Iniga left Spain for good on a June day in 1965.
It
was on a clear Sunday morning in Madrid that she waited outside on the balcony
of the nursery for the family to return from mass. She could see the father
walk away to leave the mother and child at the door. Iniga slipped inside to
stand in wait, and to take-in the scene from a closet. She watched the mother,
through the louvres, tuck the child in with affection. From the beginning the
operation didn't feel right. Though she would only have the mother and child to
deal with, she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to assassinate the
husband, a Falangist bastard. It was
going to be a simple matter of taking the child back to her birth mother whom
she'd helped to escape La Ventas. After mass it would be siesta time and the
opportunity to act would be then.
The mother comforted the boy, “Sleep Emanuel… sleep
under my wings.” The mother then softly sang a lullaby familiar to Iniga:
“Los pollitos dicen los pollitos dicen pío, pío, pío cuando tienen hambre
cuando tienen frío. La gallina busca el maiz el trigo les da la comida y les
presta abrigo. Bajo de sus alas, acurrucaditos ¡duermen los pollitos hasta el
otro día !”
The little chicks say pío, pío, pío when they are
hungry… when they are cold. The hen looks for the corn wheat, gives them food,
and provides them shelter. Under her wings sleeping chicks huddle with each
other to hasten another day.
She listened to the mother sing and heard the child
sweetly ask, “¿Esta nana me protege de secuestradores?” Will this lullaby
protect me from kidnappers?
Iniga’s throat ached with sorrow… pío, pío, pío... A
sledge hammer slammed into her breast... thirty years of suppressed grief...
her will left her as she waited for the mother to leave the room. It couldn’t
be helped… the lullaby was one her own mother cradled her with so long ago… she
sobbed loud... loud enough for all the years of isolation, holding her sorrow
deep in her chest... loud enough... enough for the mother to hear, her grieving
burst forth as her heaving body pushed the closet door open. The mother huddled
over the boy like a hen would for her chick. Iniga was devastated.
The mother’s eyes were locked on Iniga’s. She knew why
Iniga was there. The boy wailed… he screamed; she threatened, “You will have to
kill me! My husband will soon be here, and you won’t get away.”
Iniga saw no fear in the woman’s eyes, “I saw
your husband leave. The house is empty but for us. We are alone.”
“We are alone, but God sees…” she resigned.
“Don’t speak of God or justice. Hand me the boy and
you won’t be hurt,” Iniga commanded.
“Justice! What have you to offer him but poverty,
erbestea pobrezia? His mother never knew him. He would be raised with honor and
love.” After she said that much without any sign of desperation, she turned her
back to Iniga, held the boy close to her breast, and stood ready to take a
bullet.
Erbestea probrezia… the poverty of exile. For the
first time since the ambush in the Pyrenees twenty years before, Iniga was
drained of the desire to avenge. This was another woman like her own mother, regardless of how she became a mother, who spoke Euskara.
“Basque zaude? Nagoen euskal gehiegi.” Iniga was
stunned at the surprise that this woman was also Basque. The language was
banned in Franco’s Spain, but the woman had the dignity of one surrendered to
her destiny and wanted her last words to be that of her native language.
“Yes, I am Euskal, and it is only right that my
executioner is Euskal,” and saying this, she turned to face Iniga and presented
the boy, who was quietly listening to the two women as though he knew that the
danger had passed.
“You have been taken too.”
“Yes, I hated the man until I was given this boy. With
this child my life has purpose. Without Emanuel, I would rather be dead.”
Just as the murder of her parents and the rape changed
Iniga’s life, the words spoken so bravely, “I would rather be dead,” reminded
her of Harry Baker’s taunt eight years before, “You choose to die in a
worthless Jihad. You choose that over motherhood? Do you have no compassion? If
not for mine, won't you care for your own blood?”
She left the nursery empty handed… no one followed
her.
Iniga had fought on in the Pyrenees through Asturias
and Galicia much longer than Alesandro. One by one her comrades were picked off
by the Guardia Civil: Caracremada, El Quico, and finally El Piloto in the
spring of ’65. She had grown old with these men and the Maquis of Spain, but
with these men gone, she was tired and, at 40 years of age, she threw in the
towel. She was wanted by Interpol and it was risky business for her to return
to France but, penniless, she was dressed as a man when she contacted Marcel
Fournier in Biarritz.
It was over an hour’s bus ride from Biarritz, the long
way back to Bayonne before transferring to Ustaritz on the la Nive. Iniga sat,
pretending to be reading a book, wearing sunglasses over close cropped white
hair with her cap’s brim pulled down until she got off across the bridge. She
took a cab across the river the rest of the way beyond to the Fournier estate
where she had the driver drop her off a half-klic from the gate… just in case.
She’d only walked a few minutes when a little girl on
a pony trotted up to her on the road. Iniga recognized the prominent Fournier
nose adorning the girl cute face that asked at once, “Why are you walking
monsieur?”
“I’m walking because I want to meet precocious young
girls, eh?”
“Good, I’m riding my pony on the road because I might
meet a prince and he might be walking to find his princess,” for a little girl,
she laughed a throaty laugh, “I’m Adrienne Fournier and we live around the
corner from here.”
Iniga let out a sigh of relief at the name, “You
father must be Marcel Fournier?”
