Basque History of the World (43 page)

Few Basques have made better use of the new nation than Bernardo Atxaga. Starting in the emerging Euskera publishing industry, and then having his works translated into Spanish and eventually, other languages including English, he has become the most widely read author in the history of the Basque language. His 1988 novel,
Obabakoak
, meaning “Things from Obaba,” is a cycle of stories centered on a fictitious Guipúzcoan village. As of 1998, it had sold 45,000 copies in Euskera, a considerable accomplishment in a language with less than 1 million speakers. The Spanish translation sold 70,000 copies, and it has also been translated into fourteen other languages.

Before Atxaga, it was rare for a writer in Euskera to be translated and almost unheard of for them to be translated into languages other than French or Spanish.

Between the first book published in 1545 and 1974, 4,000 books were published in Euskera. In the next twenty years another 12,500 were published. Atxaga said that he started in Euskera by reading Aresti, and three years later he had read every book in Euskera available to him. That would no longer be possible. About 1,000 titles are now published in Euskera every year, including novels, poetry, nonfiction, academic books, children’s books, and translations of classics and best-sellers.

For a very long time, publishing a book in Euskera was a purely political act. The first book entirely in Basque was a collection of both religious and secular poems published in Bordeaux in 1545, written by a priest, Bernard Dechepare, who made his intentions clear in the opening paragraph: “Since the Basques are smart, valiant and generous, and since among them are men well educated in all the sciences, I am amazed that no one has attempted in the interest of his own language, to show the entire world, by writing, that this language is as good a written language as any other.”

Modern Basque publishing began while Franco was in power. Elkar was created in 1972, established as a French nonprofit company based in Bayonne, with twenty small investors, including some Spanish Basque refugees. The little company produced records of popular music in Euskera that earned money to help finance book publishing. After the death of Franco, some of the refugees returned to Spain and established a second base in San Sebastián. With its twin bases, Elkar became the largest publisher of Euskera, but soon many others appeared. Some were financed by Vizcayan banks, the Basque Nationalist Party, or the governments of the three provinces or of Navarra.

A daily newspaper in Euskera was established, along with several weeklies, magazines, and children’s publications. Basque radio and television stations broadcast on both sides of the Pyrenees. The Basque government also supported a young film industry in Euskera.

In addition to the education of Basque youth, 100,000 adult Basques have learned Euskera since Atxaga began his career. The total market is still small. Atxaga recognized that as a great opportunity. “We have the advantage and disadvantage of scale,” he said. “We can do a lot of different things.” Not yet fifty, he had published more than eight novels, twenty children’s books, poetry, essays, and lyrics for his favorite rock band—all in his once forbidden native language. It is the enviable position of a leading artist in a very small country. The ubiquitous Eduardo Chillida is in a similar position, designing monuments in such defining spaces as the oak tree in Guernica, but also designing the logo for the amnesty movement and the trademark for Guipúzcoa’s provincial savings and pension bank.

Jorge de Oteiza, a generation older than the aging Chillida and a founding father of modern Basque abstract sculpture, has not seized these opportunities. The most important collection of his work is stacked on the floor of his studio in the Guipúzcoan coastal town of Zarautz, while he, the five foot tall, white-bearded, nonagenarian enfant terrible of Basque art, shakes his cane and rails against selling art for money. As he sits in his favorite Zarautz restaurant denouncing “the other sculptor’s” productivity, a metal plaque shines on the wall from the Kutxo bank, bearing their familiar logo, designed by Chillida.

Atxaga is an elfin man whose work always displays a mischievous humor. His popularity may come from being that old-fashioned kind of Basque who, although rooted in his little country, is an internationalist at heart. His writing makes references to American popular culture, to German politics, to the world at large.

On chance encounters with old friends and former schoolmates from his San Sebastián high school, they often greet him in Euskera, good mother-tongue Guipúzcoan, and for the first time he realizes that they had that language in common all along, though they had never dared to speak it to each other.

Many things have changed since those times. The young woman at Sarriko who invited him to “a cultural meeting” for Maoist indoctrination had left long ago and, in the late 1990s, was still a guerrilla in El Salvador. Another classmate was killed in El Salvador. One of the head Maoists at the university became an important technocrat in the Basque government working on tax policy.

An unpretentious man of simple origins, Atxaga is nevertheless aware of the absurd fact that he may be the Shakespeare of his language. What he does with Batua could well affect generations, possibly even centuries, of writers. Euskera literature is new enough to offer a creative freedom that few other languages could. With that freedom comes difficult choices. There are words in Euskera that are not in common usage, and he worries that they interfere with the narrative flow. Yet he does not want to limit the richness of the vocabulary. “I would say that the first duty of literary language is to be unobtrusive. And that is our weak point, because we lack antecedents.”

Ramón Saizarbitoria, though of the same generation with the same early influences, is almost the opposite of Atxaga. Born in 1944 in San Sebastián, he is seven years older. Atxaga’s stocky physique, friendly manner, and rumpled appearance suggest his upbringing in rural Guipúzcoa. Saizarbitoria, an urbane native of the most sophisticated Basque city, is tall, thin, impeccably dressed, with a carefully trimmed only slightly graying beard, a slow, careful manner, and a quiet, reflective way of speaking. While Atxaga lives in a village in Alava, Saizarbitoria lives in the heart of San Sebastián, with an office along a wide downtown boulevard that has long been favored for political demonstrations because its many escape routes make it impossible for the police to seal off.

