Homeland

by Fernando Aramburu

  “You were my husband’s best friend. I’m still seeing the two of you on your bikes, at the jai alai court, or playing cards in the bar. And I remember Miren saying to me, Bittori, my husband is married to your husband. We couldn’t separate them with a hatchet.”

  “She said that?”

  “Ask her and you’ll see.”

  Careful, Joxian. This woman wants to catch you in her web. Why did you allow her to enter your garden? He saw himself, he couldn’t stop it, younger, leaving Txato behind at the Orio pass; he saw himself with him betting two hundred pesetas at the town ball court; in the gastronomic society kitchen heating up dinner; in the Pagoeta, arguing, but how can you be such a jerk!, to go all in with those shitty cards you’re holding.

  Nostalgic, his eyes softened in hers.

  “I was always his friend.”

  “But you cut him and stopped coming to our house.”

  “What does one thing have to do with the other?”

  “You didn’t even go to the funeral. The funeral of your murdered friend.”

  “You’re throwing all that in my face? Even if I didn’t speak to him he was my friend. And I didn’t speak to him because I couldn’t speak to him. You two did a bad thing. The two of you should have left the village. One year, two, whatever it took. He’d be alive now, you could have come back. And besides, being outside, many of us would have lent you a hand.”

  “About the others I can’t say, but you still have time to help me.”

  “I don’t know how I can do that. You can’t make time go backwards.”

  “You’re right. We’re not going to bring Txato back from the dead. But you could do me a favor. It’s very easy. All you have to do is to ask your son one thing for me.”

  “Don’t stir up those waters, Bittori. We’ve suffered, too, and we’re still suffering. Get on with your life, let us get on with ours. Each in his own house. Now we have peace. The best thing would be for us to forget.”

  “If you’re suffering, how are you going to forget?”

  “I don’t think Miren would be happy to hear all of what you’re saying to me.”

  “She doesn’t have to find out.”

  Joxian, after a brief moment of vacillation, scuttled into the shed, announcing with his obstinate silence that he considered their conversation finished. Bittori, out of sight:

  “Aren’t you even curious to know what it is I’d like to ask Joxe Mari?” She waited in vain for an answer. Then she continued. “Someone saw him in the village the same afternoon Txato was killed.”

  From inside the shed:

  “Tittle tattle.”

  “Come out of there. Face the music.”

  He came out. His lower lip was trembling slightly. That glitter in his eyes, is that a tear?

  “At the trial they didn’t bring that up.”

  “Ask him for me, Joxian. Ask him the next time you see him if he was the one who shot. I have to know quickly because I don’t have long to live. Believe me, I’m free of rage. I’m not going to turn him in. The only thing I don’t want is to be buried without knowing all the details of the attack. And tell him that if he asks me for forgiveness I’ll forgive him, but he’d have to ask me first.”

  “Bittori, do me a favor. Don’t stir up these waters.”

  A useless request, you’ve already stirred them up. Bittori took a look around. The seedbed, the cement wall, the fig tree.

  Holding his beret in his hands, Joxian watched her walk along the sloping path.

  50

  A COP’S LEG

  Before even giving him his welcoming kiss, she asked him if he’d seen the news. Upset, limp, Gorka nodded yes. And he said he felt ashamed, very ashamed.

  “I’m not surprised. Who wants to have a murderer in the family?”

  A plea began to form in Gorka’s expression, as if he were saying, your words are very strong, please don’t speak that way. The crimes attributed to Joxe Mari’s cell made him shiver.

  Arantxa patted him approvingly on his long, bowed shoulders for not having followed the same path as our brother. And she added, imitating the voice of the TV reporter: the dangerous terrorist. Three militants were being sought. Their photos on the screen. Young Joxe Mari’s with his long hair and earring was the one in the middle.

  He’s certainly become famous. Someone called Arantxa from the town. Who? A friend from old times. To congratulate her.

