“I was thinking that just the men would go,” Robert said, as if Morgan wasn’t still clinging to his arm. “I don’t know if you would like it much anyway,” he said, turning to his wife. “A lot of sitting around drinking.”
Her face dropped, and then, as if remembering their recent agreement, she said, “Don’t be ridiculous. It sounds like a boys’ day. And I was planning on going to the store anyway, if you’d like to stop by for dinner, Joni.”
Before I could answer, the deep boom of a firework exploded down the street, followed by yells, shoes slapping against wet stone, the rattling of metal.
“Fuck me,” I heard the bartender say, more annoyed than anything. There are no real swear words in Basque, so he had resorted to Spanish. People were streaming into the bar, cursing, carrying their children. The bartender walked around the counter and stood by the door. When the noise from outside grew louder, and the small bar was so crowded that there was no standing space left, he reached up to pull a grated metal security door down, then closed a wooden door behind it. Inside there was a restless jostling of bodies, some people swearing while others laughed and shouted, trying to order beers from the bar. Outside the noise increased as well, a wave rising from the end of the street, making its way toward the bar.
“What’s happening?” Morgan said anxiously. “Is there some sort of attack?”
Robert was sipping at the last of his beer, trying to remain composed, as he always seemed to. But I could see apprehension stirring in the young American, as if the ground had begun to move beneath his feet. He touched the small scar at the corner of his lip with his index finger, like he was scratching an itch, and waited expectantly for an answer.
“Not really,” I told Morgan. By now we could hear sirens from the other end of the street and the hollow pops of rubber bullets. From the wave outside, we heard a crest of cries as the bullets arrived, then security doors rippling as people outside jammed themselves into the closed doorways, out of the line of fire. “Just a few kids. It’s been happening for years, though it’s been particularly bad this year.”
In the few times that we had seen each other socially since their arrival in Muriga, this was the first time we’d talked about politics. The political situation wasn’t discussed in public among Murigakoak, particularly with visitors, and I’d adopted this code a long time before.
“Is it the ETA?” Morgan asked. “Are we being attacked? Is that what’s happening?”
“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous,” Robert said, though he was still looking anxiously out the window we were pressed up against. I could see him fighting to regain his sense of control.
“Come here,” I said, guiding Morgan closer to the window. “Do you see that one there? Hiding behind the garbage can? That is Isabela Cabrera. She has been a student of mine since she was eight. Her mother works as a manager in the Todo Todo on Calle San Francisco. And that one over there against the wall, holding the spray paint? Asier Díaz, another San Jorge student. He was wearing that same sweater after class this morning.”
They both looked at me, confused.
“Why don’t you report them to the police?” Morgan finally asked.
“The police know just as well as I do who they are,” I said as if this were common sense, though I knew how ridiculous it must seem. I’d learned early on that this was one of the requirements of living in Muriga—to act as if the inexplicable were simply unnoteworthy. I had come to Muriga in the Franco days, in the days when the etarras were seen as heroes in the Basque Country, responsible for bringing about the end of the dictatorship. I knew that even if people in Muriga were annoyed or bored by these little riots, they continued to show their support by simply accepting their existence. “This is a small town. If the Ertzaintza arrested all of these kids and threw them in prison, then there would be real trouble. It’s easier to shoot a couple of rubber bullets and wash off a little paint.”
A few minutes later, before the people at the bar finished their drinks, it grew silent in the street. A few yells, the isolated pop of a rubber bullet leaving an Ertzaina’s rifle. People continued to shuffle where they stood in the bar, growing impatient, while Robert kept his place at the window, squinting into the dimly lit street. Finally someone yelled for the bartender to open the door, and we stepped outside the way people do after taking shelter from a sudden thunderstorm.
