Guernica

by Dave Boling

  To the burn patients, she offered suggestions on coping with pain and the reality of disfigurement. Hair from one side of the head could be brushed over the burned area on the other side of the face. Long sleeves, gloves, and hats could be worn quite inconspicuously. They needed to remember that the looks they received from people in the street were usually ones of curiosity, not bad intent or insult. If not, they were stupid people and their opinions didn’t matter anyway.

  In addition to the physical skills, Sister Incarnation sought to inject attitude into the diffident and spirit into those without. To those who required pushing, Sister Incarnation was a disciplinarian. To those who needed consideration, Sister Incarnation was patient and compassionate. And to those who sought sympathy, Sister Incarnation was deaf as a stump. She was not there to reward self-pity.

  She had a ready answer to the complainers: “Look around. Think of all the ones who have been carried out of here. Find the value in what remains. Balance and leverage, balance and leverage.”

  She had no trouble staying aware of Justo’s activities. With this nun who was one third his size, Justo felt a kinship of power. Her energy was magnetic. And since the lack of an arm did not impede his mobility between surgeries, Justo became her shadow.

  “He follows me around all day,” the sister reported to Xabier. “He wants to carry things for me; he wants to lift things for me. He is so eager to prove that he’s healthy and strong and whole. If he sees a chore for a two-armed person, he jumps in and tries to prove he can do it himself with one. And he has started getting tough with other patients, pushing them. He threatened one with harm if he ever spoke back to me or didn’t do exactly as I had taught. There was one wounded soldier I had to push hard who said he felt I was treating him like a Fascist. Justo almost killed him.”

  “So, he’s creating a problem?”

  “Well, I don’t need an enforcer,” she said. “And the doctors are getting weary of his trying to get them to arm-wrestle.”

  Xabier was not surprised.

  “He keeps asking me to punch him in the right arm so I can see how much he can take,” she added.

  “So then we should presume that he’s healed now and ready to go home?” Xabier asked.

  “No, no, not at all, that’s the problem,” the nun stressed. “Doctors have done what they can with his arm, and he’ll be ready for release soon. But he’s been so busy convincing us all that he’s healthy, he’s never dealt with the loss of his arm. He tries to act as if he was born that way.”

  “Sister, it isn’t the loss of his arm that is the problem; I can guarantee you that,” Xabier said. “Justo sees that as a challenge. What you see with him wanting to work and help heal others, even if he has to strangle them to do it, is exactly who he is. My fears aren’t about the arm at all. What has he said about his family?”

  “Not one word. He gets quiet and he goes dark at night. I’ve checked on him and I know he’s acting as if he’s asleep, but he rarely is. Father, the nurses and I realized that he’s the only patient who has reached this point in rehabilitation who has not been begging to go home. By now, they’re sick of us and ready to get back to their lives. He has not said a thing about his home or about wanting to go home. It seems as if he would be happy to just stay here and follow me around all day.”

  “Has he been counseled on this?”

  “Father, we were hoping that would be something for you to take over.”

  “Me?”

  “To be honest, the doctors are a little afraid of him,” Sister Incarnation said. “Nobody wants to make him angry. When he goes dark, it’s as if he can’t even hear us talking to him. We know something is going on inside that mind, but we don’t know what.”

  The mural projected chaos, and in that regard it was perfectly at home in his work space. The artist, an inveterate pack rat, could scarcely walk through his studio without tripping on an African tribal mask, an ancient bronze cast, sculptures of his own or his friends’, sketches of unfinished works, and priceless paintings by Matisse, Modigliani, Gris, and others strewn in this museum of clutter. Interspersed with the art was an abstract tumble of shoes, books, hats, unopened mail, empty wine bottles, and partially eaten meals. Across the threshold of the mural was the detritus of his art, crumpled paint tubes and a carpet of flattened cigarette butts. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and paint, linseed oil, and Dora Maar’s fruity perfume.

  Picasso had repositioned his characters, with the bull, too late the savior, curled in a protective pose around the woman with the dead baby. He’d used the image of the Minotaur in many works, but this was not the bull-man myth, this was an anatomically complete beast ready for the corrida.

  He erased the dotted pupils of the baby’s eyes, leaving a haunting emptiness. The warrior’s upraised arm had dropped. The sun-flower burst became an incandescent lamp casting jagged light spears onto the scene. Subtly, Picasso encased all the human and animal suffering, and the burning exterior of a building, inside a room with electric lighting, creating a diorama of grief. On the far right, he painted a door to this inside-out world, slightly ajar.

  Through successive incarnations, he eliminated most of the blatant gore. Many of the studies and early figures featured bullet holes seeping black blood and body parts randomly scattered. He flirted with the idea of adding texture with collage techniques, attaching a cloth scarf to a woman’s head. And he once taped a piece of paper, resembling a blood-red teardrop, to the mother’s cheek, making it the only dot of color in an achromatic scene. Too obvious. It is simple to make people uneasy, more difficult to make them think.

