House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  He sat for a good part of that afternoon at a table out on the plaza with the knife pressing into the flesh of his back. It was an insistent presence more than an irritation. If he sat at a certain angle in his chair he could make it disappear entirely. The sun turned tepid and a cool breeze blew down from the top of the hills. Later in the afternoon, the plaza took on a different kind of warmth as it began to fill up, mostly with mothers and their young children—school had let out—but he saw some fathers too. Two figures appeared on stilts, with heads disproportionately large for their elongated bodies, enormous flaxen-haired heads, round as a full moon, representing a boy and a girl. They were dressed in traditional outfits of some sort, full skirts and pants, aprons and cummerbund sashes and vests. The children flocked to them and scrambled for candies that appeared in their wake. For a period the ringing shouts of the children dominated the plaza, with the adults talking loudly enough to make themselves heard at the tables.

  Then a traffic policeman began to allow select cars on to the plaza to park, a hearse drew up before the church door, and it was clear that a funeral was about to take place. The children disappeared, their parents finished their tapas and glasses of wine, got up from the tables on the plaza and became mourners. Ben got up with them. In the midst of the milling he was able to move close enough to the hearse to be there when, after the wreaths of flowers had been unloaded, six young men rolled the casket out. There were no expressions of grief. Men and women put out their last cigarettes and followed the casket into the church. The air was heavy with perfume and cologne and, at the church door, incense. The dress ranged from the somber to the gaudy to the plain to the incidental attire of someone like himself, and he had to believe a cross-section of the town was in attendance. He heard the amplified voice of the priest addressing the congregation, stepped inside and stood in back.

  The service was in Basque. Two screens, placed to each side of the altar, instructed the congregation in electronic script how to respond to the priest, and when a woman stood up to sing, presumably what she sang was also printed there. It was a wall of foreign sound, as hard on the ear as words gouged in stone.

  He had no idea who had died, an old man, a young woman or a child.

  He was a tourist of alien rites.

  When the priest began to say mass, Ben slipped back outside. He stood under a tree in the last light and, as the congregation filed out, inspected them, one by one. His chances all depended on the circumstances. If the deceased had been powerful enough, important enough to be worthy of a favorite son’s tribute. Or if the deceased had been an old friend, one of his cuadrilla. Or if the deceased had been a teenaged love, a mentor, a protégé, a wise old man of the mountains. Or if the deceased had been someone he’d wronged, someone who carried a secret of his to the grave. Armando Ordoki might have come, then, to make sure, to drive an additional nail into the coffin, to throw an extra shovelful of dirt into the hole.

  Except here, in their town, graves were holes in a wall.

  To help seal that hole.

  . . .

  On a gray day, a day threatening rain from beginning to end, Ben climbed up the mountain. As a first leg, he walked up a draw to the chapel of San Antonio. He was not alone. Groups of women passed him coming down, and younger women, more purposeful striders than he, passed him on the way up. He was in no hurry. He was not out for exercise or to pay homage to a saint. He walked west on a paved one-lane road. A stream ran alongside the road, a clear stream, and he walked against the current. For a distance it was overhung by oaks, and he crunched acorns underfoot. Along the shoulder of the road, dandelions and daisies and Queen Anne’s lace grew, and beyond the stream, thick on the hillside, blackberry brambles. These were plants and flowers familiar to his childhood. Off to his right the narrow draw he’d started up broadened, and those grassy meadows and terraces appeared, muted by the grayness of the day. He saw milk cattle and flocks of sheep. Plots of vegetables, pole beans and squash. There was almost no wind. The sound of the stream was always there, as though on one frequency, and on another, from out in that valley-wide draw, he might hear a dog bark or the scattered notes of a sheep bell as the bellwether moved among the flock. For a while a chain saw ruined it for him, but when the sound of the saw ceased the sounds of water and of animals came back to him pure.

