Bowl of Fruit

by Panayotis Cacoyannis

  ‘No.’

  ‘And where was Mary when your mother introduced him to Beatriz?’

  ‘Resting.’

  ‘Resting?’

  ‘She needed taking care of. Somewhere safe. My father found a place for her, through his colleagues at the hospital.’

  ‘You mean she was drinking too much, and they had her locked up so that my father could flirt with Beatriz.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. She had a breakdown, which I don’t think was her first. And nothing was supposed to happen with Beatriz.’

  ‘But it did.’

  ‘She and your father talked a lot about books, and I think they slept together maybe two or three times, just because the opportunity was there. Beatriz ended it almost as soon as it started. And then she found out she was pregnant. But she didn’t tell your father straight away that the baby was his. My parents knew all along, but your father didn’t know until a month or two before you were born. Beatriz wanted to raise you by herself. She wasn’t in love, and she didn’t want your father to feel trapped, or Mary to get hurt unnecessarily. And if the situation in Chile got worse, she planned to leave, to take you and raise you somewhere safer until she could go back. It was my mother who convinced her that your father had a right to be told, and when she explained why she hadn’t told him earlier, your father didn’t argue. He visited Beatriz as often as he could after that, and Beatriz was always happy to see him. Your father never really talked about those days, but I think that in the end Beatriz understood that she couldn’t really expect him not to care about the future of his child, and that he had to be included in it somehow. But then it was too late, and if you hadn’t been born very early in the morning… They knew where to find her because someone must’ve told them, and they took her away the same day. She’d had to beg my father to separate you, he thought they wouldn’t harm her if they found her with a baby, but she yelled at him that he was just being naïve. And when they came for her you were with me.’

  ‘I was with you and my father wasn’t there.’

  ‘Your father was there the night before, a few hours before you were born. Then the fighting broke out, and it wouldn’t have been possible to move. But the hospital wasn’t safe, so as soon as he could my father took us home. And from there he walked straight to your father’s house, to tell him what’d happened in person.’

  ‘And then my father told Mary.’

  ‘But he didn’t tell Mary you were his. He just told her what’d happened to Beatriz, and as soon as Mary saw you she asked if it was possible to adopt you. Everything was chaos in those days, but it was easier for my father to fake papers than to try and arrange an adoption, and that’s why on your birth certificate the place of your birth is Santiago, and your parents are your father and Mary. No one questioned it, the paperwork went through, and as soon as you were able to fly, the three of you left. My father didn’t want to leave the hospital, but things were getting worse by the day, and for my mother’s sake and mine we left Chile not much later than you.’

  ‘My mother died on the day I was born,’ I say.

  ‘We can’t be sure what happened exactly,’ says Anna.

  ‘That’s probably the best we can imagine,’ I say.

  ‘Try not to imagine at all,’ says Anna.

  ‘Why didn’t they tell me?’

  ‘Mary wanted to pretend you were hers. She didn’t even want to see my parents any more, because they knew the truth. And as your father really was your father, I don’t suppose he wanted to pretend that he wasn’t, so in the end the half lie became the whole truth.’

  ‘But then I grew up and I looked like my father.’

  ‘And your father owned up to whatever it was that he’d had with Beatriz. His life became hell, and he started seeing my parents behind Mary’s back. Both of them at first, then later just my mother.’

  ‘Happy days,’ I say.

  ‘I’m starving and it’s freezing,’ says Anna very matter-of-factly. ‘Let’s go eat.’

  ‘Somewhere quiet,’ I say.

  ‘Not the Sprinkle of Rocket,’ says Anna.

  ‘Wait,’ I say, as she gathers up her things. ‘I’d like to see my mother’s photograph first.’

  ‘I’ve actually got a couple,’ says Anna.

  Knowledge

  Knowledge is power? Knowledge is pain.

