House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  “What’s your name, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Pilar,” the desk clerk said.

  “I’m Annie, or Ana. I guess Annie would be Anita. That’s Spanish. I don’t know how to say it in Basque.” On a sisterly impulse, entirely unpremeditated, she reached over and squeezed the desk clerk’s hand.

  Pilar said, “I can’t tell you his name. I’m sorry.”

  “Could you put us in a room beside his?”

  The desk clerk hesitated and then, with an unfurtive but very quiet motion, exchanged the key she’d originally chosen for another, and passed it over the counter. Meticulously, she noted the change on the card she included with the key and on the guest register she kept behind the counter. The number on the card and key was 361, and Annie got the impression that the desk clerk was waiting for her to ask on which side of 361 she would find her father’s room, a question that might provoke another seizure of conscience. Of course, 361 might have been a corner room. Even though Annie knew it wasn’t.

  It was located between 360 and 362, neither of which responded to her knock. She stood before both doors, and neither yielded a trace of her father. There was no connecting balcony outside the windows, as there would have been in a movie, and any maid who might have been persuaded to open the two doors would not be on the job until the following morning. She couldn’t wait that long. Paula counseled patience, but at one o’clock in the morning, after hearing nothing all evening on either side of them, Annie returned to the lobby and ten minutes later came back with the two keys. How had she gotten them? Did Paula really want to know?

  Since they had the keys, wouldn’t Paula agree it made no sense to talk of breaking and entering?

  Not too crazy.

  They tried 360 first. The room was empty and smelled disinfected. With their expectation aroused, it was like walking into a room-sized tomb. Room 362 was the one they wanted. Her father’s clothes hung in the closet and were folded on a chair; a pair of shoes was half under the bed. His shaving kit lay on a bathroom shelf, and his toothbrush and toothpaste were set out beside the lavatory. Newspaper clippings were scattered on the desk, photographs not just of Armando Ordoki but of various ETA members as well. It was all there, especially her father’s smell, something nutty, warm and benign. Stuck into a crack between the mirror and its frame were three tickets—the train and bus ticket that had brought him from Madrid and a little cardboard stub that had once taken him to a nearby town.

  She motioned Paula back out into the hall and shut the door. Annie’s first reaction was that somebody who knew what they were doing wanted them to believe that that was her father’s room. Somebody who knew him as well as she did. “That is Ben’s room,” Paula responded. “Those are his things. I recognize every one of them.” Annie shook her head. Those tickets were too obvious a plant. Those shoes looked exactly like his. Run down at the heel the same way his were run down. “He’s here, Annie. I don’t know how we found him, but we did.” Annie wasn’t buying it. When he came back, Paula would see. He’d look like her father and the man Paula had had her “interlude” with. But he wouldn’t be the same.

  She waited until Paula fell asleep, then went to lie in the imposter’s bed. When he returned and didn’t find his key, he’d either flee into the night or summon his courage and come see who’d invaded his room. She really didn’t believe the man was her father. It was too easy. Paula might be deceived by appearances into believing otherwise, but there was a difference, all the difference in the world. Annie waited in a half-sleep until dawn. When she went under, she dreamed of a train she couldn’t get out of clattering along toward a gorge no longer spanned by a bridge. She woke to a feeling of such displacement, such utter arbitrariness, that she was filled with a cold impersonal fear. She knew where she was but, in that instant, saw no way to make where she was real. She returned to her own room and got into bed with Paula, whispering into her ear, “No, don’t wake up, don’t wake up. Just lie there and I’ll lie here.”

