“Crow, which is the way to Santiago, this way, that way or the other way?”
In a harsh voice, the crow replied:
“Kra! Kra!”
“What did he say?” one of the two women asked. Her friend answered:
“He said ‘kra’, which means ‘the other way’.”
They thanked the crow and set off along that other path. The further they went, the more convinced they were that this was the path to Santiago. The woman who hadn’t understood the crow said to her friend:
“It’s just as well you speak Spanish. Otherwise, we’d be in a right pickle!”
My mother told this story two or three times a year, and it always made her laugh.
*
The vault was open now, revealing a chamber about ten or twelve feet deep. After putting the coffin down on a slightly raised piece of ground, my younger brother and I climbed onto the edge of one of the side walls, and a cousin and a friend of the family climbed onto the other side. The walls, which were about three feet high, were over a foot thick, so there was no danger of us falling.
The gravediggers passed two ropes covered in cloth underneath the coffin and handed us the four ends. One of the men then went down into the chamber with the help of a third rope and, once there, began giving us instructions. We had to lower the coffin very gradually, keeping it as level and as stable as possible.
“Slowly! Slowly!”
Supporting the coffin with his two hands, he guided it into one of the niches. Once it was in, he scrambled up the rope like a cat. My younger brother, my cousin and I jumped to the ground.
More clanking of crowbars and steel tubes. When, after some time had passed, the gravestone was back in place, my eldest brother began sorting out the contents of the wicker basket. First, the black flowers wrapped in cellophane and the sprig of blackthorn; then a bunch of maize flowers and an armful of freshly cut green grass, neither of which I had noticed before.
“A present from Larre,” my brother said, pointing at the grass. Larre was a farmhouse he would have passed on his way to the cemetery.
Someone once asked the Basque stone-lifting champion Urtain what his favourite smell was, and he said it was freshly cut grass. I became aware of the smell as soon as I remembered his response. Or perhaps it was the other way round, perhaps I smelled the grass and then remembered.
My brother was absorbed in decorating the gravestone. He put the grass down as a base, then arranged the maize flowers on top; at the foot of the cross he placed the sprig of blackthorn laden with sloes; lastly, separating each one out from the bouquet, he scattered the black flowers over the gravestone.
The resulting composition resembled the floral carpets with which we used to decorate the streets of our village for the feast of Corpus Christi. My mother always wanted to make sure our house had one of the most striking displays. We used to go with her to the woods in search of materials, then help her make a suitably artistic arrangement.
My younger brother whispered:
“He’s brought black orchids! That isn’t what our mother would have wanted. We’re not supporters of Eva Perón!”
Many years before, on the twentieth anniversary of Eva Perón’s death, an illustrated magazine had chosen as its cover a photograph of Evita’s hearse adorned, indeed almost covered, with black orchids.
“What a marvellous funeral!” our mother cried, showing us the photograph. “But when I die,” she went on, “I don’t want any black orchids. I was born in Albiztur, in a house surrounded by maize fields, and a few maize flowers will suit me fine. And if it’s the right time of year, a little grass too.”
My two brothers had come up with completely contrasting interpretations of that story. My eldest brother saw in her words a hidden desire and a disguised request for us to carry it out; my younger brother’s reading of it was more literal. In different circumstances, this disagreement would have ended in a bitter argument, but, as with the tripe, certain ways of speaking did not go well with death.
My eldest brother was still leaning on the gravestone with his back to the rest of us. He picked up a fallen sloe from the ground and put it in his mouth.
Like the carpet of flowers with which he had adorned the tomb, this was another reference, a memory of an old anecdote. One summer day, when we brothers were still very young, our mother had taken us to a very stony place near the house where she was born. It was full of blackthorn bushes, and she encouraged us to taste the fruit.
“Go on, try those little cherries, and see how sweet they are!”
The sloes were extremely sour, and we spat them out as soon as we put them in our mouths, protesting and grimacing. She found this hilarious.
