Baina gaua dator, joan dira sapelaitsak, eta trikuak,
Marraskilo, Zizare, Zomorro, Armiarma, Igel,
Erreka utzi eta mendiaren pendizari ekiten dio,
seguru bere arantsetaz nola egon baitzitekeen
Gerlari bat bere eskutuaz, Espartan edo Korinton;
Eta bapatean, zeharkatu egiten du
belardiaren eta kamio berriaren arteko muga;
Zure eta nire denboran sartzen de pauso bakar batez,
Eta nola here hiztegi unibertsala ez den
azkeneko zazpi mila urteotan berritu,
ez ditu ezagutzen gure automobilaren argiak,
ez da ohartzen bere heriotzaren hurbiltasunaz ere.
Eventually night falls, the eagles disappear and the hedgehog,
Frog, Snail, Spider, Worm, Insect,
Leaves the river and walks up the side of the mountain,
as confident in his spines
as any warrior with his shield in Sparta or in Corinth;
and suddenly he crosses the border, the line
that separates the earth and the grass from the new road;
with one step he enters your time
and mine, and since his dictionary of the universe
has not been corrected or updated
in the last seven thousand years,
he does not recognize the lights of our car,
and does not even realize that he is going to die.
—Joseba Irazu Garmendia, a.k.a. Bernardo Atxaga,
TRIKUARENA
(The Hedgehog)
ON AUGUST 2, 1968, Melitón Manzanas, a hated San Sebastián police captain, was returning to Villa Arana, his three-story home in Irún within walking distance of the French border. As he approached the steps to his house, he heard the words, “Melitón, look who’s killing you.”
He fumbled for a sidearm, but with his wife listening on the other side of the door, seven bullets were pumped into his body. This was “Operation Sagarra.” In Euskera, sagarra means “apples,” as does manzanas in Spanish. ETA humor.
It was ETA’s second killing and first planned assassination. Txabi was avenged.
The target was well chosen. Others had been considered, even attempted, but the victim, Manzanas, was as loathed as Tkabi had been loved. In Basqueland the vengeance was viewed with satisfaction.
The regime responded on cue. The assassination occurred on a Friday and Franco declared a state of siege throughout Basqueland on Monday. It lasted for months, and thousands of Basques were arrested and tortured. Some were sentenced to years in prison. Once the state of siege was under way, the Basque Nationalist Party said through one of its publications, for the first time since 1947, that it was not opposed to the use of violence.
The repression culminated with the December 1970 trials in Burgos. The Burgos trials, show trials of sixteen alleged ETA members charged with “military rebellion, banditism, and terrorism,” were the kind of disaster for Franco that ETA members had always dreamed of provoking. From the courtroom they shouted, “Gora Euskadi!,” and sang the hymn “Eusko gudariak gera.” ETA had returned Basques to their image of the 1930s and 1940s—the heroic Basques, standing up to fascism. The one new addition was an occasionally shouted slogan: “Iraultza ala hil!” Revolution or Death, a line borrowed from the Cuban Revolution. International intellectual celebrities such as the Catalan painter Joan Miró declared their support for ETA. After three ETA members were condemned to death in Burgos, demonstrations broke out, not only in Bilbao and Pamplona but in Barcelona, Seville, Oviedo, and Madrid. The governments of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, West Germany, France, Belgium, the Vatican, and Australia petitioned the Spanish government not to carry out the sentences.
Franco’s close advisers convinced the aging and confused Caudillo, after considerable resistance on his part, that it would be a blunder to carry out the death sentences, and he reluctantly commuted them to life imprisonment.
AS IN MOST PLACES in the world, in Basqueland the late 1960s was both the worst and best of times to be attending a university. Franco had barred public universities from the “traitor provinces,” but there were two private universities: Deusto, run by the Jesuits in Bilbao, and the more prestigious University of Pamplona, run by the Opus Dei, an elite conservative Catholic lay order. To attend the public university system, most Basques had to leave, go to Madrid or Zaragoza.
However, it had always been Franco’s policy, while repressing the Basques, to nurture Basque industry. This meant that a few university facilities teaching such subjects as economics and engineering had to be available in Bilbao. The economics school in Bilbao was called Sarriko. The government did not want a university in Basqueland full of dissident students studying literature, history, and political science, but those who were interested in engineering, steelmaking, or banking could go to school in Vizcaya.
By 1968, Franco’s plan had clearly failed. Many young Basques had decided to study economics. Txabi, the singular hero of the student body, had been an economics graduate from Sarriko. Deusto, across the river from the center of Bilbao, was known as a breeding ground for militant Basque nationalism. But Sarriko students thought the radicals of Deusto were too moderate, and said they “hid behind the skirts of the Jesuits.”
