House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  Ben had seen the painting. He had stood before it in the Museum of Modern Art. At the time it was an obligatory stop on his tour of the city. He’d come with his wife and two girls, when they were small. Yet only he had felt obliged. The museum guide had explained that the painting was to remain here, in the land of the free, until real freedom was restored in Spain. He remembered the guide’s almost quipping and partisan aside: since Spain had never been a free country, it was hard to imagine just what Picasso had had in mind. And too late to ask him since the exiled Spanish master had recently died. The chances were Guernica would be here in MOMA for years to come.

  After the great visceral howl that came off the painting had died down, what Ben remembered was its playfulness. He would not remember it being painted in blacks and whites and grays. He would swear it was painted in the primary colors of a child.

  ETA was born when the commander of the Allied forces that had rid the rest of the continent of fascism, but had failed to do so in Spain, came to Madrid to extend an approving hand to Franco in his stand against communism. Ben didn’t remember this. He was far too young. He didn’t really remember Ike, except as a sort of cloudy grandfatherly visage hovering over the country during the first years of Ben’s life. Ike came and shook Franco’s hand, and separatist Basques, who had been waiting for years for the Allied hero to give them their D-Day, split from the dominant nationalist party and became an armed insurgency.

  He had read that and had no reason to doubt it. Nineteen fifty-nine. In that year, that cloudy grandfatherly visage had looked down on his daughter. But a cloudy grandfatherly visage was not a face.

  The books agreed that Franco had used the Basques to set the rest of Spain an example. The Galicians, the Valencians, the Mallorcans, the Canary Islanders, the Aragonese and especially the Catalans might entertain separatist ambitions, but once they saw what Franco did to the Basques, they’d have second thoughts. Municipal government, education, taxation, labor, the appointment of officials down through the ranks, the running of the ports, the prisons, the policing of the streets—everything of any importance was controlled by Madrid. The Basque fueros, special rights granted centuries ago by some Carlos, Felipe or Ferdinand, and which, as far as Ben could tell, had mostly to do with the levying of tolls in and out of the region, were suspended. The use of the Basque language was outlawed, although certain folkloric customs were allowed to continue. Boys and young men could still band together in groups of five or six— cuadrillas, they were called—and swear a loyalty oath. They couldn’t be kept from forming their mountain-climbing clubs and climbing to the tops of their mountains. Nor, once there, could they be kept from airing their grievances in the language of their choice, or from plotting.

  In the green valleys, beside rushing rivers, the businessmen who chose to accept Madrid’s terms prospered, while on the mountaintops, where Franco’s police and Civil Guard couldn’t be expected to climb, clandestine organizations were born.

  In God’s eye, ETA was born.

  In Sabino Arana’s eye.

  The purist. The pacifist.

  The organization would splinter, of course. There would be personality clashes and clashes of ideology. Those who sought any sort of accommodation with Franco’s Spain were termed españolistas. There was a Marxist group that thought along international lines. Those who continued to subscribe to Arana’s vision were interested only in a nation of pure-blooded Basques. Given the effects of immigration—there had been an influx of poor Castilians to work in Basque steel and lumber mills—you were considered to be pure-blooded enough if one of your grandfathers was.

  On the top of a mountain, of course, everything might seem pure.

  On a clear day, from the top of a Basque mountain, you might imagine you could see all the way to a Madrid park, around which ran a girl with a golden ponytail.

