Authors: Dave Boling
Guernica
GUERNICA
GUERNICA
A N
OVEL
D
AVE
B
OLING
For the victims of Guernica . . .
and all the Guernicas that followed
Guernica is the happiest town in the world . . . governed by an assembly of countrymen who meet under an oak tree and always
reach the fairest decisions.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Guernica was . . . an experimental horror.
—Winston Churchill,
The Gathering Storm
The painting which I am presently working on will be called
Guernica
. By means of it, I express my abhorrence of the race that has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.
—Pablo Picasso
Pronunciation Guide
Guernica
: gare-KNEE-ka
Justo Ansotegui
: WHO-stow an-SOT-a-ghee
Mariangeles
: mah-di-an-HEY-less
Miren
: MEER-en
Josepe
: HO-sep-ee
Xabier
: ZHAB-yer
Alaia
: a-LAY-a
Aguirre
: uh-GEAR-ee
Saint-Jean-de-Luz
: saint ZHON da LOSE
Lekeitio
: la-KAY-tee-o
Lauaxeta
: low-wa-SET-a
Bilbao
: bil-BOW (rhymes with “how”)
CONTENTS
(Guernica , 1939)
Justo Ansotegui returns to the market now to hear the language and to buy soap. He places bars in scattered dishes where he
can catch their scent during the day, although they fail to mask the odors of the livestock that have lived in his house for
generations. As he sits in the evening, he’ll idly lift a bar to his nose. He strokes his mustache with one so the scent will
linger in the coarse black hairs that droop past his upper lip and conceal his expressions. The many times when he awakens
in the night, he touches a soap bar at his bedside and then smells his fingers, hoping the fragrance will invite certain memories
into his dreams.
Alaia Aldecoa, the village soap maker, explains that the bars are blended with sheep milk and scented with an ingredient she
keeps secret, but Justo is not interested in how they are made, only how they make him feel.
“
Kaixo
, Alaia, it’s Justo,” he says, approaching her booth on market day.
She accepts his unnecessary introduction. She has known him for years, and besides, his scent has preceded him. From the pocket
of his suspendered wool pants, now drooping at the waist, he extracts a slippery coin. It carries a pleasant smell, as it’s
coated with residue from a soap bar he keeps in there, too.
“I would like a bar of the Miren blend,” he says.
The soap maker pinches a smile at the sound of the name “Miren,” and, as she does every week, Alaia has two bars set aside
in a separate wrap for Justo. She sells that blend to no one else. As always, she rejects his payment, and he places the coin
back in his pocket. She devotes time each week to trying to imagine something she might say that would brighten his day, but
once again she has nothing but soap to give him.
It’s Monday afternoon, the traditional shopping day, but the new market isn’t crowded. Business resumed reluctantly in the
past three years, and the market is now several blocks east of the old site, closer to the river. It’s smaller because traffic
is scant and money scarce, and so many people are gone. Since much of the trade is restricted by government control and rationing,
market day is now about things other than just buying and selling.
As he moves from Alaia’s booth on the edge of the marketplace, Justo listens to the clacking of the gathered
amumak
, like a clutch of hens, trading their only abundant currency: gossip. In earlier times the grandmothers would negotiate the
purchase of beef tongue and lamb shoulders, and the mild green peppers they would dust with garlic and fry in olive oil. And
they would sniff at the colorful garlands of chorizo sausages hanging from the butcher’s booth. The spicy links would be browned
in an iron skillet along with eggs, which absorbed their rusty juices and pungent taste. Scent tentacles from the stove could
lure a family to the table without conscious assent. The flavor would cause the little ones to gather at Amuma’s lap and exhale
into her face the garlicky breath of joy.
There’s no haste for them at the market now; there is so little to choose from. So they painstakingly examine every vegetable
and heft each precious egg.
“These are too small,” one says, triggering a flurry of critiques from the others.
“These vegetables are not fresh.”
“I would never serve this to my family.”
“Are we buying today, ladies, or just fondling?” the vendor asks.
They scoff in unison but are reluctant to replace the produce. It’s easier to deem the food unacceptable than admit they cannot
afford it. Even in good times the elderly women were particular about such matters, since cooking defined them. More than
the collection, inflation, and distribution of gossip, their mission is to feed. Aging may change many things, but it can’t
diminish their skills in the kitchen. And to improve as a cook is a way to annex emotional territory within a family. But
with so little food now there is no medium for their art. And the hunger that once chewed at them like a mean dog now seems
more like an annoying houseguest who simply refuses to leave.
Justo passes their gathering. They gesture and pause, then resume chattering and bobbing, energized by a new topic. They will
peck at the particulars of Justo’s life until another subject causes them to blink and move on. Communication is an illusion
anyway, since all speak at once.
The bells of Santa María toll the hour, and many turn their heads to look up into the cloudless sky.
Under the blue-striped canvas awnings of the
taberna
, older men play
mus
, a four-man insult contest waged around a deck of cards.
“Come, play, Justo, I will need a new partner once this one smothers under the mountain of shit he’s been using for brains,”
an old friend calls, sparking rebukes from the other players. Successively all four grumble, “
Mus!
” and it is unanimous that the inadequate cards they’ve been given should be tossed in. If all players agree, the hands are
scrapped and redealt with fresh starts and new opportunities for all.
“The world could learn much from this game,” a relieved player says.
