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  Lazkano doesn’t have a name: the Redhead calls him You.

  Lazkano remembered the staircase as if he’d walked down it the previous day: how he took the steps one by one, with their ledges curved slightly to the left, following the redheaded leader, feeling useless, disabled by his inability to drive. Wasn’t it a fact that Idoia had driven him everywhere in her Mini? And now he couldn’t even do that, because Ana didn’t have a driver’s license either.

  And there Diego went down the staircase next to the Redhead, with a Salvadoran jungle imprinted in his mind, “we need people who’re not on file,” oblivious to the fact that he’s leaving behind a certain death; incognizant of the fact that being competent and useful doesn’t always lead to salvation, that sometimes ignorance can save you; unaware of the fact that the gods haven’t abandoned him in the slightest, rather, they’ve chosen him, while he wonders, all along, what could possibly turn out to be his mission.

  Lazkano didn’t initially understand Gloria’s desertion, what led her to Barcelona and the art world; probably because back then he still hadn’t published anything. Now that he’s become a novelist, however, he understands her motivation perfectly: the assessment “so-so” is the kiss of death.

  Some of the theater friends who collaborated with Diego and Gloria tried their luck in cinema. Not very many good films were made in that brief period of resurgence, but at least there were more than in the following years. The expected renaissance didn’t take place. That was an isolated spring, the promise of a summer that never came, accompanied by the cruelty and deception of all false springs. Even Ana, that different sort of love that came without shadows, against all prognoses, left the theater and found a civil servant post in Donostia’s municipal library. Sara Fernandez was the only one who persevered and found success and, twenty years later, still garnered respect and admiration in the theaters of Bilbao, Madrid, and Barcelona. Madrid beckoned, she went, and, after a time, was wise enough to return – not like others, with her tail between her legs, but before being changed and sidelined by that cliquey provincial world. Every time she went to Barcelona on tour, Sara would call Gloria; on this occasion, because so many years had passed and because Diego was also visiting, the three got together around a table in Sa Cantina.

  “And what happened to our great white hope?”

  “La Bella Ines? She left the theater a long time ago. She hasn’t been seen again since The Mousetrap. I hear she works in a highway tollbooth.”

  “Not bad, she went from one trap into another.”

  “You’re still the same bastard you always were, Diego,” Gloria threw in, taking pity on their absent friend.

  Sara hadn’t lost a speck of her energy. She followed a strict diet and never touched alcohol. Diego and Gloria polished off the whole bottle of Chablis.

  “We should do something together.”

  “I completely agree, Sara. Right now: let’s have dinner. What do you think, fish or meat, Lazkano?”

  “No, Gloria, seriously: let’s adapt one of Lazkano’s novels and have you direct it…”

  “You are forgetting two tiny details: I no longer direct, and Diego hates the theater.”

  “I don’t understand, Gloria, you must know so many people here in Barcelona, why don’t you go to the theater more often?”

  “I haven’t set foot in a playhouse in twenty-five years.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe me.”

  “Tell me the truth, Sara: don’t you feel like you’ve seen everything already?”

  “No, Diego, not at all.”

  “You must be very special then. I thought that theater actors and directors never attended their colleagues’ plays unless they were completely certain that what they were about to watch was much worse than what they usually did. Only then do they go. For artists, protecting their own ego is more important than keeping up to date with things.”

  “That’s pretty miserable, Diego. Is that how novelists work?”

  “More or less, yeah.”

  “I was going to leave you both a couple of tickets for the play this weekend.”

  “Don’t take it the wrong way, Sara, I love you to bits but I’m not going to go.”

  “And you, Lazkano?”

  “To be honest, theater and I…what can I say, I developed a dislike for it. I suffer too much: for the audiences, for the actors…and for myself above all, I’m not going to lie. The mere fact of having to make the people on your same row of poorly attached stalls stand up, far from instilling a sense of camaraderie, makes me feel like a passive member of a collective I don’t belong to. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to the theater or to any demonstration – for the same reasons.”

  “Oh well. For me, there’s still nothing like it…when the lights are switched off and I hear someone walk onto the stage in the dark, and I hear the cracking of the boards, and I feel like I don’t know what’s about to happen, and I hear steps on the dais before the play starts, I get goose bumps. And, it goes without saying, when it’s me who walks on those boards…it’s like walking toward a precipice in the dark.”

  “Lucky you, you never fell off it.”

  “You’re mistaken: I’ve fallen off more than once. That’s the best part. The risk of the fall, and the certainty that you’ll have the chance to fall again.”

