All That Followed by Gabriel Urza Read Free Book Online

clack of the pelota. “Perhaps we could even get Irujo to come. Do you know Irujo yet?”
    “No.”
    Clack .
    “He is the history teacher that took over for Goikoetxea when he was moved to administration.” Clack . “He’s a fanatic for pelota.”
    “I’d like that,” he said.
    A final clack , and the cry of the pelota player as the ball caromed wildly from his hand, missing the wall by several feet. The door to the bar swung open, and Morgan Duarte backed into the bar, shaking an umbrella behind her before leaning it against the wall just below the coat rack. The American straightened, watching his wife’s thin, nervous figure at the front of the restaurant.
    “I should get her,” he said, standing from the table.
    “She really doesn’t speak any Spanish?” I asked.
    “Almost nothing.”
    Morgan was pointing past Susana toward our table in the dining area. When Robert walked up, he put his hand around his wife’s waist and spoke easily to Susana. Susana answered, and the two laughed while Morgan brushed at the left sleeve of her sweater.
    I found myself feeling sorry for her. As Robert and Susana spoke in Basque, it occurred to me that Morgan and I were the only ones in the room who were deaf to this language. The two of us alike in this way.
    Morgan sidled closer to the American, much the way Elena will tuck herself into the bend behind Mariana’s knee when I kneel down (knowing how I must appear to her: a tall, strangely speaking gargoyle) to ask if she has been a good girl today. The American’s wife smiled in time with Robert and Susana’s laughs; from behind them came the sound of the pelota’s clack clack clack and outside the faint ticking of rain against the hoods of the cars on the street. I could see the first hints of desperation in Morgan Duarte, as if she had just there in the Elizondo realized that she was marooned in this strange town. She pulled in just a touch to her husband’s grasp. Even he was a stranger to her now, speaking to a woman in his nearly extinct language.
    *   *   *
    AFTER THE second bottle of wine, we began to tell stories. I told them how I had found Rimbaud abandoned at a rest stop outside of Mondrag ó n, nearly dead from malnourishment. Morgan Duarte described meeting Robert four years before, when he was a first-year history teacher at a high school in Boise and she was a sophomore at Boise State.
    “On our second date he took me to his parents’ house out in Nampa and told his mother, ‘I’m going to marry this girl one day, Ama.’”
    Robert, taking his cue, chipped in, “That’s what I told them about every girl I brought home.”
    Morgan pretended to take offense, gripping him lightly on the shoulder. She told the story as if she had told it many times before, had revised and whittled it down to the shapely anecdote she shared now over coffee and cheese at the Elizondo. Even so, it was also apparent that she took great pleasure in its telling.
    In between platters of breaded lamb chop and merluza smothered in tomato sauce, Morgan excused herself for the restroom. By now, the dining area had filled with a local cuadrilla of retired men who made a daily circuit of the few bars and restaurants in downtown Muriga. We both watched her walk among the tables of old Basques, who in turn swiveled to watch this exquisite creature cross the room. Basilio Zabala leaned in to his table and said something in Basque, and the table rocked with a collective laughter. If Robert Duarte had heard the joke, he didn’t show that it had bothered him; instead, it seemed to bolster his self-satisfaction, which had become more evident with each cup of wine.
    “What will she do while you are at San Jorge?” I asked. His eyes were still on Morgan as she pulled open the door to the restroom.
    “You know, we were just married eight months before we left Boise,” he said, as if this were an answer to the question. “My father died of an aortic aneurysm in April, two months