What She Left Behind
Pedro was twelve the first time he saw his mother.
It was a frosty winter night and he lay in bed, turned away from the door to his bedroom and towards the window that looked out over the garden.
His room was dark, the oil lamp on the bedside blown out. On the other side of the bed, his father was putting his pants on, composing himself.
And Pedro was trying to forget his father was there, trying to forget what happened. It happened every night and every night he forgot about it, by making himself Pedro and the other.
Pedro was his mind and his thoughts, and the inside of his mind where he lived in any way he wished. The other was the body on the narrow bed, between the too-stiff linen sheets, in the smell of freshly sawn wood that his father brought home from his carpentry workshop and the smell of semen thick in the air.
That night the game wasn't working. Pedro and the other remained stubbornly the same, stubbornly aware of violation and intrusion.
He turned towards his window and listened to the wind whistle outside, and looked at the jeweled frost patterns and told himself his father wasn't there. Not at all. Not there.
And then he saw her.
She looked like an angel, he thought. And then, on the heels of that, that she looked like his own face glimpsed in the mirror and magically transformed into a female face of ethereal beauty.
She had the same oval face, the same broad grey eyes, the same gently arched eyebrows. But the dark-blonde hair that streamed around her face was curly and wild, and on her head — incongruous in the winter frost and the snow — rested a crown of tiny pink roses, woven together, twisted, holding her hair back.
She tapped on the window with tapered fingers and dragged them on the frost patterns, putting long, clean streaks through the white.
Had he fallen asleep? Was he dreaming?
His window, on the second floor of the house, could not be reached from any nearby wall. There were no tall trees nearby.
And yet, her face was at his window and her small, rosebud mouth formed words, words he couldn't understand — as if she spoke another language.
Behind him, he felt his father stand up — the mattress bouncing back from the weight.
Normally this was the moment of relief, the moment when he was left alone in his bed. Alone with his thoughts and his dreams. Alone, to be Pedro once more.
But today his heart beat faster, and his hand clutched the sheet tight, and his eyes clenched shut for just a moment.
If his father turned. If his father looked....
He didn't know what or why but he knew, in his rushing heart, his clenching muscles, that something awful would happen. Something...
His father shuffled to the door. The door opened and closed, softly, carefully, so as not to wake the housekeeper and maid on the floor below.
And Pedro was out of the bed and rushing to the window, and Pedro was hungry and desperate, wanting to see the woman, wanting to know, wanting to draw her close, to ask who she was and how she had the freedom to come and go through the air and look through second-floor windows.
But when he threw open the window and the frosty air blew into his room, there was nothing there.
He'd seen the woman, clear as day, and her finger marks remained, clear on the frosty glass of the window.
But outside, the fields that separated Pedro's house from the river were empty and silent, covered in a mantle of frost, like a brittle shell over the dried grass of autumn.
The river, itself, murmured in the distance, too deep and fast-running to be silenced by any winter frost.
And the trees on its banks were stripped of leaves, desolate, lifting their arms to the heavens like despairing penitents.
Pedro's eyes searched the trees and the thorny wild blackberry bushes beneath them, the unbroken layer of ice upon the fields and the river below.
If he'd not dreamed... If he'd not dreamed...
His heart beat in his chest, hammering, hammering, and the cold of the outside air could not cool the heat on his nerves, his need to know who that woman was and how she could come like that, through the air.
What had she seen? What did she know? How could he forget what happened every night if anyone knew? And why couldn't he fly away? Why couldn't he?
Impatient, irritated, he started to close the window.
A tinkle of metal, a shine of something in the dark room, and he looked down to see a small ring fall at his feet.
It was gold and plain — a flat metal band, suitable for a man's finger. Or a boy's.
On the top side, the engraving of a rose, done in exquisite detail, recalled the crown on the woman's head.
And inside, there were two names, miniature and yet flowing and curly as though done by an unhurried hand with a weightless pen: Rosa Silva.
His mother.
He opened the window again. He leaned out of it and almost called, "Mother."
But that would only bring his father into the room, screaming and yelling and pounding.
