The Bird in Last Year's Nest

by Shaun Herron

  Now he doesn’t know. Tell him what you want him to know. “We drank and we ate.”

  “Give me an idea what two young men do in Pamplona on a Friday night. It’s some time since I spent my time that way. You got to the city about … about what time?”

  He wants you to account for your movements. Give him an accounting. “Midnight. We parked the motorcycle and put the chain on it in San Augustin because we were coming back there to eat. Then we went to the Iruña in the plaza and had a drink.”

  “Saw friends?”

  He wants witnesses. Give him witnesses. “Friends of José’s. Maria Raventos and her father and mother. We had a few drinks—white wine—and some coffee with the Raventos …”

  Basa wrote on his pad.

  “… we were there for over an hour. Then we walked about a bit and went to the New London bar. It’s over the plaza beside the La Perla hotel. We’re up to half past one now.”

  Basa did not react. “Then?”

  “Then we went down the steps to San Augustin and ate at the La Vasca.”

  “That’s the little Basque place? Is the food good?”

  “Very, and cheap and plentiful. My father—we used to eat there often. Then I took José home. I was home myself just after three.”

  “Three?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said the Iruña? The café-bar?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In the plaza?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not the Iruña Zarra down the hill?”

  “On San Miguel?”

  “No, Blanca de Navarra.”

  “No, sir. Why?”

  “At four this morning, a time bomb went off in the dining room of the Iruña Zarra and wrecked the place. There was nobody in the building.” Basa sat back in his chair. “But the place was thoroughly wrecked.”

  Mauro was very still. He said nothing.

  “Julio! You’re not asking Mauro if he was involved in this?” The doctor was out of his chair.

  “Sit down, Dion. Leave this to us.” Basa said to Mauro, “The Civil Guard man who fixed your tire reported after the word went out about this explosion. Every student who was in or near Pamplona last night will be questioned. I wanted to know what you would say to my men or the people in Bilbao—whoever sees you—before you said it to them. This account is the truth, Mauro?”

  “Of course, he’s telling the truth!”

  “Sit down, Dion. Mauro can speak for himself.”

  “Yes,” Mauro said sharply.

  “Mauro,” Basa said, “your father is my good friend. When you are questioned, tell the simple truth.”

  “Yes, sir. I have to pick José up in Pamplona on the way back. Should I go to your headquarters then?”

  “Don’t do anything. Wait for them to come to you in Bilbao. They’ll come, I promise you. Your father told me you stopped in Pamplona and I have to report that I know you were in the city. But wait till they come. The bombing will not be generally known about till the television and radio people and the press get permission to report it on Monday. Why would you go to my headquarters or anybody else’s till you read it in the papers?”

  “Because you told me what happened, sir.” It sounded grateful. It felt pleasantly malicious.

  “Yes.” The colonel smiled dryly. “In my corps, my dear young man, friendship is not allowed to count. Wait. Always avoid unnecessary complications.”

  “For anyone, sir?”

  “For anyone, Mauro.” Basa’s dominical smile degenerated. He was grinning. “I will file my own report in my own terms. If you are asked about our conversation, I questioned you.”

  “Thank you, sir.” A pleasant confidence warmed Mauro.

  Ugalde stood up and was glad Basa did not. It made him feel a little less shrunken. “We’ll go now, Julio,” he said. “Thank you.” A man needs a good friend in place. He has a right to be grateful for that.

  “I’ll drive you home.”

  “No. I need to walk.” He wanted to say, I want my son to myself.

  “Well, I have things to do here this weekend and you’ll want Mauro to yourself. I’ll see you later on Sunday before I go back to Pamplona.”

  He walked with them to the electrified gates. The lethal charge was switched off, the inner gate opened. Ugalde shivered as he stepped across the bar embedded in the ground. Mauro stepped on it with deliberate care. He felt the power of the demolitionist in his feet. The outer gates opened and they passed beyond them.

  Basa watched them from inside his prison compound. They did not look back. His wave to their backs was a slack salute.

