you had to find the old paths which led down to Pallosa. Even in summer there were tough stretches, parts you had to scramble down rather than walk. She could, Miquel said, have turned back when the snow came. She knew how dangerous a snowstorm like this could be. Even if she were closer to Pallosa when it started, she might have thought that it was safer on the level track than on the slopes moving downwards, and even though it would take her hours, trudging through the snow, it might have been the wisest thing to do.

  ‘If we went to La Seu,’ Miquel said, ‘we could ask the police there to find out if she arrived in Pallosa. We could report her as missing.’

  His father sighed.

  ‘I know she’s alive somewhere,’ he said.

  Miquel did not answer him.

  When a knock came to the door, he believed in the first instant that their troubles were over, she had come back. Then, however, he realized that she would not knock the door of her own house. Whoever had knocked remained outside. Perhaps they had found her or knew where she was. When his father went into the hallway and opened the door, Miquel saw that it was Josep Bernat and his wife. They had not come to this house, he knew, since the court case.

  ‘We saw her going,’ Josep said. ‘We thought it was a strange time to be setting off. She had a bag with her.’

  ‘A shopping bag,’ his wife added.

  ‘We noticed it because it was the wrong direction for shops.’

  ‘She was going back to Pallosa, I suppose,’ Miquel’s father said.

  ‘Could you not have driven her there?’ Josep asked.

  As his father sighed again, Miquel moved towards the window where he could see dense whirling snow still falling outside. The visitors remained standing; they had not been asked to take their coats off, nor offered any refreshment. Miquel could sense that Josep now regretted his last question. He smiled hesitantly at their neighbour as his father turned away.

  ‘We could report her missing to the police in La Seu,’ Miquel said.

  ‘The road is probably impassable now and the phone lines from there might be down,’ Josep replied. ‘It’ll be worse later because it’s starting to freeze as well. They’ll open the road in the morning, I hope.’

  ‘Do you remember what time she left at?’ Miquel asked.

  ‘She didn’t leave in time to get to Pallosa before the snow,’ Josep replied.

  ‘She could have turned back when it started,’ Miquel said.

  ‘It would be hard in that blizzard to have any sense of direction,’ Josep said.

  ‘Don’t say anything more!’ Miquel’s father said.

  ‘We were going to say that the men will all search for her when the light comes,’ Josep’s wife said. ‘The minute there’s light. But they can’t search for her now. The snow has not done its worst yet. They cannot go out in the blizzard.’

  ‘She’s gone, then,’ Miquel’s father said, sitting down and sighing. ‘No one could last the night in the open. She’ll die of the cold.’

  ‘You never can tell,’ Josep said.

  ‘We’ll talk in the morning, then,’ Miquel’s father said. ‘We can ask the police to check if she ever arrived in Pallosa.’

  When Josep Bernat and his wife left the house, Miquel stood with his father watching them as they trudged through the snow. Then Miquel went outside to make sure that there was enough feed in the hen house, collecting eggs at the same time, and then feeding the rabbits and closing their shed for the night. At the doorway, he gave Clua, who seemed ravenous, some scraps. As his father sat silently at the table, he fried six eggs in oil, letting the oil splutter onto the tiles around the cooker, as his mother would never do. He cut some stale bread and brought some salt and oil and the one half-tomato that was left to the table. He put three fried eggs on a plate for his father and three for himself. As they ate in silence, Miquel thought over and over of the possibility that this was not really happening, it was a long dream he would soon wake from, or a scene which would change without warning as another knock came to the door or a jeep pulled up outside, or her face, smiling and nervous, appeared at the window as they both stood up to greet her, their food half eaten.

  In the morning he woke to the sound of boots on the stairs, boots on the floorboards below and men’s voices. He quickly dressed in the freezing bedroom before opening the shutters to a world of pure glaring whiteness. He went downstairs. Five or six men from the village were there, one of them had brought a pot of coffee and some brandy. His father, he noticed, looked shrunken and cowed beside these other men. He realized that in all his life he had seldom seen other men in this kitchen, his uncle a few times and the postman, or men coming to sell or repair something, but they were always somehow in the shadows. These men, up at dawn and ready for the search, held the centre of the room; they were confident, brusque and sharp-eyed.

  Outside on the steps of the house their dogs waited. It was bitterly cold and the snow was still falling; in the night it had settled knee-deep on the ground. It would, he thought, be hard to make any progress under these conditions. His mother, the neighbours agreed, had been gone for more than three hours when the snow came. If she had fallen or found shelter, it was not likely to be close by. The snow would have covered any tracks she had made and the air was probably too cold for the dogs to be able to trace any scent. Their only hope was that she had moved quickly or found company on the road and made her way with assistance to her brother’s house before real darkness fell and the thick snow began to settle.