“You don’t know him, do you?” Adrienne glowered
suspiciously at Iniga’s tramp like appearance. “But, everyone knows him for a
toque suave.”
“Soft touch, ha! Tell him a Huérfano from Asturias is
here to see the famous periodista. Go ahead and tell Marcel I’m here.”
“Nothing doing, you aren’t a very big man,” Adrienne
patted the pony’s rump, “can you ride a pony?”
Iniga hadn’t noticed before that the girl was riding
bareback, “Sure can, but I ought to ride up front. There’s no saddle to hold on
to.”
The pony bore them both as though there was no extra
weight. They approached the house. The front was the familiar two storied
farmhouse and stables where she’d been a guest after Drancy before the War.
Riding past the old structures, Iniga saw that the house had been extended into
a sizable mansion with two wings encircling a courtyard and fountain, Marcel
was standing at the door to greet her.
“I’ve been expecting you.”
“How did you know?” she hadn’t let anyone know she was
leaving Gijón.
“Fisherman are known for the tales they tell, aren’t
they?” Marcel maintained a network of old members of the Basque Maquis from
Boise Idaho to Bayonne. He also had contacts from the FBI to Interpol. There
wasn’t much that went on that he wasn’t informed of and he was equally adept at
keeping what he knew to himself. He appraised her appearance and saw that her
features were sunken… sullen… resignation etched into her once fiery face.
As Iniga dismounted she became curious about what
Marcel could tell her of Harry Baker and Alesandro. Speaking in an affectionate
code that Marcel would understand, she asked, “Have you learned how to load a
rifle yet?”
Iniga bathed and fell fast asleep before she could get
dressed. Marcel knew better than to have her roused for dinner. It was late
evening before she came down from her room into the kitchen. Sitting on a stool, Alesandro’s back was to her, as he was watching a small TV on the
counter. The American President, Lyndon Johnson, was droning on about the Gulf of
Tonkin, a Resolution from the year before, and escalation of troop levels to
500,000.
“Another civil war on another continent?” she
interrupted.
“Nice haircut.” Alesandro turned and arose to her.
She couldn’t contain her joy and she clung to him, “No
one told me you were here. The three of us haven’t been together since Madrid.”
“A lifetime ago.”
“Oh, Alesandro, I should have quit when you… your arm
never healed?”
“No, it never healed. The past can’t be undone with
regrets, leave it where it is,” he consoled her.
“And the Bird Dog? Do you ever… do you know?”
“Your heart can heal Huérfana, let go of the hatred.”
“How can you, after what he did to you?” she fumed.
“What he did for me, he did for you. It might have
been different for both of us had he not.”
“Yes, you can forgive Carabanchel, but I can’t forgive
La Venta and his betrayal of you. I wish to God that you would have put that
bullet in his head the day we first met him,” she relented.
“You talk like that, but I can see that something has
changed in you. I see in your eyes the seed of compassion that has sprouted at
last. I pray you would nurture it…”
“Nonsense! Don’t go religious on me.” She pulled his
body to her in a long embrace. They stood holding each other like that until
Iniga saw Adrienne at the door by the pantry.
Ever so precocious, she exclaimed, “Hey, you’re a
girl. Why is your hair so short?”
It was a grey day in Bayonne when Marcel took Iniga to
the airport. It still wasn’t safe for the three of them to be seen together so
Alesandro stayed at the estate. Though Marcel had influence and prestige, he
was acutely aware that he was always being watched by the watchers. It was well
known that he harbored some of the most seditious men and women of the Maquis
since the war. Some, like Alesandro, were called Basque Separatists or
Terrorists. Marcel’s was a debt of gratitude but not because of his politics.
If the truth were known, most of the leftist radical politics of his wards were
childish to him: after all, he was one of the most powerful men in France…
perhaps most of Europe too. Regardless, he would rarely turn away those in
need, who’d sacrificed the best part of their lives in the Résistance; or, as
Maquis in Spain’s continual struggle against Franco. Numbers of them were safe
in Idaho, Nevada, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela,
Algiers, and even Tahiti, because he could arrange a new identity and plane
ticket out of France.
Boise Idaho was one of the places the Basque diaspora
community settled. Most had been the brunt of Franco’s attempt at ethnic
cleansing. Iniga, under an alias, was able to establish herself in the
community as a teacher at the Basque Center in Boise Idaho where her identity
was closely guarded. The majority in the community would have had little
tolerance for her had they known of her history because of the atrocities often
carried out by Separatists at that time against innocent civilians. Most of the
diaspora had been coming to Idaho to build new lives as long as Boise had been
Boise. As much as they loved their homeland and culture, they embraced their
new country, and had no desire to be identified with Basque Separatists.
Iniga had to live undercover but undercover wasn’t
about waiting in ambush or planning further action. She was done with her life
as an assassin, bandito, and sequestrador (kidnapper) (as described in Franco’s
state run press). She had settled most of her personal accounts and had
eliminated those who had been Falangists or murderers themselves. More than an
assassin she had compiled lists of children given to adoption from places like
La Venta. The government of Francisco Franco had cause to be concerned as some
of these children were given to high ranking bureaucrats and wealthy
supporters. It was her last job that sent her back across the Pyrenees to seek
asylum from Marcel Fournier and brought her to Idaho.
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