Authors: Dave Boling
“Why now? Why now more than any time in the past?”
José María whispered into his son’s ear: “Because now Josepe and I are helping him.”
By the time the newlyweds reached their home, friends had unloaded the oxcart and decorated the interior with strands of chorizos
and peppers. It would help the young couple sustain themselves without having to exit the home for a week or so as they got
their marriage off to an amicable commencement. On the table was a present from Miguel’s mother, a clear glass canister filled
with lemon drops.
Miguel and Miren stepped inside, overtaken by weariness, stopping to kiss without even closing the door. The jokers who unloaded
the presents had piled many of them on the bed.
Miguel picked up one to show Miren.
“My father must have done this.” It was a carved fishing boat, with EGUN ON painted on the stern. “I’m going to put it on
our mantel, to start our own collection of special things.”
“
Asto!
” she said, noticing the dark oak chest at the foot of their bed. On the top was inlaid a
lauburu
of light poplar, and beneath that was a routed pair of interlocking Ms.
“Your gift,” he said. They grew more intent on clearing the bed, and they doused the lamp before undressing.
They had known each other for almost a year and had been convinced of the genuineness of their affection, but they had never
translated those feelings into the physical, always withdrawing by mutual unspoken decision. Neither had experience, but it
wasn’t important. In this moment, it was their nature that was most meaningful: his was to be patient and attentive to detail,
hers to be giving and agreeable. He was a craftsman; she was an artist. They were inexhaustibly tender and fully transparent.
He was power, she was grace. He solid; she liquid. Then both liquid.
(1935–1937)
Walking slowly through the small hillside meadow above her home, Alaia Aldecoa used her gifted nose to determine which of
the flowering herbs had reached the point of readiness and which would supply the perfect scent to the soaps that she made
and sold every Monday afternoon at the market. The lavenders and heathers she favored matured at different times and at various
elevations and compass attitudes. Like the people in the village, the herbs lived out their individual preferences, some seeking
exposure and others darker places, with flowers attuned to the light and shadows and the length of the day.
The process took time and particular caution at first, but by now, Alaia could negotiate the terrain by smell alone. With
her fingers, she tested the turgidity of the stem and bloom to judge the moisture content and the levels of nectar or sap
and scent. She exchanged soaps for a small sack of oats from one neighbor, wood-ash lye from the charcoal maker up the valley,
and fresh strawberries and even certain vegetables from another farmer. And she was able to use the blooms of the lilacs and
flowering osiers and dogwoods in her own yard. She cataloged their locations in her head, along with the recipes for her product
varieties, some constructed on the creamy foundation of Pyrenean sheep milk she received, in exchange for bartered services,
from a widowed farmer who lived nearby.
She charged so little for her soaps at the market that some who came from outside the valley wondered how she could manage.
It would be insulting, though, to suggest to this woman that she should raise her prices. So customers usually made no comment
as they bought soap squares for themselves and filled their sacks with bars to sell to their neighbors at home at double the
price.
For Alaia, the income was secondary to the approval from the customers, who raved of her soap’s smoothness and scent, so soothing
and so reminiscent of the hillsides. Some women went on in detail about how it softened that rough skin on their elbows, or
how effectively it scoured the stench of fish or field off husbands.
Visitors who went inside her cottage were struck by the intoxicating mixture of scents. Adding those to the constant mumble
and hum of the adjacent stream, Alaia Aldecoa’s cabin exerted a powerful effect.
As she started to roll mint leaves between her fingers at her table, a visitor arrived, knocking lightly.
“
Bai,
” she said, and he opened the door tentatively and peeked inside. When he saw that she had not made an effort to turn away
from her work, he knocked louder.
“
Bai
,” she said again softly, still focused on her table.
He rapped once more, even louder.
“Come in.”
She knew who it was without turning. He paused, taking in the outline of her dress and the storm-cloud hair that made her
one of the most provocative women in the valley. Still facing away from the door, continuing to work with the materials at
the table, Alaia pointed toward her bed.
The man sat and removed his shoes, then his shirt, and then his pants. Alaia fingered a small leaf of the fragrant mint and
placed it in her mouth, just under her tongue, and approached him now. The man took in the sun-reddened cheeks and poppy lips,
and was unfazed by the darkened lids of her closed eyes. Instead, he saw the shape and hair of the mythical
lamiak
who taunted men from the mountain caves. He smelled the clusters of flowers and heard the tumbling hum of the stream, and
he was overcome by their sensory collusion. She bent to offer her lips, and he shivered when he tasted the wet mint in her
mouth.
