Murillo, an attorney and a member of Congress, tells Agirre Sesma that, in his opinion, ETA made a mistake: if they had offered a cease-fire just then, President Felipe González would have probably shelved the Anti-Terrorist Law. “Maybe he would have, maybe he wouldn’t have.” He thinks it, but he doesn’t say it.
Agirre Sesma bumps into Javier Fontecha, recently named government delegate, even though he is younger than him; a man destined to occupy the highest ranks in politics. He’s always thought that he’s a sensible, mediocre man. He wouldn’t be surprised if he got far.
“You had guts coming to the funeral,” he provokes him, with cheap sarcasm.
“This is proving to be a very hard month, Fontecha.”
“You didn’t come to Trota’s yesterday…there are classes, I see…first- and second-rate victims.”
“I don’t go to the funerals of people I don’t know.”
“Did you know the engineer?”
“His family.”
“It’s true then: I heard you were the mediator…but it didn’t go so well this time.”
“Every door was closed. It wasn’t about money. There was no dialogue.”
“You guys always get your chunk though…”
“We are not all like Murillo. I’ve never charged a cent, Fontecha. And don’t even start again with the story of how we keep a chunk of the ransoms to finance our party…”
“I never said such a thing.”
“Besides, who are you to question me? In France we have Mitterrand; in Portugal, Soares; in Greece, Papandreou’s PASOK…all three socialist parties…you too could act differently, what else do you want to be in power for?”
Javier Fontecha sighs, but he doesn’t answer. He’s still young, although the dark leather of his overcoat and his tiredness and lack of sleep make him seem much, much older than his years.
ADELE RETOUCHERIE. ARREGLOS. They are in Agirre Sesma’s bunker again.
“Why the sudden interest? Many, many years have passed.”
“And just as many will pass again unless someone does something. The same thing that happened with the Civil War will happen: they’ll open a small curtain, clap without enthusiasm, unveil a memorial, and when there’s no one left to demand retribution or forgiveness, they’ll say justice has been made.”
“Iustitia…ius sanguinis? Ius loci? Justice, forgive my crassness, is the shaft of the cock: we don’t suck our own because we can’t bend that far. I thought this was clear from the last time.”
Agirre Sesma had started to treat him with familiarity, but he doesn’t dare do the same.
“They told me you love your profession. That you’re passionate about it…”
“When I get down to work, my heart, I put it in a drawer. In my profession you need a second set of guts, and an enormous ability to swallow your own bile.”
“For the love of God, then, why are you an attorney?”
“Certainly not for the love of God.”
“I need help.”
“And I need to know your real reasons, Lazkano jauna.”
“I told you…”
“The thirst for justice is never the real reason. People come to this office propelled by the desire for revenge, the love of money, the need to humiliate someone, by pride or by arrogance. But never because of a thirst for justice. If I don’t know the real reason, it’ll be hard to move forward…Forgive me, but my professional ethics demand that I ask you this.”
But hasn’t he already said that he would take the case? What was all that about now? Agirre Sesma senses Lazkano’s confusion and charges on:
“What is it that hurts you? Where is the epicenter of all this? Where exactly is the compass’s needle stuck?”
“If I tell you something that’s hurting me, will we start working once and for all? Will that be reason enough?”
“What was your relationship with Soto and Zeberio? What is it that you owe them, why are you so bound to them still, so many years after their deaths? I want the truth.”
This bastard is very good at grabbing the wren by its neck and strangling it until the oxygen stops going to its brain.
Lazkano has conflicting feelings, he feels a double stab. Soto and Zeberio. A double shudder.
“C’mon, I’m all ears. The truth is always the easiest thing.”
“I don’t think that’s…I’m sorry, but truthfully, that’s just my concern.”
The shudder is a double one, indeed: on the one hand, he feels that the attorney’s speech has wrecked his morale. On the other, for the first time, he feels he’s found a shrewd, experienced man; what’s more, a man who has the ability to use that shrewdness and experience. For the first time, he realizes that there’s no doubt he’s the attorney he needs. He knows where to dig.
