Homeland

by Fernando Aramburu

  She said only that. She didn’t wait for an answer. She didn’t kiss her on the cheek as she did in the past. But she gave her a pat of solidarity on her shoulder before going on her way. More or less that’s what she said. Maybe a few words were different, because memory slips sometimes. But in any case she made that gracious gesture Bittori won’t forget. Me forget? Dead first.

  “She was in serious condition when she went into the Palma hospital, and they had to do a tracheotomy, put her on a respirator, and carry out other procedures I don’t have to describe because I don’t think you’d be interested in knowing them. What you do have to know is that in those instants, Arantxa couldn’t breathe or speak or, of course, feed herself. In sum, her life depends completely on external aid.”

  They killed Txato one rainy afternoon, a few yards from the entryway to his house. And the priest, that smartass, insisted to Bittori that the funeral take place in San Sebastián. Why? It’s that if we do it there, more people will come. And she: “No way, we’re from this town, we were baptized in this town, we were married in this town, and it was in this town my husband was murdered.”

  The priest gave in. He officiated at the funeral. The bells pealed the death knell. There were few people from the neighborhood in the church, a couple of politicians of the constitutionalist splinter, some relatives who came deliberately, and little more. Company employees? Not a one. In the homily, not a word about the attack. A tragic event that moves all of us. She didn’t see Arantxa, but Xabier says she was in the rear pews with her husband. They did not come to her to express their sympathy, but they were there, unlike certain others. And Bittori will not forget that, either.

  Meanwhile, mother and son reached the Antiguo tunnel—and what should we do now? They decided to go back. Xabier in an explicative mood, though he simplified his medical jargon. Bittori, pensive, stared fixedly beyond the city, the mountains, and the far, scattered clouds, images she’d never seen that she was seeing now for the first time: Arantxa covered in tubes, Arantxa saying yes or no exclusively through her eyelids. They deserved it. Well, not that, not her, definitely not her.

  “Ama, I don’t think you’re listening.”

  “Will you be having dinner at home?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Got a date? What’s the name of the lucky girl?”

  “Her name is medicine.”

  The best-case scenario according to Xabier: Arantxa could someday walk around in the house, either using a cane or helped by other people. She can eat on her own, but not without supervision as she ingests liquids or solids, and it’s not impossible that in the future she may phonate.

  “May what?”

  “Speak.”

  Aside from those objectives, and no matter how much effort she puts into her rehabilitation (and according to what I’ve been told she works really hard at it), Xabier did not believe she would ever have what we would call a normal life.

  And just when they were about to separate at the clocks in La Concha:

  “Weren’t you going to give me the results of my blood tests?”

  “Oh, good thing you reminded me. I almost forgot. There are some figures I don’t like, so I’ve asked Arruabarrena to check the tests. No hurry, okay? A routine thing. Just to be sure, you know. Besides, you’re as solid as an oak tree.”

  They kissed and said goodbye. Bicycles, prams, urban sparrows all passed by.

  “And this Arruabarrena, who’s he?”

  “A friend, and one of the best specialists we have.”

  She watched him walk away. She knew, intuited, that after taking a few steps he’d turn around. Out of curiosity, out of habit, to check on her? And he did. Bittori, who hadn’t moved, in a soft voice: “He’s an oncologist, right?”

  Xabier nodded yes. He waved his hand as if to brush off any dramatics in the situation. He went off between the rows of tamarisk trees, a bit stooped in the shoulders, perhaps because he’s tall and used to looking down when he talks to people. It seems a lie that a man of his caliber could be a bachelor. Could it be because he dresses in such poor taste?

  18

  AN ISLAND VACATION

  No, these things happen because they have to happen or, as her mother would say, because God or Saint Ignatius, representing God, wanted it that way. What bad luck, why me? Et cetera. She repeated again and again and again the litany of complaints recited by all those singled out for adversity (ha, ha, ha, don’t be such a cynic, girl). And she once wrote on her iPad to Gorka, her sad—or simply shocked?—little brother, that since he was a writer maybe he’d like to write her story. An expression of alarm came into Gorka’s eyes, and he hastily responded no, that he only wrote books for children. Arantxa again turned the screen toward him: “Someday I’ll write it, telling everything.” That wasn’t the first time she announced—was it a threat?—that intention.

  Whenever she did, Miren would get furious.

  “What are you going to write when you can’t even brush your teeth on your own? And what for? To tell the entire town the disasters that have fallen on our house?”

  She stared at them (in the kitchen, Sunday, roast chicken) from her wheelchair, more lucid (don’t be so smug, girl) than all of them put together. What a gullible family! Her father very aged, wrinkled with sorrow, an oil stain on his shirtfront, not understanding for twenty years now anything of what was going on around him. Her brother Gorka, who lives—hidden?— in Bilbao and for long periods of time gives no sign of life. The other absent brother who isn’t there but comes up constantly in conversation: the strongman of the family rotting away in jail, for how many years now?, I can’t even remember. And ama, who possesses, approximately, the same sensibility and empathy as an exhaust pipe; but she cooks well, truth be told. And she looked at her father and mother busy chewing, silent, their faces bent over their respective plates and a flood of bitterness, or was it rancor?, began rising within her, from her chest to her throat (control yourself, girl) and she closed her eyes and was once again driving the rented car along the service road among the pines a few miles outside of Palma.

