The Bird in Last Year's Nest

by Shaun Herron

  “I know where it is and one question at a time, Mama.” Ugalde laughed at her indulgently. “Leave him. He’s a man out on his own in the world.” But he was glad she asked her questions. Now he didn’t have to.

  “Yes. Yes, of course, my love. What are they?”

  “Who?” Mauro said, making her work for answers.

  “The people you live with. How big is the flat? How many of them—the family, I mean?”

  “Three bedrooms, five in the family—grandfather, grandmother, husband, wife, child.”

  “Where do you sleep?”

  “In the living room in a bed that folds up into a thing like a sideboard.”

  “But why did you move there?”

  “To join a friend.”

  “Another one? In that flat? Where does he sleep?”

  “We share the sideboard.”

  “Is he clean?”

  She broke up their breakfast time with laughter. They chattered their domestic small talk and cleared away together. Mauro dried the dishes for his mother. Ugalde went back to the table and tilted his chair to listen to their talk. He had a good son and a good wife. Once he had a good daughter but neither his simpler skills nor the sophisticated skills of the specialists in Pamplona and Bilbao nor the men in Madrid where before the end they flew her, could save her. What did the Basques say in their outlandish language that had no source and no kin? Oren guziek dute gizona kolpatzen, Azkenekoah du hobira igortzen. All the hours shower blows on man, the last sends him to the tomb. When Christina died words had no meaning, tears no point. But they lamented, and wept, and shook themselves when they had wept enough. He shook himself now. Mauro was home. No sad thoughts. He loved Mauro with a great deep love that brought him sometimes close to tears. But no tears now. He loved Maria with an old devotion that refreshed itself often. He liked to tell her she was like an onion, fresh under every layer. She liked to tell him he was the horned pride of the herd. But that was pillow talk; not elegant or fragrant but a village of goats and gardens has its images that might not suit Madrid. He listened to their chatter, warm in his fortress with his family.

  “What do they do for a living, Mauro, these new people you live with? Mendez?”

  “Mendez, yes. He’s a mechanic of some sort, I think.”

  “Would I know the plant he works at?” Ugalde asked, merely to ask something.

  “He isn’t working at the moment. Out of work.” Mauro polished hard with a dishcloth inside a very dry cup.

  “Is that why you went to live there?”

  “Not really. I went to join my friend. But it helps the Mendez. They need the money.”

  “You didn’t like your old lodgings?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “There was a pretty daughter there, wasn’t there?”

  “I didn’t get her pregnant and run away, if that’s what you think.” It was nervous anger crushed down to the sound of irritation. “Anyway, there was no daughter.”

  “Mauro, we didn’t think such a thing. Such a thing to say.”

  “Leave him, Mama. He’s telling us he’s a man out on his own. He can live where he likes.”

  “It’s not much of an issue.”

  “It’s no issue at all, Mauro. It’s your business.”

  It passed, like a wispy cloud, trailing a small chill that dissolved in their warmth.

  Ugalde said, “Would you two hurry? Basa’s coming this morning.” He touched his son as he passed on his way out of the kitchen.

  Mauro waited for the door to close and said, “Why does he bother with Basa?”

  “Because they’re friends. The colonel’s a very nice man.”

  “How can the officer commanding the Civil Guard in Navarra be a nice man? What does a man like that want with my father, anyway?”

  “Want with him? Friendship, I suppose. What do you want with the young man who shares the sideboard at the Mendez?”

  “He’s not in the Civil Guard.”

  Maria peered hard into a cupboard, looking at nothing. “Mauro,” she said patiently, “your father is the doctor here. That means he’s the police pathologist, the district health officer, the vaccinations officer …”

  “I know all that. So is every other country doctor in the province. Does Basa cultivate them all?”

  “They’re not all as nice as your father, who also happens to like Colonel Basa. They simply like one another, Mauro, and a man needs a friend.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She turned and kissed him. “Fathers are also big boys out in the world on their own. Or do the sons become fathers and rule over their parents?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Say no more.”

