Basque History of the World (42 page)

Traditional farm foods are becoming more popular than they have been for two generations. The spread of cider mills is one example. Pacharán, a light-alcohol drink made from sloe berries, a tiny wild plum from the mountains of northern Navarra, used to be a peasant drink in the mountains but has recently started appearing in bars, restaurants, and homes throughout Basqueland.
Bortu gazna
, mountain cheese, long the pride of Basque peasants, has also become fashionable in all seven provinces. Ewe’s milk, it seems, like people, develops a stronger character in the face of adversity. The tough grasses and shrubs of the mountaintops produce a more flavorful cheese than that of sheep grazing on lush green valley floors. This cheese can only be produced in May and June, while the valley cheese is made for six months. In a rural society noted for the equal division of labor between sexes, the prestigious mountain cheese is traditionally produced only by men. Part of the mystique of Martikorena, a popular Euskera folk singer and a shepherd from Basse Navarre, is the fact, well known in French Basqueland, that he makes excellent mountain cheese.

Unformed cheese, sheep’s milk curdled with rennet, an enzyme found in the stomach of an unweaned lamb, and served as a kind of yogurt with mountain honey, used to be a meager staple of the rural poor. Known as
mamia
or, in Spanish,
cuajada
, it is now the fashionable dessert in fine restaurants in all seven provinces.

Poster from the 1930s by Jean Paul Tillac. (Collection of the Musée Basque, Bayonne)

The Asador Horma-Honda in the village of Bernagoitia, not far from Bilbao, serves modern rural food. Its recipe for
cuajada
, which follows, is a contemporary dessert made with industrially bottled rennet and unusual because it is made with sugar and cinnamon, instead of being served tart and sweetened by adding honey.

CUAJADA

Boil a liter of sheep’s milk with a stick of cinnamon. Let it cool a little, mix in sugar according to taste, and divide it into six cups. Add to each one a spoonful of rennet. Let completely cool and refrigerate.

During cheese-making season, pigs graze on the slopes with the sheep so that Basques can feed them the whey, the nutritious liquid leftover. There was a uniquely Basque breed of pig in Labourd and Basse Navarre that grazed with the long-legged, hound-eared, white Basque sheep. In the early 1980s, Basques realized that the Basque breed of pig had died out. In the Aldudes Valley, which gets steeper and steeper until farmers along the French-Spanish border are looking into a deep green gorge, it was decided to bring back the Basque pig.

The race was rebred from the few pigs remaining throughout the western Pyrenees who still had the characteristics. What is characteristic of a Basque pig? Appropriately, the most telling feature is extremely large ears, so large in fact that they fall over the pig’s face, nearly blinding the animal, resulting in a not typically Basque passive nature.

T
HERE IS
A movement in French Basqueland clearly influenced by events in Spanish Basqueland, and its activists like to call themselves
abertzale
, choosing a word Sabino Arana invented to mean “Basque nationalist,” or literally, “patriot.” As in Spain, French abertzale emerged in the 1930s, reemerged in the 1960s—a shoot from the Guernica oak was planted by the cherry orchards of Itxassou—and became stronger than ever in the 1980s and 1990s.

A variety of nationalist parties, usually left-wing, began running candidates for local election. Herri Batasuna organized in the French provinces under the name Euskal Batasuna. Abertzale parties have struggled to get more than 10 percent of the vote in the larger towns but have made a significant showing in some rural villages, which is remarkable because a substantial part of the economy of French Basque villages, as much as two-thirds, comes from pensions, farm subsidies, and other social expenditures by the French state.

Some French Basques worry that the abertzale movement will lead to a French ETA. ETA, they remember, started out as a nationalist movement promoting culture and ended up shooting Basque politicians and extorting money from Basque businessmen. For a brief moment, such a group did appear in France. Or did it?

On December 11, 1973, the office of a medical school in a Basse Navarre village was raided, officials were roughed up, and documents were stolen by a group calling itself Iparretarrak, ETArists of the north. In their communique, published ten months later, they wrote: “Our country is in the process of dying, and it will die in a few years, our land will be the paradise of retirees, invalids, and foreigners . . . If we want our rights, if we want our freedom, we have only one route: fight.” Their principal activity was vandalizing the property of the tourism trade, especially in the summer when Parisians flood the coastal region and French campers and hikers take to the mountains. They used slogans such as “Our country is not for sale” and “Euskadi will never be a Riviera.” One arrest was made in 1977, but the suspect seemed to be a sympathizer, not an activist, and after 3,500 people signed a petition, he was released.

In March 1980, two would-be Iparretarrak commandos decided to blow up the car of the wife of the
sous-préfet
in its parking place in the middle of the night. But, mishandling the explosives, the two blew themselves up instead. Given the type of devices and the time of night, the evidence indicates that they did not intend to hurt anyone, but many in French Basqueland saw this as evidence that their fears were coming true, that Iparretarrak, like ETA in the 1960s, was turning from vandalism to violence. Faced with violent attacks around the country by a variety of armed groups, both French and Middle Eastern, France started taking Iparretarrak seriously. Voters were demanding that the French police do something about terrorism, and it seemed likely that the French police would do a lot better up against these ETArists of the north than against Abu Nidal of Syria.

French Basqueland found itself with what may be an even higher number of police per capita than Spanish Basqueland. Officially, the eight officers for every 1,000 inhabitants is almost double the French national ratio. But the police turned up with nothing. In 1982, two officers were killed in Basse Navarre, and the French Basque group was again suspected. Another suspect was the Basque-Spanish Battalion, the forerunner of GAL. The matter was never cleared up, and the Iparretarrak soon vanished.

