The Bird in Last Year's Nest

by Shaun Herron

  The Bird in Last Year’s Nest

  The Bird

  in Last Year’s

  Nest

  by SHAUN HERRON

  M. EVANS

  Lanham • New York • Boulder • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  M. Evans

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  http://www.rlpgtrade.com

  10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Copyright © 1974 Summerfield Enterprises, Inc.

  First Rowman & Littlefield paperback edition 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59077-387-1 (pbk: alk. paper)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Design by Paula Wiener

  FOR BERNARD TROTTER

  Contents

  BOOK ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  BOOK TWO

  5

  6

  7

  BOOK THREE

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  BOOK FOUR

  13

  BOOK ONE

  As much is lost by a card too many as by a card too few.

  SPANISH PROVERB

  1

  Dead man to the grave, the living to the loaf.

  SPANISH PROVERB

  Dr. Dion Ugalde had shocking dreams.

  They came in that state between sleeping and waking. He knew the moment he got his head to the pillow whether they would come. His mind became suddenly too active, his inner eye filled with quickly changing scenes, his arms that on a good night gave him no trouble multiplied to four and wherever he put them and however he bent, stretched or curled them, they were in the way. His legs on these nights were never in the right place for comfort and he got cramps in his feet, wiggled his toes, stretched and bent his legs and threshed himself wide awake again.

  Then he tried once more, rolling his pupils up under their sockets as they are in sleep. You can’t force sleep, he told himself, trying to force sleep.

  Maria-Angeles said, “You can’t sleep, my love?” Gently, careful not to rush his fears.

  It had been like this since his daughter Christina was born. Then he spoke for the first time of “hostages to ‘them’ ” and his waking nightmare began, never, he told Maria-Angeles sometimes, of danger to himself; always of danger to Maria-Angeles, and Christina and when the boy came, to all three of them; never danger from torrent or flood or storm or any natural thing nor from machines made by man; always from man himself. Man was the maker of his terrors.

  So, she understood and never rushed his fears, and when he tossed, she lay awake and waited, pretending sleep till it was time to speak.

  “You can’t sleep, my love?” she said, opening the responses that seldom varied and were always gentle for they were gentle with one another, a homelike gentleness; simple.

  Soon he would say, “A little air would do me good,” and get up and dress and go out, but first there were the responses.

  “Don’t worry about me, love. You get your sleep.”

  “Think nice things. Lie down and try to relax.”

  They were very ordinary responses for they lived very ordinary lives. The extraordinary was in the past, deforming the present.

  “Yes,” he always said. And, “Don’t think about me. Get your sleep.”

  “You were dreaming again.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me cuddle you.” A square-built country doctor in Navarra, and his wife a little overweight.

  He lay down and turned on his side and she folded her body against his and put an arm around him. “Thank you, love,” he said and tried again and had too many arms and the wrong legs and with the intimate understanding of the years she turned away and pretended to sleep. In a little while, he whispered, “Are you asleep, love?” and she said nothing. “A little air would do me good,” he whispered and got up softly and took his clothes to the bathroom and dressed and slipped into their son’s room to touch him. He was not there.

  “Maria! Maria! Mauro’s not home. It’s two in the morning.”

  “He wrote that he’d be late. Don’t you remember?”

  Yes, he remembered, “I’m sorry, love. I’ll go out and watch for him coming. I’ll hear his bike. I need the air.” The real world returned slowly after his shocking dreams.

  The house of Dr. Dion Ugalde stood on the west side of the church of the parish of San Juan. The house of the priest stood on the east side of the church. The young Ugalde, newly qualified by the medical authorities and licensed by the Minister of Health, had had everything he needed except a practice; he had a profession and a devoted wife ready to go where he would go. He wrote the competitive examination for the vacant practice in the village of Burguete and the parish of San Juan, and won. The church sold him the house to the west because the priest, who lived in it, wanted to live in the house to the east.

  Dr. Ugalde stood in the moonlight looking up at the roof ridge of his house. There was a cross of iron on its front edge. He glanced, as he always did on nights like this, at the roof of the priest’s house. There was no cross of iron on the roof ridge. There was a television mast as tall as the belltower of the church. When the doctor brought his young wife to Burguete, his first and only practice, he thought of removing the cross of iron. It may be that he also thought of offering it to the priest for his roof ridge; if he did think of that, he no longer remembered. But he remembered talking to his wife about removing the cross.

  “Remove a cross?” she said. “Now? Would that be wise? People might wonder, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.” It was enough. The Civil War was over by then but Spanish flesh still broke, Spanish hearts still bled; revenge still soured the sky and the soil; three denunciations were what the peace that followed the war required for a summary execution, but one was often enough. People must not be made to wonder. Ugalde said: El muerto al hoyo, ye el vivo al bollo. Dead men to the grave, the living to the loaf. Quietly he practiced medicine and earned the loaf. In quietness and the loaf is your survival. In the years since then two priests had come and gone and a new clock was needed in the stone circle below the belltower. It said twenty past two now and in the field beyond the river behind the church the herd of goats was almost silent. The sound of Mauro’s motorbike rising and dipping off the hills into the valleys would disturb them. But there was no sound of a motorbike.

