Xabier keeps up a slow rowing rhythm. I don’t want to get blisters on my hands. A slight but continuous push is all you need for the Lorea Bi, which is light (plastic reinforced with fiberglass), to slide over the surface of the water. Where are they going? Nowhere in particular. To be alone with the city right in front of them. The farther out into the bay they go, the fewer the noises that reach them, and even those are muffled.
Aránzazu, staggering and now without her sunglasses, has moved to the forward seat so she can look Xabier in the eye when she speaks to him. And to steady herself when she goes from one end of the boat to the other, she leans on his shoulders for a moment. Those hands are warm, soft, there is velvet, velvet in love, in those hands. And then Aránzazu took off her shoes, which are more like slippers, her blue blouse, her jeans, and, wanting sun, sits there in a bikini. Her feet, the nails with dark red polish, are small and still girlish.
“I don’t know what I can do, maitia, to get on your mother’s good side. And it isn’t as though I’m not trying. But I swear I’m running out of options. What should I do?”
“My mother’s mental world is very small. Don’t worry. One of these days she’ll discover how marvelous you are and you’ll be friends.”
“I doubt it. She can’t forgive me, a simple auxiliary nurse, for having stolen her son.”
“She said that to you?”
“I see it, Xabier. I’ve got eyes.”
“The most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Another compliment? Deserved, of course. She was pretty, with a touch of maturity: just my type. Neither too old nor too young. A ripe woman, with her first wrinkles at the edges of her eyelids, which made her even more attractive, while there is still no resignation, but health, a good supply of hope, joy, despite the divorce that left her disoriented, with psychological tears, until Xabier turned up.
Her lips, full, perhaps the best feature of her charming face. And when she opened them, her fresh, white, marvelous teeth appeared. How much I remember of her!
When they were between the island and Mount Urgull, no boats nearby, gently rocked by the waves, Aránzazu asked him to put suntan cream on her back. I see bodies every day, but this is the body I love. He loved her. He loved her a great deal. And she:
“For a while now I’ve been having the same dream again and again. Should I tell it to you?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m walking through a forest or up a mountain with horrible cliffs. I’m carrying a porcelain vase in my arms. I can’t describe it. Someone whispers in my ear that it’s valuable. It would be a terrible thing if it were to break.”
“I can guess the ending. The vase falls out of your hand and smashes with a hellish crash.”
“I must have dreamed that episode more than five nights over the past few weeks. It makes me think I’m obsessing. The vase, other times a bottle, always breaks. In the dream I felt like crying, but I’m ashamed. People point fingers at me and instead of helping they criticize me. I don’t know where to hide. Then I start running like a madwoman and suddenly I realize that I’m holding a vase or a bottle or some other fragile object that’s going to break and which, in fact, does break.”
“You should write, you’ve got ideas.”
Once he’d covered her back with cream, Xabier lifted the top of her bikini, more than anything so he could touch her breasts, caress them with the excuse of putting suntan cream on them. Did she ask him to? No, but Aránzazu denies him nothing related to her body. If he’s touching, let him touch. If he’s sucking, let him suck. If he’s entering, let him enter. She told him even before those happy days they spent in Rome. Don’t hide your desires from me, use me for your pleasure when you want and as you want in exchange for sincere affection. She’s happy with that. If he understands her. Of course.
Her breasts are rather small, sag a bit, but are extremely sensitive. So that if he massages, squeezes, kisses delicately, with minute tenderness, it isn’t infrequent that she has a flash of pleasure and wants more.
She asks him, her eyes closed, concentrating on the agreeable sensations, if in the hospital he gets erotically aroused when he’s treating beautiful women.
“In the operating room never. During consultations I won’t say it doesn’t happen. It can happen that a whiff of perfume makes me forget for an instant that I’m a repairman for bodies. I think it happens to everyone. Not to you?”
“Not much.”
“I’ve treated authentic beauties, but how can you become fascinated knowing that inside those bodies a tumor is growing or that the kidneys have stopped working?”
They agree on a route as they leave the bay. Where to? There, behind the island, where they’ll be completely alone. Xabier starts rowing again.
“Now that I’m thinking about it, I can’t remember having an erection during working hours.”
As he maneuvers the oars, he evokes expressions of pain, bleeding wounds, sicknesses. He evokes naked bodies, yes, naked, even young and well-formed bodies, but full of suffering and anguish, bristling with tubes, unconscious, sentenced most certainly to death today, tomorrow, within three weeks, and he is not there to get erections. Not at all. Not even to allow himself to be swept away by compassion.
The Lorea Bi slides swiftly ahead. There are whitecaps on the sea. The blades of the oars softly enter the water, which gets darker, deeper, and more agitated. No one. Not even a sail, not even the outline of a ship from here until the far horizon. And Aránzazu lit a cigarette and stretched out in the sun, her back resting on a towel she’d spread over the platform at the prow, her feet on the seat. Xabier contemplates her foreshortened body. How is it possible to be so beautiful? The svelte, smooth, well-shaped legs that trotted through life until they reached me. The knees, the thighs with a few touches of cellulite, thighs that carry Aránzazu along the street of bitterness. She is pretentious. She said she wasn’t, that it was a matter of pride. And he fixed his eyes on the lower half of her bikini, on the cloth behind which on other occasions there was the hint of her sex in soft relief, but not that afternoon.
