All That Followed (14 page)

He still looked like the kid I had grown up with, the floppy brown hair and the crooked tooth that only came out when he smiled. But I didn’t know this person standing in front of me at all, and I wondered if he was thinking the same thing about me.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure. All the same, I’m going to see the
guiri
professor. Should I tell him you’re sick?”

“Tell him whatever you want. Tell him to read the newspaper.”

*   *   *

IN THE
last two months I might have gone to Garrett’s class twice. I’d always liked the old man, though; in
primero
he would dress like Saint Nicholas for class pictures, handing out plastic bags of candy to each of the students. It’s strange what you remember about someone. Even now, when I think of Professor Garrett, I remember the white plastic hairs his fake beard would leave on your sweater at Christmastime.

I arrived at San Jorge a half hour before the opening bell. There was a strange quiet that I wasn’t used to. Only a couple of boys stood behind the chain-link fence surrounding the play area for the little kids in
primero
. The ones who’d been dropped off early by their parents, before the buses arrived. They reminded me of goats at the zoo, the way they walked aimlessly, kicking at the dirt or climbing for a second up the slick metal of a slide, only to slip just before the top and land in the dirt. The good-looking young teacher that had been hired a year or two before, the one with the tight curls in her hair and the baggy sweaters that made her look older than she was, watched the children absently as she smoked a cigarette from the edge of the playground.

He had been my English professor since I was eight, and I can only ever remember him as being old. Fifty? Sixty? Ninety? It was all the same. But the man that opened his office door that morning seemed to have aged twenty years in the last few weeks. His eyes were rimmed with red, and he’d missed a button on his shirt, so I could see clear through to his bony chest.

“Good morning, Iker,” he said in English. He looked behind me into the hall. “Our friend Asier isn’t going to join us today, I suppose.”

“He is sick,” I said, the English words rolling awkwardly in my mouth. Garrett sat on the edge of his desk and motioned for me to sit down on a chair.

“Do you know why I asked you to come here?”

The answer seemed obvious enough, but he wanted me to say it out loud. He wanted to shame me this way.

“Because”—I struggled for the words in English, words that I’d known before, for one exam or another—“I am missing the classes.”

He leaned forward, as if to tell me a secret. When he spoke, it was in his Spanish—grammatically perfect but with its heavy American accent.

“Yes,” he said. “You are missing classes. But the better question is, ‘What are you missing these classes for?’”

It was then that I noticed the newspaper on his desk, the yellows and blacks of the burning gasoline almost standing up off the page. I waited for him to play his hand.

“I understand how this town works, Iker. Nobody thinks that I understand its little rules, but I do understand them. I’ve been here for forty years, more than twice as long as you’ve been alive.”

I’d never heard anyone talk like this, let alone an adult. A professor. An old man. An American. He hadn’t asked me anything yet, so I kept my mouth shut, waiting to see where he was taking this conversation.

“It’s the way this town works, isn’t it? To stand by and do nothing while people throw their lives away? To act like we each have our private lives, when in reality we all know everyone’s business.”

“I don’t know,” I said. The last of the hash was still tangling my thoughts. What should I have said to the old man? I couldn’t understand what he was asking me. I began to wish that I hadn’t come, that I had gone with Asier.

“Of course it is. But I can’t anymore.” He sat down in the chair at his desk and drew it closer to me so that our knees nearly touched. I could smell the stale coffee on his breath, could see the slight purple tint to his teeth. He reached behind him toward his desk, then swung the
Muriga Daily
onto his lap.

“Everyone knows, of course.” He tapped his hand on the flames of the bus. “Not about
this
. I don’t even know if you and Asier are responsible for this. But I do know that you are caught up in it. I’ve seen you—everyone has—running around like criminals with your masks and glasses. It’s the great game, isn’t it? To be the revolutionary?”

I hoped that if I kept silent it would be over sooner.

“What exactly is it that you two are fighting for, anyway?” he asked.

