Excerpt from the Beginning

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 close 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 him 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 hate 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 abelexte 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 is,” I said. “Rantxo, it is then,” said Mary Ann. The man shrugged and returned to 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 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, Efraín, 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 some of your language.” “In that case, then, I will. Although I still fell 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 grace. 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 the people in Obaba said when it was snowing softly.

From The Accordionist's Son by Bernardo Atxaga, translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Translation © 2007 by Margaret Jull Costa. All rights reserved.