Martutene

by Ramón Saizarbitoria

  She still can’t think of Melitón Manzanas, the infamous Spanish police torturer killed by ETA in 1968, as a victim. From that death, which most people considered a just execution, to the murder of Miguel Angel Blanco, which almost everybody saw as a clear case of evil and madness, each person, depending on their individual circumstances, needed a different amount of time to be able to open their eyes, to see the victims’ blood, and be able to share their pain.

  “St. Paul on horseback on the road to Damascus. You know?”

  Deceptive though they can be, it’s tempting to use parables. Most horse riders manage to stay mounted and hang onto the reins, because falling off’s hard and because it’s always too late to dismount. And there are people who’ve been traumatized by falling off, people whose amnesia prevents them from remembering that they’ve successfully ridden the craziest horses, people who are incapable of separating violence and a love for Basque culture, of accepting that their brother or friend, or somebody who could be their brother or friend, is a murderer, incapable of recognizing that they’ve supported the madness themselves, justified the crimes, incapable of admitting that their morals have been impoverished, that everything was a chimera. The victims themselves, at least the ones who had no connection with the state apparatus or its security forces, were discreet, not wanting anyone to take their admission of pain to mean they were on the bad guys’ side. But the day comes when things can no longer continue to go on as they have, because the facts take over. What should always have been clear finally becomes so: terrorism, as well as causing suffering for its victims and for those who make use of it, also becomes harmful for the cause it’s defending. Julia thinks they’ve already talked about that.

  FRAGEBOGEN: If you are one of those who fell or got off your

  horse, how did it happen?

  Suddenly?

  Little by little?

  EXPLAIN, BRIEFLY, THE MAIN CAUSE OF YOUR HAVING FALLEN /

  GOTTEN OFF YOUR HORSE.

  AFTER GETTING / FALLING OFF YOUR HORSE, HAVE YOU HAD ANY

  OF THE FOLLOWING EXPERIENCES?

  Keeping it to myself for fear of losing my friends.

  Ditto, because of physical fear.

  Not attending protests because it would have meant going

  along with Spanish nationalists.

  Starting to feel repelled by anything Basque.

  Lynn asks if ETA has killed any of her friends. Not friends, but they have killed some friends and relatives of people she knows. The first was the father of a friend of hers from school, Teresa Hoyos. He was in the army, and they killed him in 1980. She hadn’t known him well, but he must have been a good man, and she knows for sure that he respected his children’s extreme left-wing ideas. She can still see Teresa Hoyos dressed entirely in black—and by then people no longer observed such mourning customs, or not so strictly, anyway. It was a hard blow for Julia, she had seen the effects of violence first hand. They’d taken away the beloved father of somebody close, a good friend of hers, and she was very much affected by it all. She felt guilty about it. Although she told herself that she had nothing to do with the murderers who planted the bomb, she found it difficult to continue seeing Teresa Hoyos. She didn’t have the courage to talk about what she felt, and they grew apart; it was partially Teresa, too—she started spending more time with other people, with members of the victims’ association that had just been set up. She started seeing her in photos in the newspaper with those small groups of people who would get together to denounce violence, which she herself didn’t go to, even though she felt more and more obliged to do so.

  Until one day when she decided to go to one of their demonstrations. There were at most fifty people outside the regional government offices in the Plaza Gipuzkoa. She felt quite embarrassed standing there in the gardens; apart from the dozen or so people in the middle, it was a loose group, and she was at the edge of that silent gathering, while from the arches around the plaza, the few people walking by looked at them with indifference.

  She would prefer Lynn not to ask why she was embarrassed, because she wouldn’t know quite what to say. Embarrassed, to start with, about standing there silently in the middle of a square with just a handful of others and knowing that any people coming past the square as they went about their business would inevitably see them, and that reminded her of how she always felt whenever she would see those pairs of evangelists knocking on people’s doors—all those passersby must now have been thinking the same thing about her. Embarrassed because she was alone there and wanting the demonstration to be over as quickly as possible. And embarrassed, above all, because somebody might have thought she was a Spanish nationalist, an enemy of Basqueness.

