All That Followed: A Novel

by Urza, Gabriel

  He suggested that I take his wife out of Muriga for the day, to a mountaintop sanctuary that I had mentioned once.

  “In four months she’s hardly been away from Muriga,” he’d said. “It’ll be good for her to get out of town. She doesn’t even come with me anymore when I visit the family in Nabarniz.”

  She called my house the next morning. When I picked up, there was a hesitation on the other line, and I knew who it was before she even began to introduce herself in stumbling Spanish.

  “Robert,” she said. “My husband. He tells me that I call you.”

  She spoke in the same simple way that Elena did, looking for the easiest words, avoiding the past tense. I watched Elena gazing at the English-language cartoons on the BBC channel, shaking her arms in that absentminded way she used to do. I realized then that we were both being used thoughtlessly, without consequence, by Robert Duarte.

  * * *

  THIS IS how I found myself waiting for my lover’s wife at the train station cafeteria.

  “You’re doing what?” José Antonio had asked the night before.

  “You know the American couple,” I said. “They are friends of Joni Garrett’s. You met them at the grocery store a month ago.”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “I remember them. But why are you taking her to Aizkorri?”

  “Because she’s bored here,” I said. “And because I’m bored. It’ll be nice to spend a little time with someone different than the usual three people I see every day.”

  I was startled to hear myself repeating Robert’s words and even more surprised to realize their truth.

  “Sorry if we aren’t entertaining enough for you,” José Antonio said, though in fact I hadn’t even included him in the three.

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “Well, if it’s all the same, I’ll just stay the night in Bilbao, then,” he said. “You won’t be back before dinner if you’re going all the way to the refugio, and there’s a strategic meeting early on Friday that I have to be at anyway.”

  I nodded, then abruptly reached over to take José Antonio’s hand.

  “You don’t think I’ve been … different … do you?”

  He raised his eyebrows in that way he did when he was confused.

  “Since the operation,” I said. “Sometimes I feel like a different person.”

  “No,” he said, kissing my hand quickly before picking up an envelope from the kitchen table. “You’re still the strange girl I met in Sevilla.”

  I had arranged for my mother to take Elena for the day, and for the first time since he had begun working in the Partido Popular offices, José Antonio and I walked the five blocks to the train station together, José Antonio off to Bilbao and me to meet Morgan Duarte. The train to Bilbao left at a quarter to eight, twenty minutes before I was scheduled to meet Robert’s wife, so after José Antonio and I awkwardly kissed each other good-bye, and he rolled his small overnight bag past the ticket collector, I went back to the train station cafeteria and ordered a coffee. I was out of place in my nylon pants and hiking boots, the surprisingly busy station filled with people dressed nicely for a trip to San Sebastián or Pamplona.

  Robert’s wife arrived five minutes early. She was easy to spot, the only blond head in the crowd. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans with the knees worn, so they were lighter than the rest of the pants, and her hair was pulled back in a way that made her look younger than she was. She carried an orange backpack with a water bottle strapped to its side, and when she passed the glass window of the train station, she stopped quickly to look herself over in the reflection. As she tucked a stray strand of blond hair back behind her ear, I became angry again with Robert Duarte for betraying this woman.

  I waved her over to the cafeteria bar, where I was finishing my coffee. We kissed each other on the cheek, then stood in front of each other awkwardly, not knowing exactly what to say. I wondered if she knew already or if she could tell just from looking at me, touching me.

  “Well then,” I said finally. “To the mountain?”

  She nodded eagerly, happy to have some movement break our inertia. We walked to the ticket booth and I bought two tickets to Orio.

  “Robert tells me the refugio was an … escape … for the Republicans during the Civil War?” she said, searching for the word. How typical, I thought, for Robert to think of everything in the context of Basque oppression.

  “I haven’t heard that,” I said. “My grandfather used to take us up there for the views when I was a kid. With the clouds today, we might not see much. But on a clear day you can see up to the peak of Balerdi.”

