WHEN I WAS TWELVE, when we still lived in that small, moldering farmhouse in the hills behind Guernica, my father outlawed Spanish from our household. Like a dictator, he stood at the head of our family table and yelled, “No Spanish, NO SPANISH!” waving his arms as though he were helming his own national uprising. “We will all forget about that language, is that clear?”
These demands, of course, he had delivered in Spanish, though not one of us had rushed to correct him. It was evidence that he, like us, spoke nothing else. To abandon Spanish would be to abandon the language in which all of our well-intentioned but still tenuous relationships had been built. It was like removing our field of gravity, our established mode of relating to each other. Without Spanish, it seemed entirely possible that one of us might spin out into space. How were we supposed to tell each other practical things? Keep out of that corner; I’ve just spilled water and it’s slippery. Hold the door; I have too many things in my arms. Please, just leave me alone. Please, don’t even touch me.
It’s obvious to me now that for my father, this impulsive vow to speak only in Basque functioned as a sort of double agent: a radical act of political defiance masquerading as farce. When his lips split in a wily smile and his eyes flickered, I felt as though he were signing us up for a ridiculous play. On that first evening I was already calculating how soon I might be able to drop out.
Several days into our experiment, when he banished my brother to sleep outside for speaking Spanish offhandedly, we still didn’t really believe him. My mother and I watched in silence as he pulled my brother’s bedding from his mattress, and then we all followed him around to the back of the house. Until he set my brother’s comforter down on the grass, his pillow at the head of it, I had been sure that he’d been joking.
Julen’s makeshift bed that night had been placed right beneath my window, and I remember sticking my head out over him when we had all gone off to bed. Because my parents’ bedroom was next to mine, we couldn’t risk speaking, so instead we exchanged a series of faces, beginning with Our father has gone crazy. Later, after we ran out of faces to make, and after a long period of just staring at each other, he fell asleep. At some point, the moon came across his face, and I watched for a while as all the lines of approaching adulthood became more pronounced. My brother was older than me by seven years and three months. Sometimes I wished that he were my father.
My brother was allowed to sleep in the house the next night, but his slipup had signaled to my father that we would need to actually learn our new language if we were ever to abandon Spanish successfully. On Monday, he drove us all into Guernica to go to the market, and there he led us straight to a booth in the back where a pair of homely older women stood behind a table piled high with antique electronics. We were all embarrassed by the way my father, in his fledgling Basque, bartered with the women over the price of various old radios that he held up before them.
“Three!” he proclaimed, with a rusted radio in hand, and one of the women responded with a sentence that sounded like pure static.
My father deflated a little. “Four?” he asked, innocently.
Eventually one of the women said to him, “Thank you, sir, for your efforts, but maybe we should stick to Spanish for the moment.” She gestured to the radio and the few coins I held in my hand to pay for it. “For doing this.”
“Me cago en Dios,” my father had hissed without thinking about it, and immediately he brought his hands up to his mouth in embarrassment—not for the swear (“I shit on God”), but for his instinctive deference to our banned language. The light in his eyes sputtered out and he fled, walking hurriedly around all of the vendors, picking his feet up high to avoid crates of string beans and stacks of folded used clothing. We had to pay for the radio for him, choosing the most modern-looking one, and letting the woman pick through our change, until she had collected what she determined it cost.
I think even my mother must have felt like an orphan standing before those women, disturbed as we were by the momentary loss of my father and what looked like the permanent loss of a language that we had never realized we might have loved.
I should be clear about this: to speak Basque was against the law. Of course, in some towns it was flaunted freely, even in the street. There was a certain social capital attached to speaking Basque, and an additional bonus, which I’m sure would translate into any language, if you could do so without giving a fuck. But it was still, in the eyes of our ruthless leader, illegal. And how strictly the ban was reinforced varied with the ferocity of the local Civil Guard. In some towns, it was a hand to the throat. Elsewhere, your head into water. Across the river, near where my mother used to take us swimming, you stopped going to school, or work, then church, then disappeared. But I didn’t know much about that when we were back in the farmhouse. On the day of his big announcement, and in one of our last conversations together in Spanish, my father explained to me only the simple overarching facts: our ruthless leader was General Franco. Our Spain—and we—were his.