“We’re in a basement, dear friend. What these walls hear will remain within them. Take your time. Do you like cognac?”
“No, I don’t, usually.”
Agirre Sesma nods contentedly and fills a wide-bottomed, heavy glass with cognac. Then he places it very close to Lazkano, who takes it directly to his lips.
And as soon as he gulps it down, he bursts out:
“I gave them up…”
His voice quivers, betraying him again.
While Lazkano crumples and collapses, the attorney grows strong and imposing.
“They tortured you?”
Glugs of cognac pour into the bottom of the glass again. Into two glasses this time. Only the asthmatic hiss of breathing breaks the silence. Lazkano keeps drinking, and his eyes turn to the old framed laws on the walls. He can’t read any of the headers, it’s impossible.
The attorney switches off the only lamp on his desk. Treating the desk as a bar, he stretches his arms across, toward Lazkano, and places a hand on his shoulder, like a barman about to close for the night.
“Drink up.”
Attorney Luis Agirre Sesma knows nothing about the journalist Julio Virado. It occurs to him he must be younger than him, and is curious enough to read some of his articles before the interview.
Emilia brings him the last few issues of Cambio 16. The attorney can confirm that Virado’s pen is sharp, although he finds his articles and opinions suffer from excess padding. He is most amused by a sensationalistic report with the title “El bosque vasco” in which, in high literary style and with a lot of alliteration, he describes the Basque Country as a dense forest, a foresta impenetrable thickly layered with shameful interests, alliances, and acts of cowardice.
When Julio Virado is in front of him, he confirms that he’s even younger than he’d imagined.
“What do you think about the arrest of attorney and parliamentarian Murillo following his role in negotiating ransoms with ETA?”
“Murillo has all my support. It’s a travesty to punish processes of mediation that are carried out for humanitarian reasons. In cases of force majeure, and a kidnapping is such a case, criminal law allows us to pay ransoms and carry money across our borders.”
“Even if that money is then used to buy weapons, and people are then killed with those weapons?”
“There is a conflict of forces majeures in that instance: but the urgency, the need to save the life of a person now, takes priority over a possible future terrorist attack, reprehensible as this may seem, because the first can be avoided and because the second is an abstraction. In the case of a kidnapping, the law must be placed in suspense; not only for the kidnapping victim and his family, but for the whole state.”
“That’s arguable, to the extent that it can hold a whole state at ransom at any given time…”
“That’s what the German Doctrine dictates, and I adhere to that. We have to do everything possible to save whoever is at risk here and now. Afterward, we’ll see.”
“In Murillo’s case, it’s been harshly criticized that the attorney in question kept a percentage of the ransom after carrying out a process of mediation.”
“This matter can be approached from different a
ngles. I wouldn’t do that, but Murillo’s attitude seems thoroughly respectable to me…in his opinion, and given that his work as a mediator is linked to his profession, not to charge would be irregular, and not the opposite…He argues that were he to do it for free, that could arguably be construed as collaboration, which is defined by the law. I don’t agree, but both attitudes are licit.”
“What do you think about the projected reform to the criminal code?”
“I’m against it. They’ve requested the advice of Stampa Braun, and that’s a fraud. What would you think if we asked Pope Wojtyla for advice on abortion law? The decision is made the moment an adviser is picked, not when the adviser offers his verdict. In any case, I think the priority is to establish a maximum period of pretrial detention as soon as possible.”
“As you well know, some will perceive that as a weak and too lenient decision.”
“We can’t carry on the way we’ve been doing until now, keeping people awaiting trial indefinitely. It’s strange, but while that’s happening here, in Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher, who’s never been accused of being weak or too lenient, has freed thousands of prisoners from British jails, under promise to remain in the country, after a commission revised their cases.”
“Could you give us some more information regarding the rumor that more repentant prisoners are soon going to be freed?”
“First of all, I must tell you that I don’t like that word at all. It’s not accurate to talk about ‘repentant prisoners.’ That term was imported from Italy, and I don’t think it’s appropriate: we talk about reentry into society. And no, I can’t give you any more information because this issue requires my utmost discretion.”
