by Dave Boling
* * *
Miren and Catalina left the stock corrals and were sorting through the few ragged stalks and stems of vegetables available. She had seen nothing worth buying except some potatoes, but Miguel could make those stretch, especially if he managed to kill a rabbit or some squirrels as he had threatened. She smiled at the thought of him stalking game. He would be more likely to try to share his food with the rabbits and squirrels.
The bells of Santa María began to ring with an unexpected urgency. Miren looked toward the church for explanation. She heard the machine rumble to the north of town and then saw it fly into her range of vision. “Cat, look,” she said, pointing to the sky. Catalina looked only at the end of Miren’s upraised arm. But her mother’s voice was excited, and that was meaningful to her, causing her to kick and laugh in her carriage. She pulled herself up at the edge to look out.
As the driver swung around a turn heading out of the valley toward Bilbao, Father Xabier saw a black, birdlike shadow speed down the hillside and across the road. From the side window he saw the airplane just as it banked behind a mountain. President Aguirre had shared with him the scarcity of Republican air presence, so Xabier knew this had to be German. He ordered the driver to find a wide spot in the road and turn back to Guernica. Perhaps this was a reconnaissance flyover, but he knew there could be panic in town.
The driver, who had been horrified by the priest’s sermon the day before, was now more certain of the cleric’s insanity. He pulled off on the roadside before entering town and refused to go farther, not bothering to shut the door as he abandoned the car and the priest and flopped into ankle-deep water in a drainage ditch to diminish himself as a target when the forces of the apocalypse stormed through Guernica.
Biretta perched on his head, with his pumping legs hidden beneath his full-length black cassock, Father Xabier appeared to be floating at high speed toward the center of town. The powerful current of people fleeing in the opposite direction hardly slowed him. The vision of the priest in flight caused the crowd to part as he approached and congeal back into a solid mass in his wake. Some were certain they had witnessed a miracle, but they were not eager to stay and offer testimony toward his canonization. Recalling the crowds at the train station, Father Xabier decided he would go there first, hoping to bring order to what he feared could become a dangerous stampede.
From the north, the rumbling returned and grew nearer and louder, causing the ground to vibrate. Mariangeles Ansotegui squinted up into the near-cloudless afternoon sky. Around her, those who had stayed in line broke off into sprints in all directions. A high-pitched whistle added an upper register to the sounds of chaos in the plaza. Objects were falling from the plane, whistling and falling.
The first bomb exploded in the middle of the plaza. The bodies of several dozen people rose intact to varied elevations before sprouting like chrysanthemum blossoms.
Father Xabier had reached the edge of the plaza when he was knocked to the ground by the explosion. “Dear God, it is happening. Make me strong. Make Your strength my strength,” he prayed aloud, repositioning the biretta that had been blown off his head.
The first deliverance of random death struck mostly women, including one refugee in a white apron with tired eyes who had tried to run away and a lovely woman standing in line, holding a stranger’s family Bible, which was incinerated in midair by the heat of the explosion.
In a shed at the Mezos’, focused on repairing tools, Justo Ansotegui heard church bells. But he paid attention to them only when he needed to know the time, or if it was Sunday morning and they announced their call to mass. It must be four, he thought.
But they continued pealing, and he wondered why there would be a mass on Monday afternoon. When the blasts sent shock waves rippling up the valley and into the hills, Amaya Mezo knocked back the shed door and told him of the plane she had seen, and pointed to the dome of dust rising at the center of town.
“No,” he said. “No.”
Where was Mariangeles? Where were Miren and Catalina?
They were in town. A plane is dropping bombs in town.
As he ran from the shed, Justo picked up a laia for protection. It was time to fight.
It was almost a mile into town and he raced with his laia in front of him like a primitive avenger, shouting as he ran.
“Mari . . . Mari . . . Mari . . .”
And as he slowed from lack of breath, his shouts matched the two-syllable toll of the bells: “Mar . . . ee . . . Mar . . . ee . . . Mar . . . ee.”
Up a nearby slope, Miguel’s crosscut saw hummed a jagged tune as it nibbled through the broad bole of an oak. He, too, heard the bells far below, muffled by distance, and paid no attention. In moments, though, he felt deep thuds through his feet, as when a tree falls. Waves of sound radiated up to him, and he turned to the valley. Dust and smoke had risen above the buildings.
Oh, dear God, an explosion, he thought. He ran, churning so fast downhill that he couldn’t control his legs. He fell and rolled and rose and was running again in one motion, driven by instinct and the ringing of the bells.
When the explosions shook the earth only two blocks away, Miren pulled the hood down on Catalina’s carriage to shield her ears. With the pram out front, she picked up speed heading not toward a refugio, as Miguel had instructed, but to the train station in search of her mother. Up Calle de la Estación, toward the smoldering plaza, she became a blur of motion.
Ahead were screams choking out from the veil of hanging dust. From behind came the sound of the bells.
