her, of the array of possibilities, which were the ones she had in store. It crossed her mind that if she wanted to conjure up her father after more than a month’s absence, this might be a way. Over there, across the street. Under that tree. Inside that doorway.
It was noon. It didn’t matter. She’d draw him out of hiding. He was in the closet. Under the bed. Behind the bedroom door. Having been warned, her mother wouldn’t call.
III
Sabino Arana—a mysterious man. He’d been jailed by the Spanish government, charged with sending a letter of congratulations to Theodore Roosevelt for liberating the Cuban slaves from their Spanish masters. He considered Spaniards lazy, violent and drunken, a threat to the purity of any people they came into contact with; the Catalans, who, like the Basques, languished under Madrid’s rule, he considered godless. Arana himself was a devout Catholic, a sort of neo-Carlist. He espoused nonviolence. He believed the Basques were God’s chosen people and that their language was the language spoken in Eden before the fall.
They had been granted a “collective nobility” long ago; that meant, to a man, in their mountain strongholds, the Basques were a noble race. The fact that that title had been bestowed on them by a Castilian king for their defense of the Spanish realm didn’t bother Arana. Occasionally Castilian kings could be made to see the light. The Moors had never penetrated the Basque country; no Jews had. They had a blood that wouldn’t mix. A language only they could speak. The young men banded together and made periodic retreats to the mountaintops overlooking their towns. There they held their virile exercises and communed with God.
Searching for a face, Ben Williamson remembered Arana, a mystic, a holy fool, but a politician too and the founder of the largest political party in the Basque country. A pacifist. A fascist, if there ever was one.
He had not seen a face. College texts drawn off the shelves rarely contained photographs.
Basques were said to have a special cranial formation, and, it was true, a certain rare blood type. They were all black-haired, black-browed, with deep-set eyes and pronounced jaws. That was not a face.
When Franco rose it was to liberate Spain from the atheists, ideologues, soulless state planners. Yet he bombed the Basques savagely. Hermann Goering wanted to give his Luftwaffe a trial run before Germany attacked Britain and the rest of Europe; Franco pointed to a small Basque town and said, “There. It shall be a lesson to separatists. In its ruins, their shrine. You have my permission to make it disappear.” Guernica.
Ben had seen the painting. He had stood before it in the Museum of Modern Art. At the time it was an obligatory stop on his tour of the city. He’d come with his wife and two girls, when they were small. Yet only he had felt obliged. The museum guide had explained that the painting was to remain here, in the land of the free, until real freedom was restored in Spain. He remembered the guide’s almost quipping and partisan aside: since Spain had never been a free country, it was hard to imagine just what Picasso had had in mind. And too late to ask him since the exiled Spanish master had recently died. The chances were Guernica would be here in MOMA for years to come.
After the great visceral howl that came off the painting had died down, what Ben remembered was its playfulness. He would not remember it being painted in blacks and whites and grays. He would swear it was painted in the primary colors of a child.
ETA was born when the commander of the Allied forces that had rid the rest of the continent of fascism, but had failed to do so in Spain, came to Madrid to extend an approving hand to Franco in his stand against communism. Ben didn’t remember this. He was far too young. He didn’t really remember Ike, except as a sort of cloudy grandfatherly visage hovering over the country during the first years of Ben’s life. Ike came and shook Franco’s hand, and separatist Basques, who had been waiting for years for the Allied hero to give them their D-Day, split from the dominant nationalist party and became an armed insurgency.
He had read that and had no reason to doubt it. Nineteen fifty-nine. In that year, that cloudy grandfatherly visage had looked down on his daughter. But a cloudy grandfatherly visage was not a face.
The books agreed that Franco had used the Basques to set the rest of Spain an example. The Galicians, the Valencians, the Mallorcans, the Canary Islanders, the Aragonese and especially the Catalans might entertain separatist ambitions, but once they saw what Franco did to the Basques, they’d have second thoughts. Municipal government, education, taxation, labor, the appointment of officials down through the ranks, the running of the ports, the prisons, the policing of the streets—everything of any importance was controlled by Madrid. The Basque fueros, special rights granted centuries ago by some Carlos, Felipe or Ferdinand, and which, as far as Ben could tell, had mostly to do with the levying of tolls in and out of the region, were suspended. The use of the Basque language was outlawed, although certain folkloric customs were allowed to continue. Boys and young men could still band together in groups of five or six— cuadrillas, they were called—and swear a loyalty oath. They couldn’t be kept from forming their mountain-climbing clubs and climbing to the tops of their mountains. Nor, once there, could they be kept from airing their grievances in the language of their choice, or from plotting.
In the green valleys, beside rushing rivers, the businessmen who chose to accept Madrid’s terms prospered, while on the mountaintops, where Franco’s police and Civil Guard couldn’t be expected to climb, clandestine organizations were born.
In God’s eye, ETA was born.
In Sabino Arana’s eye.
The purist. The pacifist.
The organization would splinter, of course. There would be personality clashes and clashes of ideology. Those who sought any sort of accommodation with Franco’s Spain were termed españolistas. There was a Marxist group that thought along international lines. Those who continued to subscribe to Arana’s vision were interested only in a nation of pure-blooded Basques. Given the effects of immigration—there had been an influx of poor Castilians to work in Basque steel and lumber mills—you were considered to be pure-blooded enough if one of your grandfathers was.
On the top of a mountain, of course, everything might seem pure.
On a clear day, from the top of a Basque mountain, you might imagine you could see all the way to a Madrid park, around which ran a girl with a golden ponytail.
Memory began, Ben believed, in 1970, his first year in college. In addition to all the civil rights turmoil, and information and misinformation coming out of Vietnam, he vaguely remembered something about a trial of ETA activists in the Castilian city of Burgos. The books he read at his daughter’s university would tell him that the exact number of activists was sixteen, that two were priests and several more ex-seminarians. There were two women. One of the defense attorneys managed to get on the record that Spanish police had tortured his client, and with the court looking on, scars were displayed. Before they were banned from the proceedings, members of the international press got the word out. Nevertheless, all sixteen ETA members were found guilty, and three were sentenced to death. A general strike followed in the Basque country. Sympathy strikes were called in various countries. Dockers refused to unload Spanish ships. There was an act of self-immolation. Reading brought it back to him. He began to recall his first impression of ETA, and it was of bravery, and the heroism of self-sacrifice, and the glorious legitimacy of their claim to self-determination, and even of their special character, something of their larger-than-life, mountain-rimmed apartness, as if the Basques really were a tribe of superior beings. Strong, noble and steadfast down through the years. Licensed in a way inferior beings weren’t. In a manner of speaking, pure.
He remembered the Basques and ETA, and then
