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THE PLAZA DE ORIENTE in Madrid is an oval-shaped area in front of the Royal Palace. The streets around it are short and lead in seemingly random directions, but whichever direction is taken, ending up in the plaza is almost inevitable. On October 1, 1975, a crisp fall day with a bright blue sky, anyone milling around those little central Madrid streets felt helplessly sucked into the plaza by a growing crowd that looked like a cross section of Spain. Many were well dressed, though some looked like workers. The elderly, the ubiquitous amputees from the Civil War, and the newly emerging middle class and teenagers, even some children, were there. Overhead in the flawless cornflower blue sky, a plane circled, trailing a red-and-yellow banner that said, “Arriba España,” Forward Spain.

Suddenly, what seemed to be an eighty-pound man, a frail and bald figure with uncertain steps, appeared on the palace balcony almost as though he had drifted out there in his confusion. A thousand right arms stiffened and snapped straight out at forty-five-degree angles, repeating the Fascist salute over and over again while shouting in unison, “Franco! Franco! Franco!”

Under the “Forward Spain” banner, as if the past forty years had never happened, the Europe of the 1930s was alive in Madrid. The elderly man spoke in his wheezing, squeaky voice of the grave menaces to society: the Freemasons and the Communists. The voice was difficult to hear, but was anyone there who had not heard all this before? The crowd responded with their mantra and their stiff arms, and Franco weakly raised his two shaking arms in reply, then drifted behind a curtain, never to be seen by his public again.

Part Three

EUSKADI ASKATUTA

* * *

Ideas, at least profound ideas, develop very slowly and even though geocentrism may have been in theory rejected, it has not been eclipsed and is still among our most deeply implanted concepts. Geocentrism and centrism, for that matter, remain at the foundation of Western thought, seeming to us almost the natural thing to think, or, at least, to feel; that that which is ours is the center of whatever thing. However, this idea of the center is not natural but cultural, and the image of the universe coming from it seems to be caused by an erroneous perspective.

—Joseba Sarrionaindia, NI EZ NAIZ HEMENGOA,

(I Am Not from Here), 1985

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* * *

Slippery Maketos

Bilbao drinking water is agreeable and abundant.

—José Antonio Zamácola, 1815

There is a lot of money here [in Bilbao]. What difference does it make if there isn’t a glass of fresh water?

—Sabino Arana, 1897

* * *

ABOUT THE FAMOUS Basque delicacy, baby eels, José María Busca Isusi wrote, “I believe that only in our country have people dared to prepare and consume a dish which resembles a bunch of worms.” It is a Basque habit of mind to imagine that everything Basque is uniquely Basque, but Busca Isusi was mistaken. Aside from the fact that there are people in Mexico who do not hesitate to eat real worms by the plateful, Basques are not the only ones who eat the wormlike baby eel. A baby eel is called an elver in English, angula in Spanish, pibale in French, and txitxardin, which means “wormlike,” in Euskera. Elvers appear in all European rivers that flow to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and a number of other peoples, notably Atlantic French, enjoy them. But what disturbed the Basques in the 1990s was the terrible discovery that the Japanese eat them too.

The small creatures, actually smaller than most worms, turn up in Basque rivers every winter, and became associated with Basque winter holidays, such as carnival. For centuries they were scooped out just above the mouths of Guipúzcoan rivers. Six Basque families in Aguinaga, on the Orio River only a few miles from San Sebastián, became the principal suppliers in the world.

Elver fishermen waited for nightfall before dragging the river, because the elvers stay on the bottom, resting during the day. Eels avoid light. At night,