The Bird in Last Year's Nest

by Shaun Herron

  The doctor died with a peculiar drifting motion of his terrified heart. It is the only way, for a father who always fails his family.

  He swept upright in bed, his arms extended toward the sea, a high pitched moaning in his throat. “Maria,” he whimpered, “Maria,” still calling her to come from the sea.

  “You can’t sleep, my love?” she always said. She had said it often. Tonight she said, “I can’t sleep either. Shall we dress and go out?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I want to be near him.”

  Wrapped up and heavily booted, they sat in the snow among the trees on the hill above Basa’s Summerhouse.

  It lay in its floodlit pool down there, like a hypnotist’s point of light, encircled by night. Ugalde’s eyes and mind and heart were focused on it. It drew him and drained him. He took out a small torch and held it in his hat. “Hold it for me.” Then he drew in a notebook the floor plan of the Summerhouse, from memory and the prison as he looked down on it. He made many notes.

  “Is he able to sleep?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Is he sleeping?”

  “I hope so.” He willed thoughts to his son: Don’t drown in guilt because of us. Things will be hard enough for you. Think of yourself, not us. Keep your will strong. Don’t let guilt weaken your will.

  “Basa will see he has a bed and a bucket,” he said aloud.

  “You believe that? Now?”

  “He acted like a friend. He tried to warn Mauro. He tried to warn me.”

  “Why hasn’t he come to tell us, then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he can’t.”

  “Can’t?”

  “Face us. Tell us.”

  “Then he’s a coward. He left us to rot, sick with fear.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would a friend do that?”

  “I don’t know. Only the mindless and heartless have an easy time in Spain.”

  “The law requires that they admit arrests.”

  “I know. In our Spain, ‘Laws go as kings like.’ ”

  “God curse our Spain. I hate Basa.”

  “I know. I’ve always known. You hid it from him and from Mauro. But we know one another very well, my love.”

  “He was useful,” she said, excusing his friendship.

  “He was more. Much much more. I needed his friendship. I think he needed mine.”

  “You couldn’t talk to him honestly.”

  “No. Only to you, Maria. Not even to Mauro. In Spain a man can talk honestly only to his wife or to revolutionaries.”

  “Not even to them,” she said bitterly, “Mauro and his friends couldn’t.”

  “So that is our Spain,” he said, putting away the torch and his notebook and pencil, “even for Basa, the King’s Good Servant. He trusted me. Maybe he still trusts me. But when I open that place down there, his masters will make him suffer.”

  “As much as we have done, I hope.”

  Her forehead was pressed on her drawn-up knees. She was wrapped about herself for warmth in the cold night air and as if to encase her passion to prevent it from exploding prematurely on the place below. “Mauro, Mauro, Mauro …” she whispered and her hands clutched at the snow. “Luis Arrabal would blow that place away with a ton of dynamite,” she said.

  Ugalde put a consoling arm around her and drew her closer. “Maria,” he said gently, “Luis is dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mauro is in there. I’ll take him back my way. Without blood. Then we shall go.”

  “I can be some Frenchwoman’s Spanish seamstress or her Spanish cook.”

  “I’ll get work as a lab technician—I’m too old now to be reexamined by the French. And Mauro can live.”

  “You always said you couldn’t live outside Spain.”

  “It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? You can always justify what you have to do. For half a lifetime I justified our silence and saw right in things I knew to be wrong. But they have Mauro in there for doing what I told him were the wrong things in our time. And I have crossed over. I shall betray friendship with a good conscience and so long as Mauro has a future, I shall live outside Spain, content to be alive.” He bit his lip. Not you, he thought, not you. Not with a good conscience and not content. Only with vague bitterness and lonely regret.

  “Not you, Dion, not you, my love,” she said. “Not with a good conscience and not content. Only for your son. Not right or wrong, Dion. Blood. They have our blood. That is all. They have taken too much of our blood. We know one another very well.”

  “Yes,” he said and pulled her to her feet. “Come home now. We’ve watched with him. He’s asleep.”

  A coldness settled in him, like unfeeling iron in the will. Maria would rage inwardly against them. He would see them under the microscope, clinically. For half a lifetime he had taught himself to think clinically, feeling strongly only for little Christina, and Mauro and Maria-Angeles; living carefully, coldly, looking over his shoulder warily, like a defenceless animal among enemies, he sometimes told himself. Castrated, he told Maria, the minute he crossed the doorstep of their domestic fortress. Survivors, that was all. And when the safe passage of time made life seem less dangerous, he felt for Basa, friend and cover. But Basa was a problem now. He put him from his mind with the same will that for half a lifetime he had put so much from his mind. Only in his shocking dreams had his will been overwhelmed.

  He was scheming clinically as they walked down the avenue of trees from the monastery. They passed the new barracks and he looked at the one window with a light in it and felt nothing. But he thought of the Civil Guards as he would think of cattle, and involuntarily, his arm went around Maria-Angeles. His father, his mother, his brothers and sisters, and Luis Arrabal. They had had them all. That was enough.

