All That Followed (7 page)

Along the walls of the fortress, I saw evidence of the older boys: piles of broken sunflower seed shells, the crooked necks of a thousand cigarette butts, names and insults etched crudely into the stone walls with ballpoint pens. Farther up the wall, above what would have been the moat’s waterline, large divots were chipped out of the stone, scars from Franco’s Falangist tanks as they entered Muriga in 1937. By the time I completed my lap around the school, stopping once to light another Chesterfield, several other teachers’ cars had appeared in the parking lot.

I arrived early that morning in order to look over the day’s lesson plan so that the new American Robert Duarte would be impressed by the old man’s sagacity. I was already aware of my desire to impress a man who was half my age, a man who I knew had come to Muriga to take my place, even though Goikoetxea hadn’t gathered up the nerve to tell me as much. But the American had defeated me even in this small contest. I considered passing by his door, rather than stopping in to say good morning. Reminding myself that I was to be his mentor for the remainder of the term, I paused outside his small office. Robert answered the door almost as I was still knocking. The windowless room was bare except for a single chair and desk, upon which rested only a spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen. Taped to the wall above the desk was the room’s only decoration, a small charcoal drawing of a young woman that I recognized to be Morgan Duarte.

“I was hoping it’d be you. Goikoetxea has been checking on me every five minutes for the past half hour.”

“I think he’s just eager to impress our new American,” I said. “We get a few Americans in Muriga—college students, the sons and daughters of cousins that have moved away to the States—but none that intended to stay, Robert. You and Morgan are the first in a long time.”

Duarte nodded solemnly, as if understanding his role in a new light, even though I hadn’t meant the comment to mean much. “But Goikoetxea,” I continued, “he’s an old neurotic. He can’t help himself. He’d tuck you into bed at night if you let him.”

The American laughed, then sat back casually on the corner of the desk. “So what’s the lesson plan for today?”

“Well, I can’t remember offhand,” I admitted. “My notes are all in my office and haven’t been updated in thirty years, I’m afraid. But if memory serves me, the tenth-year students will be continuing with the imperative.”

“How is the class?”

“Intolerable,” I answered. “They’re all preoccupied with their college entrance exams this spring. Studying vocabulary is the last thing they’re concerned with. There’s a particularly tough lot of boys this year. You’ll see.”

“I did my student teaching at a low-income high school, mostly Latino kids,” Robert said.

“It’s different,” I started. “The kids with money can be even harder to deal with, in a way. We always think the poor kids don’t have anything to lose, which is scary. But these kids, sometimes it’s like they’re
trying
to lose it all. They think they have the most to prove. That’s
really
frightening.”

Again, the American nodded as if I’d said something very wise. I offered a smile; it’s always a pleasant surprise when people assume you to be a wise old man, instead of just an old fool.

“Don’t take me seriously,” I said. “They are, after all, just children. They’re nothing to be afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid,” he said. “I just want to know what to expect.”

Now, I think back to the empty seats in my twelfth-year English class, where Iker Abarzuza and Asier D
í
az were missing that morning, and I wonder how things would have played out if this had been the case—if we’d any idea what to expect.

13. MARIANA

The Sunday after they found the body I’d cornered Joni Garrett at a rally against political violence organized in Jos
é
Antonio’s honor. It was the end of a week in which I’d slept no more than an hour or two a night, in which I alternated between hours of crying followed by long stretches when I noiselessly mouthed the Lord’s Prayer into the dark.

I had seen Garrett through the crowd at the rally, had backed him against the wall on the far side of the Plaza de Armas. An official from the Party tried to calm me, but I pushed him away and kept moving toward Joni Garrett. I shoved a finger in the American’s pale old face, held my hand above his head as if I were beating a dog. I said things I shouldn’t have, even if they were true. I told him that he was a selfish, perverted old man who had no business here in the Basque Country. That he’d betrayed me in a way that was unforgivable. That I wouldn’t speak to him, that I would never even look at him. That he would never as much as speak to my daughter again. That if I saw him on the streets of Muriga he should turn the other way.