Pedro had made that mistake once. He was three and he'd asked his father why he didn't have a mother — why he didn't have a mother like other boys did.
He remembered the expression on his father's eyes — a mix of blinding rage and pain. And he remembered his father's fists....
The housekeeper had pulled his father away.
Later, dabbing a cool towel against Pedro's cheek, the housekeeper, a plump, motherly woman with a soft voice, had whispered that Pedro must not mention his mother. Ever.
"She left the day of your birth," the housekeeper had said, and Pedro could remember her whisper so well it might have been whispering in his ear now. "She left the day of your birth and you should never mention her. It hurts your father."
Now, ten years later, hurting his father was the least of Pedro's worries. But he didn't want his father to come into the room. He didn't want his father to know.
He looked at the empty, desolate garden, and he formed his mother's name with his lips.
If his mother could fly through the air, why hadn't she taken him?
***
The second time Pedro saw his mother he was fifteen and he was walking back home from the school, from seeing the results of his ninth grade exam.
It was a June afternoon, at the beginning of the summer vacation. Where he lived, in a village on the outskirts of Porto, Portugal, this meant green wheat planted in broad fields, birds singing in thickets of pine and blackberry and gnarled oaks covered in leaves, providing shade for reading and dreaming.
He walked home through the fields, his hands raking the green wheat stalks and tearing off unripe grains as he walked.
His grades had been better than he expected. Better than anyone could have anticipated. That wild poetry that often ran through his mind uninvited, carving wide channels in his emotions, had proven a tool for understanding the poetry of others. The speech that flowed easy through his tongue and his pen had convinced someone that he should be studying literature.
The village schoolmaster, a poor man with only his salary to live from, was prepared to stake his retirement money and send Pedro to college.
But the money wasn't needed. The money was immaterial. Pedro's father was a specialized carpenter — expert at carving saints whose ecstatic expressions and flowing limbs called business from far and wide. His saints were displayed in churches as far away as Brazil across the Atlantic.
Money was no object, if Pedro's father could be convinced to let his son go to college.
Pedro walked through the fields, rehearsing in his mind how to explain to his father, "Father, they say I'm smart."
"Father, I can do it."
"Father, I could be a doctor of philosophy."
"Father--"
The words died on his lips.
Standing in front of him was the same woman he'd glimpsed, that frosty night so many years ago — flowing hair and oval face and wide, startled-looking grey eyes.
Her hair flowed on the afternoon breeze, as did her clothes — odd vestments white and so diaphanous and sparkling that they looked as though they'd been spun from fog and woven from fireflies.
He clutched her ring upon his finger, the ring she'd given him three years ago. He felt it cold and solid.
She put out and her hand — soft velvet and cold, tapered fingers — met it.
Afraid to speak, he heard her say, "Pedro. Pedrito."
He blinked and stared, his voice for once stilled.
"Pedro," she said. "I didn't want to leave you. But you were just a baby and I couldn't— I couldn't— You were of theirs, had their blood. I couldn't bring you with me. But now you can come with me. You can come."
Still he stood mute, dumbfounded. He could feel his mouth open, actually open, sagging in an expression of utter dumbness.
She took her hand away from his and smiled, hesitantly. "Your father met me by the river and I gave him my troth to live with him and bear his children until he should strike me three times. And then I was free to go. But I couldn't take you until you were old enough to choose. Now you are free to come with me.” She waved her hand over the wheat. "I'm a king's daughter. You are a prince of the air kingdoms."
But he stepped away, he backed away from her amid the tall, rustling wheat stalks.
A prince was he? And she a king's daughter? A king's daughter of some magical kingdom?
It wasn't the magic he had trouble believing. The land he lived in was an old land, inhabited by Celts and Carthaginians, invaded by Romans and Germanic tribes and Arabs and then Germanic tribes again. Each people had inhabited the land, called it its own. Its dead had turned to dust in these fertile fields, poured their blood in great battles on the rushing river sides. Their blood and bones made up the wheat stalks, the soft loam under foot, the rugose trunks of shade-giving trees.
Their ghosts and their dreams walked the landscape, their gods and their demons followed the living and whispered in their ears.
Anything was possible.
