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 Park of the Buen Retiro.
What Madeline Pratt didn’t know was that Ben Williamson had spent days reading about ETA. Days he’d gone to visit his daughter Annie in college, he’d slipped into the library, found a carrel and pulled books down off the stacks. ETA—Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna—Basque Fatherland and Liberty. The only insurgency that Francisco Franco hadn’t been able to wipe out. Insurgency was in the Basque blood. One summer, in an effort to disrupt Spain’s tourist trade, ETA had planted bombs at random in favorite beaches on Spain’s costa azul and costa del sol. They’d buried the bombs in the sand. A German had had the bad luck to spread his towel over one.
Why not here? Blow a hole in Spain’s generational chain. Here, this potbellied paterfamilias and his hobbled wife whose ankles turned in her shoes.
Or this next couple, younger, much more attractive, she tall, blond, still with a coltish lift to her knees, and he sporting a jaunty handlebar moustache. Both stylishly dressed.
One couple interchangeable with the next? He remembered what Madeline Pratt had said about “disarticulating comandos.” The futility of putting a face on what was essentially faceless. His daughter had had blue eyes, the blue of a mountain lake—he had seen the very lake in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park—but with a subtly tightened, puzzled look about them, as if at any moment that blue water were about to freeze. A mouth that was pensively pressed shut; a pert point to her chin. Across her temple there was a blue vein that gave her away, pulsing when she was otherwise composed. An eyelid also sometimes twitched. He too had had a twitching eyelid, but the time he’d called her attention to it had led to a rebuff. A twitching eyelid meant nothing. They had taken her away from him before he’d been able to find something that did mean something. He could see her now, far more clearly than when she had been alive, but she, of course, was her own shield. She’d died on her shield.
Sitting there, witness to a procession he was ineligible to join, but, nonetheless—as his heart beat and his lungs filled—in a processional state of mind, all he could tell himself was that he’d need a face—one of theirs. He’d need a face to make a fair exchange.
II
As big a pest as her father could be, Annie had always considered him capable of a serious act. Her mother no longer did, and that, as far as her father went, was the difference between them. She didn’t know why she felt that way—she could cite no evidence—but every time she and her mother got in a discussion about him, that was the position Annie took. And they talked about him a lot. Her mother rarely visited her at college, whereas her father came often. After all, he was responsible for her education—it was the only financial demand her mother had made of him during the divorce. But her mother called. Her mother lived on the phone—luring house-hunters her way, proposing deals, closing deals. She had Annie on speed-dial on her apartment and cell phones.