Nevada Days

by Bernardo Atxaga

  “It’s all so depressing,” Mary Lore said, and with those words we brought lunch to a close.

  PSALM 37

  February 3 was a Sunday. Around nine o’clock in the morning, someone knocked on the door of our house in College Drive, and I thought, because it was early for a Sunday morning – Izaskun and Sara were still in bed – that it must be another visit from the police. When I opened the door, I found two young men. One of them was about thirty, and his companion about twenty. They were both very pale-skinned and very blond. They were wearing dark suits and white shirts, with no tie, and each was carrying a bible.

  Ángela asked them what they wanted.

  “We want you to allow us to read Psalm 37,” the older of the two said. Then, when we agreed, he indicated to his companion that he should open his bible and read. The page was marked with a red ribbon.

  The reading lasted for a couple of minutes. When it was over, the older man spoke to us again:

  “Read Psalm 37 every day. If a lot of us read it often enough, Violence and Evil will vanish from the world.”

  They spoke and moved very gravely.

  We didn’t have a bible in College Drive, so when they left, we looked for the psalm online, having found the young preacher’s English rather hard to understand.

  “Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb. Trust in the LORD, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.”

  FEBRUARY 17. POLICE STATEMENT

  Reno Gazette-Journal: “Saturday afternoon, Reno Police announced that the body discovered Friday in a field near a busy industrial area was Brianna ‘Bri’ Denison, 19, who was kidnapped Jan. 20 from her friend’s home near the University of Nevada, Reno.”

  MESSAGE TO L.

  RENO, FEBRUARY 18, 2008

  There are lots of blue ribbons in Reno in memory of Brianna Denison. We put some up too.

  Yesterday, the murdered girl’s aunt spoke for the family:

  “We are not giving up until we find that bastard. This shouldn’t have happened. Now we are on a manhunt. In my heart of hearts I know someone knows him. They may not even suspect him, but, people, please, [you] just really need to take a look at your husbands, boyfriends, brothers, nephews, or your neighbor.”

  In other statements, the family said that the murderer had definitely chosen the wrong person and the wrong state, meaning that the Denisons were an important family, and the death penalty is still in force in Nevada.

  Many people will doubtless disapprove of the family’s crude desire for revenge, because from an intellectual perspective the suffering-cum-beam in the other person’s eye is invisible or seems trivial in comparison with our own suffering-cum-mote. However, bearing in mind that Brianna’s mother spoke again and again on local and national television, begging the kidnapper to show mercy, and after almost a month of agony, all the family has been given is a body discarded like a piece of trash, what can one expect? What do you think?

  L.’S RESPONSE

  King Kong must die.

  THE OFFICE NOTICEBOARD IN THE CENTER FOR BASQUE STUDIES

  Dennis and Mary Lore were standing by the office noticeboard, reading a cutting from the obituary page of the Reno Gazette-Journal. They had decorated it with a blue ribbon, and they both looked tearful.

  “Sorry,” Mary Lore said when she saw me. “It’s just so moving.”

  Contrary to what I had imagined, the obituary had nothing to do with Brianna Denison. It was in memory of Patricia Ann Marini, an attractive, fifty-something woman looking frankly into the camera with what one sensed would have been green eyes. I read the dates underneath the photograph and discovered that she had died ten years before, on February 2, 1998.

  “She wasn’t a relative or anything, I put it here because I thought the poem her partner wrote for her was just so beautiful,” Mary Lore said.

  “Someone should write something similar for Brianna,” Dennis said, “but it seems like no-one thinks about her now, just about her murderer.”

  The poem dedicated to Patricia Ann Marini was signed with the initials K.E.F. and occupied a whole column. It described, in the form of a letter, something that had happened two months before she died. “Christmas 1997. I gave you a mauve Moleskine journal with a red woven silk bookmark. We thought recording our ideas, emotions, moments – capturing our dreams – would be fun to read on Christmas Eve ’07 …”

  That wish foundered because Patricia Ann Marini died soon afterwards, and the mauve journal had been lost until, on the very date they had talked about, Christmas 2007, it had suddenly, serendipitously, reappeared. K.E.F. found in its pages some pastel drawings by Patricia followed by her signature in dazzling blue ink, along with a promise of love: “Love forever, Christmas 97.” K.E.F. wrote that, sometimes, after turning out the light, when the moon’s rays cast blue-velvet shadows on the bedroom wall, he would run his finger over her signature. The journal had found a use. “In it now, I write my dreams, my memories – those silent ships in sail.”

  “Compare what you’ve just read with the farewell dedicated to this other Patricia,” Dennis said.

  Immediately below Patricia Ann Marini’s obituary was that of a woman called Patricia Susek. Five lines, a few names, two dates and a note stating that it would be a private funeral.

  I said nothing, and Mary Lore interpreted my silence as a criticism.

  “I know,” she said. “We’re all still feeling depressed about Brianna. That’s why we keep fixating on obituaries and suchlike.”

  “What I feel is fear,” I said.

  “It’s not so dangerous now,” Dennis said. “It will be a couple of months before the murderer tries anything again. He knows the police are looking for him everywhere.”

