The Bird in Last Year's Nest

by Shaun Herron

  “I come from Granada,” the lieutenant explained. “I’ve heard a lot about these Basque gastronomic clubs, of course, but I’ve never been to one.”

  And I’m not asking you, Mauro thought. “Ours is a very poor one,” he said. “I mean, our furniture, our equipment, everything is poor. We made the furniture from packing cases. We can’t afford much, but we love to cook.”

  “The cooking is the thing, I understand.”

  “Yes.” The subject stalled.

  Lieutenant Mieza walked with Mauro to the front entrance. He was relaxed, casual, one young man talking idly with a much younger man with whom there were links of acquaintance, distant but real—Colonel Basa of the Civil Guard. That was a good connection. That’s what Mieza had on his mind: connections! Mauro stilled his rising sense of triumph and listened, nodding, smiling, yessing, noing, being pleasing.

  He refused a ride back to his lodgings. “About my landlord,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll have a man over there before you get back. And, yes—I’ll have a good word to say about you in my report to Basa.”

  Mauro flagged down a little blue bus and half-way home got off it. His excitement wouldn’t allow him to sit. He drew great breaths; the cool air tasted strong and sweet. He swung his arms, striding; life roared in him. The fear and shame and regret of the long hours before eleven were driven far back in his mind and every vigorous step drove them further. There was nothing to fear. They knew nothing. That Mieza wanted to please Basa. “A good word to say about you to Basa.” They have eyes and ears everywhere. You can’t move but they know it; everybody believes that. Well, there you are: I was right in their jaws, fresh from a bank robbery and they hadn’t a clue. Whoever messed up Mieza’s orders was getting his arse kicked right now. That young police politician probably said, “Send a car for him,” and they picked him up at six in the morning, emptied his pockets, kept him sitting there without a pee for almost five hours. That business about his watch, too. They didn’t forget to take it. That was a technique—let him sit and watch the hours passing. For a moment, anger swept up in him and he walked faster.

  But the thought of ambitious, conniving, stupid Mieza restored his good humor. And Luis Arrabal and Dion Ugalde repossessed their heroic world, and the doctor of Burguete was his father in his silent world, and the talent ran in his bloodstream. He looked in the faces of the people passing and smiled at them, and they looked blankly back, puzzled. Who’s that? their eyes said. Do I know him? Who am I? he asked them in his head. You don’t know what I am. I blew up the Iruña Zarra in Pamplona and then toured Colonel Basa’s Summerhouse, and then I talked to him about the bombing and he hadn’t a clue. And I robbed the bank at Valmaseda, and talked to Lieutenant Mieza afterwards at Civil Guard headquarters and he’s going to commend me to the colonel. It’s in the bloodstream. The people around him were like an alcazar in which he walked, shielded and succored. Their very ignorance was a defence behind which he could move with ease and immunity. The vocabulary of Abril’s ideology came nowhere near his mind. The words that floated in it, like little orgasms, were: “cover, operation, execution, tactics, escape …” These were exciting words. He wanted to yell “ARRABAL!” and see what effect it had on the people. Instead, he spoke into the face of a pretty woman as she passed. “¡Viva Yo!” Hurrah for me! he said and she pointed a forefinger at her temple and circled it slowly and did not smile. He laughed, and saluted her and said to himself, “Pretty bitch,” and turned into his lodgings, high on his triumphs.

  Out of the fermenting air, into the staleness of his room; here was another world to subdue, and Mauro erected enclosures around his worlds with a certain panache. So he worked hard and singlemindedly on his texts till nine o’clock when his alarm went off. The alarm was a Christmas gift from his mother, and a joke they shared. She bought it one weekend when they went for a brief respite across the frontier to Bidaét. The alarm was Russian, “Made in Rostov,” the face said and it went Bong, bong, bong twelve times before it began to rattle like a crippled tank. Big Boris, they called it. He took a child’s delight in the bongs and always heard them to the end before he shut the thing off. He heard them out now, thinking how nice it would be to see his mother at Christmas—would he tell her this time about Pureza?—shut off the last bong in the middle, kissed the clock, smiling, went for his motorbike and rode through the fermenting air back into Dion Ugalde’s world.

