Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  The Basques have remained leaders in banking. In 1988, Banco de Bilbao and Banco de Vizcaya merged into one of Europe’s largest banks. This marked the beginning of a trend in mergers and consolidation of banks all over Spain. Despite these new pan-Iberian giants, the Vizcayan bank created by the 1988 merger, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya, is still the second largest bank in Spain.

  Detail from the cover of a 1930 catalogue for the Euskalduna, the now defunct Bilbao shipyard that was founded on the Nervión in 1900 and became a victim of post-Franco economic restructuring. (Untzi Museoa-Maritime Museum, San Sebastian)

  Like the nineteenth-century Basques who wanted to use rail links to open up their industry, today’s Basque want to build rail links between Basque cities and Europe. A Basque government-built commuter railroad already runs from Bilbao to Hendaye, linking Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, and Labourd. It is the first local train to connect France and Spain’s Atlantic coast. Spain, like Russia, had intentionally built its railroad tracks with a nonstandard measurement to protect against invasion by rail.

  IN 1867, a group of writers in France, including George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo, wrote a guide to Paris in preparation for a world’s fair. Hugo’s introduction to the guide, titled “The Future,” began: “In the 20th century, there will be an extraordinary nation. This nation will be large, but that will not prevent it from being free. It will be illustrious, rich, thoughtful, pacifist and cordial to the rest of humanity. It will have the gentle seriousness of an elder . . . A battle between Italians and Germans, between English and Russians, between Prussians and French, will seem like a battle between Picards and Burgundians would seem to us.”

  Only a few years after Hugo wrote these words, the future brought a bitter war with Germany. Two more would follow, leaving Europe all but destroyed. A hundred years after Hugo wrote “The Future,” a broad consensus among European leaders would end borders, end tariffs, and issue a common European passport. The process culminated with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which was to change the European Economic Community into the European Union, an entity with one currency and one central bank. The agreement was that all of the members had to ratify the treaty or it would be rejected. But when Danish voters turned it down, Denmark was told that it would be ejected from the community if it did not reverse its decision, which it did by a narrow margin. The voters in other member nations also ratified, in many countries, including France, by the narrowest of margins. Only Spain ratified without consulting its voters, saying that it was unnecessary.

  Until recently, one of the central characteristics of Basqueland had been that a border runs through it. The Basques had a border culture. Smugglers and border crossers were folk heroes. Sometimes smugglers would cross the Bidasoa on rafts made of planks. Or a “band of smugglers,” comprising as many as twelve men, would carry goods through the mountains on the darkest nights, undeterred by customs officials who waited in hiding and sometimes shot at them.

  SALMÍ DE PALOMA

  In the fall, armed men hide in the pine woods by Ibañeta where warriors once waited to pounce on Roland. But they are waiting to shoot the gray-and-white wild pigeons that fly through the pass. The birds are cooked in wine and brandy, which used to be made by monks for the pilgrims. This hunt is at least old enough to be regulated in the 1590 Fuero of Navarra.

  The following recipe comes from Julia Perez Subiza of Valcarlos, whose mother-in-law started the Hostal Maitena across from the fronton in Valcarlos in 1920.

  Ingredients for one pigeon

  1 onion

  2 garlic cloves

  1 leek

  1 carrot

  1 sprig of thyme

  a little parsley and black pepper

  1 glass of brandy

  1/2 liter red wine

  Cover the bird in flour and sauté it slowly. Chop the vegetables finely and add warm wine to the ingredients, with the exception of the brandy, which is added at the end. Bring the sauce to a boil and then cook gently.

  Basques love border stories: In the nineteenth century there was a famous story in Hendaye of French customs officials seizing thirty barrels of wine, but when they triumphantly brought them back to Hendaye, they discovered nothing but water in the barrels. It had been a decoy. In a twentieth-century story, a man crossed the Behobie Bridge over the Bidasoa from Irún, Spain, to Hendaye, France, every day. He would ride his bicycle over the bridge past the Guardia Civil and the gendarmes and would disappear into Hendaye. Later in the day, he would bicycle back with a sack of flour. The Guardia Civil stopped him every day and made him open the sack so they could carefully sift through the flour. But they never found any contraband in it. And they never noticed that he always biked into Hendaye on an old bicycle and rode back to Irún on a new one.

  An even greater irritant than the duty on commercial goods was the duty on personal items. Many individual Basques were small-time smugglers, sneaking across items for their own use. In the nineteenth century, well-dressed women would arrive in Hendaye in the morning with flowers in their hair and leave in the evening wearing the latest French bonnet.

  In 1986, Spain joined the European Community, and by the 1990s the border had disappeared. The Pont St. Jacques, or Puente Santiago, where caped gendarmes in cylindrical hats faced caped Guardia Civil in three-cornered patent leather, where young Ramón Labayen and many other Basque prisoners were exchanged, was now largely a truck parking lot A tattered Spanish flag remained. The French one was gone. The shops on the French side, which sold foie gras, chocolates, and champagne, were only open in the summer and had few customers. Without tariffs, French products could be bought for the same price on either side, just as in the days of the Fueros, when the customs began at the Ebro.

