Authors: IGMS
"Bonito," said the officer softly. "You wrote something down yesterday."
Bonito was at once ashamed. "I forgot that you could see."
"We thought it was important that you know two things. First, you're right. You are the true ruler of the house. But second, you are an only child, so you had no way of knowing that in any healthy family, the children are the true rulers."
"Fathers rule," said Bonito, "and mothers are in charge when they're not home."
"That describes the outward functioning of your home," said the young officer. "But you understand that all they do is meant for you -- even your father's vast ambition is about achieving greatness in his son's eyes. He doesn't know this about himself. But you know it about him."
Bonito nodded.
"Children rule in every home, but not in the ways they might wish. Good parents try to help their children, but not always to please them, because sometimes what a child needs is not what gives him pleasure. Cruel parents are jealous of their children's power and rebel against it, using them selfishly, hurting them. Your parents are not cruel."
"I know that." Was the man stupid?
"Then I've told you everything I came to say."
"Not yet," said Bonito.
"Oh?"
"
Why
is it that way?"
The young officer looked pleased. Bonito thought: Do I also rule
him?
"The human race preserved itself," said the young officer, "by evolving this hunger in parents for the devotion of their children. Without it, they starve. Nothing pleases them more than their child's smile or laughter. Nothing makes them more anxious than a child's frantic cry. Childless people often do not know what they're starving for. Parents whose children have grown, though, they
know
what they're missing."
Bonito nodded. "When you take me away to Battle School, my parents will be very hungry."
"
If
we take you," the young officer said gently.
Bonito smiled. "You must leave me here," he said. "My family needs me."
"You may rule in this house, Bonito, but you do not rule the International Fleet. Your smile won't tell me what to do. But when the time comes, the choice will be yours."
"Then I choose not to go."
"When the time comes," the officer repeated. Then he left.
Bonito understood that they would be judging him, and what he did with the information the young officer had told him would be an important part of that judgment. In Battle School, they trained children to become military leaders. That meant that it would be important to see what Bonito did with the influence he had discovered that he had with his parents.
Can I help them both to be happy?
What does it mean to be happy?
Mother helps both me and Father, doing things for us all the time. Is that what makes her happy? Or does she do it in hopes of our doing things in return that would make her happy? Father loves to talk about his dreams for Spain. Does that mean he needs to actually achieve them in order to be happy? Or does his happiness come from having a cause to argue for? Does it matter that it's a lost cause, or does that make Father even happier as its advocate? Would I please him most by adopting that cause as my own, or would he feel like I was competing with him?
It was so confusing, to have responsibility for other people's happiness.
So now Bonito embarked on his first serious course of study: His parents, and what they wanted and needed in order to be happy.
Study meant research. He couldn't figure things out without learning more about them. He began interviewing them, informally. He'd ask them questions about their growing up, about how they met, whatever came into his mind. They both enjoyed answering his questions, though they often dodged and didn't give him full explanations or stories. Still, the very fact that on certain subjects they became evasive was still data, it was still part of understanding them.
But the more he learned, the less clearly he understood anything. People were too complicated. Adults did too many things that made no sense, and remembered too many stories in ways that did make sense but weren't believable, and Bonito couldn't figure out whether they were lying or had merely remembered them wrong. Certainly Mother and Father never told the same story in the same way -- Father's version always made him the hero, and Mother's version always made her the suffering victim. Which should have made the stories identical, except that Mother never saw Father as her savior, and Father never made Mother all that important in the stories.
It made Bonito wonder if they really loved each other and if not, why they ever got married.
It was disturbing and it made him upset a lot of the time. Mother noticed that he was worried about something and tried to get him to tell it, but he knew better than to explain what he was working on. He didn't really have the words to explain it, anyway.
It was too much responsibility for a child, he knew that. How could he possibly make his parents happy? He couldn't
do
anything about what they needed. The only thing he controlled was how he treated them. So gradually, not in despair but in resignation, he stopped trying to make their behavior and their relationship make sense, and he stopped expecting himself to be able to change anything. If his failure to help them meant the I.F. didn't take him into space, well, that was fine with him, he didn't want to go.
But he still kept noticing things. He still kept asking questions and trying to find things out about them.
Which is why he noticed a certain pattern in his father's life. On various days of the week, but usually at least once a week, Father would go on errands or have meetings where he
didn't
try to bring Bonito -- where, indeed, he refused to take him. Until this research project began, Bonito had never thought anything of it -- he didn't even want to be in on
everything
his father did, mostly because some of his meetings could be really boring.
But now he understood enough of his father's business to know that Father never hid his regular work from Bonito. Oh, of course he met with clients alone -- it would disturb them to have a child listening to everything -- but those meetings weren't hidden. There were appointments that the secretary wrote down, and Bonito sat out in the secretary's office and wrote or drew or read until Father was done.
These secret meeting always took place outside the office, and outside of office hours. Sometimes they consisted of a long lunch, and the secretary took Bonito home so Mother could feed him. Sometimes Father would have an evening meeting after he brought Bonito home.
Usually, Father loved to tell about whatever he had done and especially what he had said that made someone else angry or put him in his place or made people laugh. But about these secret meetings, he was never talkative. He'd dismiss them as boring, pointless, tedious, he hated to go.
Yet Father never seemed as though he hated to go
before
the meeting. He was almost eager to go -- not in some obvious way, but in the way he watched the clock surreptitiously and then made some excuse and left briskly.
For long months this was merely a nagging uncertainty in Bonito's mind. After all, he had given up on trying to take responsibility for his parents' happiness, so there was no urgency to figure it out. But the problem wouldn't leave him alone, and finally he realized why.
