Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  Caseríos – large and squat with broad, gently sloping roofs – dot the hills. The best examples have three wide storeys – one each for livestock, the family and stores of grain or straw. They also have a generous inset porch that offers protection from the rain. Basque life revolved around these caseríos, sometimes grouped into small villages and hamlets, for centuries.

  Caseríos had a life of their own almost above that of their occupants. In the Basque Country it is the people who belong to the etxe or etxea, the house, not the house that belongs to the people. Many Basque surnames begin, in fact, with etxe, or versions of it – Echanove, Etxeberria etc. These are families described by their houses. Some see the emotional roots of nationalism in this concept. ‘Nire aitaren etxea defendituko dut, Oesoen kontra, sikatearen kontra, lukurreriaren kontra, justiziaren kontra’, ‘ I shall defend my father’s house, against wolves, against drought, against usury, against the law,’ starts a poem in euskara by Gabriel Aresti, who died in 1975 at the age of forty-two. In Aresti’s poem, the narrator is prepared to lose all he has, crops, livestock, income, hands, arms and, finally, his life until: ‘I shall die, my soul will be lost, my descendants will be lost, but my father’s house will endure on its feet.’

  There is graffiti here, too, in euskara. ‘Presoak etxera orain’, ‘Bring the prisoners home’, it reads. The etxe is here, too, in ‘etxera’. The graffiti refers to the fact that, unlike other Spanish prisoners, unrepentant etarras are punished for their obstinacy by being kept in jails as far from home as possible. This can turn family visits into 1,000-mile hikes every other weekend. The only Spanish flag I see is hanging over the wall of a Civil Guard barracks. But there are no signs of the ‘military occupation’ that more radical separatists insist exists here. There are no roadblocks or army patrols. This is not Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

  It is early March and, as I approach Artea, I see that the Gorbeia – one of the many mountains Basques have endowed with magical, mystical powers – is wearing a cap of solid snow. At the foot of the Gorbeia, I turn into the village and look for the large honey-stone building where Sabino Arana’s legacy is carefully preserved.

  Arana runs a close second place to Franco as the most controversial historical figure in Spain. Rabid racist and fervent Roman Catholic, he began by claiming that his patria – his homeland – was Vizcaya, the province based on Bilbao. He penned ferocious articles against the maketos – the Spanish immigrants of the industrial slums. He went on to proclaim that his patria was something wider than Vizcaya, that it belonged to a nation which he named Euzkadi. This was the nation of the Basques. Despite his ideological contortionism, Arana lit several fuses over ten intense years of political activity that ended when he died, aged just thirty-eight, in 1903. He himself would be elected as a deputy to the provincial assembly. Within four years of his death, the Basque Nationalist Party had a mayor in Bilbao’s city hall.

  For Arana, the people of Vizcaya were ‘intelligent and noble’ or ‘vigorous and agile’ while Spaniards were ‘inexpressive and harsh’ or ‘weak and clumsy’. ‘The Vizcayan cannot serve, he was born to be a señor (‘etxejaun’); the Spaniard is born to be a vassal or a servant,’ he declared. The etxe is here once more. ‘Etxejaun’ is the head of the house. Shortly before his death, however, Arana did a political U-turn. He urged his party members to become españolistas, pro-Spaniards. ‘Good Basques will continue working for their people, but not in isolation, rather within the Spanish state.’ Some see, in this, a call for the kind of autonomy the Basque Country now enjoys. Others say that, after spending time in prison, he simply realised that Spain would never let the Basques go. ‘The survival of his [Basque] country was at stake,’ said the archivist. ‘It was a sign of his grandeur.’

  Arana and other Basque Romantics fiddled liberally with history as they sought to find a ‘lost’ Basque nation. This, some said, extended back to one of Noah’s sons. The one thing they could definitely point to as something Basques had been slowly losing, however, was their language.

  Euskara is truly remarkable. It has thirteen noun cases, has had to import most of its swear words, does not use the letters c, q, v, w and y and piles on suffixes to make impressively complex-looking words. It is generous with k, z and x, with the latter often combining with t to produce a ‘ch’ sound.

