Mothers and Sons

by Colm Toibin

  Miquel looked around him and knew that he could embrace Manolo for as long as he pleased on this empty road and could hold him as closely as he wished. He put his arms around him and felt the warmth of him as he moved his hands under his jacket. He could feel the sweat on Manolo’s shirt and he could feel his heart thumping. He pulled at the shirt and then placed his hands on the warm skin of Manolo’s back. Manolo hunched towards him, letting their bodies lock, he buried his head in Miquel’s shoulder but he kept his hands by his sides as though they were stones.

  8

  WHEN MANOLO pulled back the shutters the following morning, Miquel saw that the sky was blue and the morning sun was strong enough to have caused the icicles which had hung from the eaves to begin dripping and breaking. In the kitchen, Josep Bernat was sitting with his father, insisting that the weather had turned, that the haze over the far mountains meant the real thaw had begun. That day as he walked, the abiding sound was of ice breaking and unloosening, snow melting and slipping away, and water flowing in channels at the edge of the road. Through the binoculars he could see the whiteness of snow becoming mere patches in the distance.

  The following day his uncle came from Pallosa to say that the snow on the slopes between the village and Coll del So had begun to melt. In the villages, he said, they were all watching for the vultures who would surely move upwards to Coll del So as the days got better. The villagers would follow the vultures once they appeared, he said, and Miquel and his father and their neighbours should do the same. It would not be long now, he said, before the snow and the ice covering her body would go. He would like to find her before the wild boars and the wild dogs and the vultures, he said, but it was the vultures who would come first. It was the vultures they had to watch for.

  Most of the military road was passable after a few days of higher temperatures. Miquel shifted between the fierce longing which came over him once darkness fell to have her back to them in any guise and the knowledge that the time she was lost to them was nearly ended, the snow was going to yield his mother up. He thought of her face; he hoped he might see it again the way it was, as though she were sleeping or sitting by the kitchen window. As he walked, he thought how much he would like to see her smile.

  He could walk for hours now without having his progress impeded by packed snow and ice, and when tired pushed himself to go further, knowing that once he was beyond Santa Magdalena there was nowhere he could rest. When he had walked long distances, he found that his imagination was vivid with images and scenes as though the air itself were a drug that led mild fantasies to seem entirely real. Sometimes, in the unsettling magic of this, he allowed himself to entertain moments where he was not himself, he was not Miquel, he was somebody else and yet she was coming towards him, dazed and wondering what had happened to her in all that time she was sleeping. She would recognize him immediately, crying out, not as her son searching for her, but as her own father when she was a little girl, her father come looking for her. She would run towards him waiting to be lifted, and he would kiss her and lift her up, the girl who had been lost, her small gloves keeping her hands warm, her old green coat with the fur collar, her snow hat. Only her face was freezing, her eyes were wet with cold, she was trying to smile even though her teeth were chattering.

  He would take her down to the old house in Pallosa, to the search party cheering that she had been found, to her brother waiting for her, to the warm fire and the old comfortable bed. Once, he began to imagine Manolo there too, wearing an apron, preparing a hot drink, all pale and anxious. But somehow that image failed him. Manolo did not belong to the scene.

  The first vultures appeared in the late morning in the cold blue sky a week after the thaw had begun. Miquel was already walking, they appeared black and hovering over a patch of earth above Pallosa but below the military road, precisely where he and his father and the rest of them imagined his mother might be. As he watched them carefully through the binoculars, he wondered whether he should walk to the village and find his father, who he knew was close by, and come back this way in the jeep, but he trusted that his father, or someone in the village, would have become alert to the birds of prey and would set out immediately. He also had confidence that his uncle would have already seen them. He believed his uncle’s determination that those who had loved her should find her first.

  He walked forward, stopping regularly to scrutinize them with the binoculars. Two birds hovered high in the air, not moving. He was not certain how vultures worked, but thought that they needed more than two before they swooped. He did not know how long it would take them to gather once dead prey had been spotted. He hoped that it would take time because he did not want to have to fend them off alone, he did not know how he would be able to struggle against them if more came.

  Soon, he noticed another vulture over Coll del So; he knew that it could be seen for miles. The sky was a clear blue without a single speck of cloud; there was no other movement, no other bird life in the sky. As one of them dipped, Miquel moved faster, wondering if should not cut a stick from one of the trees to strike them with. He calculated that it would take his uncle an hour or more to climb the slopes over which the birds had gathered. His father, if he took the jeep, could move faster. He was afraid now that he would be left to come on the scene alone. The grim, silent, hungry creatures, merciless in the high sky, would hardly be afraid of him. They would do what nature had taught them to do, no matter what Miquel did. He would be no match for them; all he could do was to go rapidly towards the scene over which they flew. Even to be a witness to where they landed would be better than turning now, leaving her to their beaks and claws, leaving her defenceless and helpless.

  Two more sailed through the bright air. He stood and fixed them in the binoculars, noting their size and the sheer ugliness of their colour and shape; now there were five of them. He did not know if that would be enough for the ritual of feeding which was built into their dark system, and at what point they would pounce.

  Maybe, he thought, their landing might be more ragged in its timing, lazier, less precise. In all the years, he had seen them gather in a group, but he had never seen them feed; they kept away from the villages, and they had no dealing with a healthy flock of sheep. He wished he knew more about them, how to frighten them, or how long they took at their work.