  They vacationed at Cala Millor. Who? The mother and the daughter. Two weeks in August in a cheap hotel with no view of the sea, but not at all far from the beach. Endika, seventeen then, did not want to go with them. No, no, no. The girl had no real desire, either, but Arantxa convinced her with the promise of fun, a bit of sentimental blackmail, and the purchase of a camera even though her grades were terrible. The important thing for Arantxa was to lose sight of Guillermo. If it were up to her alone, she would have gone anywhere, but the idea of leaving the children to the tender mercies of their father was unconscionable. Their marriage? Bah, you really couldn’t call that a marriage. One fight led to the next. Day after day of not speaking to each other, exchanging looks of contempt, hatred, disgust, when there was no way out of looking at each other. But the children. But the economic ties. But the flat they’d bought together. And their relatives, what would they say? Arantxa decided she would never give in, but deep down I felt tremendous insecurity, seriously, and he was going out with some woman without bothering to hide it.

  “You refuse to screw. Well, I’ve got to do something with my dick.”

  That was his style. Right in front of the kids. And if not right in front, close enough so that they could hear the curses, the reproaches, the shouts.

  Ainhoa, fifteen years old:

  “Me, ama, I’d rather stay here with my friends.”

  “I’m asking you, please.”

  The two women went alone. Guillermo drove them to the airport. Ainhoa asked him to put on some music, which he did at full volume. So he wouldn’t have to talk, I suppose. He just left the bags on the ground, quickly kissed his daughter, said have a nice flight, whether to them or to the clouds it wasn’t clear, because he spoke staring into space like a saint in a holy picture, and immediately drove
back. He didn’t even bother to help them carry their suitcases to the check-in.

  Me, I’m taking care of myself, heading for the dirty trick awaiting me among some Mallorca pines, exactly at the moment when I was enjoying a few days of relaxation without tears, rage, fights; in the company of my daughter, the sun, the salt water, and some erotic adventures with a foreigner staying at the same hotel. More than anything, to feel those old tickles again and recover from the humiliations of Guillermo, who played the Casanova, the stallion, when really he was nothing more than a barely vibrating pig in bed.

  They passed Manacor, left other towns behind. Symptoms? Not a one. She could imagine the car they’d rented in her memory as, without much appetite, she chewed the chicken her mother had cut into small pieces for her; a moment of happiness. She, driving. Ainhoa wearing sunglasses in the passenger seat exchanging text messages in her bad English (if you’d only listen to me and study) with a German boy she’d met on the beach and fallen madly in love with. How beautiful love is at that age. And the pines in the distance, the blue morning sky, all prepared to burst the bubble.

  She can’t feel her legs. And she manages, not knowing how, to stop the car in the middle of the highway, unless it was the car that stopped on its own, because at that point there was a bit of a hill, and Arantxa, as soon as she could, put on the hand brake, since she could still move her hands, as well as think and speak and see and breathe and, in reality, nothing hurt.

  “Ama, what are you doing? Why are you stopping?”

  “Get out and ask for help. Something’s happening to me.”

  Friday. What bad luck, my children, why did this have to happen to me? She said that to herself in the ambulance. One of the emergency staff was asking her questions. To keep her conscious? She answered distractedly. Almost all the space in her mind was taken up by her children, her job as a saleswoman, her future, but above all her children, still so young, what would become of them without me? Saturday, Sunday, Arantxa calmer and calmer, convinced that this is nothing more than a scare. Ainhoa, hysterical, behaving badly. How? First, she did not want to take a room in a hotel in Palma or go back to the hotel in Cala Millor; second, that the island now seemed like a prison to her and she wanted to go home on the first plane. They let her sleep in the hospital on a chair next to her mother. Guillermo in part or parts unknown. Endika, who knew where he was? Not at home, of course. I hope he’s not getting into trouble. And finally, on Monday, the doctor talked about releasing her the next day, in a self-confident voice he suggested that Arantxa have an exhaustive battery of tests in her hometown. So she spoke by telephone with her mother and then with Guillermo, that there was no need for them to come to Mallorca to get her, that she’d return with Ainhoa as planned. She even decided to spend the five days she had left of her vacation in Cala Millor. Ainhoa:

  “I’m bored here.”

  “What about the German boy? Aren’t you going to say goodbye to him?”

  The German boy, suddenly, annoyed the hell out of her.

  “Don’t talk like that, people can hear you.”

  An hour and a half later, at nightfall, Arantxa was covered with tubes in the ICU. The second stroke had just hit her, the strong one, accompanied by unbearable pains. She heard everything. The doctor, the nurses. And she couldn’t answer and suffered a great deal of anguish, my God, what a moment, she was horrified to think they might put her in a coffin and bury her alive.

  “Listen, honey, you’re not eating, why?”

  She opened her eyes. She seemed surprised, even astonished to see her mother opposite her, her father to the left with greasy lips, tearing into a chicken thigh.

