Twist Read online

  Copyright © Harkaitz Cano, 2011

  English translation copyright © Amaia Gabantxo, 2018

  First Archipelago Books edition, 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form without prior written permission of the publisher.

  Title: Twist / by Harkaitz Cano; translated from Basque by Amaia Gabantxo.

  Description: First Archipelago Books edition. | New York : Archipelago Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017055991| ISBN 9780914671831 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Basques–Fiction. | Friendship–Fiction. | GSAFD: Political fiction

  Classification: LCC PH5339.C36 T9513 2018 | DDC 899/.923–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017055991

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third Street, Suite A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Cover Art: Female Artiste, Joseph Beuys, 1950/1951

  This book was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Etxepare Basque Institute, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

  Ebook ISBN 9780914671831

  v5.2

  a

  Death keeps me awake.

  —Joseph Beuys

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Cambalache, 1983

  First Diffusions

  Legis Silva – The Law of the Jungle

  Thread of Threads

  Paper Requiem

  Ready-Made

  Submerged Worlds

  The Three Friends

  CAMBALACHE, 1983

  IT’S NIGHT OUTSIDE, or at least it ought to be.

  In the bowels of the earth it’s always night; the mole’s hour in the mole’s dominion. Do underground dwellers care about daylight? Not much. You’ve been one with the earth for a while, and at first you thought it best not to move at all. Aren’t your bowels and the earth’s one and the same? A telluric voice speaks: abandon your bones now and forever, who the hell cares. Aren’t bones drumsticks for percussionists, flutes for flutists? Are you really that attached to those humeri, those tibiae, which at this point would hardly even rattle a kettledrum? Is there anything better than a cozy lie-down? Thousands of worried insomniacs would agree: the best hours are the hours of sleep. But all these years of stillness cannot possibly be good. You’d like to dance with those stiffened extremities, awaken the tips of your fingers and toes. “If only I could free my fingers from their restraints and click them together again!” You feel that instead of plumping your cheeks, the cement dentists use for their prostheses cakes your face; besides, it’s hard to open your eyes, “the guy who embalmed me wasn’t exactly a pro,” and a white dust drier than the soil itself has taken over a section of your brain: memory loss, magnesium, limescale.

  How long does it take for a body to decompose? Six, eight, ten years? Forensic anthropologists say it depends on humidity. Wanna try? Kill a cat and leave it on a chilly window ledge, see what happens.

  Can’t remember a thing. Your head is so white, as if they’d whitewashed you into a tabula rasa. But the brainwashing has not been thoroughly successful. There is a tiny light at the end of the tunnel; take that ignited thread between your fingers and pull at the yarn one tug at a time, careful not to break that tenuous thread, so fine and brittle. You remember a little something, yes: you are capable of building sentences, linking words. You are syntax. Pure grammar. An amalgam of words without identity. You will soon recover your memory. This is only a big bout of amnesia, you must have hit your head, surely, rouse yourself, shake off the listless drone of the newly awake, the savage pain of a tequila hangover, tequila or whatever it was, that distilled poison you used to drink twenty-odd years ago. No, you know it already: this won’t be easy, it’ll be nothing like getting up from a meadow, brushing off blades of grass and whistling “Xarmengarria zira” down the winding path.

  It is going to be quite difficult to get out.

  What is out there? Is anyone waiting for you? Sprigs of lavender, tubby pine trees, heather everywhere, baby fig trees too young to bear fruit, trees beaten down by the merciless sun and curled into themselves right next to the cromlechs, as if regretful of their own birth, trees punished to provide their own shade; barren berryless bushes, brambles, a eucalyptus perhaps, fir trees. And the rest, a desert. By the sea, the earth smells stronger. It’s sweltering and the lack of drinking water weighs more heavily on the tongue than the consolation the sea breeze seagulls bring. Patchworks of tar on a provincial road. The scent of fennel and sage sprouting on the roadside; sand and aniseed. Rosemary needles are there too, ready to prickle the fingers of those who approach. Although it doesn’t come from the sea, the air is in turmoil – a south wind instead of the northern tramontana – and blows the dust upward. Look at the insomniac lizards, so still, stuck to the rocks like fridge magnets: hands up. This is not too different from the Mexican desert. Although the heat isn’t quite as scorching here, of course. The cacti are not so prominent either, they are smaller and more scarce.

