Twist Read online

  Diego Lazkano was happy. Thanks to Ana. Thanks to the shiny puddles of her green eyes. And that black hair shaped like a sickle, framing the white arc of her face. Thanks to the books they buy for each other, because they both want to read. Every time Ana rehearses a new play, Diego reads with her and then attends premieres with great satisfaction and without nerves, enjoying the radiance of his woman on the stage. In the same way they try to make things different each time they speak to each other, they vary things when they touch each other: one caresses the other’s face after peeling an orange with his fingers. It doesn’t matter if his fingers are cold between her legs, and later against his nose, cold and smelling of orange. It’s all Diego needs.

  They are one of those couples people envy when they see them walk down the street; so attuned to each other they even smile in the same way: they’re like loving siblings, and should disguise their happiness to dampen the disgust they induce in jealous pedestrians. They’ve infected each other not only with their gestures, but also with each other’s reasons to be happy; everything is times two, really: every reason belongs to both of them while, before, each had carried their own. Especially memorable was the day when they arranged their LP collections together in alphabetical order on the same shelves. “A union stronger than marriage,” they tell each other after aligning their Patti LaBelle and Mikel Laboa, Echo & the Bunnymen and Errobi LPs side by side.

  A private sphere, something intimate, something that’s only mine? Of course I have that, thinks Diego. The closeness of his dear friends Soto and Zeberio is something the couple enjoys, but the political militancy, the meetings and talks they organize in their house, the screams and running escapes from the police in demonstrations is something that belongs only to Diego. Ana has her own private sphere too. What is it? Diego isn’t sure. It belongs only to her. It’s something he doesn’t pay special attention to, he prefers to hold on to their shared way of manifesting their happiness.

  When they start living together they compete to see who can do the dishes first, who can make the bed first. The object of the game is to surprise the other, and see their smile when they realize that the job they were about to do has been completed by the other; and to make love then. Unmaking the bed that has just been made.

  To be crazy in love, to brush your teeth before eating. And then instead of eating make love using every single finger and licking everything.

  They make coffee at night and their nails are black with coffee grounds. Who knows what corners of their bodies those fingers will imprint with the scent of coffee.

  “Where were you?”

  “At Soto and Zeberio’s.”

  “Conspiring?”

  “Listening to music…”

  He has it all: friendship, love. The love of his friends and the friendship of his love.

  With sundown, the smell of coffee has substituted the embolus of the smell of oranges, but it’s still there in the background like a continuous hum, the sweet shrill of orange peel echoing against the exciting bitterness of caffeine.

  To keep mixing things up, Diego bites Ana’s neck the way Idoia had taught him; her belt falls off, mother-of-pearl buttons hit the ground, nails caress lips, a finger penetrates a furrow; they want to perfume, bend, smell, kiss, slurp each other. The tips of Ana’s fingers touch Diego’s erection too soon, she didn’t expect to find it so close to his belt. She caresses it with her fingers first and her nails next. They smile: keep it different, until the end of the day, until the end of all days, backs turned to the evidence that says there will be an end of days.

  And then fuck those backs and fuck that evidence.

  The theater group had started to slowly fragment and languish. TV steals up many of the contenders in the acting profession: some decide to become news anchors, others do dubbing courses and decide to exploit their voices for a living; an intelligent choice, perhaps, since the voice is the last bastion of youth and age takes longer to show there. An actor knows that great talent is required in order to age in the world of entertainment. Not all of us are Orson Welles.