“Txabi was a strong model, he still is,” said Joseba Irazu, who, like many Sarriko students of the late 1960s, was an unlikely economics student. He had chosen the school largely because he wanted to stay in Basque country, and he had chosen economics because it was taught there.
Joseba Irazu Garmendia was born in 1951 in Asteasu, a village of stone-walled Basque houses tucked into the velvet green mountain slopes of Guipúzcoa. Although only twenty miles inland from San Sebastián, it was then an isolated community of 1,000 people that waited for two Spanish newspapers to be delivered once a day by donkey. Joseba grew up speaking Euskera at home with his carpenter father and his schoolteacher mother, who had been expelled from the school system because she was Basque. In Asteasu, most people spoke Euskera in their houses, but once they passed the front door, they switched to Spanish.
The new teachers, the ones who had replaced teachers like Joseba’s mother, were pro-Franco. Joseba described his teacher as “Fascist but sensible.” The sensible Fascist once made him hold out his fingers to beat the tips with a stick after Joseba had been overheard speaking Euskera. But the teacher did not do this very often, because he remembered his predecessor, who, after beating the fingertips of two husky Euskera-speaking boys, was tossed out the schoolhouse window by them. “We have a guerrilla tradition,” explained Joseba.
By the late 1960s, when Joseba decided to study economics at Sarriko, Basque life and especially the Basque language were changing. In the 1960s, with limited U.S. help but still largely in isolation, Franco had finely been able to move the Spanish economy—by subsidizing Basque industry. After centuries of being highly competitive in the world, this industry had now become absurdly overblown. Instead of the cheapest steel in Europe, the Basques now produced some of the most expensive. The government was covering the high cost of production and guaranteeing a price-controlled Spanish market. Like Franco himself, this false economy was certain to collapse, but the end was not in sight. For now Spain, especially northern Spain, was enjoying some relief from years of misery.
Without the crushing pressure of economic collapse, the Basques, defiant again, were expressing themselves through culture. “For years the Basque society had been underground like a potato,” Joseba said. “And in the 1960s a new Basque country was born.”
Traditional folk festivals that had been banned after the Civil War were being celebrated once again, and traditional dances and music began reappearing. In 1960, three ikastolas, the first since the Civil War, were opened. While studying economics, Joseba for the first time heard songs, ballads of political protest, in his language.
Singers such as Benito Lertxundi from Guipúzcoa, and a number of singers from the French side, including the mayor of Cambo, Michel Labéguerie, sang songs that every student knew by heart, in a style the Cuban Revolution had learned from Joan Baez and popularized with all the leftist movements of the Spanish-speaking world. Because Franco did not understand the impact of 45 rpm records, college campuses had stacks of Lertxundi’s songs of Basque nationalism sung in Euskera.
“Only 10 percent of the students spoke Basque,” Joseba said, “but everyone knew how to say strike in Basque—greba.”
The most significant cultural advance of the 1960s was that the Basque Academy of Language at last realized its dream of unifying the Basque language. Although the earliest record of written Basque is from the third century, it remained mostly an oral language until the twentieth century. The reason for its slow development as a written language was not, as Unamuno had suggested, that agglutinating languages are unsuitable for literature. The problem was that Euskera varied so much from one region to another. The local dialect worked well for talking to a neighbor. It asserted intimacy, membership in a community. But Spanish, the universal language, was preferred for writing something down to be read by a large number of people.
Seven distinct dialects of Euskera are spoken: one from each of the seven provinces, with an eighth in eastern Navarra known as Alto Navarra Meridionale. Many of the differences stem from pronunciation. Dut, from the verb “to have,” becomes det in Guipúzcoa and dot in Vizcaya.
The aspirated h is the most unique phoneme in Euskera. That slightly aspirated “ha” on the h separates Euskalduns from Spanish speakers. The Spanish call Hondarribbia Fuenterrabía, because they cannot say the h. Yet neither can all Basques. In the Roncal Valley, near Roncesvalles, the h becomes a k, and in another valley h is pronounced like a g.
