Guernica

by Dave Boling

  With parishioners, he spoke from a seat of power, and his advice might have been ignored, but it was at least superficially respected. Trying to tell his older brother how to respond to the tragedy in his life required a greater level of sensitivity. But he also knew that Justo would not tolerate his being less than entirely honest. He would demand frankness and reject coddling from his kid brother. But if Justo would not talk about Mariangeles and Miren, where was his honesty?

  For several weeks, Justo awakened before dawn and worked around the rectory, sweeping, dusting, picking up leaves on the grounds. “I have to earn my keep,” he volunteered whenever anyone approached. “I can help around here.”

  That Justo had not stormed any of the rebels’ garrisons relieved Xabier, who slept uneasily the first few nights his brother was in residence. Rebel soldiers had not ventured into the basilica, and Justo had not left the grounds, so there had been no chance for a clash. Instead, Justo attacked his adopted daily chores at the basilica as he always had at Errotabarri.

  He sat near the main door through every mass, acting as an un-official usher, jumping up to help the elderly to their seats whether they needed it or not. At times he would lift an older woman off the kneeler if she had hardened in place during a lengthy prayer. Afterward, he picked up any messes between the pews and mopped up the floor near the door if it had been a rainy day. The basilica employed a caretaker, but he had the sense to be cautious around Justo.

  Justo brightened when Sister Incarnation appeared, and he shouted a deep “Sister Inky!

  “Look how well I’m doing; ball up your fist and hit me,” he said to the tiny woman, leaning down to within her range in case she chose to accept his invitation.

  “No, Justo, I don’t strike patients, it doesn’t look good,” she said.

  “Yes, but look at me,” Justo pressed. “Eh?”

  “Yes, Justo, you are doing very well. Your brother tells me you are a great help around here.”

  “I have to earn my keep,” he assured her. “Watch this.”

  Justo wielded the push broom with one hand in a display of his adaptation.

  “That’s very good,” she said, as if talking to a child.

  Sister Incarnation played along with Justo, agreeing that he certainly did seem physically sound. Decent nutrition and better rest had helped him regain his vigor. But she felt that the return of his external shell only made the hollowness inside him give off more of an echo.

  “I think . . . I believe he is ready to start the hard work,” the nun told Xabier. “I think if you wait much longer, the walls will be too strong to ever let you inside. He trusts you, father, he’s told me so many times how proud he is of you and what a wonderful priest and brother you are. If you trust your instincts with him, he might even help you along.”

  Xabier felt comfortable relying on her sense of timing; she had worked for de cades with those recovering from trauma. Over a late dinner, when the brothers were alone, Xabier voiced the first uncloaked question he’d dared to asked since Justo joined him.

  “You’re doing so well, Justo, have you thought about when it is you’d like to go back to Errotabarri?”

  Xabier mistimed the question, as his brother had just taken a large bite of bread crust. He looked down, finishing his mouthful. Xabier watched as Justo’s mustache undulated rhythmically.

  “I was guilty of the sin of pride, brother,” he finally said. “I thought myself a god among men, and the real God decided he needed to teach me the truth.”

  “That was no sin, Justo. It was who you are, who you’ve always been. We made it through because of your strength. Your strength let us keep Errotabarri. Your strength helped you find Mariangeles. Your strength built your family. Your wife and your daughter, even you, were loved by almost everyone in town. These things were important.”

  “Yes,” Justo said unconvincingly. “But being shown to be a fool is a hard thing.”

  “You’re nobody’s fool, Justo.”

  “I’ll tell you what a fool I was. After your sermon that frightened everyone, I went home and I spent the day and night honing my ax on the whetstone and sharpening the laia’s points with a file. I was a fool.”

  “What can I say, Justo?” Xabier said. “It isn’t your fault, you have to know that. I can’t tell you how to stop hurting. I can’t help anybody with that, and that’s what I feel is my greatest failure here; it makes me feel like a fool sometimes, too. But you have to find a way to deal with this other than pretending it didn’t happen.”

  “Oh, I know it happened,” Justo said. “And I’m ready to deal with it in my way.”

  Xabier feared where this was headed. “Revenge will do nothing for Mari and Miren,” Xabier said. “If you kill a few Fascists, they’ll soon kill you.”

  “Why would you think I’d do such a thing?”

  “You haven’t thought of it?”

  “Xabier, I don’t think I ever told you about the night I met Miguel,” Justo said. “He came to Errotabarri and that evening he told me that he thought our father was selfish.”

  Xabier had not heard the story, and it surprised him.

  “He did. He had the pelotas to sit in our house and say that to me on the day we met. He said that if Father had really loved our mother, he would not have grieved himself to death. The real love would have been for him to get over it, and live, and take better care of us.”

  “I never thought of it in that way because we were all so young, Justo, but I think he’s right. If a parishioner were in the same situation, I would give him that same advice.”

  “He asked me to think what our mother would have said to our father, and he said he thought she would have asked him to grieve hard, yes, but then be strong and move on.”

  “Justo, what do you think Mariangeles would want to say to you now?”

  “I think she’d say, ‘Go ahead, Justo, grieve hard but then be strong . . .’ ” Justo said, dropping his head.

