All That Followed (10 page)

“Sure, but what fun is there in that?” I asked, trying to change the tone of the conversation. “Just imagine how upset Jos
é
Antonio, Mister Conservative, Mister Partido Popular, would be to discover his wife is secretly a militant Basque nationalist. That he’s been sleeping beside a terrorist for the last six weeks.”

But Joni didn’t laugh. He stopped bouncing Elena on his lap, kissed the top of her head, and set her on the chair between us. Elena began immediately to pick at the chipped white paint on the armrest.

“Have you met the Americans yet?” he asked abruptly.

“The one who came to replace you?” I asked.

I’d seen the couple around Muriga, of course. They were impossible to miss, the woman with her blond hair and small mouth, the husband’s short pants and hairy legs as he ran each afternoon along the beach and up into the hills west of town. “Joni, you know I would never betray you by talking to your enemy.”

The old man laughed his nervous little laugh.

“I’ve spent a little time with them. The husband, I can’t quite figure him out. But the wife—her name is Morgan—the wife, I find myself feeling sorry for. I think she feels very alone here in Muriga.”

“Well, that’s something I can understand,” I said, though I instantly wished I hadn’t. Joni gave me a little shake of the head.

“So I thought that you might want to meet them,” he said. “You could maybe show them around, introduce them to a few people. As a favor to me.”

With Jos
é
Antonio gone for half the week, I couldn’t say that I didn’t have the time. And besides, the idea of meeting someone from outside Muriga didn’t sound bad.

“The husband,” I said. “I’ve been told that he speaks Basque.”

“It’s true,” Joni said. “I don’t know how much. Certainly, he speaks enough to defend himself. But the wife, she doesn’t even speak Spanish. She’s trying to learn—a couple phrases only. You could teach her a little Basque, if you wanted to.”

“What do you think?” I asked Elena in Euskera. “Should we become teachers?”

*   *   *

THE TRUTH
is that I didn’t feel guilty about the affair with Robert Duarte until after my husband’s death, and even then it was guilt for Jos
é
Antonio’s murder, rather than for the affair itself.

After my first meeting with Joni and the Americans (an unnoteworthy lunch, other than Robert’s strange, antiquated Euskera and his wife’s almost total silence), Robert arrived alone for our coffee date the following week, explaining that his wife had felt ill and would not be able to join us. We stayed at the Boli
ñ
a long after the first two cups were empty. Robert described his parents’ immigration to Idaho in the 1960s from Nabarniz. I asked him to translate the words of old American songs I had never understood (Toto’s “Africa”; Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart”). He occasionally reached across the table to touch the back of my hand with his wide fingertips, and there were moments of silence in which I found myself leaning in closer, and in which he had done the same. By the time I finally excused myself to pick up Elena from my mother’s apartment, we had migrated from opposite sides of the small table to sitting with our knees nearly touching. When we made plans to meet again the following Thursday afternoon (after Jos
é
Antonio had left for Bilbao for the weekend), it was understood by both of us that we would meet alone.

*   *   *

IN THE
week leading up to that next meeting with Robert Duarte, the impulses from what I was now referring to as my “terrorist kidney” were more intense, more explicit. I’d order a hot chocolate for Elena, then find myself asking the waitress to throw a shot of brandy into my cup of coffee. I’d intentionally leave Jos
é
Antonio’s breakfast to burn on the stovetop, let Elena cry herself out while I soaked in the tub, a bit of Jos
é
Antonio’s scotch in a coffee cup. I’d wake Jos
é
Antonio up in the middle of the night, rubbing a hand up and down the front of his boxer shorts, and when he leaned in to kiss me I’d roll away and pretend to go back to sleep.

“I left my wallet back at my apartment,” I told the American when we met the next Thursday.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I have money.”

“No,” I said. I could feel the voice from under the scar speaking through me, pushing me on. “I have to go shopping after. Come back to the apartment with me. It’ll just take a minute.”

I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen when we arrived at the apartment; it was odd to have a stranger, a man, walking along the same hallway that Jos
é
Antonio had rushed down that morning, hurrying to make the first train for Bilbao.

“Your husband is a politician, is that right?” Robert said. He wandered around the apartment comfortably, looking at photos, as if taking inventory.

“He thinks he is,” I said. I took Jos
é
Antonio’s scotch down from the cabinet above the stove, poured two water glasses a quarter full. It was early in the afternoon, but when I handed a glass to the American he didn’t seem surprised. We both sipped at our glasses, and I felt the warmth of the scotch run over my tongue, down the back of my throat. The voice whispered inside me, urging me on.

“He’s fallen in with the Partido Popular,” I said. I set my glass on the tile counter, reached out to grab the American at the top of his dark-blue slacks. He took a step forward, pushing against me so that I could feel the hard corner of the counter against the small of my back. I felt the roughness of his neatly trimmed beard against the side of my face, the smell of stale coffee on his breath. He put a hand on my hip, pushing me harder against the counter. I took the hand in mine, pushed it under my skirt, between my legs.

“
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 Jim
é
nez 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 Ram
ó
n 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 Ram
ó
n’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 Ram
ó
n’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 Ram
ó
n Luna had been Muriga’s discount version of Ch
é
Guevara, Gorka Auzmendi
was
Ch
é
. 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 Mondrag
ó
n 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.