All That Followed: A Novel

by Urza, Gabriel

  “We have to leave now if we’re going to beat the storm,” I said through the rain. Already there was a heavy break along the shoreline, bucking the boat. I waded out to my knees and held the gunwale tightly, trying to wrest the boat against the onslaught of waves; when I turned back toward the beach I saw Nerea tucked in her blanket, laughing.

  “It’s already here!” she yelled gleefully through the rain. The delight in that laugh, as if she were incapable of worry. I began to laugh with her, even as the boat lifted out of my reach.

  “Let it go,” she said, still laughing, gathering our things for the long walk back to town. “There’s no outrowing a storm that’s already here.”

  * * *

  THE LINE became a favorite that we used to say to each other in the year before the boy. In our first week at the guesthouse we would point to the drips falling from the ceiling joists, There’s no outrowing a storm, and it would all be just an inconvenience, just a game. Drop a plate? You can’t outrow a storm.

  But the weeks after her mother left us, it truly was as if we were trapped on this same boat, adrift in that summer squall. Everything was unsteadiness, the world itself seeming to pitch unnaturally. There were moments when our boat would crest a wave, when Nerea would emerge from her room and allow me to sit with her on the sofa or perhaps to make her a ham and cheese sandwich, and I could see the clearing skies on the horizon and know that we would survive. I would remind myself that we had survived storms before. That soon the winds would pass and the waves would settle, as they always did.

  And then there were times when our little boat would slip grotesquely down the face of a swell, and we saw neither the sea around us nor the black sky above, only our stern pointing toward the sea bottom. These were the days when I would find Nerea curled on the floor of the bathroom, holding her stomach and insisting that it was the doctor’s fault, that he had conspired with her mother to kill the child. On these days I was chained to the house, afraid of what Nerea might do if I left. I turned away the friends that came to visit, only opening the door enough to speak to them. I used every excuse possible with the headmaster at San Jorge, a kind man who was not without limits to his sympathy.

  “Joni,” he told me over the phone after the third week. He spoke to me with empathy, as if he were speaking to a son. “I don’t pretend to know what is happening with you. I don’t. But the students have been three weeks without an English class.”

  “I understand,” I said. I walked the phone to the end of its cord so that I could look out of Kattalin’s kitchen window toward our house across the field. “I will be there on Monday.”

  * * *

  THAT WEEKEND Nerea seemed back to her old self, or at least some version of it. We slept in the same bed for the first time. She walked with me into Muriga on Saturday, and we spent an afternoon at a restaurant, snacking on fried calamari and patatas bravas and sipping at a few beers with Marina Inestrellas and her cousin, who was visiting from Portugalete. On the way back to the house, I told her that I would have to go back to work on Monday.

  “Of course you do,” she said. “Someone needs to make some money around here!” She was playful, almost happy. As we passed under a low oak limb on the Paseo de los Robles, she reached up to shake the branch’s water on my head. I ducked my head and cringed, and as the cold rainwater raced down the crook of my neck I heard the high shriek of Nerea’s laugh, and then she took off at a delighted run.

  Her mother’s words still sat with me, had grown in the time since she’d left. She’s tried to kill herself before. I was certain that her mother was telling the truth.

  And so, the Sunday before I was to return to work, I woke in the dark of early morning and felt my way from the bedroom. While Nerea slept, I wandered our small house and tried to think of every way she might do it. The living room ceiling was exposed beam, and so I gathered the laundry line, the extension cords, the garden hoses, and carried them to the outbuilding at the edge of the pasture. I looted the bathroom cabinet of two bottles of aspirin, then poured out the few bottles of liquor that we kept above the refrigerator. When I was gathering the bleach and ammonia from under the sink I realized that there was no end. We were surrounded by deadly tools. A milk bottle could be broken, creating a thousand handy knives. A radio cord could be ripped from its casing and strung up on the dining room light. The gasoline cans along the side of the house. A wine key.

