All That Followed (5 page)

“So the cookies are like my
membrillo
?”

“Maybe so,” Joni said. This was exactly why I liked the old man so much. I could speak freely.

It had never been like this with Jos
é
Antonio. Everything was intensely personal to him. If I burned the toast in the morning he acted as if I’d slapped him across the face and called his mother a whore. “What’s wrong?” he’d say, putting down whatever memorandum he had been reviewing, and when I’d say that it’s only the toast left too long in the toaster, he would say, “If there’s something bothering you, just say so.”

It was easy to complain about then, but to be truthful this is what brought me to Jos
é
Antonio in the first place. If he had a fault, it was that he cared too much—about me, about his work for the Party, about Elena. It was in my second year at the Institute for Visual Arts in Sevilla that I met him (his cousin was my classmate in Advanced Computer Design), at the tail end of my second consecutive relationship with men who called only in the late hours of the night, dramatic and self-absorbed artist types who insisted on fucking with the lights on. A writer who never seemed to write, and then a sculptor whose sculptures (when he did sculpt, which was rarely) were really crap anyway. And suddenly there was Jos
é
Antonio, the negative image of these men, who would kiss me awkwardly in the hallway of my apartment building before he went home and I went inside to wait for the call from the sculptor. If I had been interested in the passion and volitility of the two artists, then it was the slow-burning persistence of Jos
é
Antonio’s courtship that drew me to him. The previous two years had left me exhausted, and with Jos
é
Antonio I felt that I could finally breathe again. There was no threat of destruction, but a somewhat more ominous promise of steadiness and predictability.

Not that any of this was clear to me in the moment, of course. Regardless of how bad his art was, I continued to sleep with the sculptor for the first two months with Jos
é
Antonio. When I mentioned this to Joni during one of our walks along the paseo he didn’t seem surprised. Instead, he took it as he does all things, as a curiosity.

“Did you ever tell Jos
é
Antonio?” he asked, after a moment.

“Would you have?” I said.

“No,” he replied. “Of course not.”

“We two are very similar, Joni,” I said.

*   *   *

WHEN I
finally ended it with the sculptor, he responded as if I had told him that I was cooking up a pork chop for dinner.

“Of course,” he had said, scratching at the dried clay smeared conspicuously across the lap of his pants. “We both knew this wouldn’t be forever.”

But with Jos
é
Antonio, he
did
seem to know from the beginning that this would be forever.

“I’ve never been in love with someone like this,” he once said as we shared a beer along the Plaza de Galicia. We had only been dating a month, and although I didn’t share his certainty, I found myself answering, “I feel the same, Jos
é
Antonio. I knew, from the first moment, that I would fall in love with you.” I’ve tried to believe it ever since.

We went on like this for two years, until I had finished my degree at the institute. By now Jos
é
Antonio had been working for the Partido Popular for over a year, as an assistant campaign organizer.

In the July after I finished my studies in Sevilla my period never arrived.

9. JONI

We caravanned down the hill from San Jorge into Muriga, the young American Robert Duarte and his wife following my car down the twisting road overhung by mossy cedars, and by the time we arrived at the Elizondo the rain had started in earnest.

I parked in the alleyway off Goiko Plaza; through the rearview mirror I watched my brake lights illuminate the pelting rain on the Duartes’ new Renault. The rain fired sharp, quickly fading shots onto the windshield, and in between the distorted holes I could see the American and his wife. It was a voyeuristic moment there on the side street behind the restaurant, as if I had crept through the dark into their backyard in Idaho, as if I stood just outside the yellow square of light that fell from their kitchen window and watched them clear the table. For longer than I should have, I continued to stare at them through the rearview.

The American craned his neck around to back up into the space directly behind my car, placing his hand on the back of his wife’s headrest. As he did so the wipers of the Renault fanned across the glass, and for a moment her face was perfectly visible through the rain. Our eyes met in such a way that I was sure she had caught me spying, but instead of ducking down, I stayed still, watching. Isn’t stillness the first camouflage of the cowardly?

