Guernica

by Dave Boling

  He titled it Minotauromachy (Minotaur Battle); the characters were some he would save as trademark symbols, and the theme would be converted for future works. As usual, critics tried to decode his message, most assuming it was another ode to the perpetually tormented soul of Spain. In her critique, Gertrude Stein agreed that it was an homage to his native country, because Picasso simply “can never empty himself of being Spanish.”

  Mendiola knew that losing Miguel would hurt his business. Despite the depressed economy, Mendiola’s shop had grown more profitable. So it was not entirely out of his concern for Miguel’s well-being that Teodoro Mendiola gave his friend warnings about starting his own business at home.

  “People who work at home get bored,” Mendiola told him. “They feel as if they’re always at work but never get out of the house. Within a year the wife will be sick of the man and he’ll wish he had a place to go to get away during the day.”

  Miguel listened but did not expect that would be the case.

  “Have you seen Miren?” he asked.

  For a newlywed man with such a wife, the time away from the workbench was unlamented. As it developed, each of Miguel’s trips in from the shop to the house felt like a surprise party.

  “I’m thirsty, dear.” They kiss.

  “I need to wash my hands, kuttuna.” They embrace.

  “Isn’t it about time for lunch?” Urgent coupling bent over the table, disrupting her preparation of the midday meal.

  Miren occasionally interrupted him in the shop, too, with equally contrived motives. “Asto, can you come in and reach this for me?” Each small task carried a tariff of at least one lingering kiss and an immodest grasp by one or the other.

  Mendiola was correct in one regard: Miguel’s mind, while at work, was often consumed by the image of Miren. But what distracted him also inspired him. He created finer products, with greater detail and polish and with lines that were subtly sensuous.

  As he lathed table legs, he thought of her slender ankles and dancer’s calves. As he beveled the corner of a tabletop, it assumed the shape of her naked shoulder. He envisioned the crease between the lean muscles of her outer thighs when he configured a piece of edging. Armrests of chairs became her arms, tapering to the end, with the wrist dipping into a gracefully curved hand. And as he rubbed in the stain and polish, he thought of massaging her neck, and then her back, down the beaded molding of her spine, down past the decoratively countersunk sacral dimples, down to the sculpted behind, with flesh the color of clear varnished pine. Tenon and mortise, he thought.

  The scent of the shop was that of fresh-milled cypress and wood adhesives. And, in time, surrounded by a mound of feathery sawdust on the floor, amid a musk cloud of varnish fumes, Miguel would slow and refocus, and realize that the piece was finished. It was beautiful and effortless.

  Time for lunch, dear. Are you ready?

  Unaware that Miguel had discovered in carpentry an element of eroticism, Miren occasionally was surprised by her husband’s readiness when he left the shop. She would admit, too, that she found her mind wandering while kneading dough or washing vegetables. And when Miguel arrived with a specific intent, she was equally eager.

  There was no element of surrender to this, as she had been led to believe from overheard conversations among older women. Yes, she was modest, but she was lustful, too; yes, he was lustful, but he was also respectful. And her natural playfulness found interesting avenues as she surprised him with the occasional tender bite or a single light fingernail scrape down the length of his spine, or, as he sometimes kissed her stomach, she would nip the end of his nose between her thumb and forefinger as mothers do to young ones when pretending to steal their noses.

  Coming in from one project, Miguel found Miren baking bread. The early afternoon sun from the southern window in the kitchen caused her to once again give off light. And the smell of the leavening dough was yeasty in the room. He walked lightly on his toes behind her. He slipped his hands onto her waist, eased her back against his hips, and immersed his face in her fragrant hair, inhaling deeply, spellbound.

  “Oh, God . . . your smell,” he said.

  “Oh, God, your smell,” she countered.

  “That soap from Alaia is wonderful.”

  “Yes, Miguel, you should use some.”

