Homeland

by Fernando Aramburu

  His brother, annoyed but impotent, was suspicious.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay, I’ll figure it out.”

  Ultimately, they would listen to Gorka and correct their mistakes, and it wasn’t unusual for them to ask him directly, even before they began, how to write this or that. It was about then, poliki, that Joxe Mari began to recognize his brother’s merits and to respect him. Which is to say that one night, right after he came home from the Arrano, he announced from bed to bed for no good reason whatsoever:

  “You study that Basque, because that’s part of the struggle too.”

  In other words, bietan jarrai. It was obvious, wasn’t it? His argumentation was simple, brusque, elemental: he would be the hatchet and Gorka the serpent. A fine pair. Somebody in the gang must have opened Joxe Mari’s eyes. How so? Well, from one day to the next he stopped making fun of his brother, of his love of books and his solitude.

  And he begged for (not like before when he demanded) favors. Such as? Three days later, Saturday, they were going to celebrate at the town handball court a welcome-home homage to Karburo.

  “Didn’t you say he was a jerkoff?”

  “Who? Karburo? A total jerkoff. It would be impossible to be a bigger jerkoff. But he survived seven years in jail for defending the cause and he deserves an ongi etorri. One thing doesn’t exclude the other. We’ve got it all set up.”

  “So what do I have to do?”

  “Photos.”

  “Of Karburo?”

  “Of Karburo and everybody else. You take your camera, go to the ball court, and start taking photos right and left as if you were the photographer at a wedding. As many as you can, okay? From the ones that turn out okay, we can make posters for three hundred pesetas each. It’s Jokin’s idea. I told him you’ve got a fucking great camera. The rest of the photos I can put in an album. I’ve already got a name for it: the gudari album. We’ll pay the costs, okay? You’ve got nothing to worry about there.”

  And Saturday came and its afternoon and Gorka, not visibly enthusiastic, headed for the ball court with his camera hanging around his neck. As he was getting ready to leave the house, in the hall, Arantxa, with reproach in her eyes, asked him why are you going when even I can see you’re not in the mood.

  From the kitchen, Miren butted in:

  “Come on girl, let him go. He should get out once and for all!”

  Toward the center of the ball court, hugging the lateral wall, was the dais. Behind it hung a banner: KARBURO ONGI ETORRI. To one side of that salute, a black-and-white photo of the honoree when he was younger, had more hair, less of a potbelly, and a smaller double chin; on the other side, above a red star, the motto Zure borroka gure eredu. Police? Not a sign of them, which was not to say that there might not be some agent disguised as an ordinary citizen in the crowd, at no small risk to his health, because everyone knew everyone else. A crowd of ikurriñas, a large turnout of local youth. Nor was there any lack of forty-year-old berets or the odd grandfather. And bing, bong, bing, bong, a boy and a girl near the dais were beating the sticks of a txalaparta. The public sat in the stands as they do when there’s a handball match. Someone greeted Gorka:

  “Hey there, photographer.”

  A means, as good as any other, to take attendance, to tell him we’ve seen you, we know what your job is, good that you’re here. Gorka never stopped taking photos. Of the txalaparta, of the audience, of the still-empty dais. He had several rolls of film in the pocket of his windbreaker. Nerea, abertzale at the time, smiled at him as she passed. Gorka pointed the camera at her; she stood still, posing as if she were sending him a kiss until he took the shot. He should make a copy for her, okay? Gorka nodded his head. Every few seconds, someone else would ask for a copy.

  A few steps farther on he ran into Josune. He asked about Joxe Mari.

  “I just left him in the Arrano.”

