House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  The other woman was sitting diagonally across the tables from him. She was red-haired and freckled, the freckles faded and the red hair muted with strands of gray. When she saw that Ben was listening too, she began to share her reactions with him. The three mortal dangers of paddling a canoe down the Zambezi River? The red-haired woman shuddered and smiled and shook her head. She might have winked.

  The first danger was the hidden snags and treacherous currents, which only the experienced guides could pick out in time. The second was the hippos, noncarnivorous, it was true, but who loved to overturn canoes and crunch them. They seemed to work in tandem with the third danger, the very carnivorous crocodiles, for as soon as the hippos overturned a canoe the crocs would cruise in. But they represented a mortal danger only up to a point. Sometimes they might settle for an arm or a leg.

  For a moment Ben did his best to quit listening and to pick up on the white noise of the traffic at his back. He went back to his newspaper. The woman doing the talking was too interested in drawing the story out and too much in love with the sound of her own voice. But then she began to talk about the animals themselves, and her voice changed. It took on a dramatic hush, it became sobered and subdued, in a way depersonalized. The first night, she admitted, she’d been scared. Water buffalo had plodded among the tents. Families of hippos had waded by at the river’s edge, making their three-toned chuffing sound, on a descending scale, that was like a scheming melodramatic laugh. There’d been lighter scampering sounds, like something running right up your spine. But the next night, she said, something had happened.

  “I lay in the tent and just gave way. The hippos were out there. There were lion roars too, and something that sounded like a chain saw cutting into wood. We were told that was a leopard. Garret was already asleep. If Garret got taken by lions he’d only know about it when they were picking his bones clean. But I lay there, and there came a moment when instead of being terrified by it all I realized that we were on the scene because the animals had decided to let us be. . . . And when I say ‘animals’ I mean the big ones, not monkeys or baboons—you should see the mounds of shit they left. We’d go off with our little shovel to do our business and it was a humbling experience to do it beside what an elephant had done. . . . The animals were the masters and we were these powerless little intruders and they’d decided to let us be. Once I understood that, instead of being menacing, that hippo sound became restful—a hippo lullaby. The lions called back and forth, and then the lion roars blended into the night and you felt . . . sleepy and protected, I’d almost say ‘secure.’”

  She paused and looked around. In the process she looked to her right, right at Ben. She had a sad, entranced expression in her eyes. She wore expensive jewelry, a necklace of amethysts, more amethysts at the ears, her eyes shaded and her hair permed. She did not look as if she’d ever in her life camped beside a river or shat beside a mound of elephant dung.

  “Am I making any sense, Paula? There’re no animals here, so we have to go back. Gar’s seen enough of it, but you’ll go with me, won’t you? It’ll be like those spring breaks we took. Instead of Florida and the beach and boys, the banks of the Zambezi and the hippos and crocs.”

  The woman called Paula looked at her friend and gave a throaty, uncertain laugh. Then she looked at Ben, as if he had made himself part of their group and had a vote to cast too.

  He smiled and tipped his head to her, as if to indicate “tough choice.” He went back to his newspaper and the stark anonymity of those faces. Paula said something to her friend about next year, and to remember that the year before it had been the Australian outback and the year before that penguins on a glacier somewhere. When Ben looked back up, Paula was still smiling at him, and he was ready to believe that they’d known each other in the past, that she had made the connection before he had and was amused to see how long it took him to catch up.

  Instead he turned to the woman beside him and said, “I couldn’t help but overhear . . .”

  She held out her hand, brightening at once. She was Leslie. He got a crunching handshake from her husband, Garret, and from Paula a grip with something of that amused and knowing warmth.

  Gay and irrepressible again, Leslie said, “Would you come with me, Ben? I’m a good judge of character. You’re peace-loving, you’re gentle. Aren’t all Bens gentle? You know your limits. You do know your limits, don’t you? The animals would accept you at once.”

  “Do you also read palms?” Ben said.

