House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  “Will you show me where Michelle was killed?”

  They took a taxi to a park, where Paula told the driver precisely where they wanted to be let off. It was around this park that her sister had run before she went to class, so it had been early in the morning, when not as many people were out—Annie had to imagine it differently. Paula led Annie around a corner and down a side of the park with trees on one side—tall pointed cypresses and their opposites, squat, crooked-limbed trees with brown, arthritic-looking pods—and on the other a long brick-and-concrete building that reminded her of a prison since it had guard towers on the corners.

  At the main entrance were two guards, young, perhaps no more than her age. They were squinting into the sun. A passing cloud cast them in a moment’s shadow and Annie felt the urge to wave.

  “They aren’t the same as the other day,” Paula said, sounding relieved. “I was afraid one of them might shoot your father.”

  “Why would he want to do that?”

  Paula shook her head. “Your father wasn’t himself.”

  Recalling the sound of Paula’s voice on the phone that day when she’d been seconds away from walking out of her father’s house, recalling the whispering stillness and the fright, Annie asked, “And you? Were you yourself?”

  “I’m better now. There was a moment . . .”

  A moment . . . when?

  “. . . when my imagination ran away with me.”

  Then Paula made a vow. “It won’t happen again.”

  She pointed to a particularly disfigured tree; she plotted a line out to a spot on the sidewalk, then went there to stand while pedestrians passed by them. At a break in the foot traffic, Annie stepped out to join her.

  She hated the spot at once. It smelled faintly of dog shit and exhaust and cheap cologne. Maybe something those boys were wearing under their heavy green uniforms. She knew her father had stood here thinking the same thing, and that only made it worse because the spot, closer to the park than the barracks but between the two worlds, had taken her father too.

  “Here? Right here?”

  Paula nodded. “According to your father. According to Ben.”

  They were standing there looking down at the sidewalk when one pedestrian didn’t pass, but stood back from them, as if back from a mourner’s front row, looking down at the sidewalk too. She was a tall woman, taller even than Annie, except she was slightly stooped, which gave her a hollowed-out appearance and the look of a woman who might nurse a worry over the years. Her eyes were large and seemed dulled with strain. She wore a sweater against a nonexistent chill.

  “Are you Americans? By any chance do you know a man named Ben Williamson?”

  The sound of her father’s name, spoken in that polite inquiring tone, seemed intrusive to Annie in a way she couldn’t account for, and she felt herself recoil. Perhaps she just didn’t like the idea that there were now three women with Ben Williamson on their minds.

  “I don’t mean to interfere, it’s just that you’re standing here, where . . .” The woman paused, cast a troubled glance down at the sidewalk, then back up to Annie. She sighed and let her shoulders fall. With tiny shakes of the head she admitted defeat. But the head-shakes set off an even tinier clashing of the absurd bronze earrings she wore, a sound that roused Annie in a way she couldn’t check.

  “Here where his daughter was killed? By a bomb, three years ago?”

  She didn’t have to be mean. “Stingy” was the word. She could have been generous with her grief.

  “Yes,” the woman replied quietly.

  “But I’m his daughter,” Annie almost crowed. “He had two, you know. One a backup to the other.”

  It was then that Paula came to her relief. Perhaps Paula was just embarrassed. She introduced herself and she introduced Annie. Annie was emotion-racked, exhausted after a long trip, and very young, but two middle-aged women could make allowances and restore an air of civility like that. Like that! Annie heard her mother’s fingers break off a come-to-attention snap all the way across the Atlantic. She glanced over at the two boys guarding that barracks or prison, or whatever it was. They were slouched. She was tempted to cross that street and see if she could straighten them up. Put some iron up their johnsons.

  Instead she listened to Paula Ortiz and the woman whose name was Madeline Pratt talk about her father. Madeline was director of the program Michelle had attended. It had been Madeline who had first brought her father to this park to show him the spot where Michelle had been killed. Since then, instead of trying to forget what had happened, she’d found herself coming back. She’d thought a lot about Ben Williamson, too, and wondered what had happened to him. The truth was, she’d worried. That time she’d brought him here she’d left him in such a state . . .