  A minute later, applause. Karburo entered the ball court making the sign of victory with his fingers. He was flanked by two leaders of Herri Batasuna and several councilors of the same ideological persuasion. Gorka preceded them, taking photos. In fact, he was the first to go up on the dais. Camera in hand, he went up, came down, went this way, that way, without anyone’s taking note of him, the invisible man. He photographed everyone who spoke at the microphone, along with the mayor, who didn’t speak but who was present, and the aurresku dancer and the chistulari who played the music, while accompanied by a small drum. He photographed Karburo, who was moved, thankful, fat, wearing a plaid shirt, his fist in the air, tears in his eyes as he called to mind the comrades still imprisoned, he said, in the extermination jails of the state. More applause, gora ETA and flowers, given to him by a little girl in peasant costume.

  Everyone stood up to sing the “Eusko Gudariak” with their fists held high. When the song was over, someone runs in. Who? Two boys wearing hoods leap up onto the dais. One unfolds a Spanish flag. Jeering whistles all around, great fun. The other uses a lighter to set fire to a gasoline-soaked cloth. Gorka, at a few meters distance, took photos.

  Escorted by a hundred or so boys, Karburo was led to the Arrano Taberna. Amid applause and goras to ETA, he took down the photo of himself as a prisoner hanging on the wall. From there he passed into the dining room, where he was presented with an homage of traditional snail stew. Gorka used his last roll of film in the dining room and went home.

  “Aren’t you going to stay to eat?”

  “My folks are waiting for me at home.”

  He was reading until late. When the bells struck twelve, he turned out the light. After a bit, Joxe Mari walked in.

  “Well, did you see me?”

  “I don’t understand why you guys cover your faces when everybody there knows you.”

  “Did you get photos of us?”

  “One when you got there, but it must have come out badly because you were running super fast. Ten or twelve as you were setting the flag on fire and a few more as you left.”

  “They have to be developed as soon as possible.”

  “I hope the man from the photo shop doesn’t tell the cops.”

  Joxe Mari fell silent for a few seconds. In the darkness, the burning tip of his cigarette glowed.

  “I’ll kill him.”

  40

  TWO YEARS WITHOUT A FACE

  She didn’t remember the last time she’d looked at her face in the mirror. It must have been in the Cala Millor hotel. Where else? She tried to reconstruct the room from memory. Twin beds, the functional furniture, the wallpaper. Exactly what you’d expect in a cheap hotel. A place to sleep and little more. It didn’t even have a view of the sea. What it did have was a small bathroom with a shower and above the washbowl a frameless mirror. Did she admire herself before setting out on the road toward Palma with Ainhoa? Of course, you can’t imagine she wouldn’t. From the time she was a little girl, Arantxa was in the habit of fixing herself up nicely. Not because her mother made her, which she did, but for the pleasure of feeling attractive. Arantxa was a really pretty girl—according to her mother, the prettiest in town. With that face and those eyes and that mane of hair she was destined for flirtation.

  Guillermo, twenty or so years back, right after he started going out with her:

  “How pretty you are! How can anyone have such a pretty face?”

  “This face and other things I won’t mention are for the man who loves me.”

  “In that case it must all be for me, because the way I love you I don’t think anyone else can love you.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Not even in the Palma de Mallorca hospital, where they shaved her head, not during the months of treatment in the Institut Guttmann did Arantxa look at herself in the mirror. At the time, no one knew that, not the doctors, not the attendants, only me. And when, sitting in her w
heelchair, she would pass by a glass door, she would quickly close her eyes. She did not want to have any idea of how she looked. Why? Because she’d decided to put all her energy into getting better and she was convinced that if she saw her reflection in a mirror she would simply fall apart.

  At first she could only move her eyelids. She could hear and understand everything and she remembered everything and wanted to talk, to answer, to protest, to request, but couldn’t. She couldn’t even open her lips. She was fed through a tube into her stomach. Arantxa, Arantxa, look: you’ve become a mind trapped in a useless body. That’s what she was. In her dreams she imagined herself locked inside a suit of medieval armor that kept her from expressing herself or moving, but with the visor raised so she could see. Horror. Her vision was good, but she did not want to see herself. I’m sure I’m very ugly, drooling, my features all twisted, in which case, she often thought it, I’d rather be dead.

  “Why do you close your eyes?”

