Mothers and Sons (25 page)

As they stood in the doorway, the sky darkened suddenly, blue-black clouds appeared over them gathering in a low dense mass. The light became a dark purple and there was no wind. Miquel shivered. He knew that it meant snow; it would be the first of the year, late in coming, and all the more severe on a day as cold as this.

‘I saw her going all right,’ Mateu said, ‘but there was no sign of her coming back.’

‘Which direction?’ Miquel’s father asked.

‘She took the road towards Coll del So.’

‘But that leads nowhere,’ his father said.

Mateu nodded.

It struck Miquel immediately that it led towards Pallosa, where his mother’s brother still lived in the old family house; it could be reached in four or five hours.

‘How long ago did you see her?’ his father asked.

‘She’s gone a few hours,’ Mateu said.

‘What? Three or four?’

‘Yes, three or four, or somewhere in between.’

The snow came down gently as the air darkened even further. The flakes were thick, they did not melt immediately on the back of Miquel’s hand which he held out to test them. The jeep, he knew, could make its way along the narrow road which led to the small church at Santa Magdalena, and perhaps even further along the military road to
Coll del So, but after that, he thought, his mother would make her way down to Pallosa along old tracks and pathways which no jeep could follow and no outsider could find. In three or four hours walking she could be still on the military road, but it was unlikely. More probably, she would have reached Coll del So and then she might even have started along the steeper tracks, and he knew that they must race to the jeep and drive as fast as they could along the winding road to these uplands where they kept their sheep in the summer, territory which remained unvisited in the winter.

‘You won’t get far now,’ Mateu said to them as they moved away from his door.

‘Are you certain she went that way?’ Miquel called back to him.

‘Ask the others, we all saw her.’

They walked back quickly to the house. As his father turned the jeep, Miquel ran into the house to fetch his binoculars.

‘What are you doing with those?’ his father asked.

Miquel looked down at them resting in his lap.

‘I don’t know … I thought …’

‘We don’t have time for thinking,’ his father said.

They drove along the narrow road out of the village; the windscreen wipers were on full, but still the snow impaired their vision and the jeep’s headlights caught sheets of whiteness. Had she been on the road coming towards them, even with her arms outstretched, they would not have seen her. It must have been clear to his father, Miquel knew, that there was little purpose in their journey. The only hope, Miquel thought, was that she had left later than Mateu had said. He considered that for a moment and then
the possibility that she had walked slowly, or had turned back at some point, and then he let his mind linger over another possibility – that she had walked quickly and left even earlier than Mateu had said and was within reach of Pallosa, that she was clambering down the old paths as best she could. Moving slowly and carefully, watching each step. It was territory she knew; she was, Miquel thought, unlikely to make mistakes. But he was not sure. Perhaps the paths down the slopes would be all hidden now and every step treacherous.

His father worked hard to manage the jeep as it began to sway and slide. Even when the snow was not blown hard against the windscreen, they could see it falling in dense waves and building up on the road in front of them so that after a while they were driving on a thick blanket of snow, which was gathering in strength as they moved forward. Soon it was obvious that their way would eventually be impeded, their way back made impossible.

Miquel knew that it would make sense for him to suggest they stop and turn, that their moving ahead was perhaps pointless and maybe even dangerous, but he knew also that if they turned and went home they would be facing into sheer emptiness, with no idea where his mother was and the long night ahead of them.

When there was a small clearing, his father, without saying anything, tried to turn the jeep, believing, it seemed to Miquel, that the snow covered a level surface. But it merely covered a sharp dip between the road and the verge into which one of the front wheels now sank. His father cursed as Miquel got out of the jeep to see if he could ease the vehicle back onto the road. He watched the wheel
revolve frantically, like a spider caught in water. In the end, they had to find stones wherever they could and a short plank from the back of the jeep and settle these under the wheel; they were blinded by the snow as they scampered about the jeep. When he turned to avoid the driving snow, he found that it was blowing and swirling in all directions as though the four winds were competing with each other. They began to push the jeep once the wheel had been stabilized, trying to lift it back onto the road, but the wheels were stuck in the snow and would not easily move. They were, Miquel guessed, half an hour’s walk from the village, maybe more in the snow, and he imagined, as his father revved the engine in one more large effort to move the jeep, that his mother, having avoided the worst of the weather, was now knocking gently on the door of her brother’s house, the house where she was born. They loved her in that house and they would welcome her and in the morning they would find a way of sending a message to say that she was safe.