But time is the best antiseptic, as my grandmother used to say, and when I saw him at Beatriz Mart
í
nez’s wedding in April, six years after Jos
é
Antonio’s murder, I had to actually remind myself why it had been so long since we’d talked. Recently, it seems that time has become less and less dependable.

I went over to the old man after the reception was over, when most guests had already left. The tablecloths were stained purple with wine, and the waiters had begun to clear coffee cups and dessert plates. A handful of people still had no place to go (or at least were in no hurry to return), and they sat at the tables just at the edge of the lights in drunken groups of two or three. I refilled my glass with the last of a bottle of cava and made my way through the clutter to Joni.

“I saw you at the ceremony earlier, when you arrived,” he said awkwardly, standing to greet me as I approached him. “It’s good to see you. How is Elena?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Fine. With my mother until tomorrow,” I said. “My mother, who insists that I stay out. That I
socialize
. That’s what it’s come to, thirty-five and already a recluse.”

But Joni didn’t smile at my little joke. There were several empty glasses on the table in front of him, and I wondered if he’d had as much to drink as I had. If he was drunk, it was a different kind of drunk than mine. He seemed somber, contemplative.

“And Rimbaud?” I asked.

“Dead,” he said flatly. “I put him down last October.”

I couldn’t help putting a hand on his shoulder. He’d had the dog since before I could remember; might have been the old man’s only true friend here in Muriga, even after all those years.

He brought his glass halfway up to his mouth, then put it back on the table, as if changing his mind. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a pack of Chesterfields. He tapped two out and placed them between his lips before lighting them both. I’ve never been much of a smoker, but when he held one out I took it. It reminded me of the last cigarette I’d smoked, a Lucky Strike I shared with Robert Duarte’s wife, Morgan, the year Jos
é
Antonio died.

“Can I ask you something?” he said as I dragged on the cigarette. “It’s something I’ve been wanting to ask since Jos
é
Antonio was killed. Since before that, maybe.”

“You don’t waste any time with small talk, do you?” I said. I paused for a moment, wondering what he might ask, and then I shrugged. It was too late for defenses. “Sure. Why not?”

He ran a hand over his mouth the way drinkers do when you ask them if they’d like another, but he didn’t say anything. The song “Pictures of You” was playing, and a few young couples rocked slowly to the music. It was a song that always reminded me of my first boyfriend in secondary school, Paulino Murillo.

“Did you love him?” Joni asked suddenly.

“Who?” I asked, thinking for a second that he meant Paulino.

“The American,” he said. He didn’t look me in the eye when he said it. “Duarte.”

*   *   *

IN THE
six years since Jos
é
Antonio’s death, I’ve decided there are two ways to be unfaithful. I tried to explain this theory to Cristina, an old friend of mine from
secundaria
, in the months after the funeral. But it wasn’t something that she wanted to hear. Her eyes wandered between Elena, who was digging through the damp soil in the park planter, and a thread on the sleeve of her sweater that she was picking nervously.

A few years later I tried again to explain my theory, this time with the therapist I’d agreed to see twice a month—to appease my mother after Jos
é
Antonio’s death—but the therapist dismissed it as symptomatic of lingering, malignant guilt.

“You still feel as if your affair with the American—Duarte—brought about your husband’s death,” he said, and when I tried to clarify what I meant, he put it down as further proof that I was in denial.

“You’re not listening,” I said. “It’s more complicated than—”

“No,
you’re
not listening, Mariana,” he interrupted. “I’m beginning to think you don’t
want
to move past your husband’s death.”

*   *   *

OF ALL
people, it was Joni Garrett who finally listened.

I breathed in two full lungs of Chesterfield. And instead of saying yes or no—neither would have been entirely true—I explained.

