The Childhood of Jesus

Chapter 4

Returning to their room that evening, he finds a note pushed under the door. It is from Ana: Would you and David like to come to a picnic for new arrivals? Meet at noon tomorrow, in the park, by the fountain. A.

They are at the fountain at noon. It is already hot — even the birds seem lethargic. Away from the noise of traffic they settle beneath a spreading tree. After a while Ana arrives, bearing a basket. ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘something came up.’

‘How many of us are you expecting?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps half a dozen. Let us wait and see.’

They wait. No one comes. ‘Looks like it is just us,’ says Ana at last. ‘Shall we start?’

The basket turns out to contain no more than a packet of crackers, a pot of saltless bean paste, and a bottle of water. But the child wolfs down his share without complaint.

Ana yawns, stretches out on the grass, closes her eyes.

‘What did you mean, the other day, when you used the words washed clean?’ he asks her. ‘You said David and I should wash ourselves clean of old attachments.’

Lazily Ana shakes her head. ‘Another time,’ she says. ‘Not now.’

In her tone, in the hooded glance she casts him, he senses an invitation. The half-dozen guests who have failed to turn up — were they just a fiction? If the child were not here he would lie down on the grass beside her and then perhaps let his hand rest ever so lightly on hers.

‘No,’ she murmurs, as if reading his mind. The ghost of a frown crosses her brow. ‘Not that.’

Not that. What is he to make of this young woman, now warm, now cool? Is there something in the etiquette of the sexes or the generations in this new land that he is failing to understand?

The boy nudges him and points to the nearly empty packet of crackers. He spreads paste on a cracker and passes it across.

‘He has a healthy appetite,’ says the girl without opening her eyes.

‘He is hungry all the time.’

‘Don’t worry, he will adapt. Children adapt quickly.’

‘Adapt to being hungry? Why should he adapt to being hungry when there is no shortage of food?’

‘Adapt to a moderate diet, I mean. Hunger is like a dog in your belly: the more you feed it, the more it demands.’ She sits up abruptly, addresses the child. ‘I hear you are looking for your mama,’ she says. ‘Do you miss your mama?’

The boy nods.

‘And what is your mama’s name?’

The boy casts him an interrogative glance.

‘He doesn’t know her by name,’ he says. ‘He had a letter with him when he boarded the boat, but it was lost.’

‘The string broke,’ says the boy.

‘The letter was in a pouch,’ he explains, ‘which was hanging around his neck on a string. The string broke and the letter was lost. There was a hunt for it all over the ship. That was how David and I met. But the letter was never found.’

‘It fell in the sea,’ says the boy. ‘The fishes ate it.’

Ana frowns. ‘If you don’t remember your mama’s name, can you tell us what she looks like? Can you draw a picture of her?’

The boy shakes his head.

‘So your mama is lost and you don’t know where to look for her.’ Ana pauses to reflect. ‘Then how would you feel if your padrino began looking for another mama for you, to love and take care of you?’

‘What is a padrino?’ asks the boy.

‘You keep slotting me into roles,’ he interrupts. ‘I am not David’s father, nor am I his padrino. I am simply helping him to be reunited with his mother.’

She ignores the rebuke. ‘If you found yourself a wife,’ she says, ‘she could be a mother to him.’

He bursts out laughing. ‘What woman would want to marry a man like me, a stranger without even a change of clothing to his name?’ He waits for the girl to disagree, but she does not. ‘Besides, even if I did find myself a wife, who is to say she would want — you know — a foster child? Or that our young friend here would accept her?’

‘You never know. Children adapt.’

‘As you keep saying.’ Anger flares up in him. What does this cocksure young woman know about children? And what entitles her to preach to him? Then suddenly the elements of the picture come together. The unbecoming clothes, the baffling severity, the talk of godfathers — ‘Are you a nun, Ana, by any chance?’ he asks.

She smiles. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘Are you one of those nuns who have left the convent behind to live in the world? To take on jobs that no one else wants to do — in jails and orphanages and asylums? In refugee reception centres?’

‘That is ridiculous. Of course not. The Centre isn’t a jail. It isn’t a charity. It is part of Social Welfare.’

‘Even so, how could anyone put up with a never-ending stream of people like us, helpless and ignorant and needy, without faith of some kind to give her strength?’

‘Faith? Faith has nothing to do with it. Faith means believing in what you do even when it does not bear visible fruit. The Centre is not like that. People arrive needing help, and we help them. We help them and their lives improve. None of that is invisible. None of it requires blind faith. We do our job, and everything turns out well. It is as simple as that.’

‘Nothing is invisible?’

‘Nothing is invisible. Two weeks ago you were in Belstar. Last week we found you a job at the docks. Today you are having a picnic in the park. What is invisible about that? It is progress, visible progress. Anyway, to come back to your question, no, I am not a nun.’

