“Know anything?”
“Nothing.”
Always the same question, always the identical answer. They were always secretive if there were other workers around. They chatted about soccer, jai alai, any subject except politics and their missing sons. They stood silently one next to the other, smoking, their eyes fixed on the mountains in front of them.
There was a time when Herminio went in for offering up toasts with cheap boxed wine whenever ETA killed someone. One afternoon, with other workmates present, Joxian called him out:
“Come on, Herminio, stop fucking around, this is no game.”
At home, Miren:
“He’s a wholesale jerk.”
“He tries to be clever and it just doesn’t work.”
One day during a cigarette break, the two of them met alone at the entrance. Filthy overalls, rust-colored faces, blackened boots.
“Know anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, we do.”
Joxian saw the joy in his eyes and the violent urge to tell; his yellow teeth, one molar sleeved in gold. Whispering, confidential:
“He’s in Mexico, a refugee.”
“How did you find out?”
“He wrote a letter to my sister who lives in Córdoba, and that’s how we found out.”
“Does he say anything about Joxe Mari?”
“He doesn’t mention him by name. If you want, Manoli can ask him directly. She’s going there this summer.”
Disappointed, Joxian shrugged his shoulders. Summer wouldn’t come for another five months. What would Koldo know by then about his son?
“The trip costs an arm and a leg,” Herminio started, back to his own story, “For now, we think she’ll be the one to go, to bring him clothes and whatever else he needs. He’s far away from us, but at least he’s out of danger. Finally we’ll be able to sleep well.”
He was practically doing one of his Andalusian folk dances. Joxian went directly from the foundry to his house to bring the news to his wife. God, why didn’t he just keep his mouth shut! He hadn’t seen Miren cry with such bitterness in a long time. And she threw her apron against the wall calendar as hard as she could. Lamentations, sobs, rage, sorrow, pain. Why did this have to happen to them? Where can he be? Who’s going to take care of him if he gets sick? And Joxian: she should stop screaming, people on the street will hear her.
“Let them hear. Very clever, that dear little Koldo, the one who named names and who’s now safe and sound. I only hope one of those snakes they have in Mexico bites him.”
“Okay, okay, that’s enough of that.”
And at night, Miren in bed in the darkness:
“What I want is for the police to catch Joxe Mari and end all this once and for all. I never stop praying to Saint Ignatius. Please, let the French police catch him. Not the Spanish police, no. Let him be in jail for a while with no problems and then they can give him back to me. What do you think?”
“The same thing. But whenever I said it you threw a fit.”
“What can you know about how a mother feels?”
“And what about what a father feels, what about that?”
The next day, both calmed down, they agreed that exile was preferable to Jokin’s fate. What happened to him? Well, he went nuts. In ’87 he went out to the hills and shot himself. Weeks went by before a shepherd accidentally found him in a gulch in the province of Burgos. He was unrecognizable, in an advanced state of decomposition, and half eaten by animals. He was carrying a false identity card. From the photo, the Guardia Civil managed to identify him. ETA repudiated the official statement in a communiqué. A mob crowded the town square to receive the coffin wrapped in an ikurriña and it was raining. It always rains on such occasions. Miren:
“Silliness.”
But Joxian does think it always rains whenever they hold a celebration of that kind. The church, overflowing, with people standing. Many faces from elsewhere and politicians. Don Serapio, during the homily, visibly having difficulty controlling his emotions, talked about “the tragic death of our beloved Jokin, the circumstances of which we hope one day will be revealed.” And then a long line of umbrellas made its way up to the cemetery. The “Eusko Gudariak” was sung at the grave site, there were plenty of long-live-ETA cheers and promises of revenge, and at the end, everyone filed toward the exit, leaving the funeral wreaths and the silence of the crosses behind in the rain.
Josetxo closed the butcher shop for several days. A few months later he was diagnosed with cancer. He lasted a year. He never got over the loss of his son.
Joxian:
“As far as I’m concerned, it was the death of Jokin that caused the sickness. A man as strong and healthy as he was. Otherwise I can’t figure it out.”
A week after the funeral, pushed by Miren, he went to see him for the first time in the butcher shop. A hug, tears, sobs. What a huge body Josetxo had. When the butcher calmed down, they talked in the back room, and Joxian asked what happened.
“They all lie. The police lie, the abertzale left lies. Everybody lies, Joxian, I’ll tell you that. No one has any use for the truth.”
He was destroyed. And the same went for Juani, his wife, though she consoled herself with prayer. What Josetxo told him that afternoon in the butcher shop, Joxe Mari would confirm to Joxian a few years later in a face-to-face they had in the Picassent prison. The French police captured Potros hiding under a bed in a house in Anglet. They found a valise and in the valise more than thirty pounds of documents, among them a list with hundreds of names and vital information about militants on active service. How’s that for a leader! They even caught Santi. The authorities released the information a few hours later in the news reports on the SER channel. And of course there was a general stampede and arrests by the dozens. Jokin became paranoid. Josetxo expressed it in his own way:
“He thought they would be coming for him, in those minutes he was in the safe house alone, and he panicked. His comrades from the talde lost track of him and he turned up after a while. He’d killed himself.”
