“But anyway, let’s not think about it just yet,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. I squinted against the afternoon sun. The dull pressure was starting just behind my eyes. I felt the taste of metal on my gums.
“Are you all right?” Nere asked, taking me by the arms. “Another of the headaches?”
I nodded, leaning back against the wall. The pain was radiating, brittle behind my eyes, and the pops of light had already begun. I slid down against the wall and held my head in my hands. Nere knelt next to me and rubbed the back of my neck. Around me, I heard the shuffle of feet, disembodied conversations. Soon the flashes faded, and the pain began to lessen. When I finally looked up, it was just as the Councilman and his wife walked past us in the archway, so close I could have touched him.
31. JONI (1951)
A week after she moved into Kattalin Gorroño’s guesthouse with us, Nerea’s mother emerged from the bedroom waving away the coffee I had prepared for her.
“You smoke, no?” she said.
I nodded. She held out her small hand, and I handed her the blue box of Dunhills from my chest pocket. She pinched one of the cigarettes out of the box, then bent down to light it on the gas range. In the previous seven days, I’d never seen any indication that she smoked. She opened the kitchen door and blew a plume of smoke out into the gray morning. She took another pensive drag, then turned toward me as if noticing my presence for the first time.
“Maybe today, young man,” she said. She nodded as if answering a question she had asked herself. “Maybe today.”
* * *
WHEN I returned from San Jorge that afternoon I found Nerea standing at the stove in one of my old dress shirts worn over a cotton blouse, the sleeves rolled up on her thin arms, stirring potatoes in a cast-iron pan. Her slender legs were hidden under a dark, heavy skirt. Her mother was seated at the kitchen table, stemming a pile of green beans and puffing on another of the Dunhills. Hearing the front door, the two women turned nearly in unison as I entered the kitchen.
“Arratsalde on,” she said, smiling weakly. Good afternoon. “You’ve made a smoker of my mother, I think.”
She hardly looked like the woman I knew: not only had the bulge at her stomach all but disappeared, but she seemed thinner, more gaunt, than even before her pregnancy. Her cheeks were hollow, her usually dark skin sallow, the color of spoiled milk. Her black hair, which had become even thicker—impossibly thick—during her pregnancy, seemed sparse and uneven, as if entire handfuls had been ripped from her skull. (Later, I found that this was exactly what had happened.)
“Arratsalde on,” I said. I stood in the doorway, trying to keep myself from rushing across the room that smelled of garlic and onion and was finally, after what seemed like years, warm. We stood like that, she at the stove in the oversized shirt, me hovering awkwardly in the frame of the door, the old woman smoking, her hands working quickly over the green beans.
“The stove,” the old woman said, looking up from the bowl of beans. “The potatoes are burning.”
And then the spell was broken, and Nerea was coming across the room to me, and it was as if the thing that had happened in Don Octavio’s office eight days before were only a story we had been told about another couple, about two unfortunate other people. I held her thin frame in my arms and we rocked like that, neither of us crying, just rocking and rocking until the old woman said again, “Nerea, mecachis, the potatoes!”
* * *
WHEN AITOR came to drive his mother’s bags back to the apartment on San Lorenzo, nothing suggested his opinion of me had changed any in the past ten days. He nodded curtly when I answered the door to the guesthouse, then pushed past without waiting for an invitation to enter. In the living room, Nerea and her mother sat stiffly on the couch that I was still sleeping on, sheets and blankets folded neatly between the two of them. Nerea smiled at her brother, who offered her the same gruff nod that he had given me at the front door.
“Well,” the old woman said. “Joni, perhaps you can help carry my bags to the car. Aitor, you stay here with your sister.”
Her two children looked at her inquiringly, while I had no choice but to follow her into the back bedroom. As soon as we entered, she wheeled around and closed the door behind us.
“She’s not well,” she said in a low voice. “You think that she is, but she’s not.”
The room was the cleanest I’d ever seen it; the hardwood floorboards shining brightly, the comforter pulled tight to the bed and folded neatly at its head, the top of the dresser cleaned of empty cigarette packs and discarded tissues.
“She’s tried to kill herself before. Of course she didn’t tell you this.” She was whispering now, her small hand gripping my forearm. “It was why I sent her to the sisters in Bermeo.”
I nodded, glancing quickly toward the closed bedroom door.
“You think that she’s well, but she’s not,” she repeated.
“What can I do?” I asked.
The old woman shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, She’s your problem now.
“Watch her, I suppose. I’ve been trying to help her for the last twenty-five years, and look at me now,” she said, holding her hands empty in front of her.
* * *
THAT HAD been on a Tuesday. That same afternoon, from Kattalin Gorroño’s house, I called the school to tell them I wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week.
“Of course, Joni,” the headmaster had said. “Take all the time you need.”
When I walked across the field from Kattalin’s to the guesthouse, I found Nerea sitting on a downed log at the edge of the river. Long shadows stretched out across the newly mowed hay, the final cutting of the season, and she was wrapped in a heavy wool shawl that her mother had left.
“You’ll catch cold out here,” I said as I approached along the small trail leading to the water’s edge. She smiled sleepily at me and patted the space next to her.
