Mack 1 3 - Soinujolearen semea in Asteasu I arrived in Asteasu in the late afternoon of July 3, 2010. The drive north through the Vall d’Aran and the green and golden fields of southern France, then back into Spain via Irún was beautiful but uneventful. When I arrived in town the clouds hung low. A thick, wet mist blanketed the lush green countryside, and the white-washed, red-roofed homes of Asteasu were bathed in a blurry twilight. That entire week the town had been celebrating its Fiesta de San Pedro, and the town was decorated with the Basque flag (called the Ikurriña, a green, red, and white Union Jack), and all types of propaganda. Joseba Irazu, the man known to the world as Bernardo Atxaga, grew up in this town and still owns the house in which he was raised, right on main street in the lower section of the town, just a stone’s throw away from the town hall and its two most important bars, the Iturriondo, and the Patxine. Upon my arrival in town, an eery feeling crept up inside of me. Atxaga had told me the day before to keep my eyes open in Asteasu, that it was a strange place where strange things happen. I had also already read Paddy Woodworth’s exceptional book on the Basque Country in which he describes Asteasu as a place where the magical coexists with the quotidian. “A few years ago a man I knew was sealing a hole there,” Atxaga tells Woodworth in the book, pointing to an agricultural outhouse. He asked me if I knew what it had been used for. “So the cat could get in?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it was made to lock up a little boy called Manueltxu. He was bitten by a rabid dog, and turned into a dog himself. When anyone came by, he used to bark and howl. And that went on until he died.” “So what was the hole for?” “For his food. His mother came here twice a day and put a plate through the hole, with great care not to be bitten.” (145) Mack 2 Atxaga leaves the story at that. Then Woodworth points out: The question is not whether these stories are true or false; they simply belong to another time, another world. The story of Manueltxu was the starting point for the boy who became the hunted boar in Obabakoak. It is the terror and sadness of these stories, rather than their precise ‘facts’, which ring true for him. (145) I never saw any human turned into an animal in Asteasu (although I did carefully avoid a cavernous hole in a wall that ran along a path I had to use to get to my car each day), but terror and sadness certainly lurk in nearly every dark corner of this mysterious town, and the tension between that other time, that other world, and the ever-pressing here-and-now permeates nearly all of conversations I had in Asteasu. The first thing I did upon my arrival was to stop by the Iturriondo to introduce myself to Jon, the bar’s owner. He greeted me warmly and let me park in the street while I carried my battered suitcase up the stairs to Atxaga’s family flat. Jon even let me use the bar’s washing machine to do my laundry. Finally, I sat down amongst the San Pedro revelers to watch Spain play Paraguay in a hotly contested, brutally physical World Cup matchup. As I sat there in the bar, completely ignored by all those people surrounding me, it suddenly dawned on me: there were at least as many people cheering against Spain as were cheering for it. This was certainly a strange place. *** A Town of Hedgehogs I came to Asteasu to study readership of Soinujolearen semea (2003) (The Accordionist’s Son [2010]), a novel that touches on many of Atxaga’s own experiences growing up in postwar Asteasu. In many ways, Soinujolearen semea is a culmination of what some writers have come Mack 3 to call the Obaba cycle, a series of short stories and novels tied together by the mythical town of Obaba, a place that could theoretically be anywhere in Euskal Herria but which Atxaga has specifically identified as Asteasu, the town where he lived the first thirteen years of his life. Atxaga begins his most famous novel of the Obaba cycle, Obabakoak, with the following statement about the Basque language: “Born, they say, in the megalithic age, it survived, this stubborn language, by withdrawing, by hiding away like a hedgehog in a place, which, thanks to the traces it left behind there, the world named the Basque Country or Euskal Herria” (Kindle Locations 114-116). This stubborn withdrawal, the secretive hiding, aptly describes the cautious, suspicious nature of many of the people in Asteasu. History has made them very wary of outsiders, and there are many things that people just do not discuss, in private or in public. One afternoon, in a back room of the Patxine, I sit down to discuss Soinujolearen semea with Xanti and Gorka1, schoolteachers and boyhood friends from Andoin, a town just a few kilometers from Asteasu to which Atxaga moved with his family when he was thirteen years old. Xanti and Gorka are a few years younger than Atxaga, and they remember how they admired those older boys from the neighborhood who had the courage to stand up to the Guardia Civil, and who later suffered the consequences for their brazen actions. “I remember, for example, an excursion into the mountains,” begins Xanti, “and later on the train we were coming down singing, and one of these [referring to the older, braver boys], they made him go back to military service for singing in Euskera. The Civil Guards stopped him, they saw him [singing] in Euskera, ‘documents,’ and he had his military ID, and he had to do almost another year of service. And, sure, we stood there a bit-- What’s going on? You know?” He repeats it in an urgent, confused whisper, and looks me dead in the eyes: “What’s going on?” 1 Names changed Mack 4 Gorka chimes in: “But afterwards nobody talks about these stories, nobody talks--” “Of course not!” Xanti cuts him off. “No, no, no. You interpret many of them after the fact.” Gorka continues: With people from our group, a bit older, who have lived through all of this on the front lines, who because we were younger-- I mean, they didn’t tell us anything. But later, in the end I feel like we still don’t talk about that. Nobody talks about that. I have friends who have been in prison, and people from my group of friends who have been thrown in prison and such-- I’m talking here about twenty five or thirty years ago, and later. Since they’ve gotten out we have never spoken about this topic. “No.” Adds Xanti. “Never.” Gorka adds flatly. “I know what their life was like then. They don’t bring it up, I don’t bring it up, and we don’t talk about that subject.” Resistance to talking about the recent Basque past, especially the events of the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing repression, which in part led to the rise of ETA, lies at the heart of Soinujolearen semea, in which David, the novel’s protagonist, finds out as a teenager that his father may have been involved in the execution of some of the town’s more liberal citizens during the war. The suspicion burns inside of David and he actively pursues knowledge about his father’s activities during and after the war. Upon finding the truth, he wants to demand a confession from his father. When he has the opportunity to confront the man about it, however, his words fail him. “I didn’t want to talk to him,” he states. “All I wanted was his confession [...] Remorse could be a first step, the beginning of a better relationship between us. Or perhaps not” Mack 5 (215). The conversation never happens, unfortunately, because there are certain topics that should simply never be discussed. Relationships are critical in Atxaga’s novels and stories, and the titles of his works often play a key role in helping the reader identify those important relationships. Jon Kortazar points out that one possible title for Soinujolearen semea is Anaiaren liburua (Book of My Brother), referring to the relationship between David and his best friend Joseba. But Atxaga chose instead “to focus on the relationship between David and his father” (66). While Kortazar sees this relationship as a symbol for the modern Basque country’s birth out of the violence of the Spanish Civil War, there are important parallels between David’s story, his relationship with his father, the way he puts together his past (and thus his identity) like the various pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and the experience of many of the people of Asteasu and the surrounding towns. Xanti’s experience with his own father bears striking similarities to David’s story. When I ask Xanti if the novel has affected him personally, he immediately responds in the affirmative: “Yes. I told you before that ... I think I translate things, you know?” He looks at me and smiles sadly. “I am convinced that I have been very much deceived in my life. Very, very much. And I could give you very concrete examples. I mean, totally deceived. In my house they didn’t tell us anything.