Guernica

by Dave Boling

  Pascual Ansotegui’s rifl e was old before the turn of the century and the boys had never seen it fired. At thirteen, Justo was as strong as some of the men in the village, but Pascual had never taught him how to shoot. Josepe could hardly heft the iron weapon off the pegs in the shed. He dragged it to his brother with both hands at the end of the barrel, the butt bouncing along the ground.

  Justo took it from him, raised it to his shoulder, and waved the heavy barrel in the direction of the diving ea gle. Xabier knelt in front of him and grabbed the stock with both hands, trying to buttress his big brother’s hold.

  “Shoot him, Justo!” Josepe screamed. “Shoot him!”

  With the rifle butt inches from his shoulder, Justo pulled the trigger. The shot exploded in the barrel, and the recoil thrust Justo to the ground, bleeding from the side of his head. Xabier flattened out beside him, screaming from the noise. The shot did not even startle the eagle, which was now applying a lethal clench of its talons into the neck of a tiny, still-wet lamb.

  With Justo and Xabier down, Josepe charged. Before he could reach it, the ea gle extended its wings, hammered them several times into the ground, and lifted off on a downhill swoop just over Josepe’s head.

  Justo fought his way uphill to Josepe. Xabier, crying to the point of breathlessness, face freckled with his brother’s blood, ran in sprints and tumbles to a neighbor’s house for help.

  “Look for other newborns, and let’s get the ewes into the shed!” Justo shouted, regaining control. They saw no other lambs that were vulnerable, and they both herded the oblivious mother ewe, still dragging birth tissue, into the shed.

  The neighbors held Xabier to calm him. But what did he expect them to do? Where was his father, after all? “Boys your age shouldn’t deal with these matters and certainly shouldn’t be shooting rifles; it’s a good thing none of our stock was harmed,” they said. He couldn’t hear them over the painful ringing of his ears but read rejection in their faces.

  “Well . . . fine!” Xabier yelled, breaking away to rejoin his brothers.

  The shaken boys gathered in the shed and clutched the ewe, which was bothered not by the loss of its offspring, a development it had already forgotten, but by the fierce embraces of these boys, one of whom was bleeding all over her wool.

  When Pascual Ansotegui returned that evening, the boys stood in a line at the door, in descending order of age, and Justo briefed his father on the events. Pascual nodded. Justo and Josepe accepted his minimal response. Xabier, though, flared with indignation.

  “Where were you?” yelled Xabier, a spindle-thin nine-year-old in third-hand overalls stained with blood.

  Pascual stared without comment.

  Xabier repeated the question.

  “I was gone,” the father said.

  “I know you were gone; you’re always gone,” Xabier said. “We’d get along just as well if you never came back.”

  Pascual tilted his head, as if this would bring his youngest into clearer focus. He then turned away, pulled the floral apron from its peg on the hearth, and began to make dinner.

  Justo knew early that he, as the eldest, would someday assume sole control of Errotabarri, and his siblings understood that they would inevitably find work elsewhere. If inequitable to the younger children, the pattern assured survival of the baserri culture. Justo Ansotegui would claim his birthright and become the latest in the chain of stewards of the land that extended back to times when their ancestors painted animals onto walls in the nearby Santima-miñe caves.

  Bequesting the farm to the eldest carried no guarantees. He who inherits the farm may never leave to discover other opportunities, to go to sea, perhaps, or to a city like Bilbao. But to run the baserri was to shepherd the family trust, Justo believed. Still, he expected a period of apprenticeship to learn. For another year or so after the lamb’s slaughter, Pascual Ansotegui unenthusiastically attended mass each morning, mouthing the responses. He returned to church to pray in silence again in the evening, wandering unseen in between. Eventually, he stopped attending mass, and one day he drifted off.

  It took several days before Justo realized his father had gone missing. He alerted the neighbors, and small groups searched the hillsides. When no evidence of death or life surfaced, the boys assumed that he had been swallowed up by a crevice or a sinkhole, or that he just forgot to stop wandering.

