The Childhood of Jesus Read online

  ‘We’re taking a walk,’ says Inés. ‘We need some air. It is so stuffy in that apartment.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘It is badly designed. I keep the window open day and night to air it. I mean, I used to keep the window open.’

  ‘I can’t do that. I don’t want David catching cold.’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t catch cold easily. He’s a tough fellow—aren’t you?’

  The boy nods. The coat is buttoned all the way up to his chin, no doubt so that wind-borne germs won’t get in.

  A long silence. He would like to come closer, but the dog has not relaxed its vigilant glare.

  ‘Where did you get that’—he gestures—‘that vehicle?’

  ‘At the family depot.’

  ‘The family depot?’

  ‘There is a depot in the city where you can get things for children. We got him a cot too.’

  ‘A cot?’

  ‘A cot with sides. So that he doesn’t fall out.’

  ‘That’s strange. He has been sleeping in a bed ever since I can remember, and he has never fallen out.’

  Even before he has finished, he knows it was the wrong thing to say. Inés’s lips clamp tight, she swings the vehicle around, she would march off but for the fact that the dog’s leash has become tangled in the wheels and has to be unwound.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I don’t mean to interfere.’

  She does not deign to reply.

  Going back over the episode afterwards, he wonders why it is that he has no feeling for Inés as a woman, not the slightest flicker, even though there is nothing wrong with her looks. Is it because she is so hostile to him and has been from the start; or is she unattractive simply because she refuses to be attractive, refuses to open herself up? May she indeed be, as Elena asserts, a virgin, or at least the virginal type? What he knew of virgins is lost in clouds of forgetting. Does the aura of the virginal stifle a man’s desire or on the contrary sharpen it? He thinks of Ana, from the Relocation Centre, who strikes him as a virgin of a rather fierce kind. Ana he certainly found attractive. What does Ana have that Inés does not? Or should the question be phrased contrariwise: What does Inés have that Ana does not?

  ‘I bumped into Inés and young David yesterday,’ he tells Elena. ‘Do you see much of them?’

  ‘I see her around the Blocks. We haven’t spoken. I don’t think she wants much to do with the residents.’

  ‘I suppose, if one is used to life in La Residencia, it must be hard to find oneself living in the Blocks.’

  ‘Living in La Residencia doesn’t make her better than us. We all started from nowhere, from nothing. It’s just a matter of luck that she landed up there.’

  ‘How do you think she is coping with motherhood?’

  ‘She’s very protective of the child. Over-protective, in my opinion. She watches him like a hawk, won’t let him play with other children. You know that. Fidel can’t understand. He feels hurt.’

  ‘I’m sorry. What else have you seen?’

  ‘Her brothers spend a lot of time visiting. They have a car—one of those little four-seaters with a roof that you can roll back, a cabriolet I think it is called. They all go off in the car and come back after dark.’

  ‘The dog too?’

  ‘The dog too. Everywhere Inés goes, the dog goes. It gives me the shivers. It is like a coiled spring. One of these days it is going to attack someone. I just pray it isn’t a child. Can’t she be persuaded to muzzle it?’

  ‘No chance of that.’

  ‘Well, I think it is madness to keep a vicious dog when you have a young child.’

  ‘It’s not a vicious dog, Elena, just a bit unpredictable. Unpredictable but faithful. That is what seems to matter most to Inés. Fidelity, queen of the virtues.’

  ‘Really? I wouldn’t call it that. I would call it a middle-ranking virtue, like temperance. The sort of virtue you look for in a soldier. Inés strikes me as a bit of a watchdog herself, hovering around David, warding off harm. Why on earth did you choose a woman like that? You were a better father to him than she is a mother.’

  ‘That’s not true. A child can’t grow up without a mother. Didn’t you say so yourself: to the mother the child owes his substance, whereas the father merely provides the idea? Once the idea has been transmitted, the father is dispensable. And in this case I am not even the father.’