16. MARIANA
“You’re feeling sorry for yourself,” José Antonio said the week before I lost consciousness in the bookstore on Miracruz. Over the previous weeks, he had complained when I stayed in bed while he dressed for work or when I fell asleep immediately after putting Elena down. He’d been promoted to deputy in charge of rural campaign recruitment not long before, and slick self-satisfaction still clung to everything he said, especially to me. “You’d feel better if you left the house every once in a while. Take the girl out for a walk. Something.”
* * *
THERE’S NOTHING like acute organ failure to remind you how small your world is, how limited your future has become. We’d been back in Muriga nearly a year. A temporary thing, we had said in Sevilla. I had been pregnant for five months, and José Antonio still hadn’t been able to find full-time work. A temporary thing, I told myself when we had moved into my old room in my mother’s apartment, and again when José Antonio accepted the position with the Partido Popular. But it was becoming less and less temporary, no matter what we told ourselves. I could feel the mortar setting, the bricks of my life locking into place in Muriga as they had for my own mother and for her mother before her.
I regained consciousness in the back of an ambulance after passing out at the bookstore on Miracruz. I recognized Maite Urrutia’s younger brother leaning over me in one of the dark-blue jumpsuits the paramedics wear, fitting a series of adhesive wires against my bare chest. There was something hard and angular under my arm, and when I lifted it, I saw it was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the book I had been waiting to buy at the bookstore.
“Lawrence,” Maite Urrutia’s brother said, noticing I had come to. “One of my favorites.”
I wanted to reply but felt a cold hiss over my mouth and realized that I was wearing an oxygen mask. He shook his head, indicating I shouldn’t answer, then took my left arm in his hand and placed two cool fingers against my wrist to take my pulse.
“You passed out at the store,” he said, looking down at his watch. “It’s probably nothing. Low blood sugar maybe. We’ll take you to the hospital as a precaution.”
I nodded under the clear plastic mask.
“I’m going back to the Uni after my year of civil service,” he said, as if we’d just run into each other at the corner store. “For literature, I think.”
* * *
HOW OFTEN do I imagine what things might have been like if it had just been a precaution. If it had just been low blood sugar or the heat of the bookstore. Would I still be in Muriga? Would José Antonio still be alive? And always, the ultimate question: which reality would I prefer?
But, of course, it wasn’t a precaution.
Instead, it was the beginning of four months of tests. Of conversations that began with the endocrinologist taking my hands in hers and sighing. Of ruling out donors: first my mother, then my cousins in Zumaia and in Gijón, each one secretly relieved when the doctor told them they were not “viable.” Of donor lists and new diets and lists of Things I Should No Longer Do. Driving a motor vehicle. Strenuous activities that might unduly stress the body, such as running. Heavy lifting. Sex.
“It’s a different story after we find a donor,” the doctor said. “After that, your life will more or less return to normal.”
“And when will that be?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“Who knows? Sometimes a week. Sometimes a year. Sometimes more.”
“And if a donor doesn’t come in time?” José Antonio asked.
The doctor scowled, but I didn’t know which she didn’t like: the question or the answer
.
“It’ll come in time,” she said, squeezing my hand in hers.
* * *
“IT’S JUST a recommendation,” I said, pushing against José Antonio under the sheets, reaching between his legs through the dark. It was six weeks after the episode in the bookstore, the night before he was supposed to leave for Bilbao for a four-day set of meetings with the Party. “She said that I should try not to exert myself. We’ll be careful.…”
“Jesus, Mariana,” he said, grabbing my hand at the wrist. He rolled away, toward the bedroom wall. “You heard what the doctor said. Are you really being this reckless? We can wait for a few months, for God’s sake.”
I lay on my back in the dark, felt that great weight that had been pressing against me more and more frequently since we’d moved back to Muriga. Even then, I knew that this sense of dread had nothing to do with the diagnosis and everything to do with the man sleeping next to me. The encroaching walls of the apartment. The breathing sound the sea made as it crept up the sand.
