Guernica (22 page)

The bodies they could recover were laid fl at, shoulder to shoulder, with tarps or cloth pulled up to their necks. Heads were
left exposed to allow identification. The undead shuffled past, staring into the faces, praying to find loved ones and praying
not to find loved ones.

Many of the unidentified had been hastily interred in mass graves, making an accurate casualty count and complete identification
forever impossible. But the real work of clearing the debris had not yet started. From parts of town, structures that teetered
at delicate angles finally collapsed, causing skittish rescuers to look up in fear that the planes had returned.

Across the street from what had been the Hotel Julian, Mendiola saw the burned shell of the stout wooden carriage his friend
Miguel Navarro had built for his daughter. He turned it upright, slowly. Scorched black and empty. He turned toward the hotel
and almost tripped on the body of a child. No, it was several children. He could not tell how many.

He joined in with crews excavating the tons of concrete that formerly had been a hotel. He was the one who found her. He still
thought of her as Miren Ansotegui, Justo and Mariangeles’s daughter, although he knew her better now as Miguel’s wife. He
forced his eyes closed and he concentrated. Memories flipped like pages in his mind. Miren dancing; Miren with her parents
at the festivals; Miren on her wedding day; Miren dancing again. With as much respect as he could summon, he removed her body—she
was so light—and laid it in the line with the others. He returned to the pile in search of Catalina. But there were so many
children there, dozens from the school who had been taken to the hotel and had been caught in that doorway. They would never
be identified.

The rains came then, helping the firefighters subdue most of the stubborn fires. At the point of collapse, Mendiola joined
a small group of exhausted men who stumbled up the hill to one of the few places that had gone untouched by bombs and fire.
They slumped to the ground and fell instantly asleep beneath the leafy shelter of the ancient oak tree.

He slashed his first sketches across blue paper, making them look as if they’d been done by a knife rather than a pencil.
In these rages, the connection between the passion and the art was direct. A wounded horse took shape, followed by an enraged
bull with a long-winged bird on its back. From a window, a woman leaned out and cast lamplight onto the scene.

On that first day, the primary elements of what would become the final composition assumed their places. There were puzzles
to be solved, problems of angles and perspective, along with the addition of the hidden and the mysterious. But a horse, a
bull, a fallen warrior, a mother with a dead child, and the woman holding the lamp were all there. These would be his cornerstone
symbols, and they’d be offered in a stark vocabulary of black and white and grays. There would be foreground and background,
shadows and light, and narrative, but no explanations.

His second day of work on the project was a long, frenzied repeat of the first. Exhausted and drained, the artist then put
down his pencils to allow the newborn characters a rest after their difficult deliveries.

CHAPTER 19

For the first time since Miguel renounced fishing in the sea, monsters attacked him in his sleep. In his dream, it was autumn;
the alders along his favorite stream had turned yellow and the weather was cool. But the wood fires in the valley smelled
of something harsh, like chemicals.

The trout hit his hook with surprising firmness and he pulled them in with a struggle, but when he attempted to unhook them,
they bit into his hands with jagged teeth, like those of the small sharks they sometimes caught in the nets at home. Each
chewed away at his hands, gnawing at his bones. He called to Justo but there was no reply. Then he heard his mother singing
in the streets . . . “For the love of God, arise!” Ah, it was time to get out of bed and head to mass before joining
patroia
and Dodo on the boat. But he could not arise.

Miguel Navarro had been struck by a flying brick from a nearby building that bounced off the rubble pile and caught him on
the side of the head. Mrs. Arana had dragged him off the mound of concrete and wood by herself.

His head injury was not a concern—in fact, it was a blessing, as it halted his digging through the collapsed building. His
fingers bled a great deal, but the loss of blood was not lethal. Of greater danger was sepsis from his injuries. For more
than a day Miguel lay in a basement hallway of the Carmelite convent, his unconsciousness deafening him to the cries of the
burn victims and the death gasps of those irreducibly broken. Many could not be saved by the few medical personnel and were
too far gone to warrant the expenditure of anesthetics, supplies of which were limited. Those doomed by blood loss or tissue
damage were summarily patched and treated only with extreme unction in a back hall where the white tile walls had been stained
by blood.

Anonymous as the others coated in the dark gray stucco of blood and concrete dust, the young man with the mangled hands was
a low priority for the few available surgeons and was allowed to fl oat through his troubled unconsciousness for several days.

When he finally examined Miguel’s hands, the surgeon saw where the skin and muscle fiber had been torn off and how far down
the exposed bones were abraded. The patient was not burned; the fingers were not blown off by an explosion. This was like
nothing he had seen.

“Anybody know what happened to this man?” the surgeon asked.

“He was digging through the concrete and glass trying to find his wife,” a nurse said.

The surgeon looked over his mask at the nurse and then up at the patient’s face. “He did this to himself?”

“He was trying to find his wife,” the nurse repeated.

“The fingers have more nerve endings than the genitals,” the surgeon told the nurse with clinical dryness.

With the bones shredded to the marrow, the chance of infection or embolism was high, as was the possibility that fragments
could enter his circulatory system and create a fatal blockage.

