“Bai,” I heard Robert Duarte say, and it matched the whisper rising up from under the scar at my side. Bai.
17. IKER
It’s worth saying that our group—Daniel, Asier, and I—never had a formal connection with the actual ETA, no matter what the papers later wrote. The men and women we saw on television who held press conferences wearing black hoods—these weren’t the people we were organizing our raids with. We’d moved our meetings to a couple of bars in town that sympathized with the cause; by now we had gained notoriety in Muriga and even in some of the neighboring towns. And though we had never met with the actual “terrorists,” we didn’t do anything to dispel our schoolmates’ perception that we took orders from them. We never said so, but we all hoped to gain the attention of these higher-ups—the real etarras who we’d seen so many times on the news.
“I’d tell them that they’ve become too cautious,” Asier said one afternoon while we swam in the bay. He said this during a calm in the heavy, breaking waves, before sliding headfirst into the water. He swam so far down that the white bottoms of his feet disappeared. When he came back up he spit a mouthful of seawater in my direction, something he knew pissed me off.
“I’d tell Ibon Gogeaskoetxea that this can be a protest that lasts another fifty years without change, or it can be a war that gets real results,” he continued. “And quickly.”
“I’d ask Jiménez if he knows where Francisco Irastara and Marcos Sagarzazu escaped to,” I said.
We fantasized about these meetings the way other seventeen-year-olds might imagine a conversation with their favorite footballers. Their cause was our cause, and the cause of our parents and our grandparents. Even if Muriga hadn’t decided on the future of the Basque Country, we all knew we had suffered and been persecuted for the past two generations. As Ramón Luna used to say, Muriga had been built on the bones of the Basque cause since the Civil War.
But we didn’t talk about the future, at least not in any real sense. It was becoming clear that Asier was expected to follow his father into finance, and by then I had started to think seriously about studying literature at the university, but we never discussed these long-term plans out loud. We daydreamed, instead, about advancing in the ranks of the movement. For me, it was always pure fantasy, though for Asier I suspect it was something more. The closest we came to meeting an actual ETA member was when Gorka Auzmendi arrived in Muriga in the summer of 1996.
* * *
BY THAT time, Asier and I had taken Ramón’s place as the head of our group because we had thrown the most rocks, been hit with the most rubber bullets, and messed around with more girls than any of the other ten or so kids who we met up with regularly. We abandoned Ramón’s rambling history lessons, and now Asier made a short political speech at the beginning of each of our meetings. These little speeches seemed to add some legitimacy, to allow me to say “meeting” rather than “fucking around.” But I’d find Asier outside the bar before our meetings, smoking a cigarette and looking over a page of notes that he’d brought along. When Gorka Auzmendi arrived, unannounced and alone, to one of these meetings at the Bar Txapela, Asier and I instantly handed over whatever small leadership roles we had gained.
If Ramón Luna had been Muriga’s discount version of Ché Guevara, Gorka Auzmendi was Ché. He was tall and athletic, and if he hadn’t been an intermediary for ETA-militar, the military branch of the ETA that was responsible for the bombings and assassinations that made the headlines, then he might have played center halfback for Athletic Bilbao. I had seen him speak at a couple of university rallies in Getxo and Hernani; he was a confident and articulate speaker who seemed more moderate in his arguments than many of the others that had taken the stage. His brother Xabi had been arrested and convicted for an attempted car bombing in Madrid five years earlier, and when Gorka arrived at the Txapela he was wearing a T-shirt with Xabi’s image printed across the chest.
“Gorka.” I found myself calling him by his first name. “It’s an honor to have you here with us in Muriga.” I was suddenly speaking so formally, as if I were introducing him to receive a prize. “I’m Iker and this is Asier—”
“Sure,” he said. He was smiling, seemingly amused by the entire scene. “The group in Bermeo tells me that Asier rolls the best porros around. Is that true?”
