All That Followed (27 page)

When my mother ushered out the last of the police that second night, I swallowed down another of the chalky white pills and waited for I
ñ
aki to arrive again. But when I woke the next morning after nearly ten hours of unbroken sleep, it was with the certainty that Joni had been right, that these visits were over for good.

It wasn’t until Beatriz Mart
í
nez’s wedding six years later, long after the reporters had stopped calling to ask for interviews and after the women at my mother’s beauty salon stopped staring each time I passed the shop, that I spoke with Joni again. We talked that night until the deejay cut the music and the staff finished clearing the empty coffee cups, until I had finished telling him my theory. When I stood to leave, the old man reached a hand out to hold on to my sleeve.

“It’s been how long now?” he asked. “Since the surgery, I mean.”

It seemed like the first time since the kidnapping that someone had asked me about anything other than Jos
é
Antonio’s death.

“Let’s see,” I said. “Elena was born in October. It was the year after that that I got sick. I guess that makes it seven years now.”

“That’s good,” he said slowly, as if considering what to say. “That’s good.”

He leaned in.

“Do you still get the … sensations?”

My right hand went to the scar.

“From the kidney, you mean?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. He placed his empty wineglass onto the blue-tiled table. “From the kidney.”

As I shook my head, I was filled with a great sense of loneliness.

“No,” I said. “I think you were right. That it was something that I was imposing on my own memories. A mixed-up sense of d
é
j
à
vu.”

“You know, I’d been meaning to talk to you about this,” the old man said. “Before Jos
é
Antonio’s death.”

The last of the guests had left, and the hotel staff was lingering impatiently at the doors.

“I think I was too quick to judge, when you first told me about these sensations,” he said. “I thought it was just loneliness. Or boredom, maybe. That you were looking for something to do, something to investigate.”

“I think that was true, to a large degree,” I said. “That’s pretty obvious now, isn’t it?”

He shook his head.

“No,” he continued. “I think I had confused you with someone else, someone from a long time before. Maybe you were right after all.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.

He didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he touched a finger to the smudged rim of his empty wineglass.

“I think I’m saying this now more for my own benefit than for yours,” he said finally. “I used to think that our meetings were about me helping you, but more and more I realize they were about something else. Something I’m ashamed to admit.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t think I was capable of surviving in a world that allowed for ghosts of that kind,” he continued. “But now, after these last few years, I’m starting to think that these ghosts just might be real. I’m starting to think they might be necessary to our survival.”

52. IKER

“How do you say, ‘Today is Tuesday’?” Andreas asks. It’s early again, before sunup, though the shorebirds have already started their morning racket. But I have been awake for an hour already, so when Andreas asks this question, I am quick to respond.

“
Gaur asteartea da
,” I say. There has been talk over the last two weeks that they will be transferring two
etarras
to the Salto del Negro after their trial in Madrid last month. When the rumor began, Andreas asked that I teach him a few words of Euskera so that he could properly greet the celebrity prisoners. “But it’s not Tuesday,” I tell him.

“Wednesday?” he asks.

“Wednesday.”

“Well then, how do you say, ‘Today is Wednesday’?” he asks.

“
Gaur asteazkena da
,” I say. “
Asteazkena
.”

He tries to repeat the word, but it comes out in a tumble, doubly mixed up with his Argentine accent.

“Good,” I say. “By the time they arrive you’ll be an honorary Basque.”

I am also looking forward to next week, but not because of the arrival of the
etarras
. Next week is the second week of April, the beginning of the Holy Week even here in the Salto, where it doesn’t seem like anything could be holy, even for a week. (I can’t take credit for this line—it’s one I’ve stolen from Fernando, a young mulatto from C
á
diz who spent a few seasons at the Salto after he burned his mother’s home to the ground.) But it’s not the week of extra rations that we are given in the cafeteria that I look forward to, or the small box of candies that each prisoner receives from the children at Colegio Arenas, one of the local Catholic schools. I’m looking forward to the arrival of Nere and the boy.

In the photograph she included with her last letter, Nere is kneeling on the beach in Muriga. Behind her are the tall cliffs that lead up to the crumbling old bunkers where I had stayed the night with Asier and the Councilman. It is a clear summer day, the kind that turns the water in the bay a translucent green. The boy stands next to her, gripping her finger to steady his chubby legs. His feet leave small impressions in the sand, and his blue eyes look seriously at the camera. I know that the cameraman is Juan Mar
í
a, Nere’s husband. But I don’t feel the anger, or jealously, or hate that I might have felt a year ago. Instead, I experience something more like a sense of friendship. As if I am allowed to live his life, inhabit his body, for even the moment that it takes for the shutter to blink open.

*   *   *

THE LETTERS
from the Councilman’s wife had begun to arrive two months earlier. I didn’t recognize the handwriting or the return address and assumed it was just more of the perverse “fan mail” I get from time to time from kids in the Basque Country, thanking me for my “contribution.” When I finally realized who it was, my hands began to tremble.

They start very formally.
Dear Mr. Abarzuza
. She introduces herself as you might introduce yourself to a distant cousin, mentioning people we have in common.
I am the wife of Jos
é
Antonio Torres. I think that we may have crossed paths once or twice in Muriga before your arrest.
The letter seems to stumble here, as if, after mentioning these small commonalities—our town, the death of her husband—she’s run out of things to say.

She tells me that she has done some research on the computer, that she has seen photographs of the Salto del Negro and she hopes it isn’t as bad as it seems. The Councilman’s wife tells me that she thinks it is a shame how the Spanish government transferred Basque prisoners to the most remote prisons in Spain.
Your mother introduced herself after the last day of the trial, before the sentencing
, she writes.
It’s obvious how much she cares for you
. The letter stumbles along like this for a while—half a page, maybe—and then something happens.

