All That Followed (26 page)

“I’m not really sure, Iker,” he said. He brushed again at his sweater. “Does it really matter?”

I didn’t say anything, but I thought to myself that of course it must matter. It was silent for a minute in the small office, and then I turned the page of my notebook and pushed a vocabulary exercise over to be graded. Garrett picked the notebook up, looked at it for a second, then put the notebook back on his desk.

“If it’s all right with you, let’s leave this for Thursday, OK?” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have asked about your wife.”

“No,” he said. “That was a long time ago.”

“Does it still bother you that much?” I asked.

“As if I lost her yesterday,” he said.

Another of the old man’s warnings that I only deciphered in the Salto del Negro.

48. MARIANA

The night of the kidnapping, after Detective Castro had come back and left the apartment a second time, I told my mother about the affair with Robert Duarte.

As I spoke I felt my secret escape the safety of the apartment, sliding out the cracks around the windows and under the frame of the door, seeping out into the streets below. If the detective discovered the affair, Duarte would become an automatic suspect. They would question him, perhaps even arrest him. I’d gone to
secundaria
with the clerk at the police station; his wife cut my hair at the salon near the post office. I could already see the story of the affair traveling into the corners of beauty salons and through doctors’ waiting rooms, across the rims of glasses in bars and restaurants, through the bleachers of the pelota court.

My mother listened quietly, and when I was through, she merely patted my knee.

“It’s all right,” she said. “We’re all only human, Mariana.”

I sat rocking on the sofa and stared at the muted television. Across the screen came a series of images: police officers at the Muriga train station, marking with white tape the places on the asphalt where the kidnappers’ car had stopped. Jokin Palacio opening the front door of our apartment building earlier in the evening, a sack of groceries tucked under an arm.

My mother tended to Elena in the girl’s bedroom as I rocked in the silence of the living room. The glowing screen of the television lit up now with the photos of Jos
é
Antonio supplied by the Partido Popular office in Bilbao, then the word
secuestro
in bold letters below the female newscaster, and finally the silent volleyball game of a sunscreen commercial. My mother sat down on the sofa, both of us watching the weatherman, until she nudged me gently with an elbow.

“Here,” she said, holding a small white pill out in her palm. After the conversation in Spanish with Castro, the soft familiarity of my mother’s Euskera seemed to take an edge out of the room. In her other hand she held a glass of water. “To help you sleep. Just for a bit.”

When I began to protest, she held up a hand.

“I promise to wake you if anything happens,” she said. “But you need a little rest.”

In the months since the surgery, swallowing pills had become just another of those things we do during the day, like scratching your head or stretching a shoulder. I took the pill and placed it on my tongue, then swallowed it down. I lay back on the couch and pulled up the wool blanket that Jos
é
Antonio’s mother had knit a few weeks after we had announced that I was pregnant. My mother stood to turn off the television, then sat next to me on the sofa. She ran a hand slowly through my hair.

“It will be fine,” she whispered, as if this were already something whose outcome she understood. I was surprised to find that I was crying. “This is the worst of it, Mariana. Tonight will be the worst.”

“Are you ashamed,
Ama
?” I asked.

“What do I have to be ashamed of?” she said, still pulling her fingers through my tangle of curls.

“Of me, of course,” I said. “The American…”

Her hand stopped its movement.

“These things happen, my love,” she said.

“But if they find out,” I said. “You know how it will be. People will talk.”

The fingertips again began their slow walk across along my hairline, and I closed my eyes. The pill had begun to settle in, and I felt my breathing begin to slow.

“Oh Mariana,” she said. “Don’t you know by now? In a town like this, people will always talk. What else would we do?”

*   *   *

THAT NIGHT,
for the first time in weeks, I dreamed.

After the pill took hold, my mother turned off the lights in the living room and went to our bedroom to sleep herself. But fifteen minutes later I was still awake on the sofa, the living room swimming unnaturally in a mix of exhaustion, desperation, and the intoxication of the medication. Light crept out oddly from behind the dark shapes of the drawn curtains, throwing unsettling images onto the glassy black of the television and the shadowy corners of the room, and then the smell arrived.