  She turned inside the radius of his arms, flicked a heavy dusting of flour onto his sweating face, and dabbed a finger beneath each ear as if to apply a cologne. She pulled back to look at him so that they met only at the hips.

  “Look at all the flour you wasted,” she said. “Flour is hard to come by these days, and valuable.”

  “Fine, then I will give it back. I’ll give it to you here”—he touched his floury lips lightly to the side of her neck—“and here,” he said, touching them to the other side of her neck.

  At the soft hollow between ascending cords at the base of her neck, he paused.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “The recipe calls for more there.”

  She leaned back to allow greater access, and the bread was left to rise on its own.

  They always talked of personal things in the close time afterward. Miguel told her of fishing and of his family and of growing up in Lekeitio, and how he had hoped there was a Miren somewhere for him. Miren told him about dancing and about her parents and about life on the baserri, and how she had no idea there would be a Miguel for her in the world. When conversation lapsed, he might race naked to the kitchen and retrieve a piece of bread or an apple that they would share, all so much more delicious now. There was no senseless modesty anymore, as he would hand Miren the food and stand at the edge of the bed, proudly male.

  And one afternoon Miren made an observation Miguel found curious.

  “I don’t know if it’s possible to tell such things, but I feel like we just started a baby,” she said, rolling to face him.

  Miguel hoped that would be the case, as a family would further dovetail their lives.

  “I’ve never heard a woman say anything about this,” Miren said. “I should ask my mother if she had any idea when this happened to her.”

  “Please don’t, kuttuna, I don’t want her thinking about us doing this.” In his mind, though, Miguel began shaping plans for the construction of a cradle.

  Amaya Mezo hummed in a gentle contralto no matter how many hours she might be in the fields with her husband Roberto. It made the baby girl carried in the sling across her chest sleep as if she were in a rocking cradle soothed by tender lullabies. Amaya’s cargo was Gracianna, her seventh child, five months old. Amaya never minded getting back in the fields to help Roberto, even in the dusty heat of the summer or when the windblown grass chaff bit into their faces and adhered to their sweat. Roberto told her many times that her songs made the work less tiring. It sounded to him like the calling of a bird.

  The Mezos’ baserri, Etxegure, was larger than the neighboring Errotabarri. And in good times, the Mezos had more stock, along with an apple orchard that produced fruit for eating and for cider. Of course, the Ansoteguis had only one child, and she was now gone with her husband.

  Amaya Mezo didn’t think about the increasing hardships, as she was lost in her song and the rhythmic thrust of the two-pronged laia into the soil and the sun on her back and the sleeping sighs of the baby against her chest. But Roberto then made a sound she’d never heard.

  Two uniformed Guardia Civil officers had snatched the unsuspecting Roberto, who struggled and was subdued by a rifle butt to the lower abdomen. He had fallen, and the two guards, each pulling at a flailing arm, had lifted him to a standing position.

  “Amaya, run!” Roberto yelled. “Get Justo.”

  But she knew there was no time to fetch the neighbor; this was up to her. She raced at the guardsmen, child bouncing in her sling, brandishing her sharpened laia as if it were a jousting stick. Sensing her willingness to run them through, the guards pulled down their rifles and cocked the bolts, one leveled at Roberto’s head and the other at Amaya’s ches
t.

  “One more step and we’ll kill you both,” one said with a paralyzing calmness.

  Amaya stopped as if she had reached the end of a tether, frozen by the sight of the rifle at Roberto’s head.

  The baby screamed.

  “What did he do?” Amaya asked. “He’s just a farmer.”

  The guardsmen said nothing. With the point of a rifle, one guard guided Roberto toward the road while the other walked backward, his weapon never varying off a line that led directly to Amaya’s chest. And they were gone.

  With Mariangeles’s help, Amaya spent every day seeking information at the Guardia offices. In a month, she was told that Roberto had been accused by “concerned citizens” of selling produce without going through the appropriate ration accounting. When she asked when the trial would be conducted, when the accusers could be confronted, she was told that such formalities were not necessary in these difficult times.

