Authors: Dave Boling
(1893–1933)
Baby Xabier cried from his crib, and when Angeles didn’t stir, Pascual Ansotegui touched a match to the oil lamp on the wall
and retrieved the newborn for his feeding.
“
Kuttuna
, it’s time,” he whispered, careful not to disturb their sons sleeping in the next room. But within a moment, Pascual’s scream
shook Justo and little Josepe from their beds. In the smoky lamplight, Pascual saw Angeles’s sheet-white face and a dark stain
on the bedding.
Justo and Josepe scrambled into their parents’ room and found baby Xabier wailing on the floor. Justo picked up his little
brother and returned him to the cradle. Josepe fought to pull himself onto the bed to be with his mother but only managed
to claw the bloody blanket toward his face. Justo pulled him back and whispered to him. The three stood at the bedside as
a corrosive grief began to hollow out Pascual Ansotegui.
Angeles had presented him a succession of three robust sons in a span of four years. Almost from the moment she recovered
from the delivery of one, she was once again carrying the next. The men in the village laughed at Pascual’s appetites, and
he took a dash of pride in their jokes. Good-natured, accommodating, and fertile as the estuarial plain on which they lived,
Angeles birthed without complications. But a few days after the uneventful appearance of her third son, she simply failed
to awaken. Pascual was left with two tots, a newborn, and a harness of guilt.
The boys grew together in a hyperactive litter, roiling and wrestling and challenging one another from predawn awakenings
until their nightly collapse, often not in their beds but sprawled at odd angles wherever their energy randomly expired. The
increasingly absent Pascual kept them fed, a minimal challenge on a thriving farm, but they otherwise operated on their own
initiative and imagination. Four males now lived at Errotabarri, the Ansotegui family farm, with no maternal or feminine influence
past the few reminders of Angeles Ansotegui’s brief life, a comb-and-brush set on her dresser, a few dresses in the closet,
and a ruffled floral-print apron that Pascual Ansotegui now wore while cooking.
As Pascual withdrew, physically and emotionally, the boys gradually took over the farm. Even young boys understand that chickens
need feed and eggs must be collected, so they completed these tasks without recognizing them as work. Even young boys understand
that stock need food for the winter, so they learned to swing the scythe through the musky alfalfa grass and fork the hay
high against the tall spindle that supported the stack.
When one of them came across a rotten egg, it became ammunition for an ambush of an unsuspecting brother. They dived together
into the cut grass before collecting it. They hid in the haystacks before spreading it for the stock. They rode the cows bareback
before they milked them. Piles of cordwood were forts before they became fuel for the hearth. Every chore was a contest: Who
could throw the pitchfork farthest? Who could run fastest to the well? Who could carry the most water?
Because each action was a competition or game, there was rarely a division of labor; the three shared each job and moved in
unison to the next. Virtual orphans, they were nonetheless content, and the farm operated in a surprisingly efficient atmosphere
of playful mayhem. But at times even the instincts of farm boys could not lead them to anticipate threats to stock or crops.
For three boys easily distracted by the ballistic possibilities of rancid eggs, surprises arose.
Had Pascual Ansotegui been conscious of the passing of the seasons, he would have reminded his sons that the ewes about to
lamb in the spring needed the protection of the shed. But in the first warm afternoons of spring, the shed was merely a wall
for young boys playing
pelota
. When Xabier clumsily sent the ball onto the roof and it wedged between cracked tiles, Justo retrieved the ladder and scaled
the canted shed, placing one foot dramatically on the peak, as if he had reached the summit of Mount Oiz. Josepe sensed in
his posture the potential for a new game.
“How about you get to stay up there until one of us hits you with sheep shit?” Josepe said, having retrieved several dried
dung biscuits.
As he took aim at his brother, Josepe spotted a sliver of darkness banking tight circles above the hillside. “Justo, Justo,
an eagle—are there lambs out there?” Josepe screamed.
“Get the gun!” Justo yelled, leaping down onto a bale and rolling off onto his feet.
