The Dinner Guest Page 9

  *

  ‘Gabriela, in your book you can say that a man in a red ski mask got me out of bed at gunpoint,’ he announced unexpectedly one day. I didn’t answer. I didn’t confess that I had put that in already, though I hadn’t known the colour of the mask. ‘Can I have Grandpa’s war diary?’ I asked after a while. My father stopped the car part way through a roundabout and said: ‘That’s my territory.’

  XVIII

  After my mother died I had a strange sense of well-being. During the autumn, I did whatever I felt like doing. I was sad, but I had no responsibilities: I was jobless, single and on leave from NYU.

  In January I left Madrid and went back to New York to school and to look for work. Soon after I got to the city, my skin broke out and my hair turned oily. I couldn’t get rid of the layers on the crown of my head. I went back to the university, to the office. I started to write about my mother, and to weigh each day against the same day the year before. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of myself from the outside and it was hard for me to recognise myself as the person who was working and going to class. I started to have dizzy spells, a queasiness that began in my head and descended to my stomach. The doctor said it was stress. The psychologist said I had lost my bearings and that to regain my balance I needed to make some changes in my life that scared me. The first step was to return to Madrid.

  *

  Wednesday, 19 December, 2012

  I go out without washing my face, feeling the weight of dried tears in my eye sockets. Behind me are the river and Manhattan, but I walk away from the towers, avoiding the sight of the city.

  My last three hours in New York are spent at home, sitting on a box with a view of the skyline. I try to calculate the weight of the buildings. I count the windows and floors of a skyscraper and estimate what they must weigh, but neither my phone’s calculator nor I can handle the load.

  The place I’m about to leave has almost no walls or corners. Everything is glass and steel, and the city and the cold creep in past the steel and the glass. A few weeks after I moved in, I tried to warm up the space. I bought plants, throws and a few pieces of wooden furniture, but it didn’t work. There was also the problem of the views. The constant presence of the city made it impossible to block out my surroundings. I’m in New York, I’m in New York. In the apartment, I was never able to forget that I lived in New York.

  This morning was spent packing boxes, and as I packed them, I enjoyed watching the space clear bit by bit. When my mother saw it, the apartment was empty, and now I feel that it only makes sense that way. Diaphanous, with no obstacles between my memory and the skyline.

  Tomorrow a removal company will come to pick up the boxes that are stacked in the living room. Someone will load them onto a cargo ship. The ship will sail down the river from Queens, cross the ocean and dock somewhere in the north of Spain, probably Vigo. In Vigo my boxes will be put on a truck that will cross the peninsula to Madrid. In Madrid the boxes will be unloaded in my new apartment.

  I get into a black Lincoln from Northside Car Service. I tell the driver that I’m going to JFK. The driver is Latino and he asks me if I’m going to spend Christmas at home. I say yes. Then he asks me if I like soccer, and I say not much, but he doesn’t seem to hear me, persisting: ‘Are you for Real Madrid or Barça?’ ‘Neither,’ I answer as I stare at the photograph on his licence. When we get on the BQE, the Empire State building comes into sight between the gravestones in the cemetery beneath the highway.

  The black Lincoln stops in front of a little signpost for Iberia. The driver gets out, rolls up the sleeves of his jacket, and helps me unload my things. I thank him. I say: ‘Feliz Navidad.’ The car drives away and I’m left alone with two suitcases and a rucksack.

  XIX

  RUNNING YOUR HAND OVER IT TO CALCULATE ITS DIMENSIONS YOU THINK AT FIRST IT IS STONE THEN INK OR BLACK WATER WHERE THE HAND SINKS IN THEN A BOWL OF ELSEWHERE FROM WHICH YOU PULL OUT NO HAND

  ANNE CARSON, The Beauty of the Husband

  Before my mother’s death I lived as if the normal thing was to die of old age. I imagined my heart stopping on the eve of my hundred-and-first birthday, after an afternoon spent playing cards and dipping croissants in tea. I didn’t think about death. Or not much. Now I believe that the standard is to die before one’s time, like my grandfather Javier, like my mother, or like a friend of a friend who was hit by a car that ran a red light on the Castellana. An untimely death is always violent. Dying young is violent. Just as being shot is always untimely. No matter how old you are.

  *

  I find a photograph of my mother taken in the Atacama Desert. The file is called Death Valley and in the picture she’s sitting against a wall of red rock. I also find something that I wrote about her in a notebook:

  After the death of a loved one, family and friends often look at pictures and pass them around to remember. Under the circumstances, the perception of the viewer is skewed. Nothing seems random; everything is a clue that reveals something about the causes of death.

  In the previous photograph, my mother is sitting at the foot of a rock wall in Chile’s Death Valley. There are pictures of me in the same valley, but they will be irrelevant until I die.

