The Bird in Last Year's Nest

by Shaun Herron

  “No”

  But Maria’s eyes glittered. “The income from this inn?”

  “Yours.”

  “And when he chose to do so, my son could resume his medical studies in Paris?”

  “You could afford it.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Yes.”

  “No impediments? From you or your people?”

  “None.”

  “And suppose we accepted the inn and then did not choose to let you use it as a transit house or an arms depot?”

  Carega answered without emotion. “Very plainly, Reis and Haro, señora. The doctor bought your son’s life. He is secure. But of course, we are not bound where this young lady is concerned. The doctor owes her to us. We are being generous. At this time.”

  “You’re threatening this child,” Ugalde stormed.

  “Yes.” There was no feeling in it. It was a mere condition. Carega was doing business.

  “So this route you provided to pay me off, it has conditions? Thrown in after the bargain?”

  “No. You are free to say no.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You mean we don’t go? All four of us?”

  “No. You go as planned. All four of you.”

  “Then what?”

  “Nothing. Your wife can be a Spanish cook. You can be a Spanish butler. Your son can be—what? A Spanish gardener? And this girl? What can she be? A Spanish whore?” His smile suggested this was her fitting prospect. “They are in great demand.”

  “There was no need for that. We’ll talk it over,” Maria snapped.

  “Tell the priest,” Carega said coldly. “I’ll be gone. Goodnight.”

  He was gone without another word.

  It was late. There was nowhere in the house to go except their empty little room and the mattresses on its floor.

  Maria said, ‘’We’ll need to use the water closet before we lie down. I’ll go first. I think I have an inflammation. I need blankets.”

  “There are no spare blankets,” Concha said in the doorway. “We are poor people.”

  Then Ugalde remembered where he had heard Carega’s voice, in the Three Kings on Basa’s tape recorder, threatening Mauro with the fate of the young priest of Guecho who had informed on Mendizábal in Guecho, and his anger reared, against Carega, against Mauro. Against Maria.

  “The answer is no,” he said. “No, no, no,”

  “We must talk,” Maria said emphatically, and left for the water closet.

  When they lay down, he covered her with his coat and hugged himself against the cold, afraid of the daybreak.

  Ugalde slept fitfully, wakened by his shivering and the dankness of the room and the cold dark walls, the damp mattress and the high little window and, between waking and sleeping, his shocking dreams plagued him. He was in the dungeons at Burgos amidst the rats and the human excrement and the guards were sick, shitting themselves to death, and their faces were in the barred peep hole in his heavy cell door, in agony and anger, screaming at him, “You did it you did it,” and crying for the keys to get at him, and as in dreams, Mauro was crossing the prison yard and Ugalde yelled to him, “Help me, Mauro,” and Mauro scaled the walls and disappeared without turning his head and Ugalde cried out, “Mauro, Mauro, Mauro,” and shot upright on his mattress and Mauro two mattresses away said, “You’ll waken the whole house,” and Maria murmured, “Can’t you sleep, my love?” And they went to sleep again.

  He propped his back against the wall and sought warmth in his own arms.

  Pureza whispered, “What is it, doctor?”

  Ugalde said, “I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”

  “I heard you shouting for Mauro. What is it?”

  “I was dreaming. Go to sleep again.”

  “I haven’t been to sleep. Was it a bad dream?”

  “No worse than life. Try to sleep.”

  “Yes.” Like a camp dog, conscious of being in the way.

  He watched the dark hours pass and the dull light come to the small high window on a raw morning. This refuge is like a prison, he thought, a common cell in some old stone jail. He was already in prison. Already? Why did I say that? I’m going free, to France. When the others stirred, he stood up and stamped his feet and flapped his arms and watched his breath.

  Concha came and stood in the doorway. “Food,” she said, and disappeared.

  Maria said, “I’ll use the water closet. I have an inflammation.”

  They washed in the kitchen. Villar and Concha sat on their stools by the wall and watched them, still, curious and censorious.