  Fortunately, Lynn does not ask her any more questions. So she sticks to telling her what she does know: when the rally finished, she only dared greet Teresa Hoyos from a distance, because she was surrounded by people, apparently the center of attention, and when Julia turned to leave, quite pleased and above all relieved at having done what she thought was her duty, another old classmate came up to her, someone she hadn’t ever talked to much back then, and said she was very glad to see her there. “Because you used to be such a fanatic,” she said to her, “always going around handing out pamphlets.” She said it condescendingly at best, as if she were saying “you used to be a real troublemaker,” and Julia found the comment offensive.

  She’s ready to admit that much of her involvement in politics when she was young may have been rather impulsive, but it was sincere and noble, and at that moment, she was offended that somebody could see it as something to feel ashamed of or something to regret. The woman who said that to her had become a proper lady—“una señora bien”—and Julia could hardly remember what she used to be like when she was young. She thinks she must have been one of those people who never got involved in anything—like most people, in other words—who sensibly had no objective other than to finish school and find a boyfriend with honorable intentions, one of those people who has never had to get off a horse because they’ve never gotten on one in the first place, not for any ethical reasons but because they’re cowards and easily manipulated. The worst of it is that individuals like that force her to wonder if things might not have turned out very differently if everyone had done the same, if everybody had stuck to satisfying their own needs, adapting as best they could to changing circumstances and living as well as possible without getting into trouble.

  She could have told her that Franco had been one of the first to condemn ETA. (Her sister had said that to her some days earlier when she said that she regretted not having realized earlier just how senseless violence is.) But Julia didn’t dare say anything to the woman. Although she agreed with her on the most important point—denouncing violence—it was as if she had nothing else at all in common with her, and she fled. She felt out of place at the next demonstration, too. To a large extent, the problem was that she always went alone, and so she would find herself surrounded by people she had no connection with, people of another style, people from another culture, when it came down to it. What’s more, she had to listen to comments she found hurtful, remarks spoken against abertzales who were proud of their heritage that went well beyond condemning terrorism. And they started to treat her like a lost sheep.

  She decided not to go to any more demonstrations, however justified they might be. She wouldn’t pay them any more attention. She decided to act as if she had no information about them, to be prudent—“in medio virtus.” She didn’t want to have anything to do with people who were increasingly claiming that the only way to solve the whole problem was to erase the nationalist chimera, to destroy the very ideas, feelings, and myths of that world that encouraged violence. Wasn’t giving up her own ideas, however crazy they might be, in order not to have anything to do with violent people, wasn’t that, in fact, a form of bowing to the will of others?

  At the same time, she found that the reports of t
orture presented by the other side—and some of them looked real enough—moved her less and less. To an extent, they deserved it. When people started talking about cowardly equidistance, she thought it was deliberately unfair and paid no attention. What’s more, the same people were calling for daring and bravery—la gallardía was the term they used in Spanish—and those were values she didn’t find particularly attractive, not to mention the fact that she didn’t think of herself as being overly affected by fear.

  She was wrong. She was afraid, even if it wasn’t physical fear; it was a type of moral fear, and it had been affecting her for a long time. She was very hurt to have to admit it. She remembers another funeral in Otzeta, an aunt’s. Following custom, after the church service, her cousins offered a reception with light snacks in a gastronomic society nearby. The walls were plastered with posters of Mario Onaindia and Juan Mari Bandrés—politicians who quit the abertzale left to join the Spanish socialists—and the word Spaniards, or traitor, she doesn’t remember which, maybe both, was scrawled across them. Her cousins are at the opposite extreme as her old classmates, but they, too, had had to keep quiet during the Franco years. Silent during the Franco years and, like many other people, vocal under democracy. Really vocal, in fact. Under the Franco regime, they were docile and well behaved, they avoided getting into trouble, as their parents had instructed them, and afterward, they traded in their bourgeois status in order to support the socialisation of suffering, began dressing in the combat gear typical of that crowd—ordinary-looking hiking clothes that were actually very expensive. They knew that she was in Euskadiko Ezkerra, but they didn’t care; they felt morally superior enough to tell her that she, too, was a traitor, and she put up with that insult without so much as a peep, because she thought doing so was an example of politeness and tolerance. She was in Otzeta the day they found Miguel Angel Blanco’s body in the trunk of a car, she was at a wedding banquet on that occasion. They were eating dessert when somebody came in with the news, and the rumor spread sadly from table to table; but then the voices got louder again and the party really got started, the dancing began, and she, too, stayed at the party, sitting at a table with the grown women, all listening to their children saying silly things, convinced—then, too—that the best thing she could do was to keep quiet in order not to spoil the party, not to spoil things.

