Twist

by Harkaitz Cano

  THE THREE FRIENDS

  DIEGO LAZKANO’S MOST PAINFUL MEMORY, by far, is one that he kept hidden in the remotest corner of his mind under the following epigraph: “Let’s play a game, let’s imagine where we might be and what we might be doing in twenty-five years.”

  In the candlelight, Xabier Soto is combing and left-parting his hair over and over again with a nacreous close-toothed comb.

  “Whatever happened to the light, Zeberio?”

  “A blown fuse, probably: what do you want me to do? What’s wrong anyway, is your toupee at risk, Elvis? I don’t think she’ll leave you just because your hair is crazy today, my man…”

  They pull each other’s leg constantly, they always do. And Kepa Zeberio is particularly talkative and clownish today.

  Lazkano goes out into the hallway too, just in case there’s anything he can do. He presses down the switch twice: the landing’s light switch clicks snappily, in vain. The lights are out in the whole building. Back then blackouts and strikes tended to be general.

  “Check the electric panel, you’re the specialist.”

  Soto is losing patience. The girl is about to arrive – “you don’t know her,” he told them – and he still hasn’t been able to tame the curl that falls on his forehead, such is the wildness of his mane.

  “So the electric panels are all for me, isn’t that so, comrade? Of course! You only understand other kinds of panels, Byzantine or…German expressionist ones, and that other dude…what was his name? Dunlop or something…?”

  “Duchamp, Zeberio, Marcel Duchamp…”

  Concrete thought and abstract thought. The eternal chasm between action and reflection.

  On the front cover of Egin, the Basque newspaper, there’s a photograph of the Minister for Home Affairs, José Barrionuevo, who’d visited the Intxaurrondo barracks the day before. Soto defaced the photograph with a marker, turning his face into an owl and translated his name into “Ol’ Owl Newhood.”

  Lazkano holds a copy of George Orwell’s 1984, and although the blackout still hasn’t been fixed, his eyes gradually adapt to the semidarkness and he manages to read to the glow of indirect light coming from the street. Soto sits next to him, still combing his hair fastidiously. He is a torrent of overflowing energy, a born activist; a tireless volcano and a free spirit. His excess of inner strength can be annoying sometimes, insulting even, if his conversational partner doesn’t have the energy for it.

  “Eighty-four…we’re only one year away. Who knows where we’ll be next year…and in twenty-five? Can you imagine? Where do you see yourself in twenty-five years, primo?”

  Lazkano’s answers tend to be brief. This is no exception. Soto and Zeberio’s presence intimidates him.

  “I’d rather not think about that.”

  “Well, I think about it, and a lot: nothing to do with what Orwell suggests. We’ll have a free country and two or three wives each very probably…Such quackery about the divorce laws…Wives is not the right word either, I’m talking about squadrons of women willing to sleep…They’ll demand their share, it goes without saying. And we’ll give it to them: nothing is more beautiful than licking them with their legs wide open, especially if you can keep it hard and tight between their breasts…Your spunk reaches their navel while your lips sink into their juices…Are you embarrassed by my words, primo?”

  Lazkano has indeed turned a deep shade of red.

  “What kind of a leftie are you? You glow like a peach every time we talk about sex! Yes, I know…you don’t need to look at us that way: our lady comrades will refute our theses, there’ll be intellectual women with whom to share our concerns….How fucking awesome would it be if intellectual fucks and the other kind merged into one…But, ah, to learn to detect the udders from which intellectuality flows, eh?…You read too much, primo…”

  That’s the kettle calling the pot black…It’s a bit rich having Soto throw that in his face; the man with the thickest glasses, the great white hope of the new Basque theater, the man who spends hours reading compulsively, night and day, whenever he isn’t, of course, bashing a typewriter or trying to tame his mane of curls in front of a mirror.

  “Is that bad?”

  “It’s not good or bad, primo. But I think that lots of people boast about the books they read, like others boast about the yachts they keep in Marbella…I personally think they’re both bourgeois habits, what can I say. Not the act of reading itself, but boasting about reading…You’re not reading to look cool, are you, to big yourself up? Tell me the truth…” Lazkano doesn’t dare offer an answer, and there’s no need, because Soto soon changes the subject.