  The language’s most expert practitioners are the bersolari – poets who compete by composing ad lib on stage in front of a crowd. A scarcity of irregular verbs and irregular nouns eases the task of learning – though, as two-thirds of the population of the region’s biggest city, Bilbao, will tell you, that does not mean people necessarily want to. About half of the Basques said they could understand or speak euskara in 2001, though fewer than one in six used it as much as, or more than, Castilian.

  Try, as they do, linguists cannot find any other living language even vaguely connected to it (though there have been claims for everything from Pictish and Minoan to Sino-Tibetan and North America’s Na-Dene languages). Euskara’s only known relative is ancient Aquitanian. This existed mainly on the northern, French side of the Pyrenees and in the mountains themselves as far as Catalonia. It died out in some areas and evolved into euskara in others, sometime after the appearance of the Romans. Euskara may be the sole surviving version of a family of languages that was, with all other previous western European tongues, wiped out by the Indo-European languages we now speak. Its forebears were being spoken in Europe thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years ago. Along with genetic and other evidence, it is persuasive evidence that Basques remained remarkably homogeneous – and secluded – until immigrants started arriving late in the nineteenth century.

  Here is a small example of euskara: Ezkutatu zuen Aitor’ek orduan altxor bat/leize baten sakonagonean,/iñoiz ez, iñork ez ebastu zezan/Eta an irauntzen da,/mendietan ezkututa,/aitalenaren isilekoa. / Bere emaitza./Orrela jaio zan enda bat,/orrela jaio zan erri bat,/euskotarrarena./Aitor’en semeak.

  It is taken from the Legend of Aitor poem. This describes how the ‘seven tribes’ of the Basque Country (the Spanish provinces of Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya, Alava and Navarre plus the areas of Soule, Labourd and Basse Navarre in France) were formed by the seven sons of Aitor. It was written by the nineteenth-century French Basque Romantic Augustin Chaho. He mistakenly thought that when Basques called themselves aitorren semeak, they were calling themselves the sons of Aitor. In fact, it seems, they were calling themselves ‘sons of good fathers’. A rough translation reads: ‘And so Aitor hid a treasure/ in the depths of a cave/in such a way that nobody could ever steal it/ And there it stays/ hidden in the mountains,/the patriarch’s secret,/his legacy./ So was born a race/so was born a people/that of the euskaros/the sons of Aitor.’

  Many clues to Gotzone Mora’s difficult life are to be found right here, in the language. Euskal Herria, the language’s own way of saying ‘Basque Country’, actually means ‘the country of euskara’. By that definition, Euskal Herria had been shrinking – probably for centuries – before Arana. Numbers are, once more, growing. Most Basques, however, still do not know how to speak the language.

  Euskara’s system of building words with suffixes allows it to generate new vocabulary easily. Arana, having learned it himself as an adult, soon thought himself fit to invent new words. Many have since disappeared. Others, however, are now highly familiar not just to Basques, but to all Spaniards. What is most revealing about them, however, are the words euskara was missing when nationalism was born.

  Arana’s inventions included: Euskadi, the Basque nation; ikurrin, flag; abertzale, patriot; gudari, soldier; aberri, fatherland; and lehendakari, roughly ‘person whose job is to lead’. The fact that he had to invent these words suggests that the Basque desire for statehood was either non-existent or, to be generous, unarticulated at the time.

  Basques, however, now live in a region officially called Euskadi. Their president’s official title is ‘Lehendakari’. Their red, green and white flag (also invented by Aran
a and based on the Union Jack) is known as the ikurriña and their national day (yet another Arana invention) is the Aberri Eguna. Bombs are planted by gudaris, as ETA members consider themselves, while the ezker abertzalea, the ‘patriotic left’ of radical separatists either applauds or tries to explain that this is all a result of centuries of continued Spanish oppression.

  Language is another Basque minefield. Just choosing to call a place by its Spanish or Basque name, for example, is a political act. Do I say San Sebastián, for example, or Donostia? Should it be Bilbao, or the euskara version, Bilbo? A good nationalist will usually try to reach for the name in euskara.

