Guernica

by Dave Boling

  “How many?” Xabier asked back. “How many what? How many people? How many pieces? How many lives? How many children?”

  How could he explain? His friend Aguirre knew the politics of numbers. But he felt it was like stacking bodies onto a scale to weigh the loss.

  “When you see burned children laying in the street, charred . . . melted, you don’t count them,” Xabier said. “When you see a group of boys fused into a blackened mass, you don’t take inventory. How many died? How many? Death was infinite.”

  From Friday’s edition of L’Humanite, Picasso read the stories of the priest’s moving speech. Picasso could see the sky he described. He could feel the fear of the people and could hear the explosions.

  In the paper that day was the first written statement from Basque president José Antonio Aguirre, calling upon the free world to help in the fight to save a small country soon to be overrun by Fascism. “I ask today of the civilized world if it will permit the extermination of a people whose first concerns always have been the defense of its liberty and democracy, which the tree of Guernica has symbolized for centuries.”

  Images formed and splintered in Picasso’s mind, with the classic symbols of Spain anchored in his consciousness, splayed by unseen torment. This would be his mural, his Guernica.

  Miren turned to Miguel and kissed his neck behind his ear, lingering there long enough to give him a playful nip with her teeth. God, she smelled wonderful. It was so good to have her back. He had been so worried.

  They sat at the transom of the Egun On. It felt strange for Miguel to be so comfortable on the water. But that’s how it was with her, just like the first trip when he took her to meet his family in Lekeitio. Except she was older, of course, and her hair was bobbed. She was more lovely than ever.

  “I tried to find you,” Miguel said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “I know. Don’t worry.”

  The boat moved so smoothly through the waveless waters that Miguel had no trouble maintaining his focus on Miren, with her thick sable hair that absorbed the light and her wide sable eyes that gave off their own light.

  “I missed you,” he said.

  “I missed you, too.”

  “Why did it take you so long to come back?”

  “I had to find my way. There was so much confusion. There were so many . . .”

  Miren looked out across the water at a flight of gulls.

  “You look so well,” he said.

  Miguel pulled her to him and lifted her onto his lap, smoothing out the layered skirts of her wedding dress to make it comfortable for her. He hugged her again tightly and breathed in the scent of her neck. They stood to slowly waltz on the deck, shifting without speaking.

  Mariangeles, piloting the boat, turned to them and smiled . . . yes, yes, Miren, I taught him to dance. The boat began rocking with their steps, rolling harder as the music quickened, harder now, and the waves splashed over the gunwales on both sides. Miguel began feeling that tightening of his throat, as if he would soon be sick again.

  “Where’s Cat?” Miguel asked.

  Miren sat with him and took Miguel’s hand.

  “Look,” she said. “Look there.”

  She pointed to a pair of lines that etched a parallel path, with another merging at an angle.

  “Look there,” she said.

  He looked. They looked like his father’s hands.

  “Keep looking.”

  He stared more deeply at the lines.

  A heavy teardrop landed there, between the two lines, and flowed toward his thumb, spreading like thick quicksilver.

  “Keep looking,” she said.

  He looked, but it wasn’t a tear that had fallen. It was a caustic acid, and as it flowed, it began dissolving his flesh, eating into the meat of his hand, and causing the bones to crumble and fall to the deck.

  “Miren!” he shouted.

  But she was gone.

  A bull blinded by fire had raged through the market before collapsing and dying on a flaming pile of wood that had been the coal seller’s booth. The bull cooked there for a day, and as its internal gases heated, it expanded; the carcass swelled to twice its original size. When the bull exploded, it sounded like a bomb’s echo, and Teodoro Mendiola was caught in a fountain of sizzling entrails and waste. He peeled off his jacket and wiped the mess from his eyes and mouth with disgust, and then he went back to work.