I remembered the way that Gorka had described our cause: a people’s right to autonomy, the right to self-determination, the need to fight against a government that put people in prison just for expressing their political ideas. But all of these seemed too far removed from the empty school at the top of the hill, from my gray slacks and my navy jacket. The old man carried on: “Your father is a banker, isn’t that right? He bought your scooter, pays for your school. And Asier—everyone knows who his father is. I understand that people in the Basque Country have suffered, and continue to suffer. Believe me, I understand that better than you think. But your lives are
easy
,” he said. “So what exactly
are
you trying to accomplish? What’s your goal?”

“I don’t know,” I said. And in fact this was true. I didn’t know exactly what I had wanted to accomplish or what Gorka or any of them had wanted from all of this. From running in the streets, from torching the bus. On the cover of the newspaper, next to Garrett’s hand, I could see the bus driver watching his bus burn, the fare box tucked under his arm.

Garrett sat back in his chair looking satisfied, and I felt like I could breathe again.

“Let me ask again,” he said. This time he took the newspaper and tossed it into a small metal garbage bin next to his desk. He waited until I looked up from my lap, and when finally I did, I could see that he was smiling. It wasn’t a condescending smile, or the smile of someone who had beaten you in a game of
pala
. It reminded me of the look my father would give me before each of my football games when I was in
primero
. “So, Mr. Abarzuza, what is your goal?”

I held my breath for a moment, and when I finally let out the air in my lungs, words began to come out with it. I told him that more and more, I just wanted to leave Muriga. That I had been reading lately, writers like Bukowski and García-M
á
rquez and Lorca. Books that I would steal from the bookshelves in Professor Irala’s classroom while the old man was in the bathroom, that I would read alone in the old bunkers above the cliffs between San Jorge and Muriga.

They were words, ideas, that I hadn’t shared with anyone, some that I hadn’t even admitted to myself. I told the old man about Nere and about the cousin in San Sebasti
á
n and the possibility of leaving Muriga to go to school there. About maybe studying literature or trying to write myself. And all through this, the old man maintained his smile, as if he had expected this all along. If I had to put a word to it, I’d say he looked satisfied.

“You’re not going to pass the English exam at this rate,” he said. “You know that, right?”

I nodded, looking back down at my hands on my lap. I remembered the things they had held in the last few days: motorcycle helmets, brown turds of hash, Molotov cocktails, a translated book of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Nere’s short, dark hair. All of the plans I’d just said out loud—the move to San Sebasti
á
n, studying literature—seemed stupid now, nearly impossible.

“But you have another three months before exams,” he said. “I’m willing to work with you. I can’t guarantee that we have enough time, but I’m certainly willing to try if you are.”

I looked up from my hands, which seemed so full and so empty at the same time.

“Please,” I said. “Please.”

*   *   *

WE SPENT
the next ten minutes creating a schedule: since I had attended so few classes, the best course of action would be to start from the beginning, compressing the entire course into a six-week class. I would be assigned three chapters a week from the textbook, and we would meet twice a week after school and once on Saturdays to review and work on conversation. By the time we’d finished planning, I had two pages of notes listing what I would be responsible for. Garrett leaned back in his chair, seemingly satisfied, and took a pack of Chesterfields from the top drawer of his desk. He drew one out and put it between his lips, then offered the pack to me.

“It’s not like no one knows you smoke,” he said when I hesitated. “We see you and the rest sitting around the other side of the school, in the old arches.”

I took one of the cigarettes and lit it with a lighter from my pocket, and for a moment the two of us just sat there, not looking at each other, smoking, thinking.

“You know, I had a Nere too, once,” he finally said. Outside his window, the playground was now filled with the small children from
primero
, playing their games with the serious faces that children always wear. He took a drag off his Chesterfield, then scratched at a small stain on the lap of his shirt. “She’s what made me want to stay in Muriga, why I’m here now, I suppose.”