  “That bloody light! Did you fix it, Zeberio? Yes or no?”

  “I’m fucking trying…”

  Lazkano tries to go back to the conversation.

  “In twenty-five years…By then our sons will have grown up.”

  “In my case, please, let them be daughters if at all possible, primo. Only daughters. After a certain age sons lose their looks and can get quite ugly.

  When it comes to Soto, it’s not easy to distinguish when he’s serious and when he’s joking. Lazkano finds his confession strange, however. Does he think of the future every now and then too? His arrogant, provocative stance, his way of talking, so irreverent and grandiose, are, deep down, just a façade. Diego decides to head to the kitchen before the conversation turns to lascivious terrains again. He finds Zeberio there: he’s just activated the inner patio’s fuses from the window and brought the electricity to their whole building.

  “We’ve teased him enough for today, Lazkano,” Zeberio whispers. “Besides, all we need now is for the partridges I hunted yesterday to go to waste in the fridge.”

  They’re still students. The only money that comes into their house are the wages Zeberio gets from the little jobs he does with his father. They run in demonstrations and throw pamphlets in the air. They shout slogans. They feel they’re at the threshold of so many things.

  They feel so because it’s true.

  By the time they return home, Zeberio has already plucked the partridges. Under the tap in the kitchen sink, two buckets, one filled with cold water and the other in the process of being filled with hot water.

  “Come here a moment.”

  Zeberio asks Soto to close his eyes. He takes his hand and submerges it in the bucked filled with almost-boiling water.

  “Fuck!”

  “Calm down, this is beneficial for your toupee! Hold it.”

  “Are you fucking crazy? I’m burning! It burns!”

  He takes his other hand and submerges it in the cold-water bucket.

  “For Christ’s sake, Kepa! What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “It’s just an experiment…One hand in hot water and the other in cold water, isn’t that so, Soto? Can you distinguish between the two? You know for sure which is the hot one and which one is the cold, right?”

  “Kinda hard to miss!”

  “But if we repeated this exercise over and over again, your nervous system would go crazy, you’d be incapable of detecting it. You’d feel your skin burn, but you wouldn’t be able to tell if it was because of the heat or because of the cold. So that you know, this is how they torture people in Chile.”

  “Fuck, Zebe, this isn’t Chile!”

  “That’s what you like to think.”

  Diego could hardly remember those days without Soto’s incessant theatrics, his uninterrupted flow of jokes, and his playful personality. He was particularly good at imitating people, he’d quickly take on people’s tics, pet words, and gestures – he could just as accurately imitate their dining companions, their old professors, or the politicians du jour who appeared on TV, anyone from Solchaga and Carrillo to Manuel Fraga or Felipe González, without forgetting the Basques, Arzalluz and Idigoras. He would liven up any and all after-dinner conversations with surrealist reinterpretations of some news bulletin. “Clown,” Zeberio always said, “you’re completely nuts,” although he laughed lik
e crazy and enjoyed Soto’s slapstick as much as Lazkano, and couldn’t hide it.

  Soto’s eyesight was as disastrous as his ear was sharp. Although he didn’t have the first clue about Italian, and because his mother was a passionate fan of opera, he liked to sing bits of arias he’d learnt by heart, loose sentences, sometimes he’d sing them and sometimes he’d declaim them with exaggerated solemnity, leaving his companions astounded. He’d memorized about a dozen lines – much later, Lazkano would discover that most were just the titles of famous arias – and he always found the perfect moment to let them out: Nessum dorma, Che gelida manina, A lui devo obbedir, Lasciate ogni speranza, E lucevan le stelle…If his French was any good, it was also due to the acuity of his ear more than to his actual knowledge of the language. As a matter of fact, he spoke French not just with his mouth and face, but with his whole body, to the extent that even the way he held himself changed, he almost metamorphosed into another person.