  Along with most of the other men in Guernica who were not crippled by the attack, Mendiola fought fires, carried wounded to shelters and temporary hospitals, and sorted through scatterings of victims. After being assured that his family was safe, Mendiola worked for the next day and a half without stopping. His revulsion at the grisly task dulled with the hours, allowing him to continue a job for which none was prepared. While so many bodies were indistinguishable, at times he was jolted by a familiar face staring up at him when a wedge of concrete or a fallen beam had been repositioned. The instinctive response was to say, “Hey, José,” as if greeting them. But after several hours, he knew that none who appeared in this way had survived, and the sight of a friend’s face brought only more sadness to be stacked on top of that which he already could not carry.

  At times, the rescuers were left to stare down into the jagged caverns of melted metal and splintered wood that had collapsed into the craters left by the heaviest bombs. They would see the back of a white dress, and a leg with a shoe and a leg without a shoe. They called out: Is anyone alive? Is anyone down there? They would need heavy equipment to lift and untangle these warrens, and the woman in the white dress would have to be patient for another day.

  The bodies they could recover were laid fl at, shoulder to shoulder, with tarps or cloth pulled up to their necks. Heads were left exposed to allow identification. The undead shuffled past, staring into the faces, praying to find loved ones and praying not to find loved ones.

  Many of the unidentified had been hastily interred in mass graves, making an accurate casualty count and complete identification forever impossible. But the real work of clearing the debris had not yet started. From parts of town, structures that teetered at delicate angles finally collapsed, causing skittish rescuers to look up in fear that the planes had returned.

  Across the street from what had been the Hotel Julian, Mendiola saw the burned shell of the stout wooden carriage his friend Miguel Navarro had built for his daughter. He turned it upright, slowly. Scorched black and empty. He turned toward the hotel and almost tripped on the body of a child. No, it was several children. He could not tell how many.

  He joined in with crews excavating the tons of concrete that formerly had been a hotel. He was the one who found her. He still thought of her as Miren Ansotegui, Justo and Mariangeles’s daughter, although he knew her better now as Miguel’s wife. He forced his eyes closed and he concentrated. Memories flipped like pages in his mind. Miren dancing; Miren with her parents at the festivals; Miren on her wedding day; Miren dancing again. With as much respect as he could summon, he removed her body—she was so light—and laid it in the line with the others. He returned to the pile in search of Catalina. But there were so many children there, dozens from the school who had been taken to the hotel and had been caught in that doorway. They would never be identified.

  The rains came then, helping the firefighters subdue most of the stubborn fires. At the point of collapse, Mendiola joined a small group of exhausted men who stumbled up the hill to one of the few places that had gone untouched by bombs and fire. They slumped to the ground and fell instantly asleep beneath the leafy shelter of the ancient oak tree.

  He slashed his first sketches across blue paper, making them look as if they’d been done by a knife rather than a pencil. In these rages, the connection between the passion and the art was direct. A wounded horse took shape, followed by an enraged bull with a long-winged bird on its back. From a window, a woman leaned out and cast lamplight onto the scene.

  O
n that first day, the primary elements of what would become the final composition assumed their places. There were puzzles to be solved, problems of angles and perspective, along with the addition of the hidden and the mysterious. But a horse, a bull, a fallen warrior, a mother with a dead child, and the woman holding the lamp were all there. These would be his cornerstone symbols, and they’d be offered in a stark vocabulary of black and white and grays. There would be foreground and background, shadows and light, and narrative, but no explanations.

  His second day of work on the project was a long, frenzied repeat of the first. Exhausted and drained, the artist then put down his pencils to allow the newborn characters a rest after their difficult deliveries.

  CHAPTER 19

  For the first time since Miguel renounced fishing in the sea, monsters attacked him in his sleep. In his dream, it was autumn; the alders along his favorite stream had turned yellow and the weather was cool. But the wood fires in the valley smelled of something harsh, like chemicals.