  19

  DISCREPANCY

  But how hot it is in this land. Miren thought the sea cooled the islands.

  “No, amona.”

  “It’s the same heat as when I visit osaba Joxe Mari.”

  The flight? A disaster. She landed in Palma five and a half hours late after an interminable wait in the Bilbao airport. She withstood the thirst, withstood it for a long time, she went on withstanding it the best she could, but finally she had to give in and make an unforeseen purchase. She drank a small bottle of still mineral water because even though the budget didn’t allow for luxuries, she didn’t feel like drinking from the faucet in the bathroom. I’d get sick for sure. She deluded herself thinking she could satisfy her thirst with what they’d serve on the plane, but time went by (one hour, another…) and she felt as if a handful of sand was blocking her throat. So there was no way out: she went to the bar and brusquely asked for her modest drink.

  What was going on? Well, all planes except hers were taking off. Between the loudspeakers’ flight announcements (to Munich, Paris, Málaga, boarding at gate…) came emissions every two seconds about keeping your possessions in sight at all times.

  So she asked travelers here and there who, like her, were waiting near the boarding gate. Listen, excuse me. And some were foreigners who were as in the dark as she was, so she couldn’t figure out how to find out why, come on now, because if the plane is parked at the loading gate with our baggage in it, why they won’t let us board.

  And what with my daughter so far away in the hospital. Now she wasn’t looking at her watch with the nervousness of before but with the start of resignation and slow rage, and she decided (heat, sweat) to go upstairs to slake her thirst. Which she did, first removing the slice of lemon, which she enjoyed, and finally she chewed up the white part because she was also feeling hunger pangs.

  Leaving the bar, she saw two members of the Guardia Civil coming toward her. She stared at their uniforms, not their faces. And a brusque qualm along with an invincible repugnance impelled her to stop next to the balustrade. Near to them, she discovered they were two young officers, a man and a woman. And since they were amused in their conversation, she took a good look at them. What should I do? These txakurras know for sure. Close now, she was upset by the woman’s natural smile and the blond ponytail poking out underneath her cap. She looked around. Let’s see if there’s anyone here from the town, in which case I’m in trouble. And she dared: excuse me. She asked the woman. She doesn’t look like a torturer. And the officer, in a cordial tone that also disconcerted Miren, said that the airport at Palma de Mallorca was closed.

  “What do you mean, closed?”

  The man answered:

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s because two of our comrades were attacked. But don’t worry. It’s probably just a provisional measure and you’ll be able to travel.”

  “Oh, okay, okay.”

  And she did get to Palma. The city below, transformed into luminous dots, the sea how black it is, and in the distance, a final remnant of the purplish glow of the sunset. Too late to visit Arantxa in the hospital. Ainhoa was waiting for her at the airport as they’d agreed.

  “Okay, tell me.”

  “Ama is in serious condition, with tubes all over her.”

  “Your aita could have come in my place. This little joke is going to cost me a fortune.”

  “He said he’ll come on Monday and that he’ll take me home the next day.”

  “Oh, so he doesn’t intend to stay? What nerve. All the work and all the expense for me.”

  “Amona, I don’t like it when you say bad things about my aita.”

  A nurse, Carme, very sweet, helped Ainhoa during the first days, until Miren arrived. Consoling her, being kind to her, she said she wasn’t to worry, that she would help her. And she drove her to get the luggage from the hotel in Cala Millor. Along the way, explanations about her mother’s condition and words of encouragement.

  “You’ll have to love her a lot.”

  She invited her into her home in Palmanova, where she lived with her two small children and a husband who’s so fat, he must have weighed at least three hundred pounds. Once upon a time he must have been handsome with his blue eyes. He wa
s from Germany, his face was a little red (okay, really red), and when he spoke to me you could hear his accent. When they spoke to their children, he spoke German and she spoke that Basque they speak in Mallorca.

  Once Miren confirmed the date of her arrival at Palma, Carme reserved a room for her and Ainhoa with two beds in a boardinghouse, far from the tourist zones, far from the hospital as well, but what can you do? She followed the instructions Miren gave her over the telephone.

  “Listen, it can’t cost too much, because we aren’t rich.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  Did she? Above and beyond. Room without breakfast, without views of the sea, next to a noisy highway, far from the center of town, but cheap, which is what Miren wanted, since she thought she was in for a long stay. She nervously calculated the expense. And how are we going to get Arantxa home with an ocean to cross? Ignatius, get me out of this predicament, please, I beg you. What about Guillermo? Why didn’t he take care of things, he’s her husband after all. No, he’s got to work. No, it’s that his boss. No, it’s that in a few days, I can’t…Excuses.

  Ainhoa told Miren about the terrorist attack that took place right near Carme’s apartment and how the whole building shook. In the living room, a picture had fallen off the wall. The glass broke, along with a lamp below the picture, and Carme’s fat husband started ranting and raving in his own language, and the children were crying, frightened by the blast and, Ainhoa thought, by their father’s shouting. Carme and Ainhoa had just returned from the hospital when the explosion went off a few blocks away. Where? The radio told them it blew up right outside the Guardia Civil barracks. Immediately, the sirens began to howl and there was a strange smell in the air.