The Bird in Last Year's Nest

by Shaun Herron

  One thing bothered him a little. He didn’t like Mauro Ugalde. He knew men did not always like the children of their friends. That wasn’t the problem, though. The difficulty here was that Mauro was a fool. A bull’s arse of a fool. A cow’s cunt of a fool. His anger surged and that was not the state of mind in which to talk to good friends for whose comfort and peace of mind he was willing to take a risk with the watchdogs of the corps.

  He took the black briefcase from the safe and phoned the control room. The control room phoned the sentry in the concrete gatehouse. Colonel Basa walked across the compound to the electrified gates. They opened, robbed of their potency, and he went out; the harmless gate in the harmless fence opened. It seemed to him in his mood to involve a lot of trouble merely to leave this place. He could do it. Vincente Hierro could not. And would not. Hierro would be tried for bank robberies and a successful kidnapping with extortion, for illegal political activity, for belonging to and leading an insurrectionist organization. He would be convicted. He had killed no one; that is, he had committed no blood crime: thirty years. He would be fifty-five when he got out. Why don’t they have sense? Basa wondered sadly.

  He crossed the four-foot-wide bridge that had no guard rails, through a herd of goats he had been too preoccupied to see or hear coming the other way. The young goatherd smiled at him with distant mockery he mistook for shyness.

  “Buenos dias, señor,” the boy said.

  “Buenos dias,” the colonel said. He had learned a lot about farm kitchens and farm people, riding horseback with Ugalde through roadless mountain valleys where the doctor made house calls; house calls made between casts in streams and pools. Farm wives cleaned their catches, fed them, served them wine from skins and goat and sheep and cow’s milk cheese fresh from cool caves. The country people were the traditional enemies of the Civil Guard. Hadn’t the corps always existed to keep them in order? But through Ugalde’s eyes Basa had seen a different peasantry here. These were not like the hard, poor and dangerous peasants of the arid south who were bitterly grateful for bread while these people ate meat and fish and plenty of it and were properly proud of their cleanness and their cooking. “Buenos dias,” he said again to the young goatherd’s back.

  There was the night Ugalde took him up the mountain to Carlos Echiverri’s farmhouse where the men of the high farms were gathering for one of those machismo feasts from which women were excluded. The men cooked, drank, ate, washed up, talked, sang and danced to the music of Carlos’ homemade fiddles, and at the head of the track far down the mountain where they had left Ugalde’s car, the colonel, well-wined and dined and expansively relaxed and hazy in the head, said happily at three in the morning, “Dion, I feel marvelous—like a boy out of school.” And Ugalde said, “We ought to feel that way sometimes, Julio. Enjoy it.”

  “Buenos dias, amigos,” Basa said again to the country people in general. He owed Ugalde for a peculiar gift—a sort of interior rest. Ugalde and Mercedes Aloys, he corrected himself.

  When he reached Ugalde’s house, the doctor took him to the kitchen. The colonel had learned to like kitchens and the Ugaldes lived in theirs.

  Basa laid his black briefcase on the kitchen table. He wished he could burn it in the stove.

  “Esplendido, Julio?” Ugalde asked him, and kept the black briefcase in the corner of his vision as he poured the brandy. It was a new thing, lying there by Basa’s elbow.

  “Please.”

  The brandy was Spanish. The doctor could not afford the costlier French brandy but he preferred the Spanish. Basa had learned to like it. He had no interest in sport and could not talk about the bullfight as a ballet. He talked of wine and brandies. “The French is a more intellectual brandy than the Spanish,” he liked to say. It was his affectation. “The Spanish is an emotional brandy—it has more of the whole man in it. More sex …” He thought that day of telling Ugalde about Señora Mercedes Aloys, the widow of the industrialist Aloys. But he could not. What began as an amusement had become a friendship. And Ugalde for his part had never spoken of his intimate domestic life with his wife. These were softer, deeper, more vulnerable things. Basa knew that now and said nothing about the señora.

