All That Followed (22 page)

“Of course,” I said.

39. JONI (1953)

She delivered in February 1953, in the Hospital de Santa Marina. The child was two weeks early, slightly underweight but otherwise healthy. They required me to stay in the lobby for the seven hours that she was in labor, though it was unclear if this was because we weren’t legally married or if Nerea had in fact asked the nurses to keep me out. After two hours of smoking the harsh Ducados that they sold at the hospital caf
é
, I asked again to be allowed into the delivery room and when I was denied I walked out through the hospital’s heavy glass doors.

It was early still—the contractions had started after midnight, and we arrived at Santa Marina just after three. The streets of Bilbao were just beginning to stir; Franco’s sanitation workers with their drab brown shirts and matching baggy pants angrily swept up crumpled papers and pieces of shattered cider glasses. The air was filled with the screeches and crashes of trucks unloading large spirals of sheet iron onto the massive ships in the harbor nearby. Closer, I heard the metal rattle of a restaurant’s storm door rolling up, and I ducked under the half-open door into the dim bar.

The young man behind the counter was placing clean glasses in neat rows onto a head-high wooden shelf. He had the dark curls made popular that year by the goalkeeper for Athletic. When I pulled back a seat at the bar he started, then smiled.

“Early, eh?”

“Or late,” I said. “Depends on how you look at it.”

He nodded, as if waiting for further explanation.

“My wife,” I said, nodding in the direction of the hospital. “She’s having a baby.”

“Right now?” he said, raising his eyebrows. He was a young guy, no older than twenty-five, but his temples were streaked through with early graying. “Shit…”

“Do you sell tobacco?” I asked.

“Of course. What do you smoke?”

I thought of Nerea alone in the hospital room with the stern nurses, and I wondered if the unborn ghost that we had refused to talk about for so many months was now the born ghost. If now at last we would be able to mention him or if we would be required to maintain our silence and to live out our existence with this new, living ghost. And then I thought of the November before last, the night of the rainstorm, and of just how much blood there had been on the sheets of the old doctor’s bed and how when it came, the body of the boy was the dark purple of a bruise, as if he were gathering all his power to finally cry out, and how as I waited the doctor massaged the body of the boy and held the small chest to his ear, and the dark purple of his skin was slowly replaced with the waxy yellow of death and the cry never came.

“Anything besides Ducados,” I said. “And a coffee with brandy.”

He placed a pack of Chesterfields on the bar, then flipped on a radio before beginning to steam the milk for the coffee, the hiss of the steam mixing with the warm voice of Victoria de los Angeles singing “Hincarse de Rodillas.”

40. JONI

Mariana began to dress differently in the months before her husband was killed, before the three boys were arrested. She’d arrive at the Boli
ñ
a in colorful summer skirts hiked up an inch higher than usual, or she’d be wearing a navy blouse with an extra button undone, the pale brown of her collarbone visible. Just the slightest bit of eye shadow, a gold band on her wrist.

It was the month that Jos
é
Antonio’s posters first appeared on the walls in the old part of town, “Torres, a New Vision for the Basque Country,” and at first I wondered if this was the reason for these small touches of glamour. One Saturday afternoon not long after destroyed this idea, though.

I had left Muriga to see an American movie showing at the cinema in Bilbao, an indulgence I still allow myself once or twice a year. As I drove past the second bridge on the way out of town, I saw Duarte and Mariana sitting next to each other at the Bar Iru
ñ
a—a roadside restaurant frequented only by passersby on the highway—halfway through a bottle of
txakoli
.

Before I realized what I was doing I had pulled over to the side of the highway, just down the road from the bar. I rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, watching the two with a hyperawareness that comes with jealousy; I read significance into the folds of their clothes, the closeness of their hands on the table, the exaggerated way that Mariana laughed at one of Duarte’s jokes. They had drawn their chairs near each other so that their knees touched under the table, and I saw Mariana’s hand reach casually for Robert Duarte’s as if this had happened many times before.

