Ghosts of Spain (41 page)

The Basques have always had their foreign admirers. Hemingway was one. ‘These Basques are swell people,’ says a character in
The Sun Also Rises.
George Steer, the twenty-seven-year-old
Times
journalist who told the world that the Germans had
carpet-bombed
Guernica during the Civil War, warned future visitors to mind their tongues. ‘There are few things the patient Basque won’t tolerate, and one is the suggestion that he is Spanish,’ he wrote in
The Tree of Gernika
in 1938. Modern Bascophiles soon capture the anti-nationalist mood music arriving from the rest of Spain. This reached a crescendo under Aznar, when nationalism
and terrorism were often – and unjustly – treated as one and the same thing. It is easy, however, to swing too far in the opposite direction. Mark Kurlansky’s
The Basque History of the World
is, in most ways, a brilliant and informed journey through the delights of Basque cuisine, history, navigation, whale-hunting, fishing, music, customs and politics. The failure of a temporary and unilateral ETA ceasefire in 1998 is, however, laid firmly on Madrid. Kurlansky produces the most absurd of reasons. ‘How would Spain justify its huge armed forces, Guardia Civil and police if it no longer had enemies?’ he asks.

Gotzone Mora is right about one thing. Silence makes the Basque Country different. Spain is, in many ways, a journalist’s paradise. Everybody has an opinion and everybody is prepared to share it with you. It makes the basic task of reporting a simple and enjoyable matter. Approaching strangers in the street in Bilbao or San Sebastián, however, I often find them politely declining to answer my questions. Polls have shown that a quarter of Basques believe they are not free to talk about politics.

It is not just politics that are dangerous ground. Start discussing anything from Basque history to folklore and you stand a chance of offending someone almost immediately. It is often wise, in fact, to find out which side of the nationalist fence the person you are talking to sits on before opening your mouth about anything other than the weather, food or relative merits of Athletico de Bilbao and Real Sociedad football clubs. Just by starting this chapter off with an avowed anti-nationalist like Gotzone Mora, for example, is to risk alienating a significant number of Basques.

History is one of the worst areas to venture into. Basques outdo even other Spaniards when stretching their political rows back in time. ‘In conversations with Basques, it is not unusual to hear expressions such as “that only happened 5,000 years ago”,’ Basque anthropologist Joseba Zulaika observes. Another academic expert, Roger Collins, points out that the ‘politicisation of normally abstruse and
recherché
anthropological arguments about the Stone Age’ underpins nationalist ideology. ‘Few statements
relating to people, their history and their language can be treated as politically neutral,’ he warns. ‘Few statements? None at all,’ adds
Dirty War, Clean Hands
author Paddy Woodworth.

There is another characteristic at work, however, when Basques stay silent, for they are famously timid. ‘Short on words but long on deeds,’ was the description of Basques given by a character in Tirso de Molina’s seventeenth-century play
Prudence in a Woman.
‘A Basque, however courageous he is in the wild, is timid and shy when confronted by man,’ agreed the Basque writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno more than two centuries later.

Basques have a reputation as adventurers, sailors and out-doorsmen. Kurlansky claims they made it to North America before Cabot ‘discovered’ it in 1497, but kept quiet about it because of the rich fisheries they found off Newfoundland. The first person to circumnavigate the globe was the Basque Juan Sebastián Elcano – who took over command of Magellan’s ships when he was killed by Filipino tribesmen in 1520. Basque sports are rugged, outdoors stuff, too. They have axe-wielding, log-chopping a
izkolariak
, stone-lifting
harrijasotzaileak
and teams for
soka-tira
, tug-of-war. Broad-shouldered oxen, meanwhile, compete dragging heavy weights in
Idi-probak
trials. These are as much trials of endurance as they are of strength. Basques bet, too. Sometimes the bets are laid between competitors. In
Vacas
, Julio Medem’s film of Basque wars, cows and rivalries, the source of one hero’s wealth is his skill with the axe.

