He parked the bike so he could keep an eye on it from inside the flower shop. He told them what he wanted and what it was for with one eye here and the other there. All in all, he wasn’t in the shop for more than two minutes. They showed him one bouquet, small, with different sorts of flowers. He didn’t want to see any others. That one was fine. He paid and left and was waiting outside the cemetery for about twenty minutes with his helmet on since he didn’t want to let go of either the bicycle or the bouquet.
To one side of the fence, on the wall, next to the black plaque listing the visiting schedule there was another, smaller one that said neither dogs nor bicyclists were allowed entry. Damn it to hell. And now what do I do? Meanwhile, a bus stopped down below. Bittori, black overcoat, got out. And taking a look at the plaque, she told Joxian not to worry because:
“What they don’t allow is people riding their bicycles around the graves. Walking them is fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Come along, Joxian, I know what I’m talking about.”
They entered the cemetery, empty at that early hour of the morning on a workday, with the exception farther up, of whom?, of two maintenance employees preceded by a noisy vehicle. So how could a bicycle matter, when it makes no noise and gives off no smoke?
As they moved up the gentle slope, amid graves and trees (pines, cypresses) they could see other solitary visitors scattered in the thick grayness of marble and cement. Joxian and his bicycle occupied half of the wide path. Bittori acted as guide one or two steps in front. But at times she looked back, and he saw her smile. Why is this woman smiling in a place where happiness is so inappropriate? She’s nuts and no one can tell me otherwise.
“I didn’t know if you would come.”
“Here I am.”
“You’re a man of your word.”
“My daughter and you got me into this. I kept my promise. Let’s hope you keep yours and that you don’t tell Miren all about it.”
“You can rest assured on that account. Arantxa isn’t wrong to say you’ve got a good heart. All anyone has to do is see the bouquet you’ve brought. Txato will love it.”
Joxian could only muster harsh cordiality, but Bittori’s wild remarks disarmed him.
“Okay, okay.”
“And he’ll be envious when he sees you dressed in the club uniform.”
“Don’t say things like that.”
“No, I just thought you did it as a way of paying your respects.”
They arrived. In the distance, on the ocean side a splotch of threatening rain was lurking; but above Polloe the sun was still shining. On the asphalt path the dry stains got bigger. Joxian stared ahead, serious, inhibited?, at the headstone with its simple cross and the four names lined up in a vertical row. He didn’t know who the dead were, though judging by the death dates (there was one from 1963) and the shared last name, except in one case, he concluded that they must be old relatives. On the lower part was the name of his friend. Not his nickname.
“Here he is. He’s been waiting for many years to be moved to the village cemetery. We haven’t done it yet to avoid happening to him what happened to Gregorio Ordóñez, who’s buried farther down. If you want, I’ll show you later. There was a time when they painted offensive graffiti on his tombstone. You must have read about it in the papers. The abertzales show no mercy, not even to the dead.”
Joxian, looking down, keeps silent. Is he meditating, praying? Suddenly he fixed his eyes on his friend’s name, on the date of his death. His death on the corner. The corner between the house and the garage where he kept his car and his bicycle. And after the date, Txato’s age on the rainy afternoon of the shots.
Bittori never stopped talking.
“I told you yesterday that your son has sent me letters. Listen, it made me really happy when he told me he wasn’t the one who did the shooting.”
Joxian does not open his mouth. Out of that man wafted a timid, pensive silence; a silence that moved from outside to within him, from then to now, in contrast to Bittori’s insistence, which ruined the intimacy of the moment.
“Aren’t you going to say to him what you said to me in the garden? I thought that was why you came.”
Now, at last, he moves. How? He turns his face to Bittori. Stupefied; his glassy eyes, where a kind of faded supplication condenses: a leave-me-in-peace, a why-don’t-you-respect.
“Would you leave me alone, please? A minute.”
He saw her slowly walk away along the road the two of them had climbed a bit before. Until he was certain Bittori was at a distance from which it would be impossible for her to study his features, hear his whispers, he did not look back at the grave.
She stopped about thirty steps away, between two large mausoleums. Standing still on the road, her hand on her visor to protect her eyes from the sun’s rays, she observed Joxian standing before her husband’s grave, the strange and slightly comic figure of the poor man in the row of slates and headstones and crosses with his brightly colored bicycling gear and his bicycle, which he pampers in the same way Txato pampered his.
And she saw him place the bouquet on the stones. Where could he have gotten it? Could he have brought it from the village? I don’t think he would have risked having his wife find out. Joxian, his helmet in his hands, made the sign of the cross. And if he said something, she couldn’t hear it; but just the mere fact that he came to the cemetery as he’d promised the previous afternoon in the shed in the garden gave Bittori a profound satisfaction.
Then, abruptly, Joxian began walking toward her, pushing the bicycle with both hands. He’d finished, how quickly, the visit to the man who was his friend, his best friend. Joxian reached Bittori. Without stopping, in a hasty voice, with phony naturalness:
“Well, I’m off.”
“It did me a world of good that you came.”
