Homeland

by Fernando Aramburu

  “But I also wrote out of the desire to offer something positive to my fellow man, in favor of literature and art, which means in favor of the good and noble that human beings hold within them. And in favor of the dignity of ETA’s victims in their individual humanity, not as mere numbers in statistics where each one’s name is lost, along with their faces and their identities.”

  Which is exactly what my mother doesn’t want: that her suffering and the suffering of her children become material for a writer so he can compose a book or a director so he can make a movie, and that they be applauded after, and win prizes, while we go along bearing the burden of our tragedy.

  “I tried to avoid the two capital dangers in this kind of writing: sentimentality, on the one hand; and on the other, sanctimony, being didactic. That’s why, in my opinion, we have interviews and newspaper articles as well as forums like this one.”

  In the second row, near the aisle, reddish hair, Xabier recognized Cristina Cuesta, whose father, like his, had been murdered. It was she all right, no doubt about it. And on her left, Caty Romero, the widow of a sergeant in the San Sebastián Municipal Police, who apparently, I don’t know where I read it, was dedicated to cleansing the police of agents who collaborated with ETA or supplied them with information and, of course, the terrorists put an end to that with two bullets.

  “I tried to answer concrete questions. How does a person live intimately the disaster of having lost a father, a husband, a brother in an attack? How does a widow, an orphan, a person who’s been mutilated face life after a crime?”

  The writer spoke calmly. Xabier thinks his intentions are good, but he does not believe anything will substantially change because someone’s written a book. It seems to him that, until now, Basque writers have paid little attention to the victims of terrorism. The victimizers are far more interesting—their crises of conscience, their sentimental backstories, and things like that. Besides, ETA terrorism is useless if you want to attack the right. The civil war is much better for that.

  “…trying to paint a representative panorama of a society subjected to terror. Perhaps I’m exaggerating, but I firmly believe that the literary defeat of ETA is under way.”

  At that moment, the woman sitting right behind Consuelo Ordóñez, the one with the beige beret, turns her head slightly to one side, for barely a fraction of a second, but enough for Xabier’s heart to take a leap when he recognized those features so familiar to him. What is my sister doing here, the one who said she wouldn’t attend a meeting of terrorism victims even if they paid her? The same thing he was doing. He realized how absurd the question was, a question to which he dedicated not even half an instant of reflection, since he was concerned with other, more pressing thoughts. What thoughts? Well, for instance, how to find a way for Nerea not to see him. He calculated the number of steps, not more than three, that separated him from the door. He didn’t hesitate. Taking advantage of the fact that the applause for the writer would conceal the noise of his movements, he stood up, went out into the corridor, and started walking rapidly, almost running, toward the door.

  110

  CONVERSATION IN THE AFTERNOON

  They hadn’t seen each other in a long time. How long? It doesn’t matter. Two, three weeks. Meanwhile, there was news about Bittori. Not good news; one fact, especially, was extremely worrisome. Xabier and Nerea agreed that the telephone was not the best medium for a long discussion about serious matters related to their mother. What should we do? Don’t you think? They agreed to meet as soon as possible, somewhere in the heart of the city. A cold afternoon, but sunny. Nerea suggested walking along Paseo Nuevo and conversing near the wide, blue sea. Free of obligations, Xabier had no problem accepting his sister’s suggestion.

  Along the way, people, children, a row of vendors selling artisanal objects. It was almost impossible to walk because of the crowds. Up ahead, municipal workers using high-pressure hoses were scouring away ETA graffiti on a lateral wall of the La Brecha fish market. To avoid being splashed, brother and sister hugged the opposite facade.

  “Some day not too far from now few people will remember what happened.”

  “Don’t get worked up, Xabier. That’s the way life works. Ultimately, oblivion always wins.”

  “But we don’t have to be its accomplices.”

  “And we aren’t. Our memories can’t be erased with high-pressure hoses. You’ll see, though, that we the victims will be accused of refusing to look toward the future. They’ll say we’re seeking revenge. People are already saying just that.”