  “I’ve never seen you with a briefcase before, Julio.” The thing lay there like a creature in one of his shocking dreams. “It makes you look very official.”

  “I am official today, Dion.” He had intended to waffle his way toward it. He was forced into it at once by a country doctor’s innocence, he thought. “I came to talk about Mauro.”

  “Coffee, too?” Ugalde said and went stone-faced to the stove.

  “Please.”

  Ugalde poured the coffee. “Then I’ll get Maria.”

  “There’s no need, Dion. Just you and me.”

  “Maria,” Ugalde said, “nothing is hidden from Maria.” He felt like cold stone.

  “We could clear it all up …”

  “Maria is Mauro’s mother, Julio. I’ll get her.”

  Basa sat alone in unhappy anticipation. Talking about a stupid youth to a father who was a close friend was bad enough. A mother was much worse; and these two were so close. He wished that had been his own married state and felt lonely; in a way, excluded.

  The Ugaldes did not return quickly. When they did, Maria had fixed her hair and changed her dress. She came to the table slowly, her hands folded under her breasts, full of dignity, her face composed. They’re an iron pair, Basa thought, always under control. And in spite of the slight impression of plumpness, Maria was almost beautiful like this. She’s Dion’s strength, he decided. Her little bob was almost a curtsey. She waited for her husband to sit down at the table and sat close to him.

  “There is something about our son, señor?” It seemed to come from a great height. Señor, not colonel. He was to be treated as a man, not as the provincial commander of a police force nobody loved.

  Waiting for them—and thinking about their son—had dissolved Basa’s small skills as a counsellor and friend of families. He intended to say only that he thought Mauro was acting unwisely, but his resentment overruled his tact. The stupid young fool was the occasion of possible strain between the colonel and his friend. And a man needs his friends. “Señora,” he said, “there may be nothing but there is the appearance of something. I think your son Mauro is acting foolishly and I want his father to stop him.”

  Maria heard it in tone and substance, weighed the emphasis on “your son” and “foolishly” and felt their spite. “What has our son Mauro been doing, colonel?” she asked gently, demoting Basa in her scale of human values. “He’s always been a quiet, responsible boy.”

  “He has left his old lodgings and gone to live with the Mendez family in the Portugalete district of Bilbao.”

  It was old news. Very innocent news. An image of human vultures from his shocking dreams made a haze in Ugalde’s head. Basa would not know this about Mauro unless the Civil Guard of the province of Vizcaya had been in touch with Pamplona about it. And if that were the case—it was the only possible case—yesterday’s tour of the political prison and this black-briefcased visit had another dimension.

  “We knew this, Julio,” he said. “He told us. He joined a friend who lodges there.” No haste. No panic. He has something to tell. Let him come to it.

  “This Mendez is out of work,” Maria said.

  “Your son told you so, señora?”

  “Of course. We don’t know these people.”

  “This Mendez is in jail, señora.”

  Maria’s foot touched Ugalde’s, under the table. “Since when? And for what?” she asked with reasonable astonishment.

  “Since early yesterday evening. He is one of the leaders of the illegal strike at the Bilbao shipyards.”

  “Mauro can’t have known that,” Maria said firmly. “He thinks about nothing but medicine.”

  Basa was willing to believe it. The boy was just a bull’s arse of a fool. It was unfortunate, in this case anyway, that the appearance of guilt was a
lmost if not quite as dangerous as guilt itself—sometimes it was just as dangerous. “I’m sure you’re right,” Basa said, “but mistakes are hard to erase once they’re officially noted.” He took Mauro’s dossier from the black briefcase. “And his has been noted. Mendez was arrested during a violent street demonstration last night. Six strikers were shot…. You’ll get some of the details in tomorrow’s papers and broadcasts. Get him back to his old lodgings, Dion, before he hurts.”

  “I’ll go. I’ll move him. Thank you, Julio.”

