her body failed her, to place her coffee cup back in its saucer and move her breakfast plate aside before lowering her head to the table. She’d been alone. A friend who’d found her told him that she had died with her eyes sweetly shut and a smile on her face. He doubted the smile. His mother must have experienced a wrenching pain in her chest, but by the time he had driven there—a distance of over one hundred miles—the mortician had already gotten his hands on her and Ben didn’t know what with her parting expression she’d been trying to say.
He took his ex-wife’s point. She talked of a bog; he could feel himself going vague. He had a special sense for the mystery of things, but he was too soon overwhelmed. Defending himself, he could say the mystery was not supposed to be explained away. He could accuse not himself but those songs—the stardust of those songs. Smoke was supposed to get in your eyes. By nature, some things were unfathomable: “How deep is the ocean, how high is the sky?”
But he lacked lasting power, a fierce finishing attention, the knack of knowing when he was about to betray himself.
With money his mother had given him, he’d sent his older daughter to Spain, assuming that a group of Basque men and women once implacably opposed to all things Spanish no longer was. He’d lost sight of them. His attention had wandered. They’d become part of his blur. They didn’t exist.
Too late, the books told him otherwise. He read squeezed into a student’s carrel in his daughter’s university. These carrels were reserved, and more than once he believed the student whose carrel he occupied had come and gone, preferring to study elsewhere rather than embarrass him. Whoever she was, she was a reader of Romantic poetry, for those were the books lined up on the shelf over the desk. He had been taught Romantic poetry in high school by a woman who had scanned every poem to death. He remembered the daffodils, of course, and a poet who wandered lonely as a cloud. And a single line: “I have been half in love with easeful Death.” He didn’t know who had written that, but, in its quiet candor, it was like the most intimate of whispers in his ear. It didn’t matter who had written it. An English Romantic poet had, and all English Romantic poets, he knew, had died young.
Michelle had just turned twenty-one. She had wanted to improve her Spanish. She had wanted to concentrate on international relations. She would have gone to Spain even if he’d sat her down and forced her to read every word in the books he’d come to two years and eight months too late.
In the ultimate analysis, ETA’s quest no longer corresponded to political realities but to psychological needs. A Basque’s need for a grievance was as elemental as his need for water and air. The psychological gave way to the spiritual, the mystical: there was, it was claimed, a sacramental side to ETA’s violence. In addition to provoking the average man’s outrage, each death achieved a moment’s transcendence. All the deaths together aspired to some sort of collective transcendence there on a Basque mountaintop. They expressed a violent yearning for God.
Ben had read that.
That massive supermarket bombing he’d vaguely recalled had taken place in the Hipercord in Barcelona. Twenty-three had died. 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