All That Followed (19 page)

Asier had handed me the rifle the morning after we had taken the Councilman. Gorka and Daniel were supposed to have returned to the bunker hours earlier, and when the sun began to rise, we decided that I would stay with the Councilman until Asier could determine what had happened. The night had been clear and cold, and the Councilman was shivering in his dark suit jacket, seated against one of the concrete walls with his hands tied behind his back. The small room was lit only by the shaky beam of the flashlight Asier carried. I blew into my hands to warm them before Asier passed the rifle to me. It was heavier than I expected, but I tried to handle the gun casually, to give the impression that I was familiar with it. I pulled the bolt action back, then pushed it into place, as I had seen Asier do several times earlier. Asier gathered his camera, the remainder of the laundry line we had used to tie the Councilman’s wrists, and his rolling tobacco from the floor.

“He hasn’t come back because they’ve caught him,” the Councilman said suddenly. Asier’s hand stopped on the bag of tobacco.

“What did you say?” Asier asked. He took a step closer. The Councilman’s lips trembled with the cold.

“It’s not too late,” the Councilman said. “They’ve probably caught your friend. But nothing has happened yet. You can still let me go. It’s not too late.”

Asier squatted down so that he was eye level with the Councilman. He set the flashlight on the ground, then rubbed his palms on his knees. He picked the flashlight back up. The Councilman squinted against the glare.

“That’s what you’d like, I guess?” Asier said. “To go home to your wife. Mariana, right?”

The Councilman’s head straightened at his wife’s name. His shivering stopped.

“Asier—” I said.

“And your daughter, Elena?” Asier said. “We know a little bit about you, Jos
é
Antonio Torres. We might even know more about your life than you do.”

“Get that goddamn light out of my face,” the Councilman said.

Asier flicked the switch off, and the bunker was lit with only the dim morning light. Outside I could hear the scraping sound of the surf against the cliffs and the high shrieks of the first gulls circling below.

“For example,” Asier continued, “you might not know that your wife, Mariana, has been having an affair for the past two months.”

As Asier said this, the gun suddenly felt small and stupid in my hands. I wanted him to stop, to do what the Councilman had said: to go home, to set him free, to set things back a day or a week or a year. But it already had a momentum that could not be stopped by me, or by Asier, or by the Councilman and his pleas. We all understood this, I think. We understood it but we didn’t want to accept it.

“Three days a week, while you are working in Bilbao,” Asier said. The Councilman sat motionless. The cuffs of his dark slacks were splattered with mud from the night before. “In your own apartment, even.”

Asier inched closer to the Councilman.

“Do you think you know who it is?” he continued. “It’s the new American, of all people. Duarte. He’s been fucking your wife for two months now. We’ve seen him in your window. With Mariana.”

“You should go,” I said. “It’s already five thirty.”

Asier rocked back on his heels, then stood up.

“Keep that gun on this son of a bitch,” he said, switching back to Basque. “If he tries anything, put one between his eyes.”

I nodded, adjusted the rifle in my hands. Asier took his bag from the floor and put it on his shoulder. Standing there in the bunker’s crumbling doorway, he seemed like an intruder in this place where we’d spent so many afternoons.

“I’ll be back in forty-five minutes. No later than an hour. You’re all right here?”

“Sure,” I said, looking at the Councilman leaning against the wall. “Sure.”

*   *   *

ASIER HAD
been gone for nearly an hour when the Councilman finally spoke.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “The other one is Asier, I heard you say. But I didn’t hear your name.”

I didn’t say anything back. I leaned the gun against the gray concrete wall, then shook a cigarette from the pack Gorka had left in the bunker.

“Not going to tell me, eh?” he said. “It doesn’t matter. You know, I recognize you now. Asier, I don’t think I’ve seen him before. But you—yes, now I remember. Your mother is friends with Estefana. From the Boli
ñ
a.”

I checked my watch again, then looked down the empty trail that wound through the damp morning grass toward Muriga. The sun had come up over the mountains behind the cliffs, softening the night chill.

