The Children

by Carolina Sanín, Nick Caistor

Genres: City Life; Literary Fiction; Magical Realism; Horror

Synopsis

One day, as she enters her local supermarket, Laura Romero has a startling encounter with a beggar, who seems to offer her a child. A short while later, in the middle of the night, she discovers a mysterious young boy on the pavement outside her apartment building: Fidel, who is six years old, a child with seemingly no origins or meaning. With few clues to guide her as she tries to discover his real identity, Laura finds herself swept into a bureaucratic maelstrom of fantastical proportions. From the National Institute for the Welfare of Families to the Hearth & Home Centre, from imagined worlds to lost loves, The Children explores the limits of isolation and intimacy, motherhood, neglect and compassion, filtered through the lives of two lonely people, whose coming together is less for company and more to share their loneliness. A tender, intelligent novel from a startling and brilliant new voice in English translation. Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor

Release date: May 18, 2017

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 160

Sample

Laura Romero heard that the woman who watched the cars outside the supermarket was offering her a child. She heard her say: I’ll keep the child for you. But Laura was not sure whether the woman really did watch the cars. She knew that when she had finished her shopping, she gave her some coins as if to pay her, and that her car had never gone missing. Maybe that was because she only left it there during daylight and when there were lots of people about, but it was also possible that the woman had some influence over the car thieves. That she was their mother, for example.

Laura used to leave the Renault in the car park outside the Olímpica, which was the name of the supermarket. The woman would see her arrive and nod, or if she was close enough, say to her: I’ll keep an eye on it for you. Laura would enter the supermarket, do her shopping, come out and put the coins in the woman’s hand. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps she was paying so as not to be as battered-looking as the woman, with a face ruined from standing out in the open the whole day long.

She looked as if she had been close to death at some point in her life. She did not look ill so much as cured in the distant past. It might have been that she did not sleep or had walked from a long way away, so far it seemed she had not arrived yet. Were those scars or stains on her face? They looked like the maps of islands.

Laura lived a few blocks from the Olímpica, so she often walked there, making the most of the opportunity to take her dog Brus for a walk. She left him tied to the supermarket rail, and sometimes when she came out she bumped into a passer-by who had stopped to admire him, and was saying what a beautiful dog, how wonderful, and what breed is he?

Greyhounds were not common in Bogotá. Some people thought he was just a skinny example of a breed they did know who had been unlucky enough to fall into the hands of a bad owner. One day in Simón Bolívar park, she had to put up with someone shouting at her: Why don’t you feed him, you fat cow? Laura did not think she was fat, although she was not as sleek as the greyhound, nor as she herself had been twenty years earlier. She was dark-skinned, with long, wavy hair, which had more white in it than she could see in the mirror. When she got the child and their story began, those who knew her had been saying for a decade already: She used to be a great beauty.

Whenever a stranger asked her the dog’s name, Laura gave a different answer: Phoenix, Shiny, Thorny, Crow, Hummingbird. By doing this she thought she was protecting him: that it was less likely someone would snatch him from the supermarket entrance or anywhere else. If they called out: Soul! or Spike! or Thistle! he would not look in their direction. Anyone who wanted to steal him would have to use force. They might succeed in the end and take him, but they would not have his real name, which would still belong to her.

The woman who watched the cars had on several occasions offered to look after the dog while Laura was shopping, but she always said no, thank you, he preferred to wait for her on his own at the entrance.

Brus was the colour of pale sand. His long, deceptively trusting face made him look like the woman who kept an eye on the cars.

All this is leading up to the afternoon when Laura heard the woman say: I’ll keep the child for you.

Laura was bending down to tie the dog up in the supermarket entrance when she sensed someone whispering behind her. She thought it sounded like a voice with no feet to hold it up, carry it along or make it come to a halt, but when she turned round, there the woman was. Until that moment, all she had ever heard her say was: I’ll watch it for you, which always sounded halfway between asking her for something and apologising. The voice talking about the child sounded different, as if it had been shaken free of its roots, not like the voices of the living, who talk as they grow.

“What did you say?”

“I’ll keep the child for you,” the woman said, and as she repeated it, the voice stepped down a rung of the imaginary ladder Laura had created for it.

The woman raised her hand to point to the dog and explained she was offering to take it outside while his owner was doing the shopping.

Laura refused as usual, and went inside the Olímpica. She had a pencil and a written list in her hand. She read a word on the list, found the corresponding item on the shelf, put it in her basket and then crossed out the word. Each time she looked at the piece of paper she also read something that was not written down.

Oil. The woman offered me a child. She wanted to give me one of her children, but my reaction made her hesitate, and to cover up she tried to make me think she was calling Brus a “child”.

Onion. The woman didn’t want to get rid of her child. If I thought she wanted to give him to me, that’s because I wanted to have him.

Parsley. The woman called Brus a “child” because she herself changed a child into Brus by a spell before he became my dog.

Eggs. Maybe when I give my dog the names of animals, plants and other things I am creating a recipe to bewitch him.

Pepper. Perhaps she watches the cars outside the supermarket simply by looking at them, casting a spell on them.

Laura came out of the supermarket, looked for the woman and gave her the same coins she always gave her. Or rather, she gave her some more coins that were added to the ones she had previously given her. Although of course it was possible they were the same ones: perhaps at the end of the day the woman bought a loaf of bread with them in the supermarket, and the next day the cashier gave them back to Laura as change from the banknote she used to buy her shopping with.

Laura went back to her apartment. She put the list away in the cutlery drawer in the kitchen, and prepared an omelette with the ingredients she had just bought. She never bought salt, because she had plenty of that. She kept a big bag of it in the maid’s room, where there was no maid. Her mother’s family were the owners of a salt mine in the mountains, so she received a bag of salt each month, plus a cheque for her share of the profits, together with that of her brother and her mother, who had given her part to Laura whilst she was still alive.

She did not go back to the Olímpica the following day because she had prepared enough omelettes to eat three times daily for the next two days. When she went back on the third morning, walking there with Brus, the woman who usually kept an eye on the cars was not there. Someone younger had taken her place, with a boy and a girl who followed her across the car park like a pair of ducklings. All three of them looked clean and well dressed. The woman was wearing high-heeled ankle boots and a striped cotton suit. She had blonde hair in a braided bun, and nobody would have thought she was there to look after cars or dogs. As the other woman had done on the previous occasion, she came over as Laura bent down to tie the leash to the rail.

“I’ll keep your dog,” she said.

Laura looked up and was about to say no, thank you, when the other woman asked if she spoke languages. She said her little brother and sister didn’t speak Spanish and had no-one they could ask what they wanted to know. So could she please talk to them.

The children stepped forward. They had realised the dog was a greyhound. They asked in English if he had ever raced, if she had rescued him from a dog track or had him since he was a puppy. If she had won him in a bet. And please, for the love of God, would she give him to them. And what was his name.

As they talked they held out their hands, palms upward, as if expecting her to give them some change. Laura was unable to invent a name for Brus, and went back home with him without going into the supermarket. She pushed her way along, driven on by the fear these strangers and their strange chorus had produced in her.

For the next two days, she did not buy any food, and she did not eat. At breakfast-time she drove through the Olímpica’s tarmac lot to see whether the clean beggars were still there. When she caught a glimpse of the blonde woman she felt frightened again, and kept on going. It was only on the third day, when the other, haggard woman had returned to her post in the car park, that Laura felt able to go into the supermarket once more.

Although the. . .