And Joxe Mari, on visiting day in the jail, whispering in Basque, confirmed the story.
“What they told me was that he’d been odd for a while. He thought there were microphones hidden everywhere, even in the shower. They told me he went so far as to turn his clothes inside out. He trusted no one. Now, that he’d end up the way he ended up, none of us ever imagined that. It was a blow, aita. It just destroyed me. And if you want me to tell you the truth, after that I became a little disillusioned about the struggle.”
48
LATE SHIFT
The whole damn day rain and he had to work the late shift. Before leaving for the foundry, he looked out the window: overcast sky, the street wet, few people around, and a single, all-encompassing cloud, hanging so low that it got tangled up on the church lightning rod.
Joxian never had a driver’s license. He either walked or biked to work. Not on his good bicycle, of course. During the work week he used an old one with a basket and a fender that he didn’t have to dry carefully. A farewell kiss? Not part of their regular routine. In the vestibule, he stopped at the built-in chest. Dilemma: a poncho or an umbrella? The poncho meant using the bike; the umbrella a twenty-minute walk downhill to the foundry. He chose the umbrella.
And off he went, passing a few people on the street. He clocked in and, as he did every day, put on his overalls, boots, gloves, helmet, and entered the dark heat of the workspace. Those were not prosperous days for his foundry or for the metallurgic industry in general. Even without being fully aware of the specific caprices of the business, he could sense it. Before, they produced more, there were more orders, the staff was larger. Well, that was someone else’s problem. He had only a few years left before retirement. His long experience operating the furnace made him practically irreplaceable. At least, that’s what he thou
ght. A worse future was in store for the young men if, as people said, the owners decided to close down the business. After all was said and done, his kids were grown up and he had a guaranteed pension.
Midway through the shift, a truck driver brought the news. More exactly a shred of news he’d just heard on the radio while driving. What happened, what time it happened, where it happened. Details? Few and vague. The only certainty: that at around four in the afternoon a person was shot on a street right in the center of town. It wasn’t clear whether the victim was dead.
Joxian heard the news when he stepped outside to smoke. He asked:
“Was it a cop?”
“No idea.”
“We’ll soon find out.”
When his shift was over, Joxian went home. Every day I get more tired. The years, well, they don’t pass in vain. He went along as he had before along the deserted streets. The morning shifts were less tiring for him. You leave work with the illusion of having free hours ahead, the incentive of a hand of mus, friends, some soccer match on TV before you go to bed. On the other hand, now he had no other choice but to eat, unwillingly, the daily fish, because this woman has fish mania, then go to bed early and the next day take it easy during the morning.
Night had fallen. It was still raining, and he couldn’t focus on anything that didn’t seem all too familiar: the usual facades with lights on behind the windows, the trees in the plaza illuminated by a few streetlights, that hissing sound of tires on wet asphalt. No police, no sirens, no blue lights. On his way home, he found no evidence of the attack. Here the houses are neither burning nor in ruins. He saw habitual things: dark doorways, streetlights, open bar doors from which came the noise of conversation and the odd guffaw. Temptation to walk in, drink a small glass or two of wine and nibble a couple of salt peppers while he smoked a cigarette, a kind of reward for having finished off the day, but that was out: look what time it is, how tired I am, and then that ill-tempered woman, no, better not stop.
Miren didn’t give him even the time to carry his umbrella to the bathroom. She blurted out:
“Txato is dead.”
It had been a long time since anyone spoke the nickname of his old friend in that house.
“Stop fucking around.”
For a moment, Joxian stood stock still, immobile. Like a post. He didn’t even blink. And without looking directly at his wife, he asked how it happened.
“The way these things happen. It couldn’t have caught him by surprise. The graffiti announced it.”
“Was he the one killed this afternoon? Don’t screw around, now.”
“Well, I’ll screw around if I like. Txato’s dead. That’s what war is all about. People get killed.”
Fucking shit, fuck all. He didn’t stop shouting obscenities, shaking his head with disgust. He tried to eat. He couldn’t. His hand shook so much that he couldn’t hold the spoon, and that annoyed Miren.
“What? You’re going to get all sad now?”
Fucking shit, et cetera.
“A Basque, from our town like you and me. Shit, if you said it had been a cop, but Txato? I never thought he was a bad person.”
“It has nothing to do with good or bad persons. The life of the nation is at stake. Are we abertzales or not? And don’t forget you have a son in the struggle.”
She got up from the table angry. She washed the dishes in silence, and Joxian didn’t move from his place. After a while, she came to the kitchen to tell him they were talking on television about what happened, but he still didn’t move. Did he want to watch? He shook his head no.
“Well, I’m going to bed.”
Joxian didn’t leave the kitchen. He poured a glass of wine from the big bottle he stored under the sink and then another and then another. When he was finished drinking, he went to bed. With the lights out, Miren said:
“If you cry for that guy, I’ll sleep in another room.”
“I’ll cry for whoever I fucking care to cry about.”
