by Lamar Herrin
Ordoki wore a white windbreaker, a black sweatshirt over which a rim of white tee-shirt showed and khaki pants, the clothes of his photographs. Essentially, he and Ben were dressed the same, only Ben had no tee-shirt showing and his windbreaker was a darker shade. Ordoki had lost his limp—perhaps the uphill gradient gave his right leg more support. Without his followers and solely in the company of his wife, he had regained his height.
By the time Ben got to the mouth of that hillside street they had turned into, he had lost them. The street curved around the base of a spur, but by his calculation they would only have had time to enter one of the first four or five chalets. The houses were all small, of white stucco and red tile, and set so closely together that it might have been possible to jump from one roof to another down the length of the street. Back when sewing machines were manufactured here, Ben could easily have imagined these homes belonging to employees of submanagerial rank. If Ordoki’s father had worked his way up to such a position, he might have escaped those blocks of working-class apartments and come here. His son might have bought the chalet for him with a bitterly satisfying laugh, since, in its smallness, with room in its garden for only a few plots of flowers and a single tree, it had survived while the factory had not.
Ben had not forgotten that the man he was calling Ordoki’s father was down on that bridge. He was willing to entertain the possibility that Ordoki had more than one father, fathers of various sorts. That Ordoki and his wife had arrived so late in town that they’d missed both the promenade and the game of pelota was puzzling, but that could be explained by whatever the afternoon’s activities were likely to be. If a meeting, for instance, had been planned.
He walked around the bottom of the spur to make sure there was no hidden stairway coming off the hill by which a man might slip away. He saw a concrete niche partway up, glassed over and lit with a flickering tier of votive candles. A shrine to a local saint, he assumed. Another day he would have climbed up to investigate, but today he returned to the mouth of that street of chalets.
Since breakfast he’d had nothing to eat but that bite of a pincho de jamon. There were at least two hours on a Sunday afternoon when no one would appear on the streets—as far as he knew, that was an absolute in Spain. Ben had time to go back to his pension and eat. Just up the road was a small bar that was open, and he certainly had time to go there. But he stood his ground. Eventually he hoisted himself up on a retaining wall and sat. There were bushes just behind him and three or four small pines, and when he began to feel conspicuous he backed into those. He sat not on rocks but, he soon realized, on the hard, deep-sea plastic sheath of his knife. For a moment he accepted the discomfort, then, as he shifted the sheath’s position, his fingers found the release button and he gave in to temptation. He heard the click and felt the finger-grooved handle slip into his hand. He didn’t hold its stainless-steel blade up to the light, but he held it beside him, out of sight along his leg. He might have been holding some wildness of life at his side, until its breathing and pulse beat were one with his own. Then he put the knife back into its sheath. Michelle would laugh at him, but Michelle was no longer alive. Annie had been born with some of that wildness and some of that boldness in her eyes. She’d been frightened too, frightened to the very root of her being. But Ben reminded himself that Annie was alive. He reminded himself so often that it became a mantra, entirely unconscious, the words in and out with his breath.
Annie is still alive. Annie is still alive.
But sitting there behind bushes and pines, he missed her when she arrived in town, walked down from the station, and he missed her again as she took her first look at the Plaza Mayor. It was empty. Tables were still set out, but even the two bars were closed.