  “My mother” may have begun long ago as a notion - an “other” reality that I had conjured entirely in negative form, so I could draw from it the temporary succour of a passing thought – but it had never amounted to anything more than the sands of an intangible and shifting opposition to Mary. Today the notion has been taking concrete form, and when I held in my hands the black-and-white physical proof, it constituted the reverse of consolation. By frozen increments of moisture, icy shards encapsulate its leaves to weigh upon a tree, and I feel the same burden of icicle daggers that grow from within - and that at any moment might invert and puncture the centre of being.

  Her name was Beatriz, and her history ended on the day mine began, prematurely in murderous torture and death. Try not to imagine at all, Anna said, but imagine is all I can do. Her name was Beatriz, and she belongs to the long-ago past. Should I now compound my impotence by contenting myself with pedantic recourse to the length of the distance between us, or with platitudes as glossy as the gloss of photographs so obscenely well preserved after more than forty years?

  ‘She smiles just like you do,’ Anna says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘you’re right, she does.’

  But the truth is that she doesn’t smile at all any more.

  ‘She’s really beautiful, isn’t she?’

  ‘She is,’ I say.

  But the truth is that she’s beautiful in vain.

  ‘You look so much like her, you know. And here she’s with my mother, about the same time.’

  ‘They look like sisters,’ I say.

  ‘And neither of them has our eyebrows.’

  ‘But they both had affairs with my father.’

  ‘Your ears are on fire,’ says Anna. ‘You’re blushing.’

  ‘I’ve also got goose-bumps,’ I say.

  ‘I get them every time I look at these pictures,’ says Anna.

  ‘I’ve been getting them all day, one way or another.’

  Anna lays the photographs down side by side, and the pale light that reaches our table from the excess over the entrance combines with the yellow brush of brightness that trickles from the streetlamps to illuminate these commonplace scenes from before we were born. How they shine, aglow in semi-darkness. Anna cuddles up to me and puts one arm over my shoulder, and as we take in the past together, I realize that History binds us.

  ‘Look how happy they are,’ says Anna. ‘Two young girls without a care in the world, just eager to live.’

  But the truth is that one of them...

  ‘And for many years after this picture was taken they did. They both did,’ says Anna, as though reading and then countering my thoughts. ‘Your mother died for what she believed in. Imagine how she must’ve lived her life, to be brave enough to do that.’

  ‘“Try not to imagine,” you said.’

  ‘There are some things you don’t need to imagine at all,’ says Anna. ‘Because there isn’t any doubt that they’re true.’

  If Beatriz were alive… If my mother were alive… A constriction prevents me from easily making a choice. Then I should call her Bea - if my father was permitted to, then so should her son. But is that the bare bones of my claim - what I may or may not be entitled (or able) to call her? No. My entitlement is to the truth of my mantra: no sooner was I born than Bea’s motherhood ended, and although I was estranged from her at almost precisely that moment, my mother’s last act was to save me.

  I ask myself ridiculous questions: if Bea were alive, would I travel to Chile to meet her? If Bea were alive she would be Beatriz. And what if the reverse were the case? Had Beatriz requested to see me, would I ever have agreed? But every
hypothesis is flawed, since in none would Beatriz be the same Beatriz that Anna has brought with her today. If Anna had brought news of a different Beatriz, who had not been so unquestionably exonerated by her death, then our history would have been different, the claims and counterclaims much more recognizably human, and the photographs would have entirely lacked luminescence. And yet I still can’t say for certain what might have happened.

  Knowledge is so often an absence.

  ‘Before we go,’ I say, ‘there’s one last thing.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ says Anna.

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘Your mother called you Angel,’ says Anna.

  ‘Angel?’

  ‘It’s pronounced “Anchel” in Spanish. The “ch” has to come from the throat.”

  ‘Ch,’ I say from the throat. ‘Anchel.’

  ‘That’s very good,’ says Anna. ‘Obviously you have it in your genes.’

  ‘But it still means angel, right?’

  ‘It does, yes.’

  ‘Was my mother religious?’

