Nevada Days

by Bernardo Atxaga

  I couldn’t accept that show of normality and, over supper, I again brought up the subject of telepathy between twins.

  “He felt a really bad headache at the precise moment when his brother fell ill in Madrid.”

  “Oh, not that again!” protested my older brother.

  “Twins are always quite special,” my father said.

  Once supper was over, we all went into the living room to read comics. Shortly afterwards, the telephone rang, and my mother was talking to someone for a few minutes. Then she pushed open the door to the living room.

  “So José Manuel has died, eh?” she said, just like that, adding that final “eh?”

  “And how’s Carmelo?” I asked. But my mother was no longer there.

  PYRAMID LAKE (2)

  The only sound by the lakeside was the lapping of water on rocks, and it was hard to comprehend the origins of a legend according to which, if you listened carefully, you could hear, on the shores of Pyramid Lake, the crying of the children who had drowned in its waters. Perhaps its origins lay in the nature of the human mind, which is incapable of keeping control of its memories or of tying up bad memories in a canvas sack, as Earle used to do with those rattlesnakes. And out of bad memories ghosts were born, and out of ghosts, legends … The lake, its ghosts and its legends certainly had an influence on me. It had been thirty or possibly forty years since I had thought of the twins Carmelo and José Manuel, and suddenly I had seen them again as clearly as when we were all children together.

  I had to drag myself back to reality. I was at Pyramid Lake, Nevada. It was September 23, 2007.

  A large fish stuck its ugly head out of the water, and I tried to call my daughters over to see it, but they were standing some way off, next to a couple of Paiute Indians, who were sitting on fold-up chairs, fishing. Ángela was even further away, taking photographs of some white pelicans.

  The two Paiutes were big, strong fellows. The older one wore his hair in a braid. When I went over to them, he was saying to my daughters:

  “I feel proud that my people have been able to take care of this place. It’s always been a beautiful place, and it still is.”

  The second Paiute added:

  “This is a sacred land. The mountains, the desert, the lake, they’re all sacred.”

  They both spoke without looking round, as if they were addressing the lake itself. I wondered if they really believed what they were saying or if they were merely repeating, once again, the script they reserved for foreigners.

  I sensed that Izaskun and Sara were about to ask something.

  “We’d better go,” I said. “If you ask too many questions, you’ll frighten away the fish.”

  They obviously considered this to be a good enough reason, and the three of us walked over to our car, where Ángela was waiting for us.

  From the road, the lake looked dark blue; the pyramid-shaped rock off-white; the desert grey. On the shore in the distance, we could see dark pillars, the sort you might see when a really violent rainstorm is approaching, but these were pillars of sand or dust, whipped up by the wind.

  In the guidebook to Nevada I had read that Las Vegas was an anomaly. The same could be said of Pyramid Lake: nearly 200 square miles of lake in a place where it never rains. An anomaly that gave life to the two towns on the reservation, Nixon and Sutcliffe. We drove towards the second of those towns, which was nearer the road back to Reno.

  Sutcliffe looked like a housing development, with individual houses just slightly larger than the sort of cabins you might find on a campsite, and it had clearly been dreamed up in the office of some town planner. All the houses were the same, so were the streets, so were the cars, both the new – every one of which was a pickup – and the old, the ones destined for the junkyard, with no wheels and with the guts of their engines exposed to the air. At one end, near the lake, in the middle of a grove of trees – which gave the place the appearance of an oasis – was the only non-identical building, the service area of Crosby Lodge: gas station, motel, shop and bar.

  We parked in the shade and went into the bar. The thermometer fixed on the door frame read eighty-one degrees.

  The place was quite busy. A man wearing the uniform of a trucking company was playing pool with a Paiute Indian. Watching the game were another ten men, most of them wearing fishing hats. Sitting at a table were three young Latinos who looked like construction workers. On the other side of the circular wooden bar was a girl with very blonde hair. She came over to us and waited while we decided what to have.

