The Childhood of Jesus (24 page)

He breaks the silence. ‘That is enough for tonight. David, go and fetch your pyjamas. You have kept Diego waiting long enough. Think up a good name for your brotherhood. Then when you come back from La Residencia, you can invite Fidel to be your first brother.' He turns to Inés. ‘Do you agree? Do you approve?'

CHAPTER 23

‘WHERE IS El Rey?'

The cart is standing at the quayside, empty, ready to be loaded, but El Rey's place has been taken by a horse they have not seen before, a black gelding with a white blaze on his forehead. When the boy comes too close, the new horse rolls his eyes nervously and paws the ground.

‘Hey!' Álvaro calls to the driver, who sits drowsing on his seat. ‘Where is the big mare? The youngster has come especially to see her.'

‘Down with horse flu.'

‘His name is El Rey,' says the boy. ‘He's not a mare. Can we visit him?'

A guarded look passes between Álvaro and the driver. ‘El Rey is back at the stables, resting,' says Álvaro. ‘The horse doctor is going to give him medicine. We can visit him as soon as he is better.'

‘I want to see him now. I can make him better.'

He, Simón, intervenes. ‘Not now, my boy. Let us speak to Inés first. Then maybe all three of us can make a trip to the stables tomorrow.'

‘Better wait a few days,' says Álvaro, and flashes him a look which he does not know how to interpret. ‘Let El Rey have a chance to recover properly. Horse flu is a nasty thing, worse than human flu. If you are sick with horse flu, you need rest and quiet, not visitors.'

‘He does want visitors,' says the boy. ‘He wants me. I am his friend.'

Álvaro takes him, Simón, aside. ‘Better if you don't bring the kid to the stables,' he says; and, when he still fails to understand: ‘The mare is old. She has had her day.'

‘Álvaro has just had a message from the horse doctor,' he reports to the boy. ‘They have decided to send El Rey to the horse farm so that he can get better more quickly.'

‘What is a horse farm?'

‘A horse farm is where young horses are born and old horses go to rest.'

‘Can we go there?'

‘The horse farm is out in the country, I'm not sure exactly where. I'll make inquiries.'

When the men knock off at four o'clock, the boy is nowhere to be seen. ‘He went with the last dray,' says one of the men. ‘I thought you knew.'

He sets off at once. By the time he gets to the grain store the sun is setting. The store is deserted, the great doors are locked. His heart beating fast, he searches for the boy. He finds him behind the store, on a loading platform, squatting beside the body of El Rey, stroking her head, waving the flies away. The stout leather belt that must have been used to hoist the mare is still around her belly.

He clambers onto the platform. ‘Poor, poor El Rey!' he murmurs. Then he notices the blood that has congealed in the horse's ear, and the dark bullet hole above it, and shuts up.

‘It's all right,' says the boy. ‘He is going to be well again in three days.'

‘Is that what the horse doctor told you?'

The boy shakes his head. ‘El Rey.'

‘Did El Rey tell you that himself—three days?'

The boy nods.

‘But it isn't just horse flu, my boy. Surely you can see. He's been shot with a gun, as a mercy. He must have been suffering. He was suffering and they decided to help him, to ease the pain. He is not going to get better. He is dead.'

‘No, he's not.' Tears are running down the boy's cheeks. ‘He is going to the horse farm to get better. You said so.'

‘He is going to the horse farm, yes, but not to this horse farm, not to the horse farm here; he is going to another horse farm, in another world. Where he will not have to wear harness and pull a heavy cart but can stroll around in the fields in the sunshine eating buttercups.'

‘It's not true! He is going to the horse farm to get better. They are going to put him on the cart and take him to the horse farm.'

The boy bends and presses his mouth to the horse's vast nostril. Hastily he grips the boy by the arm and pulls him away. ‘Don't do that! It's not hygienic! You will get sick!'

The boy wrests himself free. He is weeping openly. ‘I will save him!' he sobs. ‘I want him to live! He's my friend!'

He holds the struggling boy still and clasps him tight. ‘My dearest, dearest child, sometimes those we love die and there is nothing we can do about it except look forward to the day when we will all be together again.'