  9

  Never put your thumbs between your back grinders.

  SPANISH PROVERB

  “No,” said the colonel’s clerk, “Dr. Ugalde hasn’t called. Five days now.”

  “Mother of God,” Basa muttered and slapped a file on his desk.

  “I’m sorry, colonel. I didn’t hear …”

  “File that! Did you hear that?”

  He needs a doctor, or a psychiatrist, the clerk thought and took the file away. The colonel had not been right in his head for some days now.

  Basa sent for his car and drove to the house of Señora Mercedes Aloys. It was not his custom to go to the señora’s Pamplona house in daylight and in uniform. He went at night, circumspectly, in casual clothes.

  On the day the colonel’s wife died, he opened all the windows in his house “to welcome in sweet air.”

  Three months later Señor Aloys died. He was a small man with a large masculine wife, who, the café talkers said, looked like a farmer in drag. Aloys, they said, had never succeeded in opening her womb because she never allowed him to approach it. Basa met them formally and briefly only at those official functions his office required him to attend. He had no other social life. He was required to attend the funeral of Señor Aloys. He spoke briefly to the señora. Neither of them had much to say. It was not an occasion for saying much.

  Two months later the señora sat before him in his office. For a large and, as some said, a masculine woman, she asked very sweetly for help. The settlement of her husband’s considerable estate was being delayed by the inability of his lawyers to find certain important documents. Her late husband, she said, was a rather strange man in certain small ways. He hid things. The colonel had always been kind. Would he help her by conducting a professional search of her houses; the Pamplona house, her apartment in Barcelona and the house near Sitges?

  The colonel could not recall his kindnesses. He had never been close enough for kindness.

  “Officially, señora?”

  “Unofficially, señor.”

  He argued a little. For a large woman, she could be extraordinarily feminine. “There are other things, colonel. Records. Diaries, Things like that. They are likely to be with the leg
al papers. I would not wish the lawyers to see them. My late husband kept—he told me—some very personal notes.” She looked away shyly. “On some very personal matters we did not see alike.”

  Ah. The approach to her womb? The woman was frigid. Aloys was playing games from the grave? Or he wanted her to fear so when he told her of the notes he kept? Marriage, the colonel thought, is a long series of acts of aggression or revenge. His own had been, until he shut down all awareness of his abrasive wife, and tried to live as if she did not exist.

  “I could arrange a search of the Pamplona house, señora. But even unofficially I could not help you at Barcelona or Sitges. Protocol, you know?”

  “They are, I am sure, in the Pamplona house. If you found them there, you would, of course, hand them over only to me?”

  “Of course. You would always be within call?”

  “I shall stay in the house while you search.”

  Basa took a team of experts to her house. On the second day of the search they found a safe cunningly let into the library floor and covered by rich carpet. But where were the keys? Another expert opened the safe and Basa withdrew some legal looking papers and a small diary. He thanked his men and dismissed them and went to find Señora Aloys in the large house. She was not upstairs in her apartments. Her maids could not find her, the cook had not seen her, her manservant knew nothing of her movements. But presently he came back to report that the señora’s favorite car and her driver were also missing. The señora, it must be, had gone to call, or to shop and since he had expected her to be about the house, no doubt she would return quite soon.

  It was interesting. She had watched them lift the carpet from the library floor. Then she had left them. There had been time since then to bring a man from headquarters on the Avenida de Galicia and time for him to open the safe. She knew there was nowhere left to look, and she had been gone all this time.

  He sat down to wait and to read. The legal papers he did not understand. The diary he understood very well and he listened as he read, in case the señora should appear quietly and suddenly and hear his laughter. Little Señor Aloys was indeed a vengeful man. Had he hoped his lawyers would search, and find, and read? And talk?

  Señora Aloys was not frigid. “She is cycled like a mare,” the señor recorded. Vengefully? Plaintively? “In her seasons she is too much for one man.” He had recorded the dates of her seasons over the last year of his life. The limits of his capacity were recorded, her complaints, her demands after he had reached the point of exhaustion. “I am afraid of a heart attack,” he wrote, perhaps despairingly, perhaps mockingly. His prose did not reveal his intention, only his plight.

  Little Señor Aloys died suddenly, of a heart attack. The dates of the señora’s last recorded season and her husband’s death coincided. Basa folded the diary in the legal papers and returned them all to the open safe. He sat down to wait, pleasantly entertained.

  The señora swept in suddenly and found him half asleep. “How can I thank you?” she cried when he took the papers from the safe. The diary dropped to the floor. “Ah!” She did not look at it when he retrieved it. But she looked transformed. She had been to her hairdresser’s. She was remarkably feminine for a big woman. “You will come to dinner,” she insisted charmingly and with his policeman’s memory running over the seasons, he negotiated a date.

