Basque History of the World (34 page)

I
T 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.

T
HE
P
LAZA 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.

Part Three

EUSKADI ASKATUTA

Ideas, at least profound ideas, develop very slowly and even though geocentrism may have been in theory rejected, it has not been eclipsed and is still among our most deeply implanted concepts. Geocentrism and centrism, for that matter, remain at the foundation of Western thought, seeming to us almost the natural thing to think, or, at least, to feel; that that which is ours is the center of whatever thing. However, this idea of the center is not natural but cultural, and the image of the universe coming from it seems to be caused by an erroneous perspective.

—Joseba Sarrionaindia
, NI EZ NAIZ HEMENGOA,
(I Am Not from Here), 1985

Slippery Maketos

Bilbao drinking water is agreeable and abundant.

—José Antonio Zamácola, 1815

There is a lot of money here [in Bilbao]. What difference does it make if there isn’t a glass of fresh water?

—Sabino Arana, 1897

A
BOUT THE FAMOUS
Basque delicacy, baby eels, José María Busca Isusi wrote, “I believe that only in our country have people dared to prepare and consume a dish which resembles a bunch of worms.” It is a Basque habit of mind to imagine that everything Basque is uniquely Basque, but Busca Isusi was mistaken. Aside from the fact that there are people in Mexico who do not hesitate to eat real worms by the plateful, Basques are not the only ones who eat the wormlike baby eel. A baby eel is called an
elver
in English,
angula
in Spanish,
pibale
in French, and
txitxardin
, which means “wormlike,” in Euskera. Elvers appear in all European rivers that flow to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and a number of other peoples, notably Atlantic French, enjoy them. But what disturbed the Basques in the 1990s was the terrible discovery that the Japanese eat them too.

The small creatures, actually smaller than most worms, turn up in Basque rivers every winter, and became associated with Basque winter holidays, such as carnival. For centuries they were scooped out just above the mouths of Guipúzcoan rivers. Six Basque families in Aguinaga, on the Orio River only a few miles from San Sebastián, became the principal suppliers in the world.

Elver fishermen waited for nightfall before dragging the river, because the elvers stay on the bottom, resting during the day. Eels avoid light. At night, the fishermen would haul up a fine weave of white squirmy creatures, which they then kept alive in their own freshwater tanks for about a week until the elvers’ backs mysteriously turned dark. Since a dead eel will not turn color, the dark color ensures that the eel was taken live. This issue took on added importance as the rivers grew increasingly polluted and inhospitable to delicate little elvers.

Like all eel, elvers must be cooked live or shortly after death to maintain an agreeable texture. The fisheries are very secretive about the exact process, maintaining that this is where the real quality of the product is determined. The chief defense of an eel is its slipperiness, which comes not only from its smooth skin— the scales are ingrown—but also from glands that secrete a slime, which must somehow be removed. Plunging them in salty lukewarm water after cooking is part of the process. Then they are wrapped in cloth to be kept moist.

The elvers are sold all over Spain and exported fresh, frozen, or canned to France and Latin America. The Basques usually prepare them in olive oil, garlic, and peppers. The recipe stays the same, but the servings have gotten smaller every year.

In the 1980s, when the Orio and other rivers turned green with surfaces that were sometimes foamy and other times dark and pearly, the catches were so meager that it was widely believed the eels were dying out. The price tripled, and the Aguinaga fisheries could still not meet the demand.

That was when one of the old established Basque family-owned companies, Angulas Aguinaga, decided it was time for an alternative. It turned from the Orio to the Japanese for technology to convert surimi into a substitute elver. Surimi is the white flesh of bottom-feeding fish that has been pressed into blocks on factory ships. At one time it was made from Atlantic cod, but when that was overfished, Pacific pollack took its place. Japan’s Nichirei Corporation designed machines for Angulas Aguinaga that force the surimi out, spaghettilike, into the shape of elvers. A touch of squid ink tints the backs dark. Angulas Aguinaga, which has no Japanese on its staff, produces the substitute elvers in a factory in the Guipúzcoan industrial mountain village of Irura. It sells 500 tons of these fake angulas, which it calls
gulas
, in a good year.

“It’s a completely natural product,” asserted Angulas Aguinaga sales director Juan Carlos Souto Ibañez, although the list of ingredients on the package includes Monosodium Glutamate E-415. Souto Ibañez further asserted that unlike angulas, gulas are cholesterol-free.

