The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman

by Mamen Sánchez

  At last she heard the sound of scraping metal—oh, he was so clumsy!—and then the lock clicked, the door opened, and a warm darkness seeped out, carrying with it the smell of the tourists’ cigarettes, spilled wine, the spoils of the night before.

  “Soleá,” said Atticus, surprised, his hair messed up, wearing only his undershirt and Ralph Lauren boxers.

  “Granny Remedios is dying,” she blurted out. “She’s asked for you, she wants you to go there, she’s got a secret she wants to tell you before she dies.”

  Atticus Craftsman’s reaction to that news was far from the cold response Soleá had expected. All of a sudden, he hugged her as if she was a life raft, crying inconsolably like a child, his tears soaking her hair. She was the granddaughter, the one who should have been in pieces, but instead she remained calm, stunned to find the man she secretly loved in her arms, unsure what to do or say in the face of such an outpouring.

  “Your hands are freezing, míster,” she managed to whisper. “Put something on or you’ll catch cold.”

  But because he carried on hugging her like a big brown bear and she didn’t really know what to do with her arms, which were hanging down by her sides, she decided to hug him back, but more in the way you hug a small boy than a boyfriend: with a touch of compassion and pity. Softly, to see if he would calm down so the two of them could set off down to the Heredias’ house, where Remedios was waiting for them in perfect health, anxious to cast the spell that she planned to use to sort out her granddaughter’s messy love life.

  In fact, there was no need for the grandmother, or anyone else, for that matter, to intervene in this story of deception and disillusion. All they needed was for Soleá, there at the top of the hill, under the lintel of the cave door, to confess to Atticus Craftsman that she was crazy about him, despite being terrified by his English education, his addiction to Twinings Earl Grey, his vegetarianism, his slight limp that was a constant reminder of that fateful day on the Thames, his fierce father and his uptight mother, his aristocratic, antiquated, and cold Englishness, and his freezing-cold fingers, which that day at the beach had crawled over her back, her waist, and her belly button before coming to rest on the curve of her stomach.

  “Come on, Míster Crasman, Granny Remedios is dying to see you.”

  Atticus dried his face on the blond hairs of his forearm. He sniffed, ducked his head, and went into the cave. A couple of minutes later he emerged wearing a black shirt, black trousers, and a black belt, carrying a black umbrella, which he used to protect Soleá from the rain that was still falling on her wet hair.

  If it wasn’t for his wheat-colored hair and the white skin of his neck and hands, anyone would have taken him for a true Gypsy. Because that was what Atticus Craftsman was becoming: He was becoming Tico from Dolores’s cave, the guy who played the guitar with all his heart and sang the saddest soleás in all of El Albaicín.

  And so, slowly but surely, under the December rain, the two of them made their way to the Heredias’ house and went into the living room where the family was keeping watch over Remedios night and day so she wouldn’t be alone when God came for her.

  “Granny,” said Atticus.

  “Tico, my boy,” she replied from her deathbed. “Come close to me, here. And the rest of you, get out,” she ordered, echoing the words of Lola Flores: “If you love me, get out.”

  The grandchildren, nephews, and nieces went off to eat bread rolls drizzled with olive oil and drink coffee. They left Remedios, Atticus, and Soleá alone, telling one another old secrets.

  “Tell me, Tico,” began Remedios, “let’s see, why did you come to Granada?”

  Atticus squirmed in his seat.

  “I came to buy some poems,” he confessed. “Because I thought you were different, Granny, I thought you had some unpublished papers belonging to Federico García Lorca hidden in the attic and you were too ashamed to let anyone see them.”

  “Ashamed of what, Tico?”

  Now it was Soleá’s turn to squirm in her seat. She clearly remembered the morning at Librarte when she almost beat Atticus Craftsman to death for having insinuated that her grandfather might have been homosexual.

  “That people might have thought your husband was . . .”

  “That García Lorca’s thing was catching?” asked the old woman, her voice full of irony. “That they were lovers? But my boy, he gave me a child before we were even married and three more after the wedding . . . How could my husband have been gay, eh?”

