by Shaun Herron
Ugalde got into his car, kissed his wife, drove the car halfway down the street to the truck garage and got them to put on his chains. It had snowed all night. The snow ploughs had not yet come through and he would not wait. He set out for Bilbao.
It was a slow, grim journey. He pushed the car through deep snow down into and up out of the valleys, all the way to the road junction at Zubiri. From there it was easier, but, through Pamplona, traffic police warned him that almost to the border of the provinces of Navarra and Alava the roads were icy. He was through Vitoria before he could travel easily and it was past midnight when he reached Bilbao.
He went straight to Mauro’s lodgings. His motorbike was in the back hall of the building. He was here. With that assurance, Ugalde went to the Carlton Hotel. Now that he knew Mauro was here, it would be unreasonable to rouse the house. He went back, early in the morning.
“No, doctor, your son is not here. He has not been here for six days. Since last Saturday morning.” The landlord was uncomfortable. The police were interested in young Ugalde. The police said, “Leave him where he is.” Why did they care? Maybe he worked for them? Nobody had spoken freely in Mauro’s hearing since the landlord got Lieutenant Mieza’s message.
“He left no word of where he was going?”
“None.”
“He left his motorbike here.”
“Yes.”
“Has he ever done this before?”
“No.”
“Is there nothing you can tell me?”
“The police were interested in him.”
“What does that mean?”
“They came here for him at six one morning. I didn’t want any of that in my house and told him to leave. Before he got back here to collect his things, a Lieutenant Mieza of the Civil Guard sent a man to tell me he was not to be disturbed. That’s all I know.”
“What do you think …?”
“I don’t think. I don’t talk.”
“I have the right to see his room and his belongings.”
“He owes me a week’s rent.”
“I’ll pay it. I’m going to his room.”
“When you pay.”
Among Mauro’s possessions he found an address book and a key. They led him to Reis’ father and Haro’s father and Pureza’s apartment at all of which he found alarm and despondency to match his own. Reis’ and Haro’s fathers could find no key to match Mauro’s in their sons’ rooms. But they knew what it was. The three men went to the Gastronomic Club. They found nothing there that told them anything of consequence.
“It’s not much of a place,” Reis’ father said with distaste.
“If it wasn’t that your sons are missing, I’d think my boy had run off with this Pureza girl,” Ugalde said miserably.
“They don’t need to run off with them now—if what my son tells me is anything to go by,” Haro’s father said.
It didn’t seem to Ugalde to be an appropriate comment. He let it pass and hoped the son was quite unlike his father.
Ugalde told them nothing about the police and went to find Lieutenant Mieza. He waited an hour in the little outer room where Mauro had waited for almost five hours, before the lieutenant could find time to see an unexpected visitor.
The lieutenant was cool. Yes, I saw your son. No, I did not arrest him. Yes, I talked to him about the Mendez family and the Pamplona bombing. Yes, I told his landlord not to disturb him. Why? The boy had work to do. He ought not to spend his time searching for lodgings. Pureza? Yes, I believe she worked with a car-hire company. I’ll find out which one, if you’re interested. I cannot tell you more.
But at the car-hire company they knew nothing about Pureza. She called in, sick. She did not return. What sort of girl? A very fine girl. We’re sorry to lose her. Yes, her job has been filled. That was all.
Ugalde paid Mauro’s landlord two weeks’ rent in advance to maintain a place for him when he returned, and went home. He phoned Basa again. No, doctor, the colonel is not available. He is in Burgos. I should like to call him in Burgos. He is not available.
“Since the Saturday he phoned, Mauro has been missing,” Ugalde said to Maria-Angeles. “God in heaven, where where where?”
“Just to know something,“ Maria said in despair. “What trouble was our dear boy in, Dion? He was calling for help and we failed him. He couldn’t ask us. He didn’t trust our love. God have mercy on us.”
They settled into black desolation.
The next morning Ramiro Urbina, the vet, rode his horse down the street to the doctor’s house.
“I’ve just come down the mountain, doctor. Carlos Echiverri needs you badly. He’s very sick. I’ll ride up with you. The snow’s deep.”
