In the 1960s, the Basque academy established a common written language, which was called Batua. The twenty-four-member academy, each member representing a different linguistic tendency, tried to identify the word forms that were most commonly used. This often led them to the Guipúzcoan version. They also favored the older version over the contemporary, but rejected words and forms that were no longer in use.
AT THE AGE of twenty, Joseba Irazu for the first time read a novel in his mother tongue. He began meeting with underground groups, learning how to write in the secret language.
But campuses were busy places in the 1960s. “I am not proud of it, but I didn’t learn anything at university. We were always on strike,” said Joseba. Militants from the Basque Nationalist Party were the first to take over a Bilbao radio station. ETA members on campus soon did the same. But neither group was as active at Sarriko as the Communists. The Maoists emerged there as a highly organized group. Their small armed faction occasionally bombed a factory. “Cultural meetings” were held in which “the anticolonial struggle” and Che Guevara were discussed.
The police would sometimes enter the campus with helmets and clubs. The students did not fear them the way they did the Guardia Civil. The Guardia Civil rarely came onto the campus, but when it did, students disappeared, a terror technique learned from its onetime ally, the Nazis.
With his healthy Basque distrust of doctrines, Joseba steered around most of the radical groups. When the Maoists asked, he did translate their political tracts into Euskera. But he joined nothing. When he says now that he didn’t learn anything, he means in the field of economics. But he and an entire generation of innovative and talented writers learned how to write in their native language while studying other subjects in the universities of the late 1960s. It was their revolution.
Teaching Euskera was not allowed, but the Basque Nationalist Party and ETA offered “cultural events” that amounted to courses in Batua. Joseba’s teacher was a Basque Nationalist Party activist who, in between cultural events, more than once helped take over the radio station.
Joseba, who had always wanted to be a writer, at first found it difficult to imagine working in the secret language of his parents. That began to change when he met an infirm poet, old before his time, named Gabriel Aresti. Born in Bilbao in 1933, Aresti did not grow up speaking Euskera and was one of the first Euskaldunberri, literally, “new Basque speaker,” a non-Euskera speaker who learned the language through adult education. He went on to become one of the most influential writers of the new language. Although not a nationalist in the political sense—he was closer to the Spanish Communist Party than the nationalists—he was a passionate lover of Basqueness. His 1964 collection of poems, Harri eta Herri (Rock and People), earned him the affection of nationalists and a summons before a disapproving tribunal. But he also greatly expanded the language through such projects as translating the poetry of T. S. Eliot.
Joseba began writing poems and short stories and publishing them in underground magazines, using the name Bernardo Atxaga to protect his true identity. Aresti, having read some of the stories, sent a note telling him that there were only five real writers in Euskera. “If you keep away from the purists you could be the sixth.”
By purists, he meant the “Sabino school,” which rejected all Latin words, denied the evolution of the language, and pretended that a purely Basque language existed. Many of Arana’s invented words, such as Euskadi, had become established in the vocabulary. But there was heated debate about whether such creative linguistics should continue. Linguistic political correctness is one of the oldest controversies in the Basque Academy, of which Aresti was a member. The academy wants Euskera to be a usable, not necessarily a pure, language. Where Spanish words have become common usage, the academy kept them in Batua; modern computer terms have been adopted from the English language. “Batua is a unification of the written language,” said Juan San Martin, who was secretary of the academy in 1968 and a close associate of Aresti. “The only new language came from Sabino Arana, who made up words. We do not invent words. We are opposed to invented words.”
Gabriel Aresti died in 1975, the same year as Franco. The poet was only forty-two. Aside from his work, he left behind the young writers he influenced, the most important generation of writers in the long history of the Basque language.
No one is a prophet
in his own time.
Again I have come
to the idea,
if I had no wife or children
with pleasure
would I die
because Basque rock
would ponder my words.
—Gabriel Aresti, NERE MENDEAN,
(In My Time), 1967
FRANCO GREW OLDER, his regime looking every year more like something dusty and Baroque in a tasteless out-of-the-way museum. But he did not fall from power. There in Spain, in the 1970s, was Europe’s remaining 1930s strutting dictator.
It never went smoothly, but Franco always managed to survive. What small resistance to his regime that he was unable to quell by force served only as an embarrassment to a regime that, in the eyes of the world, never would achieve respectability. In spite of ETA and the Basque nationalists, Franco could vacation in San Sebastián without incident. In September 1970, he attended the pelota national championships. Joseba Elósegi, captain of the only Basque unit to have been in Guernica the day of the bombing, ran out to the fronton, set himself on fire, shouted “Gora Euskadi askatuta!” and leaped from the wall almost fifteen feet, landing in front of Franco.
When he recovered from his burns, Elósegi was sentenced to seven years in prison. He had been in prison before. Franco’s troops had condemned him to death in 1937, but he had escaped to France. The Nazis had imprisoned him, but he had escaped again. In 1946, he had been arrested for flying the ikurriña from a church during a Fascist celebration.
