by Shaun Herron
“Then Duarte decided he had to eat. So we went to the La Vasca restaurant where my bike was parked. Duarte held us up badly and I had to ride him home, repark the bike and plant the bomb.
“When I got down to the Iruña Zarra dining room it was packed. Fifty engineering students and fifty student nurses were having some sort of celebration, eating, drinking, singing, walking about, making a lot of noise. I placed the bomb and left.
“My contact waited for me on the road home and said the explosion would be at five. It went off at four. He mistimed the thing. We could have had a disaster on our hands instead of a punishment. We could have killed and mutilated a hundred people. This sort of thing we could have avoided with more care.”
“Was the contact a regular explosives man?” Haro asked.
“No. His business is with goats.”
They discussed the matter till they had picked it clean and Abril listened to their solemn proposals concerning the making of bombs and agreed to pass them to his link and did not tell them the response would be, “Piss. Why don’t they stick to what they know?” And they spent time on the two misplaced handguns at Valmaseda. It was important, they always agreed, to eliminate every unnecessary risk by guarding against stupid error.
“Reports,” Mauro said, and Reis tried to return to the Valmaseda money. “They cheated us of three percent,” he complained.
“It’s done,” Mauro ruled. “Forget it. Abril?”
Abril had a name he was under orders to raise with them.
“Señora Aña Anson,” he said.
It was a familiar name. It spoke to them of Pamplona painters and sculptors and musicians and writers whose work had flourished or failed to flourish under Señora Anson’s patronage and promotion. And it spoke to them of great wealth and great beauty and an industrial magnate whose plants manufactured cable buses and sewing machines and dishwashers and the common hardware of the kitchen. They had in their own kitchen in the club, some of the products of one of his plants. All these and low wages were what came to mind when they thought of Señora Aña Anson and her husband who was nearing seventy in her fortieth year.
“She must have married him for the money,” Haro said.
“There’s plenty of it,” Abril said. “She’s had a ten-million-peseta price tag put on her by the council. The way the Assembly proposed to get it is the matter I’m ordered to report on. We have been given our next operation.”
It was pleasant to discuss Señora Añson and her beauty and her cultural enterprises and her pictures in the papers; it was nervous work talking of Señor Anson and his money. The assignment came so casually, almost indifferently, as if there could never be doubt; that small or large, operations would never be questioned.
“We are to take Señora Anson. They will demand ten million pesetas for the señora—and Hierro out of jail,” Abril said coldly.
Mauro shivered on his stool. The thought of a kidnap had never touched his mind.
“What’s our percentage?” Reis asked after the shaken silence. And Abril read the bad joke and thought, They’re frightened.
“It’s too big for us,” Mauro said, not thinking of the money.
“We don’t have to collect the money,” Abril said. “Only the señora.”
“It’s too big for us,” Mauro repeated doggedly.
“The Assembly says we’re the right unit for the job,” Abril reported faithfully, free from all useless questionings.
“It’s not our kind of operation.” Mauro was inhibited by an immediate and stubborn reluctance. He had given the issue no thought. There had been no time for thought. He reacted. All his instincts told him it was a mistake. These things were too complicated. They were not like the Valmaseda operation, scouted, planned, executed and out with two bags full. Then forgotten and next day, labs and lectures. A kidnap was a job for the professionals—for those men who lived beyond the frontier and crossed it for one operation. Or for men whose lives were planning and promoting revolution; organizing, always on the move, always under cover. Young men who have to show up in class or account for their absence, young men who have to explain to their fathers why they haven’t been seen in his offices for two, three, how many days? This was not their work. The nature of their lives made them vulnerable, probably made them incompetent, certainly made them unsuitable. He spoke his mind.
“We can handle it, Mauro,” Reis said cheerfully. Mindlessly, Mauro thought.
He said, “There’s a far more serious question. You might get the money, but you’d lose the sympathy of every man, woman and child in Spain. You don’t kidnap women.” It was the first time he had allowed the word kidnap out of his mouth. It chilled him.
“We don’t decide,” Abril said. “The Fifth Assembly decides. We obey orders.”
“Are we ordered?”
“They’ll come here next Tuesday night. They’ll go into it.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know who they’ll be. They want three keys. I’ll get them made from mine.”
“You don’t kidnap women,” Mauro insisted.
“That’s not for us to say. Anything we can argue, they’ve already argued. They know the arguments and the answers. It’s all been worked out.”
“Abril,” Haro said quietly, “you have a fine proletarian sense of your station in life. Obedience comes naturally.”
“I know why I’m here, Haro. I know why I’m in this. Do you know why you’re in it?” Abril picked up a stack of dirty dishes and carried them to the kitchen. When he came back, he said into their nervous silence, as if he had done nothing to interrupt himself, “Next Tuesday we’d all better know. I don’t know who they’ll be, but the men who come to set this one up—they’ll be pros. And by God, they know why they’re in it.”
It had a harsh and threatening sound.
