All That Followed by Gabriel Urza

Txapela he was wearing a T-shirt with Xabi’s image printed across the chest.
    “Gorka.” I found myself calling him by his first name. “It’s an honor to have you here with us in Muriga.” I was suddenly speaking so formally, as if I were introducing him to receive a prize. “I’m Iker and this is Asier—”
    “Sure,” he said. He was smiling, seemingly amused by the entire scene. “The group in Bermeo tells me that Asier rolls the best porros around. Is that true?”
    Asier pulled a joint from behind an ear and offered it up. Gorka lit it with a blue lighter he’d already taken from his pocket. The room had gone silent, and we watched Gorka take a couple drags, then offer it to me. Finally it was Daniel who spoke up.
    “So why are you here?” he said. I think he meant to sound strong and assertive, but it came out more like an accusation. Even Daniel looked surprised. Auzmendi didn’t take any offense, though; instead he held his hand out to Daniel, asking for the porro back like they were old friends.
    “I was visiting my aunt in Bermeo, so I was in the area,” he said. “But in fact, I keep reading in the newspapers about the shit happening in the streets around here. I talked to some comrades—a word Asier and I put into our rotation after Auzmendi’s visit—in Bermeo, and they said I’d find you at this bar.”
    This was enough of an explanation for us, and most of our friends’ attention returned to their drinks, to the sandwiches on the table, to gossip about who was going to try to sleep with who when we traveled to Deba the next weekend.
    Asier and Daniel pulled their seats closer to Gorka to hear him over the racket of the bar; I lingered between the groups for a moment before Asier caught my eye and nodded me over. The purpose of his visit, Gorka said, was to get to know people behind the movement in the smaller towns. He told us that although he himself was not directly involved with the ETA-militar, he certainly knew people who were looking to recruit comrades for the Jarrai, the nationalist youth groups in cities like Mondrag ó n or Gasteiz. He told us he’d be speaking at a protest the following afternoon in Bilbao, at the campus of the University of the Basque Country, and invited us to join him and his friends after the demonstration.
    Asier was already nodding his head, telling him that we’d be there, that there was no way we’d miss it. With that, Gorka lifted his beer and drained what was left in his glass, then stood to leave.
    “This is something,” Asier said while we watched Auzmendi’s broad shoulders go out the door of the Txapela. “They’re starting to hear about us. I’m telling you, Iker, this is really something.”
    “We can’t go tomorrow,” I said. “We have a test in calculus. And in composition.”
    “A test?” Asier said, almost laughing. He waved his hand, brown smoke trailing from his fingertips. “Do what you want, Iker. I’m going to Bilbao.”

 
    18. JONI
    As soon as Duarte and I arrived at the pelota match the following afternoon, Irujo ordered us a round of whiskeys on ice before dragging Robert away, leaving me to pay. The fronton, which predates Franco’s invasion of Muriga in 1937 by a hundred years, is tucked into an alley behind the Plaza de los Fueros, and on the days between matches the small door looks as if it might belong to a closed bakery or a moldy storage cellar. But on the days of the pelota matches, one passes through the door and enters a vast room, empty except for the small rows of concrete stands lining the right-hand wall. The pelota court itself is what gives the room its vastness, a smooth concrete floor fifty meters by ten meters, with two looming walls that reach up ten meters.
    As I entered the room with Robert Duarte I found myself remembering my first time there, with the butcher Aitor Arostegui’s sister. We had been living together openly for two months, one of Muriga’s great scandals in that wonderful