Shortly after the Elósegi incident, U.S. president Richard Nixon arrived in Spain. Accompanying him was his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, whose impression was that the entire country was “waiting for a life to end so that it could rejoin European history.” Nixon had come to Spain hoping for a reception as large as Eisenhower had gotten, and Franco obliged him. But the long motorcade from the airport, with the cheering crowd, both paid and unpaid, appeared to have tired the seventy-eight-year-old Franco. When Nixon sat down for talks with him, the aged Caudillo dozed off, leaving the president to talk with an adviser. Reportedly, Kissinger nodded off as well.
As though he feared denting the myth of his own indestructibility, Franco did little to arrange a succession. He had played a cunning game with the heir to the throne, Don Juan, spurning his attempts at establishing a constitutional monarchy. When the pretender’s son, Juan Carlos, was ten years old, Franco had gotten Don Juan to agree to remain in exile while permitting Juan Carlos to be educated in Spain. Juan Carlos’s education, administered by Franco’s most ardent followers, was ostensibly to groom him for monarchy.
Though he hated Don Juan, who had called for an end to the regime in 1945, Franco liked Juan Carlos and thought he could make a respectable figurehead of no great weight who would not interfere with the Caudillo’s henchmen. But for years the Caudillo refused to name him as successor, and when he finally did, in 1969, he made the announcement suddenly, without warning the prince. But young Juan Carlos was not to be a true confidant. The only one Franco entrusted to fill in, should he fall ill, the man who was to look after things once Franco died, was the ever loyal Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, who had worked his way up from an undersecretary in 1942 to prime minister in June 1973. ETA called him “the Ogre.”
BY THE END of 1973, ETA had allegedly killed six people, though not all of the killings were claimed by or ever proved to be done by ETA. Since 1968, the Guardia Civil and police had killed 14, wounded by gunshot 52, and arrested without trial 4,356 Basques. Between 1956 and 1975, the regime declared eleven states of emergency. All but one of them were in Basqu
e country. Five of them were exclusively in Basque country. Random arrests were whittling down ETA’s small ranks. The number of active ETA members in 1973 was a fraction of the estimated 600 in the late 1960s.
And yet ETA’s scenario was not unfolding. Basques were not rising up in revolution in the face of stepped-up repression, and if they did, Spaniards were clearly not going to follow. Kissinger had been right. The country was just waiting for the death of one man.
Following the Burgos trials, ETA started developing a new plan. Its commandos reasoned that if they could kidnap a Spanish official, he could be traded for a number of their imprisoned colleagues. But it would have to be a high official, not some unguarded diplomat who might be easy to grab but would not be important enough to obtain the release of a large number of prisoners.
In late 1972, two ETA operatives in Madrid were told by an informant that the Ogre, Admiral Carrero Blanco, went to Mass at the Jesuit church of San Francisco de Borja on Calle Serrano every day at the same time in his black Dodge, accompanied by two police officers—sometimes only one.
“Operation Ogre” was born. ETA commandos began to stalk Carrero Blanco. They knew the movements of the guard, of the chauffeur, and of the Ogre himself. He was easy to get close to inside the church. But the longer they stalked him, the more they thought about killing him. A kidnapping would gain them back some imprisoned militants, but assassinating the man they saw as “the symbol of pure Francoism” would have far-reaching political repercussions.
Later, one of the commandos said, “Everyone knew that the Spanish oligarchy was counting on Carrero to assure a convulsion-free transition to Francoism without Franco.” The more they pondered the quarry within their sights, the more they realized that this was the target, the man who could keep Francoism alive. Even killing Franco, who surely would die soon, would not strike the blow that this assassination would. This was more important than liberating prisoners.
But also, a kidnapping would be much more difficult than assassination. The church was in an area of embassies and consulates and many guards. After June, when the admiral became prime minister, his security increased and kidnapping seemed even more difficult. The ETAcommandos contemplated a shooting, then turned to the idea of an explosion detonated by electric cable from a distance. Then they realized that since the black Dodge stopped at the exact same spot every morning, they could dig a shallow tunnel and place high explosives in the spot, detonating it from a distance without anyone ever seeing them.
On December 20, 1973, another of Franco’s show trials, public exhibits of injustice that perpetuated Spain’s low standing among Western nations, was to begin. This was to be a trial of trade unionists. Carrero Blanco went to Mass as usual, parking his car at 9:30 in the usual place. One hundred and sixty-five pounds of dynamite sent the car several stories into the air over the top of a building. According to one immediate and popular joke, the admiral had become the first Spanish astronaut. “Una bache mas, un cabron menos,” One more pothole, one less asshole, was another popular comment.
The ETA commandos had covered their retreat by shouting about a gas explosion, and Franco’s staff, either out of confusion or fearing his rage, had initially told the Caudillo that his closest associate really had died in a gas explosion. Franco repeatedly muttered, “These things happen” and went into a deep depression. By the next day’s cabinet meeting, he understood what had really happened, and staring at the admiral’s empty chair, he wept.
IT IS DIFFICULT to say to what extent the dynamite on Calle Serrano changed Spanish history. Carrero was replaced by Carlos Arias Navarro, a brutal leader, notorious for his war crimes during the Civil War. But Arias Navarro was unable to hold power. Would Carrero Blanco have done better?
