Joanet waited without moving. The noise of hammers on metal had faded into the distance.
“I wanted to tell you a funny story,” he said, going over to the shape on the floor. Tears started to course down his cheeks. “It would have made you laugh,” he stammered, coming up to her.
Joanet sat for a long while next to his mother’s body. As though she had guessed her son might come into her cell, Joana had buried her face in her arms, as if trying to avoid him seeing her like this even after her death.
“Can I touch you?”
The little one stroked his mother’s hair. It was filthy, disheveled, dry as dust.
“You had to die for us to be together.”
Joanet burst into tears.
BERNAT KNEW WHAT to do as soon as he returned home and was met by Pere and his wife, interrupting each other as they tried to tell him that Joanet had not come back. They had never asked him where he disappeared to. They always thought he went to Santa Maria, but nobody had seen him there that afternoon. Mariona raised her hand to her mouth.
“What if something has happened to him?” she said.
“We’ll find him,” Bernat said, trying to reassure her.
Joanet was still sitting beside his mother’s body. First he stroked her hair; then he curled it between his fingers, getting some of the knots out. After that, he got up and stared up at the window.
Night fell.
“Joanet?”
Joanet looked back up at the window.
“Joanet?” he heard once more from beyond the wall.
“Arnau?”
“What’s happened?”
He answered: “She’s dead.”
“Why don’t you ... ?”
“I can’t. I don’t have a crate inside here. The window is too high up.”
“THERE’S A VERY bad smell,” concluded Arnau. Bernat beat on the door of Pone the coppersmith’s house once more. What could the little one have done, shut up in there all day? He called out again, in a loud voice. Why did nobody answer? At that moment, the door opened, and a gigantic figure almost filled the entire doorway. Arnau took a step back.
“What do you want?” the man growled. He was barefoot, and the only clothing he was wearing was a threadbare shirt that came down to his knees.
“My name is Bernat Estanyol, and this is my son,” he said, grasping Arnau by the shoulder and pushing him forward. “He’s a friend of your son Joa—”
“I don’t have a son,” Pone protested, making as though to shut the door in their faces.
“But you do have a wife,” said Bernat, pushing the door open despite Ponc’s efforts. “Well ... ,” he explained to the coppersmith, “you did have one. She has died.”
Pone showed no reaction.
“So what?” he said, with an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders.
“Joanet is inside the hut with her.” Bernat tried to make his voice sound as threatening as he could. “He can’t get out.”
“That’s where that bastard should have spent his entire life.”
Squeezing Arnau’s shoulder tight, Bernat looked steadily at the other man. Arnau was frightened again, but when Pone looked down at him, he stood defiantly straight.
“What are you going to do?” Bernat insisted.
“Nothing,” the coppersmith replied. “Tomorrow, when they knock the hut down, the boy will get out.”
“You can’t leave a child all night in—”
“I can do what I like in my own house.”
“I’ll go and tell the magistrate,” Bernat said, knowing it was an empty threat.
Ponc’s eyes narrowed. Without another word, he disappeared inside, leaving the door open. Bernat and Arnau waited. He finally came back carrying a rope, which he handed directly to Arnau.
“Get him out of there,” he ordered the boy, “and tell him that now his mother is dead I don’t ever want to see him here again.”
“How ... ?” Bernat began to ask.
“The same way he has been getting in there all these years,” Pone said. “By climbing over the wall. You are not going through my house.”
“What about his mother?” Bernat asked before he could shut the door again.
“The king handed me the mother with orders that I should not kill her. Now that she is dead, I’ll give her back to the king,” Pone quickly replied. “I paid a lot of money as surety, and by God, I have no intention of forfeiting it for a whore like her.”
ONLY FATHER ALBERT, who already knew Joanet’s story, and old Pere and his wife, whom Bernat had no choice but to tell, ever found out about the boy’s terrible misfortune. All three of them paid him special attention, but he still refused to talk. Whereas before he had constantly been on the move, now he walked slowly and deliberately, as if he were carrying an unbearable weight on his shoulders.
“Time is a great healer,” Bernat said to Arnau one morning. “We have to wait and offer him our love and help.”
Yet Joanet continued to say nothing. His only reaction was when he burst into tears each night. Bernat and Arnau lay quietly on their mattress, until it seemed the poor boy ran out of energy and was overcome by a fitful sleep.
“Joanet,” Bernat heard his son call out to him one night. “Joanet!”
There was no answer.
“If you like, I can ask the Virgin Mary to be your mother too.”
“Well said, son!” thought Bernat. He had not wanted to suggest it, because the Virgin was Arnau’s secret. It was up to him to decide if he wanted to share it.
Now he had done so, but Joanet had made no reply. The room remained completely silent.
“Joanet?” Arnau insisted.
“That was what my mother called me.” These were the first words he had spoken in days. Bernat lay on his mattress without moving. “She’s no longer here. Now my name is Joan.”
“As you like. Did you hear what I said to you about the Virgin, Joanet ... Joan?”
“But your mother doesn’t speak to you—mine did.”
“Tell him about the birds,” Bernat whispered.
“Well, I can see the Virgin, and you could never see your mother.” Joan was silent again.
“How do you know she listens?” he asked finally. “She is only a stone figure, and stone figures don’t listen.”
Bernat held his breath.
“If it’s true they don’t listen,” Arnau responded, “why does everyone talk to them? Even Father Albert. You’ve seen him. Do you think Father Albert is making a mistake?”
“She isn’t Father Albert’s mother,” the other boy insisted. “He’s already told me he has one. How will I know if the Virgin wants to be my mother if she doesn’t speak to me?”
“She’ll tell you at night when you sleep, and through the birds.”
“The birds?”
“Well,” said Arnau hesitantly. The truth was he had never really understood what the birds were meant to do, but he had never dared tell his father so. “That’s more complicated. My ... our father will explain it to you.”
Bernat felt a lump in his throat. Silence filled the room again, until Joan spoke once more: “Arnau, could we go right now and ask the Virgin?”
“Now?”
“Yes, now, my son, now. He needs it,” thought Bernat.
“Please.”
“You know it’s forbidden to go into the church at night. Father Albert—”
“We won’t make any noise. Nobody will find out. Please!”
Arnau gave in. The two boys stole out of the house and ran the short distance to Santa Maria de la Mar.
Bernat curled up on the mattress. What could possibly happen to them? Everyone in the church loved them.
Moonlight played over the outlines of the scaffolding, the half-built walls, the buttresses, arches, and apses ... Santa Maria lay silent, with only the occasional flames from bonfires showing there were watchmen in the vicinity. Arnau and Joan sneaked round the church to Calle del Born; the main entrance to the church was closed, and the side by the Las Moreres cemetery, where much of the building material was kept, was the most closely guarded. But on the side where the new work was being carried out there was only one fire. It was not hard to get in: the walls and buttresses led down from the apse to the Born doorway, where a wooden board marked the site of the new steps into the church. The two boys walked over the chalk lines drawn by Master Montagut, showing the exact position for the new door and steps, and entered Santa Maria. They headed silently toward the Jesus chapel in the ambulatory. There, behind strong and wonderfully wrought-iron railings, they found the Virgin, lit as ever by the candles that the bastaixos made sure never went out.