All That Followed: A Novel

by Urza, Gabriel

  I hoped that if I kept silent it would be over sooner.

  “What exactly is it that you two are fighting for, anyway?” he asked.

  I remembered the way that Gorka had described our cause: a people’s right to autonomy, the right to self-determination, the need to fight against a government that put people in prison just for expressing their political ideas. But all of these seemed too far removed from the empty school at the top of the hill, from my gray slacks and my navy jacket. The old man carried on: “Your father is a banker, isn’t that right? He bought your scooter, pays for your school. And Asier—everyone knows who his father is. I understand that people in the Basque Country have suffered, and continue to suffer. Believe me, I understand that better than you think. But your lives are easy,” he said. “So what exactly are you trying to accomplish? What’s your goal?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. And in fact this was true. I didn’t know exactly what I had wanted to accomplish or what Gorka or any of them had wanted from all of this. From running in the streets, from torching the bus. On the cover of the newspaper, next to Garrett’s hand, I could see the bus driver watching his bus burn, the fare box tucked under his arm.

  Garrett sat back in his chair looking satisfied, and I felt like I could breathe again.

  “Let me ask again,” he said. This time he took the newspaper and tossed it into a small metal garbage bin next to his desk. He waited until I looked up from my lap, and when finally I did, I could see that he was smiling. It wasn’t a condescending smile, or the smile of someone who had beaten you in a game of pala. It reminded me of the look my father would give me before each of my football games when I was in primero. “So, Mr. Abarzuza, what is your goal?”

  I held my breath for a moment, and when I finally let out the air in my lungs, words began to come out with it. I told him that more and more, I just wanted to leave Muriga. That I had been reading lately, writers like Bukowski and García-Márquez and Lorca. Books that I would steal from the bookshelves in Professor Irala’s classroom while the old man was in the bathroom, that I would read alone in the old bunkers above the cliffs between San Jorge and Muriga.

  They were words, ideas, that I hadn’t shared with anyone, some that I hadn’t even admitted to myself. I told the old man about Nere and about the cousin in San Sebastián and the possibility of leaving Muriga to go to school there. About maybe studying literature or trying to write myself. And all through this, the old man maintained his smile, as if he had expected this all along. If I had to put a word to it, I’d say he looked satisfied.

  “You’re not going to pass the English exam at this rate,” he said. “You know that, right?”

  I nodded, looking back down at my hands on my lap. I remembered the things they had held in the last few days: motorcycle helmets, brown turds of hash, Molotov cocktails, a translated book of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Nere’s short, dark hair. All of the plans I’d just said out loud—the move to San Sebastián, studying literature—seemed stupid now, nearly impossible.

  “But you have another three months before exams,” he said. “I’m willing to work with you. I can’t guarantee that we have enough time, but I’m certainly willing to try if you are.”

  I looked up from my hands, which seemed so full and so empty at the same time.

  “Please,” I said. “Please.”

  * * *

  WE SPENT the next ten minutes creating a schedule: since I had attended so few classes, the best course of action would be to start from the beginning, compressing the entire course into a six-week class. I would be assigned three chapters a week from the textbook, and we would meet twice a week after school and once on Saturdays to review and work on conversation. By the time we’d finished planning, I had two pages of notes listing what I would be responsible for. Garrett leaned back in his chair, seemingly satisfied, and took a pack of Chesterfields from the top drawer of his desk. He drew one out and put it between his lips, then offered the pack to me.

  “It’s not like no one knows you smoke,” he said when I hesitated. “We see you and the rest sitting around the other side of the school, in the old arches.”

  I took one of the cigarettes and lit it with a lighter from my pocket, and for a moment the two of us just sat there, not looking at each other, smoking, thinking.

  “You know, I had a Nere too, once,” he finally said. Outside his window, the playground was now filled with the small children from primero, playing their games with the serious faces that children always wear. He took a drag off his Chesterfield, then scratched at a small stain on the lap of his shirt. “She’s what made me want to stay in Muriga, why I’m here now, I suppose.”

  It was something I’d never asked—why Garrett was here in Muriga. He’d been there all my life. Whenever Garrett did come up in conversation, my parents would refer to him only as “the American” or “the English teacher.” “I saw the English teacher at the butcher buying two cuts of pork,” my mother would say. “One for him and the other for that dog of his.” And now he was giving me a clue. More than that, maybe. He was confessing something.

  “What happened to her?” I asked. The bell rang for first classes to begin, but Garrett made no motion to get up.

  “She died,” he said. “She died in a car accident in 1955. She was driving the road between here and Bermeo. You know the curbs that drop all the way down to the ocean?”

  The old man was staring out the filmy window, through the haze kicked up by small fires in the fields to where the green ocean water came up to the edge of Muriga, as if he were looking for a specific boat in the harbor. I tried to imagine him as a young man at the funeral of his wife, but it was impossible to pull a younger Garrett out of the dry-skinned, white-haired man in front of me.

  “The car went off the road right there.” He moved his open hand in front of him, as if it were traveling around a bend in the road. “Our daughter was in the car with her.”

