‘Look at what is happening with the war in the Gulf,’ he exclaims, staring out of the window as if members of Iraq’s elite Republican Guard were suddenly massing in the Parte Vieja. ‘Millions of people, all around the world, protesting to their governments about the invasion of Iraq, and who listens to them? Nobody. Not Mr Blair, not the PP, certainly not the Americans and Bush. But they will do it anyway, they will go into Baghdad. And you know what makes me laugh? It is this same so-called democracy that they wish to impose on the Middle East. The same corruption. The same lies. Do you see? The people do not matter.’
‘But that’s not their fault.’ I don’t like hearing this from a politician, conviction or no conviction. ‘Democracy isn’t wasted on the public just because they don’t have a voice. It’s wasted on the politicians who take advantage of them.’
‘Exactly, exactly.’ Arenaza appears to agree wholeheartedly and drains his drink. ‘But the idea that governments listen to the public, that they are accountable to the men and women who voted for them, is a notion from the nineteenth century, in your country from the beginnings of socialism when people finally had a voice and a way of communicating with each other. Before that politics was about the special interests of elites. People forget this, and now we are back at this point. Your British government pursues a policy based on one simple ideology: follow America. That is the extent of their imagination. And in the long run it is easier for Mr Blair to say “No” to hundreds of thousands of British voters, even to ignore the voice of his own conscience, than it is for the Foreign Office of the United Kingdom to say “No” to George Bush. Now, follow my logic. Once the prime ministers of Spain and of the UK have a decision of this kind forced upon them, that is to say they have no choice in what they do because of America, then they start to see themselves as men of destiny. Good Europeans against bad, friends of democracy against friends of terror. The ego takes over.’
I’ve lost the thread here, but find a question. ‘So why are you still involved in politics?’
‘I am not. We have been banned.’
‘Yes, but -’
‘Listen to me. I have sat in on these meetings, even at the level of local politics, and none of my superiors ever cared for anything but their own personal and political advancement. They are all little Dick Cheneys, all the same. Politics is the vanity of individual men. Policy is shaped by flaws in the character.’
Why is he telling me this? Because he is drunk? ‘You’re saying that you disapprove of your colleagues?’
A heavy pause. Arenaza runs his hand through a thick clump of hair.
‘Not exactly, no. Not disapprove.’ I suppose he doesn’t want to overstep the mark. ‘It is more a question of human nature, of reality. Listen, you have somewhere else you have to go tonight?’
‘No.’
‘Then come with me. I will explain everything to you. We go to another bar and I will show you exactly what it is that I mean.’
10. Level Three
A light drizzle has started to fall by the time we leave the bar, the dark, narrow streets of the old quarter coated in black rain. The sea air is damp, Atlantic, quite different from the dry and dusty atmosphere of Madrid, and to take it in deep breaths is a welcome relief after the fug of the bar. Moving quickly beside Arenaza as we walk along the street I try to anticipate what the next few hours might hold. Anything could happen. The evening may disappear in a mulch of booze and ideology, or it could acquire a completely different character. Unless I have read the situation wrongly, Arenaza appears to have undergone some sort of political epiphany, criticizing his former masters in the armed struggle and happily articulating that revelation to strangers such as myself. It is the aeroplane phenomenon: the most sensitive information is often disclosed to the passenger sitting by our side whom we expect never to see again. As Arenaza spoke to me in the bar, confidence seemed to ebb away from him with each passing drink, as if a mask were slipping from his face. On the basis of a shared acquaintance with Julian, a former councillor with Batasuna was taking me into his confidence, and yet it somehow made perfect sense. I charmed him back there. I worked him round.
‘First we have to go to my car,’ he says. ‘I have to take off this jacket, Alec, to change out of my suit and shoes. You OK if I do this?’
‘No problem.’
