by Lamar Herrin
They met almost every afternoon. It was like a game of Twenty Questions they played while the people passed by. They never met anywhere else. She said she’d make him a meal if he missed home cooking, and he shook his head.
One day she asked him if he planned to celebrate. Then she had to tell him the date: July 4. He gave her a smile that was mostly real and strangely ashamed. He muttered loudly enough for her to hear that he had to call home. Home? And that was how Paula learned he had a daughter named Annie, which was what he meant by “home.”
Ben didn’t mention Annie’s sister, or her mother, or any of his other departed or dead. Yes, he had a twenty-one-year-old daughter, and since he didn’t want to leave her placeless in such a vast land, he ended up telling Paula the name of the town where Annie lived. Then, with a bleak sort of honesty, he claimed that was really all there was to tell.
Paula excused him and he went back to the hotel to try his luck. He called first his home phone, where he got no answer and left no message. He tried his daughter’s cell phone, which he couldn’t even get to ring. He almost called his ex-wife but decided instead to call his own phone again and leave a message. Early afternoon there—at an hour more convenient to her he’d try again. He’d tell her so. Happy Fourth, he’d add, and imagine her happy, out picnicking with her friends. In the New World. On this the New World’s day.
But she picked up on the first ring. She said, “That was you calling, just now, when I didn’t answer.”
Her voice sounded eager as a little girl’s. Before Ben could respond she cut him off. “Dad, don’t tell me where you are, okay? Not unless I ask.”
He made her that strange promise. He could tell her he was fine. The word he thought of was “interlude.” He was between one thing and another. He was taking some time for himself. More time than he’d thought. He didn’t ask, Do you mind? He asked how she was.
“Me? I’m good. I’m simplifying. I make sure Mother’s where she’s supposed to be. I sent my boyfriend home. I’m taking care of your house and car.”
“Don’t be lonely,” he told her. He knew she had friends in town. Annie had friends everywhere. He didn’t want her to be lonely, and with a curious sort of conviction in his voice, he told her there was never any need for that.
She was touched. He heard a catch in her breath. Then he heard another kind of catch, a faint shudder, and he suspected she was thinking of Michelle. She warned him, “You better take care of yourself.”
She was thinking of Michelle, and now he was. Simultaneously, Michelle had visited them both. They might have been walking in that park together, Parque Santander.
She had to rouse him. “Hey, Dad, ‘Give me one reason to stay here and I’ll turn right back around.’ Remember?”
He didn’t.
“‘Don’t wanna leave you lonely but you gotta make me change my mind.’”
Then he did. She was quoting him lines from a song. A love song.
Then she laughed, and that, Ben realized, was why he’d called, what he’d been waiting to hear. It was a laugh that cleared the decks, powerful, purgative, and in it he heard all the laughing she hadn’t done for how long?
He wished her a happy Fourth. As her father, he advised her to go out and find something to celebrate.
In the next morning’s papers he saw a picture of Armando Ordoki standing at an outdoor rally with two other men. They must have been up in the mountains, for Ordoki wore a light-colored windbreaker over his customary black shirt. His hands in his pants pockets, he was looking off to the side, with a pouting pursed mouth and dimple shadows under his bunched cheeks. He looked like a boy whose parents had dragged him off to a tiresome event and told him to stay put.
July fifth was an overcast day, drizzling rain. Ben ate in the hotel and watched the three o’clock news in his room. Nothing. Europe about to add more countries to the mix, shaking them up to see the shape that came out. The rain never let up, and by the time he walked down to the Café Gijon it was a mild downpour. Paula was not there. No one was. He walked until he came to a statue of a famous Spanish author—Ramon Valle-Inclan, the plaque read—who had been sculpted stepping off into the evening’s paseo himself. He had a long bronze beard tucked into his vest, which over the years admiring or superstitious or just playful hands had rubbed yellow. In the rain, that beard shone. He too stroked it down its billowing length and just that quickly remembered there was a literary Café Gijon behind the outdoor one. He retraced his steps. Paula was seated at a table beside one of the wrought-iron columns. She said, “I wondered if you’d remember. It was like a little test. You passed.”
