This time the charade ended like it normally did, with my surrendering to him in a torrent of giggles, and everyone else joining in too, though my father quit before the rest of us. Without moving, or raising his voice, he brought his eyes up to mine and said calmly, “Aita. That’s what you will call me now.” In his face, any sign of apology was drowned in newfound resolve.
* * *
—
If we had been more prudent, maybe we would have been nervous about teaching ourselves a banned language, but it was not as if we could speak enough to ever set the Civil Guard after us. It was not as if we could even have a full conversation. For the first week or so, our pathetic vocabularies barely overlapped. I think we all assumed that at some point we would speak a word that someone else knew, and so it became a game, a test of our faith, to continue an exchange without revealing the meaning of whatever words we had spoken to the other person.
On the second or third day of our exile from Spanish, while I was eating breakfast, my mother came into the kitchen and spoke a string of sounds that I didn’t understand. When I stared at her blankly, she bobbed her head around a bit as though to say, You know these words, don’t think too hard about it. I raised my eyebrows, waiting for her to surrender to pantomiming whatever it was that she had meant, but instead she pulled her arms into her sides as though bound in a body bag, shot raised eyebrows right back at me, and then slunk slowly out of the room.
It became our silent joke, our laughless gag. Julen adopted it too, pinning his arms to his sides in defense when our blank reactions clued him in to the fact that he had spoken a sentence we didn’t know. Imagine the stupid words we taunted ourselves with: beans, bottom, salt, ear, fingernail, onion, sock.
At that point, Julen had finished high school and I was in the middle of my summer break, and so during the endless stretch of those first wordless days, our hours became bent around breaking each other’s resolve. Even when my mother pretended to be busy frying peppers or tending to our languishing garden, she would at any moment be ready to sprint after us and pry our hands from our sides if someone came up behind her and whispered belarritik.
From the moment we returned from the market, my father had planted himself at the kitchen table, and there, he took to repairing the radio. If we had been using Spanish, he probably would have declared something like, “Esas malditas mujeres…can you believe them? Selling me junk that doesn’t even work,” but after his slipup, he was careful to uphold his own rules. Instead he suffered silently, and upon this initial bed of frustration piled up layers of small annoyances as he struggled to make any headway with the repair. Each time he thought that he had made some mistake he plunged into a hysterical cough and slapped his hand against the table, as though he had crossed some wires in his own body instead. During lulls in the game, we watched his strange behavior from our various perches: the top landing of the stairs, or outside, crouched beneath a window. When he tested it, and finally a tiny sound curled from the radio’s speaker, he pounded the table so violently that he left a spiderweb of cracks in the wood.
Reluctantly, we emerged from the shadows and hidden corners of the house to join him, and as I neared the radio, distinct voices separated out from the static. They hung there in our kitchen as though they were our own familial ghosts. Even after years—my whole life—living in the Basque Country, I still pinpoint that night as the first time I really heard our language. I still remember how my father’s eyes blazed wildly in the settling darkness. My mother put a kind hand to his back, but she looked pained. It was clear that it was the end of our game.
We all stayed around the radio for so long that night that I actually fell asleep right there, lying beneath the table, with my head upon my father’s feet. I woke up some time later, alone in the empty kitchen, my body splayed upon the floor.
Over the course of the next week, we gathered for three to four hours each day to listen, hoping to absorb whatever we could. My father perched himself over a blank sheet of paper and armed with a pen, he scrambled to copy down phrases as they spilled from the speaker, but they came out rapidly, and he was always left clawing after the end of the previous sentence while a new one dawned. And then there was the problem of no one’s knowing if whatever combination of letters he put to the page existed at all.
When it became clear that the radio was a failure—that it would never teach us any real Basque—my mother took to mimicking the woman that we always heard on the Basque news station. Like the announcer, she would say arratsalde on, in a delicate female newscaster voice, poised with clasped hands upon the table, and then she would continue her fake broadcast, beginning with the random words that we all had learned when we finally pooled our vocabularies, and then devolving into a series of ugly, made-up sounds. She once contorted her throat so extremely that she sent herself into a choking fit. Julen had rushed up and smacked her on the back until she regained control. Spit had dribbled down her chin.
My father never applauded at the end of these performances.
* * *
—
I have not shared any more about that early period of my childhood or the hours spent chasing my brother around the grounds of the farmhouse, because it does not belong here. But if it’s important to know anything else about that time, know this: every night, the sun set behind us (it seemed like it was right behind us), and though it’s simple, it’s the truth: we were happy.
That period ended abruptly with my father’s announcement that we would be moving into the nearby tavern, where he had found a job as the bookkeeper and general manager of the downstairs restaurant, my mother a job as a hostess, and guest rooms on the third floor of the upstairs hotel for all of us. “And better yet,” he went on, “the man who has hired me speaks perfect Basque, and so does the entire staff. We’re offered complimentary lessons every Sunday afternoon between the lunch and dinner shifts, which means that this,” he said, his whole face aflame, “will be the last time you’ll ever hear me speak Spanish.”
