Hour of the Crab

by Patricia Robertson

  –What was that about, Papá? Felipe said on their way back to the car. –Who’s the woman you’re looking for?

  –Someone Arregui asked me to check on. The lie came fluently, easily. –She left the hospital she was in. Just disappeared.

  –¡Joder! Felipe said again, more softly. He looked suddenly older than his age, burdened by something unexpected. –Living like that. It’s crazy. You want me to drive, Papá?

  –Just give me a moment, hijo. The breathlessness took him by surprise; in the car he sat with his eyes closed. Maybe it was a tumour, a belated punishment for all those years of smoking. Surely only such a thing — blackened, malignant, triumphant — could feel like this, could take on a life of its own.

  When they got home Luisa met them at the door, her whole being radiant. –¡Qué te parece, noticias maravillosas! Emilia had phoned half an hour ago. They were going to be grandparents.

  It was Diego, a folded newspaper in his hand, who brought the news. Hortelano, working on his monthly report, half-rose, surprised to see him here at headquarters, but Diego had already flung the paper on his desk.

  –Take a look. Page five.

  Baby Born at Sea Gains Citizenship. Above the article a photo of Olabisi with her head down, hurrying out of a doorway, the baby a swaddled bundle in her arms, and just behind her a woman in a tailored suit who must be the lawyer. Olabisi Comfort Akpan and daughter Happiness, aged four months, leaving judge’s chambers, read the caption. Hortelano scanned the article. The granting of citizenship didn’t include the father, who was to be deported the following week.

  –That’s her, isn’t it? An upper lip flickered as Diego tilted his chin. –The one you were helping out?

  –I got her a bank account. As you know. That’s all.

  –And then you went on stress leave. Diego, moving to the window, stood looking out at the port. –None of my business, Kiko, but maybe it’s getting too much for you.

  Susana had been telling Diego that for years, ever since that botched robbery when a bullet caught her husband in the thigh. Hortelano was thankful Luisa wasn’t as high-strung as her sister. He refolded the newspaper.

  –Heart palpitations, that’s all. The doctor says I’m fine. I’ve had all the tests.

  –They say when you take it home you’ve been here too long. Diego turned from the window and regarded him. –And you’re taking it home, Kiko. That risk you took, when you sent Marisol — He made a face. Hortelano laughed, not very convincingly.

  –It got to me, that business with the baby. ¿Normal, no? Look, did Susana tell you our news?

  –You’re changing the subject. Diego paused at the desk on his way out, punched Hortelano’s shoulder. –It gets in here — he pointed to his chest — and you’re done for. Wasn’t it just last year Alamillo over in Contraband died of a heart attack?

  He phoned Victoria during a lull that evening, after most of the day shift had gone home. Probably, like him, she often worked late. Her voice at the other end of the line was hoarse with what might have been weariness. –So you saw the story.

  –What’s she going to do now?

  –Stay here. Try sponsoring her husband a few years down the road. He wants that, too.

  To lose everything you’d known in order to survive, you and your child. He tried, and failed, to imagine it.

  –Can I see her?

  –What for?

  He wouldn’t be able to explain the weight in his chest, the simple need to see the baby again. In Ronda, not so very far away, his grandchild swam in its mother’s belly, warm and safe. Olabisi must have parents who would never see their granddaughter. What was that proverb his grandmother had been fond of quoting? Take care of your patch of dirt because it tells you who you are. Much of his grandparents’ village had been expropriated to make way for the new freeway that saved you forty-five minutes between Granada and Seville. Now all his friends, where they could, were buying up ruined houses in their family villages, trying to rebuild what was.

  –Will you give her a letter, if I write one?

  An outbreath of exasperation on the other end of the line. –She doesn’t read Spanish.

  –It’s for her daughter. When she grows up she’ll be able to read it.

  –Sure, okay, whatever. Mail it to me. The receiver clicked at the other end.