“Franco doesn’t want us to speak our own language because he says that in Spain, everyone should speak Spanish,” my father had explained.
“Well, that makes a little bit of sense,” I said. He recoiled. “Doesn’t it?”
“Ana, we are our own people.”
“Okay.”
“A lot of people think that we should be our own country.”
“Okay.” At this point he was no longer waving his arms. He was sitting down at his place at the head of the table and was crumpling and uncrumpling the napkin in front of him.
“We can’t give our language over to them,” he said. He was bent over the table, all the earlier bravado drained from his body. My brother and my mother stayed, petrified, in their seats, but I went to my father and put my arms around him.
After a while I said, “It’s just that it’s hard to feel like it’s my language since I’ve never spoken it, Papi.”
My father kissed the crown of my head and thumbed his clumsy fingers through my hair. I watched my mother and Julen fidget nervously across the table, and in that moment I felt a little like a victor for the rest of us. Then my father brought his hand to the back of my neck and squeezed it, a sign of affection that I always pretended to hate. We had our routine: each time he did it I would bob my head furiously, attempting to free myself, while he would let out a series of squawks, transforming me into some kind of theatrical bird. If I was feeling generous, I would thrash around a bit more for his entertainment.
This time the charade ended like it normally did, with my surrendering to him in a torrent of giggles, and everyone else joining in too, though my father quit before the rest of us. Without moving, or raising his voice, he brought his eyes up to mine and said calmly, “Aita. That’s what you will call me now.” In his face, any sign of apology was drowned in newfound resolve.
If we had been more prudent, maybe we would have been nervous about teaching ourselves a banned language, but it was not as if we could speak enough to ever set the Civil Guard after us. It was not as if we could even have a full conversation. For the first week or so, our pathetic vocabularies barely overlapped. I think we all assumed that at some point we would speak a word that someone else knew, and so it became a game, a test of our faith, to continue an exchange without revealing the meaning of whatever words we had spoken to the other person.
On the second or third day of our exile from Spanish, while I was eating breakfast, my mother came into the kitchen and spoke a string of sounds that I didn’t understand. When I stared at her blankly, she bobbed her head around a bit as though to say, You know these words, don’t think too hard about it. I raised my eyebrows, waiting for her to surrender to pantomiming whatever it was that she had meant, but instead she pulled her arms into her sides as though bound in a body bag, shot raised eyebrows right back at me, and then slunk slowly out of the room.
It became our silent joke, our laughless gag. Julen adopted it too, pinning his arms to his sides in defense when our blank reactions clued him in to the fact that he had spoken a sentence we didn’t know. Imagine the stupid words we taunted ourselves with: beans, bottom, salt, ear, fingernail, onion, sock.
At that point, Julen had finished high school and I was in the middle of my summer break, and so during the endless stretch of those first wordless days, our hours became bent around breaking each other’s resolve. Even when my mother pretended to be busy frying peppers or tending to our languishing garden, she would at any moment be ready to sprint after us and pry our hands from our sides if someone came up behind her and whispered belarritik.
From the moment we returned from the market, my father had planted himself at the kitchen table, and there, he took to repairing the radio. If we had been using Spanish, he probably would have declared something like, “Esas malditas mujeres…can you believe them? Selling me junk that doesn’t even work,” but after his slipup, he was careful to uphold his own rules. Instead he suffered silently, and upon this initial bed of frustration piled up layers of small annoyances as he struggled to make any headway with the repair. Each time he thought that he had made some mistake he plunged into a hysterical cough and slapped his hand against the table, as though he had crossed some wires in his own body instead. During lulls in the game, we watched his strange behavior from our various perches: the top landing of the stairs, or outside, crouched beneath a window. When he tested it, and finally a tiny sound curled from the radio’s speaker, he pounded the table so violently that he left a spiderweb of cracks in the wood.
Reluctantly, we emerged from the shadows and hidden corners of the house to join him, and as I neared the radio, distinct voices separated out from the static. They hung there in our kitchen as though they were our own familial ghosts. Even after years—my whole life—living in the Basque Country, I still pinpoint that night as the first time I really heard our language. I still remember how my father’s eyes blazed wildly in the settling darkness. My mother put a kind hand to his back, but she looked pained. It was clear that it was the end of our game.
