by Lamar Herrin
It turned out Paula had not told her ex-husband, Jorge, anything. She’d shown the consideration of waiting for Annie to arrive before she did that. But Jorge Ortiz knew Spain, he knew the various Spanish peoples, he knew how the people in Cantabria differed from the people in Andalusia, the gallegos from the catalans. More than anyone Paula knew, he would be in a position to make the best-educated guess. Ben Williamson was at large in the country. Where had he gone?
In a cultivated drawl, Jorge said, “I believe your father is an idealist. Would you agree? The last thing we talked about was how Americans could create an ideal country for themselves. Your father wanted to know what part of Spain he should include in his ideal country.”
He paused to see if Annie too was an idealist and would want the same advice he had given her father toward the realization of his ideal. She distrusted this man, with that easy grin off to the side of his mouth, as if he’d never had a conniving thought in his life, and that smile drawn on a line through the eyes, like a horizon one might gaze on and gaze on, not an enemy in sight. He had glossy chest hairs, and even they seemed to be curled in a friendly smile.
She finally gave in. “So what did you tell him?”
“That Spain was its life on the streets,” he replied. “In Spain we have many streets.”
“That’s good,” she said, “because I know the one he’s on.”
Jorge nodded—he was encouraged, she was to continue. Annie glanced over at his ex-wife and was amazed. A woman of intelligence and tact, Paula appeared to be in complete accord with her ex-husband, with no sense of how insufferably patronizing he could be.
“I mean,” Annie lashed out, in her own restrained and winning way, “I know exactly where he is. I know what he’s doing. We’ve communicated and I’ll be joining him soon.”
“Ah,” Jorge sighed through this new turn of events.
“We’ll be walking down the same street. Walkin’ the talk, we say in the States. An expression from the black community. Which means, if you do the walking you don’t need to do the talking. There’s no reason left to say a word.”
She couldn’t knock him loose from that grin, but a scowl passed through his eyes and he shifted his weight, as if he’d just taken a blow to his self-esteem and intended to deliver one of his own.
But he surprised her. A true caballero, if she preferred walking to talking he would defer to her wishes and not say another word. He broadened his grin. When he got up to leave, he performed a sexy ambling strut on his way to the door.
Paula said, “You haven’t talked with Ben, have you?”
“We’ve talked.”
“Not really.”
“We have a hotline.”
“Annie, you don’t know how this country is. You think there’s no end to the charm, then one day you wake up and they’re hitting each other over the head. There’s a painting by Goya—”
Annie cut her off. “Then it’s a good thing you divorced Jorge before his charm ran out and he began to hit you over the head. Take me where I want to go and we’ll find a man who’d never do that to you. I promise.”
Jorge’s sister Pepa knew the Basque country, she’d lived there for years. Her first husband had been Basque. She’d told stories about the brainwashing that went on, the cold and self-righteous way people got killed. One day you’re having a vino with a friend, and the next day he’s ETA with a gun to the back of your head. Her ex-husband, a small-time entrepreneur who sold frozen food, had made good on back payments of his revolutionary tax, and they’d taken the gun away. For a while he’d had a bodyguard, who’d been such a loudmouthed macho she was sure the bodyguard alone was enough to get her husband killed. But then, they were all loudmouthed in the Basque country—the only way to drown out the guilt. So maybe the bodyguard was just trying to make himself heard. They all wanted to be devout Catholics, and they wanted to be ruthless revolutionaries. Pepa divorced her husband, took her daughter and got out. The daughter was Annie’s age. They should talk to Pepa before they went up there.
Pepa showed up later that afternoon, without her daughter. Annie pleaded a headache and went back to lie on her bed. Then she got up and packed her small bag. Pepa had a barely mastered wildness about her. She was small and nervy and intense, with indomitable black curls. She gave the impression of having saved her energy to settle a score. If someone as gutsy as Pepa had had to get out of the Basque country, it must be pretty bad up there. Annie spread the shawl Paula had given her out on the bed, the fan open, the earrings placed to each side. Then she walked back out into the living room. She didn’t mean to be an ungrateful shit, she really didn’t, but she was leaving in fifteen minutes and if Paula wanted to come along here was her chance.
She didn’t like giving ultimatums either. Paula deserved better. Fifteen minutes was the same as saying, Cancel all your other priorities and turn yourself over to me. Paula went to pack a small bag of her own. While she was gone, Pepa gave Annie a parting piece of advice.
“Never push a Basque to the limit. They’ll kill you before they’ll admit to the truth.”
They drove out of Madrid on national highway 104. The surrounding countryside was high, flat and dry, with boulders giving way to scrub oak and scrub oak to patchy farms. Farms to towns. There’d be a church and the remains of a castle and a clustering of houses, set like the planes in a Cubist painting. In the distance there’d be a shadowy wall of mountain, which they’d eventually pass through, only to emerge onto a higher plain, surrounded by similar mountain walls. They rose in this way, plateau by plateau, as they traveled toward Burgos and the north. The car they rode in was a little plum-colored Renault. Paula drove as if at any moment the highway might end, and when night fell and her deliberateness made the darkness of the plain seem interminable, Annie took over. She drove them over the river at Aranda del Duero. On a roundabout they passed Burgos and its cathedral spires. The night became immense then, moonless and mountainless as far as they could see, the car and truck traffic thinning out until they were a tiny cockpit of a car speeding toward a point that might have existed only in a mapmaker’s dream.