“Why is it you never fish the river anymore?” she asked me.
“Do you want me to fish again?” I said, thinking back to the summer afternoons when I’d string up an old pole borrowed from Kattalin Gorroño and toss a line out into the current, occasionally pulling up a shivering river trout.
“Not necessarily,” she said. “But I wonder why you don’t anymore.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I thought about it for a moment. “It’s out of season, for one. But I think I just forgot about it, with this summer.”
Immediately I regretted saying it. This summer. It implied so much more than a season. Another life. The excitement of Nerea growing out of the small cotton skirts she had always worn. The warmth of the summer air at night when, lying naked on top of the sheets, I would hold my ear to her stomach. It was the life of the other people. She leaned her head down onto my shoulder, one of her hands reaching up to grab a handful of her dark curls.
We sat like that for a long time, her head resting against me, and when I eventually said her name she didn’t answer. I felt her small frame shaking under the wool shawl. Just when the last of the afternoon light vanished, she stood and walked the skinny trail back to the house. I stayed sitting on the downed ash tree, watching the dark shape of her silhouette move silently through the low grass. Nerea entered the kitchen door, and from the river, I saw her through the window as she closed and locked the door to the bedroom and then turned off the light.
32. MARIANA
The representatives from the Party insisted that I have José Antonio buried in Muriga. For my part, I hadn’t cared one way or another what they did with the body, whose dirt they covered it with. Where the body should be left was a concern that seemed to ignore the real question: why was there a body in the first place?
But the representatives didn’t stop there. They brought meals, put their cold hands on my arm, directed the photographers and newspapermen away. They asked their questions in quiet, slow voices, saying my name often, as if I were a very young child.
* * *
“DO YOU know, Mariana, if he would want to have been buried in the Church?”
“No.”
* * *
“SHOULD THE casket be open, or do you prefer closed?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
* * *
“DO YOU have any clothes you would like him to be wearing?”
“I’ll have to look.”
“There is a rally at the city hall at four, Mariana, to protest political violence. Will you be able to attend?”
“I’m not sure.”
* * *
“WOULD YOU say just a few words about your husband during the rally?”
“No. No, I don’t think so.”
* * *
“JUST LEAVE her in peace,” I heard them finally whisper. So they approached José Antonio’s parents about where the body should be buried. His parents had arrived at the airport in Bilbao on Wednesday night and seemed to have aged ten years since I’d seen them last, David, small and withered under his navy-blue sweater that we had sent him for Christmas the year before, his teeth somehow appearing too large for his head, Susana’s chlorine-blue eyes in their deep, darkened recesses.
His parents wanted to take the body back to Andalucía to be buried. They would hate Muriga forever for killing their son. Not just the men who had fired the two pieces of metal through their son. Even now, six years later, David and Susana haven’t returned to Muriga, not even to visit their granddaughter.
The very serious men explained to them even more slowly, and more quietly, how important it would be to the Party if the body remained in Muriga. That it would be a showing of strength. That José Antonio would have wanted it that way, they were sure of it, until finally David nodded his head weakly. I imagined them beginning to dig the hole at the exact moment David nodded his head, more of these serious men in their serious clothes stomping shovels into the black soil of the cemetery, turning up old bones in order to make room for the new.
33. IKER
During the trial they made a big production out of the rifle. The fiscal had it brought into the courtroom by an assistant on the second day. It was wrapped in brown butcher paper and clear packing tape, as if it had been sent to the court through the mail. The fiscal was a small man, and when he tore off the paper and held it by the nicked wooden stock in his undersized hands, it looked bigger than it actually was. He had Asier’s father tell the courtroom that it was his old hunting rifle, given to him by an uncle who lived in the country. Asier’s father looked weak and helpless as he answered the prosecutor’s questions, as if he were trying to come up with a response that was true and yet did not implicate his son. He told the fiscal that the gun had been stored in his bedroom closet, leaned against the back corner with a half-empty box of cartridges.
Asier had handed me the rifle the morning after we had taken the Councilman. Gorka and Daniel were supposed to have returned to the bunker hours earlier, and when the sun began to rise, we decided that I would stay with the Councilman until Asier could determine what had happened. The night had been clear and cold, and the Councilman was shivering in his dark suit jacket, seated against one of the concrete walls with his hands tied behind his back. The small room was lit only by the shaky beam of the flashlight Asier carried. I blew into my hands to warm them before Asier passed the rifle to me. It was heavier than I expected, but I tried to handle the gun casually, to give the impression that I was familiar with it. I pulled the bolt action back, then pushed it into place, as I had seen Asier do several times earlier. Asier gathered his camera, the remainder of the laundry line we had used to tie the Councilman’s wrists, and his rolling tobacco from the floor.
“He hasn’t come back because they’ve caught him,” the Councilman said suddenly. Asier’s hand stopped on the bag of tobacco.
“What did you say?” Asier asked. He took a step closer. The Councilman’s lips trembled with the cold.
“It’s not too late,” the Councilman said. “They’ve probably caught your friend. But nothing has happened yet. You can still let me go. It’s not too late.”