  She nodded, but I wasn’t sure how much she understood. When the train to Orio started up a few minutes later we were sitting next to each other in silence, but Morgan seemed content just to be moving, content to watch old farmers with wooden scythes mowing the steep hillsides of hay, tractors driving across the yard of a concrete factory.

  * * *

  WE HIKED for nearly an hour before stopping at the refugio at the base of Aizkorri. It had just started to rain, as I expected it would, and inside the building we huddled around the fireplace with four other hikers who had taken shelter. The dueña of the refugio busied herself in the small kitchen, boiling a large dented kettle for coffee and stirring a sooty pot that roiled with vegetables and beef bones. My stomach tightened with hunger, and I felt the sensation of steam on the undersides of my arms that I now associated with my new kidney.

  It was four kilometers of winding trail to the refuge—farther by double than I had walked since the operation. But it was good to be away from Muriga, away from Elena and from José Antonio and from Robert. For the hour of the hike, as well as the thirty-minute train ride, Robert’s wife and I had spoken only a handful of times, just to point out an interesting building or an especially pretty mountain peak. But as the other damp hikers slowly reanimated in the warmth of the refuge, chattering and laughing, Morgan also seemed to relax. We ordered two cups of Rioja while we were waiting for lunch, and the wine was now warm in our stomachs. She took off the blue rain jacket she had put on when it began to drizzle and hung it over the back of a wooden chair, then leaned up against the stone wall of the refuge, smiling warmly at me.

  “Robert tells me about you,” she said, watching the dueña working back in the kitchen, cutting bread for the soup. I had been waiting all day for an accusation, and now I tried carefully to read her.

  “What does he know about me?” I asked.

  “What Joni Garrett tells to him,” she said slowly. “The operation?”

  We shared a look—I still couldn’t figure out how much she knew. If she was setting a trap or if she was just struggling for something to talk about. A moment of panic drained through me as I wondered if Joni had told Robert about my theory of the terrorist kidney. How insane it must sound, I thought for the first time.

  “You are strong,” Morgan Duarte said, holding her thin arms in a body builder’s pose.

  “Yes,” I said, laughing. “I feel good today. I’m glad to be here with you.”

  She glanced across the fire to the group of hikers, who were passing around a pack of cigarettes. They were talking about Uzkudun, a boxer from the nearby town of Errezil who had been famous in the 1920s and early 1930s. One of the hikers squatted down at the edge of the fireplace and held a cigarette out against a smoldering ember, then dragged on the filter until the tip glowed red. Morgan leaned in toward me, held two fingers up to her pale lips, and shrugged questioningly.

  “Why not?” I said. I asked the man with the lit cigarette for another, and he held out a pack of Lucky Strikes. I lit the cigarette against his, then thanked him. When I gave the cigarette to Morgan, she took it in one hand and used her other hand to cover a smile.

  “It’s not normal for me,” she said before taking a tiny drag. I watched Robert Duarte’s wife smoking, trying to get my head around this day.

  “Not for me either,” I said. She took another tiny puf
f, then passed it over to me. When I inhaled, the smoke tickled the back of my throat, and I tried to hold back a cough. Morgan laughed and took another drink of the Rioja.

  “Robert,” she said. “He say … he says Joni Garrett loves you. Do you know this?”

  “Yes,” I said. As she said the words, I realized I had known this all along. “Yes, I think I do know this.”

  37. JONI (1952)

  We crawled our way through that horrible winter of 1951, through weeks at a time when Nerea refused to leave the house, others when we allowed ourselves to believe that nothing had ever been wrong at all. We fought and made love intermittently, and by June of 1952 she was pregnant again, her hair thickening as it had the previous year, her stomach swelling in the same places it had before. And yet we spoke about the new child hardly at all. She never said the words “pregnant” or “child” or “due,” as if their mere pronunciation would be enough to hex us again.

