The Dinner Guest Read online

  The description of the trajectory of the bullet that killed him is as follows:

  […] entrance via the left posterior occipitotemporal lobe and exit via the right frontal region at an oblique angle, bottom to top and left to right. Death was instantaneous […]

  ABC, 23 June, 1977

  VI

  ABC, 26 June, 1977. I zoom out on the page to get a full view of the photograph and the headlines. To the left, a bearded reporter in a blazer holds a notepad. To the right, my father and two of his brothers, all dressed in black, stand in a semicircle around him. All of them, including the reporter, have their heads bowed. My uncles are silent and my father is speaking. ‘From our special correspondents in Bilbao,’ says the newspaper.

  When we were informed that our father’s body had been found, I decided to get the car and drive up to Alto de Barazar. I was advised not to go, as the motorway could be mined. But we set out anyway in Rogelio the mechanic’s SEAT 850, very slowly. We stopped, and on the motorway I flagged down a 1430, which took us the rest of the way at top speed. I didn’t know the driver. His name was Zabala.

  We finally reached Alto de Barazar. To get from the spot where the news photographers were to the place where the body was took us a while. It was hard going and there were several forks in the path, and we chose one or another at random. Zabala came along with me, like a good friend, a Good Samaritan. We got to where the police jeeps and buses were.

  His body was in a deep gully, densely overgrown. You had to work your way in to see it. He was on the ground, his body at an angle on the slope, face up, with a four-day-old white beard. There was an expression of great serenity and dignity on his face. He was covered with a heavy, grey plastic sheet. Next to him was his raincoat, rolled up, and, within reach of his right hand, the missal that he used every day, a prayer book, the rosary and his glasses. Also an inhaler. Though he didn’t have asthma, he did have some trouble with his breathing and he sometimes suffered from spells of fatigue.

  My father used to wear out his shoes walking. He loved to go tramping in the mountains. Now he’s lost his life on a peak. He used to hike in his canvas shoes, even though he had been wounded in the war and had a limp.

  *

  After reading my father’s statement in the paper, I googled ‘Javier Ybarra killed’. Among the photographs that turned up was one showing several men lifting my grandfather’s body into a hearse. The body is covered by a white blanket and everyone except for the driver is dressed in civilian clothes. I searched for my father among them, but couldn’t find him. I know from the newspaper that my father had followed my grandfather to the hospital in Zabala’s car. Behind them came a bus and thirteen jeeps full of Guardia Civil officers and loggers who had taken part in the search. When word spread that his body had been found, one of the local radio stations interrupted its programming to play hymns.

  The procession filed down the mountain and made its way in a long line to Basurto Hospital, where my father’s oldest brother and some twenty reporters were waiting. It was eighteen minutes before my grandfather’s body emerged from the back of the hearse. At 12.25 a.m. the body was lifted out, covered in a blanket and the reporters rushed to take photographs, but they couldn’t because my father blocked the way. Before the start of the autopsy, the medical examiner handed my father’s oldest brother a gold ring and chain. At approximately a quarter to one in the morning, the siblings left the mortuary to head home. The autopsy had begun.

  During the autopsy it was discovered that my grandfather had traces of grass in his stomach and that it had been at least three days since he’d defecated, even though excrement was discovered in the hideout that the police found some time later. It was in a half-collapsed farmhouse, with boards nailed over the windows and bricked-up doors. They also found the remains of two fires and a piece of the sweater that my grandfather was wearing the day that he was kidnapped. This section of Alto de Barazar wasn’t searched when the hunt for the body was underway.

  VII

  The funeral took place on 23 June, 1977, at 6 p.m. in the parish of San Ignacio, Getxo. The Mass for the dead was celebrated by ten priests. Most of those in attendance, local people, had received at least one sacrament in the church. There were many worshippers, so many that the church had to hang a pair of speakers from the eaves so the ceremony could be heard in the grounds.

  My father and his siblings kneeled in the front row with their hands over their faces. A few reporters crouched before them and photographed them. There was a ringing of bells and the photographers covered their lenses and went up into the balcony. Mass was about to begin. The ten priests in purple cassocks filed in from the sacristy. They approached the altar from one side and stood in two semicircles around the Christ of splintered wood that presided over the church. Just in front, slightly below, was the raised bier.

  It was a long service, the sermons brief. When it ended, my father and his brothers went up to the altar to carry the coffin to the hearse. There were so many people in the church that it wasn’t easy to get through. The brothers advanced slowly, rocking the box from side to side to make way. No one spoke. The quiet was interrupted only by a man shouting ‘Death to the killers! Death to the killers!’ but he was quickly silenced.

  The cortège set off towards the Derio cemetery. Every one hundred metres, Guardia Civil officers saluted the procession from the kerb. Some townspeople stood by the side of the road, too, to pay their respects.

  VIII

  There’s almost no resemblance. The ear looks bigger, the nose sharper. The photograph of my grandfather’s body that I view in Google Images has little in common with the portrait of him in the living room. I look at the two pictures, searching for differences: longer hair, longer beard, thinner.

