Mothers and Sons

by Colm Toibin

  The weather grew worse; fresh snow fell and there were two days and nights of wind which blew the surface snow into the air and whirled it about as though it were dust. Miquel’s father disappeared to Bernat’s barn as soon as he and Miquel had taken care of the animals. He returned for lunch and then left again. His new work seemed to make him happy; he was full of jokes and good cheer as soon as he sat down at the table.

  In the days when Miquel could not work outside because of the weather, he remained in the kitchen, and tried to talk to Manolo about where he had learned to cook, and how he was feeding the hens, but the replies were merely polite and restrained. It was clear that Manolo did not want to talk. He worked quietly, moving about the house, his expression solemn, dutiful. Slowly, under his care, they began to have eggs from the hens again and the rabbits began to thrive. Despite their invitation, he did not eat with them, but ate standing at the stove, usually beginning when they had finished. And despite Miquel’s telling him that he did not need to do so, he placed his shoes and socks outside the bedroom door each night before he turned off the light. He made sure that Clua was fed, but several times Miquel noticed him stopping the dog following him or jumping up on him affectionately.

  Miquel’s father joked with Manolo that he would make a great wife for a man; all Manolo would need was a skirt, his father said, and he could travel to all the festas in the summer and by the autumn he would be walking down the aisle. Manolo never smiled when this, or one of the many varieties of it, was said, but continued whatever he was doing. Slowly, it became one of Miquel’s father’s constant themes.

  ‘Oh, we’ll have to get a skirt for you,’ he would say. ‘You’re the best housewife in the whole country. Better than any young girl of your age. You know, I think they might have sent us a girl. Maybe you’re only pretending to be a boy.’

  One day, when these comments had been made more than once in the course of a meal and had begun to sound like taunts, Manolo approached the table and stood in front of Miquel’s father.

  ‘If you say that again, I will leave.’

  His father pushed his chair back and gazed up at Manolo, who had grown much paler than usual.

  ‘I didn’t mean …’ his father began.

  ‘I know what you meant,’ Manolo said. ‘And if you say it again, I will leave.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

  ‘Don’t say it again, then.’

  ‘You’ve become very cheeky, haven’t you?’ Miquel’s father said.

  Manolo returned to the stove and kept his back to them. Miquel watched his father battling with his own face, trying to find a way to make a joke of this, and realizing, it seemed to Miquel, that Manolo had left him no opening.

  ‘Are you not happy here?’ his father asked Manolo, who did not turn or speak.

  ‘I’m asking you a question,’ his father said.

  ‘Stop saying I’m a girl,’ Manolo said without turning.

  ‘I never actually said you were a girl. When did I say you were a girl? When did I actually say that?’ his father said.

  Manolo did not respond.

  ‘Are you deaf?’ his father asked. ‘When did I say you were a girl?’

  Miquel could see Manolo’s shoulders hunching as though he were going to cry. His own feeling of powerlessness, his not finding a way to intervene, brought back to him the scene on the day before his mother had left. As his father stood up, he realized that he could not allow this cruel version of the earlier event to continue.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ he said to his father, ‘and sit down!’

  His father, he knew, would have no idea how to behave now. Miquel had been on the point of adding that his father had already caused enough trouble in the house, but was happy that he had restrained himself. His father stood with his eyes on the floor as Manolo crossed the room and gathered plates as though nothing had happened. Miquel did not move and made sure that his father could not even hear his breathing. He tried to do nothing. In the end, having heaved a long sigh, his father left the kitchen and returned to his work at Bernat’s. Miquel smiled at Manolo when he returned to the table. The smile Manolo managed in return was all the more powerful for being half-hidden and quick to disappear.

  For the first time that night Manolo spoke to Miquel in the bedroom. Having left his shoes and socks outside the door, he turned off the light and crossed the room and got into bed.

  ‘The winds won’t keep up like this,’ he said.

  ‘It’s getting worse every day,’ Miquel replied.

  ‘You often cry in the night,’ Manolo said. ‘It’s not loud or anything, but I hear you sometimes.’

  ‘I didn’t know I did that,’ Miquel said.

  ‘Do you have bad dreams?’ Manolo asked him.

  ‘Not really. I often dream that my brother is here and we are much younger.’

  ‘You don’t shout, but you cry, never for long,’ Manolo said.

  ‘I will try to keep quiet.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  They began to talk about Miquel’s mother’s disappearance and how she might be found. Manolo kept his voice low and seemed to consider everything very carefully. Miquel told him that Jordi did not know anything about her disappearance. They had received a letter from him, saying he was in Valladolid, to which his father had replied saying there was no news. When Manolo did not respond to this, Miquel knew that he was not asleep but weighing up what he had just been told.

  ‘Your father is wrong,’ he said eventually.

  ‘I know,’ Miquel said, ‘but I can’t write to Jordi myself telling him. It’s not my job. How could I tell him in a letter what has happened?’