  He went on up the street, past the post office where no stamps were sold but the bitterness from within reached out to touch him. He could hear Señor Hispavox and his wife crying at him, “You killed our son, you butcher. You should be in jail.” They never forgot. They never forgave him what no power on earth could prevent. He had watched them sideways and nervously for over twenty years. It was frightening the way in life enemies stumbled on one’s past; terrifying, the way they could use it.

  Past the grocery store where stamps were sold and Tomas Martinez a
nd his wife were grateful for what a half-trained nurse could have done for their son. Past the dark Hotel Burguete where he sometimes took the Prior of the monastery of Roncesvalles to dinner. Past the dark Bar Ibañeta where wine was four pesetas a glass and everywhere else in Navarra only two or three. In the morning long after the legal opening hour, telephone linemen and road maintenance men would be throwing pebbles at Jesus Santos’ bedroom window calling him to get out of bed and serve them his sour white wine—the sourest in Navarra—before they took to the roads. It scours the morning-mouth, they said.

  All up the street, to the end of the village, the houses of neighbors, perhaps friends—but how did he know that, and what are friends? Does the craft of survival admit the dangerous luxury of friendship? And the houses of some enemies, for all medicos make mistakes that are impossible to prove and some patients know it and some are too dependent to know it. The vet’s house was on the left at the high end of the village street. The vet was an immense man in winter sheepskins, a barbaric survival striding down the street or riding his horses from farm to mountain farm like the plundering Visigoths from whom—they said—he was descended; and in summer wildly elegant in goatskin jackets that he cured, cut and sewed himself.

  When Ramiro Urbina came to the district as the partido—adminstrative district—vet, he called on the doctor. He read from the brass plate on the front door when Ugalde opened it, “Dionisius Ugalde, Medico. I hope I’ve killed more goats, sheep, horses and donkeys than you have killed patients, for I’m a sick man.” He was big and loud and dramatic, and there was a light in his house tonight. Why? It must by now be more than half past two. The jeep that was normally parked by the side of his house was not there. Urbina was out. Where? Not at a calving. The farmers could attend to that as well as he could and it was not the season. His wife was waiting up. Ugalde could see her, sitting by an upstairs window, in the dark. Why? Urbina was out, in an autumn evening, to attend to some sick beast? He had a woman somewhere? More than one? Ugalde stopped his thoughts. This was the sort of village thinking he had always feared most; in a village, a hair out of place told a story or started one. Only behind the shutters and the heavy street doors of their houses were village people private and alone. Their houses were like fortresses. Houses ought to be like fortresses. Men need fortresses; some men more than others.

  Roncesvalles began beyond the vet’s house. There is nothing there but the time-and weather-worn pilgrims’ cross where the avenue of trees begins that darkens the way to the monastery, and across the road from the monastery, a simple pension that takes the summer pilgrim overflow from the monastic beds. There is also, of course, Roland, the heroic nephew of Charlemagne, who held the Pass of Roncesvalles against the Moors and the treachery of the courtier Gan and died with a multitude of Moorish corpses around him and rose again in poetry and song. But, the Prior insisted, the Moors never reached Roncesvalles—it was the Basques who killed Roland in an ambush in quite a petty action. The Prior is a good man, but born in Toledo, they said in Burguete, and how can he know the facts? There are 360 people in Burguete, most of them Basques. Sixty-three of them even speak Basque, including Dr. Ugalde, who had been at great pains to learn. It was the vet Urbina who taught him and who taught his son Mauro also. The doctor learned the language with calculation, his son with passion. Mauro’s passion to speak Basque puzzled Ugalde and amused the vet. For the parents came, didn’t they, from somewhere in Castile? Didn’t they?

  The doctor hadn’t forgotten the new Civil Guard barracks set back on the left from the long avenue of trees on the monastery road. Deliberately, he did not think about it. There was another new barracks eighteen miles through the hills at the Zubiri crossroads, on the bank of the Rio Arga, on the road to Pamplona. When he thought of the barracks, he thought of closed doors—the door to France closed by this one at the mouth of the Pass of Roncesvalles, the road to Pamplona closed by the one at Zubiri. The only doors Ugalde wanted to close were the doors of his fortress.

  It must be three by now and no sound of Mauro’s motorbike. The sound of solidly shod feet reached him down the dark avenue. They came slowly. One set of boots crossed the road, then all were silent. They were standing on the grass, behind the trees, he knew. He often met them here.

  “Stop.”

  Dr. Ugalde stopped. “It’s Dr. Ugalde,” he called.

  “Come forward.”

  He went forward.

  “Stop.”

  One pair of boots was behind him in the road. The other pair did not move.

