Twist

by Harkaitz Cano

  “Where are you taking us?”

  “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  “We don’t know anything, we…”

  “Shut your fucking mouth, I said,” and this time they put a piece of metal between their teeth, so there’ll be no doubt.

  Better to think before they speak now, better to say nothing, to say it only to themselves, listen to what that other personality who is over there, who is us but isn’t us, that strong and brave personality, stronger and braver than us, stronger than our madness and our sanity, capable still of speaking: Where are they taking us?

  Had they known it – but they didn’t know it – they would have looked at their room differently, they would have hugged the friends who had lent them the house, they would have left a beautiful note, nutcase, brother, nutcase: I should have stayed, writing, God, why would I leave home? Home is the best! Whose stupid idea was it to go to the festival in Ustaritz? But we have to live a little too, right? We have to die too, right? But not yet, it’s too soon for me, I still have a lot left to write, please.

  Soto hears Zeberio panting next to him, “calm down,” he’d like to tell him, but he doesn’t say anything, and even though they know that this thing has only started, they don’t know exactly, nutcase, brother, what this thing that has only just started is.

  They don’t know and they don’t want to know. To go on living. That’s the only thing they want.

  And maybe they’re evaluating the possibilities they may have for remaining alive. To begin with, they haven’t seen the faces of their kidnappers, the kidnappers don’t want them to know where they’re going…Could that mean that they’ll let them free once they know what they want to know? What’s the point, otherwise, of taking so many precautions to hide their identities and the place where they’re headed? As for what they want to know, too…what do they know? Hardly anything. If they intended to kill them, they wouldn’t have cared about being identified by them, about their seeing the place where they were headed. Or maybe it wasn’t exactly like that? Maybe covering their faces was a way of suppressing all vestiges of humanity, so that they could do whatever they had to do without much of a problem of conscience? Maybe they’ve started to elaborate a list of motives and possibilities that reveal that they shall remain alive, but maybe they can’t think of any. The inside of the car stinks of dark tobacco, dark tobacco they’ve smoked before and they’ll smoke after, but that right now no one is smoking. They both sweat under their hoods. “Vire à esquerda,” says one in Portuguese: turn left. “Lado direito,” on the right, says the other. They breathe with difficulty inside their hoods, they try to guess the road they may have taken, they calculate they’ve been on the road for twenty minutes, although it’s difficult to be sure, everything feels longer in circumstances like those, and the kidnappers’ words sound strange, “slowly, up there, stop here, turn here, careful.” They made them bend their heads down twice, as if they were afraid someone might see them from the outside, a sign that perhaps they’re driving through some urban area. “Vire à esquerda,” “Lado direito.” Portuguese? They don’t seem like policemen, although maybe they are, Soto and Zeberio haven’t crossed paths with enough policemen in their lives to be able to ascertain that. It’s time to learn a lesson, to observe and to learn; thugs or policemen, the smell of Ducados cigarettes, by association they imagine them all dark skinned, with mustaches, “where are you taking us, where are you taking us,” pain in the joints, pain in the wrists, they’re not wearing handcuffs, they’ve tied their hands with ropes, therefore they are not, they must not be, real policemen, or maybe they are, Soto and Zeberio want to go on living, they aren’t the first ones to disappear and they know it, they’ve carried out attacks with Benelli submachine guns on Basque refugees before, they won’t be the last ones, “park there, next to the tennis court, we’ll bring the car in later,” an unreal voice said, a new voice, a voice that seems to come from outside the car, this one, yes, this one has a Basque accent, he pronounced park with the same inflection with which Zeberio pronounces Faulkner, stressing the r and the k, and ironically, that type of linguistic inflection was enough for Soto to feel a speck of optimism, they have so little to go on, that was enough. We’ll be able to understand each other among Basques – he tells himself – there’s still hope.

  Even the words tennis court seem soothing to him, very far away from death, words that foretell some semblance of civilization not too far away, despite the fact that, according to Soto, “vire à esquerda,” “tennis court,” “lado dereito,” give away too many details about their location. Because, let’s not forget, this is 1983, and there aren’t that many tennis courts in this area, even if you pinned a compass on Angelu and amplified the radius of the search zone to a fifty-minute drive stretching in any direction.

  “Are you all right, Kepa?”

  “Yes, Xabier. And you?”

  The situation is dire. They call each other by their first names.

  “Yes, say how very much you love each other now, because we’ve prepared separate rooms for you.”

  Diego added one more to the list of advantages of dying young, and when he did he lost, once and for all, the fear of flying he’d experienced every time he’d had to attend the launch of one of his books abroad: to die young is a sure way of sidestepping dementia.

  How many people like me must there be on this flight? he asked himself, people who wouldn’t be too sorry to die in a plane crash? Am I so strange? Am I not climbing into a plane like someone playing a very passive, bourgeois, comfortable, and improbable game of Russian roulette?

