He watches me, the boy. He has come before, him or someone like him; a boy from the city, straight out of college. He comes to teach our children spelling and mathematics, ready to treat us with that pity we are all used to. He will go home at the end of the summer, home to his mama and papa, to his motorbike and his painted-nail girlfriend. He will not remember us.
“Happy birthday,” he says to me, his smile wide and even. Quique has told him it is my birthday. My brother will say anything that gets him another drink. Whenever I look at Quique I see him as he was when he was a child, jumping and dancing about in the dust and telling me stories I did not want to hear, his eyes as dark and unreflecting as pond water before a storm. At least once or twice a week he gets so drunk that I have to help him home, even though that means I must walk up the hill to the very top of the old town. He still lives with our mother who is ninety and who has talked only to her parrot for as long as anyone can remember. On those nights I leave them and walk all the way down and across the bridge to my place, because if I do not come home Margarita hits me. No-one knows this. She is still a strong woman, a woman who does not hesitate to wield a pan as a bludgeon. I like her strength – or appreciate it, at least.
The boy’s father is a banker, or so I hear him tell Quique. I expect he has one of those plastic cards that pull money from walls. I have seen it done. At my age I have seen most things. I have even seen a pig with two heads.
He is called Paco and the next night he’s in our bar again. He wears a guayabera over his blue jeans. Perhaps he thinks it makes him one of us. But he will only be one of us if he learns to go hungry now and then, and that is not a lesson he will have to take. I keep up conversation with Quique, even though we don’t usually have much to say to each other, there being little left to say after sixty years. But I talk just to provoke the boy, to lock him out. I ask Quique about mother and he tells me that she boiled her slippers until the pan burned dry. He says her parrot has begun to pull out its own feathers. It has a bald patch on its chest and above its wings. He says it looks like a testicle with a beak. But I can never be sure whether Quique is telling the truth.
*
Paco has his notebook out. “How many people speak your language?” he asks us.
“Thousands,” says Quique with his moon-calf smile, “everyone,” he adds, as if this makes him more convincing.
Paco looks at me, puzzled.
“You want to find out what language we have been speaking, my brother and I. You want to know something you do not already know. You are surprised that you don’t know everything in the world, because at twenty…how old are you…twenty-two?”
“Twenty-four,” he says, still smiling but a little less certain of himself.
“At twenty-four you still think it is possible to know everything.”
“Señor,” he says, “Señor, really I don’t think that. I know I have many things to learn.”
“Many things, many things,” I say. I am in a sour mood tonight. Perhaps it is because I am sixty-seven years old and I find I cannot account for my years. “If you want to know what we were speaking, why don’t you ask my brother, now that you’ve become such good friends?”
He looks at me almost as if he is disappointed in me, this Paco. He thinks Quique is a simpleton, what we call a xixi in our language. But he is wrong. Quique is no fool. He makes more money than I do and always has, driving his taxi and talking nonsense. He talks shit in Spanish just as fluently as he talks shit in Xoxitil.
“Our language is called Xoxitil and it is not for sale,” I say, getting up to leave.
“I don’t want to buy it,” he says.
“Then you want to steal it, and that is worse.”
He orders three more beers.
I decide to tell him the truth. “Only us,” I say, “we are the last who speak Xoxitil. We two and our mother and her parrot.”
He knows that I will not waste my time with lies and this tongue is, I suppose, an amazing thing: the only amazing thing I possess. “A parrot?”
“A parrot.”
“I’d like to meet this parrot,” he says.
That would be something to tell his friends, that he has met a parrot that speaks a language almost lost to men. “You cannot, my mother does not like visitors.”
He is only a little hurt. “Can I make some notes?” he says, “when you and your brother speak to each other. I’d like to make some notes. My degree is in philology.” He points at his notebook and moves his hand as if writing, as if I might not understand what he means by notes.
“No.” I want to say something clever to him. I want to say ‘my degree is in dust’ but by the time I think of this it is too late. We stand for a long time without speaking and when my brother breaks the silence it is to ask me to drink my beer.
“Why haven’t you taught your children?” asks the boy.
“They think it is ignorant, to speak a language no others speak. They think there is no point in it.” We are staring at each other now, as if we might be about to fight. “Aren’t they right? What is the point of a rooster that crows for the moon and never for the sun? Isn’t the point of words to…to…” but I cannot make the effort to explain. I wave a hand in the air as if to clear a bad smell and spit on the tiled floor. It is yellow; an old man’s spittle.
