The Bird in Last Year's Nest

by Shaun Herron

  “Julio …?”

  “I am directed not to have any communication with Ugalde—that’s why I’ve been hiding from him. He suffers and I hide—under orders.”

  “Julio …?”

  “Yes?”

  “Have we their permission to meet?” She placed the blade softly, between flesh and bone.

  “Permission?” His sallow face was florid with anger. “Permission? Do you know what Dion asked me one day? ‘Do you also know how often we draw breath in a day?’ Do you know what Carballo told me? That I must behave with the utmost social discretion with respect to the Señora Mercedes Aloys. They know how often we breath in a day. There is, he said, some concern about the difference between your social standing and my official standing. There could be embarrassments for the corps. Oil and water, by God! I can visit every whorehouse in Spain. I can have a tarty mistress so long as she’s kept because even a senior officer of the corps has a right to work off an erection … but a woman like you … how could your kind of woman actually and honestly love a policeman?”

  “Without difficulty,” she said. “If you’re the policeman.”

  “What am I to do?” He sat wearily down. “By God, I hate some of my superior officers. I think I hate my job.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  She had waited for this opportunity for a long time and had not expected that such an emotionally ripe occasion would fall so suddenly at her feet. They had wounded his pride and cut at his professional and personal self-image. She played her cards face down on his distress and came and sat at his feet, her arms resting on his thighs. She was not incongruous, sitting there, a big woman in a small woman’s place. She took one of his hands and held it. “You’ve thrown thousands of young men into jail,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And never thought much about it?”

  “Not much. A little regret, sometimes. But not much.”

  “When your whole life was the corps and nothing else, you were a hard man, Julio. You were the hammer that can fall on any Spanish head.”

  “I was dutiful, I would say.”

  “Hard, I would say. A hammer. And lonely?”

  “Very, sometimes. When I had time to be lonely.”

  “I’ve watched you become a humane man, Julio. That’s your trouble. You’re caught between the hammer and the head it can fall on. When the Duchess of Medina Sidonia wept for the hungry poor and walked with them in their own villages, the hammer fell on her head and she was thrown into jail. Perhaps if we all had that young woman’s courage …”

  “You’re talking subversion to a Civil Guard provincial commander.” But he smiled.

  “I know the policeman I’m talking to. And when the strikers of the Bilbao shipyards walked for wages they could live on, the hammer fell on their heads. And when a Civil Guard commander loves a rich woman and an obscure doctor with a foolish son, the hammer falls on his head. Your career in the corps is over, and you know it. Because you love the wrong people. The Civil Guard doesn’t tolerate rivals. Nobody is asking for much, Julio—not you, not Mauro Ugalde. Not revolution, just an end to castration.”

  “You think this way?”

  “Most of us think this way—except a handful of fools. That’s the trouble with the men who hold the hammer—they can’t prevent our thinking, only our speaking and writing. So they never know what we really think. The people who run the Spanish State are like the crew of an Iberia airliner. They issue those little cards that say either déjeme dormir or despiérteme para las comidas—let me sleep, or, wake me up for meals. And some of the meals are meager.”

  “Now answer my question. What am I to do about Dion?”

  She came to it at last. “Tell that poor man where his son is, retire from the corps—and marry me.”

  “My pension on an early retirement wouldn’t heat your houses.”

  “Not machismo, Julio, not you. You don’t need it. Leave that for the men who doubt their manhood. I love you.”

  She was forty-five and an amazon; he had passed fifty, and was tall and gaunt, with a sorrowful face. She knelt by his chair and he bent and kissed her. They did not look ridiculous.

  “Book a room in your name at the Tres Reyes for tomorrow,” he told her. “Insist that you have the number of the room when you book it. Then drive this afternoon to Burguete and see Dion as a patient. Tell him to come to the room at two tomorrow afternoon. Tell him I’ll be there. I can’t face Maria-Angeles. There is a great furnace burning in that little woman and I’m afraid of it.”