  Street-touring on a Tuesday night.

  Weaving, dodging, backtracking, curb-crawling. It was unnecessary, of course. Skull and Begoña harassed them often at the club; it was registered officially; now Mieza knew about it. He had even handled the key. Yet it wasn’t unnecessary. Vigilance was always necessary. Are they watching us? Following me? It is necessary to know. He was not followed.

  He had laughs for them tonight. He had been into the fiery furnace and look, no singeing, ARRABAL!

  He turned his key in the lock.

  Their mood was celebration.

  They opened bottles of Rioja and drank while they prepared to cook, and drank and sang and broke away briefly to dance while they cooked and the new people in the apartment below hammered the ceiling with a broom handle. And Abril did a few of his Basque high kicks and high leaps in the little space he had and provoked more ceiling-banging and dropped out morsels of information.

  “New people below. The girl was kicked out this morning.”

  “Why?”

  “Using the premises for immoral purposes, the order said.”

  “Did you go in there?”

  “We were friends if that’s all you mean.”

  “Is that why Skull asked you if you ever brought women in here?”

  “I don’t know why Skull asks us anything. Yes, I do. Because he’s a thug who works for a thug state.”

  Reis asked, grinning his horseman’s grin, “Did you sleep with her, Abril?”

  “Do I ask you who you sleep with, Reis?”

  “Skull must have known you went in there. He’s watching you.”

  “Not unless he stood outside her door and watched me go in and out.”

  They considered the geography of the house and agreed.

  “Who are the ceiling bangers?”

  ‘I don’t know their names. A couple. She’s built like a wrestler. She was up here borrowing sugar at five.”

  Mauro said sharply, “Why didn’t she borrow it from her next-door neighbor?”

  “She said this was the only door that answered.”

  “Everybody in the building was out?”

  “How would I know?”

  “If your little whore …” Haro said.

  “She is not a whore.”

  “I apologize,” Haro said. “If she was kicked out this morning, how did these people get in so quickly?”

  Abril made a face of exasperation. There had been enough questions. This one was the limit. “You don’t know a damn thing about the poor, do you, Haro? This is a poor-people street. The poor breathe down one another’s necks, waiting for a place to live. That couple was probably next on a long waiting list. Maybe they accused her. Poverty and riches have the same effects. They make people cruel. They probably have friends in the building. Their friends probably saw me going in there. Sometimes I did her shopping for her. She’s a waitress. Long hours, you know? They probably told the landlord. He probably got an order on moral grounds.” He looked at Haro. “He probably called her a whore,” he said.

  They danced no more, but they sang and cooked and drank and sang and ate and Abril dropped another fragment of information.

  “The priest at Valmaseda transferred the bag you left for him, Mauro. I transferred ours. The leadership is pleased with us. They say we’re a crack unit, ready for a big operation.” He said it proudly, like a Boy Scout who had been commended by his Scoutmaster. Haro saw it in his face and was amused. All Abril’s attitudes were so working class, he thought. And what else? He’s incurably working class. As if it were
a terminal disease. That’s why he’s the link with the next link in the Fifth Assembly; it’s never one of us. Mauro can be the leader of the unit, but never the link. Mauro and I can go into the bank and lift the money. But Abril delivers it to his link. Everything goes from us through Abril. Everything comes to us through Abril.

  “Did they tell you how much we got?” Haro asked.

  With his mouth full of chicken and grinning, Abril said, “One and a half million pesetas in dirty notes.” He often talked with his mouth full.

  “That’s twenty-five thousand dollars,” Reis said. The wine company did business with New York and exchange figures came unbidden to his mind.

  “We were to get five percent for our expenses. How much did we get?”

  “Thirty thousand pesetas,” Abril said and crammed his mouth.

  “That’s not five percent,” Reis said. “It’s a miserable five hundred dollars.”

  “What do we need it for? The Assembly needs every peseta. They’re buying guns. They have to get about. The leaders have to live. The men who’ve been driven over the mountains have to live. Their families have to eat. What do we lack? What do we need more money for?”

