That woman out walking with her five-year-old daughter was named Dolores Gonzales Catarain. Her nickname was Yoyes. Her hometown was Ordizia, province of Guipuzcoa. ETA had executed her in front of her daughter, not because she had informed on them or betrayed the cause. She had just wanted to quit.
He’d read until he couldn’t anymore. Then he had flown to Spain.
With nowhere to go—he had no interest in being a tourist—Ben went back to Parque Santander. He found the small gnarled tree and placed his hand on the spot where the bark had been blasted away from the grain. The tree, he judged, would heal itself, made of tougher fiber than he or his daughter. He couldn’t tell if the two Civil Guards cradling their machine guns across the street were the same as the day he’d stood there with Madeline Pratt. He looked up and down the street for a Seat Ibiza. The one he found this time was a sun-dulled red. He stood on the spot and closed his eyes. But he was not waiting for the car to blow up. He was telling his daughter good-bye. In some ways he might also have been speaking to his mother. I miss you. I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t know you better. I wish it didn’t always have to end like this. We travel a hundred miles or halfway around the world and stand on the spot. The spots are always empty and busy with life.
He felt his anger coming back; more than the injustice, it was anger at the everydayness, the ongoingness. He opened his eyes and for a moment willfully took on his role as obstruction. He forced people to veer to either side, and he got some looks, which he returned. Step aside? It’ll take another one of your bombs to blow me away! Then the tension went out of him and his knees sagged. He closed his eyes again and stood like some martyred saint in the heat. He told his daughter good-bye. He said, I won’t be coming back. What’s the point?
She answered, After two years and eight months? Don’t go so soon.
He shook his head.
She said, What took you so long?
He said, It’s the way I am.
But he did come back. He slept in snatches in his hotel room just off Paseo del Castellana and was up and dressed before dawn. From his window he could look out on a statue of Neptune standing as upright in his chariot as the trident he held at this side. This was the Palace Hotel, whose bar Ernest Hemingway had frequented. In fact, the same travel agent who’d booked his flight had booked his hotel, which was running a special offer for American tourists in Hemingway’s honor. In honor of the first or last drink the famous author had had at the bar? He never found out. He watched Neptune rise with the dawn, then went back at precisely the hour his daughter Michelle had gotten up to run around the Parque Santander, as if it were her private jogging track. Madrid at that hour was still fresh and clear, scented by its strong coffee and just-baked bread. It had yet to be fouled by exhaust. Stepping out of the cab, he had a moment’s perspective, down Paseo San Francisco de Sales, all the way to the Sierra del Guadarrama, whose rugged granite escarpment seemed a cloudy emanation of the plain. The air tingled with a promise he might have believed in then, two years and eight months ago. He stepped into the park and sat at one of the tables close to the concession stand. The stand was not open. Mothers had yet to take their children to school. He sat waiting to see if his daughter or some other American student who could call her to mind began to run around the park.
He saw Madeline Pratt instead. She was pacing in long thoughtful strides with her arms folded in front of her, her hands slipped into the sleeves of her sweater. Her head was half-lowered and her whole being was so inner-directed that he couldn’t escape the impression that she was performing a penance of some sort. He didn’t follow her around the park. She left his field of vision and then approximately ten minutes later entered it again, at which point it became clear she was walking laps. It was possible this was her form of exercise. While exercising, was she expressing her solidarity with all victims of ETA and acknowledging her lapse for the one student of hers that ETA had killed? That too was possible.
He watched her pass before him three more times, the sun a bit higher in the sky for each lap, casting the gray and the cornhusk yellow of her hair into an indeterminate mix. She walked stooped, visibly tiring, he thought.
He waited for her to come back around one more time. He intended to get up and join her on her last lap around the park. He wanted to thank her for her efforts, and he wanted to express how much he resented her taking his place. He wanted to shelter her from the heat that was already building in the air. He wanted to accompany her back to her office, where he could consult the clippings she had collected about his daughter’s death, and he wanted to bask in the warmth of her assistant Concha’s eyes.
The Spanish eyes of a song.
IV
There was a song Annie had played for her father. No, that wasn’t exactly how it had happened. She’d been driving his car and had left a tape in the tape deck. Between the bank and his house, or between the club and his house, or simply driving around the block, he’d listened to one song on the tape. He’d asked her about it, and on the tape deck in his kitchen she’d played it for him again.
“Give me one reason to stay here and I’ll turn right back around.”
He wondered if you had to sit down and reason things out point by point nowadays. His reasons, hers, then you looked not for a preacher but for an arbiter. Could you outargue your opposite number? On the strength of that, would she fall into your arms? He wondered. He asked her if her generation still believed in Romance. He tried to make his voice sound incidental. But to her it seemed to come out of a puzzling hush.
She really didn’t know what he meant by the word. It wasn’t love everlasting; it wasn’t youthful love fading into a long pastoral twilight that never ended. As a little girl, she could remember watching her father and her grandmother sitting side by side on the piano bench singing their “gushing oldies,” she called them. But what she remembered best was the way her father turned the pages of the songbook once Grandmother Louise’s hands were no longer so quick. He turned them on the beat, with a poise and precision that were uncharacteristic of him.
Her father had turned the pages with devotion.
Romance?
As a substitute for what? she’d asked He’d nodded his head as if he’d understood her question exactly, then he’d shaken his head, sadly, as if no answer were available. He’d given himself a kind of rousing and rueful grin and played the song over, moving to the beat.
“Give me one reason to stay here and I’ll turn right back around.”
With no reason not to, he’d left, and she didn’t know where he’d gone.
She’d finished her exams. There’d been a moment when she’d stood in her apartment, with Valerie waiting for an answer, and added up her options. She could stay there—the apartment was paid through the summer—and do advance reading for her fall classes. She could take the research assistantship her psych professor had arranged for her. There was a job in New York as an intern in a human rights organization that suited her major perfectly. She could go to New York City and do that. She could go to Boston, then Cape Cod, then Mount Desert Island in Maine with Jonathan, free of charge. Chad the Volunteer wanted her to visit his Tennessee town.
Or she could go home, to Lexington, which was finally what she decided to do. Jonathan insisted on driving her there, seven hundred miles south. In passing he’d see a horse farm or two and they’d swill good Kentucky white lightning from a moonshiner. She’d let him take her. Jonathan had seen to it that they’d gotten a late start, and they’d had to stop in an Ohio motel. She had let him make love to her. He had a carefree insouciance about everything he did, and