When she fell ill – by then, she was eighty – the woman who looked after her arrived in the house one day bearing a sprig of blackthorn heavy with fruit, just like the one my brother had brought to the cemetery. My mother picked a fruit and, smiling sweetly, offered it to the woman:
“Here you are, Paquita. Try this little cherry.”
“I’m not Paquita, Izaskun. I’m Rosa Mari, the woman who comes every day to help you.”
My mother pretended not to understand:
“Rosa Mari? How can you be Rosa Mari? There’s no-one of that name here. If you’re not Paquita, then you must be Miren.”
The woman decided to play along.
“No, I’m not Paquita or Miren. I’m Jesusa.”
“Jesusa? Well, you look more like Paquita or Miren,” my mother said, again offering her a sloe. “Go on, eat it. These cherries are so sweet.”
The woman called my eldest brother that night and told him what had happened.
“She confused me with one of her sisters. And she spoke in a strange voice, like a child.”
My eldest brother stayed with my mother for a few days, but there was no repetition of the conversation. Her memory was failing, and she became very exhausting to talk to because she would keep repeating things over and over, but she always called us by our right names.
*
There were five siblings living in Aitze, which was the name of their house in Albiztur. A boy, Bartolito, and four girls: Miren, Paquita, Jesusa and my mother, who was the oldest, and who they always called María rather than Izaskun.
There’s a photograph taken outside the house in 1928 of the five siblings and their parents, our grandparents. They look like Gipsies who have just emerged from their caravan, very poor and swarthy-looking, their skin burned by the sun; the children are all wearing rustic smocks, their hair is uncombed, and the overall impression is one of grime. And they look alarmed, as if they’ve never seen a camera before.
The person who took the photograph doubtless wanted to capture an image of anthropological interest. It was probably the owner of the electricity substation where my grandfather, Ramón, worked or else a colleague of his. That would explain why the photograph was preserved.
My mother’s mother, Grandma Leona, hated the photograph. She was ashamed of that image of the family, and said they had been caught unprepared and that, one day, she would throw it on the fire. However, when her husband Ramón was electrocuted at the substation, she had no alternative but to keep it, since it was the only image she had of him.
*
We three brothers were alone in the cemetery. We had told our friends to go on ahead and organise supper at the restaurant in the village square.
“We’ll order a few tapas and then callos, tripe, for everyone. Apparently, they make the best callos in Guipúzcoa,” one of our friends said. I would have liked to tell him to order something else, but he was already leaving, and I didn’t want to have to shout.
One of the little cemetery birds alighted on the cross on our mother’s grave. It had a blue-and-white head, a dark line passing through each eye, and a yellow breast. Suddenly, it fluttered its wings and flew down onto the grass covering the gravestone. A moment later, it was flying off with a worm in its beak.
Were birds like flo
wers? Did they go well with death? Seeing that bird with the blue-and-white head, I felt that they did, but our experience with other birds had been less positive. When we realised that our mother’s mind was going, we bought her a canary, because the doctor had told us that a simple chore like giving the bird some millet or cleaning out its cage would help maintain her brain function. The day after we had given it to her, she called us all to announce that the canary was lying on its back on the floor of the cage with its legs in the air.
It was getting dark, but there was still light in the sky. The apple trees on the hills around were all in blossom. El Hernio resembled a soft, moss-covered wall and was split in two by a bank of mist. The three of us were leaning on the grave opposite our family grave and gazing out at the landscape.
My older brother and I were talking about how spartan our grandparents’ house had been. My younger brother had said nothing since his remark about the black orchids.
Gaurkoa badugu, biharkoa seguru. Today we have food and for tomorrow too. This was a saying Grandma Leona used to come out with whenever anyone arrived at the house bringing a chicken or some meat. She was joking, of course, but having enough food was a real concern. There was very little around the house where she lived. Most of the maize fields our mother mentioned belonged to the neighbours. There weren’t many animals either: two cows, a breeding bull, and a couple of dozen hens. Our grandfather earned a wage looking after the electricity substation, but the wage was so small that, in the summer, he would make a little extra money by performing as a dantzari – a Basque folk dancer – at fiestas in other nearby villages.
