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Pepa was very happy that her brother was home, but she wasn’t so sure how she felt about him spending so much time with Antonio. Since Casita fell, Antonio had been trailing Bruno as if he were the Pied Piper. Bruno, for his part, was delighted to meet his new nephew, and nearly as delighted to have someone who would listen to him talk about his rats.
There were rather more of them than Pepa ever remembered there being. It wouldn’t make up for the loss of Antonio’s beloved animal friends, but Bruno’s rats and his uncanny ability to communicate with them were the next best thing. Even after their powers came back, Antonio could often be found in Bruno’s room, giggling away at Bruno’s dramatic re-enactments of Cervantes or translating for the rats.
It was a good thing, surely, that Antonio, often so wary of change, accepted this peculiar uncle into the family without question. There were no difficult conversations to be had. However, Pepa soon realised that Antonio genuinely looked up to him. He wanted to be Bruno when he was grown up, almost as much as he wanted to be Mirabel. When Pepa asked him if he knew what Bruno’s visions looked like – thinking to prepare him for when Bruno inevitably had one in his presence, in case it frightened him – he nodded casually. “Yeah. Pretty cool.”
So that was something her brother had failed to mention.
Félix saw no downsides. “We get a break, Mirabel gets a break, and we don’t have to worry about him off in the jungle with the jaguars. It’s good for Antonio – Bruno’s got him into Don Quixote, of all things.” He rubbed his neck ruefully. Antonio was clever, but he always wanted to be outside or in his jungle room, not puzzling away at letters and numbers, and Pepa and Félix had never had any great success at keeping him still long enough to read with. “Good for Bruno too, probably. Keep him out of his own head.”
Pepa supposed so. Maybe it was the rats. She didn’t like the creatures, though she’d come to tolerate them, and she didn’t like the idea of her son spending so much time with them. However many impassioned diatribes Bruno gave on the subject, she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were filthy animals, with their oily fur and scaly tails. She knew, secretly, that he was probably right, that the rats were no more vectors for disease than any of Antonio’s menagerie, given that Bruno was still alive and more or less well. Then again, Bruno had once dismissed the bubonic plague as a “gringo disease” (abruptly ending the argument, because Julieta was laughing too hard to continue).
She asked Bruno to have Antonio wash his hands anyways. In a gesture of good faith, Bruno began washing his own hands after handling the rats and instructed Antonio to do so as well, though of course it was utterly pointless on Bruno’s part, since there was always a rat concealed somewhere on his person. It did very little to assuage Pepa’s discomfort.
Antonio had started going to school in the mornings, and while arriving by jaguar seemed to make him popular with the other children (and effectively reassured Pepa that he wouldn’t be bullied), she couldn’t help but notice that he hadn’t made a friend his age. Señorita Ortiz, who taught the younger children, said he didn’t talk much, but didn’t seem too concerned. “His reading is good. You get children like that sometimes. He’ll open up when he’s ready. I do want to have a talk about animals in the schoolroom though.”
“I told him, they stay outside!”
“Oh, he doesn’t bring them in, but I think the birds are delivering him news? It’s rather distracting.”
Pepa liked Señorita Ortiz considerably better than the teacher of her own childhood, a certain Don Sabino, whose authoritarian incompetence had made her schooldays a living hell.
At dinner that night, Antonio babbled happily away to her, and she thought maybe she was worrying over nothing. He liked school, he assured her. He told her about Enrique and Manuel, who looked exactly the same (identical twins must run in that family), and Bernarda, who could keep a football up five times in a row. When she asked if those were his friends he just shrugged. He didn’t seem terribly bothered.
“Oh and Pico laid two eggs! His mate’s come to help look after them.”
“I thought Pico was a boy?”
“I thought so too, but Pico doesn’t care what I call him. Animals aren’t girls or boys like people are,” Antonio informed her sternly. “Girls don’t lay eggs. Toucans don’t wear dresses.”
Pepa digested that in silence. She couldn’t tell if it was a profound revelation or simply the remarkably shallow understanding of gender of a five-year-old. Quite possibly both.
“They’ll hatch in a few weeks,” said Antonio gravely. “Knock on wood.” And he rapped the table quickly with his little knuckles.
Everybody turned to stare at Bruno, who choked on his rice. He made a furtive motion towards the salt shaker, seemed to realise at the last second that that wouldn’t help his situation, and drew back. Antonio continued eating, oblivious.
