Chapter 3. The Siege

Two days later, the siege began. The same locomotive that had hauled their cars up the narrow winding track stopped just beyond rifle shot from the first barricade. Soldiers poured out by the hundreds off flat-cars carrying artillery and armored vehicles. Alesandro watched through his field glasses as the Moroccan troops took positions beside the rails before the assault began. The hastily constructed piles of rubble ramparts were easily overrun by the professional Moroccan veterans, though the miners, women and men alike, fought ferociously, and valiantly, with small arms and dynamite against machine guns and artillery. Alesandro’s group retreated to the second and then the third barricade. And, finally alone, he took to an alley he’d used before, that was now closed off with rubble from the pounding of artillery. Losing track of both Marcel and Iniga, hoping to escape, he found himself bruised, his whole body drained of adrenaline, and aching with exhaustion, he was trapped against what was left of a broken down wall that once was part of a dining room of a house. His hunger awakened as he looked at a table, its table cloth still untouched in the middle of the ruins, and imagined wine being served with a pitxos (snack) of bakaillo piperrak (peppers stuffed with cod).

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

He listened helplessly to the sounds of summary firing squads; the nightmare cries of children and women that were coming from every direction. His handful of cartridges had long been used up and all he had of his Mauser rifle was the stick of its barrel he’d used as a club after the butt broke off of the stock.

He heard a child screaming curses from over the wall of rubble.

Yague (1907-52)  

Almost two years after Asturias (Aug 14^th 1936), 

under Colonel Yagüe's direction, thousands of 

prisoners and civilians, including women and 

children, were executed in Badajoz and buried 

in common graves in one of the biggest

 massacres by the Nationalists of the war. He 

was promoted by Franco to General in 1939.

Unthinking, he said aloud, “If I’m going to die, I might as well die fighting.”

He mustered enough strength to hurl himself over the wall, landing squarely on the other side. The Moroccan was oblivious to him with his pants down to the knees and hips thrusting away on a mere child underneath.  Alesandro found renewed strength and outrage as he tossed the Moroccan off the child. It was the huérfana, Iniga! She scrambled from them as they wrestled to grab Alesandro’s rifle barrel.  He was caught off-guard as the more experienced Moroccan pinned him and they rolled together. A knife flashed at Alesandro’s gut. Alesandro, in agony, hung on the best he could. Unexpected by Alesandro, as well as his assailant, Iniga swung wildly with the barrel of the busted rifle, smashing into the side of the rapist’s head. Her face, bloody and bruised, and her body naked from the waist down, was clothed in a sheath of blood. The Moore slumped semi-unconscious to the ground. Alesandro struggled to his feet in time to see Iniga take the knife from the ground that had left the Moore’s hand with the first whack of the rifle barrel.

“Good,” she said coldly, “he is still alive.

The child wasted no time: grabbed the man’s balls, and, in one slice, held them in front of his eyes.

He yelped awake like a wounded dog, “Yeeow! Puta! Puta! Puta!”

She picked up a stone block in her tiny hands and smashed it down on her rapist’s head. She did so repeatedly after the Moroccan’s body was still.

Alesandro, in spite of his pain, grabbed her from behind and pulled her away. She wriggled out from his arms, fists pounding at his face indignant, “Cerdo, hands off…”

She opened her eyes to see his face as though coming out of a black-out, “Oh… it is you.”

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

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

“You need to get that wound treated before you drop.” She pointed to the hills, commanding, “Follow me. I have some wraps hidden up there.”

Alesandro followed, holding his guts in, as though in a dark dream. He followed her through the maze of rubble and broken down walls. He followed her to her hiding place in the hills above the town in a hole under a flat stone behind and between several boulders big enough for three to shelter.

“I hid up here until I decided to come back down to find you and the Periodista. Then that castrati caught me,” she whispered, “C’mon, there is room enough for us.”

“You didn’t find Marcel?”

“I saw him loaded with some others onto a truck. I could do nothing for him.”

