Authors: Dave Boling
For a time, rebel gunboats rarely stopped to inspect the smaller fishing boats from the Lekeitio fleet. But they were more
insistent now as the smugglers’ inbound cargo changed from food to arms and ammunition.
Josepe Ansotegui devised an effective means of veiling the contraband. The boats would arrive at barren coves near Saint-Jean-de-Luz
or other nearby ports, where Dodo and his friends would load the bags of potatoes or grain, or boxes of rifles and ammunition,
into the hold. As they fished their way back across the Bay of Biscay toward the blockade, Josepe and José María and their
crews topped off the holds with anchovies or what ever happened to be filling their nets.
A few nets of anchovies or sardines served as an effective disincentive to most inspectors who might stop their boats. A number
of times the
Egun On
and the
Zaldun
were boarded for inspection, but neither the rebel navy nor their Guardia Civil allies would wade down into a hold to check
beneath the day’s catch.
If the special cargo of the day was human, the passengers were told to hold their noses and burrow under the fish. Many responded
with a grunt of disgust, but when the ship was stopped by a rebel gunboat, they had no problem shimmying under the reeking
fish.
One guard, automatic weapon slung across his chest, ordered Josepe to open the hold. The guard peered down the hatch as Josepe
and José María looked at each other, silently praying that the three refugees hidden there would be able to hold their breath
and not move beneath the weight of the sardines.
The guard inhaled meekly, shuddered, and motioned for Josepe to shut the hatch.
“Stupid Baskos,” he said, walking toward his boat, which was lashed alongside them.
“Yes, we are just fishermen,” Josepe said.
“Ugly, too,” José María added.
“And we smell of fish,” Josepe continued as the guard stepped over the side.
“Poor us,” José María lamented.
Justo entered his daughter’s house as he entered most rooms, with an exclamation. In this case, it was a rumbling greeting
to his granddaughter on her first birthday.
“Cat-a-leeen-aaaa!”
Aboard her hobby-ram, she kicked and scooted in his direction so she could be picked up and pulled tight to his scratchy face.
Her great joy was pulling the beret from his head and flinging it to the ground, and then grabbing great handfuls of his mustache
and pulling it all directions as her
aitxitxia
responded with groans of pain.
For her birthday, Miguel had made a little rocking chair and Miren had sewn red gingham pads for the back and seat. Miren
had stashed sugar aside for weeks to bake a cake.
“Look what your
amuma
made for you,” Justo said, holding up a bag for Catalina to open. She pulled out the small white dress, looked briefly, tossed
it in the air, and went back to work on her
aitxitxia
’s mustache.
“Catalina . . . ,” Miren scolded, picking up the dress, which Mariangeles had crocheted. “It’s beautiful, she’ll love it.”
“Well, we have arranged an occasion when she can wear it soon,” Mariangeles said. “Justo has talked to Arriola at the photo
shop and he is going to take a family portrait of the three of you for her birthday. We’ll both get copies.”
Miguel wore his black wedding suit; Miren could still fit in a black-and-white dress she’d made for herself before she was
married. It was tighter in places since she’d had Catalina but still attractive. Catalina was certain she was the most special
little girl, standing, wobbly, next to her mother, holding out the hem of her skirt to her sides, and then pulling it up over
her head with a squeal.
“No, Cat,” Miren corrected her, pulling the skirt down.
“What do we do about the, uh . . . ?” Miguel asked Miren, touching his right ear slightly.
Miren brushed Catalina’s hair from a left part over to the right, but she did not have nearly enough to cover it.
“A hat?” Miguel asked.
“Then we couldn’t see her face. It’s really not very big. It’s such a small ear.”
When Miguel made whispered mention to Arriola of Catalina’s ear notch, he nodded. This would not be a problem. He positioned
Miren in a dark wooden high-backed chair, with Catalina sitting on her lap, facing to her right, toward Miguel, who was standing
beside the chair.
“Watch the birdie,” Arriola said. Catalina turned her head slightly toward the camera as the flash went off, perfectly catching
her face at a three-quarter angle, with the light reflecting off the tiny silver
lauburu
in her left ear.
Picasso hurled brushes and kicked newly stretched canvases and easels, storming across his studio. Franco’s rebels had taken
Málaga, where he’d been born, and after the bombing and artillery destroyed the buildings, they machine-gunned civilians.
Enough. He announced to friends that he would create a project to sell in support of relief for the Republican cause.
The Dream and Lie of Franco
, in essence a comic book, portrayed the Fascist leader as a buffoon, as a woman, and as a half-horse/half-man centaur being
eviscerated by a bull. At times, he was drawn wearing a bishop’s miter, kneeling before the image of money.
