Mothers and Sons

by Colm Toibin

  As they were eating, a knock came to the door which made them look up at one another in fright. When Miquel answered, he saw Josep Bernat with a parcel in his hand. Bernat had come on the two days’ search, but he had remained in the background so that he was hardly noticed. He said he would not come in, but his wife had made bread and there were some other things from her larder in the bag that he hoped they would find useful. He bowed to them and departed as soon as Miquel had thanked him.

  Bernat began to call in the evenings, often bringing a can of milk or some fresh produce with him, almost as an excuse to visit. Since Miquel had started to go out alone, sometimes beyond Santa Magdalena to venture along the military road where the snow had hardened in the freezing temperatures and each step had to be taken with care, Bernat was full of advice and ideas about where he should look. He seemed to know about every death in the area since the Civil War, especially suicides and accidental deaths. La Senyora Fluvia, whose husband was still alive, who had fallen in the snow a dozen years back, was a favourite subject of Bernat’s. Her family, he said, had passed where she was lying every day for two months but she was covered in a patch of ice on which the sun never shone and thus she lay there until there was a general thaw. Or that man who was married to the Englishwoman, who was a painter – and he drove his jeep off the road near Pallosa and killed a child as well.

  ‘It’s a pity,’ he said one night, ‘that you did not get through with the jeep that first day, you might have found her.’

  Miquel’s father nodded.

  Miquel was interested in Bernat’s real opinion about where his mother was and when or how she might be found, but he could never get direct answers. On the nights when Bernat came to the house, Miquel listened to his stories and then tried to turn the conversation to the possibility of a sudden thaw being the most dangerous for her, because her body would still not be easily found, but she would be open to birds and animals before they could get to her. Bernat agreed and thought for a while and waited until Miquel’s father had left the room and told him that, since the police had not found her and they had looked closely, then in his opinion her body would not be located until the spring thaw, until there was no snow or ice at all on that stretch of land. And then they would have to watch the sky all day, he said, and if they saw vultures they would have to get into the jeep and race towards whatever it was the vultures were circling. And that is, he said, how you will find her.

  4

  NEITHER OF THEM could cook. His father refused to try but did not stop complaining about the monotony of the food. Too many eggs, he said. Too much cold ham. Miquel tried to cook rice but it came out grainy and hard, he did not know if had put in too little water or too much. The potatoes he boiled seemed to dissolve in the water. They depended on Bernat for bread. He did not know how his mother had found the meat for stews and could offer a variety of dishes with no shop or supplier in the village. When he tried to cook lentils, his father tipped the plate, full of hot food, into the bucket where food for the hens was kept.

  Slowly, the hens began to lay fewer eggs, and gradually the rabbits began to die. Miquel knew that he had neglected them in the early days of his mother’s disappearance, but, even though he had quickly established a routine of feeding both the hens and the rabbits, they did not thrive. He spent a day cleaning out the hen house, presuming that the accumulated dirt had caused them to lay fewer eggs, but when he found egg shells everywhere among the dirt, it caused him to wonder if the hens were not, in fact, eating the very eggs they laid. He wished there were someone in the village whom he could approach and ask, but he knew his father would object even if he were to mention his difficulty to Bernat.

  As the rabbits died, he thought it strange how contented the other rabbits seemed, how normally they behaved, even though one of them lay dead in their cage, its body all stiff and useless, its eyes staring at some vague distant point. It was good for nothing now, he quietly buried it behind the barn. He did not want his father to know that he was having any domestic problems beyond the ones which were obvious.

  After a time, only the big brown rabbits were still alive; they seemed to grow fatter and healthier the more white rabbits died. Miquel kept their cages clean while his father paid them no attention. In these days in the hen house he was lucky if he found even one egg in the morning. His father, he thought, must have presumed that he was not served eggs because he was tired of them. Nothing his father ate pleased him. He took to eating cured ham and bread softened with tomato and oil, and doing so not at mealtimes but when he felt hungry. He did not eat the crusts of the bread but left them on the table for Miquel to give to Clua.

