Guernica

by Dave Boling

  Reconnaissance photos revealed Republican troops in retreat near the small town of Markina, with no antiaircraft weapons to offer resistance. Von Richthofen ordered bomber squadrons to attack in twenty-minute waves, hyphenated with fighter plane assaults. After the initial bombs forced troops to flee on the open roads, the waiting fighters gunned them down there, and those who sought protection from the fighters under cover were then convenient targets for the next wave of bombers.

  Casualty numbers among the Republican loyalists, comprised mostly of Basque soldiers, were impossible to estimate as so many were scattered in clusters along the roadsides and in the hills. Some were blown apart by the five-hundred-pound bombs; others became torches when struck by the phosphorus incendiaries that flared pink when they burned flesh. Many more were gunned down by the fighter planes.

  Von Richthofen mentally superimposed the reports from his pilots onto the map of Biscaya in front of him. The map sprang into three-dimensional relief as he visualized tiny columns of men in retreat, following the paths of least resistance, flowing like running water in predictable tributaries, collecting at a low point or being funneled through a topographic sluice. The intersection of paths that caused Guernica to sprout into a town centuries earlier made it a collection basin for troops. If soldiers fled from the south or east toward the protection of what was left of Bilbao’s Iron Belt, they would coagulate behind the one narrow passage, Guernica’s Renteria Bridge over the slender Oka River.

  “Do any of you know anything about Guernica?” he asked his countrymen.

  All shook their heads.

  Around the blue dot on the map that symbolized the historic village of Guernica, Lieutenant Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen drew a precise circle in yellow ink, marking the Condor Legion’s next target.

  The dancing was Miren’s idea; she wanted to spend an evening as if there were no war, no Franco, no danger a few mountain passes away. Lights were strung in the trees at the Plaza Las Escuelas. The music echoed other times; the txistu and tambourine were lively, with a fiddle and accordion added. At times, Mendiola stepped in with the crosscut saw that he made to hum eerily when he stroked it with a fiddle bow. Miren could never hear the music and stay seated, so she and Miguel danced several waltzes as friends watched over Catalina in her carriage.

  This was part of their agreement. After hearing Father Xabier’s sermon, Miguel insisted that Miren and Catalina leave for Bilbao, which was being lightly bombed but was fortified and sure to be the safest long-term stronghold. Xabier made arrangements. She objected; she felt her place was with her husband, and she believed a family should not be splintered. Miguel convinced her that it would be best for them all, but Catalina particularly. He would stay and watch over their home, then join them in Bilbao if the Nationalist rebels arrived.

  After leaving home that evening, the young couple felt awkward being out. They had seen the refugees and the agitated soldiers retreat into town, and to dance in their presence seemed insensitive. They agreed their stay would be brief. But the music overcame those thoughts, and the dancing caused them both to slip into a welcome fugue that softened all else.

  Reasonably adept now, Miguel loved dancing with her, feeling a part of something special. He reveled in the memory of her shock at his dancing at their wedding. He would never be a confident dancer, but he could at least remain vertical. He felt the rhythm of the music and managed to connect it to his movements. He could not look at his wife’s feet or the movement of her hips because it would disrupt his own tentative sense of timing. He focused on her face and on those eyes.

  “Just one more,” Miguel said, taking Catalina from her carriage. They held the little girl between them and they stepped slowly together.

  “Papa is going to miss his little girl,” Miguel said, kissing Catalina on her cheek before tightly squeezing Miren. “And his big girl.”

  It was a slow waltz, with Mendiola’s saw emitting weary sighs. Miren wept at the sound. This is twice in the past few weeks, Miguel realized, pulling her in even closer. She looked away and the lights became distorted stars, aligned in tree-shaped constellations. As they turned, all else revolved around their core; the confusion, disorder, hunger, war, and pain were somewhere else. Everything outside was blurred by her tears.