‘Then why the asceticism that you preach? You tell us to subdue our hunger, to starve the dog inside us. Why? What is wrong with hunger? What are our appetites for if not to tell us what we need? If we had no appetites, no desires, how would we live?’

It seems to him a good question, a serious question, one that might trouble the best-schooled young nun.

Her answer comes easily, so easily and in so low a voice, as if the child were not meant to hear, that for a moment he misunderstands her: ‘And where, in your case, do your desires lead you?’

‘My own desires? May I be frank?’

‘You may.’

‘With no disrespect to you or to your hospitality, they lead me to more than crackers and bean paste. They lead, for instance, to beefsteak with mashed potatoes and gravy. And I am sure this young man’ — he reaches out and grips the boy’s arm — ‘feels the same way. Don’t you?’

The boy nods vigorously.

‘Beefsteak dripping with meat juices,’ he goes on. ‘Do you know what surprises me most about this country?’ A reckless tone is creeping into his voice; it would be wiser to stop, but he does not. ‘That it is so bloodless. Everyone I meet is so decent, so kindly, so well-intentioned. No one swears or gets angry. No one gets drunk. No one even raises his voice. You live on a diet of bread and water and bean paste and you claim to be filled. How can that be, humanly speaking? Are you lying, even to yourselves?’

Hugging her knees, the girl stares at him wordlessly, waiting for the tirade to end.

‘We are hungry, this child and I.’ Forcefully he draws the boy to him. ‘We are hungry all the time. You tell me our hunger is something outlandish that we have brought with us, that it doesn’t belong here, that we must starve it into submission. When we have annihilated our hunger, you say, we will have proved we can adapt, and we can then be happy for ever after. But I don’t want to starve the dog of hunger! I want to feed it! Don’t you agree?’ He shakes the boy. The boy burrows in under his armpit, smiling, nodding. ‘Don’t you agree, my boy?’

A silence falls.

‘You really are angry,’ says Ana.

‘I am not angry, I am hungry! Tell me: What is wrong with satisfying an ordinary appetite? Why must our ordinary impulses and hungers and desires be beaten down?’

‘Are you sure you want to carry on like this in front of the child?’

‘I am not ashamed of what I am saying. There is nothing in it that a child needs to be protected from. If a child can sleep outdoors on the bare earth, then surely he can hear a robust exchange between adults.’

‘Very well, I will give you robust exchange back. What you want from me is something I don’t do.’

He stares in puzzlement. ‘What I want from you?’

‘Yes. You want me to let you embrace me. We both know what that means: embrace. And I don’t permit it.’

‘I said nothing about embracing you. And what is wrong with embraces anyway, if you are not a nun?’

‘Refusing desires has nothing to do with being or not being a nun. I just don’t do that. I don’t permit it. I don’t like it. I don’t have an appetite for it. I don’t have an appetite for it in itself and I don’t wish to see what it does to human beings. What it does to a man.’

‘What do you mean, what it does to a man?’

She glances pointedly at the child. ‘You are sure you want me to go on?’

‘Go on. It is never too early to learn about life.’

‘Very well. You find me attractive, I can see that. Perhaps you even find me beautiful. And because you find me beautiful, your appetite, your impulse, is to embrace me. Do I read the signs correctly, the signs you give me? Whereas if you did not find me beautiful you would feel no such impulse.’

He is silent.

‘The more beautiful you find me, the more urgent becomes your appetite. That is how these appetites work which you take as your lodestar and blindly follow. Now reflect. What — pray tell me — has beauty to do with the embrace you want me to submit to? What is the connection between the one and the other? Explain.’

He is silent, more than silent. He is dumbfounded.

‘Go on. You said you would not mind if your godson heard. You said you wanted him to learn about life.’

‘Between a man and a woman,’ he says at last, ‘there sometimes springs up a natural attraction, unforeseen, unpremeditated. The two find each other attractive or even, to use the other word, beautiful. The woman more beautiful than the man, usually. Why the one should follow from the other, the attraction and the desire to embrace from the beauty, is a mystery which I cannot explain except to say that being drawn to a woman is the only tribute that I, my physical self, know how to pay to the woman’s beauty. I call it a tribute because I feel it to be an offering, not an insult.’

He pauses. ‘Go on,’ she says.

‘That is all I want to say.’

‘That is all. And as a tribute to me — an offering, not an insult — you want to grip me tight and push part of your body into me. As a tribute, you claim. I am baffled. To me the whole business seems absurd — absurd for you to want to perform, and absurd for me to permit.’

‘It is only when you put it that way that it seems absurd. In itself it is not absurd. It cannot be absurd, since it is a natural desire of the natural body. It is nature speaking in us. It is the way things are. The way things are cannot be absurd.’