For the second time in his life, Mauro’s separate worlds failed to stay separate. The doctor of Burguete would not be separated in his mind from Dion Ugalde, Luis Arrabal’s chief lieutenant. The tried and trusted mechanisms of self-deception ceased; comforting, flattering or exciting fantasies that had colored the dreary days were suddenly aggravations threatening his security, and dreary reality was unexpectedly welcome. But dreary reality was depressing: it was the dimension of the new assignment; it was his mother, Maria-Angeles Ugalde, who took on a peculiar likeness to Señora Aña Anson; it was an assignment so large and complex and unpredictable that the prospect of failure threatened his father and mother with disastrous consequences he had not allowed himself to consider before.
He wrote two tests in the days that followed and was alarmed by his performance. His test papers, like his texts, threw up the word “kidnap.” He wrote his weekly letter to his parents and found himself forgetting in the middle of sentences how they were meant to go on. He found “kidnap” falling from the point of his pen when his mind—he thought—had thrust it out. He made four attempts to write his letter, struggling cheerlessly to be cheerful and, desperate for something to say, asked permission in his fifth and final attempt, to bring Pureza to Burguete for some part of the Christmas holiday.
And he went with Haro to the library of the faculty of commerce to search the files of newspapers they kept there for references to Señora Aña Anson. There were plenty. The señora, it was clear, was a fine horsewoman. There were pictures of her riding fine horses, opening exhibitions, reading orchestral scores with visiting conductors (“Do you think she really can read music?” Haro wondered. “When a woman looks like her, she doesn’t even need to read Spanish,” Mauro said), and smiling incessantly with and at groups of dignitaries who had agreed to do for culture what she wanted them to do. Yes, she was beautiful. She was very beautiful. She was gracious. She was generous. She was wealthy. She was half her husband’s age, and childless. Was that her aged husband’s fault? A childless woman is a pitiful thing. If she is beautiful and rich and wears clothes that define what they cover with provocative exactitude so that men and women with b
lood in their veins can see in her what women desire to be and men desire to possess, then she is doubly pitiful for she has an old man in her bed who can neither value nor possess her to that end which is the purpose of her life: childbearing. In picture after picture, with painters and writers and sculptors and musicians, her smile was frank and friendly with an unassuming openness, but in others there was about her eyes a withdrawn and private light.
“What she needs is a young and potent lover,” Haro said. “She’s sad.”
“Don’t talk that way,” Mauro said impatiently, and knew it was what more than half the women in Spain would say; what his mother would say, what Pureza would say. Once he overheard his mother say of one of his father’s patients in the village (a young waitress in the bar halfway down the street by the town hall, whose breasts were full, legs exquisite, hips eloquent, cradle empty and husband sickly), “She doesn’t need you, Dion. She needs a night on the mountain with a man like Ramiro Urbina, the vet. He’d give her twins.”
And his father laughed and said, “It’s genetics, not big genitals that make twins.”
If Señora Aña Anson in her fortieth year were to flower and bring forth, men would wonder, and women would believe she had taken a potent lover to give her a child; and the women would frown for their men and smile little smiles of triumph with other women and rejoice with and pray for the brave and determined señora who refused to allow her womb to be denied.
It was a mistake, a stupid and destructive mistake to take a woman for ransom and in exchange for Hierro; it was a monumental blunder to take this woman. “And that is what I’ll argue,” he told Haro.
On Saturday, he took Pureza on the back of the bike to the fishing village of Elancove. It roosted against the cliff above its little harbor built of massive cut stone. The one cobble-stoned, narrow street wound along the face of the cliff like a goat path. The houses were accessible only by narrow precipitous steps, and Pureza stood on the steps and touched the houses on either side with her outstretched hands. She was gay, affectionate, amusing.
“Come down,” he said. “Let’s go along beyond the harbor and have lunch. I want to talk to you.” Talk was his reason for bringing her here today. He was nervously impatient to unburden his spirit. He would have been prepared to speak his deepest fears to his mother but that was impossible. He couldn’t trust them to Haro or Reis. What he felt and feared didn’t need a hand to shake but a breast to suckle; or a womb to hide in.
Down in the harbor a fisherman cleaned a large fish on the sea wall and threw the guts into the water. The crying gulls planed down. The man’s wife came out of her house with a bucket of water and a brush and scrubbed the sea wall.
“That’s not the kind of domestic service you can expect from me,” Pureza said. She took his hand and skipped around him, spinning him. “I have different domestic joys planned for you,” she promised him. In a different state of mind and spirit he would have asked for them now. He hid his impatience of her sportive and untimely mood and hurried her along.
The striking fishermen with small glasses in their thick, broad hands stood in a clump on the concrete pad outside the bar door and with knowing, smiling eyes watched them scramble out of sight along the rocky base of the cliff beyond the harbor. Mauro could not hear their comments but he knew them. Pureza could not hear their comments.
“Dirty-minded bastards,” she said.
They ate their sandwiches and drank their wine lodged out of the wind’s way among great rocks. “Stay where you are,” Pureza said. “In a little while a couple of those bullocks will sneak along the cliff and look down to see if you’ve got my slacks off yet.”