While Atxaga struggled with the local authorities in his village for speaking his native Euskera, Saizarbitoria seldom had occasion to speak it outside of his home. In the San Sebastián of Saizarbitoria’s childhood, Euskera was the language of rural people who had immigrated to the big city, people like his parents. Nobody in his school spoke Euskera. “There were not even songs in Euskera. There was no need to prohibit it,” said Saizarbitoria. “People who spoke Euskera were suspected of being nationalists. But also there was a sense of shame in speaking the language of farmers and peasants and poor people.”

For years, nationalists struggled with this class image of Euskera as the language of peasants. The lower-class status of the language was often more image than reality. Many educated people spoke Euskera, and in some towns, notably the metalworking center of Eibar, Euskera was the language of both workers and management, a prerequisite for working in a factory even for an inmigrante from Andalusia.

Like Atxaga, Saizarbitoria found his inspiration in the invention of Batua and the works of Gabriel Aresti. Published in 1969, Saizarbitoria’s first novel,
Egunero hasten delako
(Because It Begins Every Day), was about abortion, which was legal in the rest of Europe but banned in Spain. The book’s subject and lean, carefully crafted prose launched a new genre in Euskera literature— the modern social novel.

His second novel was published after Franco’s death, in 1976. Titled
100 metro
, 100 Meter, it relates the thoughts of an ETA suspect in the last moments of his life, chased a final 100 meters, before being shot to death.

Saizarbitoria was never an ETA activist, but he was a sympathizer he said, “like almost everyone.” He has remained resolutely political. “I want to defend my culture and my identity, and sometimes nationalism is the only possibility. When I am with nationalists I am against them, but when I am with others I am a nationalist.

J
OSÉ
L
UIS
A
LVAREZ
E
NPARANTZA
, known to most Basques as Txillardegi, is a professor of Basque philology, the sociology and linguistics of Euskera, at the San Sebastián campus of the Universidad de País Vasco, University of Basqueland. His baggy corduroys and akimbo hair display stereotypical professorial disorder. On his office wall is a 1914 “ethnographic map of Europe” showing areas where Basque, Irish, and Breton were spoken, Greek-speaking enclaves in Turkey, all the rebellious niches of European language. By the late 1990s, he had authored some twenty books, including essays on linguistics, a mathematical analysis of linguistics, five respected novels, and lyrical poetry.

Where now stands the icily white, contemporary campus of this disheveled professor, in 1929 was the rural neighborhood where he was born. The rebel is still there. Until 1998, he taught only in Euskera, and when the university insisted that it wanted to offer a course taught in Spanish, he refused, until it threatened to hire a second professor of Basque philology.

The promotion of the Basque language remains the first goal of most nationalists, and although huge strides have been made, there is still much to do. Most of the business of the Basque government is still done in Spanish. Although Euskera is a requirement for nonpolitical government jobs, many elected politicians, even from the Basque Nationalist Party, do not speak it. In 1998, many Basque politicians were angered because the proposed candidate for lehendakari, Juan José Ibarretxe, could not speak Euskera well.

The most visible language fight is over signs on the highway. Slowly, names are changing back to the Basque spelling. Many are easy to understand. Guernica in Euskera is Gernika. Bilbao is Bilbo. But San Sebastián is Donostia, Vitoria is Gasteiz, Pamplona is Iruña, Fuenterrabía is Hondarribia. The only solution that would not lead to thousands of outsiders getting lost on the highway is to do what any small country with an obscure language might do, print names in two languages. But for twenty years, vigilante nationalists have been spray-painting away the Spanish names. The result is exactly what was intended: Anybody who spends any time in Basqueland knows the towns by their Basque names.

“H
OPE RISES FROM
their hearts to their lips like a song from heaven,” wrote José Antonio Aguirre. “That is why the Basques are always singing.” Song is the oldest art form in Euskera and the most profitable one. Some of the large choruses founded in nineteenth-century nationalism are in fashion again. Benito Lertxundi’s acoustic guitar and protest songs have never fallen out of fashion. Trains, shops, and public buildings pipe in his music, including the old underground songs that teenagers used to whistle at Guardia Civil—daring to think in Euskera in front of them.

As in the 1930s, anything Basque is prospering, and that includes Basque sports. Basques are again attending the goat races and wood-chopping contests, the ports are again hosting ardently contested regattas, and the always popular pelota has more fans than ever before. They are not as drawn to the long-basket jai alai from St. Pée that Basques had popularized in the Americas, but to bare-handed pelota. Appealing to the same old-fashioned machismo as the wood chopping and other tests of strength, this sport uses two or four players, armed with nothing but their bare hands with which to smack a ball somewhat smaller than and just as hard as a baseball. Bare-handed matches have a quality of theater to the way they are played on three walls with the imaginary fourth wall opened to an audience. Since there is no racquet, it is an ambidextrous two-handed game. No athlete ever looked more naked than the bare-handed pelota player with no equipment but carefully placed bandages to protect the two bare hands. It seems the entire body goes into the hand as it slaps the hard little ball.

The many other variations of pelota with baskets and paddles of different sizes were designed to make the ball go faster, making it harder to return, but in a bare-handed match the point is scored by carefully setting up the opponent through the placement of the ball over a series of volleys.

The players used to come from families of players, and many still do. Retegi II, born in 1954, won championships almost every year in the 1980s and 1990s. Tintin III was another leading player. The numbers after their names indicate the number of generations of champions. Panpi LaDouche, the greatest champion from the French provinces, was trained by his father in the family court in the village of Ascain in the Nivelle Valley. His legal name is Jean-Pierre, because until recently, parents were not allowed to register their children’s birth certificates in France with a non-French first name.