UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
A Basque Village
By ANSON GILBERT (Wadham College, Oxford)
THE pine forest, through which we had been walking, cleared, and far below me, almost at the foot of the valley, lay one of the smallest villages I had ever seen, just a huddled collection of about a dozen buildings. The hunch-backed woman whom I had chanced to meet in the railway carriage turned and, smiling wryly, said it was " triste." 1 glanced at the impassive face of her husband, whose gaunt features reminded me of a miniature bust of Agamemnon, and then at the granite-faced mountains crouching round us, at the sullen farmsteads that brooded over the rocky slopes, and at the lazy back of a passing ox-wagon. High up, and across the other side of the valley, lorries crawled like phlegmatic beetles along the main road to the Spanish inland. And a little above me, on my side, ran the railway-line. Between the two dropped this little Basque village. I could see that once it must have been on the main route to the inland, but that now it had been by-passed and left to itself. And then I knew why it
was sad. It was a forgotten village and a dying one. .
As I passed apprehensively into the narrow cobbled street, scarred with deep ruts, shutters opened among the grey stone houses and silently closed again. An old woman crossed herself, and several unshaven peasants, dressed in faded blue jackets and trousers, lounged among the shadows and eyed me with a mixture of suspicion and hostility. I suppose I must have looked an odd sight, since I had been carrying two large suitcases for two very long miles. I waited anxiously while Agamemnon, as I called him, first found out whether I could stay in the café, and then while he argued about the price I was to pay. When he at last turned to me, Agamemnon said that I was being robbed. "How much ? " I asked. "Twenty pesetas a day, everything." I resolved the sum around in my mind, and, finding that it came to only four shillings, hastily nodded my approval.
The peasants did not accept me for some time. Indeed, several days passed before they ceased staring as though I was some suspicious object, before they stopped fingering my clothes and peering at my books. But as they gradually became accustomed to my presence, so the peasants began to leave me alone. Soon I was approached only when someone wanted to know what bread, flour and a kilo of meat cost in England, questions which the peasants never tired of asking, and to which I never knew the answers, or when they felt I could be helped in something in which they had heard I was interested Seeing that I liked walking, the stocky snub-nosed forest warden offered to show me over the forests he guarded. He pointed out Mount Amborto, a famous Basque mountain, and spoke of it with such feeling that it seemed he was laying his outstretched hand on its hoary head. When I expressed an interest in the Basque language, I was lent dusty dictionaries and discovered the love the Basques have for onoma- topoeia: triski-traski (a dance), tsiki-tsiki (small), zappa-zappa (a Whisper).
Vasca told me that the village had once been famous for its clock-making, that the royal coat-of-arms over the village-hall was an honour a passing king had conferred many centuries ago, and that the fountain where the two remaining streets crossed, and where oxen now drank, was widely admired for its finely carved gargoyles. I was surprised to learn that the church, some way from the village, and half-hidden by drifts of white saplings, owned a painting by El Greco. Its authenticity, however, was questioned by a peasant. He assured me that it was a fake, for otherwise he couldn't understand why the painting had not been sold to a museum and the people given the money they so desperately needed, instead of its being displayed obscurely in one of the church's many recesses.
Sometimes on Sundays there would be a procession, a procession of only tWo: This was led by Raphael, an old man who owned the building in which I lodged. Wearing a black beret and dressed In a neat grey suit, and followed by a man slowly tapping a drum, Raphael would pipe the ceremonial songs of the Basques. Back- wards and forwards, up and down the streets. the two of them would slowly walk, while from above, from the small iron balconies, old women and children watched silently Raphael lived in a world of his own, and only came out of il to tell me that the Basques were an unhappy nation—that their language was no longer taught in the schools and that their youth sought new countries—or NA ben he gave music-lessons to the few remaining children. For some reason he was a bad teacher, and in his presence the children's eager voices became strained and unnatural. This so upset Raphael that he would rail at them for hours. But in the evenings he was again quiet and gentle, and, sipping a glass of wine, would murmur his only answer to nearly all questions, " Perhaps " Once he played a song especially for me. It was "God save the King." I shall never forget the way he rolled through the whole piece.
Raphael had sold the café itself to Maria. The café was just a long dark room with a serving-counter, wooden benches and tables, and in one corner there was a small curtained partition for the kitchen. Down the windows hung long strips of fly-paper which were changed every week. Maria, a frail dark-haired girl, worked terribly hard, with her two young cousins, from six in the morning to twelve at night, every day of the week, week in, week out mending dresses, serving copetas of anis and preparing meals. She had had one holiday in her life, and that was a few days in San Sebastian where she had seen an octopus in an aquarium. Now she was saving up for the day when she and her fiancé could begin a new life in South America.
Once Vasca took me to meet his mother. She worked in the fields all day. I noticed that the lazy emaciated peasant was strangely embarrassed in his mother's presence. Not a smile cracked through her withered face as Vasca joked about me, and so we withdrew. We watched her bending with a hoe over the slanting fields, her body hidden by a long muddy dress that seemed to belong as much to the earth as she herself. As soon as his mother had saved up enough money, Vasca would sit in the café and get steadily drunk. And then I wouldn't see him for days. But he .always came back with money.
On Saturday nights peasants from the-outlying farms streamed into the café. The older men settled themselves round the counter, while the younger men, standing round in the corners, looked as though they were waiting for something. Behind the curtain of Maria's kitchen girls could be heard talking and laughing. And then, as if from nowhere, a few passing trills from an accordion would be heard in the street, a shutter opened, the door swept aside and the next moment a furious dance would be flung out of the candle-lit room.
The girls, hiding behind the curtains, would rush out and say they wanted to fetch something from Maria's room upstairs. But before they could reach the door they were seized and whirled through the furious pace of a Basque dance. Sometimes I would follow suit, much to the amusement of Raphael, and soon the room would be filled with shouts and laughter. And then, equally suddenly, the dancing would end, the peasants disappear, the shutters be closed, the candles blown out, and silence would again shroud the sombre street.
My last glimpse ot the village was from the small bungalow Agamemnon and his wife were building higher up in the valley. As I looked down to the faded red tiles, to the houses that clung together, to the village that stubbornly refused to get any smaller, I felt that they, too, were missing something by leaving it.
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