  * * *

  FOR A long time after that morning, I tried to figure out why the old man told me about his wife and daughter. Maybe it was to gain my trust. To make me think that we were becoming friends. But now, six years later—after the death of the Councilman and after the trial, after the transfer to the Canaries—I understand the old man’s confession differently: it was simple honesty. I see it in some of the men here at the Salto, men serving life sentences or men who would rather stay in the prison than ever be free again. It’s the honesty that hangs like a stench around broken men, men who no longer have anything to take.

  23. JONI (1951)

  We had been living together for two years when Nerea became pregnant. By then we had moved out of the coldwater apartment above the grocery store and into the guesthouse of Kattalin Gorroño’s farm on the northern edge of town. Here, in the small house with its garden backing up onto the Ubera River, we would stay awake until the early hours of the morning sipping coffee at the kitchen table and reading aloud to each other the works of Miguel de Unamuno or Alfonso Sastre, artists and playwrights who had been censored by the dictatorship. In the summers I would return from a day at San Jorge to find Nerea in the kitchen beating a half dozen eggs—a fork in one hand, a new translation of an Orwell novel in the other—wearing one of my old work shirts unbuttoned and open against the afternoon heat. These are the days against which I have measured the remainder of my life.

  But even the blinders of forty years don’t block out the darker days from this time. I often suspected that the old women’s whispers as we walked through the plaza weren’t prompted only by the impropriety of a young Basque woman living, unmarried, with a foreigner but by the presence of Nerea herself. “Be careful with that one,” Santi Etxeberria told me once after the fiestas of the Virgin’s Ascent. “She’s never been right in the head since her father was killed.”

  And in fact, when I look back on those brief years, I force myself to remember not only the good days but also the days when Nerea would close herself into the spare bedro
om, refusing to eat or even bathe. On these days, which seemed to occur more often during the chilly, overcast winter months, I would pry the lock and open the door to a cold, damp draft, Nerea wrapped in the duvet and huddled against the wall underneath an open window.

  “Should I get your mother?” I asked on an evening when I was feeling particularly helpless, particularly over my head. I’d only met the old woman once, during the wedding of one of Nerea’s childhood friends, and she seemed as uncomfortable with the introduction as her daughter had been. But now I only wanted someone else in the house with us, this house that now felt cold and removed and as if it had never held the warmth of a summer afternoon. I wanted someone to put on hot water for coffee, to rattle around a couple of pots and cough once or twice while I lifted Nerea’s thin body and carried it to the bathroom, where I had filled the tub for her. But Nerea laughed at my suggestion, as if I had asked to invite Franco himself over for dinner.

  “Is that it?” she said. There was a harsh edge to her voice. “You’ve been talking with her? Is that it?”

  “No,” I answered. I tried to bring her closer even as she pulled away. “I don’t even know her. But she’s your mother. I just thought that—”

  “Are you planning?” she said, beginning now to cry. “You’re planning with her, aren’t you? To send me away.”

  “No,” I said, feeling her body go limp, her diaphragm shuddering as she surrendered herself over to the sobbing. “I could never let you go.”

  * * *

  BUT THESE dramatic swings seemed to trail off with news of the pregnancy. In the spring of 1952, the guesthouse along the Ubera River was again a place of warmth and excitement. The doors of the house were thrown open to clear the gloomy air that had accumulated over the winter. Nerea wore her hair pulled back, spent whole days planting beans and peppers in the garden, absently touching her stomach’s small roundness. She invited friends over for dinner, dragged me by the hand to the market early on Saturday mornings. There was a constant stream of potato omelets in those months, so that even now when I am ambushed by the smell of onion and fresh garlic beginning to brown in a frying pan, I am brought back to that kitchen we shared.

  “Do you ever want to get married?” I asked her one evening in bed. The coolness of the night air was slipping over us from the open window, and when Nerea turned to me, it was with a look that suggested both amusement and sympathy.

  “Eta zuk?” she said, poking me playfully in the chest. And you?

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” I said. And it was true; I hadn’t been raised in the Church, and though I knew I had never loved someone as I did Nerea, I felt no need to marry. My only desire was to keep the life we had been living that summer. But I was also aware of the town gossip. About how Nerea’s brother Aitor had cornered her outside the Bar Nestor and called her a sinvergüenza, about how small towns talk. And so I asked her again.

  “But do you, is the question. I would if it was important to you.”

  “You should know me better than that by now, Joni,” she said. “I don’t care what those people say.” She waved her hand dismissively in the direction of the town center.

  “And your family? And the Church?”

  “I haven’t been to confession since the day my father was killed. And besides,” she said. “The only God I believe in is the one that wants us to be happy in this little house.”

  * * *

  THE CHILD arrived in late November, just as the first winter storm blew in from the North Atlantic. In the office of Don Octavio, Muriga’s nearsighted doctor, Nerea labored from Monday morning until Tuesday afternoon, at which point Octavio sterilized a silver forceps and pulled the boy’s motionless body onto the bloody sheets.

