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 came 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 gives 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 that 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.
Towns and stations that prominently posted the red and black flags of the
Revolucion flashed by Alesandro’s window like in a dream. 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, steamed towards
Basque Country under orders of the Generals of the Republic in Madrid,
Francisco Franco and Manuel Goded. Sent 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.
The miners were waiting behind
the barricades by the time Alesandro and Marcel had gotten through to the hills
above Oviedo. An eagle’s aerie of a
mining town nestled on the side of a precipice at the end of a snaking narrow
track was fortified with makeshift catapults ready to launch crates loaded with
sticks of dynamite from behind the barricades against the rails leading up to
it. The steep slopes to the sides and behind left no room to be flanked or room
for retreat. The engine stopped at the first barricade and backed down the
three cars that were left of the train. The brothers reported for duty in an
old barracks, an outpost of the Guardia Civil garrison from Oviedo. The miners
had overrun it the day before with hardly a fight. The representative, from
behind a desk that was made up of a plank over empty ammo boxes, wore a beret
with red U.H.P. letters on the front.
Marcel stepped up first. The
old gruff miner looked him over. “Ever fire a rifle?”
“I’m a journalist. I came to
cover the story,” Marcel admitted.
“You’ll need to cover the
story with one of these, kazetari... er, periodista.” The miner pointed to a
stack of old Spanish Mausers for a second miner to pass over the desk.
Alesandro’s union papers he’d
obtained before leaving Bayonne, and a certificate from a military prep school,
wasn’t enough to impress the old union miner.
“A cadet from the école
militaire,”
Those weren’t enough to
impress the old miner. But he spied the pistol tucked in Alesandro’s belt.
“The Regulars use a
Campo-Giro. How did you get that one?”
“My inheritance after…”
“Otxoa? I know of an Otxoa. An
organizer, Eder Otxoa, from twenty years ago. Otxoa and Izar.”
“My father and mother.”
“Ah ha, 1919.” The miner’s
face softened, “Yes, I was in Barcelona during the General Strike. You should
be proud.”
Alesandro stood silent.
“Give this man a new rifle,”
he called out to the second minor.
“You have command of the first
rampart, comrade. They send bodies up here from
Oviedo with no experience and
no ammo or guns,” he snarled. “All we have is what we seized from this
outpost.”
“I haven’t seen combat
either,” Alesandro confessed.
“Oh? Okay.” The miner shook
his head and continued, “More than most. If you have your father’s cajones…”
“I didn’t see any artillery
except for one field howitzer.” Alesandro returned to the subject.
“We do have plenty of
dynamite. When that’s gone, we’re gone. When someone falls, take what you can…
his rifle and ammo belt. Retreat to the second barricade, if you can, when it
gets impossible to hold ‘em off. Light
these sticks underneath yours first. Have you used dynamite before?”
“No, but is looks easy enough.”
“There are a lot of dead
miners that thought so too. Get someone to brief you.”
By token of being given a
command, issued this rifle, the dynamite, and blasting caps in his pack,
Alesandro’s unofficial rank was that of an officer. He was no an officer,
albeit, with little authority in the anarchist U.H.P. (the Union of the Brotherhood
of the Proletariat). Despite the recognition granted his education, Alesandro
knew his experience of warfare was little more than that of drilling on the
quadrant… marching in ranks and carrying a rifle.
“It doesn’t look good.”
Alesandro said to Marcel. He regretted more that he’d allowed his brother to
tag along.
At the barricade, Alesandro
and Marcel befriended a courier some simply called huérfana by the others. Or,
it would be better said that she befriended them. She could see right away that
Marcel would need instruction.
Marcel blushed, holding his
antique pre-WWI Spanish Mauser. Embarrassment and confusion in his eyes
betrayed his false machismo as he fumbled with the bolt of his rifle, having no
idea how to even load or shoot it.
Unaware of her abilities and,
thinking of her as only a child, Marcel made the mistake of showing patronizing
pity for the orphan when first met her. She had brought him wine with stale
bread and he warned her, “Be careful, Huérfana, don’t go poking your pretty little
head over the ramparts.”
“You be careful!” she snapped.
“You don’t even know how to handle that rifle…. Do you?”
“I know how well enough.” He
lied.