Ben leaned over the table and kissed her on the cheek, both cheeks, as Spaniards did. She smelled of the rain, and the rain brought out the smell of her hair and skin. It was such a familiar smell, that smell of human nearness, that under other circumstances he might not have smelled it at all.
July sixth, and they entered a calendar of indistinguishable days. Paula told him more about her Spanish family. The father had died. The mother went to a mass a day and said a complete rosary too. She still dressed very, very well. One of the daughters was just as devout and was forcing her children to jump through all the Catholic hoops. The other daughter had been wild. She’d done a stint with the Communist Party, married civilly, gone to live in the Basque country, divorced, and refused to have her daughter baptized.
This maverick daughter, whose name was Pepa, Paula had remained close to. Jorge’s two brothers she couldn’t stand. As soon as the father died they had tried to squeeze Jorge out of the family’s hotel business, and, unwilling to stoop to their mercenary tactics, Jorge had made them a deal. He would come to Madrid and take over a travel agency the family had started, and the brothers would stay in Valladolid and run the hotel. The brothers agreed—the hotel was worth five times as much. They ruined it, of course. Compared to their father, they were petty thieves. They ended up coming to Madrid and demanding that Jorge cut them in on the travel agency, which had prospered. Jorge never lost his temper, which aggravated his brothers because they were always losing theirs. He gave them his “look.”
“It was the smile, just a grin on the right side of his mouth; it was the trusting way he leaned in close. It was the green eyes—the pleasure they took in everything and in nothing, next to nothing. Jorge has a rumpled face and a flattened nose, and when he looks at you that way it all gets transformed. You have this feeling there’s no limit to how far he can see. It was the way he looked at me when he told me he wanted a divorce. Would you like to meet him?”
Ben didn’t know what to say. He wanted to say, No, not yet, because as friendly as Jorge was touted to be, the man seemed to have an unnerving effect. But Ben was curious about that look.
Straining to see a face through her words, instead of Jorge Ortiz he saw Armando Ordoki. In none of the newspaper photos or television reports had Ordoki been smiling—the closest he’d come had been that distracted little pout—but it was a big broad jackal’s smile Ben saw now, the fleshy nostrils flaring. The eyes were crinkled and the fellow feeling that came out of them smelled of rot.
He told Paula, “One day. Not yet. Soon, though.”
And though she tried to toss it off, she couldn’t help asking, “How many days you think you have left, Ben? Rough estimate.”
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” he replied.
“It’s funny. That first day I came back to find you, I was thinking you’d run off to Zimbabwe. I really was.”
“You misread me.”
“I don’t think so. I still think you need to be accepted in some place like that. I wondered if you’d start with Leslie’s mud.”
He was a little defensive, a little abrupt. “And you don’t?” he said.
“And I do.”
“Need to be accepted in a place?”
She nodded. “I think it’s what attracted me to you.”
“So maybe Spain.” He gave her a conciliatory smile and gestured around
him, out to that stream of passersby you could never step into twice. He couldn’t recall having seen the same person more than once. Except Paula. “Maybe I’ll stay here.”
She looked at him levelly across the table. “I worry about Annie,” she said.
“I don’t.”
And he didn’t. Perhaps he worried about a world suitable for his daughter to live in but, strangely, not about her.
Ben went back to his hotel and tried to get Juan reminiscing about his hometown, Medina del Rioseco. But as willing as Juan might have been, he kept being called back to work and couldn’t do justice to his client, who was no longer sick in bed. The next morning, though, when Ben came down to breakfast, Juan extended an invitation. The following day, a Sunday, he’d decided to drive back to his pueblo. Just to spend the day. His wife couldn’t come with him. Would Ben like to?
Paula knew the town. It was close to Valladolid, perhaps no more than twenty-five or thirty kilometers. Its main street, the calle mayor, was arcaded from one end to the other, and the wooden columns were so old and stout they looked petrified. He should go. On Sundays these towns filled up with city-dwellers returning to their pueblos. It would be a Spanish moment.
A day with his friend Juan. She smiled.
