by Lamar Herrin
There was an office for the local police within the Town Hall, and occasionally he would see one of them directing traffic or walking the streets. Except for their billy clubs, they went unarmed. It occurred to him that in this town he’d never seen the hated guardia civil.
He waited for Armando Ordoki to appear. He wanted to see Armando Ordoki take his part in that generational dance.
At one-thirty, as the crowd began to thin, he was still waiting.
Then, off toward the far left corner of the plaza, he noticed an obstruction to the flow of pedestrian traffic, and the steady undercurrent of voices he heard took on an edge of expectancy. A number of people had left the tables or stepped out of the promenade to form a crowd around the ball court. Someone eager to address the crowd and turn it to his political purposes might do so from there, at the point where the court’s two high walls intersected. In the time it took him to walk from his spot under the sycamore to the outskirts of that crowd, he was convinced that Armando Ordoki was among them, that the excitement he heard in the crowd’s collective voice could be explained only by the appearance of a local celebrity, some man of the town with a following. Then he heard a sharp report, a clap, almost wooden, succeeded by another, which in the instant he mistook for gunfire and stopped in his tracks, waiting for the crowd’s panic. He heard the sound again and this time identified it as the sound of a ball with a wooden core wrapped in leather striking a concrete wall.
A game of pelota was about to begin. These ball courts were everywhere in the Basque country. They played some role in Basque life he did not understand.
Taking advantage of his height, Ben stood at the rear and watched the game unfold. Two players, whose white karate-style jackets were belted in red, were going to play another team belted in blue. One of the red-belted players was particularly powerful and could stand behind the back line and fire the ball into the corner, where the ricochets were trickiest. He had blond hair, not brown, but the face was long and the jaw pronounced and there was a heaviness in the swing of his shoulders and the thrust of his legs. The other players were more agile and better scurriers over the court. They ran down balls seemingly out of reach, and the crowd rewarded them with applause. But when the blond-haired man struck long and hard from the baseline there were expressions of deep admiration, verging on something else.
As the game progressed Ben was able to move up, and before it ended he was standing in the front row.
A young man with a portable scoreboard was chalking up the score. It stood 13 to 10 in favor of the red team when a man beside him said in Spanish, “You understand, don’t you?”
Ben was guessing the score went to either 15 or 21 and the first team there won. You scored a point by ricocheting a shot off both of those walls that your opponent couldn’t reach. It couldn’t be simpler. Really, the only peculiarity was that the game was played on a court of two walls, rather than three or four. But that allowed the spectators to stand as close as he was standing now, just as the blond-haired player retreated to within five feet of him to play a long hard shot.
He heard a grunt he might have made himself. The ball made a stinging splat against the palm, which was bare.
“Creo que si,” Ben said to the man beside him. He believed that he did. The man was a generation older than he and stood a head shorter. His gray hair was cut and combed into those Ordoki-style points. As a foreigner, Ben pleaded ignorance. “What don’t I know? What should I know?”
“They must be careful not to hit the ball over the wall,” the old man replied with dramatic foreboding, which was absurd since the walls were extremely high and no one had even come close. Then he added, “There is always a lot at stake, even in a match such as this.”
The red team scored two quick points, and that was the game. And that was the sequence of events. First the old man had spoken to him, the red-belted, blond-haired player had retreated to the baseline to hit a powerful shot, his team had scored two quick points and the old man had said something absurd, followed by something mysterious, to put him on alert. So Ben wasn’t taken entirely by surprise when, with a clear view from where he stood, he saw Armando Ordoki himself walking in over the bridge. He was accompanied by a small black-haired woman Ben took to be his wife. With the game over, a number in the crowd hurried out to the entrance of the bridge to welcome Ordoki into town. The old man made a comment in Basque, in a tone mixing exasperation and relief, and hurried off himself.
Ordoki’s arrival was the final event in a sequence that had begun not with the old man but as far back into the past as Ben cared to trace it. He traced it to his marriage vows, which grew out of the vows he and his mother made every time they sat down to sing. There he stopped.
Annie lay drifting, unsequenced, and every time she got out of bed she tumbled back in. She slept and awoke, and only when she felt an empty ache in her head, as empty as a room with no windows, rugs, furniture or bed, did she know she’d woken up for good. She was alone. She heard trains coming and going, and there was street noise now, a welter of voices, as if a flea market had been set up in front of the hotel. She went to the bathroom and searched her father’s overnight case for aspirin. She went next door, where the door was closed but unlocked and the room was empty, and searched there. Then she decided that what she really wanted to do was stand under a shower until the hot water ran out and the ache went away. But the water was tepid from the start. She stood under its spray until it turned cold, then, dressed in jeans and a school sweatshirt, she stepped to the window and looked down on the street. Tables and stands covered the narrow strip between the street and the rock wall buttressing the train tracks. She saw Paula standing in front of a table on which a mound of tousled scarves lay. In the midday sunlight Paula’s red hair looked even more faded; she wore a patterned poncho of some sort with black tassels. Annie watched Paula sift through the scarves and then hold two up to the light. She sent her a message not to buy the first, a Madonna blue. If she had to buy something, it should be the second, a pale yellow or gold that gave off a sparkle of champagne. A scarf to toast her father’s return? Annie asked herself: When she took her father home, would that be the end of Paula Ortiz? Her father had left Paula once, would he leave her again? If he did leave her, where would he find another woman willing to go to her lengths? Overcoming her apprehension, Paula had driven into the Basque country looking for her lover, and until she found him she was doing what she did instinctively. She was buying gifts. She bought both scarves. She crossed back over the street and, just before she disappeared from sight, appeared as a foreshortened dot of red hair with a poncho skirt. This was the woman Annie’s father stood to lose.
