Author Bio  

MOIRA McCAVANA

NO SPANISH

 

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 himself, he stood at the head of our family table and yelled, “No Spanish, NO SPANISH,” waving his arms as though at the helm of 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 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 tenuous relationships had been built: it removed our field of gravity, our established mode of relating to one another. 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 double agent: a radical act of political defiance masked as farce. When his lips split into 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.
       Even several days into our experiment, when he banished my brother to sleeping outside for speaking Spanish offhandedly, we didn’t believe him. My mother and I watched in silence as he pulled my brother’s bedding from his mattress, and 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’d been sure that he was joking.
       Julen’s makeshift bed was placed right beneath my window, and I stuck my head out over him once our parents had gone to sleep. Because their 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 as the lines of approaching adulthood became more pronounced. My brother was older than me by seven years and a few months. Sometimes I wished that he were my father.
      
My brother was allowed to sleep in the house the next night, but his slip up had signaled to my father that we would need to actually learn our new language if we were ever going 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 embarrassed by the way that my father, in his fledgling Basque, bartered with the women over the price of the 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. “Four?” he asked, innocently.
       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. “For doing this.”
       “Me cago en Dios,” my father hissed without thinking, and immediately he brought his hands up to his mouth in embarrassment—not for the swear, but for his instinctive deference to our banned language. The light in his eyes sputtered out and he fled, walking hurriedly around the vendors, picking his feet up high to avoid crates of string beans and stacks of folded used clothing. We paid for the radio for him, choosing the most modern-looking one, and letting the woman pick through our change until she collected what she determined it cost.
       I think even my mother felt like an orphan standing before those women, disturbed as I was by the momentary loss of my father and what looked like the permanent loss of a language we never realized we might have loved.
 
I should be clear about this: to speak Basque was against the law. Of course, in some towns the language 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 speak it without giving a damn—but it remained, in the eyes of our “leader,” illegal.
       How strictly the ban was reinforced varied with the ferocity of the local Civil Guard. In some places, fines piled up inside unopened mailboxes. In a town nearby, Basque lettering on certain gravestones was cemented over in the night. At schools, even, there were minor violences, like the stick to the back. But I didn’t know much about that when we were 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 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 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.” He was no longer waving his arms. Instead, he’d sat back down, and was crumpling and uncrumpling the napkin in front of him.
       “We can’t give our language to them,” he said. He was hunched over the table, the earlier bravado drained from his body. Petrified, my brother and my mother stayed in their seats, but I went to my father and put my arms around him.
       I said, “It’s just 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 like a victor for the rest of us. Then my father brought his hand to the back of my neck and squeezed, a sign of affection I always pretended to hate. We had our routine: 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 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, 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 set the Civil Guard after us. It was not as if we could 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. I raised my eyebrows, and waited for her to surrender to pantomiming whatever she’d meant. Instead she pulled her arms into her sides as though bound in a body bag, shot a pair of raised eyebrows right back at me, and then slowly backed 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 each other with: “beans,” “bottom,” “salt,” “ear,” “fingernail,” “onion,” “sock.” By then, Julen had finished high school and I was in the middle of my summer break. During the endless stretch of those first wordless days, our hours bent around breaking each other’s resolve. Even when my mother pretended to be busy frying peppers or tending to our languishing garden, she was ready to sprint after us and pry our hands from our sides if someone came up behind her and whispered belarri.

The day we returned from the market, my father 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 it? Selling me junk that doesn’t even work,” but after his slip up, he was careful to uphold his own rules. 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 he had made some mistake he plunged into a hysterical cough and slapped his hand against the table, as though he had crossed wires in his own body instead. We watched his strange behavior from hidden corners of the house: the top landing of the stairs; the pantry; outside, crouched beneath a window. When 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 to join him. As I neared the radio, distinct voices separated out from the static, and hung there in our kitchen as though our own familial ghosts. Even after years—my whole life—living in that farmhouse, I still think of that night as the first time that I really heard our language. My father’s eyes blazed wildly in the settling darkness. My mother put a kind hand to his back, but she looked pained. We all knew it was the end of our game.