In Bilbao two more etarras were killed by their own bomb, this time while they were transporting it to the target site. The police did not know what that site was to have been. The bomb had been in a backpack. It might have been left almost anywhere—not just a guardia civil cuartel, in a train station, an amusement park, a movie theater.
Police speculated that the dynamite had been in mal estado, of a poor composition, and that this had led to the premature explosion. There was further speculation about the “degradation” of ETA’s explosives in general.
Ben scanned the article for the car’s make. The charred remains, also pictured, told him nothing. But Japanese and Korean cars were being sold in Spain now; Hyundai, he’d read, had opened a plant here. ETA had a world of cars to steal from. Cars rolled off assembly lines, and generations of etarras replenished themselves. There was never a shortage of anything. There were always backpacks. That the dynamite would turn bad in their hands was just wishful thinking. The bishop of Bilbao was quoted as saying the two killed etarras were “victims of their own violence.” But he could just as easily have said that they were progenitors of their own kind, that every explosion, for the damage and death it might cause, gave birth to stars. There was no end. In cosmological processes such as these, Michelle’s death was no more than a speck of dust, which would eventually adhere to another speck and finally grow into something large enough for ETA to blow up again. He tried to see his way out of this, and failed. Then Juan picked him up and drove him to his hometown.
In an Opel—not a Seat Ibiza—they drove up the La Coruna express-way, past the turnoff for El Escorial, through the La Guadarrama mountain range guarding the northern rim of Madrid, and then on to a broken plain of granite boulders. The boulders soon gave way to small dusky oaks and sun-browned pastures. Then the trees disappeared, the last low hills leveled out, and they looked out on tableland, planted in wheat and spotted with towns clustered around their churches.
Tierra Campo, this area was called. Juan was providing a selective commentary.
He was dressed in pressed gray slacks and a white shirt. On the back seat lay a suit coat of gray, not quite a match to the slacks. He looked freshly groomed, his hair recently trimmed, and his cologne, that mix of lavender and lemon that was close to being a national smell, filled the car. He drove sitting straight up in his seat with both hands on the wheel. Was he taking extra care because he had a special passenger sitting beside him? Or was this the Sunday Juan, the Juan who on Sundays went back to his hometown? Or was he only stiff with worry that his hometown would not measure up to the boastful claims he’d made for it?
In all this space, rife with wheat and fluttered over by pigeons, there didn’t seem to be a hometown worth going back to. Just a few shells of settlements with identical silhouettes.
Then they were in it, walking down its arcaded main street, its calle mayor. The wooden columns Paula had remembered as being so old and stout as to seem petrified were actually glassy to the touch, and Ben stood with his hand pressed against one as, again and again, Juan was greeted by friends and distant family members. Juan never forgot him, not once. Ben was introduced as an “amigo,” of course, but also as an “amante de España,” and the people whose hands he shook responded “Encantado,” or “Mucho gusto,” and once, by someone practicing his English, “Spain ess different, eh?” Ben smiled and defended himself as best he could. He saw people who looked like Juan, sallow-complexioned, with protruding bones and tired eyes that lit up only when they spoke. They were faces pinched at the nose and the corners of the mouth, and they did not look very healthy.
The calle mayor emptied out into the Plaza Mayor, with its own columns and arcades but with a sudden and welcome sense of space. Ben coaxed Juan out to its center so that he could take a look around and so that he could breathe. This was the space of the plain on which the town was built, and even though people continued to pour out of that noisy and smoky calle mayor, the plaza was large enough to absorb them all.
He asked Juan, “Is it always like this? So crowded?”
Juan gave him a bitter-wise smile and shook his head. “The town is actually dying. The young people all want to go to Madrid. But on Sundays everyone comes back—even the young people do. Even I did, as you see. Because the town is our soul.”
Juan made a fist over his heart and thumped it twice. Then for a moment he closed his eyes.