‘I want to make him breathe!' the boy sobs.

‘He's a horse, he's too big for you to breathe life into.'

‘Then you can breathe into him!'

‘That won't work. I don't have the right kind of breath. I don't have the breath of life. All I can do is be sad. All I can do is mourn and help you to mourn. Now quick, before it gets dark, why don't you and I go down to the river and look for some flowers to put on El Rey? He will like that. He was a gentle horse, wasn't he, in spite of being a giant. He will enjoy arriving at the horse farm with a wreath of flowers around his neck.'

So he coaxes the boy away from the dead body, leads him to the riverbank, helps him pluck flowers and weave them into a garland. They return; the boy drapes the garland over the dead, staring eyes.

‘There,' he says. ‘Now we must leave El Rey. He has a long journey to make, all the way to the great horse farm. When he arrives, the other horses will look at him with his crown of flowers, and they will say to each other, “He must have been a king where he came from! He must be the great El Rey whom we have heard about, the friend of David!”'

The boy takes his hand. Under a rising full moon they trudge back along the path to the docks.

‘Is El Rey getting up now, do you think?' asks the boy.

‘He is getting up, he is shaking himself, he is giving that whinny of his that you know, he is setting off, clop-clop-clop, towards his new life. End of weeping. No more weeping.'

‘No more weeping,' says the boy, and perks up, and even gives a jaunty little smile.

CHAPTER 24

HE AND the boy share a birthday. That is to say, because they arrived on the same boat on the same day they have been assigned as their birth date the date of their joint arrival, their joint entry into a new life. The boy was deemed to be five years old because he looked five years old, just as he was deemed to be forty-five (so his card says) because that was how old he looked on that day. (He had been piqued: he had felt himself to be younger. Now he feels older. He feels sixty; there are days when he feels seventy.)

Since the boy has no friends, not even a horse friend, there is no point in holding a birthday party for him. Nonetheless, he and Inés are agreed that the day should be properly celebrated. So Inés bakes a cake and ices it and plants six candles on it, and they secretly buy him gifts, she a sweater (winter is around the corner), he an abacus (he is worried about the boy's resistance to the science of numbers).

The birthday celebration is overshadowed by a letter that comes in the post, reminding him that as of his sixth birthday David should be enrolled in the public school system, the responsibility for so enrolling him resting with his parent(s) or guardian(s).

Up to now Inés has encouraged the boy to believe that he is too clever to need schooling, that what little tutoring he may require he can receive at home. But his wilfulness over
Don Quixote
, his claims to be able to read and write and count when he clearly cannot, have sown doubt even in her mind. Perhaps it would be best, she now concedes, for him to have the guidance of a trained teacher. So they buy him a third, joint gift, a red leather pouch with the initial letter
D
stamped in gold in one corner, containing two new pencils, a pencil sharpener, and an eraser. This they present to him, along with the abacus and the sweater, on his birthday. The pouch, they tell him, is his surprise gift, to accompany the happy and surprising news that he will soon, perhaps as early as next week, be going to school.

The boy receives the news coolly. ‘I don't want to go with Fidel,' he says. They reassure him: being older than he, Fidel is bound to be in a different class. ‘And I want to take
Don Quixote
with me,' he says.

He tries to dissuade the boy from taking the book to school. It belongs to the East Blocks library, he says; if it were to be lost he has no idea how they would replace it. Besides, the school is bound to have its own library with its own copy of the book. But the boy will have none of that.

On Monday he arrives early at the apartment to accompany Inés and the boy to the stop where he will catch the bus that will take him to his first day of school. The boy wears his new sweater, carries the red leather pouch with the initial
D
on it, and grips the tattered East Blocks
Don Quixote
under his arm. Fidel is already at the bus stop, along with half a dozen other children from the Blocks. Ostentatiously David does not greet him.

Because they want going to school to seem part of a normal life, they agree not to press the boy for tales of the classroom; and he, for his part, remains tight-lipped, unusually so. ‘Did it go well at school today?' he dares to ask, on the fifth day. ‘Uh-huh,' replies the boy. ‘Have you made new friends yet?' The boy does not deign to reply.