From under their cover above the ruined town, they watched helpless as truck after truck-load hauled away what was left of the villagers. Troops scoured the hills looking for escapees. Some had been trapped inside pock-marked walls of broken down houses and shot on site while others were taken out to the side of the road to be executed… falling like manikins over into the arroyo. One soldier came within a meter or two of their hiding place. Alesandro feared that the pounding of his heart was loud enough to give away their position. Those that had boarded the trucks were taken away to some of the first concentration camps of the era. Three thousand were killed throughout the province as cities and towns fell one after another, and another... where hope was born and smashed. A student of history, Alesandro saw the irony in that Moroccans, who had never taken Asturias in the centuries before, had done so under the command of Nationalists, General Franco’s Colonel Yague and General Ochoa.

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 newly garrisoned Gijón on the coast. The third night they passed an isolated house where two bicycles leaned against a wall. Alesandro was weak and could walk no further. He put a hand on one of the bikes.

Iniga whispered to stop him, warning, “What will we do if we come upon a patrol. Where will we stash the bikes? You have to think ahead Alesandro!”

“I have to ride. If I get caught, so what, I’ll die here if I don’t."

She gave in to him and they rode all the way to Gijon without incident.

There they would be smuggled out during an October storm by a fishermen, escaping the Moroccans himself, in a small txalupa-bate steamer (Basque tuna boat).

Fever and infection had begun its march over Alesandro’s will by the time the boat left the harbor into the rough October seas. He complained, “Can this boat take this weather?”

The skipper replied, “It is perfect weather for this bate.” And as if he needed a reason, he added, “There will be no Navy patrols tonight.”

They docked at the port city of Bayonne where Alesandro was treated for infection. In the years before penicillin his likelihood of survival of a gut wound was almost nil. The Basque underground was nearly as active in Southern France as it was in Spain throughout this period and one of the key enlaces was the Fournier estate. A car was arranged to drive Iniga and Alesandro up the Nive River, through the rolling green hills, to a rustic farmhouse off the road a kilometer. Iniga was considered a daughter by the family, as Alesandro had been considered a son, and every opportunity was at her disposal. She attended cours moyen premiere année and the Lycée.

The Fournier family had connections with the academic world active in France and Europe. Marcel’s father knew of the latest developments in science and the arts. One was a fellow Basque who’d studied bacteriology and interned in London at Saint Mary’s Hospital where penicillin was discovered. A Professor Fleming had been, since 1928, experimenting with this new antiseptic agent that had properties most affective against staphylococci. Without this antiseptic, Alesandro would have died.

Alesandro feared Marcel was among the dead before Iniga’s witness but there wasn’t any way to look for him regardless. That he might have been arrested and imprisoned along with 30 to 40,000 others in Asturias did little to salve his guilt. But Marcel survived and would report after the elections two years later in February of 1936; “I awoke in my cell thinking it would be just another day when I heard a familiar woman’s voice ringing through the corridors. Ten of us in the cell went to the bars to see what was going on. It was the newly elected MP, Dolores Ibárruri, shouting, ‘Comrades, All Out!’ Anarchists and Communists were united in the struggle. Some of us, too weak to stand only minutes before, mustered the strength to march out of prison as victors.”

Those that had boarded the trucks were taken away to some of the first 

concentration camps of the era of. Three thousand were killed throughout

 the province as cities and towns fell one after another, and another... 

where hope was born and smashed.

Chapter 2. 1934 - Asturias Miners' Strike

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 depicted 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 these 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 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, would steam towards Basque Country after dropping off the volunteers in Oviedo 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 one year of age by the pistoleros of the Guardia Civil. He had been embraced, and given a home near Biarritz by Marcel’s Basque father, out of loyalty to the Otxoa family. That 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 fifteen 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 who had followed him over patxaran in a café alongside of other boys eager to become men.

“You aren’t going without me,” Marcel protested. “Look, I brought a bottle of patxaran.”

“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.”

Marcel was sixteen and his appearance was that of a far younger man than Alesandro. He would later say that he had been playing the part of a freelance journalist for the L’Humanité in Paris. L’Humanité was an organ of the PCF (Communist Party in France) whose editors had yet to publish anything he’d submitted until after the miners’ strike in Asturias where his imprisonment for a brief time became the cause celebrity du jour.

Taking a sip of the patxaran, 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 while opening his backpack. “See, I have another bottle in my bag.”

The brothers got drunk… Neither of the boys has ever had more than wine with dinner, so they'd gotten very drunk.... So much so, that Alesandro barely remembered agreeing to board the train while singing what would be the anthem of the revolution, “La Rhumba La Carmella,” and chanting “¡Unidad, Proletaria, y 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 at ready to launch crates loaded with bundled 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?”