  Lazkano believed that those months of his early militancy and his life with Ana, until Soto and Zeberio disappeared, were the best ones of his life. But perhaps he placed too much value on friendship. The truth about friends is something else. Something coarser. Friendships have an expiration date. Just like there’s a word assigned to girlfriends of the past, to the exes that were and are now crossed off the list, why shouldn’t there be a word to designate those who were our friends for a while but no longer are? Don’t we all have ex-friends? Those who are no longer our friends, do they have to become our enemies? Not quite. The opposite of friendship is not enmity, but indifference, abandonment, inertia, apathy. The main reasons why friendships are lost are not betrayal or sudden ideological divergence, but the unavoidable entropic motion of life. Friends use one another because it’s too hard to overcome the insecurity and the mutations of adolescence in solitude; because it’s not easy to create a band on your own, someone has to play bass and percussion, which no one ever wants to do; because we need someone’s protection; because student housing is too expensive and parents breathe easier if they know their children don’t live alone; because even though we deliberately forget, there are always practical motivations behind our actions, and in this way and bit by bit we create what for a time seem like unbreakable bonds; because in drunkenness and in sports, loneliness is too sad when you’re twenty years old, and because a shared taste in beer and music translates into enough affinity to talk into the night; and because a line from a song – ezin zaitut begira, gehiegi da Pakean utzi arte – is enough then. But then couples happen, so longed for at one point, only to then become strange elements that rub against friendships, organic shrapnel that change the power dynamics among groups of friends, “don’t think about it, what had to happen happened,” and from that point on, who knows when or why, everything starts to dissipate: after meeting up twice a week you start meeting every other week, until you realize you find hanging out boring and annoying, and phone calls start to replace meeting up, and during phone calls you keep from talking about the things you want to talk about when you meet face-to-face, and then the day to meet face-to-face turns into a burden and something that’s further and further away, and when you finally meet face-to-face you don’t know how to talk and only manage a bunch of superficial topics, and in the end you only hear news of your friends from other friends. You get news of the illnesses of parents, the births of children, invitations to weddings, and that’s all. You fake happiness. You see them at funerals. You don’t feel their sorrow but pretend that you do.

  What you don’t tell friends increases, as does what they don�
��t tell you. And your malicious tendency to judge them grows, even though you are only aware of stray fragments of their lives. You fill in the voids with mistaken assumptions, justifying or censoring your friends’ attitudes almost always inaccurately, getting further and further from their truth and yours: because staying close to one’s own maliciousness is no way of approaching someone else’s truth. You once inhabited the same skin, yes, but the desire to do so has slipped away.

  Most of one’s time goes toward directing and organizing the enterprise that is domestic life; you often see parents who, forgetting the essence of parenthood, train their children for the future, holding incomprehensible conversations with them as if they were conducting business, fearing that one day those children, those monsters, those angels, those saviors and destroyers, might be in charge of their own lives. And despite that, they over-protect them, betting everything on those little arrows directed at their future; and that leaves no room for friendship, there is no time and, when there is, time is limited and the encounter brief, an obligation really – “I have fifteen minutes” – and the coffee needs to be downed in one gulp.

  It’s possible and, more than possible, very probable, that those who were once friends become acquaintances, that one day their attitudes and expressions begin to feel remote, that you stop understanding their humor, that you can’t discern a joke that covers up a deeper pain or a cry for help. Yes, it happens. Friends become acquaintances and, given enough time, acquaintances become strangers, the key to their time and trust is lost. At that point, you’re forced to admit the painful truth: perhaps you never were very good friends after all. Beer and music kept you close, brothers in arms.

  Every now and then new friends may appear, usually related to your work, most of them linked to new preoccupations and interests, often too stemming from family connections; but that sense of an eternal blood covenant is a thing of the past: the promise of loyalty chiseled into a sculpture made out of the mud of friendship, the promise implicitly forged through shared, healthy, rivalry-free laughter. And there’s no one to blame: the only guilty party is you.

  Why not admit that friendship is similar to those absent minded love relationships between teenagers: an accumulation of apparently inexhaustible power, a magnetic bond that seems unbreakable, when the truth is that it’s something that by its very nature is circumstantial and perishable. There are exceptions, of course. Charming bars that age along with their clientele. Friends who, against all prognoses, and without needing to meet every week, manage to maintain a level of complicity decade after decade, either because they are too generous or because they’re unselfconscious; or, alternatively, because they are true gardeners who, out of that old patch of friendship, tenderness grows and genuine smiles blossom. There are those too, who share an illness or a serious condition with the same passion with which some people embrace a lover; there are those who, when not in agreement, maintain heated discussions; there are friendships that are like a couple’s relationship, or are even better than a couple’s relationship; or, furthermore, that are like relationships between lovers and even better than relationships between lovers; who hide nothing from one another and, if they do, don’t do it out of malice or self-interest.

  So many things can be shared with a friend: a bad habit, a weakness, a sorrow, a secret. And then there are relationships like the one Lazkano maintains with Gloria, which are worth their weight in gold; no matter how long since they last spoke, it always feels like they’ve just been talking the day before, there are never any false starts, they can pick up the thread of their conversation anywhere. But these are exceptions, and the majority of people go through life without friendships like these. So Lazkano should be happy. And perhaps he’s mistaken in thinking that if Soto and Zeberio had remained alive, his relationship with them would have been just as stimulating as his relationship with Gloria. It’s impossible to compete with dead friends, they’re invincible, so you idealize them in irrational ways. It’s more likely that Soto and Zeberio too would have become acquaintances, and later strangers, erased by the unavoidable erosion of life. Like going from being a stranger to being an acquaintance and then a friend, but doing the process in reverse, eventually becoming diffuse.