  One day he came into the kitchen as Miquel was eating a sausage with beans, which Bernat’s wife had left him.

  ‘I’m going to La Seu tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d take a few rabbits to sell and some eggs.’

  Miquel glanced up at him nervously.

  ‘The rabbits are dying. I don’t know how to keep them alive. The hens have stopped laying.’

  ‘What did you do to them?’ his father asked.

  ‘I’m not a woman. I don’t know anything about them.’

  ‘You’re no housekeeper,’ his father said and laughed faintly to himself. ‘Do you know that?’

  ‘Why don’t you look after them yourself?’ Miquel asked.

  ‘No, I won’t be doing that,’ his father replied. ‘Dead rabbits! Does anyone in the village know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s good. And we have no eggs?’

  ‘There’s one in the bowl on the shelf.’

  ‘We should keep it as a souvenir.’

  Miquel did not go to La Seu with his father; the sky had cleared two days in a row, which meant that some of the snow had melted. He took his binoculars and set out early with the intention of reaching Santa Magdalena well before noon and then seeing how far he could make it along the military road, some of which he knew was still deep in snow. Once he was in the sun, he was warm, at times too warm so that he had to remove his coat. For an hour or so he trudged along the narrow road. Knowing that he was free of his father’s company and the empty shadowy bareness of the house, which bore the marks of his mother’s absence in every corner and on every surface, made him almost happy. The only dread was having to turn back eventually, finding the limits which the banked-up snow had created. The road as far as Santa Magdalena was, he discovered, much clearer than anyone in the village had said. In some places the thaw had been complete and he scanned it with the binoculars in case there was any sign. It struck him how unlucky his mother had been in the hour she chose to make her desperate flight from them, and the day on which she had gone. Had she left an hour earlier, she would, he thought, have reached Pallosa safely, and had she departed an hour later, she would have got no farther than here, and known to turn back. She was caught, he believed, in the very wrong hour and she lay somewhere beneath a mound of snow in the slopes below the military road which he scanned as well, seeing nothing beyond the whiteness except stumps of trees.

  It was strange, he thought, that hardly any melting of snow had happened on the military road. Much of it received the same sunlight as the road on which he had just walked. But the military road was open to the wind, was cut sharply into the mountain with no trees or undergrowth on either side. If the wind blew snow from most directions, it would bank up on the road, which was a groove made by outsiders quickly into the earth without any thought for the terrain or knowledge of what would happen in the winter. Soon he found that the snow was up to his knees and that each step required an effort and then a further effort to extricate himself.

  He turned back and trudged through the slush for miles until he came to the village. He wished his father would learn to do something in the house, even learn how to light the fire. He would come back from La Seu, Miquel knew, with too many provisions or too few, with kilos of meat they could not keep fresh, or enough sausages for just one meal.

  H
is father was not home, which was surprising as he had left early in the morning and had nothing much to do there. Perhaps he went and saw the police again but, as far as Miquel could see, there was no point in that. There was no bread; he fried some potatoes and the egg his father wished to keep as a souvenir and he lit a fire. In these days when he thought about his mother, the feelings were sharpened by guilt, a gnawing presence in his chest which he could obliterate only by deliberately thinking about something else but which could easily and stealthily return. He regretted now that he had never, in recent years, come in like this to her kitchen on an ordinary day and watched her cooking or lighting the fire and offered to help her, or keep her company while she worked. He also knew that he should have been braver the day before she disappeared, he should have gone to her and told her that he himself would replace what his father had thrown out. He should, he thought, have forced his father not to leave her alone in a room craving alcohol. He knew that if he had been brave, he could have prevented her from leaving.

