All That Followed (15 page)

“No,” I said, feeling her body go limp, her diaphragm shuddering as she surrendered herself over to the sobbing. “I could never let you go.”

*   *   *

BUT THESE
dramatic swings seemed to trail off with news of the pregnancy. In the spring of 1952, the guesthouse along the Ubera River was again a place of warmth and excitement. The doors of the house were thrown open to clear the gloomy air that had accumulated over the winter. Nerea wore her hair pulled back, spent whole days planting beans and peppers in the garden, absently touching her stomach’s small roundness. She invited friends over for dinner, dragged me by the hand to the market early on Saturday mornings. There was a constant stream of potato omelets in those months, so that even now when I am ambushed by the smell of onion and fresh garlic beginning to brown in a frying pan, I am brought back to that kitchen we shared.

“Do you ever want to get married?” I asked her one evening in bed. The coolness of the night air was slipping over us from the open window, and when Nerea turned to me, it was with a look that suggested both amusement and sympathy.

“
Eta zuk?
” she said, poking me playfully in the chest.
And you?

“It doesn’t matter to me,” I said. And it was true; I hadn’t been raised in the Church, and though I knew I had never loved someone as I did Nerea, I felt no need to marry. My only desire was to keep the life we had been living that summer. But I was also aware of the town gossip. About how Nerea’s brother Aitor had cornered her outside the Bar Nestor and called her a
sinverg
ü
enza
, about how small towns talk. And so I asked her again.

“But do
you
, is the question. I would if it was important to you.”

“You should know me better than that by now, Joni,” she said. “I don’t care what those people say.” She waved her hand dismissively in the direction of the town center.

“And your family? And the Church?”

“I haven’t been to confession since the day my father was killed. And besides,” she said. “The only God I believe in is the one that wants us to be happy in this little house.”

*   *   *

THE CHILD
arrived in late November, just as the first winter storm blew in from the North Atlantic. In the office of Don Octavio, Muriga’s nearsighted doctor, Nerea labored from Monday morning until Tuesday afternoon, at which point Octavio sterilized a silver forceps and pulled the boy’s motionless body onto the bloody sheets.

When Nerea had finally fallen asleep after a second shot of morphine, I left the child with the doctor and midwife and made the short walk along the Avenida de San Lorenzo. From inside the shuttered restaurant came the sounds of tipsy patrons cheering Zarra and Iriondo on in the Athletic game, and the glow around the window frame seemed warm and inviting as I shuffled past. The wind swept down the narrow corridors of the cross streets and left my umbrella useless. When I arrived at the door of the Arosteguis’ apartment, I was soaked through to my underclothes.

I had never been to the apartment before; during my first few weeks in Muriga, in which Nerea and I compulsively strolled the streets, talking and pointing, she had once stopped in front of the building and pointed up to the second-floor apartment.

“This is my mother’s house. It is the house I grew up in,” she had said. The windows were obscured by white curtains, and the iron railing along the balcony was lined with small pots of red and purple geraniums. This was before she had told me of her father, of how later on her mother had sent her to live with the sisters at the hermitage near Bermeo when she was thirteen, and so I asked if she wanted to stop in.

“No,” she had said. “No, I don’t think I’ll ever set foot in that goddamned apartment again.”

And now I found myself on the landing of this same apartment, a steady shiver settling in. The yellow hallway lights buzzed, and from one of the apartments above I heard a woman tell her husband to turn off the radio. I realized, absently, that this was the same hallway through which her father had been dragged by the Falangists on that morning in 1937—I could almost see the scuffs left by the small man’s shoes as he struggled to return to the apartment, to his children, to the life that he’d already lost. And then, as if of their own volition, my knuckles struck the wooden door.

The sharp rap was followed by silence. Then shuffling behind the door and some muffled Basque, a language I knew I’d never understand. Footsteps, and then a slight crack of the door, before it quickly closed shut.