  “We’re all filthy,” Maria said.

  “You can strip down and wash all over,” Villar said without mirth.

  “You’d like that.” Concha kicked his ankle with a strong sideswipe. The old man yelped and smiled the smile of an impotent lecher.

  There were rolls and coffee on the table and they ate in separate silences, broodingly, slowly, anxious to postpone the confrontation to come when Maria said, as Ugalde was sure she would say, “We must talk.”

  And back on the mattresses in their dank cell, she said, “We must talk.”

  “I have said no,” Ugalde said. “It is no.”

  “But, Dion, surely we talk it over?” She was sweetly reasonable. “They’re offering us a home and a business and a good income and that’s what we need, isn’t it? Have we anything else to go to?”

  “Maria,” he said patiently. “Think. We’ll be foreigners in a foreign country. They’re offering us work as gun-runners in a foreign country. They’re offering us a home and a business—as foreign harborers of foreign criminals in a foreign country. They are offering us a career as criminals.”

  “You’re a criminal.” Mauro sat cross-legged on his mattress like a too-young guru. He was smiling; not a friendly relaxed smile. Ugalde could feel its brittle antagonism. Mauro said it gently, as if he knew saying it gently gave it force and gave him pleasure. The young face, still not fully formed a few weeks ago, was much older now and Ugalde looked at it for—he thought—the first time. He could not read it. It was harder, firmer; the mouth was tighter, but it was the eyes that hurt him. They were sharp and hostile, not with the hostility of immediate anger but with a sullen bitterness that wounded him.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’m a criminal. I broke open a jail to get you out of it. Your mother was there. She’s a criminal. You were inside it for bank robberies and other crimes. You’re a criminal, too. Pureza was in it for her crimes. She’s a criminal. Does that mean we have to make crime our profession, when we’re free in a free country?”

  Mauro threw up his hands and swung his head in mock dismay. “I don’t understand you,” he said in a high, excited voice that was touched with young derision. “Everything I did was political, not criminal. The same with all of us. Why are you talking about crimes? That was a political jail. It was built for politicals, not criminals. They’re asking us now to commit political acts not approved by an oppressive state. Is that crime?”

  “Let me talk to your father,” Maria said.

  “No.” Mauro scrambled inelegantly to his feet. “I want to talk to my father. I have plenty to say to him …”

  “Mauro.”

  “No.” He pointed an aggressive finger at Pureza who sat with her back to the wall, isolated and disconsolated. It was not the family Mauro had told her so much about, loving, close-knit, strong in itself. These people were raw, edgy, touching one another tentatively and recoiling as though they had been burned by the touch. “You were shut up alone in a cell, with nobody to talk to? So was I. And I didn’t want anybody to talk to, I wanted to think. And I thought plenty.” He looked sideways at his father. “About you,” he said, and the anger withered in him. The thought of his prison thoughts about his father seemed to disable him. He leaned limply with his back against the wall. “If you had a contract with life, why didn’t you keep it?”

  “I did, Mauro, till you go
t yourself thrown into jail.”

  “You did?” Perhaps he had expected silence from his father, or a declaration of love or … perhaps he didn’t know what he expected. “If you had this contract with life that you talked about—that in return for Christina and me and a quiet life you’d live a life of service, wasn’t that it? Why did you want to get mixed up with Basa? Was that the way to a quiet life?”

  “It was very simple, Mauro. We were friends. Are you telling me that was wrong? Bad?”

  Maria said quietly, “All those years, Dion, I had no friends, only acquaintances. Close friends are dangerous, one way or another they get to know things, you used to say—till you were too lonely and Basa came along. But you didn’t say to me, ‘Find a friend, Maria.’ ”

  “You, too, Maria?”

  “He caught me,” Mauro said. “Do you know why?”

  “Because you brought Señora Anson to her house. That was the right thing to do, but there were the banks …”

  “Oh, no. He knew about me before I brought that woman home. I saved her, but she turned me in while I was doing it. He had the tapes of all our planning. And you heard them before I did. Your friend Basa let you hear them. He told me. I was in his jail and you were still seeing your friend who put me there. God!”

