Mothers and Sons (26 page)

His father explained, as soon as they were inside, that his wife could easily be safe, could easily have arrived in Pallosa and be in her brother’s house. The older policeman took note of the brother’s name and said in a heavy southern accent that if the single telephone line to Pallosa, which was in the police station there, were back up he would call as soon as he returned to La Seu, and if the road were open would go to Pallosa. In the meantime, he needed a description of her.

As Miquel’s father spoke and the policeman took notes, the younger policeman leaned against the wall, just inside
the door of the kitchen, pushed his hat back on his head so Miquel was able to see his clear, unwrinkled forehead and his large dark eyes. As these eyes examined the room, seeming to concentrate briefly on the scene between the two older men, they locked with Miquel’s eyes. Miquel was aware that he had been staring at the younger man since he came into the room and it would be better now if he looked away, let whatever had happened dissolve into a moment of unconcealed curiosity and nothing more. But he did not look away. He took in the young policeman’s face in the shadowy light of the kitchen, the full redness of his lips, the square, hard stubbornness of his jaw and chin and then the softness of his eyes, the eyelashes like a girl’s. The young policeman, in turn, watched only Miquel’s eyes, his gaze cold, expressionless, as though he were sullenly blaming him for something. When Miquel looked down at the policeman’s crotch, he too glanced down at himself and he briefly smiled, opening his lips, before resuming his former expression, but more intense now, almost feral, staking out an object within his grasp.

As his colleague finished taking his notes and appeared ready to depart, the younger policeman took off his hat. Miquel, across the room, quietly acknowledged the gesture. Then the young policeman, who had not spoken once, turned and opened the door, allowing his colleague to leave first, gesturing to Miquel’s father to follow, trying, it seemed to Miquel, to engineer a moment when the two older men would be outside and the two younger ones at the door, or inside the hall. But Miquel’s father held back, insisting, out of politeness, that the younger policeman should go out before him. Miquel watched the younger policeman carefully
as his companion reversed the jeep and turned and slowed for a second before driving away.

As Miquel busied himself doing his mother’s tasks, his father went outside and began to chop wood, striking frantic blows with the hatchet, splitting blocks of wood they could have easily burned in one piece. Miquel dreaded the night, when they would have nothing left to do but wait for news of her, knowing that it might not come soon.

He remembered a game he had begun to play with her as soon as he could walk. He did not know how it had started, but, with her in the room, he used to hide under the table, or under the bed, or behind a chair, and she then would pretend that she could not find him, and they would both let it continue until the moment before he became scared. Then he would appear and she would feign surprise and shock and delight, and lift him up in the air. He had no memory of ever doing this while his father was present and, once Jordi could understand things, he would grow frightened by the disappearance and the mock search and was made jealous by his mother’s and his brother’s shouts of recognition and sudden greeting. As Miquel moved around the house now, he was acutely alert to the shadowy places, becoming darker in the twilight, the places where you could hide and then appear, as though his mother might mysteriously arrive and position herself where she could not be instantly found.

That evening they ate in silence some more fried eggs and stale bread and cold sausage until Miquel asked their father what they should do about Jordi. Even though they had no address for him, no idea where he was, they could ask the police in La Seu to make contact with him.

‘And say what?’ his father asked.

Miquel did not answer him.

‘He has enough to worry about,’ his father said.

‘He might hear it from someone.’

‘He’s well out of earshot.’

‘You can meet people from home,’ Miquel said. ‘You never know who you are going to meet, and they could have heard the news.’

‘For the moment,’ his father said, ‘we’ll tell him nothing, we’ll leave him in peace.’

When they had eaten, Foix, who had made himself the leader of the search all that day, called to the door but refused to come in, even though it was snowing hard outside. The phone lines, he said, were still down. His brother-in-law, he added, had made it through to the village and left behind two dogs who were trained to follow a scent. He had worked with them before, he said, and they were the best. So they would set out with the dogs at first light, all the men who had been with them would come again, even though the terrain might be more difficult because there could be a bigger fall of snow during the night.

Before they went to bed, his father told him that he was going to try to drive the jeep to La Seu the next day and then across the paved road to Sort and then, if he could, to Pallosa. Miquel said that he would go with the men, but when he went to the window and looked out and saw the snow coming down even thicker than before, he realized that neither his father nor the men would go very far the next day, and the village could, if the snow continued to fall as it was falling now, be cut off on both sides.

His father and himself, Miquel realized, were sleeping alone in rooms where the stark absences were palpable; it was hard to remember that both his mother and Jordi were gone, and that should Jordi return and she should not, then her absence would seem even greater. He lay on Jordi’s bed for a while until the cold made him undress and seek refuge under his own blankets. He wished it were two weeks earlier, before Jordi had left; he wished it were three years earlier, when he had just come home; he wished it were any time but now.

In the morning again he was woken by feet on the floorboards in the room below; he had slept deeply, and he longed for more time in the oblivion from which he had just been snatched. Instantly, he knew he would have to rise and spend the day searching for his mother in the freezing air, the snow getting into his boots; his toes, like his fingers, would be utterly frozen. He looked at Jordi’s bed and wondered if he concentrated hard enough could he get in touch with him to reassure him that they were all well, despite the winter, and that he had no news to tell, nothing had happened since Jordi left.

Foix, when Miquel appeared in the kitchen, took him aside and said that the two dogs, waiting outside, would need a scent to work from, and the better the scent the better the chance of finding her. Thus he would, he said, need something that belonged to her, something she wore. He began to whisper as he told Miquel that her clothes, if they had been washed since she had last worn them, would not be of much use; the closer to her body the garment had been worn the more useful it would be. He looked at Miquel as though they were both conspirators against not
only everyone in the room, but against the snow-covered world outside as well.