Alaia Aldecoa, blind since birth, raised in a convent of sequestered sisters, served the village in a capacity far more personal
and intimate than that of soap maker. It was unlikely anybody was more talented or better suited to their calling.
Picasso fell to his knees at the feet of Marie-Thérèse and theatrically promised to divorce Olga. Marie-Thérèse was pregnant.
But bureaucracy soon diverted his romantic intent. French codes, he discovered, required he evenly divide his holdings with
Olga, which meant the surrender of hundreds of paintings of incalculable value. Yes, to live with passion and be ruled by
love is life’s only way, he preached, but in this case, love’s price might be unreasonably dear.
Talk of divorce was dropped. Olga left him for good, and Marie-Thérèse swelled through the hot summer before giving birth
to a daughter, María de la Concepción, whom they called Maya.
Picasso grew dark under the weight of the conflicts in what he later called the worst time of his life, and he gave up painting
for most of the year. Instead, he wrote poetry, and he converted his pain into a large etching. He created women looking out
an elevated window, a wounded horse, and a minotaur advancing on a young girl, who fearlessly faced the danger with an outstretched
arm holding a candle.
He titled it
Minotauromachy
(Minotaur Battle); the characters were some he would save as trademark symbols, and the theme would be converted for future
works. As usual, critics tried to decode his message, most assuming it was another ode to the perpetually tormented soul of
Spain. In her critique, Gertrude Stein agreed that it was an homage to his native country, because Picasso simply “can never
empty himself of being Spanish.”
Mendiola knew that losing Miguel would hurt his business. Despite the depressed economy, Mendiola’s shop had grown more profitable.
So it was not entirely out of his concern for Miguel’s well-being that Teodoro Mendiola gave his friend warnings about starting
his own business at home.
“People who work at home get bored,” Mendiola told him. “They feel as if they’re always at work but never get out of the house.
Within a year the wife will be sick of the man and he’ll wish he had a place to go to get away during the day.”
Miguel listened but did not expect that would be the case.
“Have you seen Miren?” he asked.
For a newlywed man with such a wife, the time away from the workbench was unlamented. As it developed, each of Miguel’s trips
in from the shop to the house felt like a surprise party.
“I’m thirsty, dear.” They kiss.
“I need to wash my hands,
kuttuna
.” They embrace.
“Isn’t it about time for lunch?” Urgent coupling bent over the table, disrupting her preparation of the midday meal.
Miren occasionally interrupted him in the shop, too, with equally contrived motives. “
Asto
, can you come in and reach this for me?” Each small task carried a tariff of at least one lingering kiss and an immodest
grasp by one or the other.
Mendiola was correct in one regard: Miguel’s mind, while at work, was often consumed by the image of Miren. But what distracted
him also inspired him. He created finer products, with greater detail and polish and with lines that were subtly sensuous.
As he lathed table legs, he thought of her slender ankles and dancer’s calves. As he beveled the corner of a tabletop, it
assumed the shape of her naked shoulder. He envisioned the crease between the lean muscles of her outer thighs when he configured
a piece of edging. Armrests of chairs became her arms, tapering to the end, with the wrist dipping into a gracefully curved
hand. And as he rubbed in the stain and polish, he thought of massaging her neck, and then her back, down the beaded molding
of her spine, down past the decoratively countersunk sacral dimples, down to the sculpted behind, with flesh the color of
clear varnished pine. Tenon and mortise, he thought.
The scent of the shop was that of fresh-milled cypress and wood adhesives. And, in time, surrounded by a mound of feathery
sawdust on the floor, amid a musk cloud of varnish fumes, Miguel would slow and refocus, and realize that the piece was finished.
It was beautiful and effortless.
Time for lunch, dear. Are you ready?
Unaware that Miguel had discovered in carpentry an element of eroticism, Miren occasionally was surprised by her husband’s
readiness when he left the shop. She would admit, too, that she found her mind wandering while kneading dough or washing vegetables.
And when Miguel arrived with a specific intent, she was equally eager.
There was no element of surrender to this, as she had been led to believe from overheard conversations among older women.
Yes, she was modest, but she was lustful, too; yes, he was lustful, but he was also respectful. And her natural playfulness
found interesting avenues as she surprised him with the occasional tender bite or a single light fingernail scrape down the
length of his spine, or, as he sometimes kissed her stomach, she would nip the end of his nose between her thumb and forefinger
as mothers do to young ones when pretending to steal their noses.