Annie returned to her father’s room and made the bed. When Paula knocked, Annie was there to lead her inside and take the scarves from their plastic bag to spread over the double-length pillow. They stood for a moment looking down at the diaphanous blue and the pale gold. Faced with such colors, they were no longer compelled to look at her father’s clothes or shoes or tickets or his newspaper clippings of Armando Ordoki’s long bulbous face.
Women—maidens—gave their champions scarves to carry into battle. Annie denied herself the scarf she wanted, took the blue, and rolled it into a ball she could fit into her hip pocket.
“We both have one to give him,” she explained. “So he’ll be carrying our colors. You’re gold.”
“I bought the scarves for you, Annie,” Paula said.
“I know you did.”
Paula placed the gold scarf over Annie’s head, then slipped it around her shoulders. As deliberately as if she were sorting her desires and misgivings one by one, she looped the ends of the scarf through each other. She did not tie a knot.
“The color suits you,” Paula said.
“We have to split up, you know that, don’t you?” Annie said. “Someone has to stay here in case he comes back and someone has to look for him in . . . Eskuibar.”
Paula corrected Annie’s pronunciation, the
n shook her head. If Annie couldn’t even say the name of the town, how did she expect to go there and accomplish anything?
“Two or three stops east. Trains have been going that way all day.”
And if it wasn’t two or three stops away? What if the train didn’t even stop there and Annie got off in some anonymous town no one had ever heard of before? Paula said, “You don’t know your father is there, Annie. Tell me. Convince me. How do you know?”
Annie wanted to say because her father had been circling a spot for as long as she could remember. She never knew at what point on the circle she’d find him, only that wherever he appeared he’d be off-center, beyond the bounds of home. In Kentucky she’d slept in his bed and had never felt more . . . untethered. Here in the Basque country she’d slept in another. She could tell Paula she and her father shared a sixth sense for . . . untetheredness. Michelle, of course, carried her center with her. She’d never been more tightly tethered than when she’d been running around that park in Madrid and had gotten blown up. Centers could be dangerous places.
“I just know,” Annie insisted.
“How? Do you ‘feel’ it? We’re sitting in this hotel and you can ‘feel’ his presence two or three stops down the line?”
“Don’t mock me, Paula.”
“And don’t you go crazy on me!” Paula’s tone was stern. “What if I told you I promised your father that if I ever got the chance I wouldn’t let you out of my sight?”
“Did you?”
“Not all promises are spoken out loud.”
Paula gripped Annie by the upper arm, and the grip was her mother’s back when Annie was a misbehaving child and her mother wanted to warn her there was no limit to how hard she could squeeze.
Just as quickly, Paula dropped her hand—the strength seemed to go out of her. Her eyes looked as brittle as fractured glass. “Why didn’t Ben come back last night? Is it because he discovered we’re here? Do you think he doesn’t want to see us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Annie, is he all right?”
Annie stepped to the desk and took one more look at the man her father had come to find. Yes, Armando Ordoki’s face might belong to a thug, but past the newspaper’s smudged print was a gleaming well of darkness in the eyes, the dark, self-replenishing fire of a zealot.
She summoned her conviction. “Yes,” she assured Paula, “he’s all right.”
“Why shouldn’t I go look for him? Why shouldn’t you stay here?”
“Because I didn’t come this far to spend the day in a hotel room.”
“And I did?”
“No, you didn’t. But you should stay here to welcome him back. You’re his reward.”
“And what are you?”
“A pest, a nuisance. Just a backup,” Annie added and kissed Paula on the cheek. “Wait,” she said. “Don’t move. Count to a hundred.”
Annie went downstairs to the dining room, where the midday meal was not quite ready to be served. She brought up a bottle of mineral water, an omelet bocadillo, a jar of olives and some grapes. Moving aside the newspaper clippings, she placed the tray on the desk. “You’ve got to eat,” she told Paula. “You shouldn’t even leave the room. Dad looks slow, but he’s not. He can come and go like that.” She tried one of her mother’s finger snaps, but managed only a thin scrape. She laughed at the poor attempt.
“I’ll call,” Annie promised. “I’ll get the hotel’s number and call you in this room. You’re doing this for me, Paula. It will be the best thing anybody’s ever done for me in my life.”
“Letting you go, after what happened to your sister?”
“Michelle was a solo act. You and I, we aren’t like that. We’re a team.” Paula wasn’t buying it. She gave her young friend an almost fierce measuring stare. “I’ll come find you, Annie! Don’t think you can just disappear!”