  He hadn’t known either of his grandfathers. His grandfather on his father’s side — Enrique was named after him — had been a teacher in a small Asturian village, a gentle, patient man who his son, Enrique’s father, barely remembered. He’d been shot during the Civil War for being a supporter of the Republicans, aged thirty-one. His killer was a member of the Guardia Civil stationed in the same village. The killer had died in his sleep, years later; the two families had lived side by side in the village for years. Enrique’s father had gone to school with the killer’s son. Everyone in the village knew the truth, but nobody talked about it. Sometimes Enrique wondered what his grandfather would have thought about him being in the Guardia. Sometimes he wondered why his own father — a taciturn businessman he’d never been close to — hadn’t avenged the death himself.

  His other grandfather, his mother’s father, had died of cancer soon after Enrique was born. A stubborn, opinionated man with a quick temper who’d been mayor of his tiny Alpujarran village for years and maintained an elaborate enmity with the local priest over the perfidy of the Church. Had belonged to an anarcho-syndicalist trade union until he’d lost his leg on some construction job. Enrique’s mother, a small girl at the end of the Civil War, remembered how her father had hidden fleeing Republican soldiers in the rafters of the village’s olive press. And from the village’s dim Moorish past there were stories of a Christian siege when the villagers had survived for six months on rats and rancid olives and at the end burned their own houses rather than let them be taken.

  So as a grandparent he had no role models, except by hearsay. Still, he supposed he’d figure it out. He’d been a father, after all, and hoped he hadn’t botched the job too badly.

  He took his time on it. Began and ripped up a dozen versions. In the end he remembered that Pilar — Meléndez — had taken a picture of him that afternoon on her cellphone, his vest bulging with human flesh. He scrolled through his email. In the crook of his arms the baby’s eyes were wide, a puzzled crease on her forehead. He could feel her weight again, her pulsing warmth, the silk of her baby skin. He printed the photo out and wrote his name on the back, along with the date, and after some hesitation added his badge number and the name of his station. Someday she might want to get in touch with him. He was sure she’d be able to track him down. He couldn’t think of anything to say in a letter that wasn’t banal or obvious or self-serving.

  She stood beside him at the sink that night when he went for a glass of water. She was tall, graceful, plump-armed, in her twenties perhaps, dressed like any smart young Spanish woman. She watched him as he drank and he expected her to say something, but she didn’t. Somehow he knew that Olabisi was dead and that the father — Adebayo, was that his name? — had never returned. The light from the streetlamp outside gleamed along the curve of Happiness’s cheek like a blessing.

  Nicolás Enrique Alarcón Hortelano was born on July 23rd, weight 3.7 kilograms, with his mother’s green-hazel eyes and his grandfather’s stubborn chin, or so Enrique flattered himself. For the second time in less than a year he found himself visiting a maternity ward, only this time he wore his uniform, taking off his cap as he leaned over his grandson where he lay in the hospital bassinet. Hola, chavalito, he said softly, tears starting, and blew his nose discreetly. He hadn’t felt so limp, so vulnerable, since Nicolás’s mother had been born all those years ago — was it really twenty-seven? What happened to time that it could stretch and shrink in such fashion? He thought of Happiness and wondered if, years from now, the two of them, she and Nicolás, would meet. Perhaps they’d end up at school together, who knew. Even lovers, or married, in a new Spain where such unions wer
e taken for granted. It wasn’t something he wished for, but it might be what the future demanded of him.

  –Ouf, a boy, he said teasingly to Emilia that afternoon, taking his turn in a mob of visitors. –Make sure he keeps his curfews, won’t you. Though I’m sure he’ll be much better behaved than Felipe.

  Emilia was flushed, triumphant, Nicolás asleep on her stomach, tiny mouth half-open. –He’s an oldest child, everybody’ll be strict with him, she shot back. –The middle child gets away with everything.

  –Better not have a middle, then.

  –Ah, we only want two. That avoids the problem, doesn’t it? She bent her head and nuzzled the baby’s cheek. –Besides, he’ll have an abuelo who’s a cop to keep him in line.

  They celebrated Felipe’s nineteenth birthday and the baby’s bautismo on a dazzling August day in a restaurant noted for its pork loin in brandy, Enrique’s favourite dish. Nicolás was passed from hand to hand like a parcel, ending up at last asleep on Luisa’s practised lap. Enrique gave an impromptu speech — something about parenthood and how you couldn’t prepare for it, though afterwards he couldn’t remember what he’d said.