  “Ah, Basque!” she exclaimed when she heard us talking.

  She explained that she was from Idaho and had worked in Boise. She had recognised the sound of our language.

  The main wall of the bar was covered with photographs of fishermen, and there was a plaque informing us that the large fish with the ugly head they were all proudly holding was a cui-ui. Having recently leafed through that book about “The Misfits” in Borders, I was surprised to find not a single image from the film shoot. There was one, I seemed to remember, that would have been perfect: Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable lying next to each other on the shores of Pyramid Lake. I asked the waitress, but she had never heard of the film. Nor was she interested in Marilyn Monroe.

  “I’m more into politics,” she said.

  She took a leaflet from a box under the counter.

  “We’re going to see what’s in the shop,” Izaskun said, and they both rushed off.

  “He’ll be the next President of the United States,” the waitress said, showing us the leaflet.

  We had heard about a black politician who was contesting the Democratic leadership race with Hillary Clinton, but this was the first time we had seen a photograph of Barack Obama.

  “Go along and listen to him,” she said.

  According to the leaflet, Barack Obama would be speaking in Reno on October 14. The meeting would take place in the hotel-cum-casino Grand Sierra Resort.

  “We’ll try,” Ángela said.

  It took the girls just five minutes to review the souvenirs in the shop. Izaskun wanted to buy a silver bracelet, and Sara wanted a plastic version of the Nevada state flag, about the size of a newspaper; it was cobalt blue with a single white star. They also wanted to buy Ángela some turquoise earrings and me a dream- (or, rather, nightmare-) catcher adorned with a small eagle’s feather. We gave them some money and they went back to the shop.

  Sara had her little Nikon camera with her and, before we set off back to Reno, she took some photographs of an old telephone box that had caught her eye. It stood by the entrance to the bar and bore a sign on which the name of the company was written in large letters: NEVADA BELL.

  About five miles from Sutcliffe, the road climbed up to the official lookout point. The wind was blowing so hard that Ángela and I had to fight our way over to the information board. We finally managed to read what it said: the waters of Pyramid Lake came from Lake Tahoe, and the river that brought them, the Truckee, ended there. For the Paiute, Tahoe was “the higher lake” and Pyramid “the lower lake”.

  I stood for a while staring down at the lake below. It looked like a piece of smooth turquoise. Too beautiful. Too still. On some American night, it would doubtless come back to haunt me, unless it was caught by the dream-catcher Izaskun and Sara had given me.

  FROM SUTCLIFFE TO RENO

  Outside the Paiute reservation, the desert was less harsh and the road long and straight. As we drove along, gliding over the grey asphalt, our Ford Sedan seemed like a small solitary animal, a black mole. Suddenly, an eagle appeared. It dived down and picked up the mole – our car – in its beak.

  I jumped and raised my head.

  “You fell asleep.”

  Ángela’s voice merged with the hum of the engine. The sun was shining directly in my eyes.

  “Very few people have understood the desert as well as Daniel Sada,” I said to Ángela, as if I had been thinking about him all the time. “I remember hearing him say th
at, compared with the desert, any other landscape looks like a stage set. He was quite right.”

  Ángela indicated the back seats. Izaskun and Sara were both asleep.

  I thought of Arthur Miller and went on talking, but more quietly.

  “Do you remember what he says about Nevada in his memoirs? He didn’t much enjoy being here. He wanted a divorce so that he could marry Marilyn Monroe, and that meant spending three whole months in Nevada.”

  Ángela had given me a copy of Miller’s autobiography a few months earlier. She nodded.

  “He found this whole area around Lake Pyramid particularly inhospitable,” I went on. “He said it was like a piece of the moon. But I prefer Daniel Sada’s description: ‘Compared with the desert, any other landscape resembles a stage set.’ He was spot on.”

  I would have liked to expand on this, but my eyes were closing again. The hum of the engine was growing denser and denser. It seemed to come from the sun itself.