  Either that, or gain some weight and become a director. Go from being a chess piece to a chess player. This is the pathway Gloria chooses at the beginning. She continues to obstinately produce low-budget plays while she studies fine arts in Bilbao, sticking to her absurd fixation of not turning up to premieres – some kind of superstition. While the premiere is taking place she hunkers down in the Boulevard’s cocktail bar, drinking gin and tonics, pretending to the barman and to herself that she isn’t nervous at all, lighting one cigarette with the previous one’s butt, until the clock warns her that the play at the Antzoki Zaharra is about to end. Then she asks for the check and returns to the theater. She likes to sneak out and then sneak back in the same way; she’s always very on top of her actors during rehearsals, so she allows herself this little desertion. The first time it worked out very well and she’s repeated the ritual since: stealthily returning to the theater when the play is about to end, she likes to breathe in the tension in the stalls, to sense the laughter or the silence inside the theater as she crosses the foyer and the empty bar.

  Only then she asks her colleagues: “How is it going?” Although it’s a useless question because by then Gloria perfectly knows how everything is going, failure or success are palpable in the air and on the faces of her actors; if they managed to move the audience, if the audience laughed when they were supposed to laugh, if they held their breath when they were supposed to do so. Then comes the applause, the invitation to join the actors on the stage, the bunches of flowers, the love, the kisses, the thankyous, the achievement is all yours, the actors’, thank you so much, thank you from my heart, I love you too.

  “Actors are whiny little spoiled children, Lazkano: every now and then the horses need to be rubbed down.” The horses need to be rubbed down, quite the way of putting it.

  And who rubs down the horse breaker, Gloria? Lazkano is speechless when Gloria announces that she’ll be giving up on theater as soon as she finishes her fine arts degree. While Zeberio was putting away the lights, Soto and Lazkano found her sitting, looking dejected.

  “I’m not as strong as I thought I was, this job requires courage of steel…it’s not for me.”

  Something she overheard by chance in the bar Paco Bueno truncated Gloria’s indestructible spirit. She’d taken a trivial comment voiced by someone in a dive bar and turned it into a tremendous tragedy. It can’t even be said to have been a commentary. In truth, they’re just two words.

  “It can’t have been that bad.”

  “Someone asked ‘what did you think?’ and his friend answered ‘so-so.’ So-so?”

  Lazkano can’t believe it. Proud Gloria, who looks down equally on good and bad reviews, saying things like “they haven’t understood shit; these idiots don’t even know who David Mamet is”; unbreakable, omniscient Gloria, so sure of herself and every step she takes, is about to give up because of such a stupid comment?

  “That’s not so bad, is it?”

  “It’s the worst thing anyone can say about something you’ve created, Lazkano.”

  “First off: you don’t know who was talking, and whether they know anything about the theater,” Soto says, trying to encourage her too. “Second: don’t we belong to the Handke School? We don’t give two hoots about the public.”

  “You’re not going to persuade me, Soto…I give up.”

  “You have to keep going,” insists Diego softly. “You’ll see it differently tomorrow.”

  But this doesn’t happen. That was the last play Gloria directed. Just like that, she abandoned the theater to become immersed in the world of art. She gave it all up and moved to Barcelona.

  Those two beloved friends, Soto and Zeberio, in any case, weren’t they elevated to that category by virtue of their death and his guilt? Rather than the best friends of his life, weren’t they, increasingly so, the best friends of his death, the best friends of his future death awaiting him pati
ently on the other side? His beloved friends’ torture and disappearance joined ranks with his own father’s vanishing. Just when Soto and Zeberio’s disappearance had started to diffuse a little – just a little – in his memory, the responsibility Lazkano feels for all the disappeared, rather than shrinking, increases and becomes more piercing. His father’s disappearance only makes Soto and Zeberio reappear before Lazkano’s eyes, they reemerge in his memory, their absence becoming more pressing by the day. Their profiles redefine themselves, newly distinct, as if he’d been looking at long-lost photographs. “There are three of us and we’ve all disappeared; there’s no hope for the first two, there may be some for the third.”