What they are not is eels, and they have neither the same taste nor texture. Visually, the main difference is that there is no face. The two black specks that are eyes and the thread line of a tiny mouth on one end are missing. In the Basque provinces, where it is widely believed that it is the Japanese who are making gulas in Irura, discriminating consumers sift through their sizzling earthenware casserole with the traditional wooden fork that is always provided, and search for faces before they eat. Some Basques do not even trust this test. Against all logic and evidence, persistent rumors are heard that “the Japanese are painting fake faces on gulas.”

An
angulero
, an angula fisherman in Aguinaga, on the Orio in the 1920s. (Kutxa Fototeka, San Sebastián)

Souto Ibañez points out that his company deliberately left off the faces and changed the name to gulas, so that they could not be accused of perpetrating a fraud.

“It’s a swindle,” José María Otamendi, director of a traditional elver fishery, El Angulero de Aguinaga, nevertheless declared. Although gulas were selling for $16 per pound instead of the $40 per pound for elvers, he asserted that this was still “very expensive for some unknown fish.”

Back in the days when Angulas Aguinaga was fishing real elvers and was really in Aguinaga, Otamendi had worked for the company. But once it changed its product, he left and returned to his own family’s business. In hip boots by the swirling tanks of the busy family elver pound, he said, “It is hard work, but it is a tradition. It is what my grandfather did and my father and my son.”

Since the Orio River, which twists past the stone houses of Aguinaga, is a suspiciously bright green-gray color, and its banks are peppered with bits of trash, the companies started supplementing their dwindling catch by buying French and British elvers. But, Angulas Aguinaga claimed to be saving the eels and even asked the European Community to ban elver fishing.

Then, in the early 1990s, the angulas started coming back.

E
ELS HAVE ALWAYS
puzzled man. Until the 1920s, no one had been able to identify reproductive organs in the creatures, and it was often supposed that Aristotle had been right when he stated that they somehow were created out of the mud. An eighteenth-century Italian had claimed to discover an eel’s ovaries, but the scientific world did not accept his finding for another seventy years simply because no one had ever seen an eel egg. If eel eggs could have been found, no doubt the Basques would have eaten them too.

In the twentieth century, the surprising discovery was made that the eels in the Orio were not Basque at all. In fact, all of the European eels and all of the American eels, a related species but with approximately ten fewer vertebrae, are born in the middle of the Atlantic, in the deep, warm, algae-laden waters off Bermuda known as the Sargasso Sea.

The tiny, newborn, oval-shaped creatures then begin a journey, like salmon in reverse, to the river of their parents’ adulthood. By the second summer they pass the Azores and have grown to five times their original size, but are still only a quarter the size of a tiny river elver. In the fall of the third year, they reach the Orio River and continue to grow, until they become angula size by the winter.

Most of this process is still unknown. Once a full-grown eel leaves a European river, it seems to vanish in the depths, and the cycle has never been entirely traced. So it was not known why, later in the 1990s, the eels began to disappear from the rivers once again. Was it pollution? Aguinaga fishermen had been saying for years that most of the elvers that they didn’t catch quickly, died in the green Orio. Or were they just taking too many of them? Every elver that is eaten is one that will not grow into an eel and swim back to the Sargasso Sea to reproduce.

And yet the Basques had always taken huge quantities of elvers. In 1775, a British naturalist on a trip to Bilbao said that elvers were caught “by the millions.” A French naturalist, Louis Roule, made some calculations based on early-twentieth-century train records from Landes, the region on the other side of the Adour, and found that in 1906, between 100 and 150 million elvers were shipped by train.

B
Y THE LATE
1990s, the Basques were growing desperate. In Hendaye an elver shop operated near the St. Jacques Bridge border crossing, selling in either pesetas or francs. The shop was only open in the winter, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Soon it was sold out by Friday. Eventually it was only open one day a week. The shopkeeper’s father had bought the antique building in a
viager
contract, a French arrangement in which the owner is paid a lifetime salary and the payer inherits the property. The owner had died early enough so that the house had been a bargain, and with no real overhead, the son was able to be in the angula business. But after a while he did not even have enough for a full day. The storefront looked like an empty fish shop with a long refrigerated display counter inside containing only one cloth-covered shallow crate.