Nevada Days

by Bernardo Atxaga

  Normally, my father’s crises lasted only as long as it took to recall the history of the substation, but the day after the horse died, when my brothers and I went into the kitchen to have breakfast, the first thing we heard were these bitter words, a continuation of what he had said the night before:

  “I wish I’d burned the place down the day I inherited it!”

  He was smartly dressed, in a jacket and blue shirt.

  “Your father has to go to San Sebastián,” my mother said.

  “To see the judge?” I asked, remembering the man I’d seen standing next to the horse, the one in the suit and tie. My mother spun round, amazed that I should know what was going on.

  Three hours later, we were leaning out of the kitchen window and looking across at the place where they were going to bury the horse. There were a lot of children hanging around the grave, among them my two brothers.

  “They might impose a really big fine,” my mother said.

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know, but possibly fifty thousand pesetas. That’s what he’s saying anyway.”

  Franquito was directing the burial and gesticulating angrily. He was the ‘he’ my mother was referring to.

  “Look at the horse’s swollen belly!” I cried.

  A team of labourers began dragging the horse towards its grave.

  “Franquito has no shame!” my mother said. “He was an informer during the war. That’s how he ended up owning the restaurant. The real owner had to escape because Franquito reported him.”

  My mother left the window to go and prepare lunch.

  “Your father will be having a hard time of it in court,” she said and launched into a litany of complaints. It wasn’t his fault, but they wouldn’t give him a chance to defend himself. It had been an accident, completely unforeseeable, but the judge was sure to take Franquito’s part, because they were on the same side, the side that had won the war. That’s why he had been summoned to court so quickly. They wanted to punish him.

  “That’s it. They’ve buried the horse,” I said from my position at the window.

  “Good!” my mother exclaimed.

  My father found the judge sitting in a leather armchair, resting his chin on his clasped hands. On the wall behind him hung a portrait of General Franco.

  “I summoned you here urgently because I need to know something before I proceed with the case.”

  He made no attempt to be friendly. Still in the same pose, he went on:

  “What is your relationship with a man called Iruain? He lived in the village and had the same name as you.”

  “He was my father. That’s what people called him: Iruain.”

  The judge stirred in his armchair and placed his hands on the table. He studied my father’s face.

  “Do exactly as I am about to tell you to do,” he said at last. “Go back to the village and give the owner of the horse a thousand pesetas, so that he can buy another one. That way, we’re all square.”

  The judge got to his feet, and my father did the same. They shook hands.

  “So there won’t be a fine, then?” my father asked.

  “Do exactly as I told you and everything will be alright. As I said, that way, we’re all square.”

  My father would have liked to know the reason behind that decision and ask the judge how he had known his father, Iruain, but he didn’t dare. The judge’s attitude did not invite him to ask any further questions either, for he remained strangely aloof throughout the interview.

  The years passed, and the substation was bought by a large energy company. The question that had gone unanswered in court was often brought up at family celebrations: Why had the judge not imposed a fine? What was the relationship between that man and our grandfather, Iruain?

  If life were like literature and facts could be manipulated, if we could set up a stage in the desert, this book would say that the son of Iruain, my father, died in peace, reconciled with, or at least with a better opinion of, his father because he had discovered the judge’s motives. But that isn’t what happened. The answer came much later, too late, at the beginning of summer 2007. That was when I found out, purely by chance, that the judge was the illegitimate son of a woman who had come to work in the village, only to spend weeks looking for somewhere to live, because no-one wanted to rent a room to a single mother. Iruain, our grandfather, was the exception. He let the first floor of his house in the square to the woman and her son. That is why the judge had favoured my father; that is why he had said twice: “That way, we’re all square.”

  OCTOBER 2

  THE FIRST SNOW

  I was sitting on the verandah at the back of the house in College Drive reading the Reno Gazette-Journal, when I felt something cold touch my hand. It had started to snow. Two hours later, the sky was blue again and the peaks of the mountains that separate Nevada from California were touched with white.

  “I think the raccoon has gone,” Ángela said later on.

  We went out to look. The creature’s bright yellow eyes had disappeared from the garden.

  “Perhaps the snow was a signal for him to leave,” I said.

  “He’s probably gone south,” Ángela said. But she didn’t really believe it.

  TELEPHONE CALL TO MY MOTHER

  “We’re all fine,” I told my mother. “But from now on, things might not be so easy here. Winter has arrived. It snowed yesterday afternoon.”

  “Well, it’s been drizzling here all week. I’m fed up with it,” she said. “Where are you phoning from?”

  “From my office at the university. Like I said, if I don’t phone you from here, it will be too late for me to call you once I get home.” “Well, you don’t want to let it get too late. You need your sleep. I’m just about to go to bed myself. This weather’s really getting me down.”

  “I’ve arranged to meet Ángela for lunch. We almost always have something called a ‘Combo’. The dining room is really spacious, and we usually get a table by the window so that we have a view of the lake. There’s a swan that swims up and down. I think I mentioned that the other day …”

  “Lunch, did you say? You mean supper, don’t you?”