Generally, Basques can understand each other, though there are moments, such as Txillardegi’s call for clandestine ducks, when the meaning is entirely changed. Vizcaya and Soule, the two geographic extremes of Basqueland, are also the linguistic extremes of Euskera. The geographically central dialects, especially Guipúzcoan, are more easily understood by most Basques than Vizcayan or Souletine. But even Guipúzcoan, which is not only from a centrally located province but also from the province with the largest number of Euskera speakers, is not a universal Basque. Without a common written language, a Basque writer had a minuscule readership—only Euskera readers of the author’s native province. In 1571, a Bible was published in Euskera with a prologue that said, “We should try to find the most common language possible.” But such a universal Euskera did not exist. Some authors wrote in several dialects. The first novelist in Euskera, the late-nineteenth-century romantic Domingo de Aguirre, was from the Vizcayan port of Ondarroa but tried to increase his readership by writing some of his novels in Vizcayan dialect and others in Guipúzcoan. Even after the Basque Academy of Language was founded in 1918 with the stated goal of finding a common written language, it took decades to develop it. Impatiently, Xabier de Lizardi, one of the most influential Basque writers of the early twentieth century, wrote poetry in a unified language of his own invention. But most Euskera readers found it difficult to understand.
In the 1960s, the Basque academy established a common written language, which was called Batua. The twenty-four-member academy, each member representing a different linguistic tendency, tried to identify the word forms that were most commonly used. This often led them to the Guipúzcoan version. They also favored the older version over the contemporary, but rejected words and forms that were no longer in use.
AT THE AGE of twenty, Joseba Irazu for the first time read a novel in his mother tongue. He began meeting with underground groups, learning how to write in the secret language.
But campuses were busy places in the 1960s. “I am not proud of it, but I didn’t learn anything at university. We were always on strike,” said Joseba. Militants from the Basque Nationalist Party were the first to take over a Bilbao radio station. ETA members on campus soon did the same. But neither group was as active at Sarriko as the Communists. The Maoists emerged there as a highly organized group. Their small armed faction occasionally bombed a factory. “Cultural meetings” were held in which “the anticolonial struggle” and Che Guevara were discussed.
The police would sometimes enter the campus with helmets and clubs. The students did not fear them the way they did the Guardia Civil. The Guardia Civil rarely came onto the campus, but when it did, students disappeared, a terror technique learned from its onetime ally, the Nazis.
With his healthy Basque distrust of doctrines, Joseba steered around most of the radical groups. When the Maoists asked, he did translate their political tracts into Euskera. But he joined nothing. When he says now that he didn’t learn anything, he means in the field of economics. But he and an entire generation of innovative and talented writers learned how to write in their native language while studying other subjects in the universities of the late 1960s. It was their revolution.
Teaching Euskera was not allowed, but the Basque Nationalist Party and ETA offered “cultural events” that amounted to courses in Batua. Joseba’s teacher was a Basque Nationalist Party activist who, in between cultural events, more than once helped take over the radio station.
Joseba, who had always wanted to be a writer, at first found it difficult to imagine working in the secret language of his parents. That began to change when he met an infirm poet, old before his time, named Gabriel Aresti. Born in Bilbao in 1933, Aresti did not grow up speaking Euskera and was one of the first Euskaldunberri, literally, “new Basque speaker,” a non-Euskera speaker who learned the language through adult education. He went on to become one of the most influential writers of the new language. Although not a nationalist in the political sense—he was closer to the Spanish Communist Party than the nationalists—he was a passionate lover of Basqueness. His 1964 collection of poems, Harri eta Herri (Rock and People), earned him the affection of nationalists and a summons before a disapproving tribunal. But he also greatly expanded the language through such projects as translating the poetry of T. S. Eliot.
Joseba began writing poems and short stories and publishing them in underground magazines, using the name Bernardo Atxaga to protect his true identity. Aresti, having read some of the stories, sent a note telling him that there were only five real writers in Euskera. “If you keep away from the purists you could be the sixth.”
By purists, he meant the “Sabino school,” which rejected all Latin words, denied the evolution of the language, and pretended that a purely Basque language existed. Many of Arana’s invented words, such as Euskadi, had become established in the vocabulary. But there was heated debate about whether such creative linguistics should continue. Linguistic political correctness is one of the oldest controversies in the Basque Academy, of which Aresti was a member. The academy wants Euskera to be a usable, not necessarily a pure, language. Where Spanish words have become common usage, the academy kept them in Batua; modern computer terms have been adopted from the English language. “Batua is a unification of the written language,” said Juan San Martin, who was secretary of the academy in 1968 and a close associate of Aresti. “The only new language came from Sabino Arana, who made up words. We do not invent words. We are opposed to invented words.”
Gabriel Aresti died in 1975, the same year as Franco. The poet was only forty-two. Aside from his work, he left behind the young writers he influenced, the most important generation of writers in the long history of the Basque language.
No one is a prophet
in his own time.
