Nevada Days

by Bernardo Atxaga

  “It looks like a fighter plane,” Earle said.

  “Or a missile,” Dennis said.

  When Earle opened the door of the Chevrolet, one of the men working next to the Sonic Arrow walked towards us, waving his arms about above his head, telling us to go away. A colleague of his emerged from the cabin of the trailer truck and made some even more explicit gestures. We couldn’t stop there, we had to leave.

  “I got a photograph of it,” Dennis said quietly.

  Izaskun and Sara began rummaging around inside their backpacks. They were looking for the camera.

  “Did you take a picture?” I asked when we set off again. They made me turn round to look at the little screen on the camera. There was their treasured shot: the image of the Sonic Arrow along with one of the men in overalls and a red cap.

  “It’s astonishing that something so slender can reach 800 miles an hour,” Ángela said.

  We were once again on the shore of the salt lake bed. We made our way slowly back to the road, heading for the bar, all of us silent, deep in thought. We had the photographs, but we wanted to store the image of that car away in our memories: white, with a green-and-yellow stripe along each flank; a bird from another planet, an insect about to take flight.

  “Let’s go eat,” Earle said, stopping outside the bar. There were now five Harley-Davidsons parked under the carport.

  The motorcyclists were eating lunch in one corner of the bar. At the counter, two women, also in leathers, were chatting to the barman and smoking. From the loudspeakers came a song I didn’t recognise.

  The photograph of the ThrustSSC on the wall looked bigger than before, and the car itself uglier.

  “The British will be happy,” Dennis said. “The record they achieved in the ThrustSSC will remained unbroken until another Steve Fossett comes along.”

  The barman offered us hamburger or pizza. We all ordered hamburgers, including Izaskun and Sara. To drink, Earle and I ordered the same beer as before, Sierra Nevada. The others preferred Pepsi.

  Sara put her camera on the table.

  “I took two photographs of the racing car,” she said.

  Dennis laughed:

  “I took five!”

  He showed us the pictures on his camera screen. The “racing car”, Steve Fossett’s Sonic Arrow, the bird, the insect, suddenly looked rather pathetic, as if it felt sad to be stuck there waiting for a truck to take it away from the Black Rock Desert when it was perfectly capable of travelling at 800 miles an hour.

  Earle spoke about the regulations surrounding special vehicles like that. We had better be careful. Dennis and Sara should think twice before posting the photographs on the Internet. It could be illegal.

  The threads of my thoughts again took me back to the age of the Reader’s Digest, and I saw my mother, one summer day, sitting on the balcony of our house in Asteasu, reading. I remembered another story, also by Somerset Maugham. As in the story about the snake, the characters were travelling on an ocean liner, but in this case the subject of the dispute was a pearl necklace. One of the protagonists, an expert on precious stones, was put to the test during a gala supper given by the captain: he had to analyse the necklaces, diadems, bracelets and rings worn by the ladies sharing his table and verify which were authentic and which not. The expert wasn’t keen on having to play the entertainer, but, on the captain’s insistence, he finally agreed. It immediately became clear that he knew a lot about the subject. “That’s not a diamond, it’s quartz,” he said after merely glancing at the pendant one woman was wearing. “He’s right,” confessed her husband, and there was applause from the travellers following this improvised performance. Then it was the turn of a ring. “An excellent sapphire, probably from India,” the man said – more applause.

  They showed him other items of jewellery, and he was always right.

  Then came the turn of a pearl necklace worn by a particularly beautiful woman. The expert saw a look of anxiety in the woman’s eyes and thought that perhaps the pearls were imitation and she didn’t want to be shown up in front of the other passengers. He was wrong. The pearls were of excellent quality, probably Australian. He smiled at the woman, but she only looked even more anxious. “The pearls are genuine,” he said. His words provoked a guffaw from the woman’s husband. “I’m afraid you’ve failed, my friend. The pearls are fake!” he cried. He was rather like the fatuous fellow who had made fun of the Indian entertainer with the snake. The expert had to think quickly. There was real panic now in the woman’s eyes. He suddenly remembered something he had overheard during supper. She had spent several months alone in New York while her husband was away in Europe on business. “Let me have another look,” he said. A moment later, he gave his verdict. “No, I was mistaken. The pearls are false.” The other people present clapped him on the back. Not to worry, what did one mistake matter when he had been so right about the others?

  When the other supper guests retired to their cabins, the expert went up on deck to take the air and smoke a cigarette. There he found a fellow passenger with whom he had struck up a friendship. “The pearls were real, weren’t they?” he said. The expert answered enigmatically: “If I had such a pretty wife, I certainly wouldn’t leave her alone in New York.” And that is how the story ended.

  Again I saw my mother reading the Reader’s Digest on the balcony of our house in Asteasu. After a moment, she put down the magazine and started hanging out the washing.

  Earle was at the counter paying for the food. I suggested we go halves, but he refused.

  “In Black Rock, lunch is on me, and you can buy me lunch when I come and visit you in the Basque Country. You’re getting the bad end of the bargain, I’m afraid.”

