3

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Alone

Manu spent a few days wandering around the town and sleeping in the church at night, after doing dishes, carrying wood and fetching water for the sexton. There had been no contact with Bento. Manu had no idea how to get him out of prison. Force wasn’t an option, since Manu was weak and without resources. Tears and appeals were not going to work, either. Manu had already cried and begged in front of the guards, but was met only with cruelty, laughter and ridicule.

“Here comes the whiner again.”

“Get out of here, kid!”

“Nuisance!”

He hovered around like a silly, sluggish fly that insists on landing everywhere, until finally he would scarcely show up before the guards tried to get rid of him. They wouldn’t even let him linger near the gates as they had in the early days.

If only Manu could talk to Bento, surely he would be able to come up with a plan. His older brother was smart and full of ideas. If it hadn’t been for him, the two of them would still be in the village where they were born. Or they would have died of the plague, like the rest of their family and almost all their neighbors.

Just thinking about it made Manu’s eyes cloud up and almost overflow with tears. His head and heart were filled with sad memories of two younger brothers and their mother and father. They had all been sick in the small, dark house, and when they stopped clinging to life, their bodies were thrown on top of the pile that was growing at the front door. Then, one by one, they were taken away in the wagon used to carry the dead. It was done in a hurry, because there were so many bodies, and burials had to be quick to try to contain the plague that raged from street to street.

Manu would never forget the day they put their father’s body on the wagon, and the two of them were all alone. Bento made a decision.

“Father told me to look after you and take care of everything. Let’s get out of here.”

“Where should we go?”

“I don’t know. But staying means waiting for the plague to get us, too. We have to get away, right now. The whole town is sick, Manu. It’s only a matter of time.”

Time — trying to escape time. Moving away from an earlier time — a wonderful time, with family, their siblings’ playfulness, their mother’s lap and smile, their father’s voice telling stories by the fire at the end of the day. The time when Manu had a home.

All this had been left behind.

Within hours, they were on the road. They took only a few things — a change of clothes from one sibling, a coat inherited from another, their mother’s rosary, their father’s pocket knife. And a small object — the ceramic dove that Manu quickly snatched from a shelf and tucked in a pocket just before they left. It was so tiny and delicate, white and blue. Manu didn’t know if it was a toy or an ornament.

He remembered when it had been made. Their father had brought home a ball of clay from the workshop. It was wrapped in a damp cloth, and he showed the children how to shape it. All of them spent a Sunday playing with the clay, making models of animals — roosters, dogs and cats. None was as beautiful or as perfect as the small dove that emerged from their father’s deft fingers while he was teaching them. Manu would never forget their father’s long, magical hands, which were able to give life to wet earth.

The next day, Manu went with him to the workshop. Taking advantage of the hot kiln used to fire the dishes made by the pottery workers, he put the clay dove inside to fix the glaze. Manu saw how he had painted the dove with pigments that would change color with the heat of the kiln and turn the scratched lines representing the dove’s feathers blue. Later, when it came time to take everything out of the kiln, there it was amid all the pots and jars — a graceful blue-and-white glazed dove, tiny and perfect, ready to go back to their home. The dove lived on the shelf, looking as if it had just softly landed there to celebrate a day of peace and family joy. It watched over them all.

But the dove belonged to Manu. Forever after, he would remember the smile with which their father handed him the dove when it had cooled.

“Take it,” he said. “It’s for you.” And he patted Manu on the head with his long fingers.

“I also want to work in a pottery when I grow up.”

“Well, I’ll teach you some secrets, so that when you are apprenticing you’ll know a thing or two.”

And that’s how Manu started going to work with their father. First, Manu helped him with ceramic tiles, which were easy to make because they were square and had ready-made molds that were assembled on a trivet to go into the kiln. But little by little, Manu tried other things. Playing with the clay was fun. So was shaping it into long, thin pieces that would become the handles of mugs or pitchers.

More than anything, Manu wanted to master the potter’s wheel, where your feet turned a platform on which you put the wet mass. There your hands formed a roundness out of the clay, leaving a hollow at its core, creating pitchers, candlesticks, vases, bowls, pots of all kinds. But it was hard to do with small fingers, and Manu wondered whether it would ever be possible to learn how to do it well. In spite of this, their father encouraged him to keep trying.

“This is the way your hands become used to the wheel,” he said. “It’s a matter of feeling and being familiar with it. Absorb it little by little and you’ll find that you won’t ever forget.”

Manu didn’t forget.

What Manu couldn’t have imagined is that shortly afterwards there would be no father to continue the teaching, nor a mother waiting at home with food ready on the table. Nor could Manu have imagined being on the road with Bento, every day a little farther from the place where they were born and the cemetery where they had buried the rest of their family.

Manu and Bento were the only ones left.

Each day they traveled until they could go no farther. They drank water from streams and ate fruit from trees along the way. They slept in fields, on the hard ground. And the next day they kept walking. They kept going farther and farther from home, and, they hoped, from death.

