All That Followed (3 page)

For a moment neither of us spoke. A late-morning breeze carried the first brown oak leaves across the walk, out onto the sand with a scraping sound so soft that it would be lost entirely if you didn’t see the leaves creating the sound.

“Anyway, enough talk of kidneys,” she said. “Sometimes I feel as if the word ‘kidney’ is the only one I use anymore.” She laughed, and it was, strangely, the most untroubled laugh I had heard from her in a long while. “So, old man, when does your replacement arrive—this new American?”

“He has already arrived, I’m told. Goikoetxea himself is putting him and his wife up for a few days until they find a house.”

Elena had returned to where we sat on the chipped white bench. Her small foot flopped loosely in her shoe, and Mariana bent down to retie the hanging laces. I watched the back of Mariana’s head, the way her dark hair mingled with Elena’s lighter-brown curls, the lightness she had inherited from Jos
é
Antonio’s family from the south.

“So,” I said, “can I ask what technique you are using?”

“The rabbit and his ears, of course. Thirty-two years of the squirrel running around the tree, and now it is always the rabbit and his ears.”

5. MARIANA

This is what he said when he accepted the job as deputy campaign manager in Bilbao: that he’d always wanted to work in politics, and besides, it was better money than he could earn in Muriga. This town didn’t have room for a man of ambition, unless his idea of ambition was leaving at 3:30 each morning on the sardine boats, or working in a video store, or depositing pension checks for ninety-year-old widowers.

“You knew all this,” I said. “You knew it before you agreed to move.”

“We came here because you insisted on it. And because of her,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of Elena’s room. “That’s hardly agreeing.”

We had been living with my mother for two months, the three of us packed into a spare bedroom in an apartment just at the foot of the mountains, where the forest begins. My mother was out with her
mus
group as she was every Friday afternoon, and Jos
é
Antonio and I were in the kitchen, where we seemed to conduct all of our arguments now. I was unloading the clothes washer, leaning into the breezeway to hang his undershirts and my mother’s elastic underpants and the handful of small cloths that we draped over our shoulders after Elena had eaten. Jos
é
Antonio repetitively reached up to remove the dark sunflower shells from between his teeth, flicking them into the sink. It was a new habit of his, one that he knew I found disgusting.

“You said you wanted to be in the Basque Country,” I said evenly.

“Yes,” he answered immediately. “I said I wanted to
live
in the Basque Country. I didn’t say I wanted to
be
Basque.”

“
Joder
,” I said. “No one is asking you to be Basque. But this is something else entirely.”

Politics hadn’t mattered in Sevilla. In Sevilla, all that mattered was the next weekend trip to Benidorm, the next bar for
ca
ñ
as
. So when Jos
é
Antonio had voted for the Partido Popular in the ’93 elections, it was easy enough to ignore. In that time, to live in Sevilla was to be an amnesiac, something we Spaniards are so accustomed to becoming. Franco had died nearly two decades earlier; the Socialists had been running things in Madrid, and people in Sevilla thought that the transition to democracy was over. The fifty years since the Civil War had seemed forgotten to history already, absorbed back into the city along with ghosts of Sevilla’s past like the old Islamic minaret converted into a bell tower for the Saint Mary of the See Cathedral five hundred years earlier.

But it was different in Muriga, where our parents and grandparents had been forbidden to speak their native language for nearly half a century and had lost so many of their artists and politicians and intellectuals forever in Franco’s prisons and graveyards. Working for the PP in Muriga would only guarantee that Jos
é
Antonio would be treated as an outsider, something he had complained about since we’d arrived in August.

“Your people,” he said, leaning over the sink to spit another of the black shells. “The persecution complex you have…”

*   *   *

IT WAS
this conversation. This and a hundred like it that I began to remember only after Jos
é
Antonio had been buried for a year.

