Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  Like all eel, elvers must be cooked live or shortly after death to maintain an agreeable texture. The fisheries are very secretive about the exact process, maintaining that this is where the real quality of the product is determined. The chief defense of an eel is its slipperiness, which comes not only from its smooth skin— the scales are ingrown—but also from glands that secrete a slime, which must somehow be removed. Plunging them in salty lukewarm water after cooking is part of the process. Then they are wrapped in cloth to be kept moist.

  The elvers are sold all over Spain and exported fresh, frozen, or canned to France and Latin America. The Basques usually prepare them in olive oil, garlic, and peppers. The recipe stays the same, but the servings have gotten smaller every year.

  In the 1980s, when the Orio and other rivers turned green with surfaces that were sometimes foamy and other times dark and pearly, the catches were so meager that it was widely believed the eels were dying out. The price tripled, and the Aguinaga fisheries could still not meet the demand.

  That was when one of the old established Basque family-owned companies, Angulas Aguinaga, decided it was time for an alternative. It turned from the Orio to the Japanese for technology to convert surimi into a substitute elver. Surimi is the white flesh of bottom-feeding fish that has been pressed into blocks on factory ships. At one time it was made from Atlantic cod, but when that was overfished, Pacific pollack took its place. Japan’s Nichirei Corporation designed machines for Angulas Aguinaga that force the surimi out, spaghettilike, into the shape of elvers. A touch of squid ink tints the backs dark. Angulas Aguinaga, which has no Japanese on its staff, produces the substitute elvers in a factory in the Guipúzcoan industrial mountain village of Irura. It sells 500 tons of these fake angulas, which it calls gulas, in a good year.

  “It’s a completely natural product,” asserted Angulas Aguinaga sales director Juan Carlos Souto Ibañez, although the list of ingredients on the package includes Monosodium Glutamate E-415. Souto Ibañez further asserted that unlike angulas, gulas are cholesterol-free.

  What they are not is eels, and they have neither the same taste nor texture. Visually, the main difference is that there is no face. The two black specks that are eyes and the thread line of a tiny mouth on one end are missing. In the Basque provinces, where it is widely believed that it is the Japanese who are making gulas in Irura, discriminating consumers sift through their sizzling earthenware casserole with the traditional wooden fork that is always provided, and search for faces before they eat. Some Basques do not even trust this test. Against all logic and evidence, persistent rumors are heard that “the Japanese are painting fake faces on gulas.”

  An angulero, an angula fisherman in Aguinaga, on the Orio in the 1920s. (Kutxa Fototeka, San Sebastián)

  Souto Ibañez points out that his company deliberately left off the faces and changed the name to gulas, so that they could not be accused of perpetrating a fraud.

  “It’s a swindle,” José María Otamendi, director of a traditional elver fishery, El Angulero de Aguinaga, nevertheless declared. Although gulas were selling for $16 per pound instead of the $40 per pound for elvers, he asserted that this was still “very expensive for some unknown fish.”

  Back in the days when Angulas Aguinaga was fishing real elvers and was really in Aguinaga, Otamendi had worked for the company. But once it changed its product, he left and returned to his own family’s business. In hip boots by the swirling tanks of the busy family elver pound, he said, “It is hard work, but it is a tradition. It is what my grandfather did and my father and my son.”

  Since the Orio River, which twists past the stone houses of Aguinaga, is a suspiciously bright green-gray color, and its banks are peppered with bits of trash, the companies started supplementing their dwindling catch by buying French and British elvers. But, Angulas Aguinaga claimed to be saving the eels and even asked the European Community to ban elver fishing.

  Then, in the early 1990s, the angulas started coming back.

  EELS HAVE ALWAYS puzzled man. Until the 1920s, no one had been able to identify reproductive organs in the creatures, and it was often supposed that Aristotle had been right when he stated that they somehow were created out of the mud. An eighteenth-century Italian had claimed to discover an eel’s ovaries, but the scientific world did not accept his finding for another seventy years simply because no one had ever seen an eel egg. If eel eggs could have been found, no doubt the Basques would have eaten them too.

