House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  It was like a blessing. He might have been placing her hand in his and sending them off.

  “Everybody has their baggage,” Paula reminded him. Since Jorge knew hers and she his, she must have been referring to Ben’s. Ben’s baggage.

  “Baggage!” Jorge laughed baggage off. “We have big city dumps in Spain for baggage. We also dump a lot of baggage beside the road. We’re not as clean as you are in the United States.”

  Jorge Ortiz had never stopped smiling at him. He appeared to be taking in at the eyes a sublime pleasure.

  Jorge caught the waiter’s attention and ordered a plate of mussels in paprika sauce and a cool bottle of wine. He sat a little off to the side, his chair pulled back at an angle.

  Paula said, “It was the secret to Jorge’s success as a hotel manager. Isn’t that right, querido? Just how you relieve a guest of his baggage. They try to teach you that in school, but they can’t.”

  Jorge smiled and nodded, rocking back in his chair as something, a private reference of some sort, seemed to pass between them.

  “Relieve them in just the right way,” Paula went on, “and you’ve got a guest for life.”

  Ben listened for sarcasm and didn’t hear it. It was an admiring statement of fact.

  Jorge turned his grin on his ex-wife. He wore a silky pale green shirt, open at the first button. He wore a gold chain around his neck. The neck was powerful and the visible chest hair darker than the hair on his head, which lay in thinning uncombed curls.

  He said, “If you’re going to leave home, you deserve the chance to step away clean. You just relieve them of their load, that’s all.” He turned to Ben with a sudden leap of interest in the eyes. “An author of yours, Henry David Thoreau. He watched people walking down the railroad tracks with all their possessions piled on their backs. He called it a big deformity. He said it was a metaphor for how people live their lives.”

  Ben had read Walden in high school. He remembered a man hoeing beans in rocky earth, and he remembered a man fishing in a very clear, very deep lake. Then, out of nowhere, he remembered the man’s description for that lake: “God’s eye.”

  The waiter came with the mussels and wine. Jorge took over, pouring the wine and dipping the mussel shells into the lemon and paprika sauce and holding out the first and plumpest mussel to Ben. Ben drank the sauce down, and with a tiny tug detached the mussel at the foot.

  Jorge got Paula eating and drinking too. The treat was on him. He ate and drank nothing. It appeared he was about to get up and leave them to their pleasure.

  Ben hurried to get the mussel shell out of his hands, the wine down his throat. “If Americans can take what they want from a country and piece together one of their own, what should I take from Spain?”

  “You’ve found it already!” For an instant Ben thought he was referring to his ex-wife, but, motioning around him, Jorge meant this, the life on the streets. “The public,” he insisted, churning that laugh up at the bottom of his voice, “Spaniards are at their best when they are on display. You can trust them then.”

  “And in private?”

  He shook his head, clicking his tongue. That sage smile was there in a level line across the eyes. “Too much is going on.”

  “When are they weakest?”

  “When they are strongest.” Jorge paused, as though to emphasize the paradox. “They identify with their traditions, and in their traditions lies their strength. But when they are at one with their traditions they are most exposed.”

  Ben leaned closer.

  “They are safe from themselves then, and defenseless before an outsider. Someone—”

  Ben completed Jorge’s thought. “—someone aware of the traditions but not commanded by them.”

  “Exactly.”

  For a moment Jorge Ortiz settled back in his chair. Ben and Paula were in no imminent danger of being deprived of his company. Jorge’s eyes didn’t narrow, but they took on some sort of intensity they hadn’t had before, the green cleaner, less encumbered, more like a brightly faceted jewel than the iris of an eye. He looked a little oracular sitting there. But when he spoke it was more to confess a need than to prophesy.

  “I’ll tell you something else I like about the United States of America. You can be a renegade there. If you want to, you can escape it all. What do you leave behind—your machines and your beautiful land? But Thoreau’s beautiful land was just a pond, do you see what I mean? You can find beautiful ponds everywhere. A Spaniard can’t do that. We poor Spaniards are born captives. We are captives to the Iberians and the Romans and the Celts and the Moors and all the Christian soldiers. We have so much history and so many traditions it is like trying to walk through a forest of spiderwebs—you can never pick them all off. You Americans can. You can walk right up to the edge of it all and step free.”

