Read Online The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi - Free Book Online

wrote:
    Dear Josephine,
    How are you? And how is Isa?
    I received your last letter and read what was in it. I hope that being married is not distracting you from bringing up the boy, and also that you’ll give up the idea of coming to work in the Gulf again. I’ll send you enough money so you won’t need to go abroad. Just stay close to Isa. I don’t want him to grow up separated from his mother. What his father has done is already quite enough.
    In a few days I’m going to marry a nice girl, Iman, who loves me very much. She follows what I write and it’s good to have her read it. I’ve told her about our son and she didn’t object when I told her that he would come back to live with me once my three sisters have married. She’s going to move in and live with me in my mother’s house until things improve and we can go and live in a new house and start our own family.
    Keep well, you and Isa,
    Rashid
    Kuwait, May 1990
    At first it was my mother who asked me to read my father’sletters to her, but then his letters started to get me interested and I asked her to show me more of them.
    â€˜I don’t have any more, José,’ she replied, putting the letters back in the briefcase. ‘He stopped sending letters and the money transfers stopped after that letter because of the war over Kuwait.’
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    8
    My grandfather began to hate me. When my father’s transfers stopped arriving, he no longer bothered to hide his feelings towards me. ‘You’ll settle down in Alberto’s house one day,’ he told my mother, ‘and I don’t want that boy staying here.’ But Aida stepped in. ‘I’ll look after him,’ she said, silencing my grandfather.
    When the money stopped coming it had a big effect on Mendoza, although he still had a faint hope that the war would soon end and the monthly transfers would resume. But deep down he doubted this would ever happen.
    â€˜I hope he doesn’t go missing in the war,’ he said, addressing no one in particular, while my mother rapped her knuckles on the wooden part of the sofa for good luck.
    â€˜Or the war doesn’t drive him crazy,’ Mendoza added.
    It was an implicit admission on the part of Mendoza, who had experience of war, a suggestion that his own mind was disturbed.
    â€˜War’s like that,’ he added.
    He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. He was staring blankly as if looking at mental images of his own.
    â€˜War isn’t just the fighting on the battlefield,’ he continued, ‘but also the war that’s fought in the minds of those who take part. The first ends, the second goes on and on.’
    His eyes were frozen still. My mother said his eyes glistenedas if he was about to cry. He turned his face towards the door and headed towards his house next door. He shook his head and said in a low voice, ‘That man will never come back, never come back.’
    My mother said that before he went out, she heard three knocks on the wooden door that led outside.
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    9
    The war in Kuwait ended in February 1991 but even then no letter arrived from my father. My mother called my grandmother’s house several times but all she received was insults and shouts, and then the usual tone you get when the line is disconnected. She asked women working in Kuwait to look out for any news of my father but nothing came of that. She asked after him in the Kuwaiti embassy in Manila but there was no response from the people working there. She waited a long time, but he seemed to have disappeared.
    The first person to gloat, my mother said, was Aunt Aida.
    â€˜All men are like that. They’re all bastards,’ she said.
    From that day on my mother would reply with her favourite expression: ‘Except Rashid.’
    The days passed, but my mother’s faith that I would go back to Kuwait one day never wavered, even when no letters or news of him