Nochebuena

The photograph came at ten in the morning, which was five in the afternoon in London, and it was of a kitchen.

He knew the kitchen. It was the one at the back of the London house, with the long scrubbed table and the window onto the area steps, and his mother had made it into Sweden. There were candles in the brass holders from Solliden, and a white cloth, and on the cloth the things that were always on it on the twenty-fourth wherever she was: the herring in its three kinds, the ham with its crust of mustard and crumbs, the brown beans that nobody but her ever ate, and at the end a bowl of rice pudding with a spoon standing up in it.

His father was at the end of the table, in a jersey and a paper crown that somebody had given him a day early, holding up between his finger and thumb, towards the camera, with an expression of enormous gravity, an almond.

Under the photograph, in Swedish, his mother had written:

Julafton in London. Your father has found the almond again. I have told him that he is already married. He says that he will marry me again, then, and that this time he will find the right church.

And under that, after a space, as though she had put the telephone down and picked it up again:

I am not to talk too much today. The man with clean hands says I talked too much this week and he could hear it. So today I sit and your father talks, which is a very long day for both of us. Tomorrow I will telephone, for his Christmas, and talk too much again. God jul, Fredde. M.

He was on Tyler’s bed by the window when it came, where he had taken to sitting in the mornings. He looked at the photograph for a long time, at the almond and his father’s paper crown, and at the one thing that was not in it, which was his mother, because she had taken it; and at the chair at the near end of the table, which he could just see the back of at the bottom of the frame, pulled out, with a cushion on it, and over the back of it a cardigan that he had never seen her wear and never would.

He wrote back: God jul, Mamma. Tell him the church is the one in Stockholm. He knows where it is.

The answer came in a minute.

He says he knows. He says he was there.

---

He fed the fire at half past ten.

He did it now without thinking: the brown square, the fire, the figure in furs coming back with its arms full, and the thirty-one standing straighter in the snow. At the bottom of the screen there was a line waiting.

merry xmas eve tylers roommate

He typed, And to you. Then, after some thought, because it was Christmas Eve and it seemed unkind not to: How is Leeds?

raining, said the man from Leeds. always raining. thats why i play a game where its snowing lol. at least its different

He sat in Tyler’s chair and looked at that for a while. It seemed to him the truest thing anybody had said to him all week.

---

Tyler’s photograph came at a quarter past three, which was a quarter past five in Parma, and it was of a plate.

It was a white plate with a gold rim, the kind that comes out once a year from a high cupboard, at the end of a long table under a great many dishes, with a knife and a fork and a glass with a stem, and poking out from under the cloth at that corner a few stalks of something pale and dry, like straw. Propped against the glass there was a small folded card, and on it, in blue ballpoint, in the round careful capitals of a very old woman who had been taught to write in a school where they made you do it properly:

FRED

Under the photograph Tyler had written:

grandma made you a card. she says nobody ever had a name before. shes v happy about it

And then, a minute later:

grandpa just went out on the porch and pointed at nothing. eating now. my brother says hi. he doesnt know who you are either

And then, after another minute:

the fish is bad this year. dont tell grandma

He showed it to Rhys and Sam in the lounge, where Rhys’s mother’s parcel lay open on the table between them: a pudding wrapped in a cloth, a tin of shortbread, three pairs of socks with reindeer on them, one each, and a letter that Rhys had read and folded and put inside his sweatshirt without saying anything.

Sam looked at the card that said FRED for a long time.

“What’s the straw?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s under the tablecloth.”

“It’s a Polish thing,” said Frederick. “I think. Tyler didn’t say.”

Sam got out his phone and looked it up, and read it, and put the phone away.

“It’s for the manger,” said Sam. “The hay. So the table’s a stable.” He considered the photograph. “So there’s room.”

---

The paper suns were Rhys’s idea.

He had found them in the cupboard in the lounge where Priya kept her supplies: a stack of maroon card left over from August, a tin of gold pens, and the plastic stencil she had cut the suns from, gone soft at the edges from being drawn round four hundred times. He put it all on the table beside the pudding at four o’clock and stood back from it like a man presenting evidence.