  “We bother them.”

  “You can’t imagine how much.”

  When they reached the San Telmo Museum, they got to the point. Xabier asked Nerea to tell him about the cat. What was that all about? What was that?

  “Ikatza is dead and ama doesn’t know it. Something tells me it’s better she not find out.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Yesterday I went to her place. Quique drove me to San Bartolomé Street. He’s always in a hurry, and he never stopped complaining that he had an important meeting with a client, that it was my fault he was going to be late, so I said: stop here, I’ll walk up the hill. I didn’t have good vibrations, understand? I call ama and she doesn’t answer the phone. I call again, and again no answer. That for two days. So, it seemed better just to go take a look.”

  “She spends the day in the village.”

  “Sometimes she goes up to the cemetery. She hasn’t lost that fixation with aita’s grave. But I was surprised that she didn’t answer at the time she usually has supper.”

  Nerea had gone up part of the Aldapeta hill. On the asphalt, she saw a mass of reddish flesh and black hair. Cars were rolling over it. The bus ran over it. And she stopped on the sidewalk for an instant, enough time to recognize the collar. She visited her mother, and after an hour, when she was about to say goodbye, she asked out of the blue about the cat.

  “Where is she, I don’t see her.”

  “She’s off doing her business. Any time now, she’ll turn up on the balcony with a bird in her mouth.”

  Covering her mouth and nose with her hand, Nerea separated the dead animal from the asphalt. When no cars were coming, using a branch from a bush, she pushed the pieces of flesh and hair to the curb on the other side of the street, where there is no sidewalk, certain that her mother wouldn’t be able to see it. Finally, using the same branch to hook it first, she tossed the sticky collar over a wall.

  She told the story to her brother with an expression of repugnance.

  “You did a good thing hiding it from ama.”

  “I was gagging as I walked down to San Bartolomé. So I went into the first bar I saw to have a drink. I’m not the kind who drinks at the wrong time of day, but I needed to get rid of the nausea I felt on my tongue.”

  They walked from one side to the other, breathing in the morning breeze; a long, misty line of coast stretching into the distance; and below the walkway, the succession of waves that smash and foam against the breakwater. Nerea to her brother: he should tell what he’d brought up on the telephone in greater detail.

  “Remember Ramón Leal?”

  “The ambulance driver? Sure.”

  “A week ago he came to my office because he’d been told, because someone had said. What? That our sainted mother had been seen pushing Arantxa’s wheelchair around the village square. That is, with Arantxa in the chair. Just imagine the scene: the two of them alone strolling in broad daylight where it’s impossible they wouldn’t be seen. Why? And whose idea was it? And how is it that there wasn’t a third person with them, the caregiver who comes every day to look after Arantxa? You can imagine the gossip running wild among the neighbors.”

  “All that is a bit odd. It’s been so many years that our families haven’t spoken to each other. I haven’t seen Arantxa since my student days. Even so, I still th
ink of her as a friend. She was the only one of all of them who behaved like a human being with us. Did you ask ama about it?”

  “I think ama is suffering some kind of mental disturbance. I didn’t want to make things worse. But you should have seen the shock on Ramón’s face.”

  “What can Arantxa’s aitas be thinking?”

  “Joxian, I imagine, is still a simple soul who takes things as they come. But his wife?”

  “Miren must have taken it like a kick in the teeth.”

  “I also learned from Ramón that after her stroll with Arantxa, ama fainted on the street and people had to help her. I decided to step in, so I called you.”

  The setting sun traced a fringe of nervous mirrors over the surface of the water. Boats? None. A ferry returning, near the entrance to the bay, that’s it. Xabier and Nerea leaned on the railing. Xabier covered his incipient baldness with a brimmed cap; she, who until a few years ago wore wool berets, was bareheaded. Behind them, Oteiza’s sculpture passed its boring hours, rusty, waiting for the next storm. A few steps away from them, a fisherman using a rod stared hard at the bobbing of his white cork in the undulating waters.

