The Bird in Last Year's Nest

by Shaun Herron

  Mauro sat down beside Señora Anson. “Forgive me, señora,” he said, “and please do what I tell you when I tell you.”

  She looked steadily into his face.

  “Please,” he said. “When I tell you.”

  There was no response. She turned her face away.

  Abril wandered back into the drawing room. Mauro got up quickly.

  “Getting to know one another?”

  Mauro did not reply. Abril came around the couches and stood in front of Señora Anson. “Do you sleep well at night, señora?” he asked her.

  Her head turned slowly. She looked at everything but did not see Abril.

  “Does it disturb you that one of your horses has more spent on it in a week than a shipyard worker earns to pay his rent and feed and clothe his family?”

  She examined her sideboard with careless interest.

  “We have put a price on your head, señora—ten million pesetas and Vincente Hierro, in three days and no longer. Are you worth that much to your old husband?”

  “Go back to the hall,” Mauro said, “or the stables.”

  The others came back and cut off Abril’s reply. “All the lights out,” Abril said, “and we’re on our way.”

  They walked to the cars. Mauro walked beside Señora Anson, his hand on her arm. “Can you lie comfortably on the back seat?” he asked her. She did, without consenting to his care or existence.

  Haro came from his car to Mauro’s open window. “We read your note. We agree. We’ll do it. But they’ll kill us afterwards.”

  “We’ll face afterwards when we reach it. Wish me luck.”

  “What’s the conference?” Abril shouted from the third car.

  “Matches.”

  “Get moving.”

  Their convoy started down the long driveway. Mauro allowed the first car its three hundred yards, but Abril stayed tight behind him. They turned left into the road. Abril did not drop back.

  “Señora Anson,” Mauro said, “this is going to be a very rough ride. If the car behind drops back up where the road winds very tightly, I want you to try to sit up. Otherwise, you’ll be thrown hard onto the floor. If I tell you to move quickly, please do it. If you don’t, we’ll both be shot to death.”

  He watched Abril in the rearview mirror dropping back very slowly as the road began to twist as it climbed.

  “Sit up now, if you can, señora, and keep low and tight in a corner. Don’t let your head be seen from behind. Most of the time now we’ll be out of sight but I haven’t much time to play with. He’ll stay only three hundred yards behind us.”

  He heard her struggling to sit up.

  “Brace your feet against the front seat and be ready to be thrown about.”

  He felt the pressure of her feet behind him.

  The Arano road was five kilometers ahead. They drove the next four in silence.

  “A kilometer up the road I’m going to turn hard right and put out the lights. When I tell you, push with your feet and your back.”

  He drove a little faster, widening the gap. They were always out of sight now. “In a moment,” he said. “Push!” he shouted.

  The car swung hard. He braked hard and heard her scrambling as the lights went out. The car slid along the bank on the right side of the road and two wheels climbed and tilted the señora in a heap. Pureza’s car was there for a moment in the dying lights, headed out, then it was gone. They did not move till Abril passed the end of the road. Pureza came out of the ditch, threw the back door open and dragged Señora Anson out. She had never before been hauled out of a car by her armpits and bustled clumsily into the back seat of another one.

  They came back onto the Hernani road slowly. Mauro pulled off his stocking mask and threw it away. “Señora,” he said, “we’re trying to help you. In a couple of minutes they’ll know two cars are missing at the house where you were to be held. They’ll come after this one because you’re in it. If we take off the tapes will you trust us? Will you nod?”

  “She’s nodding,” Pureza said, and took them off.

  “Now I’ll have to drive this car, señora, and you’re not going to be comfortable. We have to get through Hernani.”

  The señora did not speak.

  “The only danger you’re in is from my driving,” he said. “Unless they catch us. Both of you watch for lights ahead.”