Again I have come
to the idea,
if I had no wife or children
with pleasure
would I die
because Basque rock
would ponder my words.
—Gabriel Aresti, NERE MENDEAN,
(In My Time), 1967
FRANCO GREW OLDER, his regime looking every year more like something dusty and Baroque in a tasteless out-of-the-way museum. But he did not fall from power. There in Spain, in the 1970s, was Europe’s remaining 1930s strutting dictator.
It never went smoothly, but Franco always managed to survive. What small resistance to his regime that he was unable to quell by force served only as an embarrassment to a regime that, in the eyes of the world, never would achieve respectability. In spite of ETA and the Basque nationalists, Franco could vacation in San Sebastián without incident. In September 1970, he attended the pelota national championships. Joseba Elósegi, captain of the only Basque unit to have been in Guernica the day of the bombing, ran out to the fronton, set himself on fire, shouted “Gora Euskadi askatuta!” and leaped from the wall almost fifteen feet, landing in front of Franco.
When he recovered from his burns, Elósegi was sentenced to seven years in prison. He had been in prison before. Franco’s troops had condemned him to death in 1937, but he had escaped to France. The Nazis had imprisoned him, but he had escaped again. In 1946, he had been arrested for flying the ikurriña from a church during a Fascist celebration.
Shortly after the Elósegi incident, U.S. president Richard Nixon arrived in Spain. Accompanying him was his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, whose impression was that the entire country was “waiting for a life to end so that it could rejoin European history.” Nixon had come to Spain hoping for a reception as large as Eisenhower had gotten, and Franco obliged him. But the long motorcade from the airport, with the cheering crowd, both paid and unpaid, appeared to have tired the seventy-eight-year-old Franco. When Nixon sat down for talks with him, the aged Caudillo dozed off, leaving the president to talk with an adviser. Reportedly, Kissinger nodded off as well.
As though he feared denting the myth of his own indestructibility, Franco did little to arrange a succession. He had played a cunning game with the heir to the throne, Don Juan, spurning his attempts at establishing a constitutional monarchy. When the pretender’s son, Juan Carlos, was ten years old, Franco had gotten Don Juan to agree to remain in exile while permitting Juan Carlos to be educated in Spain. Juan Carlos’s education, administered by Franco’s most ardent followers, was ostensibly to groom him for monarchy.
Though he hated Don Juan, who had called for an end to the regime in 1945, Franco liked Juan Carlos and thought he could make a respectable figurehead of no great weight who would not interfere with the Caudillo’s henchmen. But for years the Caudillo refused to name him as successor, and when he finally did, in 1969, he made the announcement suddenly, without warning the prince. But young Juan Carlos was not to be a true confidant. The only one Franco entrusted to fill in, should he fall ill, the man who was to look after things once Franco died, was the ever loyal Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, who had worked his way up from an undersecretary in 1942 to prime minister in June 1973. ETA called him “the Ogre.”
BY THE END of 1973, ETA had allegedly killed six people, though not all of the killings were claimed by or ever proved to be done by ETA. Since 1968, the Guardia Civil and police had killed 14, wounded by gunshot 52, and arrested without trial 4,356 Basques. Between 1956 and 1975, the regime declared eleven states of emergency. All but one of them were in Basque country. Five of them were exclusively in Basque country. Random arrests were whittling down ETA’s small ranks. The number of active ETA members in 1973 was a fraction of the estimated 600 in the late 1960s.
And yet ETA’s scenario was not unfolding. Basques were not rising up in revolution in the face of stepped-up repression, and if they did, Spaniards were clearly not going to follow. Kissinger had been right. The country was just waiting for the death of one man.
Following the Burgos trials, ETA started developing a new plan. Its commandos reasoned that if they could kidnap a Spanish official, he could be traded for a number of their imprisoned colleagues. But it would have to be a high official, not some unguarded diplomat who might be easy to grab but would not be important enough to obtain the release of a large number of prisoners.
In late 1972, two ETA operatives in Madrid were told by an informant that the Ogre, Admiral Carrero Blanco, went to Mass at the Jesuit church of San Francisco de Borja on Calle Serrano every day at the same time in his black Dodge, accompanied by two police officers—sometimes only one.
“Operation Ogre” was born. ETA commandos began to stalk Carrero Blanco. They knew the movements of the guard, of the chauffeur, and of the Ogre himself. He was easy to get close to inside the church. But the longer they stalked him, the more they thought about killing him. A kidnapping would gain them back some imprisoned militants, but assassinating the man they saw as “the symbol of pure Francoism” would have far-reaching political repercussions.