We stayed around the radio for so long that night that I fell asleep right there, beneath the table, with my head resting on my father’s feet. Several hours later I woke up alone in the empty kitchen, my body splayed upon the floor.

Over the next week, we gathered for three to four hours each day to listen to the radio, attempting 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—he was left clawing after the end of the previous sentence while a new one began. And then there was the problem of no one 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 listened to each day on the news station. Like the announcer, she would say arratsalde on, in a delicate female newscaster voice, and she would continue her fake broadcast, beginning with the random words that we all had learned when we finally pooled our vocabularies, 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 rushed up and smacked her on the back until she regained control, spit dribbling 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 spent chasing my brother around the grounds of the farmhouse, 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 simple, it’s the truth: we were happy.
       That period ended abruptly with my father’s announcement that he had found himself a job at the restaurant of a nearby tavern. “They’re in desperate need of a general manager.” He paused, and for a moment we all understood this to mean that he was leaving us. But then he continued that there was a job for my mother too, as the hostess of the restaurant, and that he’d secured guest rooms on the third floor of the hotel upstairs 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 complementary lessons every Sunday afternoon, 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 told you that I hadn’t even realized it? That the initial shock of the announcement distracted me completely from the language? I hadn’t even recognized that 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, after my father fell 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 parted ways in the early morning.

The walls of the Ibarra Tavern were plastered with purple wallpaper that slouched away from the molding, like the last dying petals of a flower. When we arrived, a month after my father had convened us for 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 that I assumed that 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 lent its longest beams of light to the tavern floor. In the kitchen, the new industrial-strength dishwasher, the steel countertops for food preparation, and the pots and pans that dangled from the ceiling. 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 to “very good.” “Oso ondo,” he posed to us all as though a question, and then he repeated it 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, we heard the distant chatter of a new group checking in. Julen pushed lightly on the nearest door and it gave to reveal a room identical to ours, with two twin beds sticking out from the wall. It was his idea to swipe the pillows from the head of the mattress, place them at the foot, and then to 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 to switch around the beds, they were all unoccupied, except for 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 showed 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 as she stretched the broom into the far corners of the kitchen, collecting the shards that first escaped her. Even before that, when the teacups were just beginning to shatter, she’d stayed calm; she hadn’t even looked at me.

In our Sunday grammar lessons with Mr. Ibarra, we began, somewhat randomly, with expressions of want: “I want, you want, he/ she/it wants.” 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 “want” with other verbs, and then we became able to 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__________.” “I want to say__________.” “I want to forget __________.”
       But as it turned out, “want” was not necessarily a logical place to start. I suspect we began there only by my father’s request. I understood—it was liberating to air our wants. For a brief moment, we felt fully formed in the language, able to express not just our needs, but our superfluous desires. After that, however, Mr. Ibarra sent us back to the 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 foolishly believed I was on the cusp of being able to speak my own thoughts as they rose up in my mind—something I hadn’t realized I’d lost when we gave up Spanish. Still, 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, that was the tragedy. Despite the hour-long lesson with Mr. Ibarra and the additional hour I spent on my own, I couldn’t figure out how “I am” changes to “you are.” I felt the limitations of the language 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 never had a curfew 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 pawed through a sink of dirty dishes while two of Maite’s friends lazily dried the plates and returned them to their place. But when my mother brought it up, my father responded, in ill-conjugated words, that we were indebted to the Ibarras for allowing us to move to the tavern in the first place. 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 called her name—I needed to know what to do with the steak knives that I had just cleared—but before I 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 shifts, they emptied into the alley behind the tavern and settled on the sloping stone. They used 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 of their skirts. From above, the alley would have looked an oddity: a narrow chamber of stone dotted with their soft, heaping mounds of flesh.
       The first time 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 held onto the metal railing with one hand, letting 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 he sat 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 felt closer to my brother when we sat together on the back stoop of the tavern kitchen. What began as a private silence, confined to our own house, turned public in front of the Maites. It felt like an honest, unpretentious show of love for each other.
       Once, out there, I woke from my thoughts encased in a veil of smoke that had drifted down the hill. A girl lounging at the foot of the steps was asking Julen a question, her arm stretched out before her, and her listless fingers clasped around his ankle.

