The Dinner Guest
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Author’s Note
One
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
Two
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
Credits
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
In 1977, three terrorists broke into Gabriela Ybarra’s grandfather’s home, and pointed a gun at him in the shower.
This was the last time his family saw him alive, and his kidnapping played out in the press, culminating in his murder.
Ybarra first heard the story when she was eight, but it was only after her mother’s death, years later, that she felt the need to go deeper and discover more about her family’s past.
The Dinner Guest is a novel, with the feel of documentary non-fiction. It connects two life-changing events – the very public death of Ybarra’s grandfather, and the more private pain as her mother dies from cancer and Gabriela cares for her. Devastating yet luminous, the book is an investigation, marking the arrival of a talented new voice in international fiction.
About the Author
Gabriela Ybarra was born in Bilbao in 1983. She currently lives in Madrid, where she writes and works in social media analysis. The Dinner Guest is her first novel and was published to critical acclaim in Spain, where it won the Euskadi Literature Prize 2016. Her work has appeared in publications such as El País, ABC and Revista Eñe.
Natasha Wimmer is the translator of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666. She lives in New York City.
For Ernestina, Enrique, Inés and Leticia
Who has beheld without trembling a stand of beeches in a pinewood?
ANTONIO MACHADO
Author’s Note
This novel is a free reconstruction of the story of my family, especially the first part, which takes place in the Basque Country in the spring of 1977, six years before I was born. During the months of May and June of that year, my father’s father – my grandfather Javier – was kidnapped and killed. I heard the story for the first time when I was eight. A school friend, a grandson of the prosecutor on the case, explained to me how his grandfather had fished my grandfather’s body out of the Nervión estuary with a trawl net, the kind that Galicians use to catch anchovies. Years later, the granddaughter of a medical examiner, a classmate at another school, told me that her grandfather had dissected my grandfather’s body after it was discovered bound hand and foot and run over by a train near Larrabasterra station. For many years I took both stories to be true, and I mixed them with conversations overheard at home to make up a version of my own. But in July 2012 I felt the need to go deeper into the details of the killing of my grandfather. My mother had died almost a year before, and with her illness my father had begun to talk about death in a strange way. I suspected that the kidnapping had something to do with it. I googled my grandfather’s name and visited archives. I took many notes on what I read, faithfully transcribing news stories and opinion pieces. But the scenes that I imagined ended up filtering into my account. What I describe in the following pages isn’t an exact reconstruction of my grandfather’s kidnapping or of what really happened to my family before, during and after my mother’s illness: the names of some characters have been changed and some passages are inventions based on stories. Often, imagining has been the only way I’ve had to try to understand.
ONE
I
The story goes that in my family there’s an extra dinner guest at every meal. He’s invisible, but always there. He has a plate, glass, knife and fork. Every so often he appears, casts his shadow over the table and erases one of those present.
The first to vanish was my grandfather.
The morning of 20 May, 1977, Marcelina put a kettle on the stove. While she was waiting for it to come to the boil, she took a feather duster and began to dust the china. Upstairs, my grandfather was getting into the shower, and at the end of the hallway, where the doors made a U, the three siblings who still lived at home were in bed. My father didn’t live there anymore, but on his way elsewhere from New York he had decided to come to Neguri to spend a few days with the family.
When the bell rang, Marcelina was far from the door. As she ran the feather duster over a Chinese vase she heard someone calling from the street: ‘There’s been an accident, open up!’ and she ran to the kitchen. She glanced for a second at the kettle, which had begun to whistle, and slid the bolt without looking through the peephole. On the doorstep, four hooded attendants opened their coats to reveal machine guns.
‘Where is Don Javier?’ asked one. He pointed a gun at the girl, obliging her to show them the way to my grandfather. Two men and a woman went up the stairs. The third man stayed below, watching the front door and rifling through papers.
My father woke when he felt something cold graze his leg. He opened his eyes and saw a man raising the sheet with the barrel of a gun. From across the room, a woman repeated that he should relax, no one was going to hurt him. Then she moved slowly towards the bed, took his wrists and handcuffed them to the headboard. The man and the woman left the room, leaving my father alone, manacled, his torso bare and his face turned upward.
Thirty seconds went by, a minute, maybe longer. After a while, the hooded figures came back into the room. But this time they weren’t alone; with them were two of my father’s brothers and his youngest sister.
My grandfather was still in the shower when he heard someone shouting and banging on the door. He turned off the water, and when the noise didn’t stop, he wrapped himself in a towel and poked his head out the door to see what was going on. A masked man had Marcelina under his arm; with his other hand he held the machine gun pointing through the open door. The man came into the bathroom and sat on the toilet. He grabbed the maid by the skirt and forced her to kneel in a puddle on the floor. Just inches away, my grandfather tried to comb his hair, his eyes on the gun reflected in the mirror. He put on hair cream, but his fingers were shaking and he couldn’t make a straight parting. When he was done he came out of the bathroom and collected a rosary, his glasses, an inhaler and his missal. He knotted his tie, and with the machine gun at his back he walked to the bedroom where his children were.