We all stayed around the radio for so long that night that I actually fell asleep right there, lying beneath the table, with my head upon my father’s feet. I woke up some time later, alone in the empty kitchen, my body splayed upon the floor.
Over the course of the next week, we gathered for three to four hours each day to listen, hoping to absorb whatever we could. My father perched himself over a blank sheet of paper and armed with a pen, he scrambled to copy down phrases as they spilled from the speaker, but they came out rapidly, and he was always left clawing after the end of the previous sentence while a new one dawned. And then there was the problem of no one’s knowing if whatever combination of letters he put to the page existed at all.
When it became clear that the radio was a failure—that it would never teach us any real Basque—my mother took to mimicking the woman that we always heard on the Basque news station. Like the announcer, she would say arratsalde on, in a delicate female newscaster voice, poised with clasped hands upon the table, and then she would continue her fake broadcast, beginning with the random words that we all had learned when we finally pooled our vocabularies, and then devolving into a series of ugly, made-up sounds. She once contorted her throat so extremely that she sent herself into a choking fit. Julen had rushed up and smacked her on the back until she regained control. Spit had dribbled down her chin.
My father never applauded at the end of these performances.
I have not shared any more about that early period of my childhood or the hours spent chasing my brother around the grounds of the farmhouse, because it does not belong here. But if it’s important to know anything else about that time, know this: every night, the sun set behind us (it seemed like it was right behind us), and though it’s simple, it’s the truth: we were happy.
That period ended abruptly with my father’s announcement that we would be moving into the nearby tavern, where he had found a job as the bookkeeper and general manager of the downstairs restaurant, my mother a job as a hostess, and guest rooms on the third floor of the upstairs hotel for all of us. “And better yet,” he went on, “the man who has hired me speaks perfect Basque, and so does the entire staff. We’re offered complimentary lessons every Sunday afternoon between the lunch and dinner shifts, which means that this,” he said, his whole face aflame, “will be the last time you’ll ever hear me speak Spanish.”
Would you believe me if I said that I hadn’t even realized it? That the initial shock of his announcing that he had quit his job at the shipyard had distracted me completely from the language? I hadn’t even recognized that of course he was speaking in Spanish until he mentioned it himself, but by then he had finished his announcement—at the end, I think he even bowed—and he was already silent, sitting down.
My mother and I found each other on the staircase later, when my father was asleep, and though I suppose we could have spoken Spanish, we didn’t. Julen discovered us when he got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and stayed with us until we all departed in the early morning.
The walls of the Ibarra Tavern were plastered with purple wallpaper that slouched away from the molding in some places, like the last dying petals of a flower. When we arrived, a week after my father had made his announcement, we were greeted by the tavern owner in the foyer, and he paraded us through the whole ground floor with our suitcases still in hand. On the tour, he spoke to us in rapid Basque, but he gestured enthusiastically enough so that I was fairly sure I understood what he was pointing out: the range of wines on tap at the bar, the lacquered wood paneling that reached midway up the wall of the dining room, the corner of the room that could be closed off for private events, and the curtains, egg-yolk orange, that made the whole room glow as though it were the inner core of the sun when, toward the end of the day, the afternoon bent its longest beams of light to the tavern floor. In the kitchen, the new industrial-strength dishwasher, the steel countertops for food preparation, the pots and pans and cooking utensils that dangled from the ceiling, and the profusion of eggs, milk, and meat stacked in the fridge.
Upstairs in our rooms, my father repeated one of the few phrases in Basque we had all learned from the radio, oso ondo, which translated literally as “very good.” “Oso ondo?” he posed to us all, and then he repeated it over again to himself as he climbed into a bed that my mother had made a moment before. He whacked the mattress with both hands, grinning as they rebounded with each effort. “Very good,” he squealed. “Very, very good!”