  Mexico? Tequila? Why the sudden mention of things on the other side of the ocean, güerito? No mames, guey! You’ve never been to Latin America, and never will! Memory’s traffic signals, no doubt. This narrator is looking for himself: a clue that will reveal whether I should address you formally or informally. I’ve been such a bastard to you. I wasn’t always good to you; you would hate me if you were alive. Reader, pay attention to even the most random details my mind leaves for you. The shattered remains of a broken bottle, the smell of last night’s burnt wood in the air, soothing hippie songs strummed on an old guitar in bygone scout camps, brotherhood songs, “zergaitik galdu itxaropena berriz ikusteko, zergaitik galdu itxaropena berriz ikusteko,” people celebrating impossible future encounters; they’re so short-lived and dim ever so quickly, those eternal two-weeks-of-summer friendships. Go, go on: long tall green blades of grass, rare shiny-leaf mint, the smell of alcohol or tar, something not quite as obvious as petrol, not as profoundly nausea inducing. A polluted sea is more bearable than the smell of diesel on the road. The wind blows the dust upward again, there is no one there. That’s it, that’s it: you were wearing a Mexico World Cup T-shirt. That’s what it was! You’ve never been to Mexico, but you were wearing a Mexico World Cup T-shirt and in handcuffs, your feet dragging, your ankles bound together (bound together again? Yes: bound once, twice, three times, bound four times, tightly bound, very bound, bound in such a way that your ankles still hurt twenty years later, bound in such a way that if you told anyone what happened to you, they would feel the tight bind in their ankles too). As they dragged you through the brambles maybe you thought of the advantages of peyote. If I were on a roller-coaster ride, or on an acid trip, if only all this were a lie! No, I don’t think so…It doesn’t look like you were alive when they brought you here. Or maybe you were? Did they shoot you in the head right here? Were you dead when they brought you, a corpse already, eyelids closed? Those who brought you here, then, did they no longer need the handcuffs? Let’s imagine that it was so, that it happened like that: that they brought you here without handcuffs. Or maybe they brought you alive but wearing blindfolds, mouth gags, wrists bound together with torn-up sheets. Your executioners were cruel and intelligent. To take cruelty beyond a certain point, to give the screw another turn, requires intelligence; and whether we like i
t or not that’s a fact the Devil knows only too well.

  Can we hear the waves of the sea from here? No. The sea is pretty close, but not close enough; the Mediterranean Sea is a quiet receptacle today. Don’t fool yourselves: the sea is a hallucination, nothing else, for the dead.

  Brambles and a clearing. And more brambles that have nothing better to do than bore us and test our patience. There is sand in the clearing and this encourages one to entertain the fantasy of walking barefoot, however soon thereafter stones appear, gravel and not-quite gravel, tiny and not-quite-so-tiny rocks. At the point where the path fades. These are not bushes like ours in the Cantabrian shores – they’re sparser, their green not as lush; a green dusted with a matte white sheen like the opposite of mint leaves; there, there, and there, dry upright brambles like whips, old boundary walls made of flat piled-up stones; the men arrive sure-footed, their eagerness for a swift finish hiding their nerves. Maybe one of them is familiar with the place. He carried out a dirty job here before. What dirty job, impossible to know. Alone or with someone’s help. Are we far from the road? One kilometer away? A kilometer and a half? Just half a kilometer? There is no need to go so far either, three steps off the road take you far away from people’s usual paths and habits. Most often two steps are enough to remove oneself from the more commonly traveled road. One single step suffices to fall off a cliff.