I held my breath and waited, listening to the sound of José Antonio’s chest rising and falling, rising and falling. I thought of the girl in the room next to us, and then of the stories my grandmother would tell, of burned witches and schoolchildren lost in shadowy forests. My hand snuck out from under the sheets, briefly touched my forehead, then the middle of my chest, then quickly to either side. It was the first time I’d made the sign of the cross in twenty-two years.
I lay, waiting, and after a while it seemed that the weight began to lift, if just a little. That the walls of the apartment had leaned away from me. That the sea had pulled back from the shore, stopped its encroachment. It was silent in the room, perfectly silent. My hand crept out, up through the dark to touch my forehead again.
* * *
IT WAS six months after the surgery that Joni introduced me to the new American. Or actually, it’d be more true if I said, “It was six weeks after the operation that Joni introduced me to the new American couple.” In the time since José Antonio’s death, I’ve often wondered why Joni had wanted to introduce me to Robert Duarte and his blond wife. Was he simply worried about me? Did he want to offer me the company of people my own age? Or maybe he thought that I’d be a good guide, someone to introduce them to the town. Or something else. Did he know that this simple introduction would lead to everything that followed?
If it was worry that prompted that first meeting, it was Joni’s worry over my growing obsession with the donor of my newly attached organ. In fact, he suggested the meeting (was this an American idea, like the “blind dates” in late-night American movies that keep me company when I can’t sleep?) during one of our coffees at the Boliña, just after I described how I had determined, through intense scientific investigation, that the kidney had almost certainly belonged to a twenty-eight-year-old ETA member.
“I don’t see why you insist on playing this game, Mariana,” he said.
“Here, hold her for a moment,” I told him, lifting Elena from her seat on my lap (how long ago, it seems, are these days when she would sit quietly with me). The old man lifted Elena onto his lap, bouncing his knee just slightly; as soon as she was situated, she asked if he would buy her an ice cream.
“She already knows how to get what she wants from men, doesn’t she?” he said.
“She learns from the best,” I said.
With Elena in his lap he seemed confident, like he was imagining himself as something more, an uncle or a grandfather. He nodded happily at Ursula Hemen as she passed the front of the Boliña, sipping at his coffee with his free hand as he bounced Elena.
“I don’t really believe it,” I said. “But certainly, it is an interesting game to play, isn’t it?”
“No, I don’t see the fun in it at all,” he said, stopping the jogging of his knee.
“Gehiago, Joni,” Elena said, looking up at the old man.
“In Spanish,” I told her.
“More?” she said. The knee began bouncing again.
“It’s difficult to explain,” I said. “But I feel like there is something it’s trying to communicate to me. A message, or a memory. Something…”
“The memories that you’ve told me about—the membrillo, lighting the cigarette for the girl—they don’t have to belong to this person, this terrorist. They are just little ghosts stirred up from some old memory of yours. A couple that you saw at the beach one day. Membrillo set out for the holidays at the grocery store,” he continued. “Has it occurred to you that you’re forcing all this onto some very normal sensations?”
“Sure, but what fun is there in that?” I asked, trying to change the tone of the conversation. “Just imagine how upset José Antonio, Mister Conservative, Mister Partido Popular, would be to discover his wife is secretly a militant Basque nationalist. That he’s been sleeping beside a terrorist for the last six weeks.”
But Joni didn’t laugh. He stopped bouncing Elena on his lap, kissed the top of her head, and set her on the chair between us. Elena began immediately to pick at the chipped white paint on the armrest.
“Have you met the Americans yet?” he asked abruptly.
“The one who came to replace you?” I asked.
I’d seen the couple around Muriga, of course. They were impossible to miss, the woman with her blond hair and small mouth, the husband’s short pants and hairy legs as he ran each afternoon along the beach and up into the hills west of town. “Joni, you know I would never betray you by talking to your enemy.”
The old man laughed his nervous little laugh.
“I’ve spent a little time with them. The husband, I can’t quite figure him out. But the wife—her name is Morgan—the wife, I find myself feeling sorry for. I think she feels very alone here in Muriga.”
