All That Followed: A Novel Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For my family

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is the product of much hard work by many people. I particularly would like to express my appreciation to the following:

  To my agent, Katherine Fausset, as well as Stuart Waterman and the rest of the good folks at Curtis Brown, Ltd. Special thanks also belong to my editor, Sarah Bowlin, whose patience and vision taught me so much about writing and editing, and to the staff at Holt.

  Thank you to the friends who saw and read early chapters and drafts, and who I hope will see their contributions in this book. Ben Rogers, Curtis Vickers, Bill Riley, Alex Streiff, Clayton Clark, Daniel Carter, Molly Patterson, Adam Carter, David Torch, Matt Herz, and website designer extraordinaire Ilsa Brink.

  This book would not exist if I had never met my friend and mentor Christopher Coake at the University of Nevada, Reno.

  This book was born from workshops at the Ohio State University, and I would like to thank the following people for their guidance and friendship: Michelle Herman, Erin McGraw and Andrew Hudgins, Lee K. Abbott, Lee Martin.

  Thanks to my sparring partner, Derek Palacio, who always pushed and believed in this book, and regularly hit me upside the head. And, of course, to Claire Vaye Watkins, Nevada royalty.

  I hope this book accurately reflects the expertise, wisdom, and patience afforded me by Dr. William Douglass and Asun Garikano, as well as Zoe Bray with the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, who gave vital feedback on later drafts and were especially helpful with the Euskera that appears in this book.

  Thanks to Professor Geoffrey Bennett of the University of the Notre Dame London Law Programme and to the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

  To the attorneys and staff of the Washoe County Public Defender’s and Alternate Public Defender’s Offices, in particular Joe Goodnight, Tobin Fuss, and Sean Sullivan, for showing me that a good lawyer is most often a good man.

  Thanks to my friends in the Basque Country, especially Katrin Diaz and Ager Insunza, Nerea Sorauren and Gorčin Stanojlović, Alain Gonfaus, Dani and Christine Rueda, Pedro Ibarra and Carmen Oriol, Gregorio Monreal, and Bernardo Atxaga.

  A special thanks to Raija Bushnell, who not only put up with me through all of this, but did so with kindness, patience, and encouragement.

  And finally, to my family, who are in every page: Carmelo Urza, Monique Laxalt, and Alexandra Urza; Kris Laxalt, Don Nomura, Amy Solaro, Kevin Nomura; Bruce Laxalt and Pam Sutton; Henry and Conchita Urza; Kristi Fons and Susan Estes. My grandparents Robert and Joyce Laxalt, Maria Luisa Larrauri Goicoechea, and Anastasio Urzaa Aboitiz.

  Gezurra esan nuen etxean; ni baino lehenago kalean.

  I told a lie at home and it was in the street before me.

  —BASQUE PROVERB

  1. JONI

  This morning the front page of the Diario Vasco—for once—shares the same headline as the other Spanish newspapers. Sabino Garamendi’s newsstand is wallpapered with photographs of the Atocha train station in Madrid, each cover depicting train carriages that had burst from the inside as if they were overshaken cans of soda, the aluminum paneling peeled back, revealing their contents: strips of dark fabric, handfuls of foam cushioning, bits of bone, women’s shoes, the pages of a child’s notebook. It is the twelfth day of March 2004.

  I slide money across the counter to Sabino and fold the Diario under my arm before crossing the street to the Boliña. Estefana is just inside the kitchen at the end of the bar, a deep-burgundy skirt beneath her stained white apron, and the briny smell of anchovies cooking in a heavy frying pan fills the room. I knock on the wooden bar; when she looks up I give a small wave to let her know that I have arrived and am ready for coffee, and then I return to the patio outside the bar.

  On television last night it was reported by every national news station that although Prime Minister Aznar, as well as the king himself, had refused to directly implicate the group responsible for the attacks, all available evidence pointed to the Basque separatist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, the ETA. And though the residents of Muriga collectively denied this suggestion, spat on the sawdust-covered floors of the bars each time a news anchor used the word “separatist,” there was also an underlying air of shared guilt, of collusion in the bombings that had left, as of last night, 191 victims dead. People lingered quietly in the bars, whole families with their children sitting at long, stout oak tables around half-empty bottles of red wine, Coke cans filled with cigarette filters, uneaten plates of potato omelet or grilled prawns. I had lingered a bit.

  The Fernandez de Larrea family sent their youngest over to invite me, the old American, to a table crowded with small plates of food, and when the parents of the youngest children began to filter out I joined the old men lined up against the wooden bar. It’s in these moments of acute community that the delusions I live by—that I am a part of this town, that I have earned my way into the life of Muriga and its people—are quickly and easily unraveled.

  By eleven last night, early for Muriga, most of the bars in the old part had emptied. Santi Etxeberria refused my offer of a second glass of patxaran, but I agreed when he asked if I’d like to join him on the walk up the Ubera River. The evenings were still cool, and a fine mist began before we had reached the cathedral.