  By the time his father’s jeep came towards him, two of the vultures had landed and the others, five or six now, were lower in the sky. His father, whose face was frozen in fear and anger and full of vigorous intent, was driving with Josep Bernat in the front passenger seat and Manolo in the back seat. He barely stopped for Miquel. When he got in, he saw that Bernat had two rifles stretched across his lap. His father drove fast and relentlessly towards the birds.

  He knew about the eyes, that they pecked your eyes out first, and he supposed they had already done that; perhaps the strongest one, or the fastest, won the right. It could not take long to pull someone’s eyes out. There would be no blood, he supposed that her blood would have congealed or drained away. He supposed, too, that they would go for the soft places in her body, leaving her head and her arms and legs for last. He was desperately trying not to cry as the jeep stopped with a jerk and they got out and began to scamper as best they could down the slope.

  Some distance below there was a flat clearing, and this was where the birds had gathered. Miquel could not believe that his mother had ended here, she could not have fallen in as open a place, he thought, and, in any case, the passes which led down to Pallosa were further along. He handed his father the glasses and, when Bernat had also looked through them, he took them himself and began to study the scene. The birds had not fully settled around their prey. They were large flapping creatures, filthy-looking, hitting against each other as though they were blind. Then they fastened on a spot and began to peck, pushing one another out of the way. As his father and Bernat edged slowly forward and Manolo stayed near him, he was transfixed by the scene the binoculars magnified. The vu
ltures were feasting on piles of viscera, snatching pieces away, eating with greed and relish and then barging back in for more. He focused on one of them putting one claw down hard for leverage so it could all the better tear the flesh from her with its beak. He dropped the binoculars, crying out, and ran towards his father and Bernat with Manolo following him.

  As they grew close, the birds began to move away, but in their resentful flapping, they had left a smell in their wake. The smell was sour and horrible, he thought, but it was not the smell of rotting flesh but the stench of something living. It was the smell of foul energy, the birds themselves, their pungent odour which came, he thought, from their digesting what was rotten and dead.

  Miquel almost smiled when he saw what they had gathered around. He had been ready to witness his mother’s entrails poured out as though she were an old and abandoned animal, and he had been ready to protect her as best he could. The vultures had come all this way, he saw, not to find his mother but to peck a large dog, like a hunting dog, down to its bones. They must have had a hungry winter, he thought, as he stood back.

  As one of the vultures flew insolently over them, Miquel saw his father lift the gun. From this close range, his father fired one shot from the rifle at the bird, the one with the scaliest wings and the most rabid energy; he sent it tumbling downwards with the force of the bullet, while the other vultures flew upwards or flapped their clumsy wings and moved angrily back.

  The injured bird, lying almost upside down, began to screech, tried to rise and fell back. Suddenly, it managed to lift its head, which was raw and unbowed, utterly alive, the eyes indignant and sharp, the nostrils almost breathing fire within the vicious beak. The vulture saw them, and all its sullen hatred for them, its savage gaze, its fierce panic, caught Miquel, as though it were directed at him and him only, as though his secret spirit had been waiting all its life for such recognition. The dying bird was beyond human in its grief and its injury, screeching still in pain. Miquel did not know why he began to edge towards it, but he quickly found that Manolo was holding him from behind, preventing him moving further as his father lifted the gun again. Miquel leaned backwards towards Manolo, seeking the warmth of him, looking for some grim comfort as the next shot rang out. Manolo held him hard to make sure that he did not move any closer to the dying bird and the carcass, half torn asunder now, no use to anyone.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I wish to acknowledge the following publications where some of these stories, often in earlier versions, first appeared: the Guardian (‘A Song’ and ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’); the London Review of Books (‘A Priest in the Family’); Finbar’s Hotel (‘The Use of Reason’); the Dublin Review (‘The Name of the Game’); In Dublin (‘A Journey’); The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories (‘Three Friends’). ‘A Long Winter’ was first published in a limited edition by the Tuskar Rock Press.

  The title of the story ‘A Priest in the Family’ comes from a definition of Irish respectability: ‘A well in the yard; a bull in the field; and a priest in the family.’

  I am grateful to Angela Rohan for her careful work on the manuscript; to my agent Peter Straus; to my editors Andrew Kidd at Picador in London and Nan Graham at Scribner in New York; to Catriona Crowe, John S. Doyle, Jordi Casellas and Edward Mulhall.

  Some of this book was written at the Santa Maddalena Foundation outside Florence in Italy. I wish to thank Beatrice Monti for her kind hospitality there.

  Colm Tóibín is the author of five internationally acclaimed novels: The South, winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literature Prize; The Heather Blazing, winner of the Encore Award for best second novel; The Story of the Night; The Blackwater Lightship, a finalist for the Booker Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and, most recently, The Master, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Le prix du meilleur livre étranger, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. It was also selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of the year. Mothers and Sons is Tóibín’s first collection of short fiction.

  His non-fiction includes Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border; Homage to Barcelona; The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe; and, most recently, Love in a Dark Time. He is also the co-author, with Carmen Callil, of The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950.

  Colm Tóibín lives in Dublin, Ireland.