  *

  Every time I think about my mother I remember her as vulnerable, though before her illness I doubt I saw her that way. This impression is a construct, created after the fact as my mind searched for early signs of her approaching death. Now, when I imagine her body, the first thing that comes to mind is the eczema that she had on her left hand, which she scratched constantly. I only really feared for her life once, when she had a separated placenta during the second month of pregnancy with my twin sisters. I was seven and we had come from Bilbao to Madrid to spend Christmas with my mother’s parents. That day I watched as my great aunt carried a tangle of bloodstained sheets along my great-grandmother’s hallway. It was just a few days before Christmas Eve and I thought it was a terrible time to be orphaned. My mother screamed as they moved her from the bedroom to the kitchen, her nightgown stained. Along the way she left a watery red trail that I followed until someone grabbed me and sat me in the living room between the television and my great-grandmother. The TV was on. A howl from the end of the hallway echoed through the china. I felt miserable and my unhappiness meshed with the commercials on TV: toothpaste, tomato sauce, Baby Feber dolls. I started to cry and my great-grandmother asked me to get her the box of sweets that she kept in the roll-top desk. My mother was taken out the back door so as not to soil the main staircase. I didn’t see her go, but I imagined her being carried down the narrow stairs on a stretcher. I left the box of sweets on the table and went running to look at the stain on the mattress. I touched it and it was hot.

  My mother was on bed rest for seven months. She couldn’t move, because if she did either she or my sisters would die. My great aunt and I visited her every afternoon, and though her health was said to be improving, whenever I looked at her I saw a tangle of bloodstained sheets. It may be that the feeling of dread never left me. Now I’m convinced that every time I saw my mother in a nightgown, I was afraid that she was about to bleed to death and disappear.

  XX

  Last night I dreamed that I was in the back seat of a taxi on Calle Velázquez in Madrid. The car stopped at the traffic light on the corner of Calle Villanueva, in front of the entrance to the Hotel Wellington. I sat there for a while looking out the window at the gold braid on the doormen’s jackets as I waited for the light to change. My phone rang and I reached into a cloth bag to retrieve it. At the other end of the line a woman said that she was going to kidnap me that night. I started to cry as she was talking. At the next light, the taxi seat turned into the yellow velvet sofa in the living room at home. I was still crying and moving in and out of the room as I packed my suitcase for the kidnapping. I folded some shirts that had been hanging to dry and I picked up a couple of notebooks. I imagined myself going mad in a hideout and I cried even harder. I was terrified that I would lose
my mind, and I planned to do exercises every day during my captivity: pacing from one end of my cell to the other, doing sit-ups. I imagined that there would be no bathroom and that I’d have to do my business in a corner. I saw myself going without food, smelling bad and doing push-ups on the floor. When I finished packing my suitcase I went out and walked to the door of the café where I’d agreed to meet the kidnapper. I woke up before she arrived.

  On Facebook I find Kepa, a school friend from Getxo. I google his contacts and discover that several have been in prison. I see a picture of him with his arms around two guys who were in ETA. Kepa had a limp. One day he told me that at home they’d said he couldn’t be my friend. He said that he had two cousins in jail. I managed to convince him that not talking was dumb and we talked until I moved to Madrid. Sometimes I wonder whether he ever thinks of me.

  I find a video on YouTube of a man showing caches and explosives to a judge. They’re in the middle of a forest. The man says:

  We wanted to kidnap a Socialist councilman in Eibar.

  I can’t remember his name.

  I can’t remember where he lives, but I do know where he works.

  He’s the head of a school, a maths teacher.

  We spent a few months shadowing him.

  From October to December.

  But in the end we gave up because he had a bodyguard.

  I look at pictures of ETA commandos and I research their lives. I have a hard time coming to terms with them, because accepting their humanity means recognising that I’m capable of the same kind of things that they are. My mind was easier when I imagined that they were crazy or that they weren’t people. Martians. Fiction.

  El País, 17 February, 1981: ‘Reactions to the Death of Joseba Arregui’. The forensic report acknowledges that the alleged ETA operative was tortured.

  The presiding judge of Madrid’s Trial Court Number 13, José Antonio de la Campa, presented a partial summary of the forensic report of the autopsy performed on Arregui. It confirms the existence of torture and physical violence. The cause of death was ‘respiratory failure resulting from bronchopneumonia accompanied by severe pulmonary oedema’. The same judge took statements all afternoon from five officials of the Higher Police Force, part of the Regional Information Brigade, who participated directly in the interrogation.

  Santiago Brouard, president of HASI, the central political force of Herri Batasuna, and a doctor by profession, stated that the bronchopneumonia specified in the autopsy as present in the deceased was caused by the torture method known as la bañera, or bathtub, in which the person’s head is submerged in a basin of dirty water, preventing him from breathing for a brief period. According to the Herri Batasuna leader, the torture victim is forced to swallow the contaminated liquid, which penetrates the lungs, causing bronchopneumonia.

  El País, 9 March, 2009: ‘Esteban Beltrán, human rights professor and director of Amnesty International, publishes the book Twisted Rights’:

  No one sees torture as a problem in Spain, including the media. I provide examples of articles that go so far as to ask ‘Does torture exist in Spain?’ I don’t know of any country in the world where there are no cases of torture and I believe that the role of the media is to investigate these cases. It would seem that the debate about torture has been appropriated by two camps: one, the Basque nationalist movement which claims that there is always torture, which isn’t true; and the other, the government and everyone else, who claim that there is never torture and that there are sufficient safeguards against it. It’s apparently not possible to say that ETA’s crimes are terrible, that they must be denounced, and that those responsible for them must go to prison, but also that torture is a crime, and it must be investigated.