  But for the third one too, for old Gabriel Lazkano, hope was decreasing by the day. If he didn’t reappear by the second week, according to statistics – and statistics are a courtesy of the police – it was unlikely he’d be found alive. Initially he thought about them as “his three disappeared,” but after a while it was “his three dead.” That’s when a kind of fisherman’s widow’s obsession took hold; after the temporary declaration of “legal absence,” he understood the unbearable unease felt when the sea doesn’t return the bodies of seamen. He understood. He needed a body. He needed one of them at least to be present as a corpse, for his bones to confirm the end of his story. A body would mean that he was somewhere, in some specific place, that his story ended there, and that sense of placement would mark a sense of an ending. A place offered repose not only to the dead, but also to their families and friends.

  Without a place there was no repose, or at least it was more difficult to find it. Cemeteries fence off death, without graveyards death could be anywhere, and families would lose the ground beneath their feet and go mad. Think of that. Times three.

  “The sink is clogged, seme, can you come over?”

  His mother’s call departed from her usual requests, it had echoes of that other SOS, “I came to the wrong place, Diego.” As soon as he arrived home, his suspicions were confirmed.

  After working the plunger hard for a while and using a fair amount of force, he managed to free up the pipe. The culprit appeared to be quite a large clump of white hair. He stared at his mother to check if the hair was hers. She hadn’t combed it yet, she must have cut that thick lock that very morning. The scissors were still on the table.

  “What did you do, ama?”

  “I felt so lonely. I wanted you to come over.”

  The wages of despair, Lazkano suddenly understood: not having the energy to even pretend. Cutting your own hair, clogging your own sink with it to then call your son so he’ll come to see you.

  The disappeared, Lazkano wondered, could it be that they cause in the not-disappeared something like a desire to disappear too? Perhaps because of the blow they’ve suffered, their usual structures, schedules, and behaviors disappear too. It’s not just that they don’t have the strength to recover the life they had before the disappearance of the person they loved, it’s that by erasing themselves too, by changing their behaviors and state of mind somewhat, they feel closer to those who are no longer there: “Before you disappeared I lived happily, now I must live with sadness; before you disappeared I used to eat out on Sundays, now I must eat at home; before you disappeared we used to spend our holidays in the mountains, now I should spend them by the sea.” It’s an unconscious, absurd behavior that separates us from our old routines, as if, in abandoning them, in removing ourselves from our habitual spaces and placing ourselves somewhere else, we could somehow bring our disappeared back.

  Lazkano was at a loss. Pink rubber gloves on and withered white lock in hand, not knowing what to do with it at all – throw it in the trash, down the toilet, or hand it over to her. Locks of hair are used to conjure spells, as tokens of love. What do you do with a lock of your own mother’s hair?

  It was true, maybe Diego’s mother didn’t know it but she had decided to disappear; to do so, instead of jumping headfirst into a river, she’d try throwing herself down the sink drain bit by bit, starting with the easiest bit first, a lock of her hair.

  “We’ll meet down there, down the gutter, in the bottom of the sea, deep in the well.”

  Diego Lazkano remembers the first time he heard the acronym AK-47. The first time he heard the initials of the FMLN, the Salvadoran guerrillas. The first time he heard the words sleeper cell and embryonic cell. It all happened the same day, with Zeberio and Soto, while the latter removed a Victor Jara LP and replaced it with one by the Doors on the record player. “Don’t torture me with that music,” Zeberio snapped. Because Zeberio liked Victor Jara; he liked singers whose songs he could understand. So, nothing in English, of course. No American music, of course. “Don’t torture me with that music,” his hair stands on end when he remembers it, he remembers it as if it’d happened that very morning, when, in fact, twenty-five years have passed. He remembers as if it’d happened the day before, that fun afternoon he had, that exchange between Soto and Zeberio while Soto blew on the needle of the record player to get rid of the accumulated dust after having given them a lesson on the Rumasa pyramid scheme and the Iran-Iraq war; three friends who hadn’t yet gone underground, in the same house, unafraid, with their futures wide open, as open as the horizon. Soto and Zeberio, dramatist and lighting designer respectively, were, like Idoia, older than Diego. He would almost always keep silent, admiring both of them unconditionally, with a passion that was as repressed as it was devoted.