“Who was the first?”
“One of my brother’s friends, in my parents’ house. I was fifteen.”
“A precocious child.”
“On the one hand, I was dying of curiosity. On the other, I saw clearly that if I didn’t let him the guy was going to rape me. I haven’t the slightest doubt about it. There was no one in the house. My brother hadn’t come home yet. So I pretended that I wanted to, and by pretending to be docile, the thing barely lasted a couple of minutes.”
“You’re not going to tell me you weren’t traumatized for life.”
“I wasn’t. And it didn’t hurt much.”
An hour and a half later, they began their return. The tide was turning. Expending the same energy they used to row out, they moved twice as quickly. At times Xabier managed to synchronize his rowing with the push of the waves. Then the Lorea Bi shot ahead. In no time at all it entered the bay.
The sun was going down. The seascape, in those sunset distances, copied the intense yellow of the sky. There was a chill in the air and Aránzazu was already putting her clothes back on. They made plans: they would have brochettes in the Parte Vieja and then go home, since the next day both were on morning duty.
Nearing the Aquarium, they heard the first clap of thunder. Immediately after, the second. They sound like firecrackers, but the locals know: it’s the police firing rubber bullets at demonstrators.
“There’s a row on the Bulevar.”
“Future terrorists in training. An hour of ruckus, they’ll set fire to something, and then a bar crawl in the Parte Vieja.”
Xabier, rowing, went off on a rant and Aránzazu was surprised by the vehemence of his words. So what? It’s that:
“I’ve never heard you talk like that. You seem to be so
meone else.”
“I’m thinking about my father and it’s hard for me to control myself.”
“They’re still after him?”
“They never stop. The other day some boys tried to set fire to a truck. He was on guard. They couldn’t do it. I felt chills when he confessed he was on the verge of making a mistake, according to him the worst mistake a man can make.”
“You’re scaring me. What mistake?”
“I didn’t ask. I saw in his face that he didn’t want to go into the subject any deeper. But I have my suspicions. Actually, I’m pretty sure.”
“It didn’t enter his mind to resort to violence?”
“I think he keeps a gun at the office and that he felt a strong temptation to use it to defend himself.”
They were getting closer to the port. In the background, above the houses, a column of black smoke was rising.
“A mistake of that kind can bring about reprisals. Violent people love it when all of us take part in their game. That way they’ll have proof about the war that only exists in their minds. I don’t want to hurt you, maitia, but that’s what I think.”
“No, that’s just what my father thinks. Cool as can be, he says they’re going to kill me someday. I repeat that he should come and live in the apartment you and I helped him buy in San Sebastián. He says he’ll make a decision soon. He pretends to be strong, but I know from my mother that some nights he cries in bed.”
“How can they hurt your father, a good, euskaldun Basque?”
“All that and owner of a business. All this madness about the armed struggle has to be financed. Don’t forget that. On the streets of the town there are still graffiti against him. Think the neighbors give any thought to erasing them? The more I think about it, the more enraged I get.”
“I see you suffer, maitia, and it breaks my heart. Shall we leave the brochettes for another day?”
“Probably all for the best. I’ve suddenly lost my appetite.”
76
GO ON, CRY IN PEACE
No one told him. He didn’t know. I’m the son. He wasn’t sure from whom. Nor was it necessary. They must have noticed by the expression on his face. Aside from the fact that a surgical gown, it goes without saying, inspires an instinctive respect. They let him through. The gray afternoon, his heart pounding, in the last second he noticed the bloodstain. It’s that you couldn’t see it clearly on the wet ground. He almost stepped in it. It happened here. He didn’t know. No one told him. In his mind, the red traces took on the form of footprints along the short path to his parents’ house. Or now only his mother’s house?
If Txato had really died, wouldn’t he be stretched out on the ground, covered by a sheet, waiting for the inspecting officer to order the removal of the body? And there were no ambulances in sight next to the Ertzaintza patrol cars. Therefore, they’ve taken him away. Therefore, while there’s space for medical intervention, there’s a thread of hope.
Two ertzainas emerged from the apartment chatting informally. One burst out laughing. When they met the surgical gown on the stairs they fell silent. A hasty salute. Xabier supposed they would have expressed their sympathy just in case. Are you a relative of the deceased, the victim, the murdered man, the executed man; in sum, of the dead man? They were very sorry, very sorry for your loss. But instead of expressing any sympathy they went on walking down the stairs. A bit later, when Xabier was pushing the door the ertzainas had left ajar, he heard them resume the babble of trivialities.
He entered. He entered taking cautious steps, like someone trying not to interrupt a sleeper’s rest. The familiar smell, the vestibule in half-light. He hadn’t visited the house for months. Why? Because he was avoiding the town. Simple as that. He felt he was being watched, watched with evil intentions, and twice already it happened that as he walked along the street people he’d known all his life did not respond to his greeting. So for some time, when he wanted to see his parents, he preferred they come to San Sebastián.
