She ordered chamomile tea. The paella had left an oily aftertaste in her mouth and a heaviness in her stomach.
Xabier paid no attention to his sister’s complaints. Without preliminaries, he went straight to the point:
“You and I should have met before going to ama’s house. Believe me when I say I was really uncomfortable. We should have agreed on a series of points to protect her from more suffering. You were in the wrong, but I realize that I’m partially to blame for not having stepped in.”
“You mean for not telling me to shut up.”
“I mean that all you had to do was tell your plans for the future little by little. Simple prudence or something you may never have heard of before: subtlety.”
“You mean the kind you’re practicing right now?”
“The story of your umpteenth separation would have been enough. It would have been better to hold off on the rest for another time. Anyway, to you it probably looked as if ama reacted calmly. Let me tell you, her calm is all appearance. It’s the mask she’s been wearing since she became a widow. She pretends to be strong. But if you took a good look, which I did while you went on and on, sometimes in a kind of euphoria, which I have to say caught my eye and not in a positive way, you’d have seen in ama’s forehead, in her eyes, that each word you spoke was like a stone hitting her.”
“Is that so? Well, it’s odd that you saw that because I never saw her raise her eyes from the plate.”
“Some things you see without having to look at them. Listen, Nerea. Maybe your separation from Quique has affected you more than you’re showing. Only you could know that. While we were eating, the impression I had of you was of a woman who suddenly wants to do a lot of things, no matter what happens, without taking into account the repercussions of your acts for the people around you. Really, you didn’t seem to be yourself.”
“And what if I’m not myself? You think I have to adopt your way of being?”
“Before your trip to London, you promised us you’d given up the idea of the healing encounter. And now we find you want to go on with the program. Why? So you can achieve some psychological well-being before you leave? Every man for himself, right? Could you really feel well-being seeing how ama is doing? I couldn’t. Maybe I could feel it for a minute with a repentant murderer standing in front of me. But then I’d go back to San Sebastián and realize that the relief I’m feeling does nothing for those I love, but just the opposite, and then I’d go back to feeling the way I did before, or worse.”
“Are you accusing me of egoism?”
“Let’s just call it naïveté.”
“Xabier, I’m not your little eight-year-old sister. It’s been a long time since we were kids. I don’t need a mentor. I can handle myself on my own.”
“I’m not denying it. That’s why I’m here talking with you, because you’re a person who’s supposedly able to make decisions, which doesn’t free you from making mistakes. Mistakes that can hurt others, which is the case now.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“You’re taking what happened to aita and making up your own personal version of it. You’re looking for a way out that works for you or for your plans or whatever you want to call them. Ultimately you stand like God himself, you begin a new life in Shangri-la, with palm trees lining the beach, but you don’t bother to think that maybe if you really do that you make the pain of those who remain here even greater.”
“The two of you are emotionally blocked. Ama and you are in a pit of sorrow and anger and melancholy you can’t get out of and I’m not even sure you want to get out. I’ve touched bottom. Enough is enough. Something inside me has to change. That’s why, after analyzing myself, I thought about going up to one of those murderers and telling him: you did this to me, these are the consequences, you take them, they’re my gift to you, and then I’d move far away with or without his asking forgiveness, move to a place where no one recognizes me or whispers behind my back. A place where I can dedicate myself to doing something for others, I don’t know, for abused women, orphans. So forget the egoism. Actually, it seems more egoistic to stay in this city licking my wounds to the end of my days. Stop staring into that damn glass of cognac. Look at me. I’m separated from my husband, I have no children and am menopausal. You’re hurting me and making me want to throw this tea in your face.”
He didn’t change expression. Didn’t look at her. Didn’t move his eyes away from the glass, not even when he said to his sister:
“There’s something you don’t know. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you sooner. It’s another reason why we should have met before. I think ama is sick. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. The results of her last tests don’t promise anything good. While you were in London, I managed to get her an appointment with one of the best oncologists around. But when the day came, ama didn’t show up at his office. She says she forgot. I doubt it. I’m trying not to alarm her. I said it was a routine examination. Of course she isn’t dumb. She knows more or less what her symptoms mean. I’m asking you please to put off your plans. In my opinion it would be better to forget about them as long as our mother is still alive. It would be an act of generosity on your part if you didn’t commit yourself to actions that could worsen her problem.”
“Cancer?”
“Most likely.”
Xabier, two cognacs and what his sister had, went over to the register and asked for the check. He also asked the man who won the match. Zero–zero in the first half. He didn’t sit down again when he went back to his sister.
“Think about it, and when you reach a decision, please tell me.”
“No need to think. Tomorrow I’ll call the mediator and tell her to forget about it. The good doctor has once again won the day. But I assure you that one day, I don’t know when, I’m going to leave this damn place.”
Xabier leaned over to give her a fraternal kiss on the cheek.
“Tough times.”
“You’re telling me.”
They parted company cordially with no show of emotion, without smiling. He walked out, and it wasn’t raining. She stayed in her corner seat, staring through the window as if hypnotized by the grayness in the street.