Only then, when they were alone and perhaps the last living things on earth, did Paula ask her where they were going. Annie said the city of Vitoria, which the Basques called Gasteiz.
Things called by such wildly dissimilar names might belong to different orders of nature entirely.
Paula said, “I’m not going to let you go crazy, Annie. This has nothing to do with Ben.”
Annie nodded. “Vitoria,” she said.
She knew at once that her father wasn’t there. She was looking for an arena of some sort, and the city was too given over to commerce and the parading of fashion to stage the sort of showdown her father must have had in mind. They spent the night at a hotel on the main highway and drove in the next morning to find the Basque parliament out of session. The day was gray and the temperature dropping by the hour. They walked down an elegant main street whose tall bay windows made the grayness glitter. Then they walked into the old part of the city and eventually down a street hung with banners in an incomprehensible language and spotted with bars with photographs of young men in the windows. It began to rain, and Annie wanted to duck into one of these bars for a coffee, but Paula wouldn’t let her. She got them into a cafeteria on a neutral street. Then she explained about ETA streets and ETA bars and how they did not take kindly to tourists. Not even to tourists ducking out of the rain for a coffee.
They sat at a front table in the cafeteria. Through the window they watched the rain fall and the wind blow and the people pass by under their umbrellas. Paula carried a small collapsible umbrella in her bag. Annie asked to borrow it, and then, as a personal favor, asked Paula not to move. Annie walked back down that street hung with banners and ducked into the first bar she came to with photographs in the window, where she ordered another coffee. The bar at midday was desolate and cold, with six more photographs hung inside, just where she could study them as
she sipped her coffee. The difference between the young men in these photographs and photographs of young men, say, back in the States was the Basques’ un-smiling un-self-consciousness. As far as she could tell, these young men weren’t posing or aping some idol. She turned her attention to the bartender and placed her father at her side. When she paid for her coffee, she paid as her father. She lingered over the face of the bartender as her father might have, but the bartender was tired and jowly and far past his prime. His face told her nothing. She returned to the cafeteria where she’d left Paula.
Paula watched her approach as if she were monitoring every motion Annie made.
Annie gave her a kiss and told her it was okay.
The rain was steady and the wind cold. They huddled under the umbrella together, arm in arm, on their way back to the car.
There Annie said, “He’s been here and gone.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“You can see it on the map. You come from Madrid to the Basque country and you start here. It’s the capital. It’s the point where it all fans out.”
“If you believe Pepa,” Paula nodded, “it’s the capital only because the Basques couldn’t decide between San Sebastian and Bilbao. She claims it’s the least Basque of all the cities.”
“That’s not the real reason I know he was here.”
She still had possession of the keys and she took possession of the car, letting Paula in the passenger door, inserting the key into the ignition, buckling her belt. She checked the side and rearview mirrors and readjusted the seat to accommodate her long legs. She started the motor and let the defroster blow. Then she turned the defroster off so they could talk. “The real reason,” she said, “is because I can feel him here the same way I could feel him back home when he came to visit me at school. Sometimes he’d come without telling me, but I knew he was around, and when friends said they’d seen him I was never surprised. How did I know?”
“Yes, how did you know?”
“Because I was the only person he had left in the world. Now he has you. Maybe that’s why I can’t feel it as strongly now. Or maybe it’s being in a foreign country. It’s like the waves are on another frequency over here. I don’t know. But there’re traces. Down on that street with the bars and the photographs in the windows there were traces. He’s been here and gone.”
Paula drew back in her seat.
Annie said, “There’s a warmth. A kind of cooling warmth. When it gets cold, that’s how I know he’s gone.”
“Annie,” Paula cautioned, “not too crazy.”
They left the city and drove out onto the plain. They skirted a lake, a reservoir, with chalets and summer homes built up on the hills. Beyond the dam they picked up the river and followed it to the east. Soon they were in a steep mountain valley, and the hillsides were terraced in grassy elevations to the forest line. Through the misting rain the green of the grass took on a lushness that made the gray towns, strung out along their narrow river, seem even more drab. The forests that rose to the mountain rim were of a dense, dark and more sculpted green, and anyone could see in an instant why a Basque with any poetry in his soul would want to get out of town and up into the mountains.
They began to see the spray-painted signs. “Gora Euskal Herria!”
The smell off the river was not always clean. It was the sweetness of detergent overlaying the sweetness of shit.
Clothes hung out in the rain, their colors half-gone.
The people in these towns had a steamed look—in the paleness of their faces and the dullness of their hair—as if they had stood too long in the rain.