In Mr. Ibarra’s lessons, I discovered all of the ways in which Basque differed from Spanish. As we continued to add new elements to our basic sentences, I began to lose my grasp on even the most basic formulations. When we started out, I could handle onion-an, and then onion-an-pretty-is,but soon that turned into give-me-you-onion-pretty-an, which, when I wasn’t paying attention, became onion-pretty-an-give-me-you, or-leave-I-will-do, and-not-I-will-return.
       In painful increments, the lessons revealed the full extent to which my father’s whim had restructured our lives. I questioned the order of every sentence that I spoke. For a time, I lost track of the word order entirely, both because I was confused and because I didn’t care, and so every sentence came out scrambled, leaving poor Mr. Ibarra stunned and embarrassed when he listened to me speak.
       One afternoon, I filled in for one of Maite’s friends on a lunch shift. A group of men lingered at one of my tables for hours, dolling 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 before I reached them, he pulled the tablecloth out from under their collection of glasses and all four drunk men charged toward the door.
       As I chased after them, I yelled, “TABLECLOTH-ME-IT-GIVE,” then, “ME-IT-TABLECLOTH,” then, “GIVE.” As my legs collapsed beneath me and the men disappeared down the street with the ruined white fabric rippling out behind them, I yelled, “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, moving on to the past tense of “to have”—and he sat there poring over his notes until my mother came in with a lopsided cake and set it down on top of them.
       He scowled at her, but he pulled my head 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. We were eating in relative peace when Julen came in carrying a birdcage with a napkin haphazardly draped over the top.
       He shoved it at me and said, “For you.”
       My mother and I spent the afternoon sliding our fingers between the metal bars of the cage, attempting to pat the bird’s head without getting nipped by its flapping beak. The bird was petite and covered in ragged feathers that it shed indiscriminately. There could have been something wrong with it, but we didn’t care; 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, forcefully. The bird was silent.
       I yelled, “I really, really, really have to go to the bathroom!”
       I planned to name the bird the next morning, but I woke up to find it had escaped from its cage and was lying in a wreath of its own feathers on the floor.

My mother had to work at the tavern that afternoon, and so Julen and I were the ones to bury the bird. We wandered the town looking for the right place to perform a burial, but in the end we decided not to bury it at all, but instead to leave it in the dumpster behind the cobbler’s shop. Julen swaddled the bird in discarded leather clippings.
       We felt silly for bringing it over in the birdcage when 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 each mourned his absence in different ways. My mother’s pantomimes grew limp; she could never be properly funny after that. My father doubled 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 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 few weeks after Julen left I started going to the clandestine Basque-language school that Maite and her friends attended. Mr. Ibarra signed me up, and he drove me there on my first day. The school was housed inside an old textile factory 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 group of students who looked at least two years younger than I was. During the lunch break I left the building and stood out on the grass behind the school. I thought I would need the time to cry, but I waited for a while, and it turned out that I didn’t. At some point, a cloud of birds burst across the sky. I watched as they neared each other then separated in turns, and I spent the rest of the lunch hour wishing my own bird were still alive.
       Later, when I returned to the building, I caught a glimpse of Maite going up the stairs between class sessions, though 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 eleven-year-olds, but within a few months, my Basque flourished. 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, when in doubt, “Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yes—totally.”
       Eventually I 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.
       Gabriel, the other barman at the tavern, took over Julen’s old shifts. Though he would join us outside after work, he was soft-spoken and withdrawn. If one didn’t know him, they could honestly confuse him and his chaste shyness for a specter haunting the place.
       But he was also nice to me. Out in the alley, we spoke to each other in slow sentences. The Maites lounged 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 spasmed at random, revealing the places where they lay otherwise hidden.