  It was late when he heard the jeep pulling up in front of the house. He had spent the evening looking into the fire, dreaming half the time of leaving there, going as suddenly as his mother did, but towards La Seu and then towards Lérida or Barcelona, or even further away, and never appearing again. Not ever seeing his brother, would, he thought, be a high price to pay for the new freedom he would win, but maybe they could meet elsewhere, maybe Jordi would leave too. And the rest of the time he entertained all the guilt that wished to call, carried in by the wind through the darkness, to enter his spirit as he pondered over and over his own responsibility for her disappearance and her death.

  He heard voices outside and thought it odd that his father had given a lift to someone from the village. Perhaps Bernat, with whom his father seemed on better terms each day, had travelled back from La Seu with him or had been collected from some other place. As he heard footsteps cutting into the brittle sheet of ice on the path outside the house, he did not move. If his father needed help to carry goods from the jeep, he could come and ask him. His father, when he walked into the kitchen, smiled at him benevolently, warmly. He was carrying bags. Behind him appeared a pale young man, smaller in height than Miquel, but strong-looking and not yet twenty, he thought. He, too, was carrying bags. Miquel was sure that he had never seen him before. He glanced towards Miquel but did not smile. Miquel turned his attention to the fire as though he were alone, taking two blocks of wood from the basket and placing them strategically in the grate.

  ‘We’re hungry,’ his father said. ‘We haven’t eaten. Manolo here will make the supper.’

  Manolo turned towards Miquel, who stoked the fire casually and said nothing.

  ‘I had my supper,’ Miquel said, ‘but I could do with some more.’

  Manolo’s eyes were dark, his hair jet black. He began to open cupboards, checking the contents and then storing any packages from the bags they had carried from the jeep.

  As they ate a supper of sausages, beans and fresh bread, it emerged that Miquel’s father had met neighbours of his brother-in-law from Pallosa to whom he had explained his plight. He needed someone to keep house for them, he said, but he did not think anyone could be found as they had no room for a girl or woman to sleep in, and there was no neighbouring woman available. The people from Pallosa had told him that Manolo, who was an orphan, was free; he worked for local farms in the spring and summer and lived with them, but in the winter there was less to do. Not only would he welcome housework, they said, which he could do very well, but the people with whom he was now lodged would welcome a mouth less to feed. Miquel’s father had decided, he said, to drive to Pallosa there and then and find Manolo and his employer, who had agreed to release him immediately.

  ‘And so I bundled him into the jeep,’ his father said. ‘He says he can cook and we’ll soon find out.’

  His father smiled conspiratorially at Manolo, who did not respond but gazed gravely at Miquel, to whom it was clear that that his father’s account of finding Manolo was like a story of buying an animal or a sack of rice. Manolo, it seemed to Miquel, realized this too, and became openly downcast the more his father, full of good humour, spoke.

  As they were sitting at the table eating, Miquel realized that he himself had not spoken much and wondered if his silence was further disheartening the new arrival.

  ‘My father is a monster,’ he said. ‘You’ve made a big mistake coming with him.’

  He and his father began to laugh, but the boy remained silent, appearing to become even sadder the more they laughed. As soon as they had finished eating, he began to clear off the table; he put a pan of water on to boil and started to stack dishes, which had been left for days, to wash. Miquel moved back to his position by the fire while his father stayed at the table.

  ‘Are there bedclothes anywhere?’ his father asked.

  Miquel shrugged. They had not changed the sheets since his mother left. He did not know if the sheets stored in the cupboard would need to be aired by the fire before they were used.

  ‘Anyway,’ his father said, ‘the mattress on Jordi’s bed will be well aired.’

  ‘Why don’t we move it down to the store room?’ Miquel asked.

  ‘The window is broken there,’ his father said. ‘He’ll freeze.’

  ‘I don’t want him in my room,’ Miquel said.

  Manolo, who had his back to them, stopped moving. He made no effort to pretend that he was not listening.

  ‘We’ll put him there tonight,’ his father said. ‘And I’ll show him where the sheets and blankets are, so he can make his own bed.’

