The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman (31 page)

“Ashamed of what, Tico?”

Now it was Soleá's turn to squirm in her seat. She clearly remembered the morning at
Librarte
when she almost beat Atticus
Craftsman to death for having insinuated that her grandfather might have been homosexual.

“That people might have thought your husband was . . .”

“That García Lorca's thing was catching?” asked the old woman, her voice full of irony. “That they were lovers? But my boy, he gave me a child before we were even married and three more after the wedding . . . How could my husband have been gay, eh?”

“With difficulty,” he admitted.

At no point did Atticus switch his gaze from Remedios's friendly face to her granddaughter's vexed expression. Soleá was praying the earth would swallow her up.

“The thing is,” Remedios went on, “we needed a reason to bring you to Granada. That's why we spun that yarn about the poems. Then we fell in love with you and didn't want you to leave. So we kept stringing you along.”

Soleá felt as if she was suffocating. Apparently, her grandmother had just declared her love on her behalf. She had said, “
We
fell in love with you,” and nodded toward Soleá as she said it.

“But this time I was the one who lied to you,” Remedios confessed. “Because I was scared that my Soleá would go back to Madrid and you'd go back to England, and the two of you would go your separate ways. So I got into bed and told everyone I was dying.”

“You're not dying, Granny?”

“No way,
niño
! I'm in better shape than you are.”

She couldn't help letting out a little laugh as she said this last bit. Atticus leaped forward to kiss her wrinkled hands.

“But you scared me to death, Remedios! I believed every word!”

“I'm truly sorry, sweetie,” she replied, flattered. “I didn't know you cared about me so much.”

Salty streaks left by the tears he had shed were still visible on the Englishman's face, and his hands were still and cold as blocks of ice.

“But I can see that you really do care,” she went on. “And I think you're the right person to trust with my secret. The part about me having a secret is true, and I don't want to take it to the grave with me.”

“Granny,” Soleá protested from the foot of the bed, “don't keep tricking
Míster Crasman.
We've pulled enough wool over his eyes already.”

“Shut up and listen, you!” said Remedios. “This secret concerns you too, the color of your eyes and the tone of your skin.”

Soleá looked fearfully at Atticus, and he returned a look full of curiosity. Soleá's eyes were two blue beacons; her skin was the color of sand, and although she was tanned she was much fairer than her sisters and neighbors.

“You see, Soleá, you take after your great-grandfather. That's why you're so blond.”

“Blond” wasn't exactly the word that Atticus would have used to describe the woman who had him under her spell. He would have said exotic, mestiza, mixed race. Dark hair and blue eyes, with tanned skin that looked peachy at times. But it was true. Compared to other women around her it was possible to describe her as blond. A different kind of blond from the Scandinavian variety, of course, a Sierra Nevada blond, which is something else entirely.

“Because you see, Tico, my boy,” said Remedios from among the bedclothes, “it turns out that my mother, when she married
my father, was pregnant by another man. Only my father knew that. He'd loved her since he was a boy and cried when she went to serve in a big house in Granada because he thought the masters of the house would steal her. ‘Don't go, Macarena, don't go, if you go I'll lose you,' he said, but she went. She was a real handful, that Macarena, no one was going to tell her what to do. She went, she worked, and one day a friend of her employer's son arrived, a young English guy who can't have been much older than twenty and was already messed up because he'd fought in some war or other and was traumatized by what he'd seen. He used to scream at night and wake up bathed in sweat and tears. And my Macarena, God rest her soul, well, she let him convince her to sleep beside him, because he was scared, he said, of the ghosts of all those dead soldiers. So she slept with him and cured him of his demons and then, when she found out she was pregnant, she didn't tell anyone, only my father. She went back to Camino del Monte, had her white wedding, went to live in Dolores's cave, which before that was called Macarena's cave, and my father gave her fourteen children, fifteen in total.”

“So, Granny,” said Soleá, “are you saying that my great-grandfather was English?”

“Yes. English. But not English from England, English from America. And he became really famous, that great-grandfather of yours.”

“Famous?”

“Well, that's the whole point, you see,” she went on. “Why would I be telling you all this if he hadn't got so famous. No one else knows about it, and until I met Tico I was ready to take the story to the grave with me.”

Atticus sat in stunned silence. From the date, from the man's
description and the location, he was sure he knew who Remedios was referring to.

“You already know who I'm talking about,” she guessed.

“Hemingway.”

“The very same.”

Just then, someone knocked at the door. Manuela, who was in the kitchen, rushed through the living room to answer it. She mumbled a good morning to the three of them, then turned the handle to let in whoever had come to pay their respects to the dying woman.

When she came back, she was as white as a ghost.

“Soleá, your boss, Berta, is at the door, and your friend María, with an English couple and a man who looks sort of like a police officer. Have you done something wrong, love?”