Most of the better bars and restaurants in San Sebastian are clustered around the Parte Vieja, but I have spent very little time here, largely because Julian’s contacts preferred to meet in the lounge bar of the Hotel Inglaterra, where the comfortable sofas and armchairs offer views out onto the promenade and the ocean beyond. As a result, I don’t know my way around and Arenaza’s frequent switches of direction along the grid of streets are disorientating. It feels as though we are heading west towards the Concha, but it is impossible to take a bearing. Arenaza is holding a copy of the Gara newspaper over his head to protect it from rain, using his other hand to talk into a mobile phone. He is speaking to someone rapidly in Basque:
‘Denak ondo dago. Gaueko hamabietan egongo maizetxean. Afari egin behar dut Ingles bankari honekin.’
Who is he talking to? His wife? A colleague? Halfway through the conversation he breaks off and gestures at a poster tacked to the window of a nearby bar. It is a cartoon depicting a caricature of Aznar, the prime minister’s tongue curling deep into the arse of President George W. Bush. The caption is written in Basque and I cannot understand it. Through the window I can see two men playing chess on stools. Arenaza mouths the word ‘Truth’ and continues speaking into the phone. ‘ Ez arduratu,’ he says. ‘ Esan dizut dagoenekoz. Gaueko hamabiak. Bale ba, ikusi ordu arte.’
Then the conversation ends and we emerge into a pedestrianized area immediately behind the town hall. It is past nine o’clock and the streets are teeming with people. Arenaza explains that his car is parked in an underground garage about fifty metres away. Putting his hand on my back, he steers me across a set of blinking pedestrian lights and we walk towards the entrance.
‘Down here,’ he says. ‘Down here.’
The staircase is poorly lit and I hold on to the banister, pushed aside at one point by a pensioner coming the other way wearing a fake mink coat. The car park is on three subterranean levels, each one increasingly damp. Arenaza’s car, a tiny, door-dented Fiat, is parked in the far corner of the bottom floor, squeezed in between a brand-new Mini Cooper with British plates and a dark blue Renault Espace. This must be the long-term car park, because the area is completely devoid of people. It is very dark now, and for the first time it occurs to me that I may have completely misread the situation. Why did Arenaza need me to come all the way down here? Why is he changing his clothes?
‘You know what, Mikel, I think I might wait upstairs.’ This could be a kidnap attempt, a robbery, anything. ‘I’ll see you at the entrance to the town hall.’
I should never have come here of my own volition. I’m letting things slip.
‘What are you saying?’ He sounds relaxed, fishing around in the boot of the Fiat, his face is out of sight. ‘Alec?’
‘Just that I need to make a phone call. From the entrance. To a friend in Madrid. She’s trying to call me. I’ll see you at the top, Mikel, OK? I’ll see you at the top.’
‘Wait, wait.’ He emerges between the Fiat and the Mini, dressed in an old sweater worn over a clean white T-shirt. ‘You’re going upstairs? Can you wait just for two minutes please?’
I back away from the car and spin slowly through a complete turn, trying to read his eyes. In the distance, something metal drops to the ground. It is too dark and very quiet. Just the concrete chill of basements and a pervasive smell of spilled petrol. Then, thirty feet away, two men emerge quickly from a van and start moving towards me. Immediately I turn and run back towards the exit staircase, with no thought other than to get out as quickly as possible. Behind me, Arenaza shouts out ‘Hey!’ but I do not respond, sprinting hard up three flights of stairs and into the blessed relief of rain and fres
h air.
At street level I bend down and double up in the crowds, resting my hands on my knees in an attempt to catch some breath. Why did Julian set me up with this guy? My head aches and the backs of my legs are shaking. Then, behind me, the two men emerge onto the street, walking at a steady pace. With a sense of relief that quickly changes to shame, I see that they are Chinese. Not Basque nationalists, not errand boys for ETA, but two tourists wearing denim jeans and raincoats. One of them is telling a story, the other laughing while consulting a map. It is humiliating. Seconds later Arenaza himself emerges, looking around with an expression of complete bewilderment. How do I get out of this one? I take out my mobile phone, press it to my ear and say the words ‘Two three four five, two twos are four, two threes are six’ in an attempt to give an impression of urgent conversation. Arenaza spots this and frowns. I wave happily back, gesturing to the phone, and then snap it shut as he comes towards me.
