“I saw the footballers again later on in the house, and there was Chirri II in his socks talking to the owner of the house. He seemed quite untroubled, as if he had forgotten about his shoes, but I hadn’t. I couldn’t help thinking about them because they were right there, underneath the sofa I was sitting on. Besides, I was alone now, Agustina having gone over to talk to the player she thought was the most handsome, Muguerza. Time passed, a quarter of an hour perhaps, and there I sat, not knowing what to do, but getting more and more worried because it was growing dark, and Don Eugenio didn’t like me coming home late. Suddenly, Chirri II sauntered over to me and said: ‘Bilbora yoan bia’dot, ta ezin naz zapata barik ibilli. Entrenadoriek kastigue ipiniko deust.’ ‘I have to go back to Bilbao and can’t go without my shoes. The trainer will punish me.’ He spoke in the Biscayan dialect. I felt horribly embarrassed. I took the shoes out from under the sofa and gave them to him. He laughed and talked non-stop while he was putting them on. ‘Ze ikisi bia’dozu, ba?’ ‘What are you going to study?’ he asked. Chemistry, I said, because that was my best subject for which I always got either an A or an A+. He told me he was an engineer and regaled me with all kinds of information about the Engineering School in Bilbao. I was so nervous, though, and found his dialect so hard to understand, that I didn’t really take much of it in. He was a really nice lad.”
*
We heard these Eibar stories over and over, and they made a huge impression on my younger brother, perhaps because he was the youngest and therefore more sensitive to what he heard at home. Once, when he was still at school, he was asked to draw a town, and he filled the sheet of paper with palaces, palm trees and other marvels. The teacher exclaimed: “What kind of town is this? It looks like paradise!” “It isn’t paradise, it’s Eibar,” my brother said. Years later, when he visited Eibar for the first time, he was puzzled to see the real thing, so densely populated and so industrial, and he realised that his mental image of the place had come from our mother’s stories. She described the things that had happened there in her youth, and they seemed to be set in an ideal geography. And yet my brother actually preferred the real Eibar to the ideal one, for, by then, he was already a voracious reader of Marx and Lenin.
Our mother told us rather more political stories too, but with the same pleasure as she told us about Chirri II or the hypnotist. For example, she would laugh about the situation in Eibar when the Republic was proclaimed. She said that on the night of April 13, the civil guards were still assiduously arresting anyone who shouted “¡Viva la República!” – “Long Live the Republic!” – then, the following morning, they were equally assiduously arresting anyone shouting “¡Viva el Rey!” – “Long live the King!” From the war, she recalled only the more picturesque details: the sound made by the rifles, pa-kun, pa-kun; the pharmacist’s double reaction when he returned from the air-raid shelter after a bombardment to find his house reduced to rubble, and how he jumped for joy because he was alive and then, hours later, wept bitterly for all that he had lost; the times she had to stay at the school when the bombardments intensified, and how, when the siren sounded, the mother superior would scold the girls for not getting down into the cellar quickly enough, and then, when the planes could be heard moving off, would scold them again for the pillow fights and other noisy games they got up to down there.
“The main instigator was always Agustina,” my mother would say. “She was an excellent mimic. Somehow she’d managed to get hold of a nun’s habit, and when we had to go down to the cellar during air raids, she would put it on and imitate the various nuns. Oh, she did make us laugh! If she’d been caught, though, she would have been punished twice over: first, for making fun of the nuns; and second, for lighting candles, which was totally forbidden during bombing raids.”
There was something rather childlike about our mother, a kind of innate joy, but this disappeared or was extinguished on the day they arrested my younger brother and took him to prison.
*
In 1972, on the night before Good Friday, a group of civil guards broke down the door of the apartment where we were living and burst in, wielding machine guns. When I woke up and opened my eyes, two of them were in my room. A third man followed. He was older than the others and had a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve.
“Get out of bed!” he bawled. “Now!”
They were more like soldiers than civil guards, because of their uniforms and, in particular, because of the caps they wore.
I started to get dressed, but the sergeant bawled at me again:
“There’s no time to get dressed. I want you out of this room now!”
On my bedside table were some photocopied sheets about the history of the Basque Country that my younger brother had made for me. I was convinced he was the one they were looking for.
My mother and father were in the kitchen; she was wearing a pink nightdress and he was wearing a pair of green pyjamas. I looked at my father. His pyjamas were clinging so tightly to his body that you could almost make out his private parts. The very young civil guard who was with them gestured to me with his machine gun, indicating that I should join them.
The apartment was very large; in fact, it was two apartments separated by a swing door. From the other side came the sound of raised voices. Suddenly, there was the noise of blows and a scream. Turning deathly pale, my father rushed over to the kitchen door.
“What’s going on?”
The young civil guard lifted his machine gun to stop my father, who instinctively pushed the barrel aside. The gun fell to the floor and several bullets scattered over the tiles. At first, I thought they were coins.