  “It shouldn’t be for long, kuttuna,” Miguel said, placing a kiss on her wet cheek. “This will be over soon and we’ll be back together.”

  Miguel tried to place Catalina back in her carriage, but she was sleepy and held on to her father’s shirt. He kissed her again, and she relented. They walked home, arms around each other, amid the unsettling sight of desperate strangers in the town.

  Miren would go to the market the next afternoon to lay in provisions for Miguel. He might be on his own awhile. She didn’t want him to be alone and lonely and to be hungry as well. She knew how to stretch their money at the market and Miguel reluctantly agreed. Tuesday morning his two girls would board the train for what ever safety they could find in Bilbao.

  Wolfram von Richthofen settled into the cockpit of his roadster and piloted it southwest toward Burgos, using the hour of travel time to or ganize his thoughts. He would confer with the Nationalist military leaders over the next step toward Bilbao.

  To the gathering of brass in Burgos, von Richthofen outlined the plan for the Monday bombing of a town he knew to have no air defense and no military relevance other than his presumption that enemy forces might be knotted there behind a small bridge. Plans were now dependent on the weather reports from reconnaissance planes that would overfly Biscaya in the morning.

  Von Richthofen wrote in his journal, “Fear, which cannot be simulated in peaceful training of troops, is very important because it affects morale. Morale is more important in winning battles than weapons. Continuous, repeated, and concentrated air attacks have the most effect on the morale of the enemy.”

  Downstairs, two pilots in the officers’ lounge celebrated the day’s sortie over Markina and unwound with doses of cognac.

  “Heard where we’re going tomorrow?”

  “A place called Guernica.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Just another Spanish dump.”

  PART 4

  ( April 26, 1937)

  CHAPTER 16

  Miren slept without stirring, but Miguel hardly dozed, passing the heart of the night making plans while studying his wife’s outline in the darkness. He feared there were still angles and shapes he had not yet memorized. He mentally sketched in the scenarios for the upcoming days and plotted the appropriate responses to each, with the protection of Miren and Catalina as the sole objective. He would take on any man or group of men who neared his home or threatened his family.

  But he kept losing focus. (Her hair has more waves since it was cut, he thought, as if its weight had caused it to stretch and straighten, and it was now allowed to recoil and contract. Her braid used to rest across the pillow like a thick, dark cable. Now it is fuller and frames her face as she sleeps.)

  If troops came to his home, he would fight—Nationalists, Germans, Italians, Moors, all of them, it didn’t matter.

  (She breathes so easily she hardly makes a sound, and she’s completely still except for her feet, which twitch at times, like a puppy running in its sleep.)

  If forces approached before they left for Bilbao, he would take the girls into the mountains, having already scouted caves and the thickest forests to protect them. But troops were said to be thirty miles away; even with steady advancement, they could not reach the outskirts of Guernica until the end of the week.

  (She always sleeps on her left side, facing Cat’s crib, with both hands tucked up under her left cheek and her knees bent like a mitered right angle.)

  Options covered, he concentrated on storing the images of Miren. She would be there only one more night. His throat tightened.

  More than a year old, Catalina called for only one feeding in the night; now, as she stirred in the predawn hours, Miguel re
trieved her and took her to Miren.

  “Kuttuna, she’s ready,” he whispered, hoping to ease his wife into wakefulness. “Miren . . .”

  Without actually wakening, Miren moved her pillow behind her shoulders and sat up to create a basket with her arms to hold Catalina, who immediately went to work. She was a dainty diner; at times, when stopping to catch her breath, she would look up at her mother and smile in gratitude. Miren dozed, feeling the comfort of the milk release, the closeness of her daughter, and the relaxing sensation of Miguel rubbing the back of her neck in the dim night. Miren fell back into her peaceful sleep as soon as Catalina was full and taken away by Miguel. But as was often the case when Miguel took hold of her, Catalina began kicking and squirming, eager to play.

  Miguel placed her back in the crib while he went to stir the fire in the main room, where they could play without disturbing Miren.

