by Shaun Herron
“Yes.”
The talk was small, and occasional. Driving through Las Arenas, Mauro said, “Look at these big villas. A lot of them are offices now, but that one … see? That’s a big Falangist moneybag.”
An old woman walked by, leading a panniered donkey laden with small milk cans.
“But look at her, Mauro. The big villas are becoming offices and the milk woman with her donkey and little cans isn’t so common anymore. Spain’s changing—for the better.”
“It has a long way to go.”
“Wait.”
“For what?”
“Changes.”
“Changes don’t come by waiting.”
“You’ll see.” Mauro was young. The young are impatient. Words are cheap. Change was already here, in a big way, all around him. Mauro would see it. Mauro would see it, wouldn’t he? They were having a day off together; things had been put right; Basa would take care of the other end of it. Don’t spoil it by unworthy doubts. Going down the steep hill into Bermeo a file of panniered donkeys met them, ridden close to the road bank by old and middle-aged women; some of them looked heavier than the donkeys. “And look at that, Mauro. The past in the present. What you have to remember is that these hill farms couldn’t have been worked without those donkeys—and they’re still useful. The past and the present are indivisible.” He felt quite philosophical, dominical, almost contented. It was a good day.
“A few tractors would help.”
“See! You don’t think! Tractors would roll over in those fields. Look up there.” The fields tumbled down the hills on their right. They laughed at one another. Casual talk on a day off. Father and son, enjoying one another. The sun shone; the clouds were only occasional.
The waters of the Bay of Biscay pounded the base of the high cliffs, roaring with the mindless and unresting power of thousands of miles of relentlessly rolling sea. They could hear its pounding up here on the high road. They drove down into Bermeo and parked on the fringe of the plaza at the head of the harbor.
Old men sat together on benches, talking. Clusters of middle-aged and young men moved along the harbor, talking; they moved into the bars open to the weather, as other clusters moved out. The fishing boats, red and blue and green and yellow and white (some of them “red, white and green, the Basque colors, in that order,” as Ugalde had heard it said), were moored in the middle of the harbor in ranks. They rose and fell on the easy movement of the water, like courtiers dancing a pavana in a walled garden.
“Why aren’t they out fishing?”
“They’re on strike,” Mauro said, looking out over the harbor.
“On strike? Since when?”
“Last Friday.” He had turned his back to his father.
“Let’s have a drink.” Is he laughing at me? Maybe; but in fun, not derision. That was fine. Sons should sometimes be amused by their fathers. That was healthy, a sign of a sound relationship. He felt magisterial. “They’d better make striking legal if everybody’s going to do it.”
“You’re learning.”
Did he mean that? It was true but did he have to say it openly, and how deeply did he mean it?
The bar they chose was crowded, the counter weighed down with food: baked milk, baby mackerel, cheese, chicken, sausage, squid, crusty bread. The bartender set up a row of glasses lip to lip and poured along it for a group approaching the bar, not lifting the bottle till the last glass was filled, not spilling a drop.
Two glasses of white wine. Two pesetas a glass. Two more glasses of white wine. It was time to talk. Three glasses of white wine. It was hard to talk, after so many years of cunning and determined concealment. “Let’s go out to the end of the harbor, Mauro.”
They were alone at the end of the harbor, far beyond the ship chandler’s shop. Mauro sat on an iron bollard, watching his father who looked back up the harbor at the dancing fishing fleet.
“What I’m going to tell you, Mauro,” he said, “could cost me my life. The Civil War amnesty was declared in 1967. It did not cover my case.”
“Your case? It covered everything but blood crimes and you weren’t even in Spain.”
“I’ll tell you things you know and things you don’t know.”
By the thread one comes to the ball of yarn.
SPANISH PROVERB
Your mother and I, Ugalde said, were born in Ramosierra.
It was a faction town, full of venom and memories. My father was mayor because no faction was strong enough to force one of their people into the job. So my father was mayor for a long time.
