For him, very smashed, totally smashed, ama. Also for Joxe Mari, who ramped up his brother’s complexes calling him boxer and challenging him to fight. As a joke, he would stand in front of him and pretend to be intimidated:
“Don’t hit me, don’t hit me.”
During the first weeks after the accident, the boy had some rough nights. The images of being run down would appear in his mind again and again, whether in dreams or in his agitated half-sleep. Always the same images. The vehicle came at him and struck him. The vehicle came at him and struck him. The vehicle came at him and the only protection he had was his pillow. Joxe Mari, who shared a room with Gorka, complained in the kitchen.
“He screams at night and doesn’t let me sleep.”
He imitated his brother, exaggerating his miserable cries. He pitilessly mocked him. Joxian would intervene, conciliatory and paternal, okay now, let’s calm down, looking sorrowfully at his younger son.
Miren on the other hand didn’t beat around the bush.
“How about not bothering your brother at night.”
In his nightmares, tires squealed; he turned his head; that gave him time to see the headlights of the metal beast. How quickly and how directly they came at him. They were already on him: ten feet, five feet, one foot. It was impossible to avoid them. The dream contained details that had not been in his memory before: the roadway wet with rain, the faint light of the gray afternoon, the bumper that looked to him like a mouth with rings of rust about to devour him.
Then legs that come running to him. Someone, the driver?, blurts out an obscenity in Spanish. Which obscenity? He doesn’t remember. The only thing he knows is that the obscenity wasn’t directed at him. Maybe it meant annoyance. Maybe stupefaction. The smell of gasoline, of wet asphalt, and he was conscious when they pulled him out from under the van, which was like pulling him out of a dark drawer. He doesn’t know who pulled him out. Must have been the driver. And he was bleeding from his mouth and nose; but nothing hurt. Nothing? He shook his head no. Not even his broken arm hurt, at least at the beginning. It felt as if it were asleep. Gorka fell facedown on the ground. Could have been killed. He felt so ashamed he didn’t cry. Joxe Mari, at home days later, pestered him.
“Of course you cried.”
“I didn’t cry.”
“Liar. The whole town heard you!”
And on and on that way until he made him cry. But that happened at home, when Gorka was recuperating with his face all deformed from a huge hematoma and with his arm in a cast. Out on the road, next to the van, he didn’t cry a single tear. He was too embarrassed. There were gawkers gathered on the sidewalk and people looking out of windows.
“Isn’t that Joxian’s younger son?”
He’d dirtied his clothing with blood and the filth from the asphalt. Oh boy, when ama finds out. He’d lost a shoe. The driver himself brought him to the hospital in the van.
They treated his arm. Not his nose. When he was still a boy the imperfection didn’t show. But later, when he reached puberty, as his face changed it was obvious his nose wasn’t properly shaped. He had a deviated septum, smashed or twisted, no one knew for sure. On the other hand, anyone could see his broken tooth. Without tenderness, his mother consoled him.
“Can you breathe?”
“Yes.”
“Can you bite?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, that does it. What more do you want?”
The man who ran Gorka over was a fifty-year-old gentleman from Andoáin, who worked as a distributor for a commercial cake business. Two weeks after the accident he went to see the boy at home. An affable man, he’d called several times to see if Gorka was getting better, if he was okay, if he could lead a normal life. You could see he was concerned. Anyway, one morning he rang the buzzer. Miren opened the door and it happens that Gorka was in the ikastola with his arm in a cast. The man left a cake as a present for the boy.
“Actually for the whole family.”
A cake with a sponge base and a thick layer of chocolate and cream decorated with marzipan cherries.
The discord began just before dinner. The family member most outraged was Miren. She remembered that the previous night, before she went to bed, the cake was still whole in the refrigerator. When she got up in the morning a bit more than a quarter of it was missing. Her first, not to say her only, suspicion: Joxe Mari, the family glutton. Because I don’t think his father would. Or maybe he did? One of them was with his handball team in some town in the province, the other was riding his bicycle. When they get back, one or the other, I don’t know which, but we’re going to find out. Arantxa noticed that her mother was talking to herself, grumbling.