  It sent shivers up Lazkano’s spine to think that when Soto and Zeberio disappeared, his friend was reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. When they released him and he returned to the house in Moulinaou Street, he found that unfinished book among Soto’s things: his toothbrush, a thick, hand-knitted winter cardigan, so common in Basque families – Ariadne’s thread, Penelope’s continuation – and a salmon-pink-colored folder. Soto had paused his reading of Faulkner’s novel on page 215, never suspecting the interruption could be final; they didn’t let him read beyond that. Whereas the pages read up until then were plagued with effusive underscores, there wasn’t a single mark on the book from there on. The way Lazkano had of perceiving existence changed completely after that finding, and he told himself that every human life is just that, a book left unfinished; without forewarning, we are deprived of the privilege of knowing the ending, and are made aware of the fact that perhaps that privilege is not always beneficial: it could be the case that the ending of the book that corresponds to us is not actually to our liking. Since then Lazkano has developed an almost pathological tendency to never leave a book half read, no matter how much he dislikes it. Be that as it may, he thought it a joke of destiny – a macabre one, in very bad taste – that it was precisely As I Lay Dying and not another book that happened to be Soto’s final read; his stomach still turned when he thought about it. Lazkano was never able to read that book or any other by William Faulkner, as a matter of fact, he couldn’t even stand the sight of a photograph of the great American writer. Poor William, it wasn’t the old man’s fault.

  But, despite that, when he collected his belongings and glanced at the book, the last paragraph Soto had underscored with his pencil was branded into his memory forever: “But I ain’t so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what ain’t. It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.”

  After he had collected the salmon-pink folder and his few belongings, when he was abandoning the house on Rue Moulinaou, he saw the red-haired man in the café across the street, watching his steps with his freckle-covered pale face, his impassive stare. The red-haired man followed his steps down two streets. Lazkano feared for a moment that he might catch up with him and grab his arm.

  But he did nothing of the s
ort.

  But, if Diego had to choose one moment among all the moments he’d shared with Soto and Zeberio, if he had to choose one that stood out, he would choose, without hesitation, the day when they played a soccer game with some French tourists in the beach in Bidart. For once, and without establishing a precedent, their usual arguments put aside – so stimulating sometimes, so bittersweet others – the three of them formed a solid team to confront four young men from Bordeaux.

  Three against four on an open beach. Zeberio took control of establishing the imaginary goals with mounds of sand and like children in a hurry they pounced on that leather ball, barefoot, bare ribbed – their skin too pale to identify them as tourists, who did they expect to fool – their jeans rolled up to their knees, as if they’d spent the evening crabbing and had just cast their scoop nets aside. They played until they collapsed with exhaustion, for the pure pleasure of the game, the still-fresh memory of the childhood times when nutmegging and dribbling a ball through the legs of your opponent brought as much pleasure or more as scoring a goal, and the long passes and the short passes, and the runs and the kickoffs, feeling the harsh rub of that insufficiently pumped ball that was starting to lose patches of leather on their insteps – the soccer balls of childhood were always partially deflated – with that natural tendency of children to get together and make teams spontaneously. To honor the truth, Soto, Zeberio, and Lazkano weren’t so far away from adolescence, that inflection point in which leather balls are abandoned because other kinds of skins and rubs start to become more interesting – even though Diego found his two friends much more mature than he was, a thousand leagues ahead of him, two upright, upstanding men, anything but adolescents. Soto was in the third year of his philosophy degree, Diego in the first one of his sociology degree. Back then two years were an eternity. Lazkano remembers specially that pass from Zeberio, when the ball flew just above their opponent’s head, how the ball fell like a stone on the sand, making a dry sound, and how before the ball could even bounce Soto had caught it, turned around and faced the goal, and executing one of those moves that even professional soccer players are rarely successful with, galloped unstoppable toward the opposing goal, leaving behind one of the Bordeaux guys who was blind to the turn of Soto’s hips, easily fooling the second one, who slipped and fell, and then stopping dead in his tracks and straightening his back for a moment to look straight into the third one’s eyes before tunneling the ball between his legs, and leaving the fourth one behind after a parabolic self-pass aided by the irregularity of the terrain and blind luck.

  He was in front of the goal, he had arrived, and he’d done everything alone, the goal was wide open to him, and he decided to enjoy it, not to shoot just yet. The sound of the waves was every bit as good as the roar of the Bombonera, the Argentine stadium of the Boca Juniors; Soto was narrating his play like an apoplectic sports presenter about to have a heart attack halfway through a retransmission, in an Argentine accent, as if running weren’t enough, nothing was enough for Soto, nothing sufficed, he wanted to add a layer of excitement to the beach in Bidart and to his nonexistent, shocked audience – “vibrante,” he said – and he did it all in a Spanish that the Bordeaux guys would be able to understand, linking sentences together “chévere pibe, amazing kid, Soto advances, in-credible, leaves him behind, mag-nificent, Soto gets rid of one, he allows himself a smile, he’s in control of the game, bárbaro, the way he dribbles that ball,” and yes, it looks like the more he speaks, the more confident he gets, the stronger he gets, the fact that he’s speaking, rather than leaving him gasping for air, seems to give him more air, speaking nonstop motivates him, it could be said that words don’t tire him – he could never tire of words – but that, instead, they feed him, they are his gas; and when he reaches the oblique line drawn in the sand by someone’s heel, he holds the ball with the top of his foot and, looking back, takes his time observing the four paralyzed guys from Bordeaux who are waiting for him to score once and for all, and looks at Zeberio, and farther behind, looks at Lazkano too, who’s keeping watch over their goal – Lazkano is the most conservative of the three, he always was, the most conscientious and straight-laced, the one who’d rather be goalie and not leave his designated area; would those roles they each kept have remained the same over the years had Soto and Zeberio’s fate been different? It was impossible to know.