  Before we left, I asked the barman about the music he was playing.

  “The Grateful Dead,” he said, giving me a thumbs-up.

  On the way back, we took different positions in the car: Earle and Dennis in the front, Ángela and me in the middle, Izaskun and Sara at the back. After a mile or so, we stopped at a small viewing point and took one last look at Black Rock. The sun was no longer shining directly on the salt surface, and we could clearly see the trailer that would take the Sonic Arrow back to its hangar.

  “Thirty years ago, I was tempted to buy into Craig Breedlove’s attempt to beat the world land speed record,” Earle said. “But my wife at the time thought I was mad wanting to invest thousands of dollars in the project and managed to dissuade me.”

  I wasn’t surprised by this statement. Mary Lore had told me that Earle was seriously wealthy, part of a family who owned half a dozen roadside casinos.

  Dennis turned to us and winked.

  “That’s a shame! Now, if you’d bought into the Sonic Arrow project, those guys in the red caps would have shown us around for sure.”

  Earle turned on the engine.

  “If it’s any consolation, Dennis, I can always drive a little faster than usual.”

  In the back seat, Izaskun and Sara clapped their hands.

  We set off. Forty miles an hour, fifty, sixty, seventy. Earle was in a hurry to get back to Reno.

  THE WOMAN WHO READ READER’S DIGEST

  A REFLECTION ON PEOPLE FROM POOR PLACES

  People who spent their lives in poor places died unknown to the world or, even sadder, unknown to themselves. How could they know themselves, when there was no midwife, no school to help them find out what it was they carried within them, in their blood, in their D.N.A.; what lay latent in their mind, their temperament, waiting for something to bring it to the surface. They lived their lives, of course, but it was a life lived all on one level, reduced to the basics, to the elemental. Then, when they died, they were forgotten. “My father’s name was Juan,” someone would say. “No, my mother didn’t work in a canning factory, she was a dressmaker,” another said. But such recollections, plus a few photographs, a silk handkerchief, a particular perfume or the way they lit a cigarette, were not enough to create a lasting image, an emblem. They were mere
detritus for the memory, or, rather, a succession of dust motes. “You are dust and to dust you shall return,” Genesis says. A very exact description of what happens to most people born in poor places.

  Of course, a miracle might occur as it did for the shepherd Ambrogiotto, who, according to Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, became Giotto, the finest painter of his day, purely by chance, when Cimabue happened to pass through his village and saw the sheep Ambrogiotto had drawn on the rocks. However, given that miracles are very thin on the ground, there were no such transformations or advances in poor places, not at least in the country areas of the Basque Country in the days when the woman who read Reader’s Digest was young, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The only way out was the Church. The convents. The seminaries.

  The children’s crusade … For much of the twentieth century, children left villages and farms in droves, heading for a convent or a seminary, forming long queues at train stations. After all, it was an attractive option, given that education and bed and board were free, but an inhuman one too. The Catholic Church did not accept that those children had bodies, or only as a secondary factor subordinated to the myth they called the soul. Their thousands of rules and regulations came down to one thing: No sex!

  The price was high for everyone, but especially for girls. They were impoverished twice over. Most of the boys went on to become priests and would be put in charge of the biggest, most powerful edifice in whatever village they were sent to; the girls, however, would end up in a cell in an enclosed convent or in a hospital. It’s impossible to imagine, as one can with certain priests, that any of them would have broken their vow of celibacy.

  On the drive back from the Black Rock Desert to Reno, I kept thinking of all those poor people. Now and again, the image of my mother would resurface, either reading the Reader’s Digest or hanging out the washing. She had been the beneficiary of a miracle. Despite being born into an extremely poor family, she managed to avoid the potato fields and the convent and was given a chance to study. However, when the Civil War broke out in 1936, she had to leave university and go back to her village. She was nineteen at the time.

  HALLOWEEN. MONSTERS

  We were in a neighbourhood in north Reno, with Mary Lore and her family: the children were getting more and more excited, banging on doors and being given sweets, while the parents were getting chilled to the bone. It was a freezing cold night.

  Sweets, laughter, children: but Halloween was nothing like Christmas. You just had to look up at the sky, at the red light of a police helicopter hovering above us, and there they were, floating in the air: the rumours. “Five years ago, a boy was kidnapped and has not been seen since”; “Three years ago, three girls were raped in Sparks”; “Two years ago, a student taking part in an orgy died from the alcohol and drugs he had consumed.” Plastic spiders on long plastic threads, but real monsters too.

  We were on our way home with the bag of sweets that Izaskun and Sara had collected, when Mary Lore met a niece of hers, who played hockey for the university team. I didn’t quite understand what they were saying, but they were talking about how some men brandishing guns had gatecrashed the Halloween ball being held by the university sports department.

  We found out the end of the story later from Mary Lore. One of the gatecrashers had killed three people.

  By the end of the day, the Reno Gazette-Journal had posted on their website the photographs and names of the people involved. The man who fired the shots was Samisoni Taukitoku, a nineteen-year-old Samoan; his accomplice was another Samoan of the same age, Saili Manu. The victims: Nathan Viljoen, twenty-three, ex-student; Derek Kyle Jensen, the same age, student; and Charles Coogan Kelly, twenty-one, a world-class snowboarder, who was just about to turn professional.