  At the time they renovated the house, Miren bought a full-length bathroom mirror. Ironically, she bought it so her daughter could see herself. Then she realized.

  “For Christ’s sake. What you don’t want to do is see yourself.”

  She immediately shouted to Joxian to come and cover over the mirror with newspaper.

  “Until you change your mind. Because, obviously, it cost us a fortune, so you can understand why we aren’t going to throw it out.”

  Joxian, regretful:

  “Don’t worry, girl. We’ll cover it up and it’ll be fine.”

  The other mirrors in the house were either—like the one in the vestibule or the decorative one in the dining room—too high, or beyond her reach—like the one in her parents’ closet or the odd hand mirror in some drawer. She tried not to look at herself in shop windows, when she was taken out for a stroll. But there were two unavoidable occasions: when she was photographed and when she was surrounded by physiotherapy machines, but I don’t care because I never saw the photos.

  The townspeople continually flattered her. The priest, too. The priest more than anyone else. How pretty you look. Ciao, pretty girl. In sum, that sort of insincere and pious stuff from which the word “pretty” was rarely missing. Arantxa found it detestable. She wrote her mother on her iPad: “Tell them that ‘pretty’ isn’t my name.”

  “Come, come, leave them alone. If they call you pretty they must have good reason.”

  After managing to stand up with the help of two physiotherapists for the first time since the fateful morning of her stroke, Arantxa made it clear she wanted to see herself in the bathroom mirror. By then she was eating and drinking on her own, though never alone, no way, out of fear she might gag. More: she’d recovered the use of her right hand (the left was still stiff, though not as tight as it was at the start) and little by little, very little by little, she was making small progress with speaking.

  She clung to the hope that she’d be able to walk, at least around the house, that one day she’d be able to go to the window on her own, to reach objects for now beyond her grasp: ordinary actions for others; for me, glory. And what joy the day she came home from therapy with the good news that she’d stood up for a moment. Celeste, who’d seen it all, confirmed it for Miren, weeping.

  “Come, come, why are you crying?”

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Miren. It’s that I’ve prayed so hard for this moment to come. I can’t help being overcome by happiness.”

  The two of them as usual bathed her the next day. Careful, hold on to her, don’t let her go. The usual. Drying her was much easier now than it had been because with her mother’s strong arms holding her up, it was possible to stand Arantxa on her own two feet.

  “Miren, are you crying?”

  “Me? Water must have gotten into my eyes.”

  And she turned her face away under the pretext of concentrating on the task of drying her daughter. Meanwhile, Arantxa emitted a chain of yelps. She wanted to talk, wanted to say things. Her yelps formed a barely sonorous ribbon, the agonizing attempt to enunciate a phrase. Celeste understood.

  “The mirror?”

  Arantxa nodded. Her mother:

  “Do you want to see yourself?”

  The same answer. Then Miren asked Celeste to rip off the sheets of newspaper and Celeste quickly pulled down those held in place by adhesive tape and finally, after two years of not seeing her own body, held up by her mother, naked, Arantxa gathered up the courage to look at herself in the mirror.

  She scrutinized herself with a serious expression on her face, resting on one foot and on the toes of the other. She’d put on weight. Yes, yes, quite a bit. Those thighs. And the rest, breasts, hips, stomach, all of it seemed to have dropped a few inches down. And such pale skin. Her left hand, clenched, she held against her ribs. I don’t like my shoulders, either. I’ve never had shoulders like these, all rounded.

  She liked her face even less. That’s me, but that’s not me. Eyes without the vitality they had once upon a time, stupid. One side of her lips slightly lower than the other and a general lack of expression in the features. Gray hairs, so many gray hairs. Furrows in the brow. There’s a lot of worry and lots of sorrow and many nights of insomnia accumulated in those furrows, problems and disappointments from before the stroke, but only I know that.

  Miren, right behind her, asked if she was happy. She answered, without taking her eyes off herself in the mirror, that she wasn’t. So you’re sad? Not that, either.

  “For heaven’s sake then, what?”