Another miner sitting on the crates behind the make-shift desk piped in, “It would be better to ask, does he have the need for a razor?”

After the laughter died, the miner at the desk followed up, “Well?”

“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 the second miner to pass over the desk.

Alesandro’s union papers, that he'd obtained before leaving Bayonne, and a certificate from a military prep school, wasn’t enough to impress the old union miner.

He snorted, “A cadet from the école militaire?” But, when he spied the pistol tucked in Alesandro’s belt, he observed, “The Regulars use a Campo-Giro. How did you get that one?”

“My inheritance after…”

The miner smiled as he saw a familiar name on the documents Alesandro submitted, “Otxoa? I know of an Otxoa. An organizer, Eder from the house of Otxoa, twenty years ago. Eder 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 miner.

“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, boisterously laughing, “More than most. You have the house of your father in your blood... eh? and maybe your mother’s spine too.”

“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 it looks easy enough.”

“There are a lot of dead miners that thought so too. Get someone to brief you.”

By token of having been given a command, issued the rifle, the dynamite, and blasting caps in his pack, Alesandro’s unofficial rank was that of an officer. He was not 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 at their first encounter. 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?”

He lied, “I know how to well enough.”

“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.

Throwing back her shoulders and trying to stand taller, she admitted, “Twelve and a half then.”

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, “We are orphans. We have no name, but the ones we choose.” Her expression changed from that serious tone to one unexpectedly 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... Inigo the warrior!”

“That was the name of the great Jesuit Saint Ignatius before he converted.” Marcel couldn’t resist showing off his history to the girl, “The warrior Inigo of the house of Loyola...”

“Yeh, yeh, so what. 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 rifle 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 or something useful, like bread with sausages. Before scurrying off again she once more instructed Marcel, “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.”

Marcel asked, “She witnessed this?”

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,” she 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.”

Posted at the barricade the brothers acquainted themselves with the others.  The road had been blocked with nothing more than a pile of stones, odd pieces of furniture, and mattresses, topped off with several sandbags, and the dreams and hopes of a people. Spirits were high among the comrades, as men and women stood watch together. A delegation that had been sent to Oviedo from Gijón and Avilés but none suspected that the help they called for from the UGT committee was going to be coming to reinforce them. It was Alesandro’s first experience with this peculiar war of initials: initials for one trade union or the other: a plague of initials drawing as much Spanish blood as Franco’s Moroccans.

This was a bloodletting that characterized the Spanish Civil War from its beginnings in Asturias to the final days of the Republic in Catalonia. The CNT were Anarchists; the UGT and PCE were the Communist Party and loosely joined together in a coalition against CEDA (the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right). CEDA held power in Madrid a few years in the beginning of the new Republic under the conservative to moderate government of Alejandro Lerroux. But history would prove that their rifles were aimed against each other as frequently as they were their common enemy.

Alesandro extended a pathetic crust of bread to Iniga the next time Iniga returned, “Please, take this bread I offer, one orphan to another,”

“You are my brother. I give you Euzkara name, Gotzon, an angel… but an innocent angel.” She accepted his offer of bread.

“You too, Marcel, I will give you Euskara name… hmm, what shall I call you, you almost famous journalist? Maybe Ortzi, because he has blue eyes like the sky.”

She disappeared for about ten minutes, returning with another bundle of butcher paper holding two huge sausages and a fresh stick of bread. Her other hand held five cartridges that she passed to Marcel with a sweet smile, “Here’s some more ammo, Ortzi, for the rifle you don’t know how to shoot.”

While admiring Iniga’s fiery disposition, Alesandro was reminded of the vigorous folk dances of the Basque, the wild frenzy of Gypsy flamenco, and the more restrained bull-fight of the matador flamenco of Catalonia. She seemed to have, at eight, the genes of passion already in her heart. A friendship of a lifetime was formed that day and the memory of 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.