  He gambled everything on the road down. Trees and banks leaped at them on corners and tight bends and slid away. Mauro alternately sank his foot and braked harshly and sweated and time and again was near to panic when his speed outstripped his driving skill, and the tires screamed for him. There was no sound from the back seat beyond an occasional hissing intake of breath. At times only chance saved them from destruction as he misjudged corners and the rear end whipped, sliding the car left and right across the road. Twice they bounced off high banks and were thrust across the road and he had no skill to do anything but hope the car would settle facing in the right direction. It was a brutal and clumsy performance. And why hadn’t Abril come? He was a better driver than Mauro. But he did not come and they went through Hernani sedately and took the road to Irun.

  “They have problems now,” Mauro said with immense relief. “They don’t know where we’re going and there are too many roads we could have taken.”

  “In that case, pull over, please. I shall come up beside you,” the señora said like a captain repossessing the bridge, and Mauro did as he was told.

  She settled herself beside him and wearily closed her eyes, but only for a moment. Mauro and Pureza watched her like mice measuring their future against a hunting cat. The señora drew up her legs and turned on the front seat so that she could see both of them. “Well,” she said, “put on the roof light.”

  Mauro turned it on. She did look tired. There was a faint puffiness under her eyes and in them a petrous light he was not able to read. While he watched it with deepening anxiety it dissolved into something he thought might be amusement. But her mouth was set, her hands clasped tightly in her lap and she searched their faces, one, and then the other, again and again, and said nothing. They waited nervously as if for some sort of permission they could not define.

  “That will do. Turn it off.”

  “Señora …”

  “The light,” she said and he turned it off.

  “There has obviously been a change of plan,” she said with faint condescension. “Where are you taking me now?”

  “But … home, señora. To Pamplona.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? But señora, don’t you want …?”

  “Don’t make assumptions about what I ought to think or want. Tell me what I want to know.”

  “Because this should never have happened.”

  “Why not?”

  He had imagined it otherwise; that perhaps the gracious señora of the hotel lobby would be a little grateful? Might even be friendly? As a child he had often been made unhappy by the way anticipated events failed to conform to his prefabrication of them. He was still inclined to write the scenario of things to come. Somewhere in his mind he sheltered the notion that the beautiful woman with the horses and painters and musicians, the woman whose smile in the lobby was so obviously for him, would receive him as something less but not too much less than the prince who hacked through malignant thorns to set her free. “Because it was wrong to think of kidnapping a woman.”

  “A woman? Kidnapping Señor Huarte was quite all right?”

  “No!”

  “But banks? You people have no reservations about robbing banks? You are the people who do that, are you not?” She made “the people” sound like a euphemism for creeping things. “That man at the farm said I was to be exchanged for Hierro and money. You are his Fifth Assembly crowd, are you not?”

  “Señora,” he said dismally, “it’s a long story and a very stupid one and we ought to go.” There was one way to escape from the increasing asperity of her tongue; if she would let them go.

 
; “Were you so poor? Did you lack so much?”

  “No.”

  “You?” She spoke to Pureza for the first time.

  “It’s hard to explain,” Pureza said lamely.

  “Are you lovers?”

  “What does that mean?” Pureza said in a voice of protest.

  “I thought it was well understood.”

  “We are not lovers. We are going to be married,” Pureza said resentfully.

  “Were you in this plot from the beginning?”

  “No. When Mau—when he refused to do it, they said they would do to him what they did to the priest of Guecho who informed on Mendizábal. So he asked me to help him get you away.”

  “They stabbed the priest to death, did they not?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now they will kill you both?”

  Mauro said, “We ought to go, señora. They could come by here and see us.”

  “You are Mauro Ugalde.”

  “Yes, señora.”

  “How did you know that?” She frightened Pureza.

  “He told me. Did you come to warn me?” the señora asked Mauro.

  “I don’t know. I think I just came to look at you,” he said simply. It was a relief to say to her something that was simple and human and truthful.

  It pleased her. She smiled for the first time. “Will you accept my thanks?” she said and Pureza thought, He flattered her; she’s vain.