  “Do you like Basa?”

  Her look was direct. “Yes.”

  Ugalde opened the kitchen door. “Colonel Basa’s here. Come with us, Mauro.”

  “Where?”

  “He wants to show us over his new building.”

  “Building? Is that what he calls his political jail?”

  “No, he calls it a jail. I call it a building. I’ve learned to be tactful and if you don’t come, I’ll lose your company for a couple of hours.”

  “I’ll come.”

  “Good. He particularly hoped you would.”

  “Particularly? Can you guarantee we’ll get out of his Summerhouse?” It was the villagers’ ironic euphemism. “Basa’s Summerhouse” they called it.

  “I’ll guarantee it. You don’t mind too much?”

  “No, no. Let’s inspect the colonel’s jail. You’d better wear a coat, Father. It’s quite cold.”

  2

  Whether the pitcher hits the stone, or the stone the pitcher, it will be bad for the pitcher.

  SPANISH PROVERB

  The corridor of the cell block was wide and grey. The walls were gunmetal grey. It did not seem that a razor blade could be fitted between the steel cell doors and their steel walls. The doors had no handles. The only things that made them distinguishable as doors was the number on each, the thin seams of their outlines and the 180-degree lens peepholes, head-high in each of them. Even the lamps set in the high ceiling above heavy glass covers gave off what Ugalde thought to be grey light.

  The place was surgical-clean. It smelled of hospital disinfectant.

  Colonel Basa walked ahead, his right arm draped companionably across Mauro’s shoulders. Ugalde came behind, puzzled by the colonel’s fatherly assumptions. His view of the corridor was blocked by the enormous colonel and his own tall son. The doctor was, and felt, the smallest of them all. He felt very, very small. He was troubled by this feeling of unusual smallness.

  “The doors have no handles,” Mauro said.

  “They can be opened only from the control room.”

  “Where do they eat?”

  “Room service,” the colonel said pleasantly. “Look in number five.” He stopped them at the door.

  “Don’t they object to being stared at, sir? What about their privacy?” Mauro asked.

  “Their what?” the colonel asked.

  Mauro put his eye to the peephole. He could see the entire cell. There was a young man in it. He sat cross-legged on the floor, with his back to the far wall. His arms were folded across his chest, his head lay back against the wall, his eyes were closed. There was no furniture, no equipment of any kind in the cell. Above the young man’s head, about as high as his hands could reach if he were standing, there were two steel rings bonded in the wall, about six inches apart. While Mauro watched, the young man stretched slowly, his arms above his head. He opened his eyes. He was crying.

  Colonel Basa did not look through the peephole. Mauro thought and at once dismissed the thought of telling him the young man was crying. It was not really a thought dismissed. Neither his mind nor his stomach would let him tell Colonel Basa the man was crying. The tears were the prisoner’s tears alone.

  Colonel Basa said, “Come along to number eleven.” He draped his arm again across Mauro’s shoulders and move
d them casually along the corridor. There was no hurry. The cells would not go away. Ugalde came behind.

  “Take a look,” the colonel said, nodding his encouragement.

  Mauro took a look. There was no furniture. There was a young man, older than the one in number five. This one might be twenty-five. He was standing, his feet a few inches from the base of the far wall, his back against it, his hands stretched above his head, his wrists in locked clamps linked by short chains to the rings in the wall. His wrists bled. His forearms were swollen. His face was sunken. His eyes were closed in pain.

  “He is being punished?” Mauro asked. “For what?”

  “For silence,” the colonel said. “Look, Dion.”

  Dr. Ugalde did not step forward. “Mauro will tell me.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d see for yourself.”

  Ugalde wondered whether in his shrunken state his eye could reach the peephole. That would make him look ridiculous. He felt a little dazed; a sense of unreality lay like a filter in his head.

  His eye reached the peephole with inches to spare. Still, his sense of smallness did not diminish. Basa stood beside him, his size overwhelming.