But if Pedro's mother truly were such — a free spirit of the air, a princess, a being of light and fog, why had she left her baby behind? She had told Pedro no more than what he knew. She had left him. She'd not given him any convincing reason, any reasoned explanation.
And he felt his gorge rise at the sight of her smooth skin, her oval face, her blonde hair streaming in the summer wind.
The heat of the sun pricked at his back, calling a river of sweat from beneath his shirt, and he felt hot, he felt mad, he felt repelled by her diaphanous beauty.
She'd known what his father was. She'd known what would happen. He was sure of it as he hoped one day to be sure of salvation.
She'd left him behind as a sacrificial victim. In her place.
He turned his back on her and ran through the fields, a formless scream escaping his lips to echo over the silent fields, the too-still afternoon.
Half an hour later, when he got home, he was sweaty and exhausted and gasping. His legs hurt, his arms felt as though they would drop off and he felt numb from tiredness and anger.
And when his father told him, "I don't need a doctor of philosophy in the family. You shall learn my trade," it didn't even hurt.
It didn't hurt because he was so angry. So angry that he could have killed them both — his angry, intrusive, domineering father, his beautiful, ethereal mother.
Instead, he went out with school friends. He'd never had many friends, growing up. He'd been the strange one, the outside one. Pedro of the poetry and the dreams. Pedro who knew words others didn't know, who could call to his tongue the name of every bird in the field, every fish in the brook.
But he went out with his school fellows, anyway.
They were celebrating their freedom from books and pens an paper. And he was saying goodbye to learning and poetry. They went from tavern to tavern, singing and laughing, calling at unknown women in the street and drinking. Drinking a lot.
When he got home, sodden drunk, to fall half in, half out of his front door, so insensible that he barely felt the rain of kicks on his side, barely heard his father screaming at him to explain himself, he'd found a kind of peace.
***
Pedro didn't love Mariana. Oh, she was beautiful enough. Twenty years old, just two years younger than he, she had midnight-black hair and pale, white-silk skin.
And perhaps he found in her regular features, her soft fingers, her musical voice an echo of his long-lost mother's.
But he didn't love her.
He'd just been happy to be here, in this small village. The village was called Alem, which, in archaic language, meant "beyond," and it was remote enough, far enough from everything to be, indeed, beyond.
Pedro liked the remoteness, the distance, where he could invent himself a new name, a new attitude.
He'd taken a contract to restore the village church, and he'd bought brand-new, crisp clothes and he played the city dandy to the locals' credulous gazes.
The church, enormous, set amid a straggle of tiny, rough-stone houses and hard-scrabble fields, good for oats and cabbage and little else, was the votive payment of some ancient king for some forgotten victory.
Inside it, gilded panels and exquisitely carved, suffering saints, had corroded with time, darkened with humidity, lost shape and splendor.
And the village had saved enough money, over who knew how many years, to have a master carpenter restore it.
Pedro had taken the contract, as much to be away from home as to make the money.
And he'd spent months, happily, restoring the lacy wooden carvings that lined the walls of the church, re-gilding the wood work, giving this saint his nose back and that one the keys to heaven that time and weather had turned to dust in the carved wooden hand.
He'd seen Mariana in the church first — her head bowed and a lacy shawl over her black hair.
And he'd seen her dark-blue eyes watching him.
From there it had been a step to the warmth of her bed, the enjoyment of her charms behind the church, where the sun warmed the stone benches and where no one could spy them save maybe the ghosts of the graveyard that stretched beyond.
It was because he didn't love her that he loved their time together. It was because he only craved her soft flesh, her yielding body; because they had nothing to talk about, nothing in common, that he could enjoy her.
And that was why it shocked him so much when the man came to the church, one afternoon, while Pedro was working on a carving of St. Anthony, with his book and the chubby baby sitting, smiling and round upon it.
"Pedro Silva," the man said.
Pedro had looked up. He knew who the man was, though he'd never talked to him. He'd have known who he was even if he'd never seen him before. He had the same dark hair and pale skin as Mariana. But his face was round, his cheeks red. And he stood taller than Pedro, his shoulders broad and massive — the shoulders of a man who worked, sun to sun, in his vast fields. And the fists he clenched, one on either side of his body, were fists the size of shovels — broad and big and immense, each giving the impression of a heavy weight, a senseless rage.
