‘Oh, God!’ mumbled Jock through the checkered scarf that half-enveloped his face. ‘Not sure I can do this.’
Ines snuggled against him reassuringly. ‘Then don’t,’ she said.
John plunged his hands deep into his blue jacket, his face partially masked by its upturned collar. ‘I hope it doesn’t get much bigger!’
‘Jeez, me too,’ I said.
Maite ran a hand lovingly through my depleted curls. ‘Guapo loco,’ she murmured in my ear.
We shifted nervously in the brisk night, peering into the dark while line after line of purple-black swells exploded onto the sandbar, their plumes of spray bright with starlight. We shuddered with each exploding wave, like soldiers approaching the battlefront, the cannon fire steadily magnifying. Steaming walls of whitewater thundered symmetrically down into the darkness of the river.
‘Let’s get some sleep,’ I said, knowing this would be impossible.
We returned to the cold damp house.
Maite and I lay together for a while, but I was far too restless. We could hear the others rustling in their rooms. Even John, our hero, was unsettled. The giant swell had dented his swagger. I grunted to myself.
‘What was that?’ asked Maite.
‘Nothing … just thinking.’
‘You seem pleased about something.’
‘Pleased?’ I sighed slowly. ‘Scared, more like it.’
She hugged me tightly. ‘Tomorrow’s a real test, isn’t it?’
I hugged her back, burying myself in her warmth.
Maite left earlier than usual and I accompanied her downstairs to the little plaza. ‘Buena suerte!’ she said quietly, after a long embrace. ‘You’ll need it.’ She kissed me on the forehead like a mother would, got in the car and wound the window half-down. ‘And take care!’
‘Don’t worry! I will.’
She inched off into the mist and I was left standing in the empty plaza, listening to the pounding of the surf, its drumbeat ever stronger. I shuddered. Of course I would take care. I loved my surfing, but I was no martyr.
I returned to my room and there in my cold bed, her arms not around me, I lay tired but awake. My body called for restful sleep, but each boom of the breaking swell reverberated through the house, and through me. I could hear, between the explosions, the others moving restlessly in their beds. I wasn’t alone in my fruitless search for sleep. I tossed and turned and gave up. I picked up my book. George, too, was mustering courage.
It’s June 12 — Bilbao’s day of reckoning. Gastelumendi must be held. Steer and his journo friend Corman rise early to an eerily quiet hotel. They hitch a ride to Urrusti at the front. With shells raining down, George moves amongst the sad and bitter troops in the trenches and shelters. Resting, he reads a book of poetry by George Herbert. A massive aerial bombardment begins and he’s nearly killed. Tanks and infantry advance with endless shelling. George sees the faces of two young Basque soldiers, standing beside him, blown away.
Gastelumendi is taken.
Bullets singing around them, George retreats with the troops. At the back of the hill, he discovers Corman and the car have gone. He walks to Zamudio, strafed as he goes, arriving with a headache, sore eyes, deaf ears and a dry mouth. Two Basque commanders revive him with wine. When Larrinaga, the Chief Communist Political Commissar, leaves for Bilbao to report the fall of Gastelumendi and Cantoibaso, George grabs a lift.
Back in Bilbao, everything is quiet. At the Presidencia, George reports what he’s seen at the front, retires upstairs, quaffs sherry and falls asleep in an armchair. The first shelling wakes him. Twelve-inch armour-piercing shells narrowly miss the Presidencia and blow up nearby houses. From a window, he sees the dead and dying; the police, Red Cross and journalists’ cars all rushing about in the dust.
Bilbao is crumbling. Only the steep ridge of Santa Marina stands against the enemy. It falls the following day, and when German planes begin to machine-gun Bilbao, people prepare to flee. At midnight, Aguirre meets with his senior advisors to decide whether to defend the city, or not. Four hours later they commit.
The enemy advances along the ridge from Santa Marina to San Roque. The Basques try to counter-attack but fail. Soldiers return to their homes in Bilbao, carrying fearful stories from the front.
At dusk a massive evacuation of Bilbao begins — to the west and to the sea. Motor lorries packed with people and possessions pour out of the city. Every boat in the Nervión is mobilised to carry refugees to Santander and France.
