“Sweetheart, we should start thinking about me meeting your family and you meeting mine.”
“Let’s begin with yours.”
“You talk as if there might be problems for me in your house.”
“Nothing like that. It’s only that there are fewer of you and it will be easier. Meanwhile I can get mine ready.”
On Saturday, Guillermo (or Guille) brought her to dinner at the house in Rentería. Fourth floor. The door opened. Angelita: short, wide, plump, sixty years old. By way of welcome, she planted two kisses like two cream pies smack on Arantxa’s cheeks: rotund, creamy, effusive. My mother never kissed me like that. As a result, as soon as she entered the flat her fear vanished.
The father, more distant, but even so open in his cordiality. Rafael Hernández, a simple, timid man wearing checkered slippers and a wool jacket. Arantxa, being cautious, spoke to him formally. By no means! Kind, humble, they spoke to her informally. And Angelita, trying to treat their guest kindly, showed her the house.
“And this is where my husband and I sleep.”
Arantxa visited them several times before introducing Guillermo to her family. As far as she’s concerned, she would have happily slept over. So why didn’t she? Well, Guillermo’s parents were terrific; but, depending on which issue you touched, a bit (quite) old-fashioned. And she answered: Guille dearest, but if you and I…but what about London? And he: yes, yes, but she should please understand him. So every once in a while, at nightfall, they would climb up Mount Urgull to carry out, using a condom, hastily, fearful of being seen, a silent coitus behind the bushes, briefly pleasant for him, accepted resignedly by her, the one whose backside always had to suffer the thorns, the sharp stones, the moisture of the grass.
The bathroom mirror asks if she loved him. The way I love my children, no. Impossible. But in a certain way she did love him, mostly at the beginning. If she hadn’t she wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble to introduce him to her family. She’d never brought a boy home. Guillermo was the first. And the last. She began one day by mentioning him to her mother in the kitchen. And when she immediately added that he lived in Rentería and that his name was Guillermo, Miren, listening in a sleepy way, not especially interested, suddenly developed furrows of suspicion on her brow and had to ask, filled with misgivings, if the boy wasn’t a member of the Guardia Civil. No, he was a junior manager in a paper factory. She asked if he was making a good salary and that was that. Not a word about I’m happy to hear you have a boyfriend, nothing about when are we going to meet him, nothing about anything.
A few hours later, she made the same revelation to her father. Perhaps she chose a bad moment. Joxian was getting ready to leave the house for the Pagoeta. Her father did not cover up the fact that he was in a hurry. It’s possible he wanted to leave before Miren got back from shopping. These matters of boys and girls, love and courtship simply didn’t matter to him. Even so, he did dedicate a minute to his daughter. Filled in a bit about Guillermo, he said he was happy for her. Then:
“Does ama know about it?”
“Of course.”
“Why don’t you bring him around someday and I’ll bring him to the gastronomic society to eat. Does he like bicycling?”
“No he doesn’t, aita.”
Joxian, apparently displeased, didn’t know what else to say. He patted his daughter on the back, as if to show his approval, clapped on his beret, and left the house.
Arantxa confided more in her younger brother. Fifteen at that time. Very tender. She needed an ally and Gorka was the only member of the family to whom she opened the doors of her intimate life from time to time. He seemed quicker than her parents.
Gorka asked, first of all, what the boy’s name was.
“Guillermo.”
“Guillermo what?”
“Guillermo Hernández Carrizo.”
“Is he abertzale?”
“He’s not interested in politics.”
“Well at least he speaks Basque, right?”
“Not a word.”
“That means Joxe Mari’s not going to like him.”
Arantxa glanced at the walls covered with posters: amnesty, independentzia, ETA, photos of jailed militants from town, Herri Batasuna electoral posters.
“Why do you think he won’t like him?”
“You know perfectly well why.”
And it was Gorka, fifteen years of age, thank you, who gave his sister the idea of strolling with Guillermo through the village. She should appear with him, they should dance on Sunday in the plaza, and then we’ll see what happens.
And that’s what they did. They went into a bar, then into another. Kaixo here, kaixo over there. They covered the entire center of town holding hands. And in the plaza, under the dense foliage of the linden trees, they danced to the rhythm of the songs played by a musical group in the kiosk. It was there Arantxa spotted Josune, who was observing them at a distance and pretending not to, and she whispered into Guillermo’s ear:
“Right over there is a girl who goes out with my brother. Don’t look at her. You’ll soon see how she manages to find out who you are and if you speak Basque.”
At home, during dinner, Joxe Mari talked about his handball match. Neither he nor his parents and much less Gorka made the slightest allusion to Arantxa’s boyfriend, whose presence that afternoon at the dancing in the plaza was in all likelihood the talk of the town at that moment.
Two days had to pass before Joxe Mari stuck his shaggy head through the door of his sister’s room and said:
“A little bird told me you’ve got a boyfriend.”
