Castro's Dream Read online

  LUCY WADHAM

  Castro’s Dream

  For my sisters Louise, Catherine,

  Amynta and Rosie and my brother Tom

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Author biography

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Part of this story takes place in the Basque Country (Euskal Herria), on both the French and Spanish sides of the border but mostly in the province of Gipuzkoa, around San Sebastian. Anyone familiar with this troubled region will know that it is difficult to consider the place without considering the violence therein and the role of the armed group, ETA. It will become clear, however, that the story is not about ETA, nor indeed about Basque politics. It does not attempt to shed any light on ETA’s present formation. Certain characters in the story are linked to a now extinct movement known as ETA-PM (a schism of ETA-M, which survives today). After Franco’s death the ‘Poli-Milis’, as they were called, abandoned the armed struggle in favour of political action. To this extent the story examines the effects of long-term violence on those who are looking for a way out.

  Euzkadi, Euskadi: the Basque Country

  Donostia: San Sebastian

  ETA: Euskadi ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom)

  In Basque the letters ‘Tx’ are pronounced ‘Ch’, so the name

  ‘Txema’ is pronounced ‘Ché-ma’, ‘Itxua’ is ‘Itch-ua’.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Sarah Ferguson for all her support and encouragement; to Dr Sophie Cohen for answering all my questions; to Dr Jorge Cardozo for letting me watch him work; to Gerard Toupier at the Pasteur Institute; and in loving memory of Professor Jean Julvez, without whom this story would never have been invented.

  Castro’s Dream

  ONE

  On the morning of Mikel’s release Astrid expected to have another episode. She dressed slowly, carefully stepping into her clothes, as though afraid that any sudden movement might act as a trigger, making her mind short circuit.

  You may not have any symptoms, the neurologist had told her. There’s rarely any warning that it’s about to happen. If it’s going to happen, it’ll just happen.

  Of course he had not addressed the fear. Fear brought its own symptoms and as Astrid well knew, it was not the thing itself so much as the fear of it that was dominating her life. The symptoms that assailed her now, as she stepped out of her building into the Paris dawn; the palpitations, sweaty palms, dry mouth and the sensory distortion, were the products of an over-active adrenal gland: knowing this did not help. She stood on the kerb, the object world swimming before her, stiff with terror.

  Behind her, the heavy glass door slammed shut, sending an unpleasant ricochet of sound waves through the spaces in her body. She took deep breaths, focusing on the horse chestnuts that grew out of the pavement on the other side of the cobbled road. The dark bitumen, buckling from the roots growing beneath, looked soft and foamy. She closed her eyes. The air was too thick, the birdsong too slow.

  Look at me now, Lola. Your calm, rational sister. Look at what a wreck I am.

  The vision of Lola dancing around her flat in her shell-pink nightie helped Astrid step off the kerb onto the cobbles. As she walked down the hill she began to hum ‘Gracias la Vida’, their favourite song. Sticking to her part, the alto, she imagined Lola’s fine voice singing out the soprano harmony she had invented to go with it.

  Up the hill towards her came a youth astride a square, fluorescent green motorcycle, trailing behind him the piercing sound of the vacuum sucking up dog shit from the pavement. Astrid walked steadily towards the man and the machine. As they passed her she did not flinch but gave a victorious smile. The youth was busy with his next target and did not see what she suddenly realised was closer to a grimace.

  While she waited for her bus, Astrid noted the slow return to normal of her metabolic function. She breathed deeply as she studied an advertisement for a vitamin supplement on the side of the shelter. A middle-aged woman with a youthful smile, aided by an invisible trampoline, had been caught in mid-air, just at that moment before her skirt flew up and gravity pulled her back. Astrid stared at the ecstatic smile and wondered at the circumstances that had brought the woman to such indignity.

  She looked down at the water running in the gutter at her feet. This habit they had of flushing the gutters with clear water every morning was one of the things she liked about Paris. They would never dream of doing something so munificent in a Spanish city, or an English one.

  The bus hummed as it approached. The doors hissed open and shut behind her. She validated her ticket in the machine beside the driver, waiting for the sound that always reminded her of her stepfather Josu’s abattoir gun. Then she made her way to an empty seat at the back of the bus and sat down.

  She looked out of the window at the dawn sky, the electric-blue and pink tinted purple by the brown glass. Her first malaise had been brought on by a conversation with Lola. She had been standing in her lab, watching the new machine that had been hooked up to a baboon’s liver. Lola had called to tell her the news of Mikel’s release. When Astrid picked up the phone Lola was already crying.

  He’s getting out. They’re letting him out. Lola had started laughing through her tears. I’m so happy, Astrid. I don’t deserve to be so happy.