  The trout hit his hook with surprising firmness and he pulled them in with a struggle, but when he attempted to unhook them, they bit into his hands with jagged teeth, like those of the small sharks they sometimes caught in the nets at home. Each chewed away at his hands, gnawing at his bones. He called to Justo but there was no reply. Then he heard his mother singing in the streets . . . “For the love of God, arise!” Ah, it was time to get out of bed and head to mass before joining patroia and Dodo on the boat. But he could not arise.

  Miguel Navarro had been struck by a flying brick from a nearby building that bounced off the rubble pile and caught him on the side of the head. Mrs. Arana had dragged him off the mound of concrete and wood by herself.

  His head injury was not a concern—in fact, it was a blessing, as it halted his digging through the collapsed building. His fingers bled a great deal, but the loss of blood was not lethal. Of greater danger was sepsis from his injuries. For more than a day Miguel lay in a basement hallway of the Carmelite convent, his unconsciousness deafening him to the cries of the burn victims and the death gasps of those irreducibly broken. Many could not be saved by the few medical personnel and were too far gone to warrant the expenditure of anesthetics, supplies of which were limited. Those doomed by blood loss or tissue damage were summarily patched and treated only with extreme unction in a back hall where the white tile walls had been stained by blood.

  Anonymous as the others coated in the dark gray stucco of blood and concrete dust, the young man with the mangled hands was a low priority for the few available surgeons and was allowed to fl oat through his troubled unconsciousness for several days.

  When he finally examined Miguel’s hands, the surgeon saw where the skin and muscle fiber had been torn off and how far down the exposed bones were abraded. The patient was not burned; the fingers were not blown off by an explosion. This was like nothing he had seen.

  “Anybody know what happened to this man?” the surgeon asked.

  “He was digging through the concrete and glass trying to find his wife,” a nurse said.

  The surgeon looked over his mask at the nurse and then up at the patient’s face. “He did this to himself?”

  “He was trying to find his wife,” the nurse repeated.

  “The fingers have more nerve endings than the genitals,” the surgeon told the nurse with clinical dryness.

  With the bones shredded to the marrow, the chance of infection or embolism was high, as was the possibility that fragments could enter his circulatory system and create a fatal blockage.

  The surgeon examined the man’s face again. He was young; to amputate both hands would be to sentence him to a difficult life. He decided that the most damaged fingers, the first two of each hand, required amputation. For thumbs, he might be able to create crude stumps by stitching skin over the remaining bone. There was enough left there to allow him to pinch objects, if nothing more. The two outside fingers of each hand could be saved almost intact, and with the short thumbs, he’d at least have the capacity to grasp objects. The surgeon hoped that the man was not someone who built things with his hands.

  * * *

  Justo Ansotegui smelled his wife Mariangeles in bed beside him. He had loved that scent since she began getting the soap from Alaia Aldecoa. She smelled so much like when she came in from the meadows or after she cooked a meal at Errotabarri.

  “Justo, Justo,” she said. He had to awaken soon, with so much to do, but if he lay there long enough he might arise to the smell of chorizos sizzling in a skillet of fried eggs. Maybe she’d make green peppers for lunch and then lamb and her special mint jelly for dinner. But now he thought of the chorizos frying with eggs. He loved that smell only slightly less than that of Mariangeles’s freshly scrubbed neck.

  “Justo, Justo.” He rolled his head toward Mariangeles’s scent and opened his eyes to look out a partially open window at a blooming tree outside.

  “Justo, Justo.”

  It was Xabier.

  He looked again toward the fresh smell and realized he wasn’t in his bedroom. And Mariangeles was not beside him. And his senses were dulled as if he’d been drunk at a feast day, and he wanted to do nothing but go back to bed and to sleep and to smell Mariangeles and the chorizos.

  “Justo.”

  Xabier kept tugging him away from Mariangeles. Spikes of light from a bare bulb overhead pained his eyes; the taste of ether burned the back of his throat.

