All That Followed (25 page)

46. JONI (1955)

It was three weeks after the girl’s second birthday when the car went off the road.

We had settled into a routine that, to an outsider, might have even seemed normal. The bedroom light that came on several times a night as a pale young man or his wife woke to attend to a crying child, the plume of exhaust spitting from the battered Peugeot as the young man drove from the house each morning, the slow walk the wife took each day at noon along the trail leading to the river’s edge, carrying the girl against her breast.

Our dysfunction wasn’t visible. On the drive back to Muriga from the hospital, when I suggested that we stop at her mother’s house to show her the child, Nerea looked at me incredulously.

“Why would I do that?” she said, holding the small bundle that was our daughter close against her. “That woman threw me out of the house at thirteen and has never done a thing for me since.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just—”

“Why would you ever say that?” she interrupted.

For two years we carried on this way, as we had in the nine months before our daughter’s birth in Bilbao. Nerea’s dark periods lasted days, and then weeks, during which we would hardly speak. Soon after we returned from Bilbao, without explanation, Nerea began to sleep in the girl’s room. Our friends asked to come see the girl, and each time I turned them down, finding some excuse or another, until finally they stopped asking. She hardly trusted me to even hold the child.

“Not like that,” she would say, stepping over to take the girl from me.

“Not like what?” I’d ask. “I hold her the same way that you do.”

But she would only shake her head and carry the girl into the next room.

“Just go to your work,” she’d say. “Drive up that goddamned hill to work with all of the other fascists. Tell my father I say ‘hello.’”

*   *   *

A TRUCK
driver had been following behind the Peugeot on the way to Bermeo and saw the car go off the road. The highway runs along the coastline for the last twenty kilometers, and a light mist had just begun, which might have accounted for the missed turn. But the truck driver, in his report to the police, stated that the car didn’t seem to turn at all, that he didn’t remember the brake lights coming on before the car went off the road.

A police investigator came to the house five days later. It was early afternoon, and Juantxo Goikoetxea and I had already been drunk for several hours. The investigator ignored our gloomy drunkenness, as if he understood that he would do the same. He asked if he might have a cup of coffee, and when Juantxo went to the kitchen to put water on the stove, he told me that the deaths had been ruled an accident due to inclement weather and poor road conditions.

“Can I see the police report?” I said.

He looked down at the folder he held in his lap; it was obvious that he had brought it in only as a prop, as a way of giving his visit an air of authority.

“Yes,” he said finally. “Of course.”

The officer sat nervously in his chair, occasionally glancing out the window toward the rain blowing across the river. With one hand I held the glass of brandy that I had been drinking before he arrived, and with the other I flipped over the pages. There were black-and-white photocopies of the accident scene: a police officer holding a tape measure to indicate how far the tires had traveled, another of the same officer at the wreckage, the Peugeot wrapped among the rocks and marram grass, his tape measure indicating that the car had traveled thirty-eight meters from the highway before coming to a stop. The front end of the car was destroyed, the driver’s-side door twisted awkwardly out as if peeled open.

A police report included the statements of the truck driver who had been following Nerea and the girl, as well as the accounts of several other drivers who saw the car leave the road. I paused on a field report by the investigating officer, a short narrative describing the various eyewitness accounts and the physical evidence collected at the scene, ending with three short sentences:
No mechanical failure found or suspected. Family members and acquaintances of adult victim report history of depression and mental illness. Preliminary conclusion is that adult victim drove vehicle from roadway with intent to inflict injury and/or death upon herself and upon infant victim.

As I reread the paragraph I heard the investigator shuffle in his seat across from me.

“There was some dispute over the cause of death,” he said. I emptied the brandy glass into my mouth and turned to the next page of the report.

A few minutes later, when Juantxo came back into the living room with a cup of coffee, I closed the folder and slid it across the table to the investigator. He stood.

“I’m sorry,” he told Juantxo quickly. “I don’t think I’ll have that coffee after all.”