  He went into his prison and sat down again at the prison commandant’s desk. His long gaunt face was melancholy.

  Ugalde and his tall son walked across the fields toward the monastery road, across the narrow guardless bridge over the river, and they did not speak.

  In the avenue of trees, Mauro stopped in the middle of the road.

  “You call that man your friend?”

  “He is my friend, Mauro. He just proved it. More than that, apart from you and Mama, he’s the only friend I have.”

  “He has things to do here this weekend, he says. What things? To draw more blood from Vincente Hierro’s wrists?”

  “That could be.”

  “And you still call him your friend?”

  “In my time, I have done worse. If we all got our due, many of us would face the hangman.”

  “You? What did you ever do to hurt anybody? You never did anything but good. What makes you talk that foolish stuff? I know you. And I know him. You have no right to have any dealings with him.”

  “Don’t shout, Mauro.”

  “I want to shout. How can you …?”

  Dr. Ugalde seized his son by the lapels of his coat. “Shut up, boy,” he said in his face. “I’ll tell you how I can and why I can and then you’ll be silent till I choose to tell you more. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ugalde let him go. “Now, walk on and forgive me for my anger. I had to shut you up. You were shouting loud enough to be heard at the barracks.” But they stood, face to face, and did not walk on.

  “I’m sorry, Father.”

  “I love you, Mauro. You know how much. Walk on.”

  They walked between the trees past the Civil Guards’ new brick barracks, and, out of earshot, Ugalde said, “Long, long ago, your mother and I made a contract with life. We had reasons, Mauro, very good reasons. ‘Give us one another, obscurity and peace, and children to love and bring up, and we will give back our skill and our service.’ That’s what we pledged. We have kept the pledge. We had Christina for a while. We still have you. We have loved you with all our hearts. Our contract with life has preserved you. We have died for you. You do not understand what I mean by that. You will, in time. Make your own contract with life, Mauro, but don’t despise ours. It assured your past, it has provided your present, and it has offered you your future. Just remember that you can serve some men, but you cannot save the world.”

  Mauro stood in the avenue of trees and gaped at his father. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Walk on.”

  They walked in silence and apart. Presently Ugalde took his son’s arm. “I know you don’t know what I’m saying,” he said, “but think about this. I do not live under Basa’s shadow. I live under his cover. What that means, I will tell you one day. But till you are qualified and licensed and have a practice and no longer need me, let it rest. Keep out of trouble with them. Do not disturb the hornets. Just keep it in your head, night and day, that your grandfather was Luis Arrabal. You can be sure they know it. You can be sure Basa knows it. This Hierro you saw just now was a midget beside Luis Arrabal and Basa knows it. But today he warned you. And he has never mentioned to me, or to Mama, that she is the daughter of Luis Arrabal. Basa has forgiven us for Luis Arrabal. He does not hold us to blame for him. Do not threaten us with talk or anger. Will you be quiet, and careful?”r />
  “Yes, Father.” Ten paces on he said, “But I am proud of my grandfather.”

  “But not of your father?”

  “You were in France when he was fighting”

  “Yes. Safe? Hiding, perhaps?”

  “I do not think that. You were born gentle.”

  There was no more talk. They came to the house.

  Ugalde said, “I have two house calls to make. If you would like to fish the Urrobi for the last time this year, tell Mama and she’ll pack some wine and food. She’ll come too.”

  In the kitchen, Maria packed cheese and bread and cold chicken and a flask of coffee and a bottle of wine.

  “Mama,” Mauro said, “Grandfather Ugalde was a gentle man, wasn’t he?”

  “A very gentle man.”

  “Like Father?”

  Maria closed the basket. “Your father is a very gentle man,” she said and put her arms about him. “But he is more. Your father is an iron man. Like Luis Arrabal.”

  “How can that be? Luis Arrabal died fighting.”

  “Mauro. Your father earns about $8,000 a year as a country doctor. We bleed to send you to Bilbao to become a doctor. When you no longer need your father, he will tell you many things. If he does not—ask me. Till then, wait and do not run into danger.” She stood back from him.