He heaved one more time as his father put sudden pressure on the accelerator. The jeep slid sideways; its four wheels were now on the road, still facing away from the village. His father shouted to him to get back in, he was going to try to turn the jeep again. He put it in neutral and let it inch forward as far as it could safely go and then he pulled up the handbrake and put it into reverse. He let the handbrake down and slowly accelerated. At first it did not move, and then the back wheels began to revolve in the snow until his father gave the accelerator fierce pressure and they moved back at speed, sliding on the road. But they were almost facing the village now; they could go back,
cutting with difficulty through the settling snow on the ground and the gusts of thick snowflakes gathering on the windscreen as fast as the wipers could remove them.

Once home, they went through all the possibilities, how quickly she could walk, at what time she had left, how long it took along the road until you had to find the old paths which led down to Pallosa. Even in summer there were tough stretches, parts you had to scramble down rather than walk. She could, Miquel said, have turned back when the snow came. She knew how dangerous a snowstorm like this could be. Even if she were closer to Pallosa when it started, she might have thought that it was safer on the level track than on the slopes moving downwards, and even though it would take her hours, trudging through the snow, it might have been the wisest thing to do.

‘If we went to La Seu,’ Miquel said, ‘we could ask the police there to find out if she arrived in Pallosa. We could report her as missing.’

His father sighed.

‘I know she’s alive somewhere,’ he said.

Miquel did not answer him.

When a knock came to the door, he believed in the first instant that their troubles were over, she had come back. Then, however, he realized that she would not knock the door of her own house. Whoever had knocked remained outside. Perhaps they had found her or knew where she was. When his father went into the hallway and opened the door, Miquel saw that it was Josep Bernat and his wife. They had not come to this house, he knew, since the court case.

‘We saw her going,’ Josep said. ‘We thought it was a strange time to be setting off. She had a bag with her.’

‘A shopping bag,’ his wife added.

‘We noticed it because it was the wrong direction for shops.’

‘She was going back to Pallosa, I suppose,’ Miquel’s father said.

‘Could you not have driven her there?’ Josep asked.

As his father sighed again, Miquel moved towards the window where he could see dense whirling snow still falling outside. The visitors remained standing; they had not been asked to take their coats off, nor offered any refreshment. Miquel could sense that Josep now regretted his last question. He smiled hesitantly at their neighbour as his father turned away.

‘We could report her missing to the police in La Seu,’ Miquel said.

‘The road is probably impassable now and the phone lines from there might be down,’ Josep replied. ‘It’ll be worse later because it’s starting to freeze as well. They’ll open the road in the morning, I hope.’

‘Do you remember what time she left at?’ Miquel asked.

‘She didn’t leave in time to get to Pallosa before the snow,’ Josep replied.

‘She could have turned back when it started,’ Miquel said.

‘It would be hard in that blizzard to have any sense of direction,’ Josep said.

‘Don’t say anything more!’ Miquel’s father said.

‘We were going to say that the men will all search for
her when the light comes,’ Josep’s wife said. ‘The minute there’s light. But they can’t search for her now. The snow has not done its worst yet. They cannot go out in the blizzard.’

‘She’s gone, then,’ Miquel’s father said, sitting down and sighing. ‘No one could last the night in the open. She’ll die of the cold.’

‘You never can tell,’ Josep said.

‘We’ll talk in the morning, then,’ Miquel’s father said. ‘We can ask the police to check if she ever arrived in Pallosa.’