“Well, that’s something I can understand,” I said, though I instantly wished I hadn’t. Joni gave me a little shake of the head.
“So I thought that you might want to meet them,” he said. “You could maybe show them around, introduce them to a few people. As a favor to me.”
With José Antonio gone for half the week, I couldn’t say that I didn’t have the time. And besides, the idea of meeting someone from outside Muriga didn’t sound bad.
“The husband,” I said. “I’ve been told that he speaks Basque.”
“It’s true,” Joni said. “I don’t know how much. Certainly, he speaks enough to defend himself. But the wife, she doesn’t even speak Spanish. She’s trying to learn—a couple phrases only. You could teach her a little Basque, if you wanted to.”
“What do you think?” I asked Elena in Euskera. “Should we become teachers?”
* * *
THE TRUTH is that I didn’t feel guilty about the affair with Robert Duarte until after my husband’s death, and even then it was guilt for José Antonio’s murder, rather than for the affair itself.
After my first meeting with Joni and the Americans (an unnoteworthy lunch, other than Robert’s strange, antiquated Euskera and his wife’s almost total silence), Robert arrived alone for our coffee date the following week, explaining that his wife had felt ill and would not be able to join us. We stayed at the Boliña long after the first two cups were empty. Robert described his parents’ immigration to Idaho in the 1960s from Nabarniz. I asked him to translate the words of old American songs I had never understood (Toto’s “Africa”; Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart”). He occasionally reached across the table to touch the back of my hand with his wide fingertips, and there were moments of silence in which I found myself leaning in closer, and in which he had done the same. By the time I finally excused myself to pick up Elena from my mother’s apartment, we had migrated from opposite sides of the small table to sitting with our knees nearly touching. When we made plans to meet again the following Thursday afternoon (after José Antonio had left for Bilbao for the weekend), it was understood by both of us that we would meet alone.
* * *
IN THE week leading up to that next meeting wit
h Robert Duarte, the impulses from what I was now referring to as my “terrorist kidney” were more intense, more explicit. I’d order a hot chocolate for Elena, then find myself asking the waitress to throw a shot of brandy into my cup of coffee. I’d intentionally leave José Antonio’s breakfast to burn on the stovetop, let Elena cry herself out while I soaked in the tub, a bit of José Antonio’s scotch in a coffee cup. I’d wake José Antonio up in the middle of the night, rubbing a hand up and down the front of his boxer shorts, and when he leaned in to kiss me I’d roll away and pretend to go back to sleep.
“I left my wallet back at my apartment,” I told the American when we met the next Thursday.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I have money.”
“No,” I said. I could feel the voice from under the scar speaking through me, pushing me on. “I have to go shopping after. Come back to the apartment with me. It’ll just take a minute.”
I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen when we arrived at the apartment; it was odd to have a stranger, a man, walking along the same hallway that José Antonio had rushed down that morning, hurrying to make the first train for Bilbao.
“Your husband is a politician, is that right?” Robert said. He wandered around the apartment comfortably, looking at photos, as if taking inventory.
“He thinks he is,” I said. I took José Antonio’s scotch down from the cabinet above the stove, poured two water glasses a quarter full. It was early in the afternoon, but when I handed a glass to the American he didn’t seem surprised. We both sipped at our glasses, and I felt the warmth of the scotch run over my tongue, down the back of my throat. The voice whispered inside me, urging me on.
“He’s fallen in with the Partido Popular,” I said. I set my glass on the tile counter, reached out to grab the American at the top of his dark-blue slacks. He took a step forward, pushing against me so that I could feel the hard corner of the counter against the small of my back. I felt the roughness of his neatly trimmed beard against the side of my face, the smell of stale coffee on his breath. He put a hand on my hip, pushing me harder against the counter. I took the hand in mine, pushed it under my skirt, between my legs.
All That Followed: A Novel Page 7