6. IKER

During our second-to-last year at San Jorge, the year before the Councilman was killed, Asier and I made a habit of ditching school during the noon breaks. We’d begun to hang around with Ram
ó
n Luna’s group, kids a few years older than us who liked to think of themselves as political. For me at sixteen years old, the idea that drinking wine instead of going to school could be considered “political” was a revelation. We’d grown up walking by posters of young Basque radicals who had been killed or arrested, had seen the strikes organized by university students when we visited cities like Bilbao or San Sebasti
á
n with our families. And with Ram
ó
n, suddenly we were a part of it.

When I recall these escapes now—as I often do after the fat guard Ricardo calls lights out each night at nine here in the Salto del Negro—one stands out not only because it involved so many of the places and people that would later shape my life, but because it was just one of those rainy autumn days that I associate with home, days that we never seem to get here in the Canaries.

On this afternoon, we made our break out of the cafeteria, our usual escape route—down the west hallway toward the student bathrooms. Asier took the lead, as he always seemed to, while I lagged behind and kept an eye out for teachers. Just before arriving at the boys’ room, we ducked into the corridor that runs past the door of the American professor Garrett’s classroom, past the old pictures of famous writers like P
í
o Baroja and Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as a series of cartoon drawings from
Don Quixote de la Mancha
that he had hung on the walls. To us, they were strange caricatures of our literature, and they stood out in a
secundaria
classroom. They reminded everyone at San Jorge that he didn’t quite belong. I’ve often wondered if he was simply ignorant of these little details that set him apart in this way or if he had known about them all along.

When I looked around the corner the hallway was empty, but we slid off our shoes anyway so that the soles didn’t pound the tile. We were almost past Garrett’s room when Asier tugged at the sleeve of my jacket, then nodded toward the classroom. Inside, the old man was sitting at a student’s desk, drinking a Coca-Cola and reading a ratty old book. A napkin was still tucked into the collar of his shirt. He reminded me of one of the little kids you see standing by themselves on the
primaria
playground.

When we reached the end of the hallway, Asier cracked the door and put his eye to the line of daylight that came in from outside. He took a full thirty seconds before turning back to me. He paused to build the tension (as he always did), before giving a thumbs-up. I pressed in closer as he counted to three,
bat
,
bi
,
hiru
, and then he swung open the door, and we were running across the fifty meters of parking lot in the direction of the wooded hillside that slopes down toward Muriga, still carrying our shoes in our hands.

This is my favorite part of the memory: the run. There’s the instant when we come through the door and the sun is so bright that we’re temporarily blinded, and we’re running only downhill, not toward any place in particular, our blazers bunched into our armpits as we swing our arms, and when my eyes adjust I see Asier’s brown hair pushed back off his forehead, his crooked tooth flashing as we sprint into the trees.

When we were safe in the protection of the forest that separates San Jorge from Muriga, Asier sat down on the black pine needles and rotting leaves and leaned back against a tree. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out an Athletic Bilbao pencil box. On the pencil box an image of Imanol Etxeberria stretched across the goal as he punched away a shot, and I remembered that Athletic would play Barcelona tonight.

Asier laid out a cigarette, rolling paper, and lighter from the pencil box. I loosened my tie and lay back on the leaves, my hands behind my head. My mind was already wandering to Mar
í
a Larra
ñ
aga and her younger sister Laura, who was only in eighth year but whose tits were already bigger than her sister’s.

“Mar
í
a or Laura?” I asked Asier, a game we always played. He was holding a small brown lump of hash, which he warmed with a cigarette lighter and carefully flaked into his palm.

“Again with the Larra
ñ
agas?” he said. “If you had any balls, you’d do something about it instead of just talking.”

“True,” I said. “But which one? For me, it’s the younger one.”

He laughed. “Last week it was the older one, wasn’t it?”

Asier crumbled a Lucky in his right hand and mixed it with the brown scrapings in his left palm, then rolled the mix in a Zig-Zag and licked the paper together. It was, among other things, the year in which Asier had gained his reputation as the best joint roller at San Jorge. He could roll one under his desk without looking—I witnessed it once during one of Irala’s never-ending lectures. Asier ran the joint quickly under the cigarette lighter before lighting an end and handing it to me. We lay against the forest floor and smoked, and we stared up through the branches of the trees at the clouds gathering in strange shapes and talked about who would win the game tonight, and if Anderson, Barcelona’s new striker, would score a goal. When we were done, we gathered our jackets and ties and walked the two kilometers down to the cliffs just past my grandmother’s old house on the east end of town.