  “I made her come with me in the car. Where are we going? You’ll soon see. I arranged several appointments for her with Arruabarrena. She promises to go, but she never does and she lets time go by and I suspected from her blood analysis that something wasn’t right in our mother’s body. Arruabarrena examined her. He did all sorts of tests. The day before yesterday he called me. I was to see him as soon as I could. The instant I saw his face, I knew he was going to give me the worst possible news.”

  “He confirmed it was cancer?”

  “Uterine cancer. Very advanced. If it had been detected earlier, it could have been operated on with some guarantee of a cure, but she didn’t take care of it, I wasn’t attentive enough, and now she has other organs affected, including the liver. Anyway, I’ll spare you the clinical details. They’re no fun, that I can assure you.”

  “How much time does she have left?”

  “At the most, Arruabarrena gives her two or three months, but she could just as easily die tonight. With surgery and invasive treatment her life might be extended to the end of the year. It isn’t worthwhile.”

  “Was she informed?”

  “Arruabarrena still hasn’t talked to her. He asked me if I thought it would be better if I communicate the diagnosis to ama, after all, I’m the patient’s son aside from being a doctor. I think he’s right. I think I’m largely responsible for not having seen the problem when we still had time to deal with it.”

  “This is not the time for recrimination. I think ama knows more about how sick she is than she lets on.”

  “In the car, she complained she didn’t need to go to the doctor, that all her life she had bad periods and stomach cramps.”

  Brother and sister started walking again. They walked down the Aquarium steps and reached the port. The first lights were being turned on in the city.

  “In any case, Arruabarrena and I came up with a palliative treatment. We’ll do everything possible so ama doesn’t suffer.”

  Nerea rested a hand on Xabier’s shoulder. They walked along like that for a while, not speaking, not looking at each other, until Nerea broke the silence. What did he intend to do when ama was no longer with us?

  “You know I only live in this city for her sake. It’s a promise I made to aita the day he was buried. I said to him: don’t worry, I’ll take care of her, she won’t be left alone. You see that after all I wasn’t up to the job. My plan is to make sure I fulfill her old desire to share a grave with aita in the village cemetery and then leave. Where? No idea. Far away, that’s for sure. Where I can be useful to people in need. What about you?”

  “I’m staying here.”

  They detoured around the streets in the Parte Vieja—too crowded. Their conversation began again at the bar of a café on Bulevar. As night fell, they said goodbye, serious, calm, with gentle brushing of cheeks. He went here; she went there. By then the sky was completely dark, and the bearable chill of the afternoon was being replaced by the harsher cold of the night. As he walked along Elcano Street, Xabier felt his sense of smell caressed by the warm aroma of roasted chestnuts. The chestnut vendor’s stand was at the corner of Guipúzcoa. A dozen chestnuts cost two and a half euros. As he was paying, the carillon at the Town Council building rang out eight o’clock. And Xabier, the pleasing warmth of the paper packet of chestnuts in the palm of his hand, sat down on a bench in the plaza, under the waning moon visible through the naked branches of a tree. He easily peeled the first chestnut. Very good. Just right, neither hard nor burnt. And the pleasurable warmth that extended inside his mouth thickened the mist of his breath. The second chestnut, also very good. Too good. He stood up. He emptied the almost full packet in a trash bin, so that the chestnuts fell one by one onto the garbage inside. Then he started walking toward Avenida, blending in with the crowd.

  111

  A NIGHT IN CALAMOCHA

  As a general rule, Miren went to visit Joxe Mari on the bus belonging to the Women in Favor of Amnesty. Joxian accompanied her from time to time. At the beginning. Then, as the years passed, more and more sporadically.

  One winter Saturday, a long time ago, they had an accident a few miles from Calamocha. After that, Joxian had no desire to travel. That wasn’t the only reason. The other, the principal reason, was Miren. She’s so bossy, they argued, you can’t talk about her son. Joxe Mari is like her leg at about the groin. Don’t touch it because right away she jumps, what a woman.

