by Lucy Wadham
The whisky was still burning the walls of Astrid’s mouth. She had stood at the end of the platform watching Lola’s train leave, watching the beautiful undulation of its flank, the orange sunlight on the windows blinking on and off, and listening to the echoing clatter even after it had disappeared from view. She stood there a moment, aware that it had taken with it something vital of herself, and then she turned and walked her zombie remains back along the platform and up the escalator to the bar on the upper floor. She had sat down at a table in the corner and drank two whiskies, one after the other, mechanically raising the glass to her lips and closing her eyes to the bitterness. When it was time to leave, she caught a bus from Montparnasse to Saint Germain, gripping so tightly to the vertical bar that she could hardly uncurl her fingers. It was only when she came through the revolving doors into the bright light of the brasserie and let André help her out of her raincoat, that she felt like crying.
The whisky had deposited its light moss onto all her senses. As she sat waiting for Chastel, she allowed herself to think of Mikel crossing La Mancha in a truck, his dark eyes wide in the fading light of that vast, empty plain. He would be trying to discover if the change that had come about in the world since he went inside was discernible in the landscape.
A flurry preceded all Chastel’s comings and goings. His bearing commanded attention. André, as usual, fawned; the cigarette girl hovered, smiling coyly, and a new waiter was arrested for a moment in his progress to the kitchens by the sight of him. Even Astrid found herself rearranging her hands on the table. Chastel sat down beside her, took her hands and pressed his lips to them.
How are you?
Fine, she answered.
Hungry?
Not very.
I’m starving.
Astrid smiled. Chastel’s appetite was a point of honour to him.
Let’s order, he said. He nodded at André who started towards their table. Did you have any luck with the anti-coagulant?
No. I’ll have to do it tomorrow. Lola needed me.
Not another abortion I hope.
Astrid ignored this, turning her gaze to André, who was there, at their table, standing to attention.
As usual, Chastel ordered gigot and purée. There seemed to be a pact between the two men to behave always in the same way. André asked the professor what he wanted, though he knew because it never varied, and the professor never looked at him when he gave his order.
And for Madame?
Brandade please.
We’ll be in among some decent laundry, Chastel said as André slid away. Malinski and Karl will be there.
Karl?
Karl Bopp, said Chastel. He says he has something new on prions.
He was talking about the conference.
Chastel liked to sit side by side in restaurants. He liked to hold her hand in her lap. I don’t need to sit opposite you, he had told her years ago. It’s distracting. Generally, Chastel did not like to face Astrid. His favourite position for making love was on his side with Astrid’s back to him. Again, he could look without being seen. This suited Astrid, who had never been able to look into her lover’s face anyway.
Chastel took her hand.
Are you alright? You seem distracted.
I feel a bit strange. I put Lola on the train home. Mikel got out today.
Good God. How terrifying.
She asked me to go with her.
She would.
I nearly did.
Come now.
It’s true. I nearly went. This evening when I put her on the train I wanted to jump up after her.
What on earth for? You hated being there the last time.
I don’t know.
Careful Astrid. You remember the tone of that lunatic’s letter. You don’t want to let those people pull you into their lives.
Astrid smiled. She had told Chastel about Mikel’s first letter. The second letter she had kept to herself.
Astrid,
Do you remember when we first met? Lola brought me to meet you. It was a warm evening in June and you were watching Reál Madrid, Atlético Bilbao on the TV. The windows were open onto the street and people had pulled their chairs up to watch as your mother was the first in the village to have a TV. You were sitting cross-legged on the floor. Your sister said, this is Astrid, the brainbox. You had a bottle of beer in your hand and you glanced at me and raised it briefly. A brainbox who likes football, I said. You smiled but did not look at me again and I remember thinking, Look at me. Please look at me, but you went on watching the match. I see now what struck me about you. It was as if you needed no one.
Can we work tonight? Chastel asked. Or are you too tired?
No no. Let’s work.