  “Txirimiri,” Santi said forlornly. It’s a word used to describe a type of rain that they say exists only here in the foothills of the Pyrenees. A rain so fine that an umbrella is useless against it, wisps of water blowing under the umbrella’s cuff to cling to the rough whiskers of your cheeks at the end of the day. It’s a poetic word, one of the first words of Basque I learned, and hearing it never ceases to conjure the image of the woman who explained its meaning my first week in Muriga, more than fifty years ago.

  The woman and I had been leaning against the stone wall of San Telmo Cathedral—the same cathedral that Santi and I now passed.

  “Txi … rri … mi … rri,”
she had said. The knees of my slacks darkened from the rain as she deconstructed the word, laying out its component parts for me to examine. “Txi … rri … mi … rri. Now you.”

  It had felt small and thin in my clumsy American mouth. I was accustomed to deep, round sounds, not these diminutive tsk’s against the front teeth. I’d expected her to laugh, but instead she took my hand up in hers. Her fingers were cold and thin and they vibrated lightly around mine.

  “Txirimiri,” she repeated slowly, holding my palm up to her mouth so that I could feel how little air came out. She leaned off the wall of the cathedral, closer to me so that now our knees were touching, and she said again the word, that wonderful word. “Tsk … tsk … txirimiri.”

  * * *

  “PRIMARY INVESTIGATION POINTS TO ETA,” the front page now announces as I unfold my paper against a patio table at the Boliña. It’s still early spring, and it’s unusual to be able to enjoy a morning coffee outside like this. And yet the last two days have brought a warm current up from the Canary Islands that has pushed back against the arctic current. I roll up the sleeves of my sweater, wipe my hands over constellations of sun spots spread across my pale forearms.

  I read the first few lines of the cover article, then turn to the sports section on the second-to-last page of the paper before placing it back down on the table. What can such an article convey, really? How many words are needed to announce an inexplicably horrible thing, to tell us that there will be no recovery from this? But Muriga has experience with these acts that erode the soul of a people.

  The bombing of Atocha, inevitably, has torn the stitches from a wound nearly six years healed, and this morning’s stillness is evidence of the effort required to convince ourselves that our lives are still intact after the death of José Antonio Torres. I watch Mariana, his widow, crossing Zabaleta holding their daughter, Elena, by the wrist. The girl is now eight years old, nearly nine. She has her mother’s features but the large, startlingly blue eyes of José Antonio. Behind her, Martín mops the walk in front of his small grocery at the corner of Atxiaga and Zabaleta, stopping after every few passes to pull from a cigarette pinched between two fingers. A pair of boys I recognize from Colegio San Jorge speed along Calle Zabaleta on their motor scooter, their light-blue oxfords untucked, flicking behind them. They are seventeen or eighteen, the same age Iker was the year that he was arrested for José Antonio’s abduction and murder.

  As Mariana approaches, I glance back into the bar to where Estefana shuffles across the worn stone floor, the cup of espresso and milk in her hand resting on a thin brown saucer. She brings me this same cup of coffee nearly every morning, and yet today I am surprised by the sight of her—this sturdy, strong woman. For the first time, I notice the ribbons of white that have wound their way through the thick black brambles of her hair. I hear the scrape of her right shoe, which doesn’t rise quite as high as the left, as it drags across the stone. She’s become an old woman, I think, and as if on cue, the dragging right foot catches momentarily on the threshold of the door, and the white cup slides from the saucer with a scraping sound, a sound not unlike the diminutive first syllable of txirimiri. There is silence, and then the cup explodes in a crest of ceramic shards and deep-brown coffee.

  Estefana curses loudly, waves the back of her hand dismissively at the nearly unbroken sky above her, and turns back to the bar to begin another coffee. Mariana and Elena are just at the end of the block now, and both mother and daughter turn in my direction at the sound of the shattering cup. There is a moment, a fraction of a second, in which recognition outweighs history—when Mariana sees only an old friend, before anger and disgust take over and she pulls the girl in the other direction, back across Zabaleta.

  When they’ve turned the corner, out of sight, I watch Estefana moving busily about the coffee machine. I study the splinters of enamel and the spreading puddle of coffee as it grows bigger on the patio’s white tile. My mind drifts to the exploding trains at Atocha, and I begin to imagine time slowing to a pause, the black rush of smoke stopping its ascent from the train platform, then churning slowly backward. I imagine the heat of the explosion, the women’s shoes, the bits of dark fabric, all flying back into the hull of the carriage, the peeled strips of aluminum being folded back around its passengers, ironed smooth again.

  I allow time to continue flowing in reverse, the world to continue this process of reconstruction. The morning’s unseasonably warm winds begin to reverse, to flow back toward the Canary Islands; the white streaks in Estefana’s black mane retreat back into her scalp. Elena’s spring jacket becomes unstitched, the small pieces of cloth are mended back into long bolts of fabric. The fabric is reconstituted into a row of cotton plants, and then into a handful of shrinking seeds, until finally the seeds are distilled into only sunlight.

