Miren and Joxian spent their honeymoon in Madrid (four days, a cheap rooming house a short distance from the Plaza Mayor); Bittori and Txato, after an initial visit to Rome and witnessing the new pope greeting the multitude, visited several Italian cities. Miren, as she listened to her friend tell the tale of the trip: “Anyone can see you married a rich man.”
“Girl, I never thought about it. Since I married him randomly…”
The two friends were returning from a churro shop in the Parte Vieja of San Sebastián that afternoon of disturbances. They stopped at an intersection that led to the Bulevar. A city bus was burning in the street. The black smoke plumed against the facade of a building, obscuring the windows. The driver had been beaten. The man, fifty-five years old, was still there, sitting on the curb, his face bloody, his mouth open as if he couldn’t breathe, and next to him two passersby taking care of him, consoling him, and an ertzaina who, judging by his gestures, was telling them they couldn’t stay there.
Bittori: “There’s trouble.”
She: “Better go up Oquendo Street, and we’ll take the long way around to the bus stop.”
Before turning the corner, they looked back. In the distance, they could see a row of trucks from the Ertzaintza parked alongside the City Hall. The officers, wearing red helmets, their faces covered with ski masks, had taken up positions. They were firing rubber bullets at the crowd of young men gathered in front of them, shouting out a chorus of the usual insults: sellouts, murderers, sons of bitches, sometimes in Basque, other times in Spanish.
And the bus kept stoically burning amid the street battle. And the thick, black smoke. And the smell of burned tires that spread through the nearby streets poisoned pituitary glands, made eyes burn. Miren and Bittori heard a few passersby complain in low voices: we all pay for those buses, that if this is what you call defending the rights of the people, let’s cut it short here and now. A wife shushed her husband: “Quiet, someone might hear you.”
Suddenly they spotted him, one more among the hooded men, his mouth covered with a handkerchief. Hey, Joxe Mari. What’s he doing here? Miren almost called him by name. The kid had left the Parte Vieja using the same street the two women had used a few minutes before. Six or seven of them stopped, the butcher’s son and the son of Manoli, from the corner where the seafood shop was. And Joxe Mari was one of those who ran to distribute backpacks along the sidewalk. Some others gathered around, stretched out their hands to get Miren didn’t know what out of the packs. Bittori had good eyes and told her: stones. And so it was: stones. They hurled them at the ertzainas.
8
A DISTANT EPISODE
The small concentration of morning light glinting off Joxian’s bicycle spoke was enough to evoke in Miren a distant episode. The scenario? That same kitchen. The memory brought on a tremor in her hands as she prepared dinner. Merely remembering it gave her a touch of the asphyxia she attributed to the heat and smoke rising from the frying pan. Not even with the window open was she able to get a good breath of air.
Nine thirty, ten, and finally she felt him arrive. The unmistakable noise of his footfalls on the building’s stairway. That mania of his for running up the stairs. He’s about to enter.
He did enter, huge, nineteen years old, hair hanging down to his shoulders and that damn earring. Joxe Mari, a healthy, robust boy hungry as a bear: he’d grown until he became a tall, wide-shouldered young man. He was eight inches taller than anyone else in the family, except the youngest, who was also getting tall, though he was a different kind of boy. I don’t know. Gorka was slim, fragile; according to Joxian, with a better brain.
Her eyebrows broadcasting her annoyance, she wouldn’t let him come over and give her a kiss. “Where have you been?”
As if she didn’t know. As if she hadn’t seen him that afternoon on the Bulevar de San Sebastián. Ever since, she was imagining him with burned clothes, a cut on his forehead, lying in some hospital.
At first, he answered with evasions; he’d become very much his own person. Mmm, you’d have to use a corkscrew to get anything out of him. And since he wouldn’t explain himself, she did. The time, the place, the backpack full of rocks.
“You wouldn’t by any chance be one of the men who set fire to the bus? Don’t you be bringing us troubles.”
Not troubles, not a damn thing, he shouted. And Miren? Well, first she quickly shut the window. The whole town will hear. Occupation forces, freedom for Euskal Herria. And she snatched the handle of the frying pan, ready to defend herself, because if I have to smack him I will. But then she noticed the hot oil and, of course, forgot about it. Joxian still not home, Joxian in the Pagoeta, and she there alone with her wild son who was shouting at the top of his lungs about liberation, struggle, independence, so aggressive that Miren could only think: this guy’s going to hit me. And he was her son, her Joxe Mari: she’d given birth to him, nursed him, and now what a way to scream at a mother.
She took off her apron, rolled it into a ball, and threw it to the floor in a fury—or out of fear?—right where Joxian stood his bicycle now, where does he get off with this stuff, bringing that thing into the house? And she didn’t want her son to see her cry. So she dashed out of the kitchen, her eyes squeezed shut, her lips puffed out, her features disfigured by grief when she burst into Gorka’s room and told him go find aita. And Gorka, bent over his books and notebooks, asked what was going on. His mother made him hurry and the kid, sixteen years old, ran out at full speed toward the Pagoeta.
A short time later, Joxian walked in, scowling: “What did you do to your mother?”