Some members of the family left. Miren married an engineer who worked on a fishing boat and she went to live with him in a village on the coast; Jesusa got a job as a kitchen hand in a restaurant in San Sebastián. Bartolito and Paquita stayed near Albiztur, Bartolito in Aizte, as a casual labourer in a quarry there, and Paquita in the nearby inn, where, in time, she would set up a restaurant. Before that, though, and only shortly after the “Gipsy” photograph was taken, our mother’s life took a most unexpected turn.
Don Eugenio Urroz Erro came to visit the family. He was the parish priest in Albiztur and by then, towards the end of the 1920s, he had already published several books, among them one devoted to the image of the Virgin of Izaskun.
“I’ve been appointed archpriest in Eibar. Presumably because they couldn’t find anyone better,” he told Ramón and Leona when they sat down under the vine trellis shading the entrance to the house. He was a modest man, and few people in the village knew that he had studied in Rome and had a law degree.
“I would like Izaskun to come with me to Eibar,” he said. Our mother had been christened María Izaskun on his recommendation, and at the time, he was the only one who called her by that second name.
Ramón had nothing to do with matters affecting the children, and so it was Leona who answered.
“Yes, take her with you,” she said.
Don Eugenio was surprised to receive such a prompt reply.
“Before you decide, let me explain what I have in mind.”
“I’m sure whatever it is will be good,” Leona said.
Years later, she would confess that, the night before the priest’s visit, she’d had a dream in which her daughter had appeared to her wearing a very elegant dress, and that was why she had been so confident about accepting his proposal.
“Yes, but I would prefer you to hear me out,” Urroz Erro said. He had a lawyer’s mind and hated to leave things vague.
He explained that his elderly mother, who was now bedridden, required a great deal of care, and the maid who was going with him to Eibar could not be with her twenty-four hours a day. She needed an assistant.
“I thought of Izaskun, because I know her and know how bright she is, but there’s something else,” he went on. “She needs to continue her education, and I’m offering to pay for her studies in exchange for her work. There’s a very good college in Eibar run by French nuns and I’m going to enrol her there.”
Leona responded quickly.
“So far, no-one in our family has had a real education. She’ll be the first. Thank you, Don Eugenio,” she said. Ramón nodded his agreement.
Two weeks later, our mother travelled by car to Eibar. She was not yet eleven.
*
One of the cows grazing in the field near the cemetery began mooing again, and was soon joined by the rest of the herd. Further off, on the farms in the area, the dogs were barking loudly. None of those animals really went well with death. They couldn’t sing like the birds or like Andrés Garay. They were rather coarse, disagreeable creatures.
We left the cemetery. My younger brother and I went to the car park; my older brother walked back down to the church to collect his Mercedes.
“And now, to top it all, we’ve got to eat tripe!” he shouted, not for our benefit, but his own.
The maize fields, the village and the church were all growing dark now. Some of the windows in the farmhouses were lit. In the distance, Les Trois Couronnes was just a dark smudge. In the opposite direction, El Hernio, ‘the tall, rugged mountain’, seemed suddenly much bigger, as if it had grown while we were burying our mother. I asked my brother if he remembered the story about the two women walking to Santiago who’d had to ask directions of a crow, and he did of course, vividly.
“She was always repeating the same stories,” he said.
It was true, but she only told us stories about Albiztur when we were children. Later, her main point of reference became Eibar. The years that she spent in Guipúzcoa’s biggest industrial town proved to be a unique experience, probably the most important of her life.
*
“Eibar was a very difficult place for Don Eugenio Urroz Erro and for all practising Christians,” my mother used to tell us. “The socialists and the republicans had a lot of power, and very few people went to Mass. More than half the funerals held were secular, and because there were so many atheists in the town, the Church tended to send Eibar the very best preachers, the most admired of all being a priest called Madinabeitia. He was in charge of the Good Friday sermon on the Seven Last Words. That day, the church would always be filled to bursting. Everyone went to hear him: Catholics, socialists, republicans and communists.
