Guernica (19 page)

“Have you thought to go to San Sebastián to stay with your children?” Mariangeles asked.

“They have their own troubles.”

The line barely moved. Mariangeles felt her emotions surfacing again. She would tell Justo of this woman, and she would tell
him that she had reconsidered their plan to stay. Maybe it would be best for all of them to leave Guernica, to go to Bilbao,
to go to Lekeitio, maybe to even get Josepe to sail them to somewhere in France. She knew Justo would never want to leave
Errotabarri, but Errotabarri would be there when they got back.

CHAPTER 17

The nuns on the convent roof spotted them first, reflecting a flash of light like the wings of distant cranes. The nuns rang
their handbells, as if the melodic tinkling could rouse the attention of a town dense with refugees. Santa María’s bells then
amplified the alert but created more confusion. They had already chimed four P.M., and this was not a call to mass. Was it?

As the nuns followed it with their binoculars, the vanguard bomber slowed its airspeed to accommodate visual inspection by
the bombardier. By the time most people grasped the meaning of the bells, their ringing was muted by screaming engines overhead.
A few ran for the
refugios
; some raced toward Santa María because it was the house of God. Others stood frozen.

But the plane dropped no bombs; instead it climbed and banked away. Those in the marketplace cheered. The devil was just taking
a peek.

Mariangeles Ansotegui responded to the bells and the sight of the plane and the spreading chaos by remaining dedicated to
her task: standing in line. Around her, refugees sought cover and screamed curses new to Mariangeles. The woman in front of
her was gone, her bag dropped where she had been standing. Mariangeles stooped to collect it; the family Bible was still there.
She would hold it for safekeeping until the woman returned. Mariangeles began thinking that the sight of the plane had been
beneficial. Many had abandoned their places in line, allowing her to move forward a considerable distance. The bells continued
to call out. She thought they must be saying that it was safe.

* * *

Miren and Catalina left the stock corrals and were sorting through the few ragged stalks and stems of vegetables available.
She had seen nothing worth buying except some potatoes, but Miguel could make those stretch, especially if he managed to kill
a rabbit or some squirrels as he had threatened. She smiled at the thought of him stalking game. He would be more likely to
try to share his food with the rabbits and squirrels.

The bells of Santa María began to ring with an unexpected urgency. Miren looked toward the church for explanation. She heard
the machine rumble to the north of town and then saw it fly into her range of vision. “Cat, look,” she said, pointing to the
sky. Catalina looked only at the end of Miren’s upraised arm. But her mother’s voice was excited, and that was meaningful
to her, causing her to kick and laugh in her carriage. She pulled herself up at the edge to look out.

As the driver swung around a turn heading out of the valley toward Bilbao, Father Xabier saw a black, birdlike shadow speed
down the hillside and across the road. From the side window he saw the airplane just as it banked behind a mountain. President
Aguirre had shared with him the scarcity of Republican air presence, so Xabier knew this had to be German. He ordered the
driver to find a wide spot in the road and turn back to Guernica. Perhaps this was a reconnaissance flyover, but he knew there
could be panic in town.

The driver, who had been horrified by the priest’s sermon the day before, was now more certain of the cleric’s insanity. He
pulled off on the roadside before entering town and refused to go farther, not bothering to shut the door as he abandoned
the car and the priest and flopped into ankle-deep water in a drainage ditch to diminish himself as a target when the forces
of the apocalypse stormed through Guernica.

Biretta perched on his head, with his pumping legs hidden beneath his full-length black cassock, Father Xabier appeared to
be floating at high speed toward the center of town. The powerful current of people fleeing in the opposite direction hardly
slowed him. The vision of the priest in flight caused the crowd to part as he approached and congeal back into a solid mass
in his wake. Some were certain they had witnessed a miracle, but they were not eager to stay and offer testimony toward his
canonization. Recalling the crowds at the train station, Father Xabier decided he would go there first, hoping to bring order
to what he feared could become a dangerous stampede.

From the north, the rumbling returned and grew nearer and louder, causing the ground to vibrate. Mariangeles Ansotegui squinted
up into the near-cloudless afternoon sky. Around her, those who had stayed in line broke off into sprints in all directions.
A high-pitched whistle added an upper register to the sounds of chaos in the plaza. Objects were falling from the plane, whistling
and falling.