  ‘A child needs a mother’s womb to come into the world. After he has left the womb the mother as life-giver is as much a spent force as the father. What the child needs from then on is love and care, which a man can provide as well as a woman. Your Inés knows nothing about love and care. She is like a little girl with a doll—an unusually jealous and selfish little girl who won’t let anyone else touch her toy.’

  ‘Nonsense. You are ready to condemn Inés, yet you barely know her.’

  ‘And you? How well did you know her before you handed over your precious charge? Investigating her qualifications as a mother was not necessary, you said: you could rely on intuition. You would know the true mother in a flash, the moment you laid eyes on her. Intuition: what sort of basis is that for deciding a child’s future?’

  ‘We have been through this before, Elena. What is wrong with native intuition? What else is there we can trust, finally?’

  ‘Common sense. Reason. Any reasonable person would have warned you that a thirty-year-old virgin used to a life of idleness, insulated from the real world, guarded by two thuggish brothers, would not make a reliable mother. Also, any reasonable person would have made inquiries about this Inés, explored her past, assessed her character. Any reasonable person would have imposed a trial period, to make sure they got on together, the child and his nurse.’

  He shakes his head. ‘You still misunderstand. My task was to bring the boy to his mother. It was not to bring him to a mother, to a woman who passed some or other motherhood test. It does not matter if by your standards or mine Inés is not a particularly good mother. The fact is, she is his mother. He is with his mother.’

  ‘But Inés is not his mother! She did not conceive him! She did not carry him in her womb! She did not bring him into the world in blood and pain! She is just someone you picked out on a whim, for all I know because she reminded you of your own mother.’

  He shakes his head again. ‘The moment I saw Inés, I knew. If we don’t trust the voice that speaks inside us, saying, This is the one! then there is nothing left to trust.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh! Inner voices! People lose their savings at the horse races obeying inner voices. People plunge into calamitous love affairs obeying inner voices. It—’

  ‘I am not in love with Inés, if that is what you imply. Far from it.’

  ‘You may not be in love with her but you are unreasonably fixated on her, which is worse. You are convinced she is your child’s destiny. Whereas the truth is Inés has no relation, mystical or otherwise, to you or your boy. She is just a random woman on whom you have projected some private obsession of yours. If the child was predestined, as you say, to be united with his mother, why could you not leave it to destiny to bring them together? Why did you have to inject yourself into the act?’

  ‘Because it is not enough to sit around waiting for destiny to act, Elena, just as it is not enough to have an idea and then sit back waiting for it to materialize. Someone has to bring the idea into the world. Someone has to act on behalf of destiny.’

  ‘That is just what I said. You arrive with some private idea of what a mother is, which you then project onto this woman.’

  ‘This is no longer a reasonable discussion, Elena. It is just animosity I hear, animosity and prejudice and jealousy.’

  ‘It is neither animosity nor prejudice, and to call it jealousy is even more absurd. I am trying to help you understand where this sacred intuition of yours comes from, which you trust above the evidence of your senses. It comes from inside you. It has its origin in a past that you have forgotten. It has nothing to do with the boy or his wel
fare. If you had any interest in the boy’s welfare you would reclaim him right away. This woman is bad for him. He is going backwards under her care. She is turning him into a baby.

  ‘You could get him back today if you wanted to. You could simply walk in and take him away. She has no legal right over him. She is a complete stranger. You could reclaim your child, you could reclaim your apartment, and the woman could go back to La Residencia, where she belongs—to her brothers and her tennis games. Why don’t you do it? Or are you too frightened—frightened of her brothers, frightened of the dog?’

  ‘Elena, stop. Please stop. Yes, I am intimidated by her brothers. Yes, I am nervous of her dog. But that is not why I refuse to steal the child back. I refuse, that is all. What do you think I am doing in this country where I know no one, where I cannot express my heart’s feelings because all human relations have to be conducted in beginner’s Spanish? Did I come here to lug heavy bags, day in, and day out, like a beast of burden? No, I came to bring the child to his mother, and that is done now.’

