Guernica

by Dave Boling

  Upon this tilted canvas, Picasso began transferring his pencil studies. The sketches on paper had grown from the vague geometry of the mural into detailed explorations of each component. A cartoonish horse came to life next to a mother with a dead baby draped over her arms, the baby’s eyes open to display pinpoint pupils. The artist repeatedly sketched the horse, the woman, and a fallen warrior, sometimes in pencil, sometimes in paints.

  The bull was turned and transmuted, assuming a thick face with giant nostrils and huge, muscular cheeks atop a pair of human lips. Across the prominent browridge spanned a tangled pair of eyebrows, thick as a Basque man’s. Teardrops started appearing everywhere—teardrop nostrils, teardrop eyes—along with sharply conical tongues and ears.

  With a thin brush and black ink, Picasso outlined the images on the canvas. He used a ladder or a long stick to hold his brushes for the upper reaches. With the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up to his elbows, cigarette in his left hand, Picasso crouched deeply to work on the lower reaches. His hair, combed from low on the right side to cover his balding crown, kept slipping out of place and falling across his forehead.

  Alaia Aldecoa’s blindness saved her life. As she stumbled away from the sounds of successive explosions, the earth opened and swallowed her. She had tumbled into a bomb crater several yards deep, a depression that protected her from the force of a bomb that would have vaporized her if she’d been at street level. Dazed and losing consciousness, bleeding from her fall, she lay balled up at the bottom of the crater until long after the attack. She awakened coughing, choking on the dust she had inhaled. Rescuers heard her at the bottom of the pit and carried her to an aid center that had been set up outside the Carmelite convent.

  The minor head wound and concussion she suffered in the fall served merciful narcotic purposes, numbing her to the sounds of the fires and collapsing buildings and the smells of incinerated beasts. When two nuns began to wash her wounds in cool water, she regained consciousness.

  “What was that? What happened? Where—”

  “There was an attack,” one nun answered. “Be quiet, you’ve been injured.”

  “My friend Miren; have you seen her? Is she all right? Miren Ansotegui.”

  The sister wiping Alaia’s face with the cloth subtly looked to the nun next to her. She shook her head slightly.

  “We don’t know yet, dear,” the first sister lied. “You should rest now.”

  Alaia gladly slipped away.

  Several days later, a squad of nuns carried her across town to the Santa Clara convent, where her old friends once again took in an abandoned orphan.

  With the two smallest fingers extruding from each bandaged hand, Miguel struggled to open the door at Errotabarri. The pain caused him to suck in deep breaths and pinch shut his eyes until they watered. People had been inside—wandering troops, perhaps, or maybe just hungry refugees—leaving a small mess. Nothing important to them had been taken or damaged. The floral apron was on its nail. Miren’s dark braid hung from the corner of the mantel.

  When he saw the hair, his chest constricted. He felt the exact outline of his heart, and the pain made it difficult to breathe. He could not look at it, but he could not take it down. He would have to decide what to do with it before Justo returned. It would be the first thing he would see. But would he be more hurt by its sight or by its absence? At some point they would discuss it. Or maybe they never would.

  The seed corn drying on the crossbeams was gone; the medicinal herbs were gone. Another small meal for somebody. He went outside and around to the ground floor. There were no animals in the stalls, of course. There was a flash of gray and white in one corner, and Miguel saw a rabbit seeking shelter beneath a shock of rotted straw. He could kill it with his slingshot . . . but he’d left that on the mountain when the bombing started. It was still up there with his crosscut saw. I’ll go get them later, he thought, as if he could use either.

  After leaving the hospital, Miguel first walked to his house to find that it had been gutted by fire, which caused the roof to collapse, leaving a stucco shell of scorched-black walls encasing a pile of shattered tiles. A few tools remained undamaged in his workshop, but the furniture, the things he had built for Cat . . . the bed . . . all were gone. Little more than the charred hinges and lock flap remained of the chest he had made as a wedding present to his wife. For Miren on their wedding day. Miren.