  XIII

  Ben Williamson lay in yet another bed in a room that looked out on that narrow park beside the river, where banners announcing protest meetings sometimes hung. Below his window Kalea San Agustin intersected a street that, if followed into the hills, would lead to the chapel of San Antonio, where he’d already been. Two stories directly below his head was the restaurant where he often ate. They knew him there. The night before, he’d been about to board the train that would have taken him back to his room in Eibar when he’d sensed to a certainty that he belonged here. With the train before him and his ticket in hand, he’d felt the base of his being shift. He’d told himself he would return to Eibar and get his things, but in the end he hadn’t even done that. He’d backed away and walked down a flight of stairs to the street. He knew what day it was and that on the following day, a Sunday, native sons frequently appeared, but in that moment he was not calculating his chances. His tour as a tourist had suddenly ended, and here was where he’d found himself. He was reminded of a game his daughter Annie had played with her friends on their bikes. They’d toss a coin at each corner they came to and allow chance to take them to the most improbable spots. Ben had chosen his spot, he’d located it on a map and come here with a purpose. Still, seen from a moment, say, five years earlier, with his family around him, all healthy and reasonably content, this spot where he stood would have seemed so absurdly random as to go beyond the element of chance and argue a willful design. Something had led him on a five-year journey and brought him here, and somebody had pulled him back from that train. He didn’t believe it, not for a second, but it was as if somebody had. He’d presented himself in the pension with a passport he wasn’t even asked for. Other than the passport, he was the clothes on his back. And his knife, which was also on his back.

  Everything else, changes of clothes and shoes, objects to shave and clean and brush his teeth with, newspaper clippings he no longer needed to remind himself what the man looked like or what the man had said, mementos of his journey, along with traces of himself, fingernails, skin flakes, fallen hairs, his lingering odors, with all of that around her Annie no longer entertained the illusion that this wasn’t her father’s room. She awoke in her father’s bed, not in Paula’s, which forced her to conclude that her early-morning move to lie at Paula’s side had been a dream she and her father had shared. She hung out a do-not-disturb sign—No moleste, por favor—and lay listening to the trains, those going to the east with their destination in San Sebastian and those to the west and Bilbao. The trains made local stops, and she didn’t need her map to tell her what the stops were. She had a way with maps. She could lie in this bed her father had slept in and project a map of the Basque country across the cracks in the ceiling. San Sebastian was called Donostia, Bilbao shortened to Bilbo. To the east was a string of Z towns: Zestoa, Zumaia, Zarautz. To the west the G towns: Galdakao, Getxo and Gernika, which Franco and Picasso had made famous. In her immediate vicinity was a clustering of E towns. Eibar, where she lay. Just to the south, Elorrio. And not many stops away on the train line east, Eskuibar. If Vitoria was the southernmost point of a triangle that opened equilaterally to include Bilbao to the west and San Sebastian to the east, she lay in a crescent between the two major Basque cities, and that crescent had a cradling effect. She wanted to get up and leave, to continue the search, but surrounded by her father’s belongings and caught in the lulling rock of that cartographer’s cradle, she stayed put.

  Her father had staged it all with uncharacteristic cunning. She might have been a bloodhound and these belongings such powerful possessors of his scent that nothing could persuade her to leave. It would take an unbreakable leash and five strong men tugging to get her out the door. Or it would take bringing in another bloodhound, a backup bloodhound. That shirt, for instance, hanging on the chair. It was tan with green checks, made of some combination of wool and polyester thick enough for this mountain cool. Its collar was buttoned down and its arms hung straight to the cuffs, which
were also buttoned. Over the pocket, over the heart, was a small stain. Had he spilled some soup? A drop or two of wine? She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen that shirt before, but just the way it hung on the chair back was enough to keep her there. The chair was narrow-shouldered and her father wasn’t. Nonetheless, he might have been sitting there. The expression he might once have worn—his characteristic expression—of a fond and powerful longing for nothing he could name had been replaced by some judicious balance of approval and disapproval, directed at her.

  She got out of bed and went to the chair. She sniffed at the collar of her father’s shirt. It smelled of his hair and of his warm, slightly nutty flesh, and it smelled of her childhood, of cars they’d traveled in together, of easy chairs big enough for two and of good-night stories, of what he’d left of himself on her pillow, the scent she would go to sleep to, and the traces of him she awoke to in her child’s room. She could always tell by the scent if he’d been to check on her during the night. Her nose was uncanny in that way. And he almost always came. Those nights he didn’t, the air she awoke to was dull and undistinguished in the most depressing way.