Alaia Aldecoa heard the bomber before anyone noticed it; it caused windows to rattle violently in their casings. But there was no context to link it to alarm. Machines had flown over before; she had heard them. It seemed another ugly vibration in a day filled with them. But the threat became obvious when the bells began their impatient clangor and the crowd started to rush around her. No one thought to guide her to a refugio or explain the madness.
Her mind flashed on the sisters’ story of the terrifying end of days. Just as they had predicted, the explosions sucked the air from her lungs while the ground bucked and rolled. Hell was powering up through the crust of the earth to swallow them. The brimstone smelled exactly as it had been described.
Her best chance was to stay in this spot; Miren would come back for her. But when the ground opened up, her instincts compelled her to run, something she had never done.
She began a fl at-footed trot, as if trying to feel her way with her toes, arms stretched out in front like stiffened antenae. She had not grabbed her cane.
The screams were coming from her right, so she ran to her left, off a curb.
The sound in the sky had returned, only stronger, with greater vibration and more urgency. There were more machines.
The whistling was more intense. Within moments, there were more death screams.
With outstretched arms, she touched the facing of a building and followed its abrasive brick surface around a corner.
She ran again when she reached the street.
An explosion knocked her to the ground.
She ran again.
People knocked her down. She rose, was knocked down again. She crawled below the spreading smoke. The town was on fire. With the next explosion, Alaia Aldecoa disappeared.
Amaya Mezo, having chased her children into the house and watched Justo Ansotegui race into town, returned to her hillside field to make sense of the sounds and the panic below. Her eldest daughter disobeyed her order to stay inside, hoping to be there if she needed help. They saw the large planes come in successive wedges, with a number of smaller planes zipping in erratic paths, like barn swallows among flights of migrating geese.
One broke off from over the edge of town and dove at her as if intending to grind her up with its propellers.
Parallel lines of dirt puffs raced toward them with the sound of rapid drumbeats. Her daughter ran at the sight, shouting at her mother to hide. But Amaya had no concept of the danger
and stood yelling at the machine, waving at it to go away from her home and loved ones.
A bullet tore off her right shoulder. The pilot flew so close she could see his face looking down at her. He wore a leather hat, and his eyes were covered by round goggles that reflected the glare of the afternoon sun.
The visions came in flashes as Father Xabier sought places to do God’s work. With staggered sprints and crouches, he had made his way toward the market as the second echelon of bombers struck.
He ran past the fire station, where a bomb had crushed the town’s lone fire truck, killing the young stable boy and the massive dray horses in their stalls. The blood from the horses and the boy flowed together down the sloping entranceway into the gutter and down to the storm drain.
To his left, several incendiaries had landed in the temporary cattle corral, and a bull engulfed in blue-white flames bellowed and broke through the fence, rampaging into the crowd.
Sheep ignited and their wool burned black as they tried to butt their way out of the pens.
A large bomb had taken out several oxen and farmers, leaving Xabier trying not to fall on their slippery remains.
Bullets from fighter planes whistled and thudded indifferently into humans and animals.
Everything burned.
A woman with three children huddled in the protection of a recessed doorway, and the priest stood as tall and wide as he could to shield them. When a lull in the bombing brought a sense of respite to their ringing ears, the family took off from behind the priest’s skirts and ran down the middle of the street.
“Wait!” Xabier shouted.
They had covered fewer than twenty yards when a fighter plane raked the street with gunfire, cutting down three of the four in one burst. The surviving child, wounded herself, dove near her mother, screaming, trying to lift her up and make her run.
The fighters darted without pattern, chasing anyone in the open. Xabier’s mind fl ashed on the image of sheepdogs racing back and forth, herding people to their deaths.
A block away, a cluster of incendiaries pierced the roof of the candy factory and flared with heat as the thermite ignited the most combustible substance, the hair of the women working inside.
Another block away a group of teenage boys who had been playing near the pelota fronton sought shelter in the mouth of a concrete culvert. When a bomb exploded within yards of them, their flesh fused into an indistinguishable mass.
In the Residencia Calzada, a home for the elderly, a bomb vaporized many of the old men and women, along with the nuns there trying to help them limp to safety.
Seeing no other means of escape from the second floor of a burning building, a man leaped from a window, flailing his arms to put out the flames on the back of his white shirt, or perhaps hoping to fly.
In a basement refugio, two dozen corpses lay in a mosaic. They were untouched—no wounds, no blood—extinguished by the absence of air.
Hundreds clustered under the arched ceiling of the church of Santa María, praying frantically before the holy statuary.
An incendiary bomb knifed through the roof and impaled the floor. The fire that could have incinerated everyone in the church never flared. The bomb did not ignite.
Miren stopped her search for Mariangeles out of fear for Catalina. Running up the street behind the bouncing carriage, she was lost in her own town. The wheels of the carriage kicked up rooster tails of dark fluid. She fought against the vortex of traffic created as the flow of people fleeing the station plaza swept into the equally misdirected flow of those frantic to leave the marketplace.