  Manolo said nothing; by the quality of his silence Miquel could see that he had made a clear judgement. They lay there saying nothing until Miquel knew that Manolo had fallen asleep.

  He himself slept for a while, and then was woken by the wind. It felt, in its fierce whistling menace, that it was preparing to lift the house from its foundations or blow the roof off, or cut through the windows and swirl frantically into each room, dragging sleepers from their beds in its wake. He listened to its howling and the flat rhythm of Manolo’s breathing and knew that he would not sleep. Soon, one of the barn doors began to bang; he knew from the sound which one it was, and he knew that he should have put stones against it earlier to secure it in place. He found his clothes in the dark and went downstairs to dress so that he would not disturb Manolo. His boots were in the hall.

  It was snowing again, the flakes were being whipped in every direction by the wind. He held his hand over his eyes to stop the wind blinding him. His torch was useless. He made his way down slowly, moving over the packed ice on which a covering of fresh snow had formed. The door was still banging. He found the stones he had used before and put them in place, holding the door firmly shut, and then he made his way back to the house.

  6

  THE SUN SHONE during the days that followed, but the wind still blew. Miquel resumed his old route, to Santa Magdalena without any difficulty, and then trying to walk along the military road where snow was banked up in all its new contours. On one of those days as he went back towards the village, with about half an hour left to go, he saw Manolo coming towards him, he had brought him some bread and ham and some biscuits. Miquel was surprised at how changed he was for the rest of the journey, how light he was, and happy that Manolo had thought of meeting him. The next day, as he was setting off, he asked Manolo if he would come again to meet him and Manolo said he would. He was already planning to do so, he said. Miquel found that this picture of Manolo standing by the stove saying these words stayed with him more as he walked than any thoughts about his father or Jordi, or where his mother’s body might be discovered.

  His father was making money from his work with Bernat and all the talk now was of expanding the stone-cutting business. He began to pay Manolo a small sum of money every week and this seemed to make him more cheerful during the time he spent in the ki
tchen while making no obvious difference to Manolo. On a Saturday night, when Manolo had been a month in the house, Miquel’s father announced that it was bath night. His family, he told Manolo, differed from every other family in the village, as indeed from the beasts in the fields, because they regularly took a bath, usually once every two weeks, but because of what had occurred in the house, they had neglected performing their proper ablutions, a matter he now wished to rectify.

  His father showed Manolo where the bright tin bath with the long back was kept, and together they carried it into the kitchen. He explained that Manolo’s job was to fill the large pot and two of the saucepans with water and bring them to the boil, and mix this water with cold water. That would be enough for his bath. Then Manolo was to put more water on to boil, he said, and when the first bath had been taken, some of the water could be removed and replaced by more clean hot water for Miquel and later for Manolo. Then finally, his father explained, amusing himself, it seemed, greatly as he spoke, the water could be thrown out for the dog to drink. And each of them would also need clean clothes and underclothes, he added, to change into once the bathing was over.

  Miquel was surprised that his father saw fit to include Manolo in the bath. Before, he and Jordi had boiled the water and changed the water, while their mother had remained out of the room. Finally, they had boiled water for her and filled a new bath for her, leaving her special soap and sponge on the chair, and a special towel, before they and their father had gone upstairs to offer her full privacy.

  Manolo put three towels on a frame in front of the roaring fire; he closed the shutters, and, as the water in the saucepans began to boil, he poured the water into the bath and then refilled the saucepans. As the big pot boiled and his father began to undress, Miquel left the room. This was what he had always done, allowing his father as much privacy as he could. It was strange, he thought, leaving Manolo in there with his naked father, ministering to him, but Manolo, he knew, had a way of managing everything, of making sure that nothing he did was ever the cause of complaint.

  When he came back to the kitchen, his father told him that he was almost finished and presently stood up in the bath waiting for Manolo to bring him the towel. Miquel had never watched his father like this before, his long legs, much stronger-looking than he had imagined, his fleshy penis and the pouch underneath larger and more real. His father stood in the firelight drying himself as though he were on display, as Manolo fussed around him, putting a mat under his feet, putting some dry thin wood on the fire and beginning to prepare Miquel’s bath.

  When his father left the room, Miquel stripped to his shorts, tested the temperature of the water, and then he slipped off his shorts and sat into the hot bath, half clean water and half the water used by his father. Before Jordi left they had a joke together, that their father had pissed in the water, and that Miquel was going to piss too, or had just done so, and Jordi would be thus left to soak in copious quantities of the family’s urine. Jordi used to cringe, demanding a full bath of clean hot water, being told by Miquel that, since he was the youngest, that would be impossible.

  Miquel did not think that Manolo would find this funny. He washed himself as Manolo began to boil more water for his own bath. He had observed Manolo looking at him as he lowered himself into the water. Manolo hovered close to the bath as Miquel washed himself. They could hear Miquel’s father moving around in the room above. Miquel knew that he would not come back into the room until the bathing was finished.