“I can manage.” Ugalde didn’t want company. He had nothing to talk about but Mauro and he didn’t want to talk about Mauro with anybody but Maria-Angeles.
“I’ll come,” Urbina said with startling firmness.
“Why?” He had never liked the man. He had always resented his little ironic smile that said, I know things you don’t know and what they are, you can stew about and that’s enough for you. Ugalde had often wanted to hit the little smile.
“I like Carlos.” There was the little smile.
“It’s all the same to me.” Everything was all the same to him. There was no word from Mauro. We have no point without Mauro, Maria-Angeles said. We survived for Mauro. Where is he, where is he, where is he? Was he suffering, was he sick, was he afraid? Carlos Echiverri’s sickness did not matter to Ugalde. He rode up the mountain out of duty, habit, thinking only that while he was away, word might come. He would have to hurry home. He pushed his horse.
“The talk is that you’re looking for Mauro,” Urbina said.
“Telephone exchange talk,” Ugalde said shortly.
“They hear things.” Urbina looked up into the sky, smiling.
“They listen. They don’t always hear what is said.” For over a quarter of a century their lives had been intensely private. Nothing that mattered to them was known to the village. Now a few panic phone calls had exposed what must look to curious outsiders like an open wound close to the heart of the family. He was angry and humiliated.
“The talk is you can’t get to Basa.”
Ugalde kept his silence. He could see the faces in the village that would smile at that news, and his flesh tingled. A sense of defeat lay heavily in the pit of his stomach.
His horse labored in the snow on the farm track. The habit of calculation took over. Let the beast make its own pace. Carlos could wait. He wanted to come down the mountain quickly. A spent horse was no good to him today.
He hitched his horse in the byre with the oxen and went through the door into Carlos Echiverri’s kitchen. There was no one there. He opened the door to the bedroom behind the kitchen. It was empty.
Urbina came from the byre door into the kitchen. “Where is he?” Ugalde asked him irritably. “Or his wife?”
Urbina shouted at the foot of the stairs, “Carlos!”
Echiverri came down the open stairs. “Thank you for coming, doctor,” he said halfway to the ground. He was wearing a blue turtle-necked sweater, baggy blue trousers and boots. They were unusual bedclothes.
“You’re not sick, Carlos,” Ugalde said, surprised.
“No, I’m not.” Echiverri stepped down. “Find a place to sit, doctor,” he said. His effort to smile failed.
“What the hell is this, Carlos? I climbed this damned mountain. For some kind of joke?”
“No joke, doctor. It’s serious. You’d better sit down.”
“Sit down. I think you’ll need to,” the vet said.
“By God, I think you’d better explain.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, sit down and let us explain.” The vet allowed his disdain to fly like a flag.
“There’s no need for that,” Echiverri said. “I’m sorry, doctor.”
Ugalde sat down on a stool near the kidney-shaped stone fireplace. Echiverri and Urbina crowded
in behind the narrow two-plank kitchen table and sat on the bench.
“I always knew you were a clown, Urbina,” Ugalde said. “But you’re a surprise, Carlos. You’re wasting my time. If you have an excuse make it, for I’m leaving now and next time you call me I’ll bear this stupid escapade in mind.”
“You’re looking for Mauro?” Echiverri asked.
The question was like a blow in the face. A mistimed Basque prank that angered him became suddenly a sinister mystery that threatened him. The faces of the two men filled his eyes and were no longer familiar.
“I can see,” Carlos said. “But you’ll not find him.”
“What is this, Carlos? What are you doing?”
“Basa has him.”
“No, no. That couldn’t be. Mauro …”
“Mauro bombed the Iruña Zarra,” Urbina said as if he knew the casual announcement would strike Ugalde like a kick in a vital place.
“No, no. This is a very cruel joke, Carlos.”
“It’s no joke. The bomb was made in Burguete.”
Urbina said, “They have him for that, and a bank at Valmaseda, and a list of others, and some dynamite jobs on barracks.”
“No. Have you gone out of your heads?”
“And last Saturday, doctor, he was part of an operation to kidnap and ransom Señora Aña Anson. They got him on the job.” Urbina was grinning.
