Northern Spain, 1985

Illustration by Pedro Gomes

When Koldo Bastarretxea turned eighteen, he received both his license and a job. He became a driver in the first fleet of ambulances to operate out of the hospital in Galdakao, which had opened, coincidentally, only a couple of hours before his birthday. He cruised into his own party in his parents’ apartment with some withered balloons from the reception at the hospital, his employment paperwork, and a certificate from his driving instructor. With his generous lips, and these papers in hand, he kissed both Amaia and her sister on the cheek.

He had known for a long time that he would not go to university, he told them that night, during their first drive together in the ambulance. Luisa sat in the passenger seat next to him, and Amaia perched in the back, on the low cot that she had pushed up against the wall of the cabin. On some later rides she lay down, as though she were the patient, and she listened only to the sound of the vehicle’s motor, and the ribbon of Koldo and Luisa’s conversations as their words bloated and broke up in the breeze.

On that first night Koldo had continued to explain why he wasn’t going to school, but Amaia soon lost the trail of his sentence to the open window. All spring they had been hearing about the cells of insurgents meeting in the deadland between their towns, and by the end of the drive she had fully convinced herself of the most drastic possibility: that Koldo had stayed home to join ETA. It was only later, in their shared bedroom, that Luisa had explained to her that Koldo’s father managed a hat shop in Bilbao, and that Koldo had been planning to take over the business when he turned eighteen. Instead, his father had snubbed him, she said, and passed the whole thing on to Koldo’s younger brother, Iñaki. Jobless, without any other plans, Koldo became an ambulance driver nearly out of necessity.

“It was mean, and totally distasteful,” she said to Amaia that night. “To not even warn him, to one day hire Iñaki to work in the shop, and for Koldo to see them coming home together, both of them in their uniforms.”

They had been getting ready to go to sleep, and Luisa tossed a nightgown at Amaia, though of course she knew that her sister, who had been blind for their whole lives, would not catch it. The nightgown struck Amaia and fell to the floor.

“Sorry,” Luisa said. Her voice softened a little. “Anyway, you get it, right? His dad is kind of a bitch.” Amaia nodded. Behind her, she heard Luisa get into bed.

“Your boobs are getting bigger,” Luisa said as Amaia pulled her nightgown over her head. “Did you know that?” and then she said, “And Koldo is cuter than his brother anyway. I know you might not be able to tell, but he is.”

For a while, Amaia really believed that everyone could not see.

That period lasted until age five, or maybe six, when one afternoon their parents brought them to the thin riverside strip of sand in Kanala, which at that time was famously frequented only by families and nudists. The former took their children there to avoid the cold, turbulent waters of the sea, while the latter preferred it for the relative anonymity it offered, as it was, by lack of those same qualities, a shitty beach. Sitting out on that sand, Luisa had made some comment to Amaia about the sagging breasts of a woman who was lounging several meters away from them. Amaia had snorted, and whispered, “Look at the them,” in agreement, though at the time she understood only vaguely that what Luisa had observed with her eyes, Amaia, with her mind, had merely made up the experience of seeing.

Only later, when Luisa shrieked at the sight of a crab thrashing towards them through the sand, and she began yelling, “Get up Amaia! Don’t you see it,” did Amaia dazedly awaken to her deficit of sight: she saw no creature coming for her. Luisa was still calling out, shrieking from far away, when Amaia heard her mother running back from the shore. She felt her mother collecting her in a pair of long, wet arms, and then her dad’s voice, like always, entered into the conversation a while later. He said something like, “, what