She stared straight ahead, until the rain had again mottled the windshield, and then she lowered the vanity mirror to fix the makeup around her eyes. She seemed smaller like that, with Robert’s thick hand behind her, as if this single item of scale revealed her true size, not exactly real. When the American had swung the car parallel to the curb he turned the keys to kill the engine, and the two sat not speaking. I opened the door of the Volkswagen and pointed to the awning of the Elizondo at the corner. The cold water ran through my thin cover of hair; I saw the American turn to say something to his wife before catching himself. He pushed open the driver’s side door and jogged over to where I stood waiting in the rain.

“She’ll be in soon,” he said, a little too loudly. Back in the car, his wife peered idly across the square on the other side of Calle Nafarroa. The plaza was surrounded on three sides by apartment buildings, small stores on the ground floor of each. Outside the Arostegui butcher shop fat pigs hung from their back feet, cut lengthwise to reveal the red muscle along their loins, the white fingers of the rib cage. Aitor’s dark figure moved silently among the hanging meat, as imposing as he had been the last time we had spoken four decades before, when he had come for his sister at the house we shared by the river. In the window next to the pharmacy, the women of Ogi Berri were placing the first of the afternoon’s breads and pastries out on display. Dark-gray water cascaded from the canvas awnings into the small stream that flowed along the gutters, carrying with it a flotilla of toothpicks, leaves, and litter.

“Would you like to wait?” I asked.

“You know how women are,” he said. I nodded, thinking,
I have no idea how women are.
“She just needs a minute or so, and then she’ll be in.”

Patxi’s wife, Susana, was behind the bar when we arrived. It was early for lunch, and the restaurant was nearly empty, though it would soon be bustling with customers. It was one of the oldest restaurants in Muriga, known for its seafood dishes and for liberal pours at the bar.

“Susana,” I said. “I present you to my successor, Robert Duarte.”

Susana looked at me curiously as she wiped her hands on her apron. She walked around the bar to where we stood, a small puddle collecting at our shoes (mine old, scuffed, the counter of the right heel chewed on by Rimbaud; Duarte’s pristine oxfords polished, mottled attractively with small beads of rain).

“A pleasure,” she said in Spanish. The American bent down to kiss the older woman on each cheek. “Duarte is a Basque name, isn’t it?”

“My father is from Nabarniz,” Robert said, before adding something in Basque. Susana’s face lifted with genuine surprise.

“Nabarniz?” she said. A rush of indecipherable Basque followed before she remembered that I was there and switched back to Spanish. “My cousins live in Aulesti. They have the mechanic’s shop there.”

“Is it too early for lunch?” I asked.

“No, of course not,” Susana said, flicking at me with her dishrag. “For an
euskaldun
like this one,” she continued, putting a hand on the American’s square shoulder, “my kitchen is always open.”

*   *   *

SUSANA SAT
us at a table just behind the partition between the dining area and the bar. The Elizondo was quiet, except for the rough scrapings of metal on metal as Ainhoa, Susana’s youngest daughter, slid an iron skillet back and forth over the gas range. On the television above the bar, as always, was the never-ending game of pelota. As we warmed from the heat of the kitchen, the American and I were mesmerized by the game, the hard
clack
of the handball as it ricocheted off the tall cement wall, the cries of the handball players as they struck the hard resin ball wrapped in worn leather. The boys of San Jorge play their version with old tennis balls. It gives them an idea of pelota technique but not what makes greatness in a
pelotari
. A good
pelotari
is one who possesses an ability to accept pain, to know that he will submit himself to it again and again, the hard slap of the pelota against a palm mutilated with small broken bones and burst capillaries.

“Have you seen a match?” I asked. The pelota cracked against the wall again. The American was leaning forward over the table, his hand on his chin, his forefinger playing absentmindedly with the scar.

“Of course,” he said, not taking his eyes from the television. “There is a fronton in Boise, at the social club downtown. On weekends my father would take me down. The old sheepherders would sit around the bar until someone got drunk enough to start up a game.”