  The painted horns of the hobby-ram were intact, but he could find little else.

  In the streets, he saw others stumbling about just as he had, searching for things that no longer existed. All scanned the ground in front of them as they walked. At his feet, Miguel saw letters. So many letters and papers. And pieces of broken crockery. Somebody’s cracked spectacles. Unmatched shoes. Shoes everywhere, but never in pairs. Splashes of color among the gray. Splashes of color on the paper. How could there have been so much paper? Did the bombers drop paper to feed the fires? Black water from the fire-men pooled in low spots and smelled of wet ash. He saw a hair ribbon still knotted in a bow. And more paper, burned around the edges, soggy in the puddles.

  The rebel troops were plentiful in the town, but there seemed to be no hostility or threat, and none made more than a casual gesture toward him. They could see that Miguel was in no condition to offer resistance. His ban daged hands were pulled up in a protective pose near his chest, like the squirrels he used to see when they sat up on their hind legs in the woods. He unconsciously curled his torso over them to keep them from being jostled, leaving him to walk like an old man with a sagging spine. Miguel felt no anger toward the troops. He did not connect them with those who’d done the damage to the town and his family. They didn’t drop the bombs. They looked as dour as most of the townspeople; they exuded no sense of victory. They wandered as aimlessly as the homeless; some of them were wounded and suffering as well.

  When Miguel walked near people he knew, they exchanged nods, saying little or nothing. What was there to say? Who would benefit from an accounting of comparative grief? I lost a husband and two sons and a business and a leg. Oh, that is terrible; I lost a wife, a mother-in-law, two hands, a home . . . and a baby girl. A baby girl. Stop it, he told himself.

  At first he wanted to find someone who could tell him what had happened to Miren and Catalina, where they had died and how. Were they buried or just gone? But when he saw what was left of the town, he recognized the pointlessness. Details would be more to carry. In his mind, they had just disappeared after leaving the house that afternoon. He would remember them as they were at that moment.

  Before leaving the hospital, Miguel decided that he would stay in Guernica, at Errotabarri, and help Justo as much as he could. Since everyone in town knew Justo Ansotegui and had heard the story of him “lifting an entire building to save the baker’s wife,” Miguel had been told of his condition soon after regaining consciousness. “Surgeons had to use a crosscut saw to amputate that giant arm,” they said.

  At least Justo has accomplished something, he thought. It will add to his legend.

  Going home to Lekeitio was an option to consider; his parents would nurse him and feed him. His little sisters would care for him. There would be fish to eat. But if he did, he would be the family victim, and he knew he could not tolerate that. Araitz would open every door for him, Irantzu would want to feed him. The An-soteguis would be across the street, and they had known Miren . . . Miren . . . much longer than he had; they would understand his grief and they would be smotheringly solicitous. There would be reminders in Lekeitio, too.

  Maybe he would go to America and start over there. Maybe he could find his old neighbor who’d gone there. Yes, there must be great demand for four-fingered carpenters in America, he thought. No, he would go nowhere else; grief is not a matter of geography. He needed to stay in Guernica. It would be the only place where he wasn’t an outsider. We are all forged of the same alloy now, he thought.

  But what he had known as Guernica was unrecognizable now. A deep crater o
ccupied the plaza where they had danced. The streets were clogged with the debris workmen stacked to be hauled away. He passed a man who had bought a chest of drawers from him for his wife.

  What to say to him? What to say to anybody? Nothing.

  He had made his way slowly to Errotabarri, looking only at the ground where his next step would fall, careful not to walk on the papers and the letters or the unmatched shoes. He had to get things in order for Justo’s return and somehow scratch up something for them to eat. Together, they would try to heal. Perhaps together they had enough arms and fingers to sort through what remained of their lives.

  As he walked toward Errotabarri, he tried to conjure Miren, but he couldn’t. What would she say now? She could always read his mind and steal his thoughts. She did that from the start. What now? What would she say now? “We’re all right, astokilo; look out for my father” and “Take good care of Alaia now; she needs you.”