  Because it’s nighttime. It ought to be nighttime and it is. The road is not a main road. This motherfucker doesn’t deserve that we hide him well, someone thinks. Mangy dog, we should hang you from a streetlight as a warning to others like you, we should leave you on the roadside like a rat, burst belly up, just like you did with Trota, we should run you into a ditch and explode you; hopefully some carsick German tourists will find you with flies around your mouth.

  But the question here is not what you deserve.

  This has nothing to do with what you deserve, but with what they want to hide. A good airtight alibi, the certainty that no one can be touched, that they’re safe, even twenty years down the line, their hands and their records clean. Safe. While they prescribe law and punishment and memory. We went too far. They went too far and they still haven’t come back. Too far. Where?

  Here.

  Maybe they came here by car, maybe they carried you on their shoulders; bitter paradox, to think of those mendacious souls carrying you on their shoulders, bidean anaia erortzen bazaik, lepoan hartu ta segi aurrera, tralala, like in the song. But who is mendacious, who does mendacity belong to? You might understand them, you should understand them, be able to inhabit their skin. If you were in their skin, you would be the same, the same as them and their circumstances. “I am I and my circumstance; if I do not save it, I do not save myself.” The second part of that sentence by the famous philosopher is often forgotten, who knows why. But no one inhabits anyone else’s skin anymore, do they? It’s hard enough to withstand our own skin, why would we think of inhabiting another’s. The difference is that now you’re in your own bones, and not in your own skin.

  The trunk opens with a bang. Could be a van. An eighties van, an Ebro with a dodgy suspension and, due to its worn-out rubber, squeaky and ineffective windshield wipers that set your teeth on edge. The vehicle staggers where dust meets sand. The corpse in the trunk moves; under the flashlight, a lifeless head with a deep cut above the eyebrow. Soon they cover you with a maroon blanket, a second skin.

  “Yes, I realize that perfectly. I am resisting temptation for now and addressing you directly, I don’t know why, it’s what comes naturally to me when I speak to the dead.”

  The dead; they are many and always grateful for a bit of entertainment.

  Here. These are the eighties. In the Spanish State, two out of every ten people of working age are unemployed, according to official data of course; the Swedish tennis player Björn Borg retires this year, Martina Navratilova wins Flushing Meadows; at the Vostok base in Antarctica temperatures reach below negative 128° Fahrenheit, the lowest ever recorded on earth; it’s been six years since Elvis Presley’s death, that’s someone else who ought to wake up one day; in the Bellvitge Hospital, in Barcelona, they perform the first-ever liver transplant in the Spanish State, it’s not all slaughter when scalpel slices skin; on March 8, and coinciding with International Women’s Day, Ronald Reagan declares the Soviet Union “an evil empire”; on September 1 Soviet hunter planes shoot down a South Korean commercial flight due to an unfortunate mistake, and unfortunately 269 unfortunate souls die. It is the year of Tennessee Williams’s death, Desire is the name of a neighborhood in New Orleans. Some have actually made up for their ancestors’ bad actions; rather late, it’s true, but something is better than nothing – don’t lose hope, contemporary witches, burning already thanks to the New Inquisition: resist! Today is May 9 and John Paul II, the pope who kneels down and kisses the ground wherever he goes, the same one who was almost killed by the Turkish hit man Mehmet Ali Agca on the KGB and the Bulgarian Secret Service’s orders two years ago, pardoned Galileo Galilei; things in palazzis, as you know, move piano-piano, but eventually lontano. Aspaldian espero zaitudalako ez nago sekula bakarrik, I’ve been waiting for you for so long I’m never alone: could be a line by Galileo, but it is also the title of Arantxa Urretabizkaia’s book, published that year; Margaret Thatcher wins the election in Great Britain, and, man, was it a home run; six years have passed since they last used the guillotine on someone, and only two since the Élysée Palace abolished the guillotine (la mort de la mort), even though sixty-two percent of the French were against it, even though sixty-one percent of French people disagreed with François Mitterrand celebrating his victory by releasing five thousand prisoners, even though and despite the fact that, therefore and otherwise, politicians are still leaders and charisma is more powerful than surveys.