The silence stretched on for just a second too long. It was Mirabel who finally took it upon herself to break it. “Um, Antonio, what’s Pico’s mate called?”
Antonio looked thoughtful. “Pico has a name for him, but I don’t know how you’d say it in Spanish . . .”
Pepa volunteered herself and Félix to wash the dishes that night, rejecting Bruno’s slightly strangled offer of help, which was delivered in a tone suggesting it might be the last thing he ever did. After the family had filed out of the dining room, Pepa grabbed Félix by the collar and pulled him into the empty kitchen. “Did you see that?”
“I saw everyone freak out,” said Félix, calmly shaving soap into the wash basin as Casita filled it. “I get it, your mother has no time for superstitions or luck – ‘God will give good things to those and only those who work for them’, y así y así- and okay, Bruno’s kind of intense in the opposite way, but I never understood why she was so uptight about not teaching it to the kids.”
“Bruno learned his superstitions from Mamá,” Pepa told him quietly, conscious that Dolores could hear every word of this if she wanted to. “Well, knocking on wood, throwing salt and sugar, the ordinary kind. He made up the finer details himself. He was always strange and rigid about some things, but when we were teenagers, he went . . . really weird. One time he stayed up all night counting the stairs in his room – there weren’t so many then, but still – to make sure they weren’t a multiple of 13. He kept saying he thought he’d made a mistake. Mamá shouted at him to go to bed but he got up and started doing it again an hour later.”
Félix laughed. “Sounds like Camilo – not the stairs thing though,” he added quickly, as Pepa glared. “But I don’t see what this has to do with Toñito. Tocar madera is kind of a funny habit for a little kid, but it’s harmless.”
“She stopped doing it herself because of Bruno,” Pepa picked up a towel and began to dry. “She thought maybe if she discouraged it altogether, she could prevent whatever was happening to him.”
“Did it work?” asked Félix sceptically.
“Yes! Okay, not for Bruno, but none of our children ever had the same problem.”
“Pepi, mi amor, I grew up in a family of six with a mother so superstitious she warned the devil himself would drag us down to hell if we spilled salt, and none of us did anything like that.” Félix looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know Bruno like you, but we both know his mind works in a unique way. Don’t you think if he didn’t have superstition he would just find something else to worry about?”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” Pepa said. It was beginning to drizzle, ruining her drying efforts. “That’s not all though. I’m worried that Antonio likes talking to animals better than talking to people.”
Felix stroked his beard, and Pepa knew the same worry had been on his mind. “He’s shy. It’s natural. He’s lucky to have his animal friends.”
“But they’re not a replacement for humans, are they?” A definite sprinkle now. Pepa abandoned her station and began to rinse for him, feeling that she could at least make herself useful that way. Pepa tried to help Julieta as much as she could, but there was a reason she’d never learned to cook. She could barely manage the dishes. They had run out of room on the drying rack. Pepa flicked the useless, now sodden dishcloth angrily at the rim of the basin. “It just feels familiar. Him and his stupid rats.”
“Pepa, I’m not talking about Bruno. I’m talking about my son Antonio.”
“And he’s just like Bruno was at that age, and I don’t want him to grow up to be like that!”
“Well, of course,” said Félix awkwardly. “No parent would want –“
“I just want him to be normal.”
Félix silently took the dishcloth from her and wrang it out, slowly and deliberately.
“Dios,” Pepa muttered. “I sound exactly like my mother.” The rain dried up, replaced by a chill in the air that had nothing to do with the Colombian tenet of opening every door and window in the heat. “I’m going to go and talk to Bruno.”
Casita supplied her with a new dishcloth, as if reminding her that work always came first. She picked up Bruno’s plate, once smashed by her in a fit of rage, now painstakingly mended, albeit with white seams running along the cracks. Casita, it transpired, had kept the shards the whole time, and they were discovered neatly stacked in a cupboard, alongside eleven whole plates which must surely have broken in the collapse. It was a pointed caveat: you broke it, you fix it.
“Pepi,” said Félix hesitantly, as she left the kitchen. “You know it’s okay to feel these things, don’t you? It doesn’t mean you have to act on them.”
It was a nice sentiment, Pepa thought. Unfortunately, for her feelings and actions were one and the same. She knocked on Bruno’s door. “We have to talk.”
She waited for about a minute, imagining staring down his foreboding representation, before the door creaked open to reveal the real Bruno, his hood pulled down low over his face.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” said Bruno defensively. “Everybody touches wood.”