47. IKER

“My father used to ski,” nere said, reading in English from a note card. Even I could tell that her pronunciation was terrible.

“
Mi padre esquiaba
,” I said.

“Very good,” she said, flipping over the card to check the answer. We had just arrived at the beach, and Nere was still wearing her baggy green hospital clothes. The hospital was only a couple of blocks up from the harbor, and when the weather was nice we liked to pick up sandwiches and carry them down to the beach for siesta. She seemed happier with her own English than she was with my correct answer. She leaned over on the beach towel to bite me lightly on the shoulder, then switched back into Basque. “You’re getting better already, you know? Keep studying like this and your test will be no problem.”

At first I had worried about what Nere would think of the weekend English classes. I thought she’d react like Asier had. That she’d think I was selling out or going against our cuadrilla. But she saw the exam as our ticket out of Muriga. We were both getting tired of the meetings in the old bunker, the weekend nights throwing firecrackers and spray-painting the same used-up political slogans on back alley walls. Instead, we talked more about our new lives in San Sebasti
á
n, about the concerts on the beach, about what part of town we would look for an apartment in.

She began to help with my English like this—quizzing me from note cards or vocabulary sheets over
kalimotxos
in the Scanner Bar or while we ate sandwiches at the beach. It never really helped as much as she thought it did, but I liked the idea of the two of us working at something together.

“These cards the old man makes are so boring,” she said. She straightened the pile of note cards against her knee. “Let’s make some better ones.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’ll tell you in Spanish and you translate.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

She pulled at the small hairs on the back of her neck, the way she did when she was thinking. “OK,” she said, smiling. “
Hace demasiado calor para llevar tanta ropa
.”

It was her lunch break, and she was still wearing the plain blue shirt she always wore under her nurse’s scrubs. She took a drink from the Coke can between us, then stretched her shoulders back in the way that made her tits look bigger.

“Well?” she said. “Are you going to translate?”

“It’s too hot…,” I said. “It’s too hot to wear so much clothes.”

“Very good,” she said. She reached back, pulling the blue T-shirt over her head. She rolled the blue shirt up and set it on my backpack to keep it out of the sand. She liked to sun herself during her lunch breaks and after work, and her shoulders were still brown from the summer. She was wearing a black bra, and when she lay on her back next to me she undid the strap so that she wouldn’t get a tan line. Her eyes were closed and I could see the soft blond hairs on her lip, the small holes on either side of her eyebrow where she had worn a piercing the year before.

“See?” she said. “Isn’t this more fun?”

I ran my fingers across her brown stomach, and I remembered the Councilman’s wife a few days earlier on the beach. I thought of the red scar that ran from her belly button halfway to her side, how it looked hot and infected. It stood out from the pale skin of her belly and her breasts.

“Yes,” I said. I lay down next to her, then kissed the smooth of her stomach. I put my hand on the inside of her legs, over the baggy hospital pants. She squeezed her legs together against my hand, and I felt her move just a little. “These are a lot more fun.”

“Next sentence?”

“
Bai
.”

*   *   *

SOMETIMES GARRETT
and I would meet at a caf
é
, at Bar Zabaleta or the Boli
ñ
a, but most often we met in his stuffy little office in San Jorge. It didn’t make sense to start going to class now, he said. I’d missed too much, and I was better off writing out sample essays and studying vocabulary on my own until I was up to speed. I don’t know whether he really believed this or if he just saw it as a way of figuring out how committed I was to passing my exams in the spring, instead of continuing to screw around with Asier and Dani. But while the rest of my class was repeating the different forms of the imperfect tense or giving group book reports in English, and while Asier and Dani were off attending an anarchist rally in Bilbao, I was studying in the public library in the basement of the city hall.

