Free All That Followed by Gabriel Urza Page A

the bar.
    I remember a siren and then a loud popping, as if someone had set off several fireworks at once, and the sound of yells, of feet running on the wet stone streets (maybe I’m inventing some of this, now that I’ve been on the other side so many times), before my mother looked to my father and said, “Ertzaintza. Finally.”
    The Ertzaintza were the Basque police force, and on nights like these (which they were used to just as much as the restaurant patrons and owners and as much as the kids in the bandannas and sunglasses), they would be sent out to scatter the rioters, fire off a few rubber bullets. Really, they just wanted to make sure a handful of troublemakers didn’t turn into something worth worrying about. To come home with a rubber bullet—or even better, a black-and-purple bruise from where the bullet had struck—was a badge of honor. We would act infuriated, thinking of ourselves now in the company of Gandhi and Guevara and Castro and not the bored kids that we were. I don’t think we ever knew exactly what was worth fighting for—or at least I didn’t. (“Against the abuses of the Franco regime, for an autonomous state!” I would have said, had you asked me then.) We were just kids playing a game, the same game that the Ertzaintza was hired to play, the same game that the shopkeepers played each time they shut their storm doors or scrubbed away graffiti. This would go on and on until, inevitably, one team or another broke the rules.
    *   *   *
    IMAGINE IT like a football game. On the red team, young nationalists. On the blue team, the Ertzaintza. They agree to unspoken rules. Broken windows are OK. Broken bones are fair game. Graffiti is acceptable, as are rubber bullets and tear gas. An unjust or overly lengthy prison sentence was against the rules. Killing, by either side, was always against the rules.
    The newspapers served as the referees. Whenever these rules were broken, we would read about it in the four-page paper printed in Muriga each morning. The headlines would read, “Ertzaintza detains two youths from Aulesti for unprovoked attack on local market,” and we would know to shake our heads over our coffee at the acts of these senseless thugs. Yellow card to kale borroka .
    A month later the paper would announce, “Two college students from Bermeo beaten and arrested during peaceful demonstration,” and this time around the Ertzaintza were to blame. The old men in the shops would spit on the ground and talk about how the Ertzaintza had too much power, about how they were just the same as the Guardia Civil. How they should leave our good boys alone—this was supposed to be a democracy now. Yellow card to the Ertzaintza. Another warning.
    Retaliation for breaking the rules comes quickly: Ertzaina who break the rules are found dead against the tires of a Volkswagen in the parking garage of their apartment building, their heads burst open by two close-range pistol shots. And the unlucky kids who get caught breaking the rules, who are unfortunate enough to be labeled etarra , well, their penalties aren’t any less severe. (As I later found out, even if you never actually had contact with a real member of the ETA, once you’ve broken the rules you are also, by virtue of association, an etarra for life.) These are the kids in their twenties who are shot down by the Guardia Civil in a raid or extradited from France and disappear for decades into a far-off prison like the Salto.

 
    15. JONI
    “What do you recommend, Joni? We’re in your hands.”
    The new American couple had been in Muriga a month, and Morgan Duarte had just begun to pronounce my name the way everyone else in Muriga did, with the j pronounced as a y , as if my name were an adjective describing one who yawns. (When I used to make comparisons such as these, the woman I had fallen in love with would accuse me of being overly poetic, batting her eyes sarcastically and saying, Aye, que guapo eres, no? Oh, you’re so