The Dinner Guest Read online

  XXII

  Yesterday I told my father what my book was about. I told him that I wanted to go to Alto de Barazar to see the place where my grandfather was killed. ‘I don’t think you’ll find anything there,’ he said. ‘It’s just a forest.’ At first I wanted him to come with me, drive up with me, help me search for the gully where the body was found, but when I suggested it, he said: ‘I’ve been there already,’ and I understood why he didn’t want to come.

  *

  On the car trip from Madrid to Gorbea Natural Park it snowed, it rained and the sun came out. Some of the changes in weather were so swift and sudden that as I drove I had the sense of slipping in and out of the same dream. Snowy fields. Bare ground. Snowy fields. Bare ground. I’ve just parked the car under the canopy of an abandoned petrol station in Alto de Barazar to shelter from the hail. All that’s left of the old petrol station is a rusty pump and a Gasoil sticker on one of the canopy pillars. To get here I followed the directions that the kidnappers sent the police: ‘Cenauri-Vitoria highway. From Alto de Barazar, take the path that leads from the right side of the bar-restaurant’. The Cenauri-Vitoria highway is the N-240. Now I’m writing in the car. It’s three o’clock. I’m facing the building that appears in the directions. It’s an inn with an abandoned café, the walls yellowing and the shutters pulled down. Elgar’s Enigma Variations is playing on the car radio. I imagine the Guardia Civil jeeps parked in the open space in front of the restaurant and on the other side of the motorway, where five snowploughs sit now.

  *

  I’ve reached the top of the trail that starts by the restaurant.

  Before I started up, I put on a yellow raincoat and trainers. I walked around the building. The road that climbed through the trees was paved and I decided to drive up the mountain. Now I’m writing some more from the car. To my right there’s a field with a big tree in the middle and a dozen sheep grazing around it. To my left is a path that heads into the forest.

  I reach the pine grove where I think my grandfather was found: ‘Trees grow very close together’. It’s raining less. I’m writing with the notebook under my coat, but sometimes a drop falls on the zip and blots the page. I try to imagine the day when the body was found. I’ve seen photographs of the restaurant and the woods on the Internet and the place is familiar to me. Something like what happens when you visit the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower for the first time after having seen them many times on TV.

  I take thirty steps down into the gully and I come to a small clearing littered with pine cones, ferns and branches. The clearing is covered in snow. This is the exact place where the kidnappers shot my grandfather, I think. I’m precisely thirty paces from the path. ‘It is about thirty metres from the trail (RIP)’. The day that his body was found it was raining. It also rained all three days the police spent looking for his body. I imagine my grandfather standing and one of the kidnappers covering his face, putting the pistol to his temple and firing.

  *

  I’m back at the car. It’s 4.04 p.m. The sheep are gone. The empty field makes me uneasy. A white SEAT is parked to my right, but I don’t see anyone. It’s starting to snow and I turn on the heat to warm my fingers. As I take notes I think about my grandfather, my mother and my father. About my mother telling us: ‘Live lightly.’ About my grandfather saying: ‘The worst they can do is shoot me.’

  *

  To have a grave in the forest would be lovely. Perhaps I should hear the birds singing and the rustling above me. I would like such a thing as that.

  ROBERT WALSER

  Credits

  Quotations from articles in El País, ABC and Blanco y Negro appear in the novel in slightly edited form. The same is true for the letters sent by the author’s grandfather and uncles during the kidnapping, the instructions sent by ETA on how to find the body, and the excerpt from José Díaz Herrera’s Los mitos del nacionalismo vasco. In the first part of the story, many passages are inspired by reports which appeared in the newspaper El Correo Español–El Pueblo Vasco between 21 May and 15 July 1977.

  The excerpt from Antonio Machado’s Fields of Castile, translated by Stanley Appelbaum, is reprinted with the permission of Dover Publications Inc. Passages from Robert Walser’s The Walk, translated by Christopher Middleton with Susan Bernofsky, are reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., © New Directions, 2012, and the excerpt from Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband is reprinted with the permission of Anne Carson and Jonathan Cape, © Anne Carson, 2001. The image of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow is reproduced with the permission of Keystone and the Robert Walser Foundation, and the photographs of the author’s father in handcuffs are reproduced with the permission of the ABC archive.

  Acknowledgements

  To Enrique, Inés and Leticia. To my first readers: Álvaro, Beatriz, Blanca, Iñaki, Mireya and Sonia. To Mónica and Ignacio for lending me their car to drive up to Alto de Barazar. To my editors, Elvira Navarro and Ellie Steel. To my translator, Natasha Wimmer. To Carlos.

  In memory of my mother, my grandparents and Roque, one of my best friends, who died in the capital of Angola on 12 October 2012. The last time we saw each other we had dinner at a restaurant on Callejón de Puigcerdá and I told him the plot of this novel.

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  Copyright © Gabriela Ybarra 2015

  English translation copyright © Natasha Wimmer 2018

  Cover design © Rosie Palmer

  Gabriela Ybarra has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published by Harvill Secker in 2018

  First published with the title El comensal in Spain by Caballo de Troya, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial in 2015

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Chapter V

  fn1 Los mitos del nacionalismo vasco, José Díaz Herrera, Planeta, 2005.