  “With difficulty,” he admitted.

  At no point did Atticus switch his gaze from Remedios’s friendly face to her granddaughter’s vexed expression. Soleá was praying the earth would swallow her up.

  “The thing is,” Remedios went on, “we needed a reason to bring you to Granada. That’s why we spun that yarn about the poems. Then we fell in love with you and didn’t want you to leave. So we kept stringing you along.”

  Soleá felt as if she was suffocating. Apparently, her grandmother had just declared her love on her behalf. She had said, “We fell in love with you,” and nodded toward Soleá as she said it.

  “But this time I was the one who lied to you,” Remedios confessed. “Because I was scared that my Soleá would go back to Madrid and you’d go back to England, and the two of you would go your separate ways. So I got into bed and told everyone I was dying.”

  “You’re not dying, Granny?”

  “No way, niño! I’m in better shape than you are.”

  She couldn’t help letting out a little laugh as she said this last bit. Atticus leaped forward to kiss her wrinkled hands.

  “But you scared me to death, Remedios! I believed every word!”

  “I’m truly sorry, sweetie,” she replied, flattered. “I didn’t know you cared about me so much.”

  Salty streaks left by the tears he had shed were still visible on the Englishman’s face, and his hands were still and cold as blocks of ice.

  “But I can see that you really do care,” she went on. “And I think you’re the right person to trust with my secret. The part about me having a secret is true, and I don’t want to take it to the grave with me.”

  “Granny,” Soleá protested from the foot of the bed, “don’t keep tricking Míster Crasman. We’ve pulled enough wool over his eyes already.”

  “Shut up and listen, you!” said Remedios. “This secret concerns you too, the color of your eyes and the tone of your skin.”

  Soleá looked fearfully at Atticus, and he returned a look full of curiosity. Soleá’s eyes were two blue beacons; her skin was the color of sand, and although she was tanned she was much fairer than her sisters and neighbors.

  “You see, Soleá, you take after your great-grandfather. That’s why you’re so blond.”

  “Blond” wasn’t exactly the word that Atticus would have used to describe the woman who had him under her spell. He would have said exotic, mestiza, mixed race. Dark hair and blue eyes, with tanned skin that looked peachy at times. But it was true. Compared to other women around her it was possible to describe her as blond. A different kind of blond from the Scandinavian variety, of course, a Sierra Nevada blond, which is something else entirely.

  “Because you see, Tico, my boy,” said Remedios from among the bedclothes, “it turns out that my mother, when she married my father, was pregnant by another man. Only my father knew that. He’d loved her since he was a boy and cried when she went to serve in a big house in Granada because he thought the masters of the house would steal her. ‘Don’t go, Macarena, don’t go, if you go I’ll lose you,’ he said, but she went. She was a real handful, that Macarena, no one was going to tell her what to do. She went, she worked, and one day a friend of her employer’s son arrived, a young English guy who can’t have been much older than twenty and was already messed up because he’d fought in some war or other and was traumatized by what he’d seen. He used to scream at night and wake up bathed in sweat and tears. And my Macarena, God rest her soul, well, she let him conv
ince her to sleep beside him, because he was scared, he said, of the ghosts of all those dead soldiers. So she slept with him and cured him of his demons and then, when she found out she was pregnant, she didn’t tell anyone, only my father. She went back to Camino del Monte, had her white wedding, went to live in Dolores’s cave, which before that was called Macarena’s cave, and my father gave her fourteen children, fifteen in total.”

  “So, Granny,” said Soleá, “are you saying that my great-grandfather was English?”

  “Yes. English. But not English from England, English from America. And he became really famous, that great-grandfather of yours.”

  “Famous?”

  “Well, that’s the whole point, you see,” she went on. “Why would I be telling you all this if he hadn’t got so famous. No one else knows about it, and until I met Tico I was ready to take the story to the grave with me.”

  Atticus sat in stunned silence. From the date, from the man’s description and the location, he was sure he knew who Remedios was referring to.

  “You already know who I’m talking about,” she guessed.