Asier pulled a joint from behind an ear and offered it up. Gorka lit it with a blue lighter he’d already taken from his pocket. The room had gone silent, and we watched Gorka take a couple drags, then offer it to me. Finally it was Daniel who spoke up.
“So why are you here?” he said. I think he meant to sound strong and assertive, but it came out more like an accusation. Even Daniel looked surprised. Auzmendi didn’t take any offense, though; instead he held his hand out to Daniel, asking for the porro back like they were old friends.
“I was visiting my aunt in Bermeo, so I was in the area,” he said. “But in fact, I keep reading in the newspapers about the shit happening in the streets around here. I talked to some comrades—a word Asier and I put into our rotation after Auzmendi’s visit—in Bermeo, and they said I’d find you at this bar.”
This was enough of an explanation for us, and most of our friends’ attention returned to their drinks, to the sandwiches on the table, to gossip about who was going to try to sleep with who when we traveled to Deba the next weekend.
Asier and Daniel pulled their seats closer to Gorka to hear him over the racket of the bar; I lingered between the groups for a moment before Asier caught my eye and nodded me over. The purpose of his visit, Gorka said, was to get to know people behind the movement in the smaller towns. He told us that although he himself was not directly involved with the ETA-militar, he certainly knew people who were looking to recruit comrades for the Jarrai, the nationalist youth groups in cities like Mondragón or Gasteiz. He told us he’d be speaking at a protest the following afternoon in Bilbao, at the campus of the University of the Basque Country, and invited us to join him and his friends after the demonstration.
Asier was already nodding his head, telling him that we’d be there, that there was no way we’d miss it. With that, Gorka lifted his beer and drained what was left in his glass, then stood to leave.
“This is something,” Asier said while we watched Auzmendi’s broad shoulders go out the door of the Txapela. “They’re starting to hear about us. I’m telling you, Iker, this is really something.”
“We can’t go tomorrow,” I said. “We have a test in calculus. And in composition.”
“A test?” Asier said, almost laughing. He waved his hand, brown smoke trailing from his fingertips. “Do what you want, Iker. I’m going to Bilbao.”
18. JONI
As soon as Duarte and I arrived at the pelota match the following afternoon, Irujo ordered us a round of whiskeys on ice before dragging Robert away, leaving me to pay. The fronton, which predates Franco’s invasion of Muriga in 1937 by a hundred years, is tucked into an alley behind the Plaza de los Fueros, and on the days between matches the small door looks as if it might belong to a closed bakery or a moldy storage cellar. But on the days of the pelota matches, one passes through the door and enters a vast room, empty except for the small rows of concrete stands lining the right-hand wall. The pelota court itself is what gives the room its vastness, a smooth concrete floor fifty meters by ten meters, with two looming walls that reach up ten meters.
As I entered the room with Robert Duarte I found myself remembering my first time there, with the butcher Aitor Arostegui’s sister. We had been living together openly for two months, one of Muriga’s great scandals in that wonderful year of 1949.
Wonderful for me, anyway. By all other accounts, it had been a difficult year in Muriga; people barely had money for food and clothes, and several of the town’s men who were in their teens and twenties struck out for the United States and South America to try their luck as sheepherders or cattlemen. A prominent bertsolari had been arrested for performing one of his improvisational poems
in Euskera at his father’s funeral, and the Guardia Civil had set up roadblocks on either side of the town, where people coming to and from Muriga would be searched for arms or propaganda. Both her brothers had threatened me, and her mother refused to make eye contact when we passed on the street, but we were untouched by the outside world, lost in the cocoon of new love.
When we crossed through the large stone doorway into the fronton, I had realized she was the only woman present; several of the men in the stands had begun to shake their heads or to make a clicking sound with their tongues. I learned later that three of these men were Nerea’s uncles. Can I begin to call her Nerea now? If I’ve avoided her name this far, it’s only for my own safety. But it’s beyond the point of ridiculousness. Nerea, Nerea, Nerea.
* * *
WHEN I left the fronton three hours later with Robert Duarte—the Euskaldun, as Etxeberria and Irujo had called him all afternoon—I was drunk and it was raining.