  Regarding collusion. A few minutes ago, when Zabaleta was talking about Basque literature and its treatment of violence, Julia got to thinking about how languages condition messages. She’s written something about that in her blue notebook. Politicians don’t say exactly the same things in Spanish as they do in Basque. It’s very obvious if you watch the chat shows and debates in the media.

  She has to think more about the idea, but for the moment she ventures to say to Lynn that “for whatever reason”—and what she’s most interested in reflecting further on is what that reason might be—she thinks that Basque is used more for trying to convince people about things, probably because it assumes some degree of shared sympathy on the part of listeners. And she doesn’t say so to Lynn, but she does think that in general—and it could be for technical reasons to an extent—people don’t have the language skills required for debating in Basque, or, to put it another way, they are more talkative and speak with greater precision in Spanish.

  But there’s more to it than that, too, and she’d like to tell Lynn about it, something about it demonstrating the existence of a sentimental attachment between those who speak it to each other, like when two people from the same country run into each other abroad. It was more apparent twenty or thirty years ago, when Basque created very close links between people. Not so much now, perhaps because more people have learned the language and it has some official status. She thought the subject could be brought up in the introduction to the translation of Bihotzean min dut and, at the same time, that it might even be possible to include the half a dozen articles Martin had previously written and collected under the title Kale borrokako mutil bati gutun irekia—or Open Letter to a Kale Borroka Boy. At the time he wrote them, Martin still believed it might be possible to convince and win over those young radicals. The letters avoid any mention of ethics, and she admits that their invocation of respect for human life as a supreme value is sometimes no more than hypocrisy. The person penning the letters is on the same side as them, understands the anger and passion blinding young people, but tries to convince his readers of the uselessness of blowing themselves up, pointing to the hypocrisy of the adults who are encouraging the struggle, noting, without in any sense forgetting the objectives, that there are less violent, more intelligent ways of furthering the cause. Letters written in the confident knowledge that they will be read, because they are in Basque, which is what their readers have in common. Julia thought the letters were beautiful, that their pedagogical purpose was intelligent, and she made Zigor read them. Later on they came to realize that this sort of pedagogical complicity, which tactically avoided all ethical issues, was useless.

  Until very late on, they believed that the people in ETA were a bunch of young kids that could be convinced. She can still remember the voice of Chillida, the famed Basque sculptor, pleading with José María Aldaya’s kidnappers to free him, and that was in 1995. She remembers the message that got played over and over again on the radio word by word: “This is Eduardo Chillida, I have a request for ETA. Show us that you are capable of doing something good. Release Aldaya. Make his family happy and work with us to make peace possible for everyone. I know that what I’m asking for is difficult, but I want to believe in Man.”

  Poor Chillida.

  Nobody can deny there’s been considerable tolerance for violence in the Basque-speaking world. Many writers and particularly our people’s poets—the bertsolaris—have encouraged it. At the other end of the spectrum, there were people who rebelled against that reality, stating that identity—a murderous identity—was the real cause of the violence, people who made the Basque language the object of their hate, to the extent that they saw patriotism as being connected with guilt, and they lost all affection and loyalty toward Basque and began to favor Spanish. (It should be taken into account that this move from one language to another, apart from the few exceptions that prove the rule, always takes place in the same direction. That, too, gives Julia cause to think, and the questions she asks herself have answers that are more painful than they are difficult.)

