Basque History of the World (46 page)

French and Spanish customs at Behobie Bridge in the early twentieth century.

What had once been guard stations now were papered over with advertising and a few posters for wanted Basques, torn edges flapping in the breeze. The correct way through, around all the parked trucks, seemed anyone’s guess. Everyone kept more or less to the right of wherever the trucks parked. But if any rules did exist, there were no police or officials of any kind watching anyway.

Behobie offered a similar scene. It was as though the truck drivers, missing their stop with the customs officials, just stopped there anyway.

At the Roncesvalles pass, France becomes Spain at the little stone bridge over the Nive in the village of Arnéguy. Arnéguy is centered on a church and a fronton. A 1920 photograph shows fans from Spain gathered on their side of the bridge to watch a pelote match in the Arnéguy fronton on the other side. There is also a customs house and a shop that sells products from all over France. Until a few years ago, a French flag flew on the little stone bridge, where gendarmes inspected papers and packages. After crossing the bridge and leaving Arnéguy, the traveler climbed along the edge of a mountain to another Basque village, Valcarlos. In Valcarlos was a store selling goods from all over Spain, and a Spanish flag flying, and the Guardia Civil, waiting to inspect papers and packages. Like Arnéguy, Valcarlos has a church and a fronton court. The two villages are much the same except that Arnéguy is at the bottom of a valley and Valcarlos up on the slopes. Both have the same red-trimmed whitewashed architecture. The people of both villages speak Basque.

The customs house in Arnéguy is now closed, the gendarmes and Guardia Civil have left their stations, and the flags are gone. The stores are still there, but without tariffs there is no advantage to buying in one town or the other. A traveler who does not remember from before can drive from Arnéguy, through the pass to the heights of Ibañeta where Roland died, and never know where France has changed into Spain. No one is going to send an army through to fight over the difference anymore.

Jeanine Pereuil said with her customary nostalgia, “You used to hide a little bottle of Pernod in your clothes and nervously smile at the customs official. Now, it’s not any fun at all to go across.”

W
HATEVER THE FEELINGS
in the rest of Spain, a united Europe is an idea that resonates with the Basques. They are not always happy with the way this new giant Europe is run. To the left, it seems too friendly to corporations and not open to individuals and small business. The dichotomy between large and free, which Hugo promised would not exist, sometimes seems a reality.

But the idea of not having a border through their middle, of Europeans being borderless and tariffless partners, seems to many Basques to be what they call “a natural idea.” “If Europe works, our natural region will be reinforced,” said Daniel Landart. Ramón Labayen said, “The European Union represses artificial barriers.” Asked what was meant by an artificial barrier, he said, “Cultures are not barriers. Borders are barriers.” The borders around Basqueland endure because they are cultural, not political.

When Europeans decolonized Africa, they left it with unnatural borders, lines that did not take into account cultures. This is often stated as the central problem of modern Africa. But they did the same in Europe. The Pyrenees may look like a natural border, but the same people live on both sides.

Arzalluz said, “The concept of a state is changing. They have given up their borders, are giving up their money. We are not fighting for a Basque state but to be a new European state.” A 1998 poll in Spanish Basqueland showed that 88 percent wanted to circumvent Madrid and have direct relations with the European Union.

In the idealized new Europe, economies are merged, citizenship is merged. But those who support the idea deny that countries will be eliminated. There will simply be a new idea of a nation—a nation that maintains its own culture and identity while being economically linked and politically loyal to a larger state. Some 1,800 years ago, the Basques told the Roman Empire that this was what they wanted. Four centuries ago, they told it to Ferdinand of Aragon. They have told it to François Mitterrand and Felipe González and King Juan Carlos.

They watch Europe unfolding and wonder what has happened to their old adversaries. Most of the political leaders endorse the new Europe whether their citizens do or not. Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, González, and Aznar were all strong backers of this new Europe. The Basques watch the French and Spanish give up their borders and their currency and wonder why it is so easy for them. Why didn’t Mitterrand worry about the “fabric of the nation being torn”? Why does Madrid not worry about losing its sovereignty? And if they do not worry about these things, why do they feel threatened by the Basques?

The Basques are not isolationists. They never wanted to leave Europe. They only wanted to be Basque. Perhaps it is the French and the Spanish, relative newcomers, who will disappear in another 1,000 years. But the Basques will still be there, playing strange sports, speaking a language of
ks
and
xs
that no one else understands, naming their houses and facing them toward the eastern sunrise in a land of legends, on steep green mountains by a cobalt sea—still surviving, enduring by the grace of what Juan San Martin called
Euskaldun bizi nahia
, the will to live like a Basque.

Postscript: The Death of a Basque Pig

A property in the valley

A house on the property

And in the house, bread and love

Jesus what happiness!

—Antonio de Trueba, “The Basques,” 1870

I
T IS CALLED
a
txarriboda
, and the whelping dog, straining at his chain a distance from the house, knew this was not going to be good.

The pig, purchased the previous spring for almost $80, was named Pepe. He was only slightly more than ten months old, and yet after six months of overeating corn, he weighed 290 pounds, an enormous, rounded, awkward, pinkish white squealing beast that it took seven men to drag out and hold down.

He was an unlucky pig, a castrated male who had been a last-minute replacement for a female who shortly before her planned execution had gone into heat and was saved for breeding.

Txariboda
is the Basque name for the annual family slaughter of a pig, generally done during the winter when it is cold. Neighbors take turns helping out at each other’s txarriboda. In the village of Muxica, three miles from Guernica, it was Felisa Madariaga and Julián Gabikaetxebarria’s turn.