Annie could have gone into the church, and by one means or another she might have found her way into the office of the local police, where a missing-persons report could have been filed. But she didn’t consider her father missing. She stepped over to the bridge. Weekday wash hung from some of the windows fronting the river, even though it was Sunday. She noted what at another time she might have regarded as the beauty of the hills. Attached to the next bridge upstream she saw a winged aluminum figure whose feet were pedaling air, but she wasn’t in the mood for local artwork, either. Nothing about the town pleased her; she’d seen several like it driving up in Paula’s car, just in a different weather. She returned to the plaza and sat on a stone bench beside a brutally pruned sycamore. The clock on the church tower behind her read three-forty. If everybody in town was out of sight, it stood to reason her father was too. The smart thing to do would be to sit there until the townspeople began to reappear, and then begin her search. Almost at once a middle-aged woman passed at a quick pace, late to get somewhere, angry, but seemingly blaming herself. An isolated case. Then two men, strolling, conversing in quiet but aroused voices. Annie picked up stray words and phrases: mal asunto, mala gente, bad business, bad people, un gilipollas, which she couldn’t translate, and Vaya que lio mas gordo, a big fat mess. One of these men looked like every Spaniard she’d seen, so she didn’t look twice, but the other, doing the talking, voicing his complaints, bore a certain resemblance to Armando Ordoki, so she followed them out of sight.
She was on the town’s main street—the market, clothing stores, a pharmacy, two bakeries, a bank, a number of bars, an opening to the river, a thin wedge of a park—and then she was standing in front of the only hotel, pension or hostal she had seen. She entered and sat down in the dining room behind the bar, where she was told that the menu of the day was no longer being served. All that was left was some potato soup and grilled sardines. When she said she’d take them, the woman noting the order gave her the same sort of double-take the desk clerk in Eibar had, and that was when Annie knew. It was not something in the passport, it was something in the looks, or the voice. It was something she and her father did, a gesture or mannerism they had. It was a need they gave off, a hunger—or a special sort of willingness to be served. She waited. When the woman came with the soup, Annie didn’t ask her if she knew her father, but she commented on how much she liked the soup and the town and the beautiful valley—she threw it all in—and waited for the woman to ask her. The woman did. Are you an American? There’s an American here. I don’t know what it is, but you remind me of him. Your voices—of course, he’s an older man. Also an admirer of our town. But there’s something else. You don’t know him?
No.
Vaya, que curiosidad.
She could wait for him here in the pension, just as Paula waited for him in the hotel in Eibar. Eventually he’d have to sleep. But, too impatient to sit still, Annie stepped out of the pension. There was more activity now on the streets, mostly children after the large Sunday meal; while their parents took their siesta the streets belonged to them. They ran in packs of four or five. She saw them in the park, eating sunflower seeds and spewing out the husks; she heard them throwing rocks down by the river. Up to her left a street ran beneath the railroad tracks and climbed into the hills. Anyone oppressed by the long narrowness of the town could follow that street and in fifteen minutes be out of it all.
She began to walk the town; the geometry now lay in her favor. If she patrolled the axis in a town so narrow, there was a good chance that when he crossed it they’d intersect. Or she could search out those pockets of warmth. She’d get hot and hotter, then come up behind him and slip her hands over his eyes. Except she suspected that those pockets of warmth originated more with her than with him. She might project a warmth that she could walk through just so she could say, If only I could be that warm again. Her mother had given birth to her, but her father had always tucked her in.
Annie walked the town looking for evidence of ETA activity, but there was nothing to compare to what she’d seen on that street in Vitoria. This was Armando Ordoki’s hometown, and there was always the chance that the man himself would come swaggering down the street. He’d have a bully’s bulging eyes and a bona fide fas
cist’s jaw. But he’d know his Marx, and his Bakunin and Frantz Fanon and Adorno. He’d have them down chapter and verse. You wouldn’t want to argue in the abstract with the man. Men never lost those arguments anyway. They ended up abstracting themselves and left you stuck in the mud.