Justo declines the offer to play, which is only a courtesy anyway. Of the numerous activities denied a man with one arm, Justo
has found that forgoing
mus
is among the smaller sacrifices.
So they proceed with the tics and gestures used to signal their partners, acts that are not only allowed but encouraged. The
creative Basques decided that cheating could be prevented by declaring it a legal part of the game. Accordingly, if one never
recognizes the existence of a border, then carrying goods across it is not smuggling, merely nocturnal commerce. And if a
race believes it has always lived in its own nation, then protecting its imaginary boundaries is a matter of patriotism, not
separatism.
A wink of the right eye to a
mus
partner reveals a bit of information and a tongue-waggle supplies another, but when the tricks fall badly, one speculates
that his partner uses his farm animals for unconventional recreation.
“God, I wish I still had sheep—for that reason or any other,” the partner answers, laughing off the insult.
Justo produces a one-note laugh and the sound surprises him.
Vagrant threads of humor arise at times. Some still try, at least. On the chalkboard
taberna
menu behind them, in small letters beneath the list of offerings and their prices, is a note highlighted only by a snowflake
asterisk: IF YOU’RE DRINKING TO FORGET, PLEASE PAY IN ADVANCE.
“Stay, Justo, please stay,” one implores. “I may need the services of Guernica’s strongest man to pull my foot from my partner’s
ass.” It’s another courtesy comment to Justo, whose renowned physical strength has not been publicly demonstrated for some
time.
“No merciful God would have put on His earth so many Fascists or such ignorant partners,” one player says, his voice lowered.
Justo scans the area to see if anyone takes offense at the statement.
He has not come to the market for cards or levity. Once the most visible of the town’s characters, he now passes odd hours
adrift in the streets and alleys. He watches, overhears discussions of the news of the town, and disappears.
The
amumak
cluck, “Of course he might be, you know, disturbed, like his father, considering everything . . .”
“Oh, yes, he might be, considering . . .”
“I think he is . . . yes . . . who wouldn’t be?”
Justo has heard the whispers and is not bothered by being thought mad. It even might be a good thing these days. People ask
fewer questions.
On a bench of land to the west, the symbolic oak of Guernica stands rigid and undisturbed. The residents tell and retell the
stories of ancestors gathering beneath the oak tree since the Dark Ages to make laws or plan the defense of the land from
invaders. Somehow, the rebels and Germans didn’t damage the tree, though little else escaped their influence.
Across the market, there are no displays of the red, white, and green
Ikurriña
because the flag is banned in public. There are no
pelota
games, as there used to be, because the fronton has not been rebuilt. There are no dances at the plaza in the evenings after
market day because dancing the
jota
or
aurresku
in public could lead to arrest.
Justo doesn’t consider these realities anymore since they no longer apply to him. He’s beyond punishment. Conspicuous in his
boasts and bluster for so many years, Justo mostly listens now. If the Guardia Civil officers are occupied elsewhere, the
market is the best place to hear the language. Since Miguel left, Justo has only the company of a yearling ewe and a few suspicious
chickens at home, and they offer such predictable conversation. In truth, they visit with him as much as Miguel had in the
final weeks before he withdrew into the mountains in a search for . . . something.
So Justo comes to listen. The language always has been the most important act of separation anyway, as the bond is to the
words more than to the land. Since nothing on maps reflects their existence, the extent of their “country” is the range of
their language. But like the dances, the flag, and the celebrations, the words are banned, making a prayer whispered in Basque
as illegal as a call to arms in the public square.
Justo’s brother Xabier, the academic priest, told him that the Basque race has gone unassimilated by invaders because of the
isolation of their stony coast and encircling mountains. But Justo joked in return that they have survived by being incoherent
to all others. It is a unique defense.
Even the sounds of the market have changed. The
mus
players throw their pasteboard cards to the table so hard and fast that it sounds like clapping, but then they pause to watch
over their shoulders for the guards in their tricorner hats and green capes. And the
amumak
in their black shifts and scarves—rolling boulders of women—are unafraid of any man bearing arms or condemnations. But their
nattering has a lower tone, as there are fewer to have to talk above.
The locals now shuffle between booths as an accordion player squeezes out a waltz from under a drooping canopy that muffles
the notes, making it sound as if the music is coming from the distance, or from the past. Many move as if they’re wading through
a heavy pointlessness—trying, like the
amumak
with the vegetables, to hold on to things that are no longer theirs. To laugh at cards and profit from business feels like
an insult to those who can no longer laugh and profit. To them, the decay of will is an act of consideration. They buy what
they must and return home.
According to the old Basques, everything that has a name exists. But Justo would argue that things now exist that are beyond
description, which imagination cannot conceive: the explosions, the smell of things aflame, the sight of oxen and men mixed
into gory minotaurs among the rubble. They existed yet are unspeakable.
At the market now, tinkers sell used copper pots with silver scars from solder repairs, and farmers cover their tables with
patchy bouquets of bunched greens and small pyramids of potatoes. Alaia Aldecoa again sells her soaps that smell of the nearby
meadows. Commerce, the pulse of normal existence, slowly and respectfully returns on these Mondays.
Justo Ansotegui extracts a scented coin from his pocket and buys two potatoes as an excuse to hear another voice. For a moment,
he listens to the language, to the rhythm of the phrases and their melancholy inflections. But there are no words for the
things they have seen.