  He could imagine Zeberio, for example, as the father of three or four kids, checking to see if they’re asleep through the crack in the door, picking up and washing his teenagers’ dirty sneakers, taking them fishing, teaching them to bait the fishing hook, to build a radio with paper clips, razor blades, and a bit of wire attached to a chunk of wood. He could imagine Soto as the president of Basque PEN, giving lectures everywhere, indefatigable in his defense of the rights of Kurdish journalists, writers, and translators, going here and there, a nomadic bird without ties of any kind, being always first to arrive in places where injustice is most flagrantly present. Each would have his life, they would see little of each other, he only needed to think of his old friends, Sara Fernandez, La Bella Ines, and so many others…Maybe Soto and Lazkano would only hear about each other through the press: “Will you look at that, indefatigable Soto has written another play”; “Ha! Lazkano has just published another one of his unbearable, obsessive, unraveling novels.” They would become each other’s spam.

  “But, what’s spam, Diego? Explain it to us, we’ve no idea.”

  He’d have to explain so many things to Soto and Zeberio if they were resurrected.

  Why? Why the hell did things have to be that way? The lives denied to Soto and Zeberio had in turn wrecked and consumed Lazkano’s life too. Or was it the other way around?

  If they hadn’t been murdered, they would have disappeared from his life all the same: during his worst sleepless nights, Diego comes to almost accept this fact. But they were killed, and this anchored them to his living mind; not to just any kind of limbo, but to his mind. The limbo of his mind. And now he can’t get them out.

  He remembers how deeply Zeberio blushed, down to the roots of his hairy beard, the day he introduced Ines to him, how his eyes lit up and smiled. Zeberio wasn’t one to show his emotions, and when Lazkano left to make some coffee in the kitchen he was on his own with the girl and quite lost. He soon found an excuse to go to the kitchen: “Lazkano, this girl is an actress, right?” Diego answered that she was: “Haven’t you ever done the lights for her?” he teased, in an unchar­acteris­tically cheeky tone. But Zeberio was too frazzled to notice: “What’s she doing here?” Lazkano informed him that she wanted to meet Soto and that’s why he’d invited her over, that he’d be over as soon as the coffee was done, not to worry, that he knew how talkative she was and he would not leave him alone with her for long.

  “Does anybody know where Soto is?”

  Zeberio was so transparent, Lazkano immediately noticed the disappointment in his face, almost heard him berating himself for entertaining the thought that he might have a chance with the girl.

  He had no idea where Soto the nutcase was. Nutcase, clown, that’s what they called each other. Lazkano sighed, the coffee started to burble to the top of the Italian percolator.

  “We’ll have to deal with her ourselves.” La Bella Ines was a walking radio. They called her la bella not because of how attractive she was, but because of how firmly she believed in her beauty. She seemed quite asexual, although her rather generous breasts dispelled such doubts. Lazkano was surprised that such an androgynous, skinny girl was to Zeberio’s taste; he was surprised and delighted, because Zeberio the silent mountain man and Ines the bony chatterbox would make quite the interesting couple.

  While they drank coffee listening to the Joy Division album Diego had put on, Lazkano found himself discovering a Zeberio he’d never met before. It was no exaggeration to say that there was an element of fascination going on in there, because, just like Soto would have preached if he’d been with them, fascinus were Roman amulets to ward against the evil eye that were shaped like erect penises.

  Ines had only performed in three plays, but she was the host of
a music program on the newly created Basque TV (everybody looks more fleshy on television, and it’s true she was photogenic), and around that time she was often in the papers because she’d been the lead of a mediocre movie premiered during the San Sebastian Film Festival. Back then, everybody thought she was an actress of great promise.

  “Have you seen the last Costa-Gavras? Unbelievable. I really recommend it. They say it’s political cinema, as if movie making isn’t a political act in itself, right? I watched it last night in Pequeño Casino, how I love that cinema…it’s charming, isn’t it? So much more than the others, Savoy or Miramar, or Amaya…right? Which ones do you like? Cinemas in San Sebastian are out of this world…”

  Lazkano remained silent because when it came to that girl and all those questions she answered herself, it was impossible to know if she expected a response or just a nod. He remained silent also because he expected another right? that didn’t arrive on this occasion (he’d counted twenty once, in one of her soliloquies).

  Lazkano observed Zeberio, not daring to say anything. It was then perhaps that Diego first became conscious of his behavior. He was able to speak naturally to Soto and Zeberio, whom he admired so much; why not, he wasn’t so different from his idols and, depending on the subject and the context, he could be as good as, or better than, them. In Soto and Zeberio’s presence, Lazkano would always speak last, stay in the shadows; he was always the third to offer an opinion, and if they didn’t ask for it, he’d just say nothing.

  “I like the Astoria,” said Zeberio finally, sounding like he’d had to go a long way to fetch those words.

  “The Astoria is okay, but the movies they play are not so good.”

  Lazkano would never forget the look on Zeberio’s face at that moment: dejected, disappointed. He’d had to make a supreme effort to utter the words “I like the Astoria,” and La Bella Ines, oblivious, had thoroughly dismissed his opinion.