“I came here to collect some hair samples,” the policeman said, putting on his hat. “In a few days’ time, we’ll know if Dennis’s D.N.A. matches that of Brianna’s killer.”
“But why all the pretence?” Earle asked. “Couldn’t you just have asked straight out? I’m sure Dennis would have been glad to help, and I’m even more sure that he has nothing whatsoever to do with the murder. That’s ridiculous! Dennis wouldn’t hurt a soul!”
Mannix and Mary Lore agreed. They felt as angry about this as Earle did.
“Alexander wanted it to be done as discreetly as possible and to carry out the test without worrying Dennis,” the policeman said. “But that was clearly a bad idea. It’s always best to follow official procedures.”
I heard the Judas voice of Alexander in my head. Why were Earle, Mannix and Mary Lore so sure? Was it normal for someone to keep black widow spiders in a jar? And he was, after all, often surrounded by young girls and took photographs too, of Izaskun and Sara for example. Then again, as far as we knew, he had no partner, which was odd for a man in his thirties.
Dennis was sitting with his head in his hands, sobbing. I silenced the Judas voice in my head.
“It will only be a matter of a few days. Meanwhile, don’t leave town,” the policeman told him.
As he left the verandah, he looked at Izaskun. She was standing there, her arms folded, looking very composed.
“Good job!” the policeman said as he passed her.
“I always tell the truth,” she responded.
The policeman headed off down the passageway and vanished from sight, with Alexander at his heels.
TELEPHONE CALL FROM SAN FRANCISCO
“Dennis is a lot better,” Earle said, “and having Jeff around has been a great help. Apparently, Jeff has to choose a font for some city council publication or other, and he’s finding it very hard to make a final choice. The house is full of bits of papers all bearing the words, ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’ I’ve read it so often now and in so many different fonts that seeing a fox jumping over a dog would seem like the most natural thing in the world. But, as I say, it’s good for Dennis. Jeff’s obsessions help him to forget about his.”
“I’m really glad things are working out,” I said.
The police had taken less than a week to announce that there was no match between Dennis’s D.N.A. and that found on Brianna Denison’s body. Alexander’s complaint, based on the photographs of young girls he’d found on Dennis’s computer and which were mainly of Izaskun, Sara and Mary Lore and Mannix’s three daughters, was declared null and void, but things did not immediately go back to normal. The accusation had left Dennis mentally shaken, and he began to behave very strangely. Earle had found him in his office playing with a spider, letting it run and up and down his bare arm. Earle had immediately got rid of the spider and taken Dennis straight to a psychiatrist.
At the other end of the telephone, I heard Earle sigh.
“He’s not as depressed as he was, but the question now is: are we all going to be driven mad by this wretched fox jumping over the lazy dog?”
“Don’t you go out for walks at all?”
“Yes, but that’s even worse. Jeff keeps asking us to identify the font on every poster and sign we come across.”
“Well, good luck with that,” I said.
“When are you leaving?”
“The day after tomorrow.”
“O.K., have a good trip, and, if all goes to plan, we’ll see you and your mountains in the fall.”
“Let’s hope Dennis can come too.”
“I think he will. Anyway, see you soon.”
“Yes, see you soon.”
FAREWELL TO RENO
On the afternoon of June 19, we paid one last visit to Rancho San Rafael Park, because Sara wanted to say goodbye to the owl. Alas, he wasn’t sitting in his usual tree, and so we drove straight back to the house to pack our bags, while Sara went down to the hut to say goodbye to the raccoon.
“He’s not there either!” she said. “He’s probably gone into hiding because he’s sad to see us go.”
“Don’t be so silly!” Izaskun said.
Mannix arrived at four o’clock the following morning in Earle’s Chevrolet Avalanche, just after our daily Reno Gazette-Journal had been delivered. He picked it up and brought it into the house.
“Here, take this with you as a souvenir,” he said, handing it to me.
“I will,” I said.
“We could have gone in my car, I suppose, but the Avalanche is big enough for all your suitcases plus an entire army,” Mannix said, taking two of our cases. “Well, perhaps not the American Army,” he added, laughing at his own joke.
He drove slowly down Virginia Street, as if wanting to allow us time to take one last look at the web of bright white lights and the red, green and fuchsia lights of the casinos.
“When you come back to Reno, I’ll cook you antelope supreme,” he said as we drove onto the I-80. “It’s pretty straightforward. You leave the fillets to marinate overnight in water, vinegar, garlic and salt. The next day, you pat them dry, dust them with flour and black pepper, then put them on a griddle with a lid and cook over a low flame for half an hour. To finish, you cover them in chicken stock and cook for a further fifteen minutes, then serve with rice. They’re really delicious.”
The airport was only a couple of miles from College Drive. We reached it before Mannix could finish telling us about a few possible variations on the recipe.
“The raccoon wasn’t there,” Sara told him while he helped us carry our suitcases to the moving walkway.
“He probably doesn’t like goodbyes. That’s normal. I don’t like them either,” Mannix said.
We all gave him a hug and made our way to the check-in desk.