  She seized his hand and turned it over with a flourish. “What did I say? You’ve got a lifeline that goes off the charts. You may live as long as the elephants.”

  Her husband, Garret, intervened, “Let the man be, Les. You’re pushing his luck. The zoo’s the place for you, Ben.”

  Paula laughed and sat back. She wore glasses. Her lips looked chapped. In fact, she looked a little weathered. The fading blotched freckles contributed to the effect, as did the paling red hair.

  Ben turned to Leslie. “That moment when you went from being terrified of the animals to feeling like you were in their safekeeping . . .”

  “Yes,” she breathed, “I listened to them, I finally heard what they were saying. . . .”

  “Do you think it takes the animals?”

  She cocked her head at him, puzzled, and he tried to clarify, “I mean—”

  It was Paula who interrupted him. “He means does it have to look, smell and sound like a huge African animal. Can it be a ‘masterful’ being of some other sort?”

  “As long as it looks, smells and sounds like something big enough to scare the holy bejesus out of you one minute and protect you like a babe in the woods the next. Is that it, Ben?”

  It wasn’t, not entirely. Once again Paula was looking at him, as if the two of them shared something, some element of common sense or deeper understanding, unavailable to this globe-trotting couple.

  He tried and failed to return to his newspaper.

  A face for what?

  When he got up to leave he found himself apologizing. “Sorry,” he said, more to Paula than the others, as if he were deserting her side. She gave him a grin at the corner of her mouth, as if to reply, Just one more of life’s nasty little tricks. He joined the evening’s promenaders down Castel-lana, left them and walked up Calle Alcala to the Puerta del Sol, where, with a motlier crowd, he circled the city’s center.

  It was back and forth, back and forth, but Ben stayed on. He did not go back to the Parque Santander, where his daughter had been killed. It occurred to him that it made no sense not to contact the police to see where the investigation into his daughter’s death stood, in spite of what Madeline Pratt had said. His daughter’s death would be considered incidental to the death of that murdered Civil Guard—he understood that. Still, he might inquire. Perhaps one of those ETA members being returned from Latin America had been indicted—one had even been extradited from the United States. If the trial hadn’t yet been held, he could attend it. If an ETA member— etarras, they were called—had already been convicted he could figure out some way to visit the prison. Convicted etarras were imprisoned anywhere except in the Basque country—it was one of the Basque nationalists’ bitterest grievances, that they didn’t have their heroic sons and daughters nearby—so Ben would have to determine which prison and get on a train, get on a bus, get on a burro, and go there. All to see a face. To look into eyes so ancestrally committed to a cause there would be no way they could look back and see him. It would be like looking down a hall of mirrors, an endless generational regression.

  The problem was that he was nothing like his dead daughter. Michelle knew why she was in Spain. She knew what she wanted and precisely by what stages she was going to get it. She knew where she was going when she got up to run that morning. She just didn’t know what had taken her away. Or maybe she did. She would have known that was a Civil Guard headquarters she ran by. She would have known it was a potential ETA target, and a tempting one at that, and she would h
ave calculated her chances, which she would have liked. They were good chances. A bomb went off, caught her in the back, blasted her on faster than her accustomed pace, and she would not have questioned her calculations. The chances had been good. But her calculations had not prepared her for this, just for the overwhelming chance that it would not happen and she could go on with her life. In that instant when a light blinded her before she blacked out, she would have understood. This is a bomb blast, this is ETA blowing up a Civil Guard headquarters, this is Europe cracking apart along its fault lines, this is a world as old as a fractured piece of porcelain being held together in a museum—I know all that. I studied it. I got informed. But what is this?

  No, Ben was nothing like his older daughter. He was like his younger and surviving daughter, Annie. He too had a sort of quester’s belief that at any given moment, as lost as he might be, there were always destinations to be had. Annie was impulsive in that way, it was the way she chose her classes, grabbed her friends seemingly on the fly. She was loyal and she was affectionate, and when she turned away from you it wasn’t because she’d given you up. She was following her quester’s intuition.

