The Schooldays of Jesus Read online

  ‘I was explaining to your wife,’ he, Simón, says. ‘As a result of some or other failure of communication, we did not learn in advance about this outing. We thought David would be coming home for the weekend, as usual. That is why we are here. We were a little anxious. But all is well, I see, so we will be leaving now.’

  Señor Arroyo regards him with what seems an amused curl of the lip. He does not say, A failure of communication? Please explain. He does not say, I am sorry you have had a wasted trip. He does not say, Would you like to stay for lunch? He says nothing. No small talk.

  Even his eyelids have a baked hue. And then the blue eyes, paler than his wife’s.

  He collects himself. ‘May I ask, how is David getting on with his studies?’

  The heavy head nods once, twice, thrice. Now there is a definite smile on the lips. ‘Your son has—what shall I call it?—a confidence that is unusual in someone so young. He is not afraid of adventures—adventures of the mind.’

  ‘No, he is not afraid. And he sings well too. I am no musician but I can hear it.’

  Señor Arroyo raises a hand and languidly brushes the words away. ‘You have done well,’ he says. ‘You are the one, are you not, who has taken responsibility for raising him. So he tells me.’

  His heart swells. So that is what the boy tells people: that he, Simón, is the one who has raised him! ‘David has had a varied education, if I may put it that way,’ he says. ‘You say he is confident. That is true. At times it is more than confidence. He can be headstrong. With some of his teachers that has not gone down well. But for you and señora Arroyo he has the greatest respect.’

  ‘Well, if that is so then we must do our best to deserve it.’

  Without his noticing it, señora Arroyo, Ana Magdalena, has slipped away. Now she re-emerges into his field of vision, receding down the lakeshore, tall, graceful, with a cluster of naked children gambolling around her.

  ‘I should be leaving,’ he says. ‘Goodbye.’ And then: ‘The numbers, two and three and so forth—I have been struggling to understand your system. I listened carefully to the lecture that señora Arroyo gave, I question David, but I confess I still have difficulty.’

  Señor Arroyo raises an eyebrow and waits.

  ‘Counting does not play a great part in my life,’ he plunges on. ‘I mean, I count apples and oranges like everyone else. I count money. I add and subtract. The ant arithmetic your wife spoke about. But the dance of the two, the dance of the three, the noble numbers and the auxiliary numbers, calling down the stars—that stuff eludes me. Do you ever get beyond two and three in your teaching? Do the children ever get to study proper mathematics—x and y and z? Or is that for later?’

  Señor Arroyo is silent. The midday sun beats down on them.

  ‘Can you give me some clue, some fingerhold?’ he says. ‘I want to understand. Genuinely. I genuinely wish to understand.’

  Señor Arroyo speaks. ‘You wish to understand. You address me as if I were the sage of Estrella, the man with all the answers. I am not. I do not have answers for you. But let me say a word about answers in general. In my opinion, question and answer go together like heaven and earth or like man and woman. A man goes out and scours the world for the answer to his one great question, What is it that I lack? Then one day, if he is lucky, he finds his answer: woman. Man and woman come together, they are one—let us resort to that expression—and out of their oneness, their union, comes a child. The child grows up until one day the question comes to him, What is it that I lack?, and so the cycle is resumed. The cycle resumes because in the question already lies the answer, like an unborn child.’

  ‘Therefore?’

  ‘Therefore, if we wish to escape the cycle, perhaps we should be scouring the world not for the true answer but for the true question. Perhaps that is what we lack.’

  ‘And how does that help me, señor, to understand the dances you teach my son, the dances and the stars that the dances are supposed to call down, and the place of the dances in his education?’

  ‘Yes, the stars…We continue to be puzzled by the stars, even old men like you and me. Who are they? What do they say to us? What are the laws by which they live? For a child it is easier. The child does not need to think, for the child can dance. While we stand paralyzed, gazing on the gap that yawns between us and the stars—What an abyss! How will we ever cross it?—the child simply dances across.’

  ‘David is not like that. He is full of anxiety about gaps. Sometimes paralyzed. I have seen it. It is a phenomenon not uncommon among children. A syndrome.’