‘Sorry, Mikel, sorry.’ My breathing is fast and irregular. ‘My phone started ringing down there and I wanted to take it. There’s this girl I’ve been seeing and the signal was weak…’
He doesn’t believe me. ‘What happened?’ he says gently.
‘Like I was just telling you. A girl…’
‘No, come on. What? You become scared by something?’
He is not angry. In fact he is being surprisingly sympathetic.
‘Scared?’ I produce an absurd burst of laughter. ‘No, of course not.’
‘You suffer claustrophobia, Alec?’
It’s an idea. I might as well play along rather than try to pretend that I received a mobile phone signal under fifty feet of concrete.
‘O?, to be honest, yes. I do. I got a bit freaked out. Call it claustrophobia.’
‘My brother has this as well.’ God bless Mikel Arenaza’s brother. ‘I am sorry, very sorry to hear about it.’ He shakes his head and puts a hand on the lower part of my neck, giving it a little squeeze. ‘You should have said something before we go.’
‘Well, I thought I’d outgrown it, Mikel, I really did. I haven’t had an episode like that for years. We bankers aren’t very tough, you know?’
He doesn’t laugh. ‘No, this is not funny. I know because of Julio. It ruins his life.’ Opening a widebrimmed umbrella, Arenaza shields me from the rain and assumes an almost avuncular air. ‘You want to rest? You want to go back to your hotel?’
‘No, of course not.’ He has applied a fresh layer of aftershave in the car park and I wish that we were not standing so close together. ‘Let’s carry on. Let’s have a drink. I’d like to, I really would.’
And he accepts, talking all the way about his own fears – of heights, of spiders – purely to lessen my own sense of embarrassment. It is an unarguably kind thing to do and I feel an unexpected sense of shame that I should have suspected him of anything but openness and decency.
‘This is where I want to take you,’ he says as we arrive outside an herrika taverna, back in the depths of the Parte Vieja. ‘Inside you will see the problems with the abertzale. Then it will all become clear.’
The small bar is jammed and thumps with the cacophonic roar of Basque heavy metal. A smell of marijuana hits me like a memory of Malasana and Arenaza looks back as we drift past its source: two Goths sucking on a joint the size of a magic marker. He is greeted, though not warmly, by several of the customers, yet he stops to talk to no one. At the bar we turn to face one another and I insist that it’s my round.
‘We pay at the end,’ he says. ‘You’re not too uncomfortable here? Not too much crowd?’
He is harping back to the claustrophobia.
‘No, I’m fine. It’s more a fear of the dark, Mikel. Generally I’m all right in crowds.’
A woman is serving behind the bar with the sides of her head shaved and the hair grown out long at the back. It is a Basque style. Looking around, I can see half a dozen young men with similar cuts, and another three or four with what can only be described as mullets. The idea – according to a journalist I had lunch with in Villabona on Wednesday – is to present a stark contrast to the primped rugs of Madrid’s young conservative elite, who tend to favour neat side partings or waves of sculpted gel. Arenaza leans over and kisses the barmaid on both cheeks, though again he is greeted coolly.
‘Let’s drink something,’ he says, ordering two large whiskeys – Irish, of course – with plenty of ice in mine. There is a small, blue-black pot on the bar, like an Inca urn, and I ask what it is.
‘That is a collection box,’ he replies quietly. ‘Money for our prisoners.’
‘For prisoners of E-T-A?’
‘Exactly.’
This catches me off guard.
‘That’s legal?’
Arenaza shrugs. I can see now that there are photographs of ETA prisoners all over the bar, hidden in corners next to ageing stickers promoting Batasuna, mug shots of ‘freedom fighters with self-conscious stares, gazing out in defiance at the insult of devolved power. About one in every five is a woman, and none of them can be much older than thirty. What must it be like to live with the day-to-day conviction of political violence, to take a human life in the name of a cause? Epiphany or no epiphany, Arenaza must have some experience of this; you do not work for Batasuna for sixteen years without drops of blood accumulating on your hands. It is in herrika tavernas like this one, all over the Basque country, that ETA firebrands will do a lot of their recruiting, pouring nationalist propaganda into the ears of susceptible young men who will later go off to bomb the hotels of British tourists in Alicante, or to blow up the cars of a politician or judge brave enough to have taken a stand against the ‘armed struggle’. Is that how he started out? Was Arenaza talent-spotted as a teenage terrorist, later to send out acolytes of his own on the path to an ignorant martyrdom?