It was a thick smell, heavy with diced vegetables and chicken stock and the dark weight of a hambone simmering in an invisible, impossibly full pot. The living room seemed to fill with the smell, as if it had been prepared just there, on the low table that was covered with Jos
é
Antonio’s old sports magazines. I threw back Jos
é
Antonio’s mother’s blanket and sat upright on the sofa, searching the room for the source of the smell. A heat began to radiate just below me, and I felt the familiar sensation of steam rising up to touch the underside of my arms.

“Hello?” I said quietly. “Have you come back?”

There was no answer, only the dark shadows dancing on the wall across the room, forming twisting shapes and faces that disappeared with the rustling of the curtains. I closed my eyes and waited for it all to pass.

It’s the pill
, I told myself.
You’re asleep right now, and when you wake it will be morning and your husband will be back and you will not hear again from the kidney.

But it
had
returned; I was sure of it when a moment later the heat of the stew trailed off and was replaced with the unmistakable smell of cigarette smoke and sea air. A cold came over me as if the living room window had been left open, and I pulled the blanket up tight as if to protect not only against the cold but also against the smell of smoke and the warmth that had pressed against the underside of my arms. I knew for certain that he was in the room. I felt him there, sitting across from me. The room seemed larger than I remembered it; malevolent black pools grew out from the corners, and the smell of smoke continued to build.

“Please,” I said into the dark, my eyes still squeezed shut. “What is it that you want? Why are you here for me?”

There was silence on the other side of the darkness, but for the first time I saw him, I
ñ
aki, his dark hair cropped short, his muted laugh revealing the crooked lower row of teeth. He was in the chair that the detective had sat in just an hour before, slapping a knee, throwing his head back.
He is here for me
, I thought, and then
No, he is here for Elena
. Dark stains seeped through his shirt, dripped from his ears. I felt the weight of the sleeping pill fill my head and knew that I was in that impossible place between sleep and reality. I leaned into a corner of the couch and waited for this to pass, but still the image came across the dark, passed through the woolen loops of the blanket: I
ñ
aki, as I had imagined him, sitting in the detective’s chair, but now flanked by two other figures. I didn’t recognize the man who stood to his left, a short man with a hooked nose, dressed in a rough work shirt. He was looking at I
ñ
aki, as if trying to understand the cause of the young man’s laughter. To his right, still dressed in his dark suit, was Jos
é
Antonio.

When I woke, it was to Elena’s cries coming down the hall in the early morning light.

49. MARIANA

“Who told you?” I asked the detective.

“It’s not important,” Castro said. “What’s important is that you trust me, Mariana. If I’m going to find your husband, I’ll need your complete honesty.”

I shook my head, feeling the power of the affair escaping my control, just as I had feared the night before.

“How can I trust you, if you won’t even tell me how you learned about Robert Duarte?” I asked.

He smiled, as if he appreciated this turn.

“An excellent point,” he said. “But I think you already know, don’t you?”

I’d been careful in my few months with Robert; we never spoke by phone, were never seen together in public after those first two innocent meetings. The only person I’d disclosed the affair to was my mother, the night before, and she’d been with me ever since. But that aside, I knew she would never betray my confidence.

And then suddenly I thought back to afternoons with Joni Garrett over the last few months. I remembered the old man delivering the news of Jos
é
Antonio’s kidnapping only a day earlier, how he held me close to him as the news began to register, as the first surge of incomprehension hit. I felt sick, as if the floor had become rolling waves under my feet.

He knew, I realized. He’d known since the beginning.

50. JONI (1955)

I left Muriga three days before the funerals. Juantxo would later tell me that there was no public ceremony, that the priest made only an oblique reference to Nerea and the girl during Sunday mass, when he asked the congregants to pray for the souls of the departed.