The first bomb exploded in the middle of the plaza. The bodies of several dozen people rose intact to varied elevations before
sprouting like chrysanthemum blossoms.

Father Xabier had reached the edge of the plaza when he was knocked to the ground by the explosion. “Dear God, it is happening.
Make me strong. Make Your strength my strength,” he prayed aloud, repositioning the biretta that had been blown off his head.

The first deliverance of random death struck mostly women, including one refugee in a white apron with tired eyes who had
tried to run away and a lovely woman standing in line, holding a stranger’s family Bible, which was incinerated in midair
by the heat of the explosion.

In a shed at the Mezos’, focused on repairing tools, Justo Ansotegui heard church bells. But he paid attention to them only
when he needed to know the time, or if it was Sunday morning and they announced their call to mass. It must be four, he thought.

But they continued pealing, and he wondered why there would be a mass on Monday afternoon. When the blasts sent shock waves
rippling up the valley and into the hills, Amaya Mezo knocked back the shed door and told him of the plane she had seen, and
pointed to the dome of dust rising at the center of town.

“No,” he said. “No.”

Where was Mariangeles? Where were Miren and Catalina?

They were in town. A plane is dropping bombs in town.

As he ran from the shed, Justo picked up a
laia
for protection. It was time to fight.

It was almost a mile into town and he raced with his
laia
in front of him like a primitive avenger, shouting as he ran.

“Mari . . . Mari . . . Mari . . .”

And as he slowed from lack of breath, his shouts matched the two-syllable toll of the bells: “Mar . . . ee . . . Mar . . .
ee . . . Mar . . . ee.”

Up a nearby slope, Miguel’s crosscut saw hummed a jagged tune as it nibbled through the broad bole of an oak. He, too, heard
the bells far below, muffled by distance, and paid no attention. In moments, though, he felt deep thuds through his feet,
as when a tree falls. Waves of sound radiated up to him, and he turned to the valley. Dust and smoke had risen above the buildings.

Oh, dear God, an explosion, he thought. He ran, churning so fast downhill that he couldn’t control his legs. He fell and rolled
and rose and was running again in one motion, driven by instinct and the ringing of the bells.

When the explosions shook the earth only two blocks away, Miren pulled the hood down on Catalina’s carriage to shield her
ears. With the pram out front, she picked up speed heading not toward a
refugio
, as Miguel had instructed, but to the train station in search of her mother. Up Calle de la Estación, toward the smoldering
plaza, she became a blur of motion.

Ahead were screams choking out from the veil of hanging dust. From behind came the sound of the bells.

Alaia Aldecoa heard the bomber before anyone noticed it; it caused windows to rattle violently in their casings. But there
was no context to link it to alarm. Machines had flown over before; she had heard them. It seemed another ugly vibration in
a day filled with them. But the threat became obvious when the bells began their impatient clangor and the crowd started to
rush around her. No one thought to guide her to a
refugio
or explain the madness.

Her mind flashed on the sisters’ story of the terrifying end of days. Just as they had predicted, the explosions sucked the
air from her lungs while the ground bucked and rolled. Hell was powering up through the crust of the earth to swallow them.
The brimstone smelled exactly as it had been described.

Her best chance was to stay in this spot; Miren would come back for her. But when the ground opened up, her instincts compelled
her to run, something she had never done.

She began a fl at-footed trot, as if trying to feel her way with her toes, arms stretched out in front like stiffened antenae.
She had not grabbed her cane.

The screams were coming from her right, so she ran to her left, off a curb.

The sound in the sky had returned, only stronger, with greater vibration and more urgency. There were more machines.

The whistling was more intense. Within moments, there were more death screams.

With outstretched arms, she touched the facing of a building and followed its abrasive brick surface around a corner.

She ran again when she reached the street.

An explosion knocked her to the ground.

She ran again.

People knocked her down. She rose, was knocked down again. She crawled below the spreading smoke. The town was on fire. With
the next explosion, Alaia Aldecoa disappeared.