  In this year, 1983, Michael Jackson’s extremely successful Thriller album comes out; also Imanol’s Iratze okre geldiak; Anjel Lertxundi publishes Hamaseigarrena, Aidanez, Madonna sings “Holiday” flashing her belly button; the actor Christopher Reeve films the third Superman movie: this time he will turn evil and, later on, of course, return to being good again; a year ago Felipe González reached power under the motto “Por el Cambio” (For Change), and he said only one word in the campaign advert: “Adelante” (Onward). Three years ago now Sandinistas assassinated Somoza, Nicaragua’s exiled dictator; it happened on Avenida Francisco Franco, in Asunción, Paraguay: the body was burned to a cinder, but the engine of his Mercedes car kept running, “You can always trust a German car.”

  The RDA is not a joke or a theme park, it’ll be six years before the Berlin Wall falls, only one before the disciplined and hormone-pumped Romanian athletes win a bucketful of medals at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and the same again before we meet Carl Lewis, “the Son of the Wind.” The franchise business, and the security guards that come with it, have not yet arrived; the only security guards we know come in armored cars and ooze a certain film noir glamour, and not the sadness of the mileurista wages twenty-five years hence. Children know pizza only from movies; photocopies are an almost unthinkable luxury, it’s not so easy to copy things and multiply them, not easy, not so easy at all, they still use duplicators, and the toxins in the ink are more intense; we write using typewriters, and when we do so we put carbon paper under every sheet, to keep thin carbon copies of the most important documents, damn carbon paper, blessed carbon paper; even though he has already written it, we still haven’t read Borges’s assertion that mirrors and copulation are abominable, or Benedetti’s that the original sin isn’t that grave, but photocopies are; wooden windows reign, we still don’t know PVC or double glazing, titanium is science fiction, in the popular mind, stainless steel is still the most prestigious alloy, in the ovens of foundries they use asbestos as if it were cake mix; you have to stick your finger in a hole to dial a phone number, the most sophisticated computer in most houses is a calculator that extracts square roots; marketing is too modern a word, shop windows
are but dark soviet warehouses in which stock piles up, you need to cross the muga and enter French territory to see a proper shop window, a luminous, elegant display case, tastefully arranged, like in Galeries Lafayette and others like it (don’t forget your passport); on the French Basque Country, on the other side, supermarkets look like jewelers to us, because Europe still bleeds bile through its frontiers and barbed-wire fences. Because contraband is still something more than a scream against all sides, it’s still an existing occupation, and carries the risk of imprisonment.

  The men who have brought you to this place so close to the Mediterranean and private hunting lodges haven’t suffered the demand, necessity, and mandate of English-language academies in order to get a job. Their lack of knowledge is such they don’t even know what X marks the spot means, they don’t subtitle movies in our – our? – country, instead, we have a magnificent army of erasers – they call them dubbing actors – who will vanquish anyone’s words with their fairground-charlatan voices; policemen educated on the language of metal in gray academies would find it difficult to imagine the myriad colors in shop windows and the gigantic suburban malls of the nineties; the railway gauge is different here and, even though the belief is widespread, it’s a lie that the Caudillo, dead eight years ago now, decided it, although it was obviously to his advantage. Why? So that in case of war foreign trains full of foreign weapons and foreign preserves with foreign labels and foreign ideas and foreign Dannon yogurts from those bright-lit supermarkets that look like jewelers don’t reach the heart of his sweet little dictatorship beyond the French frontier. Those rushing men who kick up sand with their boots are the obedient servants of an outmoded institution in an outmoded country, musketeers of a state that in two years will join NATO, in three will enter the European Union; they wanted to be swordsmen but they were born too late, such a pity, quel dommage; they work night shifts, twelve hours, sometimes they go too far, it’s understandable – they should tie a fishing line to a thumb to reel themselves in, to not veer too far. They come from a dictatorship and its rules. Rules or entrails, one and the same. They are going to bury him. In the hole. There, there, and there. Only they know where. In the entrails of the earth.