  “No, we’re going to have lunch, not supper. We’re in the United States, remember, in America. I told you the other day. It’s midday here, well, a quarter to twelve.”

  “No, no, it’s a quarter to nine! That’s why I’ve already had my supper. I’ll be going to bed soon.”

  “You’ll watch a bit of television first, though, won’t you?”

  “I don’t like television. Besides, I’m fed up with this weather. It’s been drizzling all week and shows no sign of stopping.”

  IN HOSPITAL WITH MY FATHER

  (A MEMORY)

  My father spoke Spanish reasonably well, but he always retained a strong Basque accent and tended to resort to Basque proverbs and set phrases to express himself.

  Two doctors came into his hospital room while he was asleep. Without waking him, they felt first one leg, then the other, and invited me to do the same. His left leg was warm, but his right was as cold as marble.

  They showed me the result of the M.R.I. scan they had done the day before. At first sight, it looked like a satellite picture of Amazonia: a thick line – the Amazon river itself – with a few thinner lines coming off it – the tributaries – and finally a mass of tiny threads – the tributaries of the tributaries. But it wasn’t a map of far-off Amazonia, it was an image of the veins in my father’s right thigh.

  The doctors directed my attention to the thick line. It was the femoral vein, which was damaged and even blocked. One of the doctors pointed to the blockage with his pencil and indicated a few smaller veins, which ran only a short distance, before returning to the femoral vein. They explained that because the main route was closed, the blood was trying to find a way through by making all the other veins it met en route work harder. However, in my father’s case this wasn’t enough. They needed to insert a stent in order
to open up the blockage to the femoral artery.

  They needed our permission to carry out the operation. One of the doctors said cheerily to my father, who had just woken up:

  “And what do you think, Jacinto?”

  “Me? I say that when two or three shepherds are gathered together it can mean only one thing: a dead sheep.”

  OCTOBER 12, 2007

  DIFFERENT MESSAGES

  It was snowing heavily when I arrived at the university, but that didn’t seem to worry the red-haired man in the car park distributing booklets. He came over to me, beaming, and thrust one into my hand. He had several teeth missing.

  The title of the booklet was: Have You Ever Faced Death?

  Shortly afterwards, while I was waiting in the café at the entrance to the library, two young men gave me a full-colour leaflet bearing a photograph of Barack Obama.

  The first booklet was not exactly reassuring. It opened by saying: “Most of us imagine we will die at home, in our sleep, but very few of us will die like that.” It then continued its ascetic message, taking examples from recent history: “When General McArthur took up the reins during the Korean War, the first thing he did was to remove all the awnings that were put on trucks during cold weather, leaving the soldiers exposed to the elements and at the mercy of enemy fire. Well, that is how we live our lives.”

  The statements grew weirder and weirder. In the fourth paragraph, the writer declared that a belief in immortality was common to human beings and dogs, but not to cats.

  I abandoned the booklet and began reading the Barack Obama leaflet instead. It was advertising his forthcoming appearance at the hotel-cum-casino Grand Sierra Resort. “Turn the page on Iraq,” it said in big letters. There was also a photograph of the candidate standing beneath a placard bearing the word “Change”. A slender man in a dark suit and white shirt, but no tie, was pictured waving to his followers in a way that was neither entirely serious nor entirely upbeat.

  OCTOBER 14

  BARACK OBAMA’S SPEECH. “TURN THE PAGE ON IRAQ”

  The queue of five or six hundred people who had come to hear Barack Obama filled the elegant, carpeted ground floor of Grand Sierra Resort from end to end. The dim lighting – casinos are always dimly lit – emphasised the gaudy, strident colours of the slot machines. The players moved the levers or pressed the buttons without once looking up, clinging to the machines like limpets, and they seemed annoyed by the presence of all these intruders.

  It was a striking scene. Those who were concerned about the Big Game – the war, working conditions, the arms trade, the health system – were calmly chatting among themselves or reading the leaflet distributed by the organisers. Those devoted to the Small Game, on the other hand, seemed riddled with anxiety, as if they were dealing with a matter of life and death.

  “Turn the page on Iraq,” the leaflet said. Beneath the heading was a statement Barack Obama had made in the past: “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.”

  On the second page of the leaflet was a space for him to set out his general intentions: “I’m not running for President to conform to Washington’s conventional thinking – I’m running to challenge it.”

  Next came a four-point plan to end the war, and this was followed by various contact telephone numbers and a repetition of the main slogan: “End the war. Join the movement.”

  The loudspeakers of the Grand Sierra Resort were blasting out hits from the sixties. “The House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals; “Dedicated to the One I Love” by the Mamas and Papas; “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra. After a thirty-minute wait, we all started filing into the room where the event was to be held. One of the young men on the door looked approvingly at the long queue. “More people than we expected, eh?” he said to his colleagues. It was a quarter to eleven in the morning.

