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59 “De Basque never give up dose dings. Lots oders won’t either. Who want to live like dat?” “Maybe we don’t have to give up much. Maybe each of us gives up a little bit.” “Some people, dey don’ got noding to give. Dey don’ got one pot to piss in. Den oder people, dey got too much. Dey’re de ones who won’t let go. Dey got everyding already.” “You make it sound hopeless.” “What you mean?” “You sound like there’s no hope, that we’ll get more and more people until we finally kill each other off.” “If we got war now—what you say?—with six billion people, you think we get less war with ten or twenty billion? You crazy.” “You’re probably right. But we don’t need to think about it. I don’t even know how we got on the subject.” “Dat God damn place. What de hell de name?” “Laredo.” “Yes, Fuckin’ Laredo. Dat’s why de Basque, dey stay home.” With that, he stubbornly turned away, a little heated, to look out his window. He began to whistle and I knew I had lost him for the afternoon. I recognized his melody. It didn’t have a name, at least none that I knew, but it was one of a hundred that he whistled when he became contemplative. I had heard all of them. They rivaled Euskara in age but, to my knowledge, had not been translated into sheet music. Surprisingly, I heard in his tune a variation on a theme, Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, taken from the cd playing softly in our Subaru. Threads had been woven cleverly into Dad’s ancient Basque melody. “What are you whistling?” I asked. Without looking at me, he said, “One Basque song.” I turned off the cd to listen and wondered if the new rendition gained in stature or if something special had been lost. 8 In 1910, Dad’s father, Mariano, boarded a ship bound for America where his only brother, Vicente, had established himself as a reliable ranch hand, the masterful sheepherder, horseshoer, calf roper, fence builder, barn fixer, and 60 trusted friend. Mariano planned to join him on his ranch, earn money, and send it home to feed a growing number of mouths. Mariano had two babies at this point, with another five, including Dad in 1930, to come about over the next twenty-five years. Crossing the Atlantic, one of the passengers coughed and within a day or two the passengers writhed on the deck with fever. Pale, shivering, and dizzy, Mariano retched his guts over the side, lost weight, and drowned in clothes now hanging on an emaciated body. Peering overboard into the dark deep as he heaved again and again, he might have imagined that the sea offered a welcome invitation as a final resting place. For twenty days over rolling waves under menacing skies, Mariano questioned his decision to leave Spain. When he thought his circumstance could not worsen, the clouds opened, rain fell, and a cold humidity touched his bones, adding to the gloom and despair of his illness. Then in the distance, beyond mist rising from calmer waters, in the chill of early dawn, he spied a lady crowned and wrapped in green, holding aloft her torch of liberty. Standing on feeble legs, he removed his old hat ringed with sweat and looked up to the New Colossus in the harbor. She invited the old to start anew. She represented hope and light and dreams fulfilled. Mariano passed through golden doors and entered upon a new land. He would stay a year and then return to Spain with a fuller view of the world and fuller pockets to care again for a wife, children, and more on the way. His experience mirrored the romantic understanding that most Americans have of European immigrants, those huddled masses of whom Emma Lazarus so eloquently wrote, gracing our shores and yearning to breathe free. But Dad’s experience forty years later held little similarity to his father’s. “Daddy, he put me on one bus from Lekeitio to Bilbao,” Dad recalled of his departure in December 1947. He traveled to Madrid, a city he knew only as myth, never imagining he’d see it. “Dere were big buildings. I didn’t know you could make buildings dat big. And people like sardines packed together.” He pressed his fingers to show the crush of...
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