29
A TWO-COLORED LEAF
To justify how long she’d been sitting in the café, she ordered mineral water. Outside the afternoon was turning dark. Cars passed with their lights on. Were there people in the café? Just a few. Nerea changed tables. Now she was sitting in a place closer to the glass door, where she could better observe the passing cars. She felt enveloped in a pleasing sensation of seclusion. Alone, sleepy, she had no idea where she should go.
The cars did not form a continuous, unbroken line but ran in clusters controlled by the stoplights at the start of San Martín Street. This circumstance generated a soft pleasure for Nerea and made her sadness, her aftertaste of oily paella more bearable.
And suddenly, growling away, a bus passed by, but not a city bus. And she was inside it. Here we go, my youth and I heading to Zaragoza, to take the fourth-year law course following the desire, the imploring demands of aita, who wanted to protect his daughter at all costs, so many years ago.
To Pamplona on a Roncalesa bus, early in the morning, what a weep session. My girlfriends, Thursday dinners, motorbike excursions, the discotheque. She abandoned all of it in that distant month of October. And Zaragoza meant nothing to her. A city without a beach, without a bay, without mountains, what a nightmare. How can you live so far from the sea? But aita insisted: there’s no way out, believe me. The sooner she left Basque country, the better. To Barcelona, to Madrid, wherever she chose. And she shouldn’t worry about expenses. The point was to get somewhere safe. Get her degree in peace and quiet. Since she was accepted at the University of Zaragoza, she went to Zaragoza, weeping until Pamplona, where she had to change buses, in a better mood during the second part of
the trip. Why? In Pamplona, in the café attached to the bus station, she had a café con leche and a slice of potato-and-egg tortilla and, son of a bitch, it seems that with your stomach satisfied life starts showing a more beneficent aspect. A boy traveling to Logroño—or was it someplace else? she can’t remember—came over to her, flirting, flattering, full of illusions. And she, to pass the time but without ever losing sight of the clock on the wall, let him build up his hopes and gave him a phony telephone number and a kiss on the lips. The tortilla and the boy combined to make it a happy morning. She slept until Tudela and reached Zaragoza dying of hunger, but fine.
She’d only been to the city once before. Two days of hellish heat; two nights in the nocturnal oven of a boardinghouse. She matriculated and looked for a student apartment. In a kiosk in Plaza San Francisco, she bought a copy of El Heraldo de Aragón. She tossed it out shortly after, keeping only the rentals section. One in Delicias, one in Las Fuentes, apartments here, there. The names of the neighborhoods meant nothing to her. And the heat. At two in the afternoon not a soul on the street. Not a bird, not a fly. She stepped into a phone booth. The telephone was so hot she had to use a tissue to pick it up. She dialed one of the many numbers. She was quoted a rent so low that she grew suspicious, to the point of asking if the place was in Zaragoza itself. What? In the middle of town and not in a village in the province. She noted a reaction of concern on the other end of the line. It’s in the middle of town, of course. Then she thought: damn, what am I getting into? Anyway, she caught a taxi with the idea of taking a look at the place because she wanted to get home as soon as possible and to do that she had to resolve the housing issue immediately. She thought it a good sign that the driver recognized the address right away. She concluded that the street was known and would therefore have those things no civilized street should lack. What things? Streetlights, sidewalks, shops. For a moment she was tempted to ask the driver if the place was far away, but she bit her tongue. First out of shame, because of course any person of minimum intelligence would have bought a map of the city, and second because if the guy realizes I don’t know where things are he’ll take the long way around to jack up the fare. They went up to Torrero. Beyond the canal, almost within sight of the cemetery, the driver announced: here we are, and she paid and got out. The flat? Fine. Clean, the opposite of dark, simply furnished. The views very ugly; but wait a minute, you’re not here on vacation. To tell the truth, Nerea had already accepted the place before the door opened, as she walked up the stairs to the entry. It’s that she recalled her mother’s advice to her. That the important thing, my girl, is that you have a roof over your head when classes begin; then when things calm down you can find a way to make yourself more comfortable. She also told her that when she entered the building she should check the condition of the mailboxes. Because, damn it, poverty tends to take poor care of them, while people doing okay try to keep them clean and neat, and as she said, all she had to do was see the mailboxes to get an idea of what kind of neighbors live in a building. The mailboxes made an excellent impression on Nerea, as did the cleanliness of the stairs and walls, and when the door opened and she shook hands with her future roommate, she was more than convinced she’d found a place in Zaragoza.
During the months she lived there, she barely saw her roommate, a girl from Huesca. Actually, she never knew for sure what she did. She was not, of course, a student. The downside of the apartment: the school was really far away, as were the bars and other places to have fun. Then the cierzo, the icy Zaragoza wind, and fog. Winter came and was it cold, Jesus! She bought a space heater. It barely helped. If she moved a few yards from it, the piercing cold was unbearable. Net result: at the start of the next year she moved to the flat on López Allué, better heating and better location, although more expensive as well. She shared it with two girls from Teruel. One, younger than she, was also a law student; the other in humanities. They got along well together right from the start.
