by Lamar Herrin
A man in a large floppy beret stepped into the street accompanied by a couple. The couple might have been in their midtwenties. This time the beret reminded her father of what a Left Bank artist might wear, and Ben had to consider the possibility that these young companions were artistic disciples, that it was all a subversion of the established order of art. He stepped into the darkened doorway at his back and let the three of them pass. The young woman had a dazed, enraptured look on her face; the young man’s eyes were narrowed judiciously, as if to make the difference between them clear. They reminded Ben of a photo he’d seen. In the photo the man had been more coldly calculating and the woman more wide-eyed and aware, but, essentially, the couples were the same. The man in the beret was saying something to them in Basque. His voice was level, instructional, leaving no room for doubt.
Artists never spoke like that.
Ben followed them at a distance of a block. At that well-lit intersection where the pension was located, they stepped into public view and their voices were jovial, typically loud, and their embraces came with an onrush of feeling.
Artists made spectacles of themselves and gave in to their feelings like that.
The young couple crossed over the river.
The man lingered at the intersection, as though considering the turn he might take. Then he continued down San Agustin, where numbers of people still strolled.
This time no one shied away from him. Perhaps it was the beret. Nor did anyone, seeking his favor, approach.
Ben fell in beside him, matching his stride. It was the same stride, no limp. They came to the same height.
In the Plaza Mayor the waitress at the café and a young boy had begun to bring the tables in under the arcade. Annie gave them time to complete the work, then, before the waitress could go back inside, where customers, all men, still stood at the bar, she took her aside. Yes, the waitress answered, a woman had just been there, speaking very good Spanish, a woman with red hair and . . . the word was pecas, freckles, yes just such a woman asking for a man and a girl, a girl such as Annie herself might have been. And the woman had been? Quiet, very quiet and still. As if she were looking at something very far away. Something that had already happened. The waitress shook her head.
“What is it?” Annie wanted to know.
The cute Basque waitress shook her head again. Her round eyes blinked on the slowest of shutters. “Very quiet and very still,” she repeated.
“You didn’t see us here today,” Annie said.
“I see hundreds of people every day. Especially on Sundays. It’s like a homecoming. But they’re all the same.”
“I’ll never forget you, but you didn’t see me.”
The waitress kissed her on each of her cheeks. For a brief moment Annie was visited by the other woman’s warmth, humid and very close in the evening’s cool.
“Your friend is over there,” the waitress whispered.
Paula was standing in the deeper shadows of what must have been a ball court. Where two high walls intersected she was quietly keeping watch. Annie crossed the plaza and stood beside her with the towering walls at her back, whose facing was peppered with scuff marks. They might have been marks of violence, a macabre scorekeeping of the spots where flesh had stood before concrete, and not the places where a ball had struck.
“You didn’t call,” Paula said. “I wasn’t going to lose you both.”
“He’s here,” Annie said.
“Yes, I know.”
“He’s very close.”
“You’ve felt him?”
“Everybody’s been here, now everybody’s gone. We’re the only ones left. Come with me, I want to show you something.”
She gripped Paula by the softness of her upper arm, but Paula wouldn’t be moved.
“It’s a statue,” Annie said. “It’s another stranger in town, climbing up on a bridge.”
With a nerveless equanimity in her voice, Paula replied, “I found you here. I’ll wait for him here too.”
Moving in their direction down Kalea San Agustin, Annie’s father spoke courteously. “I’ll only take a moment of your time.”
The man striding beside him responded, “Speak to me in my own language and you can have all the time you want.”
Speaking in English, Ben said, “It’s about my daughter.”
“Yes?”
“It’s about my daughter and the Basque cause.”
“Your daughter and the Basque cause?”
“Yes.”
“What is your daughter’s name?”
Before he could check himself Ben named his living daughter; then he took his living daughter back and offered his dead daughter instead.
“Michelle . . .” The man considered the name before declaring, “Michelle is not a Basque name. It’s French.” He turned to pass alongside the market. This was the passageway to the pedestrian bridge.
Ben called after him, “There are Basques in France.”
“But not named Michelle.”
“Is Sabino Arana a Basque name?” Ben asked.
The man turned back. His beret cast a diagonal shadow across his face, but this was as close as Ben would come to the man he’d seen on television talking passionately to anyone willing to listen, the man who could be quoted forever in the press.
Ben took his chance. “Armando is not a Basque name either.”
“Armando?”
“Yes. Your name.”
“You’re confusing me with somebody else.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Somebody who knows more about the Basque cause than I do.”
“I know who you are.”
“I can tell you this. The Basque cause requires a lifelong commitment. It is not an adventure you can walk away from.”
“Yoyes,” Ben replied, recalling in the moment the name, the nickname, of the woman who’d retired from the struggle to raise her daughter and whom ETA had killed before her daughter’s eyes.
“Yoyes?”
Then he remembered the complete name. “Dolores Gonzales Catarain,” he said.
“Who are you?” the man demanded.