  When I returned from the outbuilding after several trips, the sun was already up, cutting at the edges of a morning fog. The light in the bedroom was on, as was the light in the kitchen. I found Nerea at the stove, stirring milk into the top of the Cuban press.

  “Egun on,” she said, smiling. Her hair was tied back with an old piece of string as it always was in the mornings, her eyes still heavy with sleep.

  “Good morning,” I said back.

  “You were up early,” she said. She tipped the coffeepot into the two cups she’d set out on the tile counter.

  “I had to use the bathroom, and then I wasn’t tired,” I said. “I went outside to watch the sun come up.”

  “You should have come to get me,” she said, handing me one of the cups. She held the coffeepot in a towel to protect her hands, then carefully unscrewed the base from the top and shook the spent grounds into the sink. She began to run the water, then opened the cabinet under the sink for the dish soap. She paused, kneeling there with the cabinet open, and I knew that she’d realized the bleach was missing. I sipped at my coffee, then took a half baguette from the countertop and broke off the end.

  “What should we do today?” I asked. “It’s my last day of freedom before I have to go back to San Jorge.”

  She stood at the sink and began to run a yellow dishrag over the coffee press. She shrugged her shoulders, and I could tell she was turning over the evidence in her mind: the missing container of bleach, the knives removed from the silverware drawer. “Whatever you want,” she said. She turned toward me, the hot water steaming in the sink. I bit down on the hard crust of the baguette and felt the bread cracking under my teeth.

  “Did you have a chance to practice your Basque with my mother while she was here?” she asked.

  “A little,” I said, guardedly.

  “Do you still remember the word for this?” she said, holding up her brown coffee mug.

  “Yes,” I said. “Katilua.”

  “And how do you say ‘hair’?” she asked, pinching one of the wine-dark strands that had fallen over her eyes.

  “Ilea.”

  “And ‘knife’?” she said, watching me closely. “Did I ever teach you the word for ‘knife’?”

  “No,” I said. I looked down guiltily at my hands.

  “Aiztoa,” she said quietly. “Aiztoa. Now you try it.”

  “Aiztoa.” As I repeated the word, I realized the terrible stupidity of thinking I’d be able to hide all the objects in the world that could take her from me.

  She set the dishcloth on the counter and reached over to me.

  “Aiztoa,” I said again.

  Her hand was wet and warm in mine, and she pulled herself in close to me. I could smell the coffee on her breath and the warm scent of sleep, and she said, simply, “There’s no outrowing this storm, Joni.”

  35. IKER

  The idea was to hold the Councilman for forty-eight hours, as a show of strength against the Partido Popular in the coming election. The genius of the plan was its simplicity, its foolproofness: an anonymous abduction, an announcement, and then we would release him. There was no discussion of a ransom, of a swap for prisoners. These were complications known only to Gorka, though I’ve often wondered how much Asier knew and never told me.

  Asier called my house several times the week before, leaving messages with my mother. But all of my time after school was occupied by the sessions with Garrett, and when I wasn’t taking sample grammar tests or filling out verb tense charts I was with Nere, and so the messages went unanswered.

  After a
week of unreturned phone calls, I met Asier face-to-face. I was parking my motor scooter outside Nere’s parents’ house when he sat up off the curb. Daniel was with him, and I saw Asier motion for him to stay sitting on the corner.

  “I guess you got my calls,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I haven’t had the time to call back. I’ve been studying for the English exam.”

  “Studying with the American,” he said accusingly.

  “Yes,” I said. “Studying with the American.”

  He nodded, then kicked at a flattened Coca-Cola can that had been left in the road.

  “I’m applying to university in San Sebastián,” I said. “If I’m accepted, Nere will go with me.”

  He kicked again at the flattened can. His hair was longer, a single churro dangling awkwardly behind his ear. Daniel stayed on the curb smoking his cigarette.

  “She has a cousin there who we can stay with,” I said dumbly.

  “That’s good,” he said. “That’ll be good for you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We always talked about leaving Muriga, didn’t we?”

