guard booth at the driveway leading in. From the sidewalk where he stood he estimated the distance across the street to where two Civil Guards patrolled their stretch of sidewalk at sixty feet. The Civil Guards were dressed in a darker, denser green than army green and carried machine guns slung over their shoulders. Sixty feet was the distance separating a pitcher from a batter. As a teenager he had pitched. These two Civil Guards might have been teenagers themselves. They had fresh bony faces that looked struck from the same Spanish mold. They had vigorous eyebrows and hair along their upper lips. The predecessor of one of them had not survived. Ben asked Madeline Pratt where, and she moved them farther along the sidewalk, up from the headquarters’ entrance. When she stopped, he estimated the distance between them and those two patrolling boys now at ninety feet, or the distance between home plate and first base. As well as Madeline Pratt could remember, his daughter had died here. There was a tree just inside the park, one of those low gnarled trees with what looked like carob pods hanging from its limbs. He could see how the bark had been blown away. What remained of the tree looked indestructible. The car loaded with dynamite had been parked almost directly across from the entrance where the two Civil Guards patrolled. And the blast had caught her here.
“What kind of car?”
Madeline Pratt had newspaper clippings from that day. As documents pertaining to the center she’d felt obligated to keep them. He could consult the clippings.
But she must have remembered the car.
She nodded. It was a Seat Ibiza. She looked up the street and raised her hand and pointed at an unexceptional white car wedged into a parking spot.
“Like that one,” she said.
It was a hatchback model. It had no trunk. There would be a storage area for luggage, but anyone peering in . . .
“And other than my daughter and that Civil Guard . . . ?”
“Two more people were slightly injured, and there was a lot of shattered glass. But I hope you’ll believe me when I say it was truly miraculous that there were no other casualties. I know that’s small consolation.”
“It’s been two years and eight months since it happened. Look around. If you didn’t notice that tree, you’d never know. That building looks like it never got touched.”
“They had to rebuild some. They put up a plaque beside the door.”
“I don’t want to see it. What does it say? Does it even mention her?”
Madeline Pratt bowed her head. “No,” she whispered, stage-whispered in the traffic noise, the noise of concentrated human habitation, “it’s what they always say when a Civil Guard is killed, that he died for the glory of his country.”
Todo Por La Patria.
Ben stood where she’d positioned him. The pavement had been littered and swept and rained on hundreds of times since his daughter had lain here. Each horn that blew, each motorbike that drilled by, took some of her with it. He looked back along the diagonal to the headquarters’ entrance. The two Civil Guards were hardly on alert; they chatted with each other, rocked back on their heels, and cradled their guns idly, like something they’d been told to hold on to for the duration of the day. He looked from them on another diagonal to where that white car was parked. As far as those boys knew, it too could carry explosives. It could wipe out Madeline Pratt and Ben Williamson where they stood, or the vagaries of the blast could reach the Civil Guards and countless others, instead, and leave the two of them unscathed.
“They didn’t catch them, did they?” he said.
Madeline Pratt shook her head. “They have a phrase they use in the press. Desarticular comandos, which means they disband a group of four or five terrorists operating in Madrid. Another comando, or another team, comes in from the Basque country to replace them. The authorities try to pretend otherwise, but it’s not really a matter of a particular person and a particular crime. . . .”
“Why?” he asked. “Why do they pretend otherwise? So they can show that justice is being done?”
“Yes, you know . . .” and she forced herself to look at him out of that desolate dead space around her eyes, “for society and especially for the families, so that they can get some sense of—”
He stopped her. She was going to say “closure” or something equally cruel in its banal right-mindedness. “Closure” would have been a bomb blast out of that white Seat, and it hadn’t come.
He smiled at her. He wanted her to take away this smile and study it, take it to heart. He saw her eyes widen and begin to glisten. She was a tall woman, almost his height, and he could feel the shakiness in her knees. “Go away,” he told her. “Go back to your students. It’s been long enough. Erase Michelle Williamson from your mind.”
When she wouldn’t leave, he insisted. After she’d taken a few steps he called her back. “My daughter, when that car blew up, she was running away from the blast, wasn’t she? She was almost safe on first base.”
When Madeline Pratt didn’t know what to say, he dismissed her entirely. He waved his hand in front of her face. She was so brittle-boned he could have crunched her into a powder, except that she deserved better than that, bereft of one of her most promising students through no real fault of her own.
Late that afternoon Ben Williamson sat in El Parque de Buen Retiro watching the evening’s promenade. He was off the main thoroughfare, where, in addition to the promenaders, performers staged their mime and puppet and juggling shows, beggars begged, and teenagers ran amok. He was sitting in a formal garden of trimmed hedges and conical bushes whose leaves had the metallic glossiness of holly. Along the axis of this garden couples, mostly his age, walked arm in arm. It was quieter here. Behind him was a basin where a single jet of water spouted. There was a stone gate down to his left, imposing enough to be an official portal, and beyond it lay a building belonging to the Prado Museum. Out of the ruckus of that main thoroughfare, up to his right he heard guitar music competing with a violin and human voices singing for their supper, all amplified, yet strangely remote. He heard the delicate splash of the water in the fountain behind him and the footfall on crushed stone of the deliberately pacing couples.
He watched the couples, observed them closely as if he were recording his own heartbeat, his rate of respiration. Gentlemen in suits and gentlemen with canes seemed right, just as women dressed in tasseled shawls did. The evening was growing cool. But he saw more jeans and khaki and even exercise suits than he did elegant attire, and more running shoes and cheap versions of Birkenstock sandals than polished leather. But regardless of how they were dressed and out of what period of Spain’s history they seemed to emerge, as they paced by him it was as if he were being introduced to an elemental rhythm that was the social equivalent of his heartbeat, his breath-taking. People paired off and lasted the years so that they could come here in their middle age and round out the course of their lives. If he wanted to think of it that way.
He drew a breath, and, arms linked, one couple replaced another. His heart beat, and to the music of that drum, the feet paced by. The water spilled back onto itself and rose again. The smells were the prickly unsweetened smells of an orderly procreation.
If he wanted to think of it that way.
Or he could think of it as lockstep. The pacing as penitential. The procreation a mockery. The fruits of their labor were up on that thoroughfare living by their wits.
Until a bomb went off.
Here in the
