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

strategy to undermine the younger voting demographic,” he’d said. I was used to Ram ó n’s way of speaking, using three long words instead of one short one. When Ram ó n wasn’t around Daniel and I would push our hair off our foreheads to mimic his receding hairline and say, “The social imperative of the Basque revolutionary movement requires that you drink this rum and Coke immediately!” and other nonsense. We believed in Ram ó n’s cause, just not in the words he used to describe it.
    But now, in the backseat of the Croma, I didn’t make jokes about Ram ó n. Something real seemed about to happen, and it unsettled us—even Ram ó n, I think. He was fidgeting nervously with a cigarette lighter.
    I studied the article from El Diario Vasco ; in the picture, the Councilman was leaving the Muriga city hall. He didn’t look like the demon that Ram ó n described. He looked a little like a cousin of mine from Irun, actually. His hair was parted in the middle and flopped to each side like a young boy’s haircut, and in his left hand he seemed to be carrying a sandwich wrapped in foil. He was just starting to show a gut. In the background of the photo, I could see the Elizondo restaurant, Susana Monreal turned slightly toward the cameraman as she swept a napkin out into the gutter.
    The article didn’t refer to him as “the Councilman,” but rather as “Jos é Antonio Torres.” Jos é Antonio , I thought, and I tried to remember if I had seen him in town before. He had moved to Muriga after completing his graduate studies in political science in Sevilla, the article said.
    It was late afternoon, and the streetlights were just beginning to come on when I felt the start of a headache, the ones that can still drop me where I stand. It started small, just a cold metallic taste at the back of my tongue, as if I had been sucking on a ten-peseta piece. Then a slight smell of burnt hair, and with it an explosion of pain. The pain started where it always does, just behind my ears, and quickly became so sharp that I leaned over against the back of Asier’s seat, and this plunged me underwater—slow and cold and without sound. I held my breath and waited, trying not to be sick.
    An endless minute later, as the streetlights slowly came back into focus, I felt Nere’s hand at the back of my neck. We rounded the corner, and I saw we had nearly returned to the apartment building where we started.
    “Are you OK?” she began to say. But before she could finish, Ram ó n jammed the brakes of the car, and Asier was pointing across the street to a man and a woman leaving the building. The woman was tall and thin, dressed in dark slacks and a blue rain jacket. Her eyes had dark rings under them. The man with her was pushing a stroller covered by an umbrella. It was the first time I saw Jos é Antonio Torres in person.
    The pain continued to ease as we watched, all four of us trying to act casual when the couple made their way past the car.
    “She’s pretty,” Nere said absently, watching the three. She kept her hand on my head, her fingers pushing lightly through the hair at the base of my neck. “He did well for himself, didn’t he?”
    She was right. The woman was too thin to be entirely healthy, but it was obvious even from a distance that she was beautiful.
    “Take a note, Asier,” Ram ó n said, exhaling smoke into the Croma. Asier flipped open his school notebook and held his pen above the page, waiting. “Five twenty-seven. Councilman leaves apartment with wife and child.”

 
    11. MARIANA
    In the months before the doctor in Bilbao made her diagnosis, the anemia brought on by two barely functioning kidneys had left me lethargic, hardly able to leave the sofa to get Elena dressed. Jos é Antonio had diagnosed it as a mental health issue, a sort of late-onset postpartum depression, and though I never said as much, I tended to agree with him. I was on my own most of the day with Elena and felt suddenly isolated