I watched like this for several minutes before noticing that the girl was with them, playing among the empty tables. Elena was tugging at the American’s sleeve, trying to get his attention, and if I hadn’t known better I’d have thought they were just another young family enjoying an afternoon out.

*   *   *

“YOU HAVEN’T
asked about my shoelaces lately,” she said one afternoon. We were sitting on the stone wall that surrounds the beach, and a few feet away Elena was sitting at the water’s edge, the small harbor waves sending wet sand over her thick legs.

“Is she all right there, on the
orilla
?” I asked.

“She’s fine,” Mariana said, hardly bothering to check on the girl. “You used to ask. Or if not about the shoelaces, about the operation.”

“Well?” I said. “Was I right? Have the ‘visions’ gone away yet?”

“Just the opposite. My investigations are starting to pay off. I’ve discovered some details from my new friend’s former life,” she said, patting her stomach happily.

“What details are those?” I said sickly.

“Well,” she said, putting a hand on my knee. “Now who’s curious?”

It was one of the sexless flirtations that I’d noticed more and more during those months, an affectation that reminded me that I was seen as only a harmless old man.

“He was from Aia,” she said. “I read an interview with his sister. She mentioned a girlfriend in Zarautz—that explains the girl leaning up against the seawall. Remember how I told you about the girl?”

“Mariana, goddamn it, keep an eye on your daughter!” I said. A larger wave had come up the beach, spraying sea foam across Elena’s legs and into her face. The surf lifted her briefly, floated her for just a moment out toward the sea before setting her back down onto the wet sand. The girl toppled over backward, her mouth readying to cry.

“Shit,” Mariana said. She dropped down from the short stone wall where we were perched and ran the few feet across the beach, scooping the crying girl up against her. As she rubbed a hand under her daughter’s wet cotton shirt, between the small edges of her shoulder blades, I was again carried back to that terrible morning when I had hidden all the knives in the house. I felt now that something both dreadful and inevitable had been set in motion.

*   *   *

A HALF
hour later Mariana had changed Elena out of her wet clothes and given her a plastic container of sliced strawberries to snack on, and now the girl was sleeping soundly on the beach blanket. Mariana had been quiet since the incident, as if she were embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. About the kidney.”

I didn’t say anything. Elena’s shoulders rose and fell as she slept, and I fought back an urge to put a hand on the girl’s back, to touch the corn silk of the stray hairs behind her ears.

“It sounds crazy,” she said. “I know how it sounds. I think I’m just looking for something new in my life.”

“You don’t have anything new in your life?” I said, thinking of the young American up in the old fortress of San Jorge, teaching my ninth-year grammar class. But if Mariana understood what I was suggesting, she didn’t show it.

“It doesn’t seem like it,” she said, tracing her finger through the warm white sand.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I began like this or what I’d say next. But on some level, through some hidden desire, I’d been readying myself for this; it was part of a plan that led to Jos
é
Antonio’s kidnapping, to my late-night meeting with the young detective, to the day after Jos
é
Antonio’s funeral when Mariana cornered me against the wall in the plaza to demand that I never speak to her again. “I have a friend in Bilbao. A doctor.”

The finger stopped its tracing in the sand. Mariana swept away the dark hair that had fallen over her face and looked at me closely.

“And?” she said.

“And I asked him about your … case,” I said.

“Damn it, Joni. I must sound like an insane person,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Not about the memories. About the donor.”

“It’s confidential information,” she said.

“Yes, for most people,” I said, thinking quickly, trying to figure out the implications of the story as I told it. “But he’s an emergency room doctor at Santa Marina. I asked if he could find the name of the donor.”

“Why would you do that?” she asked. Her voice was shaking.

“I thought you’d want to know,” I said. “I guess I wanted to know too.”

She nodded. For a moment we both sat there in silence, the girl between us on the blanket. The wind blew voices over from down the beach, stirred the girl’s hair.

“So?” she said finally. “What did he say?”

“Do you really want to know?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “But it’s too late now.”