"Yes?" Pedro had said, looking up and trying to keep his face impassive. He'd grown up like his mother — slender and small, with his oval face, his too-wide eyes. The women thought him handsome, but men were likely to have different opinions.
"My daughter loves you," the man said.
Pedro nodded, though he wasn't agreeing. Did Mariana love him? He very much doubted it.
"Do you love her?"
Pedro shrugged. Pedro didn't love anyone. He'd realized sometime ago that he wasn't a man — a human being, made of the things that made other human beings.
Men loved their mothers and their fathers, their sisters and their brothers. They nurtured tender feelings for their teachers, their neighbors, their friends.
But Pedro was himself, alone. Neither human nor a child of the air, neither loving nor loved. A creature of flesh and blood with a spirit that longed to soar and vanish.
How could he attach himself to anyone?
His shrug didn't satisfy the man. The man came closer, fists clenched and his voice, when he spoke, had tightened into a growl. "Do you love my daughter?" he asked again.
Pedro opened his mouth and would deny it, but he saw the huge fist and he'd been struck often enough to know how it hurt.
If his father had struck him hard enough to hurt that badly, hard enough to crack ribs and break fingers, what wouldn't this stranger do?
"Yes," he said, and swallowed to make his lie more palatable. "Yes."
The man smiled, showing broad teeth. "Good. That's good. She said so. You'll marry her next month, then, as soon as we can run the bans."
Pedro opened his mouth to ask why so soon, why in such a hurry. Her father grinned and spoke softly, "You must, you know. People have seen you together. People have talked. And my Mariana has no dowry. Next to nothing, save her beauty and her reputation. And you've tainted her reputation."
***
When the man left, Pedro came to himself. What had he done? What had he done?
Had he just agreed to marry a woman he didn't love? Worse — he thought of Mariana's sweet but vacuous eyes, her empty words, her babble, her simple-minded opinions — had he just agreed to marry a woman he couldn't love? And a woman without money and without any sense to save money.
Pedro knew his father's own money had long vanished into taverns and drinking, into extravagances and compensations for the love who'd left him.
If Pedro married Mariana, he'd be consigning himself to a life of poverty, a life of struggling drudgery and squalor.
He picked up his tools, which lay scattered on the wooden floor of the church. Looking up at St. Anthony, the new side of the saints face a swirl of oak knots, the old side mellow paint showing pale skin and a dark, rolling eye, he thought that St. Anthony was the saint of dumb animals. And dumb animal seemed to be his state now.
He begged St. Anthony's help in escaping, while he carefully nestled his tools in their leather pouch.
Mariana wasn't for him, or he for Mariana. He'd lost his chance at attending school his chance at learning. He'd lost his chance at being a prince of the air kingdoms. He'd lost any chance at loving.
He would not, now, give up his remaining freedom — the swirling liberty of taverns and drinking and friends, for the sake of a woman with whom he couldn't even talk.
He decided to forgo his clothes, left in his narrow room at the local hostelry. Two pairs of pants and two shirts were little to pay for his escape.
He had his tools and his trade. He had money in his pocket. He could get a horse in the next village and cross the country to where no one would ever have heard of him or of his involvement in Mariana.
And in time Mariana would forget him and find another victim. Or another lover. Someone better suited to love and marriage than Pedro would ever be.
He shoved his tools in the back pocket of his working pants and set off across the fields towards the windows beyond.
***
The third time Pedro saw his mother was on the evening of the second day after his flight from Alem.
He was crossing a field of ripe golden wheat, as the sun sank low on the horizon. He'd stolen some apples as he walked, and he was hungry and tired both.
But he didn't want to stop to buy food. Not until he was much farther from Alem.
Doubtless Mariana's friends and relatives had sent out word. Doubtless people were looking out for him, ready to force him to go back and shackle himself to a loveless marriage.
Tired and hungry, he walked, towards the splendor of the setting sun that put a reddish tint upon the ripe wheat, making it look like bloodied gold.
