The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [136]
Atxaga is an elfin man whose work always displays a mischievous humor. His popularity may come from being that old-fashioned kind of Basque who, although rooted in his little country, is an internationalist at heart. His writing makes references to American popular culture, to German politics, to the world at large.
On chance encounters with old friends and former schoolmates from his San Sebastián high school, they often greet him in Euskera, good mother-tongue Guipúzcoan, and for the first time he realizes that they had that language in common all along, though they had never dared to speak it to each other.
Many things have changed since those times. The young woman at Sarriko who invited him to “a cultural meeting” for Maoist indoctrination had left long ago and, in the late 1990s, was still a guerrilla in El Salvador. Another classmate was killed in El Salvador. One of the head Maoists at the university became an important technocrat in the Basque government working on tax policy.
An unpretentious man of simple origins, Atxaga is nevertheless aware of the absurd fact that he may be the Shakespeare of his language. What he does with Batua could well affect generations, possibly even centuries, of writers. Euskera literature is new enough to offer a creative freedom that few other languages could. With that freedom comes difficult choices. There are words in Euskera that are not in common usage, and he worries that they interfere with the narrative flow. Yet he does not want to limit the richness of the vocabulary. “I would say that the first duty of literary language is to be unobtrusive. And that is our weak point, because we lack antecedents.”
Ramón Saizarbitoria, though of the same generation with the same early influences, is almost the opposite of Atxaga. Born in 1944 in San Sebastián, he is seven years older. Atxaga’s stocky physique, friendly manner, and rumpled appearance suggest his upbringing in rural Guipúzcoa. Saizarbitoria, an urbane native of the most sophisticated Basque city, is tall, thin, impeccably dressed, with a carefully trimmed only slightly graying beard, a slow, careful manner, and a quiet, reflective way of speaking. While Atxaga lives in a village in Alava, Saizarbitoria lives in the heart of San Sebastián, with an office along a wide downtown boulevard that has long been favored for political demonstrations because its many escape routes make it impossible for the police to seal off.
While Atxaga struggled with the local authorities in his village for speaking his native Euskera, Saizarbitoria seldom had occasion to speak it outside of his home. In the San Sebastián of Saizarbitoria’s childhood, Euskera was the language of rural people who had immigrated to the big city, people like his parents. Nobody in his school spoke Euskera. “There were not even songs in Euskera. There was no need to prohibit it,” said Saizarbitoria. “People who spoke Euskera were suspected of being nationalists. But also there was a sense of shame in speaking the language of farmers and peasants and poor people.”
For years, nationalists struggled with this class image of Euskera as the language of peasants. The lower-class status of the language was often more image than reality. Many educated people spoke Euskera, and in some towns, notably the metalworking center of Eibar, Euskera was the language of both workers and management, a prerequisite for working in a factory even for an inmigrante from Andalusia.
Like Atxaga, Saizarbitoria found his inspiration in the invention of Batua and the works of Gabriel Aresti. Published in 1969, Saizarbitoria’s first novel, Egunero hasten delako (Because It Begins Every Day), was about abortion, which was legal in the rest of Europe but banned