The road evacuation to Santander rumbles through the night strafed by enemy aircraft. It continues, night after night, until nearly 200,000 — half of Bilbao’s inflated population — has fled. Basque troops hold back the enemy advance, but with desertions increasing, large holes appear in the defence line.
George stays to the end, to witness the evacuation and the final defence of the city. When the enemy cuts the water supply, there’s mass hysteria. And later, with aircraft constantly overhead, total desperation. Machine-gunning starts in the streets, followed by shelling and shrapnel. The aerial bombardment becomes continuous. The front is close to the Nervión. Bullets singing overhead, George crosses the river to witness, up close, the Basque soldiers fighting tooth and nail to hold the slope. By evening the Nervión side of the city is encircled in flame. Before dark, the Basques make one final effort, sending their last three battalions against the enemy — in vain.
The dawn sunlight was a crisp pale glow. It stole around the rotten wooden shutters, across the cold glass pane fogged by my nocturnal breath, filtering through the grimy faded curtains to reach me.
Jock burst into my room. ‘Amigo, you have got to see this!’
I threw on clothes and raced to the balcony. Rob was already there. ‘Oh, God!’ I said, gripping the rail.
A monstrous set steamed past the top of the seawall and unleashed its force, sending massive spumes of spray into the thin dawn light. John, stirred by our movement, surveyed the view through sleep-encrusted eyes.
The port itself was a whirlpool. Six-foot waves smashed through the entrance into the fishing boats and bounced off the inner port walls. The incoming waves met the rebound in a confusion of refracting waves that lurched high and broke. A vicious rip beyond the entrance was all the while sucking water from the tiny port.
But this was a sideshow compared to what was happening beyond, something disturbingly beautiful. Last night’s steady breeze had firmed and a stiff biting wind raced seaward down the valley to meet the mountainous swells. It gripped the top of the enormous peaks, wrenching them higher, sending huge arching sheets of spray backward and skyward. A cloud of settling seaspray engulfed the breadth of the river mouth. And when the sun rose out of the hills behind the village and caught the spray, the air above the river mouth turned to rainbow.
The massive swells marched relentlessly in from the deeper Atlantic. They approached the coast and wrapped around the island of Izaro, where they split and ran down each side, at times obliterating the island from view. On the leeward side they steamed through, unleashing their fury on the shallow reef, gigantic but seemingly rideable.
Then the swells re-gathered, continuing their coastward march undiminished. They approached the sandbar as whale-blue, bay-wide ocean masses that reared up in the sudden shallows, their tops feathering, to fold over and crash onto the estuary’s sandy bank. The waves rebounded off the sandbar, sending a secondary wall of whitewater careening skyward. This too was caught by the wind and the spume whipped seaward.
The scale of the waves was beyond anything any of us had seen.
‘Let’s check it from the headland,’ said Jock, his voice hoarse.
‘Good idea.’ Rob was pale, almost whispering.
John was speechless.
‘Come on, mate,’ I said. ‘Let’s go!’
We scampered nervously down the stairs to Plaza Santa Catalina and a still-sleeping village. All the shutters were closed, the inhabitants locked down in the safety of slumber.
Striding abreast down the cobbled street to the port, we edged gingerly around it at the feet of the houses, away from where the sea spewed over the port wall. We couldn’t stand in the usual spot on the headland. The spray made that impossible. It didn’t matter. The view from anywhere was spectacular. Impossibly huge waves, at least fifteen feet high, were breaking perfectly down the river mouth’s sandbank before closing out in one giant mass in the shallows, 300 metres down-river. The channel was a torrent, running along the shore, carrying what water it could back out to sea. It tried to squeeze out through the gap between the rocky point and the sandbar, but more often than not met the broken waves that closed out the channel.