Once we were on the plane, I opened the Reno Gazette-Journal. “High-tech device lets public follow Pony Express riders,” one of the headlines said. The article described how technological advances had put paid to the Pony Express in 1861, but that one of the latest advances, GPS, was helping to recreate the journey. The contents of the famed leather mail pouch carried by the riders were now rather different. Instead of letters, it contained the GPS that would guide riders safely on their way across eight states.
The plane set off down the runway.
“Here we go,” Ángela said.
We rose gently into the air. Day was breaking, and dawn was filling the sky with light.
THE END
FINAL PIECE
IZASKUN IS IN EIBAR
A poet once put love and tripe cooked Oporto style side by side in the same poem, but it would be difficult to do that with death. How would you bring death and tripe together like that?
We three brothers had to eat tripe after our mother’s funeral, and we felt ashamed every time we wiped our lips and saw the greasy, reddish stain on the napkin; we felt coarse, rough, brutal. We couldn’t just leave the restaurant and abandon our friends and relatives and everyone who had attended the ceremony, yet we longed to be somewhere else, surrounded by flowers, as the coffin had been in the church. As my eldest brother said at the beginning of the service: flowers are one of the few things that seem bearable to someone who has just lost his mother.
The cook came over to offer his condolences, but, a moment later, he was talking about tripe, explaining how long it took to prepare, which is why it so rarely appeared on restaurant menus. In his case, he always took personal charge of chopping it up, marinating it in water and vinegar for twenty-four hours, before cooking it with leeks and carrots and a ham bone. To finish it off, he put the mixture in a frying pan, added tomatoes and chorizo and sautéed the whole thing over a low flame for another half an hour.
“It’s really delicious,” I said, unable to think about anything but the church and the funeral service, and certainly not about tripe.
*
About eighty people filled the two rows of wooden pews. Before us stood a priest we
aring a purple chasuble, and two parishioners who took turns to speak into the microphone. I found it hard to listen to them and to follow the thread of what they were saying or reading and I remained in that abstracted state until the priest, looking directly at the pew where we brothers were sitting, spoke our mother’s name: Izaskun. He repeated it several times, and said that she had been a good woman. He resorted to the usual metaphors, saying that Izaskun would live for all eternity at Our Lord’s side in Heaven, and we should not be sad because death was not death, but life.
The priest finished speaking, and the singing of the choir filled the dark church. Above them rose the voice of Andrés Garay, the best soloist in the village. My eldest brother whispered in my ear:
“They’re singing this part in Latin, as it would have been sung when our mother was a girl.”
He had made all the arrangements for the funeral service. It would never have occurred to either me or my other brother to invite the choir to be there, still less to tell them what to sing.
“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis,” sang the choir. “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.” The organ quietly accompanied each word.
Like the flowers, the music helped and consoled. It went very well with death. “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.” The melody was different this time, and the organ played more loudly: the prayer was coming to an end. I looked at the flowers on the coffin. There were lilies, marguerites, carnations, gladioli and a few pinkish flowers that my eldest brother told us were called gypsophila. In their silence, the flowers seemed, like everyone else, to be concentrating on the music. The only person to remain immune to the solemn atmosphere was a fretful baby sitting on the lap of an elderly lady.
*
The priest stepped down from the altar and sprinkled the coffin with holy water. Shortly afterwards, the service was over.
“What are you going to do with the flowers?” he asked us. “Are you leaving them here or taking them to the cemetery?”
My eldest brother had already thought of this and replied unhesitatingly.
“We’ll leave them here.”
The priest gestured to the two parishioners who had accompanied him during the Mass, and they placed the flowers on the altar steps: the lilies in the middle, the carnations and gypsophila to the left, the marguerites and the gladioli to the right. My eldest brother stood looking at them, and I thought perhaps he was going to change his mind; however, since we needed him to help carry the coffin out of the church, he ended up leaving the flowers there on the altar.
The village cemetery is on the top of a hill. In the old days, when the Mass was still celebrated in Latin, the family members would carry the coffin on their shoulders to the grave, silently followed by all the members of the congregation. The procession would pass first through a very gloomy place, a dank, moss-covered alleyway that ran alongside the church; then it would go past farmhouses and down a stony, potholed track, and it always felt – at least to me when I was eight or nine years old – as though the coffin was leading us down into a ravine; but the next stretch rose gently and had views of the surrounding maize fields and mountains, more and more mountains, all intensely green. Finally, when we reached the cemetery gates, we could see the most distant peaks, some of them over the border in France; for example, Les Trois Couronnes, which looked very blue from there.
Walking the route to the cemetery was like going from the narrow into the broad, from darkness into light, as if doing so fulfilled the desire expressed in the prayer: “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.” Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Times had changed. A road now connected the church and the cemetery.
We placed my mother’s coffin in the hearse and went off to fetch our own cars, as did the relatives and friends coming with us to the burial. My eldest brother, however, preferred to go on foot.
“You’d better come with me,” I said. “You’ll be late.”