  “And you don’t think that can be terrifying?”

  “Terrifying, yes, and maybe exhilarating too. Like a fresh start. No Spaniard can disown Spain. No Spaniard can be a renegade. Who are the most violent anti-Spaniards we have? ETA? No one is more bound to history and tradition than the Basques. All those bombs they set off? It’s as if they are trying to blow themselves free. They can’t—ever. They’re like an exaggeration of all the rest of us. You can take that point of view, you know.”

  Ben nodded. You could take that point of view. He dipped another mussel in its shell into the sauce and poured himself more wine. When he met Jorge’s eyes again, they had softened, that sharp, faceted green seemed shot through with sunlight. Jorge was smiling, laughing at his own bout of seriousness. He reached out to grip Ben again at the shoulder.

  “Hombre!” he said in his rousing wealth of fellow feeling. “Hombre.” He modulated his tone, more an expression of compassion now, like the last knell of a bell.

  After he left Ben and Paula sat a while in silence, then Ben got up and left too. Paula followed him. They walked up Alcala to the Gran Via, through thickening crowds to the Plaza de España. They continued along Calle Princesa, a narrower avenue, with more noise and exhaust. They passed three Metro stops. When they reached Moncloa, had they not veered right they would have entered a precinct of government buildings. They turned onto Calle Isaac Peral instead, where the heat caught up with them and the air-conditioned cafeterias became a temptation to stop. They kept on, Isaac Peral to San Francisco de Sales; there they turned away from the university and continued gradually uphill until they came to a park. They had been walking without pause for forty-five minutes. There was a children’s playground just inside the park, with tables set out in the shade where they might have rested. They didn’t. In the company of pedestrians of all sorts, including joggers, Ben led Paula along the broad walkway surrounding the park until they came to the far side, where a Civil Guard headquarters was located and, on a tight angle across from that, a carob tree whose blasted bark had had another three months to heal since he’d been here last.

  “My daughter Michelle was killed here,” he told her, “right across from this tree. It was a bomb blast from ETA. The target was that Civil Guard headquarters across the street. Michelle happened to be running by. Three years ago next month.”

  Paula stared at him, sweating freely, slowly nodding her head.

  He added, “There’ve been so many ETA bombings. It’d be hard to resist making them into a comparison for anything you want. I understand.” He had to catch his breath. He was winded. It was not his sadness rising up to block his throat. “But here is where the comparisons start.” He chose his spot and went to stand over it on the sidewalk.

  “I remember,” Paula said in a stunned voice. Then she said it again: “I remember,” in the awakened voice of someone recovering something buried in the past. “I thought then, ‘What a horrible freak of chance.’”

  “That was my daughter Michelle.”

  “I thought of you, Ben. I wondered who the parents of that poor girl were. You weren’t just some anonymous people.” She stepped up to him and placed her h
and on his upper arm where Jorge had given him his parting grip. She insisted, “I thought of you.”

  “I was in Lexington, Kentucky. I never left.”

  Her incredulity gave way to astonishment. She became almost fierce in her insistence. “You!” Suddenly she had him around the neck. She was wet all over. They stood over the spot where he’d determined his daughter had taken her last breath, and he could feel sobs rise up through Paula’s back. He moved off the spot and into the shade of that tree the bomb blast had not killed.

  The afternoon sun angled in over that tree and threw a glaring veil of light over the sidewalk and the line of cars and up to the door where the two boy soldiers stood in full sweltering uniform cradling their machine guns. Had Michelle not been there to take her part of the blast, this tree might not have survived. Ben broke a pod off the nearest limb, cracked it open and held it under his nose. It smelled of a rancid vanilla.

