The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [127]
Among those carrying a sign was a professorial-looking man in a blue duffel coat with his white hair disarranged in the clear winter night’s air.
It was Txillardegi, whose son was among the twenty-three sentenced to seven years in prison for being on the board of directors of the Herri Batasuna party.
In 1997, the New York Times asked Felipe González how it was possible that GAL could have come from within his government without him ordering it. He replied that the state, after thirty-six years of dictatorship, might still have elements that he could not control. “People don’t want to understand that we inherited a state apparatus in its entirety from the dictatorship,” said the man who is credited with leading his country to democracy.
“There is always a first mistake,” wrote Joseba Sarrionaindia, a Basque writer accused of being an ETA member, currently in hiding.
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15: Surviving Democracy
The Basque language is a country, almost a religion.
—Victor Hugo, on a visit, 1843
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IN 1998, a Spanish-speaking customer came into Jeanine Pereuil’s gâteau Basque shop in St. Pée. With worry lines tightening on her face, the woman ordered a cake, custard filled, and before Jeanine could wrap it, began to describe the latest attack by ETA. Simply to prove it could strike anywhere, ETA had killed a PP politician and his wife, both in their midthirties, in the distant Andalusian city of Seville.
“And they had three children,” said the customer.
Jeanine shuddered, as she often did when she contemplated Spanish Basqueland, a few miles away. She had been seeing the refugees from there all her life. “But they do have some wonderful things,” she said with a sudden smile, and began talking about dances and folk celebrations she has seen there, traditions that were vanishing from her province.
In the French provinces, two schools of thought compete: One watches the development of the Autonomous Basque Community of Euskadi with envy, wanting the same cultural and economic opportunities for Labourd, Basse Navarre, and Soule. The other sees the Spanish provinces full of menace and tragedy and fears that French Basqueland could go the same way. Many French Basques feel both ways.
Most French Basques will say that they feel they have more in common with a Guipúzcoan or a Vizcayan than with a Frenchman from the other side of the Adour. The Vizcayans and Guipúzcoans say that they feel they have more in common with a Basque from St. Pée or St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port than with a Spaniard from the other side of the Ebro.
But on the other hand, one side has experienced French history and the other side Spanish. The Spanish Basques suspect, as do many Spaniards, that the people north of the Pyrenees are a bit frivolous and insincere. The French Basques, like the French, suspect that the people south of the Pyrenees, Basques included, are a bit barbarous, dangerous, and not to be trusted.
In Mauléon, the quiet capital of Soule, Maïte Faure sells traditional fabrics. A popular item is off-white cotton with colored stripes—originally indigo but now often red and green—a motif copied from the canvases that used to protect cows from flies. By long-standing tradition, there are always seven stripes, one for each province. “I am proud to be French,” she said. “I don’t trust the Basques over there. They say we are all Basques, but I don’t think they include us.” She paused for a moment and smiled. “On the other hand, at the age of fifty, I am suddenly taking up traditional Basque dance.”
This seeming non sequitur referred to the fact that the Basques in Spain, at last free