  “Rioja,” Haro said, feeling the tension. “Thirty thousand pesetas is enough.”

  “It’s not enough,” Reis said. “They promised us five percent. When they make a contract, they should honor it. I hope you protested, Abril?”

  “I didn’t. I agreed with them. We don’t need any more.”

  “What we need is beside the point. They offered us five percent. That’s a contract.”

  Abril rinsed his mouth with red wine and said impatiently, “What are we? Bank robbers or revolutionaries?” Christ. It was the richest member of the unit—probably the richest man in the whole Fifth Assembly—who talked about money, contracts, percentages, as if they were a fucking business. That was par for the course the rich always steered. Give us our cut.

  Mauro asked, “Where is it, Abril?”

  “At the Siglo tobacco shop. We can draw it in small amounts.”

  “It’s already a small amount.” Reis was sullen and a little drunk. “It’s not the money I care about, it’s their word.”

  “Right.” Mauro pushed the nervous subject out of reach and told them of his visit to Lieutenant Mieza and the celebration was on again. They laughed at the stupidity of the Civil Guard, at the political cupidity of Lieutenant Mieza; they laughed about their now obvious superiority, they laughed about the excitement of it all, and they were all a little tight. They drank more wine and ate and sang and drank and laughed, but Abril was withdrawn now, listening and thinking more than he laughed, and more than he drank.

  His thoughts smarted. He liked them, but they were what they were: bourgeois. Once, when he called them that, Reis hoisted his long nose in the air and said, “What does that word mean, Abril? The fact is it no longer has any meaning. It’s just a resentful sound …” Well, “whore" wasn’t just a sound and Haro let it out very easily about little Eulalia who was a waitress and wasn’t even awake when they knocked on her door this morning and gave her the eviction order from her miserable room and kitchen downstairs. What Mauro and Reis and Haro didn’t know was that she came upstairs with her squashed suitcase and sat here crying for a while and he took her to a friend’s home where she’d be allowed to stay till she found another room near her work. If she hadn’t already been fired for being late for her work.

  What would Haro know about how she felt? He was a commerce student who’d go into his father’s business and get rich. What he wanted was to be one of the current national heroes—a driver of racing cars. He’d have been content with that adulation. But he didn’t have quite enough of what it took behind a wheel and he couldn’t live without excitement and danger in a society where the excitement of participation belongs to guttersnipes who become bullfighters, or working boys who become soccer stars or rich men’s sons who become racing drivers. And he couldn’t talk freely and safely or lash about him with his tongue at politicians unless he did it in a field or on the top of a mountain. Haro was here because he wanted his own freedom to say and do as he pleased, as a substitute for a chequered flag. He needed excitement. He got it in secrecy, conspiracy and robbing banks. Maybe he didn’t know this himself—but Abril was sure of it. Spain sat heavily on Haro. But it was sitting on Haro, not on Spaniards. Not on Basques. Only on Haro.

  Reis was not really different. He couldn’t breathe. He had been on many business trips with his father to London and New York and the theaters and newspapers, and magazines and books and talk intoxicated him. Nothing, it seemed, was beyond question. Everyone, it seemed, was up on his hind legs, challenging everything. It wasn’t that Reis was committed to anything he read or heard. He was committed only to his own right to challenge restraints on himself. At the club he told them of dinner parties with his father’s London and New York customers—mere businessmen like his father, who said outrageous things about society, about religion, about their political leaders, about law, and policies as if it was mere small talk, as if it was as natural as breathing and of no great threat to authority or order. And the club was useful to Reis: He could talk here as freely as Englishmen and Americans talked without his father’s alarmed rebukes, cautions, restraints. Englishmen and Americans are not Spaniards, his father said. We have no talent for the way they live. Word and action are one with us. We are not Europeans, he said, we are Spaniards. As if a Spaniard was something less than an Englishman; more dangerous to himself and others. And that itself a notion to be defied.