André brought Chastel’s gigot and a side order of purée. He set about eating with the same precision and elegance and purpose with which he performed surgery. She stared at the elaborate fork patterns on the golden surface of her brandade, smelt the garlic and felt her appetite close down as fast as if she were in the morgue.
What do you think of Henri’s paper?
I think it’s brave.
Brave. Chastel went on eating. Why brave?
Because he’s saying after all these years that he might have got it wrong.
Astrid could see from the way Chastel was slapping his purée with the back of his fork that he resented her praise of his former teacher.
It’s easy for him to spit in the soup now he’s retired. What is it? Aren’t you hungry?
I feel a little sick.
She leaned back.
Chastel put down his fork and turned to face her.
She looked sideways at him, hardly moving her head, breathing shallowly, her face damp with sweat.
Chastel wiped his mouth with his napkin, put it on the table beside his plate and gently took her hand to read her pulse. His bedside manner was reverent.
I’ll take you home, he said.
Chastel’s car smelt of leather and his wife’s perfume, which as far as Astrid knew had not changed in the ten years she had been his mistress. Laetitia Chastel was a woman of habit and of boundaries. She required of Astrid that she stay within a prescribed area. Only with time had Astrid learned where this lay. She could go with Chastel to Brasserie Lipp but not to the theatre. She could attend dinner parties at Professor Jean Daudet’s but not at Dr and Mrs Patrick Berberian’s. She could call him at home in the week but not at the weekends. And she could kiss Laetitia in public but never in private.
Frankly, I think Henri is behaving badly, Chastel was saying. Astrid looked out of the window at the Place de la Concorde lit up like a Russian ballroom. It’s this new moral superiority that gets me. It’s egomania and it’s bad form. Like an old spy writing his memoirs. I think we should nail him at this conference. We’ll do some work, study the statistics. What do you think?
Astrid was still feeling nauseous. She rested her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes.
I agree, she murmured.
There behind her eyes is Mikel. He is young again. She is at a clandestine press conference being held in the hills behind her village. A black balaclava hides his face but she can see his eyes, which slant downwards a little at the corners and give him a gentle look. Journalists from all over Spain are gathered to hear him. He is a hero, an anonymous hero, a man of glory. He leans forward and speaks into a microphone. He quotes Carlos Marighella:
To be a terrorist today is a condition that ennobles any man of honour, for it signifies precisely that attitude worthy of the revolutionary who takes up arms against the shameful military dictatorship in all its monstrousness …
Astrid stands up to address the triumvirate of masked men behind the microphones. The world they speak of has disappeared, she tells them. No one wants glory any more, or freedom for that matter. No one believes in them. The people who join up today are not monks or warriors. They’re outlaws, people fighting to live against the current. You are too old to be an outlaw,
Mikel. You cannot survive on your wits any more. You have become slow. You are forty-three, your joints ache and you cannot run.
EIGHT
Lola rested her forehead against the cold glass. She could see her own reflection against the flat expanse of the Beauce that seemed not to flash past but to rotate slowly beside the train. She thought of the poor souls who lived beneath the weight of that enormous sky, now hatched with red. Their horizon gave them no opportunity for speculation, let alone dreaming. Lola closed her eyes and smiled.
I catch myself smiling like an idiot in the street at the thought of you, she had once written to Mikel. I have decided that it would be a mistake to learn to drive. I would be a danger to myself and to others. Whenever I think of you I close my eyes. Behind the wheel I’d go sailing into the car in front.
In the seat beside her a man had his table down and was cutting out newspaper articles. The man had long, thick sideburns and in his lap was a leather handbag that smelt strongly of goat. Lola felt a wave of tenderness towards him and towards the rest of the people in the compartment. He must have sensed it for he turned and smiled at her. She smiled back and returned to her reflection.
