In Europe

bombardment. She belongs to the Basque nationalist group of victims, and that is a very different set from the Guernica victims of that namby-pamby Euro peace group on the square. She wants this to be clear from the start. She is a little grey-haired lady, but on 26 April, 1937 she was a pretty seventeen-year-old. ‘I worked in the munitions factory,’ she says. ‘We made bombs, “half moons” we called them, they looked like big waffles. It was Monday, market day. There were lookouts on the mountaintops, and when they saw planes coming they would flag to the lookouts on the church steeple.They were supposed to start ringing the bells, and the factory sirens would take over. That's how the air-raid warning worked here. But that afternoon the bells suddenly started ringing like mad, and right away a big plane came over, trawng, trawng, trawng, and dropped a bomb. Our boss said, “Get down into the shelter, fast. This is going to be bad.” So we stayed down there, for four hours. You kept hearing this thud, thud, and smoke came seeping into the cellar, people were weeping and praying and all I could think was: what am I going to do when this is over, where's my family? Finally a man came in and said, “You can all go out now. But Guernica is gone, there is no Guernica any more.” We went outside, and you saw a hand lying here, a foot there, a head lying over there. And the whole city was red. Everything was just silent and red, as red as this.’ She points to a Coke can.
    That evening I sit on the patio of Café Arrien with Monica, a Basque writer. It is warm, the trees are blossoming and over by the fountain crowds of children are playing, cavorting about and dancing in circles. Behind them lies the new centre of Guernica, reconstructed in pseudo-antique style, built by one-time civil-war prisoners in about 1950.
    We talk about the ‘society of silence’, the way Spain tries to deal with its past. ‘All my father ever talked about later was the hunger,’ Monica says. ‘Never about the war. Almost all the good books about Franco and the civil war have been written by foreigners. It's still taboo.
    ‘Here you have two kinds of silence within a marriage,’ the writer says. ‘Partners who refuse to speak their own language, and those who refuse to talk about the war. My parents belonged to both categories. My father was a leftist political prisoner, a worker from the south who was sent here as an exile. My mother was a real Basque, a staunch Catholic. One time they had a huge fight about it, on Christmas Eve. “You communists and anarchists, you came here and murdered our priests and raped our nuns!” my mother screamed. “Not enough of them!” my father screamed back. “Not nearly enough!” That was the only time.’
    Across from our café the local young people are pouring into theirs. It has pictures of Cuban, Irish and Palestinian heroes on the walls. This is the mini-world of the ultra-nationalists, the closed circuit within which approximately fifteen per cent of all Basques live, the heart of their ownparty, their own trade union, their own sports, language, history and cooking clubs, their own newspaper, their own celebrations. Here every Spanish official is a ‘fascist’, every moderate journalist a ‘collaborator’. Everywhere in the city you see their slogans: ‘Model A is genocide for the Basque language!’ And: ‘Go home!’
    ‘Doesn't this ever end, with you people?’ I ask.
    ‘ETA has stopped for the time being,’ the writer says. ‘It's not a stunt, it took endless discussions to get to there. But the road of violence wasn't leading anywhere.’ We talk about how the IRA has now taken a political tack, and about how ETA is trying to do the same, but with much less discipline. ETA's political grass roots consist largely of young people between eighteen and twenty-five; the issue of self-rule does not play a central role in the lives of most Basques over thirty. My companions feel that ETA has pretty much stopped thinking strategically, and is gradually using its attacks only to save its own, isolated little world. ‘Take the execution of Miguel ángel Blanco, that city councillor, in July 1997,’ the writer says. ‘He was just a normal guy, like everyone else. It shows you how morally poisoned the movement has become. It goes further with every attack. The one on the Guggenheim Museum, a Basque institution, killing a Basque policeman. That we could ever have come this