  “ ‘Concerned citizens’?” Justo asked Mariangeles that night. “Is that what it has come to now? People turning on each other? I’m going to see if I can find the person who did this.”

  “I don’t know what happened, Justo,” she said. “I only know that he had no chance, and Amaya is going to have problems without him. All those children. The troubles are coming here now, too, aren’t they? I don’t want you doing anything foolish. Let’s just try to be smart.”

  Dark humor spread from man to man through Guernica’s streets and cafés. Women refused to take part, perhaps because of higher sensitivity and delicate taste, or perhaps greater strength. Mendiola told Miguel that he knew times were hard because even the town’s cats were looking over their shoulders as they slinked about the streets.

  Coffee now consisted of recycled grounds with no sugar; bread was coarse and black, and meat was an almost forgotten delicacy. Those who still had pigs slaughtered them at night and then hid the meat to avoid being caught with unrationed pork. Those who had cached sacks of wheat broke into locked mills by night to grind whatever small amount of flour they could, risking arrest for making bread. Others started eating their seed corn, and some were said to have stolen oats out of horses’ feed bags in town, as the provender for stock was becoming a staple for humans.

  Miguel spent many days in the forests felling timber and learned which mushrooms were edible. He carried a sack to hold them. He still tried to fish in the stream for the small trout to bolster their sparse diet. Many of the streams were fished out, though. He thought of the thousands of fish he had pulled in during his days in Lekeitio and wondered how he could have found the process so distasteful. He thought of a grilled bream fillet and of the delicious bacalao.

  One day he spotted a grouse in a patch of brush on a hillside and quietly dropped his saw. Never taking his eyes off the prey, he felt the ground for a rock and creeped toward the oblivious bird. Ten yards, five yards . . . Miguel rose and fired the rock, hitting the bird perfectly. Miguel thrust both hands into the air and shouted. He could not believe it, but almost immediately he felt a sense of guilt that the stalking and killing had been so bereft of sport. But the bird was plump, and he brought it home along with some mushrooms. Miren rushed to Errotabarri to invite her parents for dinner. Mariangeles had been preparing a potato-and-leek soup and brought it along to add to the feast.

  “Justo asked that we start without him and said he would be along as soon as he finished up some work,” Mariangeles said when she arrived.

  “What’s he doing that’s so important that he would miss a dinner of fresh game?” Miguel asked.

  “He doesn’t want me to say anything about this, but since Roberto Mezo was arrested, he’s been spending several hours every day trying to help Amaya and her family,” Mariangeles said as she hoisted her pot of soup onto the table, careful not to spill any over the side. “There’s no way she could make it without his helping with some of the harder chores. Justo just tries to get up earlier and get his work done faster at home so he can help her family after that.”

  Miren tended the bird at the hearth and Miguel sliced the mushrooms and mixed them with some wild greens he had collected.

  “Amaya tries to get Justo to bring home a few eggs or some grain every now and then as payment, but he refuses,” Mariangeles added. “That would help, but they have so little, we couldn’t take anything from them.”

  As they sat and finished their prayer, Justo arrived, his face and clothes dirty and his customary boisterousness markedly subdued. Even his mustache seemed to droop.

  “Did somebody mention a fat bird?” Justo asked.

  Miguel carved the sign of the cross in the bread loaf and then sliced pieces off those axes, taking the first one and placing it on the mantel “to calm the stormy seas.” Justo protested that this was no time to observe traditions that wasted food, especially since they were many miles from the sea.

  Even the mannerly Mariangeles and Miren moaned as they ate the juicy bird covered with salt and herbs. And for a time, grateful eating was the only sound at the table.

  “Papa.”

  “Yes, kuttuna.”

  “It’s a good thing you are doing, helping the Mezos.”

  Justo looked at Mariangeles, the in formant.

