Shrubs in the Ditch

He was born breech, on the border between his mother’s life and death; she did not survive the delivery. On a day that suited no one. His father was off nursing a hangover outside the village, and his four siblings already had enough with their assigned chores. Even the doctor was caught off guard, and the midwife did what she could. No one had thought of a name for him—perhaps his mother had, but if she did, she kept it forever.

“There’s the boy. You’d better give him some milk or a drop of water with sugar if you don’t want him to follow his mother on her eternal journey. The damned thing came out twisted and the poor woman… she couldn’t handle it,” the midwife said before leaving the room, holding her hips and shaking her head from side to side.

“Do you want to see the child? He’s there, in her bed,” Fidel said to his father when he returned to the house.

The man barely glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, carrying all the reproach his soul could muster.

“What are you going to name him?” the boy insisted.

The father walked past, cutting through the silence as the rest of the children barely dared to look at him. He approached the cupboard, grabbed the wine bottle, and drank straight from it. His Adam’s apple pumped and relaxed his wrinkled neck as the dark liquid passed.

“Name the one who just took his mother away from me…” he muttered with a wine-soured breath.

After that, no one in the family bothered to find the newborn a name. To the villagers, he was always “Eusebia’s boy—God rest her soul,” they would add when speaking of him.

The boy grew up carrying the silence of his own mother, as if sensing no one would pay much mind to his life anyway, so it made no difference whether he cried or not. They placed him in a little nook near the hearth. From there, he learned the world. His eyes could see what happened both above and below the table—the only one in the house. The kicks Fidel, likely the eldest by height, aimed at Rosario, the one who made sure there was something warm to eat at mealtimes. The pinches Toño gave Carmencita just to make sure she remembered he was older. He also saw how his father’s left hand, whose mourning hadn’t lasted long, slipped under the wet nurse’s skirt while his right sleeve wiped the grease dripping from his lips.

And suddenly, from that same hand, when the breadcrumbs hovered over the dining room table, came a sharp blow against the oak board. Then the boy would tremble like the clapper of a cowbell—without shedding a tear, so fierce was his will to survive. Aside from the wet nurse, no one noticed him. He grew the way shrubs grow along the roadside. His silence was as vast as his curiosity. His round eyes, bright as dawn, were two small stars in the dark, and his ears, slightly large and sticking out, gave him the look of a butterfly with wings spread wide.

He spent years without speaking a word, absorbed in distinguishing the sounds of day and night. In the early hours, he heard the hinges groan when his father came home smelling of something only he could smell. Sometimes he would fall asleep to the languid drip of the sink. On Saturdays, he heard the wardrobe of his mother creak when his sisters searched among the dresses for a trace of fairy-tale dreams.

One night, his father returned more drunk than usual, kicking the door open and cursing his bad luck. He had lost the wages tied with an elastic band in a card game, though he swore someone had an eye on him and stole it. The children said nothing; they knew that when he came back like that, it was best to let him sleep it off. But that night, he was more belligerent than usual. So much so that he turned on the boy—the one he had not looked at since the day he was born.

“And what are you doing there, standing like a dummy? You, who are good for nothing, who don’t even know how to speak,” he snarled at the boy.

The child tried again and again to avoid his father’s provocations until he cornered him and, brandishing a knife, threatened:

“Speak, damn it! Open your mouth for once so we can hear what your voice sounds like!”

The boy slipped away from the blade and, standing at the threshold, said:

“You think things don’t speak, but the floor creaks, the knife cuts, the bedsprings squeak. Milk overflows when it boils and smells burnt. The wood crackles in the fire. Yes, things are there to serve us, but they also watch us. I’ve spent years conversing silently with them, and you know what? Some of them will still be here when I’m gone—and they will speak of you, too.”

With his drunken mouth, the father tried to mutter something. Without a word, the rest of the children followed the boy and closed the door.

By Susana Muñoz.