Free All That Followed by Gabriel Urza

three boxes of Don Simon table wine, whatever cigarettes we could take from our parents’ half-empty packs.
    We spoke only in Euskera, refusing to talk to people that started a conversation in Spanish (which was rarely a problem in Muriga, or even much of a statement, since for most people Euskera was their primary language). To avoid a moral compromise that last year of school, we simply skipped our English classes at San Jorge. It didn’t seem like the old man even noticed we were gone, and the new American they’d brought in to replace the old man when he fell over dead—he wasn’t going to say anything. It was clear the new American sympathized with our ideas. I’d recognized several titles from a stack of books he’d left on his desk one afternoon, the same books that we’d been reading in the bunker. The way Asier and I ran the school our final year, leaving class whenever we wanted, smoking openly on the front steps of the school, no one questioned our bravado. I wasn’t sure if the new American was afraid of us or if he wished he were tagging along.
    And, finally, by my last year at San Jorge the contents of our backpacks had begun to evolve. We added spray paint and fireworks, xeroxed pamphlets announcing rallies and strikes, clipboards with petitions. But even these items continued to change, until finally our packs were also filled with dark hooded sweatshirts, black bandannas to cover our faces.
    It was something the newspapers like to call kale borroka . Twenty or thirty of us would get together late on a Friday or Saturday night, when the streets were sure to be filled with people drinking, tourists, families finishing dinner. We loaded our pockets with rocks and fireworks and cans of black spray paint. Then we tied bandannas behind our heads, put on sunglasses, and pulled up our hoods. This was our armor. Each time I pulled the drawstrings on my sweatshirt, I would turn and look at my reflection in Asier’s sunglasses, and he would do the same, and I would like how frightening I looked: entirely faceless, anonymous, and dangerous. I wasn’t a militant. Under the hood, under the sunglasses, I knew that. But the costume was convincing.
    Here’s how it would go: we’d gather out of sight of the crowded streets until one of the older university students gave a whistle. Then we would be off, running down the main streets, throwing rocks through windows or at streetlights, spray-painting long black lines along the old stone walls, yelling our slogans, throwing handfuls of pamphlets into the doors of the bars. This had been going on for years; before us, it was Ram ó n’s older brother and his group of friends, and before that it was another group, or a band of college students from Bilbao or San Sebasti á n who had driven in. The only things that changed were the spray-painted names of the political parties as one party after the other was outlawed by the national government.
    I’d seen these early versions of kale borroka when I was a kid myself, maybe seven or eight. I was with my parents, I ñ igo Cort é z’s parents, and a couple of other families at Natalie Lizaso’s restaurant on Calle Miramar, when a heavy, empty boom exploded a half block down, followed by the whoops and yells that I’d later get so used to. The adults had been talking over cups of coffee and snacking on small plates of cheese when the firework exploded. They barely looked up from their conversation, as if nothing at all had happened. Natalie’s father lowered the storm doors and windows, and it was suddenly quiet inside the bar. He went back behind the wooden bar and began pouring brandy into short, fat-bottomed glasses as the yelling and chanting made its way through the cracks in the storm doors and into the restaurant. Still, my parents and their friends continued their conversations. It was only the clank of a rock against the door that got any reaction at all, a quick “ Hostias ,” from Natalie’s father behind