  Although the boys loved and missed their father, their affection for him was more out of habit than true sentiment. They noticed little difference in his absence: They still performed the same chores and played the same games. Justo was now in charge.

  “Here, this is yours now,” Josepe said to Justo, handing him the ruffled apron.

  “Eskerrik asko,” Justo said, thanking his brother. He lifted the strap over his head and tied the worn sash behind his back in solemn ceremony. “Wash up for dinner.”

  He had the family baserri to run. He was fifteen.

  When they were very young, the boys learned the history of Guernica and of Errotabarri. They learned it from their father, before he drifted off, and from the people of the town who were proud of their heritage. From medieval times, Guernica was a crossroads of the old Roman Way and the Fish and Wine Route that wound through the hills inland from the sea. Intersecting them both was the pilgrims’ route to Santiago de Compostela. For centuries, representatives of the region met under the Guernica oak to shape laws that outlawed torture and unwarranted arrest and granted unprece dented privileges to women. Although aligned with the kingdom of Castile, they maintained their own legal system and demanded that the series of Castilian monarchs from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella come stand, in person, beneath the oak of Guernica and swear to protect the Basque laws. Because the economy of the region hadn’t evolved under the feudal system, the Basques owned their own land and were never divided into sovereigns and serfs, merely farmers, fishermen, and craftsmen, free and in dependent of any overlord.

  A baserri in Biscaya often came to have a name, which sometimes served as a surname for those living there, as if the land and the home were the real ancestors. The home, after all, would outlive the inhabitants and maybe even the family name. They presumed that a well-structured building, like family relationships, genuine love, and one’s reputation, would be timeless if protected and properly maintained.

  At the time Justo Ansotegui assumed control of Errotabarri, a thorny hedgerow outlined the lower perimeter of the farm, and a platoon of poplars flanked the northern, windward edge. Crops were cultivated on the southern side of the house, bordered by several rows of fruit trees. Pastureland spread above the home, rising to a patchy stand of burly oaks, cypress, and waxy blue-gray eucalyptus. The trees thinned out just beneath a granite outcrop that marked the upper border of the property.

  The house resembled others near Guernica. It required the boys to annually whitewash the stucco sides above a stone-and-mortar base and to restain the oxblood wooden trim and shutters. Each stone-silled window accommodated planter boxes of geraniums, providing dashes of red across both levels and all aspects. Even as a young, single man, Justo sustained these floral touches that had been important to his mother.

  As with many a baserri on a hillside, the house was wedged into the slope. The lower floor, with wide double doors on the downhill side, housed the stock in the winter months. The upper floor, with a ground-level door on the uphill side, was home to the family. The housing of cows and sheep in the same building protected the animals from the cold, and they returned the favor by warming the upper level with their rising body heat.

  Inside, a large central room held the kitchen, dining, and living areas, with rough-cut oak columns supporting exposed quarter-sawn rafters. The hearth extended inward from a corner of the kitchen. Seed corn was nailed to the beams to dry, and herbs for cooking and medicine cured in the warmth above the hearth. Interwoven vines of red peppers hung from the support column closest to the kitchen, next to the dangling links of chorizo that lent a heavy garlic s
cent to the room.

  An unknown ancestor had carved the lauburu into the lintel above the house’s main door. This four-headed symbol of their race, like a spinning clover leaf, bracketed their lives, appearing on everything from cradles to tombstones.

  Each former master of the land inadvertently bequeathed items to Justo. He still stacked hay on tall wooden spikes that had been carved generations before. And the iron shears he used in the shed had snipped wool from sheep dead a century. Some of the smaller items offered wordless mysteries from the edge of the mantel; there was a small bronze horse with its head reared high and an iron coin bearing unknown symbols.

  During Justo’s proprietorship, the apron was likewise memorialized, draped from a nail in the mantel. And before he would pass, the mantel also would support a length of braided human hair so dark that it absorbed light.

