All That Followed (20 page)

“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 Sebasti
á
n,” 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 Sebasti
á
n 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 Ram
ó
n 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 Sebasti
á
n 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 Sebasti
á
n, 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 Ram
ó
n 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 C
á
diz, 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 Jos
é
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 Jos
é
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.

“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.

He suggested that I take his wife out of Muriga for the day, to a mountaintop sanctuary that I had mentioned once.

“In four months she’s hardly been away from Muriga,” he’d said. “It’ll be good for her to get out of town. She doesn’t even come with me anymore when I visit the family in Nabarniz.”

She called my house the next morning. When I picked up, there was a hesitation on the other line, and I knew who it was before she even began to introduce herself in stumbling Spanish.

“Robert,” she said. “My husband. He tells me that I call you.”

She spoke in the same simple way that Elena did, looking for the easiest words, avoiding the past tense. I watched Elena gazing at the English-language cartoons on the BBC channel, shaking her arms in that absentminded way she used to do. I realized then that we were both being used thoughtlessly, without consequence, by Robert Duarte.

*   *   *

THIS IS
how I found myself waiting for my lover’s wife at the train station cafeteria.

“You’re doing what?” Jos
é
Antonio had asked the night before.

“You know the American couple,” I said. “They are friends of Joni Garrett’s. You met them at the grocery store a month ago.”

“Yes,” he admitted. “I remember them. But why are you taking her to Aizkorri?”

“Because she’s bored here,” I said. “And because
I’m
bored. It’ll be nice to spend a little time with someone different than the usual three people I see every day.”

I was startled to hear myself repeating Robert’s words and even more surprised to realize their truth.

“Sorry if we aren’t entertaining enough for you,” Jos
é
Antonio said, though in fact I hadn’t even included him in the three.

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“Well, if it’s all the same, I’ll just stay the night in Bilbao, then,” he said. “You won’t be back before dinner if you’re going all the way to the
refugio
, and there’s a strategic meeting early on Friday that I have to be at anyway.”

I nodded, then abruptly reached over to take Jos
é
Antonio’s hand.

“You don’t think I’ve been … different … do you?”

He raised his eyebrows in that way he did when he was confused.