Miquel’s father, sure now that he would not get his jeep up the steep hill beyond the curve out of the village on the road to La Seu, was sitting alone at the table as more men came and more dogs yelped in the freezing morning. The snow had stopped in the night; before the dawn the temperature had dropped which meant they had to watch for patches of ice as well as deep snow. His father seemed forlorn, exhausted, distant from what was happening around him. Miquel decided not to trouble him about Foix’s request, to go upstairs alone and try to find something of his mother’s which had preserved her scent.

He had forgotten how well he knew the chest of drawers under the window of his parents’ bedroom. He had not been near it for years, but when he was a small boy his favourite pastime, under his mother’s supervision, was opening each drawer and taking out the contents and then folding them and replacing them exactly as he had found them. In the top drawer she kept documents and bills and receipts on one side and handkerchiefs and scarves on the other. The middle drawer was where she kept her blouses and cardigans, and in the two bottom drawers she kept her underwear. When she opened these drawers the smell was not of her, but of lavender and perfume. He did not touch anything; nothing here would be any use to Foix and his dogs.

In a corner of the room was the old basket, the same size as the one in his own room, where dirty clothes were thrown. It was only half-full; on the top were shirts his father had worn with some socks and shorts and vests, and
at the very bottom were the last things his mother had worn in this house and left here, as well as the blouse she had worn on the night of Jordi’s dinner which, he imagined, she was keeping so she could wash it and dry it in some special way. Below this was some of her underwear which he took and held, and then, checking that no one was behind him, he lifted to his nose. He buried his face in the intimate smell of her, which was clear despite the days that had passed since she had worn this underwear. It carried a sharp hint of her into this cold room and, for a moment, he imagined the dogs moving blindly through the landscape, living only with this smell, seeking its loving source under the snow or in the undergrowth. He would walk behind them. He dropped all of the undergarments except one back into the basket, tucking them under his father’s clothes, and carried the one he had selected downstairs and gave it to Foix, who was waiting with the dogs outside the door.

The day was much colder than the one before and progress was much harder as the two new dogs followed phantom scents which led them off the road and high into the hills while the men had to wait for them below. Miquel’s father followed them far behind most of the time, giving no impression that he was searching for her or looking for clues as to where she might be. Miquel noticed Foix and Castellet and some of the other men glancing back at him, clearly irritated. He noticed also that their neighbours, on this second day’s searching, were more animated, seemed to enjoy shouting at the dogs, had more life in them the more time went on. Their very excitement caused his father to appear uninterested, almost bored as he trudged
behind them as though his only aim were not to wet his feet.

The two dogs, Miquel thought, had more energy than intelligence, and he wondered why Foix did not realize, as he did now, that anything buried under a mound of freezing snow would be unlikely to yield a scent. But he knew that there was nothing else he could do except move forward in what was, with the exception of fox and wild-boar tracks, a flat, virgin whiteness, seeming innocent, almost beautiful, utterly harmless, its treacherous nature lying in layers under its blank surface.

By early afternoon they could go no further; the snow was too deep, and it was becoming hard to tell where the road ahead began to dip and rise and where the margin was and how steep the fall. The dogs, who had not been fed since early morning, were increasingly difficult; two of them from the village began a vicious fight, snarling and yelping as they tore at each other, having to be held by their owners, and then kicked into surly submission. Miquel noticed that all the men took part in separating them and holding them and shouting at them except himself and his father, who stood back watching, and he felt that this, too, annoyed the men. Thus he was glad when they gave up the search, having to wait for the two new dogs to come back from whatever vain quest they had been on, and began to make their way back. Miquel was careful to walk with the other men, stay between two of them, or close to one. His father lagged so far behind that several times when he turned his head he could not see him.

That night his father insisted that there would be no more futile outings, that these men hated him and had spent
two days uselessly walking the road merely as a way of torturing him and humiliating him. He would have no more of them, he said. In the morning, he said, they would go to La Seu, where it would be market day, whether the road was open or not; they would drive to the point where it was closed and wait there, or wade through whatever snow was blocking the road.

Miquel, without consulting his father, left the house and called on Foix, who, when he came to the door, asked him almost aggressively what he wanted. Miquel told him that they would not be searching the next day, but going to La Seu, where they might meet people from Pallosa. They could also speak to the police. He added that he wished to thank Foix for all his help.

‘And your father?’ Foix asked. ‘We all know he has a tongue. Has he lost the use of it?’

Miquel held his gaze calmly.

‘He is very upset.’

Foix closed the door without speaking. When Miquel went home, he did not tell his father where he had been.

The road to La Seu was open, but icy in stretches, dangerously so in the early morning. Miquel had slept a dreamless sleep and for the first few minutes of the day had believed that this would be another normal day in his life. The night had erased all memory of the days just passed. But his father, he saw when he went downstairs, had not slept at all, seemed worn out, stopping halfway through every sentence, having forgotten what it was he had wanted to say. His father’s sleepless state appeared to make him drive more cautiously, keep his speed down on bends and slopes. There was almost no traffic on the road. Even the
main road, when they reached it, was quiet and this was unusual for a market day.

Two weeks before this he had walked here with his mother, stood in the queue with her, noticed her snatching time from him to down three drinks, and now he and his father moved through the early hours of the market, as the stalls were barely set up, in search of someone from Pallosa or Burch or Tirvia, or any of the other villages around, who might have news of her. Miquel knew it was most likely that, because of the bad roads and the broken phone lines, no one would know anything about her, and they would have to be told, as though it were a guilty secret, what had happened, and then news would begin to spread. He thought of suggesting to his father that, instead of walking all morning through the ghostly market, they should find out if the road to Pallosa were open and go there now, consult his uncle before his uncle heard it as a rumour or a half-digested piece of news from someone else.