All That Followed (6 page)

10. IKER

The first time I saw the Councilman in person was in February of our second-to-last year at San Jorge. It was raining
a c
á
ntaros
, like my grandma used to say. And since the crank on Ram
ó
n Luna’s car window had broken, water was blowing in through the gap and the right shoulder of my blazer was soaked down to the San Jorge crest. Asier was in the passenger seat, and we drove yet again around an apartment building at the corner of Atxiaga and Zabaleta. Ram
ó
n’s girlfriend, Nere, sat next to me in the back, her leg resting against mine in the dark.

“What’re you reading?” she whispered.

I looked at the book sitting in my lap, then handed it to her.

“
Love in the Time of Cholera
,” she read, tilting the cover toward the light from the street. I felt Ram
ó
n watching us in the rearview mirror.

“It’s a political book, actually,” I said. Somewhere from the mix of radical histories and anarchist manifestos that Ram
ó
n assigned us I’d found writers like García-M
á
rquez and Camus, intellectuals who reinforced our political views but whose books were more than just ideas or slogans. I reached for the book but Nere ignored me, brushing away my hand so that she could read the description on the back. “The author is a socialist.”

“Sounds like a love story to me,” she said, flipping the book back into my lap.

In the eight months that Asier and I had been with Ram
ó
n’s cuadrilla, Nere had always dressed in the thin black jeans and tight black military jacket that she was wearing now. I, of course, had fallen in love with her the moment we first saw her, arriving at the
local
behind my mother’s art studio to paint banners for a demonstration (just the same ten kids with anti-Madrid slogans painted onto an old bedsheet). A month before, she had shaved off her long, dark hair except for a single thin chunk just behind her left ear. I loved her even more for this. She was cracking sunflower seeds, spitting the shells onto a newspaper clipping. The air in the car was a mixture of salt and saliva and tobacco.

“Let me see the article again,” I told her.

She spit the broken husks onto the paper, then leaned past me to brush them out the crack in the window. When she handed me the clipping it was wet with spit and rain, and the black-and-white photograph of the Councilman was darkened in the area above his head as well as at the waist of his suit jacket. Ram
ó
n had been talking about the Councilman for weeks—the usual bit about how the man was importing ideas from Madrid into Muriga, about a plan to undermine the Basque independence movement through small-town politics—but this was the first time we’d ever actually looked for him in person. “Know your enemy,” Ram
ó
n had said when he first proposed tailing him for an afternoon, though it wasn’t at all clear what we were supposed to be learning about him. When Ram
ó
n again drove the dented Croma past the market on the corner he brushed back the thin hairs from his forehead. “This asshole is just another one of the dictator’s men,” he said

We referred to him as “the Councilman,” even though he was only being mentioned as a possible candidate for the general election the following year. Torres had caught Ram
ó
n’s attention, I think, because he was so young, something you didn’t see from the PP in Muriga. “Deliberate strategy to undermine the younger voting demographic,” he’d said. I was used to Ram
ó
n’s way of speaking, using three long words instead of one short one. When Ram
ó
n wasn’t around Daniel and I would push our hair off our foreheads to mimic his receding hairline and say, “The social imperative of the Basque revolutionary movement requires that you drink this rum and Coke immediately!” and other nonsense. We believed in Ram
ó
n’s cause, just not in the words he used to describe it.

But now, in the backseat of the Croma, I didn’t make jokes about Ram
ó
n. Something real seemed about to happen, and it unsettled us—even Ram
ó
n, I think. He was fidgeting nervously with a cigarette lighter.

I studied the article from
El Diario Vasco
; in the picture, the Councilman was leaving the Muriga city hall. He didn’t look like the demon that Ram
ó
n described. He looked a little like a cousin of mine from Irun, actually. His hair was parted in the middle and flopped to each side like a young boy’s haircut, and in his left hand he seemed to be carrying a sandwich wrapped in foil. He was just starting to show a gut. In the background of the photo, I could see the Elizondo restaurant, Susana Monreal turned slightly toward the cameraman as she swept a napkin out into the gutter.

