“No,” I answered. “Of course not. But they think that I’m too old, that I’m from the past generation. They need a young American, they say. Goikoetxea tells me that the parents prefer their children to learn modern English, whatever that means.”
Mariana shook her head and issued that light clucking sound of disapproval that Basque women employ to such great effect, but didn’t say anything more. We’d spent a great deal of time together since Elena’s birth, Mariana and I, and we were past consolations.
“So who is this American?” she asked. She was still staring at her feet, the bow formed by the two rabbit ears rather than the squirrel around the tree.
“He’s a Basque, actually.”
Mariana raised the arch of her dark eyebrows a touch, as if skeptical.
“Or at least he is of Basque descent. Anselmo says that his father is from Nabarniz.”
“Nabarniz?” Mariana said, smiling. Muriga is a town of only twenty thousand, but its inhabitants never pass over a chance to disparage a town more provincial than itself.
“The usual story. The parents of the father worked the sheep ranches in Idaho for a hundred years, until they had put their children through college, and then both died the day after they retired. In forty years, the parents never returned to the Basque Country.”
I used the phrase “Euskal Herria,” the indigenous term for the Basque Country; in Muriga, it is virtually unheard of to use the Spanish term, País Vasco.
“In a way, then, your story is the usual Basque story, but in reverse, isn’t it?”
I hadn’t thought about my own life in these terms before. It was unsettling. I recalled the stories I had heard the older generation of Muriga tell, of young men who set off to work as sheepherders in the most remote areas of the American West: the Ruby Mountains of eastern Nevada, the high deserts of southern Idaho. There were the success stories, the boys from the village who would return five years later wearing audaciously cut suits purchased in San Francisco, their pockets jammed with five-thousand-peseta bills. But there were other stories, of young men who had gone mad out in the hills, who had been broken by the absolute solitude of the work. These men didn’t return to the Basque Country. Instead, they were found destitute on the streets of Boise or Reno or slumped against the wheel of a camp wagon in the middle of the desert, a thirty-thirty draped across their legs.
“Yes,” I said to Mariana after pausing to consider the comparison. “I suppose you could say that.”
I remembered my final afternoon in California before taking the bus to the airport in San Francisco in the summer of 1948. It was four years, almost to the day, after my parents had received news of my brother’s death, a brief typewritten letter signed by a colonel from the Pacific Theater. A high school basketball injury had kept me out of the war, and my father never let me forget it. He’d found a job for me with the Union Pacific, where he worked as a signalman, though it had seemed more like a punishment than a favor. But the work allowed time to study between shifts. I’d been good with language and became infatuated by Spanish culture after reading For Whom the Bell Tolls in my last year of high school. I graduated from Sacramento State a semester early with a degree in Spanish literature—an accomplishment that just drew another shake of my father’s head—and had set aside enough of my salary to buy a one-way ticket to Madrid and still have money to travel for a few months before I’d need to find a job. I’d barely left the Central Valley, let alone the United States, but I was certain that the life I’d imagined for myself existed only in my hazy, romantic vision of Spain.
Mariana bounced the young girl on her knee and looked out onto the green expanse of the bay. Across the harbor, the first of the morning fishing boats were returning to the marina.
“You never answered my question earlier,” I reminded her. “How are you feeling? You look stronger. What have the doctors told you?”
She lowered Elena down to the sidewalk and gave her a brief pat on the bottom, setting the girl tottering down the paseo.
“The truth, Joni?”
“Of course the truth.”
Again, she placed her hand reflexively to her side. I pictured the incision hidden under her blouse. How it must angle down from her ribs against her thin stomach, the way the black stitching pulled her light-brown skin together into an angry line. I stopped myself there, not knowing how far my imagination might go.
I had asked a doctor friend of mine about the operation, and he said, not surprisingly, that any time an organ was transplanted it was a very serious thing. That for the rest of the patient’s life there would be the risk of rejection; the body working against itself, always struggling to keep out the foreign object. But Mariana was young and fit, and the prognosis was good. The doctors had been surprised by how well the operation had gone and had, in fact, discharged her from the hospital a day early.
“The truth is that it’s fine. I do feel stronger.” But she said this without conviction or, rather, with a conviction that ran contrary to her words. I sat quietly, and we both watched Elena in the middle of the walkway, her short legs set apart in a sturdy stance. Nekane Basagoiti said “Agur” to us as she passed by pulling a wheeled tote filled with groceries from Martín’s store. She stopped to pick up Elena and kiss her on the cheek before continuing on her way. I knew that Mariana wanted to say more, so I waited. “But the truth, also, is that I don’t feel fine. The stronger I feel, the more I think about the organ. It occurs to me, each time I can do something new, that it’s only because another person died. Today I showered, and for the first time since the surgery, it didn’t hurt. And do you know what I felt?”
I shook my head no.
“Guilt.” She stopped herself again, and then asked, “Do you know who the ‘ideal donor’ is, Joni?”
“No.”
“A boy between the ages of twelve and fifteen who has been rendered brain-dead by a traumatic injury. Can you imagine? The ‘ideal donor,’ a thirteen-year-old boy.”