  With the freckles swarming like shadows over the pallor of her face, Paula wanted him to understand. “I knew you long before you knew me. I saw you just like I’m seeing you now. I didn’t see your wife, I don’t know why. But you . . . This is very strange. When I thought of your grief I pictured you. That day you were sitting there and Leslie was talking about the animals, I knew I had seen you someplace before.”

  She shook her head. She seemed to feel some horrible complicity he didn’t understand.

  “You wanted an end to the secrets,” he said. “It’s the last one I have left.”

  She needed to sit down. The only place to sit was with her back to that tree. With his foot he tried to clear a space for her. Owners had failed to clean up after their dogs in the area, and lacking space for himself all he could do was squat beside her. Through an opening between cars he could see the two guards across the street, and they could see Paula and him. One had alerted the other, and together they regarded this middle-aged, clearly foreign couple as worthy of suspicion. One took the trouble to step up to the curb and peer threateningly into the sunlight. Of course, these boys were bored. It had been three years since one of their kind had been killed. There was a plaque there, which they had probably not bothered to read. The second you got your name written on a plaque you disappeared. Plaques just underlined the unreality of it all. What bomb blast?

  Ben came out of his squat and, obeying an impulse of anger, stepped back out onto the sidewalk, then, when a young couple had passed, out onto the curb himself. He had the advantage of the sun. The guard wore a peaked cap, not the patent-leather tricorn hat the Civil Guard was famous for. He was round-faced. His eyes were narrowed in slits, his cheeks mounded into muscular balls. He had exposed nostrils and not much of a chin. For him, Ben might have been this massive, ill-defined shape stepping out of the sun. The guard raised his gun midway up his chest, and the man he threatened threw back his head and shoulders in a vaunting gesture he’d never made before. “Que!” Ben said in a barking growl, an equally new sound. He stepped off the curb and stood between the parked cars. With his right hand lowered flat against a car hood, which was burning, he demanded, “Que vas a hacer, niño!”

  The guard tightened into a crouch and with the barrel of his gun motioned to his companion to join him. Then he appeared to make a similar motion to Ben. Was he taunting him into crossing the street? Instead of playing childish games, why wasn’t he out shooting down ETA members and evening the score? No one had more right than Ben Williamson to cross that street and tell him so, which was what he was about to do, when Paula pulled him back. “Don’t,” she said, “that’s not the way,” and he said, “They’re like children, no one remembers a thing,” and she said, “I do.”

  As he’d led Paula to the spot, she now led him away. They took a taxi, and he knew enough of Madrid that if he’d been paying any attention at all he could have learned exactly how to reach Paula’s house. But he failed to note the way. They rode the elevator up to her apartment and she sat him down on the couch. She was going to make them supper and he wondered why. He could still taste her ex-husband’s mussels in lemon and paprika sauce on the back of his tongue. He was not hungry. He was not a man who could eat a meal, regard himself in a full-length mirror, then fall into bed and make love. He saw that boy with the machine gun again, dressed in a dense forest green. He had those round snorting nostrils in that pugnacious face. Not the way, Paula had said. But Paula had been sitting propped against a tree whose bark had been blasted bare. Incapacitated. Ben sank into her sofa. It had been that long walk. The sun. It was that word Paula had taught him, ensimismado. With a heavy displacement of weight—he was his own hillside caving in—he let himself go.

  The television was on. The remote was in his hand. On the evening news Armando Ordoki was sitting at a table with two other men, the one on his left, student-aged and student-looking, with wire-rim glasses and an ascetic face, and the man on his right much older, the eyes pouched and the mouth fallen, and Ordoki, with his right index finger raised, was holding forth. Madrid’s fascist government might hound the Basque patriots into hiding, but it would never destroy them, and the three generations sitting at that table offered proof. He named the man already in hiding, the man with the chalky pallor and the ashen mouth, who, in his contempt for the farce being conducted in Spain’s courts, offered further proof. Ordoki leaned in over the table. Something about the Basque autonomous government collaborating with Madrid in this witch hunt. The consequences of that. His finger was raised high, and his mouth twisted in a loose-lipped snarl. His eyes shot from side to side, then stared defiantly at the camera. The flesh on his face had been brought to a boil.

