In Europe

customers at the roadside restaurant are salesmen and truck drivers, the waitress silently serves up today's special, for there is nothing else to be had: salad, stuffed aubergine, stewed rabbit.
    Heading west, the countryside becomes more rugged. The hills fade into an almost treeless plain. The earth is hard and bristly, the hot wind whistles around my van. Every once in a while the road curves through a brown, silent village. This area is littered with the cadavers of abandoned farms, houses, shops, cloisters. Behind almost every ruin lies a tragedy, although there is no telling which. What, for example, is the story behind that row of fallen houses, ten kilometres or so past Gandesa? Were they burned down during the civil war, or abandoned in the 1960s when better days never arrived? And that enormous imploded house close to Alcañiz, did it simply fall down, or did soldiers blow it up? This is the old Ebro Front, where the republicans mustered all their forces in summer 1938 for a four month, last-ditch stand. Only in Belchite, an abandoned village to the East, is the war still tangible: a few piles of debris andcollapsed walls, a roofless church, one and a half trees, a cross of iron. In March 1938, Milton Wolff and his Abraham Lincoln battalion were among the last group of republican soldiers in the village; his commander was killed, then they were all swept away by Franco's tanks. More than 6,000 men were killed on both sides. The ruins were recently used as a backdrop for TV commercials for the Dutch Army: ‘We perform peace-keeping missions.’
    All the other hard-fought hills remain unsung. The dead have been hidden away beneath the soil, without a single marker. ‘Forget’ is the motto here. No one wants to rake up the past.

Chapter TWENTY-THREE
Guernica
    HALFWAY THROUGH THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU wrote: ‘Guernica is the most fortunate city on earth. Its people arrange their own affairs in a meeting of representatives that is held beneath an oak tree, and the decisions they make are always of the wisest sort.’ That, at least, is what all Basque sources claim. In fact the great philosopher was talking about Switzerland, but none of that matters here.
    Euskadi, otherwise known as the Basque Country, has a dreamlike quality. You fall into a deep abyss, and at the bottom you suddenly find yourself in a luxuriant garden, a different world with different people and a different language. After the parched Spanish plains, here there is suddenly a green little Switzerland, inhabited by a strange and ancient people. Their language grates like cuneiform. Outsiders have no idea what these people are writing or saying. Their communication with others is largely through tastes and smells: in the kitchen, a Basque becomes a true sorcerer. The hills are dotted with white farms and cows wearing bells; you can smell the ocean. Madrid is far, far away.
    The average Basque is no different from the average European. He lives in a villa or in a cruddy high-rise neighbourhood close to Donostia (San Sebastian) or Ibaizabal (Bilbao), he spends his days in an office, a shop, at school or beside the conveyor belt, he spends his weekends with friends or family, in restaurants or at the disco. Still, if you ask him what he considers the ideal life, he will start talking about a section of valley with a few cows and a farm, about the life of his grandparents and great-grandparents.
    For every Basque, the Basque separatist movement has another face. You have anti-nationalists, radical nationalists, theoretical nationalists, light nationalists, violent nationalists, pacifist nationalists, nationalists who plantbombs and fight in the street and nationalists who condemn that. Never lump them all together, not the Basques, and not the Basque nationalists either. Ever since the fifteenth century, the Basque provinces – just like other regions of Spain – have been fighting for the rights of the local nobles and citizenry, and for the traditions that go along with them. That struggle was usually about practical matters: privileges, locals laws and taxes. At the end of the nineteenth century this ‘feel for independence’ took on a more romantic hue, as it did everywhere in Europe. The founder of this new movement, Sabino Arana, advocated a government of national character for all Basques, both Catholic and pure-bred. In his study he tinkered away at assembling a nation: from the various Basque dialects he