Chapter 1. A Legacy of Secrets

The Basque Pyrenees serve as God’s fence between Spain and France. If the Pyrenees are the hartz baten hortzak, the teeth of a bear, then this part of the range has been the bear’s molars that grind down armies of occupiers and tyrants since, like the Basque people, they have been where they are before there ever was a France or Spain. Orreaga is the Basque name for the pass where the Roman road crossed from Iberia into the Aquitaine. On this verdant landscape, eleven hundred years before on Roncesvalles Pass, Basque shepherds and foresters waited in ambush with spears and knives before the retreat from their homeland of Charlemagne's armed and armored knights. And this was where Roland’s knights of the troubadours’ song died, lance and steed useless. It was on these same hills Napoleon’s invincible Grande Armée was harassed, and needled into retreat, where the Spanish Maquis held out during and after the Civil War, and, as Basque Separatists, well into the nineteen-seventies against Franco’s tyranny. Armed only by the tenacity and perseverance of the Basque language and culture, banned by Franco and revived after he died, the Basque have always been the last thing oppressors confront in the Pyrenees as they are swallowed into obscurity.

The river, La Nive, twists her way north to France and skirts past the east bank of the Basque commune of Itxassou. On one of those verdant hills above, and beyond the town, a complex nestles inside three hundred acres that was once a modest house with a rich history of its own. From the road nearby, it appears to be a typical Basque farmhouse, baserriko etxea, hidden by hedges lining a narrow lane. It had been remodeled and expanded from the inside out after the Post War, Hungry Years, by the investment banker, Marcel Fournier.

Predawn, a light radiated out of the second story window above the garage. It was the light from the window of the former Basque Maquis, Alesandro Gotson Otxoa. In his small quarters, at 84, he prepared for the day ahead by putting on his boots, trousers, scarf, and beret, as he had been doing from the same quarters since the winter of 1957. It was the spring of 1999 and he was still not feeling too old to work.

At the other end of the house... a woman was furtively sleeping with chills and sweat, with bugs crawling under her skin, with muscles cramping, her arms and legs twisted within the sheets. Her blankets tossed off, she was out of bed and down the hall to a window where the light from a dormer above the wing of the second floor over the equipment barn could be seen. Other than that light, the house was as empty as it was dark. She needed to talk with somebody to distract. Talk yes, to distract from the hunger... the hunger of every cell in her body beyond the hunger of an empty stomach. The light that radiated from the dormer above the garage was from Alesandro’s room. The main part of the house faced east as all the old traditional Basque houses do and Alesandro’s room on the wing above the garage did too. Alesandro was... well, Alesandro, a rock of stability for this woman. He had been more than a manager of her family’s estate and its farm acres, whose panorama over orchards and pastures was viewed from there all the way to the La Nive.

Officially, he was her Godfather, and always a guardian angel throughout her coming of age and awkward teens. He was there when her paternal father, Marcel, couldn’t be. It was only fitting that she should find solace in the company of this single-most dependable man left for her now that her father was gone.

She tapped lightly at his door, “Alesandro… are you awake? It’s me, uh… da me?”

He opened the door greeting her warmly, “Of course, Adrienne, please, ongi atorri… come in.”

Her eyes painfully adjusted to the loom of the light of dawn’s sun rising where the Morning Star hovered brightly above the hills from the open window of his small but comfortable room. She’d enjoyed the refuge of modest simplicity in Alesandro’s quarters since childhood and appreciated the sitting room and bedroom barely of size enough to fit a single bed. He’d remodeled it with his own good hand and added to the servant’s quarters to the old laborers loft over the original equipment barn that was now adjoined to the house for him.

Dawn broke from over the river behind the hills beyond. The window faced the open expanse of the horse pasture above the winding Nive through the fields and the looming light of the soon to be rising-sun.

Her voice quivered as she said,  “I love your room for this view.”

Alesandro was officially the estate’s grounds and farm manager. He’d insisted on having a job as a condition for staying on. Marcel considered him a monk, choosing a life of simplicity and solitude. He knew Alesandro had been writing something of a memoir of his years in isolation; his near solitary campaign against Franco; of ranging over and back across the Pyrenees; of his lost companions at arms; and finally, of his imprisonment at Carabanchel. Marcel knew this was his real vocation.