He had to look up to speak to him because of the height difference. In the flash of light off the spoke, Miren saw the whole scene without straining her memory. There, in small scale, were the tiles covering half the wall, the fluorescent bulbs that flooded the formica cabinets in a humble, working-class light, the stink of fried food and the stuffy kitchen.
He was on the verge of punching him. Who? The powerful son against the stocky father. Joxe Mari had never gone up against him that way. There were no old debts to settle, because Joxian was never an abusive father. That guy a child beater? No, he would curse in a low voice and take off for the bar the minute he sniffed discord. He always left everything to me, bringing up the boys, their sicknesses, peace in the house.
With the first jolt, Joxian’s beret flew off his head and landed, not on the floor, but on a chair, as if ordered to sit down. Joxian stepped back astonished, fearful, his thin gray hair in defeated disorder, his status as alpha male in the family lost forever but not fully accepted, no, not at all, at least until that instant.
Arantxa once said to her mother: “Ama, know what this family’s problem is? That we’ve spoken to one another very little.”
“Bah.”
“I think we don’t know one another.”
“Well, I know all of you. I know you too well.”
And that conversation, too, remained in the bicycle tire, held in the glint between two spokes, along with the old scene, oh dear, that I’ll never forget as long as I live. There she could see Joxian, poor thing, leaving the kitchen with his head hanging down. And he went to bed before his usual time, without saying good night, and she did not hear him snore. That man hasn’t slept all night.
He didn’t speak for several days. He spoke little. But now, less. Joxe Mari the same, silent, silent for all the four or five days he was still living in the house. He only opened his mouth to eat. Then, one Saturday, he packed up his things and left. At the time, we didn’t imagine that he’d left for good. Maybe he hadn’t imagined it, either. On the kitchen table, he left us a sheet of paper: Barkatu. He didn’t even sign it. There it was, Barkatu, on a sheet of paper ripped out of one of his brother’s notebooks, and nothing more. Neither muxus nor where he’d gone, not even goodbye.
He came back maybe ten days later with a bagful of dirty clothes
and a sack to hold another load of the belongings he’d left in the room, and he gave his mother a bouquet of calla lilies:
“For me?”
“If not for you, then for who?”
“Where did you get these flowers?”
“From the flower shop. Where else would I get them?”
She stood there staring at him. Her son. When he was small, she’d washed him, dressed him, spoon-fed him porridge. No matter what he does, I said to myself, he’ll always be my Joxe Mari, and I have to love him.
While the drum in the washing machine went around and around, he sat down to eat. By himself, he almost finished the loaf of bread. What a tiger. And just then his father came back from the garden.
“Kaixo.”
“Kaixo.”
That was their entire conversation. When the spin cycle was over, Joxe Mari put the wet clothes in the bag. He’d set them out to dry at his flat. Flat?
Now I share a flat with some friends, depending on who’s going out on the highway to Goizueta.
Joxe Mari said goodbye, first kissing his mother and then patting his father on the back affectionately. Carrying the sack and the bag of laundry, he went off to his world of friends and God knows what, that even if he was nearby, in the same town, his parents had no idea of. Miren remembered that she’d looked out the window to watch him walk off down the street, but this time she had no chance to finish off the memory, since Joxian suddenly moved the bicycle, and the glint from the spoke disappeared.
9
RED
Ikatza came home to bring her a dead bird. A sparrow. The second in three days. Sometimes she brings mice. People know the cat has this way of contributing to the family economy or to show her thankfulness for the treatment she gets from her owner. Without the slightest difficulty, she climbs up the horse chestnut tree until she reaches a branch that enables her to leap onto one of the balconies on the fourth floor. From there, she moves on to Bittori’s, where she usually leaves her gifts on the floor or on the dirt in one of the flowerpots. If she finds the door open, it’s not unheard of for her to leave it on the living-room rug.
“How many times do I have to tell you not to bring me dead animals?”
Did they make her sick to her stomach? A little, but she’s not in the mood to complain. The bad thing is that Ikatza’s gifts remind her of violent death. At first she would sweep them off the balcony onto the street, but some fell on cars parked in front of the entryway. To avoid quarrels with the neighbors, she brings the dead animals to the rear of the house. There she uses a stick to push them into the dustpan and then, with all discretion, tosses them into the brambles.
Wearing rubber gloves, she was doing exactly that when the doorbell rang. To keep from upsetting his mother, Xabier usually announces his arrival before opening the door.
Seeing the gloves: “Have I caught you in the act of cleaning?”
“I wasn’t expecting you.”
Tall son, short mother, and a brushing of cheeks in the foyer.
“I had an appointment with the lawyer. A trivial matter that kept me there for only a few minutes. Since I was in the neighborhood, I thought I could drop in and at the same time draw some blood. That way you won’t have to go to the hospital tomorrow.”
“Okay, but try to bruise me less than you did last time.”
Quiet by nature, Xabier was talking about whatever came into his head to distract his mother. About Ikatza’s sleepy eyes, as the cat licked her paws sitting on the armchair. About the weather forecast. About how expensive chestnuts are this year.