  “What kind of state?” Paula asked.

  “He was very angry. He wanted to shout at me, but it was all bottled up inside and I could see he was shouting at himself.”

  “Yes,” Paula murmured, “I’ve seen him like that.”

  Madeline turned to Annie. “I wanted to help him, but he wouldn’t let me. I didn’t even know where he was staying, or I would have called to see how he was.” She added, with measured self-reproach, “I suppose I could have found out.”

  “When he decides to disappear,” Annie had to offer some consolation, she wasn’t an utter shit, “there’s not much anybody can do.”

  Madeline smiled. Then she shivered—anybody could see that she was in a weakened state. “I’m so sorry about your sister,” she told Annie. “Students have to have their independence. Your sister was very . . .”

  “Responsible?”

  Madeline nodded. “I just want you to know there was nothing anybody could have done.”

  She seemed about to cry, and Annie touched her arm. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. Michelle would have demanded her rights and gotten them. If she came out here running, she had a right to, and she was right to exercise that right. That’s how she saw it. Throw her out of your program and she’d petition to get back in, and she’d get back in. . . .”

  “That never crossed my mind, believe me,” Madeline protested. “She was an ideal student.”

  “I know she was,” Annie quietly submitted. She actually made a little bow. “It’s weird, isn’t it, people walking by, like they live lives just like ours. That’s just the sort of thing Michelle wouldn’t wonder about, not for a second. That’s what I mean. They have their lives and she had hers. Well, she had hers.”

  Again Paula stepped in to rescue her from her colliding emotions. She said, “Ben has gone away, Madeline. We think he’s somewhere in Spain. But he could be anywhere. When you talked to him, was there anything he said . . . ?”

  Madeline raised her head and looked off past the pointed tops of the cypresses. “He wanted to come here,” she said. “He said if I brought him here and showed him the spot he’d leave me in peace. I got the idea no other place in the world was important to him then.”

  “And you didn’t talk about anywhere else?”

  “The Basque country because he asked about ETA.”

  “Where in the Basque country?”

  “No particular place.”

  “What did he want to know?”

  “What everybody wants to know. How the Basques could continue to let ETA kill in their name.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I didn’t know.” Madeline paused. She turned inward and drew a long breath. “I’ve never felt right about leaving him that day. I could see that I wasn’t going to do him any good, but I thought it was my duty to stay . . . I don’t mean ‘duty.’”

  “No, not ‘duty.’ I understand,” Paula said.

  “I come back to see if I can find him again. Mostly in the mornings.”

  “And you haven’t?”

  “No, but I think he’s been here. Don’t ask me why I think that.”

  “No.”

  “Those guards over there. Have you noticed,
they’re always boys.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a boy who was killed. The waste . . . it’s just sad, you know. . . .”

  Madeline shook her head again, with more futile anger now. She turned to Annie. Annie wasn’t used to seeing administrators break down, their emotions working up through that mask of efficiency they wore, and she wondered if it was her duty to lead this one back to her office and sit her behind her desk.

  “Please forgive me,” Madeline begged of Michelle Williamson’s bereaved sister. “I shouldn’t have intruded like this.”

  “It’s all right,” Annie said.

  “It’s something I have to work through alone.”

  Both Annie and Paula murmured their protests, but neither offered to take up her cause.

  The three of them looked down again. Urban concrete. The swellings and tiltings, the cracks and stains of use. A lesson in the trampling ongoingness of life—and at least one death. With their heads still bowed to the spot, Madeline said, “Eventually he’ll come back here.”

  Waiting for a taxi, Paula told Annie that she disagreed. She didn’t think Ben would return to Parque Santander. Madeline Pratt’s talk of ETA had recalled to her a time she’d been in his hotel room—where they’d gone to make love, Annie assumed. There Paula had seen newspaper clippings on ETA and on one leader in particular, a man named Armando Ordoki, a name that sounded as if it belonged to two different people, Annie thought. Armando was a Latin gallant from a bygone day and Ordoki a snub-nosed bully who smelled of a barnyard. These clippings had been lying on top of a map of Spain. In the cab driving back through the city, Annie shared with Paula what her father had said to her the last time they’d had dinner together. He had advised her or himself or the world around them “to dig in to face the day that was sure to come.” That was not the kind of thing her father would normally say. But he’d said it with, as far as she could remember, no self-consciousness for the melodrama of the phrasing or the portentousness of the tone. She’d laughed at him, she confessed to his lover. He had provided her with a laugh.

