After his parent’s divorce the boy had been sent to live with his grandmother in a little cottage overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, several miles from the Portuguese town of Cortegaca.
He had just turned nine.
From the beginning, the salt air didn’t agree with him, it made his skin feel clammy and his clothes feel uncomfortable.
His grandmother said this was because the filth of the city still clung to him, like the percebe on the hulls of the fishing boats which dotted the western horizon.
In truth, the boy was an unwelcome reminder of the grief she felt after his mother had married and moved to Madrid with her husband.
Her grandson’s presence served only to intensify the sense of abandonment the old woman had felt in the years since her daughter’s departure.
Each morning the boy would gaze out across the wide horizon as his grandmother marched him reluctantly towards the place where the previous high tide had deposited a litter of seaweed mixed with the shattered remains of crustaceans and the occasional confused tangle of fishing line.
There she would remain, with the few strands of hair that had escaped her ever-present plait flying about her head, while he alone walked haltingly down to submerge his slight, naked body in the cold salty water. He did this because his grandmother told him too. He could not argue.
It was the only way to remove the stench of the city, she told him.
It was not until his tiny scrotum burned with the cold and his teeth chattered like a pawl on a runaway ratchet that he dared creep, with submerged feet shovelling fine sand as he went, slowly back towards the shoreline where his grandmother waited with a threadbare towel and a single word; “Repouso” – home.
The repetition of this ritual over many weeks led the boy to, at first, both fear and despise his grandmother, yet as time passed he wondered whether she had been right after all.
He began to savour the smell and taste of the pervasive salty air. Even his morning ritual immersion, still silently and sternly observed by his Avó (for he had begun to use the Portuguese term for “grandmother” in preference to the more familiar Spanish, Abuela), became at least bearable if not pleasant.
Now and then he was allowed to keep a treasure he found washed up on the sand, although any pebble or scrap of bleached timber larger than his small hand, and especially the skeletal remains of any sea creature (which he found fascinating), was forbidden, save for one occasion when he had been allowed to keep the tiny, beautiful exoskeleton of a sea-horse.
The boy’s grandmother took her morning and evening ablutions in the relative privacy of a small detached bathroom, afforded (before her daughter’s divorce) by her son-in-law as a gift; although he most likely saw the gesture as being more towards securing his wife’s peace than his mother-in-law’s comfort.
The boy was allowed the use of the bathroom in the evening, after his grandmother had bathed.
He shared the old woman’s bathwater, which was raised from a bore via a large cast-iron hand pump in the back yard, and transported to the rusty yellowed-enamel bath in a steel bucket.
On Sundays, the boy was permitted to warm two buckets of water on the fuel stove in the kitchen before adding them to the contents of the bath. This was the greatest luxury afforded by their simple existence.
The boy’s mother barely earned enough to keep herself housed and clothed in the outlying suburb of Madrid where she worked as a shop assistant – any extra she managed to send them barely covered what they owed in weekly expenses.
One Sunday evening as the boy waited, hoping the old woman would not take so long with her bath as to render what warmth there was left in the tepid water imperceptible, he heard a series of noises which momentarily startled, and then puzzled him.
First there was a loud squeak such as you could make by sliding your finger across a freshly washed plate, followed by a slapping noise, then a silence made more puzzling by its sudden and unusual nature.
It took a minute or more for the boy to decide he should go to see what had made the noise, as he knew he risked the wrath of his grandmother if he disturbed her.
After standing outside the bathroom for some time, he decided it might be possible to see through the space between the badly fitted bathroom door and the frame within which it was hung, without himself being seen from inside.
The boy wondered what he would say if he was caught peeping. He could think of nothing, but his growing apprehension and curiosity overcame his fear – which it must be said was substantial.
His pulse quickened as he positioned his eye close enough to the door frame as to allow the widest possible view of the small room’s interior.
The smell of his grandmother’s piss (for the room also functioned as a makeshift toilet) was the first thing to meet the boy’s senses as he adjusted the angle of his vision and his eyes became accustomed to the candlelit interior of the bath.
In an instant his head was jerked backwards as his small frame recoiled in horror, with the realisation that the old woman was looking directly at the crack in the door frame through which he was peering.
He waited, breathlessly still, for the storm of abuse to break over his head, but there was only silence.
Perhaps she hadn’t seen him. The crack in the door frame was not large.
