“You can make friends once my brother takes us to a new home, alright?” she said, trying to appease him. He said nothing. He was in deep thought, concentrating on his ice cream, using the spoon to sculpt it. “What are you making? Oh, the castle up on the mountain?” she asked, trying to divert his attention from the tight situation they were in.
“No, this is home,” Raul corrected her. He shot his dark eyes up toward Sax Castle. It perched upon a steep mount of rock and gravel that reached a substantial elevation above the town. The afternoon sun shone fully into his eyes and Madalina was spellbound by the child’s beauty. His long eyelashes cast shadows inside the yellow-brown of his irises and his skin was without blemish. “Sax Castle once belonged to a race of dark-skinned people who’d been of the Muslim religion. But it is way older than the Moors. Did you know that?” he asked her.
Madalina was amazed by his knowledge of castles. But there was one he mentioned previously that had her wondering since he first told her about it. “Tell me about the one Mara took you to in Germany. That one sounded bigger than this one.”
“Oh,” he chirped, “that was Wewelsburg, the one where the people wanted to be like King Arthur.”
“And Mara took you there on holiday?” she asked. Raul shook his head, very intrigued by the shapes he could make in his slowly thawing dessert.
“She collected me there, actually. From there I started living with her,” he said matter-of-factly without meeting Madalina’s eyes. She gasped at the realization that he had not always been with Mara, while she thought all the while that the angry woman was his foster mother or something of that sort. “And before that? Who were you with?”
“Others. A few. They come and go. Some pass me on to others, and some steal me away. Some,” he looked at Madalina with a blank expression, “even kill to take me.”
Her heart stopped. Tears came, but she quickly looked away, pretending to admire the colossal castle on the hill. Raul had finished his sloppy work of art. He slid the pudding bowl toward her with a smile. “There. All done.”
Relieved that he was not half as upset as she was, she feigned happiness. “Wow, I’m impressed!” she sniffled with a smile, noting the detail of the makeshift building he had fashioned. It was a remarkable likeness of a temple, a rectangular base with step-like elevations growing narrower toward the top. “Is this another castle?”
Raul replied, “No, that is home.”
“Where is home?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied, shrugging and pulling the bowl back towards him to break the artwork onto his spoon before it became too mushy.
“Then how do you know it’s home, darling?” she pried, absolutely spellbound by his answers. Like riddles, they teased her deduction and she became quickly addicted to unraveling them one by one.
“I just know,” he mumbled through a mouthful of ice cream. Madalina could take no more. She decided to just come out and ask the child what she wanted to know most, what perplexed her above all other things. “Raul, why did you come willingly with me when I took you?”
“Because Mara is dead,” he answered plainly. “No use staying with a corpse. How would she take care of me?” He frowned. “Besides, I like you, Madi. You’re not mean like she was. I think you really care about me, so you are one of the good ones of all the women who took me away.”
Madalina was dumbstruck. He knew. He knew all along, she thought to herself. There was more to find out and now that he was speaking freely she took the opportunity. “Why do they take you?”
“They can’t help it,” he replied, munching happily. His words were far from trivial, but he talked as if he were discussing a trip to the zoo. Madalina felt her heart ache. She could not stop the tears now, but she grabbed her napkin and quickly wiped her eyes. What he was saying was so profound that she felt doomed and redeemed at the same time for the unnatural urge to save him. Her voice choked when she tried to articulate, desperately combating the crying spell she felt.
“All of them? They can’t help but take you? Why, Raul? Are you doing something to manipulate their thoughts?” she asked.
He scoffed. “No. I don’t do that. That’s what the doctor does when Mara took me to see him. I do nothing. Really. But I’m not stupid just because I am small. I can see that those who take me don’t know why they do it.” His revelations made her shake in terror.
“W-wh-at doctor, my darling?” she asked carefully.
“The psychologist in Sagunto. I was there only once. Mara had a fight with him and we left. Just like you. She was hiding me at the motel when you found us,” he recounted, scraping the bottom of the bowl to gather the last milky drops onto his spoon. Madalina’s eyes were bloodshot and drenched, her cheeks streaked with tears, but stronger than the awe she was under at the boy’s revelation, was the betrayal from a Judas she knew she shared with Raul.
“Dr. Sabian?” she stammered.
“Sí,” Raul confirmed, slamming the truth into her mind like a sledgehammer.
“Jesus Christ!” she hissed softly into her hands, covering her face. “No wonder. No wonder.”
“What’s wrong?” the child asked her. His voice was tender and fraught with concern, but she could not see him as she cried into her hands. Suddenly Madalina felt Raul’s hand brush her temple, his small attempt at consoling her. “Do you want some of my milkshake? It will make you feel better.”
How can he be so wise and still so much a child? she wondered, basking in his compassion. How can he know so much and still be so carefree?
“No thank you, darling,” Madalina said, still weeping softly. “I’m a little sad, but I’ll be fine in a few minutes. Um,” she sniffed and drew her hands from her flushed face to blow her nose with another napkin from the dispenser, “how do you know what your home looks like if you’ve never been there?”
The question came out of her before she’d given it much thought, similar to her inadvertent actions back in Sagunto. Madalina reckoned that such inquiries were the result of a subliminal need for answers that trumped propriety.
“Have you ever just known something but you could not explain to your parents where you got it from?” he asked her, cupping his little hands around the wet glass of the milkshake. “Sometimes I get homesick, but because I have no idea where it is, I can’t cry about it. I want to cry sometimes, because I miss my home, but from as long as I remember I’ve never been home,” he explained with difficulty.
“I guess I can relate a little, but not exactly like you,” she replied, calming her upset. “When I was in high school I had no friends as well, so I used to hide in the library and just look through books. Sometimes I would see places in other countries that I’d never visited, but it felt as if I came from there. Only I did not because I’ve always lived in Spain. Is that what you mean?”
“Si, but I was there. I remember. I just don’t know where it is.” Raul shrugged.
“How old were you?” she asked. “When you were at this place?”
He looked at her in befuddlement, unable to answer her. Glaring brown eyes stared incoherently through her and she could tell that he was trying to give her a decent reaction. “I don’t know when I was there, otherwise I must have had a memory before I was three because I was three when the first woman stole me from our house in Argen…um, Argentia?”
“Argentina?” she gasped. Raul giggled sheepishly, “Sí! I’m stupid. Sí, Argentina.”
“Were you born there?” she kept throwing him the questions that just seemed to appear in her mouth.
He laughed. “I don’t know where I was born! Geez, I can’t remember the things that happened to me when I was a baby, you know.” The little boy’s snickering warmed her heart, and she laughed with him, electing to leave him be for now. He had provided her with enough shocking and wonderful information — information she would take quite a while to process thoroughly enough to put the pieces of the puzzle together for a solution.