Guernica

  The process was as traditional as the deed. A small sewing needle, eye looped with a fine silk thread, was seared by fire. A wedge of raw potato was cut so that it would fit behind the baby’s earlobe to provide resistance. The baby was held by her arms and head to keep her steady; the lobe was penetrated and the thread of silk was left to prevent the hole from healing over. Every day, a drop or two of olive oil was dribbled onto the thread as lubricant, and the thread was pulled back and forth to keep the passage open until it was healed enough that tiny hoops or posts could be inserted.

  “Miguel, these are the baby earrings that both Miren and I wore,” Mariangeles said, pulling from a box the tiny silver lauburuak that were affixed to thread-thin studs.

  Although outnumbered four to one, the writhing Catalina was easily their equal. Justo held her head but was more concerned with petting her fine dark hair; Miguel held her arms but was afraid of bruising her if he asserted his strength; Miren held her legs, but whenever Catalina thrust them, Miren’s re sistance only provided leverage for her to scoot toward Justo at the head of the table.

  “Goodness, you’d think we were butchering a ram; this is a little baby,” Mariangeles chided.

  They continued their passive restraint but affected greater stridence by assuming stern expressions. Mariangeles pressed on anyway. When the hot needle penetrated Catalina’s left ear she squealed but did not wrestle too fiercely, and the thread hung in place as drops of blood were dabbed away by Mariangeles. Catalina’s subdued sobbing lulled them into false confidence, and Justo, Miguel, and Miren were unprepared for Catalina’s adrenalized struggle when the needle began its second penetration. She wrestled her head inside Justo’s tender grasp and blood flew.

  “Damn it!” It was the first curse anyone had heard from Mari-angeles.

  Mariangeles attempted to stanch the blood with her skirt as Catalina’s howls mortified her parents. When Catalina calmed enough to allow examination, it was clear that her jerking away had caused the needle to rip a notch in her earlobe.

  “Will that heal? Will she be all right?” Miren asked frantically.

  “She’ll be fine; it will heal up, I think,” Mariangeles answered. “We can try again a little higher up in a few months.”

  Exhausted, Catalina whimpered and sobbed on the table and outstretched her arms in the direction of Miren. Mariangeles, feeling deep guilt and the fear that her granddaughter might forever hold her responsible, handed the baby to Miren.

  The silent discomfiture in the room was broken only by the sounds of the sniffling Catalina until Miguel began laughing, slowly at first, and then more loudly. The others stared him down.

  “Miguel,” Miren said sharply.

  “My God,” Miguel said. “Look at her, our perfect little baby girl is going to go through life looking just like her aitxitxia Justo!”

  Justo fingered the frayed edges of his right ear and had no hope of containing the smile that bunched up his cheeks so hard that his eyes squinted.

  Jean-Claude Artola told Dodo that the associate he needed to meet would be at a place on Rue de la République, the Pub du Corsaire (Bar of the Privateers). He knew that Saint-Jean-de-Luz was famed not only as a port for the storied Basque whalers but as the den of some of the greediest cutthroat pirates and privateers to sail since the seventeenth century. He entered the door and found himself in the dark-oak belly of a corsair ship. Golden lantern light puddled amid the shadows. Oak decking and stout knees attached the false futtocks to the upper deck. In the middle, the mainmast extended down to the keel. The bar ran perpendicular to the beam, up the port side to the middle of the ship. He could almost feel the swell of the seas.

  “I’m home,” he announced to no one.

  A few tables and booths were clustered near the “bow,” and Dodo sat at the fore end of the bar. A woman sitting with friends soon rose to leave; her dog had been sleeping at her feet.

  “Allez, Déjeuner,” she said to the small bristle-furred dog as she neared Dodo.

  Déjeuner? Lunch. He grasped the amusing implication.

