House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  XI

  He became a tourist, after all the years.

  He was a tourist of train rides. In a light that was clear, equable and gray, he looked out his window and saw granite boulders encrusted with lichen, swaths of seasonal ferns, plots of sunflowers with their heads burned black; a perspective opened and he saw a plain, crossed in the middle distance by paths of an alkaline white. The train climbed, entered a tunnel, and when it emerged he looked out over an upland basin with yellowed poplars marking the course of streams. The basin was a natural pocket, before the age of tunnels an all but impregnable enclave, and as any tourist might, he thought of the fiefdoms of Old Castile, its history of high-mindedness and hard Christian steel.

  The train crossed a river. It crossed the basin and entered a defile.

  At close hand he saw a town rising out of the dirt and rock, a town the color of dirt and rock, except for the aged gold of the lichen-spotted tiles and the red tile of an anomalous new roof.

  The defile deepened. More tunnels. Blackberry brambles when the train reentered the light. More blackened heads of sunflowers. More ferns, a cidery gold. Overlooking the tracks a low Romanesque church with a bell gable, within which he saw the bell and beyond which he saw the sky.

  Ascending, another tunnel, another upland basin, already green with winter wheat.

  Little stubs of towns, gathered around their churches.

  A sheepherder and his flock of sheep, shaped by the darting feints of his dog.

  Vineyards, gravid with grapes. Bunches being cut from the vine, heaped into woven baskets.

  Truck yards, high-rises, building cranes, a lush green football field. They were entering a small city. A river flowed under the tracks with a steady, untroubled current. He saw the town’s name. Arando de Duero. The river that watered half of Castile, gave its name to its wines.

  Beyond, utter flatness, high and wide. To the west a vanishing horizon, to the east a barely perceptible wrinkling of the land.

  He took advantage of the sameness and went to sleep. He awoke to the name “Burgos” being called over the train’s speakers. Beyond some track-side warehouses, he saw twin cathedral spires, spiky with protrusions. But he didn’t really wake up until the train came to a dead stop in the middle of the country and he looked out the windows to see workers repairing a parallel track. One of the rails had been ripped apart. Its ends curled up. He had never seen iron curled like that, as if the rail were as pliable as a paper clip. A tourist, and no physicist, he asked himself what force.

  Night fell as the train was about to move up into the throat of a jagged pass. They entered the town of Pancorbo. In the last light he was able to make out on the crumbling station walls the spray-painted words Puto Madrid.

  From that point until he arrived at his destination, he traveled with the reflection of his own peering face imposed on the rushing darkness.

  He was a tourist of provincial cities.

  Vitoria, capital of the autonomous Basque country. He was surprised by Vitoria’s beauty. He must have been expecting something industrial and gray. The gray was there, the buildings on the city’s main street, Calle Dato, were faced with granite, but all of them had glittering bay windows, miradores, extending from the ground floor to the mansard roofs, whose sashes were freshly painted white. It was like walking down a canyon vertically veined with jewels. Men and women stood out before the tapa bars with their tumblers of red wine and their food. The canyon was a river of rich arousing smells.

  The hotel he found rated only one star; the window in his room looked down into an interior well. Two framed prints hung on the wall. One was of a pretty street of white houses with charming iron balconies and red geraniums, somewhere in the south. The other was of a church façade, as imposing and austere as a cliff face, streaked by rain. Surely, the north.

  He entered another street, Kalea Cuchilleria. Kalea must have been the Basque word for street, but the signs and banners he saw hung there, with all their X’s and Z’s, G’s and T’s, were unintelligible to him. This was a poorer, more dimly lit street, built on a gradual decline; it was lined with bars and inexpensive restaurants and one-room groceries. Most of the bars had a garish discotheque lighting. But there were others, bars that were plainly lit, hard-edged, and seemed to give off an uncompromising chill. Some had photographs in the windows, of young Basque men and women, under each of which a name was printed and a date in the past. He recognized these faces. They weren’t the mug shots he’d seen in the newspapers, but they stared straight ahead out of eyes that might never have blinked. Whatever mercy they revealed was reserved for a future date.

  Outside one of these bars, he stood reading a notice posted beside the door, written in both Spanish and Basque. The notice informed him that this was an establishment that valued free speech, and that lately police had been entering with the express purpose of denying patrons that privilege. In passing they ripped down posters and subjected customers and management to various kinds of abuse. He entered. Posters were still up—perhaps the police hadn’t been here in a while. There was a large composite photograph on the wall to his right made up twenty-nine small photographs. He counted them. One was of a young woman with her head thrown back. She appeared to be laughing. A breeze appeared to be blowing her dark hair. Five of the twenty-nine had a black slash across them and the word “Etxean” written there. Dead, he assumed. Or maybe disgraced.

  Two young women were sitting in back at the bar. They were speaking a language that seemed rough-hewn from the air. The only other patrons, a man and woman in a booth in the front room, looked as if they were keeping some sadness to themselves, perhaps a parting. The bartender, a young man, served Ben his glass of wine.

