All That Followed (18 page)

“Let’s follow them,” she whispered.

“Yeah?” I asked, trailing them down the street with my eyes.

“It’ll be fun,” she said. “We can observe our subjects in their natural habitat.”

“How much do I owe?” I said to the old woman behind the bar. She wiped her hands on her apron, then waved them in front of her.

“Tell your mother I say hello,” the old woman said.

I left two one-hundred-peseta coins on the counter anyway and followed Nere out the doorway into the bright afternoon street. She hooked her thumb onto the front pocket of my jeans, as she always liked to do. (
I want to keep you close
, she used to say. She did this, her little anchor on my pocket, for her first visits in the Canaries, when we were allowed to walk around the visiting courtyard together.
I want to keep you close.
She kept it up until the start of the third year, when we both realized that the Salto del Negro was how it would always be. She still visits, but she no longer hooks a thumb in my pocket.) Ahead of us, the Councilman and his family mixed in with the Sunday afternoon crowd. The girl’s bobbing brown hair made it easy to follow them, and as we walked, Nere began to talk about the coming year.

“If you’re accepted to San Sebasti
á
n, we can stay with Carolina. Her roommate is leaving in August,” she was saying.

“Sure,” I said, imagining afternoons reading in caf
é
s by the beach, nights out in the city’s old part with its hundreds of bars and streets running over with young people.

“She has a friend that works at the hospital there,” she said. “She might be able to help me get a job.”

The Councilman and his wife stopped in at the Arosteguis’ butcher shop, the Councilman pointing to the halved pigs hanging by their feet in the back of the store and pinching his daughter’s stomach playfully while the wife ordered cuts from the handsome butcher behind the counter.

“Do you ever worry about what your parents will say?” I asked. “When we move to San Sebasti
á
n?”

She didn’t answer immediately. Instead, we kept walking past the plaza to avoid drawing the attention of the Councilman. When we had reached the large stone archway leading out onto Calle Nafarroa, she stopped, using her hooked thumb to pull me toward her. She leaned up to kiss me, stepping on my shoe to raise herself up (another thing that stopped during the third year at the Salto del Negro), and then she leaned back against the wall of the archway.

“Of course I worry,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“My father will be furious.”

I nodded. I’d met her father once or twice at her house. He was a short man who seemed incapable of anger. The first time we’d met, when I stopped in to pick up Nere on the way to a concert in Lekeitio, he had insisted that his wife make me a ham sandwich before we left. My father, on the other hand, was much easier to imagine angry. He had made clear early on that he expected me to apply to the economics program at the University of Deusto, and Nere, with her dyed hair and piercings, didn’t have any place in that future. I hadn’t yet dared to tell him about my plans to live with the twenty-three-year-old girlfriend he didn’t know existed or that I had decided to study literature instead of engineering.

“But anyway, let’s not think about it just yet,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. I squinted against the afternoon sun. The dull pressure was starting just behind my eyes. I felt the taste of metal on my gums.

“Are you all right?” Nere asked, taking me by the arms. “Another of the headaches?”

I nodded, leaning back against the wall. The pain was radiating, brittle behind my eyes, and the pops of light had already begun. I slid down against the wall and held my head in my hands. Nere knelt next to me and rubbed the back of my neck. Around me, I heard the shuffle of feet, disembodied conversations. Soon the flashes faded, and the pain began to lessen. When I finally looked up, it was just as the Councilman and his wife walked past us in the archway, so close I could have touched him.

31. JONI (1951)

A week after she moved into Kattalin Gorro
ñ
o’s guesthouse with us, Nerea’s mother emerged from the bedroom waving away the coffee I had prepared for her.

“You smoke, no?” she said.

I nodded. She held out her small hand, and I handed her the blue box of Dunhills from my chest pocket. She pinched one of the cigarettes out of the box, then bent down to light it on the gas range. In the previous seven days, I’d never seen any indication that she smoked. She opened the kitchen door and blew a plume of smoke out into the gray morning. She took another pensive drag, then turned toward me as if noticing my presence for the first time.