By the time we hiked far enough to see the ocean, it had started to rain. A small bit of smoke came out of one of the concrete bunkers dug into the steep cliffside, and when we got closer, we heard Ram
ó
n Luna’s voice.

The bunker was left over from the Civil War, a history lesson that we had heard both at San Jorge and here on the cliffs. Ram
ó
n told us about the Basques’ last stand against the dictator’s army, about a Basque fishing boat called the
Beau Muriga
that had been recommissioned and outfitted by the Nationalists to battle a Spanish frigate not one kilometer in front of us. But what Ram
ó
n never told us, what I learned only years later in an old book I’d found in the library at the Salto del Negro, is that even though Franco later pardoned its captain for bravery in the face of certain destruction, the
Beau Muriga
was sunk after a two-hour fight, and the fascists burned half the town a couple days later. I guess even if I had known the true fate of the
Beau Muriga
, it wouldn’t have changed the way I saw the battle Ram
ó
n Luna described—not as hopeless but as heroic. As the greatest kind of courage. We were looking for outrage in those days; we were looking for martyrs.

But the Civil War was sixty years ago, and now the walls of the bunker were written over with graffiti and the floor was just old newspapers and cigarette butts, a place where our cuadrilla could meet to smoke and drink and idly listen to Ram
ó
n’s talk. I never expected anything more to come of these afternoons, though when I trace my journey to the Salto it always begins here. Ram
ó
n gave a quick nod as Asier and I entered but didn’t break his monologue.

Luken and Daniel leaned against the cracked concrete wall of the bunker, feeding twigs and bits of binder paper into a small fire in the corner. Luken was new to Muriga, but Daniel has been part of our cuadrilla since primary school. His father owned the grocery store at the corner of Zabaleta and Atxiaga, and Daniel had been stealing wine and candies from the old man since we were eleven years old. Between the two of them was a liter box of Don Pedro, and I sat near the fire and took a drink. In the shelter of the bunker, leaning close to the fire, I felt the wine warm me up from the inside, and as it mixed with the hash I felt tired and happy. I read the graffiti on the low ceiling—
Carlos
+
Michelle, Fuck Madrid, Marta S
á
nchez gives good blow jobs
—and listened.

“Did you read the
Diario Vasco
yesterday?” Ram
ó
n was asking. We’d known Ram
ó
n since before I can remember. He was the best friend of Asier’s older brother, Aimar, and it was impossible to look at him and not remember the boy who had pissed himself in his second year as an altar server, even though that was more than ten years ago. It didn’t matter. I still saw that same kid. “The Conservatives are planning an expansion of their office in Bilbao. Their goal, according to the article, is to increase their presence in the rural areas and smaller towns.”

Ram
ó
n was always lecturing like this about our struggle. The struggle of the Basque people. In his own eyes he’d become a leader, a revolutionary, and though we didn’t entirely believe this version of him, we didn’t try to discredit it either. I felt an elbow in my side, and when I turned toward Daniel, he rolled his eyes as if to say, “This speech again.” He pushed a box of cookies toward me. I took one and shoved it in my mouth whole, washing it down with another drink of Don Pedro.

Whenever Asier caught me clowning around during one of these speeches he’d tell me that I should pay attention, believe more in the struggle. I wanted to wave my hands in front of us and say, “What struggle? We live in a small city with a nice beach. They teach Euskera in the public schools, and the street signs are in both Basque and Spanish. Your father is a banker, and you were a Real Madrid fan until Ram
ó
n and his lectures.” But I knew Ram
ó
n spoke in a language that Asier had been learning over the last year—the language of “armed struggle,” of Marxism-Leninism, of “wealth condensation” and “anti-imperialism.” He was Muriga’s sad answer to the Ch
é
poster that Asier had pinned to his bedroom door.