  We both knew we were incapable of surviving again the events of the night at Dr. Octavio’s the fall before, and so I agreed to the silence. My mother had always been a devout agnostic, and in the years after my brother’s death, my father refused to even consider the existence of a God. I had only entered the cathedral in Muriga once, to attend the baptism of a friend’s son. And yet in avoiding those words, in shuttering away the sounds of Nerea’s morning sickness through the bathroom door, this seemed as close a thing to prayer as I had ever experienced.

  We didn’t allow ourselves to speculate about gender, to consider names, or even to unpack the boxes of children’s things that I had hidden away the year before. When I reached through the sheets of our bed, around her thin hips, Nerea would stop my hand with the swiftness of an animal protecting its young before it reached the tightening bulge of her belly. And so this was how we carried on, ignoring the child’s very existence, the two of us living with an unborn ghost.

  38. MARIANA

  José Antonio was kidnapped from the train station on a Monday evening by four men with their faces covered in bandannas and dark glasses. Several witnesses had seen them shove him into the back of a blue Volkswagen with Bizkaia plates and drive off before anyone realized what had happened. They watched the men take José Antonio as they might watch a band of wild horses gallop down the street; there was a moment in which nobody moved at all, nobody said a word, until Miguel Becerra yelled to his wife in their bookstore to call the police. Goreti Zunzunegi described the scene to Joni before the kidnapping had even been reported to the news, and when the Ertzaintza arrived at the apartment a half hour later the old American was already there waiting with me.

  They sent a single detective—young, prematurely bald, but with a confidence that was outside his years. He held a spiral notebook under the arm of a neatly pressed suit.

  “She knows already?” I heard him say when Joni opened the door, not bothering with formalities. The old man nodded, holding the apartment door. I watched the young detective walk purposefully down the hallway to where I sat with Elena on the gray corduroy sofa, the same one where José Antonio had sat only four days before, where Robert and I had made love earlier that afternoon. His head swiveled as he walked, seeming to catalogue every detail in the apartment. A moment of panic came over me; would he find out about Robert Duarte? Did he know already? And just as quickly, the panic was replaced by the guilt of worrying about something so selfish. José Antonio was missing; he might already be dead.

  “Mariana Zelaia, I am Detective Moreno Castro. I work with the Ertzaintza in Bilbao. You already know why I’m here?”

  I nodded.

  “Please,” he said, pulling a sofa chair closer so that he faced me directly. Joni opened the window facing Calle de Atxiaga, then removed a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and held it to an old silver lighter. “Tell me what you know.”

  I told him what Joni had told me, about the men with the bandannas and dark glasses and the blue car. I told him about José Antonio’s work for the Party, that he had announced his candidacy three months earlier. About the posters he’d been so proud of. That he worked at the Party headquarters in Bilbao three days a week, sometimes four. As I spoke, Castro nodded his bald head and scribbled notes in the black-and-white notebook that reminded me of the ones we used in secundaria. Elena was complaining next to me on the sofa, asking me to turn on the television for her; Joni had arrived just as I set her down for her afternoon nap. The phone rang several times, and each time, Joni perched his cigarette on the ledge of the window and answered without waiting for instructions from me or from Castro, each time shaking his head to indicate that the call had not been important. I remembered what Morgan had said about Joni in the refuge at Aizkorri, and I wondered for the first time why he had come that afternoon. The detective asked about José Antonio’s work schedule, about the last time I had seen him, what we had spoken about the last time he called. By the time he finally sat back in his chair, flipped through a few pages of notes, then closed the notebook, Joni had gone through at least a half dozen cigarettes.

  “Mariana, I know that it’s difficult to believe, but there’s really very little to worry about,” he said. “These cases are more common than you realize, and the odds are that we’ll have your husband safely home to you before you know it.”

  “Is that your attempt to reassure me?” I asked. Elena had come over to sit on my lap, and I bounced her gently, pressing her tightly against the crooked scar that held in my new organ.