  Señor Arroyo ignores his words. ‘The dance is not a matter of beauty. If I wanted to create beautiful figures of movement I would employ marionettes, not children. Marionettes can float and glide as human beings cannot. They can trace patterns of great complexity in the air. But they cannot dance. They have no soul. It is the soul that brings grace to the dance, the soul that follows the rhythm, each step instinct with the next step and the next.

  ‘As for the stars, the stars have dances of their own, but their logic is beyond us; their rhythms too. That is our tragedy. And then there are the wandering stars, the ones who don’t follow the dance, like children who don’t know arithmetic. Las estrellas errantes, niños que ignoran la aritmética, as the poet wrote. To the stars it is given to think the unthinkable, the thoughts that are beyond you and me: the thoughts before eternity and after eternity, the thoughts from nothing to one and from one to nothing, and so forth. We mortals have no dance for from nothing to one. So, to return to your question about the mysterious x and whether our students at the Academy will ever learn the answer to x, my answer is: Lamentably, I don’t know.’

  He waits for more but there is no more. Señor Arroyo has had his say. It is his turn. But he, Simón, is lost. He has nothing to offer.

  ‘Be comforted,’ says señor Arroyo. ‘You came here not to find out about x but because you were concerned for the welfare of your child. You can be assured. He is well. Like other children, young David has no interest in x. He wants to be in the world, to experience this being-alive that is so new and exciting. Now I must go and give my wife a hand. Goodbye, señor Simón.’

  He finds his way back to the car. Inés is not there. He dresses hurriedly, whistles for Bolívar. ‘Inés!’ he says, addressing the dog. ‘Where is Inés? Find Inés!’

  The dog leads him to Inés, seated not far away under a tree on a little knoll overlooking the lake.

  ‘Where is David?’ she says. ‘I thought he was coming home with us.’

  ‘David is having a good time, he wants to be with his friends.’

  ‘So when will we see him again?’

  ‘That depends on the weather. If it continues fine they will stay the whole weekend. Don’t fret, Inés. He is in good hands. He is happy. Isn’t that all that counts?’

  ‘So we are going back to Estrella?’ Inés gets up, dusts off her dress. ‘I am surprised at you. Doesn’t this whole business make you feel sad? First he demands to leave home, now he doesn’t even want to spend the weekend with us.’

  ‘It would have happened sooner or later. He has an independent nature.’

  ‘You call it independence but to me it looks as if he is totally under the thumb of the Arroyos. I saw you having a chat with el señor. What was that about?’

  ‘He was explaining his philosophy to me. The philosophy behind the Academy. The numbers and the stars. Calling down the stars and so forth.’

  ‘Is that what you call it: philosophy?’

  ‘No, I don’t call it philosophy. Privately I call it claptrap. Privately I call it a load of mystical rubbish.’

  ‘Then why don’t we pull ourselves together and remove David from their Academy?’

  ‘Remove him and send him where? To the Academy of Singing, where they will have some nonsensical philosophy of their own to peddle? Breathe in. Empty your mind. Be one with the cosmos. To the city schools? Sit still. Recite after me: one and one is two, two and one i
s three. The Arroyos may be full of nonsense, but at least it is harmless nonsense. And David is happy here. He likes the Arroyos. He likes Ana Magdalena.’

  ‘Yes, Ana Magdalena…I suppose you have fallen in love with her. You can confess. I won’t laugh.’

  ‘In love? No, nothing like that.’

  ‘But you find her attractive.’

  ‘I find her beautiful, in the way that a goddess is beautiful, but I don’t find her attractive. It would be—what shall I say?—irreverent to be attracted to her. Maybe even dangerous. She could strike a man dead.’

  ‘Strike you dead! Then you should take precautions. Wear armour. Carry a shield. You told me that the man from the museum, Dmitri, is infatuated with her. Have you warned him she can strike him dead too?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I am not friends with Dmitri. We don’t exchange confidences.’

  ‘And the young man—who is he?’

  ‘The young man who went out with the children in the boat? That is Alyosha, the usher, the one who looks after the boarders. He seems nice.’

  ‘You seem to find it easy, being without clothes in front of strangers.’

  ‘Surprisingly easy, Inés. Surprisingly easy. One slips back into being an animal. Animals are not naked, they are simply themselves.’