  Is Alaia alive? he wondered. How could she be?

  And what would Miren say about the braid? What would she want him to do?

  Dodo heard of the attack through the fishermen at the harbor. Their report, exaggerated through progressive retelling, was that the town had been bombed to the ground, and those who were not blown up by the bombs were burned to death or machine-gunned. Dodo thought first of his brother’s welfare and then of revenge. He urged his fishermen friends to set up a meeting with his father and Josepe Ansotegui as soon as possible. He knew of no other way to learn the truth of who had lived and who had not.

  Within a day, a friend ferried him in a small skiff to a rendezvous with the Egun On. Josepe and José María had tried to reach Guernica when they heard of the bombing but found the road blocked, and it wasn’t until Father Xabier contacted them that they learned what happened. They linked arms with Dodo and told him the news.

  “I envied Miguel for his marriage to Miren,” Dodo said. “No one deserved it more than he did. But I envied it. It seemed that he had everything that he had ever wanted.”

  “He did, son,” José María said. “He did. He had a wonderful little family.”

  The past tense struck them all as they stood in a tight cluster on the deck of the bobbing boat.

  “We don’t really know yet how badly injured he is,” José María said. “He lost some fingers trying to dig through the buildings for Miren and Catalina.”

  “You’d have had to kill him to get him to stop digging, I know that,” Dodo said. “Has he come home?”

  “No, he wants to stay at Errotabarri and help Justo,” Josepe said.

  Dodo squeezed them both, compressing the triangle, and moved toward his skiff.

  “Tell him that as soon as he heals, if he wants to get away from Guernica, we can put him to work in the mountains here,” Dodo said as he prepared to slip back into the smaller boat.

  “This will take some time, son,” José María said.

  “Well, I know he’s going to be upset,” Dodo said. “And I’m sure I can figure out some ways to help him deal with that.”

  CHAPTER 20

  For most of the previous day, the orphans had been shuttled on trains from Portugalete Station in Bilbao to the main docks at Santurce. By the morning, most of them had marched up the gangplank of the SS Habana, holding hands like paper-doll cutouts. An aging single-stack passenger ship now converted to a troop transport, the Habana was harbored along the quay of the port that served Bilbao, making it a target for the Condor Legion or Italian bombers serving the Nationalist rebels. That morning, rebel bombs fell into the river close enough to splash water on the Habana, but four thousand Basque children nonetheless were wedged on board and seemed thrilled to be leaving.

  They were orphans of war dead or children of the displaced, and they were in jeopardy in Bilbao. Some were babes in arms who had been taken aboard by the nurses and volunteers from the orphanages. Others were in their midteens. These tiny passengers had not eaten enough and had seen too much, a combination that would only grow worse with the effects of the blockade, continued bombing, and the anticipated rebel occupation. They had to be evacuated. Still hiding behind the shield of the Non-Intervention Pact, the British government reluctantly agreed to evacuate the dispossessed children. But only the children.

  Before the Habana cast off, Aguirre and Father Xabier boarded, Aguirre to assure the children that they would be gone for only a short time and that this would be a great and memorable adventure, Xabier to bless their voyage and assure them that God was watching over them.

  Aguirre came away revived by their happy faces and awed by their resilience. They had been bombed, starved, and uprooted and had endured the deaths of loved ones, but there was little apprehension and no apparent sadness. He told them to be proud of being Basques, because every Basque was proud of them. They cheered the man in the black suit, although few had any idea who he was.

  “Do you believe they’ll be gone for only a few months?” Xabier pressed his friend when they stepped down onto the quay.

  “I know that if they stay here they may be dead in the next few months, or even days.”

  “Along with the rest of us?”

  “Maybe,” the president acknowledged through the smile he forced as he waved to the children looking down from the ship.