Theirs is a small and struggling farm. Julián, in addition to working the farm with his wife, holds a job in a factory in Guernica. Felisa sells their products every Monday morning in the Guernica market, the same weekly event that the Condor Legion had chosen for a target in 1937. On the farm, they have a few dairy cows and some chickens. They also grow lettuce and are one of the principal producers in the area of choricero peppers. A Vizcayan sweet pepper that ripens to a brilliant red and is then dried, the choricero is used in a number of dishes such as the stuffing for chorizo sausages. It is also used in
bacalao Vizcaína
, the salt cod dish that is the most internationally renowned of all Basque dishes, though most foreign imitations are inauthentic because the choricero is hard to find outside Vizcaya and is almost never to be found outside Basqueland. Choricero peppers ripen in the summer and are tied together on strings like garlands of large, deep red blossoms, then hung to dry for two months.

Julián and Felisa hang the peppers on the front of their traditional farmhouse of oaken beams and massive stone. Their house is named Igertu, which in old Vizcayan dialect means “drying,” but this appears to be a coincidence since the house predates the sixteenth-century arrival of peppers. Carvings on a stone windowsill in the front of the house, a Christian cross with Basque solar stars on either side, have been dated back to Roman times. Julián has received offers from people who want to buy the house because of its archaeological significance, but it has always been in his family and he will not sell. It is the etxea of his fathers.

In the fall, Igertu turns bright as a New England hillside, because the choriceros are hung on the house to dry. They are also hung from pipes in the white tile kitchen, forming red drapery that completely covers the ceiling. The peppers that are dried outside keep their brightness, but almost half are lost to rot. The indoor ones are not as colorful, but the losses are only 10 percent. The next year the dried seeds are replanted in the fields across the road.

T
HE SEVEN MEN
held Pepe down on his side across a wooden bench, and one of them placed a green plastic basin on the ground under the pig’s neck. The knife went into the neck as the pig squealed even louder and struggled harder. But the men held him. Slowly the squeals turned into growls and then descending grunts. As the wound was worked with the knife and the blood poured out, one man kept the basin stirring to avoid clotting. After five minutes, the pig was only making low grunts and sighs and the blood was still pouring.

An ancient belief of Hebrews and some other cultures that an animal that dies an agonizing death is less edible has been upheld by modern science, and so commercial slaughterhouses avoid this kind of killing. In industrial pig slaughter, the animal is stunned and then the unconscious animal is bled. But these farmers insisted that the industrial way of killing was “not as beautiful.” They explained that the blood was darker and not as good. This blood was brilliant red.

The pig was then dragged to the edge of the field, for the long process of burning off the hairs by covering the carcass with pitchforks full of dried ferns and grasses and setting it on fire. It took more than an hour of turning and burning before the skin was completely blackened and hairless. Then the pig was washed and scraped with a knife. It now seemed like a huge, jellylike brownish object.

Meanwhile, the women were chopping guindillas, the slightly hot, thinner red peppers, cutting out the stems, opening the peppers with scissors, carefully removing the seeds and saving them, and chopping only the shiny red skin. They also chopped parsley. During this entire day of working and talking, there was never a moment of discussion about who would do what. There were the men’s jobs and the women’s jobs and no mixing of them.

They joked as they worked, speaking in Euskera and Spanish, mostly in Euskera. They talked about a recent soccer match. The referee had not been a Basque speaker and angrily told the players to speak in Spanish. Finally, he gave a yellow card, a penalty warning, to the Basque speakers. The team later protested. Some of the pig scrapers thought they should have protested; others thought that since the referee asked them to speak Spanish, they should have spoken Spanish.

With a long steel hook, the toenails were yanked off, and then the four feet were cut off and saved to make pigs’ feet. Julián worked with surgical precision, opening the stomach with long, sure knife strokes, cutting through larger bones with a hatchet.

Etching by Jean Paul Tillac, 1937. (Collection of the Musée Basque, Bayonne)

Julian was born in 1931 and was seventeen years old the first time he butchered a pig. As he chopped, he talked about what he had seen when Guernica was bombed. “Planes buzzed overhead and you could hear the bombs,” he said, laying aside the bloody hatchet and working close to the bone with his knife, “but what I remember more was over there.” He pointed to the wooded hills beyond the harvested pepper fields. “By the next town, there were German soldiers in tanks, and the reds and the Fascists were fighting, and a lot of people were killed.”

Felisa also remembered. She was only three but recalls standing on a mountain watching the planes. “Then my Grandmother took us to the soldiers and they took us away.”

The lard from around the kidney was carefully removed, the lacy lining, the caul, was set aside, as was the liver, and the heart. The lungs were hung on a hook by the esophagus, eventually to be fed to the dog who had by now lost all interest in the former Pepe because he no longer detected the scent of fear or death— or Pepe; there was only food.

The intestines were taken out and handed to the women, who received them with unhappy smiles. After Julián removed all of the organs, he opened the back and the men hoisted the legless carcass on a chain and hung it from a beam. While Julián carefully carved the fillet into thin medallions, the women were working on the intestines: emptying them, washing them over and over, soaking them in salted vinegar.

Then they went to the kitchen, where only a single row of last fall’s choricero still hung from the ceiling. The men sat at the long table, where crusty bread and bottles of Rioja wine had been placed. The kitchen had both an electric and a wood-burning stove, but only the wood burner was used. First,
porrusalda
, a hot leek and potato soup, was served, followed by salt cod and red pepper salad with slices of garlic in olive oil. Then came slices of Pepe’s grilled liver, followed by grilled sliced fillet of victim, and then
brazo gitano
, a custard-filled sponge cake. Then coffee, brandy, Cuban cigars.