  This was true. There were even police checkpoints in College Drive.

  “They always catch the criminal in the end, and they’ll catch this one too.”

  “How would you analyse that poem by K.E.F.?” Dennis suddenly asked.

  We had known each other for about six months, and this was the first time he had asked me anything related to my work as a writer. He was an I.T. expert, capable of solving whatever problem the students threw at him. Perhaps he wanted to know if I was equally competent in my own field.

  I tried to give him the explanation he wanted. The poem – I said – placed Patricia Ann Marini in a noble setting, relating her to the mauve Moleskine notebook with its red silk bookmark, along with drawings of flowers, velvet shadows and a night lit by the full moon, and that this was a way of embellishing his beloved’s final image. And that, after all, was something that had been happening since the world began.

  According to Lucan, when Apollo accidentally struck Hyacinth on the head with a discus and killed him, Apollo made a delicate flower spring from the drops of blood spilled, the flower that bears Hyacinth’s name. But that need to embellish the dead occurs in real life too and not just in myths. When Lawrence of Arabia was buried, they placed on his shroud the golden dagger he had been given at Mecca. And what about the countless black orchids and wreaths that adorned Eva Perón’s coffin?

  Instead of gold or flowers, K.E.F.’s poem preferred ordinary objects, personal things, and made of them a kind of Japanese flower arrangement, an ikebana, in keeping with Patricia Ann Marini’s personality. And that was all. No hopes. K.E.F. did not raise his eyes to heaven like those who, like Lazarus’s sisters, believe in resurrection. No invocations. No prayers. No mention of God. In that nothingness, that silence, his wishes and dreams after the death of the woman he loved had become “those silent ships in sail”. A line from Gerard Manley Hopkins came into my head: “Our prayer seems lost in desert ways, our hymn in the vast silence dies.” K.E.F.’s words were more truthful than many Christian metaphors. After death, nothing. Only, sometimes, a few flowers, a notebook, a poem, and someone who tends the memory of
the person who has gone.

  Dennis was standing with arms folded, his left hand on his chin.

  “You mentioned the moon being full, but how do you know that?” I didn’t understand what he meant at first and had to reread the poem before offering him an explanation:

  “K.E.F. says that on some nights, after he has turned out the light, the moon casts velvet shadows on the walls of his bedroom. I think that would only be possible if the moon was full or almost full. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be bright enough.”

  “Yes, you’re right. I see what you mean now,” Dennis said.

  Mary Lore looked thoughtful.

  “You should write an article for the Reno Gazette-Journal,” she said.

  “I don’t think I could. I only seem to have sombre thoughts at the moment.”

  “It’s a sombre situation, that’s for sure,” Mary Lore. “If they don’t catch the murderer soon, we’re all going to go mad.”

  “I certainly will,” Dennis said.

  WOLF PACK VS. HOUSTON COUGARS

  There was going to be a basketball game at the Lawlor Center between the Wolf Pack and the Houston Cougars, and I went to watch it with the Laxalt family and a few other friends. Even though it was only a tournament and didn’t count in the university league of the N.C.A.A., the stadium was packed with more than ten thousand spectators.

  The dominant colours were the navy blue of the Wolf Pack and the pale blue of the ribbons left in memory of Brianna Denison. A collection was taken before the game began.

  “None of the D.N.A. tests so far have led the police to the perpetrator,” Monique Laxalt explained. “Brianna’s murderer obviously isn’t a registered sex offender in Nevada. That means they’re going to have to do more D.N.A. tests in the surrounding states, and that costs money.”

  I suddenly remembered that Ángela, Izaskun and Sara were alone at home, and it was as if all the other spectators had suddenly had the same frightening thought about Reno’s King Kong, because everyone fell silent for a moment; then the game started and the shouting began, the Houston Cougars went five points into the lead, and our ears and eyes immediately transported us to another world. Seconds later, the only white player in the Wolf Pack scored a triple, and we all burst into wild applause.

  MOMENT

  I was having supper in a place on Virginia Street and gazing out through the window at the mountains beyond the desert. The light from the evening sun rested, in turn, on one peak and then another, as if it were the beam from a torch. It lit one peak, tingeing it with pinks and pale oranges, then changed, and the pinks and oranges shifted to the next peak. It occurred to me that a child would have said that the sun was jumping from one mountain to the next, and I wanted to try out that idea on Izaskun and Sara, but by the time they got back from the birthday party being held for one of Mary Lore’s daughters, the sun would have settled on a distant peak, apparently for good, as if it lacked the energy to make another leap.

  A plane left the airport and rose diagonally up over the town. The sky was edged with a coppery light, and the plane was a bright fragment of mirror in the vastness.

  CONVERSATION AT THE FUNERAL HOME

  (A MEMORY)

  We three brothers were in the waiting room at the funeral home; our father, with a rosary twined about his fingers, was lying in a coffin in a small room next door. A man came over to us carrying a file that resembled a restaurant menu, except that it was full of photographs of bouquets and wreaths and baskets of flowers and their respective prices.

  “Thanks,” my brother said, “but that won’t be necessary.”

