I wish I could say that in these ten days I was eventually accepted by the Arosteguis, but the best that can be said is that we reached a functional civility. The first two days I barely moved from the couch, coming in and out of sleep, dreaming of the boy’s waxy body, the look the doctor gave me as he tried to draw the child out with the forceps, the sob that arose from Nerea when the midwife took her hand and whispered in her ear. The morning of the third day, I woke to fingers of sunlight reaching around the corners of the blinds. I heard a quiet murmuring from behind the bedroom door, and I went to the kitchen to fill the Cuban press on the stovetop. When the old woman came out twenty minutes later, I poured her a cup of the thick, dark coffee. She accepted it without a word.
“Do you take milk?” I finally asked.
At this, she seemed to soften just a little. She shook her head, but as if in response to another question.
“You can’t go in today,” she said. I nodded, holding my coffee stupidly in my two hands. “She’s not ready yet. Maybe tomorrow, but not today.”
“What can I do?” I asked, feeling helpless. “Can I get anything? What does she need?”
“What she needs…” the old woman said, anger suddenly sparking up in her before she calmed herself. She continued on, her Spanish heavy with the rolled r’s and drawn-out s’s of her Basque accent. “What she needs is rest. She’s a fragile girl. You know this, I hope?”
I nodded, remembering the paranoia of the previous winter.
“She’s always been that way. That’s why I sent her to live with the sisters,” she said, looking keenly at me. “I don’t know how much she’s told you.”
“Practically nothing,” I lied.
“Anyway, today you cannot see her. Go to work—you work at the private school, no? Go to work. Today you cannot see her, but perhaps tomorrow.”
* * *
WHEN I’D called San Jorge two days earlier, the old secretary told me that they had already heard the news. (The doctor was, after all, the headmaster’s brother-in-law.) I told her that I would be taking off the rest of the week, and when there was no answer on the other end of the line I realized that she was crying.
“It’s OK,” I’d said, somehow. “These things happen. It’s something that we’ll get through.”
But now I heeded the directions of Nerea’s mother, if only because following directions allowed me to not think about the body of the boy, and about what would be left of the woman I loved when our bedroom door finally opened.
On the way to San Jorge, I drove to the doctor’s house. I pulled the car over onto the curb and let myself through the front gate into the garden. When Octavio answered the door, he looked surprised to see me, perhaps even frightened. He took a step back into the house before speaking.
“Joni,” he said. I tried not to look into the open house behind him, but my eyes wandered past him, through the living room, into the back bedroom where Nerea had labored for nearly two days.
“I’m not sure why I stopped in,” I said.
“Come in, please. Come in,” he said.
“No,” I said. “I can’t stay. Like I said, I’m not sure why I stopped.”
“Of course,” the old doctor said, pinching the bridge of his nose tiredly. We stood there awkwardly for a minute, just the cold clean air blowing through the few leaves that hadn’t yet fallen in his garden.
“I should go,” I said.
“Of course,” he said again, more quietly. When I turned to leave, he said, “Joni, how is she?”
I turned to look at him there in the doorway of the house. He was wearing a heavy knit sweater that was a little too big for him, the sleeves rolled up so as not to cover his hands. He seemed undersized and vulnerable standing there like that.
“I stopped by the next afternoon, but her mother turned me away. Did she tell you?”
“No,” I said.
“And yesterday I sent the midwife, but she was turned back as well.”
I nodded. We stood there for what felt like a long time, the two of us in the small garden with only the wind blowing between us.
* * *
AFTER I left the doctor’s house, I drove on the road leading to San Jorge—the same road, I reminded myself, that Nerea and her brothers had climbed the morning that their father was executed. When I entered the office, the secretary walked across the room and put her arms around me, and I thought that she might start crying again. I collected a few pieces of mail, then left a note for the headmaster to tell him that I would be back teaching the next afternoon. I started down the hallways toward the exit, but before opening the doors that led onto the parking lot I turned down the hallway of primaria.
I was hired to teach secundaria, so I rarely had an opportunity to see the youngest students at San Jorge. And now, as I walked down the halls decorated with cutout cartoons and alphabet letters, I stopped at the door of one of the classrooms to peek inside. The children wore the same gray slacks and oxfords as their older counterparts, and behind the small glass windows in the doors the children’s mouths moved soundlessly. I wondered what tiny conversations they were having, what they found so important to talk about even as their teacher tried to quiet them.
* * *
THE NEXT morning I woke early. The house was still dark and silent. I padded in my socks around the kitchen to start the coffee and then went out onto the front step and lit a cigarette just as the first light was arriving. When the bedroom door finally scraped open an hour later, I had already showered and dressed.
That morning, Nerea’s mother seemed more hunched over than I had remembered her the day before, and she appeared, for the first time, a woman who had lived through tragedy several times over. The whites of her eyes were shot through with red, and there was a pale crust at the edge of her mouth. I poured her coffee again and this time added hot milk. She nodded, then sat heavily at the kitchen table.