I pictured the incision under her blouse again, and with it came images of a young boy stretched out on the clean white sheets of an operating table, a team of anonymous doctors working around him as if he were a field to be harvested.
“I look at Elena,” she continued, “and I can’t help but think that in another ten years she’ll be nearly an ideal donor. I’ve become some sort of cannibal, Joni.”
We sat together in silence, watching the girl as she stood alone on the paseo.
“Have you talked to José Antonio about this?” I finally said. It was a meaningless question, my way of saying, I have nothing to offer here. This should be your husband’s problem.
“Not about this,” she said. “He asks how I’m doing. He asks if I am feeling any of the side effects of the drugs. He examines the incision for infection, tells me that he has grown to like my new hozka, my new bite. But no, I haven’t told him about this. About the boy.”
“There isn’t a boy. You know this, don’t you?”
“Of course. But there is someone. Maybe it’s an old man. Maybe it’s a girl, like Elena. I can’t pretend that there isn’t someone.”
“Does it matter, really?” I asked. “You act as if they’ve been killed just for your purposes. But these people were dead already. There’s no connection between you and their death, is there?”
She ran her hand over the space of her stomach, as if she were pregnant. “And would it really not make a difference to you, Joni? Would it not matter?”
She asked this question with a genuine curiosity. It was as if she’d never considered the possibility, or as if she’d never considered that someone might think differently than she had. I couldn’t bring myself to lie. “You should talk to José Antonio about this. He would understand, I think.”
She shook her head, as if she finally understood I was incapable of helping her. I suppose she had thought of me as an old man who had gathered some amount of wisdom along the journey, and I’d disappointed her.
; “No, it’s fine,” she said. “Besides, José Antonio is in Burgos three days out of the week, and when he is not in Burgos he’s working at the Party headquarters. He used all his free days when he was at the hospital with me in Bilbao.”
For a moment neither of us spoke. A late-morning breeze carried the first brown oak leaves across the walk, out onto the sand with a scraping sound so soft that it would be lost entirely if you didn’t see the leaves creating the sound.
“Anyway, enough talk of kidneys,” she said. “Sometimes I feel as if the word ‘kidney’ is the only one I use anymore.” She laughed, and it was, strangely, the most untroubled laugh I had heard from her in a long while. “So, old man, when does your replacement arrive—this new American?”
“He has already arrived, I’m told. Goikoetxea himself is putting him and his wife up for a few days until they find a house.”
Elena had returned to where we sat on the chipped white bench. Her small foot flopped loosely in her shoe, and Mariana bent down to retie the hanging laces. I watched the back of Mariana’s head, the way her dark hair mingled with Elena’s lighter-brown curls, the lightness she had inherited from José Antonio’s family from the south.
“So,” I said, “can I ask what technique you are using?”
“The rabbit and his ears, of course. Thirty-two years of the squirrel running around the tree, and now it is always the rabbit and his ears.”
5. MARIANA
This is what he said when he accepted the job as deputy campaign manager in Bilbao: that he’d always wanted to work in politics, and besides, it was better money than he could earn in Muriga. This town didn’t have room for a man of ambition, unless his idea of ambition was leaving at 3:30 each morning on the sardine boats, or working in a video store, or depositing pension checks for ninety-year-old widowers.
“You knew all this,” I said. “You knew it before you agreed to move.”
“We came here because you insisted on it. And because of her,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of Elena’s room. “That’s hardly agreeing.”
We had been living with my mother for two months, the three of us packed into a spare bedroom in an apartment just at the foot of the mountains, where the forest begins. My mother was out with her mus group as she was every Friday afternoon, and José Antonio and I were in the kitchen, where we seemed to conduct all of our arguments now. I was unloading the clothes washer, leaning into the breezeway to hang his undershirts and my mother’s elastic underpants and the handful of small cloths that we draped over our shoulders after Elena had eaten. José Antonio repetitively reached up to remove the dark sunflower shells from between his teeth, flicking them into the sink. It was a new habit of his, one that he knew I found disgusting.
“You said you wanted to be in the Basque Country,” I said evenly.
“Yes,” he answered immediately. “I said I wanted to live in the Basque Country. I didn’t say I wanted to be Basque.”
“Joder,” I said. “No one is asking you to be Basque. But this is something else entirely.”
Politics hadn’t mattered in Sevilla. In Sevilla, all that mattered was the next weekend trip to Benidorm, the next bar for cañas. So when José Antonio had voted for the Partido Popular in the ’93 elections, it was easy enough to ignore. In that time, to live in Sevilla was to be an amnesiac, something we Spaniards are so accustomed to becoming. Franco had died nearly two decades earlier; the Socialists had been running things in Madrid, and people in Sevilla thought that the transition to democracy was over. The fifty years since the Civil War had seemed forgotten to history already, absorbed back into the city along with ghosts of Sevilla’s past like the old Islamic minaret converted into a bell tower for the Saint Mary of the See Cathedral five hundred years earlier.