Father was in a conspiracy. He was meeting with people to do something dangerous or illegal. Was he planning to take over the Spanish government? Start a revolution? But whom could he meet with in
Toledo
that would make a difference in the world? Toledo was not a city where powerful people lived -- they were all in Madrid and Barcelona, the cities his parents were named for but rarely visited. These meetings rarely lasted more than an hour and a half and never more than three hours, so they had to take place fairly close by.
How could a six-year-old -- for Bonito was six now -- find out what his father was doing? Because now that he knew there was a mystery, he had to have the answer to it. Maybe Father was doing secret government work -- maybe even for the I.F. Or maybe he was working on a dangerous case that might get him killed if anyone knew about it, so he only had meetings about it in secret.
One day an opportunity came. Father checked the time of day several times in the same morning without saying anything about it, and then left for lunch a few minutes early, asking the secretary to walk Bonito home for lunch. The secretary agreed to and seemed cheerful enough about it; but she was also very busy and clearly did not want to leave the job unfinished.
"I can go home alone," said Bonito. "I'm six, you know."
"Of course you can find the way, you smart little boy," she answered. "But bad things sometimes happen to children who go off alone."
"Not to me," said Bonito.
"Are you sure of that?" she answered, amused.
Bonito turned around and pointed to the monitor on his neck. "
They're
watching."
"Oh," said the secretary, as if she had completely forgotten that Bonito was being observed all the time. "Well, then I guess you're quite safe. Still, I think it's better if you ..."
Before she could say "wait until I'm done here," which was the inevitable conclusion of her sentence, Bonito was out the door. "Don't worry I'll be fine!" he shouted as he went.
He could see Father walking along the street, briskly but not actually
fast
. It was good that he was walking instead of taking a cab or getting the car -- then Bonito could not have followed him. This way, Bonito could saunter along looking in store windows, like a kid, and still keep his father in view.
Father came to a door between shops, one of the sort that held stairs that led to walk-up shops and offices and apartments. Bonito got to the door and it was already closed; it was the kind that locked until somebody upstairs pushed a button to let it open. Father was not in sight.
The buttons on the wall had name tags, most of them, and a couple of them were offices rather than apartments. But Father would not be having a manicure and he would not be getting his future read by a psychic palm-reading astrologer.
And, come to think of it, Father had not even waited at the bottom long enough for somebody to ring him up. Instead he had taken a long time getting the door handle open ...
Father had keys. That's what happened at the door, he fumbled with keys and opened the door directly without ringing anybody.
Why would Father have a second office? Or a second apartment? It made no sense to Bonito.
So when he got home, he asked Mother about it.
She looked like he had stabbed her in the heart. And yet she refused to explain anything.
After lunch he became aware that she had gone to her room and was crying.
I've made her unhappy, he thought. I shouldn't have been following Father, he thought.
And then she came out of her room holding a note, her eyes red from crying. She put the note on the kitchen table, folded, with Father's name on it, and then took Bonito to the car, which she almost never drove, and drove to the railroad station, where she parked it and got on the train and they went to Grandma's house. Mother's mother, who lived two hours away in a small town in the middle of nowhere, but with orange groves -- not very productive ones, but as Grandma always said, her needs were few and her son-in-law was generous.
Mother sent Bonito into the back yard and then cried to her mother. Bonito tried to listen but when they saw him edging closer to the window they closed it and then got up and went to another room where he couldn't hear them without making it obvious he was trying to spy.
Yet he knew, bit by bit, what had happened, and what he had done. From the scraps of words and phrases he could overhear, he knew there was a "she" that Father was "keeping," that it was a terrible thing that Father had the key, and that Mother didn't know how she could bear it or whether she could stay. And Grandma kept saying, Hush, hush, it's the way of the world, women suffer while the men play, you have your son and you can't expect a strong man not to wander, one woman could not contain him ...
And then they saw him a second time, sitting directly under the window where Mother had walked to get some air. Mother was furious. "What did you hear?"
"Nothing," said Bonito.
"The day you don't hear words that are said right in front of you, I'll take you to a hearing doctor to stick needles in your ears. What did you hear?"
"I'm sorry I told you about Papa! I don't want to move here! Grandma's a bad cook!"
At which Mother laughed in the midst of tears, Grandma was genuinely offended, and then Mother promised him that they would
not
move to Grandma's, but they'd visit here for a few days. They hadn't packed anything, but there were clothes left there from previous visits -- too small for him now, but not so small he couldn't fit into them.
Father came that night and Grandma sent him away. He was furious at first but then she said something in a low voice and Father fell silent and drove away.
The next day he was back with flowers. Bonito watched Mother and Father talk in the doorway, and she refused to take his flowers., so he dropped them on the ground and left again. Mother crushed one of the flowers with her shoe, but then she picked up the others and cried over them for a long time while Grandmother said, over and over, "I told you it meant nothing. I told you he didn't want to lose you."
It took a week before they moved back home, and Father and Mother were not right with each other. They talked little, except about the business of the house. And Father stopped asking Bonito to come with him.
At first Bonito was angry at Mother, but when he confronted her, Mother denied that she had forbidden him to go. "He's ashamed in front of you," she said.
"For what?" asked Bonito.
"He still loves you as much as ever," said Mother.
Which left his question unanswered. That meant the answer was very important. Father was ashamed of something, ashamed in front of Bonito. Or was that Mother's kindly-intended lie, and Father was actually very angry at Bonito for spying on him?