  “Do I look odd?” she asked him as he left.

  “Odd? By no means, señora.”

  “You are looking at me oddly.”

  “Not oddly, señora. I was, if I have your permission to say it …”

  “You have …”

  “I was thinking what a marvelous woman you are.”

  “You may repeat that.”

  She first took him to her apartments and to bed on the Sunday afternoon on which she said, “Repose after victory.” Señora Aloys was not cycled like a mare. Little Señor Aloys had planned revenge for something else. She was constant in her needs. But he learned this five years ago, and in the time since then he had learned a great deal more about her; about her intelligence, her constancy, her loneliness and her wisdom. He staggered his leave and they spent its segments together at her houses in Barcelona and Sitges; and at night, in her Pamplona house. They were by now deeply domesticated, but he never talked with her about the Civil Guard. He talked a lot about Ugalde. She encouraged his friendship with the obscure doctor; it was like ballast to their own constantly deepening relationship—another layer of his growing humanity.

  “I want to talk to you,” he said abruptly as he walked into the library and appeared to take command of the room with his back to the fire; much as he did at staff meetings in his Civil Guard headquarters. “And I don’t know how to begin.” His melancholy face was drawn tight.

  “It sounds difficult.” He had never been like this before. He was nervous or angry. She came from her chair by the window and sat meekly by the fire. Big as she was she had a gift for domestic meekness when she thought it useful. It had never occurred to her to think of him as the head of the house but that he was her head she was in no doubt. She wanted to keep it that way and all her skill went into her purpose. He had never discovered what private malignancy had existed between her and Aloys; he never tried to discover and she offered no clues. Whatever it was, he saw no justifying traces in her. He put all the blame on Aloys. He knew more about her tactical skills than she suspected, but they did not offend; they flattered him. She wanted him; to be wanted for himself had become overwhelmingly important. He had no money, she was rich. He had no social standing beyond his dubious office, she was a social lioness. There was nothing he could give her except himself. That was what she wanted. It was his security, more important, more satisfying than his power.

  “Colonel Carballo was here from Madrid,” he said. “He told me I have been detailed for promotion. It will certainly be my last. They are moving me to the capital.”

  “When?” she asked, shuffling the acceptable reactions in her head.

  “February.”

  “Why don’t we sell the Sitges house and buy a house in Madrid? You’ve never liked that house and I don’t care much for it. If,” she said gently, “that would please you.”

  He heard the “we” and let it pass. But it soothed him. “It would not please me. You hate Madrid. So do I. I’m beginning to hate my job.”

  “But the corps, I’m told, doesn’t like its judgments to be questioned. You can’t ask politely to be excused?”

  “To them that would be choosing where I serve.” For most of his service he had thought of the corps as us. “They’ve already chosen my successor here.”

  She trod softly on “them” and said, “After your service, you’d think they could afford to be generous—well, a little more flexible.”

  “Flexible?” His long narrow head fell back and he glowered at the ceiling, his lips tight. “Flexible? My God—that’s what has me in this state.” He pushed a chair across the fireplace and sat down, close to her. “Look. This isn’t why I came. It can wait. I haven’t even been officially informed.

  “What is it, Julio? Something terrible?”

  He said, “I have Mauro Ugalde in jail.”

  “My God! For what?”

  “Common crimes, crimes against the State, membership of an illegal and subversive organization.” Then he added, “It’s the Fifth Assembly.” He looked across the fireplace at her. “Kidnapping,” he said miserably.

  “Kidnapping? Who did he kidnap?”

  “Aña Anson.”

  “But Julio,” she said incredulously, “I saw her this morning.”

  “You didn’t notice that wherever you see her there’s somebody near her?”

  “I only saw her for a minute or two.”

  “I hope they’re not noticeable. They’re mine.” He told her the story.

  “How are his parents?”

  She asked it, he thought, like a mother. It was so often too late for so much, he had too lately discovered. “They don’t k
now. That’s why I feel like a Moor. That’s why I came. There are things about this affair … it’s in evidence we have. I shouldn’t be talking to you about it at all but my God … and I was ordered to let no information out till Madrid has had a long look at the whole thing. They’re thinking of making a big thing of it—a scary political thing. How the corps smashed an insolent plot with ramifications. So Dion is searching for a missing son and he’s been trying to reach me and I’ve been hiding from him and he’s stopped trying to get me and what does that mean? Flexible? Promotion? I’m not being promoted. Do you know what Carballo told me? That I had been friendly with Mauro Ugalde’s father. That my reports of an examination of the boy conducted by me leaned in his favor and were slack because of my friendship with his father. That we could have had him and his friends sooner if I had not been wearing blinkers. That the boy laid claim to my friendship when he was examined by some lieutenant in Bilbao. I’m not being promoted, I’m being kicked upstairs with a new rank and the functions of a senior clerk of some kind, after a lifetime’s service in the corps. Why? Because I …”