  The children were too young to recognize the significance of having the Habana as their lifeboat. It had other qualities that were more immediately appreciated. It carried food. Many had teetered on the verge of starvation for months. They were fed eggs and meats and grain breads. They gorged themselves and hoarded as much as would fit into their pockets. The richness of the food and the vast amounts caused many of them to become ill. An early summer squall whipped up the waters in the Bay of Biscay, and very early on in what would become a turbulent forty-eight-hour passage, many grew seasick.

  By the evening of the second day, the Habana dropped anchor off Fawley, near the Southampton harbor, and was boarded by more doctors volunteering to give medical examinations to the children. Aside from the minor illnesses during the passage, the children were sound and in high spirits. From the deck, they saw the houses along the inlet decorated with flowers and fronted by immaculately tended gardens. It seemed a fantasy world, so apart from and beyond what they had known, and they repeatedly screamed, “Viva Inglaterra!” They docked the next morning to the musical accompaniment of the Salvation Army band. Because of their uniforms, the children called them the “lady policemen.”

  The reception camp featured a banner stretched above a dirt pathway proclaiming it the Basque Childrens’ Camp. A crop of five hundred circular tents, peaked by center pikes, sprouted in the field. The children were bathed, given further examinations, and fed by a co alition of volunteers.

  The following morning, the Southern Daily Echo newspaper presented an article headlined SINCERE AND HEARTY GREETING: “We appreciate the trials through which they must have passed in recent weeks and hope that there in the quiet green fields of Hampshire they will find rest, contentment and—more important still—peace.”

  In contrast to their government’s position, generous locals were glad to “intervene.” These were children, after all, babies. Many received new clothes from Marks & Spencer and chocolate from Cadbury. Within months, they were sent not back to the Basque Country for repatriation but to more permanent camps in Stone-ham and Cambridge and Pampisford and dozens of other towns that supported Basque children’s colonies. They continued their schoolwork and play and began the process of recovering from the things they had seen.

  The civil war continued to plague their country, while England was peaceful, if uneasy. To send them back to Spain might be a death sentence, or at least an invitation to greater privation. The children assimilated quickly, except for those at a camp near an air base, where nurses and supervisors repeatedly had to promise them that the planes overhead would not drop bombs.

  Father Xabier needed an informer. His accomplice was an old friend named Sister Incarnation. At four and a
half feet tall, she weighed no more than a sack of feathers, was of indeterminate years between fifty and ninety, and was as well intended as any of the sainted martyrs memorialized in the statuary around the hospital. Sister Incarnation was a nurse’s aide who also spent time at the Basilica de Begoña, where she would take patients seeking the comfort of an altar or a confessional. There she came to know Father Xabier, who so admired her energy that he once asked the sister if she ever stopped to rest.

  “We little people don’t need to sleep,” she told him. “Did you ever see a hummingbird snoozing on a branch? We rest during blinks.”

  After a succession of surgeries trimmed off his left arm up to the shoulder, Justo Ansotegui was transferred to a rehabilitation ward. When Xabier realized he couldn’t visit him every day, he deputized Sister Incarnation to serve as his watchdog. Loving her spirit, Justo adopted her and began calling her “Sister Inky.” She could have fit in his pocket.

  Wounded soldiers and civilians, and amputees and burn patients at various stages of rehabilitation, filled the wards. These were the victims expected to live, if they still cared to make the effort. The hospital had long been out of wooden legs, and orders for crutches and canes were running months behind. The war had strained the producers and suppliers of such things beyond their ability to capitalize.

  In the meantime, Sister Incarnation helped these wounded reclaim the parts of their lives that could be regained through adaptation. She taught those missing legs to operate crutches, to negotiate stairs, to adjust to their altered center of gravity. She taught the tricks of one-armed existence to those in need: how to bathe and dress, how to use other parts of their body to pinch objects and serve as a second hand. She taught female arm-amputees how to thread a needle and sew. She instructed leg-amputee farmers to swing the scythe while propping up the limited side with both crutches. Balance and leverage, she preached. Balance and leverage. The world is filled with three-legged dogs and one-legged gulls, she claimed. If they can manage with the tiny brains God provided, then so can you.