  “What do you both mean?”

  “When you no longer need us, ask us.”

  “When will I not need you?”

  They fished the pools of the Urrobi and the afternoon ached on. It was cold. There would be no more sport this year. Maria watched her husband and her son as they worked apart along the banks of the river, and she could not read their thoughts.

  At home, when the afternoon died, the strain dissolved in their need for one another and they talked. But night came and Dr. Ugalde’s dreams came, not of malevolent nature or of malignant machines, but of men and their deformities threatening his household in grotesque events; and late in the morning Mauro had to leave.

  “Come home again soon,” Maria said.

  “The first minute I can.” Mauro held his father hard. “Don’t think unkindly of me,” he said.

  “How could we do that? We love you.”

  But Mauro thought they looked older than when he came and tired, very tired.

  In the early afternoon, when Colonel Basa came to Ugalde’s he was carrying a black briefcase.

  3

  Every man is the son of his works.

  SPANISH PROVERB

  Colonel Basa’s black briefcase lay before him on the prison commandant’s desk. He took from it three files, started to open the one on top and closed it again with a tired gesture. On its right top corner there was printed DIONISIUS UGALDE, MEDICO. That’s all it says on the little brass plate that declares his life to the village, he thought, and shuffled the files. The second one said, MARIA-ANGELES UGALDE (ARRABAL) and the third, MAURO UGALDE. The thickest of the three files was Maria’s.

  He put them back in the briefcase and locked it in the office safe. Then he went out into the prison and down the grey steel corridor to look through the peephole at cell number eleven.

  There was a cot in the cell now, and a bucket. The young prisoner was no longer wrist-locked and chained to the wall. His wrists were bandaged. He lay on the bed staring at the ceiling with hostile, bloodshot eyes.

  Basa hurried back to the office and called the prison commandant in the control room. “Captain, I want a pot of coffee, some sandwiches and two cups,” he said. “Then bring No. 11 to me in your office.”

  A guard brought the coffee and sandwiches, then two guards and the captain brought No. 11. He stood with careless indifference in the middle of the room.

  Basa dismissed the guards and the captain. “Please sit down,” he said to No. 11.

  The prisoner did not sit down. His eyelids blinked with extraordinary slowness and he stared into Basa’s face.

  The colonel wondered if the man controlled the blink. “What is your name?”

  The prisoner stared and did not answer.

  “Your name is Vincente Hierro.” Basa poured two cups of coffee. “Sit down and have some coffee with me.” He pushed a cup across the desk.

  There was neither movement nor sound from the prisoner.

  “Can’t we at least talk together?”

  Nothing.

  “All I want from you is conversation.”

  Nothing.

  “Thirty years is a long time to stay silent.”

  Nothing.

  “As you please.”

  Basa took a book from a desk drawer, sat back in his chair and read. He read and drank two cups of coffee and ate half the sandwiches in twenty minutes. The only sounds in the room were the sounds of turning pages and poured coffee and a cup set gently into a saucer. The prisoner stood still and grey, like a statue cut from soapstone. His slowly blinking eyes did not shift their stare from Basa’s face. Basa did not look at him till he had eaten all the sandwiches. That took him another twenty minutes. Then he read ten minutes more, sitting very still, and the only sound was of turning pages.

  The colonel looked up and smiled at the prisoner.

  Nothing but the slowly blinking stare.

  He read very slowly for an hour and did not look again. Without taking his attention from the last page of the book at the end of the hour, he pressed a button on the desk.

  The two guards and the captain returned and took the prisoner back to his cell. When the office door closed Basa swung his chair round to face the wall, slid aside a panel and the sign: If you know how to use it, life is long enough. A television monitor stared without blinking from its recess. He reached behind him and counted under the lip of the desk, along a row of buttons till he reached number eleven. The prisoner appeared on the screen, walked to his cot and lay down. The sound of his body weighing on the bed in the wired cell was like a long sigh. His chest was heaving. Basa could hear his breathing. Sweat shone like grease on his face. He closed his eyes, took control of his breathing and laid his arms along his sides on the bed, palms down. Soon his jaws sagged slowly open and he snored.