  I allow myself more. I imagine a bullet spinning back into the rifled barrel of a stolen pistol, a blue Peugeot lifting from an ocean cliffside back onto a ribbon of asphalt. I imagine the world undone back to a spring day six years in the past, when I had not yet been set upon by the ghost of José Antonio Torres.

  3. IKER

  The letters began in early February.

  I hope you don’t mind, the Councilman’s wife said at the close of the first letter. My daughter started school today, and the apartment suddenly feels empty.

  “She’s trying to punish you,” my cell mate Andreas warned. He was working on a drawing for his sister, a view of the courtyard from the Salto del Negro’s cafeteria. “She wants you to know that you’ve taken everything from her. She wants you not only to rot your life away in here but to feel guilty while you do it.”

  “No,” I said. “I think I believe her.”

  “Fuck that,” Andreas said, blowing carefully at an area of the paper that he’d finished shading.

  * * *

  A FEW LETTERS LATER, she asked if the Councilman had begged for his life. If he knew he was going to die or if he thought, up until the very end, that he might escape from all of it.

  It’s not like that, I had written back. It wasn’t either one, really.

  It has to be one or the other, she said in the next letter, which arrived the day of the explosions in Madrid. You’re just not saying.

  No, I answered. It doesn’t have to be true. Just because you don’t beg, this doesn’t mean that you have a hope of surviving.

  You’re just not saying, she said again. You don’t think I should be asking this question, or you think you have a duty to protect him.

  I waited a long time before responding to this last letter. I scratched the tip of my pen against the concrete walls of the prison for hours at a time, trying to decide if she was right or if in reality I was only interested in protecting myself.

  4. JONI

  “It’s the strangest thing,” Mariana told me. It was early September 1997, the year before the kidnapping and murder of José Antonio Torres. We were sitting on a white bench along the Paseo de los Robles, overlooking the Bay of Biscay. A late-summer wind swept along the walkway, carrying a bite that reminded you that cider season was nearly here. Mariana’s two-year-old, Elena, knelt close to a cement planter box, prodding gently at the recoiling eye of a snail. “I calculated that I have been tying my shoelaces an average of three times a day for thirty-two years. Thirty-five thousand and forty times, always in the same manner: the squirrel runs around the tree, then through the hole and out the other side.”

  “I think we used a different method in California,” I said. “I remember my mother teaching me the ‘bunny ears’ technique. A knot for the head, and then we add on the rabbit’s ears.”

  “Yes!” she said. “The rabbit’s ears! Suddenly, after the squirrel has run around the tree thirty-five thousand and forty times, I begin to use the rabbit ears. Can you explain it?”

  “It’s not so unusual, is it?” I asked, though it did strike me as odd. I’d known Mariana since she was a child, since before she left Muriga in her early twenties for design sch
ool in Sevilla. She’d always been a little anxious, ruminative; she liked to pick her cuticles until they bled and had a strange habit of underlining sections of the Diario Vasco as if she were studying for an exam. But she had never been prone to melodrama. I picked up the small metal spoon from my saucer, placed it facedown against my tongue for the last taste of coffee and sweet cream.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked, trying to steer her away. There was, after all, no satisfying answer here.

  Mariana placed her hand reflexively at her side and looked over to where Elena now quietly played with a discarded bar napkin.

  “Elena, utzi hori,” she said sharply in Basque. The girl looked to her mother and dropped the napkin to the damp, moss-tinged tiles of the paseo. Mariana held her hand out to the girl, and when she had pulled Elena onto her lap she continued on in Spanish.

  “Is it too early for ice cream?” I asked, loud enough for Elena to hear. The girl turned to me, nearly incredulous. Even then, there was a strange wrenching that Elena provoked in me each time the girl was near, a reminder of something I worked hard to tamp down. I smiled weakly at Mariana, shrugging.

  “Mesedez, Ama?” Elena implored her mother in her voice that seemed improbably high, almost an imitation of a child’s voice.

  “Well, I can’t say ‘no’ now, can I?” she said, pushing the girl gently from her lap. I reached a hand down and the girl took it, shyly, and let me guide her to the freezer next to the cashier.

  When the girl and I returned from the bar, Elena with chocolate ice cream already dripping over the paper wrapper, Mariana was shaking her head, barely trying to hide a smile.

  “How is the term, Joni?” she asked.

  “They’re bringing a new teacher to replace me. An American, Anselmo tells me.”

  “You’re not leaving us, are you?”

  By then I’d been living in the village for five decades, most of my life. I had known her father, Iñigo, when he was her age now. And yet her question reminded me that I would always be considered a foreigner here, a visitor passing through. Even Mariana took for granted that one day I’d pack up my apartment, that I would sell my old Volkswagen, walk Rimbaud over to a neighbor’s house, and leave for California.