  “I felt like telling her to go to hell. I didn’t have the nerve. What would I get for my trouble? Hostility, criticism, and being shut out by everyone.”

  Her prediction about Joxe Mari’s future now that he’s being hunted: blown up by a bomb he’s carrying, and we have a funeral with the coffin wrapped in the ikurriña, with traditional dances and the rest of the folklore program, or the security forces capture him at some time or other. The second option would be the best for everyone: for his potential victims, for his relatives, because we know that wherever they lock him up he will cause no damage and run no risks, and for himself, because that way he’ll experience solitude, which helps men become serene and reflective.

  Gloomy and sorrowful, Gorka nodded again. He’d kindly visited his sister on the occasion of her birthday and because his parents phoned to say she was pregnant. Gifts? Two. A little book for children, in Basque, Piraten itsasontzi urdina, the blue pirate ship, his first published work, how pretty, really, very pretty, and flowers.

  Gorka and Arantxa agreed they wouldn’t say anything more about Joxe Mari. Enough is enough. Or weren’t there other important matters in their lives? Arantxa left the living room to get a vase. Married to Guillermo, she lived in Rentería, in an apartment in the Capuchinos neighborhood. And the photo of Joxe Mari, who, of course, is a hero now for the boys in the village…So there was no way to avoid it; with the flowers in the glass vase, and having rapidly dispatched some other trifles, they went back to talking about their brother.

  Arantxa:

  “I called the aitas immediately.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “Ama is very combative. She understands nothing about politics, has never read a book in her life, but she shouts slogans the way others set off firecrackers. I get the idea that she walks through town memorizing what she sees on posters. Above all else she defends her son. I don’t know”—she put her hands over her stomach—“what I would do in her place. Aita, as always, remains silent. One thing, though, he takes advantage of the fact that Joxe Mari isn’t in the house to buy El Diario Vasco.”

  “I remember the tantrum our brother threw, saying that he was buying a pro-Spanish newspaper. When the only thing that interests aita in the paper is the sports pages.”

  “And the obituaries.”

  “Okay, right, and the crossword puzzle.”

  “As if he had any interest in politics, come on! Why can’t he read what he likes?”

  “Well, he changed over to Egin because of Joxe Mari. Then he’d head for the Pagoeta to read the Diario Vasco he’s been reading his whole life.”

  “And what about ama? Every time she visits she brings HOLA! and all the movie magazines I’ve already read. Everybody in this family is nuts, don’t tell me otherwise. In 1975, you were very little, so you won’t remember, she cried when Franco died. Really, at home sitting in front of a black-and-white TV, she wept the tears of a grieving Spanish lady. But you’re better off not remembering. The last time she came she asked if we’d given any thought to a name for the baby. Before I answered I noticed that her brow was wrinkled. So as a joke I said his name would be Juan Carlos, like the king. She almost fainted.”

  Brother and sister shared coffee and pastries. Good chemistry between them. Arantxa and Gorka always understood each other. When they were small, later, and now. Through the window a commuting neighborhood, the facade of an apartment building. Clothing hung u
p to dry on a clothesline. On one of the balconies across the way, a butane cylinder. A man wearing a T-shirt leaning on a windowsill smoking. Guillermo said that a while back it was possible to see a part of Mount Jaizquíbel from here, but then they built that ugly apartment house and no more view.

  Arantxa asked her brother about the time when he shared a bedroom with Joxe Mari:

  “Didn’t he try to convince you to throw some rocks in the demonstrations?”

  “All the time. What saved me was that I was still a kid then. He would tell me that in three or four years he was counting on me to be right out front. Then he would contradict himself. Once we turned up at some anti-police riot and he got pissed off. He shouted to me: get behind, don’t you see that you might get hit with a rubber bullet?”

  “But why did you go to the riot?”

  “What the hell, everyone was going.”