  In the small museum at Artea there are 1930s badges decorated with swastikas – an ancient Basque symbol for the sun – belonging to the mendigoizales, a mountaineering-cum-nationalist propaganda club of the 1930s. The mendigoizales were a peculiarly Basque phenomenon – a political rambling club. They organised groups to walk up mountains and reflect on the importance and meaning of being Basque. The swastika disappeared from Basque symbolism after the Nazis decided to use it too. It was replaced by its alternative form, the ubiquitous lauburu – with the four arms ending in oval shapes that make it look like a four-leaf clover. The mendigoizales were a reminder that mountains were more than just things to be admired – and climbed – to Basques. Two of Spain’s most important mountain ranges, the Pyrenees and the Cordillera Cantábrica, meet here. Mountain spirits form a central part of pre-Christian Basque mythology. The mother-god Mari is said to use several Basque mountain caves as her home. Other cave-dwelling spirits are capable of transforming themselves into bulls or vultures. Hurl stones at certain mountains, the legends go, and you will incur their wrath.

  Basques were amongst the last Europeans to have towns or become Christians. They have made up for it since then. Ignatius de Loyola, the Jesuit founder, was a Basque. His aristocratic family’s torre – a large, square four-storey fortified house – has been conserved beside a huge baroque basilica and shrine devoted to him at Loiola. Some critics of nationalism say the Church, which kept euskara alive from the pulpits and by publishing magazines and books whenever it was persecuted elsewhere, is to blame for everything from Arana to ETA itself. Religion has certainly formed part of nationalism’s historical essence.

  Through Arana, nationalists trace themselves back to the Carlists. These were the reactionary, Catholic traditionalists who backed an absolutist pretender to the Spanish crown in the nineteenth century. Arana’s father was a Carlist – opposing liberal reforms that attempted both to create legal equality across Spain and loosen the Church’s power. The Carlists, colourfully attired with large red berets, fought two bloody civil wars in Spain in the nineteenth century. The leader during the first of them (1833–9) was the extravagantly mutton-chopped General Tomás de Zumalacárregui. The Carlists’ great hero died while unsuccessfully besieging Bilbao in 1835. Though nationalists see these as wars against Spain, they also pitched Basque against Basque. Zumalacárregui’s brother Miguel, as the Basque Country’s leading Liberal, helped raise troops to fight him. He went on to be a Spanish justice minister as well as mayor of San Sebastián. Few Basque schoolchildren today, nurtured on stories about Tomás, could name his ultimately more successful brother. The Carlists, always underdogs, provoked the romantic admiration of some commentators. Karl Marx saw them as having ‘a genuinely mass national base of peasants, minor aristocracy and clergy’.

  A second Carlist war followed, and failed, in the 1870s. The level of atrocities carried out by both sides appalled observers. They were said to set the pattern for the Spanish Civil War less than a century later. The Carlistas reappeared in that war, on Franco’s side. Basques and Navarrese were prominent amongst them. Some historians say more Basques and Navarrese fought for Franco than against him. His thank you included allowing Navarre to keep some of its autonomous powers – and the maintenance of a special funding regime for Alava province. It also included violent repression of anything that hinted at Basque nationalism. Franco certainly was not going to resurrect the semi-autonomous Basque government that, briefly, had appeared at the outbreak of Civil War. ‘The horrible and sinister nightmare that is Euskadi has fallen defeated forever,’ the first Francoist mayor of Bilbao declared. The Carlists’ red beret, meanwhile, became part of the uniform of the Caudillo’s Movimiento Nacional. ‘[The year] 1936 was, in fact, the first Carlist success. And they imposed on the rest of the Basques their social morals, their symbols and their monuments … My father well remembers the anti-euskara paranoia in 1938 of his mayor, who was a Basque Carlist,’ says Juaristi.

  The Carlistas were strongest in the Basque Country, though they also did well in Catalonia and had support elsewhere. They had said they would conserve the fueros, the ancient bills of rights of each Basque province and for neighbouring Navarre that were eventually, after a long period of decline, annulled in 1876. It was a good way of ensuring support. The fueros, each different from the others, dated back to the late Middle Ages. At their strongest, they amounted to a kind of shared sovereignty, partly in the hands of the monarch and partly in the hands of each province. Royal laws and decrees had to meet the conditions of the fuero, which acted like a provincial constitution, before they could be applied. Each province had its own parliament with representatives elected in myriad ways but usually representing a particular constituency of a town, village or district. Spanish customs were only payable at the border with Castile, meaning no export duties were paid to Madrid. Spanish monarchs, in turn, pledged to observe the terms of the fuero. In the case of Vizcaya, the parliaments were eventually held by the famous oak tree at Guernica. Ferdinand and Isabella swore an oath here in 1476, as did Emperor Charles V in 1526.