  No cot, no chair, no wall tap or handbasin, no bucket, no window. Only a young man, chained upright, straining to ease his bleeding wrists and swollen forearms. His face was a shadowed mask of weariness.

  “His wrists need medical attention,” the doctor said tentatively.

  “All he has to do is talk.”

  “I should have thought …” the doctor began again, searching for tact, “in such a new building … modern facilities? Where do they go?”

  “Most of them have buckets most of the time. This one—in his trousers for a while.”

  Mauro said with his hand on his father’s arm, in a voice that cried diversion, “The building’s well heated.”

  “We can control the heat separately in every cell,” Basa said, “and in winter we can make them very cold. Did either of you recognize the one in No. 11?”

  “No.”

  “That’s Vincente Hierro, the leader of the Fifth Assembly, the military wing of ETA. You both speak Basque so you know the initials mean Basque Homeland and Liberty.” It was an odd footnote. Every Spaniard knew what the initials meant.

  “I’ve never even seen the man’s picture,” Ugalde said.

  “Neither have I,” Mauro said in a flat little voice.

  “But perhaps you can explain something to me, Mauro. You belong to their generation.” There was a note of dominical supplication in Basa’s tone, like a schoolmaster appealing to the good student in a bad class. “Why? The Basque provinces are rich and prosperous—the richest and most prosperous in Spain. Yet these young men commit crimes to separate the provinces of Viscaya and Alava and Guipúzcoa and some of Navarra from the rest of Spain. Nobody in the Basque lands except these young men and women want it. But they go on, even when their own people are against them. Do you know why?”

  “I suppose it’s the way they think,” Mauro said.

  “Obviously. But that doesn’t tell me why.”

  Crablike, Mauro said, “It must be a very individual thing.”

  “What does that mean? Maybe that’s the wrong way to put it. I should have said, Does that mean anything?”

  “It seems to mean a lot to them. They’re in here.”

  “Maybe you think they have the Spanish disease?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Gambling. Do they gamble with their lives?”

  “Maybe.”

  Hierro was left to his shackles.

  Basa motioned them along the corridor. “Come and see the rest.”

  Ugalde walked behind. He followed them through the kitchens, a small one for the prisoners, a larger one for the staff. “All our meat is bought from Criado’s meat shop in the village. It makes for good relations. The staff gets meat stew on Thursday. The prisoners don’t get meat, except on Saint’s Days,” Basa explained. Then, through the staff rooms, the control room, the radio room, the interrogation rooms, the offices. The great arm around his son’s shoulders looked to Ugalde more and more like a coil. Basa’s voice washed over him, endlessly explaining and vaguely, somewhere in his mind, he wondered, since the place had been open for six months, why Basa chose this day to show them over it and why he chose to show them two young political prisoners? Ugalde had never expected to see the inside of the place and the invitation surprised him. What surprised him more was Basa’s proprietorial father-figure behavior with his son. Basa had met Mauro often on a fleeting basis and paid him small attention. And now? Ugalde drifted after them, still shrinking.

  They finished their tour of the building and went out into the compound.

  The brilliance of the day was harsh. Ugalde screwed his eyes against it.

  “Come up with us, Dion,” Basa called and did not look behind.

  Mauro hesitated, trying to wait for his father and the coil around his shoulders pressed him forward. Ugalde saw it and was irritated and a little jealous and stayed behind.

  “There are two fences,” Basa explained, needlessly loud. “The inside fence is eighteen feet high, with another foot angled outwards. This inner fence is electrified. Beyond it we have another eighteen-foot fence, canted outwards like an airport noise baffle, and covered with red danger signs. It is not electrified. A goat cannot jump it, adventurous children cannot climb it. The public is safe.” His left arm encompassed the fences.

  We know all that, Ugalde told himself. We watched the place being built.