  Lazkano remembered, for example, the day that, using summer tourists as a decoy and camouflaging among them, they fulfilled their long-delayed desire to go to Biarritz to eat a delicious roast duck for lunch. Menu in hand, Soto mock-pretended cosmopolitan intonation and manners and requested several dishes in a fake Parisian accent, without moving his lips much; he loved theater, yes, and not just writing it. Lazkano would never forget the way he puffed his chest when the young server asked him if he came from the capital. That joy, that moment when they confuse us with someone we’re not but we’d like to be, that moment can make us proud as much as being taken for someone we’d hate to be associated with can destroy us.

  Lazkano remembered also the time when a friend going on holiday left his dog in Soto’s care for a week, which coincided with the crucial last few days of his finalizing one of his plays. The dog wouldn’t give him peace while he banged furiously on the typewriter. The doggy’s head and ears bobbed up and down to the rhythm of the old Hispano Olivetti, submerged in a kind of tribal-dance-induced trance.

  “Turns out Mr. Barker here loves literature, look at him,” Soto said to Lazkano.

  “I’d say he loves music. Your typewriter’s percussive rhythms.” “I put a Bob Marley album on earlier and he went half crazy. You’ll have to ask Gloria if she needs a dog for her new play.”

  Later on he asked Lazkano, genuinely: “Oi, primo, do you know what these creatures eat?”

  He meant the question. Being a child of asphalt, he’d been sharing steak he’d bought for himself with the dog, and he’d quite likely would have fried him a couple of eggs too, and given him bread to dip into the yolks, any sort of madness, a napkin around his neck, some cutlery; where Soto was involved, anything was possible.

  Before he crossed over to Iparralde, the French Basque side, oblivious to his fate, he would avidly read Lazkano’s sociology notes – for pleasure, he’d say; he would gobble down the notes of all his friends who were studying for degrees different from the one he’d chosen; his wasn’t enough, his philosophy classes, which he passed with high marks without barely ever turning up to a class, were too thin a gruel for Soto’s voracious curiosity and intellect.

  One day that week, Lazkano accompanied Soto to renew his ID card. Still today, Lazkano finds the offices where they issue ID cards and passports unnerving, but back in 1983 they were worse than unnerving, they were scary. There were many reasons why the two of them could be thought to be suspect, they were at risk of being detained; they’d taken part in demonstrations against the Lemóniz nuclear station, in demonstrations in favor of the amnesty for Basque prisoners, and they weren’t just screaming in those demonstrations. That’s why it was a terrible ordeal to have to renew the ID card, to have to go there, voluntarily, and submissively hand over a photograph to complete your own file. A disagreeable calvary that one had to go through, rubber stamps, toxic smells of ink, fluorescent lights that buzzed and buzzed but never quite burned out; the mere fact of having to breathe that air pregnant with static electricity was hateful, although Soto was very capable at being oblivious to it all, thanks to the constant syncopated pulsation of typewriters, which made him feel at home. Lazkano’s hair stood on end, however, in seeing the posters of the most wanted criminals (members of the ETA most of them), in smelling the old coffee, the stench of Ducados cigarette butts squeezed in heavy ashtrays, in facing the screech of the stainless steel filing cabinets, the stink of old sweat that coalesced with new sweat.

  “But, are we really taking the dog?”

  “Aren’t we going to the doghouse, primo? One more dog, I doubt they’ll notice.”

  The endless mockery, the infinite jest; Lazkano appreciated Soto’s hunger to fuel the fires of everything every day of his life, with every step, in every exchange, no matter how banal and boring it was. There weren’t many like him. It wasn’t that he was always happy, it wasn’t that exactly, it was that even on the days when he woke up in the dumps, he was sufficiently clearheaded to make the most of his darkened mood: inaction was something he wouldn’t allow himself and, for Soto, the most direct action was to talk and to write, to never stay silent and to bash endless words out of his typewriter. Soto was a walking novel, a man whose daily life, the twenty-four hours of it, was an act of performance art, years before the word performance started to gain currency among us; maybe he didn’t do it consciously, maybe he only did it because he was like that, because he oozed life out of every pore of his skin.