  –You’re definitely getting soft, Papá, Felipe said, nudging him while Luz bent gurglingly over the baby. Quiet, steadfast Luz, with the same ready smile as Luisa. They’d be married before long, Felipe and Luz, or perhaps it was just that he approved of her. Not like Marisol’s boyfriend, an offhand seventeen-year-old in a leather motorcycle jacket who reminded him so much of his younger self he wanted to slug him. But then he hadn’t much liked Emilia’s husband, Roberto, at first — a stolid lump of a man, or so he’d seemed, who did something obscure in computer software at the university — though watching him now, gazing at his baby son with a kind of tender amazement, Enrique remembered how he’d felt watching his own first-born, and his throat seized up. They slit you open, children. Made you helpless with tenderness, and then gnawed you to death.

  He hadn’t felt that thing in his chest for months but here it was, weighing him down with its melancholy even in the midst of celebration. That night, getting up yet again to piss, he half-expected to see Olabisi or Happiness, but instead, incomprehensibly, it was a teenage Nicolás who stood before him. Cocky, self-possessed, full of life — just the way he himself had been at that age. The boy spoke to him in what sounded like Arabic, and for a moment he wasn’t sure it was Nicolás after all. But it was all there in his body — his mother’s eyes, his father’s dark curls, something of his uncle Felipe’s slouching grace. And something else, something almost feline that reminded him a little of Luisa when he’d first met her, slightly aloof, as though there was something being held back, some secret that couldn’t be told.

  They spent a week in a villa on the Atlantic coast, a vacation gift to the new parents from Roberto’s family. Each morning Enrique carried Nicolás down to the beach so he could absorb the sound of the waves. They sat together in a canvas beach chair, he and the child, while families picnicked on the sand around them. Luisa claimed he was far more enamoured than he’d been with his own children, which he didn’t dispute. From time to time he adjusted the baby’s blanket or tilted the miniature sunhat farther over his eyes. Sometimes, unless Nicolás began whimpering for a feeding first, he sat until Emilia came to find him, accusing him, mockingly, of kidnapping her son.

  In the baby’s face he sometimes saw his own, and sometimes Luisa’s, sometimes even Felipe’s or Marisol’s. The baby had gathered them all up and held them in his small fists. That was what babies were for — he’d never realized. They inherited nothing, they built from scratch, but they already knew how to clutch and squeeze and hold on. They were dangerous, in fact. Little terrorists of the heart. His wife must have known that all along, but he hadn’t. It was a pity, really, it had taken him so long to learn.

  When Emilia came they were both asleep, the man and the child. She lifted Nicolás out of her father’s arms and held him up to the sky. –Pillín, she whispered, Little rascal. Little king. She drew the floppy hat down over her father’s face so he could sleep on, undisturbed.

  THE GATE OF CHARITY

  When the young woman came up the hill on the donkey Lalla was indoors, shredding cilantro with her fingers. From the window she saw first the man, holding the donkey’s bridle, and then the woman, swaying woozily. She poured a glass of citron pressé from the jugful she’d made that morning and ran outside. –Put on your headscarf, shameless one, her mother called after her.

  The man was helping the woman dismount while the children crowded round, staring, mesmerized. Foreigners rarely came here; it wasn’t on the standard tour company routes. Lalla waded through, holding the glass high. The woman, pale from the heat, was shrinking back from the clutching children.

  –Here, Lalla said in English, holding the glass out. –It’s lemonade. Good. But sip slowly.

  The woman took the glass hesitantly and pressed it to her forehead, then drank in gulps. Lalla grabbed her wrist to slow her down. –I’m Lalla. Lalla Tanzir. You must join us for lunch. Her quick glance included the man, too.

  –Thank you, you are too kind. His Arabic was almost accentless, his gestures those of a native. –I am Henri and this is Cathérine, he added, using the French versions of their names, perhaps to show off his fluency, his knowledge of the country, though neither of them looked French. American, perhaps — at least the woman. Were they lovers, or simply travelling together? The woman wore a wedding ring but the man didn’t.