  I saw Arthur Miller. He was talking to Marilyn Monroe from the telephone box in the Crosby Bar, and the breeze blowing in through the cracks made his trousers flap chap-chap-chap. “I love you, I love you,” he was saying, and the chap-chap-chap gave a rhythm to his declaration of love: “I love you chap-chap-chap, I love you chap-chap-chap.” I wanted to catch Marilyn Monroe’s voice, but all I could hear was a little doll’s voice saying: “Oh, Pa! Oh, Pa!” I listened harder, and the sheer effort woke me up again.

  “Relax. Go back to sleep. I’ll tell you when the landscape changes,” Ángela said. Sometimes she shared Bob Earle’s sense of humour.

  Over where the sun was setting, I could see whirlpools of dust swaying tirelessly, as if they were taking part in a dance. I saw Marilyn Monroe outside a cinema in New York. She was wearing a satiny white dress that fell in soft folds to her knees. In the dark street, it looked even whiter. “It’s a shame the monster had to die like that. It’s sad!” she sighed. “What did you expect? That he would marry the girl?” retorted the man with her. “The monster isn’t evil,” insisted Marilyn. “If he felt loved, he wouldn’t act like that.” Then there was the roar of a subway train, and the breeze suddenly whooshed up through a ventilation grille and lifted her skirt, revealing her thighs. “It’s refreshing that breeze, isn’t it?” the man said. The images then vanished from my head, but not the noise: chap-chap-chap, chap-chap-chap. I glanced round at the back seats. Sara was awake and had stuck the plastic Nevada flag out of the window. That was where the flapping noise was coming from.

  On a hundred-yard stretch of road I saw four snakes squashed by cars. I started wondering if eagles ate snakes that had been dead for a while, and in my head there was another whirlpool, the memory of my father. He would have been about forty then. I was about seven. There was a dead snake lying in the grass. My father looked at it and said:

  “The eagle sees the snake from far away. He swoops down, grabs it in his talons and flies up again as fast as he can. Then he drops the snake. The snake suffocates during the fall, and the eagle follows behind and snatches it up again just a second before it hits the ground. Then he carries it back to his nest or to a hole in some rock and eats it.”

  My father pointed at the snake lying in the grass.

  “Can you see the marks left by the eagle’s talons?”

  He was right.

  “For some reason, the eagle didn’t manage to pick it up again. Perhaps a dog appeared and he got frightened, who knows. Anyway, he lost his lunch.”

  The memory vanished from my head like another pillar of dust.

  We passed several ranches surrounded by trees. Shortly afterwards, at an airfield protected by metal fences, I counted five light aircraft that resembled insects – grasshoppers or mosquitoes. I thought we were reaching the edge of the desert, and that we would soon come across another inhabited area, but in the miles that followed, the landscape reverted to its usual self – more wide, flat expanses, more squashed snakes on the road, more sun.

  The road dipped down, and on the hillside above us, in a corral, we saw more than a hundred horses. A lot of them were at the drinking trough, but most were standing alone, scattered about in the corral.

  “I think they’re wild horses,” Ángela said in response to a question from the girls. She stopped the car on the hard shoulder so as to get a better look.

  Most of the horses stood as still as statues and were utterly silent. It was strange: more than a hundred horses in a corral and not a sound from them.

  Ángela started up the engine again, and we continued on down the highway. From the back seats, the girls continued to ask questions. What were the horses doing there? Were they really wild horses? They were thinking of the mustangs, the fiery-eyed horses they had seen in comics and films, galloping across the desert in a cloud of dust.

  “They’re waiting for someone to adopt them,” Ángela said. “I read something in the newspaper the other day about how some horses can’t cope on their own and need help.”

  This was partly true and partly false. The scriptwriter of “The Misfits” had not invented the fact that wild horses were killed and used for dog food, but now it was the Paiutes and other native Indians who, being exempt from federal laws regarding protected species, hunted and sold the horses. Animal rights organisations had to buy them from the Indians, take them away from the reservation and then release them into the wild again in some protected area.

