Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

Things got even worse for Madrid. The Catalans and the Gallegos, the people of Galicia, informed the government that they too wanted the constitution to be revised. Twenty years earlier, the constitution had been ratified without a majority in these regions either, and time, it seemed, had silenced no one. This was the first instance in many years when Basques, Catalans, and Gallegos were united. If things continued this way, regional parties might soon make up a decisive block in the legislature.

  For as long as its rulers had been calling it Spain, this had been Madrid’s fear of the Basques, that they would lead a movement that would quickly unravel the entire Spanish state. Government officials and Españolist intellectuals started appearing on television asserting that Spain did exist “Spain is a country. It has been one for a long time,” declared one Madrid supporter.

  France had been far more clever than Spain in its repression, using economic forces more than military. France did not tolerate regional economic powers like Vizcaya. Today, France could lose Brittany, the Basques, and Corsica and still be the same country, possibly even save some money. But without the Basque and Catalan provinces, the two most productive regions, Spain would become an impoverished third-world nation.

  Faced with ETA’s cease-fire, Madrid almost immediately revealed its Achilles’ heel, the Aznar government went to the Council of Europe and asked Europe not to become involved in the peace process. Madrid then retreated to talking of not “rewarding terrorism.” But Basques, Catalans, and Gallegos were not going to be satisfied with that posture. While the government struggled for a lofty position, shunning the wayward, violent Basques who had not turned in their weapons or in any way repented for their years of violence and 800 victims, José Antonio Ardanza, the retiring lehendakari, a resolutely undramatic politician, suddenly came to life in the way lame-duck politicians often do. “It would be nice if everyone who committed acts that caused pain to others asked for forgiveness,” he said. But then he pointed out that no one had ever apologized for the thirty-six-year Franco dictatorship, nor for the violence against Basques after Franco’s death, nor for GAL.

  Nonviolence would be a new tactic, an anomaly in Basque history. All of Basque history is violent. Nationalist literature praises violence and men of violence. Sabino Arana’s first writings on Basque nationalism were an analysis of four battles. “Violence is not for the fruit it will bear. It is a consequence, an expression,” said Patxi Zabaleta.

  To the conservative businessmen of the Basque Nationalist Party, an end to violence would mean a greatly enhanced ability to attract foreign investment. To the left, it would mean more friends and supporters.

  If ETA could control its ranks and keep its non-violence pledge, it would in time disappear. But could Spain exist without ETA? In order to have a Spain, did there not have to be enemies? This was why Franco, trying to perpetuate his rule with his last breath, insisted that “the enemies of Spain” must not be forgotten. And why the PP always claimed to be the party that fought better and harder against the enemies of Spain.

  What was to be done with the soldiers of the Reconquista, the warriors against “the enemies of Spain”? How would Spain justify its huge armed forces, Guardia Civil, and police if it no longer had enemies? Why was a Guardia Civil needed?

  ETA was, after all, a necessary evil.

  IN JANUARY, a cold wind from the mountains drifts into San Sebastián. Sudden icy sprays of rain are followed by blinding white sunlight. With the weather that way, San Sebastián families like to make cocidas, a bean dish that is between a soup and a stew. Different areas have their own cocidas. A Labourd cocida, known as an eltzekari, is sometimes made with duck or goose fat. But a good San Sebastián cocida uses pork fat and has to have a ham bone. Heavyset, tough-looking housewives go to the market at the end of the medieval section of town to buy split pigs’ feet and the stump of a ham. They test the patience of the shopkeeper, choosing just the right stump—the leftover bone and foot. Some want it old and dried and very cured, some less cured, some saltier, some less salty. After choosing the optimal old foot, they insist it be cut exactly as they specify. Some want three pieces, some four. Certain pieces short, others longer. One woman wanted the dried foot, hard as a weathered tree stump, split vertically. The shopkeeper sighed and then whacked it fiercely with a heavy hatchet for a few minutes until it split.

  January 20, at the heart of cocida season, is the Saint’s Day of Sebastián. The bars put out their best pintxos, the city’s bar snacks. Angulas are traditional for this day.