  “They’re not going to let us in with a dog, Soto.”

  “And you boast about reading Orwell, primo? Don’t forget that it is us who comply, with our tails between our legs, with their demand to get ID cards so that they can better control us; it is us who do them a favor and not the other way around.”

  Lazkano offered to wait outside with the dog, but Soto, “fuck that for a game of soldiers,” wanted to have fun, have a laugh “at the expense of the repressive apparatus the state’s got going for us.”

  Besides the uniformed policeman at the entrance – not long before, an attack from one of the anticapitalist commandos had taken the lives of two agents in that very same office – there was a notice at the door. Soto didn’t need much more to get going. That was enough, a little notice at the door.

  “Están prohibidos los perros, joven,” dogs are forbidden, young man, the policeman at the entrance warned him.

  Soto then pointed at the little notice on the door with fake naïveté, and an apparently submissive stance:

  “Están prohibidos los perros, excepto en el caso de perros lazarillos.” No dogs, except guide dogs.

  “Él es un perro lazarillo.” He’s a guide dog, he indicated to the policeman, as if he were doing him the courtesy of giving him the chance to read, again, a notice he must have read a million times.

  Lazkano, meanwhile, was feeling increasingly alarmed, and kept his eyes fixed on the weapon the policeman carried on his belt.

  The policeman’s answer was to be expected:

  “Pero usted no está ciego.” But you are not blind.

  If he hadn’t been so frightened, “pero usted no está ciego,” Lazkano would have laughed hard, it was impossible not to notice Soto’s extremely thick glasses, minus seven diopters in each eye, no less. Soto was shit-scared too, but, resisting the temptation to crack a joke about his accelerating farsightedness, he answered by opening another salve with a line that one may think he’d rehearsed at home.

  “No veo que en el cartel diga nada sobre estar ciego.” Where in the notice does it say anything about blind people?

  Soto was like that, and even though the policeman gave him the brush off with a “no me vacile,” don’t waste my time, and the dog had to stay outside with Lazkano in the end, he entered the government office proud of his deed, smiling and victorious, an uncommon human being who knew how to draw mileage out of the obligations he was forced to comply with, “pero usted no está ciego,” “but you are not blind, “pero usted sí,” but you are, so many outbursts, imagined but never pronounced, so m
any words and sentences, thought and said, for once.

  “No dogs, except guide dogs.”

  “Where in the notice does it say anything about blind people?”

  Although Soto and Zeberio’s names have been linked forever (never Zeberio and Soto, always Soto and Zeberio), and although we are so used to seeing them together it’s almost unthinkable to separate them, truth must be honored, we must acknowledge that they were two very different people. They would probably lead separate lives and be engaged in different professions and different environments, had they been born in any other part of the world or lived at a time that wasn’t the tumultuous eighties. And, had they coincided by chance, say, sitting in adjoining seats on a plane – they never boarded a plane, their murder robbed them of that experience too – they would have probably found it hard to find a subject of conversation in common after those two initial minutes of courteous exchange. Among different groups too, and against all prognoses, sections cross over and shared areas emerge; some couples are sufficiently stubborn to perpetuate a youthful summer love – and end up regretting it, or not – and on occasions we start off using each other only to end up loving each other, or start off tolerating each other and end up believing that to tolerate is to love; maybe it’s just a matter of aptitude, of attempting to attract someone completely removed from it into our magnetic field, making that field attractive to them, or the other way around, abandoning ourselves into the arms of someone or something – how wonderful it is to abandon ourselves, don’t anyone dare deny it, to abandon ourselves into the arms of someone or something – to abandon ourselves into the arms of someone who might initially seem a bit dull because they’re so far removed from us, until little by little we enter their sphere, we get to know their hobbies and pastimes, we assimilate their tastes and begin to think they’re not so bad, it’s not such a big deal, why not?, we give in, and let him or her – friend, lover, spouse – shape our conversations, our plans, our schedules, who hasn’t done that sometime? Soto and Zeberio, had circumstances been different, may have been able to create a deep, long-lasting bond.