Basque Times

I kicked open the flaking gate, arms full with the squirming twins and dropped them, giggling and chirruping, into the dusty yard. In a field, an old lady, contorted to a right-angle, raised a hoe and brought it down amongst neat rows. At Unai’s lilting wail, she raised her scarfed head, grubby palm fending off the sun and gave a cry of delight.
In the kitchen of the tumbledown casa, acrid garlic and octopus wafting on the draft, Nora told her great-aunt’s story:
“She was there that day for market, but she left in the afternoon and was here on the hill when the bombing began. She watched Gernika burning.”
Glancing up at the lady’s wizened face, I found her peppercorn eyes fixed on me. She murmured something in Euskara.
“She asked how old you are”.
“Nineteen”.
A smile ironed out her crumpled lips and she nodded. The two brothers tumbled in, fighting over a rusty horseshoe. They tugged insistently at my shirt. The spinster fussed over the blood oozing thickly from their arms. I thought of my grandmother, waning in a nursing home and wished she still had this fierce vitality, born out of a struggle with dense earth and denser neighbours.
“She has lived in this house all her life. Two of her sisters died ten years ago. None of them married.”
Nora brought a plate of tangled tentacles, the flesh red-raw with paprika and the suckers like wild, staring eyes.
“And her father was killed in the civil war”.
I wondered if she knew the gravity of her words, but realised I didn’t either. And yet that alien Spain, the tumultuous Spain of Hemingway, Orwell and Laurie Lee, was sitting across the table from me cracking walnuts with her teeth. She swept the shrapnel of the shells into her hand and threw it out the window. Nora stood briskly.
“Go with the boys, we’ll wash the dishes”.
Stooping through the front door, I glanced at a picture. It was bleached with age, but showed a man and wife with four little girls standing before a door.
Later, I stood marooned on the hill. Below me, the strands of the estuary braided sluggish ways through the rushes. Hearing boots on the terrace, I turned to see the hostess making her way from the shadows with a cup. I hastened towards her, clumsy tongue fumbling for thanks, but she silenced me with a hand and proffered the tea. She stepped past me to look out at the valley. The dusky sky was festooned with gaudy hues; fiery pinks suffused through the hoary blue like a bruise. Off in the distance, the lights of Gernika burned on in the gloom.