  “Bai,” he said. “In fact, I have plans to leave as well.”

  I tried to imagine where he would go. I couldn’t picture Asier leaving Muriga without me, but I could so easily imagine the opposite. I had imagined leaving Muriga, growing older, becoming another person, walking the streets of San Sebastián or Paris or New York; but in this fantasy Asier always remained in Muriga, wandering the same streets, wearing the same torn blue jeans and black T-shirts silk-screened with band names, preserved forever as I knew him then.

  “The other side,” he said, nodding his head up the street, toward the steep foothills of the Pyrenees. “Iparralde.”

  “France?” I asked, nearly laughing. “You’re moving to France?”

  Asier scowled, the same scowl that appeared when we played table soccer and he was concentrating deeply.

  “Yes,” he said. “With Gorka, I think. There are friends there. We’ll be in exile.”

  He said the word proudly. He knew its connotations—it brought to mind all the history from Ramón Luna’s speeches in the bunker above the cliffs, of Basques who had lived in Mexico or Cuba during the Franco years, of the photographs we displayed during our protests of the young men and women who couldn’t enter back into Spain because of what awaited them. I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Well, I hope that what they say about the girls there is true,” I said.

  “Listen,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. I felt Daniel watching us. “We’re going to do it. With the Councilman, as we had planned before. It will be simple—two days only. We take him for two days, to let the Party know that they aren’t welcome here in Muriga, and then we let him go.”

  I felt his hand tighten on my shoulder.

  “You need to help us,” he said. “You’re going to leave Muriga, and that’s fine. You have the right to. But you also owe it to Muriga to help us.”

  * * *

  I’VE SPENT a lot of my time in the Salto asking myself why I agreed to Asier’s plan. Maybe I did owe it to Muriga. But more importantly, I felt I owed it to Asier. We both sensed the end of our friendship approaching, a period in our lives coming to a close. If there is one thing we’re taught in Muriga, it’s that we owe something to our histories.

  I remember telling myself that I was also thinking of Nere, though I know now this was never the case. I thought of our new life together in San Sebastián and about the new person that I was set to become, and I imagined this as a part of the new person waiting out in the future. The younger version of myself would have run the streets of this village, thrown Molotov cocktails and burned a bus, and was responsible for the kidnapping of Muriga’s Partido Popular candidate in 1998. At parties and in restaurants in San Sebastián, people would speak about these things quietly, nodding their heads in the direction of the new man from Muriga. They would know. Maybe I’d tell the story of the kidnapping; maybe I’d keep it to myself. But they would know. Nere would know.

  Of course, it had never been about her. If it had been, I would have told her all about it beforehand. She almost certainly would have tried to talk me out of it—we had a future almost in reach. When she finally found out what we were up to, it was too late: I was calling her from a roadside pay phone on the highway to France with Gorka, and the Councilman’s body was already being dragged out by the tide.

  The important thing, of course, is that I agreed. During the trial, the prosecutor didn’t care about why I had agreed. He didn’t ask about Nere, or Asier, or about the future I had planned. The only important thing to him was that I had agreed.

  Daniel testified about the conversation between Asier and me that afternoon. He told the court that I had been eager to go along with Asier’s plan, that he’d tried to dissuade us but that we pressured him into helping. Gorka’s lawyer, a public attorney appointed by the judge, slid his chair away from us when Daniel pointed, as if he were concerned that the judge might mistakenly include him with the two murderers. I struggled to stay silent, to not call Daniel a liar, to point out that he wouldn’t even make eye contact with me as he was making his accusations.

  But now I wish that Dani had looked up at me. If he had, I would have tried to tell him that I understood that he didn’t love us any less, even though he agreed to testify in exchange for a four-year sentence. I keep thinking back to those early days at the bunkers with Ramón Luna; when he and Luken would return to the public school in Muriga while Asier and I hiked back up the hill to San Jorge, there had always been a gulf between us. I would have told Dani that I understood self-preservation is sometimes at odds with what we love and that to choose to survive is not to forgo friendship.