  Have a plan, Dad, his dead daughter would advise him.

  His surviving daughter would advise him to lighten up.

  He tried to. At the Regina Hotel was a desk clerk named Juan, who spoke English and arranged day trips for him to outlying monuments and towns. Ben visited the great gloomy fortress-palace called El Escorial. Toledo, built up on its rock, was a fortress of some sort too. Stone, cold stone everywhere he looked—he was amazed at how quickly the temperature dropped when he entered one of its narrow winding streets, or stood on its cathedral floor, as if at the bottom of an enormous well. The El Grecos were white-limbed and cold. The castle in Segovia was even colder. Isabel, the Catholic queen, had held her court there and sent her warrior knights out the massive iron door to rid Spain of its last Moor, Jew or intruder of any sort. Down on the town plaza he stood beneath the aqueduct the Romans had built and marveled at how the unmortared stone had been cut and wedged into arches that still stood. It was hot down there. He stepped into one of the many bars, where hams and loops of sausages hung from the ceiling, and ordered not a beer or cool sherry or even a glass of sangria, but a brandy. But the cold was too far inside him for the brandy to reach.

  He went back to the hotel and for three days talked himself into believing he was sick. Juan, the desk clerk, sympathized—those castles were cold; if he’d gone down in the dungeon he might have picked up microbios centuries old—and made himself responsible. Juan had broths and purees and omelets sent to the room, and herb teas. There was a heavy red wine that came from a pueblo in the Ribera del Duero region of Castile that he claimed could cure anything, and he sent up a glass of that. The pueblo, in fact, had been Juan’s—its name was Medina del Rioseco—and it was from Juan that Ben first learned how bound each city-dweller was to his pueblo, and as sophisticated as he might become how unlikely he was to question the folk-truths he’d learned there.

  Juan would remove the food tray and leave the day’s newspapers. And when Ben got out of bed for good, it was because he thought he’d seen a face.

  Actually, two faces. They belonged to a man and woman just arrested in France. They were identified as ETA veterans who had risen through the ranks and come to occupy leadership roles. In addition to being collaborators in terror, they were “sentimentally linked.” Before they had established themselves in France they had had active roles in various comandos in Spain. The man, especially, had had a sanguinary career, with nine assassinations, among them a Supreme Court judge, held against his name. She, it appeared, was his helpmate. At a certain point they’d disappeared and reappeared in France, where they’d become first lieutenants to an ETA leader, nicknamed Txapote, who processed the information he received from Spain and then sent word back to the various comandos: these are the people you are to kill, x, y and z, for reasons we have deemed sufficient. When Txapote was arrested, this couple took his place. They received the information, the “intelligence” from “on the ground.” They made the final decisions. This month it’s this x, this y and this z.

  There’s a Civil Guard headquarters fronting a park in Madrid. There’ll be a young guard out patrolling. An American student will be running by. There may be others. X, y and z.

  Ben couldn’t be sure of the dates. More likely than not it had been Txapote who had issued the order to attack that Civil Guard headquarters. This couple had equally unpronounceable Basque last names. He studied the faces. The photograph of the man was clearer, better defined. He was in his midthirties now, and the face was fleshing out. The nose looked slightly swollen and out of line. There was a sinister look about the lower lip, a faint gleam that led to the darker gleam of the eyes, one of which, the right, was narrowed. Over the widened left eye the brow was raised. It was a look that said, I’ve seen you, I’ve pronounced your name, I’ve put you on my list.

  The woman’s face was slightly blurred. Her hair was disheveled, thick as a pelt. It half-covered her forehead in spiky black curls. Her eyes were opened wide and staring directly into the camera. Round eyes, straight nose, closed mouth, a chin softened in its line. She wore a necklace of some sort, with a large heart-shaped pendant, perhaps made of wood. She wasn’t talking. She was pictured beside the man, who said all he needed to with his sinister, straight-ahead look.

  The woman looked like a heedless girl who had been lured into following the man. Ben looked at her hard and said, “You and your man killed my daughter.”