Agirre Sesma found Julio Virado smart as a fox. He was also a deft manipulator, because even though he was quite faithful in his transcription of the interview, he exaggerated the weight of the words “repentant prisoners” in the highlights. There are ways and ways of bending journalism to benefit your interest. It wasn’t Julio Virado who invented the phrase “doctrine of repentance,” but from then on many news outlets echoed the terms “repentant” and “repentance.” The process that had borne such great fruit up until then started to decline, and the pathways that attorney Agirre Sesma and his team had crafted for the rehabilitation of political prisoners became incredibly convoluted. Nobody wanted to be thought of as “repentant.”
Before saying goodbye, Julio Virado shook his hand sportingly, and even handed over his business card. The detail grabbed Agirre Sesma’s attention, because back then it was a usual gesture for attorneys, but not for journalists.
“I don’t agree with you on practically anything, but it’s been a pleasure,” said the young journalist on his way out.
Frost has taken over the sidewalks, but Agirre Sesma keeps the heating off. He’s not wearing a jacket, however, only a white shirt, a dirty tie, and suspenders. Diego Lazkano makes the mistake of giving him too many clues about what he’s thinking: he steals several long glances at the heater.
“It’s not what you think. I’m not a mean old man who hates wasting money on electricity. I like the cold. More than like it: I need it to feel alive.”
“If you’re hoping to get yourself some tuberculosis, that’s not my problem.”
“You’re young, you don’t understand.”
“Yeah, the bars in my cradle block my view of the world…”
“I know that the ailments of age push people toward warmer climates, but that’s not my case. It’s cold that brings me the most pleasurable moment of the day…I cool myself under the shower with freezing water. It’s the only way. You get goose bumps and those shivers return to the skin the smoothness it once possessed. It is, of course, an illusory sensation, but for an instant you think you recover the firmness of old times. After a certain age, nothing is real; there is only the sporadic memory of forgotten sensations, and not only when one wants them. I can see the impertinence in your eyes: sex? It’s been a long time since I’ve known what it feels like. It’s enough for me to feel goose bumps under the cold water tap. I wasn’t really conscious of my face until I started to get chubby, you know? At one point you start gaining weight, your nostrils and your ears grow, and you’re incapable of reading a book without seeing your nose…you know what that feels like? I don’t wish it for you, putting all this weight on…your skin gets away from you, it emancipates from you, it becomes something else and takes on a life of its own, even though it never has the guts to completely leave your bones. In another time, I too aspired to elegance; these days, I’m content if I don’t make people cringe.”
He says all that without dramatizing, with a glint in his eye, Lazkano would say…even gleefully. It’s not easy to distinguish his jokes from his serious comments. He grabs his hat and raincoat and points toward the exit.
“It’s not all disadvantages. My office will never burn down because I left the heater on.”
The retoucherie is closed.
“Did you ever bump into Adela? An extraordinary woman. She’s always made more money than me.”
Diego wants to show the attorney that he’s good with jokes too.
“How can that be, when you both do the same job?”
“The same job?”
“You both mend things…”
Agirre Sesma gives him a knowing smile.
“That’s the wisest thing you’ve said all evening. C’mon, buy me a beer?”
“So…are we going to work together then?”
“There’s a lot to do. To start, the family.”
“The family?”
“Are you in touch? Have you spoken to them?”
“No.”
“Okay, that’s the first thing then. We can’t request that the case be reopened without the involvement of some family member.”