I knocked a second time. This time there was no muffled discussion from within the apartment, only heavy footsteps moving purposefully down the corridor toward the door. Before I had time to guess what was happening inside, the door flung open and I could see Aitor, his broad shoulders darkening the doorway.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

I took an involuntary step back into the hallway. It was a terrible way to meet her family—unannounced, shivering, a small puddle forming under my feet. It occurred to me, for the first time, that I was facing a real possibility of physical violence. Aitor wasn’t known to shy away from a fight; he’d bloodied Primo Trujillo’s nose over a spilled cup of Rioja just a few weeks earlier. But I had been two days without sleep, and any fear was outweighed by sheer exhaustion.

“I am Nerea’s friend,” I said.

“I know who you are,” he said. “Again. Why are you here?”

“She was pregnant,” I said.

“Of course she was pregnant. I saw her pass my butcher store every morning. Shamelessly unmarried, pregnant with the bastard child of a
guiri
. So I’ll ask you one more time why you are here.”

I began to speak but felt my knees give. I leaned back and let myself slide down against the wall until I was seated on the floor of the landing and held my head in my hands.

“The child is dead,” I said. “I thought that you’d want to know.”

24. IKER

After we burned the bus in Bermeo I began to keep my distance from Asier and Daniel. I made good on my promise to the American, met him directly after school to review the extra homework he had assigned me. I was grateful for the extra work, in a way; it allowed me to separate myself, just a little, from these things that seemed to threaten a different life that was slowly emerging: Gorka and his political manifestos, the cans of black spray paint, the bus driver holding his small box with the afternoon fares.

The bus had been a tipping point—everything before the spark of Asier’s lighter was anchoring me to Muriga, while everything since was in preparation to leave it behind. In my mind, I was now only waiting to be away at the university, to leave behind the rotting smell of the harbor and shake the last of the sand from the beach out of my shoes. The only bit of Muriga I wanted to take along with me was Nere.

This is a revisionist history, you might say. After all, the Councilman is dead, and I have spent the last five years here in the Salto del Negro, as far away from any universities or books or women as a person can be without leaving the surface of the planet. But isn’t history always revisionist? Doesn’t the truth lie somewhere between?

*   *   *

“WHOSE IDEA
was it?” Garrett said once, in the middle of a practice examination. “The bus, I mean. I’ve always wanted to know how those things come about.”

I put my pencil down. The old man was sipping at a paper cup of coffee from the teachers’ lounge, a finger tapping on the empty envelope of sugar on his desk.

“You don’t have to tell me, of course.”

But there in his office, the radiator filling the room with a sleepy warmth, over our cups of coffee, I found myself more comfortable, safer, than I had in a long time—the old American and I were friends, I realized.

I told him about the visits from Gorka Auzmendi, the way that the bus bombing had really been his idea, but presented in such a slow, suggestive way that it soon began to feel like our own. I recounted every bit for the old man, the way we’d filled the bottles with gasoline, the way the fat bus driver had retrieved his box of fares after Asier had thrown it out the bus door. And as I spoke I began to see them in a different way.

“It sounds stupid, doesn’t it?” I asked the old man. Rather than answer immediately, he sat back in his chair, as he often did when I asked his opinion on something.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think it does. It’s what I miss most about being young. The ability to believe in something despite all evidence to the contrary.”

It wasn’t until my second year here in the Salto del Negro that I began to understand what he meant.

25. MARIANA

Within the first week of the affair we had a routine; we had rules. Always at my apartment, always on the days that Jos
é
Antonio was in Bilbao. We were careful that the neighbors never saw him enter the apartment, that we were never seen leaving the building at the same time. We planned our next meetings in person, never over the phone. When Elena and I passed Robert and his wife, Morgan Duarte, in the street one afternoon I waved hello but made no effort to speak to them.

If Jos
é
Antonio’s lovemaking was characterized by his tenderness, the American’s was best characterized by its mix of affection and brutality. It had been less than eight months since I inherited the new kidney, and my strength hadn’t fully come back; yet I found myself being pushed into pillows, slid off the bed or the sofa and onto the hardwood flooring, my hair seized in his hands and his in mine. He would say things to me in Basque while we made love—sometimes sweet things, sometimes filthy things I’m embarrassed to repeat. He would call me his whore, or his love, or his little dog. And always, afterward, he would touch me in a way that was almost clinical, inspecting the pale webbing between my fingers, smelling the damp hair at the back of my neck, running his fingers over the raised pink line across my abdomen.