But it was different in Muriga, where our parents and grandparents had been forbidden to speak their native language for nearly half a century and had lost so many of their artists and politicians and intellectuals forever in Franco’s prisons and graveyards. Working for the PP in Muriga would only guarantee that José Antonio would be treated as an outsider, something he had complained about since we’d arrived in August.
“Your people,” he said, leaning over the sink to spit another of the black shells. “The persecution complex you have…”
* * *
IT WAS this conversation. This and a hundred like it that I began to remember only after José Antonio had been buried for a year.
6. IKER
During our second-to-last year at San Jorge, the year before the Councilman was killed, Asier and I made a habit of ditching school during the noon breaks. We’d begun to hang around with Ramón Luna’s group, kids a few years older than us who liked to think of themselves as political. For me at sixteen years old, the idea that drinking wine instead of going to school could be considered “political” was a revelation. We’d grown up walking by posters of young Basque radicals who had been killed or arrested, had seen the strikes organized by university students when we visited cities like Bilbao or San Sebastián with our families. And with Ramón, suddenly we were a part of it.
When I recall these escapes now—as I often do after the fat guard Ricardo calls lights out each night at nine here in the Salto del Negro—one stands out not only because it involved so many of the places and people that would later shape my life, but because it was just one of those rainy autumn days that I associate with home, days that we never seem to get here in the Canaries.
On this afternoon, we made our break out of the cafeteria, our usual escape route—down the west hallway toward the student bathrooms. Asier took the lead, as he always seemed to, while I lagged behind and kept an eye out for teachers. Just before arriving at the boys’ room, we ducked into the corridor that runs past the door of the American professor Garrett’s classroom, past the old pictures of famous writers like Pío Baroja and Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as a series of cartoon drawings from Don Quixote de la Mancha that he had hung on the walls. To us, they were strange caricatures of our literature, and they stood out in a secundaria classroom. They reminded everyone at San Jorge that he didn’t quite belong. I’ve often wondered if he was simply ignorant of these little details that set him apart in this way or if he had known about them all along.
When I looked around the corner the hallway was empty, but we slid off our shoes anyway so that the soles didn’t pound the tile. We were almost past Garrett’s room when Asier tugged at the sleeve of my jacket, then nodded toward the classroom. Inside, the old man was sitting at a student’s desk, drinking a Coca-Cola and reading a ratty old book. A napkin was still tucked into the collar of his shirt. He reminded me of one of the little kids you see standing by themselves on the primaria playground.
When we reached the end of the hallway, Asier cracked the door and put his eye to the line of daylight that came in from outside. He took a full thirty seconds before turning back to me. He paused to build the tension (as he always did), before giving a thumbs-up. I pressed in closer as he counted to three, bat, bi, hiru, and then he swung open the door, and we were running across the fifty meters of parking lot in the direction of the wooded hillside that slopes down toward Muriga, still carrying our shoes in our hands.
This is my favorite part of the memory: the run. There’s the instant when we come through the door and the sun is so bright that we’re temporarily blinded, and we’re running only downhill, not toward any place in particular, our blazers bunched into our armpits as we swing our arms, and when my eyes adjust I see Asier’s brown hair pushed back off his forehead, his crooked tooth flashing as we sprint into the trees.
When we were safe in the protection of the forest that separates San Jorge from Muriga, Asier sat down on the black pine needles and rotting leaves and leaned back against a tree. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out an Athletic Bilbao pencil box. On the pencil box an image of Imanol Etxeberria stretched across the goal as he punched away a shot, and I remembered that Athletic woul
d play Barcelona tonight.
Asier laid out a cigarette, rolling paper, and lighter from the pencil box. I loosened my tie and lay back on the leaves, my hands behind my head. My mind was already wandering to María Larrañaga and her younger sister Laura, who was only in eighth year but whose tits were already bigger than her sister’s.
“María or Laura?” I asked Asier, a game we always played. He was holding a small brown lump of hash, which he warmed with a cigarette lighter and carefully flaked into his palm.
“Again with the Larrañagas?” he said. “If you had any balls, you’d do something about it instead of just talking.”
“True,” I said. “But which one? For me, it’s the younger one.”
He laughed. “Last week it was the older one, wasn’t it?”
Asier crumbled a Lucky in his right hand and mixed it with the brown scrapings in his left palm, then rolled the mix in a Zig-Zag and licked the paper together. It was, among other things, the year in which Asier had gained his reputation as the best joint roller at San Jorge. He could roll one under his desk without looking—I witnessed it once during one of Irala’s never-ending lectures. Asier ran the joint quickly under the cigarette lighter before lighting an end and handing it to me. We lay against the forest floor and smoked, and we stared up through the branches of the trees at the clouds gathering in strange shapes and talked about who would win the game tonight, and if Anderson, Barcelona’s new striker, would score a goal. When we were done, we gathered our jackets and ties and walked the two kilometers down to the cliffs just past my grandmother’s old house on the east end of town.
By the time we hiked far enough to see the ocean, it had started to rain. A small bit of smoke came out of one of the concrete bunkers dug into the steep cliffside, and when we got closer, we heard Ramón Luna’s voice.
All That Followed: A Novel Page 2