  Elena laughs. ‘Your Spanish improves when you lose your temper. Maybe you should lose your temper more often. About Inés let us agree to disagree. As for the rest, the truth is we are not here, you and I, to live happy and fulfilled lives. We are here for the sake of our children. We may not feel at home in Spanish, but David and Fidel will. It will be their mother tongue. They will speak it like natives, from the heart. And don’t sneer at the work you do at the docks. You arrived in this country naked, with nothing to offer but the labour of your hands. You could have been turned away, but you were not: you were made welcome. You could have been abandoned under the stars, but you were not: you were given a roof over your head. You have a great deal to be thankful for.’

  He is silent. At last he speaks. ‘Is that the end of the sermon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  CHAPTER 14

  FOUR O’CLOCK, and the last sacks from the freighter at Wharf Two are being stacked on the dray. El Rey and her companion stand in harness, placidly chomping at their feedbags.

  Álvaro stretches his arms and gives him a smile. ‘Another job done,’ he says. ‘Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so. But I can’t help asking myself why the city needs so much grain, week after week.’

  ‘It’s food. We can’t do without food. And it’s not just for Novilla. It’s for the hinterland too. That’s what it means to be a port: you have a hinterland to serve.’

  ‘Still, what is it all for, in the end? The ships bring the grain from across the seas and we haul it off the ships and someone else mills it and bakes it, and eventually it gets eaten and turned into—what shall I call it?—waste, and the waste flows back into the sea. What is there to feel good about in that? How does it fit into a larger picture? I don’t see any larger picture, any loftier design. It’s just consumption.’

  ‘You are in a bad mood today! Surely one doesn’t need a lofty design to justify being part of life. Life is good in itself; helping food to flow so that your fellows can live is doubly good. How can you dispute that? Anyway, what do you have against bread? Remember what the poet said: bread is the way that the sun enters our bodies.’

  ‘I don’t want to argue, Álvaro, but objectively speaking all that I do, all that we dockers do, is move stuff from point A to point B, one bag after another, day after day. If all our sweat were for the sake of some higher cause, it would be a different matter. But eating in order to live and living in order to eat—that is the way of the bacterium, not the…’

  ‘Not the what?’

  ‘Not the human being. Not the pinnacle of creation.’

  Usually it is the lunchtime breaks that are given over to philosophical disputation—Do we die or are we endlessly reincarnated? Do the farther planets rotate around the sun or around one another reciprocally? Is this the best of all possible worlds?—but today, instead of making their way home, several of the stevedores drift over to listen to the debate. To them Álvaro now turns. ‘What do you say, comrades? Do we need a grand plan, as our friend demands, or is it good enough for us to be doing our job and doing it well?’

  There is silence. From the first the men have treated him, Simón, with respect. To some of them he is old enough to be their father. But they respect their foreman too, even revere him. Clearly they do not want to take sides.

  ‘If you don’t like the work we do, if you don’t think it is good,’ says one of them—in fact Eugenio—‘what work would you like to do instead? Would you like to work in an office? Do you think office work is a better kind of work for a man to do? Or factory work perhaps?’

  ‘No,’ he replies. ‘Emphatically not. Please don’t misunderstand me. In itself this is good work we do here, honest work. But that is not what Álvaro and I were discussing. We were discussing the goal of our labours, the ultimate goal. I would not dream of disparaging the work we do. On the contrary, it means a great deal to me. In fact’—he is losing the thread but that does not matter—‘there is nowhere I would rather be than here, working side by side with you. In the time I have spent here I have experienced nothing but comradely support and comradely love. It has brightened my days. It has made it possible—’

  Impatiently Eugenio interrupts him: ‘Then surely you have answered your own question. Imagine having no work. Imagine having to spend your days sitting on a public bench with nothing to do, waiting for the hours to pass, with no comrades around you to share a joke with, no comradely goodwill to support you. Without labour, and the sharing of labour, comradeship is not possible, it is no longer substantial.’ He turns and glances around. ‘Is that not so, comrades?’

