All That Followed (8 page)

If I could guess, I’d say Asier and I had fallen in love with her the first time we met her at the bunker, when we were fifteen. And not just because she was older, or because of her looks, though she’s always been a classic Basque beauty. She turned thirty just before her last visit to the prison in March. I suppose she looks her age now, which isn’t a bad thing. She stopped dyeing and chopping her hair a long time ago, and now there are light freckles on her nose where she’s stayed out in the sun too long. But it’s been four months since her last visit and still Andreas, from his top bunk, likes to talk about her perfect ass after the lights go out in the block.

Certainly her looks helped, but there was much more to her. She was as sharp as anyone in our cuadrilla, passionate about her Basque heritage and about her political activism. While changing her patients’ catheters or taking their blood pressure, she would carry on about the injustices against the Basque people. She’d remind more conservative patients of the government’s death squads, the ones that had executed more than two dozen Basque activists in the 1980s, or of the most recent student protesters to be detained in Pamplona for exercising their right to free speech.

But by the final year of
secundaria
, the three of us seemed to catch up to her. We had grown into something approaching adulthood. When Ram
ó
n traded in his punky T-shirts and piercings for collared shirts and wool sweaters, Asier and I took over as informal leaders. By then, we thought we were big-time; we had made out with practically every girl in San Jorge and many more from Bakio and Getxo and the other nearby towns. Through all this Nere seemed frozen in time, preserved in the formaldehyde of small-town Basque life. Her constantly changing hair and her quick tongue became more familiar, more approachable each time we saw her. When she kissed me the night after our first show (in an abandoned house just north of town along the river), I was surprised but not so surprised that I didn’t kiss back.

“I hope you don’t worry about Ram
ó
n,” she’d said.

“Why would I?” I said back, in the cocky way young men do after they’ve killed their kings. I was already replaying her mouth against mine, already realizing that I could love her. “Fuck Ram
ó
n.”

*   *   *

OUR FIGHT
for Basque independence was, in a way, also a fight for our own autonomy. Slowly, we began to gain some of this independence—from our parents, from our older brothers and sisters, from the teachers at San Jorge. We’d head out of town on Asier’s black scooter, backpacks full of supplies for the trip: egg and potato sandwiches that my mother prepared for the two of us wrapped in tinfoil, two or three boxes of Don Simon table wine, whatever cigarettes we could take from our parents’ half-empty packs.

We spoke only in Euskera, refusing to talk to people that started a conversation in Spanish (which was rarely a problem in Muriga, or even much of a statement, since for most people Euskera was their primary language). To avoid a moral compromise that last year of school, we simply skipped our English classes at San Jorge. It didn’t seem like the old man even noticed we were gone, and the new American they’d brought in to replace the old man when he fell over dead—he wasn’t going to say anything. It was clear the new American sympathized with our ideas. I’d recognized several titles from a stack of books he’d left on his desk one afternoon, the same books that we’d been reading in the bunker. The way Asier and I ran the school our final year, leaving class whenever we wanted, smoking openly on the front steps of the school, no one questioned our bravado. I wasn’t sure if the new American was afraid of us or if he wished he were tagging along.

And, finally, by my last year at San Jorge the contents of our backpacks had begun to evolve. We added spray paint and fireworks, xeroxed pamphlets announcing rallies and strikes, clipboards with petitions. But even these items continued to change, until finally our packs were also filled with dark hooded sweatshirts, black bandannas to cover our faces.

It was something the newspapers like to call
kale borroka
. Twenty or thirty of us would get together late on a Friday or Saturday night, when the streets were sure to be filled with people drinking, tourists, families finishing dinner. We loaded our pockets with rocks and fireworks and cans of black spray paint. Then we tied bandannas behind our heads, put on sunglasses, and pulled up our hoods. This was our armor. Each time I pulled the drawstrings on my sweatshirt, I would turn and look at my reflection in Asier’s sunglasses, and he would do the same, and I would like how frightening I looked: entirely faceless, anonymous, and dangerous. I wasn’t a militant. Under the hood, under the sunglasses, I knew that. But the costume was convincing.