The next afternoon, Julen and I padded around the upstairs floors, exploring what we hadn’t been shown on Mr. Ibarra’s tour. From down in the lobby, there was the distant chatter of a new group checking in. Julen pushed lightly on the nearest door and it opened to reveal a room identical to ours, with two twin beds sticking out from the wall. We both had the idea at the same time to swipe the pillows from the head of the mattress, place them at the foot, and then turn back the covers accordingly so that it looked like all the beds had been set up for guests’ heads to rest where their feet should have been; to loll about exposed and defenseless in the center of the room.
When we entered the rest of the rooms on the floor to switch around the beds, we found them all unoccupied, except for the one at the end of the hall, where we found the tavern owner’s wife, naked, her drooping body framed perfectly in the outline of the door.
To make up for our misconduct, we were given our first jobs at the tavern.
Julen worked the bar, and I worked clearing tables. The rest of the waitstaff were girls aged sixteen, maybe seventeen or eighteen, who were all friends of Mr. Ibarra’s daughter, Maite, and who spoke to each other urgently in fluent Basque. They were nice enough when Mr. Ibarra introduced me; each of the five of them said aupa, in a scattered chorus, and afterward Maite herself had shown me the technique for clearing customers’ plates and balancing them down the length of both arms.
When a cascade of teacups slid from my arm at the end of my first shift, one of Maite’s friends volunteered to sweep it up. She didn’t complain, even as she stretched the broom into the far corners of the kitchen, collecting the shards that had escaped her. Even before that, when the teacups were just beginning to shatter, she had stayed calm; she hadn’t even looked at me.
In the first of our Sunday grammar lessons with Mr. Ibarra, we began, somewhat randomly, with expressions of want: “I want, you want, he/she/it wants.” At first, we only had access to our very small vocabularies, and so were stuck making sentences like, “I want an onion,” or “I want a shoe,” but after that we learned how to pair the want with other verbs, and then we became able to really sound our own thoughts in the language: “I want to eat.” “I want to sleep.” “I want to use the bathroom.” “I want to do (blank).” “I want to say (blank).” “I want to forget (blank).”
But as it turned out, want was not necessarily a logical place to start. I suspect that we began there only by my father’s request. I understood—it felt liberating to air our wants. We felt like we were real Basque speakers; people who could express not just their needs, but their superfluous desires. It was a luxurious point of entry, but after that Mr. Ibarra sent us right back to the very beginning, where we belonged. The next week, all that we were given to couple with want was I am, it is, my name, and this, that, there, along with a small bank of bland adjectives: pretty, short, long, small, sad, exciting, skinny.
After our first lesson I had foolishly believed that I was on the cusp of being able to speak my own thoughts as they rose in my mind, but no matter how I toyed with that second collection of words, they never brought me any closer to sounding like myself. And they were difficult for me, still. That was the tragedy. Even after the hour lesson with Mr. Ibarra and after another spent on my own in the confinement of my room, I couldn’t even figure out how I am changes to you are. I felt the limitations of the language all over again, fumbling through those conjugations, and I lost my desire to voice even my wants.
Mr. Ibarra had us working three shifts a week, seven to midnight. Initially, my mother had stood up for me. Fifteen hours was too much, she said; I was only twelve. I had never had a curfew of any sort at the farmhouse—there was no need—but if I had, it would have been well before midnight, or one in the morning, when I really got off work, having finally pawed through a sink of dirty dishes while two of Maite’s friends would lazily dry the plates and return them to their places. But when my mother brought it up, my father responded in some combination of ill-conjugated words that we were still indebted to the Ibarras, that there was nothing he could do. Mr. Ibarra was a reasonable man. He even had children himself.
It was not until my fifth shift that I learned that Maite, Mr. Ibarra’s daughter, was in fact one of four Maites in the kitchen. I had called her name—I needed to know what to do with the steak knives that I had just cleared—but before I even finished speaking, three other girls turned around and stared at me with dull, probing eyes. Seconds later, the real Maite emerged from a corner of the kitchen with a potato skinner and a half-bare potato in hand. I held up the steak knives and the real Maite pointed to a soaking bin behind me. The other girls turned back to their work. I could never remember, later, who was Maite and who was not.