  Yes. Back then the world could still stop. They could stop the world. It was possible to stop a soccer ball with the top of one’s foot in front of a goal’s line. And together with the ball, the hands of clocks would stop, and so would the axis upon which the world turned. Soccer in that moment wasn’t the opium of crowded stadiums, but a full-bodied game that satisfied the spirit. It was possible to place the ball on that border, on that dividing line, on that boundary, on that forbidden frontier, “no trespassing,” “do not enter,” and renounce an easy goal like that, to kneel down on the ground like the Pope used to do at airports, prostrate, to kiss the wet sand and give the ball a soft header toward the netless goal, like Soto did that time, “mag-nificent, vi-brante, did you see that, bárbaro, the way he dribbled that ball,” making the soccer ball and the world cross that line very slowly, aided, slightly, by the frame of his very thick glasses.

  Lazkano would like to remember Soto like that forever. With the strength he had when he scored that goal, full of impetus, in the zenith of an energetic display that could bother those who tire too easily, bringing together words and actions, the spoken with the executed, narrating his doings nonstop and letting you know what he was about to do too, that’s who he was.

  If Lazkano could choose one moment among all the moments he had shared with Xabier Soto and Kepa Zeberio, if he had to choose one that stood out, he would chose that one without a doubt, because it was a moment of solid happiness, pure joy without a speck of shadow, the pinnacle of childish enjoyment multiplied and highlighted by the fact that it was never filtered by the reasoning of adulthood, underscored by the certainty that you are tasting, from a time and a territory that have become yours, another time and another territory, an older one, that used to belong to you and you weren’t able to appreciate sufficiently when it happened. It’s still possible to jump across to the other side. And if jumping across to the other side is possible, then everything is possible.

  They celebrated that goal like someone who returns from the beyond. Like intruders who return to infancy from grown-up land. And that’s how Lazkano relives it each time, bringing Soto back to the world of the living, although for the longest time and until his father, Gabriel Lazkano, reemerged, fully alive, one of his greatest fears was that the defective DNA traveling down his poisonous genealogical tree would erase and betray everything, even that memory, the last one of all his memories he’d want to lose; he was tormented by the mere thought that that precious day in Bidart might be suppressed from his mind by the illness that had theoretically taken his father.

  How would that memory come to be suppressed, should Lazkano succumb to that illness, so fashionable, so in-with-the-times, so destructive with everything that came its way? Would he forget everything at the same time? Or would he forget its main characters first, remembering the soccer game in an abstract way, without any specific emotion attached to it? Would everything become blurred and mixed up? Would he turn himself into the goal scorer? “Chévere pibe, amazing kid, Lazkano advances, in-credible, leaves him behind, mag-nificent, Lazkano gets rid of one, he allows himself a smile, he’s in control of the game, bárbaro.” Would he forget Soto, or Zeberio? Would the place where it all happened, the beach in Bidart, be the first thing to disappear? First the setting and then the events? Or, on the contrary, would the setting be what his traitorous memory kept? A deserted, empty beach without characters, without soccer, without ball, and without guys from Bordeaux? What life impulse would be the last in the wasteland of his mind, when his brain cells were torn from the root by that deranged harvester that lays waste to everything? Would some smells remain? T
he smell of rotting algae? The wet touch of flat sand? Would the last thing to remain be that John Paul II habit of kneeling down to kiss the ground? Would they find him in that position in the corridor of the old folk’s home when he tried to escape at night and the nurses guided him back to his room holding him by the arm? “We found a true Christian,” his minders might say, amused by seeing old Diego kiss the ground, without realizing that what he was kissing was something very different, and he was doing it while inhabiting someone else’s skin, on a beach in Bidart, and in honor of Soto, his friend. Perhaps Lazkano should leave it in writing; maybe we should all do it: “Bring me to the beach in Bidart when I start losing my memory, give me a half-deflated leather ball, a ball that has started to lose its patches, make me a goal with two mounds of sand, re-create my most sacred memory, armor-plate the scene, even if it’s nothing but theater, force me to be a part of that play, even if I don’t know which part I’m playing or why, let something mechanical or physical remain even when there’s no mental or neuronal trace of it.”