All That Followed: A Novel

by Urza, Gabriel

  Once the bathroom door was closed I would strip naked. After I had locked the door, I would angle the mirrors so that I could examine myself from all sides before showering. The affair with Robert Duarte had been going on for nearly three months, and I liked to remember the places where the American’s hands had been—from the knees up, there wasn’t a part of me that he had missed. On that particular Thursday morning José Antonio ironed his four dress shirts—always checked and with starched collars—folded them on the bed, and squared them into the black suitcase that we bought when we moved from Sevilla, hurrying to make the 9:08 train to Bilbao.

  (This scene always replays itself in slow motion, as if submerged in warm honey. I know that José Antonio will leave the apartment to board a train that will arrive, shortly, not at the San Mamés station in Bilbao but at the rocks below the bunkers on Zorroztu. It can be so easily averted—I only need to offer up a warning, an instruction to leave the train in Getxo, before it arrives back in Muriga. And yet each time I play it the routine remains the same. I don’t warn him. I don’t call the office in Bilbao, distracted as I am from thinking about the American’s hands.)

  While José Antonio finished packing the suitcase, pulling tight his dark-green tie, I lay back on the bed still wrapped in a damp bath towel, Elena now asleep (as was our habit after breakfast, before our morning walk) with her head tucked under my arm.

  “Do you have to lie there like that?” he suddenly asked, looking at me through the mirror. He said it in such a way that for a second I thought he was talking to himself.

  “Like what?” I finally said. I felt Elena move under my arm.

  “After the shower, on the bed with my daughter.”

  “What does it matter?” I asked.

  “First of all, your hair is getting the pillow wet,” he said. I was still trying to understand this tone. I couldn’t place it.

  “And secondly?” I asked. For all his talk of politics, of his plans to run for city council in Muriga, José Antonio had always been afraid of confrontation. In a way I liked this new José Antonio reflected at me in our mirror, as if a stranger had been living under our bed, in our closets for the last three years. I found myself trying to provoke him, trying to prod him out into the light of day. Instead, he only pulled again at his tie, then turned to zip closed the black suitcase.

  “Do you realize that you spend more days a week in Bilbao than you do with your daughter—with me—here in Muriga?” I hadn’t planned to say it; it wasn’t even a point I really wanted to make. In truth, I enjoyed the days when José Antonio was away considerably more than those when he was around, when we were forced to act like a family, when he felt obligated to take off his underpants (just the underpants, always leaving the shirt on) and to lie on top of me every Monday night after Elena had been put to bed.

  It occurred to me, of course, that he had found out about the American, that this was what had brought about his sudden aggression. But I didn’t care if he knew or not. I’d been less careful over the last month, leaving the American’s wineglass unwashed in the sink, a pair of my underwear pushed carelessly under the corner of the bedspread. He must suspect something, I thought, and I wanted to goad him into showing his hand. I wanted a reaction, a fight. Over the previous few days, as Elena and I waded through the small cold waves of the harbor, or while I tied braids through her thin brown curls, I had gone so far as to imagine telling José Antonio about Robert Duarte. Not just that something had occurred between us or that I had feelings for him, but in a way purposefully designed to cause the most harm, the most anger. Not a confession but an attack. That we had made love on the small bed in his daughter’s room that morning, and again the day before in the shower where José Antonio kept his razor. That the American said things to me—filthy things—in Basque, a language José Antonio couldn’t even understand.

  But when he stood up, it was the old José Antonio again. The José Antonio who had waited in the hallway as the sculptor grabbed at my breasts and pulled at my hair inside my apartment in Sevilla. He had the infuriatingly serene face of a martyr with his body riddled with arrows, still looking apologetically out at the world.

  “My time in Bilbao—is that what this is about?” he said, and I remember “this” meaning many things at once.

  “You should go,” I told him. “You’ll miss your train.”

  * * *

  “I DON’T understand,” Joni said. “So that’s your second infidelity?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s just the prologue, I guess,” I said.

