No Enemy But Time

Chapter Five

Two days after Encarnación baptized her meddlesome neighbor with a shower of urine, the old woman’s grizzled, potbellied son accosted her on the gallery outside her apartment. This man’s name was Dionisio, and he was apparently a pharmacist’s superannuated delivery boy. For a grown man with a job he spent a great deal of time around the tenement complex, and Encarnación had often heard the neighborhood children derisively calling his name when he sauntered like a bedraggled peacock through the courtyard.

A wastrel, this Dionisio, with a life going the same unpromising direction as her own.

Today he grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around to face him. His breath partook of a beery perfume, and chest hairs curled out of his shirt like so many popped packing threads. He was a man coming apart with rage; Encarnación half expected to see his shirt disintegrate and his fetid entrails come spilling out.

“Lay a curse on me!” he challenged her, tightening his grip on her shoulders. “I spit on your sorcery and your pride. How would you like to go over this rail, eh? How many would then gather to piss on your broken corpse?”

Dionisio began slapping Encarnación about. As he pummeled her, he treated her to an obscene catalogue of her faults. Finally, he delivered a stunning blow to her temple, caught her in his arms, and threw her to the gallery floor.

“But I’m not going to be imprisoned or killed for the pleasure of ending your sluttish life, you bitch. That would make you laugh from the grave, wouldn’t it? That would give you a voice with which to mock us. I know how you think.”

Squinting past the hematoma blooming beside her eye, Encarnación saw Dionisio’s chubby fingers unbuttoning his pants. Then her consciousness began filtering away. She heard a humiliating sibilance and felt an acrid warmth spreading through her skirts. Then she saw, heard, and felt nothing.

That night Encarnación Consuela Ocampo determined to do two things: to take up other lodgings and to wean her son. Long after the radios had been turned off and the run-amok children scolded into bed, she left the tenement carrying a bag of clothes and household items. The child had his usual place on her hip, and he rode wide-eyed through narrow alleys, past padlocked storefronts and bodegas. A milky sprawl of stars was visible overhead.

Their new residence was a condemned building not far from the mouth of Leoncillos Street. A row of timbers braced against the curb propped the façade of this derelict upright, and warning placards, which Encarnación could not read, stood in the building’s ground-floor fenestrae. She entered the foyer and, with an American-made bobby pin, sprang the lock on the ornate grate screening the stairs. Her son and her other burdens she then carried up three flights of steps to the empty sitting room of a desolate flat.

Here she deposited all her belongings but the child.

Before dawn she made three more trips through the labyrinthine alleys to their old apartment, never once abandoning her son in either place. Much of what she toted back to the condemned building was black-market merchandise, including nearly two dozen cartons of American cigarettes, a cache of wristwatches (Timex, Bulova, etc.), and several small electrical kitchen appliances. Once or twice, exhausted, she permitted the boy to pick his way over the cobblestones beside her, and he kept up remarkably well.

A month went by. The boy began drinking from a plastic cup that Encarnación bought for him in a department store called Gallerías Preciados, not far from the Calle de las Sierpes, Seville’s famous pedestrian thoroughfare. The milk—genuine leche de vaca—she purchased from vendors who rode their battered motorized carts past her building several times a day. She also bought oranges from fruit stalls in the neighborhood and gave her child the juice. Because she was purposely denying him her nipples, she tried to compensate by introducing him to such effervescent soft drinks as Coca-Cola and Fanta, which might not be good for him but which he greedily enjoyed. This strategy worked very well.

The boy soon ceased pestering her to present her breasts.

Another decision loomed for Encarnación. One day the city’s blue-collar henchmen would come to the building with a wrecking ball. What would happen after that? Her removal from the tenement complex had ruined her livelihood as a black-marketeer and prostitute, and what money she made nowadays came chiefly from doing errands for the owner of a nearby bodega and selling to his out-at-the-elbow customers the remainders of her cigarette and wristwatch inventories. If she should die, no one would appear to rescue her baby. And if she lived, she would have to find more lucrative work before the wrecking ball turned them out into the streets.

Her son was her joy and her martyrdom. Ever since their run-in with Dionisio’s mother, however, he had begun to change. First he had ceased vocalizing, almost as if aware that silence was the best means of preserving their squatters’ rights in the condemned building. Although he listened to the people jabbering on the sidewalk below their boarded balcony casements, he never tried to attract their attention with a hoot or a squeal. On trips into the streets on shopping errands, he habitually fixed his gaze on the lips of every speaking passerby or salesperson, but, Encarnación noticed, he did not attempt to emulate the sounds these people made. His fascination with the sequential sound patterns of human speech was entirely passive, and his mother began to fear that, having recognized her muteness, his infant mind had opted to achieve a similar state in himself.