  French and Spanish customs at Behobie Bridge in the early twentieth century.

  What had once been guard stations now were papered over with advertising and a few posters for wanted Basques, torn edges flapping in the breeze. The correct way through, around all the parked trucks, seemed anyone’s guess. Everyone kept more or less to the right of wherever the trucks parked. But if any rules did exist, there were no police or officials of any kind watching anyway.

  Behobie offered a similar scene. It was as though the truck drivers, missing their stop with the customs officials, just stopped there anyway.

  At the Roncesvalles pass, France becomes Spain at the little stone bridge over the Nive in the village of Arnéguy. Arnéguy is centered on a church and a fronton. A 1920 photograph shows fans from Spain gathered on their side of the bridge to watch a pelote match in the Arnéguy fronton on the other side. There is also a customs house and a shop that sells products from all over France. Until a few years ago, a French flag flew on the little stone bridge, where gendarmes inspected papers and packages. After crossing the bridge and leaving Arnéguy, the traveler climbed along the edge of a mountain to another Basque village, Valcarlos. In Valcarlos was a store selling goods from all over Spain, and a Spanish flag flying, and the Guardia Civil, waiting to inspect papers and packages. Like Arnéguy, Valcarlos has a church and a fronton court. The two villages are much the same except that Arnéguy is at the bottom of a valley and Valcarlos up on the slopes. Both have the same red-trimmed whitewashed architecture. The people of both villages speak Basque.

  The customs house in Arnéguy is now closed, the gendarmes and Guardia Civil have left their stations, and the flags are gone. The stores are still there, but without tariffs there is no advantage to buying in one town or the other. A traveler who does not remember from before can drive from Arnéguy, through the pass to the heights of Ibañeta where Roland died, and never know where France has changed into Spain. No one is going to send an army through to fight over the difference anymore.

  Jeanine Pereuil said with her customary nostalgia, “You used to hide a little bottle of Pernod in your clothes and nervously smile at the customs official. Now, it’s not any fun at all to go across.”

  WHATEVER THE FEELINGS in the rest of Sp
ain, a united Europe is an idea that resonates with the Basques. They are not always happy with the way this new giant Europe is run. To the left, it seems too friendly to corporations and not open to individuals and small business. The dichotomy between large and free, which Hugo promised would not exist, sometimes seems a reality.

  But the idea of not having a border through their middle, of Europeans being borderless and tariffless partners, seems to many Basques to be what they call “a natural idea.” “If Europe works, our natural region will be reinforced,” said Daniel Landart. Ramón Labayen said, “The European Union represses artificial barriers.” Asked what was meant by an artificial barrier, he said, “Cultures are not barriers. Borders are barriers.” The borders around Basqueland endure because they are cultural, not political.

  When Europeans decolonized Africa, they left it with unnatural borders, lines that did not take into account cultures. This is often stated as the central problem of modern Africa. But they did the same in Europe. The Pyrenees may look like a natural border, but the same people live on both sides.

  Arzalluz said, “The concept of a state is changing. They have given up their borders, are giving up their money. We are not fighting for a Basque state but to be a new European state.” A 1998 poll in Spanish Basqueland showed that 88 percent wanted to circumvent Madrid and have direct relations with the European Union.

  In the idealized new Europe, economies are merged, citizenship is merged. But those who support the idea deny that countries will be eliminated. There will simply be a new idea of a nation—a nation that maintains its own culture and identity while being economically linked and politically loyal to a larger state. Some 1,800 years ago, the Basques told the Roman Empire that this was what they wanted. Four centuries ago, they told it to Ferdinand of Aragon. They have told it to François Mitterrand and Felipe González and King Juan Carlos.

  They watch Europe unfolding and wonder what has happened to their old adversaries. Most of the political leaders endorse the new Europe whether their citizens do or not. Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, González, and Aznar were all strong backers of this new Europe. The Basques watch the French and Spanish give up their borders and their currency and wonder why it is so easy for them. Why didn’t Mitterrand worry about the “fabric of the nation being torn”? Why does Madrid not worry about losing its sovereignty? And if they do not worry about these things, why do they feel threatened by the Basques?

  The Basques are not isolationists. They never wanted to leave Europe. They only wanted to be Basque. Perhaps it is the French and the Spanish, relative newcomers, who will disappear in another 1,000 years. But the Basques will still be there, playing strange sports, speaking a language of ks and xs that no one else understands, naming their houses and facing them toward the eastern sunrise in a land of legends, on steep green mountains by a cobalt sea—still surviving, enduring by the grace of what Juan San Martin called Euskaldun bizi nahia, the will to live like a Basque.

  * * *

  Postscript: The Death of a Basque Pig

  A property in the valley

  A house on the property

  And in the house, bread and love

  Jesus what happiness!

  —Antonio de Trueba, “The Basques,” 1870

  * * *

  IT IS CALLED a txarriboda, and the whelping dog, straining at his chain a distance from the house, knew this was not going to be good.