Two more civil guards appeared, dragging my older brother with them and propelling him into the kitchen. He was in his underpants, and his nose was bleeding.
“Don’t you look at me like that, you poofter!” one of the guards shouted, threatening him with the butt of his gun.
My older brother had long, curly fair hair and was wearing a hippy-style bead necklace. His underpants were in the same flower-power style. Apparently, as I found out years later, when the guards burst into his room, yelling that they had come to search the place, he pulled down his underpants and showed them his bum, saying:
“Well, you’d better search up here first!”
The price for this impertinence was a bloody nose.
Sitting on a bench in the kitchen, our mother looked like a sculpture.
“It’s alright, it’s alright,” she said, but only I heard her. The kitchen had filled with loud voices, the loudest of which was the sergeant’s.
“What’s that gun doing on the floor?”
The young civil guard now looked as pale as my father. He crouched down, picked up the gun and tried to explain.
“And pick those bullets up too!” the sergeant yelled, and left the kitchen. He went through the swing door so violently that the two halves continued to creak for some seconds afterwards.
He returned accompanied by four of his men, who brought with them my younger brother. They formed a line: first, my brother, his wrists handcuffed behind his back; then, three civil guards carrying machine guns; after them, another guard carrying a cardboard box full of papers; and, finally, the sergeant himself. The younger man guarding the kitchen joined them and they all left the apartment.
My mother ran out into the corridor and pushed her way past them.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon,” my brother said. His voice sounded different, somehow hoarser.
We rushed to the window and looked down at the street. The guards were surrounding my brother as if to protect him from some danger. An illusion. When we called to him and he tried to respond, one of the guards pushed his head down hard and bundled him violently into a jeep.
My older brother started swearing and hurling insults.
“Stop that nonsense!” my father said. He was about to say more, but he began coughing and couldn’t go on.
We all went and sat in the living roo
m. An hour later, when the clock struck five, my older brother announced he was going to San Sebastián.
“I know the lawyer who deals with these cases. I’ll talk to him about what’s happened.”
My father and I went back to bed and tried to make my mother do the same. She refused and stayed curled up on the sofa.
The following morning, I was woken by the radio, which was on at full volume. It sounded like someone giving a lecture, but it was a sermon on the Seven Last Words. It was Good Friday.
“My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”
The preacher on the radio relied on repetition for effect.
“Why have You forsaken me? Why?”
My mother was still curled up on the sofa. I thought she was asleep.
“He’s not a patch on Madinabeitia,” she said.
The preacher assured us that Jesus’s cry had been not a cry of despair, but an attempt at prayer. He was trying to recite Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Why are You so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.” According to the preacher, Jesus was not cast down, but full of hope.
“Not a patch on Madinabeitia,” my mother said again. She seemed about to go back to sleep, and so I didn’t respond. Peace reigned in the living room. Not a sound could be heard. A dim light filtered in through the window. Outside, it was a grey day.
Then my mother groaned.
“Where will they have taken him?”
I told her that we would know this when my older brother got back from San Sebastián.
“Your father has gone out to buy bread,” she said. “But will there be any bread today, on a Good Friday? I can’t remember if it’s today or tomorrow when the baker’s is closed.”
There was a knock at the door. I thought it would be my father coming back from the baker’s, but I found myself face to face with Andrés Garay. He didn’t want to come in.
“Your brother hasn’t been taken to Madrid,” he said softly. “He’s in San Sebastián, in the Ondarreta barracks. We’ve told everyone we can.”
This was all new to me. I associated him only with the church choir. I didn’t know he was involved in politics.
We heard someone opening the street door. Then a cough. It was my father. Andrés Garay fled up the stairs to the next landing. I went down to meet my father and offered him my arm, but he declined my offer of help.
When we went into the apartment, my mother was in the kitchen, pounding the wall with her fist.
“Stop that now, or we’ll all go mad!” bellowed my father, throwing the loaves he’d brought with him down on the table.
*
We always return to our everyday life; we have nowhere else to go. Sometimes something extraordinary happens, some misfortune, and it seems as if everything has stopped and will never start again. However, the current of daily life keeps flowing, even when it seems to have turned to stone, and the grieving, suffering person still has to get up and have a shower in the morning, have breakfast, do the shopping, go to work, listen to what people are saying about last night’s television programmes or the latest football match, or argue with a bank clerk about some mispayment. Gradually, all these activities erase the extraordinary, the misfortune, from his or her head, for just an hour at first, then, later on, for a week or a month. In the end, all that remains in the consciousness is a shadow, a dull ache.
That is what happened in our case. We returned to everyday life. My younger brother did too. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, but was released after less than three years thanks to the amnesty that followed General Franco’s death. A few years later, he was absolutely fine, working for a book distributor and apparently contented with his life. During that time, my older brother had made big strides: by the time he was thirty-five, he was already the owner of a company renting out buses and taxis and employing five drivers. As for me, I was teaching languages in a school.