  Swatting the rump of a reluctant donkey to keep it grinding up the steep trail, Pablo Picasso chuckled when he considered how his friends in Paris would react to the vision of him in such a position. That he would think of them now, here in the Pyrenees, was a symptom of the problem. There had been too much getting in the way of his art in Paris. And this mountain trail to Gósol, with the lovely Fernande on a donkey beside him, was his path away from all that.

  It had been all too much talk of art. And when they talked, their art rose from their heads, not their guts, and their paintings went back and forth like day-old conversations.

  He didn’t need Paris now; he needed Spain. He needed the people and the heat and the unshakeable feeling of belonging.

  Fernande would sit for him now and wouldn’t talk about his painting. She knew better. He had come back to Spain for a short break, come to this quiet town in the mountains, to tear art to pieces, to make it something it hadn’t been, or perhaps something it had been long before. This was a place he could feel art. It came up at him from the dirt and radiated down in waves from the sun. It was time to shatter art and reshape it, as one might do with bright pieces of broken glass.

  Justo promised his brothers this: No one would work harder. But even as he made that vow, he conceded to himself that he knew very little of the business of operating a farm. So he began making social visits to neighbors, slipping into the conversations questions about the timing of planting certain crops or tending fruit trees and managing stock. Most neighbors were sympathetic, but they had little time to worry about somebody else’s farm—unless they had a daughter who happened to be his age. Most would consider Justo something well short of handsome, but this boy nonetheless owned his own baserri.

  Justo inquired of the neighboring Mendozabels how he might establish hives for bees that would pollinate his fruit trees and provide honey. Mrs. Mendozabel informed him that they would be delighted to help him, that in fact they should all visit over “a full dinner, which you surely don’t get much of at Errotabarri, not the kind that our Magdalena makes every night.” Justo arrived in his work clothes, consumed dinner without conversation beyond that of the baserri, and took little note of Magdalena in her white Sunday dress and the “special pie” she baked for him. He was too busy for Magdalena and all the rest of the Magdalenas who were successively dressed, powdered, and trotted out for his inspection. The dinners were pleasant, though, the information helpful, and yes, it was true, he didn’t bake pies at Errotabarri.

  Small farms could not be considered flourishing businesses, but few noticed the poverty on the hillside above Guernica. Families were fed, and whatever was left over was carted to market or traded for those goods they could not produce themselves. Justo envied the neighbors who enjoyed an abundance of help from children. By comparison, he faced a manpower shortage. Josepe and Xabier helped, but they were less invested in the chores now. Justo rose in the darkness, worked without break through the day, and fell asleep shortly after eating whatever it was he bothered to toss into a pot that night. Josepe never complained of the food; Xabier did so only once.

  Justo discovered a few tricks but never cut corners on chores that would affect the land or animals, only himself. He did not sew or mend clothing and never washed his or his brothers’ garments, he told them, because they would only get dirty again. If his brothers wanted to clean themselves, he did not complain, as long as the chores had been done.

  “You look nice this morning,” one charitable woman commented to Justo when the three boys showed up to mass at least partially groomed.

  “Yes,” Xabier cracked. “But our scarecrows are bare today.”

  And so, Justo spent no time arranging for his own comforts, and he gave no thought to entertainment or diversion.

  At times in the field, hypnotized by the rhythmic swinging of the scythe through the grasses, he discovered that he had been talking to himself aloud. He would look around to be certain Josepe or Xabier had not come upon him silently and heard his words. In these moments he realized his problem. He was lonely. The chores that had been so exciting in the presence of his brothers had become mere labor.

  The only break he allowed himself came on feast days when he would finish his chores in the morning and then walk into town to take part in the competitions, the tug-of-war, the wood chopping, the stone lifting. He won many of them because of his imposing power. And because these exposures to people were so rare, he attempted to share with everyone all the jokes and examples of strength that went unappreciated during his seclusion at Errota-barri. If he became outrageous and self-inflated, it was entertainingly so, and those in the town anticipated his visits and cheered his many victories. For someone so lonely at home, the attention felt like the first warm day of spring.