To accompany the cartoon plates, Picasso spewed written images in a poem filled with such anger that it had no room for punctuation
or syntax until he reached an artistic rhythm.
“. . . cries of children cries of women cries of birds cries of fl owers cries of timbers . . .”
No, the artist could not return to Spain to fight. But he could raise money with his art. And he could let the world hear
his rage.
Juan Legarreta collected the carpenters Teodoro Mendiola and Miguel Navarro and took them to the Taberna Vasca, near the marketplace,
for a few glasses of Izarra, the liqueur that tasted of mint and left a person’s lips tingling. Legarreta, chief of the volunteer
fire department, needed help. The Germans had bombed Durango and the Guernica town council had charged him with the task of
constructing shelters,
refugios
, where citizens could retreat in case of a similar attack.
Mendiola and Miguel had heard of the attack on munitions plants in Durango, but they knew nothing about the specific damages
created by high explosives and had no clue how carpenters would go about constructing shelters to withstand such extreme demands.
Besides, both had commissioned projects in the works, the pay from which might allow them to continue feeding their families.
“I know,” Legarreta nodded in sympathy. “I’m not getting paid either. But some of the council think we need to build these
things just in case. Some are certain that we have no cause to worry. Others are convinced that if we build shelters it’ll
just create a panic in the town.”
“Do they know something we don’t know about the danger here?” Mendiola asked.
“I don’t think they know much of anything,” Legarreta said, removing his beret and raking his fingers through his hair. “You
get a couple old Carlists and some Republicans and mix them with some Monarchists and Reds and sprinkle in a few would-be
Fascists and an Anarchist or two, and what comes out of the room is guaranteed to make no sense. But it’s better to have some
protection than none, and if it gets some people thinking about potential danger, maybe that’s not bad. I just don’t see anything
here they’d want to bomb.”
Mendiola and Miguel nodded. Even though it meant sacrifice, they were both committed to helping.
“And, Juan,” Mendiola pressed, “do you have any advice on how we should tell our wives that we’ve been diverted to a project
we really don’t know how to build to protect against an attack that probably won’t come, and for which we will receive no
pay?”
Miguel had not considered the problem of explaining such things to a wife. He laughed at the response he imagined receiving
from Miren. “As soon as I tell Miren what we are doing, she’ll insist on coming down to start sewing curtains and putting
down rugs, promising to round up all her friends to make these the coziest bomb shelters in all the Pays Basque.”
Legarreta and Mendiola had known her for many years and could imagine those exact comments.
“You know, it might be easier to get her to recruit the construction crews,” Mendiola said.
Legarreta took them to town hall and several of the more stoutly constructed residences, and he suggested reinforcing the
basements with additional supports. Miguel quickly envisioned bolstering the connection of each column to the beams with “knees”
akin to those used to attach ships’ ribs to the decking, and strapping joints with metal bands. Another freestanding shelter
was to be constructed on Calle Santa María, between town hall and the church, with the plan calling for a series of oak supports
to uphold beams covered by layers of sandbags.
“I have no idea what it would take to protect people from a bomb; I just hope this is one building project that never gets
tested,” Mendiola said.
“It won’t,” Legarreta said, adding a chuckle as reassurance. Still, he harbored two deep concerns that he did not share. The
council’s notion of what constituted a good shelter was a tightly enclosed area that would prevent penetration of bullets
and bomb fragments. But that meant that there was little flow of air to these basement rooms. His second worry was more direct:
He had ten lightly trained men in his volunteer fire department and one small fire truck, a serious issue in a town constructed
mostly of wood.
Father Xabier understood why he’d been sent to Guernica when he came upon the refugees, belongings tied in ratty bundles,
clustered in a shapeless mass in the courtyard in front of the train station. He watched ambulances arriving in staggered
succession to disgorge their cargo of broken soldiers at the temporary military hospital established at the Carmelite convent
near the river.
When Xabier left Bilbao, the town was swollen with the wave of refugees that gets pushed out in front of an invading army.
But the inflow of homeless to Guernica evoked a far more ominous sensation. Bilbao was defended to some extent; this was an
unprotected valley flooded with human runoff.
When he arrived, he heard of break-ins and the rumor that retreating soldiers had breached the cloister and taken up positions
in the Santa Clara convent on the hill. He looked at the rain clouds smudging the sky before twilight and saw no birds. Atop
the Carmelite convent, movement caught his attention. Two dark, spectral figures revolved in an agonizingly slow dance. As
he walked closer through the crowded street, he could distinguish the black robes and white wimples; they were nuns on the
roof, with upraised binoculars, scanning the skies for intruders.
