Ignacio Aldecoa*

Come Twelve o’Clock

‘Yesterday, at a quarter to twelve, a house on a construction site collapsed.’

A newspaper report.

It was so cold that it hurt to breathe. The factory sirens pierced the white morning air. The garbage trucks were heading for the rubbish dumps. Pedro Sánchez blew on his fingers.

Antonia Puerto woke up. Her little boy was crying. She opened the window a little, and the cold air flew in like a bird, fluttering about the room. The child coughed. Antonia immediately closed the window again, and the cold shrank back into nothing. Juan woke up too then, his eyes like those of a frightened hare. He turned over in bed, waking his older brother.

When Antonia closed the window, the room smelled terrible. She ran her calloused fingertips over the windowpane, over the glass scabbed with ice. She had a sour taste in her mouth from a rotten tooth. She looked down at the street, at the frozen puddles and the piles of gravel embroidered with frost. Her youngest child was crying. Pedro had already gone to work. Married for ten years, they’d had a child every two years. The first was born dead, but she never even gave him a thought; she didn’t have time. Then along came Luis, Juan and the little one. She was expecting another in the summer. Pedro was a construction worker. He’d had better jobs before, but you know how it is … He didn’t earn much, and they had to get by. That’s where she came in, apart, that is, from grumbling and keeping the house in order. She sewed shirts for the army.

The little one’s crying finally woke up both his brothers. Luis, the oldest, jumped out of bed in his shirt and hurriedly pulled on his trousers. Juan lay there, pretending that his knees were a range of mountains and imagining possible disasters.

The folds in the blankets set him dreaming; he would invent landscapes, imagine rivers where he could go fishing, stone by stone, for crabs of course. Crabs cooked with rice, because those were the best things about their summer Sunday outings.

Luis had now washed, and the little one had stopped crying. A neighbour came in to borrow some milk; for some reason theirs kept curdling. Antonia gave her some, and the neighbour, one arm folded across her chest and the other clasping a battered saucepan, began talking. Their voices reached Juan only indistinctly. The neighbour was saying:

‘When babies are born, the bones in their head are like this … Then they have to grow on both sides to be normal … If they only grow on one side …’

‘Juan!’

His mother’s voice startled him. He wanted to remain immersed in his daydream.

‘Coming.’

‘Get up now or you’ll get a good hiding.’

Juan had no choice: he got out of bed. The bedroom was right next to the kitchen. He was nice and warm there, but, once he’d been into the kitchen, there would be no going back. It made him shiver.

Juan picked up the chamber pot. His mother’s voice reached him bearing a new threat.

‘Don’t be such a lazy slob. Use the toilet.’

He didn’t want to go to the toilet because it was so cold, but he went. The toilet was in the courtyard. By the time he returned, the neighbour had gone. His mother grabbed him by the neck and dragged him over to the sink:

‘When are you going to learn to wash yourself properly?’

Finally, he had breakfast.

Feeling warmer, with some food in his stomach, he went out into the courtyard. His friends were playing at being street-sweepers. They traced semi-circles in the dust with their brooms, making swishing sounds as they did. He stood watching for a while, hands in his pockets, a scornful look on his face. He stood on one leg for a moment to scratch his ankle, but without taking his left hand out of his trouser pocket. Then his brother Luis came racing out with an errand to run. He decided to go with him.

It was fun climbing the piles of gravel, stopping to look at a puddle and break the ice with your heel, picking up an empty matchbox or a sad, damp piece of paper.

Antonia was sitting by the window in a low, wide chair, busily working. The light from the courtyard is a bitter light, an oppressive light that makes her bow her head to do her sewing. A saucepan is rattling away on the stove. Antonia puts the shirt down on her lap and pokes her tongue into her cheek, feeling for her rotten tooth. The boys don’t come back until ten o’clock, either because they got distracted or because they preferred the cold of the street to being shut up indoors. Antonia tells them off in a voice at once harsh and affectionate. Luis gets the blame for them staying out too long. Juan pouts indignantly.

‘And as for you, Juan, don’t you play the innocent either. You don’t fool me.’

Then Antonia launches into her usual monologue, which is always the same, but which has a soothing effect on her. The boys stand watching their mother, until she sends them out into the street again.

‘Off you go, you’re no use here.’

Juan walks slowly over to the door. He opens it and is just about to take a leap into freedom when his mother calls him back:

‘Now don’t go running about too much. You might start sweating and catch a cold, and then it’ll be the hospital for you, because we don’t want any sick people in the house.’

The hospital and the orphanage are the two threats she uses on her sons, to no avail. And, when neither appears to work, she resorts to their father:

‘Just you wait until your father gets home … He’ll sort you out. If you do it again, then, come twelve o’clock, you’ll pay for it right enough.’