  “It is you, doctor,” the man behind him said. “Walking again?”

  “Insomnia again.”

  The two Guards laughed and came together beside him, resting their weapons. It was almost a ritual and they wanted to talk. “It’s our duty to walk. You could give yourself a pill and sleep, doctor.”

  “I like to walk. Anyway, I’m waiting for my son. He’s very late tonight. I worry. The roads from Bilbao … that motorbike of his.” His talk with them always fumbled.

  “How long till he’s a doctor, too?”

  “Four more years.”

  “A lifetime and a fortune away.”

  They were men like other men. Some of them had sons, and, he supposed, they must all have had mothers. Ugalde thought so, often, thinking survival thoughts and said so when Mauro told him of things not printed in the papers. How do you know these things, Mauro? he asked him. Student talk? And they laughed about it, each qualifying his laughter with his unshared thoughts.

  “A fortune away anyway,” the doctor said to the Guards. “Good night.”

  He went across the monastery fields, around the leaning fence and the floodlit electrified fence of the new political prison that was Colonel Basa’s special pride, and climbed the wooded hill beyond. From a passage between the trees he could sit and watch the road that passed the graveyard two far hills away. He could not see the road but he would see the single light of Mauro’s motorbike top the hill and drop into the deep valley out of sight like a firefly. Then he would hurry home.

  But the first lights came in half an hour and they were car lights. He listened hard for familiar sound. At this time of night it wouldn’t be a tourist heading back to France. It was somebody local and the signature of the car’s sound could always be read at night. It was Ramiro Urbina’s jeep. The goat herd bustled. The jeep was loud on the hill crests, muffled in the valleys, then it came into the sound-tunnel of Burguete’s single street and stopped. The goats settled.

  It was three quarters of an hour before the single light leaped onto the crest of Cypress Hill as they called the graveyard and dipped quickly into the valley and Ugalde was hurrying before it was out of sight. Relief and the joy he always felt at his son’s homecoming sent him running. He was winded when he reached the house. The motorbike was in the square hallway, its engine still warm. Mauro was already in bed, reaching for sleep.

  Ugalde took him in his arms. “I was worried. You’re very late.” Dr. Ugalde’s father loved and was loved; but he was a man of great reserve. Dr. Ugalde loved and was loved and took care to show it. They all showed it freely.

  “There’s no need to worry. I gave a fellow in my class a pillion ride to Pamplona. I was very careful. We ate in Pamplona together.” Mauro held his father tightly in the dark. It was more than an embrace; he seemed to be clinging to his father. Ugalde took it as a sign of their mutual happiness, and accepted it gratefully. It was Mauro’s first trip home this term. “You mustn’t worry. I’m careful,” he said.

  “I know you are. I shouldn’t worry. Where did you eat?”

  “La Vasca, on San Augustin.”

  “Is that fellow who runs it still saying Hemingway always ate there?”

  “Every time.” They laughed at that. Inconsequent, relieved small talk in the locked-up fortress. All of them were in place. All was well.

  “Sleep.”

  “You sleep, too.”

  Dr. Ugalde went to bed beside Maria, at peace. It w
as past four o’clock. He moulded his body against hers and sighed and put an arm around her.

  “That’s nice,” she said sleepily. “He’s home.”

  Morning was cold and brilliant. There was hoarfrost on the grass and on the trees. Winter was coming. It was coming early by the signs. Soon brilliance would be something that spilled through small gaps in heavy clouds to be crushed as the clouds closed. Then the snow.

  But the kitchen was warm. They breakfasted at the heavy table near the big stove. The Ugaldes were warm, inside and out. They were together. The smoked hams and strings of garlic and onions slung from the beam were like symbols of rooted strength and stability and the immutable life of the countryside and the village.

  Maria Ugalde tended her men. She knew her place. Waiting on her men she was wife and mother and queen. Their love and respect for her were tangible. Their laughter was music. Their love and respect for one another were her strong center. She moved quietly from table to stove, stove to table and sat again, admiring her men. Mauro’s long absences intensified her feelings. Dion was grey-haired and russet-skinned and square in the body and still immensely strong. He walked in the mountains, brought home trout from the Urrobi and the Irati, and wood pigeon from the forests, and he sought her still like a lover, gentle and patient and often. She smiled at the thought of that. It was Saturday. He would sleep well tonight, after he made love to her. Mauro was strong like his father, handsomer, slender, taller, dark as his father had been; he smiled more readily, gaily, she thought. Her pride was boundless. She touched them often.

  Mauro gave her a scrap of paper from his pocket. “I moved my lodgings this week. That’s my new address. People called Mendez. It’s across the Viscaina Bridge and up the hill in the Portugalete district, in a block of workers’ flats opposite the new church of San Adrian.”

  Maria said, smiling, “You know I don’t know one part of Bilbao from another. Are they nice people? What do they do? Do you get good food? Have you a nice room?”