  In the twentieth century, the surprising discovery was made that the eels in the Orio were not Basque at all. In fact, all of the European eels and all of the American eels, a related species but with approximately ten fewer vertebrae, are born in the middle of the Atlantic, in the deep, warm, algae-laden waters off Bermuda known as the Sargasso Sea.

  The tiny, newborn, oval-shaped creatures then begin a journey, like salmon in reverse, to the river of their parents’ adulthood. By the second summer they pass the Azores and have grown to five times their original size, but are still only a quarter the size of a tiny river elver. In the fall of the third year, they reach the Orio River and continue to grow, until they become angula size by the winter.

  Most of this process is still unknown. Once a full-grown eel leaves a European river, it seems to vanish in the depths, and the cycle has never been entirely traced. So it was not known why, later in the 1990s, the eels began to disappear from the rivers once again. Was it pollution? Aguinaga fishermen had been saying for years that most of the elvers that they didn’t catch quickly, died in the green Orio. Or were they just taking too many of them? Every elver that is eaten is one that will not grow into an eel and swim back to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce.

  And yet the Basques had always taken huge quantities of elvers. In 1775, a British naturalist on a trip to Bilbao said that elvers were caught “by the millions.” A French naturalist, Louis Roule, made some calculations based on early-twentieth-century train records from Landes, the region on the other side of the Adour, and found that in 1906, between 100 and 150 million elvers were shipped by train.

  BY THE LATE 1990s, the Basques were growing desperate. In Hendaye an elver shop operated near the St. Jacques Bridge border crossing, selling in either pesetas or francs. The shop was only open in the winter, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Soon it was sold out by Friday. Eventually it was only open one day a week. The shopkeeper’s father had bought the antique building in a viager contract, a French arrangement in which the owner is paid a lifetime salary and the payer inherits the property. The owner had died early enough so that the house had been a bargain, and with no real overhead, the son was able to be in the angula business. But after a while he did not even have enough for a full day. The storefront looked like an empty fish shop with a long refrigerated display counter inside containing only one cloth-covered shallow crate.

  The son even tried selling “white elvers” for half price, which, since the price had soared to more than $100 a pound, was still not a bargain. White elvers were ones that for one reason or another had died before they got to the tanks and had been cooked already dead—the mushy ones that are usually culled from the bunch. No, most Basques would rather eat a gula.

  In time, most Basque rumors prove to be at least partly true and eventually companies developed—Basque companies, not Japanese ones—surimi elvers with two dots for eyes. On close inspection by those with good enough eyesight, there is still no mouth.

  IN 1998, trout and eel from the Bidasoa River were examined by the Navarra government, and although northern Navarra is thought of as one of the more pristine parts of Basqueland, the fish were found to contain high levels of heavy metals, especially copper.

  But was that the real problem? All peoples are a product of their history, and Basque history has always been about defending their birthright against outsiders. And so, after centuries of scooping up every baby eel they could find, and after more than a 100 years of dumping industrial refuse in rivers, the Basques discover
ed the real problem with their prized elvers.

  Once again, it was the Japanese. In the winter, articles began appearing in Basque newspapers saying that the Japanese were paying high prices and buying up all the angulas. One paper, La Semaine du Pays Basque, a popular weekend tabloid in French Basqueland, trying to be fair, ran the headline, “The eel, which are a delicacy to the Japanese, are disappearing from the estuaries because of pollution.”

  BERNABE RAMA was born in Bilbao but speaks no Euskera. His father was from Andalusia and, being unemployed, came to Bilbao in 1945 to work as a laborer, on roads, construction— whatever he could find. Bernabe does not consider himself a nationalist or Basqueland a nation. But like many others, he uses the word inmigrante, an internal immigrant, to describe outsiders like his family.

