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as confident in his spines

as any warrior with his shield in Sparta or in Corinth;

and suddenly he crosses the border, the line

that separates the earth and the grass from the new road;

with one step he enters your time

and mine, and since his dictionary of the universe

has not been corrected or updated

in the last seven thousand years,

he does not recognize the lights of our car,

and does not even realize that he is going to die.

—Joseba Irazu Garmendia, a.k.a. Bernardo Atxaga,

TRIKUARENA (The Hedgehog)

* * *

ON AUGUST 2, 1968, Melitón Manzanas, a hated San Sebastián police captain, was returning to Villa Arana, his three-story home in Irún within walking distance of the French border. As he approached the steps to his house, he heard the words, “Melitón, look who’s killing you.”

He fumbled for a sidearm, but with his wife listening on the other side of the door, seven bullets were pumped into his body. This was “Operation Sagarra.” In Euskera, sagarra means “apples,” as does manzanas in Spanish. ETA humor.

It was ETA’s second killing and first planned assassination. Txabi was avenged.

The target was well chosen. Others had been considered, even attempted, but the victim, Manzanas, was as loathed as Tkabi had been loved. In Basqueland the vengeance was viewed with satisfaction.

The regime responded on cue. The assassination occurred on a Friday and Franco declared a state of siege throughout Basqueland on Monday. It lasted for months, and thousands of Basques were arrested and tortured. Some were sentenced to years in prison. Once the state of siege was under way, the Basque Nationalist Party said through one of its publications, for the first time since 1947, that it was not opposed to the use of violence.

The repression culminated with the December 1970 trials in Burgos. The Burgos trials, show trials of sixteen alleged ETA members charged with “military rebellion, banditism, and terrorism,” were the kind of disaster for Franco that ETA members had always dreamed of provoking. From the courtroom they shouted, “Gora Euskadi!,” and sang the hymn “Eusko gudariak gera.” ETA had returned Basques to their image of the 1930s and 1940s—the heroic Basques, standing up to fascism. The one new addition was an occasionally shouted slogan: “Iraultza ala hil!” Revolution or Death, a line borrowed from the Cuban Revolution. International intellectual celebrities such as the Catalan painter Joan Miró declared their support for ETA. After three ETA members were condemned to death in Burgos, demonstrations broke out, not only in Bilbao and Pamplona but in Barcelona, Seville, Oviedo, and Madrid. The governments of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, West Germany, France, Belgium, the Vatican, and Australia petitioned the Spanish government not to carry out the sentences.

Franco’s close advisers convinced the aging and confused Caudillo, after considerable resistance on his part, that it would be a blunder to carry out the death sentences, and he reluctantly commuted them to life imprisonment.

AS IN MOST PLACES in the world, in Basqueland the late 1960s was both the worst and best of times to be attending a university. Franco had barred public universities from the “traitor provinces,” but there were two private universities: Deusto, run by the Jesuits in Bilbao, and the more prestigious University of Pamplona, run by the Opus Dei, an elite conservative Catholic lay order. To attend the public university system, most Basques had to leave, go to Madrid or Zaragoza.

However, it had always been Franco’s policy, while repressing the Basques, to nurture Basque industry. This meant that a few university facilities teaching such subjects as economics and engineering had to be available in Bilbao. The economics school in Bilbao was called Sarriko. The government did not want a university in Basqueland full of dissident students studying literature, history, and political science, but those who were interested in engineering, steelmaking, or banking could go to school