His mother appeared out of nowhere, forming in the air in front of him: oval face and large eyes and smiling rosebud mouth.
This time there was a fragrance around her, too, the fragrance and smell of a ripening, opening rose.
"Come with me," she said. "Come with me. There is no reason for you to struggle in this world. You don't belong to them. You are of us. A prince of the air, a thing of beauty and light. Come with me."
She touched his hand. He held hers — small and soft and cold, very cold, in his.
And in that moment of grasping her hand, the world shifted around him.
Suddenly, where the wheat field had been, there was a field of roses — low bushes woven together, spreading to the horizon. Low bushes woven together so tightly that they formed a flat pavement upon which he could walk.
And walk he did, beside his beautiful mother.
From everywhere, people materialized, dressed in garments of fog and light. And he, himself, wore fog and light that floated around him and sparkled as though fireflies had been woven into the fabric.
And his feet moved effortlessly, and his mind felt like soaring into poetry and song. The aches and pains of a mortal body had left him, and in leaving him had made him feel light and cleansed and ... good.
In the distance, a castle stood. Not a castle in stone and earth, iron and wood, like the ones that dotted the Portuguese countryside, witnesses to past battles and desperate mortal struggles.
No, this was a castle such as exists only in dreams and the pages of books. It stood against the blue sky, streaming red and gold flags.
In effortless walk over the rose fields, they were there in no time at all and entering through the door, they floated effortlessly along a gilt-and-marble salon to a high throne set atop a flight of marble stairs.
"Oh, you've come to us at last," the man on the throne said. He looked like Pedro. An aged Pedro, with frosty snow in his hair. "You've come to us, grandson. We've waited long."
The king gestured with a golden scepter and spoke to a mass of courtiers that stood behind his throne. "Put a mantle on his back and a signet on his finger. He's your prince who was lost so long in the land of men."
And Pedro blinked, sure he was sleeping but knowing he was awake while a cloak was draped over his shoulders and a light, slim creature — a girl that seemed woven of air, herself — knelt to slip a signet ring on his finger.
Pedro's mother stood on his other side, and held his hand tight and smiled proudly.
"All hail my grandson," the man on the throne said. "Who finally made the right decision, leaving behind the mortal woman and her babe and coming to us, where he belongs."
And on that word, as the cold signet ring touched his fingertip, feeling icier, colder than anything Pedro had ever felt, he heard babe.
His hand recoiled from the signet ring, and he turned, bewildered, to face the creature on the throne. His grandfather?
And it seemed to him the whole scene around him wavered — throne and marble castle walls, thronged courtiers and his mother, herself, standing smiling and proud next to him.
"Babe?" he asked.
The man on the throne either didn't hear or couldn't understand the coldness in Pedro's voice, the fear in Pedro's heart.
"The babe," he said. "Your get upon this woman. You did well to leave it. It was but a third of our kind and all the rest mortal stuff."
Mortal stuff.
A mingle of mortal and people of the air.
Pedro had impregnated Mariana. He'd set his own seed within her womb and made his likeness within her.The child would be a creature of air and mortal — human and other — himself, in whatever proportion.
And it would grow up alone, at the mercy of whoever married Mariana; at the mercy of Mariana's revenge for lost love, for the failure of her dreams of air and enchantment.
Pedro didn't know what love was or if he could ever love. But he was no longer alone. There was another of himself, growing in a womb in Alem.
"I must return," he said, and stepped back from the fantastical court. "I must return to Alem."
He pulled his hand away from his mother's and he saw his mother's face — her mouth opening wide and horrified, and her eyes too, calling to him as clearly as if she'd spoken.
"Pedro," she said. "Pedro."
"No," he said. "No. I must go.” And he was running, running back over the fields of tightly-woven roses, their pink petals becoming harsher and more real as he ran, till he could feel the thorns beneath the petals, tearing at his soles, scratching him.
His mother flew behind him, a fond wraith, and her hands clutched at him, but could not hold him.
"Pedro," she screamed. "You are mine. I've waited for you so long."