  Barack Obama made his entrance discreetly, taking advantage of a brief interval in the constant comings and goings of organisers and technicians, and few of us would have noticed his arrival had his supporters on stage not stood up to applaud him. He shook hands with four or five people there and went straight over to the microphone. The loudspeakers blared out the introductory words: “Barack Obama, future candidate for the Democratic Party, future President of the United States.”

  A huge satin flag occupied the back of the stage, and it gleamed, softly and warmly, in keeping with the friendly atmosphere in the room. The main spotlight trained on Barack Obama was equally soft, as were the colours he was wearing: light brown suit, white shirt, maroon tie. A complete contrast to the colours on the slot machines or, generally speaking, to the colours of American popular culture. The aesthetics of the event and of the whole campaign seemed to follow the guidelines established by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki in his book In Praise of Shadows, and were, in that respect, rather Japanese.

  Barack Obama began by echoing a lot of the slogans that appeared in the leaflet. In the moderate speech that followed there was just one barb: he had been against the war from the beginning. Hillary Rodham Clinton, on the other hand, along with other Democratic politicians, had not hesitated to fall in line with the stance adopted by President George Bush. The matters in hand, however, had to do with the present, not with the past. It was a question of who had and who didn’t have the necessary qualities to confront the grave problems facing us in the future.

  When it was time for questions from the floor, thirty or forty hands shot up. By then, Barack Obama was in shirtsleeves and walking slowly back and forth on the stage.

  An Afro-American man sitting in front of us asked if he felt particularly pressured because he was black. Barack Obama said no. Who cared if he was green or red or white or yellow or black? The United States had more important things to deal with.

  He listened with particular attention to the person who asked the next question, an old lady from the Pyramid Lake reservation. The living conditions of the Paiute Indians were dreadful, she said. Some Paiutes were so poor that, “without the help of kind neighbours”, they would die of hunger or of easily treatable illnesses. Barack Obama replied sympathetically, and promised to do what he could to change the national health system.

  The old lady from Pyramid Lake was followed by a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars. His situation and that of all veterans was, he said, truly pitiful. The country paid lip service to their contribution to the nation, and Veterans Day was widely celebrated, but the reality was quite different. You should see the terrible state the veterans’ hospitals were in. Barack Obama repeated what he had said before. He would try to change the national health system, and the hospitals for those who had risked their lives defending their country would be included in that plan. When Obama finished speaking, the veteran thanked him effusively and gave him a military salute.

  There were more questions, and in answering one of them, Barack Obama told a story. When he was campaigning to be a senator for Illinois, a woman asked him to come and speak in her town, and he agreed. When the day arrived, and he realised that the town in question, Greenwood, was a long way away, he was tempted not to go; he had too much work, he was tired out. When he did somewhat reluctantly travel to Greenwood, he was met by only four people, the woman who had invited him and three of her friends. He thought it might be better to cut the visit short. However, the woman asked him to give her just half an hour. She would go from house to house and bring everyone from the town to meet him. And she did. Half an hour later, the room was packed with people, and the meeting was a wild success. And all thanks to the willpower and enthusiasm of one woman.

  As he reached the end of this story, Barack Obama began a kind of crescendo: “One voice can change a village! A town can change a valley! A valley can change a county! A county can change a state! And a state can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world!”

  For the first time since the event began, Barack Obama was
using the rhetoric of all such political meetings.

  “Only an American candidate could make such a statement without seeming ridiculous,” Ángela said. “Because what happens here really will influence the whole world.”

  When we left, the slot-machine addicts were still there, brows furrowed, faces taut with anxiety. The people who had attended the meeting, on the other hand, looked much happier than they had when they went in.

  In the car park, we found our Ford Sedan surrounded by a small group of people. We soon understood why: one of the teachers at the C.B.S. had chosen to change our license plate to read “Obaba”, which could have been mistaken for “Obama”.

  TEXTBOOK BROKERS

  On the corner of Virginia Street and 9th, I noticed a small shop I hadn’t seen before. It was called Textbook Brokers. Inside, as far as I could make out, a fifty-something man was apparently sorting through a pile of books. He had a long ponytail that came halfway down his back. When I went in, I saw that I was the only customer.

  It wasn’t books the man with the ponytail was sorting through, but vinyl records, and the sound of him riffling through L.P. covers was all that could be heard in the shop. Everything else was still and quiet. The books on the shelves and the postcards in the drawers were still, and so were the black-and-white photographs on the walls: desert landscapes, Indian teepees, horses, the streets of Reno as they were in the early twentieth century. They seemed to have been there for many years and would stay there for many more until someone’s eyes or hands alighted on them.

  The ray of light coming in through the window was filled with dust motes. These were not entirely still, like the other objects in the shop, but they were moving very sedately. They rose and fell, turned and rose again. Like a slow-motion dance.

  The man with the ponytail went over to one end of the counter and put on a record. In a way, I was disappointed. Music is perhaps an attempt to improve on silence, but it often fails. Besides, the silence in Textbook Brokers was so delicious.