House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  Days, and he saw nothing he might not have seen in other towns, in the town of Medina del Rioseco, for instance. Town functionaries, town petitioners, town officials parading in and out of the Town Hall. Women going up to the town market with their canvas-enclosed shopping carts, coming back with their carts full. Harried young men out on some urgent errand; young mothers, frequently in pairs, pushing their baby carriages. Children, in their school uniforms, with their overlarge satchels and book bags. Groups of retired men, in brightly colored running shoes, pacing up and down the town for their morning’s exercise. Once they’d finished walking, these men would sometimes sit on benches close by and hold disputatious conversations with aggressive gestures. It seemed as if they might come to blows, but of course they never did.

  He saw the young men too, in their groups of four or five. He saw the way they walked together, their odd rhythms meshing into some powerful locomotive force. As groups, they were angular, pent up, working off each other and leaving the air charged with a youthful tension as they passed. Judging from what he could hear, they spoke in Spanish, not Basque. It sounded like sex and money and cars. Never public controversies or current events.

  The young women their age passed by too, frequently alone and mostly quiet. Their faces looked set, steeled to a life of self-denial.

  Ben was waiting. He’d been given to understand that Spaniards returned to the towns they came from. Did Basques come back? He was betting that they did.

  He spent the nights in Eibar and day by day returned to Eskuibar. Eventually certain men, harbinger-like, began to appear to him. These men all had long faces. They had heavy jaw lines and chins, or they had jaw lines and chins that had shelved away and allowed flesh in dewlapped folds onto their necks. If the cheeks were slack, the face could seem horsey, and in the pouched eyes he’d notice a pleading expression. But if the cheeks were strong and the face broader, the eyes took on a recalcitrant life. He saw all varieties. But the long fleshy nose, with the flaring nostrils, was a constant. The mouth was all in the lower lip. The upper lip was a ridge line, but the lower was loose, swollen, spilling off in the center with its own little landslide of flesh.

  He saw young men of twenty with this face, and he saw at least one grandfather. Allowing for the discoloration of age, the complexion was always sandy and the hair color brown. He had not seen this face anywhere else in Spain or during his brief stay in the Basque country, and he wondered about inbreeding. He assumed there was a town type.

  He walked the streets. He’d begun to be known. People greeted him with a nod. Or a “Buenos dias.” Never in Basque. He hadn’t thought he could remain unnoticed, and he nodded back. He found a restaurant to eat in, over which a pension was located. The restaurant featured a menu of the day, and he came to know the waitress who took his order, and the older woman who came from the kitchen with a tureen and ladled out his soup. He believed the two women were daughter and mother and the man manning the cash register the father and husband. A young man, who might have been a family member too, worked behind the bar, and he had the “before” face of that young man on the poster in Vitoria who’d been beaten into all the swollen colors of a storm cloud by the guardia civil or some other branch of the police.

  Workers ate in that restaurant with him. On any given day, one of them was sure to make him do a double-take. He understood it might happen like this. They might simply be sitting one table away in a restaurant, eating soup ladled out of the same tureen. Their eyes might meet as they brought the soup spoons to their mouths.

  Ben would leave that restaurant and walk the town to the end until there was no more working-class housing left. He didn’t expect to find a plaque, and he certainly didn’t want to ask anyone, but he asked himself: Where did Ordoki live? Where had he lived as a boy, when his father had made his living here? When he made his friends and found his group, his cuadrilla, and when that group became a comando that would be disbanded and its members dispersed to prisons in the four corners of Spain—where had he lived then? Somewhere in these blocks of apartments with wash hanging out and orange canisters of butane gas rolled onto the balconies, apartments smelling of gas and detergent and whatever had been left frying on the stove? And when Ordoki came back, a favorite son, a man with a college degree, two children and a wife, and when he set out to walk the town, where did he set out from?