Joxian didn’t respond to that. Why this sudden haste? Why this brusque way of taking off? Bittori soon got her answer. Joxian managed to take four steps when his first sob came. He walked more quickly. He was going toward the exit with his bicycle, his face lowered, and a visible tremor in his shoulders.
114
A PANE OF GLASS BETWEEN
Just before Joxe Mari was transferred from the Picassent prison to the Albolote penitentiary—because of a serious incident involving a prison guard—he finally received a visit from his brother.
He would complain to his mother. What’s going on with Gorka, why doesn’t he come, I’d really like to see him. Miren would say he didn’t visit them, either, and look how close he is, and that neither she nor Joxian knows what’s going on with that boy, who seems to be hiding from us.
Miren tried to convince him on one of the rare times they spoke over the telephone. How did she try? Well, in her usual way, by picking a fight accompanied by a hailstorm of reproaches, and of course she made things worse. Months went by before they heard anything about him.
Arantxa interceded during one of Gorka’s secret visits to her Rentería apartment. She had met with Joxe Mari on one occasion. No more, because Guillermo absolutely forbade it, just as he’d forbidden Arantxa to bring their children to meet their terrorist uncle, that’s all I need.
Arantxa’s request, reasonable, from sister to brother, devoid of acrimony, moderate as a plea, did not convince Gorka.
“We’ll see.”
When he says we’ll see he really means no. Nevertheless, his sister’s words left him uncertain. More than that: possessed by an uncomfortable inner whisper. Remorse? Probably. So to purge himself of this annoyance he explained the situation to Ramuntxo, and what would you do, and he decided for him. Meaning, that he should set up a visit to his brother as soon as possible. Which is what Gorka did, but not really desiring it, and the next month, the three of them went to Picassent: Ramuntxo at the wheel, Amaia at his side, bribed with a paternal promise tha
t they’d go shopping in Valencia, and in the backseat, Gorka, alone, depressed, regretting after the first mile he’d ever embarked on this trip.
“How would you describe your relationship with your brother?”
“I’d say nonexistent.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“Are you trying to interview me?”
“I’m interested for your sake. Are you afraid of him or not?”
“Before I was. Now I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in a long time.”
“You don’t like us to talk about these things?”
“They pain me and you know it. Which is why I don’t understand why you want to sour the day for me.”
“I’m sorry. End of interview. Dear public, a few words from our sponsor and we’ll be right back with other subjects.”
Gorka said goodbye to Ramuntxo and Amaia in the prison parking lot. Tall, ungainly, joyless, he entered the building. As if he were a steer at the gates to the slaughterhouse. After passing through the standard security check, he was assigned a visiting room. A narrow box, an uncomfortable hard-plastic chair, suffocating heat, a lot of filth, especially on the glass, and on the left and on the right all those people talking at the top of their lungs, mouths close to the microphones, God knows what bacteria bred there.
He saw his brother before his brother saw him. He was struck by his loss of mass and especially of hair. He couldn’t keep from staring at his brother’s hands, the hands of a handball player who was powerful, strong, the brother he admired and feared so much as a child, hands later transformed into instruments for taking the lives of human beings, how many?, only he could know, and for a moment he felt a slight chill and a poignant, sad happiness for not being his brother or being where he was.
Joxe Mari must have noticed something on his brother’s face before he sat down, something that wiped out the smile on his own face. For a few seconds, they stared at each other, serious, scrutinizing, separated by the pane of glass. And it was Joxe Mari who spoke first.
“As you see, I can’t give you a hug.”
“Don’t worry.”
“I was dying to see you, brother.”
“Well, here I am.”
“I feel you’re cold. Aren’t you happy to see me?”
“Of course I’m happy, but I’d have preferred seeing you somewhere else.”
“Of course, asshole, me too.”
He might have spared Gorka the asshole part. That was aimed at the old Gorka, the skinny, withdrawn teenager. Talking down, the voice of the bully. Gorka didn’t like it and he pulled back, openly distancing himself from the microphone, which was like telling his brother in so many words: cut it out, I’m not your subordinate in the cell. And there was nothing at all in Joxe Mari that didn’t produce an intimate, living repulsion in him. Aside from the fact that the place stank. Don’t they ever ventilate it? Pity? None. His eyes, perhaps the part of him that’s changed least in all these years, were the eyes that had looked at his victims before he executed them. And his bald forehead was that of a murderer, above the eyebrows of a murderer, the nose of a murderer, the mouth (teeth in bad shape) of a murderer. I’m thinking these things, but it wouldn’t be right to say them and I wouldn’t dare.
They exchanged superficial details of their respective private lives. Two strangers pretending to have intimacy. It was useless to try to converse as they did when they shared a bedroom in their parents’ house. Gorka protected himself, making up questions so he wouldn’t have to talk about himself. The forty minutes he’d spend in that rattrap would seem like eternity.