They passed through a town called by its Spanish name, Mondragon, and its Basque name, Arrasate. Annie parked the car off the town plaza, close to the river. In addition to the grayness of the air and the rushing grayness of the river, in Mondragon-Arrasate part of the hillside had been sliced away so there was a scarred grayness of stone. She sensed that her father had been here and gone, and she took from the town a hard foretaste of what was to come.
Before they left, she and Paula entered a small restaurant on the town square and had a meal. The food tasted of that steamed grayness—it was there in the beef, in the beans and the greens in the soup. Like the taste of iron, but more bitterly plain. She engaged the waiter in conversation, determined to take from him one word that went beyond the menu of the day. It was like prying back the jaws of a trap, opening a rift in a wall of stone. What was it like living here, in this town, beside this river, between these valley walls? Winter, spring, summer and fall? Paula signaled her to be quiet, but she was determined.
In the end Annie struck from the waiter the thinnest of smiles. “It’s always the same,” he said.
“No way out? What if the politics change?”
And the smile went back to stone.
“Don’t do that,” Paula reprimanded her once they were outside. “You don’t talk politics up here.”
“I’ll talk any way I goddamn please!” Annie voiced her defiance in the uniform grayness of the day. “They murdered my sister!”
“There’re things you don’t say,” Paula responded under her breath.
Annie apologized. This was not who she was. Paula happened to have caught her in a string of bad days. But then, so had her mother, and so had Jonathan and Valerie and Patty and how many others.
Annie kissed her newfound friend, her father’s lover. For an instant they stood on a street in Mondragon-Arrasate pressed cheek to cheek.
They drove up the valley in the near-dark and must have crested a hill because when Annie looked again the direction of the river had changed. From here on out, Basque streams flowed north to the Atlantic. They drove until the stream they were driving along, whose name she had not caught, joined another whose name she knew. The Deba. There, at a confluence of rivers and valleys and a darkness that settled like some foul sediment out of the sky, she had a decision to make. The town she’d determined as their destination lay to the east, but it was not a town she wanted to enter in the dark. To the west was a small city, which she thought of as neutral ground. As a gesture of goodwill, she might have consulted Paula.
But instead, Annie drove them west, to a city with all the unattractiveness of the towns, multiplied by ten.
Eibar.
It was a city built in a chute. There was a moment’s widening where a terraced park was located, and she tried to stop there, but a policeman moved them on. The area around the park was reserved for pedestrians, and in spite of the chilling fine rain, the side streets were full. A fiesta day? Paula didn’t know. They parked farther along and walked back. Families, teenagers, the middle-aged and the elderly—a promenade was moving sluggishly down the center of these streets, and in front of every tapa bar groups had gathered to drink tumblers of red wine and eat serrano ham on small buns.
Paula led her into a bar and insisted she eat. Annie ate her ham and drank her wine, and in the thick of it, in their perfume and cologne and smoke, in the wetness and warmth of their collective odors, in what they dumped into their rivers and built damply on their banks, she felt as if she were swilling down the entire Basque nation.
They had to buck the pedestrian current to get back up to the park, where Paula learned from the policeman the location of the nearest hotel. The second they entered it, before the desk clerk could attend to them, Annie detected traces of her father everywhere. He’d stood at that counter, sat on those sofas of cracked vinyl and waited before the elevator door. He’d come and gone any number of times.
The desk clerk, a woman like most of the women she’d seen in the Basque country, but whose large, still and stoical eyes belonged somewhere else, took a personal pleasure in being able to serve Annie and her companion. She put herself at their disposal. Annie handed over her passport, and whether it was the name, the address or the photograph, something caused the desk clerk to start and glance back up at the young woman before her.
Annie said, “What?” and the woman
smiled and shook her head. Nothing, it was nothing, she had a lovely room for them.
Something. No, nothing. Breakfast was served from seven-thirty ’til ten.
“Something,” Annie insisted, and her tone of voice caused Paula to shift uneasily at her side. “What was it?”
“It was nothing. A mistake.”
“I reminded you of somebody, didn’t I?”
“Not really.”
“There’s another American here.”
The desk clerk shook her head.
“Pretty strange,” Annie muttered under her breath.
Paula said, “Leave it alone.”
Annie smiled and turned to face the desk clerk. “You have a guest here whose right to privacy you’re trying to protect. I think that’s admirable. You have an American guest here who has the same last name and the same hometown, and who looks a little like me. That’s even more admirable because the coincidences are piling up. You have a guest here who for some reason wants to be left alone, and you’re doing what any true professional would do, you’re protecting your guest with seniority, who also happens to be a pretty sweet guy, much sweeter than me.”
The desk clerk shook her head. She didn’t understand. Annie didn’t doubt her. Her Spanish and English were crashing around her, and it was as if she were running to get out of a burning house.
Annie shook Paula off. “I am truly sorry,” she confessed. “I am looking for my father. I thought he might have come through here, that’s all.”
The desk clerk had begun fighting her emotions. Her eyes were moist. Here was another chance for Annie to make amends.