  Memory began, Ben believed, in 1970, his first year in college. In addition to all the civil rights turmoil, and information and misinformation coming out of Vietnam, he vaguely remembered something about a trial of ETA activists in the Castilian city of Burgos. The books he read at his daughter’s university would tell him that the exact number of activists was sixteen, that two were priests and several more ex-seminarians. There were two women. One of the defense attorneys managed to get on the record that Spanish police had tortured his client, and with the court looking on, scars were displayed. Before they were banned from the proceedings, members of the international press got the word out. Nevertheless, all sixteen ETA members were found guilty, and three were sentenced to death. A general strike followed in the Basque country. Sympathy strikes were called in various countries. Dockers refused to unload Spanish ships. There was an act of self-immolation. Reading brought it back to him. He began to recall his first impression of ETA, and it was of bravery, and the heroism of self-sacrifice, and the glorious legitimacy of their claim to self-determination, and even of their special character, something of their larger-than-life, mountain-rimmed apartness, as if the Basques really were a tribe of superior beings. Strong, noble and steadfast down through the years. Licensed in a way inferior beings weren’t. In a manner of speaking, pure.

  He remembered the Basques and ETA, and then he forgot about them. Later he’d hear something about a bomb going off in a supermarket, killing dozens, and a news report that stuck with him for a while about a woman out walking with her five-year-old daughter who was identified as a disaffected ETA activist and was gunned down by her erstwhile comrades, with her daughter looking on. That image stuck with him for a while; then he forgot it too. He assumed the people who had killed that woman and bombed that supermarket and the people who’d opposed Franco and to whose cause he’d once thrilled were not the same.

  The truth was, he forgot them all. He didn’t know if ETA had succeeded in its intentions or not. Or if it had gotten the best deal it could and, like everybody else in this impure world, had compromised.

  He was in his midforties and felt older than that.

  He had not lacked for money, not really. He’d made modest amounts of it buying and selling properties of diverse sorts. He’d been consulted. Without having a real specialty, certainly not a profession, he’d been a conduit; things had flowed through him. His father had built up the family fortune with a road construction company, which he, Ben Williamson, except for one summer spent shoveling blacktop, had never taken part in. But when his father died in his midsixties of a well-deserved heart attack, Ben’s mother, instead of selling the business as she’d been expected to do, hung on to it, hired a manager she could trust and watched it prosper.

  No one had thought she could do it. She had been known as the heart of the party. She was the woman who gathered all the other partygoers around the piano and made them sing. On those midweek evenings when the next party was still days away, she might run through a few chords on the piano, and, regardless of where Ben was in the house, those chords were as good as a summons. They sang songs of a deep dark yearning—“When day is done and shadows fall I think of you”—and they sang twilit songs with a melancholy lilt—“We were sailing along, on Moonlight Bay”—and they sang songs to make your foot tap—“Just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street.” Some nights they sang through the songbook, and on some songs his mother might break away and sing harmony to her son’s melody. It was always a thrilling moment because he never knew when she was going to do it. The effect was as though he suddenly had another person sitting at his side, someone keeping pace with him but hanging just out of his reach, a potential match when the distance closed and the two voices sounded as one; someone who was no longer a mother.

  “We could make believe I loved you. We could make believe that you loved me.”

  He was young when she first sat him down on the piano bench and taught him these songs. How young? He sang with her before his voice changed, and he sang with her later when his voice had dropped an octave. Her voice was narrow in its range, and there were times he was a
fraid she wouldn’t be able to hit a high note, that the song would shatter and it would all end. He dreaded singing “Indian Love Song” for that reason. There was a high yodeling note she could reach but, he worried, wouldn’t be able to sustain— “I’ll be calling you . . . oo . . . oo . . .” She insisted they sing it too, he taking the Nelson Eddy part, she the Jeanette McDonald. That he and his mother would be calling their love back and forth to each other, as though from mountaintop to mountaintop, didn’t embarrass him. His father might be reading the evening paper in his living room easy chair, and he might give his paper a crackling snap. Upstairs, his older brother might slam a door. Their mocking disapproval didn’t bother him. He was afraid his mother’s quavering voice in that upper register might come apart. He was afraid there would be a final croaking note, and then she would fold up the sheet music, close the songbook, and bring the piano top down. It would be over.