Asier squatted down so that he was eye level with the Councilman. He set the flashlight on the ground, then rubbed his palms on his knees. He picked the flashlight back up. The Councilman squinted against the glare.
“That’s what you’d like, I guess?” Asier said. “To go home to your wife. Mariana, right?”
The Councilman’s head straightened at his wife’s name. His shivering stopped.
“Asier—” I said.
“And your daughter, Elena?” Asier said. “We know a little bit about you, José Antonio Torres. We might even know more about your life than you do.”
“Get that goddamn light out of my face,” the Councilman said.
Asier flicked the switch off, and the bunker was lit with only the dim morning light. Outside I could hear the scraping sound of the surf against the cliffs and the high shrieks of the first gulls circling below.
“For example,” Asier continued, “you might not know that your wife, Mariana, has been having an affair for the past two months.”
As Asier said this, the gun suddenly felt small and stupid in my hands. I wanted him to stop, to do what the Councilman had said: to go home, to set him free, to set things back a day or a week or a year. But it already had a momentum that could not be stopped by me, or by Asier, or by the Councilman and his pleas. We all understood this, I think. We understood it but we didn’t want to accept it.
“Three days a week, while you are working in Bilbao,” Asier said. The Councilman sat motionless. The cuffs of his dark slacks were splattered with mud from the night before. “In your own apartment, even.”
Asier inched closer to the Councilman.
“Do you think you know who it is?” he continued. “It’s the new American, of all people. Duarte. He’s been fucking your wife for two months now. We’ve seen him in your window. With Mariana.”
“You should go,” I said. “It’s already five thirty.”
Asier rocked back on his heels, then stood up.
“Keep that gun on this son of a bitch,” he said, switching back to Basque. “If he tries anything, put one between his eyes.”
I nodded, adjusted the rifle in my hands. Asier took his bag from the floor and put it on his shoulder. Standing there in the bunker’s crumbling doorway, he seemed like an intruder in this place where we’d spent so many afternoons.
“I’ll be back in forty-five minutes. No later than an hour. You’re all right here?”
“Sure,” I said, looking at the Councilman leaning against the wall. “Sure.”
* * *
ASIER HAD been gone for nearly an hour when the Councilman finally spoke.
“What’s your name?” he asked. “The other one is Asier, I heard you say. But I didn’t hear your name.”
I didn’t say anything back. I leaned the gun against the gray concrete wall, then shook a cigarette from the pack Gorka had left in the bunker.
“Not going to tell me, eh?” he said. “It doesn’t matter. You know, I recognize you now. Asier, I don’t think I’ve seen him before. But you—yes, now I remember. Your mother is friends with Estefana. From the Boliña.”
I checked my watch again, then looked down the empty trail that wound through the damp morning grass toward Muriga. The sun had come up over the mountains behind the cliffs, softening the night chill.
“Do you think I could have one of those?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
He shook his head, then stared with me out the door toward Muriga. I dragged on the cigarette, waiting for the whole horrible morning to be over.
“It shouldn’t surprise me,” he said as I snubbed out the cigarette on the floor of the bunker. “The affair, I mean. If what your friend said is true. It shouldn’t surprise me but it does.”
“I’m not really sure,” I said, although I had seen it myself in the window of their fifth-floor apartment.
He shook his
head again.
“No,” he said, “I can see it now and I’m sure that it’s true.”
“I’m sorry,” I heard myself say.
“The funny thing, of course, is that I was doing the same.”
He was still staring off through the doorway, strands of his dark hair falling into his face.
“Her name is Isabel,” he said. “She works at the Party headquarters in Bilbao.”
I picked up the rifle from the wall, slid the action forward and back again.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “Stop talking.”
The Councilman regarded me gloomily.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I’m just feeling the need to confess.”
“Stop your talking,” I said, nearly yelling.
And then I felt the dull pressure behind my eyes, one of the headaches building. I shouldered the rifle and looked down the sights, one eye closed like I had seen in the movies. On the other end of the barrel the Councilman stared back with what seemed like boredom, as if all things had already been done. I dropped the rifle back down into the sling of my arm. The morning sunlight coming through the empty windows dimmed as the pain gathered strength. I stepped toward the door so that the Councilman couldn’t see me, the taste of copper arriving under the edge of my tongue.
I turned and pointed the rifle again at the man crouched against the wall, who was staring hungrily at the cigarette butt I had put out on the cracked concrete floor below him.
“Not another fucking word,” I said.
34. JONI (1951)
My first year in Muriga we had taken a boat from the marina—a small rowboat that Nerea claimed she’d been given permission to use by one of her uncles. I had rowed us across the bay, around the western harbor to a hidden gravel beach she knew. We ate lunch and made love on a blanket we had brought for this purpose, and later fell asleep in the midday sun.
When I woke I was shivering. Thunderheads bruised the afternoon sky, and the sea had turned gray, jagged. The boat scraped against the rocks of the beach. I shook Nerea’s shoulder, but even as the first rains of the storm arrived, she shrugged me away, pulling the blanket happily over her.
All That Followed: A Novel Page 14