The second change was in some ways even more worrisome. The child dreamed. These dreams, during which his eyelids flickered and his body thrashed, seemed to be especially vivid and captivating for one so young. Midnight horror shows. Morphean fantods. When his eyelids ceased jumping and his body lay perfectly still, the whites of his eyes showing like crescents of hard-boiled egg, Encarnación would panic and try to rouse him. Although he always came out of these swoons, they never failed to frighten her. She was afraid that her treatment of her son had mentally unbalanced him and that she had ruined his life forever. The final revenge of the vieja who had tormented her on the tenement rooftop was the accuracy of her analysis of the boy’s chances as an adult. Encarnación felt that she had doomed her son.

The highway to Santa Clara, the American housing area on the outskirts of Seville, was wide and desolate, the surrounding landscape forbidding under the summer moon. Encarnación, not without suffering and doubt, had made up her mind to brave the edge of this highway on foot.

Carrying her son, she crossed the final bridge before the jungle of minor industries flanking the highway on the south. Traffic was light but daunting, most demoralizingly so when the gigantic automobiles of American military personnel came whooshing by. Off to Encarnación’s right, the spooky amber of the Cruz del Campo sign gleamed above the dark superstructure of the brewery. No one stopped to offer her and her child a ride, and she did not attempt to solicit one. She was prepared to walk the entire distance.

To rest her arms, however, she soon set the boy down. Delighted, he trotted out ahead of her. Even barefoot, he looked quite handsome, for Encarnación had dressed him in a striped jersey and a pair of navy-blue shorts. She hurried to catch up with him, took his hand in hers, and counted his tiny steps in order not to have to think about the implications of what she was doing. Shortly—all too soon—the American enclave emerged from the oppressive dark.

Santa Clara reposed in the arid Andalusian countryside like an oasis of elms, neat stucco houses, and towering shepherd’s-crook street lamps. At the housing area’s unguarded entrance, these lamps cast overlapping circles of green-white radiance, blotting out the color of the lawns and imparting an oily sheen to the asphalt streets. Insects whirred in the grass, and music issued from an open doorway somewhere along the nearer of two parallel drives. In defiance of the panic building in her, Encarnación picked up her son and headed straight into this displaced American suburb. She had no clear idea what she was going to do, but she felt confident that her instincts were right. She knew a little about Americans.

Chance intervened.

A gaggle of teenage girls approached Encarnación along the drive, gossiping and gesticulating as they came. They had on toreador pants, or tight-fitting shorts, clothes that few Spanish girls would ever wear.

Despite the heat, the tallest of the five girls sported a crimson jacket with leather circlets around its shoulders and a huge felt hieroglyph on its left breast. Encarnación halted, weighing her options and hoping to calm the beating of her heart.

“Hey, look!” one of the girls exclaimed. “What’re they doing here?”

“Somebody’s maid, I’ll bet, looking for a ride home.”

“What about the kid?”

In a moment Encarnación was surrounded by these teenagers, even the shortest of whom dwarfed her.

They had apparently taken her child for either her little brother or a babysitting charge, and he charmed them by reaching out toward them with grimy fingers. Their banter was jolly, Encarnación decided, and she was especially reassured by the manner of the freckle-faced Amazon in the garish letter jacket. The letter jacket itself reassured her, ugly as it was.

“Hey, he’s cute. Really cute. He looks a lot like Lucky James Bledsoe.”

“Yeah, he really does.”

Then all the girls laughed, and the one in the letter jacket asked Encarnación, in tremulous Spanish, if she could hold the little boy. “Con su permiso, por favor.” Encarnación yielded her son to this request, and he immediately clutched his new protectress’s red-gold hair and twisted it experimentally in his fingers.

“Ouch,” the Amazon cried, pulling her head back and laughing.

Whereupon another girl attempted to snatch the boy away from her. A mock battle for the right to hold him ensued, and he was swung from side to side as the girl in the letter jacket sought to retain custody.

Encarnación, deadening her instincts, began to back away. When she reached the edge of the circle of light cast by the street lamp, she turned around and ran, darting between a pair of single-story duplexes and disappearing into the shadows. Only then did the girls realize what she had done, and only then did her son break his self-imposed silence and screech in outraged bafflement. “Hey, you can’t do that!” shouted the Amazon after his fleeing mother. “Vuélvase—come back! Come back here!”

The intruder was gone, vanished into blackness.

“Looks like you’ve inherited a little brother, Pam.”

The girls huddled together in the tree-lined drive. Raucous in the heavy stillness of the evening, the lyrics of a popular song reverberated from a nearby house:

“Gee, what am I supposed to do now?” Shifting the screeching child to her other arm, the girl searched her friends’ shocked faces for an answer.

On the roof of the condemned building across from Leoncillos Street, Encarnación knelt beside the iron railing and brought great gouts of air up from her lungs. These she expelled painfully through her mouth and nostrils, her head hanging forward. The sound thus made was a resonant, unsteady keening, and she kept this up until her strength was gone and dawn began to glimmer in the east.