  There is a murmur of agreement.

  ‘But what of football?’ he responds, trying another tack, though with no confidence. ‘Surely we would love each other and support each other just as well if we all belonged to a football team, playing together, winning together, losing together. If comradely love is the ultimate good, why do we need to move these heavy bags of grain, why not just kick a football?’

  ‘Because by football alone you cannot live,’ says Álvaro. ‘In order to play football you must be alive; and to be alive you must eat. Through our labour here we enable people to live.’ He shakes his head. ‘The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that labour cannot be compared to football, that the two belong to different philosophical realms. I cannot see, I truly cannot see, why you should want to disparage our labour in this way.’

  All eyes are turned on him. There is a grave silence.

  ‘Believe me, I do not mean to disparage our labour. To prove my sincerity, I will come to work an hour early tomorrow morning, and cut short my lunch break too. I will move as many bags per day as any man here. But I will continue to ask: Why are we doing this? What is it for?’

  Álvaro steps forward, throws a brawny arm around him. ‘Heroic feats of labour won’t be necessary, my friend,’ he says. ‘We know where your heart is, you do not need to prove yourself.’ And other men come up too to clap him on the back or give him a hug. He smiles at all and sundry; tears come to his eyes; he cannot stop smiling.

  ‘You have not seen our main storehouse yet, have you?’ says Álvaro, still gripping his hand.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is an impressive facility, if I say so myself. Why not pay it a visit? You can go right now, if you like.’ He turns to the driver, hunched on his seat waiting for the stevedores’ debate to be over. ‘Our comrade can ride with you to the storehouse, can’t he? Yes, of course he can. Come!’—he helps him clamber up beside the driver—‘Maybe you will appreciate our work better once you have had a sight of the storehouse.’

  The storehouse is further from the wharves than he had expected, on the south bank at the bend where the river begins to narrow. At an ambling pace—the driver has a whip but does not use it, merely clucking to the horses now and then to encourage them—it takes them the best part of an hour to get there, time during which not a word is said.
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  The storehouse stands alone in a field. It is vast, as big as a football pitch and as high as a two-storey house, with great sliding doors through which the loaded dray passes with ease.

  The working day seems to be over, for there is no crew to do the unloading. While the driver manoeuvres the dray beside the loading platform and sets about unharnessing the horses, he wanders deeper into the great building. Light filtering through gaps between wall and roof reveals sacks stacked metres high, mountain upon mountain of grain stretching back into the dark recesses. Idly he tries to do the computation, but loses track. A million sacks at least, perhaps several million. Can there be enough millers in Novilla to mill all this grain, enough bakers to bake it, enough mouths to consume it?

  There is a dry crunch underfoot: spilled grain. Something soft bumps against his ankle, and involuntarily he kicks out. A squeal; all of a sudden he is aware of a subdued whispering all around him, like the noise of flowing water. He utters a cry. The floor around him is heaving with life. Rats! There are rats everywhere!

  ‘There are rats all over the place!’ he calls out, hurrying back, confronting the drayman and the gatekeeper. ‘There is grain all over the floor, and you have a plague of rats! It’s appalling!’

  The two exchange a glance. ‘Yes, we certainly have our share of rats,’ says the gatekeeper. ‘Mice too. More than you can count.’

  ‘And you do nothing about it? It’s insanitary! They are nesting in the food, contaminating it!’

  The gatekeeper shrugs. ‘What do you want us to do? Where you have grain you have rodents. That is how the world is. We tried bringing in cats, but the rats have grown fearless, and there are too many of them anyway.’

  ‘That’s not an argument. You could set traps. You could lay down poison. You could fumigate the building.’

  ‘You can’t pump poisonous gases into a food store—have some sense! And now, if you don’t mind, I need to lock up.’

  First thing next morning he raises the matter with Álvaro. ‘You boast about the storehouse, but have you ever been there yourself? It is crawling with rats. What is there to be proud of in working to feed a host of vermin? It is not just absurd, it is insane.’