“He hasn’t got a door,” said Rhys.

They looked at him.

“Mr Luna. Everybody’s got a door with their name on. Even the RA. Even you had one, sir, for about two hours.” Rhys picked up the stencil. “He’s been here thirty years and he’s never had a door. He’s got a desk.” He put the stencil down on the maroon card. “We could put one on the desk.”

So they made a sun for Mr Luna.

It took an hour and ten minutes, which Sam recorded. Rhys drew round the stencil with a gold pen and cut it out, slowly, with his tongue between his teeth, with the scissors from his kit, which were small and very sharp and had not been issued for this purpose. Sam measured the rays with the edge of the shortbread tin, and found three of them a sixteenth of an inch longer than the others, and trimmed them. And Frederick, who had been given the silver pen because his handwriting had been the subject of four tutors and a Swedish court, sat with the finished sun in front of him for some time, and then wrote on it, in capitals, as neatly as he had ever written anything, including his signature at the foot of a great many Acts of the parliament of Hanover:

IGNACIO

Rhys looked at it.

“Should it say Mr Luna?”

“Everybody’s says their first name,” said Frederick. “That’s the point of the suns.”

“Mine says Rhys,” said Rhys, after a moment, as though he had never thought about it before; and they went down to the lobby, the three of them, at ten past five, when the day porter had gone to the back office, and taped it to the front of the desk, under the lamp, where a person coming in through the doors at night would see it first.

---

Mr Luna came on at ten, and he came with a pot.

It was an enamel pot, blue with white speckles, the size of a small drum, with the lid tied down with string, and he carried it in through the doors in both arms, wrapped in a striped towel, with a thermos under one elbow, and he did not see the sun on the front of the desk because the pot was in the way. He put it down beside the radio and the jar of butterscotch, and pressed both hands into the small of his back, and breathed out.

“Feliz Navidad,” said Mr Luna, to the lobby, which had the three of them in it, because they had been sitting on the bench by the noticeboard since a quarter to ten, waiting, without admitting to one another that that was what they were doing.

“Feliz Navidad,” said Frederick.

Mr Luna looked at him over his glasses.

“Where’d you get that accent, son?”

“A teacher. At school. Señora Ruiz.” He thought about her. “She said I was too thin.”

“She was right,” said Mr Luna, and began to untie the string.

He did not see the sun until he came round the front of the desk to fetch more chairs from the lounge. Then he saw it. He stopped, with one hand on the back of a chair, and looked down at the front of his own desk, at the maroon card under the lamp with its straight gold rays, one of them a sixteenth of an inch shorter than it had been, and the silver capitals in the middle.

He looked at it for a long time.

He stood there with his hand on the chair, in his short-sleeved shirt with the sun on the pocket, and looked at his name, and the lobby was quiet except for the radio, which was playing carols very low, in Spanish; and Frederick, who had been brought up by a woman who knew the length of every silence, did not know the length of this one, and found that he did not need to.

“Huh,” said Mr Luna, at last.

He took his hand off the chair. He reached down, and with one finger pressed the corner of the tape flat, where it had lifted a little.

“Nobody ever put me on a door,” he said.

“It’s a desk,” said Rhys.

“At night,” said Mr Luna, “it’s the same thing.” And he went and fetched the chairs, and set them out at the end of the desk in a row beside the plastic one that was always there, and then, after a moment’s thought, one more.

---

There were three kinds, and they had come from different rows.

“Red,” said Mr Luna, laying them out on paper plates on the desk, in their husks, steaming, out of the pot, where they had been standing on end in rows like books on a shelf. “Pork, red chile. My sister Lupe’s row. Lupe’s heavy on the chile, so if you’re a crier, son, you’re going to cry.” He laid out another kind, smaller, fatter, paler. “Green corn. Those are my niece’s. She’s twenty-six and she makes them better than anybody in the family and nobody’s allowed to say so in front of Lupe.” And another, from the bottom of the pot, a little pink, with raisins showing through the masa like stones in a stream. “Sweet. Cinnamon. Those are the kids’. You’ll find a raisin in one of ‘em that isn’t a raisin. Don’t ask.”