  “I have a copy of his Bilbao dossier. There’s nothing in it but this one folly. And, of course, his family history.”

  “You mean his grandfather, colonel?” Maria asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll go. I’ll move him. He doesn’t think about politics.” Ugalde would have left at once for Bilbao.

  “Other people think about politics,” Basa said.

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Julio.”

  “Bilbao has asked my records office for a full report on your son’s background.” Basa took out the Ugaldes’ dossiers. He said, leafing intently, “His family background—not his grandfather, but his parents.”

  “I see.” Everything inside Ugalde seemed to settle and calcify. What does a man do? he thought desolately. I hide the truth from my son because there is no amnesty and he might by a slip of the tongue betray me and when after all the years amnesty comes, I am still not covered, for there is no amnesty for blood crimes and I still cannot tell him, for my survival is his survival also. And in his ignorance and innocence my son is foolish and his folly opens my life for a new inspection. What ought I to have done? Deceive him? Prepare him? Trust him? He didn’t know. They had been over this so often. They always came to the same conclusion: Let him be free of it; put no burden on the young. Poor Mauro. All we prepared him for was to make the kind of mistake you cannot make in Spain. “Ask, Julio,” he said and his voice sounded in his head like dropped stones.

  “I’ve been through your dossiers with a flea comb,” Basa said. “You realize,” he said with his head down, apparently reading, “that I am breaking rules …”

  “Thank you, Julio.”

  “They’ll go through these in Bilbao with their own flea comb. You know that.”

  “Yes.” Ugalde added a politic word, “As they should.”

  “Yes. Anything that needs explanation must be explained. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m uneasy about this, Dion. I may find myself adding to your dossier by collaboration with you who are the subject of it. If one of my men did this …”

  “You must do what you think right, Julio. Friendship ought not to …”

  Basa looked up smiling. “But it will. I have few real personal debts. Two, in fact. One of them is to you. Shall we begin?”

  “Please.”

  “The real problem I find when I study these records is you, señora.”

  “You will explain that to me, colonel?” Maria’s composure was a generation old.

  “Your father was Luis Arrabal, once the doctor of Ramosierra.”

  “Yes.”

  “He left Ramosierra in 1936 when the Civil War began …” He paused for a moment to consider and omit a passage in the dossier that described Arrabal as a notorious Republican bandit. Then he went on, “… and died in Huesca during a battle with the Civil Guard.”

  “He died in Huesca. He was buried in a summer pasture in the mountains.” She looked steadily at him, her face without expression.

  Basa made a note of it. “That does not appear to be known.”

  “I have seen his grave.” She did not add, “We pay the shepherds to tend it every summer.” She wanted to add, bitterly, that they had not dared to go near it over the years.

  “It is believed that all his men died with him, señora. How could you know this, and who buried him?”

  “One of his men did not die. He buried him.”

  “Who is this man and where is he?”

  “Dead.”

  Basa gratefully passed on. “They will think a great deal in Bilbao about the fact that Mauro is Arrabal’s grandson.”

  “Julio. Like me, my son has no political opinions,” Ugalde protested and quoted a proverb in support. “ ‘In last year’s nest there are no birds this year.’ ”

  “We must show clearly that he is your son, Dion, and not Arrabal’s grandson. Arrabal is a shadow over your son now that he has involved …” He smothered his impatience with Mauro. “You were born in Ramosierra, Dion?”

  “Yes. My father was the mayor.”

  “A neutralist in a divided town? That it what the record says.”

  “The people trusted him. He was wise. It kept the peace.”

  “This is where the problem arises, Dion. The formal record says you were in France, a student, when the Civil War began.”

  “That is so. It has all been documented. Where is the problem?”

  “I find, among the papers in your dossier, a copy of a list of your family killed when a shell struck your house in Ramosierra.”

  “My family was destroyed by that shell.”

  “Except you?”

  “My father, mother, two sisters, two brothers. I was in France.”