Pascual Ansotegui’s rifl e was old before the turn of the century and the boys had never seen it fired. At thirteen, Justo
was as strong as some of the men in the village, but Pascual had never taught him how to shoot. Josepe could hardly heft the
iron weapon off the pegs in the shed. He dragged it to his brother with both hands at the end of the barrel, the butt bouncing
along the ground.
Justo took it from him, raised it to his shoulder, and waved the heavy barrel in the direction of the diving ea gle. Xabier
knelt in front of him and grabbed the stock with both hands, trying to buttress his big brother’s hold.
“Shoot him, Justo!” Josepe screamed. “Shoot him!”
With the rifle butt inches from his shoulder, Justo pulled the trigger. The shot exploded in the barrel, and the recoil thrust
Justo to the ground, bleeding from the side of his head. Xabier flattened out beside him, screaming from the noise. The shot
did not even startle the eagle, which was now applying a lethal clench of its talons into the neck of a tiny, still-wet lamb.
With Justo and Xabier down, Josepe charged. Before he could reach it, the ea gle extended its wings, hammered them several
times into the ground, and lifted off on a downhill swoop just over Josepe’s head.
Justo fought his way uphill to Josepe. Xabier, crying to the point of breathlessness, face freckled with his brother’s blood,
ran in sprints and tumbles to a neighbor’s house for help.
“Look for other newborns, and let’s get the ewes into the shed!” Justo shouted, regaining control. They saw no other lambs
that were vulnerable, and they both herded the oblivious mother ewe, still dragging birth tissue, into the shed.
The neighbors held Xabier to calm him. But what did he expect them to do? Where was his father, after all? “Boys your age
shouldn’t deal with these matters and certainly shouldn’t be shooting rifles; it’s a good thing none of our stock was harmed,”
they said. He couldn’t hear them over the painful ringing of his ears but read rejection in their faces.
“Well . . . fine!” Xabier yelled, breaking away to rejoin his brothers.
The shaken boys gathered in the shed and clutched the ewe, which was bothered not by the loss of its offspring, a development
it had already forgotten, but by the fierce embraces of these boys, one of whom was bleeding all over her wool.
When Pascual Ansotegui returned that evening, the boys stood in a line at the door, in descending order of age, and Justo
briefed his father on the events. Pascual nodded. Justo and Josepe accepted his minimal response. Xabier, though, flared with
indignation.
“Where were you?” yelled Xabier, a spindle-thin nine-year-old in third-hand overalls stained with blood.
Pascual stared without comment.
Xabier repeated the question.
“I was gone,” the father said.
“I know you were gone; you’re always gone,” Xabier said. “We’d get along just as well if you never came back.”
Pascual tilted his head, as if this would bring his youngest into clearer focus. He then turned away, pulled the floral apron
from its peg on the hearth, and began to make dinner.
Justo knew early that he, as the eldest, would someday assume sole control of Errotabarri, and his siblings understood that
they would inevitably find work elsewhere. If inequitable to the younger children, the pattern assured survival of the
baserri
culture. Justo Ansotegui would claim his birthright and become the latest in the chain of stewards of the land that extended
back to times when their ancestors painted animals onto walls in the nearby Santima-miñe caves.
Bequesting the farm to the eldest carried no guarantees. He who inherits the farm may never leave to discover other opportunities,
to go to sea, perhaps, or to a city like Bilbao. But to run the
baserri
was to shepherd the family trust, Justo believed. Still, he expected a period of apprenticeship to learn. For another year
or so after the lamb’s slaughter, Pascual Ansotegui unenthusiastically attended mass each morning, mouthing the responses.
He returned to church to pray in silence again in the evening, wandering unseen in between. Eventually, he stopped attending
mass, and one day he drifted off.
It took several days before Justo realized his father had gone missing. He alerted the neighbors, and small groups searched
the hillsides. When no evidence of death or life surfaced, the boys assumed that he had been swallowed up by a crevice or
a sinkhole, or that he just forgot to stop wandering.
Although the boys loved and missed their father, their affection for him was more out of habit than true sentiment. They noticed
little difference in his absence: They still performed the same chores and played the same games. Justo was now in charge.
“Here, this is yours now,” Josepe said to Justo, handing him the ruffled apron.