But the Maites loved Julen. That was true of all of them. After the night shift, they emptied into the stone alley behind the tavern and settled on the sloping bricks. They made use of the angle of the alley to recline comfortably in provocative poses. Someone was always lounging on her side with her head propped coquettishly upon a hand; others lay on their backs, and kept their bent legs open wide enough to make a tent with the skirts of their dresses. From above, the alley would have looked an oddity: a narrow chamber of stone dotted all over with soft, heaping mounds of flesh.
The first time that I was invited to join, I sat a length away, on the back steps of the tavern kitchen. A blanket of smoke hung above us in the air. After ten minutes of the Maites talking around me, I got up to leave.
“Wait, Ana,” someone called out after me. I stopped and swung around on the stairs. I had been holding on to the metal railing with one hand, and I let my weight fall away from it so that my body dangled before them.
“Yeah?” I said.
“What’s your brother’s name?”
Every night after that all the Maites cawed after Julen until he wandered to the alley and joined me on the back steps. He accepted one of their cigarettes the first time that he sat out back with us, but each time after that he declined. Some of the Maites tried to engage him in conversation, but his answers, by necessity and, I liked to think, by preference, were short. I still can’t remember feeling closer to my brother than when we sat together on the back stoop of the tavern kitchen. What had begun as a private silence, confined to our own house, turned public in front of the kitchen girls; it felt like an honest, unpretentious show of love for each other.
At this same time, in Mr. Ibarra’s lessons, I was discovering all the ways in which Basque differed utterly from Spanish. Even the order of words in a sentence was different, at times nearly opposite. I had known that from the beginning, but as we continued to add new elements to our basic sentences, I began to lose my hold on even the most basic sentence formulations. When we started out, I could handle onion-the, and then onion-the-pretty-is, but soon that turned into give-onion-the-pretty-to-me, which, when I wasn’t paying attention, became give-onion-the-pretty-to-me-otherwise-leave-will-I-and-ever-no-return.
The lessons revealed in painful increments the full extent to which my father’s whim had restructured our lives. I began to question the order of every sentence that I spoke. There was a period when I lost track of the order of modifiers entirely, both because I was confused, and because I really didn’t care, and so every sentence that I tried came out scrambled, leaving poor Mr. Ibarra stunned and embarrassed when he listened to me speak.
At some point during this period, I was filling in for one of Maite’s friends on an afternoon shift. A group of men lingered at one of my tables, doling out liquor in small doses until the rest of the dining room emptied and they remained there alone, exceptionally drunk. I watched them from behind the bar with the boy who worked when Julen and Mr. Ibarra were not around. When one of the men raised a wobbly hand for the check I started toward them, but just before I reached them, he pulled the tablecloth out from under their collection of glasses and all four drunk men charged together toward the door.
As I chased after them, I yelled, “TABLECLOTH-ME-IT-GIVE,” then “ME-IT-TABLECLOTH,” then “GIVE,” and then, as my legs gave out beneath me and the men disappeared down the street, the ruined white fabric rippling out behind them, “Tablecloth tablecloth tablecloth tablecloth.”
We canceled our Basque lesson on the Sunday of my thirteenth birthday, and instead the four of us sat at a table in the corner of the dining room. My father was disappointed to miss the lesson—we were becoming relatively advanced, already moving on to the past tense of to have—and he sat there, poring over his notes, until my mother came in from the kitchen with a lopsided cake, and set it down on top of them.
He scowled at her, but then he pulled my head in toward his and kissed my hair. “Today, you have a birthday,” he said to me. Then, growing excited, he said, “Tomorrow, you had a birthday yesterday.” His eyes darted around the room. “Today, we have cake—”
“Be quiet,” my mother said, cutting into it. On the top was written “Ana 13 urte,” which just meant “Ana, 13 years.” I wondered if maybe she hadn’t known the word for birthday until my father spoke it just then. We were all eating in relative peace when Julen came into the dining room, carrying a birdcage with a napkin haphazardly draped over it.
He shoved it at me and said, “For you.”
My mother and I spent the rest of the afternoon sliding our fingers between the metal bars of the cage, attempting to pat the bird’s head without getting nipped by its beak. The bird was petite and covered in ragged feathers that it seemed to shed indiscriminately. There could have been something wrong with it, but we didn’t care; for a brief period of time, my mother and I directed toward that bird all of our love.