  Nonetheless, here was a day that had come, and Annie was nowhere close to being dug in.

  She was tired. She had to rest. The next day they would decide what to do about her twice-missing father. But from the Palace Hotel, where Paula had let her off, she began to walk. In the plazas there was still some daylight, but in the narrower streets it was already dark. When she was a kid on her bike she’d played a game with her friends called “Coin Corner.” At every corner they came to they’d flip a coin: heads they’d turn to the right, tails to the left; they weren’t allowed to turn back or go straight ahead. Occasionally they’d end up in the country, where they wouldn’t come to another corner for miles. Once, she remembered, the luck of the coin toss had had them circling home in a right-angled spiral. There’d been another time when they’d all gotten lost down by the river and she’d had to stop in a bait shop and call her father. But that had been all right. They hadn’t disobeyed; they’d obeyed the toss of that coin. Michelle, of course, had never played. She wouldn’t allow one minute of her life to be determined by a coin toss. The coin Annie and her friends had used was a quarter, and the head that directed them, big and shiny enough to see in the dark, belonged to George Washington, father of the country.

  She decided she needed a guide, and the first she chose was a proud, upright man with a pelt of black hair shining down his neck. She followed him until he came to a door where he growled, “Pedro,” into an apartment intercom and was buzzed upstairs. Next a very thin girl, pale, un-Spanish, hair a phosphorescent blond, shivering in a minidress, led Annie on a quick-march into a bar where she pleaded with a burly man, who could have been her father, or a pimp, for money, which he finally gave her. The girl clattered back into the streets on elevator heels and disappeared. There was a young man Annie’s age whom she followed because he had a resigned, almost restful look on his face, until he met up with another whose resignation just seemed dull to her, more the result of sloth. They stood on the sidewalk talking—about computers, she believed. To get away from them she chose an elderly man dressed in a sort of jacket-shirt that looked vaguely tropical. His cologne was as sharp as smelling salts. She heard him muttering something to himself at set intervals that sounded like “bueno . . . bueno,” and she noticed that no one got in his way. Up a darker cross street with no stores and few bars, he stopped in front of a tall door, whose wood was so old it looked petrified. Above it she noticed the weather-corroded form of what might once have been an escutcheon. He opened a small door in that tall door, and the cool mustiness of a stone courtyard flowed out at her, mixed with his cologne. Once he’d stepped inside, he turned to her. In the shadows, he had a narrow face of long hard lines, ridge lines, something shaped by the elements, and eyes giving back a sharp black light. “Lineage”—she thought of the word. The face of a conquistador; eyes as black and cutting-fine as obsidian. What you came to Spain for. “Le puedo servir en algo, señorita?” he said like a true caballero, but with a history of cruelty in his tone.

  She backed away from him, not intending to offend. She was only looking for something else. Returning to a better-lit street, she thought she saw her father ahead, his shape at least, those familiar, slightly sagging but not yet broken-down lines. She didn’t. It wasn’t anybody she saw. She stepped into the near-dark of cross streets and came out at a Metro stop where a number of bars were located; the small plaza they fronted was covered with tables. Her father had been here, at this cozy little hot spot of Madrid night life. She’d bet on it. Doing what? Searching the faces of the boys and girls her age clustered around the bars and then going over each of the tables out on the plaza, lit by the streetlights’ orange glow. A parchment-orange glow, just the right light for this Old World nook. Looking for? His daughter, Michelle, of course. Annie too found herself going over the tables. She saw groups of girls she identified as Americans because those were the shoes and socks and designer jeans, the name-brand tee-shirts and college-embossed sweatshirts, the ponytails and orthodontically straightened teeth they wore. She went to a bar open onto the street and ordered a gin and tonic from the bartender, although waiters were serving the tables. She took it with her and sat at a table where there were three girls and a vacant chair awaiting a fourth.