  “I’ve never conspired against the State with a Civil Guard commander. The penalties are very severe.”

  “The Duchess of Medina Sidonia bore them bravely,” he said.

  “But will you marry me?”

  “Yes, I’ll marry you. I want to marry you.”

  “And to hell with machismo? Money is only money.”

  “And to hell with machismo. Money is only money.”

  “And retire from the corps?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  He fumbled. “Maybe they’ll allow me to finish this case. There are men involved I want to find. Maybe Mauro Ugalde knows what I need to know about them. If I could find these men … well, it would restore my credit in the corps.”

  “Is that important to you?”

  “How could it be otherwise? I’ve given my life to the Civil Guard.” A little flame of anger ran through him. “And this stupid boy destroyed it in a day. He destroyed me, he hurt his father and mother. He’s a stupid lout.”

  “You hate the boy?”

  “You can’t hate a fool. I loathe the big-headed bastard.”

  “You won’t help him for his father’s sake?”

  “For his father’s sake I will—if I can. But without credit, how can I?” He brushed it all away impatiently. “If I can, I will. There’s a man, older than these young fools, a professional. I want him. I want to finish with credit.”

  “Will it take long?”

  “How can I tell? If they let me finish the case, we’ll marry the day I retire. All right?”

  “Yes. But no machismo, Julio?”

  “No machismo. My pension will pay our light bills for a year.”

  “Hurry,” she said, a little like a large girl.

  When he had gone, she sat by the fire, smiling at the flames. She felt ten years younger. There would be a head of the house. The señora was a Basque; a house is not, if it has no head. Nobody is asking for much; only the answer to their own needs.

  Basa drove back to the Avenida de Galicia with a mild but pleasant sense of lightness in his heart. By the time he had walked the corridors of his headquarters and sat down behind his desk he had already begun an uneasy self-questioning. Did the lightness that had quickly faded come from the welcome promise of a wife and home, or was it only the promise of a safe escape from the prospect of humiliation after a long and successful career in the corps? He didn’t know. And when I say to Dion that his son is in jail, the son will still be where he is. And what will Dion say to me then? He didn’t know. His experience had not prepared him to deal with doubts and emotions that took him along strange and new paths. All he knew, by instinct and training, was what the corps knew—that doubts are dangerous. He did not feel younger. People are not asking for much; only the answers to their own questions.

  When the Señora Mercedes Aloys was beckoned into Ugalde’s surgery in the afternoon, the mountain farmer Carlos Echiverri was leaving it. He was smiling.

  10

  A good hope is better than a bad holding.

  SPANISH PROVERB

  Ugalde started the engine and waited for the gauge to register. He had enough gasoline in the tank to get him to Zubiri. Filling the tank there wouldn’t give him much time, but it would at least be a natural occasion to look at the Civil Guard barracks across from the filling station.

  “Tell him nothing, Dion,” Maria said firmly at the car w
indow.

  “Don’t worry, my love,” he said, patting her hand.

  “Why would the man send that woman to tell you?” She had asked it many times.

  “As I said, Maria, I don’t know. I’ll ask him.”

  “Don’t trust him.”

  “No.”

  She bent to kiss him. “Mauro is in his jail, Dion.”

  “Have I forgotten, Maria?”

  “He is cunning.”

  “Am I not?”

  His mind was on Basa, on the strangeness of his messenger and his message, on what they would say to one another. Maria’s anxious insistence irritated him. She knew it. “I’m sorry, Dion. I’m his mother, that’s all. Forgive me.”

  He squeezed her hand. It was fear and lack of sleep and unyielding tension. “Rest, my love. Don’t fear for Mauro—or me.”

  “No.”