  Gastronomic societies march through the streets. There is considerable debate about the origin of this institution known as a txoko, which means “a cozy place.” Though San Sebastián is the city most known for them, some theorize that the first of these gastronomic societies began in nineteenth-century Bilbao as company social clubs, possibly even inspired by the British. They try to be exclusive, voting on new members, restricting kitchen entry to members. Originally, most of these gastronomic societies did not allow women even to enter their clubhouse. Now some will allow them to come to dinner, but since only members are allowed in the kitchen, the women cannot cook. Only a very few allow women members. Txoko members periodically get together and cook feasts in what are usually professional-quality kitchens. The wine cellars are restocked every year with a pilgrimage to the Rioja.

  The seventy-five gastronomic societies in San Sebastián are considered important enough that the mayor is expected to eat in each of them at least once a year. Constant meals at these men’s clubs was one of the things Ramón Labayen said he liked least about being mayor of San Sebastián.

  On Saint Sebastián Day, half of the members of the local gastronomic societies dress as chefs in white with toques, aprons, and even towels on their hips. These potbellied chefs pursue the other half, who are wearing Napoleonic military uniforms. Throughout the evening, groups of chefs pursue Napoleonic soldiers through the streets. The soldiers in tall cylindrical hats beat drums, and the chefs, led by a conductor-chef using a giant knife, spoon, or whisk for a baton, clank out the same on their barrels. The seemingly vexed soldiers then pound even harder and more elaborately on their drums. Only to get a flat echo from the barrels at the rear of the column.

  When Napoleon’s troops occupied San Sebastián, Basque citizenry taunted them by following behind and beating on barrels. But then, when it was daring, it was mostly women doing it.

  The festival lasts from midnight on January 19 until the following midnight. The chefs pass around bottles and get progressively red faced and bloated looking, but both chefs and soldiers beat out their rhythms and responses with great seriousness.

  By 10:30 P.M., the crowds go into the restaurants to eat txangurro a la Donastiarra, San Sebastián-style stuffed spider crab. The dish is all in the stuffing, since the crab is a leggy but scrawny animal that many cultures have ignored because it requires a gastronome’s heart and a surgeon’s hands to extract its meat.

  TXANGURRO A LA DONASTIARRA

  Use sea water, or else water with salt and yeast. Once the water boils, put the crab in for 15 minutes. After it has chilled, remove all the meat from the legs and the center, and whatever water is there, to pass through a food mill.

  The preparation is as follows: put some olive oil in a skillet with minced onion and a finely minced clove of garlic; when they start to brown add a glass of wine (some prefer brandy), reduce and pass through a food mill with a little white pepper, a teaspoon of English sauce and a litte mustard, according to taste, and a couple of spoonfuls of previously prepared tomato. When all this is reduced, add a spoonful of bread crumbs. Once you have made the preparation, add the crab meat, and when all this is seasoned, put it in the shell and add a little butter just before serving and a little more bread crumbs and slip it into the oven.

  —Nicolasa Pradera, 1933

  ON SAINT SEBASTIÁN NIGHT, 1998, by the central market at Nicolasa Pradera’s famous old restaurant, the contemporary chef-owner, Juan José Castillo, from Be
rmeo, surveyed the crab dishes coming out of the kitchen. Meanwhile, the chefs and soldiers were marching through town saluting the police station and various other institutions. When they came to Casa Nicolasa, Castillo ran out to the balcony and bounced up and down on his toes, waving his arms to the drum cadence in unconcealed boyish glee as his waiters ran below distributing bottles of champagne. Then he suddenly decided it was too cold for champagne and ran downstairs to distribute coffee and brandy, then charged back up to his balcony to listen some more.

  As the gastronomes got increasingly merry and plodding, toques and high Napoleonic hats starting to slide to one side, another group began to form. They were marching for amnesty for political prisoners—accused ETArists in Spanish prisons around the peninsula. Each one carried a sign on a stick showing a photo of a prisoner. Many of the demonstrators were relatives of these prisoners, but rather than carry photos of their own family members, the group shuffled their signs, each carrying one selected by random to make the point that they were not asking for amnesty for a relative, but rather for freedom for all Basque political prisoners.