“What’s wrong with you, ama?”
“Nothing.”
They said nothing more. The father arrived, the son arrived, separately, a few minutes apart. What time could it be? One p.m.? About then. Hungry, tired, Joxian wearing bicycling clothes, they asked what was for dinner. Reproaches, accusations, arguments, that’s what there was for dinner.
Joxe Mari had no problems with confessing. But wait, the cake had already been cut when he took a slice for breakfast. That’s why he thought it was there for everyone.
“What do you mean, already cut?”
“A slice larger than the one I took was gone. I swear to God, ama.”
Miren, with angry eyes, clenched her teeth, turned toward her husband, and began to shout without giving him time to explain himself. And Joxian, shaking his head, said he didn’t do it. And she, well then, who if not you. He confessed that before leaving the house he couldn’t resist the temptation to eat three marzipan cherries, but that was all. He hadn’t touched the rest. Joxe Mari didn’t believe him:
“Come on, aita, it can’t be.”
“What can’t be?”
“When I got up a big piece of the tart was gone and you left the house before I did.”
“May God strike me dead. How many times do I have to tell you I only ate three pieces of marzipan? A slice was missing when I opened the fridge.”
They all looked at Gorka.
“No, I didn’t do it.”
Miren sprang to the boy’s defense.
“Leave the kid in peace. It’s his cake. As if he’d eat it all by himself.”
And Gorka, please don’t argue, the cake is for all of us. The little boy’s sweet, conciliatory words only enraged the family more; to the point that Miren, in a fit of anger, tore off her apron and said:
“You can eat without me.”
She walked out of the kitchen stamping her feet in spite and came back a minute later walking slowly and with a calm expression on her face, since in the meanwhile, Arantxa, whom she met in the dining room, what’s going on, ama, what are you all shouting about?, stated in a matter-of-fact voice that:
“Last night I was hungry so I cut myself a slice.”
“You took the first piece?”
“You mean I wasn’t supposed to?”
The five of them ate in silence. It was Joxe Mari, once the dishes had been removed, who placed the cake on the table and got the big knife out of the drawer.
“Come on, let’s stop this silliness. Who wants some?”
Arantxa shook her head no. Miren didn’t bother to answer. She started washing the dishes. Joxian:
“Share it with your brother.”
Gorka only wanted a little piece. Joxian thought it was too little.
“Give him a little more.”
But Gorka claimed he wasn’t hungry. Joxe Mari pulled the cake over to himself, clearly intending to wolf down the rest. His father stared at him in astonishment. After the appetizers, the chickpea soup, the roast chicken with potatoes, of which he’d eaten by himself as much as all the other members of the family together, how is it possible there would be room in his stomach for such
a huge quantity of dessert? Under the table, he kicked Joxe Mari’s leg. Once he caught his attention, he signaled that he wanted a piece. Joxe Mari surreptitiously gave him a piece behind his mother’s back. Joxian wolfed it down. Then it was Arantxa, holding in her laughter, who also asked Joxe Mari for a slice.
38
BOOKS
After his septum was crushed, Gorka opted for solitude. His brother and sister weren’t around the house much. He only went out to go to the ikastola. Why? Books, or as his father, with concerned wrinkles in his brow, put it, the goddamned books. The boy had caught reading fever.
His parents became increasingly disturbed. Not exactly because of the books. What then? Because he spent so many hours locked away in his room, Saturdays and Sundays, too, often until Joxe Mari came home and ordered him to turn out the light. A strange son. And Joxian:
“A shame he doesn’t have a window in his head so we could look inside.”
At night, in bed, the parents talked in low voices.
“Did he go out?”
“Are you kidding? He spent the whole afternoon reading.”
“He’s probably studying for an exam.”
“No, I asked him and he says no.”
“The goddamned books.”