The article didn’t refer to him as “the Councilman,” but rather as “Jos
é
Antonio Torres.”
Jos
é
Antonio
, I thought, and I tried to remember if I had seen him in town before. He had moved to Muriga after completing his graduate studies in political science in Sevilla, the article said.

It was late afternoon, and the streetlights were just beginning to come on when I felt the start of a headache, the ones that can still drop me where I stand. It started small, just a cold metallic taste at the back of my tongue, as if I had been sucking on a ten-peseta piece. Then a slight smell of burnt hair, and with it an explosion of pain. The pain started where it always does, just behind my ears, and quickly became so sharp that I leaned over against the back of Asier’s seat, and this plunged me underwater—slow and cold and without sound. I held my breath and waited, trying not to be sick.

An endless minute later, as the streetlights slowly came back into focus, I felt Nere’s hand at the back of my neck. We rounded the corner, and I saw we had nearly returned to the apartment building where we started.

“Are you OK?” she began to say. But before she could finish, Ram
ó
n jammed the brakes of the car, and Asier was pointing across the street to a man and a woman leaving the building. The woman was tall and thin, dressed in dark slacks and a blue rain jacket. Her eyes had dark rings under them. The man with her was pushing a stroller covered by an umbrella. It was the first time I saw Jos
é
Antonio Torres in person.

The pain continued to ease as we watched, all four of us trying to act casual when the couple made their way past the car.

“She’s pretty,” Nere said absently, watching the three. She kept her hand on my head, her fingers pushing lightly through the hair at the base of my neck. “He did well for himself, didn’t he?”

She was right. The woman was too thin to be entirely healthy, but it was obvious even from a distance that she was beautiful.

“Take a note, Asier,” Ram
ó
n said, exhaling smoke into the Croma. Asier flipped open his school notebook and held his pen above the page, waiting. “Five twenty-seven. Councilman leaves apartment with wife and child.”

11. MARIANA

In the months before the doctor in Bilbao made her diagnosis, the anemia brought on by two barely functioning kidneys had left me lethargic, hardly able to leave the sofa to get Elena dressed. Jos
é
Antonio had diagnosed it as a mental health issue, a sort of late-onset postpartum depression, and though I never said as much, I tended to agree with him. I was on my own most of the day with Elena and felt suddenly isolated in Muriga, the town that I had spent the greater part of my life in. Occasionally, I’d meet up with Victoria, my oldest friend, at the park on the Paseo de los Robles, and Elena would play on the brightly painted jungle gym with Victoria’s son C
é
sar. Victoria and I would talk for a while about old boyfriends or about our husbands’ jobs. But inevitably we ran out of things to talk about, and we would sit in silence and watch our children laughing or screaming as they ran around the little park. I found myself missing Sevilla and the self-centered existence I had there.

But almost immediately after the operation, my energy began to return, and with the new energy came the smells, the cravings, the edges of these new memories. They kept me company, in a way. When they came, I would tap the black stitches on my abdomen and wonder what my new kidney was trying to tell me. When Elena was asleep for her afternoon nap, I would go to the living room mirror and lift up my shirt.

“Who are you?” I’d ask the incision, and as if in response, I would smell a whiff of hashish or feel a humid warmth on the underside of my arm, as if I’d just passed my hand over a boiling pot of stew.

It became a game. On the days that I smelled the hashish, I would speculate that the kidney had belonged to a Moroccan man who had sold cigarettes on the streets of Zaragoza, and on the days that I felt the heat on the underside of my arm, I would picture my kidney pumping away inside a heavyset woman working in the kitchen of an old restaurant.