  ‘Not at all,’ says Anna. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Which one, the English version or the Spanish?’

  ‘The English would be easier,’ says Anna. ‘Unless of course we happen to be in Chile.’

  I’m suddenly Angel, it’s suddenly “we”, and we suddenly might happen to be in Chile.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I say. ‘Maybe Angel should belong just to Bea.’

  9

  Short Story

  Paella

  Building on the Spanish theme, Anna has suggested paella, musically instructing me how to pronounce it correctly, and once again I apparently prove myself exceptionally adept.

  Los Hijos, which according to my new Spanish teacher could mean either The Sons or The Children, is at the back of Parkway towards Regents Park, a cavernous underground space decorated atmospherically with vivid wall-to-wall paintings depicting bullfights and flamenco dancing, rather clichéd subject matters for a Spanish restaurant perhaps, but somehow authentic nonetheless, executed with great skill and panache.

  It took us less than half an hour to walk here at a leisurely pace from Tufnell Park. Sunday nights, even when they are just beginning, have a peculiar winding-down feeling about them, an aftertaste of melancholia that perfectly exemplifies the slow-fast equivocal nature of Time. But even as that onset of refreshed disillusion settled about us in its customary way, it somehow left us untouched, and as we undulated freely through the scatterings of people in the street, I was filled with an illimitable awe that did not correspond to the smallness I had always ascribed to myself, and that suddenly like every other smallness laid its equal incommensurate claim to the vastness beyond. Perhaps it’s just uncommon to fall in love on Sundays.

  ‘You like it here?’ Anna asks when we have settled at our candle-lit table for dos.

  Exhilarated by our walk, I would have been as happy, or almost as happy, with the fast food on offer next door.

  ‘I love it,’ I say.

  The disordered arrangement of the tables and its low-ceilinged curvature give Los Hijos an air of subterranean illicitness palpable with intimate presumption. Love songs wail away in the background in a doleful drone, the powerful female voice as though goading us forlornly to yield to an unspeakable fate.

  ‘And I really like the paintings,’ I say.

  ‘They’re a little bit garish,’ says Anna, ‘but somehow they do make the place feel homely.’

  ‘Homely? The place is charged with danger,’ I say. ‘That haunted voice is warning us.’

  Anna laughs.

  ‘But at least not too loudly,’ she says.

  ‘Just sadly,’ I say.

  ‘There’s a special kind of sadness that cheers you up,’ Anna answers mysteriously. And then turning to the open menu in front of her, ‘Paella takes a while to prepare, so I think while we wait…’

  ‘No more olives,’ I say.

  ‘Do you mind spicy?’

  ‘I like spicy,’ I say, and when the waiter comes back Anna orders seafood paella for two, a bottle of the house white wine, and patatas bravas to share while we wait.

  ‘Forty, forty-five minutes for paella,’ the waiter informs us gruffly. ‘You like some olives?’

  ‘My friend is allergic to olives,’ Anna tells him with an impolite smile. And when he turns on his heels and strides off, ‘Oh dear,’ she says.

  ‘I think we have another Federico on our hands,’ I say.

  ‘Federico was nice.’

  ‘He wasn’t nice from the beginning.’

  ‘So we should give this guy a chance,’ says Anna.

  ‘A chance to spoil our dinner,’ I say. ‘Let’s just leave him be.’

  ‘And let’s embrace the danger,’ says Anna. ‘The haunted voice is telling us we must.’

  ‘Then we must listen to the haunted voice,’ I say.

  Bea is still fresh on my mind, and every sensory prod, however unrelated, seems to want to return me to her. I have never been particularly musical – in my ignorant eclecticism I may often have enjoyed it as background, but music somehow never aroused me – it failed to get under my skin. All this is occurring to me now for the first time. As I heed my own jocular instruction irresistibly, and I do listen to the haunted voice, only then do I know in retrospect, and solely by the chasm of the contrast, that I have not really listened to music before. But now it pervades me, and twisting like an expert acupuncturist the point of every needle that has pricked me with numbness, it brings back to life dot by dot a boy I can barely remember. And when the music swirls in its triumphant final dirge, the heartbroken crackle in the voice reveals to me what lies at the root of my boyhood, and what lies at the root of my boyhood is Bea.

