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The Accordionist's Son

Graywolf Press

THE BEGINNING

It was the first day of term at school in Obaba. The new teacher was walking from desk to desk holding the register in her hand. "And what's your name?" she asked when she came to me. "Jose," I replied, "but everyone calls me Joseba." "Very good." The teacher then addressed the boy sharing my desk, the last member of the class left to ask: "And what's your name?" The boy replied, imitating my way of speaking: "I'm David, but everyone calls me the accordionist's son." Our classmates, boys and girls of eight or nine, greeted his answer with giggles. "So your father's an accordionist?" David nodded. "I love music," said the teacher. "One day, we must ask your father to visit the school and give us a little concert." She seemed very pleased, as if she'd just received a piece of wonderful news. "David can play the accordion too. He's an artist," I said. The teacher looked amazed: "Really?" David elbowed me in the ribs. "It's true," I said. "In fact, he's got his accordion over there by the door. After school, he usually goes and rehearses with his father." I had difficulty finishing my sentence because David was trying to cover my mouth with his hand. "Oh, but it would be lovely to hear some music!" exclaimed the teacher. "Why don't you play us something? I'd really like that."

As if her request filled him with sorrow, David slouched reluctantly over to the door to fetch his accordion. Meanwhile, the teacher had placed a chair on the main table in the classroom. "You'd be better up here, where everyone can see you," she said. Moments later, David was, indeed, up there, sitting on the chair and holding the accordion ready to start playing. Everyone began to clap. "What are you going to play for us?" asked the teacher. "'Padam Padam,'" I called out, anticipating David's reply. It was the song my friend knew best, the one he'd practiced most often because it was a compulsory piece that all accordionists had to play in the local competitions. David couldn't help but smile. He enjoyed being the school champion, especially in front of all the girls. "Attention, everyone," said the teacher, like a master of ceremonies. "We're going to end our first class with a little music. I'd just like to say that you seem very nice, hard-working children. I'm sure we're going to get on well and that you're going to learn a lot." She gestured to David, and the notes of the song — "Padam Padam" — filled the classroom. Beside the blackboard, the leaf on the calendar showed that it was September 1957.

Forty-two years later, in September 1999, David was dead, and I was standing by his grave along with his wife, Mary Ann, in the cemetery belonging to Stoneham Ranch, in Three Rivers, California. Opposite us, a man was busy carving the epitaph that was to appear on the gravestone in three different languages, English, Basque, and Spanish: "He was never closer to paradise than when he lived on this ranch." It was the beginning of the funeral oration that David himself had written before he died and which, in its entirety, read:

"He was never closer to paradise than when he lived on this ranch, so much so that he found it difficult to believe that life could possibly be any better in heaven. It was hard for him to leave his wife, Mary Ann, and his two daughters, Liz and Sara, but, when he left, he had just the tiny necessary sliver of hope to ask God to take him up into heaven and place him alongside his uncle Juan and his mother Carmen, and alongside the friends he once had in Obaba."

"Do you need any help?" Mary Ann asked the man carving the gravestone, shifting into English from the Spanish we normally spoke together. The man made a gesture with his hand and asked her to wait. "Hold on," he said.

There were two other graves in the cemetery. In the first lay David's uncle — Juan Imaz. Obaba 1916 — Stoneham Ranch 1992. "I could have done with two lives, but I only had one"; in the second, the first owner of the ranch — Henry Johnson, 1890–1965. Then, in one corner, there were three more tiny graves, like toy graves. They belonged, as David had explained to me on one of our walks, to Tommy, Jimmy, and Ronnie, his daughters' three hamsters.

"It was David's idea," explained Mary Ann. "He told the girls that their pets would sleep sweetly beneath the soft earth, and they accepted this gladly and felt greatly consoled. However, shortly after that, the juicer broke, and Liz, who must have been six at the time, insisted on burying that too. Then it was the turn of a plastic duck that got burned when it fell on the barbecue. Later, it was a music box that had stopped working. It took us a while to realize that the girls, especially the little one, Sara, were breaking their toys on purpose. That was when David invented the business about words. I'm not sure if he talked to you about that or not." "I don't think he did," I said. "Well, they started to bury words." "Which words do you mean?" "Your words, words from your language. Did he really not tell you?" I assured her again that he hadn't. "I thought you talked about everything on those walks of yours," smiled Mary Ann. "We talked about things that happened in our youth," I said. "As well as about the two of you and your idyll in San Francisco."

I'd been at Stoneham for nearly a month, and my conversations with David would have filled many tapes. Except that there were no recordings. There were no documents. There were only traces, the words that my memory had managed to retain.

Mary Ann looked down toward the banks of the Kaweah, the river that flows through the ranch, where, in a field of green grass, five or six horses grazed among granite rocks. "It's true about our idyll in San Francisco," she said. "We met while we were both on holiday there." She was wearing a denim shirt and a straw hat to protect her from the sun. She was still a young woman. "I know how you met," I said. "You showed me the photos." "Oh yes, of course, I forgot." She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the river, at the horses.

