All That Followed by Gabriel Urza Read Free Book Online Page A

after the wedding.”
    He stopped to sip from a glass still half-full of cold table wine. I knocked a cigarette from my pack and struck a match.
    “He left us a bit of money, so she won’t need to work,” he continued. “She’s an artist—charcoal sketches, some watercolor—so that will give her something to do. She mentioned enrolling in one of the language schools in Bilbao, but I think Morgan will mostly want to stay at home, get used to being married.”
    “Of course,” I said. Duarte’s words were sickeningly familiar. “ Get used to being married . Of course.”

 
    10. IKER
    The first time I saw the Councilman in person was in February of our second-to-last year at San Jorge. It was raining a c á ntaros , like my grandma used to say. And since the crank on Ram ó n Luna’s car window had broken, water was blowing in through the gap and the right shoulder of my blazer was soaked down to the San Jorge crest. Asier was in the passenger seat, and we drove yet again around an apartment building at the corner of Atxiaga and Zabaleta. Ram ó n’s girlfriend, Nere, sat next to me in the back, her leg resting against mine in the dark.
    “What’re you reading?” she whispered.
    I looked at the book sitting in my lap, then handed it to her.
    “ Love in the Time of Cholera ,” she read, tilting the cover toward the light from the street. I felt Ram ó n watching us in the rearview mirror.
    “It’s a political book, actually,” I said. Somewhere from the mix of radical histories and anarchist manifestos that Ram ó n assigned us I’d found writers like García-M á rquez and Camus, intellectuals who reinforced our political views but whose books were more than just ideas or slogans. I reached for the book but Nere ignored me, brushing away my hand so that she could read the description on the back. “The author is a socialist.”
    “Sounds like a love story to me,” she said, flipping the book back into my lap.
    In the eight months that Asier and I had been with Ram ó n’s cuadrilla, Nere had always dressed in the thin black jeans and tight black military jacket that she was wearing now. I, of course, had fallen in love with her the moment we first saw her, arriving at the local behind my mother’s art studio to paint banners for a demonstration (just the same ten kids with anti-Madrid slogans painted onto an old bedsheet). A month before, she had shaved off her long, dark hair except for a single thin chunk just behind her left ear. I loved her even more for this. She was cracking sunflower seeds, spitting the shells onto a newspaper clipping. The air in the car was a mixture of salt and saliva and tobacco.
    “Let me see the article again,” I told her.
    She spit the broken husks onto the paper, then leaned past me to brush them out the crack in the window. When she handed me the clipping it was wet with spit and rain, and the black-and-white photograph of the Councilman was darkened in the area above his head as well as at the waist of his suit jacket. Ram ó n had been talking about the Councilman for weeks—the usual bit about how the man was importing ideas from Madrid into Muriga, about a plan to undermine the Basque independence movement through small-town politics—but this was the first time we’d ever actually looked for him in person. “Know your enemy,” Ram ó n had said when he first proposed tailing him for an afternoon, though it wasn’t at all clear what we were supposed to be learning about him. When Ram ó n again drove the dented Croma past the market on the corner he brushed back the thin hairs from his forehead. “This asshole is just another one of the dictator’s men,” he said
    We referred to him as “the Councilman,” even though he was only being mentioned as a possible candidate for the general election the following year. Torres had caught Ram ó n’s attention, I think, because he was so young, something you didn’t see from the PP in Muriga. “Deliberate