“What do chestnuts matter to you with the salary you pull in?”
Bittori, her sleeve rolled up, leaning on her elbow over the dining-room table, wanted to talk, not to be talked to. She was dying to talk about one particular subject: Nerea.
Nerea this, Nerea that. Complaints. A furrowed brow, reproaches.
“I can tell you all this because you’re my son, and I trust you. I can’t deal with her. I never could. They always say the first time you give birth is the worst, that it clears the way for the ones that follow. Well, the fact is that giving birth to her hurt me more than giving birth to you. And I mean a lot more. And then, what a difficult child. And as an adolescent, don’t get me started. And now it’s even worse. I thought that after all that with aita, she’d start to focus. Mourning embittered me.”
“Don’t say that. In her way she’s suffered as much as you and me.”
“I know she’s my daughter and that I shouldn’t talk this way, but why should I hold in what I’m feeling when, even if I do, I’m not going to stop feeling it? Each time it gets harder and harder not to get furious. I’m too old to put up with certain kinds of behavior, understand? Four days ago she went to London with that playboy husband of hers.”
“Let me remind you that my brother-in-law has a name.”
“I can’t stand him.”
“And it’s Enrique, if you don’t mind.”
“As far as I’m concerned his name is Cantstandhim.”
The needle easily penetrated the vein. The slim tube rapidly turned red.
Red. Xabier, Xabier, you have to go home, something’s happened to your father. That the something was bad was understood. And those words, something’s happened to him, continued to resonate in him in a lasting moment outside the flow of time. He was given no more details, and he didn’t dare ask. But he immediately realized from the expression on the face of the woman who reported the news, and from the expressions on all those he walked by in the hall, that something very serious must have happened to his father, something red, the worst. At no time did he consider the possibility of an accident. As he made his way to the hospital exit, he saw sorry faces filled with compassion, and one old friend who immediately turned away in order not to join him in the elevator. So it was ETA. While he crossed the wide expanse of the parking lot, he imagined three possibilities: restricted mobility, the rest of his life in a wheelchair, a coffin.
Red. His hand was trembling so hard he couldn’t get the key into the ignition. It fell to the floor of the car, so he had to get out and look under the seat. Maybe it would have been wiser to take a taxi. Do I turn on the radio or not? In his haste, he’d forgotten to take off his lab coat. He talked to himself, cursed red lights, cursed. Finally, as the first houses in the village were coming into sight, he decided to turn on the radio. Music. Nervous, he twisted the dial. Music, ads, trivialities, jokes.
Red. The Ertzaintza forced him to detour. He parked in a no-parking zone behind the church. If they want to give me a ticket, let them. It was pouring rain, and he ran home as quickly as he could. By then he’d heard the news on the radio, although the reporter had no information about the physical condition of the victim. Besides that, he’d mispronounced Txato’s last name. Between the garage and his parents’ house Xabier saw blood mix with the rainwater slowly washing to the curb. He was running so quickly, so nervously that he almost ran by the entry. To the Ertzaintza agents, he identified himself as the son. Whose son? No one asked. His lab coat opened the way for him, even if he clearly looked like a member of the murdered man’s family, not a single ertzaina even considered asking him where he was going.
“She still hasn’t called.”
“Maybe she did and you’d gone out. I called you yesterday and the day before. You didn’t answer. That’s one of the reasons I came to see you. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“And if you were so concerned, why didn’t you come sooner?”
“Because I knew where you’ve spent the last few nights. The whole village knows.”
“What does anyone know about me?”
“They know you get off the bus at the industrial park and that you make your way to the house trying not to run into anyone. Someone in the hospital who saw you told me. Which is why I wasn’t alarmed. And it may be
that Nerea’s made more than one attempt to talk to you. I’m not going to ask you about your intentions. It’s your village, your house. But if you decide to revive stories from the past, I’d be grateful if you’d keep me informed.”
“It’s my business.”
Xabier put his instruments and his mother’s blood sample in his attaché case.
“I’m part of that story.”
He went over to the cat, who let herself be petted. He said he wouldn’t stay for dinner. He said other things. He kissed his mother before leaving, and since he knew she would appear at the window, he looked up before getting into his car and, supposing she was behind the curtain, waved goodbye.
10
TELEPHONE CALLS
The phone rang. It must be Nerea. Bittori didn’t answer, even though all she had to do was stretch out her hand. Let her call, let her call. She imagined her daughter on the other end of the line saying, with growing impatience: ama, answer; ama, answer. She didn’t answer. Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. Ama, answer. Upset by all the noise, Ikatza took advantage of the open balcony door and made for the street.
Bittori made her way over to Txato’s photo, practicing a few dance steps.
“Like to dance, Txatito?”
Seconds later, the phone stopped ringing.
“It was her, your favorite. What do you mean, how do I know? My dear husband, you knew about trucks and I know about my things.”
Nerea did not come to her father’s funeral or to his burial.
“I may get Alzheimer’s, I may forget you were murdered, I may forget my own name, but I swear that as long as I have my memory, I’ll remember she denied us her company when we most needed her.”
Homeland Page 4