‘Would you like something to eat?’ he asks.
‘I’m not hungry.’
As if on cue my mobile phone trills and a text message comes through from Sofia:
Miss u tonight. Hope u are being careful in the north. Be aware of the basques. They are fascists. xxx
‘Is everything all right?’
I switch off the phone.
‘Everything’s fine. Still feeling a bit strange from the car park.’
He picks up our drinks and finds a corner in which to stand and talk.
‘Tell me something,’ I ask him, feeling like I want to have this out. ‘Are these bars used for money laundering? If I buy you a whiskey or a bocadillo, am I helping to pay for a detonator on E-T-A’s next car bomb?’
He appears to admire my frankness.
‘Well, it is true, up to a point. What is the reason for denying this? A lot of people are engaged in the war, Alec. A lot of people want to see an independent Basque state.’
‘And a lot of people just want to be left in peace. Most people want to have nothing whatsoever to do with politics. You said so yourself, just half an hour ago.’
‘It’s true, it’s true.’ He looks suddenly disgusted by his cigarette and extinguishes it in an ashtray. ‘Politics is over for the great majority. We have talked about this. The complete irrelevance of political discourse of any kind. This is why an event like 9/11 comes as such a shock to the average American. “Who are these people?” they ask themselves. “What have we done to them that they can do this to us?” People are ignorant of the facts. They are misinformed by journalists on the television and in the newspapers, and anyway they do not care. If they did, they would seek answers. If they did, they would take to the streets.’
‘But Spanish people never stop taking to the streets. There are protests in Madrid all the time. I can’t hear myself think in Calle Princesa at the moment. Every time I look out of the window there are 10,000 people protesting against the war in Iraq.’
He smirks. ‘And they will not be heard. It is only a story that fills news programmes, something to give people a subject to talk about over lunch. This protest makes them feel good, as if they have done s
omething. But it is just the orgasm of the collective act, a masturbation.’ Arenaza mispronounces this word and I almost laugh. ‘Take away that person’s television, their car, their house, then you will see them commit to a cause.’
‘But that’s the position here in Euskal Herria. You insist, in spite of all the freedoms enjoyed by modern Basques, that Spain has stolen something from you. Your country. And yet you’ve given up – on yourself and on the people. You think democracy and freedom of speech are wasted on them.’
This gives Arenaza pause, as if I have locked him in a contradiction, and again I begin to wonder whether he really believes anything he says. It all seems so cynical, so reductionist, so completely at odds with the confident, Madrid-bashing nationalist of first acquaintance. Has he been told to say it?
‘I will explain.’ Moving only his eyes, he gestures towards a spidery figure standing about ten feet away in the bar. A stooped, ageing man, bald and bearded, is jabbering with electric conviction at a teenager wearing jeans and leathers. ‘What do you see over there?’
‘I see somebody trying to make a point. And I see an impressionable young man.’
When I have explained the word ‘impressionable’, Arenaza says, ‘Exactly!’ and reproduces an earlier smile of triumph. ‘This man was one of my former colleagues. We work together in the same office. Do not worry, he does not speak English. He will not be able to understand what we are saying. He is a man filled with hate. Once a true patriot, now extreme in all of his views. Just as I was telling you – a person of conviction who allowed personal vanity and weakness to cloud his judgment. And this boy you see, this is the first time that I have seen him in the bar. He is just a child, there are hundreds like him, and my colleague will be instructing him in the good sense of the armed struggle, letting him pick up the street slang of our language, giving him a purpose, a direction. See the way he looks at him, as if in the presence of greatness.’
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