There was a jolly expression on his face. Arantxa looked him in the eye as if trying to discover some sign of hostility, but there was none. He added in the same festive tone:
“Let’s see if someday you can make me into an uncle.”
Weeks later, Joxe Mari moved into an apartment in the village with some friends. Only then did Arantxa dare to bring Guillermo to her parents’ house.
44
PRECAUTIONS
Txato was the way he was: turned within himself, a hard worker, stubborn. And that stubbornness which, hmm, made him a bit difficult to live with (argue with him? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!) also enabled him to start a business from nothing, with more illusion than capital, next to the river, on a lot filled with brambles which he got on loan, and eventually to not only keep the business going but make it prosper. But that stubbornness was also, as Bittori said, his perdition.
She often chewed him out for it in the cemetery.
“You’d be alive today if you weren’t so hardheaded. You could have paid. And if you didn’t, you could have moved the damn trucks somewhere else as you yourself said so many times but you never did it, and to boot you knew I’d have followed you.”
He’d come home and tell nothing about work. If Bittori asked him how the day had gone he’d answer invariably in a dry, evasive way that it had been fine. And she was never sure if “fine” meant badly or just okay or if “fine” really meant fine. To take the measure of his mood, she would search his face. Txato would get annoyed:
“What are you looking at?”
And according to his expression, the shine in his eyes, the wrinkles on his forehead, Bittori would try to figure out if her husband was calm, if he had worries.
“Has it been a long time since they threatened you?”
“A good while.”
“Think they’ve forgotten about you?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”
Now that Nerea was in Zaragoza, Txato thinks the fear doesn’t weigh down on him as much. We’ll never know. That man, Bittori said, was buried in a shroud of secrets. It’s true that he looked less anguished after his daughter left to study far away. And Xabier? Well, since he wasn’t living in the village, Txato thought he was out of dang
er.
At home, he stopped talking about the letters. But if Bittori reminded him of them, it caused him boundless irritation.
“God damn it, if I haven’t told you anything it’s because there’s nothing new.”
Txato, Txatito. Bittori would repeat it to herself even if it was irrelevant to the situation at hand, more with sorrow than with tenderness. This is the truth: he was left more isolated than the numeral 1 on the clock face. Friends? He didn’t go to see them, they didn’t come to see him. They isolated him at the same time he isolated himself. He stopped playing cards at the Pagoeta, stopped having Saturday dinners at the gastronomic society. Once he accidentally ran into Joxian on the street. They looked at each other, Joxian fleetingly, he fixedly, with expectation, waiting for he didn’t know what, a sign, a gesture. And Joxian raised his eyebrows as he passed as a kind of greeting, as if to say no, I’d stop to talk to you, but…
Txato hung up his bicycle. Hung it up forever. He brought it down to the garage and there it hangs, held up on the roof with two hooks and two chains. He stopped paying his dues to the cyclotourism club. No one wrote to remind him. And at the end of the season, no one sent him the invitation all members received with the announcement about the date and the plan for the annual assembly. The certificate, diploma, or whatever it was where the stages the rider finished and the points he won was folded in half and stuffed into his mailbox. Whoever brought it didn’t bother to ring the doorbell. It didn’t matter at all that Txato had been president of the club for five years. They could go to hell. And on Sundays, Bittori, who before would complain that on the one day of the week when they could be together he was always with his bicycling friends, now had to put up from morning to night with her husband’s foul mood.
All his life Txato had liked walking to work, rain or shine. It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes away. By bicycle even less. Ever since the Sunday when the graffiti appeared he’d only gone out in his old Renault 21. As he put it, it was so no one would have to avert their eyes or cross the street. On Saturday afternoons, and this was new for him, he would go with Bittori to San Sebastián. They would go to mass and have a snack together in the same café on Avenida de la Libertad that Bittori frequented with Miren when they were still friends. And both Txato and Bittori noticed that a few acquaintances who cut them cold in the village said hello and even stopped to talk with them for a while, what a nice day, no?, here in San Sebastián.
Txato took his precautions. He wasn’t a fool. To begin, he never parked his car on the street. Bittori:
“Don’t even think of it.”
He had his own garage. But even so, he crouched down to look at the undercarriage before he got in. Later he got the idea of placing boards around the car, all connected in such a way by string that if someone, after getting into the garage, itself difficult, would move them, even a few inches, he would notice. At his business, he reserved a space for himself in the parking area for trucks, a place he could observe from the office window.
There was one problem with the garage. It was located around the corner in the house next to his. That forced him to walk the forty or fifty steps between the garage and his entryway. It was in that short passage he was killed one rainy afternoon; but, as Bittori, sitting on the edge of his grave, said to him:
“They killed you there, sure, but they could just as well have killed you somewhere else. Because those people, when they’re out to get you, never stop.”
At first, he painted over the graffiti painted on the metal garage door. He’d picked up a can of white paint expressly for that purpose; but it was useless. The next day the graffiti was there again. Txato faxista, oppressor, kill him, ETA. Things of that sort. He got used to not looking at the graffiti. They started urinating on the door, which took on a vaporous odor.