“You’re a liar. You’re a pair of pewerted bastards.”
“He’s in Basa’s Summerhouse.”
Ugalde crouched on his stool. They watched him crouch. He was crushed and they knew he feared what they said and believed what he feared.
Urbina said, “He’s been with the Fifth Assembly for over a year and a half.”
Ugalde’s shoulders sank lower. He couldn’t doubt it. Somewhere in his mind the fear had been there since the morning with Mauro and Basa at the Summerhouse. He tried to look steadily at them.
“How would you know this?”
Urbina said, “We got you up here to do business with you.”
“Business? What sort of ‘business’ are you in?”
“Trading. Your son was to transport the Señora Anson to a holding-house. Instead he bolted with her and drove her to her home in Pamplona. Basa arrested him there. But that’s not all. When his treacherous associates, Reis and Haro, got to the Anson house after they also bolted, the Civil Guard picked them up. Even that’s not all. When two of the men on the team reached the holding-house under the impression that your son and his friends would be there before them, what do you suppose they found? The Civil Guard waiting for them. Five people waiting in the house were already under arrest. The conclusion isn’t difficult to draw. Your son acted as a police spy—and your friend Basa was not grateful.”
Ugalde’s face was hidden in his hands. Leave him alone, Lieutenant Mieza told Mauro’s landlord and thereafter, who talked in his hearing?
Urbina said, “So we will trade with you, Ugalde. Your son for Vincente Hierro.”
“I don’t understand you.” He said it wearily, his head full of confusion. He wasn’t sure he had heard Urbina properly. He wasn’t sure he had been listening to Urbina. He had been hearing Mauro’s landlord and Lieutenant Mieza.
“If we could get at Mauro, we would kill him now,” Urbina said. “If Basa gets him a short jail term as a police spy, we intend to kill him when he comes out.”
Ugalde raised his head slowly. Urbina had cleared its confusion. “There is not enough man in you for that, Urbina,” he said. “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire in the gutter. Never, never, never again make a threat against my blood. I will kill you with pleasure.”
“There was not enough man in you to fight with your wife’s father,” Urbina said contemptuously. “You hid away in France. So any threat you make worries me a lot.”
“So it should, so it should,” Ugalde said with heat in his belly. “Let me hear your bargain.”
“You and your son are the only people who have been favored with a tour of Basa’s Summerhouse. You know all about the inside of that place. I sat in the trees and watched the pair of you with your friend. You have the knowledge we need. We will provide the men. You will provide the plan. And we will bring Hierro and all the others out. In return for this, you can have your son again.”
Ugalde looked into Urbina’s face for a long time. “You are in this, Carlos?” he said, not looking at the farmer.
“Yes, doctor.”
“I would not take this man’s word for the condition of a dying goat,” Ugalde said, his look still on Urbina. “But you are an honorable man, Carlos. Is this clown a man of power in the Fifth Assembly?”
“No, doctor.”
“What authority has he?”
“None.”
“What authority have you?”
“Here? Absolute—subject to the council.”
“Is what he said true?”
“Yes, doctor.”
“You want my answer?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In two days. In not more than four days. Hierro is to go on trial in Burgos before a military court in two months’ time.”
“And this?” He waved a finger at Urbina. “What is his part?”
“One man among many.”
“Come to my surgery in three days, Carlos. But do not bring this incompetent goat patcher.”
“Yes, doctor.”
Ugalde left them behind the table. He got his horse from the byre and sat forlornly hunched in his saddle. His horse took him home through the deep snow.
“How is Carlos?” Maria-Angeles asked when he came in from the stable.
“Go to the kitchen and make coffee and open a bottle of brandy,” he said, “and I will come and tell you.”
And when he came and told her, she sat at the end of the table closest to the stove, her hands folded under her breasts. Her eyes were hot in her frozen face and when Ugalde got to Urbina’s claim that Mauro was a police spy, she whispered, No, no, no, like an icy wind among frost-stiff leaves.