He had no idea about what he might find in Zeberio’s mom’s house. He knew she’d become a widow a few years back, and he imagined her lifestyle, and her two daughters’, was probably quite ordinary: each with her work and family, routine phone calls to tell one another that things were all right – “I’m managing” – and family visits once a week, plus mandatory birthday and Christmas celebrations, sweetened by the arrival of children and a commitment to the future, having parceled away the pain of the past for the sake of everyone’s sanity. Many years had passed since they’d inflicted that wound that would never heal, if having your soul split in two can be called a wound. What happens to the wounds that haven’t healed and you know for certain never will? What happens is that you learn to live with them, as if they were living entities. Because the pain of losing a son, that pain is equal to a whole living entity, a mini-being with tears, demands for attention, conjectures and superstitions, prayers not to be forgotten, approachments and distancings, a habit of disappearing for a while every now and then. A living entity who is dead, but awake. He had no idea what he might find in Zeberio’s mom’s house, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine that he was going to find a house filled with images of her dead son, young forever. A whole house filled, everywhere, with Zeberio’s childhood and first communion photographs. Flecks of fossilized joy disseminated along the shelves like sweet shrapnel shards. Those flecks of joy, could they be anything other than domestic stars in a constellation of pain? The photographs of the lost child, turned into pictures of a saint. On the way to Zeberio’s mom’s house, Diego tried to remember the more restricted but also more intense range of colors of photographs from the seventies and eighties: the bright reds and oranges from Agfa and Kodak prints; back then they developed them the proper way. Before the boom of pixels and screens everywhere, photographs used to belong, by right, to the realm of the fetish. He had no idea what he might find in Zeberio’s mom’s house, maybe an altar, the dead son’s room left intact: a room that traveled back in time, with the same painted paper on the walls, faded fleur-de-lis patterns, Victor Jara LPs, books about the developing world and Marxism, a Che Guevara poster and another one of Pertur, the disappea
red ETA leader, next to one another, ready to simultaneously break into song; hiking boots and multipocketed waistcoats, maybe – stuck to the wall with thumbtacks – some map of the world from back in the day before the dismemberment of the USSR and Yugoslavia, to remember that the world is the world and El Salvador is in El Salvador, and not in our heads; who knows, maybe Zeberio’s shotgun, and, why not, a fishing rod behind the door.
He walked on, thinking about the house he might find; maybe he expected a house similar to his mother’s, an ancestral family home organized around the stove, the radio, and the kitchen calendar, one offered by the Seaska shop or the Caja Laboral Bank; wide-bottomed TVs covered by crotchet mats; cathedral-like headboards, nostalgic souvenirs, cheap but brought from faraway places, a Lladró figurine or two, the rooms with bunk beds that brothers and sisters shared, where they fought, a still life hanging in the corridor, rather ugly rugs, maroon-colored encyclopedias on bookshelves made of dark wood; maybe a rocking chair, a survivor of the days when grandma lived at home; furniture that no one uses but everyone thinks it is a pity to throw out; a bedside table with a little lamp on either side of the bed, as established by the norms; maybe a sophisticated lamp, because for a while Zeberio’s parents sold electric goods…maybe the sisters run the business still.
What right did he have to stir the matter of Soto and Zeberio, to ask their parents for a signature because there was enough evidence to warrant the opening of the case? Was it his place to get the ball rolling so that newspapers restarted their engines and flowed with new rivers of ink? Agirre Sesma had made it very clear that the family had to ask for it, that the family came first, that they deserved all their respect, and that they couldn’t take a single step without earning their approval.
Two days earlier he had made an appointment with Xabier Soto’s parents in a cafeteria. His ama’s words affected him deeply. “In the first few years, I liked seeing Xabier’s friends. Talking to them about how far he might have gone, had his life not been cut short, what problems he might encounter, where he might live and what his job might be. It was his friends who kept him alive, and being with them was like being with Xabier. After a while I grew tired. Where was Xabier? He was dead. I could choose some of his friends and adjudicate their virtues and defects to our son. To continue the story when there was no story to continue. I could own their wins and their mistakes. But wasn’t that a bit fake? To have a son and lose him is very tough: don’t look for your son in his friends. Don’t think that their wrinkles and their children and their white hairs are the wrinkles and the children and the white hairs of your lost son. If anywhere at all, your dead son is to be found in your way of speaking, your way of walking, or in your desperate way of looking at the world. And he is also in the strength with which you confront your desperate way of contemplating the future. That’s how I see it, at least.”
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