  “I shouldn’t be doing this, you know,” Miguel said directly into her face as she sat up on his leg. “You’ll think that it’s time to play every night after feeding.”

  “Ba-pa-ba-pa,” she replied.

  “But you will be gone for a time and you won’t remember this when we’re back together.”

  She offered no response except to reach toward his mouth and pull his upper lip toward his nose.

  “Hey, you, ugh.” Prying her pincers off his mouth, Miguel held both her hands and gave her a pony ride. He was rewarded by a belch that would have made her grandfather Justo proud.

  They agreed that Miguel would not work in the morning; he would hike into the hills in the afternoon once Miren and Catalina set off for the market. By evening, he’d quit his logging and they would all meet at Errotabarri for dinner with Justo and Mariangeles before the Tuesday morning trip to Bilbao. They would settle into the temporary housing Father Xabier had arranged and wait for the future to sort itself out.

  Still awake at dawn, Miguel left his sleeping wife and daughter in their beds and walked to the bakery on Calle Santa María in hopes of finding something other than grainy black bread for their breakfast. Strangers filled the streets, strangers who were hungry and upset, dirty and homeless.

  At the bakery, where he saw nothing worth buying, he was told that there had been a break-in the night before, the first time they’d had such a problem. Some who sat in the bakery storefront that morning, finding comfort there in their mutual uncertainty, told of hundreds of war-wounded who had been brought to the hospital at the Carmelite convent overnight. Men from the Loyola Battalion had been burned and disfigured by phosphorus bombs; others had lost limbs or bled to death before they could be treated by the few doctors available.

  Surely, Miguel thought, these were tales from the alarmists, exaggerated like so many stories told in town. From more reliable mouths, he heard talk of canceling the afternoon market and the pelota games scheduled for the evening. At the last moment, the council agreed that people would have too difficult a time making it through the week without the market, and it would be impossible to get word to the outlying farmers who already were herding stock toward town. And to cancel the pelota games might cause more alarm than necessary.

  The news that all would proceed as normal settled Miguel as he trudged back home without the bread he’d sought.

  Wolfram von Richthofen rose before dawn, executed his calisthenic ritual, and braced himself with a cool scrub-down and a close shave. He brushed back his retreating hair and covered it with his garrison cap, pulling it low and tight so that the German eagle on the front spread its wings directly between and only slightly above his eyes. Scanning the skies on his short drive to the airfield, von Richthofen saw that the clarity overhead faded into a gray film over the mountains to the north.

  The merest possibility of a weather-abort caused worries. Planes that sat on the ground did nothing to further the war. By nine thirty, the reconnaissance planes touched down at the Vitoria air-field and the technicians hurried inside to develop, fix, and print their film for the impatient von Richthofen. The reports were specific and encouraging: Light clouds were moving into the region until midday but were expected to blow through by afternoon, leaving conditions ideal.

  Father Xabier faintly attended to a series of irrelevant matters in the Santa María presbytery, and when he found himself dusting the feet of Christ on a wall-hung crucifix, he finally conceded that his procrastination in returning to Bilbao was a matter of avoidance. He had no way of knowing if reports of his inflammatory sermon had reached his superiors in Bilbao. He had not asked for approval before taking on the mission to Guernica for President Aguirre, which in itself could be viewed as a breach of protocol. He did not doubt that penalties or a defrocking were in the works already.

  That Xabier, from his bed in the presbytery Sunday night, could hear the dance music from Plaza Las Escuelas convinced him that his message had gone unheard. If the parishioners had fully comprehended the threat, there would have been no dancing but running to safety far from this valley; there would have been no music except for the steady hum of cart wheels on the road to Bilbao.