Was it possible to ride one? If you could harness the paddling speed to catch one, it was possible — theoretically possible. But how could you get out there? You’d be sucked instantly and uncontrollably into the rip that ran to the narrow passage. To arrive there at precisely the right moment, when no waves were breaking, would require extreme luck. If you were that lucky, you’d have to escape the outbound rip, paddle behind the breaking swells, somehow locate the right take-off position, contain your fear of a rogue set, and then launch, blinded by spray, into one of the massive beasts. If you made the blind, free-fall take-off, managed to draw a huge, long bottom turn onto the glassy mountainous wall, and rocket down the hollowing wave, trying to control the chattering board, you’d still have to exit early enough to avoid the almost certain death when the wave closed out in the shallows. If you lost your board, leg rope broken, you’d be alone, helpless, and swept back out to sea, probably to drown. If you broke bones or were knocked unconscious, it was certain death.
Even with perfect luck, it would be impossible to paddle across the torrential rip and get back to the near shore. At low tide, with supreme luck, you might get washed downriver, recover, paddle from the sandbank to Laida beach on the far side, and wait for someone to drive around and pick you up.
But imagine the feeling of conquering one of those magnificent beasts, the sheer ecstasy of flying along a rolling, glassy mountain and imagine what the others would think. It would never be forgotten.
‘I’m going out!’ I declared.
John regarded me dismissively, thinking I was joking. Rob, mute, stared out to sea. Jock eyed me gravely through his steelrimmed glasses moist with spray. ‘You are joking?’
‘I’m not.’
‘Don’t be crazy! You’ll get killed!’
I glared at him. ‘No, I won’t … I can do it.’
A few of the other surfers, bleary-eyed, approached from the vans. ‘Man, look at that!’ cried the American, Roger, as a huge set poured through.
I started to move off.
Rob looked at me. ‘You’re not going out, are you?’
‘Yeah. I am.’
‘Are you mad?!’ He shook his head. ‘What are you trying to prove?’
‘Nothing … I have to try.’
‘Owen, don’t be an idiot,’ John yelled.
That was it. I ran back to the house, suited up, grabbed my board, rounded the port again and jogged towards the others on the headland.
Against the noise of the sea, John shouted, ‘Are you completely insane?’
‘I know I can do it,’ I yelled back.
‘What happened to your instincts? Have you lost touch with reality?’
At that moment a rogue set heaved into the river mouth closing out the entire breadth of the estuary. Wave after wave smashed along the sandbar and obliterated the passage.
‘Have you?’ John yelled again. He shook his head grimly at the port, which was seething with fury. ‘Grow up!’
‘Grow up?’ I threw my board down on the grass. ‘What do you care?’ I yelled back. ‘I can make my own decisions … You do as you please!’
‘What do you mean, do as I please?’
‘You just pissed off! Left us in the lurch!’
John’s mouth fell open. He stared at me, searching for words. ‘Jesus, Owen, I had to. I had to escape!’
‘What about the rest of us? Mum, Dad, me! We couldn’t escape! We had to deal with it!’
John’s shoulders sank. ‘I know. I shouldn’t have left, but I just had to. Something inside told me to.’
‘So bloody easy to run, John. We needed you … I needed you!’
‘Owen, I was sixteen … I would do things differently now.’
‘Would you?’
‘What do you mean?’ His eyes blazed. ‘You don’t think I’ve suffered too? I feel like I failed her!’
‘We all do. All of us bloody do!’
John’s head sank. ‘I’m sorry, mate … I really am.’
‘We’re all sorry,’ I said. Tears ran down my cheeks. I felt my shoulders fall. ‘No-one’s fault.’
John nodded. He took a big breath, pushed it out, and looked at the ocean. ‘Owen, go on. Go out, surf if you have to. But don’t get killed. There’s no point wasting your life … you’ll never be a doctor then, never know your destiny.’
‘Doctor? Destiny?’ I pushed at the board with my foot. ‘Who cares?’
‘Mum and Dad … me. Louise would have.’
I took a giant breath. ‘I guess.’ I looked at the heaving sea and picked up my surfboard. ‘Louise probably bloody hated doctors.’
Jock and Rob and the other surfers hadn’t taken their eyes off us, hadn’t moved.
A huge set poured through and we watched for a long time — I, for one, feeling small and vulnerable, witnessing nature’s raw power — a breathtakingly beautiful force.