He unscrewed the thermos and poured into four paper cups something thick and dark and steaming that smelled of chocolate and corn and cinnamon.

“Champurrado,” he said. “My mother’s. She didn’t make it, she sat in the chair and told my daughter what she was doing wrong, which is the same thing.” He handed the cups round. “Eat. You unwrap ‘em. You don’t eat the husk.” He looked at Rhys. “Somebody always eats the husk.”

Rhys, who had been about to, stopped.

They ate at the desk under the lamp, the King of fourteen countries and two officers of the Royal Protection Service on three of the plastic chairs and a night porter of thirty years behind the desk in his own, with the fourth chair empty at the end, which nobody mentioned. The radio played carols from a church that Mr Luna said was the one in the old barrio, four blocks away, where he had been baptised, and where his mother would have gone to Misa de Gallo tonight if her granddaughter, who was a nurse, had not told her that at ninety-one, if she went out at midnight in December, she would come home in an ambulance. The red ones made Frederick cry, as promised. Sam ate four of the green ones, one after another, in a perfectly straight line, and wrote nothing down. Rhys found the raisin that was not a raisin in his second sweet one and held it up between his finger and thumb, a small silver bell on a thread, and looked at it.

“That’s luck,” said Mr Luna. “Means you’re getting married.”

“I’m not.”

“Didn’t say this year,” said Mr Luna.

At eleven Rhys got his phone out and sent a message across the road, because the sergeant’s rule was no deliveries and he was not sure whether a night porter’s mother counted; and he held the phone at arm’s length when the answer came, as though it might go off.

“She says,” said Rhys. “Two. Red.”

Sam carried them across the road at ten past, in a napkin, on a paper plate, with a paper cup of champurrado held very level in his other hand, and Frederick watched from the doors as he crossed the dark road under the one street lamp and went up the outside stair beside the dentist’s and knocked, and the door opened about a foot, and the light came out, and the plate and the cup went into it; and then the door shut, and Sam came back down the stair and across the road, empty-handed, with exactly the face he had gone with.

“She said thank you,” said Sam.

“Anything else?”

Sam thought about it.

“She said to tell Mr Luna they were the right ones.”

Mr Luna, at the desk, wrapping the pot back in its towel, did not look up.

“I know they were,” he said.

---

The telephone on the desk rang at midnight.

It was an old telephone, cream-coloured, with a curly cord and a row of buttons along the bottom, and it rang with an old telephone’s ring, a real bell, very loud in the empty lobby; and Mr Luna, without looking at the clock, put down the crossword and picked it up on the second ring and said, “Palo Verde, night desk,” and then, at once, in a different voice altogether, “Sí, Amá.”

He listened.

“Sí,” said Mr Luna. “Sí. Los comieron. Todos.” He listened. “No, Amá, los rojos.” A pause. “Sí, lloró.” He looked at Frederick over his glasses with no expression whatsoever. “El flaco.”

He listened for some time after that. He said sí four more times and no once, quite firmly, and once, very quietly, something that Frederick did not catch, with his eyes on the paper sun on the front of the desk. Then he held the receiver out across the desk, on its curly cord, at the full stretch of it.

“She wants the thin one,” said Mr Luna.

Frederick took it.

“Hello,” he said, and then, because it was a woman of ninety-one on the telephone at midnight on Christmas Eve, in Spanish, the way Señora Ruiz had taught him to say it to people older than himself: “Buenas noches, señora. Feliz Navidad.”

There was a silence on the line. Then the voice came: very old and very small and absolutely clear, a voice like a piece of paper that has been folded and unfolded a great many times and has never torn, speaking in Spanish, quite fast, as though she did not have time to waste and did not intend anybody else to waste it either.

