All That Followed (4 page)

By the time Ram
ó
n finished the rain had begun to let up. We passed the box of wine around the fire, and Asier rolled one more before we stood and stretched our legs. Asier and I headed up the hill to San Jorge while Daniel and Luken went back down along the cliffs toward the public school in town.

It wasn’t until the fourth day of the trial, two years later, that I realized the significance of those moments when the four of us split ways, Daniel and Luken returning to the dingy school on Atalde Street next to the public health clinic, and Asier and I back to the looming fortress of San Jorge. I never understood the importance of this divide until it was too late.

7. JONI

I was still considering Mariana’s question as I steered the old Volkswagen up the final curves of Monte Zorroztu and turned off into the dark fingers of pines that marked the driveway to Colegio San Jorge.
Wouldn’t it matter to you, Joni?
On the south side of the drive stood a weathered sign bearing the school crest, a red cross over an expanse of peeling white paint. Along the top, in Spanish, read the school motto: “Serve by Teaching, Teach by Serving.” Underneath, in English: “International School of Muriga,” an addendum that was stenciled onto the sign after I, the lone foreign teacher, accepted the teaching position in 1948.

My window was rolled down to allow in the thin mountain air and to force out the gray smoke from my cigarette. The sounds of the primary school playground came in with the fresh air—high shrieks of pleasure, harshly spoken imperatives, the rattling of chain link from the loners who paced the perimeter of the yard, kicking at the fencing as if testing for a weak spot. As I parked the car I saw the children as Mariana had suggested: not just children but containers of organs playing in the yard, waiting to be harvested. As Dav
i
d Hermo ran off with Juliana Gorriti’s pencil case I imagined a pink liver hidden under his navy V-neck sweater. Dav
i
d sprinted to where a group of boys waited, beckoning him to safety behind the soccer goal. Yes, I admitted, Mariana had been right. It would make a difference where the kidney had come from. It would make all the difference.

Colegio San Jorge was converted to a school from an old Republican army barracks in 1941 after Franco’s forces had rooted out the last of the antifascists in Muriga. Before that, it had been a fortress dating back to the sixteenth century. During my first summer in Muriga I would lie in bed with the woman who taught me to say
txirimiri
, naked on top of the sheets in the cold-water flat I had rented from Mart
í
n’s father above what is now the grocery, and she would tell me what it had been like. She told me how the Guardia Civil had rounded up all of the Republicans, Communists, and Anarchists and shot them against the wall of the barracks. Forty-eight men from a town of two thousand, including her father and uncle. And now the children of Muriga, these grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Civil War, throw tennis balls against the ramparts, tuck themselves into the mossy alcoves of a five-hundred-year-old doorway to light the tips of their stolen Lucky Strikes. There’s some comfort to it, that Muriga still exists among the bones and shell casings of its own people, though whenever I attempt to explain this to my Basque friends they wave their hands and say, “You’re an old romantic, Joni. It is only because you are a foreigner. I would say the same, or something similar, if I was with you in California.” They always use the Spanish word for foreigner,
extranjero
. Stranger.

By the time I crossed the playground of the primary school, which occupied the western wing of the fortress, the children were no longer lungs or kidneys or livers but were again children. Their black shoes scuffed from kicking at the dirt or at each other, their cheeks flushed with the cool air.

I left my briefcase on the desk in my small office, which overlooked the steep, forested hillside that ran down to Muriga a kilometer below. Rivulets of brown smoke crept up where farmers had begun to burn the chaff from their fields. I heard a knock against the pebbled glass panel on my door, and when I looked up I found Juantxo Goikoetxea’s toadlike head wedged into the open space, four or five strands of hair pulled absurdly across the top of his head, thick-rimmed glasses pushed up tight against his face.

“When you are ready, John.” He spoke to me in stiff, carefully considered English. “The American waits in my office.”

“Are we speaking English today?”

“Yes,” Goikoetxea answered gravely, now in Spanish. “The American speaks Basque but does not speak Spanish very well. And his wife not at all. Only English.”