“Not today,” she said, offering a tired smile, again shaking her head. “I’m sorry. Not today.”
29. MARIANA
In the months before José Antonio’s death, it all seemed to boil up to the edge, as if Muriga were the cauldron in the kitchen of the Boliña, and Elena’s emerging teeth were the scallions, and the American Robert Duarte’s sweat against my chest was the stock, and the peeling edges of José Antonio’s campaign posters were pale bits of cabbage, and it was all a great stew that was suddenly heated too quickly. Or maybe this is just how I see it now that the pot has already spilled over. It’s possible—likely, even—that at the time, there was no stew and no heat (perhaps not even the cauldron of Muriga as I remember it now) but only the broth of real life, its parts blurred into each other a long time ago.
What I can say for certain is that ten weeks before his body was found (still wearing his only suit), José Antonio called from the Party offices in Bilbao to inform me that a committee had formally approved his bid to run for Muriga’s city council the following November. That same night, alone in the bedroom with the window cracked open so I could smell the sea foam whipped by a two-day storm, I woke no fewer than four times. The series of dreams that visited me that night seemed to belong to someone else (who else, of course, but my new pet? Even now, I can’t help but touch the light line at my belly button as I recall that night). When I went to the kitchen just before five to put a pot of coffee on the stove, I could only remember the skeletons of the dreams, tiny images connected only in their violence: a young woman with no eyes at all, attacked by two men with red ribbons instead of arms; a calf struck down by a white postal van; and finally, only the black sensation of drowning.
“Iñaki,” I said quietly that morning, waiting in the dark for the coffee to brew. It was the first time I had addressed the organ directly. By now I was certain that the young terrorist was in fact growing, becoming stronger, fighting for space inside me.
And did my new kidney answer? Did the dead speak through my own mouth, with my own tongue?
Of course not.
But I continued on anyway. At first I spoke so quietly that it was barely anything more than the moving of my mouth. I asked about the dreams, and I asked about his life before he was killed by the Ertzaintza. I thanked him for his gift to me. I asked him about the image of the young girl that had come to me several times, the girl with the short, dark hair who was handing me a cigarette. About whether she had been his girlfriend, or perhaps a cousin or a coworker. Had he been in love with her? Had she broken his heart, or did he break hers? I asked if the smell of membrillo that came to me when I woke from the surgery was the same smell of the membrillo that his grandmother would set out after Easter dinner. I asked him if it was true that he had killed the intelligence officer in Madrid, and if so, then why? I asked if he ever regretted it. I asked what he missed most, now that the only part of him left on this earth was in the dark pit of me.
By now a gray light was beginning to come in through the open shutters of the living room, and I could see that the sill was wet with the fine mist that we call txirimiri. As I tapped out the spent grounds from the coffeepot and refilled the small reservoir with water, I told him about the affair with Robert Duarte and about how I had never once felt guilty. I asked if this made me a bad person, and when he didn’t answer, I continued on. I told him that I knew what my old friends, the ones I had grown up with, were saying behind my back, about Mariana, who had brought the pestilence of Madrid to Muriga in this husband and his posters about his “New Vision for the Basque Country.” I talked about my old life in Sevilla, and I admitted that I sometimes fantasized about something bad happening to Elena so that I could be free entirely of José Antonio.
I wondered out loud what Iñaki would have thought of my husband and his Partido Popular, if he would have spit on the posters of José Antonio. If Iñaki might have lain in wait outside of our apartment, had he not been killed in a shoot-out with the Ertzaintza. If he might have slid between the tires of our car at three in the morning to secure a packet of explosives that would ignite when José Antonio turned the ignition (perhaps with me and Elena in it). Or if perhaps he might not wire the bomb correctly, if maybe in the dark of the night and in the excitement of the task he might connect a red to a green, or a green to a blue, and in the morning as we started the car to drive the twenty kilometers to my aunt’s house in Guernica, the explosives would not detonate. Would the small gray package of explosives ride with us along the steep road to Guernica and then back to Muriga; would it fall harmlessly as the car passed over a bump in the road?
Elena slept late. I drank cup after cup of coffee and reached out the window to feel the cool mist against my palm and wrist and talked and talked until, just after eight, there was a knock. When I opened the door, I found my neighbor, Maite, in her dusty pink housecoat.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”
“I’ve heard voices over here since five. The only time people talk at that time of the morning is when someone has died.”
30. IKER
Some days the Councilman would come out of the train station looking like shit, his dark suit wrinkled and his eyeglasses sliding to the end of his nose, his black briefcase pulling one shoulder down so that he leaned to one side. On others—if it was one of the odd warm days we get in Muriga in late September—he would bounce down the steps onto the curb, the navy jacket folded under an arm and the white of his dress shirt rolled up, showing his hairy arms. Or he would step out into an afternoon rainstorm, holding the morning’s copy of El Correo over his head in a way that reminded me of my father. But always, he would come off the 6:24 train from Bilbao.