  There was a footbridge, a raised platform, crossing over the railroad tracks. One day Ben stood there as a train passed by under his feet. It passed the length of the town going west toward Bilbao and then, where the valley narrowed, leaned toward the south and curved out of sight. Almost certainly Ordoki had stood there as a schoolboy, before he’d gone to school and met up with his friends. What boy doesn’t yearn to go away on a train? If only to play hooky for a day? Beyond Bilbao lay the ocean, and what boy doesn’t dream of shipping out and seeing the world?

  Ben looked for the sports fields. He knew boys left parts of themselves on fields of play that might be lost for the rest of their lives. But he couldn’t find them. There was that two-walled handball court beside the Town Hall, but he meant fields of dirt and grass that a boy could stretch out in and exult when he’d just kicked a goal. He assumed they must be up one of those draws to the west. At certain hours of the afternoon, when the town went into a lull, he could hear the shouts of boys, all contained, sounding as one voice, like a tree full of warbling birds. But he didn’t go looking for them.

  Instead, he went to the river. Here, he was sure. He walked along its banks and saw the footprints in the muddy spaces between some of the rocks. Boys came to the river alone, they came in groups. They came to mull over their thoughts or to plot among themselves. They came to race the current, to leap from rock to rock. Standing beside even such a small river as this, a man could remember what it was like to be a boy with an immediacy that was stunning. It didn’t matter that the town was apparently trying to dredge out a deeper channel and had scattered a lot of gravel with heavy machinery, leaving tire and tread prints in the mud and ugly white gashes in the rock.

  He walked the river’s banks. He began at that small park on San Agustin, where a banner had been unfurled announcing in Basque an event of some sort, perhaps a demonstration, and walked the distance between the three town bridges. When he got to the third, the bridge that led into the Plaza Mayor, he crossed over and walked the bank back on the other side. The dirt was dry, crusted hard in spots, but he moved close enough to the water line to feel his feet sink into the mud. He could hear the squish his feet made, and added that to the sound of the running water. Very quietly, he filled his lungs with air.

  He was about to pass under the second of the three bridges, one for pedestrians, when he looked up to discover a figure of some sort scrambling onto the bridge railing above him. The figure was winged; its hands were gripping a bar below the railing and its feet were pedaling air. Making use of a rock the dredgers had thrown up, Ben managed to scramble up the retaining wall. When he stepped out onto that bridge he felt a peculiar apprehension that had as its image those frantically pedaling feet, as the winged figure tried to tread the air. The wings, made of riveted aluminum plates, were of no help. It was a strange sculpture to be attached to the side of a bridge in a town like this. He walked out onto the bridge and stared directly down into the small upturned face. The aluminum nose came to a straining point. The mouth was opened in a rictus of fear. Cigarettes had been extinguished there in a small puddle from the last rain.

  “Curioso, no?” a voice beside him said.

  Ben looked to his side, toward the town. In the buildings facing the river, business was being done; in the apartments wash hung from kitchen and bathroom windows. He understood it would happen like this. It would not be on the Plaza Mayor as he studied the passersby. It would not be in a restaurant as he cast his eyes around at the other diners while sipping his soup. It would be when his attention was taken and no longer his.

  “Icaro,” the other man on the bridg
e said.

  “Yes, Icarus, of course,” Ben answered.

  “Ah, English. You are English?”

  The man was maybe five years too young. The pouches had yet to form under the eyes, the chin was less pronounced; those high and low water marks were missing from the neck. But beneath a green-and-white-checked shirt the tee-shirt was black.

  “Yes, English,” Ben said.

  “I know some English. A little.”

  “Could you tell me what this sculpture is doing here? It is very strange. It makes no sense.”

  “The artist . . . how do you say? He make a gift to the town.”

  Suddenly the man was smiling. But the fleshy lower lip would not stay still, as if one smile were about to give way to a darker, more sinister one.

  In a reflex action, Ben found himself clutching the rail, as the winged figure clutched it from below.

  “Icarus,” the man said, taking an almost juvenile relish in repeating the name in a tight-throated English pronunciation.

  No, this was a much younger man, with a certain dissipation in his face Ben hadn’t noticed until now.

  He released the rail.