  “For what?” Mauro said uncomfortably, burdened with guilt.

  “You have been fools. You are also brave. Thank you. Now, if you will, I should like to go home.”

  “Yes, señora.”

  “The snow had come when I left Pamplona. Have we chains?”

  We? “Yes,” Pureza said, “in the trunk.”

  “Let us go then.”

  The road to Pamplona from Irun runs along the Rio Bidasoa that marks the frontier for about ten kilometers. Then the line retreats to the peaks of the Pyrenees. They went cautiously, expecting to meet the snow and did not meet it, till they had climbed into the Bidasoa mountains. By then they were almost friends.

  From time to time the señora curled a little tighter and rested her head on the back of the seat, catnapping. It seemed to refresh her. “This has been something of an adventure,” she said in tones like those of a young mother encouraging her young children. “What plans have you when you’re rid of me?”

  “My father is the doctor of Burguete,” Mauro said. “I’m going to drive over there and talk to him. I’ve got to talk to him. I’ve done so much that’s … he’ll know what I ought to do now.”

  “Yes, that would be wise.”

  So she would not call the Civil Guard? Mauro and Pureza relaxed. Señora Anson relaxed. The stiffness between them melted under the touch of her forgiveness.

  He talked of his father and mother, of their quiet life, his father’s practice, his own and Pureza’s plans for a life not unlike it in some small town. “We’re going to spend Christmas with my parents,” he said.

  “Then you certainly are going to marry.”

  “When I qualify. You must be exhausted, señora?”

  She was tired, but not exhausted. They met the snow at Sumbilla. It was wet and treacherous and they roused the innkeeper at the Villa Pancho with her name. “There are things that cannot be put off any longer,” she said and asked for the bathroom. The innkeeper led her to his own and pointed Mauro and Pureza through the bar to the public lavatories. When they came back to the bar, there was coffee which they were not allowed to touch until the señora returned. They ate bread and cheese and drank a great deal of coffee and the señora said it was a great blessing on a night like this that the Basques were such acceptably, even incredibly, clean people. She had restored her appearance in the innkeeper’s bathroom. Yes, she was very beautiful, and generous, and brave. And the innkeeper’s wife came from her bed, washed and dressed, and hovered and poured more coffee and cut more bread. “I love eating,” the señora said, “and it doesn’t show.” They were friends. One hundred pesetas, the innkeeper said and Mauro tried to pay, but the señora would not have it. “You are my guests,’’ she said and gave the innkeeper the keys of the car and asked him, please, if he would put the chains on the rear wheels, and gave him another hundred pesetas for his trouble. He went out into the slush.

  The snow sat like icing on the crossbars of the telephone poles. They passed a car trailer, jackknifed with its cabin in the ditch and a sheer drop across the road, and the señora was full of folksy enthusiasm for the things that came and went in the headlights. At Narvarte, ferns stacked like hay, at Oyaregui a glimpse of sheep in a field of maize, but she was silent when a large police sign said HIELO and they slowed to a crawl and the car shifted on the ice and the drop on the right yawned like the abyss, full of blackness. Their progress through the Velate pass was slower than a turtle’s. Mauro was afraid of the tight and endless turns that gave him no rest and when they were through it, as if she knew something must be said to unstring his nerves, she laughed at the pigs, lying in a crowded heap at the door of the roadside inn at Venta da Arraiz. Then the worst was over and they crossed the watershed. They were on the mesa on which Pamplona stands; the rivers no longer fed the waters that ran to the Bay of Biscay.

  “When we see you safely home, we’ll go on to Burguete, señora,” Mauro told her again, as if to retest her intentions.

  “If the passes are open on a night like this.”

  “They usually are.”

  “But you must come in and rest. And my husband will want to thank you.”

  “There’s no need to thank us. He can thank Pureza if he feels he must thank anyone. She had nothing to do with the thing and she ran a big risk helping me. But me—I should thank you. And I do.”

  “For what?”