They offered to help with odd jobs on the farms and in the villages they passed through in exchange for a meal and a night sleeping in a barn or on a pile of straw. Sometimes a farmer would give them a ride on a hay wagon carting casks of wine or olive oil to a nearby market.

After a few weeks, they made it to Lisbon, tired but still alive. It was a day of celebration, with processions and singing, but they were dusty, spattered with mud and poorly dressed. It was then that Bento had the idea to go to the tavern in search of work.

When they arrived, they were both clean and tidy, having bathed in the fountain in the square. Their hair was newly cut with the pocket knife, and they were wearing clean clothes they had brought from home. The clothes may not have been exactly the right size, but they were fresh and in good condition and weren’t covered with road dust.

That was only a few months ago, but it seemed like years. They had left their family, their home, their freedom — everything — behind. Even Bento was gone now. And without Bento, Manu had no idea what to do. He was all on his own, looking for shelter.

And he was hungry. How could anyone think when their stomach was growling? The soup from the church barely warmed him or lasted him through the night. At dawn, it was a little less chilly, but Manu couldn’t worry about being hungry then. The sexton would open the main door of the church, and people would begin to arrive for mass. Manu had to go out and walk in the sun and start to warm up. But soon that miserable feeling was back. The sense of emptiness just got worse. A hollow pain. Hunger.

Manu spent the whole day walking aimlessly through the market stalls, waiting for some leftover food to fall to the ground, or hoping to nibble on a discarded fruit or vegetable that was not totally spoiled. But a lot of other people had the same idea. Manu had to compete for the scraps with beggars of all kinds. Even dogs were on the prowl for a bone to gnaw or a piece of sausage to snatch, as they circled through the legs of the customers and vendors.

A little ahead of Manu, in the shadow of a small awning, was a table full of carefully displayed fruit. He thought of passing by surreptitiously, like someone distracted, and grabbing some. It was important to plan what to take. A few berries wouldn’t help much. But a melon would certainly soothe the stomach. But what if the owner saw, or if that perfectly balanced stack collapsed all at once and all those colorful fruits tumbled to the ground? There would be a chase, a huge commotion, and someone might even call the guards. It was very risky.

Risky? Or was it, on the contrary, the perfect solution? Maybe this was just the idea that Manu was looking for.

If there was a great uproar and confusion, the guards would arrest the culprits for sure. It was Manu’s chance to find Bento. He was sure that nothing bad could happen if he was at Bento’s side, even if they were at the bottom of a dungeon.

With this in mind, Manu took another stroll around the market square. Now it was clear what to do — carefully choose the best stalls, run very quickly and grab a slab of bacon here, a peach there, another fruit at another stall, always taking care to pull from the bottom of each pile, so that everything would go flying. Manu could also throw a few pieces of sausage to the dogs, so that they would begin to fight and add to the confusion.

The plan was quickly put into action. Manu crisscrossed through the buyers and sellers, running and pulling something from every stall, knocking over baskets and spilling bags filled with grain. People were running around everywhere. Some, who were also hungry, ducked down to compete for the scattered produce. Others tried to gather whatever they could and put it back on the tables. Some, baffled, sought to help one side or the other. People shoved and yelled.

“Get your hand out of there!”

“Drop it!”

It wasn’t long before the brawl began. A woman rapped a child on the head and started throwing oranges at the crowd. An urchin came up behind her and hit her on the head with a melon.

“Here come the king’s guards!” someone yelled.

That was the cry Manu had been waiting for. Now it was only a matter of staying in the middle of it all, so as to be picked up immediately when the guards arrived. They would grab him for sure, and in an instant he would be with Bento. To attract more attention, Manu grabbed a sausage and began to eat it ostentatiously, walking slowly through the chaos.

On one side of the plaza was a stately mansion with four steps leading to a stone porch. It looked like a small stage, all set for a performance. Well, it was time to put on a show. Manu climbed the steps of the mansion and leaned against the wall beside the heavy wooden door, nibbling from a pear in one hand and half a sausage in the other. He watched the uproar with a racing heart, feigning a disdainful smile while trembling inside.

The guards came running down a side street. They were pushing people, grabbing their arms, dispensing blows. The shouting got louder. Amid the tumult, a bearded man — tall, strong and well dressed — spoke to the soldiers with vigorous gestures, as if he were giving orders. It was impossible to pick up a single word he said, there was so much noise in the square. But from his imposing manner, he could only be their boss.

Suddenly, the man saw Manu. The child stared at him boldly. Why? The man was furious. He strode toward Manu.

Everything was going according to plan. In a few moments, Manu would be arrested and would find Bento.

All at once, the big man sprang up the steps to the house, two at a time, and grabbed the little body by the shoulders, pulling the child firmly to his side.

But then he did something unexpected.

The man wrapped Manu in his cloak and threw the weight of them both against the heavy wooden door of the mansion. With a creaking sound, it opened. Quickly, the man closed it again and secured the latch — a solid iron clasp.

Manu was trapped all right, as planned, not in Bento’s dungeon but in a strange place, in the hands of an unknown, bad-tempered man.

No wonder his legs were trembling and his heart was beating so hard it seemed it would burst.