Free All That Followed by Gabriel Urza Page B

pretty, aren’t you?) I wondered what had brought about Morgan’s sudden change in pronunciation, but it was easy to speculate. Robert smiled at her when she said it, the way someone might smile when they’ve taught their dog a new trick. “Is there anything that you’d prefer not to eat?” I asked. We were pushed up against the wooden bar of the Boli ñ a and in front of us was plate after plate of pintxos , colorful and oily. Thick pieces of bread stacked with Serrano ham the deep red of cabernet or bright-green pimientos de Guernica topped with sardines and lanced through with wooden toothpicks. “You don’t care for seafood, if I remember.”
    “We’ve made a pact, Joni,” Robert said, smiling at his wife.
    “That’s right,” Morgan said, pushing closer to be heard over the din around us, the conversation and whine of the Formula 1 engines from the television in the corner of the bar. It was past ten, and the old men who had started making their rounds of the local bars at noon were by now yelling their jokes and insults. “We’ve decided, Joni, that we’re going to try anything that’s offered to us while we’re here.”
    There was an excitement to her voice, as if she were sharing some sort of secret. “While we’re here,” she had said. In these three words the agreement that Robert Duarte had struck with his wife was clear: make the best of the situation, of Muriga, and in return I promise that we’ll leave. And Morgan was telling herself: soon this will be over and it can be the wild two years of our early marriage when we lived in the backwoods of the Basque Country, where Robert played the role of the Euskaldun come back to the homeland, to Euskal Herria as he will say when we return to our air-conditioned home and outsized cars and our friends we’ve known since high school. We will tell them about the fiestas that last until five in the morning, and I’ll wear the Basque rope-soled shoes when I pick peppers and green beans from the garden, and in return all I have to do is try to enjoy it. This was the deal, of course.
    “You seem to be much more comfortable over here than when you first arrived,” I said. She wore the ecstatic look of a prisoner whose sentence had just been overturned. She smiled her delicate American smile.
    “I am, Joni,” she said, giving Robert’s arm a squeeze. He winced, as if those thin hands could cause him physical pain. “I’m much more comfortable here. I’ve been painting more—did Robert mention that I paint?” she said. When I nodded my head, she invited me to their apartment to see some of the sketches she’d done of Muriga since she’d arrived. Then, pointing to the trays set out on the bar, she asked, “So what should we eat?”
    “ Chipirones ?” I asked Robert. “Squid in its own ink, if you’re feeling adventurous?”
    “You have to at least try one,” Robert said to his wife. “My mother used to keep frozen packets of squid ink in the freezer when I was growing up.”
    I ordered a half dozen pintxos for us to share, including some less exotic plates, which Morgan mostly favored. People went in and out of the door of the bar, just another stop as they hopscotched down the street from one place to the next, saying hello to a friend behind the bar before emptying their glass and heading to the next restaurant. At any given time there were three or four generations of Murigakoak at the bar, old men with their traditional black berets and starched white shirts, young parents having a glass of wine or a bite to eat while their children slept precariously in strollers surrounded by tipsy teenagers in torn jeans. As they left the bar, Santi Etxeberria and Alonso Irujo stumbled over to invite me to the pelota match the next afternoon.
    “Bring the Euskaldun ,” Santi said, clasping Robert on the shoulder. He’d already become a minor celebrity in the town, the Basque American with the blond wife. Perhaps derisively, somebody had begun to