“If you’d like, I could take you to a match this weekend,” I said. Again, the
clack
of the pelota. “Perhaps we could even get Irujo to come. Do you know Irujo yet?”

“No.”

Clack
.

“He is the history teacher that took over for Goikoetxea when he was moved to administration.”
Clack
. “He’s a fanatic for pelota.”

“I’d like that,” he said.

A final
clack
, and the cry of the pelota player as the ball caromed wildly from his hand, missing the wall by several feet. The door to the bar swung open, and Morgan Duarte backed into the bar, shaking an umbrella behind her before leaning it against the wall just below the coat rack. The American straightened, watching his wife’s thin, nervous figure at the front of the restaurant.

“I should get her,” he said, standing from the table.

“She really doesn’t speak any Spanish?” I asked.

“Almost nothing.”

Morgan was pointing past Susana toward our table in the dining area. When Robert walked up, he put his hand around his wife’s waist and spoke easily to Susana. Susana answered, and the two laughed while Morgan brushed at the left sleeve of her sweater.

I found myself feeling sorry for her. As Robert and Susana spoke in Basque, it occurred to me that Morgan and I were the only ones in the room who were deaf to this language. The two of us alike in this way.

Morgan sidled closer to the American, much the way Elena will tuck herself into the bend behind Mariana’s knee when I kneel down (knowing how I must appear to her: a tall, strangely speaking gargoyle) to ask if she has been a good girl today. The American’s wife smiled in time with Robert and Susana’s laughs; from behind them came the sound of the pelota’s
clack clack clack
and outside the faint ticking of rain against the hoods of the cars on the street. I could see the first hints of desperation in Morgan Duarte, as if she had just there in the Elizondo realized that she was marooned in this strange town. She pulled in just a touch to her husband’s grasp. Even he was a stranger to her now, speaking to a woman in his nearly extinct language.

*   *   *

AFTER THE
second bottle of wine, we began to tell stories. I told them how I had found Rimbaud abandoned at a rest stop outside of Mondrag
ó
n, nearly dead from malnourishment. Morgan Duarte described meeting Robert four years before, when he was a first-year history teacher at a high school in Boise and she was a sophomore at Boise State.

“On our second date he took me to his parents’ house out in Nampa and told his mother, ‘I’m going to marry this girl one day, Ama.’”

Robert, taking his cue, chipped in, “That’s what I told them about every girl I brought home.”

Morgan pretended to take offense, gripping him lightly on the shoulder. She told the story as if she had told it many times before, had revised and whittled it down to the shapely anecdote she shared now over coffee and cheese at the Elizondo. Even so, it was also apparent that she took great pleasure in its telling.

In between platters of breaded lamb chop and
merluza
smothered in tomato sauce, Morgan excused herself for the restroom. By now, the dining area had filled with a local cuadrilla of retired men who made a daily circuit of the few bars and restaurants in downtown Muriga. We both watched her walk among the tables of old Basques, who in turn swiveled to watch this exquisite creature cross the room. Basilio Zabala leaned in to his table and said something in Basque, and the table rocked with a collective laughter. If Robert Duarte had heard the joke, he didn’t show that it had bothered him; instead, it seemed to bolster his self-satisfaction, which had become more evident with each cup of wine.

“What will she do while you are at San Jorge?” I asked. His eyes were still on Morgan as she pulled open the door to the restroom.

“You know, we were just married eight months before we left Boise,” he said, as if this were an answer to the question. “My father died of an aortic aneurysm in April, two months after the wedding.”

He stopped to sip from a glass still half-full of cold table wine. I knocked a cigarette from my pack and struck a match.

“He left us a bit of money, so she won’t need to work,” he continued. “She’s an artist—charcoal sketches, some watercolor—so that will give her something to do. She mentioned enrolling in one of the language schools in Bilbao, but I think Morgan will mostly want to stay at home, get used to being married.”

“Of course,” I said. Duarte’s words were sickeningly familiar. “
Get used to being married
. Of course.”