I had taken the train to Bilbao the Friday before, wandering the streets of the industrial town until I found the small bar where I had taken refuge the morning that our daughter was born. It was early afternoon, and the bar was nearly unrecognizable, the tables filled with regulars gathering for
pintxos
or a drink before heading back to work. I looked around for the curly-haired bartender, but the only people working were a couple in their midfifties who moved in a synchronicity that only comes from decades of coexistence.

“Are you looking for someone?” the woman asked, catching me peering past the bar into the kitchen where the man scraped furiously at a hot steel grill.

I shook my head. She watched me standing there dumbly for a moment.

“Well, is there something I can get you?”

“A
ca
ñ
a
,” I said. “And a whiskey.”

She poured a small glass full of Ballantine’s, then quickly moved down the bar toward the tap; a short man shouted an order as she passed, and she nodded to show that she’d heard. When she returned, she placed the glass of beer in front of me, as well as a plate of golden
croquetas
.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t order these.”

She waved a hand at me.

“They were an extra order,” she said, already moving to another customer at the end of the bar. “On the house.”

*   *   *

I HAD
planned to take the evening train back to Muriga, but when I arrived at the ticket window the specter of the empty house loomed darkly. Instead, I bought a ticket to Bakio, a tourist town on the beach just outside of Bilbao. I checked into a room I couldn’t afford and spent the next four hours at the hotel bar with a German man on vacation.

My mother wired money for the plane ticket after I called her drunk from the hotel’s front desk at two in the morning. It was the first time we’d spoken in nearly two years, when she learned that she’d had a grandchild and also that this grandchild was dead. The next day I took the overnight train to Madrid, lighting one cigarette after the other.

“On vacation?” the desk agent said at the airport, reading the name on my ticket.

“Something like that,” I said.

“Your Spanish is very good,” he said. “You’ve been here before?”

“It’s my first trip, actually,” I said. It was true—the last time I had been in Madrid was seven years earlier, when I arrived from San Francisco with a few hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, a Fodor’s guidebook that I’d bought at the airport, and a suitcase of slacks and shirts that I’d taken from a box of my brother’s old clothes in storage.

But even so, this didn’t feel like a return, like my life in Muriga was coming to an end. Rather, I was in full retreat; I already knew that I would be trying to escape Nerea for the rest of my life.

My father dealt with my return—and with the story of my dead wife and daughter—as he’d dealt with the death of his own son. Which is to say, in silence. When my mother returned with me from the airport in San Francisco he barely looked up from the television set, as if he’d been expecting this moment since I’d left. And as much as I knew I had needed to flee Muriga, I soon came to understand that my life was there now, or away from the United States, at least. The house had already been consumed with mourning; there was no place for my own here.

I rode with my father to the train yard the next morning, and the foreman agreed to give me the night shift starting that same day. But when I returned to the signal booth that night I was overcome with loneliness, despite the familiarity of my surroundings. The same screeching of the rails, the same gasoline smell of the booth. The strangeness of my name spoken in English.

A few days later I wired Juantxo to see if I might be able to have my job back at San Jorge. When he wrote back the next day, I realized how ridiculous it had been to ask. As if anyone else would have swooped in to take the job in my absence. In his cable, Juantxo told me that there had been a collection taken among the teachers at San Jorge, and among some of the parents as well. Enough for a ticket back. Muriga didn’t
need
me, I understood then, but I had a place there. It was more than I could say about the house I’d grown up in.

51. MARIANA

When I was visited by I
ñ
aki the night of Jos
é
Antonio’s kidnapping—or dreamed or imagined him, as Joni might have put it—it was for the last time. By the next night they had caught two of the kidnappers and were conducting house-to-house searches and roadblocks in the hope of finding my husband alive with the other two fugitives, who by now had been identified as Iker Abarzuza and Gorka Auzmendi. Our apartment on Calle Atxiaga had been occupied nearly all day with police officers and officials from the Party office in Bilbao; I was questioned several times by Detective Castro, about any identifying marks or scars that Jos
é
Antonio had, about any suspicious people I had noticed over the last several weeks, about the affair with Robert Duarte.