  The snow was packed on the road, but he drove slowly, thinking; trying to think inside Basa’s mind. He had done little else since he got his message, tracing the growth of their friendship over the years, picking at incidents or oddities that would tell him things about Basa that friendship and companionship had obscured. But as a survivor he had examined Basa piece by piece and as a whole so many times, there was nothing left to discover. The man was a policeman. His own son had committed crimes that were crimes in any society, not just in Spain. There might be more provocation to commit them in Spain, but they were still crimes. Basa had his duty. “Don’t trust him,” Maria said in his head as if he had already been seduced from his obligation to his own blood by a clever adversary. “He is cunning.” That woman who came, the large Señora Mercedes Aloys, and the place of the meeting—these were strange things, unlike Basa. The provincial commander of the Navarra Civil Guard surely didn’t need to behave like a fictional John Miro whose adventures he read for relaxation? “Don’t trust him.” Surely, in spite of the familiar illegal practice of concealing arrests until it suited the Civil Guard to reveal them, Basa could have told him, of all men? In spite of all he knew, there was something not to trust. He was angry again when he turned off the Pamplona road into the filling station at the Zubiri crossroads.

  The filling station and the barracks were both new. “Fill her,” he said to the young mechanic. “I’ll stretch my legs.”

  “Doctor,” the young man said. And, “Any news of your son, señor?”

  Ugalde stopped in the act of getting out of his car. The station was new, he had never bought gasoline here before, he did not know the narrow, unformed face of the young man who stared solemnly down at him. “None,” he said and walked away. Did everybody on the road from Burguete to Pamplona know that the son of the doctor of Burguete was missing? He looked back at the mechanic, busy with his pumps, and said, “Where do you live?”

  “Saicós, señor.”

  Saicós was less than a kilometer over the hill and up the dirt road that joined the Pamplona road at the station. On and off the main road, they knew about Mauro. Ugalde walked away.

  The new barrack looked exactly like the new one at Burguete. Its back was to a little bend in the Rio Arga. Between them, the two buildings blocked the roads to France and Pamplona and he did not intend to take Maria over the mountains with snow on the ground. They had to come this way when he opened Basa’s Summerhouse and if anything went wrong up there, the men here would learn of it quickly and close the road. He wished he knew more about what went on in the building. Did their telephone wires have to be cut? Would cutting them create more difficulties than it solved? With snow on the ground, and at night, sound would travel far from Burguete. Would it travel this far? How far was it? Fifteen kilometers? Sound played odd tricks in the snow, along the valleys, but it would not travel this far he decided. Providing Basa’s Summerhouse and the Burguete barracks could not communicate, they would all be well off the ground before these men knew anything about it.

  “You like the barracks?” the mechanic asked him when he came back to the car.

  “It serves its purpose, I suppose. It’s not meant to be pretty.” He paid for his gasoline.

  “I have hot coffee, señor,” the mechanic said. “It’s a cold day.”

  They went into the station and drank coffee, gazing in gloomy silence at the brick building across the road. There was nothing else to look at and nothing to talk about. “Everything’s modern,” the mechanic said suddenly. “The radio room is on the second floor, in the back right-hand corner. Very modern.” He set his cup on the counter, stepped down into the shop and bent over the engine of a car. “I’m sorry about your son, señor,” he said.

  Ugalde stared at the bent back. There was a kind of deadness in his mind, a puzzled weariness. Why did the man say that? About the radio room; as if he knew what was going on in my head? Or wanted to know? It wasn’t just the men in uniform you had to fear, you had to fear the people who wore no uniform, who looked like you and talked like you. That was why the talk was always about soccer, or the bulls, or pelota, or racing drivers. Nothing? Carlos feared them, Urbina feared them; they believed Mauro was one of them.

  “Thank you,” Ugalde said. “And for this coffee.” Nervously he went to his car, fighting against a backward glance.

  He was into Pamplona by midday. The shops were open from nine-thirty until one, and from four until seven, and he had a little shopping to do for Maria that could be done quickly before he went to meet Basa. It was like Maria irritatingly to urge care against cunning while she pressed a shopping list into his hand. But he couldn’t find the list. It had been in his left trouser pocket with his paper money. He supposed he must have dropped it when he paid for the gasoline. One or two items from it were still in his memory, but the small loss upset him like an ill omen. He bought the things he could recall and had forty minutes to spare.