He was the gentlest and the fairest man ever born in Spain. Everybody trusted him. He knew the Civil War was coming. That is why he sent me to France to study the language before my medical studies could begin.
Your mother’s father, Luis Arrabal, was a very different man. He was big, my father was small. He was bold, my father was gentle. But they loved one another and I loved them both. My father was shy. He loved me and never embraced me. When I have children, I said, I’l1 let them see my love. Luis Arrabal let me see his love. He was the doctor. He made me a doctor. He laughed a lot, sang, drank, danced—lived, the way people mean that.
The war had already begun the day I got on the bus to begin my journey to France. The whole family and Luis Arrabal and your mother, who was fifteen then, saw me away, waving. All but Luis thought I was going to France.
Twenty miles from Ramosierra I got off the bus. Everything I had was in a pack. A man met me on the roadside, a mountain farmer who made the best goat and cow’s milk cheese in Old Castile. I stayed at his farm for three days, till Luis came. I said to Luis, I am going back to tell my father I am going to fight. I’ll not cheat him this way. He said he could tell him. I said, No, I would do it, face to face. He knew. He didn’t argue. That night we went back to Ramosierra and I stayed hidden in his house till it was dark the next day. Then Luis and your mother went, not to play cards for wine with my father, but to bring my father to me.
That was the night the shell struck. It might have been an accident. Some drunken gunner, maybe. The Nationalist troops were to the south of the town. It was their gun.
They brought me the news. Luis Arrabal was mad, full of the most terrible rage. I was full of shock and grief that turned to rage. I can still feel it, after all the years.
We left that night. The whole town knew I was by now in France. But there was in Ramosierra a man who kept a bar. One of his customers was a shopkeeper who came to the bar every night and drank till he was in a stupor. He never went home till the bar closed. And while he was there, the man who owned the bar slipped out and went to the shopkeeper’s house and his childless wife, and she took him to bed.
The killing in Ramosierra began that night. It had started before Luis Arrabal and I slipped out of his house. Small fighting, then. Factions killing factions. Raiding houses mostly that night, killing Falangists, at first. We heard a little gunfire from different parts of the town. And as we came out of Luis’ house, we ran into the bar owner on his way to the shopkeeper’s wife.
“You didn’t stay long in France,” he said to me, and hurried on. He was a Falangist, like the shopkeeper and his wife. That night, I hated him.
Luis said, “I listed you as dead in your father’s house, because we’ll both die before this is over. That man knows you were here, and alive. If you do not die, he will remember.”
It was that sort of time. Men went mad. We followed him to the shopkeeper’s house and waited till they had time to get to bed. Then we went in and killed them.
Mauro said, rising, “You killed them?”
We killed them. I had no gun at the time. But my father, mother, brothers and sisters were dead—all at once. A Nationalist shell killed them. It didn’t matter whether it was fired by accident or not. What mattered was that it wiped out my family. I had no gun. I would have killed the two of them. I did. I was there.
Mauro sat down limply. “It sounds strange, hearing it in your calm voice. It doesn�
��t sound like my father’s life. I don’t think I can take it in.”
I was not calm then. I screamed at their naked, dead pelts. It was bloodletting. Theirs for mine. Like almost every other Spaniard except my dead father, I wanted blood. I wanted it to run in the rivers. We drenched the land in blood.
“Is there more?”
A great deal more. A year more. That night we rode bicycles up the rough road as near as we could to the mountain farmer’s place. We carried them the rest of the way and buried them in a haystack. The next day we went deep into the mountains. There were men there waiting for Luis. All the time he had been getting ready. They had arms, ammunition, medical supplies, most of it stolen through information Luis got for them. Those mountains were our training ground. Luis had studied tactical manuals, German, English, French. We ambushed mounted Civil Guard patrols till they didn’t dare to ride the roads or walk the mountains except in troops. Luis was leader and medical officer. I was medical orderly. But that was Mola country and it got more and more dangerous for us. They killed our farmers and took their stock. We had been living off their sheep and goats and cheese. There were too few of us. We could get supplies only when we ambushed, and soon they were too strong for our band. We broke up and went north. That is how we came to Biscay and the Basque militia. The Battle of the Iron Ring was on. Mola announced that he would now end it. It took him longer than that. We were sent to Irun to keep open a gateway for supplies, if any ever came, from France. That is where the Luis Arrabal you know about was born.