  And in his opinion, it was the same thing for Joxe Mari, at least at the beginning. A game with his friends, a sport. You go, you see some danger, once in a while you take a hit, and you go on living. Later in the tavern, you drink, you eat, you talk with the gang, and you notice with an agreeable tickle that you’ve picked up the fever heating everyone else up, the fever that unites them in a cause. At night, in bed, Joxe Mari would brag. That he’d crack a beltza on the helmet with a rock. That he’d set fire to a bank machine, the fifth that month. He would turn toward his brother to drink in the admiration pouring from him: the same pride he showed when he talked about his victories with the handball team. Just what I said, a sport, fun, until suddenly the abyss.

  Now that he thinks about it, Gorka thinks Joxe Mari entered the territory of pure, hard hatred and aggressive fanaticism when they found the handcuffed body of that bus driver from Donostia in the Bidasoa River.

  “Zabalaza?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Gorka remembered that his brother came home in a frenzy. He didn’t have the slightest doubt—and neither did his friends—that the bus driver died in the Intxaurrondo barracks where they tortured him. They killed him, he died by accident, whatever it was, and then they set up a story about an escape that not even a baby would believe. Gorka, shocked, watched his brother walk from one side of the room to the other. And inside Joxe Mari boiled with rage, more intense and fervent than usual, and Gorka noticed in his words and obscenities a furious desire to destroy, to take revenge, to cause damage, a lot of damage. Against whom? Doesn’t matter, to cause damage no matter what or where.

  “He taught me how to make Molotov cocktails. One Saturday I had to go with him out to the quarry. I was to leave the books. I made half a dozen bombs following his instructions and we threw them, bam, bam, against a boulder.”

  Some time later, he hit a cop with a Molotov cocktail on the Bulevar in Donostia. It didn’t matter if they were cops or the Guardia Civil. One of the guys’ legs caught fire for long enough to have burned. Luckily, his buddies managed to avoid a tragedy.

  “Joxe Mari couldn’t see that inside the uniform there was a person who earns a living, who may well have a wife and kids. I didn’t have the courage to say it to him, but as far as I’m concerned, I swear, anyone who denies that a person is human because they’re wearing a uniform seems terrible. Anyway, the next day he was mad because the newspapers didn’t mention the cop’s leg.”

  His friends in the gang treated him to dinner—the prize for anyone who set fire to a policeman.

  51

  IN THE QUARRY

  Like the movies. Seriously. Gorka left his house at midmorning on a Saturday to go to the library. How calm everything was: blue sky, few clouds, nice temperature. He saw her, big, thick, on the opposite side of the street. Josune, who instead of responding to his greeting, iepa, put her finger on her thin lips demanding silence.

  She was walking one step behind him.

  “Don’t turn around. Keep moving, keep moving.”

  He didn’t turn around and he did keep moving. When they turned the corner, she ordered him in a low voice to wait for her in the church. They separated.

  Gorka sat in the last pew. The church was empty. The only light was coming though the stained-glass windows high above. If the priest turns up, what do I say to him? That I’m having an attack of devotion? Josune made him wait more than twenty minutes. Highly suspicious, he guessed something serious had taken place. He leafed through the late library books he’d already read. He stared at his watch, stared at the altarpiece, at the statues, at the columns; he again stared at the books. Finally, he noted, because of squeaking hinges and because of the sudden brightness streaming in behind his back, that the girl had opened the door. Josune waved to him to meet with her under the stairs that led up to the choir loft.

  “If someone comes in, even someone you know, we go our separate ways. I warn you, they’re following me.”

  “Who’s following you?”

  “Who else? The txakurrada. I’m not sure, see? But who knows if they’re using me to catch more of us. Joxe Mari is looking for you.”

  They whispered to each other in the dark enclave. Gorka, worried, bent his body forward so he wouldn’t smack his head against the lower part of the stairway. Josune never took her eye off the center of the church and the pews just in case someone appeared suddenly.