So long had she left him alone, struggling alone and without protection. He wouldn't do that to a child of his.
And his mother was in his hair and on his shoulders, her hands touching him and attempting to hold him, yet feeling like no more than a whisper of breeze on his flesh.
"Pedro," she said, her voice as faint as the wind.
He woke up in the field of wheat, with the stars shining overhead.
Footsore and hungry, he made his way back to Alem.
***
Fifty years later, Pedro's house was small and dismal, set in a fashionable sixteenth-century suburb that had fallen into despair and disrepute.
The road, on either side, was filled with ruined and half-ruined houses, sometimes little more than random piles of rocks. But from those piles, a straggle of children would emerge, begging and screaming. And from those stones the smell of cabbage soup and human waste emerged, so deeply ingrained into the neighborhood that it seemed as solid as the crumbling mortar, the irregular stones that made up the houses.
The house where Pedro had lived was different. Small — comprising a room, a kitchen and a bedroom — and relying on an outhouse for plumbing, it nonetheless was kept in good repair. And every spring, the rose bushes he kept in containers and flowerbeds gave the patio the look of an enchanted place.
It was spring now, and the children had come back — all the children and their children. They had his quick wit and Mariana's beauty and sometimes Pedro marveled that such misfit beings, such creatures melded of two substances could do as well as his children had in the world.
A doctor, an engineer and two artists had come from his humble cottage and grown up, sharing a bed in the living room.
Looking at his children's sprawling houses, sometimes Pedro marveled that they came back at all, to visit the place where they'd grown up. That they'd admit to it.
But there they were, on this spring evening, talking and giggling inside, and telling stories of their childhood that seemed much funnier now, than when need had to make do and drove them to extremes for new clothing or better food.
And Pedro was outside, listening to them and enjoying a feeling he wasn't sure he could name.
Contentment? Acceptance?
Whatever it was, it allowed him to stand in his yard, smelling his outhouse and his roses, and hearing the heavy traffic of cars and buses outside his window and not feel pain. It allowed him to know he'd never own a car, never to fly through the air in an air plane. Never to see other lands, never do any of the things that were open to his children and grandchildren in this brave century in which he'd grown but not been born — and not feel pain.
He'd aged well and the back he leaned against the warm stone wall of his house was straight and unbowed. His large grey eyes, too, still worked well enough for him to discern someone sitting by the pink rose bush.
For a moment he started, because he thought it was his mother. Same streaming hair, though darker, same oval face, same large eyes. But this girl's eyes were much darker and she was a child, nine years old. Euridice, his youngest grand-daughter.
She had a book on her lap and was looking at him with a puzzled expression.
He enjoyed helping his children and grandchildren with his homework. "Euridice?" he said. "Something you don't understand?"
"Oh, all of it," she said, and lifted her book, showing a cover with a familiar castle and a diaphanously attired princess. "What happens when Cinderella runs away? What happens when the selky wife returns to her people? What happens when the nymph slips into her tree again?"
For a moment Pedro didn't understand. He frowned at Euridice, thinking of his mother slipping away into the night.
What had happened?
Fear and pain and revenge for what couldn't be, what couldn't happen, for the enchantment that had never be true.
He shaped his lips to say that mortals remained behind. That mortals remained behind in pain, in hunger, in need.
But then Euridice looked at him, dark eyes serious. "See, that's why I don't like fairytales," this child of the new century said. "Because they're silly. They never tell us what happens after the magic is gone."
Pedro put his hand down on her head. Its calloused skin touched silky hair. He looked down at her large, wondering eyes.
And suddenly a bubbling laughter came over him. He'd thought he'd given up his kingdom, his place as prince of the air. He'd thought he'd tied himself needlessly to need and poverty and a life without love.
For many years, struggling from day to day, he'd thought he was a fool not to have run -- not to have run and been a prince in the wide kingdoms beyond, rather than staying here with the wife he didn't love, the children for whom he'd had to provide with daily toil.
And instead...
"The magic is never gone," he said, and it seemed to him that at the edge of his vision he saw rose fields extending to a never-ending perfect castle. And his body felt light, full of magic and youth. "The magic is within."