  * * *

  THIS IS just another one of the true but untrue accounts that I give from within the painted concrete walls of the Salto del Negro. We’re all familiar with these evolving memories here. Manolito, the old gypsy who has been in the Salto longer than anyone, once came to our cell with a plastic bag filled with clear rum that a guard had smuggled in for him. After he passed the bag between Andreas and me, he leaned drunkenly back against the legs of Andreas’s bunk. We all pretended that we were friends at a bar, telling stories. When the conversation died down and the rum got us thinking of old times, Andreas asked the old man what he had done to arrive in the prison.

  “The truth is, I don’t remember,” he said. He picked at the elastic band around the neck of his shirt. “They tell me I stabbed a woman in Cádiz, but I don’t believe it.”

  Andreas laughed. Manolito reached for the plastic bag and tipped it up so the last of the liquor dripped into his caved-in mouth.

  “When I think of my time before the Salto, I remember living the life of a saint. Don’t you?”

  36. MARIANA

  “She wants to meet with you,” said the voice of the American, Robert Duarte. He was stepping out of the receding steam of the shower as he said it. He took a blue towel off the rack—the same one José Antonio had used that morning—and began to dry his black hair. He rubbed coarsely, almost violently, in a way that reminded me of the way he made love, sacrificing pleasure for efficiency. I was so hypnotized, watching him, that his words didn’t register at first.

  “Who does?” I asked.

  “Morgan,” he said. There wasn’t even a pause in the violent movement of the towel over his head, roughly down onto his neck and across the dark hair on his chest. “My wife.”

  “I know who Morgan is,” I said.

  Finally he stopped his drying. He wrapped José Antonio’s towel around his waist and regarded me across the bathroom. I sat naked on the closed toilet seat, my hair still dry, waiting for the American to leave before I showered alone in the empty apartment as I liked to do.

  “Well, she wants to meet with you,” he said again.

  “What for?” I asked, annoyed that I had to ask such an obvious question.

  He shrugged his shoulders.
<
br />   “I think she’s lonely,” he said. “She said she’d like to draw your portrait. But really, I think she just wants to have someone close to her own age to talk to. She hasn’t had the best luck meeting people here.”

  “We don’t exactly have a reputation for being welcoming,” I agreed. “But you don’t really think that’s a good idea, do you? For the two of us to meet alone?”

  He gave the same irritating shrug, then pulled a white V-neck shirt up over his head.

  “Why not?” he said. “It’s not like she suspects anything. And besides, it might be good for you as well.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He leaned in close to the mirror, wiping the fog away with a forearm. He held his left eye open with two fingers, then plucked a contact lens with the other hand.

  “Eh?” he asked. He put the contact on the tip of his tongue and rolled it briefly in his mouth, then pinched it out and put it back in his left eye. “These contacts always dry out if I wear them in the shower.”

  “What do you mean, ‘It might be good for you as well’?” I asked again. I was annoyed by the question, but in a backward way I was flattered. It was the first time he’d shown an interest in my life outside the bedroom.

  “You just seem to spend a lot of time alone,” he said.

  “I have Elena,” I answered quickly.

  “Exactly,” he said. “You divide your time between a seventy-year-old and a two-year-old. You need to interact with people that you have more in common with.”

  “And your wife?” I said. “I suppose we do have at least one thing in common.”

  “I think you’d like her,” he said, ignoring my barb. “And she loves children. She wants to start trying as soon as we get back.”

  It was the first time he had mentioned leaving Muriga, but it didn’t surprise me. His time in Muriga seemed more like a safari than an attempt to start a new life. For all the weekends he visited his cousins in Nabarniz, there was a distance that he maintained between his life and those he lived among. Even when he watched me undress at the foot of the bed, he seemed more curious than hungry. For the first time, I thought about the end of the affair. Of what I would be left with when Robert Duarte left Muriga.