  He walked toward the forested rim. He wore a black sweatshirt he’d bought for the occasion. Between his right hip and the small of his back he wore his knife, designed for underwater fishing. He wore no cap; his thinning fair hair was exposed. On his feet, running shoes, which he’d bought where the retired men who walked up and down their town-long street bought theirs. The shoes were white.

  He came to the chapel of San Antonio, nicely kept up, but with nothing venerable about it. Here the women, out for their pilgrimage and exercise session, turned back. The chapel was locked. Through a small barred window he looked inside, but all he could see was the austere and shadowy outline of an altar. An off-center bell gable was attached to a small tower. Adjoining the chapel he saw what, on first glance, because of the chicken wire stretched across an exposed wall, he took to be a henhouse. But he soon realized it was another of those ball courts, with a balcony built at one end for spectators.

  Behind the chapel was a small park with picnic tables beside the stream. For those who wanted to stop.

  The road narrowed, and he continued uphill.

  The road and the stream had parted ways. The road ran through open pastureland, long clumped grass the sheep and cattle had yet to graze on, while the stream flowed down the valley crease. He heard the distant rush of its water. When he came alongside a group of cattle, they regarded him with sullen indifference. He heard them uproot the grass and grind it heavily between their jaws.

  The road wound higher and higher, increasing its angle of ascent as it neared the tree line. He took his first rest sitting on the side of a terrace. He’d brought no food and nothing to drink. When he turned to take his first look back, there was no town. Even the chapel of San Antonio had been obscured from sight.

  He had ceased to be a tourist of that sort.

  When the road reached the forest, it continued on along its flank until, he believed, it ended at a farmhouse some fifty yards above. Off to his right he saw a broad grassy path that might have once been a logging road. He cut off there, moving up between two spurs as the valley narrowed to a draw again and the draw drew to a point. He had to step over a small stream, a tributary, but the main stream was directly below him now, a more turbulent flow than down on the pastureland.

  Emerging from a tunnel of pines, he came to a zone of the hillside where reforestation had taken place, and these young pines, set out in rows to his left, smelled strongly of their resin. Off to his right the drop to the stream was precipitous. The freshening and rank odor of stream water and leaf mold and mud rose straight to his nose.

  On an outcrop of granite, he shifted his knife farther up his hip and took his second rest. He heard the water and a low soughing sound that must have been wind, although he felt no wind on his face and the pine needles were still.

  What remained of the logging road ended there. The path continued, in an arduous, switchbacked ascent, up the mountainside. There at the path’s mouth, just where he’d begun to need it, he found a walking stick. It was of a stout green wood he couldn’t identify—certainly not pine—cleanly cut at both ends with an axe. Planted in the ground like a staff, it rose a good foot above his waist, and there was a spot near the upper end, between nubs where the side branches had been cut off, that fit his grip as naturally as a baseball bat. It was stout and straight enough to be used as a club if he needed to fight off animals, stout and straight enough to support his weight as he worked his way up the mountain. He’d found it propped in open view against a rock, left, clearly, for the next hiker who came this way.

  He was that next hiker.

  He climbed the mountain in a three-legged ascent. The air was cool and damp t
he higher he went, and the rock in the path was slick. Water sluicing down the path had taken most of the dirt, and human and animal traffic had done the rest. The path was very old. In stretches, the rock was worn smooth, and even with his rubber-soled shoes the footing was treacherous. Without the stick he wouldn’t have had much chance. He wedged it in between rocks or in spots of earth off to the side and pushed himself farther up. In the parts of the path where some earth remained and the going was not so steep, he used the stick like a cane, to test the footing a step farther on. If a wild boar had come charging down the path he would have used it as a club. But he saw no boar, he saw no animals of any sort, not even a rabbit or a squirrel. He heard the isolated cheeps of birds, and occasionally he’d see small birds flitting among the branches, but the tree cover was thick and his vision was mostly reduced to what lay up the path. A brief clearing might give him a glimpse of the sky, but the sky was a uniform gray and close overhead, like a lid. Once he saw a hawk rocking back and forth on wind currents he didn’t feel a trace of.