  The man was even dressed like a maître d’, in a black suit, and his whole appearance was reminiscent of the ageing romantic leads in films from the 1950s: wavy hair slicked back, elegant eyebrows, blue eyes, perfect teeth. Had my father come back to life and seen him, he would have made a joke, something along the lines of: “I haven’t even got to heaven yet and already I’m seeing angels.”

  “Did you have something else in mind?” he asked.

  “I own a florist’s shop,” my older brother said. “So I’ll take care of the flowers.”

  This wasn’t, in fact, true. While he did own various businesses, the main one being a limousine rental firm, he definitely didn’t own a florist’s shop, but that was his style: keep things short and to the point.

  The man left and we were once again alone, waiting for the other visitors to arrive. After a while, my younger brother stood up and went into the room where our father was lying. He returned at once.

  “Whose bright idea was the rosary?”

  “Nobody’s,” I said. “It must be the custom.”

  “What do you mean the ‘custom’?”

  He swore, oblivious to the crucifix on the wall. I imagined Jesus sternly wagging a finger at him for using such language. I got a fit of the giggles then and covered my face with my hands.

  “We have to remove that rosary – now!”

  And my younger brother went off to fetch the man in the dark suit.

  “Revolution in the funeral parlour!” said my older brother.

  “What flowers are you going to take to the church?” I asked.

  “Hyacinths.”

  Our father’s name was Jacinto.

  “It’s logical if you think about it.”

  My older brother had a particular love of flowers, and even organised his holidays around them. He would visit Saint-Pierre or some other island to spend a week photographing flowers or go on tours of the world’s finest botanical gardens. When Ángela published an article about Atanasio Echeverría, a botanical artist who accompanied some of the eighteenth-century expeditions to North and Central America, my brother bought her a print of one of Echeverría’s illustrations from Madrid’s botanical garden and gave it to her as a present.

  My younger brother returned, accompanied by the undertaker.

  “I see your point, but we couldn’t remove the rosary even if we wanted to. He’s been dead for too long. You have doubtless heard of rigor mortis,” the man said angelically. We were causing him endless problems, but he seemed nevertheless to like us.

  “Well, if there’s nothing to be done …” my younger brother said.

  “Besides,” the man-angel added somewhat hesitantly, “the fingers of your father’s right hand were not exactly presentable, shall we say, and I thought it best to disguise them a little.”

  Our father, Jacinto, had lost the tips of the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, the consequence of two minor accidents in his carpenter’s workshop.

  “The marks of his profession and nothing to be ashamed of,” my younger brother said. “On the contrary.”

  “Continual struggle, permanent revolution,” murmured my older brother.

  “I respect your point of view, of course, but if you wanted a purely secular affair, you should have gone about the whole business differently and organised the funeral and the service outside the church.”

  “The whole business …” When he left, I started laughing. Then my older brother joined in, and my younger brother. For some reason we found that expression deeply comical, as well as the angel’s suddenly stern expression.

  “We must calm down,” my younger brother said, stopping laughing. “People will be arriving soon.”

  Indeed, only a few seconds later, our aunt and uncle appeared with their children, the entire Albizu clan. We all embraced, and they went in to see our father. We three brothers and my aunt stood in the doorway.

  “How’s María?” she asked. Her family always called my mother María rather than Izaskun.

  “She’s fine, but she didn’t want to come today. She’ll be there at the funeral, though,” my older brother said.

  “Do you remember how we always used to have lunch together during the feast of San Juan? Now we never see each other. What changed?”

  We said nothing. That was when José Francisco had been alive. Our aunt was addressing the chorus in her beautiful voic
e, but the chorus could not answer.

  A burly, bald-headed man entered the room.

  “This was my father’s best friend,” I told my aunt. “He was the last person to make him laugh.”

  “I told him about a trick some rather loutish young men played on a poor woodsman,” the man said, shaking my hand.

  “There’s never any shortage of loutish young men,” my aunt said, and she went into the room to see my father.

  “Ah well, so it goes,” I said to my father’s friend.

  “Yes, we’ll all end up here one day, if not today, then tomorrow. But there’s one thing you must be quite clear about: your father has gone over to the other side having lived as happily here as the Shah of Persia.”

  THE SUBJECT OF STEVE FOSSETT RETURNS

  FEBRUARY 15, 2008

  The remains of Steve Fossett and his plane had still not been found, and a judge in Illinois had declared him officially dead. The news was in all the papers.

  “It’s a shame we can’t ask the vermin who ate him for his whereabouts,” Earle said when we talked about it.

  The Internet was soon full of weirdos with their questions: “How could an experienced pilot like Fossett die in such a stupid way?” “Why are they in such a hurry to declare him dead?” “What private interests lie behind the official declaration?”

  The days passed, and the weirdos’ hypotheses became ever weirder. One of them, who signed himself “Oxo”, wrote:

  “The day he disappeared, Fossett was carrying a million dollars in a suitcase. Why did he need so much money on what was a routine flight? To pay off the aliens perhaps? According to a close friend of his, Fossett was worried about growing old and about the boring future that awaited him and he wanted to buy immortality from the aliens.”