  Bernabe is the head chef at the Restaurant Bermeo, a leading traditional Bilbao restaurant. Asked for his angulas recipe, he referred to a twenty-year-old book of standard recipes. His only change was that where the old recipe had indicated angulas for four people, he crossed it out and wrote “for six.”

  ANGULAS

  (for six)

  600 grams angulas

  4 cloves garlic, sliced

  a few slices of guindilla

  enough olive oil to cover the bottom of a casserole

  Put the casserole on a high flame wth olive oil and sliced garlic. When the garlic starts to change color, work in the angulas and guindilla slices. Keep the casserole constantly moving for 30 seconds. Then remove it. It is essential that the dish be served very hot, but not overcooked.

  * * *

  13: The Great Opportunity

  This is the best opportunity Spain has had in a century.

  —Felipe González, interview with the author, September 1981

  * * *

  FRANCO DIED SLOWLY, torturing himself and Spain for more than a month, while aides and ministers, the fawning court, tried to get everything signed and readied for the fight to perpetuate their rule without their Caudillo. Finally, his daughter insisted on disconnecting the various tubes of an elaborate life-support system. On November 20, 1975, he died, leaving behind a written statement warning: “Do not forget that the enemies of Spain and Christian civilization are on the alert.” While black armbands were seen on the streets of Madrid, Catalans discreetly uncorked champagne at home, and Basque youth less discreetly danced in the streets of Euskadi.

  Juan Carlos became king and head-of-state, in accordance with Franco’s wishes. He further fulfilled Franco’s wishes by appointing Arias Navarro head-of-government. The first phase of what is known in Spanish history as “the transition” was largely a struggle among various members of Franco’s regime. Arias Navarro tried to build a stable government but, by July, had given up and resigned. Juan Carlos next appointed another figure from the Franco years, a former civil governor, suave and sphinxlike forty-three-year-old Adolfo Suárez.

  The new thirty-seven-year-old king, tall, handsome, and silent, known more for skiing than politics, was a mystery. The extreme right wing had never trusted him. Franco had been warned that this prince who never talked was waiting for his sponsor’s death to dismantle the regime. But Franco’s opponents believed, as did Franco, that he was a harmless puppet. The Spanish public believed he had few thoughts of his own and could be manipulated by anyone close to him. Juan Carlos jokes, in which the king was portrayed as an idiot, were in fashion.

  One of the new king’s first acts was sending a representative to French Basqueland with the task of contacting ETA, assuring them things were going to be very different, and inviting them to negotiate peace. But nothing about Juan Carlos’s demeanor, public image, or initial public acts had given ETA cause to trust him, and they dismissed the offer as insincere.

  The last Franco year had broken all records since the 1950s for repression of Basques. The first post-Franco year, which began with Arias Navarro, was barely an improvement. His minister of the interior, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, another figure from Franco’s dictatorship, but one with an image as a reformer, was now disappointingly Francoist. The participants in demonstrations were brutally attacked, and though the number of arrests was drastically reduced, the sixteen Basques killed by Guardia Civil and police in 1976 was barely an improvement over the eighteen in 1975.

  Spain had an opportunity at last to catch up with European history, to become a democracy and rejoin the West. As head-of-government, Suárez tried to please the forces pushing for democracy while keeping his old Francoist colleagues and the military content enough to restrain from forcibly overthrowing the government. The rightists wanted a tough policy toward the Basques, and throwing them to the Guardia Civil seemed a small price to pay for persuading the unhappy right wing not to derail the entire process. Even displaying the ikurriña remained illegal.

  ETA was not waiting to see how the transition turned out According to Spanish authorities, ETA killed eighteen people in 1976, starting with a Guardia Civil who tried to remove a booby-trapped ikurriña. At this point, ETA had divided into two groups. The killing was done primarily by a group called ETA militar. In an underground publication they identified three types of people they intended to kill: Franco-supported mayors, police collaborators and informants, and law enforcement officials who attempted to remove ikurriñas.

