All That Followed (13 page)

“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.

There had been a rowing competition in the bay in Bermeo earlier in the day, and the streets in the old part were filled with people from neighboring towns who had come to cheer their teams on and of course to eat and drink after the regatta. But even with the crowded street, everyone knew the rules. When our first fireworks went off—before we even made it a single block—people pushed into the doors of bars and restaurants and the metal sound of storm doors slamming closed came to me from all sides. Soon enough the streets were nearly empty, except for a few drunks. Just before we reached the main boulevard we ran past two old men who had been locked out of their bar by the storm doors and were huddled in the stone entryway holding small glasses of beer. I felt a pang of guilt about the whole thing, about breaking up the evening for these innocent people. But then Asier was grabbing me by the shoulder, and there wasn’t time. Asier, Daniel, and I broke off from the stampede, changing course toward the series of benches along the boulevard where two buses waited at the curb.

The first bus was filled with passengers, old women and mothers with their children, teenagers too young or too drunk to drive back to their towns, and so we went directly to the next bus, as was our plan. The driver was a middle-aged man with a huge gut, and when he saw us, three men with dark glasses and bandannas covering their faces, he stood from his seat and pushed forward the box that held the fares he had collected that night. Asier took the small aluminum box and threw it out the bus door, pointing for the bus driver to follow it out onto the street.

If I’m honest—and I have no reason to lie now—I felt a change taking place in Asier. The voice that came from under the bandanna, ordering the few remaining passengers out the back door of the bus—first in Euskera, then in Spanish—seemed entirely foreign. It wasn’t the voice of the boy who cried at his tenth birthday when his cousin punched him in the stomach, or even the one that had yelled to me over the waves at the beach the week before. Daniel was kneeling down in the aisle, pulling the two-liter bottles out of his backpack, and I simply stood in the empty doorway watching the scene clicking forward.

Daniel took one of the bottles and ran to the back of the bus, while Asier removed the remaining bottle and put it under the steering wheel. You could see the small wet treads where the driver’s feet had been just moments before.

“Ready?” Asier yelled to Daniel in the back of the bus. It was surprisingly quiet in there, just the three of us, and then Daniel nodded back. Asier took a lighter from his pocket, and Daniel did the same. It was a strange dance, the way they moved in time with each other. The rags that hung from the tops of the bottles lit simultaneously, and still the bus was quiet.

“OK, let’s go,” Daniel said from the back of the bus. “Fuck. It’s done.”

And then we were back on the streets, running past the bus driver and the couple of passengers who were still standing outside, and then we were back into the night, taking a side road to catch up with the rest of the group. I waited for the two explosions, but instead all I heard were the sirens of the Ertzaintza as they arrived in the old quarter of the city.

21. JONI (1948)

Nerea was only ten when she witnessed her father’s execution. She told me this in bed after the first time we made love.

It was pouring outside my apartment that afternoon; the ticks of rain on an aluminum shed outside sounded like letters being typed on the old Hermes I kept in the corner of my bedroom. But even with the rain, blown in by a storm settling in on Muriga from the Bay of Biscay, she insisted we keep the window open to allow out the smoke from my Dunhill. It had become an obsession of hers, this idea of letting the smoke out, as if the apartment itself were capable of respiration. As if the building might die if it were not allowed to breathe.

“Do you remember it? When your father was killed?” I asked her. We were still in that wonderful first phase, when you are more honest with each other than you ought to be and when you convince yourself that it will always be this way. I didn’t yet feel uncomfortable asking. I knew she would answer.

“Of course,” she said. She laid her head across my forearm and inhaled deeply, as if she was trying to store the smell of my arm, or of the sheets, or of my bedroom, in that same vault that held the memories of her father. “He was short. Probably not any taller than I am,” she said. “That’s what always stands out about that day. How short my father was compared to the others.”

I flicked the flint of a lighter to start another cigarette. It was the same lighter I had bought in the airport in San Francisco the day that I left the United States, one that I still have today, in the back of some desk drawer. I ashed the cigarette into a water glass on the nightstand.

“Was he a prisoner already?” I asked, touching her thick black braid with the hand that did not hold the cigarette. “Did they already have him at San Jorge?”

“No. They came for him the same morning that he was shot,” she said. “Things like this are supposed to happen at night, aren’t they? The bad men are supposed to come when it’s dark, and they are supposed to do their killing out of sight, where no one can see.”

Gooseflesh rose up from her shoulder blades, down over the notches of the ribs on her back. I pulled the sheet up over her shoulders, but she shrugged it off, so it settled in a pool at the small of her back.

“No,” she said. “I’m not cold.”

Neither of us said anything for a moment, and it was as if the ticking of the rain outside were the sound of a film being projected in her mind. I pinched the lobe of her ear, which was our little game, and still she said nothing.

“I don’t know where my mother was when he was shot,” she said. “It’s something I’ve never asked her. When they came for him I was in the bedroom, and my brothers and I all sat in our beds and listened to the voices from the next room. We heard my mother say something and the sound of a bucket being tipped over or of silverware falling onto the kitchen floor. Then a shout that I always imagined was my father’s, but I can’t be sure of this. I don’t even remember what his voice sounded like, Joni.”

“It’s normal,” I said, suddenly uncomfortable. “You don’t have to tell me this.”

“Of course I do,” she told me, putting her lips to the underside of my wrist. “I love you, and so I have to tell you this,” and it was then that I knew that I loved her too. I wonder how often it happens this way, to realize that you are in love only after hearing it said.

