The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [134]
Navarra is said to have been pro-Franco, but between the sheer slopes in this isolated narrow valley of the wandering Bidasoa River, there was little sympathy for the invading Fascist regime. At the very beginning of the Spanish Civil War, in September 1936, the Ituren village doctor, a passionate Basque nationalist, was taken out of town and shot by pro-Franco forces. This caused one of Europe’s oldest carnivals to disappear. It was not held in the winter of 1937 or for years afterward. The carnival, which predated the Christianization of Basques, had finally faded into history.
But the stubborn people of Ituren remembered their customs and kept speaking their Basque language instead of Spanish, even when it was illegal. As the regime loosened its reign of terror, they slowly resumed their ways. Now every winter, the Monday before Ash Wednesday, once again, the strange events of Ituren awaken the spring in the cold mountain earth.
Since this was not a workday, the few hundred townspeople were sleeping late. They were still in bed at 10:00 A.M. as the sun’s rays cleared the rocky ridges, greening the white frosted slopes. The few dozen stone houses that are the town of Ituren emerged from a cold blue shadow.
An older man was in one of Ituren’s two bars trying to warm himself up on a mixture of hot coffee, anise liqueur, and sherry. It seemed to work. Although anthropologists say the carnival slowly started up again in the 1940s, he had no memory of any carnival after 1936 until the 1950s. “I think it was 1952 that there was enough so that some priest could denounce it as pagan, un-Christian. Little by little things started again. In the 1960s some general from Elizondo saw it. We thought, oh, trouble. But he liked it and it’s been growing ever since, so now it is like before the war.”
Slowly the townspeople gathered in the plaza and warmed up in the two bars, playing traditional songs, and teenagers showed off the folk dance steps that under Franco their parents had not been allowed to learn.
Joaldunak are all young men. They start apprenticing at age five, and once they marry they must leave the group. A joaldun (the singular of joaldunak) must be young—young and strong. The bells they wear are huge and meticulously crafted of beaten copper, with deep vibrato tones. They are strapped on to each joaldun with a complicated system of lamb’s leather cord that is pulled so tight that the bells stand free of their backs.
A rhythmic dirge of bells peeled—a deep, metallic, atavistic rumble. The bells rang by the exaggerated steps of the joaldunak’s dance as they maneuvered like a solemn marching band, filing in intricate patterns around the plaza, across the little bridge behind the plaza that leads over a gurgling crook of the Ezcurra, a tributary of the Bidasoa, on to country paths to other parts of town and off to neighboring fields and villages. They never smiled, never joked—even the youngest ones with their smaller bells. Twenty cones in their deliberate stride, copper bells echoing off the rocky ridges of the mountain crests, the joaldunak marched quickly past frosty green fields, leafless forests, and still-barren orchards. Occasionally as they made their way over mountain trails, a leader would trumpet a ram’s horn announcing to all the residents of the valley the promise of spring and declaring to the frosted mountain air that they would be Basques in the Basque way forever.
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16: The Nation
If you do not teach your children the language of your parents, they will teach you.
—Sabino Arana, BASSERITARRA, June 20, 1897
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THE MOST IMPORTANT word in Euskera is gure. It means “our”— our people, our home, our village. Cookbooks talk of our soups, our sauces. “Reptiles are not typically included in our meals,” wrote the great Guipúzcoan chef José María Busca Isusi. That four-letter word, gure, is at the center of Basqueness, the feeling