  He stopped to rest, but almost at once started up again. That uphill motion was in his heartbeat, the surge of his blood. The walking stick would not lie quietly at his side.

  At a turn of the path higher up, a cairn of rocks had been erected. He sat there for a moment and settled his breath. He found a stone and placed it, not on top of the cairn but safely to the side. Then he continued on.

  Eyes on the path, leaning on his stick, Ben Williamson paced his panting breaths to his step and climbed this Basque mountain. With no change in the light, he lost track of time. There was a moment, an interlude, when a break in the foliage gave him a view of a distant house, a house set out on its own private spur, a front lawn, a second-story deck stained a cedar red. He saw a dog out front, standing statue-still, as if on point. He didn’t stop, the moment passed, and it was as if he hadn’t seen this improbable house and dog at all. He felt pains in his lower back, spasms in his stomach and an ache in his lungs that demanded more air, but all at a certain remove, as if he’d reached a stage in his climb when the body became a machine whose travails were its own affair, something all bodies went through.

  He climbed not until his body gave out but until he’d distanced himself sufficiently from it to see himself whole. He saw a pale man dressed in a familiar black sweatshirt leaning into the next step. He saw a man leaning earthward, propped on a stick, his flesh hanging heavy on his bones. He saw that same man standing naked in a full-length mirror, a woman with a thatch of red hair, freckles and a heaviness in her hip standing at his side. He saw another woman who could fill a mirror by herself but who, in her quick humor and massive ease, revealed to him the young woman she’d been: hungry, fit, athletic, golden. He saw, in profile, an older woman seated at a piano, and as that older woman began to sing—songs of love, longing and loss—he saw two young women, who at the same time were two children and two girls.

  Once they’d started he couldn’t stop these pictures from forming. As all tourists finally must, he had become a tourist of himself.

  Legs trembling, he sat on the rock of the path with his knife printed into his hip and the walking stick laid across his lap. With the rock so slippery and his legs so weak, he’d need that stick even more going down. Whether he’d gone high enough up the mountain or not, he couldn’t say. No one had sprinted past to put him to shame. No one had passed him coming down. There’d been that cairn of stones, a record, perhaps a mortuary record, of those who’d used this path. And there’d been that house, which, in the glimpse he’d had of it, seemed like a shrine to those who’d given up and put themselves at a distant remove. His choices were to crawl under those stones or to try to reach that house. His other choice was to climb back down the mountain and reenter the town.

  XII

  While they were deciding what to do, Paula Ortiz insisted that Ben’s daughter leave the hotel and come stay with her, and then she insisted that Annie take the master bedroom, which was absurd, since there was a perfectly comfortable guest bedroom. But Annie slept in the bed where she was sure her father and Paula had made love. It had a high, scrolled, ornately carved headboard; there was a wardrobe with carving and a marble-topped dresser to match. Perhaps Paula wanted to give her a taste of Spanish history. She began to bring Annie gifts. She brought a hand-painted fan with a lacy fringe, and she brought an embroidered shawl, of a bone-colored white that looked as if it had lain at the bottom of a noblewoman’s chest for centuries. She mothered Annie. She wanted her there where she could keep an eye on her. While Ben was missing, the least she could do was keep his daughter from harm. Annie might have been kept from harm back at that college she attended, but that was not what Paula meant. She meant here, where danger was rife, where young women out jogging could suddenly be deprived of their youth, their old age, everything, she wanted to make sure Annie Williamson was safe. To be made safe, there had to be a threat, and the greater the threat, the safer Paula would make her. Annie understood the logic, but she already had a mother. If Paula confined Annie to the bed where she and Ben Williamson made love, would that same logic allow her to consider Annie the fruit of that union just by virtue of her having slept there?

  Was that how Paula Ortiz conceived of it? Was that how Paula Ortiz conceived?