  “You must have been eating in Spain recently,” Dodo said to her. With a broad belt cinching her skirt waist below a loose shirt, the woman seemed to match the decor. She could have trodden the foredeck with the corsairs, Dodo thought. She flashed across his mind in images of impish larceny and feminine roguishness. This was a woman, he was certain, with whom a man could raise infinite amounts of hell.

  Within a minute, he discovered that she was Renée Labourd, the woman he had been told to contact. Within weeks, they were companions, attracted mostly by their own qualities in each other. To Dodo, Renée carried a hint of the wild. To Renée, Dodo displayed, in the most interesting ways, the spirit of her father.

  Sensing his potential, Renée began schooling Dodo in the crepuscular arts, the “travail de la nuit” that had served as her family’s business for generations. Her father and mother operated a small auberge on the road outside Sare. The town, just southeast of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, was situated near so many mountain passes along the Spanish border that it was considered the capital of the contrebandiers who exploited a thriving unsanctioned import/export trade. For several generations, the Labourd family had rented rooms, with mountain views out each shuttered and flower-boxed window, and served exquisite French-Basque cuisine to locals and guests. But their real job always had been ferrying goods across the border.

  After hearing from Dodo the accounts of his first few disastrous nights in the mountains, Renée instructed Dodo in both the practice and philosophy of the business. The creative avoidance of unlawful taxes, unfair tariffs, and absurd embargoes carried no negative connotations among those who lived there, she stressed. The border didn’t belong there; it was not recognized by those in residence on either side because their families predated its random scribble across the maps.

  Renée’s parents had used her as a decoy or an appealing little diversion since childhood, letting her charm the Guardias or gendarmes with a dance or a song or a story as Mère and Père slipped past them with anything smaller than an elephant carrying a piano. Some nights it was as simple as toting packs of French wine and cheese, other times as tricky as herding a string of horses up the steep passes.

  After having dropped their delivery one night, Dodo and Renée strolled hand in hand through the French checkpoint like lovers enjoying the moonlight. As they were cleared to pass, the border guards were roused to investigate suspicious activity up a nearby draw. Dodo and Renée stood and watched as the two guards gathered their weapons and headed off into the darkness. Slipping into the unattended guard shack, they pocketed whatever blank paperwork they could find for future use, collected the small cache of spare ammunition, and made love on the captain’s desk.

  Miguel stepped lightly, heel to toe, and crouched in the cover of weeds when he neared the stream. There were fish to be had, but it was no longer a matter of recreation. Now it was about fending off hunger. So, like nearly everything else in their lives, it was more serious and harder work. But on this day, he pulled six trout from a stream he hadn’t fished in some time. Two would serve as dinner, two would be a nice gift to Mendiola to supplement his family’s meal, and one would brighten the evening of the widow Uberaga next door, leaving one to spare.

  “Miren, you should take a fish to Alaia’s,” he suggested. “I don’t know how much help she’s getting from Zubiri these days. It might be a nice surprise.”

  Miren appreciated her husband’s thoughtfulness, and as soon as they finished eating she walked to Alaia’s cottage, hoping to get the trout to her before she prepared her evening meal. Miren had never heard Alaia complain, but the scarcity of food had to affect her at least as much as anybody in town. Selling bars of soap inexpensively at the market could not provide much for Alaia to live on.

  As Miren slipped through the door, she called out, “Alaia, look what Miguel brought home for—”

  She could not actually see Alaia as she entered, only a pale, fu
rrowed rump cresting and plunging.

  “Uuugggg.” It was old man Zubiri, whom she did not recognize until her shout caused him to dismount in a panic and snatch up the overalls that were gathered at his ankles. Having not bothered to remove his boots for the experience, all Zubiri had to do was regain his feet, pull up his overalls, and fly past Miren through the door she had left open. His beret had been firmly in place the entire time.

  Miren said nothing. She stood frozen, holding a fish.

  Alaia sat up on the bed, inhaled deeply, and readied for Miren’s inevitable inquest. But her friend was stunned mute.

  “Miren?”

