A few days after he lost his job, Guillermo was already depressed and was already talking that nonsense about jumping in front of a train. And later, he started making predictions in the presence of his children, who were still so young, predictions about a bleak future in an affected tone that the children couldn’t understand and weren’t spoken so they would understand. He’d suddenly bend over Ainhoa’s crib, and paint, in a speech meant for adults, an atrocious panorama of privations. And he did the same with Endika. He’d suddenly lift him in his arms and say something negative, ill-omened, sorrowful.
He lent even less of a hand with the household chores than he did when he worked at the paper factory. Why? Because he felt it was humiliating for him to vacuum the floor, wash dishes or windows.
“I wasn’t born to be a housewife.”
“Really, and I was?”
It was in situations like that when Guillermo would seriously blurt out that stuff about throwing himself onto the train tracks or swallowing a bottle of bleach. Arantxa would fume, her teeth clenched, her eyes moist, but she could also see her children, so tender, so fragile, and she chose to hold it all in. Depending on the day of the week, she would unburden herself with a workmate. She would tell her this, that, disconnected details, but not everything, not the most intimate things, since they were not linked by a close friendship. Girlfriends, real girlfriends, she had none. The couple had distanced themselves from their hometown friends. In Rentería, Arantxa only got together from time to time with neighbors and, more frequently, with people close to Guillermo. Also, she’d rather lose an eye than tell anything to her mother. Miren knew that her son-in-law was unemployed. It never occurred to her to ask if they needed any help.
The people Arantxa did open her heart to were Angelita and Rafael. She even revealed to them that their son threatened to throw himself in front of a train and drink bleach. This is what they said. Rafael: don’t worry; Angelita: you keep calm. And they helped with unlimited generosity. For a year, Rafael paid their monthly mortgage bill; every week Angelita went to the supermarket with Arantxa and paid for everything (the shopping cart piled high) with her credit card. And Guillermo? He knew nothing about it. He made do with walking in the hills picking mushrooms and talking to himself.
Until, ten months after he’d lost his job, when something unexpected happened. On one of any number of afternoons, as he pushed Ainhoa’s pram across the Plaza de los Fueros, Guillermo ran into his friend Manolo Zamarreño. Manolo saw him, waved to him to stop, and came over smiling, carrying a message of hope and something else. What? A telephone number written on a slip of paper. He was to call immediately, today if possible, because there was a job open in the offices of the Mamut superstore and they were urgently looking for a replacement.
“Call. Maybe you’ll be lucky, but hurry up.”
And thus it was that Guillermo abandoned the nettles and mushrooms in favor of numbers. He earned less than he did in the paper factory, but he was earning something. In a matter of days, his good humor returned along with a desire to live. He became affable, chatty, generous, and asked Arantxa to forgive him for the bad months he’d put her through, but that she should please understand that during the whole time he’d been suffering overwhelming anguish.
“Two children, unable to feed them, you understand.”
When he got his first paycheck, he treated her to dinner in a restaurant. And the next day, home from work, he brought her a rose. Arantxa put it in a vase with water without making much of a fuss because Ainhoa, as usual, was crying in her room. And the next morning, as she was leaving the house, Arantxa threw the flower into the garbage.
88
BLOODY BREAD
It was Thursday, June 25. Guillermo and Arantxa had managed to schedule a week of vacation at the same time. They couldn’t always manage it, but this time they did. By then, both of them working, they could allow themselves a few modest indulgences. And since the children were a little older (Endika was six, the girl about to turn four), they could travel with them without the inconveniences and limitations of traveling with babies.
Yesterday the four of them went to the Biarritz beach; today they were going to have dinner at the house of amona Miren, and tomorrow, well, we’ll see. They had a secondhand car. Not great but good enough for their needs.
That Thursday’s problem: they had no bread for their midday meal. That problem is easy to solve. Guillermo—if only all our disasters were like that—offered to step down to the bakery immediately and buy half a baguette. Jovial, he asked, with the front door open: who wanted to go with him. To separate the children, who never stopped fighting, Arantxa said:
“Take Endika, he’s driving me crazy.”
And Guillermo (let’s go, champ) brought him along.
A Thursday they’d never forget, a Thursday that could have cost the lives of father and son. They wouldn’t have been the first and they wouldn’t have been the last. Holding hands, they passed next to the black scooter holding hidden explosives. Guillermo, I swear to God, recalled it. Arantxa:
“Are you sure?”
He was absolutely certain, because it annoyed him to see the moped parked on the sidewalk and he made a comment about it to his son, something like: that’s something you shouldn’t do, that’s bad, or anyway something like that.
A few yards beyond, at the door of the bakery, he ran into Manolo Zamarreño, who was coming out with a baguette. It was five, maybe ten minutes after eleven. And Manolo, as he exchanged a few commonplaces with Guillermo, messed up Endika’s hair as a kind of caress.
On the street, right next to them, his escort was waiting.