  Guilt consumed the penitent at the confessional. She outlined for the priest the details, how she tucked a bread loaf up under her apron at a local market. It was not for her but for her children. That she had not eaten herself was of minor consequence, but to hear her children plea so pitiably was impossible to ignore.

  “Yes, I stole,” she said. “And for one afternoon the children had some stale bread in their stomachs. I am sorry to God. I am sorry to the baker. When the war is over, I will pay him back double. God understands, doesn’t He?”

  Father Xabier faced more of these stories each day, along with the parishioners’ more difficult questions of how such a life can continue and how many prayers would go unanswered. They had lost parents to bombing or sisters to starvation, and, most often, husbands to artillery shells on the front as the circle of fighting cinched tighter around them.

  They challenged Xabier to come up with excuses. But he found it impossible to be the interpreter of the inexplicable. To go by the book, Xabier would have had to remind the woman that difficult trials were a common biblical theme, and that strong people with deep faith survived and afterward knew the reward of their virtue. But he said none of that as he looked through the screen at the emaciated face that made the still-young mother look ages older. Instead, he told her that she need feel no guilt over trying to feed her children. It was her most important job.

  “Try to find ways other than stealing; remember, the baker has hungry children, too,” Father Xabier said, knowing she faced few options. “Try to find a shelter. And have faith.”

  “I will, father.”

  “Then go, my child,” he said, again feeling foolish wearing the paternal expression.

  “Is there no penance, father?”

  Xabier knew the woman had been through enough without his imposition of further duties. But he also knew that she would not feel genuinely absolved without paying remittance.

  “Yes, there is something: pray.”

  “Pray? How many times?”

  “As often as you can.”

  “I am already doing that, father.”

  He loved and hated unveilings, the way they all would gasp even if they had no idea if what they were seeing was art or crap. But this new one could not be veiled. It was too large. The room would be the veil. When his guests stepped through the door, they would step into the painting, into t
he room within the room.

  The painting screamed, and they heard it immediately, but it took time for them to catch the whispers. They saw the fallen warrior before they detected a shadow flower next to his broken sword. They saw the bull before the broken-winged bird on the table in the dark background. The wound to the horse was noticed only after attention was drawn away from his pained muzzle. They stared and paced its length, making new discoveries as they moved from angle to angle.

  Most were jolted by the work, the mass and scope if nothing else. All hints of color had been removed, leaving it starkly black and white, with muted grays. They needed many minutes to absorb the work, taking it in from far away to close, then left to right, and then back out to a full-frame perspective again. It took time to discover the motility: things hiding in shadows, features half-erased and progressive, growing and fading with movement.

  The bull had turned now to display its puckered anus and pendulous testicles, and the nipples on the women resembled baby pacifiers. On each visible palm a set of intersecting lines presumably foretold their common misfortune.

  When it appeared at the Spanish Pavilion, some questioned the symbolism and meaning. He was told that some expected a more literal depiction of the bombing. He assured them that the message was clear.

  One woman attempted an explanation of her reaction to the mural and could only say, “It makes me feel as if somebody is cutting me to pieces.”

  Asked how he expected the work to be viewed over time, Picasso would not commit. It would depend on whether or not it made a difference.

  “If peace wins in the world,” he said, “the war I have painted will be a thing of the past.”

  President Aguirre alerted Father Xabier to his need for a conference at the rectory, which meant there would be no random arrival in the confessional. The rebel troops had almost surrounded Bil-bao, with the road to Santander the only means of escape.

  “How soon?” the priest asked.

  “I was sitting at my desk last night with a few ministers, planning the evacuation, and the window exploded,” Aguirre told Xabier. “Rebels on Monte Artxanda were close enough to take potshots at us. Three bullets hit the desk and wall. One shattered a glass in front of me on my desk. They not only knew where we were, they were within rifle range of us.”

  “They’re that close now?” Xabier said, expressing alarm more than asking a question.

  “Monte Pagasarri is falling this minute,” Aguirre said. “We’ve got three battalions left, and they headed into the mountains with nothing but bolt-action rifl es and grenades. I listened to them singing hymns in the trucks: ‘We are Basque soldiers; to liberate Euskadi, our blood is ready to be shed for her.’ ” Aguirre spoke the lyrics.

  Xabier groaned in sympathy.

  “We’ve shipped more than a hundred thousand refugees to France in the last two months,” Aguirre said, “but there’re still so many—”

  “Friend,” Xabier said, stopping him. “I wanted to tell you I admired the release of the rebel prisoners. I know it was hard, and it brought criticism, but it was the right thing to do.”

  “I was afraid they’d be slaughtered out of vengeance before the rebels got here,” Aguirre said. “I don’t regret it. We got a cease-fire out of it for a few hours to accommodate their return to the rebel lines.”

  “It’s not something they would have done for us,” the priest said.

  “We’re not in the murder business. War is bad enough; murder is something different.”

  “I’m the priest, but I’ve vilified the rebels far more than you ever have. Especially after what they did to Lorca.”

