The Childhood of Jesus

Chapter 14

Four o’clock, and the last sacks from the freighter at Wharf Two are being stacked on the dray. El Rey and her companion stand in harness, placidly chomping at their feed-bags.

Álvaro stretches his arms and gives him a smile. ‘Another job done,’ he says. ‘Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?’

‘I suppose so. But I can’t help asking myself why the city needs so much grain, week after week.’

‘It’s food. We can’t do without food. And it’s not just for Novilla. It’s for the hinterland too. That’s what it means to be a port: you have a hinterland to serve.’

‘Still, what is it all for, in the end? The ships bring the grain from across the seas and we haul it off the ships and someone else mills it and bakes it, and eventually it gets eaten and turned into — what shall I call it? — waste, and the waste flows back into the sea. What is there to feel good about in that? How does it fit into a larger picture? I don’t see any larger picture, any loftier design. It’s just consumption.’

‘You are in a bad mood today! Surely one doesn’t need a lofty design to justify being part of life. Life is good in itself; helping food to flow so that your fellows can live is doubly good. How can you dispute that? Anyway, what do you have against bread? Remember what the poet said: bread is the way that the sun enters our bodies.’

‘I don’t want to argue, Álvaro, but objectively speaking all that I do, all that we dockers do, is move stuff from point A to point B, one bag after another, day after day. If all our sweat were for the sake of some higher cause, it would be a different matter. But eating in order to live and living in order to eat — that is the way of the bacterium, not the. .’

‘Not the what?’

‘Not the human being. Not the pinnacle of creation.’

Usually it is the lunchtime breaks that are given over to philosophical disputation — Do we die or are we endlessly reincarnated? Do the farther planets rotate around the sun or around one another reciprocally? Is this the best of all possible worlds? — but today, instead of making their way home, several of the stevedores drift over to listen to the debate. To them Álvaro now turns. ‘What do you say, comrades? Do we need a grand plan, as our friend demands, or is it good enough for us to be doing our job and doing it well?’

There is silence. From the first the men have treated him, Simón, with respect. To some of them he is old enough to be their father. But they respect their foreman too, even revere him. Clearly they do not want to take sides.

‘If you don’t like the work we do, if you don’t think it is good,’ says one of them — in fact Eugenio — ‘what work would you like to do instead? Would you like to work in an office? Do you think office work is a better kind of work for a man to do? Or factory work perhaps?’

‘No,’ he replies. ‘Emphatically not. Please don’t misunderstand me. In itself this is good work we do here, honest work. But that is not what Álvaro and I were discussing. We were discussing the goal of our labours, the ultimate goal. I would not dream of disparaging the work we do. On the contrary, it means a great deal to me. In fact’ — he is losing the thread but that does not matter — ‘there is nowhere I would rather be than here, working side by side with you. In the time I have spent here I have experienced nothing but comradely support and comradely love. It has brightened my days. It has made it possible —’

Impatiently Eugenio interrupts him: ‘Then surely you have answered your own question. Imagine having no work. Imagine having to spend your days sitting on a public bench with nothing to do, waiting for the hours to pass, with no comrades around you to share a joke with, no comradely goodwill to support you. Without labour, and the sharing of labour, comradeship is not possible, it is no longer substantial.’ He turns and glances around. ‘Is that not so, comrades?’

There is a murmur of agreement.

‘But what of football?’ he responds, trying another tack, though with no confidence. ‘Surely we would love each other and support each other just as well if we all belonged to a football team, playing together, winning together, losing together. If comradely love is the ultimate good, why do we need to move these heavy bags of grain, why not just kick a football?’

‘Because by football alone you cannot live,’ says Álvaro. ‘In order to play football you must be alive; and to be alive you must eat. Through our labour here we enable people to live.’ He shakes his head. ‘The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that labour cannot be compared to football, that the two belong to different philosophical realms. I cannot see, I truly cannot see, why you should want to disparage our labour in this way.’

All eyes are turned on him. There is a grave silence.

‘Believe me, I do not mean to disparage our labour. To prove my sincerity, I will come to work an hour early tomorrow morning, and cut short my lunch break too. I will move as many bags per day as any man here. But I will continue to ask: Why are we doing this? What is it for?’

Álvaro steps forward, throws a brawny arm around him. ‘Heroic feats of labour won’t be necessary, my friend,’ he says. ‘We know where your heart is, you do not need to prove yourself.’ And other men come up too to clap him on the back or give him a hug. He smiles at all and sundry; tears come to his eyes; he cannot stop smiling.

‘You have not seen our main storehouse yet, have you?’ says Álvaro, still gripping his hand.

‘No.’

‘It is an impressive facility, if I say so myself. Why not pay it a visit? You can go right now, if you like.’ He turns to the driver, hunched on his seat waiting for the stevedores’ debate to be over. ‘Our comrade can ride with you to the storehouse, can’t he? Yes, of course he can. Come!’ — he helps him clamber up beside the driver — ‘Maybe you will appreciate our work better once you have had a sight of the storehouse.’