Here’s how it would go: we’d gather out of sight of the crowded streets until one of the older university students gave a whistle. Then we would be off, running down the main streets, throwing rocks through windows or at streetlights, spray-painting long black lines along the old stone walls, yelling our slogans, throwing handfuls of pamphlets into the doors of the bars. This had been going on for years; before us, it was Ram
ó
n’s older brother and his group of friends, and before that it was another group, or a band of college students from Bilbao or San Sebasti
á
n who had driven in. The only things that changed were the spray-painted names of the political parties as one party after the other was outlawed by the national government.

I’d seen these early versions of
kale borroka
when I was a kid myself, maybe seven or eight. I was with my parents, I
ñ
igo Cort
é
z’s parents, and a couple of other families at Natalie Lizaso’s restaurant on Calle Miramar, when a heavy, empty boom exploded a half block down, followed by the whoops and yells that I’d later get so used to. The adults had been talking over cups of coffee and snacking on small plates of cheese when the firework exploded. They barely looked up from their conversation, as if nothing at all had happened. Natalie’s father lowered the storm doors and windows, and it was suddenly quiet inside the bar. He went back behind the wooden bar and began pouring brandy into short, fat-bottomed glasses as the yelling and chanting made its way through the cracks in the storm doors and into the restaurant. Still, my parents and their friends continued their conversations. It was only the clank of a rock against the door that got any reaction at all, a quick “
Hostias
,” from Natalie’s father behind the bar.

I remember a siren and then a loud popping, as if someone had set off several fireworks at once, and the sound of yells, of feet running on the wet stone streets (maybe I’m inventing some of this, now that I’ve been on the other side so many times), before my mother looked to my father and said, “Ertzaintza. Finally.”

The Ertzaintza were the Basque police force, and on nights like these (which they were used to just as much as the restaurant patrons and owners and as much as the kids in the bandannas and sunglasses), they would be sent out to scatter the rioters, fire off a few rubber bullets. Really, they just wanted to make sure a handful of troublemakers didn’t turn into something worth worrying about. To come home with a rubber bullet—or even better, a black-and-purple bruise from where the bullet had struck—was a badge of honor. We would act infuriated, thinking of ourselves now in the company of Gandhi and Guevara and Castro and not the bored kids that we were. I don’t think we ever knew exactly what was worth fighting for—or at least I didn’t. (“Against the abuses of the Franco regime, for an autonomous state!” I would have said, had you asked me then.) We were just kids playing a game, the same game that the Ertzaintza was hired to play, the same game that the shopkeepers played each time they shut their storm doors or scrubbed away graffiti. This would go on and on until, inevitably, one team or another broke the rules.

*   *   *

IMAGINE IT
like a football game. On the red team, young nationalists. On the blue team, the Ertzaintza. They agree to unspoken rules. Broken windows are OK. Broken bones are fair game. Graffiti is acceptable, as are rubber bullets and tear gas. An unjust or overly lengthy prison sentence was against the rules. Killing, by either side, was always against the rules.

The newspapers served as the referees. Whenever these rules were broken, we would read about it in the four-page paper printed in Muriga each morning. The headlines would read, “Ertzaintza detains two youths from Aulesti for unprovoked attack on local market,” and we would know to shake our heads over our coffee at the acts of these senseless thugs. Yellow card to
kale borroka
.

A month later the paper would announce, “Two college students from Bermeo beaten and arrested during peaceful demonstration,” and this time around the Ertzaintza were to blame. The old men in the shops would spit on the ground and talk about how the Ertzaintza had too much power, about how they were just the same as the Guardia Civil. How they should leave our good boys alone—this was supposed to be a democracy now. Yellow card to the Ertzaintza. Another warning.