  Among those carrying a sign was a professorial-looking man in a blue duffel coat with his white hair disarranged in the clear winter night’s air.

  It was Txillardegi, whose son was among the twenty-three sentenced to seven years in prison for being on the board of directors of the Herri Batasuna party.

  In 1997, the New York Times asked Felipe González how it was possible that GAL could have come from within his government without him ordering it. He replied that the state, after thirty-six years of dictatorship, might still have elements that he could not control. “People don’t want to understand that we inherited a state apparatus in its entirety from the dictatorship,” said the man who is credited with leading his country to democracy.

  “There is always a first mistake,” wrote Joseba Sarrionaindia, a Basque writer accused of being an ETA member, currently in hiding.

  * * *

  15: Surviving Democracy

  The Basque language is a country, almost a religion.

  —Victor Hugo, on a visit, 1843

  * * *

  IN 1998, a Spanish-speaking customer came into Jeanine Pereuil’s gâteau Basque shop in St. Pée. With worry lines tightening on her face, the woman ordered a cake, custard filled, and before Jeanine could wrap it, began to describe the latest attack by ETA. Simply to prove it could strike anywhere, ETA had killed a PP politician and his wife, both in their midthirties, in the distant Andalusian city of Seville.

  “And they had three children,” said the customer.

  Jeanine shuddered, as she often did when she contemplated Spanish Basqueland, a few miles away. She had been seeing the refugees from there all her life. “But they do have some wonderful things,” she said with a sudden smile, and began talking about dances and folk celebrations she has seen there, traditions that were vanishing from her province.

  In the French provinces, two schools of thought compete: One watches the development of the Autonomous Basque Community of Euskadi with envy, wanting the same cultural and economic opportunities for Labourd, Basse Navarre, and Soule. The other sees the Spanish provinces full of menace and tragedy and fears that French Basqueland could go the same way. Many French Basques feel both ways.

  Most French Basques will say that they feel they have more in common with a Guipúzcoan or a Vizcayan than with a Frenchman from the other side of the Adour. The Vizcayans and Guipúzcoans say that they feel they have more in common with a Basque from St. Pée or St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port than with a Spaniard from the other side of the Ebro.

  But on the other hand, one side has experienced French history and the other side Spanish. The Spanish Basques suspect, as do many Spaniards, that the people north of the Pyrenees are a bit frivolous and insincere. The French Basques, like the French, suspect that the people south of the Pyrenees, Basques included, are a bit barbarous, dangerous, and not to be trusted.

  In Mauléon, the quiet capital of Soule, Maïte Faure sells traditional fabrics. A popular item is off-white cotton with colored stripes—originally indigo but now often red and green—a motif copied from the canvases that used to protect cows from flies. By long-standing tradition, there are always seven stripes, one for each province. “I am proud to be French,” she said. “I don’t trust the Basques over there. They say we are all Basques, but I don’t think they include us.” She paused for a moment and smiled. “On the other hand, at the age of fifty, I am suddenly taking up traditional Basque dance.”

  This seeming non sequitur referred to the fact that the Basques in Spain, at last free of dictatorship, are pursuing their Basqueness with such remarkable energy and limitless ambition that it is waking up the sleepy Basques who have lived in peace in France. Excitement about the growth of Basque culture on the Spanish side inspired Faure to learn dance.

  The 212,000 people in the French Basque provinces represent less than 9 percent of Basques. But they have played an important role because, though they have not had the prosperity of Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya, neither have they had the political turmoil. The little provinces of Labourd, Basse Navarre, and Soule have been the safe haven of Basqueland, where refugees could go, where troubled Basques from the other side could find shelter. But what would the role of French Basqueland be in a peaceful Euskadi? If the seven provinces were ever united, the situation of the French Basques would be similar to what it is now under France: Neither the population, nor the money, nor the power would be in their provinces.