  He smiled, then stood to leave.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t imagine how difficult this must be.” He took a business card from his pocket and placed it on the low wooden coffee table. “Call anytime. There are two officers down below, and one outside the door. There’ll be another detective here within the hour. They may call to demand a ransom. We already have a monitor on your line from the external box. Keep them on the line as long as you can. Agree to anything they ask for.”

  He turned to Joni.

  “Are you going to stay with her?”

  “Yes, of course. Her mother is in Zarautz for the day but should be back soon. She knows.”

  It was strange how he said all this, as if giving the detective the idea that he might have been my uncle or my father.

  “Good,” Castro said. “Good. Just one other thing…”

  He turned to Joni.

  “Can I ask for a moment in private with Mariana?”

  When Joni looked to me I nodded nervously, the panic suddenly rushing back.

  “Sure,” Joni said. He lifted Elena into his arms, and we watched the old man walk with the girl down the hallway toward the kitchen. When we heard the water running in the sink, Castro flipped his notebook open to a blank page.

  “Is there anything that you haven’t told me?” he said. “Anything at all?”

  I felt it was a question that he already held the answer to. Was he asking if I was sure that I had ever loved my husband? If I had been violating my marriage vows three times a week for the past three months? If I was harboring a terrorist kidney just across the room from him?

  “No,” I said. I picked up the business card from the table and read it over, holding it by its edges. “Nothing that I can think of.”

  “The only reason I ask is—you understand—we’re required to investigate all possibilities. To me, this clearly seems to be politically motivated. In fact, we’ve already identified several potential suspects here and in Bilbao and Mondragón. But we’re required to investigate all possibilities.”

  “Of course,” I said. I rubbed my palm unconsciously over the scar. “I would hope so.”

  “Great,” Castro said, brushing his hands over the front of his dark slacks. “If something comes to mind—if you remember anything more—you’ll let me know?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  39. JONI (1953)

  She delivered in February 1953, in the Hospital de Santa Marina. The child was two weeks early, slightly underweight but otherwise hea
lthy. They required me to stay in the lobby for the seven hours that she was in labor, though it was unclear if this was because we weren’t legally married or if Nerea had in fact asked the nurses to keep me out. After two hours of smoking the harsh Ducados that they sold at the hospital café, I asked again to be allowed into the delivery room and when I was denied I walked out through the hospital’s heavy glass doors.

  It was early still—the contractions had started after midnight, and we arrived at Santa Marina just after three. The streets of Bilbao were just beginning to stir; Franco’s sanitation workers with their drab brown shirts and matching baggy pants angrily swept up crumpled papers and pieces of shattered cider glasses. The air was filled with the screeches and crashes of trucks unloading large spirals of sheet iron onto the massive ships in the harbor nearby. Closer, I heard the metal rattle of a restaurant’s storm door rolling up, and I ducked under the half-open door into the dim bar.

  The young man behind the counter was placing clean glasses in neat rows onto a head-high wooden shelf. He had the dark curls made popular that year by the goalkeeper for Athletic. When I pulled back a seat at the bar he started, then smiled.

  “Early, eh?”

  “Or late,” I said. “Depends on how you look at it.”

  He nodded, as if waiting for further explanation.

  “My wife,” I said, nodding in the direction of the hospital. “She’s having a baby.”

  “Right now?” he said, raising his eyebrows. He was a young guy, no older than twenty-five, but his temples were streaked through with early graying. “Shit…”

  “Do you sell tobacco?” I asked.

  “Of course. What do you smoke?”

  I thought of Nerea alone in the hospital room with the stern nurses, and I wondered if the unborn ghost that we had refused to talk about for so many months was now the born ghost. If now at last we would be able to mention him or if we would be required to maintain our silence and to live out our existence with this new, living ghost. And then I thought of the November before last, the night of the rainstorm, and of just how much blood there had been on the sheets of the old doctor’s bed and how when it came, the body of the boy was the dark purple of a bruise, as if he were gathering all his power to finally cry out, and how as I waited the doctor massaged the body of the boy and held the small chest to his ear, and the dark purple of his skin was slowly replaced with the waxy yellow of death and the cry never came.