‘Really? What if I were to say that to me it seems not just absurd but ugly too?’

He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘You cannot mean that. I myself may seem old and unattractive — I and my desires. But surely you cannot believe that nature itself is ugly.’

‘Yes, I can. Nature can partake of the beautiful but nature can partake of the ugly too. Those parts of our bodies that you modestly do not name, not in your godson’s hearing: do you find them beautiful?’

‘In themselves? No, in themselves they are not beautiful. It is the whole that is beautiful, not the parts.’

‘And these parts that are not beautiful — you want to push them inside me! What should I think of that?’

‘I don’t know. Tell me what you think.’

‘That all your fine talk of paying tribute to beauty is una tontería. If you found me to be an incarnation of the good, you would not want to perform such an act upon me. So why wish to do so if I am an incarnation of the beautiful? Is the beautiful inferior to the good? Explain.’

‘Una tontería: what’s that?’

‘Nonsense. Rubbish.’

He gets to his feet. ‘I am not going to excuse myself further, Ana. I don’t find this to be a profitable discussion. I don’t believe you know what you are talking about.’

‘Really? You think I am some ignorant child?’

‘You may not be a child but, yes, I do think you are ignorant of life. Come,’ he says to the boy, taking his hand. ‘We have had our picnic, now it is time to thank the lady and go off and find ourselves something to eat.’

Ana reclines, stretches out her legs, folds her hands in her lap, smiles up at him mockingly. ‘Too close to the bone, was it?’ she says.

Under a blazing sun he strides across the empty parklands, the boy trotting to keep up with him.

‘What is a padrino?’ asks the boy.

‘A padrino is someone who acts as your father when for some reason your father cannot be there.’

‘Are you my padrino?’

‘No, I am not. No one invited me to be your padrino. I am just your friend.’

‘I can invite you to be my padrino.’

‘That is not up to you, my boy. You can’t choose a padrino for yourself, as you can’t choose your father. There isn’t a proper word for what I am to you, just as there isn’t a proper word for what you are to me. However, if you like, you can call me Uncle. When people say, Who is he to you? you can say, He is my uncle. He is my uncle and he loves me. And I will say, He is my boy.’

‘But is that lady going to be my mother?’

‘Ana? No. Being a mother would not interest her.’

‘Are you going to marry her?’

‘Of course not. I am not here to find a wife, I am here to help you find your mother, your real mother.’

He is trying to keep his voice even, his tone light; but the truth is, the attack by the girl has shaken him.

‘You were cross with her,’ says the boy. ‘Why were you cross?’

He halts in his tracks, lifts the boy up, gives him a kiss on the brow. ‘I’m sorry I was cross. I wasn’t cross with you.’

‘But you were cross with the lady and she was cross with you.’

‘I was cross with her because she treats us badly and I don’t understand why. We had an argument, she and I, a heated argument. But it’s all over now. It was not important.’

‘She said you wanted to push something inside her.’

He is silent.

‘What did she mean? Do you really want to push something inside her?’

‘It was only a manner of speaking. She meant that I was trying to force my ideas on her. And she was right. One should not try to force ideas upon people.’

‘Do I force ideas on you?’

‘No, of course not. Now let us find something to eat.’

They scour the streets east of the parkland, hunting for an eating place of some kind. It is a neighbourhood of modest villas, with now and again a low apartment building. They happen on only a single shop. NARANJAS says the sign, in large letters. The steel shutters are closed, so he cannot see whether it indeed sells oranges or whether Naranjas is just a name.

He stops a passer-by, an elderly man walking a dog on a lead. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, ‘my boy and I are looking for a café or restaurant where we can get a meal, or failing that a provisions shop.’

‘On a Sunday afternoon?’ says the man. His dog sniffs the boy’s shoes, then his crotch. ‘I don’t know what to suggest, unless you are prepared to go in to the city.’

‘Is there a bus?’

‘Number 42, but it doesn’t run on Sundays.’

‘So we cannot in fact go in to the city. And there is nowhere nearby where we can eat. And all the shops are closed. What then do you suggest we do?’

The man’s features harden. He tugs at the dog’s lead. ‘Come, Bruno,’ he says.

In a sour mood he heads back to the Centre. Their progress is slow, since the boy keeps hesitating and hopping to avoid cracks in the paving.

‘Come on, hurry up,’ he says irritably. ‘Keep your game for another day.’

‘No. I don’t want to fall into a crack.’

‘That’s nonsense. How can a big boy like you fall down a little crack like that?’

‘Not that crack. Another crack.’

‘Which crack? Point to the crack.’

‘I don’t know! I don’t know which crack. Nobody knows.’

‘Nobody knows because nobody can fall through a crack in the paving. Now hurry up.’

‘I can! You can! Anyone can! You don’t know!’