  She brought Annie earrings with silver filigree and teardrop pearls, to go with the tasseled shawl, and had her stand in front of the wardrobe mirror to get the full effect. Paula stood off to the side. With her eyes, cheekbones and hair, with those statuesque legs and that aristocratic poise, Annie could be Spanish, she said. Annie stood there looking at herself and at the zealous, gift-giving woman at her side, and asked herself how much longer this could go on. She assumed her father had stood before this mirror, and she could imagine him asking himself the same question. One minute he was standing there, his volition, his self-regard, the whole history of who he was, in a state of suspension, and the next minute he was gone. The last he had seen of himself was, in a manner of speaking, what Annie saw of herself now. Her image superimposed on his. This was an old wardrobe, and perhaps mirrors like photographic plates retained their images. She looked past her own and found his and said, All right, Dad, tell me. It’ll be our secret. Where have you gone?

  Annie got Paula to bring her a map of Spain, and then, beginning with the heavily touristed Andalusia, she moved her finger over it asking her father’s lover if she could imagine her father there? Or there? What would he be doing among those Moorish towns of the south? What would he be doing among the orange groves of Valencia? La Mancha, following the footsteps of Quixote? Barcelona, to see the Gaudi? She swung her finger north; across the north stretched the old pilgrim’s trail to Santiago de Compostela, in the westernmost province of Galicia. Maybe that was where her father had gone, Paula suggested, to perform a penance on the road to Compostela. A penance for what? Paula did not know.

  Annie coaxed Paula’s hand to where her own had been. From Santiago de Compostela she moved Paula’s index finger back east and left it squarely in the Basque country, by chance over a tiny dot of a town, beside a hair-thin river she could not see.

  “I think he’s gone there,” Annie said.

  Paula did not answer.

  “And if he’s gone there,” Annie continued, “it’s to look for Armando Ordoki. Why else would he cut out all those pictures?”

  Paula shook her head.

  “There were a lot of them, you said.”

  Paula admitted there had been.

  “If he cut out all those pictures, he’s gone looking for the man.”

  “Revenge?” Paula asked

  Annie nodded. “For what happened to Michelle.”

  Obstinately, Paula shook her head again. “That’s not the man your father is.”

  “Maybe that’s the man my Spanish father is. The man my father is in Spain. Isn’t revenge, defense of honor and all that, part of the Spanish code?”

  Paula uttered, “I’m so sorry, Annie.” But whether sh
e was apologizing for herself or the country, Annie was unable to tell.

  “We should find out where Armando Ordoki is. If we don’t find my father there, we can look for him on some pilgrim’s trail to Santiago de Compostela, I don’t care.”

  Paula wanted to talk to her ex-husband. She had an ex-sister-in-law in whom she confided, and she wanted to talk to her. Or the American Embassy. What were embassies for if not to locate missing citizens abroad? But Annie’s father wasn’t missing. Her father knew exactly where he was. And Annie believed that because of that corny thing he’d said to her, about digging in to face the day that was sure to come, and because, in spite of her mother’s heckling from the sideline, she believed her father had it in him to perform an extraordinary act. Her mother might have her local successes against such opponents as Mr. Maverick, but beyond that, was her mother capable of anything extraordinary? Annie admitted she didn’t know. She’d been a Daddy’s girl from the start.

  She had that Metro map still in her mind. The red to the cobalt-blue line and she was within a block of the main office of the public library. On the Internet, she scrolled through dozens of verbose pronouncements Ordoki had made about the victimization of the Basques before she came to an article with a short bio. She learned where he worked—when the Basque legislature was in session, in the capital of Vitoria—and she learned the name of his hometown. Family, education, hobbies and pastimes. His activities as a member of ETA. Time served. She saw a photograph. He had the face that suited him, if he was the bullying man-of-one-idea he seemed. She printed out this information and the picture and took them back to Paula’s apartment, where a man was visiting, whose rumpled, slow-to-respond face couldn’t mask what was going on in the eyes. He was all over her at once. Then, on a blink, he was suddenly quiet, seemingly serene.