“Do you think I could have one of those?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

He shook his head, then stared with me out the door toward Muriga. I dragged on the cigarette, waiting for the whole horrible morning to be over.

“It shouldn’t surprise me,” he said as I snubbed out the cigarette on the floor of the bunker. “The affair, I mean. If what your friend said is true. It shouldn’t surprise me but it does.”

“I’m not really sure,” I said, although I had seen it myself in the window of their fifth-floor apartment.

He shook his head again.

“No,” he said, “I can see it now and I’m sure that it’s true.”

“I’m sorry,” I heard myself say.

“The funny thing, of course, is that I was doing the same.”

He was still staring off through the doorway, strands of his dark hair falling into his face.

“Her name is Isabel,” he said. “She works at the Party headquarters in Bilbao.”

I picked up the rifle from the wall, slid the action forward and back again.

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

The Councilman regarded me gloomily.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I’m just feeling the need to confess.”

“Stop your talking,” I said, nearly yelling.

And then I felt the dull pressure behind my eyes, one of the headaches building. I shouldered the rifle and looked down the sights, one eye closed like I had seen in the movies. On the other end of the barrel the Councilman stared back with what seemed like boredom, as if all things had already been done. I dropped the rifle back down into the sling of my arm. The morning sunlight coming through the empty windows dimmed as the pain gathered strength. I stepped toward the door so that the Councilman couldn’t see me, the taste of copper arriving under the edge of my tongue.

I turned and pointed the rifle again at the man crouched against the wall, who was staring hungrily at the cigarette butt I had put out on the cracked concrete floor below him.

“Not another fucking word,” I said.

34. JONI (1951)

My first year in Muriga we had taken a boat from the marina—a small rowboat that Nerea claimed she’d been given permission to use by one of her uncles. I had rowed us across the bay, around the western harbor to a hidden gravel beach she knew. We ate lunch and made love on a blanket we had brought for this purpose, and later fell asleep in the midday sun.

When I woke I was shivering. Thunderheads bruised the afternoon sky, and the sea had turned gray, jagged. The boat scraped against the rocks of the beach. I shook Nerea’s shoulder, but even as the first rains of the storm arrived, she shrugged me away, pulling the blanket happily over her.

“We have to leave now if we’re going to beat the storm,” I said through the rain. Already there was a heavy break along the shoreline, bucking the boat. I waded out to my knees and held the gunwale tightly, trying to wrest the boat against the onslaught of waves; when I turned back toward the beach I saw Nerea tucked in her blanket, laughing.

“It’s already here!” she yelled gleefully through the rain. The delight in that laugh, as if she were incapable of worry. I began to laugh with her, even as the boat lifted out of my reach.

“Let it go,” she said, still laughing, gathering our things for the long walk back to town. “There’s no outrowing a storm that’s already here.”

*   *   *

THE LINE
became a favorite that we used to say to each other in the year before the boy. In our first week at the guesthouse we would point to the drips falling from the ceiling joists,
There’s no outrowing a storm
, and it would all be just an inconvenience, just a game. Drop a plate? You can’t outrow a storm.

But the weeks after her mother left us, it truly was as if we were trapped on this same boat, adrift in that summer squall. Everything was unsteadiness, the world itself seeming to pitch unnaturally. There were moments when our boat would crest a wave, when Nerea would emerge from her room and allow me to sit with her on the sofa or perhaps to make her a ham and cheese sandwich, and I could see the clearing skies on the horizon and know that we would survive. I would remind myself that we had survived storms before. That soon the winds would pass and the waves would settle, as they always did.

And then there were times when our little boat would slip grotesquely down the face of a swell, and we saw neither the sea around us nor the black sky above, only our stern pointing toward the sea bottom. These were the days when I would find Nerea curled on the floor of the bathroom, holding her stomach and insisting that it was the doctor’s fault, that he had conspired with her mother to kill the child. On these days I was chained to the house, afraid of what Nerea might do if I left. I turned away the friends that came to visit, only opening the door enough to speak to them. I used every excuse possible with the headmaster at San Jorge, a kind man who was not without limits to his sympathy.