I thought that perhaps he didn’t want to take his car because, although the road was an improvement on the old one, it was still very dusty and stony, and he had just bought a new Mercedes-Benz S 500. A luxury brand.
“No, I’d rather go on foot,” he said. From the boot of his car he took a wicker basket, which, from what I could see, contained a bouquet of black flowers wrapped in cellophane. Then, without any further explanation, he headed off.
The flowers went well with death, like the prayers in Latin and the path through the maize fields with views of the mountains; the cars, on the other hand, were more like the tripe. They seemed out of place, they jarred. More than twenty cars set off almost at the same time and began manoeuvring round each other to get behind the hearse. The noise of the engines really grated on me, and I regretted not having followed my brother’s example.
In the cemetery chapel there was a kind of stone pedestal on which they placed the coffin, and the priest again spoke about my mother, this time adding more details. He mentioned the places where she – “our Izaskun” – had lived, the villages of Albiztur, Eibar and Asteasu; he mentioned my father, “a good man who left us four years ago”; he mentioned us – “three sons who, thanks to the sacrifices made by her and by her husband, were all able to go to university”; finally, he mentioned that she had been a schoolteacher and that many of the people at the funeral had been taught to read and write by her. What followed, though, was more banal, a repetition of those metaphors about death and eternal life.
The coffin had to be carried to the grave, as we had when we carried it from the church. I looked for my eldest brother among the thirty or forty people gathered in the chapel, but he wasn’t there. A friend offered to help.
“You’d be best carrying it by the handles rather than on your shoulders,” the priest said. We followed his advice and began walking rather clumsily, finding it hard to keep in step. The coffin seemed to weigh more than it had in the church.
There was a slight slope up to the family vault, where my father and my aunt and uncle lay.
My eldest brother had never been a particularly sociable person. Ever since he was a child, or perhaps since adolescence, he had always had a rather brusque manner. Nevertheless, he had decided to walk up to the cemetery not because he wanted to be alone, but in order to fill the wicker basket, and when he reached the cemetery, we saw that it was full of grass and sprigs of blackthorn. On top of these lay the black flowers wrapped in cellophane.
My brother was wearing a dark velvet suit, a white linen shirt, very pointed red shoes, and a gold ring in his left earlobe. Add to that the wicker basket, and he cut a somewhat eccentric figure.
The priest stood looking at him, and my brother indicated that he intended to decorate the grave with the contents of the basket. However, he would have to wait. The two young gravediggers had got behind in their work and were only now, somewhat belatedly, removing the gravestone. In the silence of the cemetery, you could hear the clank of crowbars and steel tubes. A few tiny birds were flitting about among the graves.
Removing the stone was no easy task, and the gravediggers were performing a kind of dance, jumping from one side to the other, from the ground onto the grave and from the grave onto the ground, continually shifting the position of the wooden wedges and the steel tubes. After a few minutes, the priest began reading a prayer, but the cows grazing in the nearby field began mooing so loudly that he had to wait for them to stop before he could go on. He glanced at the wicker basket, where a sprig of blackthorn heavy with sloes protruded from beneath the bouquet of black flowers.
From the part of the cemetery where we were standing, you could see one of the tallest mountains in Guipúzcoa, El Hernio – or, as a popular poem calls it, mendi arkaizti tontor aundiya, the tall, rugged mountain. It looked taller than it actually was, because it rose very steeply to its height of 3,527 feet and resembled a wal
l. How long would it take one of those tiny birds flitting among the graves to reach the top? I calculated that, if it flew straight there, it would take about half an hour. I did the same calculation for the cows. How long would it take them to reach the top? Given that they walked more slowly than most people, I thought it would take about four hours.
There were more of us holding the coffin now, because some friends had joined us. Meanwhile, the gravediggers continued their labours, raising the gravestone an inch at a time and constantly changing the position of the crowbars and the steel tubes. How much would it weigh? The only way I could calculate that was by comparing it with the stones that oxen were made to pull in contests at country fairs, and which usually bore a number indicating their weight. I remembered seeing one that weighed 7,500 pounds. The gravestone was longer and considerably thinner, but it could easily weigh maybe 4,500 pounds.
The gravediggers kept working: one inch, two inches, three inches … It was taking a long time.
The lower slopes of ‘the tall, rugged mountain’, El Hernio, were much gentler. As children, we thought the mountain looked like a woman lying down. How many times had we been there with our mother? Thirty times? Forty? And how often would she have climbed it with her parents from the village where she was born, Albiztur? Another forty or fifty times at least. It was her favourite mountain, and the site of one of her favourite stories.
*
One day, our mother used to tell us, two women from Albiztur were walking to Santiago and got as far as Zelatun, at the foot of El Hernio, but three paths lay before them. They weren’t sure which of the three would lead to Santiago.
“Let’s wait until someone comes,” one of them said, and they sat down on the grass.
A day passed, and no-one came. Another day, and still no-one. On the third day, a crow approached them. He wasn’t the informant they were expecting, but since no-one else had appeared, they decided to ask him:
Nevada Days Page 35