  “Hemingway.”

  “The very same.”

  Just then, someone knocked at the door. Manuela, who was in the kitchen, rushed through the living room to answer it. She mumbled a good morning to the three of them, then turned the handle to let in whoever had come to pay their respects to the dying woman.

  When she came back, she was as white as a ghost.

  “Soleá, your boss, Berta, is at the door, and your friend María, with an English couple and a man who looks sort of like a police officer. Have you done something wrong, love?”

  CHAPTER 48

  Fate chose the worst possible moment for Soleá Abad Heredia to meet Moira Craftsman, her future mother-in-law, for the first time. Maybe that’s why it was so hard to break the arctic ice that lay between them for years, despite poor Atticus’s efforts to bring the two very different women together. From the moment they met, the hatchet was out and was buried only on the blessed day that the twins Tom and Huckleberry came into the world; one fair, one dark. Their maternal grandmother inexplicably nicknamed them Zipi and Zape, which seriously disconcerted the Craftsmans, who had never heard of that Ibáñez chap and had no interest in broadening their knowledge of Spanish humor or its great masters. “My grandsons,” said Marlow, “will bear the names of protagonists from great novels, following a Craftsman family tradition that has existed since time immemorial, not some vulgar comic-strip character.” “By Jove!” added Atticus, provoking an outburst of laughter from Manuela, Remedios, Consuelos, and the seventeen cousins who had gone to visit the hospital in Granada to keep Soleá company while she was in labor.

  The day they met, Soleá’s hair was wet, her skirt was covered in mud, her eyes were full of tears, and she was sitting at the foot of an old, toothless, and disheveled dying woman’s bed, and the old woman was inexplicably clutching Atticus’s hands.

  Of course, because the only light in the room was a dim glow from the fire, it was too dark for Moira to see that the young Gypsy with long blond hair was in fact her missing son. It was Atticus who recognized his parents, despite how awful his mother looked: pale, having just thrown up, and wrapped in a dirty coat that was too big for her.

  “Mother! Father!” he exclaimed, jumping up from his seat next to the bed.

  “Atticus?”

  Moira Craftsman fainted. She froze on the spot, started trembling, and then keeled over so the full length of her slim body slammed onto the floor, and she hit her nose on the terra-cotta tiles.

  “Tell Consuelos to get down here!” shouted Remedios from her bed, remembering her younger sister’s therapeutic powers and forgetting, meanwhile, that the Andalusian regional council had recently opened a state-of-the-art medical center only three blocks from the house, where they dealt with all sorts of emergencies.

  Consuelos came running down from where she had been sleeping in one of the rooms upstairs and hurled herself to the floor, wrapping her arms and legs around Moira as if she were saving her from drowning and had to swim her to shore.

  Marlow Craftsman couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the old woman’s unconventional approach, much less the behavior of his son who, instead of prying the woman away from his mother’s body, was trying to hold everyone else back so they wouldn’t intervene in the rescue.

  The madness was over in next to no time. As soon as Moira’s heartbeat had matched the rhythm of Consuelos’s, Manuela brought a damp cloth from the kitchen and cleaned the blood from the nose of her daughter’s future mother-in-law, and then between them all they settled her into the bed recently vacated by Remedios who, to the great surprise of her daughter and sister, had jumped up and was now standing to one side in her crumpled nightgown.

  Consuelos had to lie next to Moira, because every time the Englishwoman opened her eyes she had a fit and fainted again. Soleá moved to one side, protected by her mother and grandmother; Atticus and Marlow stationed themselves at the head of the bed; and Berta, María, and Inspector Manchego stood at the foot. They all remained deep in silence until the seventeen cousins came back from Manolo’s Bar.

  In the semidarkness, it was easy to confuse one person with another: the unwell woman with Remedios, the Englishmen with priests, the strangers with distant relatives.

  “Oh, oh, my dear Remedios has left us!” cried one of the aunts from Antequera at the top of her voice.

  “Oh, my dear, sweet Remedios!” shouted six or seven cousins in unison.