The surgeon examined the man’s face again. He was young; to amputate both hands would be to sentence him to a difficult life.
He decided that the most damaged fingers, the first two of each hand, required amputation. For thumbs, he might be able to
create crude stumps by stitching skin over the remaining bone. There was enough left there to allow him to pinch objects,
if nothing more. The two outside fingers of each hand could be saved almost intact, and with the short thumbs, he’d at least
have the capacity to grasp objects. The surgeon hoped that the man was not someone who built things with his hands.

* * *

Justo Ansotegui smelled his wife Mariangeles in bed beside him. He had loved that scent since she began getting the soap from
Alaia Aldecoa. She smelled so much like when she came in from the meadows or after she cooked a meal at Errotabarri.

“Justo, Justo,” she said. He had to awaken soon, with so much to do, but if he lay there long enough he might arise to the
smell of chorizos sizzling in a skillet of fried eggs. Maybe she’d make green peppers for lunch and then lamb and her special
mint jelly for dinner. But now he thought of the chorizos frying with eggs. He loved that smell only slightly less than that
of Mariangeles’s freshly scrubbed neck.

“Justo, Justo.” He rolled his head toward Mariangeles’s scent and opened his eyes to look out a partially open window at a
blooming tree outside.

“Justo, Justo.”

It was Xabier.

He looked again toward the fresh smell and realized he wasn’t in his bedroom. And Mariangeles was not beside him. And his
senses were dulled as if he’d been drunk at a feast day, and he wanted to do nothing but go back to bed and to sleep and to
smell Mariangeles and the chorizos.

“Justo.”

Xabier kept tugging him away from Mariangeles. Spikes of light from a bare bulb overhead pained his eyes; the taste of ether
burned the back of his throat.

“Justo.”

His brother leaned against the bed, wearing full vestments. Was he there to perform last rites? He felt bad enough. “What
happened?”

“Justo, God bless you, you’re going to be fine.”

“What happened?”

“You were trapped in a building.”

It was enough to trigger memories of the bombing, and the woman with the backward head, and the baker’s wife. But no more.

“Justo, they had to amputate your arm, there was nothing they could do to save it,” Xabier said.

Justo looked to his left side. Although he felt his fingers, hand, and arm, and sent the mental instructions for them to wiggle
and move, he saw nothing there beside him. It was gone. He gave the matter some thought.

“It wasn’t my best arm,” Justo said.

Xabier nearly laughed.

“Does Mariangeles know about this?”

“Justo . . . I’m sorry . . .” Xabier knew there was no other way. “She was killed by a bomb.”

Killed by a bomb. He had to keep asking, to be done with this.

“Miren?”

“Justo . . . I’m sorry . . .”

“Catalina?”

“Justo, there were so many little ones at the market . . . yes, gone.”

Justo rolled his head toward the window and looked out. He was sick. Xabier knelt to clean the mess.

He’d been such a fool to think that being strong would protect his family.

Xabier had returned from Paris immediately after meeting with the press, and Aguirre’s aides had already located Justo and
compiled a report for him on his family’s fate. As it turned out, Xabier had entered the train station plaza in time to witness
Mariangeles’s death, although he had no idea she was in that first cluster of victims. Miren had been found and quickly identified
because everyone in town knew her. He was assured that she died without suffering.

Legarreta told of Justo’s foolish bravery. He lay for many hours trapped and bleeding, with his arm disarticulated behind
his head from the weight of an oak beam. With the help of Bilbaino fire-men, Legarreta arranged a series of supports and braces
and extracted victims and survivors.

“Where am I?” Justo asked after his brother finished cleaning the floor. He did not actually care where he was, but to speak
and listen was a defense against thinking.

“In the hospital in Bilbao. They stabilized you in Guernica and put you under to make the trip here. There wasn’t much they
could do there and the doctors here had no choice but to amputate.”

Justo looked again at his left side, where the sheet lay flat.

“My ring?”

“I got it for you,” Xabier said. He had arrived from France on the morning of Justo’s amputation. The surgeon asked if Xabier
wished to bless his brother before the operation. He did, and when he dared examine the grotesquely twisted appendage, he
saw purple flesh swollen around his wedding ring.

“Can you get off his ring?” Xabier asked the surgeon.

“I’d have to cut it and pry it off because the tissue is so swollen and damaged around it.”

“Don’t do that,” Xabier said, bothered by the symbolism. “After you remove the arm, could you then cut the finger to get at
the ring?”

The surgeon nodded. “He won’t feel a thing.”

As Xabier waited for Justo’s surgery to finish, he walked the crowded hallways and offered blessings to patients. After several
hours, the surgeon appeared and presented Xabier with the ring, intact and freshly sterilized.

“Was the surgery a success?” Xabier asked.

“I think so, but it took twice as long as I expected,” the doctor said. “I’ve never seen an arm like that. It was like sawing
through a ham shank. But he should be fine. He should consider himself fortunate; that beam could have taken off his head.
As it was, that injury would have killed most men.”

At his brother’s bedside, Xabier took the ring from a pocket and put it on the third finger of Justo’s right hand. No, he
thought, I don’t think Justo will consider himself fortunate.