  “I think you need to listen to her, brother,” Xabier said, reaching for Justo’s hand.

  By fall, most of the burned and gutted buildings had been cleared to make way for the town’s reconstruction. Workmen bulldozed the concrete debris into the bomb craters, packed it down, and paved it over. Holes from bullets and shrapnel still pocked many of the standing structures, and most would be tuck-pointed to erase the evidence later. These were the scars most easily repaired.

  For a carpenter, it should have been a profitable time. The council asked Mendiola to help supervise parts of the reconstruction. He questioned Miguel about helping, and Miguel remembered that the last time they joined in a civic endeavor, it was to build a refugio. What construction codes would be required now? Were they to replace the buildings in the same spots as if nothing had happened? Or would everything be new and different to avoid comparisons to all that had been?

  Most of the work was done by forced labor crews of captured Republican soldiers, many of them Basques, who were now compelled to rebuild the city they had been unable to protect in the first place. But the Francoists who now dominated the town council also hired locals for minimal pay. Miguel dodged recruitment by reminding them that many of his tools were lost or damaged. He could have just held up his hands as an obvious excuse, but he kept those in his pockets now. He had found a few small hand tools amid the debris of his home, and he also had discovered, rusting on the hillside above town, the crosscut saw that he had dropped that afternoon. He decided he would starve before working beside the prison-labor force of men who might have been neighbors.

  Miguel tested his capabilities with some light work at Errotabarri, mostly maintenance to the house and shed. He had not gone into the room where Miren had slept when she was growing up. He also had not killed and eaten the rabbit, and his restraint was rewarded by the appearance of several others who established a colony in the basement. From somewhere, a bony chicken arrived, too, as if sprung from an egg that had been dormant beneath the rotting straw. Perhaps this was
the final chicken in all the Pays Basque, Miguel speculated. The Basque Country—could he even call it the Basque Country anymore?

  He eased himself into his return to work, not because of the pain he still felt, but because there was a limit to what could be achieved at Errotabarri. Some volunteer corn popped up over the summer, and he mostly kept it as seed stock for the next year. Since there were no grazers to feed, he let the grass grow untouched in hopes it would reseed itself and come back thicker.

  He discovered that his favorite stream still had a few fish that would take worms and grubs, which made a satisfying meal when fried along with the wild mushrooms that still grew in the shaded ravines on the hillside. He relearned the skill of fishing through trial and error. Mostly he learned to adapt. He could awkwardly grasp the crosscut and bow saws, and the brace-and-bit drill. It was exhausting and inefficient but manageable if he took it slowly.

  Miguel had no interest in spending more time than necessary in town. Falange soldiers were still about, and he could not even nod in their direction as he passed. Their force had thinned out since the first weeks after the attack, but there still were Fascists and the Guardia Civil in sufficient numbers to make him uncomfortable.

  To walk through the town carried the risk of having to talk. And he found himself losing the knack. Ventures in public forced him to rise to the surface, while the rest of his time was spent at some subsurface level, lost in thought or dreaming. If he could stay away from people, his days were less complicated. Not easier, because it all felt like wading through a viscous twilight, but less complicated. For long stretches, he wouldn’t realize his distance from consciousness until he tried to say something, to the squirrels or to the fish he’d caught, and was surprised by the words coming out in a coughing sound, as if dust and cobwebs had collected in his throat.

  The day of his release from the hospital, he’d asked of Alaia’s welfare. He’d been told that she’d been unharmed and the sisters were looking after her. To inquire further would have meant more talk, more time in town. He’d met his obligation.

  It was better to just stay in the mountains and at the baserri. He could still fell a tree and swing an ax. It was much slower, but it was quiet work in the quiet hills, and the exhaustion dulled his mind. Until the point when fatigue would numb him, he was vulnerable to memories. How old would Catalina be right now? Would she be walking? Would she be using the bigger toys he’d made her? Would it be time for them to start another baby?

  He’d empty his mind again and focus on the saw blade’s hum, dropping tree after tree, until exhaustion rid him of memories. He repaid the occasional loan of Mendiola’s mule with a portion of the lumber he brought in, and he made enough money to stay alive, to buy some seeds for replanting, and to replace some of the tools that he found himself needing.

  Alaia Aldecoa felt cloistered again as silence joined darkness as a constant in her life. She had so desperately sought to leave the convent and then spent so much energy convincing Miren that she needed to be independent. And now, back at her cabin, she had nothing but independence, and a life once empty somehow grew more empty.

  There would be no more business partners, as Miren had labeled them. She was done with that. The closeness she’d wanted turned out to be something else. No one knocked on her door, and she would not have admitted them anyway. So many were gone now; so many were desperate for other things. She kept the hatchet that Zubiri had used for splitting her kindling. If soldiers arrived with bad intent, she would swing it in the direction of their sounds until she made contact or she was killed.

  No one arrived to buy soaps, either, and the market had not been reestablished.