“Lucky for you, then, that you hired him to teach English.”

Goikoetxea laughed uneasily. He had never been comfortable as an administrator, and I suspected he secretly longed for the days when he only taught geography. He withdrew his toad head from the doorway, saying again, “When you are ready, John.”

I had promised Goikoetxea that I would take my replacement to lunch and show him around the town a bit before he observed my afternoon classes. As the only American at Colegio San Jorge (or in Muriga, for that matter), I was often called upon for this sort of duty, to accompany an Australian cousin or British girlfriend on a tour of the city, more for my services as interpreter than for my stellar company. But this was a professional assignment, to situate the new man in Muriga, make sure that he knew how to dial an international number, show him where to take his wife in case of illness.

I took an envelope of graded papers from the briefcase and left them on the desk next to the day’s lesson plan. I had used these plans for the better part of thirty years, each one on the same day of each year, so that each time I taught the imperative form of “to leave,” I knew that Athletic Bilbao, the nearest football team in the Primera Liga, would open its season that week in San Mam
é
s, and when the children of San Jorge chanted conjugations of “to love” (I love, you love, he loves, she loves, we love, they love…), I knew that it would soon be my mother’s birthday. I examined the page I had set out for the day, on the use of the imperfect tense. The page of notes, typed decades ago, was lined with handwritten annotations in a half dozen different inks. Within these scrawlings, a more subtle difference came into focus: the earliest notes written in sharp block letters with a youthful crispness, the most recent, scribbled in a sloping, weary script. Hopelessly tattered, its edges torn and dog-eared, the paper itself was yellowed to something resembling parchment, physical evidence of my arrival into old age.

I imagined the American studying this lesson plan, drawing this same conclusion, and so I slid it into a drawer before setting off to Goikoetxea’s office, closing the door behind me.

When I entered the office, which awkwardly occupied a turret on the northeastern corner of the school, the American and his wife sat in two chairs opposite Goikoetxea’s desk. None of the three were speaking, and I had a feeling that this had been the case for several minutes. Goikoetxea stood up from his desk, relieved, and said in hurried Spanish, “Finally, Joni. We have been waiting.”

The new American and his wife stood to greet me. The wife was a classic American beauty, one that stirred an immediate sense of nostalgia after so many years in the Basque Country. Her hair was, of course, blond, cut neatly just above her bare shoulders. She wore a fall dress, dark-brown cotton accented with a colorful red ribbon. It had obviously been picked out from one of the boutiques in Biarritz or San Sebasti
á
n on their way to Muriga. But the Europeanness of it was undone by the cream-colored skin, the broom-handle thinness of her arms, the frailty of her features. Here among the women who were, at best, a generation away from the fields, with their dark, solid shoulders, she seemed transported not just from another continent but from another time.

And next to her stood the new American, Duarte. He, too, was undeniably handsome. Broad-shouldered, just enough color mixed into his complexion to betray his Basque ancestry, but with a hint of severity that was absent from his wife. A dark beard encircled his tight mouth, almost concealing the faint scar of a cleft palate.

“John,” Goikoetxea said in his stilted English. “I present you to Robert Duarte, and to his woman, Morgan.” Neither Robert nor Morgan flinched at the mistranslation.

“
Egun on
, Mr. Garrett,” the American said. His voice was softer, of just a higher register than one would expect of a man his size. “Everyone that we have encountered in Muriga has mentioned you. It’s great to finally meet.”

“Juantxo mentioned that you spoke Basque,” I said, Goikoetxea’s head perking at the mention of his name.

“Just a bit I learned from my father around the house,” he explained.

“I thought you might take them to the Elizondo,” Goikoetxea said in Spanish, eager to usher us out of his office so that he could return to his business, his historical maps of medieval Europe, his stacks of biographies on the early cartographers.

“Yes,” I said. I caught myself staring at the thin scar running from the top of the American’s lip. Jagged, like the sutures running along Mariana’s thin abdomen, like the frayed edges of my lesson plan.
I was eating. I used to eat.
“Of course. The Elizondo.”

