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No one has forgotten the bombardment. "I have been aware of it since I was aware of anything," says a young businessman whose parents lived through the attack. "For years we were not allowed to talk about it. They gave us more football and more pelota [the game known in the U.S. as jai alai] and more toros [bulls], so we would forget it. But we haven't." In the Restaurante
Arrien, bombed out and rebuilt, the old men, many with Gudari (Basque republic soldier) emblems in their lapels, sit drinking tinto, playing cards and ruminating about Spain's first parliamentary elections in 41 years, to be held next June. They remain insistent that the truth must come forth about Guernica. "We need to get at the whole truth," says Pensioner Juan Aguirre, 61, "and we still don't have it."
Spiritual Center. No one is more outspoken on the subject than Joseba Elosegi, a former captain in the Basque army. His machine-gun company from the Saseta Battalion was recuperating in Guernica when the bombers came. "Guernica's significance does not lie in its stones," he says. "You can change those. What you cannot change is its legend, its face as a spiritual center for the Basques."
Elosegi lost 25 of his 100 or so men during the bombardment. He took pictures the next day in the smoke and the rubble, 48 hours before the Nationalists occupied the town. In 1970 he sneaked a mineral-water bottle filled with pure alcohol into the San Sebastian fronton, where Franco was attending an international jai alai tournament. Elosegi doused himself with alcohol, set it afire, and jumped into the arena from the second balcony, shouting, "Cora Euzkadi Askatuta!" (long live the free Basque country) and "Guernica, Guernica!"
"I wanted to bring the fire of Guernica to the one who had provoked it," he explains. "I wanted to give him a fiery abrazo." Elosegi missed his target and paid for his act with 17 days in a coma and 30 months in jail. One of the organizers of the anniversary remembrances, he is calmer today about the raid but no less committed. "Guernica was an obsession with me," he says. It is an obsession shared by hundreds of Guernica's inhabitants and countless other Spaniards as well.