  “Icarus falls to the earth,” Ben said. “His wings burn up and he falls to the earth. He’s just a wingless boy. But this Icarus has powerful wings. He’s more like an evil angel crawling up from the underworld to enter the town. Wouldn’t you say?”

  The man cocked his head at a disapproving angle and backed off a step. “Como?” he said.

  “What I want to know is what this angel is doing . . .” Then Ben stopped and tried it in Spanish, “Lo que quiero saber es que hace este angel aqui . . . in your town?”

  The man shook his head, muttering, “Yo que se?” with something of a boy’s petulant impatience in his tone.

  Ben saw then that the man really was a boy, just a boy grown quickly old. The boy added something in Basque, something dismissive and brusque, full of consonants that left a hard hacking sound in the air.

  This was the language spoken in Eden before the Fall?

  Ben took a step toward his companion on the bridge. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe he’d like to get him in his grip, and then, if the man cooperated, Ben thought he might like to throw him over the railing. Down by the river he could find other boys to play with, or take a walk along the river by himself. Ben closed his eyes in anticipation, and just as he’d expected, when he opened them the boy-man, whoever he was, was gone.

  Ben went back to his hotel room in Eibar and stayed there for five days. He ate his meals not in the hotel but around the corner in a drafty restaurant on the plaza. Up in his room he’d catch himself staring across the way at that mirador, with all its cloudy panes, behind which no face had appeared in years. The hotel seemed mostly empty. The woman behind the desk was as solicitous as ever, but there was a limit to what she could do. In good conscience, she couldn’t recommend a single tourist attraction in town. So he mostly sat in what passed as the hotel lobby and read a Basque newspaper called Gara. Half the articles were written in Basque. The half written in Spanish he could read, and piecing them together, he got the whole array of Basque grievances. There was always an article about torture and police abuse and an article about the imperiled state of the Basque language. There was an article about onerous decrees from Madrid regarding education and labor unions, an article about judicial high-handedness and the periodic prohibition of demonstrations, and an article about military exercises on Basque soil. There was an article about Basque soil, how it extended into Navarra and across the border into France. There was always more than one article about the hated guardia civil, how they battered down doors in the pursuit of suspects, how they ransacked homes. How they verbally abused. How they lashed out with their truncheons. How they stole. How, it was all but stated, they deserved what they got.

  A Civil Guard was killed during those days when he left his car to remove a sign reading, “Gora ETA! Death to all guardia civil!” behind which a bomb had been hidden. He was thirty-two, the father of six-year-old twins.

  Ben kept reading. Above all, there were articles about Basque prisoners, how far they were imprisoned from the Basque homeland and how many loved ones died in a given year traveling to reach them. How they were interrogated and tortured with the sack over the head, the electrodes to the testicles, the hose up the anus. How they were kept in solitary confinement, and when they finally got out, how they were prohibited from using the Basque language with anybody, fellow prisoners and visiting family members alike, unless a prison translator was present. How one guard so hated the sound of the language that every time a prisoner struck up a song in that tongue he got beaten. A song, a beating. A song, a beating.

  It was propaganda, Ben understood, of the most unabashed and transparent sort. Nonetheless, he read on.

  Eskuibar was also in the news. While he’d been away, a demonstration had been staged in the Plaza Mayor in support of the two ETA members from the town who were in prison, both of whom had finished serving eighteen years. The authorities considered the demonstration “an apology for terrorism” and broke it up. Seven citizens of the town had been arrested and brought to the nearby city of Eibar to be interrogated.

  He stopped reading there.