  Paula entered the room. She’d had the good sense to return the key to room 360. She’d asked about breakfast and, in passing, had bent down and pretended to find the key on the floor beside the counter. The Sunday desk clerk, the sort of man who wanted things in their place and didn’t care how they got there, formally expressed his thanks and pointed her to the dining room, where she’d hurriedly had her café con leche and brought up another, plus a croissant, for Annie. Annie had to eat and she had to face the possibility that her father might not be coming back soon. He had taken an impromptu side trip. He’d gone over the mountains and reached the high seas, where he’d shipped out. They were back where they had started, waiting for him to return. In some ways, it made better sense to wait for him in Madrid, where he might have already circled back.

  “I know where he is,” Annie said.

  “You do?”

  “In Ordoki’s town. It’s called Eskuibar. It can’t be more than two or three stops on the train line going east. It’s close. If you had to, you could walk there.”

  “Then what’s this?” Paula motioned around her.

  “His base of operations.” Annie shrugged.

  Paula looked at the closet and the chair, where Ben’s clothes hung. She looked at his shoes on the floor. She stepped to the mirror, took out the ticket stub and read the name of the town. Experienced, resourceful, cultured, well traveled, a veteran of the wars, she appeared to be reviewing all she knew of the man, how needfully he’d come to her, how long he’d stayed, how suddenly he’d disappeared.

  “And you propose we search for him there?” she said. She was looking out the window, across the way, where dilapidated buildings clung to the valley wall. One building had a mirador, where at that moment the sun, streaming into the valley, glanced off its many panes.

  “Yes, but we have to wait.” Annie got back into bed and checked an urge to bury her head under the covers. “But not long,” she assured Paula. “Can we wait?”

  . . .

  After days of cold drizzle and rain, the sunshine brought a dizzying surge to his blood, and Ben stood for a moment outside the pension, his grip firm on a lamppost of wrought iron, until his dizziness subsided and his sight cleared. The hills to the east were as he’d first seen them, a glistening green, on which black-and-white cattle and wool-heavy sheep grazed and cast their shadows down toward the town. The pine forests looked as cleanly delineated as if their curving flanks had been drawn by a draftsman’s pen. Along fence rows and before farmhouse doors, late-season flowers had come back to life, sprinklings of white and orange. The sky he saw as a shell of pristine blue. He walked to the river, its grayness shaded entirely to green now, a clouded jade-green that in the right flash of sunlight could turn emerald.

  There had been mornings when he’d stepped into the street before his house in Kentucky and something as tiny as a corpuscle of his blood and something as vast as the dome of the sky had struck a single universal chime, and he’d known the world was his. He’d been a boy then. Sometimes his mother had played a chord on the piano that was an echo of that chime. The melody that grew out of that chord was like a luring promise that it might all be true. He’d experienced that chiming again when he’d married and beauty had come to rest in the body of his wife, in the life they’d lived together, in the day-to-day. In certain days of the day-to-day. The chiming struck deep, to the very biological origin of it all, the days his daughters were born. He had not been present at Michelle’s birth, his wife’s labor having been so prolonged he’d come to think of himself as an impediment; he’d left the scene so that Gail’s suffering could end and his daughter could be delivered. But for Annie’s birth, he’d been there from start to finish. He’d gone through the Lamaze training and tirelessly practiced with his wife her breathing exercises and the tricks they’d taught her to relax. It had all worked; at least her labor had been much easier, even though there had come a moment when, he understood, her pain was next to unbearable and like nothing he’d ever be asked to endure. It was then that one of the nurses summoned him down between his wife’s upraised legs and told him to look up the birth canal, where he’d see a shiny spot of black, the size of a quarter. That was the top of his daughter’s head. He didn’t return to his wife’s side but remained looking over the doctor’s shoulder as Gail made a last heroic shove and his second daughter squirmed out of a bloody darkness and into the doctor’s hands. In that moment the chiming struck a chord so deep it no longer sounded as sound. It was seismic. He felt it in his knees and in the aroused blossoming of his own flesh, and when they placed his daughter on the tray to be weighed, there came a moment when she twisted her head around and somehow managed to look behind her, directly at him. Annie had been born with her eyes open. He saw a boldness in her look, and he saw a wildness of fright, as if she’d just changed from one species to another and woken to a world of infinite peril. He had never imagined such boldness and such fright could coexist, but that had been the message she’d sent him.