  –She doesn’t look well. You’d better bring her inside.

  They put the woman, Lalla and her mother, in her mother’s bedroom, kept dark and cool by the drawn shutters and the thick walls. –It’s the elevation, Lalla told her. –You aren’t used to it. Her mother brought a damp cloth to lay across the woman’s forehead. –Just rest, Lalla said. –You’ll feel better by evening.

  The man, Henri, sat under a fig tree with the other men: Lalla’s grandfather, her brother Firhun, the Hasnaoui boys. There were no men of working age left, only the old, the young, the crippled. She and her mother carried out trays of harira, olives, a goat tagine, followed by dates and oranges and mint tea. The man Henri ate like a native, dipping his fingers unselfconsciously in the couscous. She didn’t know why but there was something she didn’t trust about him. Did his eyes rest a little too long on Firhun, on the younger of the Hasnaouis? She’d met men like him at the hotel, foreigners who rarely spoke Arabic the way he did but who slipped the maître d’ folded bills and asked in whispers where boys could be found.

  Afterwards, while the men talked, she and her mother ate their own meal in the kitchen. Only a spoonful remained of the tagine, her favourite dish, though since her grandmother’s death no one could make it the way she had. Familiar fury flared for an instant. In Fez, with her friends, they neither ate last, after the men and children, nor wore headscarves. Of the five of them only Zahra had a fiancé. Najia was studying to be a dental hygienist; Mernissa planned to join her aunt, who owned her own restaurant, in America; Amina volunteered at a centre for unmarried mothers. The Qur’an, as Zahra often pointed out, spoke of the equality of men and women; hadn’t the Prophet himself, peace be upon him, taught women and ordered that they be allowed to attend the mosques at night? Hadn’t he said, “If any do deeds of righteousness be they male or female and have faith, they will enter Heaven, and not the least injustice will be done to them?”

  In practice women were lesser, were ignored and silenced. It was precisely why Lalla had left her village at seventeen, to her parents’ despair. Her brother Yunes had left the year before, as all the young men did, a fact lamented but accepted as some harsh and inexplicable fate. –I bore children only to give them away, her mother said, mouth twisted in bitterness, the day Lalla left.

  But when her father fell ill, and could no longer farm their small plot of land, and then died, it was Lalla’s earnings that kept the family going. Each month, standing in the bank queue to send the money, she was quickened by an
emboldening pride, a fierce, self-reliant joy. Pride was a defect of character, so the Qur’an said, but why shouldn’t she feel proud to be supporting her mother and her grandfather and her three younger brothers?

  –Riuza’s daughter is to be married in the autumn, her mother said, peeling an orange with strong thick nails. –To think the two of you played together just yesterday!

  Riuza and her mother were cousins. She would have to come back for the wedding, which meant asking for more time off, though she and Jedira barely talked anymore. She helped herself to another date and spat out her annoyance along with the stone.

  –And there’s been little rain again this year, it’s getting harder and harder to find pasture.

  Her mother did not comment on the visitors. Why they — why anyone — might want to wander the earth in such a fashion was an insoluble mystery, and ultimately of no interest. She rose, poured a little water into a basin, and rinsed her fingers. –Go and see if the men want more tea. And don’t linger talking. That may be how you behave in the city, but here we still respect our traditions.

  It was in Fez, her first day at the hotel, where she learned that such traditions were not, in fact, as unbreakable as stone. She’d heard rumours, of course, but had never before seen such things with her own eyes. Foreign women came and went as they pleased, alone. They arrived alone too, suitcases haloed with the dust and glory of airports in distant countries. Men talked to them, laughed with them, flirted with them, yet the sky did not fall. That was also the day that Mouna, one of the chambermaids, went down to the kitchen and brought back a tall glass of pale yellow liquid in which cubes of glass floated. No, not glass — ice. How could it exist on such a hot day? It was magic, a piece of magic she brought home a few years later, buying a generator for the village and then a tiny fridge for her parents’ home. The citron pressé recipe, too, though her mother refused to touch the stuff.