  ANOTHER MONSTER: LEVIATHAN

  This information was followed by a note about a man called William Castillo. According to the judge, he ought to pay with his life for the life he took from Isabelle Berndt in 1995. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

  A group of about twenty or twenty-five people were calling for clemency from the Leviathan – the Nevada State Government – holding up a placard at the prison gates: “We are here for Peace and against the death penalty”. A blurred photograph, taken at night, showed the group’s spokesperson, a Latino Catholic priest.

  WARNING FROM THE LEVIATHAN THREE DAYS AFTER HALLOWEEN

  MEMORY OF A RURAL HALLOWEEN

  A friend of my father’s came to visit him in hospital. He was a bald, burly fellow, but even at the age of seventy, he still had the face of a child. Determined to keep the conversation light, he told us what had happened to a logger from his village. He was, he said, a man who believed in witches, lost souls and other such superstitions. One day, in the local bar, a few young men started winding him up.

  “Sure, you used to be a big, strong guy, but now you’re old and will have to get using to staying sat in your chair.”

  “Shut your mouth! I’m still stronger than the whole lot of you,” retorted the logger.

  The young men continued to taunt him, until, finally, the furious logger decided to resolve the matter with a fight.

  “O.K., why doesn’t one of you come outside with me, and we can sort this out once and for all?”

  “We don’t want a fight,” the young men said, “but we’ll make a bet. If you win, we give you twenty pesetas, if you lose, you give us ten bottles of wine.”

  They explained the bet to the logger. He had to run from the bar to the cemetery and back in less than half an hour. In the dark.

  “And another thing. You have to run round the inside of the cemetery.”

  “Why inside?” the logger asked.

  “Well, apparently, you’re afraid of graveyards, or so we’ve been told. And we wanted to make the bet that little bit harder.”

  The logger was not amused by this condition, but he thought he could easily win those twenty pesetas, even if he walked the distance, and so he accepted. It was already dark, and he set off at once, followed by the young man charged with making sure that he fulfilled all the conditions.

  The others stayed in the bar, laughing. They knew that waiting for the logger at the cemetery were at least ten other young men all wearing white sheets smeared with earth. As soon as they saw him walking among the graves, they would start howling and moaning. That was the joke. They thought the logger would then flee in terror.

  “Let’s just hope he doesn’t have a heart attack,” the owner of the bar said.

  Even someone who didn’t believe in ghosts or phantoms would get the fright of his life if he saw corpses in shrouds wandering around a cemetery at night, so just imagine the reaction of someone who did believe in those things?

  Time passed. The half-hour was nearly up. The young men were growing increasingly nervous. No-one came, not even the colleague who had gone with him as a judge. Then the logger burst in through the door.

  “Where is he? Where is he?” he yelled, completely beside himself.

  The young men didn’t know who he meant.

  “Where is who?” they asked.

  “What do you mean ‘who’? The gravedigger, of course!”

  “The gravedigger?”

  The young men had no idea what was going on.

  “They’ve all come out of their graves!” bawled the logger, waving his arms about. “I went into the cemetery and almost went mad with the noise they were making. All the dead have left their graves!”

  The young men said nothing. Then, finally, they asked:

  “So what did you do?”

  “What could I do? I knocked them to the ground. I tackled as many of them as I could, but some escaped. They’re probably still there.”

  When old people laugh, their laughter tends to be very superficial. You can’t say of them what the Jacques Brel song says, “le rire est dans le cœur”, “laughter is in the heart”. But when he heard the logger’s story, my
father roared with laughter.

  “When did this happen?” I asked the friend.

  “A few years before the war,” he said, staring up at the ceiling while he tried to remember the date. “I think it was the year Uzcudun became European champion.”

  “1926 then,” my father said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with his brain, is there?” the friend said to me cheerily.

  “It’s certainly in better shape than my legs,” my father said.

  MY FATHER’S HOSPITAL ROOM-MATE

  He was a polite enough man, from the city; he sold pharmaceutical products. He told us he had a blocked vein in his neck, and that they had decided to operate on him because he ran the risk of having a stroke. He was terribly rude to women, though. He spoke as peremptorily to the nurses as if they were his maids, and when his wife visited him, he looked visibly annoyed.

  “I told you not to come,” he would say, then go back to his crossword, his favourite pastime.

  A few days after the visit from my father’s friend, he asked us:

  “That brute you were talking about the other day, who was he? Was he Uzcudun the boxer?”

  On his neck, beneath his left ear, he had a dressing the size of the palm of his hand.

  The question was addressed to my father, who had known Uzcudun from the village fiestas of his youth, but he said nothing. He may not even have been awake.

  “No, it wasn’t Uzcudun,” I said. “That business in the cemetery happened in another village, not in Régil.”

  “Ah, that’s right, Uzcudun was from Régil. A real King Kong. During the war he used Republican prisoners as sparring partners.”