  The day of the Calamocha business they’d left in the morning for a family face-to-face in the Picassent prison, but they hadn’t gone by bus but rather in Alfonso and Catalina’s car, because at that time their son was in the same prison.

  You wouldn’t say the two couples were linked by close friendship. Miren criticized them behind their backs, principally because they didn’t speak Basque. Joxian doesn’t care what language they speak. In any case, he didn’t think much of them. Why? He would shrug his shoulders: no idea.

  But after all, Alfonso and Catalina were from their village, though they’d come in the sixties from somewhere or other. As far as Miren was concerned they had nothing Basque at all, not even the air they breathed. Especially the woman, you could tell from her accent where she came from. They’d produced a son, an ETA militant who at the time was in jail with Joxe Mari. And it seemed the two boys got along well.

  Don Serapio stopped Miren one day in the street. What a busybody. The priest was chatting with Catalina under the town hall portico. The priest stops to talk to everyone. He governs souls and bodies. Or he tries to. Because if you go to mass, there’s no one there, except on certain days. He saw Miren, who had stopped to buy cheese from a street vendor, and he called to her: kaixo, Miren, and she couldn’t pretend to be deaf because he was about eight steps away. So she forgot about buying cheese and went over to him. It turns out that Catalina, standing there, and her husband were thinking about going to see their son the same day that she and Joxian were going, something the priest was fully aware of.

  Joxian, at midday:

  “That’s what you get for blabbing.”

  “He’s my confessor.”

  “Go to some other village to confess.”

  Net result: that in the presence of Don Serapio, Miren and Catalina agreed, there was no way out, to travel, the four of them, to Picassent in Alfonso’s car. Well, it almost happened that the priest would have to officiate at a funeral mass for all four of them.

  The accident happened on the return trip. Days later, a note about it appeared in Egin after Alfonso telephoned a newspaperman from Teruel. On the way out, Joxian sat in the front passenger seat next to Alfonso, driver and pain in the ass. Probably for that reason he can’t stand him. A know-it-all. Never shuts up. About soccer, cars, food, mushrooms: h
e knows all about everything. And at one point in the trip he put on a zarzuela cassette. Miren, under her breath, when they separated inside the prison:

  “It’s in the blood. The only thing they forgot to do was shout long live Spain.”

  On the return, when he was about to get into the car, Joxian found that Catalina was sitting up front. He had no choice but to sit in back alongside Miren. They’d barely gotten under way when she pinched him on the thigh so he wouldn’t tell something about Joxe Mari which he’d already begun to reveal.

  Two days later, at home:

  “You should thank Saint Ignatius that Catalina stole your seat.”

  “My guardian angel is smarter than hers.”

  Alfonso, his hands on the wheel, took charge of the conversation. He was praising his son, who works out a lot in jail and began studying English. Unfortunately, they have to talk to him in only one ear because on the other he can barely hear a word. And he accelerates, passes a truck, and explains:

  “It’s because of the beatings they gave him when he was arrested.”

  Miren would butt in from time to time.

  “And didn’t you lodge a complaint?”

  “Why bother, when they pay no attention? Our sons are in the clutches of the state.”

  “Well, they beat my Joxe Mari, too. A bunch of them. One at a time they wouldn’t dare because he’s so big.”

  Joxian, lost in thought, sad as always when he leaves Joxe Mari behind (okay, son, stay well), was staring at the landscape, out of touch with the conversation. Out of touch up to a point. They’d been driving a good while and now it was his turn to covertly nudge Miren so she’d stop talking. They were passing through Teruel as afternoon was coming to an end. Lonely fields, with patches of snow; a row of mountains in the distance about to fade into darkness, and outside the car a bitter cold. Suddenly, Catalina made a naive slip of the tongue. Maybe she assumed an intimacy where there is none. Or it might simply be she didn’t know to what extremes Miren could go in her patriotic-political fever.