  “We’ll need reinforcements, then,” the old man said, reaching for one of the half bottles of wine left on the next table.

  * * *

  AFTER JOSé Antonio had boarded his train for Bilbao that morning I left Elena with my mother, telling her I had errands to run. Robert had said that he would come to the apartment after his morning class if he was able to, but when he hadn’t arrived by noon I was anxious to leave the house. It had been raining for eight days straight, but on this particular Thursday a three-day stretch of sun began in Muriga (and again ten days later, the Sunday that José Antonio’s body washed ashore), so I put on a swimsuit and tucked a towel and tanning lotion into an old straw beach bag and walked the three blocks to the beach.

  Because it was a Thursday, and because it was an hour and a half before siesta began, the beach was relatively empty: only a few middle-aged women already roasting their bare and hanging breasts, a couple of younger mothers with their children and an armful of colorful plastic shovels and buckets, a few groups of teenage boys who had taken the good weather as a cue to skip school and smoke cigarettes. I waved to Doña Estefana, a friend of my mother’s, and rolled out my towel in an empty area at the end of the beach, just before the sand turns to heavy gray boulders.

  The scar curling across my abdomen wasn’t something I had thought about since the surgery, even when Robert Duarte undressed me for the first time. But now, on the beach in the full light of day, I felt self-conscious. When I pulled my shirt up I noticed just how big it was, how the scar was still healing and you could see the holes where the surgeon’s needle had dove and surfaced. I left the shirt on over my swimsuit top and rolled onto my stomach, opening a magazine in front of me. Flipping through the glossed-out photographs, I thought only of my next meeting with the American, Robert Duarte, and how I seemed to have more in common with him than with my own husband. Didn’t Robert speak to me in the same language as my mother? Didn’t he believe in the same politics, share more of my blood? I reached down to the place in my stomach that held my new kidney, my Basque kidney, and thought nonsensically that the kidney would approve of Robert Duarte. He even fucks like a Basque, I said to myself.

  I woke up a half hour later, my face stuck with sweat to the first page of the magazine. I sat up, drank from a bottle of water in the beach bag, watched the old women wading just at the water’s edge. When I reached behind me for the tanning oil, I noticed a young man—a boy, really—sitting on the wall at the edge of the beach, watching me. There was enough distance between us—thirty meters at least—that we could each look at the other without threat, and so I stared back, watching the young man like you might watch a bird picking at a discarded sandwich.

  His hair was dark and straight, and I could see that it was once cut neatly but that it had grown messy through neglect. The arguments he must have had nightly with his mother about that hair. He wore the dark-gray slacks and light-blue oxford from Colegio San Jorge, and his uniform jacket was folded carelessly on his lap. When I turned to get a better look at him, he glanced quickly down the beach, as if to make sure that we were alone, and then continued staring back at me. A challenge, I thought.

  I pulled the light linen shirt over my head, folded it, and placed it in the beach bag. My stomach was surprisingly pale in the sunlight, but still the curl of the scar stood out, beginning only ten centimeters or so below my swimsuit top and continuing down below the striped
green fabric of the bottom. I thought that my Basque kidney might appreciate some sun on such an unusually warm day. He, of anyone, would appreciate the rarity of it, would know that it could be another five months before he might enjoy sun like this. Still watching the boy (who was still watching me), I reached behind my back to unfasten the top of my swimsuit.

  It’s not uncommon, of course, to go topless at the beach, but it’s not something I ordinarily do. Ever since the affair with the American became public knowledge, people in Muriga think I can’t wait for the lights to turn off so I can lift my skirt. Nobody’s said as much, of course, but it’s true. I’d think the same thing if it wasn’t about me. The truth, though, is that I’ve always been shy by nature. But that morning I felt different, bolder. I wasn’t just tanning at the beach. I was undressing in front of this boy.