  “Anybody else would turn me in.”

  “Would they?”

  “And I’d deserve it.”

  They came companionably into Pamplona. There had been companionable moments on the journey when Mauro half-regretted Pureza’s presence. There was a warmth about the señora, something in her smile, in the way she looked directly into his face when she smiled, a focused and excluding look that took possession of him and built a screen …

  He searched the approaches to her house. Reis and Haro were not parked where they were meant to be. Abril went after them? Caught them? Killed them? “My friends were to be here,” he said. “They were to take the road through Leiza. Abril must have caught them.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said as if of some inconvenience, “there is all the more reason for you to come in and rest.”

  It was a rich house, too rich for his blood or his experience of houses. The señora retreated from him, not because anything in her bearing toward him changed but because she was in her setting and it was not his. He took Pureza’s hand and felt close to her, in need of her. “Come to my husband’s library,” the señora said, “and I will bring him to you. And while you wait, there are drinks on the table.”

  She closed the door and left them, standing hand in hand in the middle of the large oak room.

  “She was good luck for us, Mauro,” Pureza said. “We’ll need even better luck with Abril and his people and maybe you were right. Maybe it’s going to work.”

  “It’s going to work. There has to be a way to make it work. We’ll find it.”

  The library door opened. Colonel Basa came in and closed the door behind him. “Good morning, Mauro,” he said. “Señora Anson called me from the inn at Sumbilla. She and her husband have asked me to thank you again on their behalf.” His scholarly face was melancholy.

  “Colonel …” Mauro began. His legs were as shaky as his voice.

  “You are under arrest.”

  “Colonel, my father and mother …” He looked and felt pitiful, without marrow in his bones.

  “I had them in mind when I sent your father to Bilbao to see you. You, it would appear, did not.” Basa opened the door and the Gua
rds came in.

  “Please, señor, please,” Pureza cried like a child whose world is falling, “I have nobody but Mauro …”

  “Where you will be for a long time to come, you will not need anybody. You may take them,” Basa said to the Guards. “They go to Burguete.”

  They had to hold Mauro by the arms. He staggered as he walked.

  Basa said savagely, as Mauro passed, “You stupid, clownish bull’s arse. What have you done to them?”

  “Mauro, Mauro,” Pureza cried.

  Mauro did not hear her. He was listening to the voices of his father and mother.

  BOOK THREE

  Fresh sin, fresh penance.

  SPANISH PROVERB

  8

  There is no point in saying “tus, tus” to an old dog.

  SPANISH PROVERB

  The Ugaldes never had much mail. A letter a week from Mauro, bills, twice a year a note from Maria-Angeles’ cousin who lived across the frontier in Pau, once a year from Dion’s cousins in Paris—that was about all. Mauro’s weekly letter was conspicuous.

  “There’s no letter from Mauro,” Maria-Angeles told Ugalde.

  “Look again. He never misses.”

  There was nowhere to look. This morning there were no bills, no circulars from the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education or any other ministry. There was no mail at all.

  “It’s late, that’s all. He’s probably had tests he had to prepare for. It’ll come tomorrow.” But Mauro’s phone call was still in his mind. He met the postman in the morning.

  There was no letter. Not the next day, or the next. Ugalde phoned the medical school and gave up. It would have taken a week to get an answer to a simple question: Has Mauro Ugalde been attending classes? He was ill; that must be it. There was no phone at his lodgings. But if he were at his lodgings he would be well enough to write. He called the hospitals. There were Ugaldes in hospital, but none was Mauro Ugalde. His friend José Duarte might know, but the Mendez had no phone. He phoned the priest of the church of San Adrian who sent a messenger across the street to the Mendez flat. José Duarte no longer lived there. He phoned Basa. He had never asked a favor. One can turn to a friend for help, when the matter is of the heart. Basa could not be reached. Colonel Basa was involved in something very important and had left orders that he was not to be disturbed. His subordinates were not prepared to disturb him.