Retaliation for breaking the rules comes quickly: Ertzaina who break the rules are found dead against the tires of a Volkswagen in the parking garage of their apartment building, their heads burst open by two close-range pistol shots. And the unlucky kids who get caught breaking the rules, who are unfortunate enough to be labeled
etarra
, well, their penalties aren’t any less severe. (As I later found out, even if you never actually had contact with a real member of the ETA, once you’ve broken the rules you are also, by virtue of association, an
etarra
for life.) These are the kids in their twenties who are shot down by the Guardia Civil in a raid or extradited from France and disappear for decades into a far-off prison like the Salto.

15. JONI

“What do you recommend, Joni? We’re in your hands.”

The new American couple had been in Muriga a month, and Morgan Duarte had just begun to pronounce my name the way everyone else in Muriga did, with the
j
pronounced as a
y
, as if my name were an adjective describing one who yawns. (When I used to make comparisons such as these, the woman I had fallen in love with would accuse me of being overly poetic, batting her eyes sarcastically and saying,
Aye, que guapo eres, no?
Oh, you’re so pretty, aren’t you?) I wondered what had brought about Morgan’s sudden change in pronunciation, but it was easy to speculate. Robert smiled at her when she said it, the way someone might smile when they’ve taught their dog a new trick. “Is there anything that you’d prefer not to eat?” I asked. We were pushed up against the wooden bar of the Boli
ñ
a and in front of us was plate after plate of
pintxos
, colorful and oily. Thick pieces of bread stacked with Serrano ham the deep red of cabernet or bright-green
pimientos de Guernica
topped with sardines and lanced through with wooden toothpicks. “You don’t care for seafood, if I remember.”

“We’ve made a pact, Joni,” Robert said, smiling at his wife.

“That’s right,” Morgan said, pushing closer to be heard over the din around us, the conversation and whine of the Formula 1 engines from the television in the corner of the bar. It was past ten, and the old men who had started making their rounds of the local bars at noon were by now yelling their jokes and insults. “We’ve decided, Joni, that we’re going to try anything that’s offered to us while we’re here.”

There was an excitement to her voice, as if she were sharing some sort of secret. “While we’re here,” she had said. In these three words the agreement that Robert Duarte had struck with his wife was clear: make the best of the situation, of Muriga, and in return I promise that we’ll leave. And Morgan was telling herself: soon this will be over and it can be the wild two years of our early marriage when we lived in the backwoods of the Basque Country, where Robert played the role of the Euskaldun come back to the homeland, to Euskal Herria as he will say when we return to our air-conditioned home and outsized cars and our friends we’ve known since high school. We will tell them about the fiestas that last until five in the morning, and I’ll wear the Basque rope-soled shoes when I pick peppers and green beans from the garden, and in return all I have to do is try to enjoy it. This was the deal, of course.

“You seem to be much more comfortable over here than when you first arrived,” I said. She wore the ecstatic look of a prisoner whose sentence had just been overturned. She smiled her delicate American smile.

“I am, Joni,” she said, giving Robert’s arm a squeeze. He winced, as if those thin hands could cause him physical pain. “I’m much more comfortable here. I’ve been painting more—did Robert mention that I paint?” she said. When I nodded my head, she invited me to their apartment to see some of the sketches she’d done of Muriga since she’d arrived. Then, pointing to the trays set out on the bar, she asked, “So what should we eat?”

“
Chipirones
?” I asked Robert. “Squid in its own ink, if you’re feeling adventurous?”

“You have to at least try one,” Robert said to his wife. “My mother used to keep frozen packets of squid ink in the freezer when I was growing up.”

I ordered a half dozen
pintxos
for us to share, including some less exotic plates, which Morgan mostly favored. People went in and out of the door of the bar, just another stop as they hopscotched down the street from one place to the next, saying hello to a friend behind the bar before emptying their glass and heading to the next restaurant. At any given time there were three or four generations of
Murigakoak
at the bar, old men with their traditional black berets and starched white shirts, young parents having a glass of wine or a bite to eat while their children slept precariously in strollers surrounded by tipsy teenagers in torn jeans. As they left the bar, Santi Etxeberria and Alonso Irujo stumbled over to invite me to the pelota match the next afternoon.