  The newspaper spoke about the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, the FMLN guerrillas, peasants, pupils, even bishops that were disappearing in El Salvador. It wasn’t the only place. It was happening in Guatemala too. In Chile. Uruguay. And many other places.

  “They abandon bodies in ditches. Look at this: the head of a peasant left in the playground of the school for his children to see.”

  “Terrifying.”

  “It’s not like the FMLN are angels, exactly: they use AK-47s, they finance their missions through murder and kidnapping – but their violence is child’s play compared to the extreme-right militias of El Salvador.”

  “And you know who’s training those militias, right, Soto?”

  “Yeah, I know, don’t start with all that again: the Americans, who else. Bell Helicopters, M16 rifles…I know, I know, but if you think I’m gonna stop playing the Doors and put Victor Jara back on because of that, you can dream on.”

  Diego Lazkano continued reading the paper: seventy-five thousand dead in El Salvador alone; that’s half of Donostia, he thought, and considered that what was going on in the Basque Country was really nothing; luckily, they’d never suffer or cause such rivers of blood as the ones experienced by the tiny Latin American country. Seventy-five thousand dead, a million refugees, another million left homeless. Those were enormous numbers, and the small numbers associated with theirs turned their conflict into a shrug-worthy matter. It was all a matter of scale, of perspective and numbers, that’s what Soto said – and Zeberio didn’t argue against him. The use of violence was measured with different parameters in that house; it wasn’t questioned, it was all part of the logic of the dynamics of war, all militants and leaders accepted a certain level of cruelty, they didn’t think of particular consequences, but of symbols: it was the symbols that were “removed,” and no one’s head would ever be left in the playground of a school where their kids went to learn. Diego Lazkano thought like this for years, and although the way he saw violence changed with time, he thought that cruelty and numeric comparisons with El Salvador were probably always present in the minds of the leaders of the ETA, whom he imagined hiding in farms in the agricultural depths of France. His biggest mistake was perhaps to assume that something like a bearable number of deaths could ever exist; a Latin American jungle got stuck in their heads and they got lost in it; hell, they even came to think that jungle was the Basque Country. And it wasn’t. Even if every mental lucubration could easily turn into a forest or a jungle.

  Diego Lazkano remembers th
e first time he heard the expression sleeper cell, and how attractive and soothing those two words seemed, because he believed in the revolutionary potential of the people in hiding, asleep somewhere, because he couldn’t imagine that a “sleeper cell” could do anything that bad, really; and, as a matter of fact, it couldn’t, unless it stopped being a “sleeper,” and in that case it could do anything – good or bad. But for as long as the cell continued to sleep, so did many dreams. That’s how Lazkano saw it, so naïve and so young still. It didn’t cross his mind to think about nightmares when the man who led their group turned up in their house.

  He was a redhead, with freckles all over his face. Back then he had seemed very old, but he couldn’t have been older than forty.

  The beardless Lazkano, on the other hand, must have looked too young to the Redhead, and he paired him with Zeberio in hopes of turning them into a “sleeper cell,” while he suggested he had “some other duties” in mind for Soto. And just like that, the pair linked forever by death could have been Lazkano and Zeberio, or perhaps in this case, Zeberio and Lazkano, the other way around. However, when they were about to leave the house and the Redhead handed over the car keys to Lazkano, things changed forever.

  “I…I don’t have a driver’s license.”

  Diego was so ashamed he barely whispered the words. The Redhead stared at him in astonishment and then turned to Soto and Zeberio with a doubtful look that seemed to say: “What sort of people are you bringing along? Couldn’t you have said something sooner? We won’t get anywhere like this. With people who can’t drive, what commando, what sleeper cell, or what kind of bullshit do you think we can organize here?”

  Finally, the Redhead took pity on young Lazkano and, avoiding his head, threw the keys at Soto.

  “You take care of it then, Soto.”

  “You, come with me…We need people who’re not on file.”