Coming in from one project, Miguel found Miren baking bread. The early afternoon sun from the southern window in the kitchen
caused her to once again give off light. And the smell of the leavening dough was yeasty in the room. He walked lightly on
his toes behind her. He slipped his hands onto her waist, eased her back against his hips, and immersed his face in her fragrant
hair, inhaling deeply, spellbound.
“Oh, God . . . your smell,” he said.
“Oh, God,
your
smell,” she countered.
“That soap from Alaia is wonderful.”
“Yes, Miguel, you should use some.”
She turned inside the radius of his arms, flicked a heavy dusting of flour onto his sweating face, and dabbed a finger beneath
each ear as if to apply a cologne. She pulled back to look at him so that they met only at the hips.
“Look at all the flour you wasted,” she said. “Flour is hard to come by these days, and valuable.”
“Fine, then I will give it back. I’ll give it to you here”—he touched his floury lips lightly to the side of her neck—“and
here,” he said, touching them to the other side of her neck.
At the soft hollow between ascending cords at the base of her neck, he paused.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “The recipe calls for more there.”
She leaned back to allow greater access, and the bread was left to rise on its own.
They always talked of personal things in the close time afterward. Miguel told her of fishing and of his family and of growing
up in Lekeitio, and how he had hoped there was a Miren somewhere for him. Miren told him about dancing and about her parents
and about life on the
baserri
, and how she had no idea there would be a Miguel for her in the world. When conversation lapsed, he might race naked to the
kitchen and retrieve a piece of bread or an apple that they would share, all so much more delicious now. There was no senseless
modesty anymore, as he would hand Miren the food and stand at the edge of the bed, proudly male.
And one afternoon Miren made an observation Miguel found curious.
“I don’t know if it’s possible to tell such things, but I feel like we just started a baby,” she said, rolling to face him.
Miguel hoped that would be the case, as a family would further dovetail their lives.
“I’ve never heard a woman say anything about this,” Miren said. “I should ask my mother if she had any idea when this happened
to her.”
“Please don’t,
kuttuna
, I don’t want her thinking about us doing this.” In his mind, though, Miguel began shaping plans for the construction of
a cradle.
Amaya Mezo hummed in a gentle contralto no matter how many hours she might be in the fields with her husband Roberto. It made
the baby girl carried in the sling across her chest sleep as if she were in a rocking cradle soothed by tender lullabies.
Amaya’s cargo was Gracianna, her seventh child, five months old. Amaya never minded getting back in the fields to help Roberto,
even in the dusty heat of the summer or when the windblown grass chaff bit into their faces and adhered to their sweat. Roberto
told her many times that her songs made the work less tiring. It sounded to him like the calling of a bird.
The Mezos’
baserri
, Etxegure, was larger than the neighboring Errotabarri. And in good times, the Mezos had more stock, along with an apple
orchard that produced fruit for eating and for cider. Of course, the Ansoteguis had only one child, and she was now gone with
her husband.
Amaya Mezo didn’t think about the increasing hardships, as she was lost in her song and the rhythmic thrust of the two-pronged
laia
into the soil and the sun on her back and the sleeping sighs of the baby against her chest. But Roberto then made a sound
she’d never heard.
Two uniformed Guardia Civil officers had snatched the unsuspecting Roberto, who struggled and was subdued by a rifle butt
to the lower abdomen. He had fallen, and the two guards, each pulling at a flailing arm, had lifted him to a standing position.
“Amaya, run!” Roberto yelled. “Get Justo.”
But she knew there was no time to fetch the neighbor; this was up to her. She raced at the guardsmen, child bouncing in her
sling, brandishing her sharpened
laia
as if it were a jousting stick. Sensing her willingness to run them through, the guards pulled down their rifles and cocked
the bolts, one leveled at Roberto’s head and the other at Amaya’s chest.
“One more step and we’ll kill you both,” one said with a paralyzing calmness.
Amaya stopped as if she had reached the end of a tether, frozen by the sight of the rifle at Roberto’s head.
The baby screamed.
“What did he do?” Amaya asked. “He’s just a farmer.”
The guardsmen said nothing. With the point of a rifle, one guard guided Roberto toward the road while the other walked backward,
his weapon never varying off a line that led directly to Amaya’s chest. And they were gone.
With Mariangeles’s help, Amaya spent every day seeking information at the Guardia offices. In a month, she was told that Roberto
had been accused by “concerned citizens” of selling produce without going through the appropriate ration accounting. When
she asked when the trial would be conducted, when the accusers could be confronted, she was told that such formalities were
not necessary in these difficult times.