“
Barkatu
,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Nerea smiled at my awkward pronunciation. It always made her happy to see our Euskera lessons being put to use in conversation. She held out her hand toward mine, as if she were pinching the air. When I offered the half-burned Dunhill, her thin fingers pinched the filter just above mine.

“You smoke now?” I asked.

“Today, I smoke,” she said. She took a small drag off the cigarette, just enough to fill her tiny mouth, and quickly exhaled the smoke toward the open window. She passed the cigarette back to me, then suddenly turned onto her back. “I’ll never understand this habit of yours,” she said absently.

“So you love me,” I said, not because it was a question I needed answered but just to draw her away from the discussion of her father.

“Of course,” she said. “Do you realize,” she continued, “that you are the first person I have told this story to?”

I watched the ceiling with her and said nothing. When she continued, she told me that after the voices in the kitchen left, her oldest brother, Aitor, had opened the bedroom door. The kitchen was empty, as if her mother had only walked down the street to buy a loaf of bread and her father had already left to teach his morning class, except that a cup of coffee had spilled across the white tablecloth of the kitchen table, and the front door was left open into the hallway. Across the hall their neighbor, Do
ñ
a Mercedes, stood in her open doorway. When she saw the three children she ordered them back into the house, telling them that their mother would be back in the afternoon. But as soon as he heard her door click closed, Aitor led his brothers and sister out into the hall and down the two flights of stairs to the entrance of the apartment building.

“There were people in the streets, like on a festival day,” she said. As Nerea described how they had followed the crowd up the hill to the fortress at San Jorge, I imagined a procession of peasants with pitchforks and torches, something from
Frankenstein
, moving with slow conviction up the same road that I drove each morning in our Peugeot.

“You already know that Muriga isn’t a big city,” she said. “But in 1937 it was much smaller even. Just a few thousand. It seemed like everyone in the city was walking to the barracks at San Jorge that morning. It was the week after Easter Sunday, and there wasn’t one cloud to block the sun.”

When they arrived at San Jorge a crowd had gathered along the north wall of the barracks, facing the bay below. The men were milling about uncomfortably, as men often do before a funeral begins, and several women in the crowd were crying. Nerea remembered someone pointing out that there wasn’t a single fishing boat in the water that morning. She and her two brothers had pushed themselves through the wavering, quiet audience, past the legs of uncles and cousins and friends of their mother and father, until they were standing just behind the front row, where they had a clear view of the stage but were still hidden. By the way people looked at them, the children knew they shouldn’t have been there.

Nerea described how the single iron door on the north side of the barracks opened—the door that now leads to the gymnasium—and how her father and three other men were led out the door, followed by a dozen Falangists carrying rifles with bayonets, their folded hats worn tilted across their foreheads.

“You are probably imagining it was like the movies, where there is a firing squad and the captain says, ‘One, two, three.’ But it wasn’t like that. Not at all.” She was still staring up at the ceiling, past it, twenty years behind the ceiling. “Most of the men with the rifles were facing the crowd, while a few of the others pushed our father and the three other men against the wall. This is where I have the image of my father as a short man. He didn’t even come to the shoulder of the man standing next to him. When the Falangist captain pulled his pistol from his belt, my father was the first man he shot.”

22. IKER

We never heard an explosion, but in the newspaper the next morning the front page contained a photograph of the bus in Bermeo radiating flames five meters high. In the picture, the fat bus driver stood with his hand on his bald head as he watched the bus burn, his little aluminum box still tucked under an arm. As I read the article my mother clucked her tongue in that disapproving way. “
Qu
é
gilipollas
,” she said. She placed a plate of toasted bread in front of me, on top of the newspaper. When I moved the plate and continued to read, she seemed to watch me more carefully.

“Where did you say you were last night?” she asked, pouring coffee into the cup she had set out for me. At the place next to mine was my father’s plate, dusted in crumbs, and his empty cup.

“I told you,” I said. “With Asier and Daniel. We were writing new songs—we’re playing in Guernica in two weeks.”

Well, the first part was true. I
had
been with Asier and Daniel. I stared at the picture of the driver in front of the flaming bus and began to worry about just how far things had progressed.

That morning I drove my moto to the turnoff just before the road begins to climb to San Jorge, to the small clearing in the woods where Asier and I would meet each day before school. Asier was already there, sitting on the black vinyl seat of his Honda and smoking, flicking his ashes onto last year’s rotting leaves. He was in a pair of jeans and a ripped Misfits shirt, his favorite. He held the joint out to me and I took it.

“Not going to school?” I said.

“Are you kidding me?” he said. “After last night? Did you
see
the newspapers? It couldn’t have gone more perfectly. Gorka called my house this morning to congratulate me.”

“You?” I asked.

“Us,” he said. “You know what I mean. Don’t be a pussy about this, Iker. Last night was huge. It could mean huge things for us.”

I wondered what “huge things” could include. Lately I had been talking more seriously with Nere about applying to university in San Sebasti
á
n. It was farther away, too far to make the drive every day, as most kids from Muriga did when they attended university in Bilbao. But living away from home was something I found myself thinking about more and more. Nere had a cousin there, and we planned to visit after I finished final exams, maybe look at some apartments. None of these, of course, were ideas I mentioned to Asier. They didn’t have any relevance to his “huge things.”

“I have to go,” I said. I straightened the collar on my uniform and pulled the red tie close to my neck. “The fucking American professor called my mother last week. Said I wouldn’t graduate unless I did extra work to make up for absences. He didn’t call your parents?”

“He did,” Asier said. “I don’t give a shit about his class, or about San Jorge. And neither should you, Iker. We’re working on much more important things now. The bus in Bermeo—that will be on the news tonight. Just watch. Things are really going to change for us.”