Mothers and Sons (31 page)

By the time his father’s jeep came towards him, two of the vultures had landed and the others, five or six now, were lower in the sky. His father, whose face was frozen in fear and anger and full of vigorous intent, was driving with Josep Bernat in the front passenger seat and Manolo in the back seat. He barely stopped for Miquel. When he got in, he saw that Bernat had two rifles stretched across his lap. His father drove fast and relentlessly towards the birds.

He knew about the eyes, that they pecked your eyes out first, and he supposed they had already done that; perhaps the strongest one, or the fastest, won the right. It could not take long to pull someone’s eyes out. There would be no blood, he supposed that her blood would have congealed or drained away. He supposed, too, that they would go for the soft places in her body, leaving her head and her arms and legs for last. He was desperately trying not to cry as the jeep stopped with a jerk and they got out and began to scamper as best they could down the slope.

Some distance below there was a flat clearing, and this was where the birds had gathered. Miquel could not believe that his mother had ended here, she could not have fallen in as open a place, he thought, and, in any case, the passes which led down to Pallosa were further along. He handed his father the glasses and, when Bernat had also looked through them, he took them himself and began to study the scene. The birds had not fully settled around their prey.
They were large flapping creatures, filthy-looking, hitting against each other as though they were blind. Then they fastened on a spot and began to peck, pushing one another out of the way. As his father and Bernat edged slowly forward and Manolo stayed near him, he was transfixed by the scene the binoculars magnified. The vultures were feasting on piles of viscera, snatching pieces away, eating with greed and relish and then barging back in for more. He focused on one of them putting one claw down hard for leverage so it could all the better tear the flesh from her with its beak. He dropped the binoculars, crying out, and ran towards his father and Bernat with Manolo following him.

As they grew close, the birds began to move away, but in their resentful flapping, they had left a smell in their wake. The smell was sour and horrible, he thought, but it was not the smell of rotting flesh but the stench of something living. It was the smell of foul energy, the birds themselves, their pungent odour which came, he thought, from their digesting what was rotten and dead.

Miquel almost smiled when he saw what they had gathered around. He had been ready to witness his mother’s entrails poured out as though she were an old and abandoned animal, and he had been ready to protect her as best he could. The vultures had come all this way, he saw, not to find his mother but to peck a large dog, like a hunting dog, down to its bones. They must have had a hungry winter, he thought, as he stood back.

As one of the vultures flew insolently over them, Miquel saw his father lift the gun. From this close range, his father fired one shot from the rifle at the bird, the one with the
scaliest wings and the most rabid energy; he sent it tumbling downwards with the force of the bullet, while the other vultures flew upwards or flapped their clumsy wings and moved angrily back.

The injured bird, lying almost upside down, began to screech, tried to rise and fell back. Suddenly, it managed to lift its head, which was raw and unbowed, utterly alive, the eyes indignant and sharp, the nostrils almost breathing fire within the vicious beak. The vulture saw them, and all its sullen hatred for them, its savage gaze, its fierce panic, caught Miquel, as though it were directed at him and him only, as though his secret spirit had been waiting all its life for such recognition. The dying bird was beyond human in its grief and its injury, screeching still in pain. Miquel did not know why he began to edge towards it, but he quickly found that Manolo was holding him from behind, preventing him moving further as his father lifted the gun again. Miquel leaned backwards towards Manolo, seeking the warmth of him, looking for some grim comfort as the next shot rang out. Manolo held him hard to make sure that he did not move any closer to the dying bird and the carcass, half torn asunder now, no use to anyone.

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to acknowledge the following publications where some of these stories, often in earlier versions, first appeared: the
Guardian
(‘A Song’ and ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’); the
London Review of Books
(‘A Priest in the Family’);
Finbar’s Hotel
(‘The Use of Reason’); the
Dublin Review
(‘The Name of the Game’);
In Dublin
(‘A Journey’);
The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories
(‘Three Friends’). ‘A Long Winter’ was first published in a limited edition by the Tuskar Rock Press.

The title of the story ‘A Priest in the Family’ comes from a definition of Irish respectability: ‘A well in the yard; a bull in the field; and a priest in the family.’

I am grateful to Angela Rohan for her careful work on the manuscript; to my agent Peter Straus; to my editors Andrew Kidd at Picador in London and Nan Graham at Scribner in New York; to Catriona Crowe, John S. Doyle, Jordi Casellas and Edward Mulhall.

Some of this book was written at the Santa Maddalena Foundation outside Florence in Italy. I wish to thank Beatrice Monti for her kind hospitality there.

Colm Tóibín is the author of five internationally acclaimed novels:
The South
, winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literature Prize;
The Heather Blazing
, winner of the Encore Award for best second novel;
The Story of the Night; The Blackwater Lightship
, a finalist for the Booker Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and, most recently,
The Master
, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Le prix du meilleur livre étranger, and the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize for Fiction. It was also selected by the
New York Times Book Review
as one of the ten best books of the year.
Mothers and Sons
is Tóibín’s first collection of short fiction.

His non-fiction includes
Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border; Homage to Barcelona; The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe;
and, most recently,
Love in a Dark Time
. He is also the co-author, with Carmen Callil, of
The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950
.

Colm Tóibín lives in Dublin, Ireland.