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.