  It was a response to his challenge, to intimidate him. My breasts and my scar were out in the sun, telling him to fuck off. It was as if the kidney hadn’t just restored me to my complete self but had somehow added to me, made me something greater and more powerful than I was before. I imagined a voice radiating from my abdomen, soothing me, encouraging me on. I glanced quickly around. The old women were still floundering at the water’s edge. A couple of overly sunned old men rallied with paletas and a tennis ball at the far end of the beach. I locked eyes with the boy, who was still watching me from the low wall at the edge of the sand, and then I leaned back slightly, one hand out behind me on the towel bracing me, and pushed the other hand down inside my swimsuit bottoms.

  We sat like that, the boy frozen on the stone wall watching, as my hand moved slowly under the damp cloth of the swimsuit. I closed my eyes, felt the heat of the sun through my eyelids, heard the small voice of my kidney coming from within. Yes. Go ahead. Bai. Yes. Bai.

  When I opened my eyes the boy was gone.

  * * *

  “SO THAT’S an example?” Joni asked. The last of the guests—Ander Martínez’s daughter and the young man I hadn’t recognized—had disappeared ten minutes before, and now the staff was folding up tables, disconnecting cords from the public-address system.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s one example.”

  “I’m not sure I see the distinction,” he said.

  20. IKER

  As I said, kale borroka is a game with certain rules; even if they’re not written down, they’re understood. And when one team breaks a rule, well, that’s when you get penalized.

  In the end, I stayed in Muriga to take the two midterms while Asier went to see Gorka Auzmendi speak at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao. When I saw him before school the next morning it was clear that he had barely slept, and yet he was so excited that he could hardly stop talking.

  “Fucking mind-blowing,” he said, before even saying hello. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Three thousand college students. Three thousand comrades. At exactly ten in the morning, the students rushed into each of the university buildings, forced everyone to leave. Once the buildings were empty, they chained the doors closed. Fucking incredible.”

  He was nearly out of breath, as if it had just happened five minutes before.

  “And Auzmendi?” I asked.

  “A genius,” Asier said. “After the buildings closed all of the students gathered outside the School of Architecture. They built a stage, with a microphone and everything, and people came to speak to the audience. Gorka was the last to speak—he talked for forty minutes and no one in the audience interrupted even once. I wish I could remember five percent of what he said.”

  I found myself strangely jealous of Gorka, of the way that Asier fell over him, seemed to want to be him.

  “And what about after the protest?” I asked. “Did you meet with him?”

  “Of course,” he said. “And none of this bullshit about sitting in a bar drinking kalimotxo, either. He took a few of us to a friend’s apartment—a professor of sociology—and we stayed until five in the morning, drinking red wine and discussing the Situation.”

  There was something that annoyed me about the way he said “the Situation.” I had gone to the same meetings as he had, read the same pamphlets, and listened to Ramón’s history lessons for almost three years. And now, after a night drinking cheap wine in some old man’s apartment, Asier seemed to say that he understood things in a way I didn’t.

  “He gave me some books,” Asier said. “The professor did. You can borrow them when I’m done.”

  “Are we still going to Bermeo this weekend?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

  “Yes, of course. But there’s a change of plans. We’ll meet after school to discuss it.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I have plans already.” Which was true, actually. I’d made plans to meet Nere at her house at five, since her parents didn’t come home from work until late on Thursday nights.

  “Well, change them,” he said. “Daniel is already planning on it, and he’s telling other people to be there as well.”

  “Listen,” I said, getting frustrated. “I can’t make it. Just tell me now what this ‘change of plans’ is.”

  And then Asier was smiling, as if he had just now realized that our friendship had been transformed, but if we acted quickly enough we could switch it back. “Sure,” he said. “Of course. So here’s the thing: it’s a lot like what you and I were discussing the other day, actually. When we were swimming. I was talking with Gorka and Jorge—Jorge is the sociology professor—and we decided that the problem with the independence movement in general, and with the activities in the street in particular, is that things have become stagnant. The activities are always the same, and so people become complacent.”