When Josep Bernat and his wife left the house, Miquel stood with his father watching them as they trudged through the snow. Then Miquel went outside to make sure that there was enough feed in the hen house, collecting eggs at the same time, and then feeding the rabbits and closing their shed for the night. At the doorway, he gave Clua, who seemed ravenous, some scraps. As his father sat silently at the table, he fried six eggs in oil, letting the oil splutter onto the tiles around the cooker, as his mother would never do. He cut some stale bread and brought some salt and oil and the one half-tomato that was left to the table. He put three fried eggs on a plate for his father and three for himself. As they ate in silence, Miquel thought over and over of the possibility that this was not really happening, it was a long dream he would soon wake from, or a scene which would change without warning as another knock came to the door or a jeep pulled up outside, or her face, smiling and nervous, appeared at the window as they both stood up to greet her, their food half eaten.

In the morning he woke to the sound of boots on the
stairs, boots on the floorboards below and men’s voices. He quickly dressed in the freezing bedroom before opening the shutters to a world of pure glaring whiteness. He went downstairs. Five or six men from the village were there, one of them had brought a pot of coffee and some brandy. His father, he noticed, looked shrunken and cowed beside these other men. He realized that in all his life he had seldom seen other men in this kitchen, his uncle a few times and the postman, or men coming to sell or repair something, but they were always somehow in the shadows. These men, up at dawn and ready for the search, held the centre of the room; they were confident, brusque and sharp-eyed.

Outside on the steps of the house their dogs waited. It was bitterly cold and the snow was still falling; in the night it had settled knee-deep on the ground. It would, he thought, be hard to make any progress under these conditions. His mother, the neighbours agreed, had been gone for more than three hours when the snow came. If she had fallen or found shelter, it was not likely to be close by. The snow would have covered any tracks she had made and the air was probably too cold for the dogs to be able to trace any scent. Their only hope was that she had moved quickly or found company on the road and made her way with assistance to her brother’s house before real darkness fell and the thick snow began to settle.

The men moved slowly, with determination. It seemed to Miquel that they knew as well as he did that this quest was pointless, that even a body would not be found under the relentless covering of snow, and that under these conditions, even reaching Coll del So would be impossible.
They were doing it, he knew, because they could not do nothing, despite their dislike for his father. They would not wish it to be known that they had idled in their houses, or done easy winter work, when a woman of the village had disappeared in the snow. And so all morning they moved carefully along the road which his mother must have travelled. They stopped only when a flask of brandy and some bread and cold sausage were passed around. They did not speak much to each other but they did not speak to Miquel or his father at all.

It was well past midday, with the snow falling still, and they had not yet reached the church of Santa Magdalena where the narrow military road began. Miquel watched them consulting with each other while his father stood apart. He knew that they wished to abandon the search for the day; it would take them three hours to get back to the village. This meant that they could go forward for another hour or more and still be back before dusk, but it was clear that they were already tired, each step in the heavy snow took its toll on their energy; they would be exhausted by the time they reached home.

It was easier to dream than do anything else, to imagine his uncle driving his mother home from Pallosa after her night of rest, and his uncle’s jeep appearing in the village at the same time as they all arrived back. As they turned, it struck Miquel forcefully that they all knew that his mother had not survived, that the men from the village had taken him and his father out on this vain search as a way of distracting them from the cold fact that Miquel’s mother was missing, she lay dead somewhere near or below the Coll del So, covered in a metre or more of snow, that she
would not ever come back to their house, unless they brought her coffin there when they found her. Walking, then, was a way of getting them used to the new fact without their having to wait all day in an empty house, with nothing happening, and nothing to say.

When they came back into the village they saw a police jeep outside their house, with two uniformed members of the Guardia Civil inside. As soon as the group of villagers came fully into view, one policeman got out of the jeep, and then, when they were closer, the one who had been in the passenger seat emerged. He was very young, Miquel noticed, and seemed almost shy. He kept his hat on as he glanced at the men coming towards him and then looked away. His companion, the driver, was middle-aged, stocky, hatless. Miquel watched him singling out his father and himself as the two men he would need to speak to and wondered how the police had been alerted. As they approached the jeep, Miquel checked the back seat in case they had found her and had her body. But there was nothing except an old rug.