“How do you say this in Basque?” he would ask, pressing his lips to the scar, in that way of his that seemed affectionate but might have just been simple curiosity.

“
Orbaina
,” I said.

“Of course,” he said. He had been asking me for the Basque translations of peculiar words like these since the first day we met. He spoke Euskera well, but his vocabulary had holes in it, lacking, for example, a whole range of words that dealt with pain or toil, as if his family home where he had learned his Basque was free entirely of grief, or tenderness, or aching.

His inquiries, however, seemed to be unrelated to any real interest in my life, but rather only to advance his own version of what it was to be Basque. He often asked silly questions such as “What do the Basques think of the election of Aznar?” or “The death of Fran
ç
ois Mitterrand doesn’t seem to have much importance here in Muriga, does it?”

“I have no idea,” I’d say. Or I’d make up an answer, just to humor him or to confirm his sweeping generalizations. “Yes,” I’d tell him. “It’s true. Basques don’t like spicy foods.”

After that first day in the apartment he never once asked about Jos
é
Antonio, or about Elena, for that matter. When Robert occupied my home for those brief afternoon hours in which our affair existed, I never again caught him examining the photographs on our walls of our honeymoon in the Canary Islands or of our only trip to C
ó
rdoba, when we had introduced Elena to Jos
é
Antonio’s parents. Instead, he would sit uncomfortably on our couch, flipping through Jos
é
Antonio’s old football magazines and fidgeting impatiently, smoothing down his dark hair with his fingers. When once I mentioned that he had to leave, that my mother would soon be bringing Elena home, he seemed almost grateful to be allowed to escape the apartment.

After we had been sleeping together for a few weeks, however, I found myself struggling not to interrogate him about his wife. It wasn’t jealousy—I knew that she was more beautiful than me, that she was doubtlessly more compatible with Robert than I was. But I wanted to know the most commonplace details of their lives. (Where do you store the olive oil, on the countertop or under the sink? How often do you change the sheets on the bed? Does your wife change them, or do you, or is it something done together? Did you bring peanut butter from the United States to eat while you are in Muriga? Do you brush your teeth at the same time?) Maybe this is what we both gained from the affair, this voyeurism.

The one time that I brought myself to actually say his wife’s name, it was to ask where the two had met—the most commonplace of questions, something you might ask an old friend from primary school if you saw him in the street. We had just collapsed onto the sheets of my bed when another of the memories came to me (as they often did during my afternoons with the American), a brief flash of a young woman with dark, short-cropped hair leaning back against a stone wall, the salty, rotted ocean air pulled into my lungs, and suddenly I was talking. Against all my expectations, Robert answered immediately, as if it was the question he most wanted to be asked.

It was at a barbecue the day after his graduation from the university in Idaho, he said, on the beach of what was called Lucky Peak Reservoir. He had seen her earlier in the afternoon, sipping at a can of beer and refusing to swim in the cold water, but it wasn’t until the sun had set and the party began to wind down that he gathered the courage to approach.

“She looked just like she does now,” he said, to himself as much as to me. “Her older sister was a friend of my cousin. Even after we had been dating for several months, she said that she wouldn’t sleep. When she told me that, I knew that I had to have her.”

26. JONI

The elections weren’t for another several months, but after Jos
é
Antonio’s death in March 1998 the few placards and campaign posters that he had plastered along the granite walls of the old part of town were left behind, an unspoken homage. Jos
é
Antonio’s dark suit seemed a little too large for his thin build and he was framed in bright lettering proclaiming, “Torres, a New Vision for the Basque Country.” Mariana had told me it was a campaign slogan that had been devised by the party in Bilbao. It was the same slogan being used by a wave of young conservative party candidates in small towns throughout the region, she said, one that had tested well in market research from Madrid.