91
THE LIST
Through the usual channels, they received the list of names and addresses. Businessmen from their zone, restaurant owners, shop owners, people with property who hadn’t settled accounts with the organization. A total of nine. The note had no instructions attached to it, nor were any necessary. One name caught Patxo’s eye.
“Here’s one from your village.”
“We call him Txato. He’s got a trucking company alongside the river, just above my father’s garden. I didn’t know he was one of the ones who doesn’t pay. Son of a bitch!”
Txopo’s suggestion: since the objective is known and easily found, why not begin with him? It would be a matter of finding out what his haunts were, what time he’s there, if he’s accompanied, and all that.
Patxo saw an opportunity to make a joke.
“Maybe Joxe Mari doesn’t like the idea. Since the guy’s a neighbor in his village, maybe the thing changes a little.”
“What changes? Are you retarded or what? It doesn’t matter to me where the enemy’s from. Even if he were a family member. If we have to eliminate him, we eliminate him. We don’t discuss orders or disagree with them.”
They agreed that he wouldn’t take part in the spying since that would put both his security and the cell’s at risk. But he did go to the village with his comrades the first night, in the Seat 127. Without getting out of the car, he explained things to them. This is the business. He lives here, on the second floor. There where it says Arrano Taberna, you’ll have to ask for Patxi. And then he limited himself to supervising the actions of the talde from the San Sebastián flat. So there would be no doubts:
“When we’re done, if we decide to strike, I’ll be there.”
With his habitual caution, Patxi, who never took part in actions, who was never arrested, even though he was the boss of the abertzale gang in the town, found them a place to stay through a third party. Then he informed them he was no longer involved in the matter and asked them not to come into the Arrano. Joxe Mari, understanding:
“He’s right. Everybody there knows everybody else. Two outsiders would attract a lot of attention. Let’s just have one of us stay, that’s enough.”
Patxo set up shop in the village for a week. It was Txopo’s job to travel each day from one flat to the other with information, messages, notes, but he always slept in the San Sebastián apartment, where he also wrote up the reports, for which Joxe Mari was profoundly thankful since he just couldn’t deal with words.
Seven days were enough for Patxo to gather enough information. More than enough, he said. And he brought his comrades up to date on his investigation.
“It turns out that the guy who lent me the room works in the objective’s company.”
“What’s his name?”
“Andoni.”
“I know him. He’s a troublemaker from the LAB union.”
“With his help I’ve accumulated a ton of details related to the capitalist’s life. Andoni by the way can’t stand him.”
Joxe Mari, disagreeing, reminding them of the rules:
“It seems to me that the armed struggle is not a matter of standing or not standing someone. It isn’t our job to knock off people we don’t like. If that were the case, I’d have to put four bullets into Andoni. Why? Because he’s a bad animal. It’s family inheritance. In the Franco days, his uncle Sotero would hang a Spanish flag on his balcony and now he’s in Herri Batasuna. I just don’t trust guys like that, what can I say? As a person, I like Txato more, but it’s obvious I have to act against him because the liberation of Euskal Herria demands it.”
“Okay, okay, don’t get so pissed off and let Patxo make his report.”
“Which I was about to do. The capitalist changes his route a lot but he doesn’t have many options to chose from. He drives. Andoni, who told me lots of things about him, confirmed that he has no fixed work schedule. You can see he’s the boss; he comes and goes whenever he feels like it. But remember this: the first thing he does when he leaves the entryway to his house is to walk to a garage that is not on the same street as his house but on the next one, around the corner.”
“Now tell me something I don’t know. As a kid, I was in that garage any number of times.”
“In those forty or fifty yards between the entryway and the garage it would be easy to grab him, whether he was coming or going. Especially between the garage and the corner, which seems to me a terrific spot for an ekintza. The street is narrow, quite dark, and almost no one, not people or cars, passes through. Kidnapping him would be nothing.”
“Sure, but we don’t have the infrastructure. Where would we put him? And besides we couldn’t do that without consulting the higher-ups. So forget the kidnapping. Txato would recognize me with his eyes closed, just from my voice. Forget about that idea.”
“I didn’t say we should kidnap him, just that it would be easy to do it.”
“Okay, explain yourself better.”
“He never goes to bars. Andoni had already given me that detail. Before he did go. Now he doesn’t because the abertzale gang in the village has scared the shit out of him. And he gets up and out early in the fucking morning. Between one and one thirty he usually goes home to eat. In the time I was in town there was only one time when he didn’t show up. Andoni says that depending on which day of the week it is he sometimes eats in the office. He goes back to work at about half past three, give or take a minute. On Monday, he went back at a quarter to four. As always, he walks to the garage and picks up his car, a red Renault 21. Carrying out an ekintza at the end of the day would be, I think, complicated. The day before yesterday it was already eleven and the guy still hadn’t turned up. I took off.”
“Escort?”
“Nothing. I tell you this objective is ripe for the picking.”