  ‘I noticed you and your dangerous goddess being yourselves together. That must have been exciting.’

  ‘Don’t mock me.’

  ‘I am not mocking you. But why can’t you be frank with me? Anyone can see that you have fallen for her, just like Dmitri. Why not admit it instead of talking in circles?’

  ‘Because it is not true. Dmitri and I are different people.’

  ‘Dmitri and you are both men. That’s enough for me.’

  CHAPTER 10

  THE TRIP to the lake marks a further cooling in relations between Inés and himself. Soon afterwards she informs him that she will be taking a week’s leave in order to spend time in Novilla with her brothers. She misses her brothers, is thinking of inviting them to Estrella.

  ‘Your brothers and I have never got on well together,’ he says. ‘Particularly Diego. If they are going to be staying with you, maybe I should move out.’

  Inés does not protest.

  ‘Give me time to find a place of my own,’ he says. ‘I would prefer not to announce it to David, not yet. Do you agree?’

  ‘Couples get divorced every day and the children come through,’ says Inés. ‘David will have me, he will have you, we just won’t be living together.’

  He knows the city’s north-east by now like the back of his hand. Without difficulty he finds a room for himself with an ageing couple. The facilities are rudimentary, the electricity tends to cut out unpredictably, but the room is cheap and has its own entrance and is within reach of the city centre. While Inés is at work he removes his belongings from the apartment and installs himself in his new home.

  Though he and Inés put on a show of spousal amity for the boy, he is not for a moment deceived. ‘Where is your stuff, Simón?’ he demands; whereupon he, Simón, has to admit that, for the time being, he has moved out to make way for Diego and perhaps Stefano too.

  ‘Is Diego going to be my uncle or my father?’ asks the boy.

  ‘He will be your uncle, as he has always been.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I will be what I have always been. I do not change. Things change around me but I am unchanging. You will see.’

  If the boy is distressed by the rupture between Inés and him, Simon, he shows no sign of it. On the contrary, he is ebullient, full of stories about his life at the Academy. Ana Magdalena has a waffle machine and makes waffles for the boarders every morning. ‘You must buy a waffle machine, Inés, it’s brilliant.’ Alyosha has taken over the reading of their bedtime stories, and is reading them a story about three brothers and their quest for the sword Madragil, which is also brilliant. Behind the museum Ana Magdalena has a garden with an enclosure where she keeps rabbits and chickens and a lamb. One of the rabbits is naughty and keeps burrowing his way out. Once they found him hiding in the basement of the museum. His favourite among the animals is the lamb, whose name is Jeremiah. Jeremiah does not have a mother, so he has to drink cow’s milk out of a bottle with a rubber teat. Dmitri lets him hold the bottle for Jeremiah.

  ‘Dmitri?’

  Dmitri, it turns out, is the one charged with looking after the Academy’s menagerie, just as Dmitri is the one charged with bringing wood from the cellar for the big oven and with swabbing the bathroom after the children have had their shower.

  ‘I thought Dmitri worked for the museum. Do the people at the museum know that Dmitri is also employed by the Academy?’

  ‘Dmitri doesn’t want money. He does it for Ana Magdalena. He will do anything for her because he loves her and worships her.’

  ‘Loves her and worships her: is that what he says?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice. That’s admirable. My concern is that Dmitri may be performing these services for love and worship during time when he is being paid by the museum to guard their pictures. But that is enough about Dmitri. What more can you tell us? Do you like being a boarder? Did we make the right decision?’

  ‘Yes. When I have bad dreams I wake Alyosha up and he lets me sleep in his bed.’

  ‘Is it just you who sleeps in Alyosha’s bed?’ asks Inés.

  ‘No, anyone who has bad dreams can sleep with Alyosha. He says so.’

  ‘And Alyosha? Whose bed does Alyosha sleep in when he has bad dreams of his own?’

  The boy is not amused.

  ‘What about the dancing?’ asks he, Simón. ‘How is your dancing coming on?’

  ‘Ana Magdalena says I am the best dancer of all.’

  ‘That’s nice. When can I persuade you to do a dance for me?’

  ‘Never, because you don’t believe in it.’