On the wall peg hung Txato’s old sheepskin jacket, the one he’d had for so many years. And Xabier couldn’t help stretching out a hand to touch it. I don’t know why I touched it. Just a few seconds, as if he were trying to prove to himself that some vestige of its owner’s life remained in the jacket.
He walked toward the only place in the flat where there was light, and indeed, there in the living room was his mother. Heartbroken, teary-eyed, sobbing? In those moments, Bittori was observing the street from between the blinds. And when she heard her son arriving, she brusquely turned toward him, and in her features there was angry serenity, haughty fortitude, a kind of dignified tension that erased any hint of grief from her features.
“I don’t want you to give me an injection.”
She could calm down on her own. Not him; emotionally wrenched, he threw himself into his mother’s arms.
“Go on, cry in peace if that helps you. No one’s going to see me shed a single tear. That’s a pleasure I’m not going to give them.”
But Xabier couldn’t control himself, bent over his mother, enveloping her in a grief-stricken embrace. He was broken in sorrow: his mother in old slippers, the felt of one spattered with blood; his mother pretending to be strong, his gray-haired mother, his wretched mother, and to one side of them, on the table, the reading glasses Txato used at home, the ballpoint pen, the newspaper open to the crossword puzzle. And during that attack of weeping I hear her ask me if I want her to make something to eat. Has she been so affected that she’s lost all notion of reality? Was she denying what happened?
Just the opposite, Bittori hadn’t the slightest doubt that:
“He’s dead. Get used to the idea.”
“Who told you?”
“I just know it. When I saw him he was still breathing, but it was almost over. I can tell you for certain he won’t come back from this. I think his head was blown open. Txato’s gone, you’ll see.”
“I suppose they took him to the hospital.”
“They did, but it’s useless. You’ll see.”
Poor Nerea when she finds out. We have to get word to her as soon as we can. Xabier, calmer now, looked in the drawer his mother was pointing to for the slip of paper with the telephone number on it. They answered the telephone immediately. Not even two rings. The usual voices and noises of a bar in the background. He left the message without going into detail. He only made clear who he was and formulated the request. Which was? That they tell his sister to call her family as soon as she could. He emphasized that it was urgent. To be sure, he repeated Nerea’s address. The man at the bar told him he didn’t have to, that he remembered the girl.
“Are you sure that aita was alive when they put him in the ambulance?”
“I didn’t leave his side for a second. His eyelids were fluttering, and I didn’t stop talking to him because I thought: if I don’t talk to him, I’ll lose him. But he couldn’t answer me. He was bleeding to death. Look, when I got home I had to change clothes.”
“I wish you’d tell me if he was conscious or not.”
“Listen, you’re going to make me faint. His eyelids moved. A little.”
“Was it you who called the police and the ambulance?”
“I didn’t call anyone. They suddenly appeared with the sirens going full blast. Some neighbor must have made the call. I was screaming my head off. They probably heard me in the next town.”
After his siesta, Txato had coffee; actually some cold remnants at the bottom of the pot. Bittori, who heard him grunt, offered to make a fresh pot, but Txato, either because he saw her dozing on the sofa, her arms crossed in the position a napping person falls into, or because as usual he was in a hurry, refused her offer.
“I’ll make do with what there is.”
He left the house. At what time? A little before four. And she was pained now for not accompanying him to the vestibule to
give Txato a kiss that might have been the last of his life. God forbid. She would have preferred using her energy in a tenderer farewell, after so many years being married to him and two children, instead of wasting it on a stupid conversation about hot or cold coffee.
“If you were to ask me, I’d say I only remember the noises. First, the sound of the door when he left for work, then his footsteps on the stairs, the nothing, me on the sofa with my eyes closed, thinking: let’s see if I can get a half-hour snooze. And suddenly the shots. Don’t ask me how many. But that it was shots I didn’t doubt, not for a second. Then I ran to the balcony. I saw Txato down on the sidewalk and no one else. I didn’t see who shot or even if it was just one person. Well, I didn’t stand there staring but instead ran down to the street and when I saw all the blood I started screaming like a madwoman. Do you think anyone came to help? Because I tried to lift your father. I said to myself: I’ve got to get this man on his feet. He’s heavy. So I started talking to him. Look, I was so frantic that I said: I love you. We never said that to each other. Not even before we were married. We just couldn’t say it. We showed it without words. But I just had to talk and talk or he’s going to slip away. And at least, look, if he dies, he’ll at least know I loved him. No one helped me. The street, empty. The windows, closed. And it was pouring. I’m telling you, no one. Someone who saw everything through a crack must have called the police and the ambulance. Otherwise I can’t explain how they got here so quickly. In ten minutes the Ertzaintza was already here. And a little after that, the ambulance.”
The telephone rang. Nerea? Bittori signaled to her son—run, run—to answer the phone. Xabier, standing next to it, only had to twist around and stretch out his arm.
“Hello?”
“Gora ETA!”
He hung up.
“Obviously that wasn’t your sister.”
“There are people who only want to hurt us. Probably better we don’t answer the phone.”
“But what if Nerea calls?”
Homeland Page 35
