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

old and Adrian had started walking a few months earlier. He was in the middle of his second year. I looked after my little brother if Aida was busy. I didn’t look after him in the full sense: all I did was keep an eye on him and stop him going outside or into the kitchen. He was chubby and very pretty, with small eyes and a flat nose squashed between his plump cheeks. ‘That’s what legitimate children look like,’ Mendoza told Aida.
    One night Aida asked me to look after Adrian while she went off to help Uncle Pedro sort out his new house. Merla was asleep upstairs. I was alone with him in the little sitting room. All I remember of what happened are some disjointed images that Aida pieced together for me when I was older. She explained to me the implications of one image that still flickers indistinctly in my memory.
    It’s dark and raining heavily. Thunder and lightning. Aunt Aida, in the rain, shouting, ‘Adrian! Adrian!’ Uncle Pedro’s children moving around outside. Men and women carrying flashlights, searching Grandfather’s land. Uncle Pedro running between the trees shouting, ‘Adrian! Adrian!’ Their clothes soaked and sticking to their bodies. The rain lashing down. The beams of the flashlights. Straight lines criss-crossing and never resting on one spot. All I remember are the voices and the images frozen by the sudden flashes of lightning.
    â€˜Here, here,’ shouted Pedro’s wife. Then Merla screamed andAunt Aida wailed. All the flashlights pointed to one spot. Everyone running to somewhere between our house and my grandfather’s house. I followed them. Pedro jumped into the watercourse, picked up something and put it on the bank between the bamboo stalks, which were leaning over because of the rainwater. A flash of lightning lit up the scene. Everyone dispersed, with shock on their faces. People made the sign of the cross. Uncle Pedro holding Adrian’s face in both hands. It was dark blue. There was a thick black liquid running from his mouth and nose. Uncle Pedro pressed the boy’s chest and kept pressing, locking his fingers, pushing down on Adrian’s chest. Hitting, hitting. He pressed his lips to the lips of my little brother and blew. Then he burst into tears.
    *   *   *
    We should be able to forget the mistakes we make in childhood, but if the victim of your mistake is still there, right in front of your eyes, and grows up with you, and the effects of the mistake still show, then how can you forget?
    I often make excuses for myself. I say I was just a child that didn’t understand, that I couldn’t be held responsible, that it wasn’t my fault.
    The excuses are persuasive, but if you try to convince both your head and your heart at the same time, one of them refuses to believe.
    I borrow my mother’s saying: ‘Everything happens for a reason, and for some purpose.’ Resorting to faith, by its very nature, requires faith.
    But what if the faith is all a pretence?
    With the passage of time everything new becomes old. But Adrian’s face seems new whenever I see it.
    He sits in front of me in his favourite corner, his mouth open, drooling constantly, reminding me of something I want to forget: a crippling sense of guilt about a mistake I can’t even remember happening.
    â€˜Aida, isn’t there any way to cure him?’ I ask my aunt.
    She gives her usual answer: ‘No. That’s what they told us in the hospital, after the incident, years ago.’
    Although she’s told me to my face dozens of times over the years what the doctor said, I still ask. ‘What did the doctor say?’
    I hear the same answer as always. ‘It’s because the oxygen didn’t get to his brain. Damage to the cells.’
    I’m always deeply disappointed, as if I expect a different answer every time I ask.
    After nearly drowning, Adrian was in a coma for weeks. After that he gradually