Escort? Yes. His friend José Luis was murdered in a bar in Irún, and he took over as legal counsel to the People’s Party in the Rentería Town Council. Guillermo, at home, when he found out:
“You’ve got to have guts to take on a job like that.”
“Guille, if I were the kind of woman who goes to mass, I’d be praying for him. May the Almighty protect him. And if he’s removed, I hope you won’t think to take his place, okay?”
“Me? Are you nuts? I want to live.”
Manolo had only had the position for a few days and, to begin, they burned his cars. They insulted him, they put up degrading posters, they painted his name inside a target. But he wouldn’t back down. He declared to the press: “I was born here and I’m staying right here.” And indeed, he did stay a week, another, not many, until his fatal moment that Thursday in June when he stopped off to buy his daily loaf of bread and stopped to chat for a few seconds with Guillermo.
One was entering the bakery, the other leaving. After the brief conversation, Manolo made his way along the sidewalk with his guard behind him. Guillermo was waiting his turn at the counter. Suddenly there was an awful roar. Endika fell to the floor. The noise of broken windows. And Guille quickly put him back on his feet. Then, paternal, nervous, falsely calm, he said:
“Don’t cry, don’t move from this spot, I’ll be right back.”
And he went out.
The scooter exploded right in front of a doorway marked number 7. Manolo? He didn’t see him. He did see his escort, sitting on the ground, his back resting against a car, his face blackened. Vehicles damaged. A momentary, thick, smoky silence. And then the first voices, a woman’s screams, people (neighbors) who gathered to stare.
And Manolo?
There he was. Where? Between two cars, stretched out on his own blood, lots of blood. He was black from the explosion, which seemed to have caught him full on. Almost naked, wearing only his underwear and shoes. On his wrist, a watch. And the bread he just bought split in half.
With the child in his arms, don’t look, don’t look, Guillermo had no choice but to pass close to the place with the wreckage and the dead man and the escort sitting on the ground before the police came and the street was cordoned off.
&nb
sp; “Did you look? Tell me the truth.”
“No, aita.”
“Swear?”
“I didn’t see anything.”
On the street, he met Arantxa, who was running toward him as fast as she could, her eyes alarmed.
“Are the two of you all right? What happened?”
“Manolo.”
“What?”
“Manolo.”
He opened his mouth and all he could say was that: Manolo.
“Manolo Zamarreño?”
He nodded, the boy still in his arms. There was no need to explain. Arantxa, in a stupor, slapped her palm against her forehead. And they didn’t say another word. They hastily went up to the flat, where she in a fit of panic had left the iron on and the baby alone. The first siren soon began to howl, getting closer and closer, already in the neighborhood.
Just then, the telephone rang. Angelita. What happened? What an explosion. Arantxa, with the children standing there, told her without telling, said it without saying it, but telling her she wasn’t alone and her mother-in-law, fully understanding the situation, assured her she understood.
Guillermo installed his grief and indignation in the kitchen like someone driving a post into the ground, sitting at the table, his head in his hands. The rest of the family went into the children’s room. They followed their mother in intimidated silence. Their father was wailing. Arantxa brought the transistor radio with her. With her ear pressed to it, the volume turned down, she heard a confirmation: a bomb attack in the Capuchinos neighborhood, one dead.
She arranged Ainhoa’s hair. She rearranged it. She did it all over again. There were still two hours left before they would go to her parents’ house for dinner, but she needed any task to fill in the time and to recover her calm and to give herself over to the relief, the enormous relief, mmm, to be with her children, to touch them, to feel them, to know they were safe and sound.
Endika, sitting still at her side, grabbed on to the waistband of her skirt the same way you hold on to the rail in the bus. His mother walked a few feet to get some hairpins out of a dresser drawer and the boy followed her silently. When she came back it was the same, without releasing his hold on her skirt.
Through the partially open door came Guillermo’s diminishing sobs, deeper now, not as high-pitched as before, barely audible, broken. At the beginning, Arantxa, to protect her children, was tempted to close the door. She instantly changed her mind. Let them hear, let them learn, let them know what kind of country they’re growing up in.
In the kitchen, Guillermo was talking now, ranting about politics. He disparaged nationalism, which poisons consciences, he was saying, which put so many young Basques on the path of crime. And he distributed guilt: to the lehendakari with their forked tongues, to the hypocritical bishop, to the abertzales up to their ears in the blood of others, and to all those evil, spying neighbors who tell ETA at what time the victim passes through this and other places. Resentful, he mocked them:
“Well, here you have a Spaniard you can knock off without any problem when he goes to buy bread. He’s a father with a family? Well, he should have thought of that before he became a legal counselor. Yes, but he’s in a pro-Spanish party that oppresses us and besides we’ve got a conflict here.”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, is that guy going on like that with the window open? Arantxa decided to find out.
“People will hear you.”
“Let them hear me.”
The kitchen window was closed.
“You don’t live alone, you know.”
“A ferocious hatred has taken hold of me. It’s as if the nettles were pricking me inside my body. Arantxa, honey, tell me something that will end this hatred that’s tearing me apart. Hating is the last thing I want in life.”