  Astrid had not been able to reply. This time it was not guilt that had prevented her from speaking, but a sense of loss that took her breath away. She had stood there watching the baboon’s blood in the tubes, gripping the phone until she could feel nothing but her tight fist around the phone and herself trickling like sand through the fist, onto the floor. She had intended to go for a walk and had called out to Vincent, the lab technician, to watch the baboon, then she had passed out where she stood. When she woke, her head was in Vincent’s lap and he was stroking her hair ineptly.

  Now, as usual, nausea followed the other symptoms, and a numbing in the upper body, but as the bus crossed Paris from north to south Astrid noted an improvement in her state. By the time they crossed the Seine at Austerlitz she was feeling better.

  She entered the hospital compound. The doorman in his glass box beneath the porch looked up from his paper and nodded. She noticed that today he had white tape on the arm of his spectacles. She made her way along the narrow concrete path towards the lab, breathing in the smell of dew on grass, her senses tethered again.

  She opened the lab and stepped inside and turned on the cei
ling lights one by one. She took her lab coat from its hook and put it on. She thought of Lola lying awake in her dirty little flat, waiting for her lover’s call.

  Astrid fetched her mobile phone from her handbag and laid it on the workbench where she could see it.

  Lola would be waiting for the call in that shell-pink nightie. She had bought it in the flea market near her flat. It was made of shiny, synthetic material, cut on the bias that clung to her shape. She wore it all the time indoors. Often she wore a bedjacket over it made of Easter-yellow ostrich feathers.

  Astrid took a tray of new test tubes from the supply cupboard and broke open the cellophane. She pulled a tube from its holder, setting her teeth against the squeak of the polystyrene. They needed more bleach. She made a note of this on the wipe-clean noticeboard beside the fridge. She sniffed the pleasant smell of the felt-tip pen, then replaced the lid.

  She put on her gloves and fetched her utensils from the sterilising unit and laid them out on the trolley, one by one.

  Lola had only ever had one persistent ambition: to be a woman. At boarding school she had drawn hair with black biro onto her bare pubis and Astrid had watched her cry as their house mother, Sister Theresa, had slapped her face. Wicked girl, she had called her. Astrid wanted to believe that she had been filled with compassion at the sight but she suspected herself of having felt a first flicker of that pleasure, so dangerous, in being the good one.

  Astrid lifted the white rat from its cage. She held it expertly in one hand, its head in a delicate clamp between her index and middle finger, and carried it to the slab. She did believe that guilt had brought on the first attack, made her mind cut out as the neurologist had put it. Thomas Meydenburger was an old friend. He told her that the EEG showed delta waves, indicating a lesion.

  It’s just scarring. Probably from an old fall. Did you fall as a child?

  Constantly.

  He nodded, smiling at her with his mouth closed. His face was tanned, although it was winter and his blue eyes were pink around the rims.

  Is that it? she had asked.

  It’s not a very precise science, I’m afraid.

  Does that bother you?

  He contemplated his biro, which he turned between his well-padded finger ends.

  Not really. I wasn’t cut out for science. I prefer ideas. And people.

  Is that why you decided against surgery?

  Surgery was for the macho, people who need action.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  I’m macho then.

  I think you’re a woman of action. I’ve always admired that in you.

  Astrid clicked her tongue, a Spanish habit, out of place here.

  Will you have dinner with me? he asked.

  I don’t have dinner. I’m virtually married.

  How is the great man?

  He’s fine. He’s seventy next year.

  Thomas smiled. His lips were dry and chapped. Astrid thought it must be the air conditioning.

  He looks good for seventy, he said.

  He does.

  They’re all like that, the great surgeons. Go on, have dinner with me. Please.

  I’ll come if you can tell me what’s wrong with me.

  Next week. I’ll tell you at dinner next week.

  What, you’ll have made something up by then?

  You’re a hard woman, Astrid. Then he must have caught her expression. I’m joking, he told her. I like it. You always reminded me of one of those Latina freedom fighters.

  Astrid looked into her handbag:

  You’re right, Thomas. I am hard. She looked up. How much do I owe you?

  But he had refused payment and replaced the lid of his biro with a resolute click. As they stood by the door, he had put a soft, manicured hand on her cheek.

  Don’t frown, he said. I didn’t mean to upset you.

  And she had told him that she did not believe him about the old fall.

  What can I say? he said. It’s an ictus. Transient global amnesia. The mind cuts out. No one knows the aetiology. Do you have migraines?

  I did. For a while a long time ago. Bad ones. Then they went. He nodded slowly. She could see the questions crowding in his mind. They started when I was in prison, she added.

  Clearly, he said, there can be psychological factors.

  Clearly, she said.

  He had smiled an apology and told her that there was unlikely to be a sequel and that she should try not to worry.