Joxe Mari didn’t see the matter quite as clearly, he shook his head, doubted: first we should, we’d have to. His comrades had no difficulty whatsoever in demolishing each one of his objections. That the business was a piece of cake: a minimum of logistical effort, victim with no escape route, a village where even the streetlights are abertzales. An easy place to get away from. Who could ask for anything more? No problem. He went on bringing up this and that, with his scruples and his what-ifs. They: Patxi had prepared the situation with a campaign of graffiti and persecution, and that:
“At this very moment, not a soul would lift a finger to help the businessman.”
“Shit, what I don’t want is for Patxi, Andoni, and the others to think that they’re the godfathers of the ekintza. We’re not their hunting dogs. Who can guarantee that afterward they don’t go around town saying this, that, and the other thing, and what if there’s a mole among them? They’ve given us their help. Fine. But the when, the where, and the how, we’ll decide here among ourselves.”
“Okay, if that’s the problem, we can just let some time pass before we strike.”
“That’s what I was talking about, that the way you described it the thing was way too hurried. And the fewer people involved, the better.”
That’s exactly what they did. Through the end of spring, the whole summer, and part of autumn, they were busy with other names on the list. One of them was the owner of a metalworking shop in Lasarte. As soon as they saw that the objective, a fat man about sixty years old, usually parked his car in a vacant lot near the shop, they thought: why don’t we use a car bomb? More than anything to experiment, because they hadn’t built a single bomb since taking the weapons course. It was high time they made their first. So, the next day, Joxe Mari visited the site and in the twinkling of an eye placed the bomb in the car’s undercarriage. From there, he and Patxo went to spend the afternoon in a nearby cider bar and calmly wait for the explosion. They bet drinks:
“If the bomb goes off before eight, I win.”
Their explosion made no
roar, so nobody won the bet. After nightfall, they left the cider bar. What a strange thing. Maybe the shop owner walked home or biked, or someone picked him up, or who the hell knows. When they got to the flat they asked Txopo. He didn’t have the faintest idea. They turned on the TV, then the radio, and finally the citizens band radio to pick up police communications. Nothing. The next day they expected the news from one moment to the next. All in vain. They let another twenty-four hours go by before approaching the place. This time they went by bicycle. The fat man’s car wasn’t in the lot. Maybe on the other side of the shop or behind it? No. Conclusion: the bomb hadn’t gone off.
Joxe Mari, in a bad mood, recalling the words the instructor always repeated:
“It’s not the bomb that failed but us.”
And together they reviewed the steps they’d taken in preparing the bomb. In the course, they made a point of saying they had to test things. They had. What the hell could have happened?
Patxo:
“Know what I think? I think the fat guy smelled something fishy and called the txakurras.”
“I don’t think so. If the TEDAX had intervened, the action would have reached the newspapers. I think the bomb fell off the car and is in some ditch somewhere.”
To purge any self-doubts, they agreed to blow up the fat man’s shop. Not even the foundation would survive, God damn it. And Joxe Mari and Patxo went over one morning to study the place and see where they should place the bomb so it would cause the most damage possible. But instead of the metalworking shop they found an empty building. Not even the sign over the entrance was left. They realized the owner must have freaked out and closed the business or moved it to a safer location. The bomb they’d built, with fifteen pounds of ammonal and a timer, they used for someone else on the list, the owner of a bar. The media highlighted the magnitude of the destruction. No regrets about the wounded.
92
THE CHILD SHE LOVED MOST
He was told he had a visitor. There they were once again: his mother’s eyes behind the glass. In them, there is an initial uncertainty, an expectant tremor until they see him arrive, big, apparently healthy but without hair. Then they soften; they become clear, caring, maternal; she seems to retain a touch of youth despite features more and more marked by the ravages of age.
Aita rarely comes to the prison, once or twice a year. She attributes it to how tiring the long bus trip is and to the fact that your father is no longer the man he once was, and she launches into an attack against the state (Miren never says “Spain”) for its policy of scattering prisoners far and wide. But Joxe Mari knows that his mother would rather Joxian not come. He gets overcome with emotion. Every time he comes he starts crying; his son, so many years, I’ll die without seeing him free. And she thinks all that hurts Joxe Mari’s morale.
Besides, they usually fight during the trip. Over nothing. Even before they start, at home, she criticizes the way he shaved or she tells him he’s got hairs growing out of his ears; then, on the bus, she warns him, scolds him, reproaches him right in front of other prisoners’ families. That’s her way of grinding down his pride, and he gets mad, madder, and finally counterattacks awkwardly, livid, weak. It’s the same on the trip home. So it’s better he stay behind.
Joxe Mari expected the usual: complaints about how uncomfortable the trip was, the inhumanity of scattering prisoners all over Spain, the heat of Andalucía. Why do they have to punish the family members of the prisoners? And also, the usual gossip about the village, the recent deaths, Arantxa’s slow rehabilitation.
But today was different. Anyway, careful with what we say, they feel they’re being watched. They speak in Basque, but the guards probably secretly record their conversation and have a translator. So they don’t go near politically delicate subjects or, if they absolutely have to, they speak in whispers with circumlocutions and shared expressions, and half-words. After so many years, they’ve become experts in that kind of communication. They understand each other, get along well, need only an exchange of glances to fathom each other’s thoughts. And she, so sparing all her life in expressing her emotions, once told him point-blank, with the glass between them, that he was the child she loved most.