The final black moments of the night passed. Joxian, in bed fully dressed, did he sleep? Not even half a minute. As soon as light came through the blinds, he got up. Where was he going? No answer. A long stream of urine flowing in the bathroom broke the silence. And instead of going back to bed, Joxian went out to the street without breakfast. At that time, when he was on the late shift? He rode his bicycle without a poncho even though it was raining. He rode along this highway, that other highway. Where he was going didn’t matter. Halfway up the Orio hill was the little pass where in the old days he would have little races with Txato, races Txato always lost because no matter how much heart he put into the pedals, he didn’t have the cyclist’s legs that Joxian did. On the side of the road, with no witnesses, he stopped to let out all his feelings.
A little before one, he got home soaking wet. He washed and put on clean clothes. On the table, a plate of lentils and a steak with fried garlic. He took a banana to the foundry and decided, frowning, not to speak with anyone all day. He was keeping his promise until late in the day. Then Herminio came over to him during cigarette break, that idiot Herminio, who comes over and says:
“I’d swear I saw Joxe Mari in town yesterday.”
“You swear lots of things.”
“No, seriously, when I was on my way to work. He was in a car.”
“Buy some glasses and stop fucking with me. My son is far away. Not as far as yours, but let’s just say far enough.”
“It’s just that, in profile, it seemed to me…”
“You were mistaken.”
Joxian tossed the cigarette onto the ground even though he hadn’t smoked even half. As he stamped his foot on it, he whispered an incomprehensible word. Then he went back into the shop.
49
FACE THE MUSIC
One afternoon, as he did every year halfway through autumn, he sold Juani his rabbits. Seventeen in all, beauties. He sold them cheap—a friend’s price—but felt he wanted to settle things quickly. Why? Because often, at the butcher shop, Juani would slip Miren a couple veal cutlets, a couple of links of pork sausage, or some blood sausage, whatever she could pilfer.
Joxian was cleaning the empty cages, intending to fill them with baby rabbits. It was ten a.m. Sun, serenity, chirping birds, and at times the clack-clack of some machine in the Arrizabalaga brothers’ shop on the other side of the river. He had replaced an old rusty screen and was carrying the cages out of the shed, when he saw her, standing with her bag and her gloomy face at the entrance to the garden.
He looked at her and instantly there were sparks. Surprised? Not really. Joxian expected to run into her sooner or later on the street, now that she spends so much time in the village. What he did not foresee was that she’d come looking for him. Let’s see if Miren is right: this nut is taking advantage of the fact that the armed struggle is over to persecute us.
He turned his back on her and went on fixing up the cages. She’ll leave soon. He felt her cold gaze on the back of his neck, pure venom. He no longer experienced the placidity his small garden paradise usually afforded him. Even the birds had stopped singing. And the Arrizabalagas’ machine was silent. To look busy, Joxian moved the cages, angry with himself for not finding a way to end the situation.
After so many years, how many? at least twenty, she spoke to him.
“Joxian, I’ve come to talk.”
“So talk.”
That was brutal, Joxian, that was brusque, and since he noticed it himself a sudden flush of shame flowed over every inch of his face. God, how peaceful things had been until that moment! There was nothing he could do but turn his head. She:
“Won’t you invite me in?”
“Come in.”
Bittori came in along the gently descending path, between the rows of leeks on one side and the rows of escarole and lettuce on the other. Impassive, she looked everything over
. Did she remember, recognize? She stopped two steps away from Joxian; praised the garden. How pretty, how perfectly tended. Pointing toward the seedbed, she asked if that was the dirt from Navarra that her husband had given him. And Joxian, his head down, nodded.
Were they hostile? No. Rather, they were curious, each one studying the other. Joxian, intimidated, defensive:
“Why have you come?”
“To talk.”
“To talk about what? I’ve got nothing to say.”
“Yesterday I was in Polloe. I go a lot, see? I sit on the edge of the grave and speak with him. He asked me to send you regards.”
What’s she trying to do? Provoke me? He didn’t answer. His hands filthy from garden work, his beret covered with dust, which he took off so he could mop the sweat off his head with a handkerchief; his boots the ones he wore at the foundry. Joxian had gotten old. He was gray around the temples and bald above. The years had taken their toll on Bittori as well.
“I haven’t come to argue. You never did anything to me, and I don’t think I ever did anything bad to you. And if I did I’d have no problem asking your forgiveness.”
“You don’t have to ask me for anything. What happened, happened. Neither of us can change that.”
“What did happen? I only know one part. I thought maybe Joxian can finish the story. It was that hope which brought me to your garden. I only want to know, and then I’ll leave. I promise.”
“So, you come to the village every day so people can tell you things about the past.”
“The village is as much mine as it is yours.”
“I don’t deny that.”
“But it’s obvious you take me for an outsider, for someone who just visits. You’re wrong. I’m living in the house I’ve always lived in. You know it well. You visited us often enough.”
“I don’t care where you live.”
For the first time since she arrived, a hint of a smile appeared on Bittori’s lips, the slightest arch of a smile. Her eyebrows became less sad. And on the tip of one of her shoes there was a speck of mud. There they were: she on one side and he on the other, separated by a small section of the path. And Bittori made a show of making sure she didn’t trample any lettuce.
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