  “They need help; besides, I was losing a little of my strength, so a bit more work is good for me,” he kidded. “I would wager she did not tell you who has been over there every day helping with the little ones and doing most of the cleaning and the house work, did she?”

  Miren smiled at her mother, who shrugged in admission.

  “Did they ever hear what happened to Roberto?” Miguel asked.

  “Apparently there are more rats in town than the ones that are being captured and cooked,” Justo said.

  “One of us?” Miren asked. “How could people do that to their neighbors?”

  “This sort of thing changes people—some, at least,” Justo said. “You put too many chickens in the same pen, without food, and you’ll see it. They’ll peck each other to death.”

  They quietly chewed.

  “Character comes easy when the belly is full,” Justo added. “It gets harder now. And could get harder still.”

  It was the first healthy meal the four had eaten in some time, but the conversation left them unsatisfied, and Justo and Mariangeles departed with brief hugs and thanks soon after the dishes were cleared. Both were already exhausted, and they were now in the habit of going to sleep as soon as darkness came.

  Early the following evening, as Justo finished his work at Errotabarri and headed to the Mezos’, Miren and Miguel arrived to join him. Without explanation, they each took a scythe and began sweeping through the tall grasses and spreading it to dry.

  “Thank you,” Justo said to Miguel.

  “It’s nothing; I don’t want to lose my strength in my old age, either.”

  Amaya Mezo, having prepared dinner for her children, left the kitchen without eating more than a few nibbles so she could join the trio in the field. As she gathered and spread hay, she began humming. Her three helpers picked up their pace. To them, it sounded like the song of a bird, carefree and at peace.

  CHAPTER 12

  Most of them never had much anyway, so it wasn’t the poverty that so upset those in town. Some weren’t even troubled by the rash of break-ins and stealing from businesses, as hunger nibbled away at people’s principles. Many understood it, recognized it as human nature, and had considered it themselves in dark moments. It was only food, and the damage generally was small, a broken window or doorjamb.

  But something more menacing filled the atmosphere now, an uncertainty that crackled in the air, in the suspicion on the streets that caused people to look down rather than ahead, and in the night that announced itself with the sound of lock bolts snapping shut.

  To Miguel, it seemed as if many were pulling themselves in tighter, to become smaller, impenetrable. He saw those types every day, although they did not want to be seen. He talked to them every day, but they did not want t
o respond. They looked up as if they had been in a cloud of thought, coughed a quick greeting, and hurried off in search of a place to disappear.

  Others had not changed; they hailed him on the street and made jokes about their circumstances, and asked of his business and wife.

  “Until people start eating furniture, business will be slow,” Miguel kidded each time to save himself the energy of thinking up new responses.

  Miguel had been able to stay reasonably busy with small specialty orders: a chest as a gift for some other newlyweds, a few cabinets and dressers . . . mostly fine finished work for those in town who still had a little money and cared for things that would last into better times.

  As Miren’s belly started to swell, Miguel began construction of the cradle. His slender wife approached pregnancy as she did all other endeavors, unsparingly and with an energy that infected those around her. Her lean dancer’s figure began to fill in early, and after years of joking at her own expense about certain inadequacies, she loved how her blouses stretched tightly across the front. If pregnancy rendered some women too ill or uneasy to be intimate, it had an opposite effect on Miren, who became increasingly libidinous.

  After the cradle was built, Miguel painted a fish leaping from the water at the head. At the foot, he painted a woman dancer, hands raised and a leg elevated in midkick.

  “And when the baby is born and we see if it is a boy or girl, I will rout its name across the headboard,” Miguel told Miren one night.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” she answered.

  “Why? It will become an heirloom for his family, then.”

  “Because, dear, I don’t want you to have to keep making different cradles for each of the many babies we will have.”

  Miguel hadn’t thought beyond the first. He had been so engaged in the process, so overtaken by having a child with Miren, that he hadn’t considered later additions. Since she mentioned it, he liked the idea.