  The men moved slowly, with determination. It seemed to Miquel that they knew as well as he did that this quest was pointless, that even a body would not be found under the relentless covering of snow, and that under these conditions, even reaching Coll del So would be impossible. They were doing it, he knew, because they could not do nothing, despite their dislike for his father. They would not wish it to be known that they had idled in their houses, or done easy winter work, when a woman of the village had disappeared in the snow. And so all morning they moved carefully along the road which his mother must have travelled. They stopped only when a flask of brandy and some bread and cold sausage were passed around. They did not speak much to each other but they did not speak to Miquel or his father at all.

  It was well past midday, with the snow falling still, and they had not yet reached the church of Santa Magdalena where the narrow military road began. Miquel watched them consulting with each other while his father stood apart. He knew that they wished to abandon the search for the day; it would take them three hours to get back to the village. This meant that they could go forward for another hour or more and still be back before dusk, but it was clear that they were already tired, each step in the heavy snow took its toll on their energy; they would be exhausted by the time they reached home.

  It was easier to dream than do anything else, to imagine his uncle driving his mother home from Pallosa after her night of rest, and his uncle’s jeep appearing in the village at the same time as they all arrived back. As they turned, it struck Miquel forcefully that they all knew that his mother had not survived, that the men from the village had taken him and his father out on this vain search as a way of distracting them from the cold fact that Miquel’s mother was missing, she lay dead somewhere near or below the Coll del So, covered in a metre or more of snow, that she would not ever come back to their house, unless they brought her coffin there when they found her. Walking, then, was a way of getting them used to the new fact without their having to wait all day in an empty house, with nothing happening, and nothing to say.

  When they came back into the village they saw a police jeep outside their house, with two uniformed members of the Guardia Civil inside. As soon as the group of villagers came fully into view, one policeman got out of the jeep, and then, when they were closer, the one who had been in the passenger seat emerged. He was ve
ry young, Miquel noticed, and seemed almost shy. He kept his hat on as he glanced at the men coming towards him and then looked away. His companion, the driver, was middle-aged, stocky, hatless. Miquel watched him singling out his father and himself as the two men he would need to speak to and wondered how the police had been alerted. As they approached the jeep, Miquel checked the back seat in case they had found her and had her body. But there was nothing except an old rug.

  His father explained, as soon as they were inside, that his wife could easily be safe, could easily have arrived in Pallosa and be in her brother’s house. The older policeman took note of the brother’s name and said in a heavy southern accent that if the single telephone line to Pallosa, which was in the police station there, were back up he would call as soon as he returned to La Seu, and if the road were open would go to Pallosa. In the meantime, he needed a description of her.

  As Miquel’s father spoke and the policeman took notes, the younger policeman leaned against the wall, just inside the door of the kitchen, pushed his hat back on his head so Miquel was able to see his clear, unwrinkled forehead and his large dark eyes. As these eyes examined the room, seeming to concentrate briefly on the scene between the two older men, they locked with Miquel’s eyes. Miquel was aware that he had been staring at the younger man since he came into the room and it would be better now if he looked away, let whatever had happened dissolve into a moment of unconcealed curiosity and nothing more. But he did not look away. He took in the young policeman’s face in the shadowy light of the kitchen, the full redness of his lips, the square, hard stubbornness of his jaw and chin and then the softness of his eyes, the eyelashes like a girl’s. The young policeman, in turn, watched only Miquel’s eyes, his gaze cold, expressionless, as though he were sullenly blaming him for something. When Miquel looked down at the policeman’s crotch, he too glanced down at himself and he briefly smiled, opening his lips, before resuming his former expression, but more intense now, almost feral, staking out an object within his grasp.

  As his colleague finished taking his notes and appeared ready to depart, the younger policeman took off his hat. Miquel, across the room, quietly acknowledged the gesture. Then the young policeman, who had not spoken once, turned and opened the door, allowing his colleague to leave first, gesturing to Miquel’s father to follow, trying, it seemed to Miquel, to engineer a moment when the two older men would be outside and the two younger ones at the door, or inside the hall. But Miquel’s father held back, insisting, out of politeness, that the younger policeman should go out before him. Miquel watched the younger policeman carefully as his companion reversed the jeep and turned and slowed for a second before driving away.

  As Miquel busied himself doing his mother’s tasks, his father went outside and began to chop wood, striking frantic blows with the hatchet, splitting blocks of wood they could have easily burned in one piece. Miquel dreaded the night, when they would have nothing left to do but wait for news of her, knowing that it might not come soon.

  He remembered a game he had begun to play with her as soon as he could walk. He did not know how it had started, but, with her in the room, he used to hide under the table, or under the bed, or behind a chair, and she then would pretend that she could not find him, and they would both let it continue until the moment before he became scared. Then he would appear and she would feign surprise and shock and delight, and lift him up in the air. He had no memory of ever doing this while his father was present and, once Jordi could understand things, he would grow frightened by the disappearance and the mock search and was made jealous by his mother’s and his brother’s shouts of recognition and sudden greeting. As Miquel moved around the house now, he was acutely alert to the shadowy places, becoming darker in the twilight, the places where you could hide and then appear, as though his mother might mysteriously arrive and position herself where she could not be instantly found.