  Website of the Psychiatric and Psychotherapeutic Research Institute of Madrid, Antonio Sánchez, 26 September, 2013: ‘Trauma and Forgetting’.

  In discussing denial and forgetting, it is especially relevant to cite the general attitude towards those who as children lived through a traumatic event; because of their youth, it is assumed that they aren’t aware of what has happened to them, and at the same time they are presumed to be able to fully overcome the trauma, so that they are de facto denied the existence of the pain they experienced.

  Email to my father from one of his cousins, 28 January, 2014:

  I’m writing to you regarding the door of the Ybarra-Arregui mausoleum in the Derio cemetery. I believe I had mentioned that the bottom hinge is broken and now the door can’t be opened all the way or locked.

  I’ve found some metal workers through Vicenta, the woman who cleans the vaults. I met with them yesterday and they seem competent (and have good references).

  It will cost something like €1000, but since the door has to be taken into the shop anyway, I’d like to have the sloppy old layers of paint stripped and a new coat applied (after the old paint is sandblasted). In other words, make it look nice and ready for the next hundred years. Painting the door would cost €300.

  I’ve talked to my siblings and we think that the job could be split among the three families, not bothering with property shares. So you – the Ybarra Ybarras – would be responsible for payment of a third of the total, about €433.33. What do you say?

  *

  When my father hired his first security detail, I thought he didn’t need it. In 2000, only politicians had bodyguards. We didn’t want to see ourselves or him as a target. It was when he began to have protection that we realised we were being stalked by a terrorist group.

  XXI

  Friday, 28 March, 2014

  ‘Gabriela, I need you to come to my office to pick up your mother’s clothes. Choose the things you want to keep and take them. They’re all over the place. I’ve been told there’s a company that does pick-ups and delivers the clothes to churches. I’m going to phone them this week.’ My father has been calling me for days with the same plea. I listen to it at a bus stop, sitting at my desk, in the car on the way home from a trip to the Pyrenees … Each time he sounds more desperate: ‘Gabriela, when are you planning to come? Monday? Tuesday? What day is good for you?’

  Before my father took my mother’s clothes to his office, I intercepted the black dress that I wore to the burial. Between the funeral home and the various services, I had run out of dark things to wear and all I could think of was to look in my mother’s cupboard. There were lots of dresses on the hangers, though hardly any of them were nice. She had long ago given up caring about her appearance and in recent years she bought only cheap things: clothes from beach stands, ugly shoes. My sisters and I used to laugh at her shoes. But the black dress was nice. Elegant. She had bought it in Italy. My sisters and I helped her choose it. We said: ‘That one looks amazing on you,’ and she wore it out of the store.

  I’ve been putting off going through my mother’s clothes for more than two years. Each time I think about doing it I imagine myself weeping over a heap of beach dresses and I postpone the trip. Today I decide that tomorrow I’ll go. To prepare myself, I put on the black dress and head to a work meeting. On the way there on the Metro I imagine my mother in the same dark dress, her hips curvy.

  I didn’t wash the dress for a year. I didn’t want it to lose her smell. But the day came when my sweat masked hers and I washed it. I touched the dress often, though I didn’t put it on much. I never knew what shoes to wear it with. She wore it with horrible sandals with embroidered felt flowers. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll look for them at my father’s office. If she could wear them and not care, maybe I can too.

  *

  Monday, 31 March, 2014

  I’m in my underwear in front of a pile of jackets. A little while ago I crossed Calle Mayor with a suitcase on the way to my father’s office. The clothes that he wants to get rid of fill three cupboards. When I came into the office I set the suitcase in a corner, got undressed and began to try things on, checking to see how they looked in the mirror. Now I’m in the robe that my mother wore to breakfast every morning. The stor
e where she bought it doesn’t exist anymore. The fabric doesn’t smell like her either; it smells like a mix of air freshener and mothballs. It isn’t a nice day outside. It’s raining in fits and starts. I try to remember, but it’s hard. Many of the dresses don’t say anything to me, and others bring back random moments: my mother in the kitchen stewing beans, my mother dressed to go out … There’s a lot of noise from the street. I hear police sirens and megaphones. Official cars are everywhere. The people who get out of the cars are dressed in black and carry dark umbrellas. Next to the cathedral gates there are several reporters, cameras in hand. A thin girl in heels goes up the stairs. I open the suitcase and put in a blazer, a coat and a pair of blue trousers. I want to look out the window again. I’d like to think about my mother, sort through her clothes, write down what I remember … but I can’t. All I can think about is turning to look outside again. It’s Suarez’s funeral. The president who was elected a few days after my grandfather was killed. There’s a dark blue sedan parked at the gate. Mariano Rajoy came in it, I think. There are some old men leaning on their elbows on a wall. Like me, in my window.