“Let it all out, protest, go ahead, but don’t shout. Outside the house, not a word. Okay? Don’t make trouble for me. We’ll go to the funeral, we’ll express our sympathy. We don’t have to sacrifice our manners.”
“In the condition I’m in, I can’t go to your parents’ house, understand? You go with the kids.”
“Of course you’re not coming. All we need is for you to mention my brother and start arguing with my mother who’s such a fanatic nowadays.”
“Her poor boy in jail, a first-class killer.”
“Okay, enough. You promised we’d never bring up that subject in front of my parents. The children have a right to visit their grandparents.”
At about one thirty, Arantxa left the house with the children in their Sunday best, clean, fresh smelling. Ainhoa went over to give her father a kiss. Endika, behind her with a fearful voice:
“Are you sad, aita?”
“Very sad.”
“Because of what happened to Manolo?”
“So you did look.”
“But only with one eye.”
He hugged the boy, hugged Arantxa, walked them to the door, watched them go down the first flight of stairs, and when they turned around to say goodbye he blew them a kiss.
89
THE AIR IN THE DINING ROOM
If Miren only knew. If she only knew what? That when she wasn’t there her grandchildren sometimes called her the bad amona. All of Arantxa’s efforts to make them change their opinion were useless. She realized: they’ll probably be quiet to please me, but I can’t keep them from feeling what they feel.
Even little Ainhoa, about to turn four, sensed a hint of rejection in amona Miren, which in the case of Endika, depending on the situation, was open hostility.
Exactly the opposite was true for Angelita and Rafael. In part because they spent more time with the children and saw them every day. They had more options to offer them amusement and affection. They were mild mannered by nature, generous, funny, and devoid of Miren’s harshness and severity. In truth, Miren didn’t behave that way because of bad faith but because that was her nature. She had always been that way, harsh in temperament, impatient with her own children, her husband, in reality with the whole world.
As far as aitona Joxian was concerned, well, to put it bluntly, the man mattered little. Okay, nothing. As a general rule, Ainhoa and Endika saw him once or twice a month; but when they saw him he would sit in his chair, motionless, dull, silent, without the energy to suggest activities, and often it was as if he really weren’t there.
Once already, Endika asked his mother why aitona Joxian spoke so little.
“Maybe he doesn’t have anything to say.”
“Aita says it’s because osaba Joxe Mari is in jail.”
“Maybe.”
The Thursday of the Rentería attack, when Arantxa got to her parents’ house with the children, aitona Joxian still hadn’t returned from the Pagoeta, which explained why Miren was sulking.
She opened the door. Joy? Not a jot. Actually, just the opposite, that unwelcoming, annoyed glitter in her eyes.
“I thought it might be your father. He still hasn’t come home from the bar. I’ll have a little talk with him about that.”
Then she turned to her grandchildren with curt tenderness, her worn-out slippers, her apron spattered with blots of moisture. And doesn’t it occur to her to fix herself up, put on a good face, say something to the kids to make them laugh and make them feel welcome, have a little present for them, a surprise?
She doesn’t lean over far enough for the children to kiss her without some difficulty. And she reproaches Endika because he came in without saying hello.
“Cat got your tongue or something?”
She asks the girl who combed her hair so badly, and to Arantxa:
“Isn’t your husband coming?”
“He didn’t feel well.”
She doesn’t bother to ask if he’s ill, if he’s hurt himself, nothing. Why is that? She just can’t bring herself to do it. If you were to dig around in her intim
ate thoughts, she’d defend herself, saying that all her life she’s done nothing but work. There was the proof: the table set, the whole house saturated with the delicious smell of food, the heat of the oven. Once again, she’d worked like mad. The whole morning. Even in the afternoon, when she made the béchamel sauce for the croquettes. She was certainly worn out, convinced that no one ever thanks her, no matter what she prepares.
And her obsession with Basque. That vindictive, demanding attitude, testing the grandchildren every time they visited. She asked them questions to make them speak the language of the homeland, and they spoke it naturally, easily, though with the limitations that went along with their age. And it wasn’t unusual that if Guillermo was there, the children would pass into Spanish without realizing it.
Miren would stop them, cutting, rigorous:
“We speak Basque here.”
Which was a form of pretending Guillermo wasn’t really there. Often she spoke to him through Arantxa.
“Ask your husband if he wants more chickpeas.”
And Arantxa, what else?, would turn to Guillermo and translate the question. Guillermo never lost his sense of humor.
“Tell her to supply me with eighteen units.”
Joxian walked in scratching his ribs, a sign he’d been drinking. Miren doesn’t care if he drinks a lot or a little. All she needs is to see him make that unconscious scratch even once to become furious. She held back because her daughter and her grandchildren were present. Even so, in the dining room, Arantxa could hear her mother scold him in a low voice as he took off his shoes. Because he was late? But it was 2:25 and they agreed they’d start eating at 2:30. Or might it be because she hoped he’d arrive earlier to lend a hand? But when has this man ever lent a hand in this house?
Homeland Page 41