He read in a newspaper that potential victims with fixed routines were the most exposed. That is, easy targets. For a few months, he wouldn’t leave the house at the same time two days in a row. He also changed his route. He would come home at one or one thirty or even two to eat or he would eat at the office whatever Bittori prepared for him. And in the evening, he did the same thing whether the workday ended at eight or nine, at nine thirty or ten. The irregular schedule drove him crazy, after all he was the guy who bragged that he worked with the consistency of a watch. And when he had his daughter at a safe distance in Zaragoza and also because the criminals—who tried to make his life impossible—had reduced their persecution, he ended up going back to his old routine and his usual habits, except when ETA committed a murder and, at Bittori’s urging, he stepped up his precautions for a while.
One thing he often did was open the kitchen window or the curtain on the balcony door a little so he could keep an eye on the street. He took care not to let Bittori see him. She would get mad. Why? It seemed to her that he was dirtying the curtain and the window frame.
Years later, in the cemetery:
“Those people didn’t stop outside the entryway. Didn’t it occur to you to think that the person watching you was a neighbor who also pushed aside his curtain so he could take note of your comings and goings and then report them to the terrorists? I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t a certain slob who never washed his hands before sitting down at the dinner table. Neither before nor after. And of course someone you knew, and if you pressure me a bit, someone who owed us favors.”
45
STRIKE DAY
The elected deputy for Herri Batasuna, Josu Muguruza, thirty-one years old, was assassinated in a Madrid hotel during dinner. Net result: general strike. Moderately supported in big cities. In towns, support is obligatory. A complete shutdown (stores, bars, workshops) or you know what the consequences will be. From the top of the hill, Txato could see some of his employees standing at the gate, from which hung a banner used on other occasions. There were three: Andoni, wearing an earring, and two others. The rest of them had stayed home. One telephoned the previous night and Txato—fed up with people calling to threaten him and curse him out, fascist exploiter, son of a bitch, time to make your will—hesitated before picking up the receiver. Finally, on the outside chance it was Nerea calling from Zaragoza, he did. But it wasn’t. An employee wanted to inform him politely that he would prefer to work.
“If you want to work, why don’t you?”
“Well, it’s like this, the other guys…”
Early in the morning when he got out of his car outside the gate, those three were standing guard there. Cold, frost on the grass, and the morning mist rising from the river that remains floating for hours in the low spots. He looked them over carefully:
“What’s all this?”
Andoni, his face grim, chin stuck out defiantly:
“No work today.”
“No work, no pay.”
“We’ll see who loses.”
“We all lose out on this.”
Txato tried to fire that smartass once before. He was a mediocre mechanic, and lazy. Right before his boss’s eyes he tore up the letter of dismissal without bothering to read it. Hours later he turned up accompanied by two individuals who identified themselves as members of the LAB union, linked to the Basque liberation movement. The threats reached such magnitude that Txato had no choice but to reinstate that swine whose mere presence made his blood boil.
The three strikers kept warm by making a fire in a metal barrel. They were burning boards, branches, sticks. Txato pointed out in no uncertain terms that they’d appropriated a barrel that didn’t belong to them. To say nothing about the boards. In the weak morning light, the sun still behind the mountain, the fire turned their faces red. Txato: the faces of animals, of people with social resentments who bite the hand that feeds them.
Bittori:
“Right, but without them who’s going to drive the trucks, who’s going to fix them?”
He ordered them to move aside the barrel b
ecause he wanted to open the gate. Andoni, sullen, definitive, repeated that today no one worked. The other two kept quiet. Inhibited? It’s that stopping the boss from entering is a serious thing. And, eyes averted, behind Andoni, their leader, they pushed the barrel aside.
Andoni threw a fit:
“What are you doing?” Didn’t he see what they were doing? And he added, furiously, with hatred, biting out the words: “Okay, but not one truck leaves the yard.”
Txato hid in his office. Through the window, if he stretched his neck, he could see the three-man picket line. They fought off the cold by jumping up and down, blowing on their hands. They gave off steam, they chatted, they smoked. Jerks. Their heads have been filled with slogans. Easily manipulated monkeys, eager to obey. And how thankful they were when he hired them! Bittori:
“Hire people from around here so the salaries don’t leave.”
Why he gave Andoni, the guy with the big balls, a job was, more than anything else, because some people she knew came to Bittori begging and wheedling and if only please and so on. If he only knew then what he knows now!
He wasted no time and called several clients to inform them of the situation. That he was very sorry and that they please understand. Later, his mood improved but still annoyed, he made more calls, modified the schedule, arranged changes of date, had to cancel an important job, gave instructions by telephone to his drivers that they should be back on the job that same day so they could park their trucks in a free space in the industrial park. And when Txato saw that another two strikers had joined the original three, including the polite guy who’d called the previous evening, he reached the conclusion that things just could not go on this way, I have to do something, these jerks aren’t going to make me acquiesce.
Homeland Page 20