And what was today’s news? Suddenly, ten minutes into their conversation, Miren starts speaking mysteriously, she mumbles, she says. What? That there’s a problem keeping her from sleeping at night. And seeing her expression of worry, Joxe Mari understood this was one of those matters it was better not to speak openly about in the meeting room. Aita? Arantxa? Miren shakes her head. The crazy woman? She nods affirmatively. Again? She nods again while she brings her hand to the glass and shows him the words written in tiny letters on her palm: “She wants to know if it was you who shot her husband.”
“Tell her to go to hell.”
“She won’t give up.”
“Why do you let her get near you?”
“She didn’t speak to me. I’d like to see her try! But, aita, you know how he is. He lets her and she checks to see when she can catch him in the garden. And then Arantxa writes things to her on her iPad whenever they meet. And I tell Celeste: when you see that lady, get away from her. But, my boy, no one listens to me.”
She covers up by bringing up an unimportant matter. If the food has been all right lately.
“They always use too much salt.”
Meanwhile, Miren showed her son the palm of her other hand. “What should we tell her?”
“Because if we don’t say anything, she’s going to drive us crazy. I already told you I can’t sleep.”
“Aren’t there a couple of boys in the village who can put a scare into her? In my day, things like that never happened.”
“The village is not what it used to be. Now you don’t see graffiti or posters the way you did before. The whole thing’s a little dead.”
“Shit, there’s got to be someone. Speak with you-know-who.”
“Since he closed down the tavern we hardly ever see him. It seems no one wants to know anything. Now all the talk is about the peace process and that we have to ask the victims for forgiveness. Forgiveness my ass. Aren’t we the victims? There are fewer and fewer of us, we’ve been abandoned. And if you open your mouth, they ask us to apologize for terrorism.”
In his bed, Joxe Mari stared at the piece of sky outlined by the square of the window. Blue afternoon sky, crossed by the stream of white smoke from a plane. I can feel myself sinking. His stomach was burning. They say they put drugs in the food to keep the prisoners calm. And in his case, a guy famous as an ETA hard man, they probably give him a double dose. Could it be that or something even worse? A horrible future: to die of cancer here, without ever returning to the village. He’s thought about it often. There have been cases.
Instead of the blue sky what he saw now through the window was his mother’s hands and what he’d been able to read on them. Don’t come to me with mournful widows. If they want to rewind their story, they should go to the archives. What’s done is done. So the armed struggle is over? Perfect. Gora ETA for all time to come, and eyes on the future.
Suddenly, against his will, it began to rain hard. Where? In memory. He was sinking slowly but surely. The hard man, the first to begin hunger strikes and the last to end them, the one who took the podium in assemblies to mock prisoners who swallowed the hook of being reintegrated into society.
But a man can be like a ship with a steel hull. The years pass, and cracks begin to appear. Through them leak the waters of nostalgia contaminated by loneliness, and the water of awareness that he’s made mistakes and the water of not being able to correct the mistakes, and the water that corrodes so much, the water of repentance you feel but about which you do not speak out of fear, out of shame, out of not wanting to look bad in front of comrades. And so the man, a ship with cracks, can sink at any moment.
From the cell window, one can only see gray. It h
asn’t stopped raining since the previous afternoon. One advantage is that bad weather takes people off the street. No one feels like stopping to talk, everyone’s in a hurry to get to wherever they have to go. A short distance from the corner was the telephone booth. Really, it was as if someone had put it there deliberately to make the ekintza easier. How so? Well, on the one hand, when you’re inside you don’t get soaked; on the other the booth was a hideout and at the same time an unbeatable observation post. And if some local came by? He could pretend he was talking on the phone. Also, the slightly fogged glass helped. And with my hood up, perfect. A townsperson would have to stick his head into the booth to see he was the man inside.
He saw the red Renault 21 appear at the corner. His heart skipped a beat. Nerves? Yes, a bit; but not the way it was at the beginning, when his legs would shake. After so many attacks, he learned to keep calm. He’d talked about it with Patxo who, he said, felt the same thing every time the moment to act approached.
“It’s normal. We aren’t psychopaths.”
An instinctive impulse led him to feel the shape of the Browning in the pocket of his sweatshirt. Above all, no failures. He could make out Txato’s blurred profile in the car. Those big ears have maybe three or four minutes of life left. A calming detail: the objective was alone. Patxo, in all the days he’d spent checking things over in the village, never saw him leave or come back accompanied.
After Txato had probably turned the corner, Joxe Mari, his eyes fixed on the second hand of his watch, waited until half a minute had passed before he left the phone booth. It was a bit of extra time alive he conceded to Txato, so he could open the garage door without being alarmed or suspicious. It seemed the second hand was moving more slowly than usual. Come on, come on. He got to the corner in time to see Txato go back to the car and go into the garage. The plan: when he came out, Joxe Mari would go toward him and execute him. One shot he thought would not be enough. Better to be sure in case the victim recognizes him and survives. Then, without delay, but also not in a wild run that might possibly catch the eyes of neighbors, he would make his way to the place where Patxo was waiting with the car.
Homeland Page 43