  Once more Ben walked the town. From his pension all the way to the cemetery at the far end of town. He passed along six walls of crypts he had not passed before. “Here lies” in Spanish was “Aqui yace” and in Basque, it seemed, “Hemes dago.” A number of the deceased had Spanish names. He found one Benjamin. Many of the graves carried black-and-white photographs embossed in glass ovals onto the marble slabs, photographs taken from years past when men didn’t appear without their berets and women wore grays and blacks. He studied these pictures, which, in their sternness, seemed to have been taken expressly to appear here.

  He turned and walked back. When he finally got off his feet it was to take a table in the Plaza Mayor while one was still available. Crowds of people were entering the plaza from Kaleas San Agustin and San Blas. They were stepping down from the train station and coming across the river on the bridge. When mass was over they filed out of the church door. If he’d been stationed on the highest of the hills overlooking the town, up on that lone outcropping of rock where the television antenna had been erected, he would have seen people moving through their town as blood circulates through a body, thinner at the extremities but dense and rich there at the heart.

  He ordered a café con leche, nothing to eat.

  Actively now, face by face, Ben was looking for Armando Ordoki. In the thickening crowds he saw a couple of men who caused him to look again, but he was no longer given an adrenaline start by everyone who came close. He knew the type. Face long, chin heavy, mouth full, nose fleshy and flared, eyes pouched and protuberant when opened wide, hair brown and cut short and combed forward into those Caesar-like points, complexion sandy or meal-colored, neck puffed and beginning to wrinkle, something bearish in the slope of the shoulders and the sway of the gait; the clothing of choice, black: a tee-shirt, sweatshirt or turtleneck sweater.

  He fully expe
cted Armando Ordoki to come back. If Spaniards returned to their towns on Sundays to renew their spirits, it stood even more to reason that Basques would. Here were their roots. Here they had formed their cuadrillas. Their whole sense of who they were was determined by the remoteness of these mountain valleys. The Moors had never been here. No Jews had. The Romans, it was said, had tried to conquer the region and failed.

  Of course, he might have sought Ordoki out in the Basque parliament in Vitoria. He might have followed him on one of his well-publicized trips abroad. Or marched with him in a protest he’d called or agreed to take part in. He might have met up with him anywhere. On a city street. At a corner when he stopped his car. The shower room in a gym. In a barber shop, when he was having his hair cut and combed into those points.

  It didn’t have to be in his hometown.

  Ben got up. The crowds had cut off his sight. He left the plaza and walked San Blas until it intersected with San Agustin, where the bakeries were doing a brisk business selling traditional Sunday cakes. Then he followed San Agustin back to the plaza. He established a vantage point under one of the sycamores in front of the church, from which he could survey the entire plaza. The crowd, he soon saw, was made up predominantly of couples, ranging from the elderly to newlyweds. The teenagers and the children were somewhere else. He saw some single men, as he and Juan had been single men in Medina del Rioseco, but these men soon found couples to attach themselves to. Couples themselves met other couples and began to fuse. He was watching extended families form. An elderly man, a father of families, and his wife might spend an hour touring the plaza and town, and before they left to go off to their Sunday meal they’d be joined by as many as ten. There was something ceremonial about it all. Had children been there, darting in and out, the effect would have been ruined, but without them it was like watching a dance whose steps had been determined long ago. There was no evidence of political divisions. He saw no banners, no signs in the windows, no raised fists or other inflammatory insignia on tee-shirts. Those streaks of red and yellow paint splashed between the windows of the offices of the governing Basque party were a barely distinguishable part of the backdrop scenery, flaking and dulled.