Mouroir

The Shoes

Late that afternoon we went swimming for the last time in the sea at the bottom of the garden, the slanting rays. Shadows had started fumbling over the land and the sea was perceptibly growing more winy and deeper. The earth is its own impediment to light. In this very blue glow we plashed about until my wife’s hair was lank and sluggish like a shoe to the sloe-eyed face, and then we ran back up the garden in our pale bodies. Behind us the sea was churning the gravel, and quickly afterwards darkness.

It was the next day that we departed for our destination: the North. (“The Devil hath established his cities in the North” — St Augustine.) Father, Mother, my wife and I, our dead uncle Don Espejuelo and the warder. We were to drive to the city from where we could take the aeroplane — and onward in two legs, first to a halfway point and then beyond to the true North. Complicated! Cutting up the journey and using two tickets each somehow worked out cheaper. Away from the sea we thus sped, the road winding through the dry hills with the sparse scrub, and in the back of the car our dead uncle Don Espejuelo was coughing dust and shaking his head at the senselessness.

We found the city quite deserted and dark. Even the air terminal was enfolded in darkness as if by heavy drapery and we came upon no other prospective passengers there. Here we were to wait for a while before we picked up our tickets and all the necessary paraphernalia and papers with which to proceed past the customs barrier to the airstrip somewhere outside the limits of the agglomeration. That, I was convinced, would present major problems: the man of customs in his white shorts would leaf through our passports and then poke his head through the rolled-down window to scan the interior of the car and he might just ask a question of our dead uncle Don Espejuelo sitting there as big as life in his dust coat and his dark glasses and surely Don Espejuelo would open his mouth to utter his favourite silly argument — “He is two. Always he is together like wheat transformed. And what is it holds him together? Why, the sandwich spread of the soul to get her. Don’t open him up. One-sliced he’ll become crumbly and dead: just bread. . ” — whereupon the perplexed official (not programmed for this type of irregularity) may sharpen his glance and our uncle would vomit his cackling cough and his coat will probably even come awry or flap open to show that underneath it harbours merely dust and then we should be in trouble because it is surely illegal to be gallivanting along the State’s roads with a defunct member on the back seat, even though in presence of a warder. . “And anyway,” Don Espejuelo would compound the official’s ire with a bare-toothed grin, “it is anyway to pass from the hardly known to the hardly unknown.” Full of disjointed and inappropriate clichés he is, Don Espejuelo. “Point less, hah!”

But for now we went wandering through the murky halls of the air terminal. I thought of buying some reading matter for the flight. At the news stand a magazine named Times turned out to be a religious tract. I picked up a newspaper call The Jewish News but that proved to be several sheets of advertisements for furniture removers. And the pages were yellow and coated with dust. A little further along the vast mezzanine floor a young lady tried to tempt us with some souvenirs: she wanted to sell my wife a nose-ring of dull silver encrusted with several tiny green emeralds. At this my wife wrinkled her nose and sniffed disdainfully.

Yes, it was time to set out for the airfield. We walked out to the car parked by the kerb. But here Father stopped us. Don Espejuelo, he announced, has gone missing and would have to be found before we may continue. It is not done to discard one’s family en route. Nobody knows where he’s disappeared to, no, not a living soul. And with this he got into the car, adjusted his wide-brimmed hat and smoothed down his double-breasted suit, and drove off with a laugh.

The warder stood in the entrance hall looking down at his shoes with a sorry expression. One black shoe was snub-nosed and high, the other one — black too — was very long and limp and creased. He lifted his mournful gaze to us: no, he felt obliged to declare, Don Espejuelo will never be found, nor will he ever come back. Because he has absconded with the shoes. (Damn.)