“You’re joining us for dinner, aren’t you?” Robert asked. “Morgan is expecting both of us.”
“I’m not sure,” I said, though the idea of Morgan Duarte serving a warm meal was much more appealing than returning to my empty flat to walk Rimbaud and reheat the soup I’d made three days earlier. It’s times like these when I realize I’ve adopted too many of Muriga’s mannerisms, to turn down an offer at least once before accepting.
“She’s trying to roast a chicken—I’m not guaranteeing it’ll be the best meal you’ve ever had, but she’ll be disappointed if you don’t come.”
“Sure,” I said. I was drunk and happy now in the rain, and company sounded good. “As long as we can stop in Martín’s shop so that I can pick up a bottle of wine or two.”
Morgan Duarte had been expecting us to arrive drunk, it seemed. When she opened the door, it was obvious that she had been drinking as well. She greeted us with a water glass half-full of white wine, and by the time we had shaken off our umbrellas and removed our wet shoes, the glass was empty. We joined her in the kitchen, the counters covered with carrot greens and grains of dry white rice and a compact disc player that played an American song I’d never heard before, as well as the empty wine bottle standing next to a corkscrew and two spent corks.
Behind her, in the living room looking out toward the harbor, the walls were broken up by large sheets of drawing paper filled with charcoal landscapes and portraits. I recognized a face or two—Gotzone Urueta, Pantxo Ortiz de Urbina—sketched out in a minimalist style, dark lines making economic use of the negative space. A coffee table was barely visible under several open notepads, stacks of books on the legacy of Spain in the twentieth century and the Basque independence movement. I wondered vaguely why he would be so interested in the Nationalists, before reminding myself of the obvious appeal this history would have to a young American like Duarte. The romantic appeal of armed struggle for someone who’d never seen it up close before.
“It smells wonderful in here, txakur txiki,” Robert said, a hint of surprise in his voice. Morgan swung her arms up to grasp him behind the neck, to pull his bearded face down so that she could press her lips to the scar just below his nose.
“I love it when he calls me that,” Morgan said, turning to me. “It’s Basque for ‘my little dog.’”
* * *
AS ROBERT had warned, the chicken had been left in the oven for too long and the rice was undercooked, so when there was a pause in the conversation it was most often to allow the parties a chance to chew. Robert and I continued to pour tall glasses of tempranillo throughout dinner, and by the time Robert put on a pot of coffee, Morgan’s chin was in her hand and her eyelids were beginning to waver.
“Tell me something, Joni,” Morgan said as her husband came back into the dining room. “You used to be married, right? That’s why—”
“Morgan,” Robert interrupted her. He now seemed entirely sober, as if he’d never been drunk at all.
“Did Juantxo warn you not to bring it up?” I said. “It’s all right. It was a long time ago. The truth is that I don’t talk about it much. People here are afraid to mention her to me, I think.”
It was silent for a moment, and I felt my head sway in the apartment’s heavy warmth, weighted down by the heat of the oven and the dark smell of the coffee brewing.
“Who was she?” Robert asked.
“Her name was Nerea. Do you know the butchers in Goiko Plaza, across from the Elizondo? The fat one with the red nose and the handsome one? Those are her brothers.”
Robert nodded. I could feel him watching me closely. His wife reached over the table and divided the last of the tempranillo evenly into our two glasses.
“Is that why you came to Muriga?” she asked, almost hopefully.
“It’s not why I came,” I said. “I came here to teach at San Jorge, because I was young and wanted to get away from my parents, and because I read too much Hemingway as a teenager. But I stayed because of her.”
Another silence.
“Juantxo told you what happened, I’m sure,” I said.
“Just that she died when she was very young,” Robert said.
He said it in a manner that was free of affect or emotion, so there was no way to tell exactly how much they had been told. I reached for the glass of wine on the table but instead of drinking from it just held it in my lap.
“It was a car accident,” I said. “It was 1955. God, we were practically children, when I think about it now.”
