All That Followed (2 page)

I allow myself more. I imagine a bullet spinning back into the rifled barrel of a stolen pistol, a blue Peugeot lifting from an ocean cliffside back onto a ribbon of asphalt. I imagine the world undone back to a spring day six years in the past, when I had not yet been set upon by the ghost of Jos
é
Antonio Torres.

3. IKER

The letters began in early February.

I hope you don’t mind
, the Councilman’s wife said at the close of the first letter.
My daughter started school today, and the apartment suddenly feels empty.

“She’s trying to punish you,” my cell mate Andreas warned. He was working on a drawing for his sister, a view of the courtyard from the Salto del Negro’s cafeteria. “She wants you to know that you’ve taken everything from her. She wants you not only to rot your life away in here but to feel guilty while you do it.”

“No,” I said. “I think I believe her.”

“Fuck that,” Andreas said, blowing carefully at an area of the paper that he’d finished shading.

*   *   *

A FEW LETTERS LATER
, she asked if the Councilman had begged for his life. If he knew he was going to die or if he thought, up until the very end, that he might escape from all of it.

It’s not like that
, I had written back.
It wasn’t either one, really.

It has to be one or the other
, she said in the next letter, which arrived the day of the explosions in Madrid.
You’re just not saying.

No
, I answered.
It doesn’t have to be true. Just because you don’t beg, this doesn’t mean that you have a hope of surviving.

You’re just not saying
, she said again.
You don’t think I should be asking this question, or you think you have a duty to protect him.

I waited a long time before responding to this last letter. I scratched the tip of my pen against the concrete walls of the prison for hours at a time, trying to decide if she was right or if in reality I was only interested in protecting myself.

4. JONI

“It’s the strangest thing,” Mariana told me. It was early September 1997, the year before the kidnapping and murder of Jos
é
Antonio Torres. We were sitting on a white bench along the Paseo de los Robles, overlooking the Bay of Biscay. A late-summer wind swept along the walkway, carrying a bite that reminded you that cider season was nearly here. Mariana’s two-year-old, Elena, knelt close to a cement planter box, prodding gently at the recoiling eye of a snail. “I calculated that I have been tying my shoelaces an average of three times a day for thirty-two years. Thirty-five thousand and forty times, always in the same manner: the squirrel runs around the tree, then through the hole and out the other side.”

“I think we used a different method in California,” I said. “I remember my mother teaching me the ‘bunny ears’ technique. A knot for the head, and then we add on the rabbit’s ears.”

“Yes!” she said. “The rabbit’s ears! Suddenly, after the squirrel has run around the tree thirty-five thousand and forty times, I begin to use the rabbit ears. Can you explain it?”

“It’s not so unusual, is it?” I asked, though it did strike me as odd. I’d known Mariana since she was a child, since before she left Muriga in her early twenties for design school in Sevilla. She’d always been a little anxious, ruminative; she liked to pick her cuticles until they bled and had a strange habit of underlining sections of the
Diario Vasco
as if she were studying for an exam. But she had never been prone to melodrama. I picked up the small metal spoon from my saucer, placed it facedown against my tongue for the last taste of coffee and sweet cream.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, trying to steer her away. There was, after all, no satisfying answer here.

Mariana placed her hand reflexively at her side and looked over to where Elena now quietly played with a discarded bar napkin.

“Elena,
utzi hori
,” she said sharply in Basque. The girl looked to her mother and dropped the napkin to the damp, moss-tinged tiles of the paseo. Mariana held her hand out to the girl, and when she had pulled Elena onto her lap she continued on in Spanish.

“Is it too early for ice cream?” I asked, loud enough for Elena to hear. The girl turned to me, nearly incredulous. Even then, there was a strange wrenching that Elena provoked in me each time the girl was near, a reminder of something I worked hard to tamp down. I smiled weakly at Mariana, shrugging.

“
Mesedez, Ama?
” Elena implored her mother in her voice that seemed improbably high, almost an imitation of a child’s voice.