The Beauce was not unlike the landscape around Astrid’s prison: the flat plain tied up with high-tension cables, the occasional concession to forest in a geometric plantation of pine trees. Every week Lola had taken the bus from Donostia to Madrid and then another bus to Henares where she would pick up one of the green vans run by the penitentiary. There was no talking in the van and Lola would sit with the other visitors, each hemmed in by the peculiar shame of having a loved one in prison. Boyfriends and husbands sat arms folded and faces closed. The men, she noticed, sat rigid while the women, the mothers and sisters clutching their shopping bags full of food, cigarettes and magazines, let their bodies sway slackly with the movement of the bus.
Lola still went on marches calling for the regrouping of Basque prisoners. The authorities scattered them all over Spain, making it expensive for their relatives to visit them. She still received literature from the party and flyers put out by the youth movement to which she had once belonged. Astrid would not march and she would not read the literature. She would have nothing to do with anything related to Basque nationalism. Lola had once asked her to accompany her on a trip to demonstrate outside Mikel’s prison and she had refused.
Why won’t you do anything to help him?
He’s paying, Lola. Everyone has to pay for what they do.
Lola was watching her pour the warm milk into the egg yolks for flan.
You paid and you’d done nothing.
Astrid stirred in the vanilla sugar.
I paid, she said. It wasn’t much.
God, Astrid. Sometimes I think you’re mad. You got put in prison for something you didn’t do.
It wasn’t that bad. I would never have got away if it hadn’t been for prison. I’d be a family doctor in San Sebastian.
Astrid thought she was better off in Paris but Lola worried that if she left Paris Astrid would have no one. And she would leave Paris. Mikel, she knew, would never agree to live outside Euskadi.
I cannot say how I will be when I get out. I have changed, Lolita. I am not the man you fell in love with. I no longer like myself, for one. Your hero has lost the self-love that made him a hero. Perhaps this is what was meant by the word honour. It is an old-fashioned word but that is what I had and have lost. I believe it is something that cannot be retrieved.
Prison mail was slow. It had been months before Mikel received her reply. It had been the beginning of a new phase between them.
Mikel. You’ve forgotten who I am. I’m a woman now. I’m not a child. I don’t need a hero. I need a man and I’ve chosen you. Everything I do, I do for you. I dance for you and sing for you, I wash and dress for you. I even fuck for you.
On her next visit Lola had found him changed for the better. He met her with his sad smile and held her face in his hands.
Yes, he had said. You’re a woman. You’re a woman who must make love. You would become ill if you didn’t.
He had kissed her as he had not kissed her in years. When she left him, her mouth was red and sore.
*
At just before midnight Lola was on the new train from Hendaye to Donostia. The train was brightly lit with lavender neon. She sat alone in the carriage while Spanish pop music played loudly from the speakers. When the train crossed the border, she could feel the change in her that never failed to occur. It was as though she had been wrapped in an invisible cloak that impaired her movements and made her weak.
In Irún a young couple boarded. He was very drunk. She supported him as they made their way to the far end of the carriage. They dropped into a double seat facing her and began to kiss voraciously. She remembered kissing like that, her tongue turning relentlessly in Mikel’s mouth. She remembered feeling drunk on Mikel’s spit or perhaps dizzy from the apnoea, for she had never liked breathing through the nose. It could make her panic and trigger an asthma attack. The girl was pierced through the bridge of her nose and all along her earlobes. The boy creaked in his leather jacket. Both had long, dark, unwashed hair.
The journey took her through Renteria, the suburb where Mikel grew up. After his father died, his mother had moved into town to inherit her parents’ joke shop but Mikel had never taken to Donostia and all his friends were from Renteria. Lola looked out at the same red-brick tower blocks, still spilling laundry, only now there seemed to be more of them and more tightly packed. (The speed with which housing blocks went up in this country was astonishing, and the speed with which they fell apart.) She looked down onto a group of kids playing football in a floodlit playground. When she had met Mikel there had been scrubland between the flats, patches of no man’s land inhospitable enough to adults to serve as a sanctuary to the children. She remembered sitting there on a grassy hillock with him, watching a group of kids play rugby.