“I can show you around in case
you get scared and need to hide.” She parried.
“How old are you Huérfana?”
Alesandro challenged.
“My name isn’t Huérfana,” she
glowered, “It is Iniga and I’m thirteen.”
“Ten, really?” he countered,
as she looked no older than that.
“Twelve and a half then.” She
admitted, trying to stand taller.
Alesandro liked her attitude,
“Iniga? That’s Euskara, eh?”
“Yes, it is Basque and it
means desire!” before skittering away she stopped and turned, stomped her feet,
threw back her head, snapped her fingers flamenco style, and proudly
proclaimed, “I am Gitano too!”
They laughed at her Chaplinesque
image in canvas trousers stomping her bare feet and making dust instead of the
percussion of the clacking of heels.
The girl was always busy
running back and forth with the latest news, sometimes extra food, and even
ammo.
“I gave you my name,” she
demanded, “What are yours?”
“My name is Alesandro, and
this is my brother Marcel. I am also huérfano.” He looked over to Marcel to
confirm the truth of what he said because her eyes gave them both the scrutiny
of a prosecutor.
“Marcel? That’s French.” She
sneered, still looking at them with suspicion, “and Alesandro, that isn’t
Euskara,” she scowled impishly.
“Yes it is, Alesandro Otxoa…”
and elbowing Marcel, he added, “Marcel Fournier is going to be a famous
periodista from Bayonne.” He offered her a crusty piece of the bread she’d
given him.
“A kazetari, eh. I’ve never
heard of him, but, Otxoa? Ah, my father spoke of an Otxoa from Barcelona he
knew when he was young.”
“Eder Otxoa?” asked Marcel.
“Yes, that’s the name. I think
so.” Her expression was awestruck, her eyebrows pinched as she became serious,
“But we are orphans… we have no name but one we choose.” Her expression changed
from that serious tone to expectantly cheerful. “I am an orphan and my name is
only one.”
“We are orphans not
bastardos,” Alesandro pulled a crust of bread out of his coat pocket, “we have
names to live up to. What is your family name, Iniga?”
“My family is gone, I will
live up to my own name!”
Alesandro objected, “But it
was your mother and father that gave you your fire.”
She countered, “But they tried
to reason with murderers,” she set her face. “When I saw my mother and father
fall to the ground, I knew I was alone.”
“Here, watch closely,
periodista,” Iniga pulled the bolt back, put a spiral wire brush on the end of
a cleaning rod in the barrel and handed it back to Marcel. He followed her
instruction and proceeded to brush the rust from the barrel. She inspected it
several times before she handed him a swab on the rod to oil it. Only then did she give him a few rudimentary
lessons on aiming and pulling the trigger after which she took the gun back and
loaded five cartridges from a scarf bulging from her belt filled with several
rounds.
Iniga was a dynamo that never
stopped running off on errands. She’d be away ten minutes or an hour and always
came back with news of something useful like bread with sausages. Before
scurrying off again she instructed, “Look, if you hear the buzzing de abejas
near your ears, that isn’t the zumbido of bees… keep your head down ‘til you
see others on the line firing. Whatever you do, don’t be the first to lift your
head… even just to peek.”
A woman next to them had been
enjoying the lesson. After Iniga left she lit a cigarette and waved her hand
towards the track bed ahead, “Iniga was orphaned the day this strike
began. Her father was a respected
organizer of the miners and was shot there with his Romani wife as they were
announcing the fall of the garrison at Oviedo to the miners there.”
“She witnessed this?” Marcel
asked. He didn’t doubt Iniga’s word but his journalist instincts motivated him
to draw facts from multiple sources.
The woman continued, “Iniga
slipped away behind her mother into the arroyo. The whole town was forced to
witness the execution.... The execution that began the uprising here.
“You were forced to watch?”
“We evicted the Guardia
Civil,” proudly answered, “We took action from there. The Guardia Civil
retreated to their barracks, afraid to face the people and hoping to be rescued
by their Generals in Madrid.”
“How did you have weapons to
oppose them?”
“Ha, we had nothing we didn’t
take from them. We were armed with axes, shovels, a few hand guns and old
rifles. Men arose from the mine shafts and the women who been widowed and
children orphaned joined in too.”