“Well, I can’t say ‘no’ now, can I?” she said, pushing the girl gently from her lap. I reached a hand down and the girl took it, shyly, and let me guide her to the freezer next to the cashier.

When the girl and I returned from the bar, Elena with chocolate ice cream already dripping over the paper wrapper, Mariana was shaking her head, barely trying to hide a smile.

“How is the term, Joni?” she asked.

“They’re bringing a new teacher to replace me. An American, Anselmo tells me.”

“You’re not leaving us, are you?”

By then I’d been living in the village for five decades, most of my life. I had known her father, I
ñ
igo, when he was her age now. And yet her question reminded me that I would always be considered a foreigner here, a visitor passing through. Even Mariana took for granted that one day I’d pack up my apartment, that I would sell my old Volkswagen, walk Rimbaud over to a neighbor’s house, and leave for California.

“No,” I answered. “Of course not. But they think that I’m too old, that I’m from the past generation. They need a young American, they say. Goikoetxea tells me that the parents prefer their children to learn modern English, whatever that means.”

Mariana shook her head and issued that light clucking sound of disapproval that Basque women employ to such great effect, but didn’t say anything more. We’d spent a great deal of time together since Elena’s birth, Mariana and I, and we were past consolations.

“So who is this American?” she asked. She was still staring at her feet, the bow formed by the two rabbit ears rather than the squirrel around the tree.

“He’s a Basque, actually.”

Mariana raised the arch of her dark eyebrows a touch, as if skeptical.

“Or at least he is of Basque descent. Anselmo says that his father is from Nabarniz.”

“Nabarniz?” Mariana said, smiling. Muriga is a town of only twenty thousand, but its inhabitants never pass over a chance to disparage a town more provincial than itself.

“The usual story. The parents of the father worked the sheep ranches in Idaho for a hundred years, until they had put their children through college, and then both died the day after they retired. In forty years, the parents never returned to the Basque Country.”

I used the phrase “Euskal Herria,” the indigenous term for the Basque Country; in Muriga, it is virtually unheard of to use the Spanish term,
País Vasco
.

“In a way, then, your story is the usual Basque story, but in reverse, isn’t it?”

I hadn’t thought about my own life in these terms before. It was unsettling. I recalled the stories I had heard the older generation of Muriga tell, of young men who set off to work as sheepherders in the most remote areas of the American West: the Ruby Mountains of eastern Nevada, the high deserts of southern Idaho. There were the success stories, the boys from the village who would return five years later wearing audaciously cut suits purchased in San Francisco, their pockets jammed with five-thousand-peseta bills. But there were other stories, of young men who had gone mad out in the hills, who had been broken by the absolute solitude of the work. These men didn’t return to the Basque Country. Instead, they were found destitute on the streets of Boise or Reno or slumped against the wheel of a camp wagon in the middle of the desert, a thirty-thirty draped across their legs.

“Yes,” I said to Mariana after pausing to consider the comparison. “I suppose you could say that.”

I remembered my final afternoon in California before taking the bus to the airport in San Francisco in the summer of 1948. It was four years, almost to the day, after my parents had received news of my brother’s death, a brief typewritten letter signed by a colonel from the Pacific Theater. A high school basketball injury had kept me out of the war, and my father never let me forget it. He’d found a job for me with the Union Pacific, where he worked as a signalman, though it had seemed more like a punishment than a favor. But the work allowed time to study between shifts. I’d been good with language and became infatuated by Spanish culture after reading
For Whom the Bell Tolls
in my last year of high school. I graduated from Sacramento State a semester early with a degree in Spanish literature—an accomplishment that just drew another shake of my father’s head—and had set aside enough of my salary to buy a one-way ticket to Madrid and still have money to travel for a few months before I’d need to find a job. I’d barely left the Central Valley, let alone the United States, but I was certain that the life I’d imagined for myself existed only in my hazy, romantic vision of Spain.