  Had he known during the Sunday service that Republican forces were being bombed and strafed at Markina as he spoke, he would have stressed that fact in his sermon. Had he known that the makeshift hospital at the Carmelite convent would swell Sunday night with the dying and disfigured, he would have urged the flock to go look for themselves. To talk of blood is theoretical; to have them see it, to step in it, to smell it as it darkened into sticky puddles would have been infinitely more illustrative.

  Instead, they danced. Were the hazards less immediate, he would have been amused at this display. If there was to be a dance then it was foolish to believe that anything would keep them from dancing. If there was to be a fight, they would fight—and then they would dance. None would argue that the circumstances were worthy of a battle to the death, but they obviously were not enough to cause them to forsake an evening of dancing.

  Dominus vobiscum.

  Xabier walked down Calle Santa María, past the eyesore refugio in the street, toward the train station. At the train station plaza, he found hundreds aligned to buy tickets for passenger trains that were now running with sporadic unpredictability. As reluctant as he had been to return, biretta in hand, to face his superiors, he knew he could not put it off another day. He walked back to Santa María, where a young priest arranged for a car and driver to take him the twenty miles to Bilbao that afternoon. Soon enough, Xabier thought.

  Justo was conditioned to take a break from work at midday, even if the noon meals had grown sparse. June would bring the twenty-third anniversary of their marriage, and he still anticipated visiting with Mariangeles over lunch even if their separation had been only the length of one morning.

  He had been hoeing and weeding his early plantings, and when he came into the house he found Mariangeles mending a pair of his pants that had been patched so many times that it was only her thread that sustained the thin fabric mosaic. Justo’s disregard for his appearance always amused her. If she didn’t notice that the seat of his pants was split wide open and demand he surrender them for repairs, Justo might wear them for months that way.

  “The sheep have never complained,” he always responded, even after all the sheep were gone. Mariangeles also had volunteered to bind a seam in a pair of pants that Miguel had ripped while logging, a favor for her daughter, who was so busy with little Catalina.

  “I am going to miss that little one,” Justo said, already wistful. “Give her a big kiss from her aitxitxa when you see them at the market.”

  “You can give it to her yourself; they’re all coming up for dinner tonight for a last meal before they leave for Bilbao.”

  “Do we have a few crusts of bread and crumbles of stale cheese that we have stolen from the mice that we can lay out for company?” he asked sarcastically. “Or have we gotten lucky and are able to cook up the mice themselves?”

  “Justo! We’ll have some soup and some vegetables and bread, and
we will have each other’s company,” Mariangeles said, biting off the end of a thread before asking, “Justo, do you think we should invite Miguel to stay here while they’re gone?”

  “He wouldn’t be as lonely here,” Justo said. “But if he didn’t have work to do at his shop or in the woods, he would be going to Bilbao with them already. Besides, I think that if he stayed with us he’d feel he needed to help us with the chores rather than do his own work.”

  “We might be able to convince him that he’d be safer here than in town,” Mariangeles continued.

  “If we tell him we think it’s safer here, that would only convince him that there’s real danger to his home and belongings, which would make him more determined not to leave,” Justo said, sitting at the table, examining the dried seed corn that Mariangeles had soaked and softened into a soup for his lunch. “With all these strangers about, I’m sure he’ll want to stay at home to protect their things.”

  The image of rebels and Moorish mercenaries strolling through Guernica chilled them both. Was it possible they would come into the hills and farms to take what they wished? Would it come to fighting the intruders with laiak and hoes and scythes?

  “Mari . . . ,” Justo said.

  “Yes . . .”

  “Would you consider going with Miren and Catalina?” Justo asked. “It might be good for all three of you to go. I know you’ll be safe here, and we’d be here to protect each other, but you might be a help to Miren with Catalina.”

  “Are you trying to be rid of me? We’ve never spent a night apart. My place is here, with you. Miren will be fine with Cat. She would feel the same way about staying with Miguel if it weren’t for the little one.”

  “She is still so young and Bilbao is a very large place that isn’t always safe even in good times,” Justo said. “I worry about her being alone with Catalina.”