Praise for Mundaca
‘Mundaca is a wonderfully compelling tale, a mixture of romance and intrigue woven into the fabric of Basque history, local characters and personal tragedy. This adventure is told against the extraordinary natural beauty of the town’s location, including one of the most unique waves found anywhere in the world. It’s extremely rare these days to read something that gives genuine insight into what those early years of travel and cultural upheaval were like. Owen Hargreaves has eloquently captured something of those times, and done so from a deeply honest and personal perspective.’
— Wayne Lynch, surfing legend
‘Owen Hargreaves has written a cracking debut novel that succeeds in combining surf noir, a political thriller and an enigmatic love story with all elements melding and flowing into one another seamlessly, much like a well-shaped board. It’s a slow burn that progressively draws you in as Hargreaves skilfully builds layers of intrigue that pull you deeper. The mystical Spanish rivermouth of the book’s title looms as a central character, reflecting and fuelling the emotional journey of the young Australian surfer at the centre of the unfolding drama.’
— Tim Baker, former editor of Tracks, Surfing Life and Slow Living magazines, award-winning author, journalist and three-time winner of the Surfing Australia Hall of Fame Culture Award
‘Mundaca captures the surfing zeitgeist of the ’70s, nailing it on what it was like to be on the road, living the Kerouac dream with a surfboard. Any surfer from that era will relate, but the relationship with Maite is really the heart of the story for me … the ending twist was a welcome surprise.’
— Kevin Naughton, journalist for Surfer, The Surfer’s Journal, The Surfer’s Path, Surfline and Travelers’ Tales books; author of the surf novel Trout Rising
First published in 2021
by Unbuckle & Run Press
Melbourne, Australia
unbuckleandrun.com
[email protected]
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Copyright © Owen Hargreaves, 2021
All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of this publication may be reproduced, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.
The right of Owen Hargreaves to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
ISBN 978 0 6451 3480 3 (paperback)
ISBN 978 0 6451 3481 0 (ebook)
The author welcomes readers’ feedback via the Mundaca page of unbuckleandrun.com
Cover design and typesetting: Luke Harris at WorkingType.
Editing: Clare Strahan and Dr Euan Mitchell.
Printed and bound by Ingram Spark.
The cover photo of the surf break at Mundaca, Spain, was first published by Stab Magazine, USA. All reasonable efforts were made by the author and Unbuckle & Run Press to identify the photographer and obtain authorisation. Any advice or claim concerning the copyright of the cover photo is welcomed.
Note: Mundaca is the Spanish language spelling for the Basque village of Mundaka in Viscaya, Spain. Basque language was suppressed during the Franco period, including 1975 when the story is set.
In tribute to George Steer and his book,
The Tree of Gernika.
Based on a true story
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
EPILOGUE
PLEASE REVIEW
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
There are triggers of all kinds that send you scurrying. The trigger of a gun, of course. And you scurry fast. But there are other triggers. Ones that send you scurrying in a different direction — back to the distant past, to events you thought were well and truly buried.
A sight, a sound, a scent; a trigger can take any form. The trigger fires — like a gun — and your mind scurries. You are momentarily transfixed, transported. You live the memory again as if it were the first time. But it’s not the first time. And the passage of time distorts things, plays tricks with your mind.
One memory might trigger another. And another. Fragments of events, not necessarily in sequence, the connections sometimes a mystery. You are left wondering what is the truth behind the memories. Did the event really unfold that way?
Sometimes the connections between real events are as tenuous as the memories themselves.
But it’s a trigger that sets things off, jolts a memory, calls up the fragments, pulls the invisible threads that link them, conjures whole events, until a story — true or otherwise — grows and takes on a shape and life of its own.
Trigger, memory, event, story.
A red-checked tablecloth is one such trigger. It transports me to northern Spain, June 1975 … the town of Guernica, deserted, midday hour. Arturo, his hand on my shoulder, urging me forward. A wide stone walkway, round tables, red-checked tablecloths.
A bar. An old man sitting in a corner reading a newspaper, red wine, black beret, thick-rimmed glasses.
Two middle-aged men standing, smoking, talking. Bartender wiping, listening. They study us — Arturo is one of them; me a foreigner, an extranjero. I squirm, look away. Dismissive grunt, they resume conversation.
Bartender sidles over. Arturo, arching thick black eyebrows, orders. San Miguel beer, two tall glasses. Froth surges up, subsides.
Small plates of pinchos atop the bar. Arturo passes a tortilla wedge. Warm, firm, juicy.
Sawdust floor: cigarette butts, toothpicks, crumpled serviettes.
Arturo chats with the bartender. A strange musical language. The two local men join in, frequently interrupting, hands moving fast. Mundaca, Lequetio, Australiano. They study me. Conversation halts abruptly. All eyes to the door.
Two men swagger in. Swarthy, moustachioed, rifles slung over shoulders. Heavy olive-green uniforms, black boots, belts, curious black hats. Patrons’ faces hard-set, sullen. Transformation unnerving. I try to shrink.