Back in the main plaza, she sat at a table, and told the waitress to bring her anything, anything she wanted. The waitress brought her a bottle of mineral water, compliments of the house, saying she, the waitress—a girl approximately Annie’s own age with a round face, and cute, cute as a Basque button—hoped that improved her day. Annie drank the water with a real thirst, the day still warm, her walk long and her search fruitless. Every person she saw returning to the plaza after the midday meal looked so satisfied with his lot and fundamentally fulfilled by his Basque being that she couldn’t imagine how any more Basqueness could be appealed to in the name of whatever separatist cause. She tried to visualize her father among them, and, such was the foulness of her mood, she couldn’t see him at all. She tried picturing him where she’d seen him last, on the campus of her school, and managed only a familiar and heavyset blur. For a moment she gave in to a rage at these Basque families who had taken her father away from her. In a small lucid part of her mind, of course, she blamed only herself. She breathed deeply and let that lucid part expand. In the margin of the light she cast, her father reappeared to her, and she saw him as clearly then as she had when, in the candlelight of a restaurant, he’d told her to dig in for the day that was sure to come. He’d had a naked and obstinate sort of honesty in his eyes that she’d missed at the time but caught in retrospect. Back home, she’d laughed and shaken her head at this lover of old ballads. Now, she set her jaw and faced him with all the frankness she could muster. She committed her missing father to memory.
He might have slept. He’d been warm in his spot in the brush and the pines, and although people had passed below him along the road he hadn’t stirred. Perhaps no one had passed—he couldn’t be sure. But he was awake when the person he waited for came by; he was cold and sore, and it was nearly dark. The man he’d identified as Armando Ordoki was alone. Ben crawled out of his hiding spot, lowered himself from the retaining wall, and followed at a distance. Maybe sixty feet. Pitcher to catcher. The man was dressed as he had been, except that he now wore a beret. In no photograph Ben had seen of Ordoki had he worn a beret, but he’d seen no photographs of Ordoki in his hometown. Unlike the berets the old men wore, which could seem sculpted to the tops of their heads, this one was large and floppy and fell off to the side. It had something at the top, a little clipped-off pig’s tail. It reminded Ben of a nightcap, or something a jester might wear. Its immediate effect was to make the man who wore it into a problematical figure, perhaps a figure of fun.
Ben followed the man down to the river, where he turned left and retraced the route he had taken earlier. During the walk along the river he was greeted by only one other person, a very young man. The older man placed his arm around this subordinate’s shoulder and talked close to his ear. They never broke stride. At the Icarus bridge the young man stepped away, perhaps to carry out a mission. The man in the beret continued on alone. There was no trace of that limp. His gait resembled neither a bear’s nor a sailor’s; Ben couldn’t even call it a swagger. It was straight up and straight ahead.
At the bridge beside the park the two of them crossed the river. Ben expected to see the old man he’d spoken to at the pelota court lurking somewhere nearby, but he did not. The last couples with young children were lingering in the park. The bars on San Agustin had begun their tapa hour. The man in the beret turned left, away from the bars and smell of food, and into that neighborhood of working-class housing. The door he entered led to a staircase and an upstairs apartment. Ben was sure of the apartment because he’d seen the old man standing out on the balcony watching the man Ben would continue to think of as his son approach.
He sat across the street on two cinder blocks and waited.
Dusk fell. The temperature dropped. A breeze sluicing down the valley made itself felt. Ben sat in the shadowy zone between streetlights, while his daughter sat at a table in the more generously lit Plaza Mayor, two empty espresso coffee cups before her now. Finally she took the chance. The waitress in her irrepressible spirits had proved loyal. Had she seen a foreigner, a tall blond and balding man anytime lately in the town? He would be a friendly man, well behaved, a little heavyset, who kept to himself, moved slowly, but somehow made you want to match your step to his. The waitress had seen such a man. She’d waited on him. He’d have his café con leche, watch the people, then get up and do more or less what Annie had been doing. Yes, he moved slowly, but he sometimes seemed like the most restless person on the planet. The waitress wasn’t sure when she had seen him last. There were so many people.
Judging by the look on his face, would the waitress call him happy or sad, lost or found, or what? The word the waitress used was añoranza, which was an elusive word, so she and Annie tried to pin it down, until it was something deeper than homesickness but not so clearly defined. A longing? A longing for something missing? A longing for something you can taste but have never had in your mouth? Something like a guarantee?
Well, the waitress wouldn’t go that far. Añoranza. You want to be where you’re not.