  He drove, the lost shopping list on his mind, annoyed with himself that the trivial necessities of a day’s living push in on the major pressures that need all a man’s attention and found himself turning off the Avenida Zaragoza into Galicia. Startled by his own unawareness he parked outside the Bar Estadium directly across the street from Basa’s headquarters and sat behind the wheel, without resolve, as if he had been drawn here by a force that neutralized his mind. Then with a growling snort of self-assertion he got out of the car and went into the bar.

  “Brandy.” There was nobody else in the bar. He sat on a stool and watched the windows of the Civil Guard headquarters, almost as if he expected to see Basa looking down at him from one of them. Todo por La Patria, the inscription said above the door. All for the nation. A young Civil Guard paced over the snow in the paved area between two small lawns. A bronze bust of the Duke of Ahumada stood in its plinth. The Duke wore a pointed bonnet of snow like a night cap and looked faintly preposterous. Ugalde left the bar quickly and went across the street. The young policeman smiled. “Buenos dias, señor,” he said agreeably.

  “Buenos dias,” Ugalde said. “The duke looks ridiculous in his night cap.” He was warm inside, full of sudden and resentful defiance. It came, it seemed, from nowhere.

  “Yes. Should I knock it off?”

  “No, no, don’t spoil it. There’s little enough to laugh at. Where are you from, young man?”

  “Seville, señor.”

  “How long since you saw it?”

  “Two years. I’m going on leave in April. My father and mother are there.”

  He had a wide, neat black moustache and the olive skin of his kind. His face glowed with happy expectation.

  “You look forward to seeing them?”

  “Oh, yes, señor.” It was longing. “Much, much, much.”

  He’s a boy, Ugalde thought, who loves his father and mother and longs to see them. He is not to be feared.

  “Are you a soldier, señor? You speak like a soldier.”

  “Once, long ago,” Ugalde said, “I fought for Spain.”

  “Todo por La Patria,” the young man said, his eyes bright, his smile shining, his hand placed over hi
s heart. The way American senators do when they look silly on ceremonial occasions, Ugalde thought. But this young man did not look silly. “Yes,” the doctor said. “All for the nation.” He said it enviously. He loves his parents, he loves his corps as Basa loves his corps; there is no dissonance in his spirit; everything is clear to him: All for the nation. His parents also, if the nation called for it? They said, didn’t they, that in the training of a Civil Guard, it was taught that if two prisoners are escaping and one of them is your father, shoot him first? All for the nation.

  “Love your parents most of all,” Ugalde said foolishly. Lucky young man. Who would fear such a pleasant and innocent young man? He wanted to embrace him and turned away. Envy and pity mingled. He crossed the street and got behind the wheel. The young man stood, smiling. He waved; a sort of salute. Ugalde waved, and backed and drove out of Galicia into Zaragoza. He had a country and no country. He had a family, a son to be loved. I am too weak to serve my country as it ought to be served. How ought it to be served? I don’t know, he said aloud like a man struck by sudden pain, and his will hardened. But I can serve my own with one mind.

  He was ready for Basa and came burning to the Jarcines de la Taconera and parked and went briskly into the Three Kings Hotel and took the elevator to the seventh floor.

  The face discreetly back from the doorway shocked Ugalde. Basa’s face had always been lined and shallow, sinking under high cheek bones. It was the face of the men of his southern race, darkened by the shadow of some distant Moor. But his face was gaunt and grey and the eyes were weary, without light.

  “Dion,” Basa said as if he could think of nothing else to say.

  “Julio.”

  Ugalde sat down in an armchair by the big window that looked out over the snow-dusted, honey-tiled roofs of Pamplona. This was a cynical game and he had a game plan. Say yes, say no, say nothing. But the gaunt face swept his plan from his mind for a moment. He almost said, “You’re a hard man to reach,” but that, however heavy with accusation, could be almost friendly. He crossed his legs and said nothing.