Guernica (23 page)

The rebel troops were plentiful in the town, but there seemed to be no hostility or threat, and none made more than a casual
gesture toward him. They could see that Miguel was in no condition to offer resistance. His ban daged hands were pulled up
in a protective pose near his chest, like the squirrels he used to see when they sat up on their hind legs in the woods. He
unconsciously curled his torso over them to keep them from being jostled, leaving him to walk like an old man with a sagging
spine. Miguel felt no anger toward the troops. He did not connect them with those who’d done the damage to the town and his
family. They didn’t drop the bombs. They looked as dour as most of the townspeople; they exuded no sense of victory. They
wandered as aimlessly as the homeless; some of them were wounded and suffering as well.

When Miguel walked near people he knew, they exchanged nods, saying little or nothing. What was there to say? Who would benefit
from an accounting of comparative grief? I lost a husband and two sons and a business and a leg. Oh, that is terrible; I lost
a wife, a mother-in-law, two hands, a home . . . and a baby girl. A baby girl. Stop it, he told himself.

At first he wanted to find someone who could tell him what had happened to Miren and Catalina, where they had died and how.
Were they buried or just gone? But when he saw what was left of the town, he recognized the pointlessness. Details would be
more to carry. In his mind, they had just disappeared after leaving the house that afternoon. He would remember them as they
were at that moment.

Before leaving the hospital, Miguel decided that he would stay in Guernica, at Errotabarri, and help Justo as much as he could.
Since everyone in town knew Justo Ansotegui and had heard the story of him “lifting an entire building to save the baker’s
wife,” Miguel had been told of his condition soon after regaining consciousness. “Surgeons had to use a crosscut saw to amputate
that giant arm,” they said.

At least Justo has accomplished something, he thought. It will add to his legend.

Going home to Lekeitio was an option to consider; his parents would nurse him and feed him. His little sisters would care
for him. There would be fish to eat. But if he did, he would be the family victim, and he knew he could not tolerate that.
Araitz would open every door for him, Irantzu would want to feed him. The An-soteguis would be across the street, and they
had known Miren . . . Miren . . . much longer than he had; they would understand his grief and they would be smotheringly
solicitous. There would be reminders in Lekeitio, too.

Maybe he would go to America and start over there. Maybe he could find his old neighbor who’d gone there. Yes, there must
be great demand for four-fingered carpenters in America, he thought. No, he would go nowhere else; grief is not a matter of
geography. He needed to stay in Guernica. It would be the only place where he wasn’t an outsider. We are all forged of the
same alloy now, he thought.

But what he had known as Guernica was unrecognizable now. A deep crater occupied the plaza where they had danced. The streets
were clogged with the debris workmen stacked to be hauled away. He passed a man who had bought a chest of drawers from him
for his wife.

What to say to him? What to say to anybody? Nothing.

He had made his way slowly to Errotabarri, looking only at the ground where his next step would fall, careful not to walk
on the papers and the letters or the unmatched shoes. He had to get things in order for Justo’s return and somehow scratch
up something for them to eat. Together, they would try to heal. Perhaps together they had enough arms and fingers to sort
through what remained of their lives.

As he walked toward Errotabarri, he tried to conjure Miren, but he couldn’t. What would she say now? She could always read
his mind and steal his thoughts. She did that from the start. What now? What would she say now? “We’re all right,
astokilo
; look out for my father” and “Take good care of Alaia now; she needs you.”

Is Alaia alive? he wondered. How could she be?

And what would Miren say about the braid? What would she want him to do?

Dodo heard of the attack through the fishermen at the harbor. Their report, exaggerated through progressive retelling, was
that the town had been bombed to the ground, and those who were not blown up by the bombs were burned to death or machine-gunned.
Dodo thought first of his brother’s welfare and then of revenge. He urged his fishermen friends to set up a meeting with his
father and Josepe Ansotegui as soon as possible. He knew of no other way to learn the truth of who had lived and who had not.

Within a day, a friend ferried him in a small skiff to a rendezvous with the
Egun On
. Josepe and José María had tried to reach Guernica when they heard of the bombing but found the road blocked, and it wasn’t
until Father Xabier contacted them that they learned what happened. They linked arms with Dodo and told him the news.