The night I visited the quarry with the Maites, I was the last one cleaning up in the kitchen. When I emerged I found a pool of people milling in front of the stoop and, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw the full assortment of Maites were there— girls who worked only one or two other shifts with me, whose faces still stood out as foreign.
       The real Maite hovered at the top of the hill, detached from the group. When I shut the door to the kitchen, she turned and began walking, and the rest of us followed her up and out of the alley. I asked the girl nearest to me where we were going but I didn’t understand her answer.
       “The quarry,” Gabriel cut in from behind me. I shook my head. “Where they dig for rocks.”
       He described the rock nearby as a raw piece of meat: blood red, roped with streaks of white. When I made a face, Gabriel shook his head. “No,” he continued, “it’s beautiful. It got so popular that they overdrilled it. They went down so deep one day that they hit a water supply.”
       After a long time, the road declined, and we sunk down the mountain. Somehow I emerged at the helm. The Maites descended the road behind me, the whole group of them dis- persed up the hill. I still remember the drone of the car engine as it approached the sharp bend ahead, its swinging headlights as it came upon us, and after the real Maite yelled Move back to her friends, I remember the light striking them in their white summer clothes as they idly cleared the street while the car sat there, stranded. Still, I can’t decide if, caught in the blinding sweep of those beams, the girls appeared criminals unmasked, or if the swing of their skirts as they left the road rendered them a suite of doves disbanding.

At the quarry, everyone stripped down to their underclothes, and our excess shirts and pants and dresses lay heaped in piles on the 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 the bank dropped off quickly. When I saw a 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, then she said, “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 glossed the water’s surface. I’m sure they were talking to each other, or they were laughing about something, but the threat of the stone wall that rose 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.”
       One by one, other bodies surfaced and joined us up on the sand. “Hey,” Maite’s friend whispered. She nudged me, then motioned toward Gabriel splayed out in his boxers. “Are you guys going to kiss or hold hands or what?”
       I fake-slapped her like we were real friends.
       “Okay, okay,” she said. “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, 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 into me affectionately. I realized how little I 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 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. He tried, “Así?” Like this? I nodded, and signaled for him to keep going.
       “What do I say,” he asked, in Basque. I shrugged. I could already feel my body growing loose with desire. 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 barely registered the words as he spoke them. 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 the word caseríothat set me off. I may even have even laid myself totally and completely on the ground.
       When we emerged from the trees, the Maites were all collecting their clothes and getting ready to leave. For a while, Gabriel’s clammy hand held the tip of my fingers, but at some point they let go. When we reached the tavern, I slid inside without saying goodnight 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 that he spoke and I realized I had never really heard them. I had listened only for their rhythm, for the shallow aesthetics of them. Alone in my room I had nothing to hold onto except the fading memory of their sound.

Gabriel began leaving me little presents around the tavern.
       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 on one of the empty tables in the dining room on my way to the staircase. Some time later I found a silver bracelet on the corner of the counter where I normally helped with prep work. There was no note, but I felt confident in my assumption; 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.
       I wasn’t purposefully 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.
       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, that 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, Gabriel’s looked totally different, but it prompted my first thought of that radio in more than a year. I got caught up in assessing how each of its features compared to the original, whose body, I realized then, I had committed to memory. When I didn’t respond, Gabriel said, “Spanish, remember?” His face thawed into that same, timid smile.
       I knew it was unkind to take the radio from Gabriel, thank him, and tell him I couldn’t listen that afternoon. I was sorry when I closed the door on his sinking expression, but there was nothing else I could do. When I set the radio on my bed, the hefty mechanical weight of it sunk into the mattress and sprouted a crown of pleats in my covers. The whole time, I thought, it could have been that easy: 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 could have pulled a pair of my father’s shoes from the closet while my parents remained in the dining room downstairs cycling through their slow-growing vocabulary and diligently practicing the construction of conditional clauses. I could have put the radio on the bed, laid my head on those shoes, and listened for hours. And if I arranged it all right, maybe the year would have bent back on itself, 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 hung out in the mid-August air.