  My grandfather Javier was mayor of Bilbao from 1963 to 1969, as well as president of the Provincial Council of Vizcaya from 1947 to 1950, of the newspaper El Correo Español-El Pueblo Vasco, and of the Bilbao juvenile court. He was also a consultant to various companies, a member of the Royal Academy of History and author of ten books on the province of Vizcaya. He had a slight limp, having been wounded in the right knee during the Battle of the Ebro in the Civil War.

  ETA had him in its sights because it considered him the epitome of the Neguri intellectual and because he belonged to one of the families that had traditionally occupied top posts in the province. The group saw him as a symbol of central government power. Three days before his death, on 15 June, 1977, the first elections of the new democracy were held. My grandfather’s killing was condemned in the media and rejected by all political groups, but no one took to the streets to protest. ‘If he was killed, it must be because he did something wrong.’

  The name of the district of Neguri comes from the combination of two Basque words: negua and hiri, or winter and city, which are a vestige of the publicity slogan with which the area was promoted: ‘For winter too.’ Until the arrival of the railroad in 1903, it had been mostly a neighbourhood of summer people, but with the construction of the train lines, new residents began to move in and built palaces on the beach, a tennis club, a clay pigeon shooting gallery and a golf course. The area’s period of greatest splendour lasted until the thirties: the neighbourhood families got rich on the proceeds of blast furnaces, banks, mines and shipping companies. When my grandfather died, at the end of the seventies, business was in decline. The factories had become obsolete, though a few people still lived off their income. Some heirs struggled to resurrect family empires, while others spent their days wandering the tennis club, the yacht club and the golf club. In 1983, the year that I was born, a flood finally swamped Vizcaya’s ailing industry. The Estuary of Bilbao, once a global symbol of progress, was now a muddy wasteland full of crumbling blast furnaces.

  *

  At the beginning of the eighties, an air of defeat settled over the neighbourhood. The fall of the Franco regime had coincided with the oil crisis and with ETA’s first assassinations in the province. Many resi
dents imagined that they were going to inherit great fortunes, but it was not to be. Some felt nostalgia for the glorious past. Others checked out. Heroin, hashish, sex and cocaine were consumed in a van that circled the streets near the train station, driven by a blonde woman. The seeming calm of the comfortable houses and gardens with clipped hedges was interrupted every so often by threats, disappearances and deaths. The first ETA attack in the neighbourhood came on 26 November, 1973. A hooded man sprayed gasoline on the ground floor of the yacht club and started a fire that burned down the building. In the following months it was rebuilt in concrete and steel, but on 19 May, 2008, the explosion of a van left the back side of the club in ruins once again. During the roughest years at the beginning of the eighties – the so-called años de plomo, or Years of Lead – the neighbours pretended that nothing was happening: they played tennis, had cocktails, went out sailing and visited the open-air restaurants of Berango. The tension was under wraps. A car in flames, a dead body, and a few hours later everything seemed to return to normal.

  If a death threat was received, it was only discussed in private, never with casual acquaintances. Few felt they had the right to voice their discontent. Between 1973 and 2008, ETA planted a number of bombs in the neighbourhood and kidnapped a few residents. Many families sold their homes at a loss and left the Basque Country. We moved in ’95. The day my mother told me we had to go, I had just come back from a school trip to the pine groves of Azkorri. It was almost the end of the year, my sixth in primary school. My mother was boiling water in a pot. ‘We have to move to Madrid,’ she said. I didn’t cry in front of her. But I did later, when I told my two best friends that weekend.

  I knew there were people who wanted to kill my father. Sometimes I watched him transcribing an interview or reading a book and I tried to understand why. Most of the time I wasn’t afraid, except when there was some clear danger. Otherwise, I lived at a remove from the conflict. The stories about ‘La ETA’ and my grandfather’s killing were mixed with others that my father told me about Pompeii, Degas’s ballerinas, Darío’s ‘The princess is sad’ poem, and Max Ernst’s bird men.

  TWO

  I

  The surgeon who filed the bridge of my mother’s nose didn’t do a good job of shaping the wings, so the end of her nose looked like a half-inflated ball. I imagine the big bulbs of the surgery lamp illuminating the nurses’ covered heads and my adolescent mother anesthetised on the hospital bed dreaming about wheat fields in summer.

  After the procedure, she was supposed to tend the scars for a few months and go back to the doctor so that he could redo her nose. She never went. She got used to the imperfect wings. The operation had been my grandmother’s idea. The beak of her own nose was even sharper and she didn’t like to be reminded of it on someone else’s face. I inherited it too, though mine is only a small bump that my mother liked to stroke.

  My mother was the kind of person who felt little attachment to places, objects and her own body. When she died, the only belongings that we had to go through were her clothes and shoes. Nothing else was exclusively hers. At home, she spent most of her time in the office, but even so, nothing in the room belonged just to her. She wasn’t bothered by birthdays, or new places. When we moved to Madrid, it took her scarcely any time to get used to the city. When she was admitted to the hospital, she immediately belonged to the hospital.

  My mother’s death brought back my grandfather’s death. Before it, the killing was just a pair of handcuffs in a glass case next to the bronze llamas that my parents had brought back from Peru. The tedium of illness recalled the tedium of the wait during the kidnapping. My father began to talk about blood-stained rosaries. It would be months yet before I could understand his pain.