  She has to admit, at the same time, that her wish for the terrorists to listen to reason and let themselves be convinced had an ulterior motive: the desire and hope that there could be an end to the violence without having the concept of abertzale soiled. She wanted the violence to stop before Basque patriotism was completely ruined by it, before the cruelty and lack of dignity became clear for all to see, before their well-earned reputation as a noble community—sincere, hard-working, unconquerable, and also pacific—was dragged through the mud. The homeland of the oldest nation in Europe; the bombarded tree of democracy at Gernika; Agirre, Iruxo, and Beldarrainena; the soldiers who protected their enemies’ lives behind the lines; Eustakio Mendizabal Txikia, who wrote, “Whatever I’ve done to them as an enemy / May they damn me for that”; ETA members who set fire to themselves in protest against Franco; the shameful last stand of violence in Europe . . . She wanted the violence to end before Basque society became a sad case of collective cowardice.

  But it probably had to happen the way it did, so that future generations could make no mistake about it.

  Drain the chalice to the last drop.

  The fear that the baby will be thrown out with the bath water. Does she know that expression? Throw out the baby with the bath water: Discard something valuable along with something not wanted. Having to deny dreams and feelings that she thought beautiful, that were part of her character, just because they once fed some people’s madness hurts her. She likes to think that there was no reason for those things to have been harmful; they’re what made her f
ather turn out to be such a sincere and hard-working man. But sometimes she wonders if it wouldn’t be better to flush the Basque character and everything that makes the Basques special down the drain. She finds it brings her some relief to say “merde à dieu, à la patrie, et à tout le reste”—to tell God, homeland, and all the rest to go to hell. Accursed homeland. It’s ruined so many lives, brought about so much suffering—like a fat sow eating its own young—suffering from which it will never free itself.

  “Do you understand any of this?”

  Lynn nods her head, as she usually does, several times. Like a diligent child.

  “But how can you understand it, when I don’t myself?”

  Jaime Zabaleta and Martin come in at the exact same moment that Harri knocks on the door. They greet each other in the usual Otzeta way, with provocative comments: Zabaleta asks Harri if she’s just come from the hairdressers’, because she’s quite dolled up; and she asks him if his tie’s shrunk, because the tip of it is hanging quite a long way up from his belt, what with the size of his belly. She’ll give him a new one on his birthday. To which Zabaleta replies that he can’t complain about presents, holding up a first edition of Biotz-begietan, which he says he doesn’t deserve. At which Harri concludes, “Of course you don’t deserve it.” She looks at Martin, and then at Julia, without trying to hide her anger, and Zabaleta instinctively tucks the book away in his jacket. He’s going, but first he has to call his bodyguards, and they position themselves on either side of the door, continually looking left and right. Harri’s remark: “They’ve given you some pretty shoddy bodyguards, you must not be very important.”

  Harri doesn’t like Jaime Zabaleta. As soon as they leave, she tells Martin off: whatever favors he may owe Zabaleta, they can’t deserve such a considerable reward. A first edition of Lizardi’s Biotz-begietan, for God’s sake. She gives Lynn her take on Zabaleta and what his story is. They used to call his father Joxe Gaizto, or Evil Joxe, because he was a fanatic Requeté—“which is why that jerk was named Jaime,” as if the girl could possibly understand that reference—and also a poor wretch, a man who did everything for the Goytisolos and took care of their house there, which they never used. Old man Goytisolo, Abaitua’s father-in-law, had paid for Jaime Zabaleta to go to university. In other words, being Spanish ran in his family. Julia doesn’t like this way of talking that Harri has—and her mother and sister, too—which involves invoking situations with family members to put people down. And she also always talks the same way they do when referring to somebody she doesn’t like, as if she had some secret information about the person, something they should be ashamed of. “I could tell you a thing or two about that one,” she’ll say malevolently, her head cocked to the side and one shoulder raised.