  We were leaving behind us the houses in Sun Valley now and coming into the outskirts of Sparks. In another fifteen minutes we would reach Reno and our house in College Drive.

  I was assailed by more memories. I saw myself in the village where I was born. The pig they were killing in the butcher’s back yard kept screaming, and I could hear it as clearly as if it were there in my bedroom. This was followed by another incident, which took place in the slaughterhouse. The slaughterman slit the throat of a cow, and the little boy standing next to me, seeing the cow’s legs twitching even after it had fallen to the ground, asked: “Did they electrocute it?”

  Neither that cow nor all the thousands of other cows who had met the same fate were anything like the drawing on the Laughing Cow cheese triangles; the screaming pig was nothing like Babe, the Sheep-Pig; the mustangs in the comics or in the films were nothing like the horses we had seen in the corral on the hill. However shiny or cute the wrapping, the contents were still terrible. As Daniel Sada might have said, reality was the desert, and representations of reality the stage set.

  DEATH OF A HORSE

  (A MEMORY)

  The electrocuted horse lay in the alleyway all day, and the children keeping watch over it, waiting for something to happen, felt duly rewarded when two Civil Guards and a group of other people arrived and began an inspection.

  “You see,” one of the men said, addressing the crowd and holding in one hand the electric cable hanging from a post, “this is what killed the horse. Because it wasn’t properly attached, it fell on him and killed him.”

  I knew the man. He was the horse’s owner as well as the owner of the village’s only restaurant. People called him Franquito because, during the Civil War, he had been a great admirer of General Franco.

  “He looks like a Percheron. How much did he weigh?” asked another of the men, dressed in suit and tie. Someone next to me said he was the judge.

  “I was only about three yards from the horse. If I’d been any closer, the cable would have killed me too,” Franquito said.

  “Excuse me, sir,” one of the guards said, addressing the judge. “Draught horses tend to weigh anything from 1,700 to over 2,000 pounds, and he was one of the bigger ones.”

  “I’ve never seen a horse that big before,” the judge said.

  “I just want something to be done about it,” Franquito said, raising his voice. “That cable could have killed me. They should slap a big fine on the owner of the electricity substation. He lives right here, on the square. His name’s Jacinto.”

  “Calm down, please,” the m
agistrate said. “We’ll do whatever needs to be done.”

  Then he went over to another member of the group, a young man wearing glasses.

  “Write a report, will you?”

  I ran to my house. Jacinto, the man Franquito had mentioned, was my father. The substation belonged to him, and so did the cables. The horse was lying dead in the street. What would happen? I wanted to ask my mother.

  I went into the house, but no-one was there, not my mother or my brothers. I escaped to the pelota court and stayed there watching a game until it was dark.

  Over supper, my father repeated the story he always told us when there was some problem at the substation. His father, my grandfather, had gone to the provincial capital to study technical drawing and get a good job in some government office, but his efforts proved fruitless, because every post was assigned beforehand depending on who you knew. He was so disillusioned that he decided to leave it all behind him, and when he came back, he built a substation in the valley, in a place that wasn’t even accessible by road.

  This was doubtless a mistake. A wrong decision. But it wasn’t my grandfather who paid for the mistake, it was my father. At the age of ten, when the other children were coming out of school and going to play pelota or run around in the square, he would have to go to the substation to check all the machinery. He was often left alone too, because his mother, my grandmother, worked for a dressmaker in the next town and only came back to the village at weekends, and because my grandfather used to spend his afternoons and evenings in the local bar.

  “When will you be back, Pa?” my father would ask him.

  “Before they ring the angelus bell.”

  But he used to take longer than that, and my father would get frightened there in the dark valley, and would walk again and again up to a bend in the path just to see if his father was coming. Fear seethed inside him like eels in water.