“Maybe today, young man,” she said. She nodded as if answering a question she had asked herself. “Maybe today.”

*   *   *

WHEN I
returned from San Jorge that afternoon I found Nerea standing at the stove in one of my old dress shirts worn over a cotton blouse, the sleeves rolled up on her thin arms, stirring potatoes in a cast-iron pan. Her slender legs were hidden under a dark, heavy skirt. Her mother was seated at the kitchen table, stemming a pile of green beans and puffing on another of the Dunhills. Hearing the front door, the two women turned nearly in unison as I entered the kitchen.

“
Arratsalde on
,” she said, smiling weakly.
Good afternoon
. “You’ve made a smoker of my mother, I think.”

She hardly looked like the woman I knew: not only had the bulge at her stomach all but disappeared, but she seemed thinner, more gaunt, than even before her pregnancy. Her cheeks were hollow, her usually dark skin sallow, the color of spoiled milk. Her black hair, which had become even thicker—impossibly thick—during her pregnancy, seemed sparse and uneven, as if entire handfuls had been ripped from her skull. (Later, I found that this was exactly what had happened.)

“
Arratsalde on
,” I said. I stood in the doorway, trying to keep myself from rushing across the room that smelled of garlic and onion and was finally, after what seemed like years, warm. We stood like that, she at the stove in the oversized shirt, me hovering awkwardly in the frame of the door, the old woman smoking, her hands working quickly over the green beans.

“The stove,” the old woman said, looking up from the bowl of beans. “The potatoes are burning.”

And then the spell was broken, and Nerea was coming across the room to me, and it was as if the thing that had happened in Don Octavio’s office eight days before were only a story we had been told about another couple, about two unfortunate other people. I held her thin frame in my arms and we rocked like that, neither of us crying, just rocking and rocking until the old woman said again, “Nerea,
mecachis
, the potatoes!”

*   *   *

WHEN AITOR
came to drive his mother’s bags back to the apartment on San Lorenzo, nothing suggested his opinion of me had changed any in the past ten days. He nodded curtly when I answered the door to the guesthouse, then pushed past without waiting for an invitation to enter. In the living room, Nerea and her mother sat stiffly on the couch that I was still sleeping on, sheets and blankets folded neatly between the two of them. Nerea smiled at her brother, who offered her the same gruff nod that he had given me at the front door.

“Well,” the old woman said. “Joni, perhaps you can help carry my bags to the car. Aitor, you stay here with your sister.”

Her two children looked at her inquiringly, while I had no choice but to follow her into the back bedroom. As soon as we entered, she wheeled around and closed the door behind us.

“She’s not well,” she said in a low voice. “You think that she is, but she’s not.”

The room was the cleanest I’d ever seen it; the hardwood floorboards shining brightly, the comforter pulled tight to the bed and folded neatly at its head, the top of the dresser cleaned of empty cigarette packs and discarded tissues.

“She’s tried to kill herself before. Of course she didn’t tell you this.” She was whispering now, her small hand gripping my forearm. “It was why I sent her to the sisters in Bermeo.”

I nodded, glancing quickly toward the closed bedroom door.

“You think that she’s well, but she’s not,” she repeated.

“What can I do?” I asked.

The old woman shrugged her shoulders, as if to say,
She’s your problem now
.

“Watch her, I suppose. I’ve been trying to help her for the last twenty-five years, and look at me now,” she said, holding her hands empty in front of her.

*   *   *

THAT HAD
been on a Tuesday. That same afternoon, from Kattalin Gorro
ñ
o’s house, I called the school to tell them I wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week.

“Of course, Joni,” the headmaster had said. “Take all the time you need.”

When I walked across the field from Kattalin’s to the guesthouse, I found Nerea sitting on a downed log at the edge of the river. Long shadows stretched out across the newly mowed hay, the final cutting of the season, and she was wrapped in a heavy wool shawl that her mother had left.

“You’ll catch cold out here,” I said as I approached along the small trail leading to the water’s edge. She smiled sleepily at me and patted the space next to her.

“Why is it you never fish the river anymore?” she asked me.