In the hour that remained before the dinner shift, we insisted on parading it around town, and on the walk we shared the cage between us, each of us nervously holding it by the tips of our fingers. And though it was obvious, by appearance alone, that the bird was no relation to a parrot, when my mother set its cage down on my bed that night she attempted to teach it phrases, as though the bird were capable of repeating them back to her. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. The bird stared out at both of us. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she repeated again, forcefully. The bird was silent.
I yelled, “I really, really, really have to go to the bathroom!”
I had been planning to name the bird the next morning, but I woke up to find that it had escaped from its cage and was lying in a wreath of its own feathers on the floor.
Julen and I were the ones to bury the bird, because my mother had to stay at the tavern for work. We wandered the town for a little, looking for the right place to perform a burial, but in the end we decided not to bury it at all, and instead to leave it in the dumpster behind the cobbler’s shop. Julen swaddled the bird in discarded leather clippings.
We felt silly for having brought the bird over in its birdcage when afterward we were left carrying the empty cage back across town.
My brother left us, six months into our time at the tavern, for an apprenticeship at a tailor’s shop in downtown Bilbao. He had been looking for a full-time job for weeks, and while he could have easily picked one up at the tavern, he didn’t.
We all mourned his absence in different ways. The bottom fell out of my mother’s jokes; she could never be properly funny after that. My father took to doubling up on Basque lessons with Mr. Ibarra. I started hanging around with the Maites until two or three in the morning, thinking of them, increasingly, as my own siblings. Maybe it was true that we had all spun out of orbit. Or maybe Julen had, and we, in the aftermath, each used it as an excuse to drift a little farther out.
A little after Julen left, I started going to the clandestine Basque-language school that Maite and her friends attended. Mr. Ibarra had signed me up, and he was the one who drove me there on my first day. The school was housed inside an old textile factory off of a road just outside of town. Its sheet-metal sides had rusted to the shade of dirt, and on the outside it bore no markings.
Inside, Mr. Ibarra led me through a hall of makeshift classrooms to a class of students who looked at least two years younger than me. I left the building during our break for lunch and stood out on the barren grass behind the school; I had thought I would need the time to cry, but I waited for a while, and it turned out that I didn’t. At one point a rush of birds burst across the sky and I watched them near each other, then separate in turns. I only remembered my own dead bird once they had all passed, and though I had never seen it fly, I imagined it dipping drunkenly around them, and the thought became hysterical to me. I actually stood out there and began to laugh.
Later, when I returned to the building, I saw a flash of Maite going up the stairs between class sessions, and I realized that she hadn’t been in the car that morning, when Mr. Ibarra had driven me to school.
Initially I was furious with Mr. Ibarra for having placed me in a class of fifth graders, but within a few months, without my even realizing it, my Basque flowered. At some point I understood the majority of what the Maites fired back and forth between each other, and I began to chime in in little ways: “You’re right, he’s a turd!” or, “Pass me a cigarette,” or even just, “Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yes—totally.”
I don’t even remember when I finally moved from the back steps to the alley with the rest of them; it happened seamlessly. I didn’t try any seductive poses, but I did note my own pooling flesh upon the cobblestones and the growing downhill tow on different parts of my body over the course of the nights that we spent there.
The other barman at the tavern took over Julen’s old shifts, and he always joined us outside when we all got off work. His name was Gabriel, and he was immensely skinny, almost a ghost of a boy. If you didn’t know him, you could honestly confuse him and his chaste shyness for a sort of specter, haunting a place.
But he was also nice to me. Out in the alley, we spoke to each other in slow sentences. The Maites lounged all around us and we carved a void in the flood of their ceaseless chatter. When he talked, I could see through his skin to each muscle in his face at work. When he listened, the dormant muscles sometimes spasmed at random, revealing the places where they lay temporarily hidden.
No one had warned me that we were going to leave the alley on the night that we did. I was the last one cleaning up in the kitchen, and when I finally came out back I found a pool of a people milling in front of the stoop. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that the full assortment of Maites was there—girls who had worked only one or two other shifts with me, whose faces still stood out as foreign.