Would you believe me if I said that I hadn’t even realized it? That the initial shock of his announcing that he had quit his job at the shipyard had distracted me completely from the language? I hadn’t even recognized that of course he was speaking in Spanish until he mentioned it himself, but by then he had finished his announcement—at the end, I think he even bowed—and he was already silent, sitting down.
My mother and I found each other on the staircase later, when my father was asleep, and though I suppose we could have spoken Spanish, we didn’t. Julen discovered us when he got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and stayed with us until we all departed in the early morning.
II
The walls of the Ibarra Tavern were plastered with purple wallpaper that slouched away from the molding in some places, like the last dying petals of a flower. When we arrived, a week after my father had made his announcement, we were greeted by the tavern owner in the foyer, and he paraded us through the whole ground floor with our suitcases still in hand. On the tour, he spoke to us in rapid Basque, but he gestured enthusiastically enough so that I was fairly sure I understood what he was pointing out: the range of wines on tap at the bar, the lacquered wood paneling that reached midway up the wall of the dining room, the corner of the room that could be closed off for private events, and the curtains, egg-yolk orange, that made the whole room glow as though it were the inner core of the sun when, toward the end of the day, the afternoon bent its longest beams of light to the tavern floor. In the kitchen, the new industrial-strength dishwasher, the steel countertops for food preparation, the pots and pans and cooking utensils that dangled from the ceiling, and the profusion of eggs, milk, and meat stacked in the fridge.
Upstairs in our rooms, my father repeated one of the few phrases in Basque we had all learned from the radio, oso ondo, which translated literally as “very good.” “Oso ondo?”
he posed to us all, and then he repeated it over again to himself as he climbed into a bed that my mother had made a moment before. He whacked the mattress with both hands, grinning as they rebounded with each effort. “Very good,” he squealed. “Very, very good!”
The next afternoon, Julen and I padded around the upstairs floors, exploring what we hadn’t been shown on Mr. Ibarra’s tour. From down in the lobby, there was the distant chatter of a new group checking in. Julen pushed lightly on the nearest door and it opened to reveal a room identical to ours, with two twin beds sticking out from the wall. We both had the idea at the same time to swipe the pillows from the head of the mattress, place them at the foot, and then turn back the covers accordingly so that it looked like all the beds had been set up for guests’ heads to rest where their feet should have been; to loll about exposed and defenseless in the center of the room.
When we entered the rest of the rooms on the floor to switch around the beds, we found them all unoccupied, except for the one at the end of the hall, where we found the tavern owner’s wife, naked, her drooping body framed perfectly in the outline of the door.
To make up for our misconduct, we were given our first jobs at the tavern.
Julen worked the bar, and I worked clearing tables. The rest of the waitstaff were girls aged sixteen, maybe seventeen or eighteen, who were all friends of Mr. Ibarra’s daughter, Maite, and who spoke to each other urgently in fluent Basque. They were nice enough when Mr. Ibarra introduced me; each of the five of them said aupa, in a scattered chorus, and afterward Maite herself had shown me the technique for clearing customers’ plates and balancing them down the length of both arms.
When a cascade of teacups slid from my arm at the end of my first shift, one of Maite’s friends volunteered to sweep it up. She didn’t complain, even as she stretched the broom into the far corners of the kitchen, collecting the shards that had escaped her. Even before that, when the teacups were just beginning to shatter, she had stayed calm; she hadn’t even looked at me.
* * *
—
In the first of our Sunday grammar lessons with Mr. Ibarra, we began, somewhat randomly, with expressions of want: “I want, you want, he/she/it wants.” At first, we only had access to our very small vocabularies, and so were stuck making sentences like, “I want an onion,” or “I want a shoe,” but after that we learned how to pair the want with other verbs, and then we became able to really sound our own thoughts in the language: “I want to eat.” “I want to sleep.” “I want to use the bathroom.” “I want to do (blank).” “I want to say (blank).” “I want to forget (blank).”
But as it turned out, want was not necessarily a logical place to start. I suspect that we began there only by my father’s request. I understood—it felt liberating to air our wants. We felt like we were real Basque speakers; people who could express not just their needs, but their superfluous desires. It was a luxurious point of entry, but after that Mr. Ibarra sent us right back to the very beginning, where we belonged. The next week, all that we were given to couple with want was I am, it is, my name, and this, that, there, along with a small bank of bland adjectives: pretty, short, long, small, sad, exciting, skinny.
After our first lesson I had foolishly believed that I was on the cusp of being able to speak my own thoughts as they rose in my mind, but no matter how I toyed with that second collection of words, they never brought me any closer to sounding like myself. And they were difficult for me, still. That was the tragedy. Even after the hour lesson with Mr. Ibarra and after another spent on my own in the confinement of my room, I couldn’t even figure out how I am changes to you are. I felt the limitations of the language all over again, fumbling through those conjugations, and I lost my desire to voice even my wants.
Mr. Ibarra had us working three shifts a week, seven to midnight. Initially, my mother had stood up for me. Fifteen hours was too much, she said; I was only twelve. I had never had a curfew of any sort at the farmhouse—there was no need—but if I had, it would have been well before midnight, or one in the morning, when I really got off work, having finally pawed through a sink of dirty dishes while two of Maite’s friends would lazily dry the plates and return them to their places. But when my mother brought it up, my father responded in some combination of ill-conjugated words that we were still indebted to the Ibarras, that there was nothing he could do. Mr. Ibarra was a reasonable man. He even had children himself.