“A father concerned about his daughter.”
His living daughter had drifted out from the ball court. The waitress had gone back inside the café. A group of kids was gathered under the arcade, but they soon scattered. Annie heard footfalls in the plaza, made by people who had disappeared by the time she came to look for them. The town was quiet. If the Plaza Mayor was a stage, the stage was set, but it was too big a stage, too centered in the public eye, too resonant with historical occasions, too much a pour-in point for all the currents that made up the town, and she was not where she had to be. She stopped and listened. She heard the river, and she heard voices borne on the water. If voices got on the river they might be carried from one end of this mountain-rimmed town to the other, and she instructed her hearing until it was not apartment dwellers with their windows open and their nightly mutterings she heard but the voices of men relating matters of real import, real consequence, or voices relating their passion’s blind folly. Those were the voices the river favored and those were the voices she heard.
Two men. One of them would be her father.
Annie was not a fool. If she heard the water making the sounds of two men talking, she heard what she’d come to this town to hear, she quite understood. But if those were the sounds the water made, and if one of the sounds was the voice of her father, what choice did she have?
She moved off toward the river. Paula called after her, and then Paula moved with her.
The man Ben had addressed as Armando Ordoki walked away, paused as though considering his course of action, and then walked partway back, so that the two now stood no more than five feet apart. The river ran below them. They were in a shadowy walkway that passed behind a string of offices and stores. The window just upstream gave them a darkened look into a gallery where pictures by local artists hung. Pictures of this river and these hill
s.
“I will take the time to explain something to you,” the man announced with professorial forbearance. “Please listen carefully. I will describe to you a scene that all Basques know. When the guardia civil come to take your son or daughter away, they will march you and your wife and younger children outside into the street. More often than not, you will be barefoot, perhaps only half-clothed. They will insult you and threaten to beat you if you move. They intend to make an example of you. Your neighbors will not take you in because then the guardia civil will evict and beat them. You stand outside in the rain and cold and listen to your child’s screams. When they finally take him away they will not let you back into your house. Not at once. First they will take all his possessions away, in big cardboard boxes, before your eyes. His books, his notebooks, his tapes, his posters, his clothes, his toothbrush and hairbrush and razor, everything, his childhood toys if he has any left. When they do let you back inside, you will find your house ransacked and no trace of your son left. Or your daughter. This is how the Spanish state functions. They are scrupulous down to the last detail. They will take your son or daughter to Madrid and for five days you will have no news of their whereabouts. You will not know if your son or your daughter is alive or dead. The one thing you can be sure of is that he—or she—will be tortured. Perhaps you have seen the photographs. . . .”
“Yes.”
“You may have opposed what your son or daughter chose to do, but once they have done it you are part of the fight. Do you understand? You will never forget the night they came for him—or for her, for your daughter. They will have violated you too, in your innermost being. You think, what a pretty town. Most tourists think of our Basque towns as ‘timeless.’ Time here cuts deep. It is like a razor cut. It begins when they come for your child and you stand outside counting the seconds and minutes and hours. You will never know how many families have stood like that, exposed—”
“Armando Ordoki,” Ben said.
The man stopped talking. He looked at Ben with an alerted curiosity, the flesh flow on his face come to a quivering halt. Ben remembered that Ordoki as a very young man had been taken away. It followed that Ordoki’s family had stood outside.
“Why do you call me that? Armando Ordoki no longer lives in this town.”
“I want to know if the cause is just,” he said.
“It is just.”
“In spite of the suffering. The torture and all the families that have had to stand outside.”
“In spite of everything.”
The man turned to go. At the grip of a hand on his shoulder, he turned back.
“My daughter,” Ben said.
“Ah, yes, your daughter,” the man recalled, in his voice a faint trace of scorn.
“In spite of her?”
The man removed Ben’s hand from his shoulder. With his free hand he motioned back to the passageway they’d taken along the market to reach the spot where they stood. “Is that your daughter?” he inquired. “Is the woman beside her your wife?”
Annie saw two men talking at the entrance to the bridge. Two men dressed the same, roughly the same age, build and size. Beyond the man her father was talking to she saw the aluminum figure with the useless wings desperately trying to reach the safety of the bridge. She identified her father by his lighter skin, his finer and lighter hair, by the neck she’d held on to as a child, and the heavily sloped shoulders she’d ridden on when her father played horsey. Seen from the rear, he was immediately recognizable as the man who had tried to stand between her and the world’s harm.
Her shield.
The man doing the talking wore a beret that shadowed his face, but he was as close a facsimile to Armando Ordoki as her father was likely to find. She saw the man turn away and her father place a hand on his shoulder to turn him back. Paula gave a gasp, a sharp intake of breath as if she’d been stung, and it was then that the man looked their way and raised his voice, asking if they were her father’s daughter and wife.
It was an old trick, and with his eyes on the man before him, her father refused to be baited into turning around. In a show of solidarity, Annie refused to run to his side. Once that single gasp had escaped her, Paula stood quietly, as quietly—what had the waitress said?—as if she were looking at something very far away, something that had already happened.