“Madinabeitia would arrive in Eibar at the beginning of Holy Week and stay in our house. I remember that the first year he came, I was looking after Don Eugenio’s mother when I heard voices. I went into the living room and realised that Madinabeitia was rehearsing his Seven Last Words sermon, and so loudly that he could have been heard out in the street. I sat down in an armchair to listen to him.”
Thirty or forty years later, my mother could still imitate Madinabeitia’s vehement delivery: “I am thirsty!” “It is finished! Consummatum est…”
“I wanted to go back to my patient, because I had to change her position in bed frequently so that she wouldn’t get bed sores, but I just couldn’t make myself get up and leave the room. I was so moved by Madinabeitia’s voice that I was almost in tears, especially when he began to call out pleadingly: “Father, Father, why have You forsaken me?” I don’t know how long I sat there. When I did eventually get up to resume my work, I noticed Don Eugenio. He was sitting in another armchair, listening. He hadn’t even realised I was there. He was a wonderful man, but not a good public speaker, and he admired Madinabeitia enormously.”
*
“A lot of people used to come to Don Eugenio’s house,” my mother would tell us. “Not just preachers and religious people. Once, a hypnotist came. He was a very thin man and a heavy smoker. One day, Don Eugenio gave a lunch to which he invited local councillors and other town worthies, among them the hypnotist. They were all sitting in the living room, smoking, and the other guests started making fun of the hypnotist, saying that hypnosis was mere flimflam, and that they were surprised at a serious man like him presenting himself to the world as an expert on the matter. I heard all this because
, on that particular day, I’d been asked to help out in the dining room, which was right next to the living room.
“Initially, the thin man said nothing, but he went out onto the balcony. I thought he had decided to leave the other guests so as to put an end to the joshing. However, that wasn’t his intention at all. Pointing down into the street, he said to one of the councillors who had come out onto the balcony to join him: ‘When that girl carrying the cakes passes underneath the balcony, call out to her and say whatever comes into your head. I just need her to look up here.’ I ran over to the kitchen window to watch. There was the girl with her tray of cakes. They came from Soloaga’s, the best patisserie in Eibar.
“The girl reached our house, and the councillor did as the thin man had told him. The girl immediately stopped and came in through the street door. Shortly afterwards, the doorbell rang. I ran to open it, but the thin man, the councillor and other guests all beat me to it. The girl held out her tray and said: ‘I thought you might like some of these cakes.’ The thin man gave her some money and said: ‘Thank you, but not just now. So sorry to have bothered you.’ The assembled guests looked astonished. “How did you do that?’ they asked. ‘Through hypnotism,’ answered the thin man. He said nothing more, neither then nor during lunch. Don Eugenio greatly enjoyed the incident and said something in Latin along the lines of ‘The victor never explains.’”
*
“In general, the students at the school I went to all came from rich families,” my mother used to tell us. “For example, one girl in my class was an Orbea, of Bicicletas Orbea, and another was a Beistegui, of Bicicletas B.H. One afternoon, Don Eugenio gave me permission to visit a classmate who lived on the outskirts of Eibar, and when I arrived, I saw five or six boys playing football in a part of the garden planted with palm trees. My friend, whose name was Agustina, whispered to me: ‘They play for Bilbao Athletic.’ They were wearing ordinary clothes, but since they really did play very well, I had no reason not to believe my friend. One of them, a rather thin boy with curly hair, took off his shoes and left them at the foot of one of the palm trees, then went back to the other boys and continued playing. ‘That’s Chirri II,’ Agustina told me, and with that, she grabbed my arm and dragged me over to them. She was a very bold girl – not even the nuns at Aldatze could tame her – and so I guessed at once what she was intending to do. She wanted to steal Chirri II’s shoes. I tried to pull away, but Agustina kept a firm grip on me. Before I knew it, she had picked up the shoes and stuffed them under her shirt, and since we were arm in arm, no-one noticed. She was laughing, but I was frightened.
Nevada Days Page 36