  The second group, ETA politico-militar, began the post-Franco era with a new tactic: They would kidnap people for high ransoms. On January 11, 1976, they captured industrialist Francisco Luzariaga, who suffered a heart attack during the kidnapping and was released. Two days later, they took another hostage but released him after a month because it became clear that the victim’s family were Basque nationalists.

  All of this might have made ETA unpopular if the Guardia Civil was not at the same time engaged in its tactics of tearing down ikurriñas and disrupting folk festivals. On August 18, the Guardia Civil attacked a Basque song festival in Guernica because of the presence of ikurriñas.

  The Basque Nationalist Party was having its own transition. Leizaola took a teaching position and faded into obscurity, while the newly invigorated old party, led by Xabier Arzalluz, an emotional man from an old Carlist family, at last dropped its insistence on loyalty to the Catholic Church. But the old slogan Jaungoikua eta Lagizarra, God and the Old Laws, has remained. Letters in the party still end with un abrazo en JeL, an embrace in JeL, when written in Spanish, or in Euskera, JeL beti gogoan dogula, always remember JeL.

  When the Basque Nationalist Party demands the return of the Fueros, it is not asking that the legal code of 1526 be put back into place with its statutes on everything from a woman’s place to the purity of cider. Nor does the party demand complete independence, something the Basques have not had since the Romans. What it wants is the restoration of the ability Basques had under the Fueros to enact their own laws.

  But the first order of post-Franco business for the Basques was an amnesty for political prisoners. The amnesty movement, Gestoras Pro-Amnistía, attracted many of the most prominent Basques, including not only stubborn longtime activists like Joseba Elósegi but also soccer stars and artists. The sculptor Eduardo Chillida, whose massive abstract work in stone, wood, or steel had become renowned in the international art world, designed the movement’s logo.

  In hindsight, the fact that it took two years to achieve a general amnesty for those imprisoned for resisting Franco—two years of demonstrations, petitions, and negotiations to decriminalize opposition to the dictatorship—was one of the early signs that the new Spanish democracy would not be entirely different from the old regime. Guardia Civil attacked peaceful demonstrations for amnesty and on several occasions shot and killed demonstrators.

  Another sign was the fate of Eva Forest, a Catalan mother of three who had run a Madrid organization called Solidarity with Basqueland. She had been jailed and tortured in 1974 for the crime of interviewing the ETA commandos who had killed Carrero Blanco and then publishing the interview in Hendaye under the name Julen Agirre “from some
where in Southern Euskadi.” Police had discovered a draft of the manuscript in her apartment in a random search. The charge was “necessary collaboration,” meaning presumed guilt by circumstance. After the death of Franco, the Spanish continued to hold, interrogate, and torture her. The story is all the more remarkable because Spain was desperately trying to gain acceptance in Europe as a budding Western democracy and freeing Eva Forest was becoming a European cause célèbre. She was finally released in 1977 without ever having been brought to trial.

  Freeing Eva Forest was one of many steps in slowly, one group at a time, obtaining the release of political prisoners. Arzalluz showed a new tough leadership, insisting, in line with Basque public opinion, on a total amnesty that would include all ETA members. The last of the imprisoned Basques were released in December 1977. For a few days, Spanish jails held no Basque political prisoners.

  In January, a new round of arrests began.

  IN 1977, the new democracy that was to end Spain’s isolation in Europe was launched with general elections to a two-house parliament, the Cortes. One month before the elections, the ikurriña was at last legalized when the Basque Nationalist Party demanded the right to use it as their party symbol. Adolfo Suárez, the former Franco technocrat, became the first elected prime minister. His party won 34 percent, and Felipe González’s Socialists came in second with 28 percent. But in the Basque provinces, the parties demanding autonomy from Spain, led by the Basque Nationalist Party, won a clear majority, including ten Senate seats. One of the new Basque Nationalist Party senators was the fiery Joseba Elósegi.