“Not the way you do,” Pepa shot back, grabbing his wrist before he could escape. Bruno stiffened, his eyes darting about the upper floor, until at last he seemed to decide against making a scene and pulled her inside. “It’s not normal to steal salt from your own kitchen, Bruno!”
“How did you- ? Did Dolores tell you that?” asked Bruno, slightly panicked. Pepa wondered what else Dolores could tell her.
“No. She keeps her secrets, including yours. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.” When Dolores was younger, she had a habit of bringing up the inconvenient things she’d heard, and it had always been met with we don’t talk about that. Now, Pepa found that Dolores had been doing as she was told the whole time, and could hardly fault her for it. “You’re not as stealthy as you think you are.”
Bruno’s shoulders sagged slightly, but he steered her away from the stairs, at the top of which his vision cave lay, and towards a small green door. His bedroom was a creative mess on a good day, and a regular mess on a bad day. Today, crumpled pages of indecipherable writing entirely carpeted the old table that served as his desk. A couple of rats were gently shredding them for nesting materials. Paintings of rats lined the walls. It was often expressed that Bruno would be a good artist, if only he would choose another subject. In fact, Bruno had produced a perfectly adequate picture of the northwest mountains and another of the church for their new casita, at Alma’s request. They now hung in the hall, next to the restored portrait of Pedro, but Pepa thought that beside the rat paintings they lacked a certain vitality and humour.
“Oh, Juli doesn’t mind, says you do what you need to, though she wishes you’d just ask.” Bruno made as if to say something, but it came out as a wordless croak. “But you’re not teaching Antonio to do the same.”
“I’m not,” said Bruno, attempting to tug his hand free. She’d always been stronger than him.
“He learned it from you! I never, never touched wood around him. It would remind me of you, and then I’d start raining-”
“Okay, okay, so,” Bruno took a deep breath, “Sometimes I have to do my superstitions around him, and if he asks why, I tell him it’s for luck, because what else am I supposed to say? I dunno how much he notices, but he’ll never see me get, you know, stuck, it’s just a quick knock knock-“ Bruno rapped lightly on the doorframe to demonstrate. Then he froze, his hand hovering above the wood, sighed, and brought it down. “- knock, knock, knock, knock on wood.”
He bit his lip. “Mierda.” He’d paused, Pepa thought. He hadn’t done it right. Bruno went through the sequence again.
“You see?!”
“Sorry,” Bruno said, finally freeing himself from her grip. He held up his hands. “I didn’t think Antonio would copy me. But look, I can move on. And if I can’t, I’ll ask him to go away. He’s a smart kid, he’ll get it. I’m serious, it’s better than it was.”
“You’re not trying hard enough!” Lightning flashed. A strong wind tore through the room, scattering Bruno’s papers and pulling his hood down. “Look at me when I’m talking to you! You need to stop it. You don’t have to do this. You’re not bad luck, you don’t make bad things happen, you know that, don’t you? What would happen if you didn’t do these things?”
Bruno averted eye contact.
“Do it,” Pepa insisted, advancing upon him. “Right now. Just knock once, no more.”
“I don’t want to, and you can’t make me.”
“Then I won’t leave.”
“Fine,” said Bruno petulantly, and reached out a reluctant hand. He knocked, a single time, and then pulled it quickly back into the sleeve of his ruana as if the door had burned him. He looked humiliated somehow. Like she had exposed him for something. Pepa felt guilty, but she pressed on. It’s what he needs to hear.
“See?” said Pepa. “Nothing happened. Nothing’s going to happen.”
“Don’t you think I know that?!” Bruno burst out. “Of course I can stop, here, now, when you ask me to. But it’s like a mosquito bite, you know? It itches, and you can ignore it, once, twice, but eventually you’ll give in. And then it’s only a temporary relief, because scratching just makes it start itching more.”
Pepa wondered if he’d chosen that metaphor on purpose. As a child, Pepa never could leave a mosquito bite alone. She scratched and scratched, until it scabbed over, and then she picked at that too. It felt good, alone in the night, somewhere Mamá and Don Sabino had no dominion, though there was always a price to pay in the morning when Alma saw the blood on the sheets.
Alma thought it was a habit she’d outgrown, but the truth was that Pepa had just learned to let Julieta heal her before she could start picking in earnest.