  “Mauro, I don’t know …”

  “You don’t know what? Who sent you to Bilbao to root me out of old Mendez house? Basa. Who took a great interest in the friendship between you and Basa? Lieutenant Mieza in Bilbao. I thought a lot about that in my cell. And I saw it! He wasn’t a young lieutenant trying to make friends with your colonel. He was putting two and two together. Basa sent you to Bilbao. Basa gave me a clean bill in his report. And the lieutenant added it up—your coming to get me out of there. I could see him thinking it over. ‘Who knows him better than his father? Nobody. So there’s something to find out, if his father’s scared enough to come tearing over here to move him. And Basa’s the father’s friend. Maybe he knows more than he’s telling.’ Oh, he added it up all right, and called me in, and got the club key, and bugged the place and got the first word they had about the banks and the barracks. They knew nothing till then, nothing at all. You put me in jail, you and your friendship with Basa.” He waved a wearily dismissive hand. “You.”

  Ugalde stood, stunned and confused. And wounded. “And you, and you alone are blameless, Mauro? You didn’t commit crimes? You didn’t rob banks?”

  “Crimes? What crimes?” His anger burned again. “They were not crimes, they were political acts. They were blows struck at an oppressive regime by the Fifth Assembly. We were all fighting for the liberation of the Basque lands.”

  “You’re not even a Basque,” Ugalde said impatiently. “You’re a Castillian.”

  “We were doing what you were doing in the mountains with Arrabal. And when you told me what you’d done in those days, I knew I was right. And if you hadn’t come to Bilbao that day I’d still be doing it and there’d have been no disaster. They didn’t know. They wouldn’t have caught me.”

  “And you’d have gone through with the kidnapping of Señora Anson?”

  “That bitch! Yes, by God. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have gone through with it.”

  “But that doesn’t answer the question, Mauro. It’s not what you know now, it’s why you refused to go through with it then. You must have had a strong reason for refusing.”

  “I was wrong. I was a coward. I should have gone through with it.”

  “So.” Ugaldo made a defeated gesture. “So Reis and Haro don’t matter. You’re still a Fifth Assembly man—even though they execute your friends on false charges?”

  “That was …”

  “What was that, Mauro?” Ugaldo asked disgustedly.

  “I’m not going to argue with you.”

  “No, only about me. The family’s life is rubble around your feet because you chose to get mixed up with the Fifth Assembly and you’re not going to discuss it. Very well, don’t. You want to take Carega’s kind offer?” He felt weak and futile.

  “Yes.”

  “And you, Pureza?”

  “Why do you ask me? I don’t belong to this family. I wanted to. That’s why I stayed in the Fifth Assembly. That’s why I helped Mauro with Señora Anson. Mauro took my help the way he took everything you gave him. When we were arrested, I cried to him for help. Just a word from him would have helped me. But I was of no more use to him. He didn’t even look back. He’s only a taker.” She looked up bravely at Ugalde. “Even if Mauro wanted me, what would I become with him? What will he think or do the day after tomorrow? I just wanted him to love me. I wanted nothing but the chance to love him. I wanted the kind of life he told me you and your wife had. But when real trouble comes, what happens to you? What happened to Mauro once he got out of your hothouse? I don’t want to belong to your family. I don’t want to be dependent on you.”

  “How dare you, girl?” Maria shouted.

  “A little while ago I wouldn’t have dared, señora,” she said. “I was too frightened. I’m still frightened. But Mauro sickened me by the things he said to his father. He would blame anybody for anything so long as he didn’t have to face himself. All he’s doing now is looking to that man Carega for a way out of the dismal future. He’d have to carry his own weight in it and he can’t face the thought of it. He had this lovely fantasy of being in the Fifth Assembly till he qualified, doing all sorts of exciting things while you supported him, then settling down to a nice quiet life—when he had to support himself.” She added slyly, “And me. All I want now is the quiet life away from the Civil Guards and the Fifth Assembly. I just want to be free of other people’s passions and other people’s interests and I don’t want to end up as a servant in your Fifth Assembly inn. That’s what I’d be if I were with you. When Mauro wanted me, all he really wanted was a mother substitute for his fantasy future. Well, he has you again. I’ll leave you at Bayonne.”