He was never closer to paradise than when he lived on this ranch. The man carving the stone came over to us carrying the piece of paper on which we'd written the epitaph in three languages. "It's a strange language this," he said, pointing to the lines in Basque, "but kind of beautiful too." He pointed at one of the words; he didn't like it, he wanted to know if there was another better word that could replace it. "You mean rantxo?" The man put his finger to his ear. "Yeah, it doesn't sound good," he said. I looked at Mary Ann. "If you can think of a better one, go ahead. David wouldn't have minded." I racked my brain. "I don't know, perhaps ..." and I wrote abeletxe on the piece of paper, a word which the dictionaries translate as "fold or shelter for cattle, separate from the farmhouse." The man muttered something I couldn't understand. "He thinks it's too long," Mary Ann explained. "He says it's got two more letters than rantxo and that there's barely enough room on the gravestone as it is." "I'd leave it as it is," I said. "Rantxo, it is then," said Mary Ann. The man shrugged and returned to his work.

The path that connected the stables and the houses that made up the ranch passed by the cemetery too. First came the houses of the Mexican ranch hands, then the house that had belonged to Juan, David's uncle, and where I was staying; and finally, higher up, on the top of a small hill, the house where my friend had lived with Mary Ann for fifteen years; the house where Liz and Sara had been born.

Mary Ann left the cemetery and went out on to the path. "It's supper time, and I don't want to leave Rosario on her own," she said. "It takes more than one person to get the girls to turn off the TV and sit down at the table." Rosario, along with her husband, Efrain, the ranch foreman, was the person Mary Ann depended on for nearly everything. "You can stay here a while, if you like," she said when she saw I was about to follow her. "Why don't you dig up one of those words? They're behind the hamsters' graves, in matchboxes." "I don't know if I ought to," I murmured doubtfully. "As I said before, David never spoke to me about them." "He was probably afraid of looking ridiculous," she said, "but there was no reason to. He invented the game so that Liz and Sara would learn something of your language." "In that case, then, I will. Although I still feel like a bit of an intruder." "I wouldn't worry. He used to say you were the only friend he had left on the other side of the world." "We were like brothers," I said. "He didn't deserve to die at fifty," she said. "It was a dirty trick." "Yes, a very dirty trick indeed." The man carving the gravestone looked up. "Are you leaving?" he asked. "No, not yet," I replied and went back into the cemetery.

I found the first box of matches behind Ronnie's grave. It was in a pretty bad state, but the tiny roll of paper it contained was perfectly preserved. I read the word David had written on it in black ink: mitxirrika. It was the word used in Obaba to mean "butterfly." I opened another box. The roll of paper contained a whole sentence: Elurra mara-mara ari du. It was what people in Obaba said when it was snowing softly.

Liz and Sara had finished supper, and Mary Ann and I were sitting outside on the porch. The view was really beautiful: the houses of Three Rivers nestled beneath enormous trees, for the road to Sequoia National Park ran parallel to the river. On the flatter ground, I could see vineyard upon vineyard, lemon grove upon lemon grove. The sun was gradually setting, lingering on the hills surrounding Lake Kaweah.

I could see it with pristine clarity, just as you can when the wind blows the atmosphere clean and everything seems newly minted. Except that there was no wind, and my perceptions had nothing to do with reality. It was all because of David and my memories, because I was thinking about him, about my friend. David would never see this view again: the hills, the fields, the houses. Nor would the songs of the birds around the ranch reach his ears. His hands would never again feel the warmth of the wooden boards on the porch after a day of sun. For a moment, I imagined myself in his place, as if I were the one who had died, and I felt the awfulness of that loss even more keenly. I couldn't have been more affected if a great crack had suddenly opened up in the earth, swallowing fields and houses and threatening the ranch itself. I understood then, only in a different sense, what is meant by the words: "Life is the greatest thing there is, whoever loses life loses everything."

We heard a whistle. One of the Mexican ranch hands — wearing a cowboy hat — was trying to move the horses away from the riverbank. Immediately afterward, however, everything fell silent again. The birds stopped singing. Below, cars with their headlights on were driving along the road to Sequoia National Park, filling the landscape with bright red splotch and lines. The day was drawing to a close, and the valley was at peace. My friend David was now sleeping forever. Accompanying him in that sleep were Juan, his uncle, and Henry Johnson, the ranch's first owner.

Mary Ann lit a cigarette. "Mom, don't smoke!" shouted Liz, leaning out of the window. "It's one of my last ones. Don't worry, I'll keep my promise," replied Mary Ann. "What's the word for 'butterfly' in Basque?" I asked the girl. From inside the house came the voice of Sara, her younger sister: "Mitxirrika." Liz shouted: "Hush up, silly!" Mary Ann sighed. "Her father's death has affected her a lot. Sara's coping better. She hasn't really grasped yet what his death means." There was the sound of neighing and another whistle from the Mexican ranch hand in the cowboy hat.