  She could tell from the way her dress hung slack that she’d grown stringy from lack of food. Zubiri continued to help as he could. He was alone and could share what subsistence he could scrape off his small baserri. He knew without discussion that their arrangement had changed. They were friends now, and he would help Alaia for that reason. They talked more, and that seemed important. He had managed to hide a goat at a shepherd’s cabin in the mountains, which meant milk and cheese for them. He also tended bees, and he shared the honey with Alaia. It was a different closeness.

  She thought of Miren often. She remembered the smell of breakfasts at Errotabarri, and how Justo greeted them both with hugs and outrageous stories while Mariangeles was careful to make sure her needs were met. She remembered Miren and Mariangeles, and the way they were like two generations of the same person. And she thought of Miren when she went to sleep, recalling the nights in her bed, sharing private thoughts and wrestling.

  Alaia no longer needed to recognize the time of day. She slept when she wished and for as long as she could. There was only waking and sleeping now, and in her solitary darkness there was little difference between the two.

  Why go to town? So much had changed and she had no one to show her the ways in which the new streets bent around the new construction. So she stayed at home and survived without purpose. At times she worked on her soaps, even though there was no market in which to sell them. She gathered herbs in the meadows for scents and for making tea, and she collected greens to boil and eat.

  She found herself thinking of Miguel and how enormous was his loss. It had been a perfect family. But he had almost two years with Miren. He had Justo and his family. She had only soap and thoughts, and she felt that was slender excuse for a life. But she also had a small, worn rag doll that had become more important to her than she could have imagined.

  The herringbone pattern of the wood made the floor of the Basilica de Begoña seem to rise on the lengthy path from the entrance to the altar. Sister Incarnation helped a woman on crutches all the way to the front pew, taught her how to genuflect in her new condition, and then retreated to give privacy to her prayers. At the back of the main nave, she found Justo Ansotegui, who had been watching her.

  “You look well, Justo,” she whispered.

  “Thank you.” Justo gestured for her to sit. “I need to apologize to you, sister. I was dishonest with you. I’ve talked with my brother Xabier and we’ve straightened out a few things.”

  “Dishonest about what, Justo?”

  “About my family, about my life, about what was going through my mind,” he said. “I didn’t believe I could talk about it without breaking down, without being weak. I didn’t want you to see that in me.”

  She patted his knee.

  “By not telling you about my wife and daughter I kept you from knowing them,” he said. “And it’s important to me that you understand who they were.”

  “Justo, people have to find different ways,” she said. “That takes time; that’s not being dishonest. You just weren’t ready.”

  “Sister, my wife and daughter were my life,” he said. “I know you hear that all the time. The only thing I could do was convince myself they were alive somewhere and I was going to see them again. So, yes, I was dishonest with you and I was probably being dishonest with myself. I apologize. For as hard as you worked with me, you deserved better than that.”

  “Justo, I knew your family,” she said. “Father Xabier told me everything. I just couldn’t talk about them until you were ready. I knew when it was time that you would tell Father Xabier how you felt and he would be the one to help you through this.”

  They sat quietly for a moment, watching the altar candles flicker and reflect off the stone columns as parishioners branched off to the side chapels for prayers. It was a busy place, but solemn.

  “I wanted to tell you that I’m going home soon,” Justo said. “I hope you would keep watch on that brother of mine. We have a family problem of thinking we can save the world.”

  “Justo, that’s almost exactly what he told me about you,” she said. Both laughed loudly enough that some in prayer turned to scowl, easing back around when they saw that a nun was involved.

  “I worry how he makes everyone’s problems his own; he invites their suffering,” Justo said.

&nbs
p; “Don’t worry for him, that’s what makes him such a fine priest,” the nun said. “He told me that you were the one who saw that in him.”

  “Sister, I just wanted to get him out of the house.”

  “Justo,” she said harshly, “you are in the house of God; you should not lie here.”

  From her pocket, she retrieved a small green cloth medallion connected to a string to be worn around the neck, emblazoned with the likeness of the Virgin Mary and the inscription IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY, PRAY FOR US NOW AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATH.

  “Justo, I want you to wear this scapular.”

  “Thank you, sister, I will.”

  “You never know when you might need help from the Mother of God.”

  “True enough.”

  He spread the supportive cord of the small medallion to accommodate its passage over his head, slipped it down around his neck, and tucked it inside his shirt.

  Both rose, dipped deeply as they stepped into the aisle, and crossed themselves. Sister Incarnation checked that her patient in the front pew was still bent in prayer and then walked toward the entry with Justo.

  “Justo, I’ve never had a patient like you,” she said.

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “I think it is, yes,” she said with her small birdcall laugh. “I want you to do what your brother says. Listen to him. You are a good man and there are not enough of those to go around these days.”

  “Sister, I promise you I’ll do my best to be myself again.”

  “Good, Justo,” she said. “Because I would not want to have to get tough with you.”

  The tiny nun moved in closer, as if to hug him. Instead, she reached up to her full height and socked him on the right shoulder.

  Fishing was the best part now, on the hillsides in the afternoon with the coolness of the stream beneath the alders. Neither shouted when a fish was caught, although it meant more to them now. But an instinctual response surfaced whenever the line was pulled hard by one taking the bait. The connection seemed so different to Miguel from the winching in of hundreds in a net.