The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [69]
Marriage to Sabino, however, was not to be a peasant’s fantasy of marrying into the upper class. He ordered his original Vizcayan to cloister herself in religious contemplation to prepare for the marriage. For a honeymoon, he took her to Lourdes, the Catholic shrine near French Basqueland where thousands of infirm peasants flocked for faith healing.
Soon came an event in the life of Spain and the Basques, of Unamuno and Arana, of singular importance. Americans call it the Spanish-American War, but in Spain it has always been known as El Desastre, the Disaster.
THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR, the Disaster, the Cuban War of Independence—it was a different war for different people. But only the United States won. Though the war’s boosters in America had promoted it as the war to rescue poor Cuba in its noble struggle against Spanish tyranny, once the new territories of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines were taken by military force, the United States had little interest in setting any of them free. In fact, the United States granted Puerto Rico and Cuba less self-government than the Spanish had offered. The new territories were, to the Americans, delicious war booty. Books with titles such as Our New Possesions excitedly introduced these prizes to the American public. Meanwhile, the Spanish public had to adapt to suddenly being without these places, the last of the empire that they had known for four centuries. Spain had lost the lands won by Columbus, Magellan, Elcano, and all the other great men reproduced in stone and bronze. The places with which they traded, the places to which a Spaniard went to seek a fortune or adventure, the places to go when things went wrong in Spain, the places that were Spain’s claim to being a world power, were gone.
This disaster produced the greatest flow of literature Spain had seen since the period from the mid-fifteenth century to the late sixteenth century known in Spanish literature as the golden age. The new turn-of-the-century writers and artists were called “the generation of ‘98,” a group who responded to El Desastre by seeking to analyze and redefine the newly diminished Spain. Through paintings, novels, poems, and essays, they searched for the essence of Spain in Castilian landscape, in the history of the golden age, in critical examinations of classic literature such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. The pivotal question was: How can Spain undergo a regeneration?
Miguel de Unamuno by Ignacio Zuloaga (1870-1945). Born in Eibar, Zuloaga, with his dark vision of Spain, was one of the leading painters in the generation of ‘98. (The Hispanic Society of America, New York)
Curiously, this search for the soul of Spain was led by Basques. Experiencing the Spanish simultaneously as both “us” and “them” is essential to discovering the soul of Spain. Castilians, for whom Spain is only “us,” are the exception. Unamuno was a central figure in the generation of ‘98, as was San Sebastián-born Pío Baroja, the doctor-turned-novelist. Lesser-known members of the group, such as Ramiro de Maeztu, were also Basque. A number of the central figures were non-Basque, notably philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and poet Antonio Machado. But even most of these non-Basque writers were not from the Castilian heart of Iberia. Yet Spain, even Castile, was their focus.
It was not the focus of Sabino Arana, who referred to Spain as Maketania and said, “It doesn’t matter to us if Spain is big or small,