  There is a silence, and then the music changes abruptly. The tempo is faster now, more cheerful, and the masculine voice doesn’t brood. The time for sadness has passed, it seems to be saying, and we must literally shake it off, by vigorous physical movement. But the only physical movement I’m capable of is the little it takes to burst into tears, and as the voice goes rousingly off pitch, I begin to sob uncontrollably.

  When Anna finds my hands I withdraw them, not roughly but gently, as if merely to safeguard my moment of absence – in a visceral way I am acknowledging a loss that nearly preceded and almost eluded me, and that now I am suffused with entirely. Bea will only subside by melding with me, so she can be with me always and everywhere. But still I can’t help asking myself: how could my father not have told me this before?

  I wipe my face dry with a handkerchief, but when I smile at Anna she smiles back inconsolably, and I know she blames herself for my sadness.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘I know what you mean now.’

  Anna looks at a loss, and the corners of her mouth pinch unsteadily, as though readying themselves for her turn to burst into tears.

  ‘Remember what you said? That there’s a special kind of sadness that cheers you up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I know what you mean now.’

  When I find Anna’s hands she doesn’t withdraw them.

  The sins of the father

  ‘But I do have a grudge against my father,’ I say.

  ‘A grudge?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what else to call it.’

  ‘Today hasn’t been easy,’ says Anna.

  ‘There’s nothing I regret about today. What I regret isn’t that you told me, it’s that you told me what my father should’ve told me. But how can I regret what was never up to me?’

  ‘So instead of regret you have a grudge, which your father can’t answer.’

  ‘I can’t think of a good enough reason why he couldn’t have told me, can you?’

  ‘That’s an unfair question to ask me,’ says Anna.

  ‘Why? Unfair to who?’

  ‘To your father.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I can’t put myself in his place and give you an answer.
I didn’t know him at all.’

  ‘I didn’t know him either, but that’s beside the point.’

  ‘He was a good man, you said.’

  ‘He was a liar.’

  ‘He wasn’t exactly a liar.

  ‘Hiding the truth is a lie.’

  ‘So when Mary,’ Anna begins, but then she cuts herself short.

  ‘Yes, when Mary lied I went along with it,’ I say, ‘but my father was already dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Anna, ‘I’ve no right to challenge how you feel.’

  ‘Maybe how I feel is unfair, but it’s still how I feel.’

  ‘If they were ever going to tell you, they should’ve told you about Beatriz together, your father and Mary, as soon as you were able to understand.’

  ‘But Mary didn’t want to, and my father went along with the lie.’

  ‘It was almost an impossible choice if Mary didn’t know he was really your father. And later when she did, I’m sure he was hiding the truth to protect you.’

  ‘My father was selfish and weak. And he left me with Mary.’

  ‘I just don’t think a grudge is the answer,’ says Anna. ‘And if you must bear a grudge, I think it’s fairer you should bear it against me.’

  I’m still holding Anna’s hands, but unconsciously I must have pressed them too hard, and I notice that the blood has left the tips of her fingers completely.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, flattening her hands against the table and rubbing them softly. ‘Was I hurting you?’

  Anna smiles that same inconsolable smile, as if to chide me for the irony I hadn’t intended. Whatever reassurance I had managed to give her, I have since taken back, and now I must try to return it, but this time without any strings. Anna isn’t to blame for my anger any more than she’s to blame for my sadness.

  ‘But I’m not just the messenger,’ she says, as if to forestall her defence. ‘It was my choice to call you.’

  ‘And it was my choice to meet you. Look at me, Anna. How many times do I need to say that I don’t regret it, that actually it’s the best thing that’s happened to me ever.’