  As he stood up in the water, Manolo came towards him with the warm towel. Miquel stood shivering facing the fire as Manolo dried his back and his neck and torso, rubbing hard and then handing him the towel so Miquel could finish drying himself.

  Manolo’s own water was hot now; he cleared out some of the old water and then poured more from the saucepans and the big pot into the bath. As Miquel sat and dressed himself, he watched Manolo strip with his back to him, not facing him until he was naked. His shoulders were much broader than Miquel had ever noticed in the bedroom, the muscles on his shoulders and back more developed, his torso and buttocks completely hairless, but his thick, short legs covered in dark hair. He moved slowly, almost gracefully, towards the bath, seeming to be utterly alert to Miquel’s eyes watching him.

  7

  SINCE HIS FATHER was now travelling every day with Josep Bernat, Miquel told Manolo that he could come earlier to meet him if he wanted, if he had time, and thus Miquel would not have to walk back all the distance on his own. He also told him to take food for himself and a bottle of water so they could both find a place in the sun and eat together. At night now, he looked forward to going to the bedroom and being alone with Manolo, talking to him for a while before they went asleep.

  On one of these days as they were walking back, examining how the snow lay in ridges and banks, they heard shots being fired from the trees up above Santa Magdalena. The shots, which came in quick succession, echoed against the far hills so that it was impossible to be sure precisely where they had come from. Miquel remembered that a jeepload of men, including Foix and Castellet, had passed him earlier on the road and he had seen their empty jeep with a trailer parked at the hermitage at Santa Magdalena itself.

  The shots seemed to disturb everything, the bird life scattered; every living thing, he knew, would have sought shelter in fright and panic. He and Manolo stopped to listen as more shots, four or five this time, rang out. Suddenly, he began to choke back tears. These men could easily be hunting in the space where his mother had died. She could easily have walked off the road just here, mistaking a blanket of whiteness for the way forward. Miquel did not want them to find her, their dogs smelling and licking her. As more shots sounded, he moved fast, Manolo coming unwillingly behind him. When Manolo asked him why he was going back towards them, Miquel did not answer. For one second he had had a vision of her alive here, running in terror from them, desperate to avoid being shot. As they made their way up the slopes behind the church, they heard shouts and the barking of the dogs and three further shots from the same rifle, a brief and decisive interval between each one. When they heard a shriek and then a cry, Miquel signalled to Manolo to move faster until a sudden shout stopped them.

  ‘Hey, you!’ It was Foix’s voice. ‘Get away from here! Do you want to get shot?’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Miquel shouted back. ‘Why don’t you go and shoot some place else?’

  ‘We’re killing wild boars, it’s men’s work. You and your little kitchen boy’ll be very sorry if you don’t go back to the road.’

  Manolo pulled at Miquel’s jacket, signalling to him to come with him now. They moved slowly down through the snow, walking with a difficulty Miquel had not known when they were climbing, finding ice under the snow, but getting away as fast as they could from the hunters.

  They walked back without speaking, Manolo’s hand on Miquel’s shoulder. There were no more shots. After a time, they heard the jeep approaching and stood out of the way. As it nosed forward, the men inside had a strange, guilty, excited look. They slowed as they passed and Miquel could see the raw thrill in their faces. On the trailer, lying huddled against each other, were four wild boars seeping blood, heavy with death, thrown there, fat, substantial, burrowing creatures, the most powerful animals in the cold dark world just a short time before, but utterly beyond it now, gristle and meat and bone and dead staring eyes, the trailer carrying them leaking blood into the snow in single drops, and then, when the trailer shifted sideways, in a small dense red puddle.

  Miquel began to sob as he walked along, allowing Manolo to hold him and comfort him. For the first time in a while he felt the sharp certainty of his mother’s disappearance; the idea that when she was found she would not be alive appeared to him as brutal fact. She would not be returning to them. Finding her, he thought, would mean nothing; looking for her was pointless. He stopped crying after a while and kept close to Manolo, who brushed casually against him as they walked through the slush and m
uck of the road.

  ‘You are lucky, you know,’ Manolo said to him.

  Miquel did not reply.

  ‘You are lucky that this has already happened to you, your mother’s going, that it cannot come again.’

  ‘I wish she was at home, alive,’ Miquel said.

  ‘Yes, but you would always dread that this blow was going to come, her death, now you are free of it. It has happened. It cannot happen again.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ Miquel said.

  ‘In the last house where I stayed,’ Manolo said, ‘the old man died and all his children came, some of them were old themselves. And even though he was old and dying for a long time, all of them cried for days. Weeks later I would find the woman of the house crying. And when her sister came they cried, and when her brother came they cried even more. I knew that no one would ever make me cry. There is no one who could die whose death would make me cry. No one. And I am grateful for that, and that will never change. My parents died before I could remember, my father even before I was born. I have no memory of them. I have no brothers and sisters, and I have no feeling for my uncles and cousins. Every time I watch someone with a person they are connected with, I always feel sorry for them. It is better not to have it. You are lucky now that she cannot be taken from you again.’