But the police remained. Unlike in Spain, they try not to let their presence be felt. From the French point of view, le Pays Basque is a tourist destination. Basque nationalism is often reduced to something folkloric, something nice for the tourists. French travel posters advertise, “Basqueland, land of folklore.” The ikurriña, that politically charged symbol that is fought over on the other side of the mountains, is a favorite souvenir of French Basqueland sold in every tourist shop—flags, scarves, earrings, key chains, even scented cardboard ikurriñas to dangle from the rearview mirror of the car.

Efforts to revive folk customs, even when intended as political acts, get French government support because the tourists like these events. A group in the inland side of Labourd, concerned about reviving folk customs, went to Ituren in Navarra to study the
joaldunak
, grim-faced ancestral pagan characters who awaken spring with their giant copper bells and black horsehair whips. They learned how to make the cone-shaped hats and how to wear the big copper bells and perform the dances. They learned enough so that a troop of joaldunak could make an appearance at a carnival festival, although their simple march in and out of town was not nearly as elaborate as the two-day ritual between Ituren and neighboring Zubieta. Joaldunak began appearing for the winter carnival in various Labourdine towns including St.-Jean-de-Luz, where the French always gave them a special round of applause. Joaldunak are characteristic of the residual pagan customs of northern Navarra but had never before appeared in Labourd, which leaves the question of whether a culture is being preserved or created in French Basqueland—what Mitterrand was referring to when he said that the legacy of Basque culture was being “even improved upon.” But the joaldunak at the St.-Jean-de-Luz carnival were no more incongruous than the Herri Batasuna campaign for local elections in 1998 in which Basque nationalists rode around San Sebastián with giant plaster joaldunak mounted on the roofs of cars. These joaldunak were not even somber looking. They had broad Howdy-Doody smiles.

O
VER THE BORDER
, in Ituren, joaldunak arrived one by one at the town plaza, a small paved space surrounded by a town hall and four other stone buildings. Some walked and others came by car, already wearing their laced-up black moccasins, carrying their cone-shaped hats, sheepskins, and bells.

In Ituren they have named the joaldunak Zanpantzar—a name which appears in all seven Basque dialects. In the French provinces, Zanpantzar is a grotesque papier-mâché giant, who is set on fire to burn away evil for the coming year and mark the end of carnival. But in Ituren, the name refers to a group of twenty joaldunak.

Navarra is said to have been pro-Franco, but between the sheer slopes in this isolated narrow valley of the wandering Bidasoa River, there was little sympathy for the invading Fascist regime. At the very beginning of the Spanish Civil War, in September 1936, the Ituren village doctor, a passionate Basque nationalist, was taken out of town and shot by pro-Franco forces. This caused one of Europe’s oldest carnivals to disappear. It was not held in the winter of 1937 or for years afterward. The carnival, which predated the Christianization of Basques, had finally faded into history.

But the stubborn people of Ituren remembered their customs and kept speaking their Basque language instead of Spanish, even when it was illegal. As the regime loosened its reign of terror, they slowly resumed their ways. Now every winter, the Monday before Ash Wednesday, once again, the strange events of Ituren awaken the spring in the cold mountain earth.

Since this was not a workday, the few hundred townspeople were sleeping late. They were still in bed at 10:00 A.M. as the sun’s rays cleared the rocky ridges, greening the white frosted slopes. The few dozen stone houses that are the town of Ituren emerged from a cold blue shadow.

An older man was in one of Ituren’s two bars trying to warm himself up on a mixture of hot coffee, anise liqueur, and sherry. It seemed to work. Although anthropologists say the carnival slowly started up again in the 1940s, he had no memory of any carnival after 1936 until the 1950s. “I think it was 1952 that there was enough so that some priest could denounce it as pagan, un-Christian. Little by little things started again. In the 1960s some general from Elizondo saw it. We thought, oh, trouble. But he liked it and it’s been growing ever since, so now it is like before the war.”

Slowly the townspeople gathered in the plaza and warmed up in the two bars, playing traditional songs, and teenagers showed off the folk dance steps that under Franco their parents had not been allowed to learn.

Joaldunak are all young men. They start apprenticing at age five, and once they marry they must leave the group. A
joaldun
(the singular of joaldunak) must be young—young and strong. The bells they wear are huge and meticulously crafted of beaten copper, with deep vibrato tones. They are strapped on to each joaldun with a complicated system of lamb’s leather cord that is pulled so tight that the bells stand free of their backs.

A rhythmic dirge of bells peeled—a deep, metallic, atavistic rumble. The bells rang by the exaggerated steps of the joaldunak’s dance as they maneuvered like a solemn marching band, filing in intricate patterns around the plaza, across the little bridge behind the plaza that leads over a gurgling crook of the Ezcurra, a tributary of the Bidasoa, on to country paths to other parts of town and off to neighboring fields and villages. They never smiled, never joked—even the youngest ones with their smaller bells. Twenty cones in their deliberate stride, copper bells echoing off the rocky ridges of the mountain crests, the joaldunak marched quickly past frosty green fields, leafless forests, and still-barren orchards. Occasionally as they made their way over mountain trails, a leader would trumpet a ram’s horn announcing to all the residents of the valley the promise of spring and declaring to the frosted mountain air that they would be Basques in the Basque way forever.

16: The Nation

If you do not teach your children the language of your parents, they will teach you.

—Sabino Arana
, BASSERITARRA,
June 20, 1897

T
HE MOST IMPORTANT
word in Euskera is
gure
. It means “our”— our people, our home, our village. Cookbooks talk of our soups, our sauces. “Reptiles are not typically included in our meals,” wrote the great Guipúzcoan chef José María Busca Isusi. That four-letter word,
gure
, is at the center of Basqueness, the feeling of belonging inalienably to a group. It is what the Basques mean by a nation, why they have remained a nation without a country, even stripped of their laws.