Outside the window of Goikoetxea’s office a dark thunderhead was mounting over the harbor; it was just beginning to rain along the Paseo de los Robles, where I had sat to have coffee with Mariana a few hours before.

“There’s no use waiting, is there?” I said. “It looks as if a storm is set to arrive.”

8. MARIANA

At first it was easy enough to explain away the sensations that came to me after the surgery. Jos
é
Antonio suggested that the strange smell when I woke in the recovery room might have only been the anesthesia still lingering in the back of my throat, and this seemed likely enough. But they continued even after we returned to Muriga, these amplified sensations of d
é
j
à
vu. I would run my fingertips along the underside of the kitchen table, and suddenly it was as if I were standing on the verge of a memory, at the edge of an entire life I had forgotten.

Mostly, they would come to me as odd smells, strange appetites that were easy enough to ignore. Suddenly I would be craving Corn Flakes, or I’d remember a few words from a song I’d never heard before, or I’d have the unexpected desire to open the bedroom window during a storm.

“You’re getting the floor wet,” Jos
é
Antonio would say. “And besides, the cold air can’t be good for you.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I’d say, sitting on the floor next to the open window, tracing designs on the dark hardwood with the water left by the rain.

*   *   *

TEN DAYS
after we returned to Muriga from the hospital, on the first day that Jos
é
Antonio had returned to work at the Party headquarters in Bilbao, the old American professor Joni Garrett came to visit at the apartment. My mother had left the day before, after I assured her that I could shuffle around well enough to change the girl’s diapers and steam vegetables for her lunch. But after a morning alone with Elena I became restless, eager for someone to talk to, and so when I ran into Joni Garrett on the way to the corner bakery I invited the old man up.

“Did they make a large incision?” he asked, and when I lifted my shirt to show him, he knelt down and put a hand lightly up to the clean dressing. It was a strangely personal thing to do; I hadn’t expected his touch, only the old man’s curiosity. “Does it hurt much?”

“No,” I said. “Not as much as you’d think.”

He nodded, then asked if I had tea instead of coffee.

As I filled the kettle with cold water he asked, in his usual way (I’ve never been sure if he’s actually poetic or if his way of speaking is just the product of translating his thoughts into Spanish from English), what my first memory was immediately after the operation.

“In the moment that you came back,” he began, “before your eyes opened, what did you recollect?”

“
Membrillo
,” I said without hesitation. I was surprised by the answer, as if it wasn’t me at all that had said it:
membrillo
. Quince jam.

There had been an old woman in the bed next to mine in the recovery room. Unconscious. Chest rising and falling in time with the machinery. A ribbed blue tube down her throat. Wires and bandages holding together every limb. And above the clatter of the room—the sucking and breathing of the woman’s respirator, the newscast from Telecinco (a house fire in Burgos; Bar
ç
a 3–1 over Betis), the burning fumes of alcohol swabs and antiseptics—the undeniable smell of
membrillo
, the sweetness of the caramelized fruit.

“That isn’t so unusual,” Joni said. “I saw a program once where a woman was having an operation to remove a tumor from her brain. You should consider yourself lucky, Mariana. A new kidney is easy. For brain surgery, they keep the patient awake.”

I couldn’t help laughing. I’d heard several people in Muriga say that they found Joni Garrett off-putting or eccentric. They mistrusted him for never having married, and they couldn’t understand why he’d stayed in Muriga for so long. But he always had a way of cheering me up. “So what does this have to do with
membrillo
?”

“In the program, the doctor performing the surgery is speaking with the patient. The top of the woman’s skull is removed completely. The doctor pushes a metal probe against a certain part of her brain and asks her, ‘What do you feel?’ ‘The uncomfortable feeling when you walk on the beach and there is sand between your toes and your sandals,’ she says. ‘Good,’ the doctor says, and then he moves the probe to another part of the patient’s brain. ‘And now?’ ‘Cookies,’ the woman says. ‘I smell the pecan cookies that my aunt made for me when I was eight years old.’”