“Wednesday?” he asks.
“Wednesday.”
“Well then, how do you say, ‘Today is Wednesday’?” he asks.
“Gaur asteazkena da,” I say. “Asteazkena.”
He tries to repeat the word, but it comes out in a tumble, doubly mixed up with his Argentine accent.
“Good,” I say. “By the time they arrive you’ll be an honorary Basque.”
I am also looking forward to next week, but not because of the arrival of the etarras. Next week is the second week of April, the beginning of the Holy Week even here in the Salto, where it doesn’t seem like anything could be holy, even for a week. (I can’t take credit for this line—it’s one I’ve stolen from Fernando, a young mulatto from Cádiz who spent a few seasons at the Salto after he burned his mother’s home to the ground.) But it’s not the week of extra rations that we are given in the cafeteria that I look forward to, or the small box of candies that each prisoner receives from the children at Colegio Arenas, one of the local Catholic schools. I’m looking forward to the arrival of Nere and the boy.
In the photograph she included with her last letter, Nere is kneeling on the beach in Muriga. Behind her are the tall cliffs that lead up to the crumbling old bunkers where I had stayed the night with Asier and the Councilman. It is a clear summer day, the kind that turns the water in the bay a translucent green. The boy stands next to her, gripping her finger to steady his chubby legs. His feet leave small impressions in the sand, and his blue eyes look seriously at the camera. I know that the cameraman is Juan María, Nere’s husband. But I don’t feel the anger, or jealously, or hate that I might have felt a year ago. Instead, I experience something more like a sense of friendship. As if I am allowed to live his life, inhabit his body, for even the moment that it takes for the shutter to blink open.
* * *
THE LETTERS from the Councilman’s wife had begun to arrive two months earlier. I didn’t recognize the handwriting or the return address and assumed it was just more of the perverse “fan mail” I get from time to time from kids in the Basque Country, thanking me for my “contribution.” When I finally realized who it was, my hands began to tremble.
They start very formally. Dear Mr. Abarzuza. She introduces herself as you might introduce yourself to a distant cousin, mentioning people we have in common. I am the wife of José Antonio Torres. I think that we may have crossed paths once or twice in Muriga before your arrest. The letter seems to stumble here, as if, after mentioning these small commonalities—our town, the death of her husband—she’s run out of things to say.
She tells me that she has done some research on the computer, that she has seen photographs of the Salto del Negro and she hopes it isn’t as bad as it seems. The Councilman’s wife tells me that she thinks it is a shame how the Spanish government transferred Basque prisoners to the most remote prisons in Spain. Your mother introduced herself after the last day of the trial, before the sentencing, she writes. It’s obvious how much she cares for you. The letter stumbles along like this for a while—half a page, maybe—and then something happens.
She begins to tell me about Elena, her daughter.
It’s at this place that I hold my breath when I reread the letter even now, as if the words will have changed and she will use her daughter as a weapon against me. The daughter without a father. But instead of this attack that I’m waiting for, maybe hoping for, I find only this: Elena has just started her first year in primaria at San Jorge. This was your school, wasn’t it? The teacher tells me that she already has two boyfriends, and to watch out, she’ll be trouble by the time she reaches secundaria.
The letter seems to gather steam after this. She tells me about her childhood in Muriga and about how she fell in love with the Councilman. She tells me about the funeral, and the way that the Party in Bilbao tried to get her to speak out against political violence. In a single paragraph that takes up an entire sheet of paper she tells me about her in-laws in Sevilla, about a surgery she had the year before the trial, and about a wedding that she recently attended. And in none of it is the accusation that I wait and wait for.
I had already drafted several responses when two more letters from Mariana Zelaia arrived just four days later. Finally, I think, she’s gathered the nerve to accuse me, to condemn. But the first letter is conversational, again, like she’s just catching up with an old friend. She describes a dinner with her mother. She tells me that she is considering looking for a job, just a little something on the side. She wishes me well, tells me I should feel free to write her back.
She starts the second letter by apologizing for writing twice in a single day, but there is something she wants to tell me.
When Elena came home from school today she asked about José Antonio, she begins. This isn’t the first time she’s asked about her father, of course. But it was different this afternoon. Today she didn’t ask what happened to her father—we’ve talked about the fact that he died a long time ago—but instead she wanted to know why he was killed. She wants a reason for why her friends are all allowed fathers, but she is not.
I can tell that she knows something more than she’s letting on. You know how Muriga can be, and the kids at San Jorge talk (like you must have talked, right?). But she won’t tell me what she’s heard—she wants my version of it. I don’t tell you all this because I want you to feel guilty. You’ll have to take my word for it when I say that I feel just as guilty as you must. I told her that it was a good question, why her father had died, and that there probably wasn’t just one answer. Can you think of a better response for her?
She was watching television when I began this letter tonight. When she asked what I was doing I told her that I was writing a letter to an old friend of her father’s who lives in the Canarias. I hope this is all right with you.