  Ben alluded to the notice outside and asked the bartender what it was the police did, the abuses, what was the worst, and the young man nodded, as if this thoughtfully inquiring tourist, who might have been undercover police himself, had come to the right place. “They torture us for our beliefs,” he said. “They don’t want us to look like ourselves because we stand for everything they don’t, and when they look at us they see their shame. So they do that,” and he directed his patron’s attention to the poster on the wall at his back.

  It was another composite, but made up of only three photographs and all of the same man. The “before” was of a round-faced boy of perhaps twenty, with an alert and unwavering but undefiant gaze. He wore a striped collarless shirt, buttoned to the top. His neck was unmarked. There were two “after” photographs. In the first the boy wore a neck brace and a white shirt or gown of some sort. His face was badly swollen and, except for the area around the mouth, which had a nocturnal pallor, colored a raspberry red. At first glance he seemed to be wearing sunglasses; a closer look revealed that the area around his eyes had been beaten black and that the skin had a glossy sheen easy to mistake for glass. In the third photograph the back of this boy’s head was pictured, and a sizable chunk of his hair had been ripped down to the white of the scalp. This boy had a name, Unai Romano. The Basque word for “torture” was a borrowing, as if the concept was meaningless until the Spaniards came along: “torturak.” The text continued in Spanish: “100 prisoners were tortured this year alone. After seeing this, what are you going to do?”

  A tourist of tortured Basque prisoners.

  Ben asked, “This Unai Romano, what did he do? What did they accuse him of doing?”

  The bartender shook his head. “Of belonging to a subversive organization,” he said. Una banda armada. “They do that and think we won’t recognize ourselves. One day they’ll do that to me.”

  “The Civil Guard?”

  The bartender nodded. “The Spanish national police too. The Basque police—our own police torture us. As soon as you cross the border, the French police. They all take turns. They’re like occupying armies competing to see who can do the most harm.”

  “ETA?” Ben said.

  The bartender smiled.

  “ETA didn’t protect him
.” Ben signaled over his back to Unai Romano, bruised beyond recognition.

  The bartender smiled.

  “How do you know I’m not police?” Ben asked.

  “I watched you reading our notice beside the door. I saw you looking at the faces in the photographs, those of us who are in Spanish prisons. I saw the way you looked at them,” the bartender gestured to the girls, “and I saw the way you looked at me. You’re not police. You’re someone else.”

  “Who?” Ben was keenly curious in that moment.

  “Someone who wants to know the truth.”

  “A hundred prisoners tortured this last year is a very round number. What if it’s a lie? What if it’s only him, Unai Romano?”

  “It’s not.”

  “But what if it is?”

  “If it is, it’s as bad as a hundred. It’s a hundred all in one.”

  “If it’s just one,” Ben said, “then it won’t happen to you. That’s what I mean.”

  “It will,” the bartender said.

  The bartender was no more than a boy.

  A tourist of Basque boys counting the minutes until they become disfigured men?

  He continued on a bus up winding valley roads. The valley rose in terraced steps. These were unrocked, grassy elevations; on the lower and broader ones cattle grazed, above them sheep. The grassed terraces formed pleasing patterns with the forests of pine and spruce. Where the trees had been lumbered, reforestation had taken place, and the young trees neatly planted in rows gave the whole hillside a combed look. There were no crags, no inaccessible peaks.

  He might have been in Switzerland. On neutral ground.

  The small river running down the valley was called the Duna. Built on its banks he saw the same town again and again. Narrow, long and tight, the highway on one side and train tracks on the other. Lumber mills and steel mills, a few still running, at the extremes. The nucleus, a small plaza mayor, a church, he assumed a town hall and frequently a two-walled court of some kind where a game like handball might have been played. Apartment buildings built tall and in close proximity to take advantage of the limited space. Housed at such close quarters, an apartment dweller might hear his neighbor’s whispers. Only those people who lived in apartments whose balconies overlooked the river might be able to take a breath entirely their own. Except that the river gave off a whiff of sewage, its color a murky gray-green.

  Wash hung from those balconies. It would have the river’s smell.

  Entering the towns he saw signs, erected by the Basque department of tourism, welcoming visitors. Of the four languages these signs were written in, all but the Basque language had been spray-painted out.

  The name of the town of Mondragon was spray-painted out and only its Basque name, Arrasate, remained visible.

  The bus reached the river Deba and followed it northwest to the small city of Eibar, no different from the towns he’d passed through except that two streets, not one, ran its length, and its length was long. The bus let him off and he found the city’s only hotel, around the corner from its plaza and park. The desk clerk was a solemn-faced woman of surprising sweetness, who welcomed him to her city and offered to do whatever it took to make him feel at home.

  He gave her his passport, and she gave him a room high enough to see beyond the tenement in front and the train tracks to the steep valley wall where buildings clung, one with a mirador. There was no luster left in those panes of glass and little paint left on the sash. He opened his suitcase and took out a tan windbreaker. He placed the suitcase on the luggage rack. Then, to take possession of the room, he inserted his bus ticket and yesterday’s train ticket into the crack between the mirror and its frame.

