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.
They crossed themselves: “That’s what you should always do when you come into church,” Father Albert had told them. They grasped the iron bars of the chapel.
“He wants you to be his mother,” Arnau said silently to the Virgin. “His mother has died, and I don’t mind sharing you.”
Clinging to the bars, Joan stared in turn at the Virgin and at Arnau.
“What?” Arnau asked.
“Be quiet!”
“Father says he must have suffered a lot. His mother was imprisoned, you see. She could only reach her arm out through a window, and he couldn’t see her. Not until she had died, but even then he says he didn’t really look at her because she had forbidden him to.”
The smoke rising from the pure beeswax candles in the rack below the statue clouded Arnau’s sight once more, and the lips of the Virgin smiled at him.
“She will be your mother,” he declared to Joan.
“How do you know, if you say she replies through—”