“Do you want me to fish again?” I said, thinking back to the summer afternoons when I’d string up an old pole borrowed from Kattalin Gorro
ñ
o and toss a line out into the current, occasionally pulling up a shivering river trout.

“Not necessarily,” she said. “But I wonder why you don’t anymore.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I thought about it for a moment. “It’s out of season, for one. But I think I just forgot about it, with this summer.”

Immediately I regretted saying it.
This summer
. It implied so much more than a season. Another life. The excitement of Nerea growing out of the small cotton skirts she had always worn. The warmth of the summer air at night when, lying naked on top of the sheets, I would hold my ear to her stomach. It was the life of the other people. She leaned her head down onto my shoulder, one of her hands reaching up to grab a handful of her dark curls.

We sat like that for a long time, her head resting against me, and when I eventually said her name she didn’t answer. I felt her small frame shaking under the wool shawl. Just when the last of the afternoon light vanished, she stood and walked the skinny trail back to the house. I stayed sitting on the downed ash tree, watching the dark shape of her silhouette move silently through the low grass. Nerea entered the kitchen door, and from the river, I saw her through the window as she closed and locked the door to the bedroom and then turned off the light.

32. MARIANA

The representatives from the Party insisted that I have Jos
é
Antonio buried in Muriga. For my part, I hadn’t cared one way or another what they did with the body, whose dirt they covered it with. Where the body should be left was a concern that seemed to ignore the real question: why was there a body in the first place?

But the representatives didn’t stop there. They brought meals, put their cold hands on my arm, directed the photographers and newspapermen away. They asked their questions in quiet, slow voices, saying my name often, as if I were a very young child.

*   *   *

“DO YOU
know, Mariana, if he would want to have been buried in the Church?”

“No.”

*   *   *

“SHOULD THE
casket be open, or do you prefer closed?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

*   *   *

“DO YOU
have any clothes you would like him to be wearing?”

“I’ll have to look.”

“There is a rally at the city hall at four, Mariana, to protest political violence. Will you be able to attend?”

“I’m not sure.”

*   *   *

“WOULD YOU
say just a few words about your husband during the rally?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

*   *   *

“JUST LEAVE
her in peace,” I heard them finally whisper. So they approached Jos
é
Antonio’s parents about where the body should be buried. His parents had arrived at the airport in Bilbao on Wednesday night and seemed to have aged ten years since I’d seen them last, Dav
i
d, small and withered under his navy-blue sweater that we had sent him for Christmas the year before, his teeth somehow appearing too large for his head, Susana’s chlorine-blue eyes in their deep, darkened recesses.

His parents wanted to take the body back to Andaluc
í
a to be buried. They would hate Muriga forever for killing their son. Not just the men who had fired the two pieces of metal through their son. Even now, six years later, Dav
i
d and Susana haven’t returned to Muriga, not even to visit their granddaughter.

The very serious men explained to them even more slowly, and more quietly, how important it would be to the Party if the body remained in Muriga. That it would be a showing of strength. That Jos
é
Antonio would have wanted it that way, they were sure of it, until finally Dav
i
d nodded his head weakly. I imagined them beginning to dig the hole at the exact moment Dav
i
d nodded his head, more of these serious men in their serious clothes stomping shovels into the black soil of the cemetery, turning up old bones in order to make room for the new.

33. IKER

During the trial they made a big production out of the rifle. The
fiscal
had it brought into the courtroom by an assistant on the second day. It was wrapped in brown butcher paper and clear packing tape, as if it had been sent to the court through the mail. The
fiscal
was a small man, and when he tore off the paper and held it by the nicked wooden stock in his undersized hands, it looked bigger than it actually was. He had Asier’s father tell the courtroom that it was his old hunting rifle, given to him by an uncle who lived in the country. Asier’s father looked weak and helpless as he answered the prosecutor’s questions, as if he were trying to come up with a response that was true and yet did not implicate his son. He told the
fiscal
that the gun had been stored in his bedroom closet, leaned against the back corner with a half-empty box of cartridges.