She said that he spoke very well for a gringo. She said that her son had told her there were three boys in his building who could not go home, and that she did not like it, and that she had sent the green ones especially, because the green ones were the ones for people who were a long way from their mothers, everybody knew that. She asked whether he had eaten enough. He said that he had eaten six. She said that six was not enough for a boy who was too thin, and that she had a great-granddaughter of nineteen at the university who was studying to be an engineer, and was very pretty, and would be back on the eighth.

“Gracias, señora,” said Frederick, with great care. “Pero tengo novio.”

There was another silence on the line, a short one.

“Ah,” said Mr Luna’s mother. And then, without any change in her voice at all, as briskly as before: “Entonces que coma más.”

Then he must eat more.

Mr Luna, at the desk, put his hand over his eyes.

She asked him where his mother was. He said she was in London. She asked whether his mother was well. He looked at the paper sun on the front of the desk for a moment, under the lamp.

“Está cansada,” he said. She’s tired.

The old voice did not say anything for a while. He could hear behind it, very faint, in a kitchen on the other side of the town, a television with a Mass on it, a choir, and somebody laughing in another room, and a door.

Then she said, in Spanish, slowly now, the first thing she had said slowly:

“Llama a tu mamá.”

Call your mother.

He stood at the desk with the cream telephone at his ear and looked across it at Mr Luna, who had taken his hand from his eyes and was looking back at him over his glasses; and he thought of the three rules he had been given at this desk at ten o’clock on his first night, and knew where the second of them had come from.

“Mañana,” he said. “Me va a llamar mañana. Hoy no puede hablar mucho.”

Tomorrow. She is going to call me tomorrow. Today she can’t talk much.

“Mañana, entonces,” said Mr Luna’s mother. Tomorrow, then. And then, as though it were settled, and she had a great many other people to telephone, which perhaps she had: “Dale el teléfono a mi hijo.”

He gave the telephone to her son.

---

He went up at one, with the pot’s towel over his arm, because Mr Luna had said that the towel would need folding and that a boy who could not fold a towel at twenty would not be able to at forty, and he had been unable to think of an answer.

Rhys was on the chair at the end of the corridor, under the night light, in the reindeer socks.

“Sir.”

“Rhys.”

“Merry Christmas, sir.”

“Merry Christmas.”

He went into 312. The fire was burning low on the two screens, and the snow was falling on the forest, and the thirty-one were standing round it close with their hands out. He did not feed it. It was not morning yet, and Tyler had said that morning was best.

He sat on Tyler’s bed by the window, with the towel in his lap, and took out his phone.

It was eight in the morning in London on Christmas Day. He wrote, in Swedish, God jul. The porter’s mother says I am to call you. Today. She was very firm.

He looked at it for a while. Then he sent it.

The answer came before he had put the phone down, which meant that she had been awake, and holding hers.

Then you had better, wrote his mother. At two, your time. Your father will have had his lunch and his sleep and will be in a good temper and will want to say a great many words, and I will let him, and then I will talk too much. Tell the porter’s mother thank you. Tell her that I am the mother, and that I say she is right.

He read it twice. He was about to put the phone down when it lit again in his hand.

Is she very old?

Ninety-one.

Then nothing. Then the three small dots at the bottom of the screen that meant she was writing, and they went on for some time, longer than anything she had written that night; and then they stopped, and went away, and came back, and went away again, as though she had written a thing and taken it out, and written it again, and taken it out again.

Good, wrote his mother, at last. Go to sleep, Fredde.

He sat on the bed by the window with the phone in his hand and watched the screen until it went dark, as screens do, and touched it, and it lit, and there was nothing more.

Outside the window the butte was a black shape against the stars. On the screens beside him the fire burned low, and did not go out.

He folded the towel. It took him three goes. Then he put it on the end of the bed, square, the way Sam would have, and lay down on the bare mattress by the window, in the coat, with his face to the glass, and did not sleep for a long time.