A shudder runs down Juan’s spine whenever his mother threatens him with his father, because he knows his father will be tired when he gets home and, if he does give him a beating, he’ll do it indifferently and unthinkingly. Not like his mother, who beats him conscientiously and vociferously.

A ray of sunlight gilds the façades of the houses now that the mist has burned off. The sparrows puff out their breasts like a child blowing out his cheeks. A dog lies down in the sun, tongue lolling. The milkman’s horse stamps its hooves and twitches its ears. The morning yawns with happiness.

Juan wanders off to an empty plot of land. He whistles to himself and sees how far he can throw stones.

The windows of the house opposite are tinged blood-red, just like the water when you rinse out your nose after you’ve been picking it too much. The walls of the house next to the empty plot are grey, like when you lick your finger and leave your fingerprint on the whitewashed partition wall. Juan is good at making out clown’s faces in the damp stains on the walls. He remembers that, when he had a cold once, those faces on the wall had been his sole entertainment.

Antonia leans out of the window and bawls:

‘Juan, come here.’

‘Coming, Mum.’

But Juan the dreamer lingers for a while longer, rooting around for something or other on the ground.

He finally reaches the front door and goes upstairs. His mother says:

‘Take this to the shop for me, will you? And say I’ll drop by later on. Then you can carry on doing whatever it was you were doing, and I won’t say a word.’

She shoots him an ironic glance:

‘You’ve got until twelve o’clock to do whatever you want.’

Luis is sitting with his little brother on his lap. He smiles because he feels he’s being rewarded for being virtuous. Juan is startled. It’s been a long time since she said anything like that to him. Yes, he can do what he wants now, but not for very long, only for an hour or an hour and a quarter if his father stops to have a drink with his friends, which seems unlikely given that it’s Friday and, on Fridays, there’s no wine for his father and not much food for them. What bad luck. Juan can’t tell the time, so, when he reaches the shop with his mother’s basket, he asks the shopkeeper:

‘Could you tell me what time it is, please?’

‘Ten past eleven.’

‘This is from my mother; she’ll drop by later on.’

‘Thanks, lad. Here, have some almonds.’

The shopkeeper is a kindly man and gives all his customers’ children almonds. Juan mumbles his thanks and leaves. He’s not much interested in almonds today, and so he just bites into one of them, then stuffs the others in his pocket, while he considers how soon twelve o’clock will come.

Juan sits down on the front step and ponders what he could do with that time. He could go back to rooting around on the empty plot; go upstairs and apologize for being naughty; go over to the corner of the street and watch some men digging a ditch; go upstairs and crouch in a corner and wait; play in the courtyard and make just enough noise for his mother to know that he hasn’t gone far and is playing like a good little boy. Yes, that’s what he’ll do.

In the courtyard, the boys who had been playing at being street-sweepers are now playing with an old packing case. Juan stands by watching with a pleading look in his eyes. One of the boys, sweating and panting, turns and asks:

‘D’you want to play?’

‘All right.’

Juan generously shares out his almonds. Antonia Puerto continues her sewing. Now and then, she gets up to go over to the stove, where the saucepan continues to rattle and moan. Every time she picks up the lid, she burns her fingers, and has to use the folds of her apron as an oven glove. Luis is helping her, while the little one babbles happily away. From downstairs they hear Juan’s voice; pleased, Antonia looks out of the window, and Juan turns round at that very moment and sees her there. It’s a quarter to twelve and Juan has triumphed.

A neighbour comes in from the street and hurries across the courtyard. When she sees Juan, she asks:

‘Is your mother in?’

Juan nods and follows her upstairs. When they reach their apartment, the neighbour knocks at the door, anxiously, quickly, telegraphically. Like a strange kind of SOS. The ring on the bell, the rap on the door, the pounding on the knocker that makes the inhabitants of a house rush out, hearts beating fast. Antonia comes to the door.

‘What’s wrong, Carmen?’

‘Wait a moment, and I’ll tell you. In you go, Juan. You’re needed on the phone, Antonia. It’s the foreman at the building site. Something’s happened to your Pedro.’

Taking off her apron, Antonia races down the stairs.

‘Take care of the kids, will you?’

‘Of course, don’t worry.’

Juan has heard everything and starts to cry loudly. Frightened, Luis does the same. The neighbour picks up the little one and tries to calm them all down. She closes the door.

Antonia rushes into the shop which has the only telephone in the street. She finds it hard to speak.

‘Hello … yes, it’s me. Is it bad? Yes, right away.’

The sun comes in through the shop window, setting the red ball of cheese on the marble counter glinting.

The factory sirens rise up to the clear, transparent, midday sky. It’s twelve o’clock.