  Should I stop operating? she had asked.

  No. Listen to me. You know how you can drive somewhere for hours, thinking about things, listening to music? You may not remember a single thing about the drive itself, about how you got from A to B but that doesn’t mean you weren’t concentrating on your driving. You were just on automatic on some level. Do you see?

  But I didn’t remember anything, Thomas. Not a single thing. Four whole hours completely gone. All I know is that I had a case of wine in the back of my car and when I got home it was gone.

  Are you sure?

  Yes. Chastel put it there.

  Maybe you drank it with a group of Brazilian transsexuals in the Bois de Boulogne.

  Astrid smiled distractedly.

  They had said goodbye and hugged and he had not mentioned dinner again. In that moment by the door she felt him retreat from her. It was not hard to understand why. She remembered a date with him in their first year of medical school. They had been to a cramped Chinese restaurant near the faculty. She had tested him on the endocrine system and then he had taken her back to his tiny maid’s room that smelt of stale yogurt. She remembered sitting beside him on a small, lumpy sofa and becoming aware that he was very nervous. She was deliberating as to whether or not she should kiss him and get things started when he suddenly put out his hand and gripped her breast hard and with such suddenness that she uttered a cry of alarm. The gesture had been entirely without eroticism and he had begun to apologise immediately. I’m sorry, he had said, shaking his head. I’m so sorry. She had not minded but Thomas had been mortified and never invited her back to his flat again.

  She sighed at the memory, made an incision into the sedated rat’s sternum and drew the scalpel in a neat line to its pubis.

  TWO

  Lola was lying on her side staring at the red digits of the alarm clock and still the buzzing sound, when it came, pierced her poor heart. She drew an arm from beneath the sheet and stopped the noise. Lola’s heart was her weak organ. It murmured, Astrid said, and because of this murmur would never be fully reliable. When Astrid told her this, the cold stethoscope pressed against the freckles on her chest, Lola had watched her long dark lashes from above and smiled to herself. This was her sister’s first diagnosis and Lola was proud of her, even if she was telling her something she already knew, that her heart was weak and unreliable.

  Yes it’s a heart murmur, Astrid had said, pulling her head away from Lola’s chest, wrapping her brand new stethoscope around her hand. Don’t worry, Lolita. It’s not serious. We just have to watch it.

  And Lola had buttoned her shirt and gone to get some beers from the fridge for them both and they had clinked bottles as though they were toasting this new task they had in common, to watch her heart.

  The alarm clock displayed 06:31.

  He had been let out one minute ago. It would take that long just to draw in some of the dawn sky from all around him, the blue of an exotic butterfly above him and the gold of lager on the horizon behind him, and then to take a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and light up his first free man’s cigarette in twenty years.

  Lola closed her eyes and saw her beloved standing there on that arid plain with the high walls of the prison behind him; standing as he always did with his feet apart as if the earth might shift beneath him at any moment.

  Smoke, Mikel. Smoke, she said. And she rolled over and buried her grin in the pillow.

  She was stupid. She rolled over and looked up at the ceiling. She had not been thinking clearly. It would
take time to get to the nearest call box. He would have to wait by the side of that lonely road for a truck travelling from Ciudad Real to Cuenca. He would climb up and greet the driver and in that greeting alone there would be something at once warm and commanding that would make the driver want to be liked by him. All men wanted to be liked by Mikel. She turned and looked at the clock: 06:46.

  Of course: the first call box would have been vandalised; perhaps by an inmate, just freed, sour from captivity and looking to poison the next man’s freedom. But Mikel would gently replace the receiver and step out of the phone box and climb back into the truck without a word. The mystery of this man who had been locked away for blood crimes was that he was quiet and meek in all his actions save those that were part of what he used to refer to as The Work.

  But this, Lola did not like to think about.

  Call me, call me, call me, she said aloud.

  She put her hand between her legs to distract herself and closed her eyes but the phone was bound to ring now and he would catch her after all these years and he would tease her, saying that she could not leave her bizcocho alone for one minute. But the telephone stayed quiet and Lola knew that it was the old Mikel she was imagining, he would not tease her now. She could not remember when she last saw him laugh. He no longer tried to get into her pants during visits and even in the last place, a model prison, where rooms were made available for sex, he had not wanted her. She had stopped weeping and begging because she did not want to drive him away. Lola was afraid of life without Mikel.

  She kicked off the sheets. After all this time, she could still feel the precise weight of his hands on her body and smell that faint smell of damp on his skin. She remembered Astrid talking about a well-documented regressive sexual disorder, and had thought she recognised herself in the pathology. It had something to do with the primary sexual experience and never being able to get over it. There was a name for it that Lola had forgotten.

  She looked again: 07:15.