There’s no doubt that Joxe Mari is also beginning to feel disgusted. How so? It’s that no affection, or understanding was coming from the other side of the glass. Much less a smile. What’s going on? He was trying to read in the depths of his brother’s eyes and what he saw in them he did not like. He was not fond of sentimentality. He suddenly hardened his expression.
“In your heart you condemn my militancy, right? And you have contempt for it.”
Gorka wasn’t expecting that. He was on guard.
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s easy to see that the aitas pressured you to visit me. You can’t fool me.”
“I came on my own.”
“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not keeping you here, especially if you plan to make my situation worse. Or do you think I don’t get it?”
“I didn’t make such a long trip to make anything worse. And I didn’t come here to play the part of your little brother. And of course I don’t approve of the things you did that got you here. I never did.”
“So you’re the kind who thinks I deserve to be here?”
“That’s a question you’d have to ask your victims.”
“I’ve taken a lot of hits since I was arrested. None hurt me as much as what you’re saying. My own brother, Jesus!”
“It’s because I’m your brother that I’m telling you what I think. Would you rather I lie, that I congratulate you for the pain you’ve caused to God knows how many families? And what for?”
“To save my people.”
“By spilling the blood of others? That’s beautiful.”
“By spilling the blood of our oppressors who smash us every day and don’t let us be free.”
“That also goes for the children you’ve killed?”
“If it weren’t for this glass, I’d explain it to you in a way you’d really understand.”
“You’re threatening me?”
“Looks like it.”
“If you like, you can shoot me. You’ve killed others for less in the name of a people you never consulted about it.”
“Let’s just forget about it. I can see we’re not going to understand each other.”
“You started it.”
“Some of us heard the call of the homeland. Others dedicate themselves to leading a comfortable life and having a good time. I suppose it’s always been like that. Some sacrifice themselves, others take advantage.”
“Who has a comfortable life?”
“Well, not me, that’s for sure.”
“I do radio programs in Basque, I write books in Basque, I help our culture. That’s my way of contributing something to our people, but something constructive, without leaving a ton of orphans and widows in my wake.”
“You’re a great talker. You can see you work in radio. And things are going fine for you, right?”
“I’m not complaining.”
“I was told you’re living with a man. And you condemn what I’ve done. You were always a little odd, but I never imagined you’d go that far.”
Gorka, mute, his features paralyzed, his face burning with sudden anger. And his brother with a sarcastic, scolding expression on his face:
“Ama thinks you’re ashamed of us. I can tell you that I’m the one who’s ashamed of having a faggot for a brother who doesn’t give a shit if he drags our name through the mud. That’s why you never go to the village, right?”
“Who told you I live with a man?”
“What difference does it make? Or do you think that just because I’m in a Spanish extermination prison information doesn’t get to me?”
“I live with someone who loves me and whom I love. I imagine that for you it’s as if I were talking in Chinese. What can a gangster understand about love?”
Gorka said that last bit as he stood up, angrily shoving the chair. He brought his mouth one last time to the microphone, but he thought better of it and swallowed the words that rose in his throat. He turned on his heel, and as he was about to leave that hot and filthy and fetid shithole of a room, he heard behind him Joxe Mari’s words, begging him with a novel, in him never-seen-before humility, to come back, don’t go off now, because we have to have a t—”
On the trip back to Bilbao,
a long trip, a red-and-yellow summer afternoon, Amaia asleep on her seat, Ramuntxo asked him how the meeting had gone and if he was thinking of coming back another time.
“We’ll see.”
That was all he said. Then he fell asleep or pretended he was sleeping.
115
MASSAGE SESSION
Ramuntxo agreed to stretch out on the massage table as Gorka insisted he do; but that wasn’t going to change anything because massage or no massage he was certain he was going to kill himself. What was the problem? Well, his ex, that scheming slut, that snake whose principal obsession in life was injecting him with her mortal venom, had finally done it.
It had been four weeks since Ramuntxo had driven to Vitoria to pick up Amaia. The child was sixteen at the time. Gorka: not a good age to be spending a weekend in her father’s company, no matter how many gifts he buys her, no matter how many of her whims he satisfies. The girl had gotten fat. But more than obesity, it was acne, bad luck that, that made her ugly. Her character had soured. She practiced an aggressive variation on unhappiness.
Gorka tried to stay on the sidelines; but from time to time the pity Ramuntxo inspired in him made it impossible and he stepped in.
“Don’t you realize she tyrannizes you?”
“Of course I realize it. What do you want me to do?”
Every other weekend, Ramuntxo drove his daughter to Bilbao and brought her back on Sunday afternoon. At the usual hour, he rang the buzzer. No one buzzed him in. He passed the time in a nearby bar. He went back. More buzzer pushing. From the street, there was no light visible in the flat. And he didn’t find the scheming slut’s car in the neighborhood. He took advantage when a neighbor left the entryway to go in and go up to his ex’s apartment. The doormat, how odd, wasn’t there. Ramuntxo rang her bell, pounded on the door. Bam, bam, bam, nothing. It wasn’t the first time something like this took place. Nerves, curses, insults against the evil female who’s spent years sabotaging the father-daughter relationship.
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