  They hadn’t killed his daughter. They probably hadn’t even issued the order. Anyway, the French had them. They faced charges first in France, and only after serving their sentences there could they be extradited to Spain. Where they’d serve much longer sentences. If they were ever freed they’d be unrecognizable. This might be the last time anybody would see them side by side.

  At least they had gotten him out of bed. Juan was pleased, off the hook, and offered to arrange more day trips, or to serve as a travel guide and make phone calls ahead to hotels in provincial cities. Ben declined. He walked to the Paseo del Castellana and took his seat in the outdoor café there. On his third time back to the Café Gijon he saw the woman named Paula again, sitting where she’d sat before. This time she was alone and reading a newspaper.

  He sat down in front of her, with his back to that parallel street of two-lane traffic. If not at the same table, almost. But with that same angle of vision just off to his left.

  He said, “Hello,” and she looked up from her paper.

  It became clear that unless they wanted to behave like children one of them was going to have to get up and sit directly across from the other.

  Ben didn’t give her the chance. He stood and sat at her table.

  He said, “Your friends, Leslie and Garret?”

  “They’ve gone back to Dublin. Unless I go there, I see them once a year. They stop by here on the way home after one of their exotic trips. Leslie and I were college roommates.”

  “I got that,” he said. “When do you go back?”

  “I live here,” she said. “This is home.”

  She smiled at his surprise, that he wasn’t faced with another tourist like himself. Her lips were still chapped, and a couple of bottom teeth were set at an odd angle. Just a hint of that angling and his daughters would have been at the orthodontist’s, but the crooked teeth suited her. They were part of that weathering effect. Ground will freeze and thaw out and twist stones around like that. Gravestones.

  She seemed to Ben eminently companionable, and in his experience not many women were. But then, he wasn’t looking for a companion.

  “I’m curious,” he said. “How did that happen?”

  “How did what happen?”

  “That you made this your home.”

  “A life story already?”

  “I withdraw the question.”

  They smiled at each other.

&
nbsp; He said, “Do you come here often? I haven’t seen you since that day.”

  “I have six or seven cafés I like to sit in. Depends on the circumstances, I guess, the weather, the day of the week.” She paused, as if reviewing the week, or as if debating to what end she wanted to direct what remained of this day. “No, I probably haven’t been back here since then.”

  He took her pause as a cue, vaguely, something of a test. He put his question to her again. “What are you doing here? It doesn’t have to be the entire life story.”

  “It wouldn’t be. I’m not done yet, Ben.”

  He smiled.

  “And I’m guessing you’re not just a tourist . . .”

  “Toledo, Segovia, El Escorial.” Ben recited his stops.

  She sat back up, finished her coffee and nudged her newspaper aside. There was a moment when he could look behind her and watch the human traffic passing before that rushing backdrop of cars and trucks. Most of the motorbike riders wore helmets. The more daring ones didn’t as they cut across lanes. He picked out a couple walking by, in this case two young women, both attractive, slender, dressed in some sheer Mediterranean fabric, in profile close enough to be sisters, their sunglasses worn back on their heads at this early-evening hour . . . but the motor traffic caught them and he couldn’t follow them out.

  Paula said, “I could make it sound more dramatic than it is. I am an innocent American woman, brought to a foreign country and abandoned by a Latin snake.” She gave a mocking laugh, but with some reflection in it too, as if she were exaggerating only up to a point. “How’s that, Ben?”

  “I can’t be sure,” he said, “but I may have heard it before.”

  “The truth is I married a Spaniard who came to the States to get a master’s in hotel management. Spaniards love to come to the States to get master’s degrees. Among the wealthy it’s a rite of passage. My Spaniard—his name is Jorge Ortiz—came and did it beautifully. He was straight-A from the start. I married him and he brought me back to his hometown, in this case a city, not a pueblo, Valladolid. I have a large Catholic family I was ready to take a break from, and I walked into another one. Castilian Catholic, not Irish Catholic. There’s a difference.”