The first kind of infidelity, I told him, is the most common and always involves another person. It’s a way of testing out another version of what life might have looked like, if chance or fate or God or whatever you’d like to call it had turned the world slightly in one direction instead of the other. These are variations that we’ve come to know from movies like
Casablanca
or from stories our friends tell after swearing us to secrecy: a drunken fling after a conference with the coworker, the neighbor whose boyfriend works evenings, and so on. Or you are introduced to a handsome young American right when your husband begins to spend weekends in Bilbao, as just another example. These are the stories that we’re used to, and even if we don’t necessarily approve, at least they’re familiar. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to participate in this kind of infidelity.

Joni only nodded. He seemed far away, and when I followed his eyes there were only two kids, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, dancing to Jarabe de Palo. The girl was Ander Mart
í
nez’s daughter, but the boy I didn’t know.

“But there’s a second kind of infidelity?” Joni asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And I have some experience with this too, I’m afraid.”

14. IKER

We began to go to the neighboring towns at night, on weekends.

When we were fourteen or fifteen, it was only to see a band play in some basement bar or to try for one of the girls we’d met the weekend before. Asier began to play the guitar—a fact that he liked to advertise when girls were around—and I inherited my brother’s old drum kit when he moved to Gij
ó
n for work. Even though Asier was tone-deaf and I had the rhythm of a broken washing machine, we could technically say that we had a band, that any day now we’d be playing in a basement or storage shed near you.

Soon, however, we began to plan our trips around other events. We went to a real political meeting in Gasteiz, not just a few kids drinking and smoking in an abandoned bunker. University students and professors spoke about the independence movement and the unfair treatment of ETA prisoners, describing them either as prisoners of war or political prisoners or as martyrs for the revolution. A concert was planned to raise money to fight the Spanish government’s outlawing of Herri Batasuna, the political wing of the ETA. We met people whose friends were in prison for political crimes. “He got five years for passing a pamphlet out in front of city hall in Donostia,” they would say, or “They put him in a prison in the Canary Islands for writing an article for
Egunkaria
in support of the right to self-governance.” And even though we couldn’t quite imagine someone being sent to prison for passing a pamphlet, and we didn’t understand exactly what the “right to self-governance” meant, we shook our heads and said “fucking fascists.” Then we rolled another joint or mixed another two-liter of wine and coke.

After a while we could tell that Ram
ó
n was full of crap, just another big fish in a small pond, his posturing about Jos
é
Antonio just something to get our attention. Sometimes, we would go with Ram
ó
n in his broken-down Fiat to the nearby towns. But more often, I’d ride on the back of Asier’s moto, and we would lean in against the cool nights and winding mountain roads. We told Ram
ó
n that it was just easier for us to leave on our own, when we were able, but the truth was that once we began to meet kids from the other towns, we didn’t really need Ram
ó
n around. And in fact we were a little embarrassed to show up with him at all. Nere had ended things with him at the beginning of the summer, though she was still around.

It was always the same kids that traveled from town to town, and after a few months we knew them all: the Zabala brothers from Bermeo, Mikel and Alain from Mundaka, Tito from Nabarniz. (A couple of these names may sound familiar. In the years after Jos
é
Antonio Torres, Tito Zabala was arrested and convicted of extorting business owners in Getxo, while Marutxa and David Oresti are the primary suspects in the bombing of a police station in Catalu
ñ
a in 2000 and are thought to have fled to South America.) Most of us cut our hair short, leaving two or three long chunks that we would braid or dread, which was the style among young nationalists. We would talk politics or hand out pamphlets or spray-paint street signs with pro-ETA slogans, and then we would drink and fool around in the alleys behind bars or in the dark corners of parks. They were our comarades-in-arms and our coconspirators, but more importantly, they were our friends and our lovers.

Nere was Ram
ó
n’s age, five years older than Asier and me—this fact alone made her more beautiful and mysterious than the gray-uniformed girls of San Jorge—and she even had a real job. While Asier and I were drinking cans of beer in the bunker (it seems now that my life will always revolve around either of two concrete bunkers: the crumbling walls above the cliffs in Muriga and the chipped yellow cage of the Salto del Negro), and Ram
ó
n Luna was in a university classroom in Bilbao, she drew vials of blood from old women’s arms and delivered bowls of runny gelatin and lukewarm soup at the hospital on Calle Nafarroa.