That was all she said till she heard him out. When he had finished she kept her silence for a while. She stared without sight through the kitchen window at the white wall of the house next door, and he recalled her sitting like that in Arrabal’s house in Ramosierra the night his family was destroyed. She was a girl then, fifteen, but all the things she now was were already in her, waiting their full stature. That night, she said to the darkened room they sat in, “They have taken everything already,” and in her mind and in her heart she settled to wait for the time of vengeance which always came.
She did not stir now, except with her voice, rustling the brittle leaves.
“Dion.”
“Maria?”
“They have had enough.”
“Yes,” he said, and the wormwood and the gall he had buried down the years stirred in his belly like a small fire in a dry wood, waiting for the wind.
Dr. Dion Ugalde had shocking dreams. They came in that moment between sleeping and waking.
Eyesfront.
They are laughing at us, mocking us. Look straight ahead at the sea and pay no attention to their vulgar cackling. He wanted to say it. He could not say it.
Dr. Ugalde, in a striped bathing-suit whose legs reached almost to his knees, marched briskly across the sand toward the sea. He gripped in his right hand the hand of his daughter Christina who wore a fragmentary bikini and was almost as tall as her father and that was not right for she died when she was small and twelve years old. She was laughing and did not seem to hear the people on the sea wall laughing at them. Her hand was in the hand of her brother Mauro who was wearing the most recent thing in men’s bathing trunks; not like his mother who held his other hand and wore a sort of shift that came down to her knees half hiding the bloomers that were fastened with a little skirt of their own around her ankles. Each walked a half-pace behind the other like a one-legged formation of geese.
Dr. Ugalde’s ne
rves were drawn out. It was not wise to swim today in La Concha; he knew this and wanted to say it and was thrust on by some nervous force. He tried; he could not say it. His wife rejoiced in the sun on her face and the warm sand under her feet; Dr. Ugalde shivered and his feet were icy. Christina chattered about her happiness at her private school and had never been to one. That was strange and disturbing, the doctor thought, for he could never afford to send her to a private school. Mauro whistled a Basque tune. They were happy. Dr. Ugalde marched on against his will and worked his mouth trying to speak to them. His family was not conscious of his distress or of any danger.
San Sebastian’s La Concha beach was crowded, yet their progress to the sea was unobstructed. People melted before them, almost from under their feet. People were everywhere and nowhere, laughing at the ridiculous quartet marching across the sand. Their laughter was a whirring sound that covered every octave within the range of the human voice, the high shrill like a concert of tin whistles, the low like pounded oil drums, all turning circles in the doctor’s head. Don’t you hear them, don’t you hear them? he cried soundlessly in his head and his family said nothing. The loudest and deepest laughter came from the statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus standing as high as a mountain on the Northern headland that sheltered shell-shaped La Concha from the Bay of Biscay. That was shameful, the doctor thought helplessly and, in the time he thought it, the bright day died and night came down and the Sacred Heart floated on its tourist floodlights, high in the black sky, and the laughter became hostile shrieking, circular in sound and shape, the Sacred Heart the loudest and most menacing of all.
Don’t go in, don’t go in. The doctor’s voice broke loose from his constricted throat and escaped too late; his family also broke loose and ran in the dark, gaily, to the sea. It is night, it is night, he screamed; they didn’t know and didn’t hear. He was angry, at the laughing crowds, at the Sacred Heart, at his stupidly unheeding wife and children; most of all at them for they were his and ought to listen even when they couldn’t hear. Couldn’t they heed the laughter? Couldn’t they feel the terrible coldness of the water in which he stood up to his ankles, fully dressed now, calling impotently? Couldn’t they see the four trawlers roaring in from the ocean, ploughing the water, quartering like a pack of hunting torpedo boats the tiny area the family swam in till it was churned and broken and white? The swimmers saw, and dived, and surfaced and dived as the trawlers bore down and they screamed to Ugalde for help and his feet were rocks in the sand, frozen, his arms wouldn’t move from his sides; his voice was trapped again; his mouth was open, wailing without sound and the fireworks display began and the flying light and the laughter drowned the night and his family’s cries, and the floodlit Sacred Heart floated above La Concha beach, immense and hooting clownishly.