Annie walked the main street again until she was back at the pension, where from the pay phone she called Paula. She wasn’t surprised that Paula didn’t answer. At the pension bar she had yet another coffee. A few last tapistas stood to either side, with their little forks eating cuts of ham or chorizo, sepia or shrimp off little oval plates, washing it down with little tumblers of red wine, but tapa hour had all but passed. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but she was not hungry. Empty the body out altogether and she might achieve the sort of clarity that would allow her to entertain a presentiment.
She stood at the door to the pension and, in her mind’s eye, watched Paula in her little plum-colored car drive across the bridge into town. Annie crossed to the park that fronted the river, and there, in the shadows, put her faith in her powers to the test. Five minutes, no more. As other cars were leaving town to return to the cities after a day in the pueblo, Paula drove in. She parked in a spot Annie had all but picked out for her in front of the pension and went inside. With her flawless Spanish and her canny reading of the Spanish scene, Paula would have no problem. Had anyone seen such and such a man and such and such a girl? Yes, such a man and such a girl had been seen. Five minutes, no more, but when Paula reappeared at the pension door, dusk had given way to night.
It was as if Annie had summoned her. Pale Paula, with her fading freckles and ash-red hair. Annie should have gone up to her. Instead, she waited until Paula, following the directions she’d almost certainly been given in the pension, walked off down Kalea San Agustin toward the Plaza Mayor. Annie crossed the bridge and walked a parallel route, between the highway and river. Two cruising Basque assholes blew their horn at her, which, curiously, allowed her to feel closer to home. At the pedestrian bridge, she stopped to see just what it was hanging off its railing. Like her father, she failed to recognize the figure as Icarus. But she didn’t see it as a fallen angel either. Dim light came off the metal of the figure, the ghostly aqueous sheen of a fish glimpsed at the limit of sight. She thought of it as something risen from the river, its face designed to cleave the water like that, the round of its mouth gasping in this alien air. A winged human figure emerging from the realm of fish, it was caught between three orders of nature and belonged in none. She felt a strange affinity with this creature and took the time to lean over the railing and pick the shredded cigarette butts out of the mouth. What sort of town would bolt this statue onto the side of a bridge? Stranded, furiously pedaling the air. What sick sort of town?
She placed her hand against the precipitous slant of its cheek. Something, the coolness and cleanness of the touch, gave her Paula, who would have reached the Plaza Mayor by then, and, if the café was open, wou
ld have inquired of a waitress there if she had seen just such a man, just such a girl.
On his cinder blocks, her father leaned over his knees to keep the hard blue plastic out of the flesh of his backside. Various people had passed him. He had given a start to one woman on the arm of her husband. On another occasion he might have had to apologize. But the man had been upset with his wife and didn’t seem to care if someone scared her to death. Tonta, the husband upbraided her for being so skittish, while, seated in his shadow, Ben tried to order his thoughts. He heard muffled voices, and he heard car and truck traffic and, he calculated, the last train. He heard the last of those people who’d come back to the pueblo going home. Then came a period of footfalls up and down the street, followed by the rattle of trash cans, closing windows, closing doors. Few cars drove this far into the neighborhood, and the last one passed him then. The last motorcycle.
His daughter had left the river and turned up a road and then another that swung her around the spur of a hill. On the town side of the road a string of small chalets was built, and Annie walked that road until the chalets ended and she came to a break in the foliage. At that point she had a dark, low-angled view into the town. She saw the river, the glimmer of the bird-fish-man hanging off a bridge; the church tower gave her the Plaza Mayor, the bridge that led to it and the avenue in. While she was standing there, a full moon rose over the hills behind her and the town changed mood. It took on the silver patina of old photographs, as if it were already a town behind glass.
At the bridge leading back into the plaza, Annie glanced upstream and down. She saw nothing. She heard the river, and if she heard men’s voices behind it, they were voices that could just as easily have belonged to animals or birds, the sound of running water could do that. She crossed the bridge, passed through the silver membrane the moon had cast, and reentered the town.