We continued our lookouts throughout the summer before our final year at San Jorge, even after Ramón Luna had left Muriga for university in Bilbao. What started as a game had taken on a different tenor without Ramón. Asier and I would meet Daniel at the bridge that crosses the Ubera on Monday afternoons, where we knew the Councilman would pass on his way home from the station. As we waited for his familiar form to walk out of the string of people coming off the train, we would lean over the low stone wall, out over the river. When the tide is low during the summer months, the silver flashes of river trout jump out from the brown river bottom. Waiting for the Councilman, we’d flick the shells of our sunflower seeds from the bridge and watch the fish rise to the surface, mistaking the husks for an insect wing before spitting them out into the river to be carried into the bay.
Starting down the Avenida de Getxo, the Councilman might stop in at a newsstand or a café before walking the seven blocks across the plaza, in front of the city hall, and along the Paseo de los Robles to his apartment building at the corner of Atxiaga and Zabaleta. From the mailboxes in the apartment entryway, we had learned that they lived on the fifth floor on the left side of the building facing toward the bay, which was blocked by another row of apartments. The three of us would sit in the entryway of Santi Etxeberria’s musty hardware shop, watching the window and talking about Lizarazu’s off-season trade from Athletic until old Etxeberria would run us off. Sometimes, a few minutes after the Councilman had disappeared into the entryway of the apartment building, we would see his white sleeves reach out and swing closed an open window five stories up.
* * *
I OFTEN think back to a Sunday afternoon the spring of the Councilman’s death. Nere and I were finishing our coffees in Estefana Torretxe’s bar when we saw the Councilman pass by with the little girl on his shoulders, his wife following a few steps behind them. For all the times I’d seen him in the past months, it was the closest we’d ever been to each other. He added a small bounce to his walk so that the girl sprang up with each step, which made her laugh inaudibly outside the window of the bar. Behind her, the Councilman’s wife seemed unaware of her family, and if I hadn’t known better I wouldn’t have thought the three were related. As she passed the door of the bar, she reached a hand into the doorway to wave to Estefana.
Her voice was soft and worried as she said, “Agur, Estefana, agur,” into the almost empty bar. The old woman waved back from behind the counter, but the family had already continued down the block toward the plaza.
“Gaixoa,” I heard Estefana say to herself. Poor girl. I was wondering whom she was referring to, the wife or the daughter, when Nere squeezed my leg under the table.
“Let’s follow them,” she whispered.
“Yeah?” I asked, trailing them down the street with my eyes.
“It’ll be fun,” she said. “We can observe our subjects in their natural habitat.”
“How much do I owe?” I said to the old woman behind the bar. She wiped her hands on her apron, then waved them in front of her.
“Tell your mother I say hello,” the old woman said.
I left two one-hundred-peseta coins on the counter anyway and followed Nere out the doorway into the bright afternoon street. She hooked her thumb onto the front pocket of my jeans, as she always liked to do. (I want to keep you close, she used to say. She did this, her little anchor on my pocket, for her first visits in the Canaries, when we were allowed to walk around the visiting courtyard together. I want to keep you close. She kept it up until the start of the third year, when we both realized that the Salto del Negro was how it would always be. She still visits, but she no longer hooks a thumb in my pocket.) Ahead of us, the Councilman and his family mixed in with the Sunday afternoon crowd. The girl’s bobbing brown hair made it easy to follow them, and as we walked, Nere began to talk about the coming year.
“If you’re accepted to San Sebastián, we can stay with Carolina. Her roommate is leaving in August,” she was saying.
“Sure,” I said, imagining afternoons reading in cafés by the beach, nights out in the city’s old part with its hundreds of bars and streets running over with young people.
“She has a friend that works at the hospital there,” she said. “She might be able to help me get a job.”
The Councilman and his wife stoppe
d in at the Arosteguis’ butcher shop, the Councilman pointing to the halved pigs hanging by their feet in the back of the store and pinching his daughter’s stomach playfully while the wife ordered cuts from the handsome butcher behind the counter.
“Do you ever worry about what your parents will say?” I asked. “When we move to San Sebastián?”
She didn’t answer immediately. Instead, we kept walking past the plaza to avoid drawing the attention of the Councilman. When we had reached the large stone archway leading out onto Calle Nafarroa, she stopped, using her hooked thumb to pull me toward her. She leaned up to kiss me, stepping on my shoe to raise herself up (another thing that stopped during the third year at the Salto del Negro), and then she leaned back against the wall of the archway.
“Of course I worry,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“My father will be furious.”
I nodded. I’d met her father once or twice at her house. He was a short man who seemed incapable of anger. The first time we’d met, when I stopped in to pick up Nere on the way to a concert in Lekeitio, he had insisted that his wife make me a ham sandwich before we left. My father, on the other hand, was much easier to imagine angry. He had made clear early on that he expected me to apply to the economics program at the University of Deusto, and Nere, with her dyed hair and piercings, didn’t have any place in that future. I hadn’t yet dared to tell him about my plans to live with the twenty-three-year-old girlfriend he didn’t know existed or that I had decided to study literature instead of engineering.
All That Followed: A Novel Page 13