Asturias Fandango: from Adriane

Alesandro still thought of himself as an academic but, while visiting a friend in Barcelona, the miners went on strike in the mining towns of Asturias in 1934. It was Dolores Ibárruri, standing on the back of a flat-bed truck with no megaphone, and only the rhetoric of passion, that awakened his genes passed down from the father and mother he’d nearly forgotten. He realized that the embers of his calling had been smoldering: a vocation that would be ignited in Barcelona and quickened in the mining towns of Asturias.

Trains, controlled by the Anarchist CNT, were loaded up with other hopefuls like himself and crossed the width of Spain bound for Asturias. Especially ironic was that the same trains were then loaded up with the Guardia Civil and Moroccan Regulares by the Generalissimo of the Republic, Francisco Franco, to relieve the garrisons besieged by the CNT in the cities and villages of Asturias. The well trained and equipped veterans of the Moroccan Regulars were especially brutal and had been given free rein to suppress the region by what was then the right wing government of the Republic in Madrid.

The miners had been waiting behind the barricades by the time Alesandro had gotten through to the hills above, and far beyond Oviedo, to an eagle’s aerie of a small mining town nestled on the side of a precipice. The town was fortified with a barricade against the single road that led up a winding track to it and backed by the steep slopes behind leaving no room for retreat. He’d been issued an antique WWI Mauser that he had no idea how to even load or shoot before he was posted at the barricade, nothing more than a pile of furniture, mattresses, a row of oil drums filled with water, a sandbag here or there, and the dreams and hopes of a people.

The spirits were high among his comrades as men and women stood watch together. None suspected that help they called for from the CNT wasn’t coming to reinforce them. He’d befriended a courier tyke called Huérfana by the others. The Guardia Civil had orphaned her in the days leading up to the strike before they’d been evicted, forced out of their barracks, by axes and shovels, a few hand guns and old rifles, by men arising from dangerous mine shafts and the women who been widowed and children orphaned. Her father was a respected organizer of the miners but was caught on the road with his Romani wife as they were announcing the fall of the garrison at Oviedo to the miners there. Iniga slipped away at her mother’s urging into the gathering crowd of onlookers witnessing the rifle shots of their execution. It was their execution that began the uprising in this village as the outrage that had been simmering so long came a boiling point.

 Unaware of her abilities and thinking of her as only a child, Alesandro 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?”

“My name isn’t Huérfana,” she glowered, “It is Iniga and I’m ten.”

“Ten, really?” he challenged, as she looked no older than eight.

“Nine and a half then.” She admitted, trying to stand taller.

He liked her attitude, “Iniga? That’s Euskara, eh?”

“Yes, it is Basque and it means Fiery One!” before skittering away and out of sight she stopped and turned, stomped her feet and snapped her fingers over her head flamenco style, added, “I am Gitana too. What’s your name?”

“Alesandro. Gypsy, I am also huérfano.” He laughed at her Chaplinesque image in canvas trousers stomping her bare feet and making dust instead of the percussion of the clacking of heels.

“Alesandro, that isn’t Euskara,” she scowled impishly.

“Yes it is, Alesandro Zúñiga…” He offered her a crusty piece of the bread she’d given him. “Then you are my sister.”

“Zúñiga, my father spoke of a Zúñiga from Barcelona he knew when he was young.”

“Eder Zúñiga?”

“I think so. But we are orphans… we have no name but one we choose.” Her expression changed from a serious tone to expectantly cheerful. “I am an orphan and my name is only one.”

“Then, please, take this bread I offer,” he extended his pathetic crust of bread.

“Then you are my brother. I give you a Euzkara name, Gotzon…an angel…, but an innocent angel.” She accepted his offer of bread but disappeared for about ten minutes, returning with a bundle of butcher paper holding two huge sausages and a fresh stick of bread.

Her other hand held five cartridges that she passed to him smirkily saying, “Here’s some ammo for the rifle you don’t know how to shoot.”

He handed her the rifle and she showed him how to load it. While she went through the rudimentary functions of the rifle for him, Alesandro thought of the differences between vigorous folk dances of the Basque, the wild frenzy of Gypsy flamenco, and the more restrained but equally fiery flamenco of Catalonia. A friendship of a lifetime was formed that day and her tiny feet pounding up the dust on an Asturias barricade brought a smile to his face in the harder times of the years to come.

Two days later the siege began. The town was overrun easily by the professional Moroccan veterans even though the miners fought ferociously and valiantly. Exhausted, Alesandro retreated to an alley he’d used before that was now closed off with rubble from the pounding of artillery. Hoping to escape he found himself almost trapped.

He moaned, “This is where I’m going to die.”

Leaning up against what was left of a broken down wall he listened helplessly to the sounds of firing squads and cries of children and women that were coming from every direction. His handful of cartridges had been used and all he had of his old Mauser rifle was the stick of its barrel he’d used as a club even after the butt broke off of the stock. He heard a child screaming curses from over the wall of rubble.

Thinking, “If I’m going to die, I might as well die fighting.” He mustered enough strength to hurl himself over the ruins, landing squarely on the other side to see a Moroccan with his pants down to the knees, hips thrusting away, on the screaming child underneath.  Alesandro swung wildly with the barrel of his busted rifle smashing into the side of the child rapist’s head. The child he rescued was the huérfana, Iniga. Her face, bloody and bruised, and her body, naked from the waist down, was clothed in a sheet of blood. He tried to lift her… to take her away… where? No telling… away, that was all.

She wriggled out from his arms, fists pounding at his face indignant, “Cerdo, hands off…” Then she opened her eyes to see his face, “Oh… it is you.”

He gave her his coat to cover her, “We need to get out of here.”

Had the occasion not been so horrific, little Iniga almost looked comical in the oversized coat. She found her trousers that had been tossed aside and pulled them up and on over her bloody legs. She rolled the Moroccan over face up and pulled out a knife from the sheath on the Moroccan’s belt that was unbuckled still hanging below his knees. Alesandro stood aside stunned and watched as she grabbed him by the balls and in one quick slice cut them off. He came to.

 “Puta! Puta!” He screamed in agony as she held them up like a trophy. These would be his last words.

A thick bile rose in Alesandro’s throat… he was about to vomit… he choked anxious, “Let’s go before someone hears…”

“Someone hears alright!” She picked up a heavy block of rubble with both her small child’s hands and slammed it down… slippery with fresh blood… like an eel out of her hands… picked it up again… pounded down and down again repeatedly on Moroccan’s skull long after his body stopped jerking and he’d stopped breathing.

“Follow me!” She finished…

Alesandro followed as though in a dark dream. He followed her through the maze of rubble and broken down walls to a hiding place through a hole burrowed out under a slab of concrete.

“I was digging this out when that castrati found me,” she whispered, “C’mon, there is room enough for you.” They watched from under their cover as truck after truck-load passed by hauling away what was the left of the villagers. Some were taken out to the side of the road to be shot… falling over into the arroyo. Others that were left were taken away the first concentration camps of the era. Three thousand were killed throughout the province as one after another, and another, thirty to forty-thousand were imprisoned.

Iniga had saved Alesandro that night as she led him out through the cover of darkness; sheltering by day, and walking by night, the several kilometers to Gijón on the coast. There they would be smuggled out by Basque fishermen in a small fishing boat to safety across French border all the way to the port city of Bayonne.