  She introduced herself. No, she was not in an abroad program but did attend a quality university, which she named, and that was cool. She was here on a self-assigned sabbatical to scope out the scene. That was even cooler. That made her an object of envy. Maybe she’d do a survey of these abroad programs in all major European capitals. In that case, she’d want to know, Why Spain? That was not so cool, not if they had to defend their choice of country to her as they’d done in paragraph after bullshitting paragraph on all those application forms. But they’d try. At least one of them would. This was a girl named Susan, with glowing cheeks, a turned-up, glowing nose, a pink and glowing tongue tip. Spain was this and Spain was that. The old and the cutting edge side by side. Families who went by tradition and families who went by the latest fad. Boys who thought they were toreros and boys who were more technologically advanced than boys in the States. The classes at the university could be a bore, but there was this awesome life on the streets, which was a university in itself. That was the real reason to come to Spain. Susan swiveled around to take in this plaza, snuggled down in its rectangle of modest apartment buildings.

  “And ETA?” Annie said. ETA? they wondered. “Yeah, you know, ETA, those guys that blow awesome places like this up and don’t mind killing the odd American when they do it.”

  “ETA is a Basque problem,” another of them said. “We don’t go to the Basque country.”

  “Give them enough time,” Annie told them, “and ETA will come to you.”

  They turned away from her then, even Susan, who gave her that drop-jawed look that asked, How could you bring up ETA after we’ve been so sweet to you?

  “Armando Ordoki?” Ann
ie overpronounced both halves of the name. “Armando” with a swoon. “Ordoki” with an oinking grunt. “Anybody heard of him?” Like a teacher tapping her chalk on the blackboard to get a wayward class’s attention, she had to tap her glass on the metal table to get theirs.

  “Armando Ordoki,” the authority among them finally said, “is not ETA. He’s the leader of Borroka,” which, for Annie’s information, meant “the struggle.” “You should pay a little attention to current events.”

  “ETA, Borroka,” Annie shrugged, “what’s the difference?”

  She entered the Metro and stood before its color-coded map of the city. There were ten subway lines, ten colors, and the longer she looked at the map, the more they came to resemble an elaborately designed swastika. She located herself on the lime-green line at the plaza of Chueca. From there she branched out. When she actually bought a ticket and stood waiting for a train, she had a detailed abstract of the city in her mind. The trains were more than half full, but she paid no attention to the people. The people were up on the streets. The lime-green to the fuchsia to the cobalt-blue to the yellow to the red to the battleship-gray. When she came up for air she was half a block from a park, which, as she approached, she thought she recognized. Had she meant to return here? She had not. She hadn’t even known the park’s name. It was large, perhaps the equivalent of three city blocks, and except for a handful of lonely lights, dark in its interior. Walking its perimeter you passed out of the shadow and into the light again and again. You did this until you came to the spot, which you could locate exactly if you could plot a line from that barracks door to the scarred tree. But she couldn’t be sure of the tree; the one she picked out was so gnarly and rough there was no way to tell in the dark where its roughness was due to unnatural causes. If there had been guards in front of the barracks, she might have asked them. But the guards were gone. The city was teeming everywhere else, but here at the moment there were no passersby. That jetlagged vacancy she’d started the day with was back on her. Love your sister or end up hating yourself, had been her mother’s parting advice. As her exhaustion carried her closer and closer to Michelle’s disembodied state, Annie could turn the tables and say, All right, Michelle, you’ve been a shade longer than I have. If you love me—if you love me—you’ll come out of hiding and clue me in. They’d played hide-and-seek as girls, but sooner or later Michelle would just go off and not come back. A gamer, Annie would look for her and look for her before giving up in a loser’s disgrace. Here they were again, in a foreign country, playing the same game. The only difference was that they were both twenty-one. Annie had caught up with her sister and had a right to demand that Michelle show her face. Hide-and-seek. She felt like a child, but she was so fucking far from home she had to find somebody. Being bitterly honest, though, she could admit that she didn’t care if Michelle stayed dead another three years, as long as she could find their dad. But she didn’t like being bitterly anything. It was not her style.