  Miren was paralyzed by two revelations: Someone as old as Zu-biri still had sex, and her friend, now standing nude by her bed, was so beautiful that it caused her to stare. Her figure was lush, so pleasingly arched and dimensional, and her nipples were as round and deeply brown as chestnuts.

  “Miren . . . oh.” Alaia sensed her embarrassment and retrieved her gray cotton dress, calmly felt the collar edge for the opening that would identify which was the front, and then slipped it over her head.

  “Miren?” she said, straightening the dress.

  Miren recaptured enough composure to place the fish on the table.

  “Here is a fish I brought,” she said. “I can help you fry it up if you’re hungry.”

  “Say it, Miren.”

  “Alaia, how could you be in love with old man Zubiri?”

  Alaia’s outburst of laughter shocked Miren again.

  “I’m not in love with Zubiri,” she said. “We’re more like business partners.”

  “Then why were . . . and . . . that didn’t look like business.”

  “He helps out with food; he brings me the things I need for soaps, and milk, and cordwood for the stove,” Alaia said.

  “And you?”

  “I help him with things he’s needed for a long time.”

  Miren wondered how she could trade herself for things that Miren would have gladly supplied. If she needed help or food, all she had to do was ask. Miguel would cut and stack firewood for her. Her father and mother would help. Alaia didn’t have to resort to this.

  “Miren, it’s not just Zubiri. There are a few others, too, and I’m not going to tell you who they are, because they expect me to keep this private. Some of them, in fact, don’t want to believe that I know who they are.”

  “You have many business partners?”

  “Miren, I know what I’m doing. I don’t have to make excuses, but I will remind you that I was in that convent for eighteen years. I grew up with dozens of nuns.”

  Miren mumbled something beneath her breath that Alaia could not hear.

  “Miren . . . I’m a big girl. I do it because I want to. If you have worries about me, thank you, but save them.”

  Miren was new to intimacy herself and was certain that she was more naïve than prudish. Yes, if Alaia cared to know, she enjoyed the contact, too, so much so that she thought about it much of the day when Miguel worked. But that was different.

  “Even with an old man?” Miren asked. “Do you enjoy that?”

  “It’s still closeness,” Alaia explained. “It meets a need for him, and I can promise you, as much as you might not believe it, considering the love you have with Miguel, it helps me, too.”

  “Do you do this with anybody?”

  “I don’t ask questions because I don’t want them asking questions of me either,” Alaia said. “I know who they are. I hear them in the market; I can recognize most of them, although they like to think that I can’t. If I know it’s a married man who shows up at the door, I act as if he is here to buy soap and tell him that I only sell it at the market on Mondays. But I don’t sit here judging them, either. I don’t have room for that.”

  Miren was flushed; the smells, the stream muttering, the unsettling realization that her best friend was . . . what? What do you even call it?

  “I hope I didn’t scare him off for good,” Miren said. “I’d hate to be responsible for the failing of your business. You might have to work to get more good customers.”

  “I think he’ll come back,” Alaia speculated. “I just have to start remembering to bolt the door when I have a guest. I think that will provide enough security for him. I would ask that when you see Mr. Zubiri in town you’d try not to point at him. I don’t want any hints of anything to get back over those convent walls.”

  Miren remembered Alaia’s inability to have children, which sated some of the practical elements of her curiosity. How does word of mouth spread if she’s scrupulously confidential? How does she avoid more than one arriving at a time? Does she have a schedule? Does she sell them soap afterward? She struggled to shunt her curiosity, and she remembered her uncle Xabier’s words once when she asked him to explain the shaky character of someone in town.

  “Well, we are here to witness, not to judge,” Miren said to Alaia, tentatively echoing Xabier.

  “Good girl,” Alaia said. “I don’t expect you to understand, I just hope you would trust me.”

  “I have to tell you, Alaia . . . I just bore witness to images I may never be rid of.”

  “What . . . not a handsome vision?”