Amaya Mezo, having chased her children into the house and watched Justo Ansotegui race into town, returned to her hillside
field to make sense of the sounds and the panic below. Her eldest daughter disobeyed her order to stay inside, hoping to be
there if she needed help. They saw the large planes come in successive wedges, with a number of smaller planes zipping in
erratic paths, like barn swallows among flights of migrating geese.

One broke off from over the edge of town and dove at her as if intending to grind her up with its propellers.

Parallel lines of dirt puffs raced toward them with the sound of rapid drumbeats. Her daughter ran at the sight, shouting
at her mother to hide. But Amaya had no concept of the danger and stood yelling at the machine, waving at it to go away from
her home and loved ones.

A bullet tore off her right shoulder. The pilot flew so close she could see his face looking down at her. He wore a leather
hat, and his eyes were covered by round goggles that reflected the glare of the afternoon sun.

The visions came in flashes as Father Xabier sought places to do God’s work. With staggered sprints and crouches, he had made
his way toward the market as the second echelon of bombers struck.

He ran past the fire station, where a bomb had crushed the town’s lone fire truck, killing the young stable boy and the massive
dray horses in their stalls. The blood from the horses and the boy flowed together down the sloping entranceway into the gutter
and down to the storm drain.

To his left, several incendiaries had landed in the temporary cattle corral, and a bull engulfed in blue-white flames bellowed
and broke through the fence, rampaging into the crowd.

Sheep ignited and their wool burned black as they tried to butt their way out of the pens.

A large bomb had taken out several oxen and farmers, leaving Xabier trying not to fall on their slippery remains.

Bullets from fighter planes whistled and thudded indifferently into humans and animals.

Everything burned.

A woman with three children huddled in the protection of a recessed doorway, and the priest stood as tall and wide as he could
to shield them. When a lull in the bombing brought a sense of respite to their ringing ears, the family took off from behind
the priest’s skirts and ran down the middle of the street.

“Wait!” Xabier shouted.

They had covered fewer than twenty yards when a fighter plane raked the street with gunfire, cutting down three of the four
in one burst. The surviving child, wounded herself, dove near her mother, screaming, trying to lift her up and make her run.

The fighters darted without pattern, chasing anyone in the open. Xabier’s mind fl ashed on the image of sheepdogs racing back
and forth, herding people to their deaths.

A block away, a cluster of incendiaries pierced the roof of the candy factory and flared with heat as the thermite ignited
the most combustible substance, the hair of the women working inside.

Another block away a group of teenage boys who had been playing near the
pelota
fronton sought shelter in the mouth of a concrete culvert. When a bomb exploded within yards of them, their flesh fused into
an indistinguishable mass.

In the Residencia Calzada, a home for the elderly, a bomb vaporized many of the old men and women, along with the nuns there
trying to help them limp to safety.

Seeing no other means of escape from the second floor of a burning building, a man leaped from a window, flailing his arms
to put out the flames on the back of his white shirt, or perhaps hoping to fly.

In a basement
refugio
, two dozen corpses lay in a mosaic. They were untouched—no wounds, no blood—extinguished by the absence of air.

Hundreds clustered under the arched ceiling of the church of Santa María, praying frantically before the holy statuary.

An incendiary bomb knifed through the roof and impaled the floor. The fire that could have incinerated everyone in the church
never flared. The bomb did not ignite.

Miren stopped her search for Mariangeles out of fear for Catalina. Running up the street behind the bouncing carriage, she
was lost in her own town. The wheels of the carriage kicked up rooster tails of dark fluid. She fought against the vortex
of traffic created as the flow of people fleeing the station plaza swept into the equally misdirected flow of those frantic
to leave the marketplace.

She could go faster with Catalina in her arms, but debris fell in hot gusts and stung Miren like hail. She’d almost been knocked
down by the crowds, so Catalina was safer inside the carriage. She kept speaking to her, though, telling her through the canvas
canopy that everything was all right.

The rumbling bombers again muted the cries for help.

Miren choked on the concrete dust and on the heat and the smell. As she passed in front of the Hotel Julian, several young
mothers herded a group of shrieking schoolchildren into the entryway.