Whatever is the judgment of history, at the time the assassination was widely seen as the end of Francoism. The stagnating nation felt exhilarated. Leaders such as Felipe González, Communist chief and Second Republic veteran Santiago Carillo, and both Basque and Catalan leaders began secretly meeting to plan for a transition to democracy.
By September 1975, ETA was suspected of a total of thirty-eight killings, whereas during the same period the police and Civil Guard had only killed thirty-three Basques. On September 27, Franco had five political prisoners, including two accused ETA members, shot by a firing squad of Guardia Civil volunteers. The Spanish Basques went on strike. The French Basques demonstrated in Bayonne. An angry crowd set the Spanish Embassy in Lisbon on fire. The French government protested the executions. Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme called the members of the Spanish government “murderers.” Mexican president Luis Álvarez Echevarría, of Basque ancestry, himself notorious for suppression of student demonstrations, asked for the expulsion of Spain from the United Nations. All the leading European trade unions called for the boycott of Spain, fifteen European countries withdrew their ambassadors, and Spanish embassies faced demonstrations around the world. But Franco was still alive, still in power, still killing.
THE PLAZA DE ORIENTE in Madrid is an oval-shaped area in front of the Royal Palace. The streets around it are short and lead in seemingly random directions, but whichever direction is taken, ending up in the plaza is almost inevitable. On October 1, 1975, a crisp fall day with a bright blue sky, anyone milling around those little central Madrid streets felt helplessly sucked into the plaza by a growing crowd that looked like a cross section of Spain. Many were well dressed, though some looked like workers. The elderly, the ubiquitous amputees from the Civil War, and the newly emerging middle class and teenagers, even some children, were there. Overhead in the flawless cornflower blue sky, a plane circled, trailing a red-and-yellow banner that said, “Arriba España,” Forward Spain.
Suddenly, what seemed to be an eighty-pound man, a frail and bald figure with uncertain steps, appeared on the palace balcony almost as though he had drifted out there in his confusion. A thousand right arms stiffened and snapped straight out at forty-five-degree angles, repeating the Fascist salute over and over again while shouting in unison, “Franco! Franco! Franco!”
Under the “Forward Spain” banner, as if the past forty years had never happened, the Europe of the 1930s was alive in Madrid. The elderly man spoke in his wheezing, squeaky voice of the grave menaces to society: the Freemasons and the Communists. The voice was difficult to hear, but was anyone there who had not heard all this before? The crowd responded with their mantra and their stiff arms, and Franco weakly raised his two shaking arms in reply, then drifted behind a curtain, never to be seen by his public again.
Part Three
EUSKADI ASKATUTA
* * *
Ideas, at least profound ideas, develop very slowly and even though geocentrism may have been in theory rejected, it has not been eclipsed and is still among our most deeply implanted concepts. Geocentrism and centrism, for that matter, remain at the foundation of Western thought, seeming to us almost the natural thing to think, or, at least, to feel; that that which is ours is the center of whatever thing. However, this idea of the center is not natural but cultural, and the image of the universe coming from it seems to be caused by an erroneous perspective.
—Joseba Sarrionaindia, NI EZ NAIZ HEMENGOA,
(I Am Not from Here), 1985
* * *
* * *
Slippery Maketos
Bilbao drinking water is agreeable and abundant.
—José Antonio Zamácola, 1815
There is a lot of money here [in Bilbao]. What difference does it make if there isn’t a glass of fresh water?
—Sabino Arana, 1897
* * *
ABOUT THE FAMOUS Basque delicacy, baby eels, José María Busca Isusi wrote, “I believe that only in our country have people dared to prepare and consume a dish which resembles a bunch of worms.” It is a Basque habit of mind to imagine that everything Basque is uniquely Basque, but Busca Isusi was mistaken. Aside from the fact that there are people in Mexico who do not hesitate to eat real worms by the platef
ul, Basques are not the only ones who eat the wormlike baby eel. A baby eel is called an elver in English, angula in Spanish, pibale in French, and txitxardin, which means “wormlike,” in Euskera. Elvers appear in all European rivers that flow to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and a number of other peoples, notably Atlantic French, enjoy them. But what disturbed the Basques in the 1990s was the terrible discovery that the Japanese eat them too.
The small creatures, actually smaller than most worms, turn up in Basque rivers every winter, and became associated with Basque winter holidays, such as carnival. For centuries they were scooped out just above the mouths of Guipúzcoan rivers. Six Basque families in Aguinaga, on the Orio River only a few miles from San Sebastián, became the principal suppliers in the world.
Elver fishermen waited for nightfall before dragging the river, because the elvers stay on the bottom, resting during the day. Eels avoid light. At night, the fishermen would haul up a fine weave of white squirmy creatures, which they then kept alive in their own freshwater tanks for about a week until the elvers’ backs mysteriously turned dark. Since a dead eel will not turn color, the dark color ensures that the eel was taken live. This issue took on added importance as the rivers grew increasingly polluted and inhospitable to delicate little elvers.
Basque History of the World Page 23