  You don’t believe in it. What does he have to believe in before the boy will dance for him? The mumbo jumbo about the stars?

  They eat together—Inés has cooked supper—then it is time for him to take his leave. ‘Goodnight, my boy. I’ll come by in the morning. We can take Bolívar for a walk. Maybe there will be a football game in the park.’

  ‘Ana Magdalena says, if you are a dancer you mustn’t play football. She says you can strain your muscles.’

  ‘Ana Magdalena knows about lots of things but she doesn’t know about football. You are a strong boy. You won’t hurt yourself playing football.’

  ‘Ana Magdalena says I mustn’t.’

  ‘Very well, I won’t force you to play football. But please explain one thing to me. You never obey me, you hardly ever obey Inés, yet you do exactly what Ana Magdalena tells you. Why so?’

  There is no reply.

  ‘All right. Goodnight. I will see you in the morning.’

  He trudges back to his lodgings in a bad mood. There was once a time when the boy gave himself heart and soul to Inés, or at least to Inés’s vision of him as the little prince in hiding; but those days seem to be over. For Inés it must be dispiriting to find herself supplanted by señora Arroyo. As for him, what place is left for him in the boy’s life? Perhaps he should follow the example of Bolívar. Bolívar has all but completed the move into the twilight of a dog’s life. He has grown a paunch; sometimes, as he settles down to sleep, he lets loose a sad little sigh. Yet if Inés were so thoughtless as to introduce a puppy into the household—a puppy meant to grow up and take the place of their present guardian—Bolívar would close his jaws around his junior rival’s neck and give him a shake until the neck-bone snapped. Perhaps that is the kind of father he should become: idle, selfish, and dangerous. Perhaps the boy will respect him then.

  Inés leaves on the promised trip to Novilla; for the time being the boy is again his responsibility. On Friday afternoon he is waiting outside the Academy. The bell rings, the students pour out, but there is no sign of David.

  He climbs the stairs. The
studio is empty. Beyond it an unlit corridor leads to a series of rooms panelled in dark wood, empty of furniture. He passes through a dim space, a dining hall perhaps, with long, battered-looking tables and a sideboard stacked with crockery, and finds himself at the foot of another flight of stairs. From above comes the murmur of a male voice. He ascends, knocks at a closed door. The voice pauses. Then: ‘Come in.’

  He is in a spacious room lit by skylights, evidently the boarders’ dormitory. Seated side by side on one of the beds are Ana Magdalena and Alyosha. A dozen children cluster around them. He recognizes the two Arroyo boys who had danced at the concert, but David is not there.

  ‘I apologize for intruding,’ he says. ‘I am hunting for my son.’

  ‘David is at his music lesson,’ says Ana Magdalena. ‘He will be free at four o’clock. Would you like to wait? You can join us. Alyosha is reading us a story. Alyosha, children, this is señor Simón, David’s father.’

  ‘I am not intruding?’ he says.

  ‘You are not intruding,’ says Ana Magdalena. ‘Sit down. Joaquín, tell señor Simón what has happened thus far.’

  You are not intruding. Sit down. In Ana Magdalena’s voice, in her whole bearing, there is an unexpected friendliness. Has the change come about because they were naked before each other? Was that all that was needed?

  Joaquín, the elder of the Arroyo boys, speaks. ‘There is a fisherman, a poor fisherman, and one day he catches a fish and he cuts it open and in its stomach he finds a gold ring. He rubs the ring and—’

  ‘To make it sparkle.’ It is his younger brother who interrupts him. ‘He rubs the ring to make it sparkle.’

  ‘He rubs the ring to make it sparkle and a genie appears and the genie says, “Each time you rub the magic ring I will appear and grant you a wish, you have three wishes, so what is your first wish?” That’s all.’

  ‘All-powerful,’ says Ana Magdalena. ‘Remember, the genie says he is all-powerful and can grant any wish. Alyosha, go on reading.’

  He has not looked properly at Alyosha before. The young man has fine, rather beautiful black hair which he combs straight back from his temples, and a complexion as delicate as a girl’s. There is no sign that he shaves. He casts his dark, long-lashed eyes down and, in a surprisingly resonant voice, reads.