Zaragoza. If her brother only knew, if her mother only knew. Except for the beginning, when she shivered with cold in the Torrero flat and felt alone, as if wrapped in a membrane of nostalgia, she was close to happiness. She didn’t realize it at the time. She limited herself to exhausting the pleasing possibilities of youth. She soon made friends. People so open, so healthy in spirit, and so pleasant in character, she never found anywhere else. And she, without scanting her studies (she didn’t fail a single examination), frequented the night, physical love, alcohol, and, but less often, cocaine and marijuana. And she learned to get along without the sea, and she forgot the worrying and dramatic things which, perhaps, she should not have forgotten. The fact is she didn’t forget them. Or they came to her muted by distance or simply didn’t reach her because her family, especially aita, always so protective, did not in any way, shape, or form want them to reach her.
That gray Sunday in the café of the Europa Hotel with her glass and her bottle of mineral water on her table, she watched the cars pass and remembered faces and places in Zaragoza, anecdotes and parties, and so many adventures typical of student life, and again she experienced the sensations of her past, and all the good memories suddenly seemed to her like the leaves of trees. Which trees? Who cares? Like those leaves that are one color on one side and another color on the other, one side shiny green, pleasant to see, the other a paler shade of green which was the green of guilt and remorse. She stared at her hands and was sorry she’d been young; even worse, she was sorry she’d been happy.
Her mother, by telephone, reproached her for not visiting. They felt abandoned now that so many people in the village had stopped speaking to them. Barely a minute later, her father came to the phone and, lowering his voice, told her, “Don’t come, girl, don’t even think of it, we’ll visit you, and if you need anything, tell me.” Damn, how much he loved her. My aita, my old man. In Zaragoza, she thought he’d sent her to study far away to free her from the persecution he was being subjected to. Because she did know about the threats and the graffiti and that they’d begun the preparations and administrative shifts to move the business to a more peaceful region. Nevertheless, she did not know what her mother told her when they’d already buried aita. In an extortion letter they’d enumerated a series of details about Nerea. All of them accurate: the place where she was studying at the time, her dinners on Thursdays with her girlfriends in San Sebastián’s Parte Vieja. They even knew what color her motorbike was and where she usually parked it.
30
TO EMPTY MEMORY
She’d finished the water by then. Seven fifteen p.m.: she decided to pay up and leave, but…But what? An interior voice said to her: Nerea, don’t be an idiot, don’t even think of locking yourself away in the solitude of your house with your head filled with memories; pour them out here and now; empty your mind. Think: the night is long and November is humid, dark, a bastard of a month.
At this point, she felt a sad-sad weight that kept her from getting out of the chair. She waved the bottle of mineral water at the waiter to signal she wanted another even though she wasn’t thirsty. She was ashamed of sitting there like that without buying something.
She, her mother, her brother, all three had become satellites of a murdered man. Whether they wanted to or not, their respective lives for long years now had been rotating around that crime, that perpetual focal point of, of what?, of sorrow, of pain. It has to end but I don’t know how to end it. Whenever I come up with an idea, someone comes along to knock it down.
The waiter brought the mineral water and a glass with ice in it and a slice of lemon. And she, tired of staring at the traffic, withdrawn into her tedium and nostalgia, forgot to thank him. She, within herself, as if she were in a meeting room at the prison sitting opposite a repentant ETA member: my family doesn’t know where or when I found out. They always thought that the news had come to her from her roommates, informed by the son of the bar owner. On the other hand, what difference does it make? She told
her mother she’d been with some girlfriends and had come back to the apartment late, very late at night, and knew nothing about what had happened.
A lie. At around five in the afternoon, as she was leaving the library, she heard: there’s been an attack. Someone, behind her, asked: where? But Nerea, in a hurry to get back to her apartment, dump her things, and get ready for the party the students in the Veterinary School were throwing, paid no attention to the dialogue. An attack: so what? It simply did not arouse her curiosity. Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll read about it in the paper. And in the apartment, the lights out, there was no one. She showered without wetting her hair, because outside it was cold and rainy. And then one of her roommates turned up. Hi, hi. But not a word about attacks. We know that Xabier had yet to call the bar owner, unless his boy had rung their bell when none of the three girls was at home. Before six, Nerea was ready. In point of fact, she didn’t do much primping. In those days, she wasn’t as fond of makeup as she is now. She sprinkled on some perfume and that was that. A boy she knew, what was his name?, José Carlos, came by and picked her up.
They formed a group of ten or twelve students, boys and girls, some Nerea didn’t know. And off they went, gathering in a bar on Maestro Tomás Bretón Street with the idea of warming up with a few drinks and at the appropriate time, she did not know when exactly, they would climb into several cars since, according to what she’d heard, of course, the Veterinary School was all the way to hell and gone. She had not the slightest idea where it was. She asked if it was too far to walk to and people laughed. She became serious. More, she tensed up. Thinking she was angry, one of the boys said he was sorry. And a girl: what’s wrong with you? She did answer the girl but evasively: nothing, just that. Another girl asked if she was feeling okay and she again said she was fine. What was she going to say?
Homeland Page 13