“Joni,” he told me over the phone after the third week. He spoke to me with empathy, as if he were speaking to a son. “I don’t pretend to know what is happening with you. I don’t. But the students have been three weeks without an English class.”

“I understand,” I said. I walked the phone to the end of its cord so that I could look out of Kattalin’s kitchen window toward our house across the field. “I will be there on Monday.”

*   *   *

THAT WEEKEND
Nerea seemed back to her old self, or at least some version of it. We slept in the same bed for the first time. She walked with me into Muriga on Saturday, and we spent an afternoon at a restaurant, snacking on fried calamari and
patatas bravas
and sipping at a few beers with Marina Inestrellas and her cousin, who was visiting from Portugalete. On the way back to the house, I told her that I would have to go back to work on Monday.

“Of course you do,” she said. “Someone needs to make some money around here!” She was playful, almost happy. As we passed under a low oak limb on the Paseo de los Robles, she reached up to shake the branch’s water on my head. I ducked my head and cringed, and as the cold rainwater raced down the crook of my neck I heard the high shriek of Nerea’s laugh, and then she took off at a delighted run.

Her mother’s words still sat with me, had grown in the time since she’d left.
She’s tried to kill herself before.
I was certain that her mother was telling the truth.

And so, the Sunday before I was to return to work, I woke in the dark of early morning and felt my way from the bedroom. While Nerea slept, I wandered our small house and tried to think of every way she might do it. The living room ceiling was exposed beam, and so I gathered the laundry line, the extension cords, the garden hoses, and carried them to the outbuilding at the edge of the pasture. I looted the bathroom cabinet of two bottles of aspirin, then poured out the few bottles of liquor that we kept above the refrigerator. When I was gathering the bleach and ammonia from under the sink I realized that there was no end. We were surrounded by deadly tools. A milk bottle could be broken, creating a thousand handy knives. A radio cord could be ripped from its casing and strung up on the dining room light. The gasoline cans along the side of the house. A wine key.

When I returned from the outbuilding after several trips, the sun was already up, cutting at the edges of a morning fog. The light in the bedroom was on, as was the light in the kitchen. I found Nerea at the stove, stirring milk into the top of the Cuban press.

“
Egun on
,” she said, smiling. Her hair was tied back with an old piece of string as it always was in the mornings, her eyes still heavy with sleep.

“Good morning,” I said back.

“You were up early,” she said. She tipped the coffeepot into the two cups she’d set out on the tile counter.

“I had to use the bathroom, and then I wasn’t tired,” I said. “I went outside to watch the sun come up.”

“You should have come to get me,” she said, handing me one of the cups. She held the coffeepot in a towel to protect her hands, then carefully unscrewed the base from the top and shook the spent grounds into the sink. She began to run the water, then opened the cabinet under the sink for the dish soap. She paused, kneeling there with the cabinet open, and I knew that she’d realized the bleach was missing. I sipped at my coffee, then took a half baguette from the countertop and broke off the end.

“What should we do today?” I asked. “It’s my last day of freedom before I have to go back to San Jorge.”

She stood at the sink and began to run a yellow dishrag over the coffee press. She shrugged her shoulders, and I could tell she was turning over the evidence in her mind: the missing container of bleach, the knives removed from the silverware drawer. “Whatever you want,” she said. She turned toward me, the hot water steaming in the sink. I bit down on the hard crust of the baguette and felt the bread cracking under my teeth.

“Did you have a chance to practice your Basque with my mother while she was here?” she asked.

“A little,” I said, guardedly.

“Do you still remember the word for this?” she said, holding up her brown coffee mug.

“Yes,” I said. “
Katilua
.”

“And how do you say ‘hair’?” she asked, pinching one of the wine-dark strands that had fallen over her eyes.

“
Ilea
.”

“And ‘knife’?” she said, watching me closely. “Did I ever teach you the word for ‘knife’?”