  Marlow Craftsman, with the sole intention of setting things straight, took a step forward and tried to explain that the woman wasn’t their Remedios, it was his Moira from Kent, and that she wasn’t dead, she had simply fainted.

  Because none of them understood what he was saying, and before Berta had time to translate, there was a growing murmur of voices complaining about the church, the clergy, and the habit they had of coming into someone’s house as if it was their own, get away from my aunt, you idiot, I want to give her a last kiss.

  The lack of respect toward his father implied by the word “idiot” unleashed in Atticus the same rage that had ripped through Soleá that day in the Librarte office when he called her dead grandfather gay. Marlow, in shock, watched the transformation of his son into a wild beast: Atticus’s body grew rigid, his fists clenched, his eyes closed to a squint, his voice became hoarse, he turned the air blue.

  “I shit on all your ancestors!” shouted Atticus. “Every last one of them! Tico from Dolores’s cave won’t stand for anyone insulting his father, by Jove!”

  Atticus, with his shirt open to his navel, launched himself at the cousin from Antequera, pushed his chest at his, and both of them rolled on the terra-cotta floor, to the astonishment of everyone around.

  Suddenly, they heard a gunshot, and plaster dust rained down on the terrified Marlow. All eyes turned to the corner, where a big man dressed like a sheep farmer had just fired at the ceiling with a gun that was straight out of a gangster movie.

  “Are you crazy?” Soleá exclaimed. “The kids are sleeping upstairs, and that bullet could go through the ceiling and kill one of them!”

  These wise words were enough to make most of the rabble rush noisily upstairs. They were led by Manuela, shouting like a madwoman, with Remedios bringing up the rear in her nightgown and between them the Heredia cousins, aunts, and uncles, Berta, María, and Consuelos, who had managed to jump out of bed as soon as the silence was broken.

  Upstairs it was all shouts and screams; they counted the children and found that the number of kids sleeping peacefully was the same number as had been put to bed the night before. All safe and sound, thank God. They stomped back down, thirty of them in total, children and adults, Gypsies and payos, friends and strangers, and all surrounded Moira Craftsman’s bed, some of them shocked to find an Englishwoman in Remedios’s place.

  “Would you look at that, I’m cured!” shouted Remedios from halfway down the sta
irs. “Everyone can go home and Manuela will let you all know about the wedding.”

  “Who’s getting married, Granny?” asked one of Soleá’s sisters in amazement.

  “Who do you think? Your sister and Tico, for God’s sake.”

  Moira Craftsman, who had managed to stay conscious for a couple of minutes, fainted heavily again. And she hadn’t even understood what Remedios had said. It was enough for her to see the huge smile on Atticus’s face and the blush on Soleá’s to understand that the dark-skinned woman with witch’s eyes, wide lips, toasted skin, and curly hair was—unless Freud stepped in—in all likelihood the mother of her future grandchildren.

  This time she had fallen so deeply unconscious that they decided to rush her to the health center that the Andalusian regional council had opened three streets from the house, to see if modern medicine was capable of reviving her.

  CHAPTER 49

  Granada had never shined so much as on that sunny afternoon after the rain: The orange trees were a glistening green, the geraniums were overflowing like whole forests, and a fresh dusting of snow lay on the mountain peaks like icing on cakes.

  Atticus and Soleá went up to the San Miguel lookout point from where they could see the Alhambra, Granada’s second sun, waking up, stretching, shaking itself out, and glowing.

  As they gazed at that magical scene, Soleá learned that Atticus had the warmest heart in all of England. His hands were still freezing, the poor thing, but the blood that rushed through his body was boiling hot. Everything about him was scalding hot: his kisses, the passion of his words, his downy blond skin, and his eyes, if he opened them, or if not, his eyelids.

  If it was a single kiss, it was the longest in history. If there were several kisses, Soleá didn’t know where one ended and another began; they were all like water from the same stream. Kisses that destroyed bridges, waterlogged crops, swept livestock away, and flooded houses. Mud up to knee level, the dog on the roof, rescue helicopters, and fallen trees.