The four of them were waiting on the bed, watching the woman who had Marcelina by the wrists. In the silence, the whistle of the kettle could be heard.
When she was done securing the maid, the woman went down to the kitchen, set the kettle on the counter and turned off the stove. Meanwhile, on the floor above, her companions shifted the captives. First they made them move to the ends of the bed, leaving a space. Then they pulled off my grandfather’s tie and sat him in the middle.
The biggest man took a camera out of the black leather bag at his waist and pulled the ski mask out of the way to look through the viewfinder, but neither my father nor his siblings nor my grandfather looked at him. The hooded man snapped his fingers a few times to get their attention, and when he finally succeeded he pressed the shutter three times.
*
A point that has yet to be cleared up is the w
hereabouts of the photographs that the kidnappers took of the family, and the three snapshots of Ybarra that they removed from the house.
‘I can confirm that we haven’t received any of the three pictures of my father as evidence,’ stated one of the children. ‘We don’t know what might have happened to them, or to the photographs that were taken of the family with my father moments before he was carried off. The photographs are of those of us who were at home at the time, together with him, saying our goodbyes.’
El País, Friday, 24 June, 1977
Mount Serantes was covered by a dense, heavy fog that broke up into heavy rain. Torrents poured down the mountainside into the Nervión estuary, which filled up gradually, like a bathtub. Its banks didn’t overflow, but the banks of the Gobela, a river very near my grandfather’s house, did. On Avenida de los Chopos the water spilled into the street, covered the pavements and surged into garages. Some cars’ headlights came on by themselves. From inside the house the sound of the rain was loud, like someone throwing bread crusts at the windows. Outside, a number of roads were cut off: Bilbao-Santander near Retuerto, Neguri-Bilbao along the valley of Asúa, and Neguri-Algorta.
Beginning at 8.15 in the morning, cars piled up on the roads into Bilbao, in an 18-kilometre traffic jam that reached as far as Getxo. All over Vizcaya, the rain, the cars and the slap of wipers on windscreens could be heard. My grandfather was shut in the trunk of a SEAT 124D sedan making a slow getaway. In the front were two of the kidnappers, with the radio on. No one knew anything yet. ‘Y te amaré’, by Ana y Johnny, could still be heard between traffic and news breaks.
*
The articles from the days that followed the kidnapping are sketchy and brief. The first in-depth report I find was published on 25 May, 1977, in Blanco y Negro, a supplement of the newspaper ABC. It’s titled ‘The Worst They Can Do Is Shoot Me’. A few lines below, a column heading reads: ‘Handcuffs French-Made’.
When my father trod in the puddles in the garden, he hadn’t yet managed to get the handcuffs off. Upon reaching the gate, he pushed it open with his shoulder and stepped out. Water was rushing over the paving stones. My father scrutinized the street, the lamp post, the bushes, and the soaked hair of a woman loaded with shopping bags who stopped to his left. The woman put the bags on the ground to cover her head and said hello. He answered politely but briefly and walked on, getting wet, until he stopped in front of a house with stone walls, and hedges whipping between the rails of the fence. He rang the bell. He said: ‘Hello, I live next door. Can I use the phone?’ There was a buzz, the door quivered, and a maid with her hair in a bun asked him to come in. She led him into the house, stopped in front of a bone-coloured telephone on the wall and handed him the receiver. When she saw the handcuffs her mouth went a funny shape and she crossed herself. My father, dripping, dialled the police quickly without looking at her. He gave his first name, his last name, his location and a summary of what had happened that morning. Then he was silent, listening to the officer. The maid’s eyes popped, as round as her bun. My father, though, looked calm.
*
Before leaving, the intruders warned my father and his siblings that they couldn’t report the kidnapping until midday. At a quarter to twelve, two of the brothers managed to pull free of the bed frame. At twelve thirty the police arrived, followed fifteen minutes later by the press.
The officers freed the women first. Last was my youngest uncle, who, once he was released, ran down to the garden to shout my grandfather’s name among the hydrangeas. My father spoke to the reporters on the porch. They stuck their tape recorders under his chin and he said, ‘Everyone behaved impeccably. We were calm throughout it all.’
As the lunch hour neared, more policemen and reporters came. The rest of the siblings and some cousins arrived too. The oldest brother gazed down the road. Meanwhile, the youngest was still in the garden looking for my grandfather in the hydrangeas.
*
The oldest had blue eyes and was wearing a green anorak and jeans. The second, dark and thin, was wearing a dark checked shirt. The woman, slim, was wearing an orange raincoat. The fourth, of medium height, never took off his white coat. The four assailants ranged in age from twenty to twenty-five.