The next day I am sitting beside the window listening to football on my radio. The battery is weak so I have to hold it between my ear and the glass, which is cool on the back of my hand even though it is a hot day. The window looks out over the next place, a wooden shack with a tin roof. The Nuas live there. If Señora Nua looked out of her window she would see a shack much like hers, though a little neater, for Margarita is a neat woman. Neat and angry.
The door is rattling as if someone is pulling on it. It rattles again. Chac barks once. He is too old and stiff to move to the door, but he stands cautiously and then gives another feeble bark, as if to say ‘there, that is my duty done’. I do not move because I don’t want to lose the signal on my radio, even though it is nil-nil and almost half time. Again there is a rattle. I shout for Margarita. She has made a garden over the years and that is the way she chooses to use what she calls her time. She digs and digs in it though it gives her little enough in return. She comes through the room and looks at me as she looks at all her enemies. She says nothing as she pulls on the door.
I hear his voice. “Is Señor at home?”
Margarita jerks her head towards me and turns and leaves. Paco takes a step inside. He notices that I have seen him, though I am careful not to move. I watch him as a lizard watches a beetle, with one eye half-closed. He squats down to give Chac a pat. The dog smells bad. Not many people touch him these days and he is grateful for this stranger’s attention. He licks Paco appreciatively. I shout at him: “Stop!”
Finally the boy looks at me and speaks: “Señor, I hope you do not mind me coming like this, but I….”
“Go away.”
He bows his head. After a moment or two he says: “What’s his name?”
“He is Chac.”
“Ah, Chac. The god of rain. Does he bring rain?” he smiles.
“Rain? Why should he bring fucking rain? He’s a dog.”
He smiles again, as if he is prepared to tolerate anything from me. After a moment or two he continues. “I would like to explain, Señor,” he pauses, as if awaiting permission to go on.
I look out of the window. I can see Margarita bending to pull a weed, then another and another. Her thighs are strong and rounded and arouse me, just as they always did. If I told her that her body is still firm as an eggplant she would look at me with the deep disapproval she does when I sing to her, yet it pleases her, this constancy. I cannot give her my strange words; she has never been interested in those. She rises and falls like an old but reliable machine.
Paco coughs, and I can see that time has passed. “You see, Señor, I have made a study of Mayan languages. There are no records of Xoxitil. None. I would very much like to make a record of the words. I beg you, Señor, to allow me to make some notes.”
I have never had power; over my children a little, perhaps. “Ask my brother,” I say.
“I have. He told me that I must come and speak to you. He…he respects you.”
I know this is true. Even my own sons look down on me, but my brother, my foolish brother who is richer than anyone knows, he respects me. Paco looks at me with surprise. Perhaps he has not seen me smile before.
The second half of the match has begun, and I lift the radio back to my ear. He waits a moment until he understands that I will say no more. When he has pushed the door behind him and been gone a minute or two, I put down the radio and go to stand at the other window. I can see him walking slowly away. His shoulders are broad and his waist thin; he is built in a different way to the people I know. His shoes scuff the dusty path as he walks down towards the riverbed and across the bridge, where he stops a while to watch the boys in dirty shorts playing football amongst the old bicycles and refrigerators and burst and stained mattresses. A few clumps of thick, reedy grass mark the path of the trickle of water that is only fit for the crows to drink.
The rain begins in the night. We hear it when it is heavy like this because it makes the roof beat like so many drums. Margarita likes the sound of it. She brings herself close to me and we wind ourselves together like strands of rope. In the morning it is still raining and by lunchtime the stream has turned itself back into a river. By evening Margarita’s garden has become a pond and the next day the rain falls and falls, throwing itself down so that the river stretches wide, filling every space it can find and reaching up to touch the bottom of the bridge itself. Señora Nua walks across the bridge with her five children, taking them to her sister who lives up the hill. She comes back later with a cart and I see her start to pile her rugs and pots and pans onto it. I go out to help her.
“You should leave, too,” she says. “They are saying the river will burst and make us all drown.”
I frown at the improbability of this before I help her across the bridge. There are dozens of women doing the same, pushing empty carts towards us or pushing carts filled with their possessions up the hill towards the old town. I did not know they had so much, each one piled high with pots, pans, undergarments, linen and, some of them, a television. Plastic sheets keep off the rain.
Paco almost runs into me. He is pushing an empty cart across the bridge, ready to help all those who are leaving. The rain has made his long hair stick to his head. He wears a T-shirt that is soaked through. “Isn’t it terrible, Señor?” he laughs. “I am pleased to see that you are leaving.” He is breathing heavily and he holds his face close to mine so that he will not have to shout through the storm. I can smell his breath, which is clean like a child’s.
“I am not leaving,” I say.
“What about Chac, can Chac swim?”