  Miquel sighed and stared into the fire. When he looked up again, Manolo had resumed his work at the stove and the sink. When he moved across the room to clean the table he did not look at Miquel. By the time Miquel went to his bedroom, his father had already shown Manolo the way, and helped him carry sheets and blankets and a pillow to the room, which seemed almost cramped when Miquel entered it. Manolo was studiously unfolding each blanket and then spreading it meticulously across the bed. He did not turn when Miquel came in, only when the door was closed. He did not greet him, but continued to work as Miquel stood and watched him, waiting until he was finished before getting undressed.

  Manolo rummaged in a small suitcase as Miquel lay in bed. This was, as far as he could make out, the only bag Manolo had brought with him. It had barely space for a change of clothes. When Manolo took off his pullover, Miquel saw that his shirt was torn at the back and frayed at the cuffs and collar. Downstairs, he had noticed a smell, like something rotting, which became more intense when Manolo took off his shoes. It was only when Manolo had removed his trousers and was putting them over a chair that Miquel realized the smell came from the boy’s socks, which he now began to remove. He put them on the floor under his bed and looked at Miquel for permission to turn off the light.

  ‘Can you leave your shoes and socks outside the door?’ Miquel asked.

  Manolo nodded, showing no sign that he had any objection to doing this. As he bent to collect his socks and then moved across the room to pick up his shoes, Miquel realized that he had brought no pyjamas with him and that he was not wearing any shorts. He was going to sleep wearing his old shirt. When he had put the shoes and socks outside, and closed the door, he turned off the light and crossed the room. Neither of them spoke as they lay in the dark. Miquel guessed that Manolo fell quickly asleep.

  He imagined writing to Jordi now with the news. Our mother has disappeared, she is dead, lying encased in ice, we will have to watch the sky for vultures when the thaw comes so that we can find her before they do. Your bed is being slept in by a dark, silent, sad-looking boy who has arrived without many clothes and seems willing to do a woman’s work. He has moved in beside me, I can hear his breathing, which is light and regular. In the morning, I will try and find another place for him to sleep.

  5

  HE WALKED each day as far as he could; the snow was starting to melt along the
military road and some stretches of the road to Santa Magdalena were dry. He walked each day at a different time, depending on the work he had to do, but he could often leave his father and Manolo to manage. His father, by this time, had begun to work cutting stones for Josep Bernat and spent some time away from his own house. Manolo worked hard, cooking and washing and cleaning and helping with the animals if he were needed.

  As the thaw continued, Miquel’s uncle came from Pallosa, and drove his jeep along the road out of the village as far as Santa Magdalena and then walked with Miquel along the military road, most of which now was clear, even though the land around it was deep in snow. He got out of the jeep several times and surveyed the landscape with Miquel’s binoculars. When Miquel told him what Bernat had said about the vultures, he agreed. They would have to wait, he said, and watch for them, and hope to find her as soon as the temperature rose. He did not think, he said, that any vultures had appeared over Pallosa yet, nor anywhere higher than Sort. If he saw them hovering, then he would know that the real spring had begun.

  When he came face to face with Manolo in the house, Francesc embraced him and greeted him warmly. Miquel stood back as Manolo smiled and asked about people and events in Pallosa; he was more animated than he had been since he came to their house.

  Outside, before he left, his uncle told him that Manolo’s father had been taken into custody and shot at the end of the war when his mother was still pregnant. His mother had lived only for another year, dying of tuberculosis, but dying too, he thought, because of the loss. Manolo was brought up by his father’s cousins until he could work and then moved to various houses around Pallosa, some of whom treated him badly. It was a very sad story, his uncle said, because Manolo’s father had been hardly involved in the war at all, he was just unlucky. He hoped Manolo would be happier here than he had been in some other quarters. Miquel knew by the way his uncle spoke that it was obvious that he and Manolo had not become friends. That evening, Manolo seemed grateful and surprised when he was given some of Jordi’s clothes by Miquel, some shirts and shorts and a pair of old boots. He promised that he would look after them carefully.