  Miren didn’t say it—she felt too hurt to try to be clever—but she believed it was the first time she envied Alaia’s absence of sight.

  The priest slid back the panel on the grated port that provided the confessor plausible anonymity.

  “Welcome, my child,” he said, feeling a bit ridiculous greeting a man in his early forties that way. But it was protocol.

  “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned,” a voice pronounced in the customary low and serious tones the situation demanded. “It has been a week since the last time I got drunk with my priest.”

  “That will cost you ten Our Fathers and another bottle for the priest. But for our new president, the penance will be waived.”

  At times, if Xabier could not be found in the rectory when he sought his private counsel, Aguirre would slip into a confessional and visit with his unofficial adviser. That position of confidence had become more important in recent months. In a move to assure their assistance in the fight against the rebels, the embattled Republican government had granted nationhood to the Basques. As expected, Aguirre was named president, and he swore his oath of office in Guernica in an intentionally understated ceremony. No one saw benefit in announcing the event to prospective Francoist assassins, who would not have been pleased with his message that day.

  “Humble before God, standing on Basque soil, in remembrance of Basque ancestors, under the tree of Guernica, I swear faithfully to fulfill my commission,” Aguirre said before presenting his statement on the war.

  “We stand against this rebel movement, which is subversive of the legitimate authority and hostile to public will, because we are forced to by our profoundly Christian principles,” he said. “We believe Christ does not preach the bayonet, the bomb, or the high explosive. Until Fascism is defeated, Basque nationalism will remain at its post.”

  In a time when informants and spies and political opponents might shadow someone in Aguirre’s position, the meetings with Father Xabier in a back confessional, half obscured by a concrete support column, offered welcomed privacy.

  “Bad news,” Aguirre announced softly.

  “Has there been any other kind?”

  “Workers and farmers were trying to defend Badajoz against Franco’s rebels, and doing a surprisingly good job of it,” Aguirre said. “But the African troops fighting with the rebels were so upset by the resistance that they drove them all into the bull ring, and machine-gunned every one of them.”

  “Damn them,” Xabier said, forgetting his location.

  Aguirre paused. “Four thousand dead.”

  “Dear God. In the name of the church, of course,” Xabier added sarcastically.

  “Of course. Pious Franco.”

  Hard-heeled footsteps neared and paused. Aguirre and the priest sat silently. br />
  The footsteps moved on, and Xabier now whispered so close to the grating that he could smell the tobacco on Aguirre’s breath. “It’s not a matter of piety. The church is a broker of power, so he’s waving the banner of Catholicism. I’m not surprised he’s trying to exploit it; I’m surprised the church is falling for it.”

  “Does the Vatican really understand what he’s doing here?”

  “That’s the war I’m fighting: the Roman front,” Xabier said. “The bishops of Vitoria and Pamplona broadcast a letter to condemn Basque Catholics who supported our cause, but, thankfully, the vicar-general rejected the letter. So we’re again facing a split that could turn nasty.”

  “Have you said anything to them, to the bishops?” Aguirre asked.

  “All I am is an assistant parish priest; the prelates aren’t going to tip their miters just because I ask them to.”

  “Would that lead to trouble for you from above?”

  “Do you mean the Vatican or God?”

  Aguirre laughed more loudly than he should have. They hushed and listened for footsteps.

  Miren couldn’t forewarn Miguel or alert her father, fearing both would revolt and physically restrain her. They would never understand the problems she faced, the trouble that was being caused, and how much pain she’d endured. Miren was certain that this was one crucial decision she had to make on her own and live with the consequences. She had no choice; she had to cut her hair.

  It dangled into problem areas when she leaned over to change Catalina. And whenever the baby came up onto her shoulders to be patted to sleep, she would grab tiny fistfuls and attempt to pull her body weight up by the hair. The pain jolted Miren to the roots. Besides, to waste time in vain pursuits like maintaining it was inexcusable. Mariangeles understood and was surprised it had taken Miren this long to reach the decision. She offered to cut it.