  “You are an impertinent child,” Maria said.

  “Maria,” Ugalde said and stared about him bleakly. “You wanted to talk. Talk to me. Just say whether you want this thing, this business, as you call it.”

  “Dion,” she said, “we have nowhere to go.”

  “We’ll find work.” But he knew now what she wanted, and he knew why and did not want to hear her say it.

  “We’re too old for what we can find.”

  “It’s late to take that into account. We knew it when we decided to end one life and bring Mauro out of jail.”

  “All the more reason for listening to Carega.”

  “What reason?”

  She said harshly, “This family has unfinished business with them. They have manhandled us for three generations. They have brought us to this, huddled in this damp hole, hiding for our lives. I will not forgive them.” Her head was high, her teeth shut. She wanted to scream, “Fathers, brothers, sisters, son—and you and me. I will not forgive them.”

  “You were content to live the way we did for half a lifetime.”

  “I think of all those years, Dion. I began to think of them the day Carlos told you they had Mauro. They were servile years. Except to one another we were like stone. We lived in silence, like mutes. We liked what we hated merely to live. It was a kind of degradation. We had no right to anger or action. We were forced to find our whole life in one another. Only Mauro found his way back to his own blood—my blood, my father’s blood. When they took him, do you know what they did? They made me free. I am not servile now. I will not see you a serving man because of them. I will not see Mauro a Spanish gardener. Carega wants to put a weapon in my hands and I want a weapon.”

  “And all the dead, Maria? The Guards who died when they didn’t need to …”

  Mauro said, “Not enough of them died.”

  “Dion, my father died fighting them.”

  “I think I should tell you something about Luis Arrabal,” Ugalde said. “One day in Huesca we raided a bank and all the clerks had been armed.
They didn’t know how to use guns as we knew and we killed them all. They were men in their fifties. Everybody else was in the war. The same day we watched on the mountain when a Nationalist patrol ran into a Republican patrol. We watched the Nationalists wipe them out. They had better arms and they were better soldiers. That night we listened on the radio we’d taken from a Civil Guard barracks. We heard from the French that Republicans in Barcelona were fighting one another in the streets. When all the others had gone to sleep, Luis said to me, ‘Dion, today we killed four harmless men to get the money to live on and fight on. And we’ll die in these mountains the way those harmless men died in their bank. And today Republicans are fighting and killing one another. They can’t agree among themselves. We are here and not in Barcelona because we can’t abide some of them. That is Spain, Dion. ¡Viva Yo! Hurray for me!’ And I asked him, Do you think we’ve been wrong, Luis? He sat looking at me, then he got up and walked away. It was in our next action that Luis and almost the whole band were killed. While he was bleeding to death, he said one last thing to me. He said ‘¡Viva Yo! Dion. Go to Paris.’ That is why I went to Paris.”

  Mauro said, “You left that out when you told me you were with Arrabal in the mountains.”

  “I left out a lot more than that.”

  “What you told me that day in Bermeo made me certain I was right and you were wrong. You didn’t expect that, did you? But I was right then. I’m right now.”

  Ugalde said, “I haven’t done much right in this life, have I?”

  He went out to the water closet and sat in it, full of wretchedness.

  In the afternoon the priest came. He was a young man.

  “You have an answer for Carega?” he asked Ugalde.

  “Tell him the answer is, Yes.”

  Maria kissed him. Mauro said nothing, but he watched his father uneasily.

  “Then you will go straight to Gan from Bayonne. You will stay there till all the legal arrangements are made.”

  “When do we leave here, Father?”

  “You go aboard tomorrow night. I have what you need, and fresh clothes.”