“I envied Miguel for his marriage to Miren,” Dodo said. “No one deserved it more than he did. But I envied it. It seemed that
he had everything that he had ever wanted.”

“He did, son,” José María said. “He did. He had a wonderful little family.”

The past tense struck them all as they stood in a tight cluster on the deck of the bobbing boat.

“We don’t really know yet how badly injured he is,” José María said. “He lost some fingers trying to dig through the buildings
for Miren and Catalina.”

“You’d have had to kill him to get him to stop digging, I know that,” Dodo said. “Has he come home?”

“No, he wants to stay at Errotabarri and help Justo,” Josepe said.

Dodo squeezed them both, compressing the triangle, and moved toward his skiff.

“Tell him that as soon as he heals, if he wants to get away from Guernica, we can put him to work in the mountains here,”
Dodo said as he prepared to slip back into the smaller boat.

“This will take some time, son,” José María said.

“Well, I know he’s going to be upset,” Dodo said. “And I’m sure I can figure out some ways to help him deal with that.”

CHAPTER 20

For most of the previous day, the orphans had been shuttled on trains from Portugalete Station in Bilbao to the main docks
at Santurce. By the morning, most of them had marched up the gangplank of the SS
Habana
, holding hands like paper-doll cutouts. An aging single-stack passenger ship now converted to a troop transport, the
Habana
was harbored along the quay of the port that served Bilbao, making it a target for the Condor Legion or Italian bombers serving
the Nationalist rebels. That morning, rebel bombs fell into the river close enough to splash water on the
Habana
, but four thousand Basque children nonetheless were wedged on board and seemed thrilled to be leaving.

They were orphans of war dead or children of the displaced, and they were in jeopardy in Bilbao. Some were babes in arms who
had been taken aboard by the nurses and volunteers from the orphanages. Others were in their midteens. These tiny passengers
had not eaten enough and had seen too much, a combination that would only grow worse with the effects of the blockade, continued
bombing, and the anticipated rebel occupation. They had to be evacuated. Still hiding behind the shield of the Non-Intervention
Pact, the British government reluctantly agreed to evacuate the dispossessed children. But only the children.

Before the
Habana
cast off, Aguirre and Father Xabier boarded, Aguirre to assure the children that they would be gone for only a short time
and that this would be a great and memorable adventure, Xabier to bless their voyage and assure them that God was watching
over them.

Aguirre came away revived by their happy faces and awed by their resilience. They had been bombed, starved, and uprooted and
had endured the deaths of loved ones, but there was little apprehension and no apparent sadness. He told them to be proud
of being Basques, because every Basque was proud of them. They cheered the man in the black suit, although few had any idea
who he was.

“Do you believe they’ll be gone for only a few months?” Xabier pressed his friend when they stepped down onto the quay.

“I know that if they stay here they may be dead in the next few months, or even days.”

“Along with the rest of us?”

“Maybe,” the president acknowledged through the smile he forced as he waved to the children looking down from the ship.

The children were too young to recognize the significance of having the
Habana
as their lifeboat. It had other qualities that were more immediately appreciated. It carried food. Many had teetered on the
verge of starvation for months. They were fed eggs and meats and grain breads. They gorged themselves and hoarded as much
as would fit into their pockets. The richness of the food and the vast amounts caused many of them to become ill. An early
summer squall whipped up the waters in the Bay of Biscay, and very early on in what would become a turbulent forty-eight-hour
passage, many grew seasick.

By the evening of the second day, the
Habana
dropped anchor off Fawley, near the Southampton harbor, and was boarded by more doctors volunteering to give medical examinations
to the children. Aside from the minor illnesses during the passage, the children were sound and in high spirits. From the
deck, they saw the houses along the inlet decorated with flowers and fronted by immaculately tended gardens. It seemed a fantasy
world, so apart from and beyond what they had known, and they repeatedly screamed, “
Viva Inglaterra!
” They docked the next morning to the musical accompaniment of the Salvation Army band. Because of their uniforms, the children
called them the “lady policemen.”

The reception camp featured a banner stretched above a dirt pathway proclaiming it the Basque Childrens’ Camp. A crop of five
hundred circular tents, peaked by center pikes, sprouted in the field. The children were bathed, given further examinations,
and fed by a co alition of volunteers.