They moved troops from Navarra and Aragon to close the door to France. They brought the Italian flyers with them and heavy artillery. We had no planes. We had no artillery. We were short of rifles. Barcelona offered us a thousand rifles—but they had no ammunition to go with them. From France, through the Basques there, we did get knives. We became very expert with knives.
They drove us yard by yard in daylight off the ridges around Irun. At night, when their planes were no use to them, we drove them back. But in time, we were off them for good. They mounted their artillery on the ridges and bombed us and shelled us in Irun all day, every day. At night we crept out among them and spread terror. One day Luis crossed the river into France and came back with cards on which had been printed only one word, in red: ARRABAL. We all carried a few on our night raids and wherever we killed, we left one. We left them as much as a mile apart on the same night. Arrabal was everywhere; the Arrabal was born.
But yard by yard they came on. Then the French Communists took the prominent Falangists they’d been holding out at Fort Guadalupe, and shot them. Systematically, we set Irun on fire, leaving channels for the enemy to advance through. They could not come through fire. They came through the gaps in the fire and we lay in the shadows of the fires and in the ruins and killed them and there were always more to come. We had a great lust to kill them—till we had nothing left with which to kill them.
“It’s time to go,” Luis said.
We swam the Bidasoa to the French side. The bridge was for the refugees who jammed it. French men and women and children stood on their bank of the river and watched us; they had stood there and watched the slaughter. They came there in buses, from as far away as Biarritz. They were like spectators at a bullfight or a game. The French are a peculiar people.
Mauro stared in awe at his father.
Ugalde looked out over the ships in the harbor. He didn’t see them. He was enclosed in his story. He saw nothing but times past. He did not hear the rising and falling breast of the sea, only the sights and sounds of the past.
In those days, he said, the Basques on the French side of the mountains were still Basques. They fed us, clothed us, sheltered us—and armed us.
We knew, from the men who went to Barcelona from Irun to plead for arms, what was going on there—we knew about the political intrigues, the assassinations, the in-fighting, we knew about Killers’ Alley where the Russian Communists sent the Spanish Communists and Anarchists they wanted rid of and had them shot facing the beautiful sunsets on the Bay of Sitges. “It is not for us,” Luis said. “We’ll fight only for Spain. Only for Spain, for Spain, for Spain …”
I can hear him …
Later we knew it was the Anarchists who took the bourgeois to the cliffs over the Bay of Sitges and shot them cleanly so that they fell off the cliffs already dead. It was the Communists who tortured and killed Anarchists and bourgeois because they were Anarchists and bourgeois. “It is not for us,” Luis said. “We’ll fight only for Spain …”
We killed only Falangists.
The arms the French Basque farmers got for us were poor. We needed to arm ourselves better and we needed money. There were nine of us to feed and arm in Luis’ first band. Luis decided we should look at Lesaca. It is seventeen kilometers from the frontier to Lesaca by road—the road was little better than a cart track then. It is only six kilometers straight down the mountain. Luis and I went down the mountain.
We went, father and son, to look for work. Today, the work is in Huartes’ factory. Then it was on the roads or the quarries or in the small mines on the slopes of the mountain behind the town. There were payrolls there and the Bank of Guipúzcoa brought the money on Fridays to a room it rented in a house in the little plaza. There was a Civil Guard barracks and stables just outside the town with a ten-man detachment. Many men of the town were away because of the war. We got work in a quarry. We worked for a week and found out all we needed to know-how the Guards patrolled, where the dynamite at the quarries was kept, with the detonators and plungers, what time the money arrived and how it was brought. The men worked six full days a week. On Sunday we went walking, with bread and a bottle of wine, and slipped up the mountain against the frontier to meet the others.