  He went back to the lobby and, since she was so eager to help, let the desk clerk find him the best transportation to a nearby town. A bus was available, but the best way, she informed him, was to take the train, which came through on the hour. In the direction of San Sebastian.

  Close. Al lado.

  He became a tourist of trains again, with local stops.

  The town of Eskuibar had a small, wedge-shaped industrial park at the near end, a swelling before the midpoint where the church, Town Hall and main plaza were located, a long, tapering section where commerce took place and middle-class residents lived, and at the far point a squeezed-in area that was squat and monochromatic and hung with wash, which he assumed to be the workers’ quarters.

  Past that the valley narrowed and curved out of sight.

  Ben stepped down from the train. With a town so narrowly built, he had to take only a few steps more before he stood in the Plaza Mayor. Of the mountain peaks, the tallest rose to the northwest. A radio or television antenna had been erected there on an outcropping of rock, the only rock he saw on the mountain rim. At every other point to the west the rim was forested. To the east, where the angle of ascent was gentler, those terraced pastures might reach all the way to the top. In the sunlight their green was lush.

  The strollers among the athletic Basques would go to the east. The climbers to the west. He remembered: the Basques’ need to ascend, to form manly clubs, climb their mountains and plot.

  He took his bearings. One street, San Agustin, seem to run the length of the town, and another, San Blas, partway. He walked San Blas first, two banks, an elementary school, an insurance agency, a pharmacy, appliance stores, small shops. A plaza with arbors of wisteria growing at each end, fronted on one side by a modest but clean apartment building of four stories. When Blas fed into Kalea San Agustin, he walked that second street until the wall of buildings to his left gave way to a small park that bordered the river. The town market was on San Agustin, and a whole assortment of shops, the ones he’d expected, but specialty shops too, framing shops and health food stores and shops selling scented candles and soaps. The signs in front of these shops were written almost entirely in Basque. The bars were also on San Agustin, although none with those photographs displayed in the windows. At that small park he took his first close look at the river. He noted the smell and the graying of the green and the unclean way the water slipped over rocks, but the river was for later.

  He walked San Agustin almost to its end, until he was sure that the sameness of dirty, cream-colored apartment blocks, broken up by the occasional bar and car repair shop, was all there was, then he came back to the Plaza Mayor and walked in the other direction. In the industrial park he saw warehouses housing businesses for car parts and machine tools and construction materials. There was an office-studio for industrial design. He stood beside a sculpture of a sewing machine, large and low-barreled, the size and shape of some African animal, a hippopotamus. Sewing machines must have given the town its light-industrial start. Past the industrial park he came to a large gothic-pointed gate, with statues of saints in its niches, beyond which lay the cemetery. He wasn’t ready for the cemetery yet, but he walked down one row of wall crypts and back up another looking for a family name. The names he saw were all unpronounceable—he didn’t even try.

  Back in town, he ordered a coffee in a bar on the main plaza. Off to his right, hanging on the wall, were photos of two men. Both looked to be in their midthirties. They were square-faced with cleanly cut features beginning to flesh out. They looked enough alike to be brothers. Beneath the photos the names of two different Spanish cities were written, followed by numbers of five digits. Those would be the cities, he surmised, in which these men were imprisoned and the numbers their cell numbers. Between the photos was something, perhaps an insignia, made with a black ribbon.

  He walked out into the plaza, where people had begun to gather, as they did, he assumed, at this afternoon hour in plazas all over the country. But this wasn’t Spain, he had to remember. It was Pais Vasco. It wasn’t even that. It was Euskal Herria. He’d seen the sign spray-painted in Vito-ria and most of the towns they’d driven through that day. Gora Euskal Herria! was the way it was worded, and with no end to the bitterness of the irony, he knew that gora meant “long live.”


  There were two Basque names he’d taught himself to say. One was the name of this town—Eskuibar, Ace-coo-ee-bar—which he practiced until he could combine the vowels and out of four syllables make three. The other was the name of its favorite son.

  He took the train back to the small city of Eibar, where for the indefinite future he would be spending the night.

  But, like a tourist caught in a revolving door, the next day he was back in Eskuibar’s Plaza Mayor, sitting under the pruned sycamores that grew in front of the church. Off to his left stood the Town Hall, a low gray stone building with arches, an arcade and a building-length balcony. Farther down and attached to the Town Hall was one of those two-walled handball courts he’d noticed in other towns. Across from it stood another building, where PNV, the nationalist party that ran the autonomous Basque government, had its local offices. Red and yellow paint had been splashed on the stone there, the colors of the Spanish flag, which he took to mean that some believed PNV was collaborating too closely with the government in Madrid. It was not his concern. Behind him rose the church and bell tower of San Blas, whose bells could sound jarringly off-key. Directly before him, just beyond that ball court, the plaza opened out to a bridge that crossed the river to become a street, then a narrow road leading up into the pastured hills to the east.