  At one of these outings he met a girl from Lumo who had come downhill to join the dancers. Her name was Mariangeles Oñati, and she caused Justo Ansotegui to reevaluate his approach to personal hygiene and self-imposed solitude.

  Josepe Ansotegui smelled the Bay of Biscay long before he could see it. Having walked the serpentine mountain road north from Guernica for two days, past the caves and the jagged marble quarry and beyond the well-tended farms, he descended steadily in the direction of the breeze that carried the briny musk of low tide. When he arrived at the Lekeitio harbor in the softening dusk, clusters of women in aprons and scarves were prying small fish from nets along the quay. They chatted and sang in pleasant harmony.

  Josepe scanned the boats moored along the perimeter of the harbor wall, looking for crews still at work. The first man he approached about a job responded with a laugh and a head shake. The second told him that fishermen came from fishing families, and farm boys were meant to be farmers, as was life’s order.

  “My older brother took over the family baserri, so I thought I’d give fishing a try,” he explained. “I was told there was always work to be had on the boats.”

  “I’ve got some work,” a man on the adjacent boat shouted. “Let’s see if you can lift this crate.”

  With great strain, Josepe hoisted an overflowing crate of fish to his knees, then up to his waist, and off-loaded it to the dock. He looked back with a sense of triumph.

  “Yes, you’re strong enough,” the fisherman said. “No, I don’t have any work for you—but thanks anyway.”

  In the aft of a boat closest to the harbor mouth, a fisherman stood alone scanning the sky. “Zori,” the man said of his skyward focus when Josepe approached. “The old fishermen looked for zori, for omens, by reading which way the birds were flying.”

  “And are the birds saying anything special this evening?” Josepe asked, glancing at a squadron of gulls that bickered above the harbor.

  “I think they’re saying they’re hungry; they’re circling the processors, waiting to dispose of our messes.”

  The two shook hands.

  “I’m Josepe Ansotegui of Guernica, I’m almost seventeen years old, and the only fishing I’ve done is in a stream with a string and a pin,” the boy said. “But I’m told I’m smart, and I’m looking for work.”

  “Did you catch anything with your
string and pin?”

  “I caught a fat trout once, yes,” Josepe offered pridefully.

  “Did you gut and clean the fat trout?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “That’s all you need to know about fishing right now; you’re hired,” Alberto Barinaga said. “We’ll worry about your intelligence later.”

  Barinaga, owner of the Zaldun, welcomed Josepe on board and into his home. Perhaps he had foreseen a productive relationship in the flight of the birds. In time, Barinaga became impressed by Jo-sepe’s stories of growing up in a pack of playful boys following his mother’s death, and he admired his strength and his attitude. But mostly he came to appreciate his dedication to learning the business of fishing. In daily tutorials, while he scrubbed gunwales or repaired nets, or while at the family’s dinner table, Josepe absorbed the encyclopedia of maritime lore and culture the veteran captain presented.

  “We chased the bowheads and cod to the shores of the Americas,” Barinaga preached at dinner. “The Santa María was one of our caravels, and Columbus had a Basque navigator and crew.”

  “That is why he ended up in the Americas instead of the Indies,” his eldest daughter, Felicia, needled.

  “Magellan had our navigators, too,” the captain continued.

  “Some have suggested that we are so good on the waters because our race began on the lost island of Atlantis.”

  Barinaga paused for effect, nodding his head as he buttered a thick slice of bread. “It is a possibility that I would not discount.”

  Josepe, in turn, learned of his patroia from the gossipy crews of other boats. Barinaga was much admired among the family of fish-ermen. On several occasions, his seamanship allowed the Zaldun to arrive in rescue of foundering boats and endangered crews. Jo-sepe pulled in the lessons with both hands. He learned the songs of the sailors and joined in the singing as they repaired fraying nets on the days when rough seas sentenced them to work ashore.