“You’re always up before dawn, even when no one is here,” she stood by the window and looked around the room. Her picture was framed on the wall above his writing desk. It was snapped when she was fourteen; an innocent image, naked in the surf, with arms stretched above adolescent breasts budding skyward. He’d snapped that picture in better days... innocent days. Next to it was a 2 ½ x 3 ½ Kodak Box picture of Alesandro, with an arm over her father’s shoulder. They cut dashing figures, wearing Basque berets, from when the two drank home-brewed patxaran (pronounced pacharan) in Madrid, before they joined the barricades in the mountains above Oviedo during the miners’ Strike of '34 in Asturias. Alesandro looked the hardened veteran, though he’d only attended Lycée Militaire before then, but they were determined, as though together, they would surely bite-off Generalissimo Franco’s balls. Alesandro would have done anything for Marcel or any one of his handful of close associates from those times. But Marcel’s face… the one that Adrienne knew, was ambiguous.

She vaguely knew of their ordeal from those times and asked her father only once of his imprisonment. It disturbed her that his eyes darted away as though ashamed. His answer was modest, saying, “I was little more than a Civil War tourist caught up in a catastrophe.”

Alesandro’s once jet-black hair had turned completely white. Adrienne thought it made him look distinguished. Time had been gracious to the contours of kindness that shaped Alesandro’s face since those days. The chiseled revolutionary Anarchist’s features had eroded with time and hardship. The stone-cold warrior’s eyes of the old photograph had been transformed… their fiery intensity was replaced by a gentle light. He, and her father, had both survived Stalinist partisans, intramural purges, and Falangist assaults. A cat, allotted more than double the nine lives, Alesandro had also escaped the atrocities of the Albatera detainment by jumping off a transport truck. He had led the street fighting in Barcelona. He had endured Camp Gurs in Vichy France after Madrid was crushed, and survived, after years of traversing the Pyrenees against the Guardia Civil, the four years of imprisoned in Carabanchel. He’d witnessed, with sullen eyes, first-hand, the oppression in Spain that followed the Wars.

Reminded of her father by the snapshots, she bent over Alesandro’s desk with eyes full of tears for the first time since her father died, “I’m so sorry I didn’t love him enough.” The words burst out between sobs unexpected. Arising from the midst of her chest where, like a latent volcano awakening from its long dormant magma chamber, emotions raw broke loose.

Standing, Alesandro pulled her to his chest with his good arm and let her cry it out.

Between wiping tears from her face and sweat from her brow, her eyes focused on a familiar picture from under the glass of the desk. It was a fading, wallet sized, black and yellowed white, crumpled photo of a young woman with fierce eyes under a beret cocked jauntily to the side that barely held down a cascade of jet black curls. The words Pío, Pío, Pío were inked across the bottom of the picture where her cupid-bow lips kissed the tip of an odd-shaped knife she held in front of her face, “Who is that woman, Alesandro? I’ve been wondering about her.”

“I’ll have to tell you about Iniga someday.”

“I think I met her once?”

“Yes, you met her.” His eyes darkened. "You are closely related."

“I am, but how?" She was in no mood for riddles, "I must have been eight-years old.”

"I meant to tell you about it before you were married, but..."

Disregarding this non-answer, she asked, “Avez-vous été amoureux?”

“No… yes, in a way,” he paused and reflected, “We might have been lovers… but she was more to me a little sister.”

Mocking outrage, she tried to lighten the mood, “No, yes, in a way? So, many equivocations? What was it, incest, eh? Alesandro!”

He motioned for her to sit with a pendulum swing of his immobile right arm that hung near useless at his side. He was purposely evading the topic altogether. He moved some of his papers and books off the chair at his desk with his left hand, saying, “Some things are better left unsaid, for now. How are you doing, Moineau?”

“Oh, I don’t know…” she blushed. Moineau, meaning little sparrow. It was his nom de ’affection: she loved it as a child; hated it as a teen, but she strongly, strangely, loved it when he said it then. “Things are so bizarre. Rémy tried to take charge of everything. Mama was content to let him run all our affairs at first… what have I to do?”

“And this isn’t okay with you?”

“I can’t complain… I’m hardly ever here anyway. Rémy can handle all the lawyers and banks… the estate. I counted on being here for Mama, and that’s all. But he… he swooped in like a falcon and scooped her up before I could do anything.”

“Yes, I’d heard you were back for a few days…”

“Just a few… to pay my respects,”

“Didn’t want to bother you.” He handed her a tissue, “I missed you at the funeral.”

 It was a sore subject. Anger replaced grief with this reminder, “Funeral services are nauseous for me.”