Then we worked five more days—till Friday. We had dynamite from three different quarries, detonators and three plungers as well as wire, all hidden away. On Friday night our men came down the mountain and slipped in around Lesaca. Two went up the road from the village, two went down, to ambush the two-man patrols. One took dynamite to the bridge across the river in front of the town. There were four of us to do everything else, and five Civil Guards in the barracks. The other Civil Guard spent the night outside the house the bank used to keep the money for the men’s pay on Saturday.
We planted dynamite at one side of the barrack building, and behind it, where the stables were. The barracks was a wooden building. The horses heard us but the Guards didn’t. Then Luis and I went to the plaza. The other two men lay by the plungers in the long grass behind the barracks, waiting for us to come back.
We watched the Guard in the plaza for a long time. He walked up and down, up and down.
Luis taught himself to be very good with a knife. All he and I had with us there in the plaza were knives. He balanced his knives and practiced for hours every day. “They are quiet friends,” he said. When he touched me I went around the plaza and came in from the other side. The Guard heard me and faced me and called to me to stop. I heard the thud of the knife and the man’s small cry. We carried him to the field behind the barracks and went back to the house. Now we had the dead Guard’s hat, his ammunition, his rifle and his revolver.
Luis knocked on the door. He had the Guard’s hat on his head and his ammunition slung over him. He knocked harder and we were afraid the town would be up and about. But the woman came, shouting curses and Luis shouted to her to bring the bank clerk for there was a messenger here for him from San Sebastian. When she opened the door, abusing us, we were in. We got the clerk, he opened the safe; we put the money in a bolster and tied the woman and her husband and the clerk sideways across the same bed.
“Tell them it was Arrabal,” Luis said. “Keep the name in your heads—Arrabal, Arrabal, Arrabal. Tell the Civil Guard and the Falange it was Arrabal.”
The man said, “We’re not Falangists.”
The clerk said, “I’m not a Falangist.”
“Then stay quiet and we’ll not be back,” Luis
said. “Tell them it was Arrabal.”
We went back to the field by the stables and brought out the horses but this time they heard us. It was my job to set the straw on fire and the Guards were running. Two of them were killed by the dynamite at the side of the barracks, the other two were shot running for the stables. The barracks was on fire, but one of the men held two horses and we went inside and collected four rifles, four revolvers, two boxes of ammunition for the rifles, one for the revolvers. We took bandolera and holsters and belts. Then we collected all the guns and ammunition and bandolera and holsters off the dead Guards and lashed them on the two horses. We ran for the bridge and the man waiting there blew a hole in the middle of it. We met the rest of the men on the mountain. They had guns and ammunition taken from the ambushed Guards. It was almost light when we crossed the frontier. It was our first raid. We were well armed now. All that day we watched them hunting on the mountain. From then on we watched them often.
They said we were bandits. We were soldiers.
The Nationalists were through to the Bay of Biscay but they still had to take Bilbao. They were pushing toward Barcelona, along the line of the mountains. By the time they were half-way across Huesca we had fifty men and the arms for them. We knew those mountains. We lived in them, in caves, in shepherds’ huts on the French side, in holes we dug in the ground, in farmhouses over the frontier.
Ugalde paused a long time, lost in his memories.
That was when I learned about the human race, he said at last. The farmers knew about the banks and the money. At one time they staked sheep where we would find them to butcher. Now they wanted pay for everything they did for us. Even water, when the streams dried. Now they sold it to us. When the snow came and life was very grim, their prices went up. We always paid what they asked. They never betrayed us. They wanted the money.
We never attacked in groups of more than ten at a time. Sometimes we used five groups, each attacking in a different place on succeeding nights, some east, then west, then west, then east. There was never a pattern they could follow. They thought we moved a lot and very fast. That’s how some of the legends were born—how could we move so fast? We didn’t.