They ate lunch with Juan’s older sister at her house under the bell tower of one of the town’s many churches. The bells when they sounded the quarter-hour had a thin and jangling tone, and Juan’s sister had a fond, hectoring voice that jangled on the ear like the bells. Her name was Maria Rosa. Her husband was stooped, and looked up at Ben with bright, easily amused eyes. They had three daughters, two of whom were there with their husbands. There were three small children. Juan’s mother and father came but remained in their chairs, the father, a trickster, trying to lure the children close so that he could trip them up with his cane. It seemed impossible that there would be a grandmother, although Juan had claimed that one still lived, and Ben heard Maria Rosa more than once speak the word “abuela.” In addition, there was another sister, a widow, who seemed finicky and bitter but who had a daughter with an expansive laugh who waited on her and tried to humor her back into the fold. Juan had one brother they didn’t talk about, except to say he was abroad, working in Germany, and another who had prospered in trucking and came with fine wine and champagne and a wife too loudly dressed and made up for such humble surroundings. The wife made perfunctory inquiries of everyone there, then sat off to the side and smoked.
The house was not small. It consisted of three stories, but they insisted on gathering on the third, in a small, low-ceilinged dining room that adjoined the kitchen and the pantry, where sausage and ham hung in the near-dark beside loops of garlic and swatches of vegetation that smelled like herbs. Onions and potatoes and turnips sat in earth-smelling baskets on the floor. The entire family welcomed Ben and asked him questions at the start, mainly about his country and how it matched with the movies they’d seen, and although he mostly understood and did his best to fashion an answer out of the Spanish he knew, they grew impatient and called in Juan to translate. Juan was busy with family members he wanted to talk to and grew impatient with their impatience. The children marveled at Ben for a while, then went back to their games. The daughter with the expansive laugh, when she wasn’t busy pampering her mother, seemed anxious to include him, but her mother won out. The brother’s wife assumed Ben was putting up a show but was as bored as she. “They do this every time one of them comes back to town. What do you think? Isn’t it a rollo?” He could understand everything but the last word. He told her he didn’t know what a rollo
was, but family reunions like this seemed fine.
Ben didn’t have family to reunite, but he didn’t tell her that. She wasn’t interested. She sat off on her sidelines, and finally, when the novelty of him wore off, he sat off on his. Juan kept in touch. And when time came to eat, Ben got first servings of a stew called cocido, which seemed to have a bit of everything in it but tasted finally of turnips and sausage, and of the piles of bony lamb chops whose cooking smoke coated everything in the room. And wine and champagne. There were many toasts and competing conversations in the low-ceilinged room. The bells never ceased to ring. Finally it was all too much—although he didn’t tell the brother’s bored wife this. But with the flan, the coffee and cognac, and then the puro, which the brother insisted he take a puff of, he found himself dreaming back to the spacious Plaza Mayor and the way it absorbed all the humanity the calle mayor could pour into it. The closeness in Juan’s ancestral home had gotten to him. Suddenly, for no reason at all, except the closeness, he remembered the two etarras blown up inside their own small car.
He thanked them all for having him, and just when he thought they were ready to step outside, Juan asked him to come say hello and good-bye to the abuela.
They found her in what must have been the smallest room in the house, so small it was hard to imagine what it could have been used for other than this: to contain Juan’s grandmother. There was a round table, fitted with a fringed tablecloth, an overhead light. No window. On the walls hung a crucifix and devotional images of the Virgin. One of the children—one of her great-great-grandchildren, it would have been—left when he and Juan entered. The room was stifling, yet the old woman was swaddled in layers of gray and black cloth, and she was sitting with the tablecloth draped over her lap. On the table somebody had left a sprig of rosemary, but the dominant odor in the room was of rotted wood. All the time Juan spoke to her the old woman never ceased to whisper in the thinnest escape of air. Only when Ben was introduced and leaned over the table did he see the rosary wrapped in her hands, which were as earthen as roots. Her face was a small weathered knot of wood, and her hair was a thin fibrous yellow pulled back on her skull. The rosary with its silver cross and jet-black beads was the most alien object in the room. He didn’t touch her. Juan kissed her, but Ben stood back by the door. His glamour had worn off completely by now. She wasn’t interested in visitors from the United States of America. But to keep his word to Juan—and this visit to the family matriarch was like the very last course of a very long meal—he said, “Adios, Abuela.”