The storehouse is further from the wharves than he had expected, on the south bank at the bend where the river begins to narrow. At an ambling pace — the driver has a whip but does not use it, merely clucking to the horses now and then to encourage them — it takes them the best part of an hour to get there, time during which not a word is said.

The storehouse stands alone in a field. It is vast, as big as a football pitch and as high as a two-storey house, with great sliding doors through which the loaded dray passes with ease.

The working day seems to be over, for there is no crew to do the unloading. While the driver manoeuvres the dray beside the loading platform and sets about unharnessing the horses, he wanders deeper into the great building. Light filtering through gaps between wall and roof reveals sacks stacked metres high, mountain upon mountain of grain stretching back into the dark recesses. Idly he tries to do the computation, but loses track. A million sacks at least, perhaps several million. Can there be enough millers in Novilla to mill all this grain, enough bakers to bake it, enough mouths to consume it?

There is a dry crunch underfoot: spilled grain. Something soft bumps against his ankle, and involuntarily he kicks out. A squeal; all of a sudden he is aware of a subdued whispering all around him, like the noise of flowing water. He utters a cry. The floor around him is heaving with life. Rats! There are rats everywhere!

‘There are rats all over the place!’ he calls out, hurrying back, confronting the drayman and the gatekeeper. ‘There is grain all over the floor, and you have a plague of rats! It’s appalling!’

The two exchange a glance. ‘Yes, we certainly have our share of rats,’ says the gatekeeper. ‘Mice too. More than you can count.’

‘And you do nothing about it? It’s insanitary! They are nesting in the food, contaminating it!’

The gatekeeper shrugs. ‘What do you want us to do? Where you have grain you have rodents. That is how the world is. We tried bringing in cats, but the rats have grown fearless, and there are too many of them anyway.’

‘That’s not an argument. You could set traps. You could lay down poison. You could fumigate the building.’

‘You can’t pump poisonous gases into a food store — have some sense! And now, if you don’t mind, I need to lock up.’

First thing next morning he raises the matter with Álvaro. ‘You boast about the storehouse, but have you ever been there yourself? It is crawling with rats. What is there to be proud of in working to feed a host of vermin? It is not just absurd, it is insane.’

Álvaro bestows on him a benign and infuriating smile. ‘Wherever you have ships you have rats. Wherever you have warehouses you have rats. Where our species flourishes rats flourish too. Rats are intelligent creatures. You might say they are our shadow. Yes, they consume some of the grain we offload. Yes, there is spoilage in the warehouse. But there is spoilage all along the way: in the fields, in the trains, in the ships, in the warehouses, in the bakers’ storerooms. There is no point in getting upset about spoilage. Spoilage is part of life.’

‘Just because spoilage is part of life does not mean we cannot fight against it! Why store grain by the ton, by the thousands of tons, in rat-infested sheds? Why not import just enough for our needs, from one month to the next? And why can’t the whole trans-shipment process be more efficiently organized? Why do we have to use horses and carts when we could use trucks? Why does the grain have to come in bags and be lugged on the backs of men? Why can’t it just be poured into the hold at the other end, and pumped out at this end through a pipe?’

Álvaro reflects at length before he replies. ‘What do you think would become of us all, Simón, if the grain were pumped en masse as you propose? What would become of the horses? What would become of El Rey?’

‘There would no longer be work for us here at the docks,’ he replies. ‘That I concede. But instead we would find jobs assembling pumps or driving trucks. We would all have work, just as before, only it would be a different kind of work, requiring intelligence, not just brute strength.’

‘So you would like to liberate us from a life of bestial labour. You want us to quit the wharves and find some other kind of work, where we would no longer be able to hoist a load onto our shoulders, feeling the ears of grain in the bag shift as they take the shape of our body, hearing their rustle, where we would lose touch with the thing itself — with the food that feeds us and gives us life.

‘Why are we so sure we need to be saved, Simón? Do you think we live the lives of stevedores because we have been found too stupid to do anything else — too stupid to assemble a pump or drive a truck? Of course not. You know us by now. You are our friend, our comrade. We are not stupid. If we had needed to be saved, we would have saved ourselves by now. No, it is not we who are stupid, it is the clever reasoning you rely on that is stupid, that gives you the wrong answers. This is our dock, our wharf — right?’ He glances left and right; the men murmur their approval. ‘There is no place for cleverness here, only for the thing itself.’

He cannot believe his ears. He cannot believe that the person spouting this obscurantist nonsense is his friend Álvaro. And the rest of the crew seems to be marshalled solidly behind him — intelligent young men with whom he every day discusses truth and appearance, right and wrong. If he were not fond of them he would simply walk away — walk away and leave them to their futile labours. But they are his comrades whom he wishes well, whom he owes the duty of trying to convince that they are following the wrong path.

