The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [146]
In the idealized new Europe, economies are merged, citizenship is merged. But those who support the idea deny that countries will be eliminated. There will simply be a new idea of a nation—a nation that maintains its own culture and identity while being economically linked and politically loyal to a larger state. Some 1,800 years ago, the Basques told the Roman Empire that this was what they wanted. Four centuries ago, they told it to Ferdinand of Aragon. They have told it to François Mitterrand and Felipe González and King Juan Carlos.
They watch Europe unfolding and wonder what has happened to their old adversaries. Most of the political leaders endorse the new Europe whether their citizens do or not. Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, González, and Aznar were all strong backers of this new Europe. The Basques watch the French and Spanish give up their borders and their currency and wonder why it is so easy for them. Why didn’t Mitterrand worry about the “fabric of the nation being torn”? Why does Madrid not worry about losing its sovereignty? And if they do not worry about these things, why do they feel threatened by the Basques?
The Basques are not isolationists. They never wanted to leave Europe. They only wanted to be Basque. Perhaps it is the French and the Spanish, relative newcomers, who will disappear in another 1,000 years. But the Basques will still be there, playing strange sports, speaking a language of ks and xs that no one else understands, naming their houses and facing them toward the eastern sunrise in a land of legends, on steep green mountains by a cobalt sea—still surviving, enduring by the grace of what Juan San Martin called Euskaldun bizi nahia, the will to live like a Basque.
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Postscript: The Death of a Basque Pig
A property in the valley
A house on the property
And in the house, bread and love
Jesus what happiness!
—Antonio de Trueba, “The Basques,” 1870
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IT IS CALLED a txarriboda, and the whelping dog, straining at his chain a distance from the house, knew this was not going to be good.
The pig, purchased the previous spring for almost $80, was named Pepe. He was only slightly more than ten months old, and yet after six months of overeating corn, he weighed 290 pounds, an enormous, rounded, awkward, pinkish white squealing beast that it took seven men to drag out and hold down.
He was an unlucky pig, a castrated male who had been a last-minute replacement for a female who shortly before her planned execution had gone into heat and was saved for breeding.
Txariboda is the Basque name for the annual family slaughter of a pig, generally done during the winter when it is cold. Neighbors take turns helping out at each other’s txarriboda. In the village of Muxica, three miles from Guernica, it was Felisa Madariaga and Julián Gabikaetxebarria’s turn.
Theirs is a small and struggling farm. Julián, in addition to working the farm with his wife, holds a job in a factory in Guernica. Felisa sells their products every Monday morning in the Guernica market, the same weekly event that the Condor Legion had chosen for a target in 1937. On the farm, they have a few dairy cows and some chickens. They also grow lettuce and are one of the principal producers in the area of choricero peppers. A Vizcayan sweet pepper that ripens to a brilliant red and is then dried, the choricero is used in a number of dishes such as the stuffing for chorizo sausages. It is also used in bacalao Vizcaína, the salt cod dish that is the most internationally renowned of all Basque dishes, though most foreign imitations are inauthentic because the choricero is hard to find outside Vizcaya and is almost never to be found outside Basqueland. Choricero peppers ripen in the summer and are tied together on strings like garlands of large, deep red blossoms, then hung to dry for two months.
Julián and Felisa hang the peppers on the front of their traditional farmhouse of oaken beams and