Even after a month without a missed appointment, the old man always seemed surprised to see me show up. He marked up my papers with handwriting that was so jittery it looked like it was written in the backseat of a car. While I was waiting for him I’d flip through a stack of vocabulary cards that Nere had written out for me, or I’d just smoke a cigarette and stare out the tiny window that looked down on Muriga below.

“You’re going to have to do better than this on the exam,” he said on one of these afternoons after we had gone over a reading comprehension sample. An answer sheet I had spent nearly two hours on was covered with his blue ink. “You’re getting better, but we only have a couple of months left.”

“I know,” I said. But it surprised me, actually. I thought that the hard work of the previous month was guaranteed to pay off, and for the first time I wondered what would happen if I didn’t do well on the exam. We both reached for the packs of cigarettes we had left out on a corner of the old man’s desk. I lit my Lucky, and when I was done I handed the lighter to the old man. We smoked in silence for several minutes, Garrett reading over another practice exam while I read from the next chapter in my lesson book.

“How’re your friends these days?” he said after a few minutes, taking off his reading glasses to rub his eyes with the palms of his hands.

“My friends?” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “D
í
az. Who are the kids from the public school? Daniel Garamendi? Umberto Rodriguez’s kid?”

“Joseba. Fine, I guess,” I said. “I don’t see them as much, since…”

“Since what?”

“Nothing,” I said, thinking of the fat bus driver in Bermeo clutching the aluminum fare box while his bus melted onto the street.

“The Young Nationalists,” the old man said.

“Eh?”

“That’s what the new English teacher calls your group,” he said. “Duarte—do you know him?”

“I’ve seen him around,” I said.

“He’s … how can I say this? He’s an admirer of the cause,” he said. I didn’t like the way he said it; his tone made clear that he didn’t think much of Duarte or his beliefs.

“There are a lot of people that believe in ‘the Cause,’ if that’s what you want to call it,” I said.

He looked at the tip of his cigarette like he was thinking about something else.

“Sure, sure,” he said, flicking his ash into an empty coffee cup. “I was around during the worst of the Franco years. I can understand why
some
people believe in the cause.”

“But not others,” I said. I wanted him to come out and say it.

“No,” he admitted. But he stopped short of calling my friends and me fakers, posers. He rolled the tip of the Chesterfield slowly in the bottom of the coffee cup, rubbing the gray ash off. I couldn’t figure the old man out—what he was after. But I felt that he had crossed a boundary, talking about the new American teacher this way. I took a chance.

“Is it true what they say about you?” I asked.

He kept rolling the cigarette, and for a minute I thought that he hadn’t heard the question. He stubbed the yellow filter out in the cup, then brushed off a little ash that had fallen on his dark-gray sweater. He reached again for the pack of cigarettes and shook another out into his bony fingers.

“What do they say about me?” he finally said. He smiled at me in a cold way that I hadn’t seen before.

“Never mind,” I began to say. He pushed my pack of Luckys toward me, then lit his own.

“No,” he said. “It’s all right. I’ve been telling you what I think of everyone else. I can listen to what they say about me.”

The room was hot and stuffy with the cigarette smoke, and I began to feel claustrophobic and nauseous. Garrett’s face softened a little, and he leaned back in his chair to blow out a long cloud of smoke.

“Besides,” he said, “I’m kind of curious.”

“Well,” I said. And then I thought, Fuck it. He was the one who started this whole thing, wasn’t he? If the old man wanted to hear the straight story, I’d give it to him. “Well, my dad says you’re a—that you’re a faggot. That’s his word. He says that’s why you haven’t been with a woman that he can remember. He told me to watch myself around you when we meet like this.”

The old man nodded a little bit, then looked at me through the cigarette smoke.

“And did you believe him?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. “He’s an asshole anyway. I try not to listen to anything he says. Besides, you used to be married.”

“That’s true,” he said. He seemed far away, like he knew the next question I was going to ask and he was already thinking of the answer.

“Did she kill herself?” I asked. “My mother says that the paper wrote it was a car accident, but that everyone knows she did it on purpose.”