The manuscript I'm working on now is written as two parts. In part one I was drawn into a history lesson on the Spanish Civil War, the Post WWII Franco Regime and the French Resistance. These were the parents of the people in part two: where they got their start and so on.
At present a plebiscite for Catalonia's autonomy is climaxing after a century of struggle by the people of Northeastern Spain. The results of which are overshadowed by Scotland's drive that just recently failed. Over on the West end of the Pyrenees another people whose language and culture were suppressed with equal ferocity by the Franco regime is often skipped over.
I'd read Hemingway and Orwell (mostly about Catalonia) and seen several documentaries and movies that covered what had gone down during that period. It was, however, difficult to find sources about the Basque people in English.... not even documentaries. The suppression of the Basque language by Franco is partially responsible for this but what sources I did find were rich with a spirit that is skipped over by the pro-Stalinist or Marxist Anarchists of Barcelona and Madrid. The libertarian Basque nationalism that the first spark that lit the flames of the Spanish Civil War begins in Asturias and still fetsers today. Asturias is where my story begins.
From Part I: The Maquisard
Chapter
2: Asturias
A group of
villagers were huddled at the side of the tracks leading into a mining town
nestled between steep hills. A woman patted a young girl on the head and
slipped the girl behind her skirts as the Guardia Civil ordered the group to
line up. The girl scurried away and down into the arroyo behind. The woman
raised her fist in the air as a distraction and a last gesture of defiance with
a shout, “Viva la Revolucion!”
A man joined her with raised fist, as did the
others in the group. “Viva la…”
The girl scurried away down into the arroyo
before some of the bodies, neighbors she had known since she was born, fell
after a loud volley of Mausers. Then there was then a horrible silence except
for a restrained moan, a few pops and cracks of pistols. She watched from her
hiding place under a boulder as the refrain from an old lullaby passed softly
from her lips: “Los pollitos dicen los pollitos dicen pío, pío, pío cuando
tienen hambre tienen frío.” Tears clouded her vision. It would be the last time
she afforded tears to wash her face for over thirty years.
In
English the whole verse is: “The little chicks say pio, pio. pio when they are
hungry... when they are cold. The hen looks for the corn... gives them food,
and provides them shelter. Under her wings sleeping chicks huddle together to
hasten another day!”
Sleeping…
hung-over… soothed by the lullaby rhythm of steel wheels on steel tracks…
chunk-cat-clack…chunk-cat-clack… chunk-chunk… Then noise: a whistle… awake…
another town… steam hissed… exploded from pistons, escalated by the chatter and
clamoring of another group of volunteers boarding. Alesandro peered through
half-shut lids to watch the eager new ones standing in the aisle, falling
against each other whenever the train jerked to a start. He’d been crammed into
a seat on the wooden bench of the car, shoulder to shoulder, with young men…
young or younger than he. Their voices were, from the start in Madrid, loud and
boisterous… songs of the revolution… “A Las Barricades!” Bravado smothered fear
and anticipation, driven by the cheers of crowds alongside the tracks. Red and
black flags on la locomotora del destino chugged their cars away from the
station and from the safety of homes and chalkboards of classrooms.
After this
disruption of not-thought, his attention turned to the changing Castilian
landscape that passed his window… images flashed by. The train wound its way
towards Asturias; another country on the far side of Spain. Some aboard were
CNT labor unionists, veterans of street fighting, but most were volunteers:
metropolitan boys with pink hands. The propaganda
posters depict men; masculine men with chiseled chins and muscled forearms, fists thrust skyward over the barricades... men, not boys…
boys who hoped to be greeted with cheers and welcomed
by the calloused hands of miners holding firm at the barricades of Gijón and
Oviedo, they would be heroes; heroes alright, dead heroes.
The train they
rode left Madrid was loaded up with untrained young and eager faces armed by
little more than the enthusiasm and the naivety of youth. Only a few had seen
blood from more than a scratch before and were unprepared for what awaited them
in the mining towns in and above Oviedo or Gijón on the Biscay coast. From
Madrid they crossed north through the heartland of Castile-Leon and into a
region of rugged mountains, passed towns and stations that prominently posted
the red and black flags of the Revolucion. The rails were controlled by the
anarchist labor union, the CNT, most sympathetic to the cause. But, this was an
irony of a civil war full of ironies that, in cooperation with the new Republic
in Madrid, the same union trains, controlled by the same union, would fill its
cars with experienced and hardened Moroccan troops,
Regular Army troops of Colonel Yague and General Ochoa, under orders of the
Generals of the Republic in Madrid, Francisco Franco and Manuel Goded, to quell
the miners’ general strike that had crippled most of the country.
Next to Alesandro
snored the fledgling journalist; his brother by adoption and Euskara
blood. Euskara blood knows no nation but
the Basque Country of the coastline and mountains along the Bay of Biscay and
the Pyrenees Range of Southern France and Northern Spain. Their bond, however, was stronger than the
fraternity of blood. Alesandro Otxoa was orphaned at five years of age by the
pistoleros of the Guardia Civil. Alesandro Otxoa had been embraced and given a
home near Biarritz by Marcel’s half-Basque father out of loyalty to the Otxoa
family. It happened during the general strikes at La Canadiense in 1919. One of
his earliest memory was that of a door being kicked in… of his father’s
shouting… his mother’s cursing… screams… both taken out the door… the sound of
clap-crack pistol retorts… their bodies lifeless on the street.
Alesandro took his
secondary level education at the Lycée Militaire and thus had an inkling of
military experience: little more experience than to know how to load and shoot
a rifle, to march in drills, and to study rudimentary military history on his
own in the school’s library. Therefore he felt responsible for, and protective
of, Marcel, whose military ambitions were next to nil and who wasn’t supposed
to be on this train in the first place.
The storm clouds
forming in the atmosphere over the Second Republic of Spain were dark with
foreboding: a civil war of which the life of Alesandro (Gotson) Otxoa would be
entangled, from his first taste of combat in this one week in October of 1934,
until his imprisonment in Carabanchel in the mid nineteen-fifties.
Alesandro was
determined, and obligated by his heritage, to leave the comfort and safety of
Bayonne at twenty years of age to join the CNT of the anarchist movement rising
up in Barcelona. There in Madrid, as soon as he heard the news of the strike,
he tried to bid farewell to Marcel over wine in a café alongside of other boys
eager to become men.
“You aren’t going
without me,” Marcel protested.
“There is too much
going on here, Marcel. The people need your voice. Someone has to keep an eye
on the political wrangling of Euro…” Alesandro rattled off his argument
staccato knowing his words were falling on deaf ears.
“I won’t have it
Alesandro, the hottest story in all of Spain is in Asturias.”
Taking a sip,
holding the bottle to his lips without mocking, he said sincerely, “You’re an
academic, Marcel. How well would you… would you be able to kill a man?”
“Ha, I can. Just
as well as anyone. Hell, we are all amateurs!” he argued.
The brothers got
drunk… so very drunk that Alesandro barely remembered agreeing to board the
train singing what would be the anthem of the revolution, “La Rhumba La
Carmella,” and chanting “¡Unidad, Proletaria Hermanos!” with the others. His
stomach sick, he came to and swore to himself that he’d never get drunk again.
It was an oath that he kept except for an occasional toast or to wash down
stale bread. Alesandro knew from the time he awoke aboard that train he was
going to keep his vigilance guardedly; for, one afternoon, his guard was down
and his drunkenness nearly cost the life of his little brother.
www.amazon.com/Book-Job-Revisited-Taxi-Romance-ebook/dp/B00NY2JQYC
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