It was not until my fifth shift that I learned that Maite, Mr. Ibarra’s daughter, was in fact one of four Maites in the kitchen. I had called her name—I needed to know what to do with the steak knives that I had just cleared—but before I even finished speaking, three other girls turned around and stared at me with dull, probing eyes. Seconds later, the real Maite emerged from a corner of the kitchen with a potato skinner and a half-bare potato in hand. I held up the steak knives and the real Maite pointed to a soaking bin behind me. The other girls turned back to their work. I could never remember, later, who was Maite and who was not.
But the Maites loved Julen. That was true of all of them. After the night shift, they emptied into the stone alley behind the tavern and settled on the sloping bricks. They made use of the angle of the alley to recline comfortably in provocative poses. Someone was always lounging on her side with her head propped coquettishly upon a hand; others lay on their backs, and kept their bent legs open wide enough to make a tent with the skirts of their dresses. From above, the alley would have looked an oddity: a narrow chamber of stone dotted all over with soft, heaping mounds of flesh.
The first time that I was invited to join, I sat a length away, on the back steps of the tavern kitchen. A blanket of smoke hung above us in the air. After ten minutes of the Maites talking around me, I got up to leave.
“Wait, Ana,” someone called out after me. I stopped and swung around on the stairs. I had been holding on to the metal railing with one hand, and I let my weight fall away from it so that my body dangled before them.
“Yeah?” I said.
“What’s your brother’s name?”
Every night after that all the Maites cawed after Julen until he wandered to the alley and joined me on the back steps. He accepted one of their cigarettes the first time that he sat out back with us, but each time after that he declined. Some of the Maites tried to engage him in conversation, but his answers, by necessity and, I liked to think, by preference, were short. I still can’t remember feeling closer to my brother than when we sat together on the back stoop of the tavern kitchen. What had begun as a private silence, confined to our own house, turned public in front of the kitchen girls; it felt like an honest, unpretentious show of love for each other.
* * *
—
At this same time, in Mr. Ibarra’s lessons, I was discovering all the ways in which Basque differed utterly from Spanish. Even the order of words in a sentence was different, at times nearly opposite. I had known that from the beginning, but as we continued to add new elements to our basic sentences, I began to lose my hold on even the most basic sentence formulations. When we started out, I could handle onion-the, and then onion-the-pretty-is, but soon that turned into give-onion-the-pretty-to-me, which, when I wasn’t paying attention, became give-onion-the-pretty-to-me-otherwise-leave-will-I-and-ever-no-return.
The lessons revealed in painful increments the full extent to which my father’s whim had restructured our lives. I began to question the order of every sentence that I spoke. There was a period when I lost track of the order of modifiers entirely, both because I was confused, and because I really didn’t care, and so every sentence that I tried came out scrambled, leaving poor Mr. Ibarra stunned and embarrassed when he listened to me speak.
At some point during this period, I was filling in for one of Maite’s friends on an afternoon shift. A group of men lingered at one of my tables, doling out liquor in small doses until the r
est of the dining room emptied and they remained there alone, exceptionally drunk. I watched them from behind the bar with the boy who worked when Julen and Mr. Ibarra were not around. When one of the men raised a wobbly hand for the check I started toward them, but just before I reached them, he pulled the tablecloth out from under their collection of glasses and all four drunk men charged together toward the door.
As I chased after them, I yelled, “TABLECLOTH-ME-IT-GIVE,” then “ME-IT-TABLECLOTH,” then “GIVE,” and then, as my legs gave out beneath me and the men disappeared down the street, the ruined white fabric rippling out behind them, “Tablecloth tablecloth tablecloth tablecloth.”
We canceled our Basque lesson on the Sunday of my thirteenth birthday, and instead the four of us sat at a table in the corner of the dining room. My father was disappointed to miss the lesson—we were becoming relatively advanced, already moving on to the past tense of to have—and he sat there, poring over his notes, until my mother came in from the kitchen with a lopsided cake, and set it down on top of them.
He scowled at her, but then he pulled my head in toward his and kissed my hair. “Today, you have a birthday,” he said to me. Then, growing excited, he said, “Tomorrow, you had a birthday yesterday.” His eyes darted around the room. “Today, we have cake—”
“Be quiet,” my mother said, cutting into it. On the top was written “Ana 13 urte,” which just meant “Ana, 13 years.” I wondered if maybe she hadn’t known the word for birthday until my father spoke it just then. We were all eating in relative peace when Julen came into the dining room, carrying a birdcage with a napkin haphazardly draped over it.
He shoved it at me and said, “For you.”
My mother and I spent the rest of the afternoon sliding our fingers between the metal bars of the cage, attempting to pat the bird’s head without getting nipped by its beak. The bird was petite and covered in ragged feathers that it seemed to shed indiscriminately. There could have been something wrong with it, but we didn’t care; for a brief period of time, my mother and I directed toward that bird all of our love.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 8