Basques, they’d have second thoughts. Municipal government, education, taxation, labor, the appointment of officials down through the ranks, the running of the ports, the prisons, the policing of the streets—everything of any importance was controlled by Madrid. The Basque fueros, special rights granted centuries ago by some Carlos, Felipe or Ferdinand, and which, as far as Ben could tell, had mostly to do with the levying of tolls in and out of the region, were suspended. The use of the Basque language was outlawed, although certain folkloric customs were allowed to continue. Boys and young men could still band together in groups of five or six— cuadrillas, they were called—and swear a loyalty oath. They couldn’t be kept from forming their mountain-climbing clubs and climbing to the tops of their mountains. Nor, once there, could they be kept from airing their grievances in the language of their choice, or from plotting.
In the green valleys, beside rushing rivers, the businessmen who chose to accept Madrid’s terms prospered, while on the mountaintops, where Franco’s police and Civil Guard couldn’t be expected to climb, clandestine organizations were born.
In God’s eye, ETA was born.
In Sabino Arana’s eye.
The purist. The pacifist.
The organization would splinter, of course. There would be personality clashes and clashes of ideology. Those who sought any sort of accommodation with Franco’s Spain were termed españolistas. There was a Marxist group that thought along international lines. Those who continued to subscribe to Arana’s vision were interested only in a nation of pure-blooded Basques. Given the effects of immigration—there had been an influx of poor Castilians to work in Basque steel and lumber mills—you were considered to be pure-blooded enough if one of your grandfathers was.
On the top of a mountain, of course, everything might seem pure.
On a clear day, from the top of a Basque mountain, you might imagine you could see all the way to a Madrid park, around which ran a girl with a golden ponytail.
Memory began, Ben believed, in 1970, his first year in college. In addition to all the civil rights turmoil, and information and misinformation coming out of Vietnam, he vaguely remembered something about a trial of ETA activists in the Castilian city of Burgos. The books he read at his daughter’s university would tell him that the exact number of activists was sixteen, that two were priests and several more ex-seminarians. There were two women. One of the defense attorneys managed to get on the record that Spanish police had tortured his client, and with the court looking on, scars were displayed. Before they were banned from the proceedings, members of the international press got the word out. Nevertheless, all sixteen ETA members were found guilty, and three were sentenced to death. A general strike followed in the Basque country. Sympathy strikes were called in various countries. Dockers refused to unload Spanish ships. There was an act of self-immolation. Reading brought it back to him. He began to recall his first impression of ETA, and it was of bravery, and the heroism of self-sacrifice, and the glorious legitimacy of their claim to self-determination, and even of their special character, something of their larger-than-life, mountain-rimmed apartness, as if the Basques really were a tribe of superior beings. Strong, noble and steadfast down through the years. Licensed in a way inferior beings weren’t. In a manner of speaking, pure.
He remembered the Basques and ETA, and then he forgot about them. Later he’d hear something about a bomb going off in a supermarket, killing dozens, and a news report that stuck with him for a while about a woman out walking with her five-year-old daughter who was identified as a disaffected ETA activist and was gunned down by her erstwhile comrades, with her daughter looking on. That image stuck with him for a while; then he forgot it too. He assumed the people who had killed that woman and bombed that supermarket and the people who’d opposed Franco and to whose cause he’d once thrilled were not the same.
The truth was, he forgot them all. He didn’t know if ETA had succeeded in its intentions or not. Or if it had gotten the best deal it could and, like everybody else in this impure world, had compromised.
He was in his midforties and felt older than that.
He had not lacked for money, not really. He’d made modest amounts of it buying and selling properties of diverse sorts. He’d been consulted. Without having a real specialty, certainly not a profession, he’d been a conduit; things had flowed through him. His father had built up the family fortune with a road construction company, which he, Ben Williamson, except for one summer spent shoveling blacktop, had never taken part in. But when his father died in his midsixties of a well-deserved heart attack, Ben’s mother, instead of selling the business as she’d been expected to do, hung on to it, hired a manager she could trust and watched it prosper.
No one had thought she could do it. She had been known as the heart of the party. She was the woman who gathered all the other partygoers around the piano and made them sing. On those midweek evenings when the next party was still days away, she might run through a few chords on the piano, and, regardless of where Ben was in the house, those chords were as good as a summons. They sang songs of a deep dark yearning—“When day is done and shadows fall I think of you”—and they sang twilit songs with a melancholy lilt—“We were sailing along, on Moonlight Bay”—and they sang songs to make your foot tap—“Just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street.” Some nights they sang through the songbook, and on some songs his mother might break away and sing harmony to her son’s melody. It was always a thrilling moment because he never knew when she was going to do it. The effect was as though he suddenly had another person sitting at his side, someone keeping pace with him but hanging just out of his reach, a potential match when the distance closed and the two voices sounded as one; someone who was no longer a mother.
“We could make believe I loved you. We could make believe that you loved me.”
He was young when she first sat him down on the piano bench and taught him these songs. How young? He sang with her before his voice changed, and he sang with her later when his voice had dropped an octave. Her voice was narrow in its range, and there were times he was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hit a high note, that the song would shatter and it would all end. He dreaded singing “Indian Love Song” for that reason. There was a high yodeling note she could reach but, he worried, wouldn’t be able to sustain— “I’ll be calling you . . . oo . . . oo . . .” She insisted they sing it too, he taking the Nelson Eddy part, she the Jeanette McDonald. That he and his mother would be calling their love back and forth to each other, as though from mountaintop to mountaintop, didn’t embarrass him. His father might be reading the evening paper in his living room easy chair, and he might give his paper a crackling snap. Upstairs, his older brother might slam a door. Their mocking disapproval didn’t bother him. He was afraid his mother’s quavering voice in that upper register might come apart. He was afraid there would be a final croaking note, and then she would fold up the sheet music, close the songbook, and bring the piano top down. It would be over.
His father died when, hands on, he was unable to open a tar-stuck valve on an asphalt spreader down at the yard and his heart exploded in his chest. His brother he rarely saw. Charley had gone west to college, caught the current of things out there, and made his fortune being a Californian. His mother made a go of the business and succeeded to a degree her husband hadn’t. And when her sense of things told her the times were about to turn, she sold the business for a handsome price. Then after informing her older and never unsuccessful son what she was going to do, she gave Ben, her companion in song, a significant part of that handsome sum. Outright. He immediately called Charley, and Charley laughed his qualms away. Charley said he’d earned it. All his mother really said was that he’d spent too many years bouncing around from job to job. She knew he wasn’t poor, but here was enough money to allow him to do what he really wanted to.
Which was?
To “stagnate,” his ex-wife would claim. It was her favorite word. She gave to its pronunciation a sort of bog-like gloom. With enough money Ben Williamson would become a bog unto himself. Give him some more and that bog would become quicksand.
His mother died a year after Michelle was killed. She too from a heart attack, also without warning, while she was having her morning coffee. She’d had no