“My daughter is dead,” Annie heard her father say. “I have no wife.”
“Dead? You did not say your daughter was dead.”
“Three years ago there was an ETA attack on a guardia civil headquarters in Madrid. Before a park called Santander. Do you remember that?”
The man shifted his gaze away from her father and looked Annie directly in the eye. He did not look at Paula. Paula Ortiz did not interest him. Like her father, he had a fleshy face, but his was flesh growing off a scowling hardness so that at any moment it might gather itself for one more murderous assault.
She returned his stare. She was searching for the gleaming darkness she’d imagined at the bottom of his eyes, but in the inconstant light all she saw was the petty and impersonal shine of two eyes looking at her with their own petty and impersonal design. She’d seen their like before. It occurred to her that if this was Armando Ordoki, Armando Ordoki was not someone who deserved to be singled out.
There was no shortage of thugs.
“ETA,” she heard him advise her father, “is not something you want to be talking about.”
Whereas in a world full of fathers, she had only one.
Her father said, “My daughter was a student. She was running around that park. When you killed that lone guardia civil you killed her.”
The man assumed an Ordoki-like bearing. Upright and righteous, he declared, “I did not kill your daughter.” But at the back of his voice Annie believed she heard a faint stirring of sympathy, something like a quiet current running through his voice, which might have been the pacifying effect of the river running through them all. Armando Ordoki was said to have two children. A daughter of his?
“When you did not raise your hand to condemn the killing,” her father made clear, “you might as well have set off the bomb.”
“Raise my hand?”
“In the Basque parliament.”
“I don’t sit in the Basque parliament.”
“I ask you again,” her father said. “In spite of her?”
“In spite of her?”
“In spite of my daughter’s death, is the cause just? The Spanish government takes your young men and women away. They torture them. They make inalienable enemies out of every Basque family. Does that give you the right to take my daughter’s life?”
Annie saw the man do a remarkable thing, utterly un-Ordoki-like. He glanced back at her, as though including her, as though asking permission to act for them both. Then he raised his heavy-fisted hand and laid it on her father’s shoulder. She might have said he laid it there consolingly. If he’d been anybody else, she might even have said fraternally. Her father stiffened. But the man did not remove his hand.
“If what you say is true,” he allowed, “your daughter died an innocent death.”
Her father stepped in closer to him and said something Annie couldn’t make out, but whatever it was caused the man to step back. His hand remained on her father’s shoulder, but his arm had gone rigid. He now appeared to be holding her father off. By the length of his arm, he appeared to be demonstrating the extent of his Basque apartness.
“That Civil Guard headquarters,” he responded in a rehearsed and faintly wearied voice, but not lacking resolve, “was a legitimate military objective.”
“But my daughter wasn’t,” her father reminded him, loud enough for them all to hear.
“Unfortunately, your daughter was within range.”
“Her name was Michelle Williamson, and she was twenty-one years old.”
Ben experienced it in the aftermath. The knife was in his hand and his hand was held before him, but the actual drawing of the knife was t
he click he heard afterward, and the leap of the handle into the palm and the fingers slipping into their grooves. He was not an agile man, but he’d once caught a pickpocket with his fingers nibbling in his hip pocket. He’d caught him by the wrist. In that instant he saw that boy’s lean, startled face.
He and the man in the beret looked down at the blade, moonlight running cold on the stainless steel. That was his knife, Ben recognized it at once. He was astonished to find it in his hand.
One astonishment gave way to another: his daughter Annie had appeared at his side. She too was looking down at the knife. A third: moving up beside Annie, steadfastly, as though honoring a pledge, was Paula Ortiz. The four of them formed a close-knit group on the bridge, and Ben thought—the thought was presented to him, from the day’s events, an image sprang to his mind—of the way families formed in this town.
Blood pairings.
The man leaned in, as though his eyes had deceived him. Which meant they all huddled closer.
“What are you going to do with that?” he said.
Ben advanced the point of the knife to the other man’s midsection. Powerful tremors passed through his shoulder into his arm. To his left, close to his ear, he heard Paula Ortiz say, “The Goya, Ben. If you do it, you’ll be stuck.”
The Goya he saw was of two giants, colossi, mired to the knees in a mortal mud.
Obeying those tremors, the knife point found its way into the fabric of the windbreaker, the cotton shirt and the rubbery vicinity of the other man’s flesh.
His daughter Annie reached out and removed the beret. Exposed, the face before them instantaneously changed shape; the eyes flared and widened, the forehead rose like a cliff. With a pallor that shone like the dusky sheen coming off the Icarus, or the fallen angel, or the bird-fish-man struggling to reach the bridge, the man threatened to become someone they’d never seen before.
“Who are you?” Annie said.
“Not the person you’re looking for,” he replied.
“Then you’re nobody. Just another one of them.”
“One of them?”
“Another Basque with a great big hard-on of a non-negotiable demand.”