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.
No comments:
Post a Comment