Mary Ann stubbed out her cigarette and started rummaging around in the drawer of a small table on the porch. "Did he ever show you this?" she asked. She was holding a letter-sized book of about two hundred beautifully bound pages. "It's the edition the friends of the Three Rivers Book Club were preparing," she said, a half smile on her lips. "It had a print run of three. One for Liz and Sara, one for the library in Obaba, and a third copy for the friends of the club who helped publish it." I couldn't suppress a look of surprise. I didn't know anything about this either. Mary Ann leafed through the pages. "David used to say jokingly that three copies were three too many, and that he felt a complete fraud. He said he should have followed Virgil's example and asked his friends to burn the original."

The book had a dark blue cover. The title was in gold. At the top was his name, David Imaz — using only his mother's maiden name — and, in the middle, the title in Basque: Soinujolearen semea — The Accordionist's Son. The spine was made of black cloth and there was no lettering on it at all.

Mary Ann pointed at the title. "Needless to say the gold lettering wasn't his idea. When he saw it for the first time, he clutched his head and again quoted Virgil and said what a fraud he felt." "I don't know what to say. I'm really surprised," I said, examining the book. "I asked him several times to show it to you," she explained. "After all, you were his friend from Obaba, the person who would present the copy to the library in the village where he was born. He kept promising he would, but only later, when you were getting on the plane to go home. He didn't want you to feel obliged to offer an opinion." Mary Ann paused before continuing. "And maybe that's why he wrote it in a language I can't understand. So as not to put me in an awkward position either." The half smile returned to her lips, but this time it was sadder. I got to my feet and paced up and down the porch. I found it hard to remain seated, hard to know what to say. "I'll take the copy to the library in Obaba," I said at last. "But first, I'll read it and write you a letter giving my impressions."

There were now three ranch hands rounding up the horses by the river-bank. They seemed to be in a good mood. They were laughing loudly and pretending to fight, swatting each other with their hats. Inside the house, someone turned on the TV.

"He'd been toying with the idea of writing a book for ages," said Mary Ann. "Probably ever since he arrived in America, because I remember him mentioning it to me in San Francisco, the first time we went out together. But he didn't do anything about it until the day we went to see the carvings made by the Basque shepherds in Humboldt County. You know about those carvings, don't you? They're figures and inscriptions carved with knives on tree trunks." I did know about them. I'd seen a program on the amerikanoak, the Basques in America, on Basque TV. "At first," she went on, "David was really happy, and all he talked about was what those inscriptions meant, about the need every human being has to leave his or her mark, to say 'I was here.' Suddenly, though, he changed his mind. He'd just spotted something on one of the trees which he found really disturbing. There were two figures. He told me they were two boxers and that one of them was a Basque and that he hated him. I can't remember his name right now." Mary Ann closed her eyes and searched her memory. "Wait a moment," she said, standing up. "I've been sorting through his things and I think I know now where I can find the photo we took of that tree. I'll be right back."

It was getting dark, but there was still some light in the sky and a few clouds lit by the sun, small, round, pink clouds, like the little cotton wool balls you might use to plug your ears. Below the ranch, the trees and the granite rocks blurred into one, as if their shadows were all made of the same material, shadows that filled the riverbank, where there were now no more horses or ranch hands wearing cowboy hats. The loudest sound was the voice of a TV presenter describing a terrible fire near Stockton.

Mary Ann turned on the porch light and handed me a photograph of a tree trunk. It showed two figures with their fists raised as if squaring up to fight. The drawing was fairly crude, and time had so distorted the lines that they could have been two bears, but next to the figure, the shepherd had carved their names, along with the date of the fight and the city where it took place: "Paulino Uzcudun–Max Baer. 4–VII–1931. Reno."

"I'm not surprised David was upset," I said. "Paulino Uzcudun always sided with the Spanish fascists. He was one of those people who claimed that the Basques themselves had been responsible for destroying Guernica." Mary Ann watched me in silence. Then she told me what she remembered: "When we came back from Humboldt County, David showed me an old photo in which his father appeared along with that same boxer and with some other people. He said it had been taken on the day the sports ground in Obaba was formally opened. 'Who are these people?' I asked him. 'Some of them were murderers,' he said. I was surprised because that was the first time he'd ever spoken about anything like that. 'And who were the others? Thieves?' I said, half joking. 'Probably,' he said. The next day, when I came back from school, I found him in the study, setting out on his desk the files he'd brought with him to America. 'I've decided to make my own carving,' he said, by which he meant this book."

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Excerpted from The Accordionist's Son by Bernardo Atxaga, Margaret Jull Costa. Copyright © 2003 Bernardo Atxaga. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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