Blanco y Negro, Wednesday, May 25, 1977
*
Here are two pictures of my father in the aluminium handcuffs made by a French company, Peripedose.
II
The wind came in the back door, circling the burners of the stove and knocking at the windows. The air on one side of the glass thumped against the air on the other side. The guests had gone and everyone who was left gathered in the living room, taking stock of the situation. On the floor, books and family photographs were still scattered; a bronze frame lay empty, and the wind cavorted at will, ruffling the fringe of the rug and making little tornados over the sofa.
The sawn-off handcuffs were sitting on the chest of drawers in the hall. Next to them were four lengths of rope, and the scraps of cotton with which the kidnappers had wrapped the women’s wrists so as not to hurt them. The strips of tape for their mouths and the cloths used to cover their faces were in the bin in the kitchen. None of the siblings wanted to sleep alone in their rooms. They chose to lie down together, sprawled on the sofa.
Since the police had left, no one had returned to the back room. It upset my father and his siblings to remember the brass bars of the bed to which they had been bound. They were also haunted by the voices of the kidnappers, echoing soft and polite in their heads, the musical, bell-like Don Javier with which their captors had addressed my grandfather, never lowering their machine guns.
The siblings spent the day after the kidnapping in the living room of the house where the crime had been committed. The oldest brother stroked his chin. The youngest played at putting on and taking off his shoes with a nudge of the finger. On the table by the door there was a telephone that rang incessantly. A sibling exclaimed and took the receiver off the hook, leaving it on the tabletop. The noise ceased. Those present gathered around the sofa for protection from the silence.
Time passed, night fell and still there was no information about my grandfather. My father and his siblings paced the room. They moved to and from the sofa, clustered around it, leaned on it, stood. On the coffee table the radio was on, waiting for the news. The announcer began to speak precisely at ten, but there was no update on the kidnapping or my grandfather.
*
Outside the house nothing seemed to be happening, but a closer look would have revealed two Guardia Civil officers sitting in jeeps parked by the gate. The headlights and engines of the jeeps were turned off, but every half hour the drivers started their engines and cruised the streets around the house: down Avenida de los Chopos and Carretera de la Avanzada, along the Gobela river, and past the church of El Carmen. At four in the morning the streets were empty and no light showed in the windows of the house. Inside, no one was asleep; the siblings lay there awake in the dark, listening to one another’s breathing.
My father got up from the sofa, opened the balcony door and went out to smoke a cigarette. It had stopped raining, but there were still drops of water on the railings. Inside the house, the memory of my grandfather was suffocating; recurring images of the kidnapping. But outside there was a breeze and he could think about the leaks at his apartment in Harlem, or about a bombed-out building he had visited in the Bronx. He extinguished his cigarette in the plumpest drop of water on the ledge and left the stub in a flower pot. He remembered he had to pick up some rolls of film from a lab in the centre of Bilbao. Then he looked out at the garden and thought about all the things he wanted to do when the kidnapping was over. He lit another cigarette and smoked it with his gaze on the branches of a chestnut tree.
At eleven thirty in the morning on Sunday, 22 May, an anonymous voice, feminine and fragile as a baby bird, called the Radio Popular broadcasting station: ‘We’ve got Javier Ybarra,’ it said, stumbling over the words. In the background, cars and the
shouts of children could be heard. ‘Check the mailbox in front of Number 37, Calle Urbieta in San Sebastián,’ the voice said before hanging up.
The postman didn’t like this particular mailbox, because every time he opened it, the rusty hinges squealed like a rodent. The mailbox was old. The rain had made channels between the bald patches where the paint was worn off, and now an enormous stain covered its domed top.
The document turned up in the spot indicated, in parts. First one typed sheet, then another, and finally the third. They hadn’t been stapled or clipped together. The statement was unusually long, and written in a way that made it seem fake: there was no clear acknowledgement of the kidnapping or conditions for return. The postman, accompanied by a policeman, found only typewritten musings that left no opening for negotiation.
Meanwhile, my father and his siblings were still shut up in the house on Avenida de los Chopos, waiting for news, receiving the press and trying to communicate with the kidnappers. Around three in the morning, the oldest came into the living room, arm in arm with his wife. No one was sleeping. ‘They want a billion pesetas,’ he said, and tossed a bundle of bills on the table. The siblings spent all night counting money. The sum the kidnappers were demanding was impossible. When morning came, the older siblings made the rounds of the banks to see about a loan. The rest stayed home, pacing the living room and talking to reporters: ‘It’s a lie that they’re asking for a billion pesetas,’ said one of my uncles to the press. ‘How did your father react last Friday?’ asked one reporter. ‘He showed no qualms about being kidnapped, not for a second. He got dressed, collected his hat and some books, and tried to reassure us,’ said my father.
III
It isn’t true that my grandfather’s house was called Los Nardos. It was called Bidarte, or Crossroads, because it stood at an intersection.