One morning, standing in front of him in the kitchen, his mother amused herself watching while the boy ate. Hunched over, his bony hands around the coffee cup, his hair greasy, acne. Miren bit her tongue, but she finally had to let it out.
“Listen here, could it be you have psychological problems?”
Fourteen years old. His friends would pass by to pick him up and he didn’t even come out to say hello. What the hell was wrong with him? Was he sick? Or was he angry with them? After a while, they stopped coming. And Joxian became desperate.
“Damn it to hell. What a kid.”
Joxian went over to him. He put a friendly hand on his shoulder. He offered him two hundred, three hundred pesetas.
“Go on, have a good time.”
“Aita, I can’t.”
“Who’s stopping you?”
“Don’t you see that I’m reading.”
“Come on, I’ll give you permission to smoke.”
“No, no, aita. Lay off, please.”
Sometimes, Joxian, somewhere between being supportive and just plain curious, would ask him:
“What are you reading?”
“A Russian writer. It’s about a student who kills two women with a hatchet.”
Joxian left the room confused, concerned. Fourteen years old, all day stuck at home like a monk. Is that normal? Thinking about it, he stopped in the hall, he scrutinized an object, it didn’t matter which object: the picture of Ignatius of Loyola, the built-in cabinet, a doorknob, anything that seemed to him visibly comprehensible, and for a few seconds he searched the object for something, even if he didn’t know what—an order, an answer, an explanation for what he wasn’t able to understand. Until he got to the Pagoeta, the image of Gorka hunched over the book, the goddamned book, wouldn’t fade from his thoughts.
At night, in bed, he said to Miren:
“Either he’s very intelligent or he’s dumb. I can’t figure out who he takes after.”
“If he’s dumb, he takes after you.”
“I’m being serious here.”
“Me, too.”
And the fact is he gets mediocre grades in school. Naturally not as bad as Joxe Mari’s were. Joxe Mari and sports, yes; Joxe Mari and manual labor, that, too: but Joxe Mari and studies (the same thing happened later on with the theoretical courses in the metallurgic company where he was an apprentice) were like oil and water, which didn’t keep him from mocking Gorka.
“Come on, who are you trying to kid? All those books just to pass those shitty math and English courses?”
It was Arantxa who passed on to her younger brother a love of reading. How so? It happens that every so often, on his birthday, his saint’s day, Christmas, or for no particular reason, she would give him comic books; as years passed, the odd book. The same thing, in point of fact, she did with Joxe Mari, but with no result. In this case, as Arantxa would put it, the famous parable of the seed in fertile land or in the desert was apt. Joxe Mari is an intellectual wasteland. But in Gorka, favorable soil, the passion for reading germinated.
There’s more. Arantxa, when Gorka was a toddler and she barely nine or ten, liked to read aloud to her brother, the two of them sitting on the floor or he in bed and she at his side, traditional stories, Bible stories from a picture book for children.
While he was recovering from the car accident, Arantxa got in the habit of going to the municipal library to find books for him. Gorka by then was reading on his own, sounding out the words, and he began to acquire taste: Jules Verne, Salgari, soon Sven Hassel’s war novels, and others about spies and detectives, all in cheap pocket editions.
Later on, without telling her parents, why bother?, Arantxa started lending him her own books, about thirty of which she kept in a cardboard box on her dresser. Love novels mostly, along with an abridged edition of War and Peace, Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata and Jacinta, and six or seven by Álvaro de Laiglesia which Gorka didn’t like as much as she did, but in any case he happily read all of them.
And when his parents started to criticize him for staying home instead of going out on the street to have fun with friends, Arantxa told him, when they were all alone, in a voice filled with mystery, that he wasn’t to pay them any attention.
“Read as much as you can. Get culture. As much as you can, the more, the better. So you don’t fall into the hole so many in this country are falling into.”
Hole or no hole, Gorka dedicated himself to reading with passion and Joxe Mari, whenever he saw him with a book in his hand, joked:
“Listen, since you’re such a reader, could you read the lines on my hand?”