  This Romantic picture of the Basques was captured by William Wordsworth in his ode to Guernica’s oak, written as Spaniards – with help, in what became known as the Peninsular War, from Wellington – were trying to expel Napoleon’s troops in 1810.

  Oak of Guernica! Tree of holier power …

  What hope, what joy can sunshine bring to thee,

  … If never more within their shady round

  Those lofty-minded Lawgivers shall meet,

  Peasant and lord, in their appointed seat,

  Guardians of Biscay’s ancient liberty.

  The Basque fueros and their parliaments, however, were provincial affairs. Those of Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, Alava and neighbouring Navarre acted autonomously of one another, swearing loyalty to whichever king ruled them. Rights varied, but could include not having to do military service outside their own frontier. What the fueros did not amount to, however, was independence – either as individual provinces or as a state called Euskal Herria, the Basque Country. The last Basque-centred kingdom was that of Navarre – which was conquered, and absorbed into the rest of Spain, in 1512. Both Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa had, in any case, gone into the orbit of Castile by 1200. The last time, in fact, that all the Basque lands – including those in France – were jointly ruled by a Basque was in 1035. This was when Sancho the Great held the kingdom of Navarre. He, however, titled himself King of the Spains, and ruled a far larger area. Collins says Sancho’s rule had no impact on Basque ‘self-awareness or aspirations’. They were too busy squabbling amongst themselves. Their social structure was based, instead, around the family. That does not stop ETA bloodily pursuing the impossible dream of a state that would, a thousand years later, again unite all Basques – be they French or Spanish – under a government of fellow Basque.

  If Spanish history is today a political battlefield, Basque history is its bloodiest corner. The fueros, Arana, the tree of Guernica, the kingdom of Navarre and the Carlists are fought over tooth and claw. Even the Battle of Roncesvalles – when Basques fell on Charlemagne’s retreating rearguard in 778 – is the subject of heartfelt, emotional commemorations by separatists. It is still possible, for example, to buy books that state ‘the Basque pueblo was already formed in neolithic times.’

  For my archivi
st in the Sabino Arana Foundation, the fueros obviously represented a golden era. Nationalists mourn what they see as a lost Basque Arcadia, where grass-roots democracy protected the rights of man and there was harmony between man and nature. It is a world of clover-filled pastures, isolated valleys, peacefully ruminating cows, deciduous forests, mountain spirits, sturdy farmhouses, noble souls and fiercely proud farmers, blacksmiths and lumberjacks prepared to defend their idyll against all comers.

  I left the Sabino Arana Foundation unenlightened as to the true course of Basque history. One thing, however, was clear. The founder of the Basque Nationalist Party had planted his political seed in fertile ground. The robust nationalist tree, despite the efforts of dictatorial force and democratic persuasion, has grown and gathered strength ever since.

  I drove around behind Artea’s church and its frontón – a sort of large, open squash court with just two walls in the shape of a long L, where pelota vasca, literally ‘Basque ball’, is played. The frontón is a feature of almost any Basque village. Larger towns – in both the French and the Spanish regions – boast covered, all-seater frontones with a third wall at the back. Here the great players of the sport knock a hard ball against the walls using their hands, small wooden rackets or the long-curved baskets of the spectacularly fast and exciting cesta punta or Jai-Alai version.

  I stopped at a large building on the other side of the village. Measured in historical time, this was a journey of more than six decades from the time when Sabino Arana died. I was moving on to the 1960s, to the time ETA first emerged as a fighting force. It was a time when younger nationalists became frustrated with the Basque Nationalist Party’s peaceful opposition in exile and reached for their guns. I had come to see Xabier Zumalde, alias El Cabra (The Goat), who was one of the first to pick up a weapon in anger. El Cabra is in his late sixties now, though still lean, fit and keen. Years ago he was one of the first military leaders of what was still an embryonic, amateurish armed outfit. Today he is a maverick. ‘I am a military man,’ he said, as we tried to stave off the cold by an open fire. ‘I don’t understand politics. Give me fifteen or twenty men and I can do anything. Give me any more than that and I am lost.’