Mariana bounced the young girl on her knee and looked out onto the green expanse of the bay. Across the harbor, the first of the morning fishing boats were returning to the marina.

“You never answered my question earlier,” I reminded her. “How are you feeling? You look stronger. What have the doctors told you?”

She lowered Elena down to the sidewalk and gave her a brief pat on the bottom, setting the girl tottering down the paseo.

“The truth, Joni?”

“Of course the truth.”

Again, she placed her hand reflexively to her side. I pictured the incision hidden under her blouse. How it must angle down from her ribs against her thin stomach, the way the black stitching pulled her light-brown skin together into an angry line. I stopped myself there, not knowing how far my imagination might go.

I had asked a doctor friend of mine about the operation, and he said, not surprisingly, that any time an organ was transplanted it was a very serious thing. That for the rest of the patient’s life there would be the risk of rejection; the body working against itself, always struggling to keep out the foreign object. But Mariana was young and fit, and the prognosis was good. The doctors had been surprised by how well the operation had gone and had, in fact, discharged her from the hospital a day early.

“The truth is that it’s fine. I do feel stronger.” But she said this without conviction or, rather, with a conviction that ran contrary to her words. I sat quietly, and we both watched Elena in the middle of the walkway, her short legs set apart in a sturdy stance. Nekane Basagoiti said “
Agur
” to us as she passed by pulling a wheeled tote filled with groceries from Mart
í
n’s store. She stopped to pick up Elena and kiss her on the cheek before continuing on her way. I knew that Mariana wanted to say more, so I waited. “But the truth, also, is that I don’t feel fine. The stronger I feel, the more I think about the organ. It occurs to me, each time I can do something new, that it’s only because another person died. Today I showered, and for the first time since the surgery, it didn’t hurt. And do you know what I felt?”

I shook my head no.

“
Guilt
.” She stopped herself again, and then asked, “Do you know who the ‘ideal donor’ is, Joni?”

“No.”

“A boy between the ages of twelve and fifteen who has been rendered brain-dead by a traumatic injury. Can you imagine? The ‘ideal donor,’ a thirteen-year-old boy.”

I pictured the incision under her blouse again, and with it came images of a young boy stretched out on the clean white sheets of an operating table, a team of anonymous doctors working around him as if he were a field to be harvested.

“I look at Elena,” she continued, “and I can’t help but think that in another ten years she’ll be nearly an ideal donor. I’ve become some sort of cannibal, Joni.”

We sat together in silence, watching the girl as she stood alone on the paseo.

“Have you talked to Jos
é
Antonio about this?” I finally said. It was a meaningless question, my way of saying
, I have nothing to offer here. This should be your husband’s problem.

“Not about this,” she said. “He asks how I’m doing. He asks if I am feeling any of the side effects of the drugs. He examines the incision for infection, tells me that he has grown to like my new
hozka
, my new bite. But no, I haven’t told him about this. About the boy.”

“There isn’t a boy. You know this, don’t you?”

“Of course. But there
is
someone. Maybe it’s an old man. Maybe it’s a girl, like Elena. I can’t pretend that there isn’t someone.”

“Does it matter, really?” I asked. “You act as if they’ve been killed just for your purposes. But these people were dead already. There’s no connection between you and their death, is there?”

She ran her hand over the space of her stomach, as if she were pregnant. “And would it really not make a difference to you, Joni? Would it not matter?”

She asked this question with a genuine curiosity. It was as if she’d never considered the possibility, or as if she’d never considered that someone might think differently than she had. I couldn’t bring myself to lie. “You should talk to Jos
é
Antonio about this. He would understand, I think.”

She shook her head, as if she finally understood I was incapable of helping her. I suppose she had thought of me as an old man who had gathered some amount of wisdom along the journey, and I’d disappointed her.

“No, it’s fine,” she said. “Besides, Jos
é
Antonio is in Burgos three days out of the week, and when he is not in Burgos he’s working at the Party headquarters. He used all his free days when he was at the hospital with me in Bilbao.”