One night, each boy in his bed, Joxe Mari spoke to him bitterly:
“You’d be better off dropping those novels and joining the struggle for the liberation of Euskal Herria. Tomorrow there’s going to be a demonstration at seven. I expect you to be there. Some friends of mine have been asking me where you’ve been keeping yourself. The boys from your group are front and center, but no one ever sees you. What am I supposed to tell them? Well, you see, he’s become quite delicate and spends his days reading. Tomorrow at seven I want to see you in the square.”
And Gorka went, what else could he do? To be seen. He said hello to this guy, to that other guy, and Joxe Mari, who was one of the those carrying the banner at the head of the demonstration, gave him a wink. Gorka, mixed in with the mass of young people, shouted slogans with moderate enthusiasm. In the same way, his fist held high like the others’, he sang the “Eusko Gudariak.” By eight, he was back at home reading.
39
I THE HATCHET, YOU THE SERPENT
And they grew, Gorka taller, Joxe Mari wider. Their only resemblance was their last name. Joxian’s friends teased him. Did he feed the one but not the other? At home, he carefully omitted any reference to jokes about his sons. They drove Miren nuts. What a brawl she had with a neighbor who insinuated Gorka had a tapeworm.
While Joxe Mari was still living with the family, one brother slept on the left, the other on the right, their respective beds in opposite corners of the room with a space between them covered by a carpet.
And since Joxe Mari’s bed was on the window side of the room, there wasn’t enough space for his sports and patriotic posters. So, today a poster, tomorrow a picture, he invaded Gorka’s space. Gorka’s night table stood right below a poster showing the hatchet and the serpent and the motto Bietan jarrai.
Gorka’s only poster was a large-scale reproduction of the famous photo of Antonio Machado in the Café de las Salesas.
“Who the hell is that guy?”
“Come on
, you know who he is.”
“No, seriously. Tarzan’s grandfather?”
“A poet.”
This was an ideal line for Joxe Mari’s sense of humor: exactly the answer he was hoping for so he could show off his wit:
Oh, poet,
Your verses fill the halls
Please unzip my fly
And just massage my balls.
One day when Gorka was out, Joxe Mari used a felt marker to draw a beard and the kind of sunglasses blind people wear on Antonio Machado’s picture, and near the poet’s mouth he put a comic-book-style balloon inscribed: Gora ETA. And he joked, assuring his brother with a sarcastic expression on his face that the old man with the hat knew what he was talking about. Gorka, resigned, even apathetic, let himself be humiliated. Which disgusted Arantxa, who often scolded him for being that way:
“Why don’t you defend yourself? Why don’t you just contradict him?”
“I don’t want to get him mad.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“A little.”
When it came to intellectual matters, Gorka was vastly superior to his brother. In bed, in the dark, Joxe Mari often continued arguments he’d just had in the Arrano Taberna with his gang. His face toward the ceiling as he took nervous drags on the last cigarette of the day, he would advocate the armed struggle and independence, and no one could change his mind about that. The theoretical fussing of some friends annoyed him no end. He would only discuss objectives: the incorporation of Navarra, the expulsion of the Guardia Civil, those things, damn it, things you can understand without the need of philosophic blather. And when the dialectical annoyance had subsided, he would turn to Gorka and, friendly, fraternal, calm, are you asleep?, would make requests like this:
“All right then, explain this Marxist-Leninist stuff to me, but in words easy to understand, and do it fast because tomorrow I have to get up early.”
The younger brother also outmatched Joxe Mari in his use of Basque. He regularly read literary works by euskaldun writers and since the age of sixteen wrote poems in Basque he showed only to Arantxa. And, well, without exaggerating, he could run rings around Joxe Mari and his friends, who spoke only what they spoke, which was kitchen Basque and street Basque slightly improved in the ikastola. The boys would meet in their homes to make posters written by hand that they would then paste up on the town walls. It often happened that Joxe Mari brought them all to his room and there Gorka showed them the grammatical and spelling mistakes they would have committed, some of them whoppers.
Homeland Page 17