  Reis needed to defy. Abril suspected that Reis thought the free-flying mouths of Englishmen and Americans made very little difference to the shape of their societies. Socialist-talking businessmen—in England, particularly—who lived like kings, couldn’t expect their privileges and advantages to suffer any diminution or they wouldn’t talk as they did. Abril was certain Reis wanted the Anglo-Saxon liberty to say and do what he pleased—in a Spanish society that would be different from its present structure only with respect to the mind and the mouth. He was quite persuaded that Reis believed the free word was a personal pleasure only. He needed to defy. He cheered the strikers because they defied. He came to the Fifth Assembly because it defied. It was a convenient sort of defiance, dangerous in a way, and that was satisfying, but clandestine; and that was a form of insurance against the consequences of, say, standing up in church and denouncing the chief of state. For that, you were arrested on the spot.

  Mauro was a different specimen altogether. The Fifth Assembly chose him. The word came from Burguete, from the link with a unit in the mountain farms. “He’s Arrabal’s grandson and he’s ready.” So Pureza was cast like a lure and Mauro was in. But Abril knew now that there wasn’t much to choose between the three of them: Reis and Haro were bourgeois iconoclasts. They hadn’t a real political idea in their heads; they were frustrated egoists who wanted to hit at something and the biggest target was “the State,” or “society” or “the regime,” or “oppression”—there was no consistency even in their vocabulary and they declined to learn Abril’s. They were stubbornly bourgeois; not because they rejected Abril’s vocabulary on some other ideological ground, but because it was “foreign” and their own, they were sure, was better. There was something silly, they thought and told Abril, about a Spanish working man using all those strange words, “like a parrot,” as Reis put it, “who’d taken a course at the London School of Economics.” And Mauro? He was a bourgeois romantic. He wanted to be another Luis Arrabal out of his time and context.

  The important thing about them was not, however, that they were or were not ideologists but that they were useful. Trained, indoctrinated cunningly according to their weaknesses—by which the Fifth Assembly strategists meant the things in them that made them willing to act under orders—they could be used. And Abril was their link, a proletarian with an ideology and a vocabulary that belonged to it. “Don’t force the language if they can’t swallow i
t. Don’t use it at all,” Abril’s link told him at last. “Use them” There were more important things than vocabulary to bother about.

  Abril watched them and listened to them as if they were children. He was twenty-five. But they were useful children, tools in the larger cause. They had much to lose and valued what they had and understood nothing of its relation to the purposes of the men whose cause they joined and all but a very few of whom they had ever seen. Reis was the eldest among them. “Twenty-eight,” Abril liked to tell himself with a proletarian sense of superiority that arose out of a known and defined purpose, “and emotionally retarded.”

  “You’re very quiet, Abril.”

  “I’m listening.”

  So it came to review time. At some point, usually within two weeks of an operation, when all of them had had time to reflect on it, they reviewed the operation and considered its flaws.

  “Review time,” Mauro said, and called them to order.

  They were, Abril sometimes thought, like the Catholic social workers who took parties of working-class boys to the mountains or the sea for charity holidays. There were times for teeth-cleaning, foot and hand inspecting, praying, sleeping, eating—and reviewing. Still, Abril was not the unit leader, he was the unit link and the unit manipulator. Mauro was the leader, so he led. That was one thing the Assembly knew about its handful of bourgeois units: The bourgeois “knew how to lead.” “Leave them their illusions,” was the word from the link. The problems of a bourgeois unit led by a proletarian had been experienced and examined and judged to be not worth the problems the bourgeois created. So Mauro was the leader.

  “The Pamplona operation,” he said, “was an almost unqualified success. The problems were of two different sorts. One was our fault, the other was inherent in the tactical approach. First, the inherent problems.

  “I had to meet my contact in the plaza and pass him the key to my saddlebags where he was to put the explosives. I also had to get rid of José Duarte, who was my extra cover, since he lived in Pamplona and I lived in Burguete and it was natural that both of us should be there on a weekend trip home. But at the Iruña café-bar we ran into his friends and they delayed us. I could see my contact through the big windows. He circled the plaza three times before we got away. Then I had to slip him the key as I passed him in the street. He was carrying the bomb in a paper parcel and wanted rid of it.