While Robert stood to retrieve the coffee, I placed my wineglass on the table. Morgan was poking absently at the silverware that was still on the table. Her jaw was sliding slightly back and forth, a nervous habit I hadn’t noticed before, and then I realized that she was about to cry.
“Does Robert ever teach you any Basque?” I asked her, trying to change the subject.
She shook her head.
“He should,” I said. “Have you heard the saying around here? That the best way to learn Basque is to look at a Basque ceiling?”
Her jaw stopped its strange movement, and she looked at me questioningly.
“It means that the best way to learn Basque is to sleep with a Basque,” I explained. “Lucky for you, you’re already married to one.”
She smiled, and I kept talking. I found that I enjoyed making Robert Duarte’s wife smile. And because I had been drinking, I spoke about the woman.
“She taught me a few words of Euskera, you know. Nerea did,” I said.
“Yeah?” Morgan said, brightening.
“Sure,” I said. “Eskerrik asko. That means ‘Thank you.’”
“Even I know that one,” she said. “And what else did she teach you?”
“Well,” I said, looking around the room. “Let’s see. ‘Table’ is mahaia.” I patted my hand on the table. “Mahaia. Try it.”
“Mahaia,” she said. Her small voice filled with delight at this new game. “Mahaia.”
“How about this?” she asked, holding up her empty wineglass.
“I’m not sure about that one,” I said. “We never got to that lesson. Euskaldun!” I called into the kitchen. Robert looked up from where he was carefully pouring hot milk into the three cups of espresso. “How do you say ‘wineglass’ in Euskera?”
“Edalontzia,” he said. He was smiling now, thankful that the conversation had veered away from Nerea.
“This is a fun game,” Morgan said, laughing. “How about this?” she said, holding up a wooden-handled knife. She pointed it toward my chest in a mock threat.
“Aiztoa,” I said, my heart dropping as I said the word.
“Aiztoa,” Morgan Duarte said. “Aiztoa.”
Suddenly I didn’t care for this game at all. “Bai. Aiztoa,” I said again, standing to leave.
19. MARIANA
“So what is the second form of infidelity?” Joni Garrett asked me.
I had spent the years after José Antonio’s death imagining what I would say if I ever spoke to the old man again, things that I hadn’t remember
ed to say when I cornered him at the rally. A laundry list of things carefully crafted to inflict the most damage, to cause the most pain. But now it felt good to simply chat again as we used to. The last of the crowd at the Beatriz Martínez wedding was still milling around half-empty bottles, still picking at their desserts; the dance floor was nearly empty. I took a breath, readying to tell him something I’d never revealed to anyone.
The second form of infidelity, I told him, is more disturbing. And not because of the physical activity itself (which might not even be as bad as the more “normal” infidelities) but because it isn’t a version of love at all. It’s something completely selfish.
“You’ve had one of these infidelities?” Joni asked. He was watching me carefully now. “The second kind?”
“Yes,” I told him. He handed me another Chesterfield and an orange lighter. “Yes, I think I have.”
* * *
IT WAS a Thursday—I remember this for several reasons. I remember that when the alarm went off, our apartment smelled of the pork soup that our neighbor Doña Maite still starts each Thursday morning. And José Antonio was packing his suitcase to leave for Bilbao, which always happened on a Thursday. In addition to knowing it was a Thursday, I can tell you it was also the second week of March 1998. Ten days later José Antonio’s body would be found washed up on the rocks below the old bunkers on Monte Zorroztu. Those are weeks you remember, whether you want to or not.
I had gone about my morning routine: first, coffee on the stovetop. Then I fed my new kidney a handful of antirejection medication. (By now, I had discovered that not only did my kidney tie his shoes differently, but he also loved membrillo and the smell of spilled wine mixed with garbage in the streets the day after a fiesta.) Next, I would change Elena and warm a bottle, and if the girl wasn’t fussing I would leave her with José Antonio and retreat to the bathroom to shower.
All That Followed: A Novel Page 8