The real Maite and one of her friends hovered at the top of the hill, detached from the group, and when they saw me shut the door to the kitchen, they began walking, and the rest of us followed them up and out of the alley. We turned left onto the broad central avenue, the closed storefronts appearing somehow naked and indecent, and then at the end of the avenue, where the street forked, Maite took us down the narrower of the two branches until it went all the way out of town. Somewhere, in one of those early chasms that stretched between the buildings, where the stone façades buckled into sky and weeds, Gabriel found his way to my side. I had already asked the girl nearest to me where we were going but I hadn’t understood her answer.
“The quarry,” Gabriel said. I shook my head. “The quarry—like the place where they dig for rocks.”
“Oh.”
He told me about the strange rock they had discovered when they first began digging outside of our town. He described it like the inside of a raw piece of meat: blood red, roped with streaks of white.
“Ew,” I said.
“No,” Gabriel continued, “it’s beautiful. Everyone thinks so. It was so popular that they over-drilled the quarry. They went down too deep one day and hit a water supply. Within hours the whole thing had filled up.” He pantomimed water rising. The outline of his hands stood barely apart from the slate-colored clouds passing over us.
At some point after that, I drifted from Gabriel. The road declined, and we sank down the mountain. Somehow I emerged at the helm. I still remember the view from below, as the Maites descended the road behind me, the whole group of them dispersed up the hill. I still remember the drone of the car engine approaching the sharp bend ahead, and its swinging headlights as it came upon us, and even after the real Maite yelled move, back to her friends, I remember the light striking their white summer clothes and their clearing the street idly while the car sat there, stranded. Still, I can’t decide if, caught in the sweep of the beams, the girls appeared as criminals unmasked or if the swing of their skirts as they left the road made them look instead like a suite of doves disbanding.
At the quarry, everyone stripped down to their underclothes, and our shirts and pants and dresses lay heaped in piles upon the lip of sand. At the far end of the swimming hole, a wall of stone stretched high up into the sky. It was impossible, in the dark, to tell whether or not it was red.
I went into the water with everyone else, but it was cold, and it dropped off quickly. When I saw the point of someone’s cigarette light up somewhere along the sand, I swam back to join them. One of Maite’s friends nodded to me and exhaled as I settled down beside her. We lounged alongside each other for a while, then she asked, “How deep do you think it is?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It drops off fast.” She was silent. “Have you been in?”
Out in the swimming hole, orphaned heads skimmed the water’s surface. I’m sure that they were talking to each other, or else they were probably laughing about something, but in my memory the menace of the stone wall above them canceled all their sound.
“Twenty-five meters,” she said. She tapped the tip of her cigarette against a rock. “That’s how far down they drilled before they hit the water.” When she brought the cigarette back to her mouth she looked at me for a brief moment, and she said, “No. I never go in.”
Eventually other bodies surfaced and joined us up on the lip. “Hey,” Maite’s friend whispered. She nudged me, then motioned toward Gabriel splayed out upon the sand in his boxers. “Are you guys going to kiss or fuck or what?”
I fake-slapped her like we were real friends.
“Okay, I’m just joking,” she said. “You’re too young to fuck, but what are you going to do? You like him, right?”
I shrugged. Stretched out and bent at odd angles, Gabriel’s spidery legs glowed.
“You like him.” She was talking louder now. “So go do something, don’t waste your chance. There are some trees over there.” She gestured somewhere behind us. Gabriel had obviously heard her, and he looked over.
“Look.” She grabbed one of my shoulders and pointed to him. “He wants to go off with you, too.” Gabriel had already gotten up and started loping over when she called out to him, “You want to, don’t you?” In response, sweet, spindly Gabriel said nothing. He just continued nearing, the whole time smiling at both of us.
He led me into the trees, and we stumbled through branches for a couple of minutes until we could barely make out the edge of the quarry. When I strained my eyes I could just see the tip of the girl’s cigarette flying about in the air. Gabriel put his back to a tree and stared at me affectionately. I realized how little I really knew him.
“Come closer.” He grasped my arms. He whispered, “What do you want me to do?”
I don’t know how else to explain it: the question struck some sort of dormant reflex. I answered instinctively, as though I had always planned to say to him, “I want you to speak Spanish to me.”