  Rebels had captured the priest’s favorite poet, and because they understood him to be homosexual, they shot him repeatedly in the rectum and finished him with a bullet to the head.

  “I know,” Aguirre said. “But there’s been much for both sides to be ashamed of.”

  “How long do we have before they march into Bilbao?”

  “It depends on how eager they are. Right now, it’s convenient for them to surround us and starve us. That achieves the same results with less ammunition.”

  “What then?”

  “Rather than have the troops fight to the last breath here, we’re going to try to sneak out our last divisions to the front in Barcelona. There’s nothing more we can do here, but our troops can still fight for the Republic there.”

  “What about you?”

  “That’s why I’m here; we’re leaving for Santander tonight,” Aguirre said. “We discussed keeping the troops and the government here and fighting to the death, but the feeling is that our fate is already determined. We’re going into exile.”

  “I’m glad you’re going, and I’m glad you came here before you left,” Xabier said. “I will miss hearing your confessions.”

  “I’ll be back,” Aguirre protested. “It may take a while, but we’re trying to keep the government together so it doesn’t have to be entirely rebuilt. We finally got our autonomy and that’s worth coming back for. Besides, I’ve got to get back here to keep an eye on the radical priest of Begoña.”

  “Go with God, my son,” Xabier said out of habit before amending his blessing to “Until later, my friend.”

  Aguirre sneaked out of the rectory, but the scent of cigarettes lingered in his path.

  That night, Aguirre and his family boarded a plane under heavy shelling at the Santander airfield, lifting off the ground as rebel forces stormed the strip. In the coming months, the Aguirres would be chased across Eu rope, often wearing disguises. Several in his family would be shot and killed.

  Knowing his return to Spain would mean a swift execution, Aguirre could not come home as long as Francisco Franco was dictator. José Antonio Aguirre, the first Basque president, who took his oath of office beneath the sacred oak of Guernica, would never again see his country.

  Franco’s first act after the fall of Bilbao was to declare that the speaking of Euskara was illegal. Basques were told to “speak Christian,” and within two weeks, the Catholic hierarchy of Spain issued proclamations condemning Basque priests for having ignored “the voice of the church.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Miren called him in from the wood shop in that frisky way that meant she had a chore for him. He’d been lathing a table leg and he smelled of cypress shavings and sweat.

  “What do you think of this color?” she asked.

  “Kuttuna, the paint’s getting all over you,” Miguel said. “You shouldn’t paint in your wedding dress.”

  “I thought the yellow was too bright in here,” she said. “The black will be better, don’t you think?”

  “It’s pretty dark . . . but it’s different.”

  “Exactly—it’s different,” she said. Dots of paint freckled her face.

  “I don’t care what it looks like,” Miguel said. “Do you need me to get the high parts?”

  “No, I can reach.”

  She put down her brush and they held each other, and at the sound of Mendiola’s saw music, they danced.

  “I ache for you,” he said.

  She nodded.

  He leaned down so his mouth was at her ear. “I love you. I miss you.”

  She whispered the same words to him.

  “I looked for you,” he said.

  “I know, asto, I know. Thank you. I knew you would.”

  “I’m sorry we fought,” he said.

  “We didn’t fight,” she said, pulling back to look in his eyes. “That wasn’t ever about us. That was so small.”

  “It was time we wasted.”

  “Maybe not. We had things we needed to say and that was all it was. Every married couple has those things.”

  They turned slowly to the music, moving like one connected body. Turning, turning, holding tightly.

  They drifted and swayed. Closer.

  “Thank you, Miguel,” Mariangeles said. Miren’s mother?

  She joined them dancing, holding them both. The same feel. The sam
e smell.

  “She misses dancing, too,” Miren said.

  They turned, all three, and as the music slowed, the walls grew darker until they were entirely black.

  More difficult for Father Xabier than addressing an el derly person as “my child” was trying to become a father to his big brother. Being subservient to Justo, being his little brother, was the position he’d occupied longer than any other. To help him was tricky, to guide him impossible. Justo’s physical progress had impressed the surgeons and nurses and Sister Incarnation. But each worried about his emotional withdrawal.

  Xabier had written to Josepe in Lekeitio with updates on their brother. In the past, Josepe had occasionally sailed to Bilbao to visit Xabier at the basilica, but the blockades and the mining of the harbor made these trips impossible now. Xabier reasoned that Josepe would have the best advice on dealing with their brother because of his age and the fact that he had more in common with Justo than a celibate cleric. If nothing else, Josepe had known him a year longer. But his plea for advice elicited only a terse response:

  Dear Xabier,

  Let me know if I can provide anything—absolutely anything—other than advice on how to deal with our brother. Maybe this is why Justo sent you to the seminary. Pay him back. Good luck.

  Josepe

  Seeing no alternatives, the priest made a place for Justo at the Basilica de Begoña rectory. There, at least, he would have food and attention and be away from the hospital and doctors. Xabier could take care of him and keep him away from the rebels who had taken over the town. Xabier feared how Justo would act in their presence and knew there was little he could do about it if Justo decided to instigate a confrontation.