Thus it continues for three weeks, four weeks. Then a letter arrives in the mail, with the school's address in the top left-hand corner. Headed ‘Extraordinary Communication', it invites the parent(s) of the pupil in question to contact the school secretary at his/her/their earliest convenience to fix a time for a consultation with the relevant class teacher in order to address certain issues that have arisen relating to his/her/their son/daughter.

Inés telephones the school. ‘I am free all day,' she says. ‘Name a time and I will be there.' The secretary proposes eleven o'clock the next morning, during señor León's free period. ‘It will be best if the boy's father comes too,' she adds. ‘My son does not have a father,' Inés replies. ‘I will ask his uncle to come along. His uncle takes an interest in him.'

Señor León, the first-year class teacher, turns out to be a tall, thin young man with a dark beard and only one eye. The dead eye, made of glass, does not move in its socket; he, Simón, wonders whether the children do not find this disturbing.

‘We have only a little time,' says señor León, ‘therefore I will speak directly. I find David to be an intelligent boy, very intelligent. He has a quick mind; he grasps new ideas at once. However, he is finding it difficult to adjust to the realities of the classroom. He expects to get his own way all the time. Perhaps this is because he is a little older than the class average. Or perhaps at home he has been used to getting his own way rather too easily. In any event, it is not a positive development.'

Señor León pauses, places the fingers of one hand against the fingers of the other, tip to tip, and waits for their response.

‘A child should be free,' says Inés. ‘A child should be able to enjoy his childhood. I had my doubts about sending David to school so young.'

‘Six is not young to be going to school,' says señor León. ‘On the contrary.'

‘Nevertheless he is young, and used to his freedom.'

‘A child does not give up his freedom by coming to school,' says señor León. ‘He does not give up his freedom by sitting still. He does not give up his freedom by listening to what the teacher has to say. Freedom is not incompatible with discipline and hard work.'

‘Does David not sit still? Does he not listen to what you say?'

‘He is restless, and he makes the other children restless too. He leaves his seat and roams around. He leaves the room without permission. And no, he does not pay attention to what I say.'

‘That is strange. At home he does not roam around. If he roams around at school, there must be a reason for it.'

The solitary eye bores into Inés.

‘As for the restlessness,' she says, ‘he has always been like that. He doesn't get enough sleep.'

‘A bland diet will cure that,' says señor León. ‘No spices. No stimulants. I come now to specifics. In reading, David has unhappily made no progress, none at all. Other children who are not as naturally gifted read better than he does. Much better. There is something about the activity of reading that he seems unable to grasp. The same goes for figures.'

He, Simón, intervenes. ‘But he has a love for books. You must have seen that. He carries
Don Quixote
with him wherever he goes.'

‘He clings to the book because it has pictures,' replies señor León. ‘It is generally not good practice to learn to read from books with pictures. The pictures distract the mind from the words. And
Don Quixote
, whatever else may be said about it, is not a book for beginning readers. David's spoken Spanish is not bad, but he cannot read. He cannot even sound the letters of the alphabet. I have never come across such an extreme case. I would like to propose that we call in a specialist, a therapist. I have a feeling—and colleagues of mine whom I have consulted share my feeling—that there may be a deficit.'

‘A deficit?'

‘A specific deficit linked to symbolic activities. To working with words and numbers. He cannot read. He cannot write. He cannot count.'

‘At home he reads and writes. He spends hours at it every day. He is absorbed in his reading and writing. And he can count to a thousand, a million.'

For the first time señor León smiles. ‘He can recite all kinds of numbers, yes, but not in the right order. As for the marks he makes with his pencil, you may call them writing, he may call them writing, but they are not writing as generally understood. Whether they have some private meaning I cannot judge. Perhaps they have. Perhaps they hint at artistic talent. Which would be a second and more positive reason for him to see a specialist. David is an interesting child. It would be a pity to lose him. A specialist may be able to tell us whether there is some common factor underlying the deficit on the one hand and the inventiveness on the other.'