  “Justo.”

  His brother leaned against the bed, wearing full vestments. Was he there to perform last rites? He felt bad enough. “What happened?”

  “Justo, God bless you, you’re going to be fine.”

  “What happened?”

  “You were trapped in a building.”

  It was enough to trigger memories of the bombing, and the woman with the backward head, and the baker’s wife. But no more.

  “Justo, they had to amputate your arm, there was nothing they could do to save it,” Xabier said.

  Justo looked to his left side. Although he felt his fingers, hand, and arm, and sent the mental instructions for them to wiggle and move, he saw nothing there beside him. It was gone. He gave the matter some thought.

  “It wasn’t my best arm,” Justo said.

  Xabier nearly laughed.

  “Does Mariangeles know about this?”

  “Justo . . . I’m sorry . . .” Xabier knew there was no other way. “She was killed by a bomb.”

  Killed by a bomb. He had to keep asking, to be done with this.

  “Miren?”

  “Justo . . . I’m sorry . . .”

  “Catalina?”

  “Justo, there were so many little ones at the market . . . yes, gone.”

  Justo rolled his head toward the window and looked out. He was sick. Xabier knelt to clean the mess.

  He’d been such a fool to think that being strong would protect his family.

  Xabier had returned from Paris immediately after meeting with the press, and Aguirre’s aides had already located Justo and compiled a report for him on his family’s fate. As it turned out, Xabier had entered the train station plaza in time to witness Mariangeles’s death, although he had no idea she was in that first cluster of victims. Miren had been found and quickly identified because everyone in town knew her. He was assured that she died without suffering.

  Legarreta told of Justo’s foolish bravery. He lay for many hours trapped and bleeding, with his arm disarticulated behind his head from the weight of an oak beam. With the help of Bilbaino fire-men, Legarreta arranged a series of supports and braces and extracted victims and survivors.

  “Where am I?” Justo asked after his brother finished cleaning the floor. He did not actually care where he was, but to speak and listen was a defense against thinking.

  “In the hospital in Bilbao. They stabilized you in Guernica and put you under to make the trip here. There wasn’t much they could do there and the doctors here had no choice but to amputate.”

&nbs
p; Justo looked again at his left side, where the sheet lay flat.

  “My ring?”

  “I got it for you,” Xabier said. He had arrived from France on the morning of Justo’s amputation. The surgeon asked if Xabier wished to bless his brother before the operation. He did, and when he dared examine the grotesquely twisted appendage, he saw purple flesh swollen around his wedding ring.

  “Can you get off his ring?” Xabier asked the surgeon.

  “I’d have to cut it and pry it off because the tissue is so swollen and damaged around it.”

  “Don’t do that,” Xabier said, bothered by the symbolism. “After you remove the arm, could you then cut the finger to get at the ring?”

  The surgeon nodded. “He won’t feel a thing.”

  As Xabier waited for Justo’s surgery to finish, he walked the crowded hallways and offered blessings to patients. After several hours, the surgeon appeared and presented Xabier with the ring, intact and freshly sterilized.

  “Was the surgery a success?” Xabier asked.

  “I think so, but it took twice as long as I expected,” the doctor said. “I’ve never seen an arm like that. It was like sawing through a ham shank. But he should be fine. He should consider himself fortunate; that beam could have taken off his head. As it was, that injury would have killed most men.”

  At his brother’s bedside, Xabier took the ring from a pocket and put it on the third finger of Justo’s right hand. No, he thought, I don’t think Justo will consider himself fortunate.

  When the canvas arrived and was stretched onto its frame, an odd happenstance surprised Picasso. The expansive studio had no problem accommodating the twenty-five-foot breadth of the canvas, but at nearly twelve feet high, it didn’t fit vertically against a wall. Instead, Picasso had to wedge the frame against the rafters at a slight angle and keep it in position with a series of shims he whittled. He worried: Would the angle alter the perspective?