  The pig, purchased the previous spring for almost $80, was named Pepe. He was only slightly more than ten months old, and yet after six months of overeating corn, he weighed 290 pounds, an enormous, rounded, awkward, pinkish white squealing beast that it took seven men to drag out and hold down.

  He was an unlucky pig, a castrated male who had been a last-minute replacement for a female who shortly before her planned execution had gone into heat and was saved for breeding.

  Txariboda is the Basque name for the annual family slaughter of a pig, generally done during the winter when it is cold. Neighbors take turns helping out at each other’s txarriboda. In the village of Muxica, three miles from Guernica, it was Felisa Madariaga and Julián Gabikaetxebarria’s turn.

  Theirs is a small and struggling farm. Julián, in addition to working the farm with his wife, holds a job in a factory in Guernica. Felisa sells their products every Monday morning in the Guernica market, the same weekly event that the Condor Legion had chosen for a target in 1937. On the farm, they have a few dairy cows and some chickens. They also grow lettuce and are one of the principal producers in the area of choricero peppers. A Vizcayan sweet pepper that ripens to a brilliant red and is then dried, the choricero is used in a number of dishes such as the stuffing for chorizo sausages. It is also used in bacalao Vizcaína, the salt cod dish that is the most internationally renowned of all Basque dishes, though most foreign imitations are inauthentic because the choricero is hard to find outside Vizcaya and is almost never to be found outside Basqueland. Choricero peppers ripen in the summer and are tied together on strings like garlands of large, deep red blossoms, then hung to dry for two months.

  Julián and Felisa hang the peppers on the front of their traditional farmhouse of oaken beams and massive stone. Their house is named Igertu, which in old Vizcayan dialect means “drying,” but this appears to be a coincidence since the house predates the sixteenth-century arrival of peppers. Carvings on a stone windowsill in the front of the house, a Christian cross with Basque solar stars on either side, have been dated back to Roman times. Julián has received offers from people who want to buy the house because of its archaeological significance, but it has always been in his family and he will not sell. It is the etxea of his fathers.

  In the fall, Igertu turns bright as a New England hillside, because the choriceros are hung on the house to dry. They are also hung from pipes in the white tile kitchen, forming red drapery that completely covers the ceiling. The peppers that are dried outside keep their brightness, but almost half are lost to rot. The indoor ones are not as colorful, but the losses are only 10 percent. The next year the dried seeds are replanted in the fields across the road.

  THE SEVEN MEN held Pepe down on his side across a wooden bench, and one of them placed a green plastic basin on the ground under the pig’s neck. The knife went into the neck as the pig squealed even louder and struggled harder. But the men held him. Slowly the squeals turned into growls and then descending grunts. As the wound was worked with the knife and the blood poured out, one man kept the basin stirring to avoid clotting. After five minutes, the pig was only making low grunts and sighs and the blood was still pouring.

  An ancient belief of Hebrews and some other cultures that an animal that dies an agonizing death is less edible has been upheld by modern science, and so commercial slaughterhouses avoid this kind of killing. In industrial pig slaughter, the animal is stunned and then the unconscious animal is bled. But these farmers insisted that the industrial way of killing was “not as beautiful.” They explained that the blood was darker and not as good. This blood was brilliant red.

  The pig was then dragged to the edge of the field, for the long process of burning off the hairs by covering the carcass with pitchforks full of dried ferns and grasses and setting it on fire. It took more than an hour of turning and burning before the skin was completely blackened and hairless. Then the pig was washed and scraped with a knife. It now seemed like a huge, jellylike brownish object.

  Meanwhile, the women were chopping guindillas, the slightly hot, thinner red peppers, cutting out the stems, opening the peppers with scissors, carefully removing the seeds and saving them, and chopping only the shiny red skin. They also chopped parsley. During this entire day of working and talking, there was never a moment of discussion about who would do what. There were the men’s jobs and the women’s jobs and no mixing of them.

  They joked as they worked, speaking in Euskera and Spanish, mostly in Euskera. They talked about a recent soccer match. The referee had not been a Basque speaker and angrily told the
players to speak in Spanish. Finally, he gave a yellow card, a penalty warning, to the Basque speakers. The team later protested. Some of the pig scrapers thought they should have protested; others thought that since the referee asked them to speak Spanish, they should have spoken Spanish.

  With a long steel hook, the toenails were yanked off, and then the four feet were cut off and saved to make pigs’ feet. Julián worked with surgical precision, opening the stomach with long, sure knife strokes, cutting through larger bones with a hatchet.

  Etching by Jean Paul Tillac, 1937. (Collection of the Musée Basque, Bayonne)

  Julian was born in 1931 and was seventeen years old the first time he butchered a pig. As he chopped, he talked about what he had seen when Guernica was bombed. “Planes buzzed overhead and you could hear the bombs,” he said, laying aside the bloody hatchet and working close to the bone with his knife, “but what I remember more was over there.” He pointed to the wooded hills beyond the harvested pepper fields. “By the next town, there were German soldiers in tanks, and the reds and the Fascists were fighting, and a lot of people were killed.”

  Felisa also remembered. She was only three but recalls standing on a mountain watching the planes. “Then my Grandmother took us to the soldiers and they took us away.”