The soldiers sit at a table, hanging their rifles over the backs of their chairs. The rifles sway backward and forward, the dark wooden butt of one grazing noisily against the chair leg, its long metal barrel pointing in a slow circling motion towards the ceiling.
‘Camarero!’ the heavier-set of the pair calls out impatiently.
The bartender regards them with a necessary politeness.
‘Dos vinos de marca … y tráenos usted pinchos de atún y tortilla,’ the soldier orders gruffly.
The bartender begins, unhurriedly, to prepare their drinks and food.
The soldier strums the tabletop with his fingertips and eyes each patron; and each, unflinchingly, turns his face. His eye catches mine. I shudder and look away. His contemptuous gaze moves on and I am drawn back to him in morbid fascination. Beyond the surly exterior something else lurks.
Arturo seems impatient to leave. He pays the bill in a business-like fashion, the bartender
equally stern.
‘Adiós,’ Arturo calls out firmly.
‘Adiós,’ the locals reply, their focus shifting momentarily from the soldiers to us. Only the old man lost in his paper doesn’t look up or speak.
‘Guardia Civil … cabrones!’ Arturo almost spits when we reach the car. Civil guards … ‘the bastards’. From the same town? They couldn’t be. Jeez, they wouldn’t feel such hatred for their own kind. Would they? It seemed to come from both sides.
… How could I forget that first day in Spain? I haven’t. I can’t. And to think she came from that town. But that’s not where this story begins. Not my version. It starts in South-West France, a few weeks later, when I met Greg.
CHAPTER 1
The Steakhouse sat atop the cliffs of the Côte des Basques, about a kilometre to the south of the glitzy centre of Biarritz. It was a low-budget night venue where the cool people, the more adventurous local girls and all the surfers went. There was a wood-panelled bar filled with foreigners, Aussie and American surfers noisily recounting their latest adventures. Bemused French surfers watched from the sidelines.
I went out to a verandah that overlooked the sea to get fresh air. A guy was leaning on the railing, gazing seaward into the darkness, tall and lean, with thin blond hair and the shoulders of a surfer. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, restless. He turned my way and the moon lit his tortoise-shell glasses and carefully trimmed moustache. His slumped shoulders spoke of sadness, defeat.
‘G’day,’ I said tentatively, testing the waters.
He looked across, annoyed, as if I’d broken a spell, but his countenance softened. ‘Howdy, amigo. Sorry, I was away with the birds.’
‘Anything interesting out there?’
‘The sea, the night sky. They’re always interesting.’
‘True. Although it’s a bit hard to see the sea in the dark.’
‘But you can hear it while you watch the stars. Truly soulful, man.’
I laughed. ‘You must be a surfer.’
He grunted softly. ‘Would anyone else come to a place like The Steakhouse?’
‘I wouldn’t know. It’s my first time here.’
‘Me too, but, man, it has that desperate surfer feel about it. Don’t you think?’
‘It’s a surfer’s haunt, for sure. But the French come too, girls included.’
‘Not really my kind of place. What’s your name?’
‘Owen, from Melbourne.’
‘Greg, Central Coast, California.’
‘Been here long?’
‘A few days. Flew in from the south of Spain.’
‘Surfing?’
‘No. I should have gone surfing. That was my mistake.’
‘Mistake? How do you mean?’
Three or four beers later, I found out.
‘Well, man, I wanted to travel and paint,’ Greg said, after he’d drained his glass. ‘So I went to Marrakesh, an amazing city, and headed up into the Atlas Mountains to this place called Ketama, where I heard they made hash. A local family invited me to stay. It was a fairly primitive farmhouse with a marijuana crop, but the scenery was beautiful and they seemed friendly enough, and I was able to paint. After four days I was ready to leave, but they wouldn’t let me go. They made it pretty obvious that I risked my life if I tried to escape. Every day they’d have a family meeting to decide what to do with me — like they owned me!’
‘Jesus! What did you do?’
‘It was crazy, man!’ He stole an anxious glance towards the sea. ‘So I tore out the two main pages from my passport and put them, along with most of my travellers’ cheques, in a plastic bag, which I stuck up …’ He made a face.
‘Really? You did that?’
‘It was the only thing I could think to do, man! And my instinct was right, because they went through all my stuff. They kept the cash in my wallet, which wasn’t much, and I’d left a couple of travellers’ cheques to keep them happy.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘The headman of the family “invited” me to help them build a mud-brick outbuilding. I couldn’t refuse, but I took it real slow. They weren’t too happy about that.’ He grinned nervously and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, a silver sheen in the moonlight revealing a scar above his right eye.
‘I was desperate.’ His eyes grew large behind his glasses. ‘I convinced them to let me go to the nearest town to cash the few travellers’ cheques they’d kept and bring them back the money. But they’d only let me go with one of their goons.’ He ran a hand through his hair. The moonlight caught his glasses and I couldn’t see his eyes, but his voice was tight. ‘We walked down through the valley to the main road and we met several other families along the way. The men all checked me out with the same conniving look. If I’d been alone, I wouldn’t have got out of there.’ His hand trembled.