  That evening they ate in silence some more fried eggs and stale bread and cold sausage until Miquel asked their father what they should do about Jordi. Even though they had no address for him, no idea where he was, they could ask the police in La Seu to make contact with him.

  ‘And say what?’ his father asked.

  Miquel did not answer him.

  ‘He has enough to worry about,’ his father said.

  ‘He might hear it from someone.’

  ‘He’s well out of earshot.’

  ‘You can meet people from home,’ Miquel said. ‘You never know who you are going to meet, and they could have heard the news.’

  ‘For the moment,’ his father said, ‘we’ll tell him nothing, we’ll leave him in peace.’

  When they had eaten, Foix, who had made himself the leader of the search all that day, called to the door but refused to come in, even though it was snowing hard outside. The phone lines, he said, were still down. His brother-in-law, he added, had made it through to the village and left behind two dogs who were trained to follow a scent. He had worked with them before, he said, and they were the best. So they would set out with the dogs at first light, all the men who had been with them would come again, even though the terrain might be more difficult because there could be a bigger fall of snow during the night.

  Before they went to bed, his father told him that he was going to try to drive the jeep to La Seu the next day and then across the paved road to Sort and then, if he could, to Pallosa. Miquel said that he would go with the men, but when he went to the window and looked out and saw the snow coming down even thicker than before, he realized that neither his father nor the men would go very far the next day, and the village could, if the snow continued to fall as it was falling now, be cut off on both sides.

  His father and himself, Miquel realized, were sleeping alone in rooms where the stark absences were palpable; it was hard to remember that both his mother and Jordi were gone, and that should Jordi return and she should not, then her absence would seem even greater. He lay on Jordi’s bed for a while until the cold made him undress and seek refuge under his own blankets. He wished it were two weeks earlier, before Jordi had left; he wished it were three years earlier, when he had just come home; he wished it were any time but now.

  In the morning again he was woken by feet on the floorboards in the room below; he had slept deeply, and he longed for more time in the oblivion from which he had just been snatched. Instantly, he knew he would have to rise and spend the day searching for his mother in the freezing air, the snow getting into his boots; his toes, like his fingers, would be utterly frozen. He looked at Jordi’s bed and wondered if he concentrated hard enough could he get in touch with him to reassure him that they were all well, despite the winter, and that he had no news to tell, nothing had happened since Jordi left.

  Foix, when Miquel appeared in the kitchen, took him aside and said that the two dogs, waiting outside, would need a scent to work from, and the better the scent the better the chance of finding her. Thus he would, he said, need something that belonged to her, something she wore. He began to whisper as he told Miquel that her clothes, if they had been washed since she had last worn them, would not be of much use; the closer to her body the garment had been worn the more useful it would be. He looked at Miquel as though they were both conspirators against not only everyone in the room, but against the snow-covered world outside as well.

  Miquel’s father, sure now that he would not get his jeep up the steep hill beyond the curve out of the village on the road to La Seu, was sitting alone at the table as more men came and more dogs yelped in the freezing morning. The snow had stopped in the night; before the dawn the temperature had dropped which meant they had to watch for patches of ice as well as deep snow. His father seemed forlorn, exhausted, distant from what was happening around him. Miquel decided not to trouble him about Foix’s request, to go upstairs alone and try to find something of his mother’s which had preserved her scent.

  He had forgotten how well he knew the chest of drawers under the window of his parents’ bedr
oom. He had not been near it for years, but when he was a small boy his favourite pastime, under his mother’s supervision, was opening each drawer and taking out the contents and then folding them and replacing them exactly as he had found them. In the top drawer she kept documents and bills and receipts on one side and handkerchiefs and scarves on the other. The middle drawer was where she kept her blouses and cardigans, and in the two bottom drawers she kept her underwear. When she opened these drawers the smell was not of her, but of lavender and perfume. He did not touch anything; nothing here would be any use to Foix and his dogs.

  In a corner of the room was the old basket, the same size as the one in his own room, where dirty clothes were thrown. It was only half-full; on the top were shirts his father had worn with some socks and shorts and vests, and at the very bottom were the last things his mother had worn in this house and left here, as well as the blouse she had worn on the night of Jordi’s dinner which, he imagined, she was keeping so she could wash it and dry it in some special way. Below this was some of her underwear which he took and held, and then, checking that no one was behind him, he lifted to his nose. He buried his face in the intimate smell of her, which was clear despite the days that had passed since she had worn this underwear. It carried a sharp hint of her into this cold room and, for a moment, he imagined the dogs moving blindly through the landscape, living only with this smell, seeking its loving source under the snow or in the undergrowth. He would walk behind them. He dropped all of the undergarments except one back into the basket, tucking them under his father’s clothes, and carried the one he had selected downstairs and gave it to Foix, who was waiting with the dogs outside the door.