If a Basque is shy when confronted by man, he (or she) is reputed to be even more timid when confronted by the opposite sex. ‘It’s a straightforward choice,’ the Basque comic Oscar Terol explains. ‘Either you can be Basque, or you can have sex.’ This has something to do with what Unamuno once called a ‘puritanical’ Basque approach to religion. ‘Priests have told me that they know, from the confessional, that the exceedingly rare cases of adultery that occur in our mountains are owed, in great part, to the woman’s anxiety to have children, when the husband does not give them,’ he said. Traditionally Basques have often sought the company of their own sex. The
cuadrilla
– the same-sex group of
friends who meet almost daily for a drink or two – can still be seen doing the rounds of bars in the evenings.

Nationalisms are, by definition, exclusive – despite the loud denials here in the Basque Country and in Catalonia. That makes them unintelligible to most outsiders, a red rag to other Spaniards and a cross to bear for fellow Basques who do not share their creed.

Many people blame one man for the fear, violence and hatred that runs through the Basque Country. Sabino Arana, the father of Basque nationalism, died a century ago. He had a short but eventful and controversial political life, creating the Basque Nationalist Party along the way. Today, his words and ideas continue to fire both nationalism and ETA. A hundred years after his death he has become one of the most argued over figures in Spanish history. I decided to visit the foundation that honours his name in Artea, a village on the old road inland from Bilbao up towards the regional capital Vitoria and the plains of Alava.

On the way there, I first looped around Bilbao to look at Neguri, Getxo and Las Arenas – the wealthy outer suburbs of greater Bilbao. Large stone mansions stand on the shores of the Nervión estuary where it opens out to the Bay of Biscay. The mansions look across the water at a south shore populated with dockside cranes, piles of scrap metal and smokestack industries. This is Bilbao’s wealth staring across the water at its own source. In Las Arenas I drove my car onto the wobbly platform that hangs from the vast iron structure of the Vizcaya Bridge. This is the world’s first ‘transporter bridge’, erected in 1893. Only thirteen of them were ever built, with seven of them in Britain. It is a monument to the Basque Country’s – and Bilbao’s – place at the heart of Spain’s (late nineteenth-century) industrial revolution. A platform for half a dozen cars and a hundred or so foot passengers hangs from the 150-ft-high iron structure that spans the murky Nervión. It runs, swaying gently, along rails atop the structure. A dozen cables kept us suspended above the river for the two minutes it took to deliver me into the industrial left bank neighbourhood of Portugalete.

Locally mined iron ore and timber from Basque forests provided the raw materials of this industrial revolution. Hungry Spaniards from further south provided much of the manpower – for a miserable life of twelve hour days and twenty-five-year lifespans.

For Spaniards from elsewhere, one of the things that most hurts about separatism and nationalism in the Basque Country is that these are now amongst the richest people in the land. Per capita disposable household income in the Basque Country is the highest in Spain. It is not the poor who seek emancipation, but the rich.

As I drove on to Artea, I recalled the people I had met several years earlier, when I embarked on a project to make an oral record of Basque violence. Inspired by Tony Parker’s
May The Lord in His Mercy be Kind to Belfast
, I wanted to give voice to those who lived the violence directly – both victims and perpetrators – letting each speak for themselves in their own words. The project did not prosper, but the research immersed me for a few months in the suffering caused by Basque violence.

‘The trouble with the Spaniards is that they have never stopped being
conquistadores
,’ said the barman in one village near Vitoria as he invited me to a
chato
, a small glass, of red wine and some slices of
chorizo
. ‘They think they are better than us.’ The
conquistadores
he was talking about were just two dozen miles away across the plain in the Castilian province of Burgos. The bar belonged to Blanca, a small, strong-willed and bitter woman in her mid-seventies. The youngest two of her seven children were ETA men. One was in jail. The other was in a niche at the cemetery after a police shoot-out. For Blanca, her sons were wronged angels. ‘Nobody can say my boys are bad,’ she swore. ‘They never tried to harm anybody. Quite the opposite, in fact. When something needed doing here in the village, they always there to do it.’ They were, she insisted, ‘
bellas personas
’.