“
Eskerrik asko
,” Justo said, thanking his brother. He lifted the strap over his head and tied the worn sash behind his back in solemn ceremony.
“Wash up for dinner.”
He had the family
baserri
to run. He was fifteen.
When they were very young, the boys learned the history of Guernica and of Errotabarri. They learned it from their father,
before he drifted off, and from the people of the town who were proud of their heritage. From medieval times, Guernica was
a crossroads of the old Roman Way and the Fish and Wine Route that wound through the hills inland from the sea. Intersecting
them both was the pilgrims’ route to Santiago de Compostela. For centuries, representatives of the region met under the Guernica
oak to shape laws that outlawed torture and unwarranted arrest and granted unprece dented privileges to women. Although aligned
with the kingdom of Castile, they maintained their own legal system and demanded that the series of Castilian monarchs from
the time of Ferdinand and Isabella come stand, in person, beneath the oak of Guernica and swear to protect the Basque laws.
Because the economy of the region hadn’t evolved under the feudal system, the Basques owned their own land and were never
divided into sovereigns and serfs, merely farmers, fishermen, and craftsmen, free and in dependent of any overlord.
A
baserri
in Biscaya often came to have a name, which sometimes served as a surname for those living there, as if the land and the home
were the real ancestors. The home, after all, would outlive the inhabitants and maybe even the family name. They presumed
that a well-structured building, like family relationships, genuine love, and one’s reputation, would be timeless if protected
and properly maintained.
At the time Justo Ansotegui assumed control of Errotabarri, a thorny hedgerow outlined the lower perimeter of the farm, and
a platoon of poplars flanked the northern, windward edge. Crops were cultivated on the southern side of the house, bordered
by several rows of fruit trees. Pastureland spread above the home, rising to a patchy stand of burly oaks, cypress, and waxy
blue-gray eucalyptus. The trees thinned out just beneath a granite outcrop that marked the upper border of the property.
The house resembled others near Guernica. It required the boys to annually whitewash the stucco sides above a stone-and-mortar
base and to restain the oxblood wooden trim and shutters. Each stone-silled window accommodated planter boxes of geraniums,
providing dashes of red across both levels and all aspects. Even as a young, single man, Justo sustained these floral touches
that had been important to his mother.
As with many a
baserri
on a hillside, the house was wedged into the slope. The lower floor, with wide double doors on the downhill side, housed the
stock in the winter months. The upper floor, with a ground-level door on the uphill side, was home to the family. The housing
of cows and sheep in the same building protected the animals from the cold, and they returned the favor by warming the upper
level with their rising body heat.
Inside, a large central room held the kitchen, dining, and living areas, with rough-cut oak columns supporting exposed quarter-sawn
rafters. The hearth extended inward from a corner of the kitchen. Seed corn was nailed to the beams to dry, and herbs for
cooking and medicine cured in the warmth above the hearth. Interwoven vines of red peppers hung from the support column closest
to the kitchen, next to the dangling links of chorizo that lent a heavy garlic scent to the room.
An unknown ancestor had carved the
lauburu
into the lintel above the house’s main door. This four-headed symbol of their race, like a spinning clover leaf, bracketed
their lives, appearing on everything from cradles to tombstones.
Each former master of the land inadvertently bequeathed items to Justo. He still stacked hay on tall wooden spikes that had
been carved generations before. And the iron shears he used in the shed had snipped wool from sheep dead a century. Some of
the smaller items offered wordless mysteries from the edge of the mantel; there was a small bronze horse with its head reared
high and an iron coin bearing unknown symbols.
During Justo’s proprietorship, the apron was likewise memorialized, draped from a nail in the mantel. And before he would
pass, the mantel also would support a length of braided human hair so dark that it absorbed light.
Swatting the rump of a reluctant donkey to keep it grinding up the steep trail, Pablo Picasso chuckled when he considered
how his friends in Paris would react to the vision of him in such a position. That he would think of them now, here in the
Pyrenees, was a symptom of the problem. There had been too much getting in the way of his art in Paris. And this mountain
trail to Gósol, with the lovely Fernande on a donkey beside him, was his path away from all that.