‘You poor bastard! How did you get away?’
‘Thank God, the bank was closed for lunch, so we went to the market to wait. The souk was really crowded and I managed to give him the slip and got on a bus to Ceuta.’ He drew a big breath of cool night air, then exhaled with a long, steady sound, like the wind, filled with emotion and relief. And when the breath escaped him, his shoulders relaxed.
I, on the other hand, was gripping the railing. ‘Jeez, mate, what a lucky escape!’
‘It was! I couldn’t relax until I’d got out of Morocco. At the border I showed what remained of my passport, they shrugged, asked for a fee, and let me pass.’ The edge in his voice petered out to a tired rasp. ‘On the Spanish side, I convinced them I’d been abducted. They gave me a transit visa to get to the US embassy in Madrid to get a new passport. Then I came straight here. Arrived two days ago.’ He dropped his hands to the rail and gazed out to the sea’s gentle murmur.
‘That’s a wild story!’ I let go of the rail. ‘My heart’s flying just listening!’
‘Man, I was so relieved to get to Spain! My nerves are totally frazzled, though. I want to take it easy.’ He leaned against the rail. ‘And surf my brains out.’
‘Makes sense,’ I said. ‘Surfing’s good like that.’
A camping buddy passed by. ‘Coming, Owen?’ said the Kiwi. ‘We’re leaving.’
I turned to Greg. ‘I better go, mate. Good to meet you. See you at the beach.’
‘I’m there every day … and now you know why.’
In the heart of Biarritz, everything appeared remarkably new and clean, and somehow make-believe. The crisply dressed and manicured passers-by looked down their noses at me.
I headed down the broad terraced steps on the south side of the casino, along the elegant beachfront, to the beach.
The Grand Plage was like the stage in an amphitheatre — a groomed stretch of sand sat at the southern end of a bay, backed by steeply climbing hills and book-ended by rocky headlands to the north and south. The hills were strewn with magnificent villas and apartments, the foreshore dominated by the casino — an opulent but fading monument to the glory days of the 1920s and ’30s.
The groomed section of the beach was organised with great élan. Umbrellas and deckchairs, all in tidy rows, could be rented at exorbitant prices, and rich beach-goers, mostly elderly, basked lazily in the sun in their skimpy swimwear. The ungroomed beach near the rocks was where the young people congregated. Long-haired youths in board shorts and bikiniclad girls sprawled on colourful towels, surfboards propped nearby, wetsuits drying in the sun. There was no order here, just disarray and a sense of anarchy. Beyond, in the cobalt blue sea, a disparate flock of surfers rode the meagre swell.
I found some vacant sand on the fringe of the ungroomed section, set down my board and wetsuit, and made myself comfortable. I watched the sea for a while, then got out my book, lay back, and tried to read. I soon dozed off.
I was lying on my towel, The Tree of Gernika open at the first page, when Greg approached. ‘Hey, Owen.’ He settled a beautiful long, blue surfboard on the sand, sat on his towel and fl
icked at the cover of my book. ‘Guernica with a “k” and no “u”,’ he said.
I shook myself awake. ‘Basque spelling.’
‘Is that right?’ He peered at me through the thick-lensed, tortoise-shell glasses with his pale blue eyes. ‘I know the painting well, and that’s spelt with a “c” and a “u” … probably because Picasso wasn’t Basque. He was from Malaga. Well, he was born in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, but raised in Malaga. He did the painting in Paris, for the World Fair. Then it toured all round the globe.’
‘You seem to know a lot about Picasso.’
‘Art college.’ He brushed the sand off his hands. ‘Guernica is one of the all-time great protest paintings and one of my personal favourites. But I’ve never heard of George Steer. Where did you get it?’
‘From a girl in Mundaca.’
‘Mundaca? The Spanish left-hander river-mouth wave?’
‘That’s right. A beautiful little fishing village.’
‘And she gave you the book? That’s curious. Didn’t she want it back?’
‘I don’t think so. She said something about other copies.’
‘Really? In English? That’s strange.’
‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t thinking too clearly … if you know what I mean.’
Greg laughed. ‘Oh! I get it! What’s her name?’
‘Maite.’
‘My-tay. Never heard of that one.’
‘Well, it’s a Basque name.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘She’s an artist too,’ I added. ‘Well, an art student at least. She studied in Dublin for a while.’
‘Dublin?’ He seemed surprised. ‘Weird choice. Dublin’s not famous for its art schools.’
‘Maybe, but she has plenty of spectacular scenery to paint in the Basque country, Mundaca included.’
Greg’s moustache twitched and one hand unconsciously moved towards it. ‘Mundaca sounds inviting. Surf, a beautiful village, dramatic countryside, a great place to paint. It sounds more and more intriguing.’ He smoothed his moustache from the middle out with a thumb and index finger. ‘So does Maite.’
Mundaca: A Tale of Intrigue, Romance and Surfing in Franco's Spain Page 1