  I could tell that these words, “stagnant,” “complacent,” weren’t his words but Auzmendi’s or the professor’s. But still I nodded my head.

  “What needs to happen is change. Something to catch the people’s attention again.”

  We both knew what he was saying: we needed to break the rules.

  “So this is what I was thinking,” he said, and then he told me the plan that Auzmendi had diagrammed for him.

  * * *

  THAT FRIDAY afternoon, as usual, I excused myself from Irala’s class to go to the restroom, then left out the front doors, along the empty moat where some of the younger children were running laps for their physical education class, and out to the parking lot where I’d parked the motor scooter my father had given me for my birthday that year.

  Once I’d driven out onto the road that leads down to Muriga, I cut the engine, as I would often do, and let the moto coast around the shoulders of the mountain. I had spent the entire morning at San Jorge grinding my teeth thinking about what would happen that night. And although I knew the tenets of the cause, I wasn’t wondering if what we were about to do would alter the future of Basque autonomy. I was worrying about how it might change our lives. But now, listening to the ticking of the two wheels spinning underneath me, breathing in smoke from the farmers’ summer burn piles, I let myself relax. I didn’t think about the past or the future—about Muriga’s past, the rotted soldiers buried under San Jorge, or my own future away from Muriga, in classrooms discussing the great Basque and Spanish novelists, or in the beds of women I hadn’t yet met. For the couple of minutes it took for the moto to roll down the mountain I was in a radiant free fall.

  The three of us, Asier and Daniel and I, met at the gas station on the ground floor of Asier’s apartment building. Asier had gone to Bilbao again the night before and hadn’t been at school that morning.

  “OK,” he said. “We all understand the plan, right?”

  Daniel and I both nodded. I pushed my moto next to Asier’s so that they were beside the gas pump but also blocking it from the view of the cashier inside.

  “I’m going to go pay,” Asier said. “Get ready.”

  After he said it, he just stood there for a moment, looking out across the boulevard toward the harbor, where the fishing boats were floating at their
buoys. Daniel had taken off his backpack and was pulling out the empty two-liter bottles.

  “Asier,” I said, and he snapped back to attention.

  “Right,” he said. Then he turned and went into the gas station.

  I sometimes wonder what little debate he was having with himself in that moment. Whether he realized that he might be pushing the pebble that would start a landslide, or whether he was just going over Auzmendi’s plan one more time in his head, taking into consideration all the details he might have overlooked.

  When he came back out of the gas station, Daniel took the hose from the pump as if he were going to fill the tanks on the two motos.

  “It’s fine,” I whispered. “There’s no one around.”

  Daniel filled the two empty bottles with fuel, spilling a small puddle on the concrete underneath. Asier was sitting on his bike, looking nervously around. The smell of raw gasoline seeped out from the open bottles.

  “Who was it?” I asked. “Behind the counter.”

  “Benito,” he said. “The guy was so stoned he barely recognized me.”

  A dark-green Renault turned off the boulevard and stopped at the pump next to us. Its driver reached into the glove box for something, over the lap of the thin blonde in the passenger seat. I recognized the driver as Duarte, the young English teacher from school.

  “OK,” I told Daniel. Asier put on his black helmet and slid down the wind guard. “Time to go.”

  Daniel had already put the bottles into his backpack and was zipping it closed when he looked up at the Renault.

  “Hostias. Did I ever tell you that I love blondes?” Daniel said.

  “I thought brunettes. Or was it redheads?” Asier said.

  “Those too,” Daniel said, swinging behind me onto the backseat of the moto.

  * * *

  WHEN ASIER told us about Auzmendi’s plan, he’d made it clear that the most important thing was to keep the operation simple. “The Operation,” he kept saying, another one of Gorka’s terms, I guess. But it did make what we were planning more legitimate. So in an alley behind the basketball courts in Bermeo, when Asier gave the whistle to the forty or so of us (our friends from Bermeo had brought along ten or fifteen kids from their school), only the three of us from Muriga were aware of the real plan.