I like to think that at that moment I took a breath. That I paused, and in that pause I thought about what I was about to say—the lie I was about to tell. That I considered the consequences, that I had Mariana’s best interests at heart. I like to think that now.

“It was a boy,” I said. “Fourteen years old. Hit by a work truck while he was riding a bicycle to his father’s house.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, I don’t believe that.”

“It’s true,” I said. “I swear to you that it’s true.”

41. IKER

The visiting room isn’t like what you’d expect from the movies. It isn’t a wall of heavy glass divided by a bank of two-way telephones, and it isn’t a large room cut in half by a row of rusted iron bars. It’s a visitation room for offenders that have been deemed “nonviolent,” a label I earned after my second year in the Salto. The prison administration has tried its best to make the visitation room comfortable for the families of the inmates. The room is filled with small tables, and the inescapably yellow concrete walls have been plastered with printing paper colored over by children’s crayons and markers. The papers contain the shaky outlines of small hands, green and orange scribbles that seem completely meaningless but that are nonetheless dated by an adult and labeled with the young artist’s name. There are art supplies in plastic boxes in a corner of the room, and there is a vending machine that sells Conguitos and Chupa Chups and sunflower seeds. The visitation room seems more like a primary school classroom than the south wing of Spain’s most remote penitentiary.

Nere has remained faithful to me as much as I could expect or hope for her to be faithful. Which is to say, she remains faithful by faithfully telling me about her life in Muriga, which has carried on in my absence. On Easter Sunday last year, for the first time since my transfer to the Gran Canaria, she didn’t come to the prison alone. I had been warned, of course, but when she entered the family visiting room carrying the boy, I held back tears for the first time since my transfer to the Salto, when I was only eighteen.

“Iker,” she had said when she entered the visitation room, holding the colorful bundle close against her chest, “Iker, this is Julen.”

We stood across from each other there in the visitation room, neither knowing how to proceed now that there was this new life held between the two of us. I tried to smile for her, but when I reached over to put a hand on her arm, she began to cry.

“He’s very handsome,” I said. She nodded weakly, looking down at the small face pressed against the thin ridge of her collarbone. “He has blue eyes.”

“Yes,” Nere said. She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her free arm. “Juan Mar
í
a has blue eyes. I thought he wouldn’t get them, because mine are so dark. But yes…”

*   *   *

SHE HAD
met Juan Mar
í
a during my second year. The sentence itself was a span of time entirely inconceivable—twenty-eight years before the first possibility of release—and I told her that I didn’t expect her to wait. She had only nodded when I told her this. She had come to this long before. And yet it wasn’t until that second year in the Salto—when Nere told me about the young doctor who had transferred to the hospital in Muriga from Pamplona—that I fully understood my life and plans with Nere had died with the Councilman.

We found ourselves trying to hold on to what we had first loved about each other—we tried to keep the openness that we had both valued so much in Muriga, the honesty that had set this relationship apart. But in the end she didn’t want to know about the unpleasant realities of the Salto del Negro, and I didn’t want to hear about her life without me in Muriga—the apartment that she and the doctor had paid a deposit on, Friday nights in the old part of town with a group of friends I didn’t know. The spaces between our conversations in the Salto grew larger and larger. The letters became less frequent.

For the next two years I almost dreaded her annual visits. They seemed only to disturb the soothing monotony of life in the Salto. Her trips to the Canaries began to double as vacations—she would spend an afternoon with me in the visitation room, and then she and the doctor, Juan Mar
í
a, would spend three days drinking oversized cocktails on the beach of the Hotel Neptuno before returning to Muriga.

When the letter arrived in June of my fourth year in the Canaries, after almost five months without communication, I nearly threw it out without opening it.

“What’s biting your ass?” Andreas finally asked after I had been carrying around the envelope for a week. He was shaving with the disposable razors that we are allowed to have in our cells once a week, and he stopped the blue razor halfway down his chin to point at the envelope. “Most of us are glad to get a letter every once in a while, but you’ve been in this mood ever since
that
arrived.”