‘Listen to yourself, Álvaro,’ he says. ‘The thing itself. Do you think the thing remains forever itself, unchanging? No. Everything flows. Did you forget that when you crossed the ocean to come here? The waters of the ocean flow and in flowing they change. You cannot step twice into the same waters. As the fish live in the sea, so we live in time and must change with time. No matter how firmly we may pledge ourselves to follow the venerable traditions of stevedoring, we will in the end be overtaken by change. Change is like the rising tide. You can build barriers, but it will always seep in through the chinks.’

The men have by now closed in to form a half-circle around Álvaro and him. In their bearing he can detect no hostility. On the contrary, he feels he is being quietly urged on, urged to make his best case.

‘I am not trying to save you,’ he says. ‘There is nothing special about me, I claim to be no one’s saviour. Like you I crossed the ocean. Like you I bring no history with me. What history I had I left behind. I am simply a new man in a new land, and that is a good thing. But I have not let go of the idea of history, the idea of change without beginning or end. Ideas cannot be washed out of us, not even by time. Ideas are everywhere. The universe is instinct with them. Without them there would be no universe, for there would be no being.

‘The idea of justice, for instance. We all desire to live under a just dispensation, a dispensation in which honest toil brings due reward; and that is a good desire, good and admirable. But what we are doing here at the docks will not help to bring about that dispensation. What we do here amounts to no more than a pageant of heroic labour. And that pageant depends on an army of rats to keep it going — rats who will work night and day gobbling down these tons of grain we unload so as to make space in the shed for more grain. Without the rats the pointlessness of our labour would be laid bare.’ He pauses. The men are silent. ‘Don’t you see that?’ he says. ‘Are you blind?’

Álvaro looks around. ‘The spirit of the agora,’ he says. ‘Who is going to respond to our eloquent friend?’

One of the young stevedores raises a hand. Álvaro nods to him.

‘Our friend invokes the concept of the real in a confusing way,’ says the young man, speaking fluently and confidently, like a star student. ‘To demonstrate his confusion, let us compare history with climate. The climate we live in, we can agree, is greater than we. None of us can ordain what the climate shall be. But it is not the quality of being greater than us that makes climate real. Climate is real because it has real manifestations. Those manifestations include wind and rain. Thus when it rains we get wet; when the wind rises our caps get blown off. Rain and wind are transitory, second-order realities, such as are accessible to our senses. Above them in the hierarchy of the real sits climate.

‘Consider now history. If history, like climate, were a higher reality, then history would have manifestations which we would be able to feel through our senses. But where are these manifestations?’ He looks around. ‘Which of us has ever had his cap blown off by history?’ There is silence. ‘No one. Because history has no manifestations. Because history is not real. Because history is just a made-up story.’

‘To be more accurate’ — the speaker is Eugenio, who yesterday wanted to know whether he would prefer to work in an office — ‘because history has no manifestations in the present. History is merely a pattern we see in what has passed. It has no power to reach into the present.

‘Our friend Simón says that we should get machines to do our work for us, because history so ordains. But it is not history that tells us to give up honest labour, it is idleness and the lure of idleness. Idleness is real in a way that history is not. We can feel it with our senses. We feel its manifestations each time we lie down on the grass and close our eyes and vow we will never get up again, even when the whistle blows, so sweet is our pleasure. Which of us, loafing on the grass on a sunny day, will say, I can feel history in my bones telling me not to get up? No: it is idleness that we feel in our bones. That is why we have the idiom: He does not have an idle bone in his body.’

As Eugenio has spoken he has grown more and more excited. Perhaps out of fear that he will never stop, his comrades interrupt him with a round of applause. He pauses, and Álvaro grasps the opportunity. ‘I don’t know whether our friend Simón wants to respond,’ he says. ‘Our friend dismissed our labours here as a useless pageant, a remark which some of us may have found hurtful. If the remark were merely unconsidered, if on further reflection he would like to withdraw or amend it, I am sure the gesture would be appreciated.’

His turn. The tide is against him, unmistakably. Does he have the will to resist?

‘Of course I withdraw my thoughtless remark,’ he says, ‘and apologize moreover for any hurt it may have caused. As for history, all I can say is that while today we may refuse to heed it, we cannot refuse for ever. Therefore I have a proposal to make. Let us gather again on this wharf in ten years’ time, or even in five years’ time, and let us see then whether grain is still being unloaded by hand and being stored in sacks in an open shed for the sustenance of our enemies the rats. My guess is that it will not.’

‘And what if you are proved wrong?’ says Álvaro. ‘If in ten years’ time we are still unloading grain exactly as we do today, will you concede that history is not real?’

‘I will indeed,’ he replies. ‘I will bow my head to the force of the real. I will call it submitting to the verdict of history.’