President Aguirre had tracked troop movements of the Republican forces, mostly Basques in this region, in the three weeks
since the bombing of Durango. He knew his forces had battled well but been overpowered on successive fronts. They had withdrawn
toward the protection of Bilbao, which required many of them to filter back through Guernica. Another battle line had to be
established, to forestall rebel troops and earn time for the continuous attempts to strengthen the “Iron Belt” fortifications
of Bilbao.
Late in the week, Aguirre had visited Father Xabier’s confessional. Xabier knew Aguirre had entered his box before he heard
his voice; through the grating, he could smell him. He had always been a heavy smoker, but now the disquieted Aguirre was
lighting one cigarette with the last embers of its predecessor and carried in his clothing a heavy film of tobacco.
“Are you smoking in the confessional?” Xabier asked.
“Forgive me, father, for I have smoked.”
“Put it out; it’s blasphemous.”
“I already confessed to it; absolve me and let’s move on,” Aguirre said.
They crossed themselves simultaneously.
“You’ll never believe this . . . ,” Aguirre started, his voice more tense than the priest had ever heard. “Our engineer, the
great Captain Alejandro Goicoechea—”
“The designer of the Iron Belt?”
“Yes, that one,” Aguirre said. “He’s defected. To the rebels . . . took all the blueprints with him. Every detail. Every place
where the ditches are narrow and the fence is unprotected.”
“God help us,” was all that Xabier could think to say. “What now?”
“I need you to go home,” Aguirre said. “I need you to arrange to speak at mass, to warn them about what’s going on, to tell
them everything you can about the danger.”
“Me? Why not you?”
“They know you and they trust you. You’re one of them. I’m sending others, advisers and counselors, to towns in all directions.”
Xabier had no need to weigh the factors; he knew it was the right approach. Aguirre, kneeling at the confessional, detailed
the grim threats constricting around them.
“Now do you see why I need you to tell them?”
Xabier, sensing a challenge greater than any he had imagined for himself as a student, sent word to the priest at Santa María
in Guernica and began shaping his warnings.
He arrived at Errotabarri Saturday evening for dinner, a starchy marriage of bread and garbanzo soup. He waved off Mariangeles’s
apologies. His brother and his wife were gaunt.
“I want to warn you about what I’m going to have to say at mass in the morning,” he said. “It is going to shock people, but
it’s for their benefit. They need to know what might happen if things keep going as they are.”
“Won’t the rebels go straight to Bilbao?” Mariangeles asked. “There can’t be anything in Guernica they could want.”
“Nobody knows,” Xabier answered between bites. “Franco’s troops are bloodthirsty for Basques, and the Germans are unpredictable.
For Franco, there is more to this. Every one of us he can be rid of now will be one fewer to worry about when he’s running
Spain.”
“If our few troops retreat to Bilbao, then the rebels would just be able to walk in with no need to hurt anybody; isn’t that
a possibility?” Mariangeles asked, her voice inflecting upward.
“Anything is possible,” Xabier said. “That could happen, or many could be hurt. There’re no rules to this.”
Justo held a palm up toward Xabier; he had a point to make.
“They know the history of the town. They know what it means to us; they know it’s the heart of our country. If they attack
Guernica it would be a sacrilege—it would have the opposite effect of what they want.”
Xabier focused on Justo’s face for a moment.
“Exactly,” Xabier said. “They know the importance of this town.”
When the bells of Santa María made their call to mass, Xabier watched the pews fill with the people he’d known since he was
a boy. Not a seat was empty, yet there was little sound beyond a few whispered greetings and pardons for jostling as parishioners
slipped into their usual seats. When Xabier stepped to the altar, murmurs of recognition rippled in a wave from the front
to the back. “What could bring him back from Bilbao?” “Did you know that Father Xabier was going to preach today?” “He looks
thin, don’t you think?”
All rose.
“A reading from Psalm Thirty,” he said, opening his Bible at the purple cord that marked his page. “ ‘I praise you, Lord,
for you raised me up and did not let my enemies rejoice over me.’ ”
Solemnly, more slowly, he repeated the passage, stressing “and did not let my enemies rejoice over me.”
He gestured for all to sit.
“Most of you know me and know my family,” Xabier said. “And I hope that you will trust that I’m not here to frighten you into
greater piety. President Aguirre himself asked me to come and speak with you. He wanted me to tell you that we all are facing
danger as the war comes nearer. It is near enough that some of us should not even be here at mass today. Some of us should
be in the mountains and the fields fighting a threatening enemy. We should be preparing to protect our families, our loved
ones, our property, our homeland.”
Parishioners stared forward.
“Men and women and children are being slaughtered by Nationalist rebels all over Spain,” Xabier continued. “We have failed
you by not telling you how dangerous this is. The rebels are killing in the name of God. And the church, by its silence, would
appear to be condoning this evil. I cannot be silent.”