The following morning, the
Southern Daily Echo
newspaper presented an article headlined SINCERE AND HEARTY GREETING: “We appreciate the trials through which they must have
passed in recent weeks and hope that there in the quiet green fields of Hampshire they will find rest, contentment and—more
important still—peace.”

In contrast to their government’s position, generous locals were glad to “intervene.” These were children, after all, babies.
Many received new clothes from Marks & Spencer and chocolate from Cadbury. Within months, they were sent not back to the Basque
Country for repatriation but to more permanent camps in Stone-ham and Cambridge and Pampisford and dozens of other towns that
supported Basque children’s colonies. They continued their schoolwork and play and began the process of recovering from the
things they had seen.

The civil war continued to plague their country, while England was peaceful, if uneasy. To send them back to Spain might be
a death sentence, or at least an invitation to greater privation. The children assimilated quickly, except for those at a
camp near an air base, where nurses and supervisors repeatedly had to promise them that the planes overhead would not drop
bombs.

Father Xabier needed an informer. His accomplice was an old friend named Sister Incarnation. At four and a half feet tall,
she weighed no more than a sack of feathers, was of indeterminate years between fifty and ninety, and was as well intended
as any of the sainted martyrs memorialized in the statuary around the hospital. Sister Incarnation was a nurse’s aide who
also spent time at the Basilica de Begoña, where she would take patients seeking the comfort of an altar or a confessional.
There she came to know Father Xabier, who so admired her energy that he once asked the sister if she ever stopped to rest.

“We little people don’t need to sleep,” she told him. “Did you ever see a hummingbird snoozing on a branch? We rest during
blinks.”

After a succession of surgeries trimmed off his left arm up to the shoulder, Justo Ansotegui was transferred to a rehabilitation
ward. When Xabier realized he couldn’t visit him every day, he deputized Sister Incarnation to serve as his watchdog. Loving
her spirit, Justo adopted her and began calling her “Sister Inky.” She could have fit in his pocket.

Wounded soldiers and civilians, and amputees and burn patients at various stages of rehabilitation, filled the wards. These
were the victims expected to live, if they still cared to make the effort. The hospital had long been out of wooden legs,
and orders for crutches and canes were running months behind. The war had strained the producers and suppliers of such things
beyond their ability to capitalize.

In the meantime, Sister Incarnation helped these wounded reclaim the parts of their lives that could be regained through adaptation.
She taught those missing legs to operate crutches, to negotiate stairs, to adjust to their altered center of gravity. She
taught the tricks of one-armed existence to those in need: how to bathe and dress, how to use other parts of their body to
pinch objects and serve as a second hand. She taught female arm-amputees how to thread a needle and sew. She instructed leg-amputee
farmers to swing the scythe while propping up the limited side with both crutches. Balance and leverage, she preached. Balance
and leverage. The world is filled with three-legged dogs and one-legged gulls, she claimed. If they can manage with the tiny
brains God provided, then so can you.

To the burn patients, she offered suggestions on coping with pain and the reality of disfigurement. Hair from one side of
the head could be brushed over the burned area on the other side of the face. Long sleeves, gloves, and hats could be worn
quite inconspicuously. They needed to remember that the looks they received from people in the street were usually ones of
curiosity, not bad intent or insult. If not, they were stupid people and their opinions didn’t matter anyway.

In addition to the physical skills, Sister Incarnation sought to inject attitude into the diffident and spirit into those
without. To those who required pushing, Sister Incarnation was a disciplinarian. To those who needed consideration, Sister
Incarnation was patient and compassionate. And to those who sought sympathy, Sister Incarnation was deaf as a stump. She was
not there to reward self-pity.

She had a ready answer to the complainers: “Look around. Think of all the ones who have been carried out of here. Find the
value in what remains. Balance and leverage, balance and leverage.”

She had no trouble staying aware of Justo’s activities. With this nun who was one third his size, Justo felt a kinship of
power. Her energy was magnetic. And since the lack of an arm did not impede his mobility between surgeries, Justo became her
shadow.

“He follows me around all day,” the sister reported to Xabier. “He wants to carry things for me; he wants to lift things for
me. He is so eager to prove that he’s healthy and strong and whole. If he sees a chore for a two-armed person, he jumps in
and tries to prove he can do it himself with one. And he has started getting tough with other patients, pushing them. He threatened
one with harm if he ever spoke back to me or didn’t do exactly as I had taught. There was one wounded soldier I had to push
hard who said he felt I was treating him like a Fascist. Justo almost killed him.”