Soon, though, certain sensations began to crowd out the rest. It was as if the kidney were trying to communicate something to me, something more specific than “I existed before you. I belong to someone else.” I found myself craving the smell of burning sulfur, so that I would light a match just to wave it out, then repeat the action. Late at night, I would sit at the kitchen table lighting match after match, touching the pink scar and theorizing that my kidney’s original owner had died in a house fire, or perhaps in a burning car.

Eight weeks after the surgery, I began to take Elena to the library in the basement of the Muriga city hall in the afternoons. I would point to Javier Gamboa, a friend of my mother’s who had worked as a security guard at city hall for as long as I can remember, and Elena would say, “
Arratsalde on
,” in her high child’s voice. Javier would lower himself to Elena’s height on his brittle knees and say, “
Arratsalde on, Elena. Zer moduz?
” Good afternoon, Elena. How are you today?

While Elena stumbled around the empty aisles of books or slept in her blue stroller, I would scroll through rolls of microfiche, scanning through six weeks of Spanish newspapers for the day of March 4, 1997. When I first told Joni about this new pastime of mine, he had shaken his head in a way that suggested not judgment but real worry. It was a look I had been used to seeing from my mother, or from Jos
é
Antonio, but never from Joni.

“What do you hope to gain from this new hobby, Mariana?” he had asked during one of our morning coffees at the Boli
ñ
a. It was his use of my name that did it, that changed it from a question to a warning. The change in tone had annoyed me.

“It’s not that I hope to
gain
anything, Joni,” I said. “It’s interesting, is all. More interesting than staying at home with a two-year-old, anyway.”

*   *   *

ON THE
first day of my investigations, I learned that there had been no house fires in all of northern Spain the day of my operation, and there had been only two fatal car accidents. According to public record, ninety-eight people died on March 4 in the region of the country that my new organ had come from, though nearly all of these had died of old age and would not have been donors. Of the list of the dead, I found only five viable candidates: an eleven-year-old girl struck down by a car in Le
ó
n; two men in their forties killed in an auto accident between Pamplona and Vitoria; an eighteen-year-old girl who had committed suicide in Pasajes; and one other.

The last death was mentioned on the front page of every newspaper that appeared the day of my surgery. It was accompanied, most often, by a series of three photographs.

The first photograph showed an apartment building like you might have found anywhere in the Basque Country, except that it was surrounded by the dark navy uniforms and black ski masks of the Ertzaintza. There was white police tape stretched around several police cars, blocking off the entrance to the apartment building. A crowd had gathered, pushing against the tape.

The second photograph of the series was dated two years earlier, the blackened shell of a sedan smoldering in a parking garage. The car was so completely destroyed that it was impossible to even tell the make, while the windows of the two cars next to it had melted in the explosion. There was a white sheet placed on the driver’s seat of the sedan, though it was difficult to imagine that there was anything to cover up; even the car seats seemed vaporized entirely. And again the dark figures of the Ertzaintza milling through the background of the photograph. The scene looked vaguely familiar, as if I might have seen it on the news when the explosion had taken place two years earlier. The caption read:
Spanish Intelligence Officer Killed in ETA Car Bomb, June 12, 1995
.

As I examined the final photograph I experienced a physical reaction, a tremor of nausea and a tingling along the pink seam holding in my borrowed kidney. The picture, the largest of the series, was a police photograph. It showed a young man in his midtwenties. He had dark hair cut short. His ears were a little on the large size and his nose drifted slightly to his right. He was wearing a T-shirt, and he smiled just enough to show his crooked bottom teeth.

The caption below read:
I
ñ
aki Libano, ETA Terrorist Responsible for 1995 Assassination, Killed by Ertzaintza Tuesday in Mondrag
ó
n.

12. JONI

The morning after my lunch with the Duartes I returned to work at San Jorge. The sun was just coming up over the foothills of the Pyrenees as I headed toward the main entrance of the school. I had made it a point to arrive before Robert Duarte, but when I found his new Renault already in the lot, I began to walk the perimeter of the schoolyard, finishing a cigarette.