He was silent. In the dark, I watched the familiar tremor of his muscles. Eventually he tried, “Así?” Like this? I nodded, and signaled for him to keep going.
“What do I say?” he asked, in Basque. I shrugged. Tears were already welling in my eyes. I waved my arms, to say continue.
It’s not important what he said in the forest behind the quarry, whatever stories he told with poise and animation almost embarrassing to witness. I couldn’t tell you what he said because I didn’t even register the words as he spoke them. When he was several sentences in, I dropped to my knees, and listened to him like a child. I may have started crying when I heard the word cucharilla, unless it was instead caserío that began the flood. At one point, I may even have laid myself totally and completely upon the ground.
When we emerged from the trees, the Maites were all collecting their clothes and getting ready to leave. On part of the walk home, Gabriel’s clammy hand held the tips of my fingers, but at some point he let go. When we reached the tavern, I slid inside without saying good night to him, and I felt no remorse for allowing him to walk alone to the far reaches of town. Upstairs, I tried to recover the words he had spoken, and that was when I realized I had never really heard them. I had listened only for their rhythm, for the shallow aesthetics of them, and alone in my room I had nothing to hold on to except for the fading memory of their sound.
After our visit to the quarry, Gabriel began leaving me little presents around the tavern. I wasn’t purposely avoiding him, but I wasn’t spending my nights out in the alleyway either. When I heard him go down to the basement to restock the liquor cabinet at the end of our shift, I would dart past the bar and up the stairs to my room.
First, he left me a bag of almond cookies that his mother had made, my name written in careful, feminine handwriting across the front. I discovered them sitting on one of the empty tables in the dining room on my way to the stairs. Sometime later I found a silver bracelet on the corner of the counter where I normally helped with prep work in the kitchen. There was no note, but I was fairly sure that I knew who had left it; a bracelet had been found on the floor of the dining room the day before. The next week I received a random assortment of glass beads, then a collection of tea bags, a patterned matchbook, a pile of loose stamps.
One Sunday afternoon, when my parents were downstairs in their usual lesson with Mr. Ibarra, Gabriel knocked on the door to my room.
“Ana,” he called. “I know that I’m annoying you, but please let me give you one last thing.”
I hadn’t expected to feel nervous around him, but when he stood there before me I saw him again in his boxers, me again, in my underwear, on the ground. He apologized for his other gifts, and I told him not to be stupid, that they were very nice. He said no, they weren’t right. What he should have given me from the beginning was this: he produced a small, used radio from his bag.
“So that we can listen together,” he said. “In Spanish.”
The radio wasn’t the same model as my father’s. In fact, it looked totally different, but it prompted my first thought of that original radio in more than a year. I got caught up in assessing how each of its individual features compared to the original, whose body, I only realized then, I had committed to memory. When I didn’t respond, Gabriel said, “Spanish, remember?” His face thawed into that same, timid smile. “It’s sort of…our thing.”
I knew that I was being mean when I took the radio from Gabriel, thanked him, and told him that I couldn’t listen that afternoon. I was sorry for a moment, when I closed the door on his sinking face, but there was nothing else I could do. When I set the radio on my bed, the hefty mechanical weight of it sank into the mattress and sprouted a crown of pleats in the covers. The whole time, I thought, that was how easy it could have been: I could have nudged the needle past the covert station that broadcast in Basque, and I could have found Spanish waiting there on any channel.
I thought then that if time were as flexible as it was in my mind, I would have done it all over again. I would have pulled a pair of my father’s shoes from my parents’ closet, while they remained in the dining room downstairs, cycling through their slow-growing vocabulary and diligently practicing the construction of conditional clauses. I would have put the radio on the bed, put my head on those shoes, and listened for hours. And if I really arranged it all right, maybe the year would have bent back on itself, and delivered me back to the kitchen in our old farmhouse, and maybe my father would be there, waving around his arms, saying, “We will all forget about Basque, is that clear?”
Maybe my brother would be there too, coming in through the back door, his arms wound around a tangle of sheets and a comforter. Maybe they came straight from the clothesline, clean from my mother’s scrubbing, dry from a night suspended in the mid-August air.