  “The patrols,” Basa said as two guards approached them. “Four patrols, in pairs. They are never out of one another’s sight, from before or behind.” The patrols went by, heavy with weapons.

  And why tell us this? The whole village knows it. Half the village has timed the patrols on their rounds, worked out their pace, their positions, their system. Twelve feet in from the electric fence, right-wheel in the corners—they had worn hard-earth paths for the whole world to see.

  “Night and day,” Basa said, gesturing. “Floodlights at night.”

  We have seen them from the beginning. At first the priests at the monastery couldn’t sleep because of the lights and the pulse of the generator.

  Basa pointed to it over in the northeast corner of the compound. “We have our own power. We have outside power, too, if we need it, of course, but we can’t be cut off.”

  Everybody had heard it night and day till the sound became a part of them like another heartbeat; they accepted it now and absorbed it, without awareness.

  “They can’t get in, except our way,” the colonel said, “and they can’t get out, except our way. It is not a place to get into—unless for a conducted tour.”

  Basa turned, and waited, and called, “Come up with us, Dion,” and the cold sun hid his face. He draped his long arms over their shoulders and steered them, like oxen under the yoke, toward the front door of his prison and into the prison commandant’s office.

  The prison commandant was about his business somewhere else in the building. Basa sat down behind the desk. His head looked out of place on his great frame. It was narrow; the face was pale and angular, the forehead high, the eyes dark and shadowed. His cheeks were not yet sunken but they were sinking. Ugalde always thought he had the face of a scholar worn down by the classroom. It had no business on that powerful body.

  Basa’s little smile as he looked at Mauro was that of a headmaster with a pupil he liked. He surprised them both. “Your father is my good friend, Mauro,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, I know.”

  It was not the sort of announcement Ugalde would have made and it was not in character with the Basa he knew. The colonel was in a queer mood today, a new mood, at least an unfamiliar mood.

  “Tell me frankly what you think of our new jail.”

  Jumping about a bit, from friendship to jails? Mauro wanted to say, I didn’t know you cared what anybody thought, or, There are no rats in this one, or, You�
��d better ask Vincente Hierro. He said, “I’m not much of a judge of jails. It’s very clean.” That was something positive.

  “The prison commandant, Captain Rubio, thinks he’s a bit of a philosopher. He’s a Seneca man. He keeps these quotations on the wall above my head. What do you think of the first one?”

  Mauro and his father looked up. Seneca, on a printed card on the wall, said: If you know how to use it, life is long enough. A philosophical policeman leading a little seminar. It was peculiar.

  “I’d have to agree,” Mauro said.

  “How do you use it, Mauro?” A priest, also?

  “Study. At this stage, medical studies. That’s my right use of life, sir.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Visits home. Just now, nothing else.”

  “You use your motorcycle?”

  “It’s the cheapest way.”

  “You had an uneventful trip this time?”

  Ugalde watched them with undefined uneasiness. Basa had never pried before.

  “Not entirely. We came by Tolosa up into Pamplona …”

  “We?” With the lifted eyebrows of an interested elder.

  “Yes. One of my friends at the university comes from Pamplona. I gave him a pillion ride.”

  “From Pamplona? Maybe I know him?”

  “José Duarte.”

  Basa wrote on a pad. “The trip wasn’t entirely uneventful, you said.”

  “No. We had a flat rear tire a few miles on this side of Tolosa.”

  “No spill?”

  “No, but neither of us was very good at fixing a puncture.” Tell him, Mauro thought. He knows already. “The Auxilio en Carretera came by and saved us.”

  “The Civil Guard has its uses. I hope they were pleasant?”

  “Yes. Quite pleasant.”

  “What time was that?”

  Tell him. He knows already. “We lost the tire about ten-thirty. They came along about ten-forty-five. We were on the move again by eleven-fifteen.”

  Ugalde was oppressed by the room. It was close, and getting closer. Mauro was under control. He was proud of him. But he was also under examination.

  “What do two healthy young men do in Pamplona? Do you see girls?”