I push past him and shove Señora Nua’s cart up the hill. He has thought of Chac when I have not. Señora Nua lets me keep her cart once it is emptied – she thinks I have changed my mind about leaving our place. When I get back I lift the old dog onto it and push him along the muddy track, across the bridge and all the way up the hill to where my mother and Quique live. Chac does not complain about the rain beating down on his elderly black coat. Even though we see little rain in this town he is old enough to have felt it before. He turns his head from time to time to look back at me pushing him along, his brown eyes blinking slowly.
When I get to Mama’s the two-roomed flat in which she and Quique live is full of people, their voices high with excitement. Usually the place is quiet, filled with yellowing lace and the smell of kidneys stewing on the hob and mothballs dissolving in the wardrobes. These neighbours of mine greet me, warm with their commiserations. Four families are squeezed around the walls. Each one has taken up a space on the floor and none offers to give up their corner for me. Mama is sitting on her bed, holding the parrot’s cage close to her and talking to the bird in Xoxitil. Two children watch her, their eyes wide and solemn as if they are watching a witch casting spells. Quique was not lying: the parrot has pulled out every feather it could reach with its beak. I can see its heart beating in its breast, blue and uncertain.
Quique stands in the middle of the outer room and smiles at me. He gives a shrug. Chac smells particularly bad now he is so wet. “I will find a space for you and Margarita” he says. But he knows as well as I do that there is no space left. “I can sleep on the ceiling,” he says, looking up at it. It is the sort of thing he has always said.
“We are fine at our place,” I say. “We are staying there. Only Chac, he cannot swim. You will look after him?”
“Yes. Yes, I will.” He smiles the smile he casts over every question, the one that makes me doubt him.
I take his arm in my hands. I am still stronger than him. “Look after him,” I say, squeezing him. “Don’t let him out except when you must. When he has to pee. Here – he has a leash. Take him out on his leash. Will you do this?” I surprise myself with my insistence. But what is a man if he cannot save even his dog?
“I will. Today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next…”
“Yes, good.”
*
We hear the river burst its banks in the middle of the night. The sound of water and mud groans its way into the kitchen and bedroom. Margarita and I grapple our way onto the roof where we sit in the absolute darkness and feel our home shift beneath us. We are ready to be tipped into the mud. We are ready.
At daybreak the rain stops as suddenly as it began. Now the sun is hot, stewing the brown lake that stretches away for a mile or more in every direction. Our roof is just a foot or two above the surface of the water. If it rises further we will have to swim, but there is nowhere close enough to swim to. In the distance we can see the old town square shimmering at the lake’s edge. Little figures stand in a row along its banks and boats move about, looking like busy insects.
We drink the coffee that Margarita made the night before and put in a flask. Soon we will need shade. I can see some other people sitting on roofs here and there, though none very near to us. Somebody waves. I do not wave back.
In the distance a rubber boat with an outboard motor is making its way towards us. It scuds over the waves of the uninvited lake as if towards some cheerful place, but the smell in the air is not the smell of salt and wind, but already the smell of rot and ruin. The water is not deep enough to cover the bloated cattle corpses, the putrefying hay, the wrecked lives that lie beneath. Everything will be bad now; I know this without even having to think about it.
He is shouting something to us, but we cannot hear the words above the whine of the motor. He is with a soldier. As he comes closer I see that he is wearing the same shirt that he wore the day before. It is torn now. We are in no hurry, and the time he takes to reach us stretches like resin. He steps onto the roof and helps Margarita into the boat. I cannot move. He stands over me and lifts me to my feet. Today his breath smells sour, and I am pleased that he is, after all, such a man.
The body of a woman lies in the bottom of the rubber boat, and beside it sits a boy of six or seven years old. His eyes catch mine, but are silent. When we reach the shore the soldier lifts the woman and places her into the arms of the man who is waiting for her. He is weeping, tipping his head forward so that his tears fall onto his wife’s corpse. Paco lifts the boy from the boat, who walks unsteadily over to the weeping man and puts his hands around his thigh, turning to look back at me as if it is I who drowned his mother. Paco’s arm is shaking slightly as he guides me onto dry ground. Qarixi, I say. He drops his eyes. “It is nothing,” he replies, and I know that he has understood me. It is the first thing I say to him in Xoxitil: thank you.
***
Sean Lusk’s debut, The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley was a BBC2 Between the Covers pick, a Sunday Times Historical Fiction Book of the Month, and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize and the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award. He is also an award-winning short story writer, winner of the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Fish Short Story Prize. He has lived in Greece, Pakistan and Egypt and now lives in the Scottish Highlands.