These kids will all feed the organisation, he had told her. Erakundea, he had called it. One way or another, their anger will serve us.
She and Astrid came from the hills. Their beautiful village, with its vast pelota court whipped by the west wind, had fed the organisation since it began and had provided many of its leaders. Unlike Astrid, Lola had always been proud of her roots. No one had ever bothered her about the fact that only her father was Basque. The other kids felt sorry for her, not because her mother was English but because she was a drunk.
When Lola came out of the station, she felt one of those hot breezes, laden with the smell of refuse that seemed to rise only on this side of the border. She could feel -everything acting upon her, effecting the change, that pulled her back to her past self: the outdated graphics, the road signs, the dustbins, their shape and colour. And the brown: why so much brown everywhere? Surely the prevalence of brown was something worth fighting against. For brown was definitely the colour of Francoism and it was still everywhere. In this part of town, at least, nothing had changed since Franco: the hat shops, the umbrella shops, the toy shops, the glove shops and the numerous marble-floored patisseries, frequented by armies of smart, fat ladies dressed in beige and brown and teetering on tiny high-heeled shoes.
She passed a café she remembered. It had always been full of Guardia Civil. Inside, a group of men stood at the bar in a sea of cigarette butts. She slowed to look at the faces. One of them looked straight at her. He was sallow with thick jowls and piscine features. He dropped his cigarette and stamped on it. Her heart jumped and she hurried on. But he was not Guardia Civil because she could have taken a clear shot from the door. They always made sure they faced the door, backs to the wall. She told herself to look at this town anew. It had been ten years. There was an autonomous government with its own police force. It was no longer occupied territory.
She lifted her face towards the bay. Even from this distance she could smell the sea. Ahead was the red neon sign of the Hotel Londres. The curling letters had always made her think of luxury and s
he longed to spend a night with Mikel in one of the rooms with balconies overlooking the bay. Nothing, of course, would make Mikel set foot in a place like that. Once, many years ago, she had had a drink in the bar by herself. The barman had given her a lighter with the hotel’s emblem on it. She had thrown it away like an incriminating object.
She was ashamed of her love of luxury. Even now she was ashamed of her desire to go to that hotel and take a room just to bathe and wash her hair and blow-dry it properly and shave her legs. Mikel disliked all artifice and she believed he sniffed it out in her. This was one of the things that made her cleave to him. She believed he had the ability to see through to her essential self. No one else had ever given her this impression.
She hurried past the hotel and out into the wide promenade that lined the bay. The warm wind from the sea made her eyes water. She looked at the blurred lights of the Santander ferry on the horizon where the black water met the thinner darkness of the sky. The wind moved in the soft branches of the tamarisks and in their strange, hollowed trunks. A group of small boys ran across her path and down the steps to the beach. She admired the Spanish habit of letting the children play at night. She watched them chase each other, drawing illegible patterns with their footprints in the smooth, flat sand. She offered a wish then: a little boy. She wanted their first child to be a boy.
When she entered the narrow streets of the old quarter, Lola was finding it hard to breathe. She scrambled for her inhaler in the bottom of her bag but it did not help. It was the place that was oppressing her, assailing her with its own memories. She hurried on, averting her eyes from the now meaningless graffiti, from the posters – filled with new faces, new prisoners that she did not care about – hanging in shreds from the walls. She turned away from the bars open to the street and the faces, the sea of Basque faces. At his mother’s joke shop she stopped, fighting for breath, and put down her bag. The coat of blue paint, the last Mikel had put on, was now peeling. The lettering, of course, was brown: Bromas y Regalos. She walked past the shuttered facade to the side door and rang the ground-floor bell. Mikel’s mother opened the door. She was wearing a candy-floss pink dressing gown. Hungrily, she searched Lola’s face. Then she burst into tears.