She could go faster with Catalina in her arms, but debris fell in hot gusts and stung Miren like hail. She’d almost been knocked down by the crowds, so Catalina was safer inside the carriage. She kept speaking to her, though, telling her through the canvas canopy that everything was all right.
The rumbling bombers again muted the cries for help.
Miren choked on the concrete dust and on the heat and the smell. As she passed in front of the Hotel Julian, several young mothers herded a group of shrieking schoolchildren into the entryway.
Miren turned at the doorway to follow them, but a screaming whistle caused her to look into the smoky air as a bomb sliced through the middle of the small hotel. The explosion thrust a column of air through the funnel of the entryway, and within seconds, the hotel’s concrete facing sloughed off, burying those in front of it beneath several tons of flaming rubble.
When the strafing fighters peeled away after others, Xabier knelt to inspect the small family that had been gunned down. The youngest, a girl of perhaps four, bled from her side but continued to tug at her mother as if to wake her from a nap.
Xabier pulled her away from her dead family and carried her to the nearest refugio. The door opened quickly, allowing him to squeeze inside a different level of hell.
Hundreds had wedged into a space meant for dozens, and as layers of incoming souls entered, they compressed those in the back.
Early arrivals, gagging on the superheated air, begged those in the front to leave the doors open for ventilation.
“Get us out,” a woman screamed.
But when they swung the double doors open, a percussion bomb landed just outside, and its violent intake of air sucked four people into the fireball. In shock, others tried closing the doors, but they were blocked by the lower part of a man’s leg, still wearing a black espadrille.
At the back, in the dark, people licked the walls, trying to suck in condensation to fend off the steaming heat.
They stumbled and could feel with their feet in the darkness that they were now standing on the bodies of those who had collapsed.
At times, men or women overtaken by claustrophobia would scream wildly, crawling over others, clawing against flesh to clear their way to the front.
They would take their chances with the bombs and the fire rather than die from being trampled or smothered.
As calmly as he could, standing at the gate between two hells, with a little girl dying in his arms, Father Xabier offered prayers of absolution.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the moment of our death . . .”
Wolfram von Richthofen and his aide, standing on the northern face of Mount Oiz, admired the precise waves of planes on their approach to the valley. But even from this vantage, some ten air miles south of Guernica, they were unable to see the village itself. A rising mass of smoke and dust from the explosions climbed above the hilltops, providing evidence that heavy damage was being inflicted. But von Richthofen could not see the destruction as clearly as he had hoped.
He discarded his cigarette and headed down the mountain for a quick drive back to Vitoria.
As the town emptied, Miguel rushed against the flow into the core of devastation. His instincts were to fight through the mayhem and get to the market.
They would be with Alaia, and all of them would have gone to the closest refugio in the middle of Calle Santa María, the one Miguel had shown her.
Why did he let her talk him into staying another day?
He would scold her when he saw her.
No, he wouldn’t.
Bombs still fell from the chevrons of airplanes droning above the town. Smoke and dust rose, but Miguel barely noticed the explosions, and none of his impulses to run away from the destruction registered.
Near the market, Mrs. Arana bent and keened over a mass of concrete and brick rubble that had once been a store. She saw Miguel running in her direction and shouted, “They’re here, help them!”
Miguel threw himself on the pile. He could not know that he was blocks from his family. He could not understand that this was futile, that the bodies beneath were neither alive nor his loved ones.
He thought of none of these possibilities. “They’re here,” he had heard.
Miguel lifted concrete, slab after slab, tossed aside broken bricks, and dug into glistening piles of shattered window glass with his bare hands.
Bombs fell and buildings ignited. He heard none of it.
Dig to find them. Dig to save them.
Miren. Miren and Cat.
He hoisted off more slabs and shards, which began to bite at him, and he could not lift them as well as he had. Even the smaller bricks became slippery and difficult to grasp.
There was no air to breathe.
The bombs fell and the ground shook and guns fired. He didn’t hear them. He didn’t hear Mrs. Arana begging him to stop and to look at his hands.
He had no hands, he had no feeling; he would dig until he rescued them. He’d dig because he promised. He’d dig until he found them.
Until he was blown from the pile by an explosion.
Souls in shredded clothes, with gaping mouths and blank eyes, stumbled past Justo as the streets became smoking flues. He dropped his laia as he entered town, realizing his ancient tool would be useless against the airplanes he saw winging overhead.
Legarreta, the fireman, brought him to a halt by clasping his shoulders and speaking into his face. Justo wrestled against him, looking past him to places where his wife might have sought protection.
“People are still alive in parts of this building, Justo; you have to help me get them,” Legarreta explained with uncommon calmness, barely glancing away from Justo as a man crawled past using his arms to pull along his mangled legs.
“Have you seen Mariangeles or Miren?” Justo shouted as a bomb exploded a block away.
“No, Justo, I need you to help lift debris; we need manpower,” Legarreta said, his face soiled black as a sheep’s. “People are in here now.”