Alesandro had good instincts: he read her feelings and laughed lightly, “You know the cliché? We are Catholics, but we are Basque, and we always follow the priests with a candle or a club.”

Adrienne laughed a restrained, ha. Nonetheless, it felt good for her to laugh with Alesandro…. Always positive Alesandro… his yin to her yang, or the other way around. His quips relieved her angst.

“Understood, so, what is it you plan to do now?” he held both her hands in his calloused left hand. It was a comfortable gesture and a fatherly one she longed for now that Père was gone. She loved her father. How badly could she have disappointed him... his junkie daughter. And then there was her gay younger brother, Eder. They had rebelled so thoroughly from father’s influence, always distant Père on business… the business of France. Yet, she also knew his love was unflagging and she knew Alesandro was an angel standing in on father’s behalf. Eder too was like a son to Alesandro. He was named after Alesandro’s father.

Marcel possessed good business acumen, amassed tremendous wealth, and became one of the powerhouses of France’s recovery after the war. Remaining apolitical, between the radical socialists and the moderate democratic socialists, his ideals (though never extreme) eventually drifted towards becoming more moderate and had been instrumental in helping Charles De Gaulle found what would become the Fifth Republic in ‘58’.

This was all before Adrienne was born. It was happening while Alesandro suffered in Franco’s prisons… his small band of Basque maquis hanging on in the Pyrenees had been wiped out and long gone. Still, in time for her christening, her father managed to bribe, maneuver, and otherwise wrangle the Franco government into releasing Alesandro from the very pit of hell, Carabanchel. For this task he’d employed the help of the mysterious “Bird Dog”. Ironically, Gotson, Alesandro’s Basque nom de guerre meaning Angel of God, was now termed a terrorist by Interpol, the DST (Directorate of Territorial Security), the RG (General Intelligence Directorate), the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as he sat protected from all those acronyms. Protected, isolated, writing his memoirs in a small room on the estate of the billionaire, Marcel Fournier, his war was over.

“I don’t know what to do now,” but, truthfully, she barely cared one way or another.

“You don’t look well… are you… again?” his brow turned down out of concern over judgment.

“It is obvious?” Sweat beaded on her forehead but she was cold. Every cell in her body ached.

“Please,” his brow knitted before he spoke, “There is the privatklinik in Switzerland; Meiringen… I believe?”

“No, no, Alesandro… don’t go on like my brother. Rémy taunts me all the time. I can’t go through that again.”

“But you are so sick …”

“I can get through this. I’ve done it several times already,” this wasn’t just bravado, Adrienne knew she could. Experience told her that, as hard as it was, quitting was easy compared to staying quit from the relentless obsession of its grip. “You know, Rémy tried to get Père to have me declared incompetent the last time….”

“No, though I did suspect something was troubling Marcel after you left.”

“I am not going to grant Rémy another opportunity. I’m taking this respite to get clean and go back to California where Rémy won’t be watching every move I make.”

"That woman in the picture... she was your husband's mother."

Adrienne was too dope-sick to be patient with Alesandro, "I don't know what you mean. His mother was at the wedding."

The odor of fresh coffee caused her stomach to turn, “Please excuse me Alesandro, I have to …”

Alesandro put a trash can under her chin just in time.

He thought to himself, "Yes, some things are better left unsaid."

Adrienne: The Chaos of Desire - Book I. Prologue

The Maquisard:

Villagers huddled at the side of the tracks leading into a mining town nestled between the precipice of an arroyo below and the steep crag of the mountain above. A woman patted a young girl on the head and slipped the child behind her skirts as the Guardia Civil ordered the group to line up. With a shove from the woman, the girl scurried down and away. As a distraction, the woman raised her fist in the air and, as a last gesture of defiance, shouted, “Viva la Revolucion!”

A man joined her with raised fist, as did the others in the group. “Viva la…”

A loud volley of Spanish Mausers barked and echoed like angry dogs against the witness of the Cantabarian Mountains. Bodies tumbled into the arroyo. Some of them were neighbors the girl had known since birth. She crawled under the corpse of her mother protector. Except for a restrained moan, followed by a few pops and cracks of pistols from above at the roadside, there came a horrible silence. Once the Guardia Civil left, she waited from her hiding place beneath a boulder in a hollow dug out by a badger 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!”