“So, he’s creating a problem?”

“Well, I don’t need an enforcer,” she said. “And the doctors are getting weary of his trying to get them to arm-wrestle.”

Xabier was not surprised.

“He keeps asking me to punch him in the right arm so I can see how much he can take,” she added.

“So then we should presume that he’s healed now and ready to go home?” Xabier asked.

“No, no, not at all, that’s the problem,” the nun stressed. “Doctors have done what they can with his arm, and he’ll be ready
for release soon. But he’s been so busy convincing us all that he’s healthy, he’s never dealt with the loss of his arm. He
tries to act as if he was born that way.”

“Sister, it isn’t the loss of his arm that is the problem; I can guarantee you that,” Xabier said. “Justo sees that as a challenge.
What you see with him wanting to work and help heal others, even if he has to strangle them to do it, is exactly who he is.
My fears aren’t about the arm at all. What has he said about his family?”

“Not one word. He gets quiet and he goes dark at night. I’ve checked on him and I know he’s acting as if he’s asleep, but
he rarely is. Father, the nurses and I realized that he’s the only patient who has reached this point in rehabilitation who
has not been begging to go home. By now, they’re sick of us and ready to get back to their lives. He has not said a thing
about his home or about wanting to
go
home. It seems as if he would be happy to just stay here and follow me around all day.”

“Has he been counseled on this?”

“Father, we were hoping that would be something for you to take over.”

“Me?”

“To be honest, the doctors are a little afraid of him,” Sister Incarnation said. “Nobody wants to make him angry. When he
goes dark, it’s as if he can’t even hear us talking to him. We know something is going on inside that mind, but we don’t know
what.”

The mural projected chaos, and in that regard it was perfectly at home in his work space. The artist, an inveterate pack rat,
could scarcely walk through his studio without tripping on an African tribal mask, an ancient bronze cast, sculptures of his
own or his friends’, sketches of unfinished works, and priceless paintings by Matisse, Modigliani, Gris, and others strewn
in this museum of clutter. Interspersed with the art was an abstract tumble of shoes, books, hats, unopened mail, empty wine
bottles, and partially eaten meals. Across the threshold of the mural was the detritus of his art, crumpled paint tubes and
a carpet of flattened cigarette butts. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and paint, linseed oil, and Dora Maar’s fruity
perfume.

Picasso had repositioned his characters, with the bull, too late the savior, curled in a protective pose around the woman
with the dead baby. He’d used the image of the Minotaur in many works, but this was not the bull-man myth, this was an anatomically
complete beast ready for the
corrida
.

He erased the dotted pupils of the baby’s eyes, leaving a haunting emptiness. The warrior’s upraised arm had dropped. The
sun-flower burst became an incandescent lamp casting jagged light spears onto the scene. Subtly, Picasso encased all the human
and animal suffering, and the burning exterior of a building, inside a room with electric lighting, creating a diorama of
grief. On the far right, he painted a door to this inside-out world, slightly ajar.

Through successive incarnations, he eliminated most of the blatant gore. Many of the studies and early figures featured bullet
holes seeping black blood and body parts randomly scattered. He flirted with the idea of adding texture with collage techniques,
attaching a cloth scarf to a woman’s head. And he once taped a piece of paper, resembling a blood-red teardrop, to the mother’s
cheek, making it the only dot of color in an achromatic scene. Too obvious. It is simple to make people uneasy, more difficult
to make them think.

Guilt consumed the penitent at the confessional. She outlined for the priest the details, how she tucked a bread loaf up under
her apron at a local market. It was not for her but for her children. That she had not eaten herself was of minor consequence,
but to hear her children plea so pitiably was impossible to ignore.

“Yes, I stole,” she said. “And for one afternoon the children had some stale bread in their stomachs. I am sorry to God. I
am sorry to the baker. When the war is over, I will pay him back double. God understands, doesn’t He?”

Father Xabier faced more of these stories each day, along with the parishioners’ more difficult questions of how such a life
can continue and how many prayers would go unanswered. They had lost parents to bombing or sisters to starvation, and, most
often, husbands to artillery shells on the front as the circle of fighting cinched tighter around them.