The dawn gave way to a clear morning and the village came to life. The fishermen were the first to appear. Anxious and weary, they checked their boats. It was too late to do anything about it if they weren’t still securely tethered. Women — spinsters, black-garbed widows, girls, and yawning wives with their bleary-eyed children — appeared in search of the day’s first bread. Then the tradesmen, the pensioners, the bar owners, the bartenders, the shopkeepers, and the new mothers with their swaddled babes tucked tight in their prams and, later still, delivery men, local farmers and other passers-by — all drawn magnetically to the headland, to stand with the surfers at the railing beneath the denuded plane trees and marvel at the ocean, all gossip strangled by the sea’s pounding and roaring.
I met Maite at Plaza Santa Catalina in the evening and we went to the house. She’d visited a friend in Bermeo where all the talk was of the fishing boats that hadn’t made it back to port in time. She let me rave about the waves, the upcoming day and our hope for rideable surf. ‘Don’t you get stranded at sea,’ she said gravely.
‘I won’t. I’m not that brave.’
I was drifting into half-sleep when she said quietly, ‘Franco is dying.’
‘Yes,’ I replied, dreamily, ‘so they keep saying.’
‘This time it’s true. He’s going to die any day. I heard it from a close friend of the family … Patxi, the friend of my grandfather’s in the nursing home.’
I raised myself on one elbow. ‘You’ve never talked much about your grandfather’s friend.’
‘No.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘He’s suffered a long time, from war injuries.’
‘Oh.’ I pulled her close.
‘He was a journalist who knew George,’ she whispered.
‘He knew George?’ I was wide awake now.
‘Yes.’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘They met during the Civil War. He’s old, very unwell these days. His contacts say Franco is on his deathbed.’ Her nails dug into me. ‘If the monarchy is restored, there might be an amnesty for the prisoners.’
‘Do you really think they’ll release prisoners?’
‘There’s talk of it! We’re hoping!’
‘I’m glad,’ I said, hugging her close. ‘At least there’s hope.’
‘Yes, finally.’ She held me tight, her nails no longer biting.
My thoughts turned to George and the grandfather’s friend, Patxi, but then her hands began caressing and
distracting me.
We fell asleep in each other’s arms, spent and emotionally exhausted. Much later, Maite awoke with a start, slipped out of bed, dressed at speed, kissed me and raced off into the night.
I got up with the sun, threw on a sweater and pants and scampered to the balcony. The swell had dropped a little, but the waves were still huge. A brisk offshore wind skated down the river valley, meeting the waves head on. I ran to rouse the others.
Rubbing his eyes and yawning, John was first to join me on the balcony. ‘Holy hell!’ He was soon wide awake.
‘Check it out!’ I yelled. ‘What do you reckon, fellas? Rideable?’
‘Far out!’ said Rob. ‘That’s the best bloody surf I’ve ever seen!’
We raced across the Plaza with boards underarm. The sun broke through the clouds and the sky began to clear. ‘A good omen!’ said Rob, raising his free hand to the skies.
‘I hope you’re right!’ said Jock. ‘This is scary, man! Crazy scary!’
I swallowed hard when we rounded the cannon. The tide had turned and was on the rise. The port was turbulent, but nothing like yesterday. We nimble-footed down the steps, launched into the water and began to paddle. You could feel the sea start to draw, feel it clutching. ‘Christ!’ Jock muttered when he stroked alongside.
We nosed nervously out. The rip was drawing fast. We paddled carefully into the grip of the rushing current, to be sucked out to the passage between the rocky point and the sandbar. Timing our transit was crucial. There was a pause between sets. I made it through easily, Jock was fine, Rob too, but John barely scraped over the first wave of a large set. ‘Be careful, brother,’ I whispered as I hauled up the face of the next wave.
Stroking to the take-off area, I felt the inward surge of the ocean. We paddled in tentatively, fearful to get too close. A set loomed and broke with a thunderous boom. I edged in a little closer, keen. Jock stayed wide, watching. Rob lingered in between us. John had been carried way out by the rip and was steadily making his way towards us. I could feel my heart wild in my chest. We didn’t have to wait long. A solid set of about twelve feet approached and I felt the water drawing hard off the sandbar. It was difficult to hold position.
Mundaca: A Tale of Intrigue, Romance and Surfing in Franco's Spain Page 23