When the canvas arrived and was stretched onto its frame, an odd happenstance surprised Picasso. The expansive studio had
no problem accommodating the twenty-five-foot breadth of the canvas, but at nearly twelve feet high, it didn’t fit vertically
against a wall. Instead, Picasso had to wedge the frame against the rafters at a slight angle and keep it in position with
a series of shims he whittled. He worried: Would the angle alter the perspective?

Upon this tilted canvas, Picasso began transferring his pencil studies. The sketches on paper had grown from the vague geometry
of the mural into detailed explorations of each component. A cartoonish horse came to life next to a mother with a dead baby
draped over her arms, the baby’s eyes open to display pinpoint pupils. The artist repeatedly sketched the horse, the woman,
and a fallen warrior, sometimes in pencil, sometimes in paints.

The bull was turned and transmuted, assuming a thick face with giant nostrils and huge, muscular cheeks atop a pair of human
lips. Across the prominent browridge spanned a tangled pair of eyebrows, thick as a Basque man’s. Teardrops started appearing
everywhere—teardrop nostrils, teardrop eyes—along with sharply conical tongues and ears.

With a thin brush and black ink, Picasso outlined the images on the canvas. He used a ladder or a long stick to hold his brushes
for the upper reaches. With the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up to his elbows, cigarette in his left hand, Picasso crouched
deeply to work on the lower reaches. His hair, combed from low on the right side to cover his balding crown, kept slipping
out of place and falling across his forehead.

Alaia Aldecoa’s blindness saved her life. As she stumbled away from the sounds of successive explosions, the earth opened
and swallowed her. She had tumbled into a bomb crater several yards deep, a depression that protected her from the force of
a bomb that would have vaporized her if she’d been at street level. Dazed and losing consciousness, bleeding from her fall,
she lay balled up at the bottom of the crater until long after the attack. She awakened coughing, choking on the dust she
had inhaled. Rescuers heard her at the bottom of the pit and carried her to an aid center that had been set up outside the
Carmelite convent.

The minor head wound and concussion she suffered in the fall served merciful narcotic purposes, numbing her to the sounds
of the fires and collapsing buildings and the smells of incinerated beasts. When two nuns began to wash her wounds in cool
water, she regained consciousness.

“What was that? What happened? Where—”

“There was an attack,” one nun answered. “Be quiet, you’ve been injured.”

“My friend Miren; have you seen her? Is she all right? Miren Ansotegui.”

The sister wiping Alaia’s face with the cloth subtly looked to the nun next to her. She shook her head slightly.

“We don’t know yet, dear,” the first sister lied. “You should rest now.”

Alaia gladly slipped away.

Several days later, a squad of nuns carried her across town to the Santa Clara convent, where her old friends once again took
in an abandoned orphan.

With the two smallest fingers extruding from each bandaged hand, Miguel struggled to open the door at Errotabarri. The pain
caused him to suck in deep breaths and pinch shut his eyes until they watered. People had been inside—wandering troops, perhaps,
or maybe just hungry refugees—leaving a small mess. Nothing important to them had been taken or damaged. The floral apron
was on its nail. Miren’s dark braid hung from the corner of the mantel.

When he saw the hair, his chest constricted. He felt the exact outline of his heart, and the pain made it difficult to breathe.
He could not look at it, but he could not take it down. He would have to decide what to do with it before Justo returned.
It would be the first thing he would see. But would he be more hurt by its sight or by its absence? At some point they would
discuss it. Or maybe they never would.

The seed corn drying on the crossbeams was gone; the medicinal herbs were gone. Another small meal for somebody. He went outside
and around to the ground floor. There were no animals in the stalls, of course. There was a flash of gray and white in one
corner, and Miguel saw a rabbit seeking shelter beneath a shock of rotted straw. He could kill it with his slingshot . . .
but he’d left that on the mountain when the bombing started. It was still up there with his crosscut saw. I’ll go get them
later, he thought, as if he could use either.

After leaving the hospital, Miguel first walked to his house to find that it had been gutted by fire, which caused the roof
to collapse, leaving a stucco shell of scorched-black walls encasing a pile of shattered tiles. A few tools remained undamaged
in his workshop, but the furniture, the things he had built for Cat . . . the bed . . . all were gone. Little more than the
charred hinges and lock flap remained of the chest he had made as a wedding present to his wife. For Miren on their wedding
day. Miren.

The painted horns of the hobby-ram were intact, but he could find little else.

In the streets, he saw others stumbling about just as he had, searching for things that no longer existed. All scanned the
ground in front of them as they walked. At his feet, Miguel saw letters. So many letters and papers. And pieces of broken
crockery. Somebody’s cracked spectacles. Unmatched shoes. Shoes everywhere, but never in pairs. Splashes of color among the
gray. Splashes of color on the paper. How could there have been so much paper? Did the bombers drop paper to feed the fires?
Black water from the fire-men pooled in low spots and smelled of wet ash. He saw a hair ribbon still knotted in a bow. And
more paper, burned around the edges, soggy in the puddles.