She begins to tell me about Elena, her daughter.

It’s at this place that I hold my breath when I reread the letter even now, as if the words will have changed and she will use her daughter as a weapon against me. The daughter without a father. But instead of this attack that I’m waiting for, maybe hoping for, I find only this:
Elena has just started her first year in primaria at San Jorge. This was your school, wasn’t it? The teacher tells me that she already has two boyfriends, and to watch out, she’ll be trouble by the time she reaches secundaria.

The letter seems to gather steam after this. She tells me about her childhood in Muriga and about how she fell in love with the Councilman. She tells me about the funeral, and the way that the Party in Bilbao tried to get her to speak out against political violence. In a single paragraph that takes up an entire sheet of paper she tells me about her in-laws in Sevilla, about a surgery she had the year before the trial, and about a wedding that she recently attended. And in none of it is the accusation that I wait and wait for.

I had already drafted several responses when two more letters from Mariana Zelaia arrived just four days later. Finally, I think, she’s gathered the nerve to accuse me, to condemn. But the first letter is conversational, again, like she’s just catching up with an old friend. She describes a dinner with her mother. She tells me that she is considering looking for a job, just a little something on the side. She wishes me well, tells me I should feel free to write her back.

She starts the second letter by apologizing for writing twice in a single day, but there is something she wants to tell me.

When Elena came home from school today she asked about Jos
é
Antonio,
she begins.
This isn’t the first time she’s asked about her father, of course. But it was different this afternoon. Today she didn’t ask what happened to her father—we’ve talked about the fact that he died a long time ago—but instead she wanted to know
why
he was killed. She wants a reason for why her friends are all allowed fathers, but she is not.

I can tell that she knows something more than she’s letting on. You know how Muriga can be, and the kids at San Jorge talk (like you must have talked, right?). But she won’t tell me what she’s heard—she wants my version of it. I don’t tell you all this because I want you to feel guilty. You’ll have to take my word for it when I say that I feel just as guilty as you must. I told her that it was a good question, why her father had died, and that there probably wasn’t just one answer. Can you think of a better response for her?

She was watching television when I began this letter tonight. When she asked what I was doing I told her that I was writing a letter to an old friend of her father’s who lives in the Canarias. I hope this is all right with you.

*   *   *

I’M EAGER
to show the letters—five in total now—to Nere when she comes with the boy next week—as eager as if they are something that I’ve created myself. I want to show her the news about the girl at San Jorge and tell her the story of the Councilman waiting for two months before he asked to come up to the apartment of his future wife. But this part—this last letter—I’ve decided to keep for myself.

“How do you introduce yourself?” Andreas asks from the bunk above. “How do I tell someone my name?”

I refold the first letter and slide it back into its envelope. I think back to the day that I followed the Councilman’s wife to the beach, the week before Gorka Auzmendi’s pistol jumped in his hand. How she was looking at me when she reached behind her thin neck to undo the swimsuit top.

“
Ni Iker Abarzuza naiz
,” I said.

53. MARIANA

The absences came in waves in the years after Jos
é
Antonio’s death. First, the most tangible: Jos
é
Antonio himself.

He’d only lived in the apartment half-time during the final year of his life, when he was commuting to and from Bilbao, but after his death his absence seemed disproportionately large. The weekend after the funeral I gathered all of his clothes and threw them into the dumpster next to Etxeberria’s hardware shop, as if I were throwing my husband out of the house. But his side of the closet, his dresser drawers, stayed empty. Each time I tried to fill them with a shirt, a pair of underwear, one of his daughter’s small jackets, they stood awkwardly alone, out of place, trespassing, until finally I would remove them and leave the space empty.

The second absence was the one left by Robert Duarte. News of my affair with the American was the talk of Muriga for months after Jos
é
Antonio’s killing. After Joni revealed the affair to Castro, the rumor spread quickly from the police station, as I had feared it would, traveling the usual circuits that gossip followed in town. The last to hear, of course, is always the shamed woman herself.

“Are they talking about it?” I asked my mother, a few weeks after Jos
é
Antonio’s murder. “About the American?”

“Yes,” she said. She shrugged. “You know how it is, Mariana. They’ll talk for a while, and then they’ll forget about it.”

But she was wrong about that; she knew, just as well as I did, that even if they stopped talking they wouldn’t forget. That it was now a part of me, as much as the scar across my abdomen: adulterer. Betrayer of a dead husband.
Sinverg
ü
enza.

Just when interest in the affair began to fade later that year, it was revived again by reports from the trial of the three young men charged with the murder. Each day, the newspaper’s headline reminded me—and Muriga—of my guilt.

It wasn’t until a month or so after the trial that I began to miss the affair with Robert Duarte, the imagined life that I had allowed myself. I’d told myself from the outset that the American hadn’t loved me, but I never truly believed that our afternoons together weren’t significant to him as well. I’d told myself that he didn’t love me, that he’d never leave Morgan Duarte, but I’d also allowed myself to imagine that one day he might. Robert was my escape, I realized—from Jos
é
Antonio, and from Elena, and from Muriga—one I could never make myself.

I obsessed over the end of the affair even as I began to mourn my husband’s death. I’d been told only that Robert had been held at the police station in Bilbao for two days after Jos
é
Antonio’s kidnapping—until the four young men had been arrested—and that both he and Morgan Duarte had left Muriga soon after.

It was the last I heard of Robert Duarte. In the weeks after he left I waited for a phone call, a letter—any sort of communication, but it never came. I couldn’t make sense of it any more than I could make sense of Jos
é
Antonio’s death; one day, I had both a husband and a lover. The next, I had neither.