Could she have simply been daydreaming – as he often did in the confines and relative privacy of the bath – and not registered his presence?
He had to risk another look.
Once again he lowered his head to the place through where he now knew he could see most clearly. Once again as his eyes adjusted to the light he saw the face of his grandmother.
She was smiling.
It was an expression he had never before seen and the boy found it unnerving. It was as if she had thought of something funny, and then her mind had drifted, while the smile remained fixed on her lips.
The elongated shadow cast by the timber cottage blocked the morning sun’s rays from reaching the narrow path by which the boy and his grandmother approached the beach each day.
The small building they called home was plain and unremarkable except for the kitchen chimney which jutted skywards at an awkward angle due to an error in its construction.
Translated in dark silhouette onto the rippled sand of the beach, the chimney’s conical steel cap seemed to be pointing out the spot where the boy’s grandmother would customarily wait, towel in hand, for him to return from the freezing foam of the ocean each day.
As he made his way down the sandy slope towards the shoreline, the boy watched his lone shadow emerge from the confines of the one cast by his grandmother’s house with a mixture of resignation and curiosity.
Without premeditation he raised his arms high above his head, sending two corresponding shadows shooting out towards the sea and azure horizon beyond. He repeated this gesture several times at different speeds, watching the way the shadows rippled across the sand and the ease with which they travelled.
High above the windswept shore, a lone seagull which had been wheeling and diving silently overhead let out a rasping cry.
The boy stood for a moment, contemplating the confusion of events he had just left behind, before letting the towel drop from his shoulder, and removing the oversized t-shirt and underpants which served as his pyjamas.
He glanced back towards the cottage momentarily, as if to confirm what he already knew, then ran down to the surf.
Ironically, it was his grandmother’s insistence on the subjugation of his will under her authority that made it possible for him to maintain the semblance of normalcy under which he now functioned.
While the boy would never have contemplated such a frivolous act as waving his arms above his head and watching the shadows play on the pale sand in the presence of the old woman, it was still to her – for better or worse – he owed the stoicism with which he faced this new day.
Only after he entered the water and allowed the gentle buffeting of the surf against his lean frame to soothe the knotted muscles in his back and arms did he allow precious few tears to fall and be swallowed by the vast ocean.
Even then he could not help regarding the act of crying with a suspicion, once again derived from the old woman. It seemed as if the tears he shed were somehow someone else’s. Someone who was weak and should be looked down upon.
“AVÓ.”
The word escaped his lips involuntarily.
Throughout the night the boy had crouched beside his grandmother’s still form; stunned and in awe of the circumstance in which he found himself.
It was the first time the boy had ever seen his grandmother’s hair out of the plait she otherwise wore day and night. The cascade of silver-grey had fallen out of the plastic shower cap she wore when she slipped and fell. It glistened and clung about her shoulders and breasts and down past her waist making her look like an aged fragile Lady Godiva.
He could not help but reach out and touch her prone figure – seeing his grandmother unclothed did not alarm the boy.
Back in Madrid his mother thought nothing of walking around their apartment in various states of undress.
Much to the annoyance of his father, the boy while still young had been allowed to share his mother’s bath and bed, where the pair would sometimes engage in mock lover’s embraces, kissing and melodramatically declaring their love for each other.
It was a game the boy was particularly fond of and he would often pretend to fall asleep, hoping to be allowed to stay nestled in his mother’s arms.
As he knelt beside the silent, motionless form of his grandmother, it seemed as if she had been transformed into a beautiful, fragile creature that had been washed up on the seashore.
He dabbed at a tear which had run down her face using a handkerchief he’d retrieved from her coat pocket (along with the sea horse skeleton he thought he had lost some weeks before) then reverently kissed her cheek.
“Avó, please…”
The faint, shallow breath the boy could still hear with his face close to hers was the only sign his grandmother was still present.
She had not moved since he found her, and although her eyes were open they gave no hint that she was aware of her surroundings.
The haemorrhage caused by the fall and clashing of her head on the rim of the bathtub had initially robbed the old woman of the power to move or communicate, while for a time leaving intact her senses of sight, hearing, and touch.
She felt the boy’s soft dry lips on her cheek and heard his pleading declaration but could do nothing to communicate the words which repeatedly arose from the depths of her failing consciousness to consume and torment her.
“Meu filho, meu filho.”
My son, my son.