* * *
I’M EAGER to show the letters—five in total now—to Nere when she comes with the boy next week—as eager as if they are something that I’ve created myself. I want to show her the news about the girl at San Jorge and tell her the story of the Councilman waiting for two months before he asked to come up to the apartment of his future wife. But this part—this last letter—I’ve decided to keep for myself.
“How do you introduce yourself?” Andreas asks from the bunk above. “How do I tell someone my name?”
I refold the first letter and slide it back into its envelope. I think back to the day that I followed the Councilman’s wife to the beach, the week before Gorka Auzmendi’s pistol jumped in his hand. How she was looking at me when she reached behind her thin neck to undo the swimsuit top.
“Ni Iker Abarzuza naiz,” I said.
53. MARIANA
The absences came in waves in the years after José Antonio’s death. First, the most tangible: José Antonio himself.
He’d only lived in the apartment half-time during the final year of his life, when he was commuting to and from Bilbao, but after his death his absence seemed disproportionately large. The weekend after the funeral I gathered all of his clothes and threw them into the dumpster next to Etxeberria’s hardware shop, as if I were throwing my husband out of the house. But his side of the closet, his dresser drawers, stayed empty. Each time I tried to fill them with a shirt, a pair of underwear, one of his daughter’s small jackets, they stood awkwardly alone, out of place, trespassing, until finally I would remove them and leave the space empty.
The second absence was the one left by Robert Duarte. News of my affair with the American was the talk of Muriga for months after José Antonio’s killing. After Joni revealed the affair to Castro, the rumor spread quickly from the police station, as I had feared it would, traveling the usual circuits that gossip followed in town. The last to hear, of course, is always the shamed woman herself.
“Are they talking about it?” I asked my mother, a few weeks after José Antonio’s murder. “About the American?”
“Yes,” she said. She shrugged. “You know how it is, Mariana. They’ll tal
k for a while, and then they’ll forget about it.”
But she was wrong about that; she knew, just as well as I did, that even if they stopped talking they wouldn’t forget. That it was now a part of me, as much as the scar across my abdomen: adulterer. Betrayer of a dead husband. Sinvergüenza.
Just when interest in the affair began to fade later that year, it was revived again by reports from the trial of the three young men charged with the murder. Each day, the newspaper’s headline reminded me—and Muriga—of my guilt.
It wasn’t until a month or so after the trial that I began to miss the affair with Robert Duarte, the imagined life that I had allowed myself. I’d told myself from the outset that the American hadn’t loved me, but I never truly believed that our afternoons together weren’t significant to him as well. I’d told myself that he didn’t love me, that he’d never leave Morgan Duarte, but I’d also allowed myself to imagine that one day he might. Robert was my escape, I realized—from José Antonio, and from Elena, and from Muriga—one I could never make myself.
I obsessed over the end of the affair even as I began to mourn my husband’s death. I’d been told only that Robert had been held at the police station in Bilbao for two days after José Antonio’s kidnapping—until the four young men had been arrested—and that both he and Morgan Duarte had left Muriga soon after.
It was the last I heard of Robert Duarte. In the weeks after he left I waited for a phone call, a letter—any sort of communication, but it never came. I couldn’t make sense of it any more than I could make sense of José Antonio’s death; one day, I had both a husband and a lover. The next, I had neither.
* * *
THE NEXT absence was the hardest to admit. Eventually, I realized how much I missed Joni Garrett, despite his betrayal. He was the closest thing to a friend I’d had in a long while, and he’d become almost a grandfather to Elena. I had trusted him completely. With my friendship, with my daughter. With secrets I could barely admit to myself.
After the chaos surrounding José Antonio’s death began to settle—after Robert Duarte disappeared back to the United States and after the four young men were sent off to prisons far away from Muriga—I was confronted with long empty spaces each afternoon that had previously been occupied by Joni. I wandered the streets with Elena, stopping alone for coffee or aimlessly walking the aisles of the Todo Todo.
It was in these empty midday hours that I understood exactly how much I had lost the moment José Antonio was pulled into that car.
* * *
I FOUND myself fixating on Elena to fill these empty spaces. I began to take her everywhere with me. Not just to the grocery store or to the hair salon but to the insurance agent for a meeting to discuss the life insurance policy José Antonio had taken out when Elena was born. To doctor’s appointments in Bilbao, where the nephrologist who performed my transplant discussed hormone levels and dietary restrictions and life expectancies for transplanted organ recipients. To the funeral home, where I was informed that the Party office in Bilbao had paid for my husband’s burial through member contributions. Elena was with me at all of these places.
I spoke to her as I would speak to an adult, a peer. In the late hours of the night as she slept in front of the blinking television set, I would tell her about the way her father used to complain about Muriga, about her mother’s afternoon hike to the refugio at Aizkorri with her friend Morgan Duarte, about the three men that had come to me in a dream the night her father was kidnapped.
It wasn’t until this last year, six years after José Antonio’s kidnapping, that I discovered the final absence, which had in fact preceded the other two: the loss of my terrorist kidney when Joni Garrett revealed the identity of my organ donor. Not Iñaki Libano, the young man with the crooked nose who had killed a Spanish intelligence officer in Madrid in 1995. Not the militant nationalist who had been shot to death in his sister’s apartment in Mondragón but, rather, a fourteen-year-old boy who had been killed in a senseless accident.