  When Nerea had finally fallen asleep after a second shot of morphine, I left the child with the doctor and midwife and made the short walk along the Avenida de San Lorenzo. From inside the shuttered restaurant came the sounds of tipsy patrons cheering Zarra and Iriondo on in the Athletic game, and the glow around the window frame seemed warm and inviting as I shuffled past. The wind swept down the narrow corridors of the cross streets and left my umbrella useless. When I arrived at the door of the Arosteguis’ apartment, I was soaked through to my underclothes.

  I had never been to the apartment before; during my first few weeks in Muriga, in which Nerea and I compulsively strolled the streets, talking and pointing, she had once stopped in front of the building and pointed up to the second-floor apartment.

  “This is my mother’s house. It is the house I grew up in,” she had said. The windows were obscured by white curtains, and the iron railing along the balcony was lined with small pots of red and purple geraniums. This was before she had told me of her father, of how later on her mother had sent her to live with the sisters at the hermitage near Bermeo when she was thirteen, and so I asked if she wanted to stop in.

  “No,” she had said. “No, I don’t think I’ll ever set foot in that goddamned apartment again.”

  And now I found myself on the landing of this same apartment, a steady shiver settling in. The yellow hallway lights buzzed, and from one of the apartments above I heard a woman tell her husband to turn off the radio. I realized, absently, that this was the same hallway through which her father had been dragged by the Falangists on that morning in 1937—I could almost see the scuffs left by the small man’s shoes as he struggled to return to the apartment, to his children, to the life that he’d already lost. And then, as if of their own volition, my knuckles struck the wooden door.

  The sharp rap was followed by silence. Then shuffling behind the door and some muffled Basque, a language I knew I’d never understand. Footsteps, and then a slight crack of the door, before it quickly closed shut.

  I knocked a second time. This time there was no muffled discussion from within the apartment, only heavy footsteps moving purposefully down the corridor toward the door. Before I had time to guess what was happening inside, the door flung open and I could see Aitor, his broad shoulders darkening the doorway.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  I took an involuntary step back into the hallway. It was a terrible way to meet her family—unannounced, shivering, a small puddle forming under my feet. It occurred to me, for the first time, that I was facing a real possibility of physical violence. Aitor wasn’t known to shy away from a fight; he’d bloodied Primo Trujillo’s nose over a spilled cup of Rioja just a few weeks earlier. But I had been two days without sleep, and any fear was outweighed by sheer exhaustion.

  “I am Nerea’s friend,” I said.

  “I know who you are,” he said. “Again. Why are you here?”

  “She was pregnant,” I said.

  “Of course she was pregnant. I saw her pass my butcher store every morning. Shamelessly unmarried, pregnant with the bastard child of a guiri. So I’ll ask you one more time why you are here.”

  I began to speak but felt my knees give. I leaned back and let myself slide down against the wall until I was seated on the floor of the landing and held my head in my hands.

  “The child is dead,” I said. “I thought that you’d want to know.”

  24. IKER

  After we burned the bus in Bermeo I began to keep my distance from Asier and Daniel. I made good on my promise to the American, met him directly after school to review the extra homework he had assigned me. I was grateful for the extra work, in a way; it allowed me to separate myself, just a little, from these things that seemed to threaten a different life that was slowly emerging: Gorka and his political manifestos, the cans of black spray paint, the bus driver holding his small box with the afternoon fares.

  The bus had been a tipping point—everything before the spark of Asier’s lighter was anchoring me to Muriga, while everything since was in preparation to leave it behind. In my mind, I was now only waiting to be away at the university, to leave behind the rotting smell of the harbor and shake the last of the sand from the beach out of my shoes. The only bit of Muri
ga I wanted to take along with me was Nere.

  This is a revisionist history, you might say. After all, the Councilman is dead, and I have spent the last five years here in the Salto del Negro, as far away from any universities or books or women as a person can be without leaving the surface of the planet. But isn’t history always revisionist? Doesn’t the truth lie somewhere between?

  * * *

  “WHOSE IDEA was it?” Garrett said once, in the middle of a practice examination. “The bus, I mean. I’ve always wanted to know how those things come about.”

  I put my pencil down. The old man was sipping at a paper cup of coffee from the teachers’ lounge, a finger tapping on the empty envelope of sugar on his desk.

  “You don’t have to tell me, of course.”

  But there in his office, the radiator filling the room with a sleepy warmth, over our cups of coffee, I found myself more comfortable, safer, than I had in a long time—the old American and I were friends, I realized.

  I told him about the visits from Gorka Auzmendi, the way that the bus bombing had really been his idea, but presented in such a slow, suggestive way that it soon began to feel like our own. I recounted every bit for the old man, the way we’d filled the bottles with gasoline, the way the fat bus driver had retrieved his box of fares after Asier had thrown it out the bus door. And as I spoke I began to see them in a different way.

  “It sounds stupid, doesn’t it?” I asked the old man. Rather than answer immediately, he sat back in his chair, as he often did when I asked his opinion on something.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think it does. It’s what I miss most about being young. The ability to believe in something despite all evidence to the contrary.”

  It wasn’t until my second year here in the Salto del Negro that I began to understand what he meant.

  25. MARIANA