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."