  A belle epoque postcard from Biarritz.

  THE BASQUES WERE among the inventors of beach resorts. Biarritz, like San Sebastián, is one of the oldest beach resorts in the world. In 1892 on a visit to Labourd, Pierre Loti, the French merchant marine officer-turned-novelist, wrote, “Poor Basqueland, such a long time intact, like some sort of little Arabia, protected by loyalty to its ancestral traditions and by its language that no one can learn, and here it is, vanished just like that. In just the last few seasons, tourists, who seemed not to know about it, have made the discovery.”

  Since then, French social programs have greatly expanded both tourism and retirement to the Basque provinces. In Loti’s day, the Basques had only to stave off an invasion of the wealthy. But six weeks guaranteed vacation and early retirement pensions have made tourists and retirees the basis of the economy in coastal Labourd, which the French tourist industry insists on calling La Côte Basque.

  Ugly white housing, of a design that speaks of nothing so much as quick construction and easy cleaning, much of it occupied only from May through October, is marring the outskirts of the beautiful ancient port of St.-Jean-de-Luz. Tourism is moving into Basse Navarre, and in Soule locals wish it would come their way too because their farms cannot compete with agro-industry, and traditional crafts cannot compete with Asian factories.

  Soule, where fewer than 14,000 people live in quiet villages surrounded by mountainsides patched with small cornfields, is the forgotten province. It has always been that way. On May 5, 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, when Louis XVI presided over the États Généraux, Soule, neighboring Béarn, and also Brittany were the only parts of France that were not represented. Soule had not been making a political statement. It simply could not raise enough public funds to send someone to Paris. Mauléon, Soule’s capital, has a shady main square with a fronton court, where a few dozen people might pass at the busiest time of day. This is called the lower town. The upper town is built along the ramparts of a medieval castle. Why don’t tourists visit the castle? locals wonder. Without them there is only the corn crop, and a few sheep. Little is left of the town’s main business, making espadrilles.

  In the thirteenth century, the king of Aragón commented on the curious hemp-soled cloth shoes, tied at the ankles, worn by recruits from the Pyrenees in the army of the Crusade. In nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Mauléon, the identical shoe was still being made and sold throughout Basqueland. In the famous photo of
Sabino Arana behind prison bars, he is wearing espadrilles. Even in the early twentieth century, every morning, the now quiet town of Mauléon would fill up with about 1,000 espadrille workers. One plant made soles, another made fabrics, and women, often working at home, sewed them together.

  In the 1950s, when Maïte Faure’s father died, her mother had to support the family with the only work available for women: sewing espadrilles. Strapped to her palm almost permanently was the small circular metal guard for pushing the thick needle.

  In the 1980s, the handmade espadrille started to lose its market to the less expensive factory-made one from Spain, and then an even less expensive one from China In 1981, France imported 3 million pairs of Chinese espadrilles. About eighty people still work on espadrilles in Mauléon, because no local would wear one from China or anywhere else if it was not handmade. The last traditional textile plant for espadrilles is outside town, and a few artisans still hand sew them. But the population of Mauléon is in decline, as people leave their Euskera-speaking world for employment on the French-speaking coast or in Paris.

  Sabino Arana in prison wearing espadrilles. (Sabino Arana Foundation, Bilbao)

  WHILE THE SPANISH wanted the Basques to be the engine of their economy, the French provinces were of little economic significance to planners in Paris. The French, with coal, iron, and waterways to build great industrial centers in the north and east, could afford to let their Basques, ports and all, languish in benign neglect. The French state offered French services to the Basques and few opportunities for development. French schools were provided, were obligatory, and did not allow any language but French. Many Basques heard the French language for the first time at age five when it was forced on them in school. Under French administration, Basque culture had suffered a slow erosion over 160 years, but between 1965 and 1970, Euskera experienced a sudden, powerful blow: Television was introduced to rural France. For the first time in history, the French language was commonly heard in the homes of Basque farmers.