Later, one of the commandos said, “Everyone knew that the Spanish oligarchy was counting on Carrero to assure a convulsion-free transition to Francoism without Franco.” The more they pondered the quarry within their sights, the more they realized that this was the target, the man who could keep Francoism alive. Even killing Franco, who surely would die soon, would not strike the blow that this assassination would. This was more important than liberating prisoners.
But also, a kidnapping would be much more difficult than assassination. The church was in an area of embassies and consulates and many guards. After June, when the admiral became prime minister, his security increased and kidnapping seemed even more difficult. The ETAcommandos contemplated a shooting, then turned to the idea of an explosion detonated by electric cable from a distance. Then they realized that since the black Dodge stopped at the exact same spot every morning, they could dig a shallow tunnel and place high explosives in the spot, detonating it from a distance without anyone ever seeing them.
On December 20, 1973, another of Franco’s show trials, public exhibits of injustice that perpetuated Spain’s low standing among Western nations, was to begin. This was to be a trial of trade unionists. Carrero Blanco went to Mass as usual, parking his car at 9:30 in the usual place. One hundred and sixty-five pounds of dynamite sent the car several stories into the air over the top of a building. According to one immediate and popular joke, the admiral had become the first Spanish astronaut. “Una bache mas, un cabron menos,” One more pothole, one less asshole, was another popular comment.
The ETA commandos had covered their retreat by shouting about a gas explosion, and Franco’s staff, either out of confusion or fearing his rage, had initially told the Caudillo that his closest associate really had died in a gas explosion. Franco repeatedly muttered, “These things happen” and went into a deep depression. By the next day’s cabinet meeting, he understood what had really happened, and staring at the admiral’s empty chair, he wept.
IT IS DIFFICULT to say to what extent the dynamite on Calle Serrano changed Spanish history. Carrero was replaced by Carlos Arias Navarro, a brutal leader, notorious for his war crimes during the Civil War. But Arias Navarro was unable to hold power. Would Carrero Blanco have done better?
Whatever is the judgment of history, at the time the assassination was widely seen as the end of Francoism. The stagnating nation felt exhilarated. Leaders such as Felipe González, Communist chief and Second Republic veteran Santiago Carillo, and both Basque and Catalan leaders began secretly meeting to plan for a transition to democracy.
By September 1975, ETA was suspected of a total of thirty-eight killings, whereas during the same period the police and Civil Guard had only killed thirty-three Basques. On September 27, Franco had five political prisoners, including two accused ETA members, shot by a firing squad of Guardia Civil volunteers. The Spanish Basques went on strike. The French Basques demonstrated in Bayonne. An angry crowd set the Spanish Embassy in Lisbon on fire. The French government protested the executions. Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme called the members of the Spanish government “murderers.” Mexican president Luis Álvarez Echevarría, of Basque ancestry, himself notorious for suppression of student demonstrations, asked for the expulsion of Spain from the United Nations. All the leading European trade unions called for the boycott of Spain, fifteen European countries withdrew their ambassadors, and Spanish embassies faced demonstrations around the world. But Franco was still alive, still in power, still killing.
THE PLAZA DE ORIENTE in Madrid is an oval-shaped area in front of the Royal Palace. The streets around it are short and lead in seemingly random directions, but whichever direction is taken, ending up in the plaza is almost inevitable. On October 1, 1975, a crisp fall day with a bright blue sky, anyone milling around those little central Madrid streets felt helplessly sucked into the plaza by a growing crowd that looked like a cross section of Spain. Many were well dressed, though some looked like workers. The elderly, the ubiquitous amputees from the Civil War, and the newly emerging middle class and teenagers, even some children, were there. Overhead in the flawless cornflower blue sky, a plane circled, trailing a red-and-yellow banner that said, “Arriba España,” Forward Spain.
Suddenly, what seemed to be an eighty-pound man, a frail and bald figure with uncertain steps, appeared on the palace balcony almost as though he had drifted out there in his confusion. A thousand right arms stiffened and snapped straight out at forty-five-degree angles, repeating the Fascist salute over and over again while shouting in unison, “Franco! Franco! Franco!”
Under the “Forward Spain” banner, as if the past forty years had never happened, the Europe of the 1930s was alive in Madrid. The elderly man spoke in his wheezing, squeaky voice of the grave menaces to society: the Freemasons and the Communists. The voice was difficult to hear, but was anyone there who had not heard all this before? The crowd responded with their mantra and their stiff arms, and Franco weakly raised his two shaking arms in reply, then drifted behind a curtain, never to be seen by his public again.