  “Studying medicine?”

  “Not at that time. My French wasn’t good enough then to take my first year in medicine. I went to Paris to live with my mother’s brother who was in business there. He had three sons. The professor of one of my cousins gave me French lessons for a year. My uncle paid for the lessons. This was all documented when I came home to Spain and applied to the Ministry for my license to practice.”

  “It’s all here, Dion. Your uncle’s written testimony is in your dossier. But so is this handwritten certificate listing the dead in your father’s house. It is signed by the local doctor—Luis Arrabal. You are listed among the dead. I take it that was done in the pain and confusion of the moment? A mistake?”

  “No!” Maria’s strong denial surprised Basa.

  “It’s obvious that nobody has bothered to examine this list over the years, señora. The contradiction has to be cleared up, for now that there’s reason to examine the list, somebody will.”

  “Then they should know the story, señor.” She needed him. Señor, she called him, restoring his human status. “It is one we often talk of in this room.” Rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing. They had spent years deciding, re-examining, rehearsing the tone and texture of just such an explanation. Far into many nights they had talked about what touches the Spanish heart and mind. There was the man who had been sought for years as a “Republican bandit” and one day he wrote, from France, that the daughter he had not seen for as many years was dying and he wanted to see her. He fought for conscience, he wrote. He would come, and go again. They met him at the bridge over the Bidasoa and took him to his daughter, and took him back to the bridge, and let him go. A man of conscience, who will suffer for conscience, can be understood; and admired. And shot, if he came again. And there was also the Dramatic, and the Romantic, and the Tragic … the Spanish heart is fierce and vengeful and complex and generous.

  “Señor,” Maria said, her hands folded under her breasts, “my father, Luis Arrabal, and Dion’s father disagreed about everything and loved one another. Dion loved his own father but he loved my father also. It was Luis Arrabal who made him want to be a doctor. When the shell hit Dion’s house I was fifteen and he was in France. He was to come back when he qualified. We were promised. The day the shell hit the house, I was walking with my father to Dion’s house. Our fathers were going to play cards for wine. There was only one shell that day. When it struck we ran to the house. There were pieces of people in the ruins. My father said they had all been in one room. He was like a madman. We shovelled the pieces we could find into sacks and buried them in the garden. People came and helped. The priest came and mumbled from his book. My father had no love for priests. He howled while the priest mumbled. His
friend was dead, and all the family, all but Dion. Then my father made a list of the dead and we walked to the town hall. Against the door, he added Dion’s name to the list and signed it. ‘Now he will never come back,’ he said. ‘He will not come for a girl when his family are like butchered goats. He will leave Paris and come to me in the mountains and fight and die. We will record his death here. One of these days he will go unrecorded into a common grave.’ My father wanted to change the land, señor, but he was as fatalistic as a Moor. That is what happened, señor. I waited for Dion. He did not go to the mountains. He studied. But he came back for me, and I was waiting there. And now we are here. And still there are questions.”

  “They were fearful times,” Basa said, not knowing what to say.

  “Savage,” Maria said savagely.

  “There may still be people at Ramosierra who would remember you were not there, Dion?”

  “The town was fought over by armies. It fought itself, too. Neighbors slaughtered neighbors. After it was over, neighbors denounced neighbors. There could be somebody. We do not know. I went once more, for Maria. There is nothing there. We do not go …” But there was nobody who could tell. He knew that. Let them search. All the searching was done long, long ago. All the measures to still memories were taken long, long ago.

  “It’s enough. I’ll explain the list. I suppose putting Dion’s name on it was the kind of gesture Luis Arrabal would make.”

  “I loved my father, señor,” Maria said hoping she sensed one man’s understanding of another. “He left that night, mad with rage. We never saw him again. Those times were like that.”

  “Of course, of course,” Basa fumbled. “I’m sorry, señora. They were savage times. They are over. Certainly, they’re over. Go and get your son out from among these people, Dion.”