Mauro stayed six feet from her. Their backs were braced against confronting rocks. The wind’s whistle and moan were shut away. Now that they were apart and safe in a place where talk could be free, he wasn’t sure how to reach his dangerous subject.
“Pureza,” he said. “I can’t think of anything these days but you and me and a practice in a country town.” He began where all his disturbed emotions took him and always took him when he was afraid; to a place to hide, a dream of repose, a breast to suckle.
“That’s nice,” she said and lobbed pebbles for him to catch, like a pet.
“Is that all you have to say?”
“What would you like me to say?”
“That you can’t think of anything these days but me and you and a practice in a country town.”
“That’s what I do think.”
“There’s nothing more important?”
“What could be more important?”
“You got me into the Fifth Assembly.”
“You think that’s more important?”
“No.”
“Then what’s bothering you?”
“It would sound ridiculous if I said I couldn’t tell you.”
“It would be ridiculous. It would mean you don’t trust me. It would also be about the Fifth Assembly.”
“It is.”
She caught her own pebbles for a moment tossing them high. “What is it, Mauro?” She watched the pebbles. “Do you want out?”
“No. We’ve never swapped information unless they put you on one of the club’s operations.” It was impossible … it was also unwise … to say, I want to be sure I can trust you, I want to be sure the Fifth Assembly isn’t more important.
“Is it a bank?”
“No.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Very. And complicated.”
“Bank jobs aren’t?”
“Do you think they are?”
“I’m always so afraid that I want to run away. If you weren’t there, I think I would, I’m quite sure I would.”
That was an opening. He probed it. “Then why do you do it?”
“Haven’t you seen that yet? When I fell in love with you I wanted to stop. I stayed in because you stayed in. I wanted more than anything to impress you. To tell you the truth, I thought you wouldn’t want me if I wasn’t brave and bold and a great joker. Mauro, do you want out?”
“No.”
“I trust you, Mauro. I love you. Shall I tell you what I really think?”
“Yes.” They were on the right track, going the way he wanted to go. She would take them, it seemed, to where he wanted to be.
“You’ve told me a lot about your family, how close you are. I think you’re too close and you got into the Fifth Assembly as a kind of assertion of your freedom—from boyhood to manhood. Something like that. I think we both did the same thing for the same reason. My parents bullied me and I joined something I couldn’t tell them about to spite them. You did it to … just to be a bit free of them. Is that silly?”
“No. But there’s more to it than that. I think I want to be more like my grandfather than my father. I love him very much, don’t misunderstand me. But Luis Arrabal—well—”
“So you don’t want out?”
“No.”
“Then tell me what’s bothering you, Mauro. I think you’re frightened.”
“I am. If I’m caught, the world will fall in on me.”
“Then, by God, I want to know. I’m going to know, Mauro. If not, take me home and forget me.”
“They want Hierro out of jail.”
“A jail break? It can’t be done. They’d shoot Hierro as soon as it started.”
“Not a jail break. They want Hierro and ten million pesetas for Señora Aña Anson of Pamplona.”
Pureza jumped up. She leaned over him, unbelieving. “A kidnap?”
“Yes.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
“No!”
“They’re sending men to the club on Tuesday night.”
“You? No! A woman? No! No, Mauro, no!”
“I’ll need all the arguments you can give me.”
“No arguments, Mauro. You just refuse. You won’t do it.”
“They’ve already decided that.”
She sat down beside him, holding tightl
y to his arm. They were quiet. They did not see the fishermen watching them from the top of the cliff. Then she cried.
“No, no, no,” she said. “The club can’t do it. There are always delays and where are you and Reis and Haro if you’re held up somewhere? How do you account for yourselves? It’s stupid, Mauro. And it’s wrong. Not a woman. But not you anyway. It’s impossible. It’s too complicated. Oh, God. It’s wrong.”
And too dangerous, he thought. I’m frightened. Country town banks are easy, but this. The complications made his head swim.
“I asked my mother if you could come to Burguete for Christmas. Will you come?”
I asked my mother. The words advanced his deflation. He was out of his depths. He felt too young, too dependent, too far from solid ground, too vulnerable. The thought of a country practice and Pureza in bed and in the kitchen was a kind of womb.
“What did she say?”
“She hasn’t had time to say.”
“I’ll come.”
“On Tuesday night, I’ll refuse.”
“Yes,” she said listlessly. “Please let’s go home.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“I don’t want you to leave me. The girls are away for the day.”
“Dry your eyes. The men at the bar will think I tried to assault you.”
“You’ll refuse, Mauro? And stick to it?”
“I’ll stick to it.” Will they allow me to stick to it?
“I love you so much, Mauro. I need you so much.”
It was astonishing that anybody should love him. He did not feel like a leader. He felt like Dr. Ugalde’s boy, Mauro. He wished he could talk to his father and touch him and tell him how he loved him, how he needed him.
“You’ll love my father and mother,” he said.