José, an
etarra
(Eta member) who had been let out of jail with medical problems, told me he was pleased to see a new generation of activists appearing. He had been jailed after being caught taking part in the kidnapping, for ransom, of a businessman. He
refused to see this as a form of torture. As proof that a kidnapping was no suffering for the victim, he told me anecdotes about how they had managed to play the card game
mus
with their captive.
Mus
requires a certain amount of secret nodding and winking between partners, something that, he admitted, had been complicated by the fact that he and the other
etarras
were wearing masks. More sinisterly, however, he was against a unilateral end to the violence. Basques, he claimed, had been fighting for independence for five hundred years. ‘We should not give way out of tiredness. We have to pass the baton on to the next generation. There are youngsters now who are ready,’ he said.

If the stories of those on ETA’s side were hard, those of the victims were simply heartbreaking. In Seville I met María Dolores, the widow of a police officer who had been machine-gunned to death with three other colleagues. A distraught police sergeant, a friend of her husband, had grabbed a pistol from a colleague and blown his own brains out in front of the four coffins. ‘I think it was a coherent thing to do, given the circumstances,’ she told me. ‘It is hard to see something like that, the shot in the head and the pool of blood … Those who practise violence make you live situations that are beyond belief. It is something you don’t even see in the films.’ María Dolores spent the next seven months dressed in black, without talking, almost without eating and with a permanent fever. ‘The doctors did lots of tests, but they could not say why I had that fever. The body is a mystery. I guess it was the
fiebre de tristeza
, the fever of sadness,’ she said.

A decade after losing his wife and two daughters, aged thirteen and fifteen, in a bomb attack on Barcelona’s Hipercor supermarket that killed twenty-one people, Álvaro wept as he told me the story of his search for them. He eventually found them, charred black by smoke, in a morgue. ‘I told them it couldn’t be them, that my daughter was white, and my wife too. But eventually I had to admit it. It was my wife and daughter,’ he said. A few hours later he was shown a third body. It was his other daughter. ‘I don’t trust anybody any more. I have made a world for myself, which is me, on my own,’ he told me.

Some victims fantasised about ways of exacting revenge. A wheelchair-bound former Civil Guard officer – whose lack of bodily control meant he wore diapers that needed constant changing – still recalled the hatred in the face of his attackers. He suggested to me that
etarras
should be hung live on television. He also showed me a photograph of his uniformed daughter – one of the first women to have joined the Civil Guard.

Rosa, the widow of a murdered
ertzaina
– a police officer in the Basque government’s own force – had had to cope with the fact that he had been shot while sitting at some traffic lights in his car, with her fourteen-year-old son sitting beside him. Her husband came from a
euskaldun
– a
euskara
-speaking – family. His grandmother, Rosa told me, had her hair shaved off as punishment for talking
euskara
. But even ‘good’ Basques – ethnic, nationalist,
euskara
-speaking – can be in ETA’s sights. It is not just the
españolistas
who are targets. Graffiti that appeared on some walls in the Basque Country soon after her husband’s killing read: ‘
Cabezón, devuelvenos la bala
’, ‘Hard-head, give us the bullet back.’ ‘My only worry is that something might happen to my children … That they might go the wrong way because of what happened, and start fighting from the other side,’ she said. Fortunately, if we except GAL and the dirty war, no one here seems tempted by that last option.

Taking the valley road up towards Artea, I was reminded that it was not just Bilbao that took to industry. Up and down the narrow, steep valleys of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, workshops and small factories, many making machine parts, thrive. A tradition of working iron in small, water-powered
ferrerías
extended back at least to the fourteenth century – with some three hundred of them in place by the sixteenth century. The Basques had, however, mainly been farming people. Their system of inheritance by primogeniture ensured that property – normally the family farmhouse, the
caserío
or
baserri
– remained undivided. The road to Artea followed one of these valleys. Factories, warehouses, workshops and sawmills were dotted along the valley floor. Lone cyclists, wearing the lurid Lycra colours of some local
team, pedalled uphill through the truck fumes. Basques are as obsessed by bicycles as they are by balls. The five times Tour de France winner Miguel Induráin emerged from these pedal-obsessed valleys. His imitators continue to risk life and limb amongst the traffic every day.