  He spent a day walking up and down the city, but it was so narrow and long he never reached the end. He passed a police comisaria, and he passed a station for the guardia civil. He wondered where those seven men were being interrogated. A civil guard stood before the station’s door. This was not a fresh recruit, not a boy. He had on his patent-leather tricorn hat, which was like the hats Napoleon wore and could make a man in this day and age smile. Ben had stopped before the guard; unaware, he might have been smiling. The guard had a ham-heavy face and eyes that moved in tiny reconnoitering lurches over every passerby. Here, in the heart of the Basque country, there were no innocent passersby. His hands were motionless on the machine gun they all carried strapped over their shoulders, but that reconnoitering motion of the eyes had speeded up, and the guard now gave off a bitter heat that the man before him could feel on his face. Ben turned and walked away. He got in among other passersby and tried to walk with their everyday pace. If he was ordered to stop or be shot, he didn’t know which he would choose. He understood that those articles he’d been reading about the guardia civil’s brutal treatment of the Basques were too formulaic to be true, but he remembered them, nonetheless, the bag, the electrodes, the hose, and then he remembered the tortured boy’s face on the poster in that bar in Vitoria, and the face of the young bartender, who awaited his turn.

  A tourist of his own panic, which he confronted and overcame, Ben walked away.

  The time had come to arm himself.

  He returned to Eskuibar. The police had been here and gone and taken away seven of its citizens, but he saw no change on the streets. That banner, which he’d never managed to decipher, had been removed from the small park beside the river. That was all. He walked the streets of Eskuibar now, looking into stores, looking at what was displayed, because the signs hanging overhead didn’t help him. He was looking for something he didn’t yet know the shape or nature of. Not a gun. He’d once shot six bullets out of a revolver at a target twenty paces away and hadn’t come close. The pistol had bucked in his hand with a willfulness that was astonishing; he assumed the shots had traveled straight up to the sky. Something else. Where San Blas and San Agustin rejoined before heading into the industrial park, he came to a hardware store and saw a small iron-shafted hatchet displayed in the window. He had a boyhood memory for that too, the time he and his friends had crossed the creek behind their suburb and cut down a number of tall poplars to make a log cabin. He remembered the hatchet biting into the soft wood, the chips flying, and he remembered the moment when the tree made that splintering crack and began its slow-motion descent to the ground.

  The Basque were sportsmen. He doubled back on San Blas and found a hunting and fishing store, where sooner or later it had to be. A pic
ture of a shotgun with its breech cracked open hung over the door. The Spanish word for shotgun, escopeta, appeared on the sign. In the window displaying fishing equipment, he saw a knife with a black, finger-grooved handle and a partially serrated blade of stainless steel, perhaps six inches long. Beside it was a sheath made of a translucent plastic. As objects, neither the knife nor the sheath evoked a moment from his boyhood. He entered the store and asked the salesman to remove it from the window so he could hold it in his hand.

  The salesman was another young man, but of the round-faced type, with eyes so blue they shimmered. He was very friendly. The knife was for deep-sea fishing, he explained. It was for reaching under the water and cutting through particularly stubborn obstructions. That little serrated section allowed you to grate. The blade was flat on the top edge and curved like a cutlass on the bottom. It was as bright as the young man’s eyes and shone like a mirror. To prove it, the clerk held the blade up to his customer’s face, and it was so, his customer saw himself. The knife came with a sheath, also bright, of a deep-sea blue, which featured a safety latch. The young man demonstrated how you inserted the knife into the sheath with a locking click and how you released it by pushing a button. The knife made a little leap, then, into the hand, perfectly balanced; the grooves fit the fingers. He gave it to his customer to get the feel of, and all that the salesman had said of it was true. It was balanced, it fit, and it shone. Ben tested the blade against his thumb. It was sharp. He placed the blade’s point against the tip of his index finger, and with the slightest pressure he would have drawn blood.

  He paid 4,500 pesetas for the knife and walked down San Blas carrying it in a black plastic sack. At the Plaza Mayor he entered the second of the two bars and, while the bartender was preparing his coffee, stepped into the men’s room, which he locked. He took off his windbreaker, slipped his belt through the opening on the sheath, then slid the knife around behind him, closer to his right hip than the small of his back. He tried reaching back for it once, and although his arm was muscle-bound his fingers managed to find the release button, which he didn’t push. He turned before the lavatory mirror to make sure his windbreaker was long enough to reach past the sheath and that it billowed out enough to conceal the bulk. Then he washed his hands.