A Sewer of Deceit

   Harry set little Nicky up in another safe-house when he was hatched, until his mama had escaped la Ventas. Three months later she had been taken to the safe house by the bribed Padre. Their first contact was a fiery one. Harry’d gotten the news that his efforts were successful via a phone call from the same bribed Padre. She was taking a bath when the wet nurse let Harry in the apartment.

   “You can wait here, senor.” She gestured towards a straight backed chair next to Nicky’s cradle.

   Harry didn’t even think of lifting the screen over the cradle to look in at his son like any proud father would.

   Harry had counted on his betrayal being a secret and that she wouldn’t know of it. It wouldn't be so bad, he thought, that his affair with Iniga would pick up where it had left off before she was arrested. He sat and waited as the wet nurse knocked on the bathroom door, “Senora, your husband is here.”

   “I don’t want to see him!”

   The ruse that Iniga and Harry were lovers, or even friends, dissipated as he crossed the room and opened the bathroom door. He stood in awe, stunned, at the raw beauty of Iniga’s naked body. She looked better, even after the deprivation of prison, than the last time he’d seen her and he longed to hold her in his arms. “La Ventas treated you well?”

   She was still startled at the sudden opening and reached for a gun that was no longer there, as one would have always been before her arrest. “What makes you imagine that you are welcome here?” she spat out the words with contempt.

   “Is this the gratitude I get for bustin' you loose?” Harry knew this was a weak thing to ask but he had no words for the unaccustomed guilt her indignant posture extracted from his gut.

   “You are alive now because I have no way to kill you, Harry,” she showed her palms as the hatred seethed from the cupid lips he longed to press to his. Those cold steel-grey eyes diverted his eyes to her firm breasts, and then to a newly stitched scar that went down the length of her belly: a Caesarian birth, no doubt.

   The conviction of her words left Harry with little to say. Words weren’t his strong suit and neither was the expression of emotion. He understood that she knew what had happened but he tried just one time to explain, “Alesander is in Biarritz.”

   “That was your trade?” she looked up at him.

   “Yes,” and his chest ached to lift her… to draw her body to his.

    “Go, and take Nicholas with you,” she spoke with a determined voice but her steel grey eyes welled with tears, “I’m going back.”

   “No, I won’t take him, he needs a mother.” Harry made a desperate plea to what he imagined to be her maternal instincts.

   “Okay, I’ll keep him for now, but you’ll never see him again.” She countered.

   “You’ll die in the Pyrenees, Iniga, the U.S. has a base in Rota now,” he had to make this one last argument, though he knew it would not mover her. “The CIA is very good at taking care of insurgents. Even if you win… look at Iran…” referring to Mohammad Mosaddegh’s parliamentary government before the CIA re-installed the Shah in 1953, “you think they will tolerate a Basque government run by anarchists, or, most likely, Communists?”

   “No, Harry, my time in La Ventas convinced me. My world is not yours,” she then added, “I can’t go back like you and your kind. I can’t drop out and drop in as I please, like you; Alesander and I are guidari. We counted ourselves as dead the minute we picked up a weapon to resist.”

   "Alesander, I have good reason to believe, is retiring in Biarritz. His stay in Carabanchel convinced him," Harry lay down his trump card hoping she'd...

   "He will never retire until he is dead," she fired back with a hand she knew she ought best fold.

   “So, you are convinced you want martyrdom. You want to die in a worthless Jihad and you choose this over motherhood?”


   He could see that he'd hit her in the chest with a hammer and that the blow only caused her face to set in a concrete resolve that no hammer could bust up.

   Harry remembered the first time he and Iniga met in a cabin in the Pyrenees during the war. She was only a teen then with Alesander’s guerrilla group; a smatchet on her belt,her frame so small that any rifle would outweigh her, but she carried a full pack and a fierce determination he'd just seen again. He let his eyes caress her body one more time before closing the door. 

   He heard her from shout from behind the bathroom door as he left the apartment and his son, Nicky, “Adios, Bird Dog, we are not the same as you say, you are a whore!”

   “Adios, my fiery angel.” He wasn’t used to poetic adieus and he hoped that leaving Nicky with her would temper her revolutionary fervor. She could have left Spain and Franco’s oppression for Southern France like Alesander in Biarritz, but it would not be so. They would not see each other for over four decades… as she lay dying.
 
   Nicky was lost to him too. She arranged for her wet nurse to care for him. When the wet nurse immigrated to the US with Nicky she put the bastardo, her ticket for immigration, on the steps of a Catholic orphanage with his birth certificate in a manila envelope pinned to his blanket a few days after her feet hit the ground off a Greyhound Bus in Los Angeles. A life begun in the sewer of betrayal, abandonment and deceit, left Nicky with a perspective on life that might be understood under these circumstances.