The next morning after waking to this realization, I registered Elena at San Jorge, where several of the women from my mother’s mus group had grandchildren attending. When I returned home without her—the first time since her father’s death—I set a pot of coffee on the stove and began to draft a letter to the Abarzuza boy.
54. JONI
With the bombing of the trains in Atocha yesterday morning, Muriga has again begun its old rituals of self-preservation. Just as it turned on the Abarzuza boy in the weeks after José Antonio’s murder six years ago—dehumanizing him, scrambling to manufacture evidence that he wasn’t one of us, that he was an outsider all along—the town has changed its dialogue to set itself apart from the Basque terrorists that are purported to have detonated the explosives that tore apart four trains in Madrid. In the bars last night, I listened to Aznar’s speech and watched Estefana Torretxe and Santi Etxeverria nodding in agreement as he condemned the Basque independence movement. They spoke of the unidentified terrorists as “monstrous,” the bombing as “cowardly” or “shameless.” They spoke as if it were impossible to consider that this monstrous act might have been carried out by their sons, their nieces, their neighbors. Anything to distance themselves.
The reports began to come in this afternoon, just ahead of the general elections in two days. The Basque news anchors are now happily reporting that the attacks in Atocha are most likely the work of al-Qaeda in northern Africa, that four suspects have already been identified. I’ve tried to go about my day as usual, though even the students in my ninth-year English class have been whispering about them. After the final class of the day, I sequester myself in the small office that has been my second home for fifty years. A half hour later, there is a familiar knock on the pebbled glass of my office door, and then Juantxo’s toadlike face peeks anxiously into view.
“You’ve heard?” he asks.
“No,” I say, looking up from a stack of student essays about their approaching Easter vacations. “About the bombings?”
“Yes,” he says eagerly. “They’ve decided that it was the Arabs—that the ETA was not involved.”
I nod, not knowing what to say. Juantxo stands awkwardly in the open doorway, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
“This is wonderful news, isn’t it?” he says.
I guess that it is, though I think of the photographs I’d seen in the paper this morning, of the trains ripped open from the inside and of the woman’s shoe scattered in among the debris on the train platform, and wonder how anything about this could be considered wonderful news.
“We’re going out for a drink,” he said. “Lucinda and a couple of the secretaries. You’ll come?”
“No,” I say, and I tap a finger on the pile of papers on my desk. “Not tonight.”
“Sure,” he says, “of course,” and then he is gone.
When I close the door to my office an hour later, the sun has just begun to dip over the foothills of the Pyrenees to the west. I start toward the entryway, past the old broom closet that had been the American Robert Duarte’s office in the year of José Antonio’s death. The office is empty, as it has been since the day José Antonio’s body was recovered.
In a way I envied his ability to simply abandon Muriga. Morgan had left as soon as she had learned why her husband was taken into questioning by the police; while Robert was trying to deny the affair to Detective Castro at the Ertzaintza headquarters, she was packing three suitcases. She drove the Renault to the airport in Biarritz and was back at her parents’ house in Boise by the time Robert was let out of custody.
I visited the American the day before he was to leave. The apartment, which had never been tidy, now looked as if it had been ransacked—kitchen drawers were flung open, dishcloths and silverware spilling from their edges.
“So you’re leaving,” I said. “Just like that?”
Robert looked at me incredulously. He was folding winter jackets and stuffing them into the bottom of a cardboard box. For t
he first time he looked lost, bewildered.
“As opposed to what?” he said, in a way that seemed to hope I might have another answer for him.
“To staying, I suppose.”
“She’s my wife, Joni,” he said. “Or at least she was, anyway. I have to follow her. You of all people must understand that.”
* * *
THE AMERICAN continued filling the cardboard box, unpinning the charcoal sketches that Morgan had left tacked to the wall of the living room, folding them hastily and stacking them on top of the winter jackets.
“Do you think I might keep this one?” I said. It was a roughly sketched portrait of a young girl, about three. She had dark curls that fell over her eyes, and in her hand she held a melting ice cream bar.
“It’s Mariana’s daughter, you know,” he said awkwardly.
“Yes, I know. Her name is Elena.”
“Anyway, sure. You can have it.”
I unpinned the paper from the wall, then carefully folded the portrait lengthwise and slid it into my briefcase.
“Do you think you can get her back?” I asked.
“Morgan? I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I think so, but I don’t know.”
He paused for a moment, stood up from the box he had been packing as if he just now fully realized that I was in the room with him.
“And what about you, Joni?” he said. “Why are you staying here? Juantxo is going to replace you the next chance he gets.”
I looked down at my empty hands. They were pale and thin and broken down. In the brief time that I had known him, I had secretly admired the Euskaldun—his ability to drop in and be so accepted, then to just as easily leave it behind.
“It’s my home, I think. All my old ghosts are still here with me, keeping me company. They’ll never believe that,” I said, gesturing out the window toward the street below. “They’ll never believe that but it’s the truth.”
All That Followed: A Novel Page 21