  Out of Arantxa’s mouth came another discordant, incomprehensible ribbon of screeches.

  41

  HER LIFE IN THE MIRROR

  It was raining. What should we do? On Sundays Celeste did not usually take care of Arantxa unless Miren went to Andalucía to visit Joxe Mari.

  “So we can’t go anywhere.”

  Four in the afternoon. During the morning they didn’t go out for their usual stroll because of the terrible weather. It wasn’t simply raining; there was a demonic gale blowing. There is always the possibility of covering Arantxa and her chair with a special raincoat bought for that purpose, a kind of sleeping bag with a hole for her head and a hood, and then going out even if only for a short while to get some air, but what we’ve got today is practically a hurricane.

  Miren:

  “Good thing we went to mass yesterday.”

  Sitting in her wheelchair opposite the balcony door, Arantxa was looking out onto the street. Blasts of raindrops crashed furiously against the windowpanes. A gray afternoon, howling wind. Arantxa bored and irritated. She wrote on her iPad, “Take me to the bathroom.” And in the bathroom, as soon as she was opposite the mirror, she signaled to her mother to leave.

  “Before you refused to look at yourself; now you stare at yourself all the time.”

  Arantxa typed the letters with an angry finger: “I don’t owe you any explanations.”

  Offended, her mother left.

  “Listen, I never asked you for any.”

  The door slammed. And Arantxa locked away. It was all the same to her. What a disgusting mother. She’s mistaken if she thinks that she’s punishing me like that. What Arantxa wanted was solitude. Her greatest desire, finally to be alone, out of the visual field of advice givers, wheelchair pushers, feeders, protectors, and people usually helpful who at all hours exhibited for her benefit their prodigious (I die laughing) capacities for patience in all its different dimensions: patience-tenderness, patience-compassion, patience–badly dissimulated anger, patience-rage because she didn’t do them the favor of dying. They could all go to hell. Since the afternoon of her disaster, she hasn’t been the owner of her life. And she wanted to be alone, damn it, alone. To look at herself in the mirror? Well, so what?

  Tense, defiant she looked into her own eyes, expecting the movie of memories to begin, the tale of her broken life. That�
�s right, broken, broken into shards of glass like a bottle that’s fallen to the floor. And each shard a memory, an episode, the dispersed shadows and figures of yesterday.

  Mirror, mirror, tell me when, tell me where, tell me who. Arantxa evoked a Saturday in 1985. It had come to her before. The boy was neither handsome nor ugly, neither tall nor short. He went a lot to the KU discotheque, and even if you don’t do it intentionally, you end up making eye contact. He usually went there with his male friends and she with her girlfriends. But really the guy didn’t interest her. Maybe because of his clothes, I don’t know, maybe because of the way he danced. A bit like a gorilla, no charm, no waist. Not a speck of elegance. And the way he moved his head, please! He looked as if he were driving nails in with his forehead. So, just one more in that dancing, young crowd.

  During one of who knows how many evenings she noticed he was staring at her. Other guys were looking at her, too, and from time to time she even danced close with one or another. Whenever that happened, it bothered her that they’d try to make her laugh. The thing was that all of them, at least at the beginning, would try to be funny. And yes, in his eyes there was a powerful determination, a predator’s fixity that she liked, and no sooner had they changed the lighting, turning on the purple bulbs, and slow music began than he dashed over to her and she, standing next to the bar, turned him down.

  The boy (twenty-three years old; Arantxa nineteen) did not try to convince her. Nor did he reveal that the rejection annoyed him. He revealed nothing, but he smelled good. He went on studying her in the violet half-light with those quiet and confident eyes, as if waiting for Arantxa to change her mind. She turned her back on him. A second later, as she turned her head, she saw him make his way around the edge of the dance floor, calm and stiff, heading toward the sofa where his friends were sitting. In the air an agreeable aroma was still floating. She noticed it again an hour later while she waited on line with her friends at the coat check. She turned around to locate the origin of the fragrance, and there he was, right behind her.