  Paula was sitting on the sofa with Ben. The remote was on the coffee table, the television was off, and he couldn’t be sure it had ever been on. He didn’t know what had happened to supper. Had they already eaten? Had she given up on it? Was she there to lead him off to bed? Paula kept her distance. She drew breaths as if she were about to speak, but when she did it was in a whisper. “I’m scared, Ben.”

  “You’re scared.”

  “I don’t scare easily. I’ve lived in this country for almost twenty years, and I’m scared.”

  He understood. They sat on the sofa waiting for something to happen to them. The next thing.

  “I don’t understand this afternoon.” Her voice was like one of his daughters’ when they were little girls. It was as clear as a trembling chime in a world of engulfing noise. “It was like I had to meet you. When Michelle was killed, it was like she was a daughter of mine I never had. It happened and I read about it—it was in all the news—and I said to myself, I’ll never have a child if this is what happens to them. I think I decided then.”

  She paused. He heard her shiver. He could have moved closer, but it wouldn’t have done any good.

  “I don’t believe in destiny,” she continued. “I don’t really believe in God. But something brought us together. Otherwise I wouldn’t have seen you like that. You understand, don’t you, Ben? I saw you! Not just any grieving father—I saw you! I saw the sadness in your eyes. I saw your shoulders. I saw the way you stood. Your empty hands.”

  She shuddered. She drew two breaths, but only the second got through. “That guardia civil could have shot you, you know. You don’t know how nervous they are.”

  He couldn’t remember how he’d come to be standing on the street, defying that boy and his machine gun. He could only remember Paula’s hand on his arm, pulling him away.

  “Please,” she said, “call your daughter. Call Annie. I want to be here when you do. I want to hear the sound of her voice.”

  He owed her that. She was scared. There was death everywhere in this country she’d adopted. He did not get up, and neither did she, but her phone appeared in his hand. He pressed the numbers for Annie’s phone, and nothing happened. He pressed the numbers for his own phone and heard it ring. Then he heard the sound of his own voice. “I’m not home now but I’ll be happy to return your call.” He let Paula hear it too. When the time came to l
eave a message he left that up to her. He saw that she was about to, she was about to speak, when a fine panic took control of her. If I leave my number now, what new forces am I exposing myself to? Call me back, and do I get God or Fate or some roaring animal or annihilating Chance? Ben read that in her face. She turned off the phone and hid it between them on the sofa. She kept her hand over it for a while, as if it were a shameful secret they shared. He didn’t remember when she took her hand away and touched him on the cheek. By that time he must have been asleep.

  X

  When the phone rang she had already stepped out of the house and locked the door. Her father’s car was loaded with her stuff and she was late in returning to college. What persuaded her to turn around, reopen the house, step back in and answer it? Afterward she’d tell herself there’d been a kind of desolate persistence in the ring. The kind of need that could only repeat itself. Please. Please. Please.

  The woman said, “My name is Paula Ortiz. I live in Madrid. I’m a close friend of your father’s. He’s disappeared and I don’t know where he’s gone. I thought you should know.” And before Annie could reply that disappearing was something her father was good at, the voice that belonged to Paula Ortiz added, “You’re Annie. I know you. I know your father very well.”

  How well? Well enough for Annie to say, He’s gone looking for Michelle. If Michelle isn’t in Madrid, find out where she’s gone.

  She said instead, “He hasn’t come back here.”

  “I’ve been waiting for this to happen,” Paula Ortiz said.

  Annie thought quickly. Her father and Paula Ortiz were having an affair. Her father had had enough of Paula Ortiz, as Annie had of Jonathan, and of all Jonathan’s predecessors. Her father had split, but being kinder than Annie, he had made his disappearance seem mysterious, as if other forces were at work. Paula Ortiz was worried for Annie’s father when she might have shown some consideration toward herself. She’d been left.