In a program dedicated to Mikel Labo, which aired shortly after the death of the most influential Basque singer-songwriter of his era, an elderly stranger told the cameras of the friendship that bound him to the artist in San Sebastian . I remember with emotion the time they spent together in the Basque country and complained of never being able to convince Laboe to return the visits, while I understand, or better, while realizing, with a certain fatalism, which was go this way. According to my friend Nicolas, who then is the one who brought me this episode, Laboe would have loved to visit the land of his friend, however, preferred not to have to do. In order not to deprive yourself of the taste that they could ever imagine, I would add (because it's the same answer, and I assume therefore that the base there is the same reason, I like to give when they ask me why it has never been to Paris throughout the my life).
The discovery of the Labo Mikel owe a very long documentary by Julio Medem, entitled La pelota bathtub, borrowed a few years ago from the library district of Gracia. This is an inspired collage of interviews with Basque or otherwise linked to cultural or political reasons, the "Basque question" with which the talented director of San Sebastian (but now madrileño of adoption) would, without actually succeeding (in the bottom of the film as you get tired after a bus trip in which he chatted with all passengers) and add his testimony to the understanding dell'irrisolta and often misunderstood situation of his country, joining, but would rather sliding, images imbued with the music of epic Baga, biga, higa , opera ancestral and onomatopoeia that makes so much talk over the idea of \u200b\u200ba region that will probably never be an independent nation by the political point of view, but that has always been the Heimat real, different and unique, for many men who were born there or for those metaphorical Heimat , who, like me, thanks to my friend's life, there are simply passed many times, from a bizarre road trip with close friends, continuing with a wet and even more bizarre New Year's Eve with Laura and her sister, ending with a ride Hemingway's father, transforming the randomness in habit, the tourist trip in personal journey, the road novel of formation, the landscapes of the coast in the walls of their room.
visceral attachment to their land, the jealous demands of his own words, the passionate defense of their traditions, the wide sense of family, pride and sincere rough to belong to a small world made up of old memories, gestures, moods out of time, stories, tales of grandparents and uncles are certainly not the prerogatives of the Basque people, but in that strip of land that separates from Bilbao Bayona these elements acquire a different meaning, that can also hide imperfections, flaws, the ingenuity that any declaration of unity brings. Devoid of any ornament or pimp holographic self-satisfaction, the true epic Basque (not the maximalist and exploited its self-styled political spokesman) is hidden, it is perceived in the stories of the old fishermen of Ondarroa, trees paintings the mysterious forest of Oma, the roar of the San Mames stadium, Bilbao, La Catedral, when marking the athletes, txirimiri in bathing suits, plastic figures in the paintings of Aurelio Arteta, Mikel in the cries of Labo, in reproductions of old wooden boats that can be bought in a shop in Casco Viejo of San Sebastian, in post-industrial landscapes of Barakaldo. The epic Basque appears in all its spirit when you travel for its coastal roads, those marked in black on the map, when you stop for a swim in the bays, when you see the cliffs eroded by the incessant flow of Cantabrian Sea, when you walk in feeling dumb of any country gables, thinking about the elderly on the sideline with head in txapela pelotari I bet on point after point, turning the bowl games of pelota in a clash of civilizations between neighbors or building huts.
The epic is in the silence of the lighthouse head Matxitxako indicating the route for vessels with their loads back from the North Sea to the ports of Bermeo, Ondarroa, Getaria, in the silence of friends silent when you have to understand something important but do not use the words take you on the beach to watch the waves, in the silence of yellowed photos of a past clinging bitterly to not to get sucked in the anonymity of this, in the silence of marmitako, potato soup, tuna and tomatoes that the sailors were preparing to warm their bones, that the old mother of my friend Fernando's prepared when he was a boy and that, so good, he has never eaten more, breaks the silence of the telephone conversation between Nikolas and his mother made from time to time in Euskera, not because it is needed, not because they do not normally they speak in Castilian, not for not being understood, but only to avoid the language of their homeland, as happened to his story, in the future remains a mystery to which only affect the archaeologists and poets. The Basque is my epic, lived in the silence of a highway at night, trying to guess the output for Hondarribia without going to France, with the cranes of Irun in phosphorescent distance, while a friend is sleeping and the other is recalled about the time lost in another coast, in another life.
The epic of the Basque Country is intertwined in every family history, breaking the barriers that artificially separate the universal and the personal. It is witness a wonderful book, Bilbao Bilbao-New York- , written in Basque and subsequently translated into English (soon, I hope, comes the Italian version). The author and narrator, Kirmen Uribe, but also born poet was born in Ondarroa, a fishing village in the province vizcayna, glorious son and grandson of fishermen in the area. Ondarroa had to go to a July morning to swim, but the wrong street and found ourselves on a winding ridge that carried over Mutriku, in the mountains. When I finally fall back on the coast, after a few stops gastro-intestinal, we now Lekeitio, just in time to die on the sand, preferably in the shade. Kirmen reconstructs the story of his family, documenting the process, seeking information on the generations that preceded them to him I can give anyone. So here is the grandson of the architect Bastida, who had commissioned the painting to his friend Aurelio Arteta En the pilgrimage to the living room of his home in Ondarroa, that fresco preserved at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao Kirmen's grandfather, just released by the doctor's office where he announced his remaining few months to live, wants to go to observe, because He then attended the show, and perhaps in that pilgrimage , among rural girls, also depicts the love of his life. This is why Uncle Boni, patron of the boat Bizkargi , whose help the teacher to fill in the Eneko Barrutia Diccionario de los pescadores vizcaìnos is documented in a cd, and listening to his voice Kirmen realizes that Nerea his girlfriend was right when he said that the cormorant Ondarroa to call him "sakillu" (for Ondarroa, because is only Bermeo could be another story). Hence the Maritxu elderly aunt, in her apartment in the dusty heart Bilbao, who teaches the meaning of the gesture Kirmen maite-maite , "a gesture that did not know, must have been lost in time":
Maritxu remember the last time saw his father. He stared at her from afar and waved his hands cone: he put one over the other and stroked. Maritxu I repeated the same gesture, and with the palm of a hand caressed the back of the other. "This means maite-maite," my aunt explained to me with his words than eighty years ago.
other side of the sweetness of the look of Kirmen Uribe, but following the same horizon rippled the Basque coast, there is a modern electric grandchildren Mikel Labo, although in reality, musically speaking, there is nothing in common. You cross the border to Hondarribia, where the sultry voice of Miren Iza (in its sweet they might drown, as if they were long waves that washed ashore) started in the direction of Madrid, with its Tulsa. The first exit after San Sebastian, on the highway that leads to Bilbao, leads to Zarautz, which mostly looks like a miniature edition of Guipuzcoan capital, with its concha scale of one to five and the detached house which suggest the frescoes of Arteta, to family dinners, to the rhythms of life different, more human and intense - the opposite of Delorean, whose syncopated rhythms rather refer to the stable of DFA Records . Lekeitio Pass and entered it in Biscay, the stop must be made in Getxo, a suburb of Bilbao pijo well, where the best youth observes the ocean and sees the coast of Oregon, Portland Pavement, when they played for the first time in Spain became accompanied on their tour by Tenant Communist . Today this legendary group, so Quinquis de los ochenta , No more, but the Pavement are resurrected, and if they returned to Spain I am sure that would accompany the Mcenroe , litanies in which post-rock, narcoleptic enough, sometimes it seems that riannidi the thread of the epic Basque Mikel Labo had started with his harrowing Gernika.
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