  “Your brother and Jokin are waiting for you at the quarry. They’ll fill you in. I don’t want problems. I put a lot at risk just bringing you the message.”

  “Wait a minute, will I be in danger?”

  “Just make sure no one’s following you. Then those two will tell you what they have to say.”

  They agreed that she would leave the church first. Gorka would wait another twenty minutes inside. The longer he waited, the better.

  “Remember to ask your brother if he’s got anything to say to me.”

  Gorka decided to go to the library first. Why? Because the books he was carrying would slow him down and also not to arouse suspicion. It may be that having seen him with Josune, the authorities might be keeping an eye on him as well.

  Josune:

  “They know that the ones who escape will still try to talk with their families and their friends to ask for help, money, whatever. So, kontuz. That’s all I have to say to you.”

  And off she went, corpulent, her mouth without lips. What can my brother see in that girl? I can’t figure it out. But now he too was caught up in the fear. Fear of what? Fear of whom? No idea. In any case, he stayed inside the church for half an hour. He tried to read, but no luck there.

  He went out into the plaza. He stopped to look around. To the left, to the right, far off, at windows. The butane truck, familiar faces, pigeons looking for crumbs. He felt a wild disquiet. Son of a bitch. And just when I was feeling fine. He passed by Josetxo’s butcher shop. Could he know his son and my brother are in trouble? And leaving the library without the book he was going to check out, he entered an alley. He looked both ways. No one. And from now until Monday, what will I have to read?

  Taking a roundabout route, he walked up to the quarry. Down below, over the village rooftops the church bells pealed out noon. Scent of the countryside. Scattered, tranquil cows. Gorka looked back every so often. No one. A strategy: he left the road to cross a piece of the mountainside that was devoid of trees, still moist from morning dew. Behind him stretched a wide area covered with grass where the people following him, if there were any, would have no place to hide.

  He found his brother and the other guy in a ruined house. On seeing him, one whistled loudly. And I took such care so he could whistle? They asked him if he’d been followed. He thought not.

  “What are you two doing here?”

  “Nothing, the txakurras caught Koldo yesterday and came for us at dinner time. Luckily, we got away.”

  They escaped in the clothes they were wearing. They spent the night huddled in a corner of that storag
e space or shed without doors or windows which had also lost a part of its roof. Jokin: at least it’s not winter. In their minds, there was room for only one idea: get across into France as soon as possible. But under these conditions, it would be impossible. Jokin was wearing bedroom slippers. Joxe Mari, in shirtsleeves, complained of fatigue and hunger. Jokin had no cigarettes.

  “You don’t smoke, right?”

  Joxe Mari cut off his brother’s answer:

  “The only thing this guy does is read.”

  Between them the two friends had only a little cash. A little, sure, but how little? In truth, very little. Some change in their pockets, some of which Joxe Mari used to call Josune from a pay phone.

  An error by the Guardia Civil enabled them to escape.

  “The dumbasses went to the wrong flat.”

  Did they make a mistake? Up to a certain point. Prior history: days before, from the second floor where they and Koldo were living, the young men noticed that a pipe was broken on the third. There was an enormous wet stain and black rings (mold?) on the ceiling. The breakage did not seem recent. Until now no one had noticed it. There was no alternative: repairs had to be made. The owner suggested they move into the flat on the right side of the ground floor as long as the repairs went on. Meanwhile, to compensate for their trouble, they wouldn’t have to pay rent. Money saved. They accepted.

  In sum, the Guardia Civil knocked down the door of the first apartment because they were moving on the information they’d pried out of Koldo. As the friends found out months later, the cops practically drowned him in the tub and beat him until he was unconscious. In the afternoon, they’d arrested him on the street and brought him to the Intxaurrondo barracks. There were no coincidences or accidents: they were looking for all of them but only grabbed one. Koldo talked because, of course, in situations like that how are you not going to talk? But he kept to himself (or fainted before he could reveal it?) that one detail about the temporary change in apartments.