The day we celebrated my father’s seventieth birthday, we went over the family history, and the years my younger brother had spent in prison occupied only a couple of minutes, while my older brother’s business career took much longer. He had just acquired a white limousine for weddings, and that was the main topic of conversation over lunch.
My mother joked: “It seems strange that someone who rents out wedding limousines doesn’t get married himself. When are you going to hire that limousine for your own wedding?”
She hadn’t realised that my older brother was gay.
“What do I need a wife for, when I have the prettiest of women here at home?” he said. He knew how to flatter our mother.
We leave behind whatever happens to us, but our way of living changes. To use a metaphor common in religious texts, grass – life – begins to sprout and grow in different cracks in the wall. After his time in prison, the differences between my two brothers became more marked, and they tended to avoid meeting. When they had to meet – on my father’s seventieth birthday for example – the tension between them was tangible, and they would sometimes engage in bitter arguments about the current political situation. For my part, I was tired of always being the conciliatory intermediary and made little effort to participate in family life. In this new situation, my father cut himself off and spent time at the local pool or gym, or went walking in the countryside. Our mother changed too.
“You’ve lost your sparkle,” my younger brother would say to her.
It was true, and one of the consequences of this was the loss of the childlike joy that had led her to tell us her stories. She continued telling them, especially the ones about her childhood, the one about El Hernio and others, but only at family get-togethers, when she’d had a drop of champagne. As for Eibar, that vanished completely from her conversation.
Gradually, her stories were replaced by complaints: “I’ve got terrible back ache today.” “It’s such a lot of work looking after your father.” “Sometimes I don’t even feel like getting out of bed.” “It’s not much fun getting old.” A few years later, her mind began to go. We knew this the day she confused Rosa Mari with one of her sisters.
We took her to a specialist in geriatrics, who put her on some medication that restored her to reality – “The very worst place to be,” according to my younger brother. Then the complaints started again: “It’s not much fun getting old,” she would say over and over.
A few months later, one Sunday afternoon, I went to see her and found her sitting in the living room, talking to the village priest. She was frowning.
“You have to understand, Don Eugenio. You don’t seem to realise how many hours I spend with your mother in her room,” she said in a high, thin voice. She thought she was in Eibar. She was confusing the village priest with Don Eugenio.
“Apparently, the other day, I told her off for playing hopscotch,” the priest said, winking at me.
“No, not for playing hopscotch,” she shrilled, shaking her head. “For drawing chalk lines on the bedroom floor! But how am I supposed to play hopscotch without making lines!”
“Yes, but it’s a wooden floor and the chalk makes a real mess,” the priest said, getting up, relieved to be able to hand over to me.
“I can’t always be studying,” insisted my mother. “I need to have fun and go out. That’s what Agustina’s always saying, that I should go dancing with her and go and see Bilbao Athletic playing.”
“I hope you enjoy Agustina’s company,” the priest said.
“You know very well that Agustina’s my best friend,” my mother retorted. “The other day she gave me her sunglasses. She says her eyes are her best feature and she doesn’t want to hide them.”
“I see,” the priest said, moving towards the door.
My mother continued arguing with the supposed Don Eugenio even when the priest had left. I tried to give her some supper, but she seemed so exhausted that I decided to put her to bed. Once in bed, she suddenly burst
into tears.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She gave me an explanation, which I didn’t understand. I couldn’t tell whether she was talking to me or to someone from the past. I asked her what she could see.
“María Ángela,” she said.
“And where are you?”
“In the cemetery in Eibar.”
I thought she was referring to one of her school friends. I fell back on metaphors, as priests do, and began talking to her about heaven. María Ángela will be fine, contemplating God.
My mother turned to me, perplexed:
“I’m talking about the street, about Calle María Ángela,” she said. “It’s been bombed by the Italians. You can see it from the cemetery.”
Years later, in a catalogue of photographs by Indalecio Ojanguren, I came upon a photograph showing Calle María Ángela after the air raids during the Civil War. The street itself is almost untouched, but the houses on either side have been reduced to rubble. The tower of Casa Zuloaga is still standing, but is badly damaged by fire and its roof has caved in. The church of San Andrés and the Augustinian convent are damaged too, with great cracks in the walls.
“But that isn’t why I’m crying,” my mother said.
“Why are you crying then?”
“Didn’t you know? Don Eugenio is dead.”
Even sixty years later, this news still affected me.
“What happened?”
“Those horrible planes bombed the train taking him to Bilbao. Apparently, Don Eugenio had a heart attack and died instantly. He must have been so afraid. He was always terrified of the air raids. The first time they bombed Eibar, he took me with him to the shelter. We were the first to arrive.”
Nevada Days Page 37