It was something I’d never asked—why Garrett was here in Muriga. He’d been there all my life. Whenever Garrett did come up in conversation, my parents would refer to him only as “the American” or “the English teacher.” “I saw the English teacher at the butcher buying two cuts of pork,” my mother would say. “One for him and the other for that dog of his.” And now he was giving me a clue. More than that, maybe. He was confessing something.

“What happened to her?” I asked. The bell rang for first classes to begin, but Garrett made no motion to get up.

“She died,” he said. “She died in a car accident in 1955. She was driving the road between here and Bermeo. You know the curbs that drop all the way down to the ocean?”

The old man was staring out the filmy window, through the haze kicked up by small fires in the fields to where the green ocean water came up to the edge of Muriga, as if he were looking for a specific boat in the harbor. I tried to imagine him as a young man at the funeral of his wife, but it was impossible to pull a younger Garrett out of the dry-skinned, white-haired man in front of me.

“The car went off the road right there.” He moved his open hand in front of him, as if it were traveling around a bend in the road. “Our daughter was in the car with her.”

*   *   *

FOR A
long time after that morning, I tried to figure out why the old man told me about his wife and daughter. Maybe it was to gain my trust. To make me think that we were becoming friends. But now, six years later—after the death of the Councilman and after the trial, after the transfer to the Canaries—I understand the old man’s confession differently: it was simple honesty. I see it in some of the men here at the Salto, men serving life sentences or men who would rather stay in the prison than ever be free again. It’s the honesty that hangs like a stench around broken men, men who no longer have anything to take.

23. JONI (1951)

We had been living together for two years when Nerea became pregnant. By then we had moved out of the coldwater apartment above the grocery store and into the guesthouse of Kattalin Gorro
ñ
o’s farm on the northern edge of town. Here, in the small house with its garden backing up onto the Ubera River, we would stay awake until the early hours of the morning sipping coffee at the kitchen table and reading aloud to each other the works of Miguel de Unamuno or Alfonso Sastre, artists and playwrights who had been censored by the dictatorship. In the summers I would return from a day at San Jorge to find Nerea in the kitchen beating a half dozen eggs—a fork in one hand, a new translation of an Orwell novel in the other—wearing one of my old work shirts unbuttoned and open against the afternoon heat. These are the days against which I have measured the remainder of my life.

But even the blinders of forty years don’t block out the darker days from this time. I often suspected that the old women’s whispers as we walked through the plaza weren’t prompted only by the impropriety of a young Basque woman living, unmarried, with a foreigner but by the presence of Nerea herself. “Be careful with that one,” Santi Etxeberria told me once after the fiestas of the Virgin’s Ascent. “She’s never been right in the head since her father was killed.”

And in fact, when I look back on those brief years, I force myself to remember not only the good days but also the days when Nerea would close herself into the spare bedroom, refusing to eat or even bathe. On these days, which seemed to occur more often during the chilly, overcast winter months, I would pry the lock and open the door to a cold, damp draft, Nerea wrapped in the duvet and huddled against the wall underneath an open window.

“Should I get your mother?” I asked on an evening when I was feeling particularly helpless, particularly over my head. I’d only met the old woman once, during the wedding of one of Nerea’s childhood friends, and she seemed as uncomfortable with the introduction as her daughter had been. But now I only wanted someone else in the house with us, this house that now felt cold and removed and as if it had never held the warmth of a summer afternoon. I wanted someone to put on hot water for coffee, to rattle around a couple of pots and cough once or twice while I lifted Nerea’s thin body and carried it to the bathroom, where I had filled the tub for her. But Nerea laughed at my suggestion, as if I had asked to invite Franco himself over for dinner.

“Is that it?” she said. There was a harsh edge to her voice. “You’ve been talking with her? Is that it?”

“No,” I answered. I tried to bring her closer even as she pulled away. “I don’t even know her. But she’s your mother. I just thought that—”

“Are you planning?” she said, beginning now to cry. “You’re planning with her, aren’t you? To send me away.”