Basque History of the World (33 page)

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.

A
T 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
, N
ERE
M
ENDEAN
,
         
(In My Time), 1967

F
RANCO 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.”

B
Y 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.