  II

  The afternoon of 4 April, 2011, my mother called me and said: ‘Gabriela, I have cancer, but it’s really nothing.’ A few hours later she boarded a plane and sat on her tumour all the way to New York. As she and my father were driving to the airport, I went to Bryant Park to sit in front of the hotel where they had stayed three weeks earlier, when they came to the city to visit me.

  The afternoon of the call, I explained to my boss that I needed to go out and get some air. Bryant Park was just two blocks from the office. I crossed Times Square, and when I got to the park I sat on a green café chair at the edge of the lawn. Two minutes later I dialled Manhattan Oncology Center. ‘I need an appointment for my mother,’ I said to the woman who answered the phone. ‘I can’t help you, everyone is gone, I’m the cleaning lady,’ she said. ‘So what do I do until tomorrow?’ I asked. ‘There’s nothing you can do,’ she said.

  My mother wanted an appointment with Doctor Marsden, a surgeon she had heard good things about; she had told me so on the phone. I googled Doctor Marsden and decided that he was good looking. My mother thought so too. Soon afterwards, a friend of a friend of my mother’s called. It was someone I didn’t know, but he had the email of the wife of one of the doctor’s patients. From my café chair in Bryant Park I wrote an email to the woman asking her for help. The woman replied a few minutes later, saying I had to write to Luke; that Luke would help us. I wrote to Luke, Luke got back to me quickly and said that Doctor Marsden would see us in a week. When my mother landed I told her that I’d made her an appointment with the surgeon. ‘How did you do it?’ she asked.

  *

  Before my mother’s diagnosis, I didn’t pay much attention to death. And I didn’t think much about it over the course of the treatment, either. During the hour and a half that I sat in Bryant Park, I contemplated the fact that the first time I’d heard about her tumour had been in this same place three weeks before. When she’d sat down on one of the café chairs in the park, my mother remarked that she had to rest her weight on one buttock because if she didn’t then her bum hurt a lot. She said the word bum in a low voice, and then more loudly she said: ‘I’ve got a strange pimple.’ In those days I still believed that premature death belonged to the realm of fiction.

  I don’t think that my mother thought of death as fiction. In the years leading up to her diagnosis, she had borne close witness to her parents’ illnesses; and before that, when my father received kidnapping threats that never materialised, she remembered her father-in-law and was afraid that something of the same kind could happen to us.

  The afternoon that I spent sitting in Bryant Park, I remembered my mother’s parents. Both of them died of cancer. When each was ill, my mother spent a lot of time with them: visiting one doctor or another, playing cards … Her siblings helped when they could. Two of them didn’t live in Madrid, and the third swapped shifts with her when he wasn’t at work. My family always felt that not enough was done to save my grandfather; they thought that the doctors had given him up for lost too soon, and that in the United States it wouldn’t have happened. Years later, around 2004, it was discovered that my grandmother had a brain tumour. Her children decided that she would be operated on in Los Angeles. The operation went well, and a few weeks later she was back in Madrid, where she continued her treatment. My mother and her siblings found a doctor who had a degree from Oxford and whose office was full of awards and diplomas. This gave them confidence. When my mother got sick, the United States was the only option she considered.

  *

  I still don’t know much about the day when her tumour was discovered. The only information I have is what my father wrote in his diary:

  Start of Ernestina’s illness. Husband’s notes.

  Madrid. Wednesday, 23 March, 2011. Appointment with Doctor Herreros after surgical procedure/biopsy.

  The tumour is very localised, in a pre-existing fissure in the anus. It is a hairy polyp with some cancerous cells at the base. It is small, flat, adhering to the sphincter, and a scar was left when it was removed. Will have to excise the scar to see whether there are traces of the tumour underneath. Operating seems to be the best option, but it must be done carefully so as not to damage the sphincter. If it’s skilfully done it shouldn�
�t be necessary to implant an artificial anus. The lesion is very localised, external and was detected early. Before operating, a three-week wait is required for the wound to heal. Meanwhile, the following tests can be performed: endoscopic ultrasound, X-ray, MRI, probe and TAC.

  These notes were taken by her husband, in longhand, during the appointment.

  *

  It all happened very quickly. From the time of her diagnosis until she died was just six months. I can’t remember my parents’ arrival in New York and I’m not sure whether it was on this trip or another one that they spent a few nights in a room where the refrigerator vibrated so much that they couldn’t sleep. My mother’s first few days in Manhattan were spent shopping. We bought clothes at the Ann Taylor on Madison Avenue that were instantly too big for her because she lost so much weight during the treatment. Among other things, she bought the jeans that I have on now. My mother had always been very thin, but in the months that followed my grandfather’s death she had aged all of a sudden, her metabolism changed, her face and hips widened and her belly grew round. Over the past few years she had gained even more weight and she went to the gym often, though she didn’t like it and wasn’t good at it. After she died, I gained a lot of weight too. From the back I look like her. I’ve signed up for Pilates classes. I wore her tracksuit for several months until last time I went on holiday I left it in the washing machine and it got mouldy.