CHAPTER 48

F
ate chose the worst possible moment for Soleá Abad Heredia to meet Moira Craftsman, her future mother-in-law, for the first time. Maybe that's why it was so hard to break the arctic ice that lay between them for years, despite poor Atticus's efforts to bring the two very different women together. From the moment they met, the hatchet was out and was buried only on the blessed day that the twins Tom and Huckleberry came into the world; one fair, one dark. Their maternal grandmother inexplicably nicknamed them Zipi and Zape, which seriously disconcerted the Craftsmans, who had never heard of that Ibáñez chap and had no interest in broadening their knowledge of Spanish humor or its great masters. “My grandsons,” said Marlow, “will bear the names of protagonists from great novels, following a Craftsman family tradition that has existed since time immemorial, not some vulgar comic-strip character.” “By Jove!” added Atticus, provoking an outburst of laughter from Manuela, Remedios, Consuelos, and the seventeen cousins who had gone to visit the hospital in Granada to keep Soleá company while she was in labor.

The day they met, Soleá's hair was wet, her skirt was covered in mud, her eyes were full of tears, and she was sitting at the foot
of an old, toothless, and disheveled dying woman's bed, and the old woman was inexplicably clutching Atticus's hands.

Of course, because the only light in the room was a dim glow from the fire, it was too dark for Moira to see that the young Gypsy with long blond hair was in fact her missing son. It was Atticus who recognized his parents, despite how awful his mother looked: pale, having just thrown up, and wrapped in a dirty coat that was too big for her.

“Mother! Father!” he exclaimed, jumping up from his seat next to the bed.

“Atticus?”

Moira Craftsman fainted. She froze on the spot, started trembling, and then keeled over so the full length of her slim body slammed onto the floor, and she hit her nose on the terra-cotta tiles.

“Tell Consuelos to get down here!” shouted Remedios from her bed, remembering her younger sister's therapeutic powers and forgetting, meanwhile, that the Andalusian regional council had recently opened a state-of-the-art medical center only three blocks from the house, where they dealt with all sorts of emergencies.

Consuelos came running down from where she had been sleeping in one of the rooms upstairs and hurled herself to the floor, wrapping her arms and legs around Moira as if she were saving her from drowning and had to swim her to shore.

Marlow Craftsman couldn't believe his eyes when he saw the old woman's unconventional approach, much less the behavior of his son who, instead of prying the woman away from his mother's body, was trying to hold everyone else back so they wouldn't intervene in the rescue.

The madness was over in next to no time. As soon as Moira's
heartbeat had matched the rhythm of Consuelos's, Manuela brought a damp cloth from the kitchen and cleaned the blood from the nose of her daughter's future mother-in-law, and then between them all they settled her into the bed recently vacated by Remedios who, to the great surprise of her daughter and sister, had jumped up and was now standing to one side in her crumpled nightgown.

Consuelos had to lie next to Moira, because every time the Englishwoman opened her eyes she had a fit and fainted again. Soleá moved to one side, protected by her mother and grandmother; Atticus and Marlow stationed themselves at the head of the bed; and Berta, María, and Inspector Manchego stood at the foot. They all remained deep in silence until the seventeen cousins came back from Manolo's Bar.

In the semidarkness, it was easy to confuse one person with another: the unwell woman with Remedios, the Englishmen with priests, the strangers with distant relatives.

“Oh, oh, my dear Remedios has left us!” cried one of the aunts from Antequera at the top of her voice.

“Oh, my dear, sweet Remedios!” shouted six or seven cousins in unison.

Marlow Craftsman, with the sole intention of setting things straight, took a step forward and tried to explain that the woman wasn't their Remedios, it was his Moira from Kent, and that she wasn't dead, she had simply fainted.

Because none of them understood what he was saying, and before Berta had time to translate, there was a growing murmur of voices complaining about the church, the clergy, and the habit they had of coming into someone's house as if it was their own, get away from my aunt, you idiot, I want to give her a last kiss.

The lack of respect toward his father implied by the word “idiot” unleashed in Atticus the same rage that had ripped through Soleá that day in the
Librarte
office when he called her dead grandfather gay. Marlow, in shock, watched the transformation of his son into a wild beast: Atticus's body grew rigid, his fists clenched, his eyes closed to a squint, his voice became hoarse, he turned the air blue.

“I shit on
all
your ancestors!” shouted Atticus. “Every last one of them! Tico from Dolores's cave won't stand for anyone insulting his father, by Jove!”

Atticus, with his shirt open to his navel, launched himself at the cousin from Antequera, pushed his chest at his, and both of them rolled on the terra-cotta floor, to the astonishment of everyone around.

Suddenly, they heard a gunshot, and plaster dust rained down on the terrified Marlow. All eyes turned to the corner, where a big man dressed like a sheep farmer had just fired at the ceiling with a gun that was straight out of a gangster movie.

“Are you crazy?” Soleá exclaimed. “The kids are sleeping upstairs, and that bullet could go through the ceiling and kill one of them!”

These wise words were enough to make most of the rabble rush noisily upstairs. They were led by Manuela, shouting like a madwoman, with Remedios bringing up the rear in her nightgown and between them the Heredia cousins, aunts, and uncles, Berta, María, and Consuelos, who had managed to jump out of bed as soon as the silence was broken.

Upstairs it was all shouts and screams; they counted the children and found that the number of kids sleeping peacefully was the same number as had been put to bed the night before. All
safe and sound, thank God. They stomped back down, thirty of them in total, children and adults, Gypsies and
payos
, friends and strangers, and all surrounded Moira Craftsman's bed, some of them shocked to find an Englishwoman in Remedios's place.