  For a moment Basa watched No. 11. Then he closed the panel, shut off the monitor and stood up.

  “Repose after victory,” he said aloud.

  The saying was not his own but he used it with admiration and regret. Five years earlier he would not have ordered No. 11 out of wrist irons, against the wishes of the prison commandant, and would not have offered him coffee, sandwiches and conversation or tolerated his insolent and victorious silence for an hour and a half. There would have been little anger in his response that long ago; merely a stony, dutiful rigidity and, now and then, irritability about young men who were “a bull’s arse of a nuisance,” but by no means a menace. The irony of it was that as this breed of young men became more menacing, Basa’s admiration for them grew with his bewilderment. “They’re proud and brave,” he told Señora Mercedes Aloys on their first afternoon in bed, “but why don’t they have sense? They can’t win.” Then, since he had just made vigorous and sustained love for the first time to a vigorous and substantial widow, he turned on his side to sleep, and heard her say happily as he dozed, “Repose after victory” He wondered in his drifting mind whether she thought the afternoon victory had been his or hers. There had been something of a contest in the beginnings of his relationship with the señora. The contest was over,

  That was three years ago, the same year that Basa met Ugalde when he came to Burguete to keep an eye on the investigation of the death in peculiar circumstances of a member of a French angling party. Tourist deaths in peculiar circumstances were full of potential political embarrassments. The provincial governor had climbed on Basa’s back before the petulant French could climb on Madrid’s back and Madrid could put its spurs in the provincial governor’s flanks. Basa had spent a lifetime in the corps, shrewdly and skillfully lived; he had few enemies and the few were of small consequence. He had no intention of allowing some stupid escapa
de that turned to tragedy among a group of drunken Frenchmen to become a political embarrassment for the provincial governor who might in consequence turn into a political enemy. Basa had cornered carefully for twenty years in a regime in which dangerous hairpin bends were the rule.

  Ugalde was the local police pathologist and a good doctor. The victim did not die from the wounds he suffered in a brawl in a small roadside bar. The doctor ruled that the Frenchman died of alcohol poisoning. But, as one survivor to another, tactfully Ugalde suggested, “to cover yourself, Colonel,” that a pathologist from Pamplona, and another from France “nominated by French officials,” should check his conclusions. The dead man was a minor consular official. Basa took Ugalde’s advice and was impressed by the terms in which it was offered. The affair died in a mist of French embarrassment and regrets. The members of the fishing party were all minor consular officials.

  Basa liked the country doctor. He met him at a moment when some obscure and unrecognized need to like somebody, was pushing him toward unaccustomed friendship. First came the Señora Aloys whose husband died a few months after the death of Basa’s cold and abrasive wife; then Ugalde, who had obviously conducted himself with a humane concern for the colonel’s personal survival. Such disinterested concern was outside Basa’s professional experience. That it was disinterested he was quite certain. All the signs said so. The doctor was obscure. He asked no questions. He was of no consequence in society, had no expectations and wanted no change in his humble way of life. He had no factional interests, no political connections, he was an interesting and companionable nonentity. There were hair-raising facts in his wife’s dossier, but it was also clear that there was nothing of the fearsome hawk of a grandfather in this quiet nest. This good couple wanted and sought obscurity. So they should, with Arrabal in their lineage. And they should be allowed to have their obscurity and enjoy it.

  Basa and Ugalde drifted half-consciously into friendship, carefully, slowly, lured by mutual liking and mutual loneliness and protected by a sensible reticence. Ugalde’s friendship with Basa became part of the doctor’s protective coloring. The colonel was power; he was the shelter rather than the shadow of the regime. Basa’s friendship with Ugalde was important to him, though for a long time he did not fully admit this to himself. The doctor was, like the señora, harmless. The colonel, without worry and for the first time in his upward progress in the corps, had two people on whom he could turn his back. That was restful; and he was right. He was at the age, he knew, when he needed some restfulness in his life.