“I’ve always known my superstitions weren’t totally – logical,” Bruno admitted. “Even when I’m doing them. When Mamá found me doing something over and over and over again, she’d ask me ‘Why?’ and I’d say I’d had some terrible vision – which, I mean, usually wasn’t a lie – and I was trying to stop it. But the ones in emerald glass, they’re always certain. She knew that and I knew that but anything was better than ‘I don’t know’.
“People started to blame me for the visions, and I know my gift, I know that’s not how it works, but then I would think, but what if it is? What if that’s what I wanted to happen the whole time? So I tried to stop thinking of anything bad that might happen in case it did. Remember that game we used to play with the parrot?”
“What?” Pepa stared at the wall, disoriented by the sudden change of direction. “Oh. The one where someone said ‘parrot’ -?”
“- and the first one to picture a parrot lost.”
“We must have had nothing better to do,” said Pepa wistfully. “I always cheated.”
“Obviously,” said Bruno. “Juli thinks the parrot game is simple. She told me she worked out that you can only think one thing at a time, so she just thought of a chicken instead.”
Pepa snorted. “It’s that easy, is it?”
“Not for me,” Bruno mumbled. “Turns out, it’s really difficult not to think of a parrot. Or – or an earthquake destroying the town, or all the maize dying, and for me it was like once the idea arrived it wouldn’t leave. The more I tried to block it out, the louder the image got, you know? I didn’t want to be thinking it but then maybe I did want to be because I was thinking it but I didn’t want to want to be thinking it and on and on and on. And it never came true but that couldn’t convince me that it wouldn’t next time. Sometimes I convinced myself they were premonitions, ‘cause it was easier to believe they weren’t my thoughts at all. But when I lost my power, I had them anyway.” He flopped limply onto the bed. “And when I knock, I feel in control. At least for a second.”
Pepa sat down beside him, pressing her shoulder into his rather than forcing him to look at her. Ever since they were teenagers, Pepa had found a guilty kind of security in being “not as bad as Bruno”. He had taken up the status of the crazy brujo of the family, which she had always assumed would be hers, and she knew it was all that prevented her from sliding backwards into the same role. So she was unsettled now to find that what he was describing wasn’t difficult to understand at all. As a hurricane spins, it picks up water vapour, gaining angular momentum, until it’s impossible to stop. “So you knock on wood to . . . what, cancel out the bad luck you might’ve created? But you know you don’t need to. Why still do it?”
"Because in the moment, I know my mind is lying to me. But I also know that if I don’t do it, everybody’s gonna die, and it’s gonna be my fault,” Bruno said wearily.
“Bruno-” She wanted to say that’s not true or don’t let people hear you say that or try thinking of clear skies, old habit. Instead what she said was: “I’m sorry. That sounds hard.”
He allowed himself to be pulled in for a hug, and buried his face in her shoulder. She heard a muffled sob.
Since Casita fell and rose again, every Madrigal had been expanding their powers, learning new ways of being, and Pepa was no different. She was discovering all kinds of new weathers, or perhaps old ones she had forgotten: a joyful clap of thunder, a righteous blaze of sunlight, the sacred silence of snow. It was a warm summer rain that she let fall on them now, for healing and washing away those things better forgotten.
“I don’t think it’s ever going to stop,” Bruno confessed. “I’m fifty years of age. I think I might be too old to change.”
“If you’re old, hermano, what does that make me?” Pepa nudged his ribs playfully with an elbow.
“Old,” said Bruno seriously. “You’ll be an abuela pretty soon.”
“Was that a prophecy?”
“Dios mio, I can’t say anything in this house.”
“You didn’t answer the question!” Bruno gave no indication either way, so Pepa returned to the subject at hand. “Anyone can change, at any age. Look at Mamá.”
“That’s true,” said Bruno. “But what if I don’t? Does that make the rest of my life a waste? I haven’t given up, Pepi; but I’ve gotta start living with it, because that might be my only option. Maybe I’ll never get better, and maybe that’s not the worst thing there is. You’re gonna be frustrated with me sometimes, and I’m sorry for that, and I’m always gonna make some people uncomfortable, but that’s their problem. I can’t hide any more.”
“I didn’t want Antonio to be like you,” Pepa blurted. “I was scared. I saw the way people treated you, and what that did to you, and I couldn’t watch the same happen to him. I’m sorry.”
Bruno gave her a grim smile, pulling off his sodden ruana and hanging it over the back of the chair to dry. “No, I get it. I don’t wanna see Antonio grow up like I did either, but he won’t. He’ll grow up to be like Antonio, whatever that means, and he’s going to be incredible. The only thing you can do is make sure he knows that.”