  His father died when, hands on, he was unable to open a tar-stuck valve on an asphalt spreader down at the yard and his heart exploded in his chest. His brother he rarely saw. Charley had gone west to college, caught the current of things out there, and made his fortune being a Californian. His mother made a go of the business and succeeded to a degree her husband hadn’t. And when her sense of things told her the times were about to turn, she sold the business for a handsome price. Then after informing her older and never unsuccessful son what she was going to do, she gave Ben, her companion in song, a significant part of that handsome sum. Outright. He immediately called Charley, and Charley laughed his qualms away. Charley said he’d earned it. All his mother really said was that he’d spent too many years bouncing around from job to job. She knew he wasn’t poor, but here was enough money to allow him to do what he really wanted to.

  Which was?

  To “stagnate,” his ex-wife would claim. It was her favorite word. She gave to its pronunciation a sort of bog-like gloom. With enough money Ben Williamson would become a bog unto himself. Give him some more and that bog would become quicksand.

  His mother died a year after Michelle was killed. She too from a heart attack, also without warning, while she was having her morning coffee. She’d had no history of heart trouble. She couldn’t have been expecting it. Nonetheless, she’d had the presence of mind, as her body failed her, to place her coffee cup back in its saucer and move her breakfast plate aside before lowering her head to the table. She’d been alone. A friend who’d found her told him that she had died with her eyes sweetly shut and a smile on her face. He doubted the smile. His mother must have experienced a wrenching pain in her chest, but by the time he had driven there—a distance of over one hundred miles—the mortician had already gotten his hands on her and Ben didn’t know what with her parting expression she’d been trying to say.

  He took his ex-wife’s point. She talked of a bog; he could feel himself going vague. He had a special sense for the mystery of things, but he was too soon overwhelmed. Defending himself, he could say the mystery was not supposed to be explained away. He could accuse not himself but those songs—the stardust of those songs. Smoke was supposed to get in your eyes. By nature, some things were unfathomable: “How deep is the ocean, how high is the sky?”

  But he lacked lasting power, a fierce finishing attention, the knack of knowing when he was about to betray himself.

  With money his mother had given him, he’d sent his older daughter to Spain, assuming that a group of Basque men and women once implacably opposed to all things Spanish no longer was. He’d lost sight of them. His attention had wandered. They’d become part of his blur. They didn’t exist.

  Too late, the books told him otherwise. He read squeezed into a student’s carrel in his daughter’s university. These carrels were reserved, and more than once he believed the student whose carrel he occupied had come and gone, preferring to study elsewhere rather than embarrass him. Whoever she was, she was a reader of Romantic poetry, for those were the books lined up on the shelf over the desk. He had been taught Romantic poetry in high school by a woman who had scanned every poem to death. He remembered the daffodils, of course, and a poet who wandered lonely as a cloud. And a single line: “I have been half in love with easeful Death.” He didn’t know who had written that, but, in its quiet candor, it was like the most intimate of whispers in his ear. It didn’t matter who had written it. An English Romantic poet had, and all English Romantic poets, he knew, had died young.

  Michelle had just turned twenty-one. She had wanted to improve her Spanish. She had wanted to concentrate on international relations. She would have gone to Spain even if he’d sat her down and forced her to read every word in the books he’d come to two years and eight months too late.

  In the ultimate analysis, ETA’s quest no longer corresponded to political realities but to psychological needs. A Basque’s need for a grievance was as elemental as his need for water and air. The psychological gave way to the spiritual, the mystical: there was, it was claimed, a sacramental side to ETA’s violence. In addition to provoking the average man’s outrage, each death achieved a moment’s transcendence. All the deaths together aspired to some sort of collective transcendence there on a Basque mountaintop. They expressed a violent yearning for God.

  Ben had read that.

  That massive supermarket bombing he’d vaguely recalled had taken place in the Hipercord in Barcelona. Twenty-three had died. That woman out walking with her five-year-old daughter was named Dolores Gonzales Catarain. Her nickname was Yoyes. Her hometown was Ordizia, province of Guipuzcoa. ETA had executed her in front of her daughter, not because she had informed on them or betrayed the cause. She had just wanted to quit.