Accompanied by a core of friends and admirers and that old man, Armando Ordoki and his wife left the plaza and took the long walk down Kalea San Agustin. It was not always possible to keep him in view. He was shorter than Ben had expected him to be, and his shambling gait was more like a sailor’s roll. Then Ben realized it was the result of a limp. Ordoki favored his right leg, and every time he came down on it he seemed to perform a curtseying little dip. His wife walked at his side, but in her expression she might have been miles away. It became clear: this was not her town. Her husband was animated. Politically, he’d always been animated, richly venting his indignation and wrath. Now he was festive, directing his pleasantries to the men around him, members, perhaps, of his original cuadrilla, and to those who crowded in on the edges and hung on his words. The old man, who was old enough and like-featured enough to be his father, brought up the rear and had not been addressed or embraced individually, but perhaps Ordoki was waiting until they were home and the core’s core became a matter of blood. That downward flow in Ordoki’s face, which had always been stanched with the fury of his politics, was now caught up in little eddying pockets and puckers of his pleasure to be back, so that he looked like a chubby and good-humored boy. His cheeks shone, his full bottom lip.
Ben had no doubt it was Armando Ordoki. He had only to look at the people they passed on the street. He was not everyone’s favorite son. When townspeople saw who was walking toward them, they averted their glance—some of them did—and gave Ordoki and his group a wide berth. Others, seeing it all in advance, stepped off into doorways until they had passed. Seconds later, when Ben passed these people, he couldn’t fail to detect their expressions of disapproval. He heard the powerlessness of their long-standing opposition under their breath.
This was fear. There was no mistaking this.
Once, when the group unaccountably stopped in the street, Ben got too close. The old man might have turned around and seen him and motioned to him to catch up. He’d turned and motioned to somebody, as if he were enlisting recruits.
Just down from that little park beside the river the group turned off into a bar that had never caught Ben’s attention since it had no photographs in the window or posters on the door. Ben sat in the park and waited. In the time he sat there, the people who came out of the bar seemed to move with more decisiveness than usual; there was something purposeful and ringing-clear about their voices, even about their jokes, and he got the impression that they had been in the presence of an inspirational force. He waited until the street was empty and the two bakeries nearby had closed their doors. The bakery scents had been replaced by the odors of steamed vegetables and broiled beef. Finally, convinced that Ordoki and his friends had left and he’d somehow missed them, Ben got up to stroll past the window in an effort to see inside; then he entered. Ordoki was sitting with the others at a table in the rear, where the light from the street didn’t reach. Once again the old man, stationed on the outskirts of the group, made an intemperate old man’s gesture for him to come join them, and Ben had no choice but to wave back, no, he’d sit at the bar, where he ordered his vino and pincho de jamon.
He had just been served when Ordoki and his followers left. They brushed his windbreaker, and one of them brushed hard enough that he felt the location of his knife shift. From the man himself, at the actual moment of his passing, Ben was no farther than three feet. He was even closer to his wife, who had a cleaving sort of face, as clean-featured as a hawk. Along with the festivity on Ordoki’s face was a slyness now, as if he’d just heard a joke whose meaning only he and a few others got. Someone said in Spanish, “No solamente parece un cerdo, es lo que es”—“He not only looks like a hog, that’s what he is”—which got a laugh, but the response came in Basque. When the old man passed, he grinned at Ben, the foreigner, and shook his head.
Ben ate one bite of his pincho, took one swallow of wine and was on the street in time to see the group break up at the bridge beside the park. Ordoki and his wife crossed the bridge in the company of three others. The old man was not one of them. The majority of the group entered the neighborhood of working-cla
ss apartment buildings just beyond the pension. The old man remained at the entrance to the bridge, glancing into the cars that passed, but primarily, Ben suspected, waiting for him.
He walked instead back down San Agustin toward the plaza. A passageway beside the market led him to the river and that pedestrian bridge with the statue of Icarus. Ordoki and his wife walked along the river on the other side, in the company not of three men now but two. At the bridge they lost another, but not before they had stepped out and taken a look down into the upturned face of the boy whose powerful aluminum wings no longer served him. The men seemed to be agreeing on plans for a future date, perhaps that evening. They nodded to each other, taking their cues from Ordoki. His wife spent all her time inspecting the workmanship of the statue, leaning over the railing as though to study the engineering involved.
One of the men added his cigarette to those already in Icarus’s mouth. It was just possible that Ben heard, thinner and keener than the water’s rush, the hiss of the extinguishing ash. That man then crossed the bridge and passed within five feet. Their eyes never met. Ben had seen him before, middle-aged and overweight, small eyes and a long fleshy slab of a face.
Ben let him pass, then continued down San Agustin to the plaza, stepping out onto the bridge Ordoki had entered town by.
Across the river, and about to turn up into a hillside street of modest chalets, Ordoki and his wife were down to themselves.
She was dressed in a stylish high-belted jacket, the sort women who show horses wear, and tan slacks that even flared a bit at the thighs like jodhpurs. She wore midsized platform heels.