  He’d read until he couldn’t anymore. Then he had flown to Spain.

  With nowhere to go—he had no interest in being a tourist—Ben went back to Parque Santander. He found the small gnarled tree and placed his hand on the spot where the bark had been blasted away from the grain. The tree, he judged, would heal itself, made of tougher fiber than he or his daughter. He couldn’t tell if the two Civil Guards cradling their machine guns across the street were the same as the day he’d stood there with Madeline Pratt. He looked up and down the street for a Seat Ibiza. The one he found this time was a sun-dulled red. He stood on the spot and closed his eyes. But he was not waiting for the car to blow up. He was telling his daughter good-bye. In some ways he might also have been speaking to his mother. I miss you. I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t know you better. I wish it didn’t always have to end like this. We travel a hundred miles or halfway around the world and stand on the spot. The spots are always empty and busy with life.

  He felt his anger coming back; more than the injustice, it was anger at the everydayness, the ongoingness. He opened his eyes and for a moment willfully took on his role as obstruction. He forced people to veer to either side, and he got some looks, which he returned. Step aside? It’ll take another one of your bombs to blow me away! Then the tension went out of him and his knees sagged. He closed his eyes again and stood like some martyred saint in the heat. He told his daughter good-bye. He said, I won’t be coming back. What’s the point?

  She answered, After two years and eight months? Don’t go so soon.

  He shook his head.

  She said, What took you so long?

  He said, It’s the way I am.

  But he did come back. He slept in snatches in his hotel room just off Paseo del Castellana and was up and dressed before dawn. From his window he could look out on a statue of Neptune standing as upright in his chariot as the trident he held at this side. This was the Palace Hotel, whose bar Ernest Hemingway had frequented. In fact, the same travel agent who’d booked his flight had booked his hotel, which was running a special offer for American tourists in Hemingway’s honor. In honor of the first or last drink the famous author had had at the bar? He never found out. He watched Neptune rise with the dawn, then went back at precisely the hour his daughter Michelle had gotten up to run around the Parque Santander, as if
it were her private jogging track. Madrid at that hour was still fresh and clear, scented by its strong coffee and just-baked bread. It had yet to be fouled by exhaust. Stepping out of the cab, he had a moment’s perspective, down Paseo San Francisco de Sales, all the way to the Sierra del Guadarrama, whose rugged granite escarpment seemed a cloudy emanation of the plain. The air tingled with a promise he might have believed in then, two years and eight months ago. He stepped into the park and sat at one of the tables close to the concession stand. The stand was not open. Mothers had yet to take their children to school. He sat waiting to see if his daughter or some other American student who could call her to mind began to run around the park.

  He saw Madeline Pratt instead. She was pacing in long thoughtful strides with her arms folded in front of her, her hands slipped into the sleeves of her sweater. Her head was half-lowered and her whole being was so inner-directed that he couldn’t escape the impression that she was performing a penance of some sort. He didn’t follow her around the park. She left his field of vision and then approximately ten minutes later entered it again, at which point it became clear she was walking laps. It was possible this was her form of exercise. While exercising, was she expressing her solidarity with all victims of ETA and acknowledging her lapse for the one student of hers that ETA had killed? That too was possible.

  He watched her pass before him three more times, the sun a bit higher in the sky for each lap, casting the gray and the cornhusk yellow of her hair into an indeterminate mix. She walked stooped, visibly tiring, he thought.

  He waited for her to come back around one more time. He intended to get up and join her on her last lap around the park. He wanted to thank her for her efforts, and he wanted to express how much he resented her taking his place. He wanted to shelter her from the heat that was already building in the air. He wanted to accompany her back to her office, where he could consult the clippings she had collected about his daughter’s death, and he wanted to bask in the warmth of her assistant Concha’s eyes.