Back to Bizkaia: A Basque-American Memoir

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67 to build one house or make one ranch. You work here, dere, all over de place.” His fingers punctuated the air. “You work hard, you get money. If you want to do someding you do it. If you live alone, like one sheepherder, den in dis country, you live alone and no one bother you. Dat’s de difference from every place else.” 9 An hour of whistling filled the car. Melodic, sweet, in tune, the songs poured slowly through Dad’s puckered lips. As long as I had heard them, the songs seemed heavier than air, weighed down by decades or centuries of history and identity and culture, war and peace, love and life. I often sat in meetings, listening to managers drone on and on about the virtues of their company, trying to convince me to partner with them to bid a federal technology contract. When my mind wandered, a whistling came into my head, a familiar tune, many tunes, each one bringing me back to Dad, back to a special time and place of youth in Elko that mixed Basque customs, dance, language, sheep, cards, games of strength, and history. In mid-phrase, he stopped. I noticed the absence. “Santander!” Dad saw a sign overhead. “I been dere before. Small town, but good size.” “I thought you hadn’t been along the coast.” “Only once for one day.” “When was that?” “After I sell de Star Hotel, I come back here to see Momma and Daddy. I bought one car in Santander. It one French girl; I mean, French car.” “You bought a French girl, Dad?” “I no say dat,” he shot back testily. “So you had a French girl in your car?” “No, no.” “What was her name?” “Dere no French girl.” “Was she Italian?” I laughed then. “Dere no French girl, no girl. One French car. I mix up.” “I’m sure Freud would understand.” “What you mean?” “Nothing.” 68 “You shut up.” He hit me in the arm. The city of Santander had transitioned from the small, quaint seaside town that Dad had remembered to a burgeoning metropolis, the capital of Cantabria , with nearly 200,000 people. It felt like a tourist haven, congested with pedestrians and lines of cars speeding to the beach. I wondered from Dad’s recollection if Santander had exchanged homespun distinction for sheer size, but the question remained unexplored as we made our way west along Spain’s northern shore. “We stop here?” “Do you need a bathroom?” “No. I good.” “Then we’ll keep going.” “How far?” “We’ll drive until we run out of road,” I said. “We fall in de ocean.” “We’ll stop before then.” Dad resumed whistling, picking up a different musical thread, touching old notes, and improvising around familiar melodies. “Look at that,” I said after a bend in the road overlooking a cove. He straightened in his seat to focus on a bridge with white iron cables stretched in arcs to a cherry red base crossing a narrow waterway. “What dey build dat for?” “Looks like something from the Guggenheim in Bilbao.” “Ugly,” Dad uttered, wrinkling his nose. “You know what that reminds me of?” I asked him. “One piece of shit?” “No, Dad. That massive tree—that cement sculpture—between Elko and Salt Lake right in the middle of the desert. All you see for miles around—sagebrush , sagebrush, sagebrush—and then, a huge tree sculpture out of the blue.” “I seen dat.” “Well, it reminds me of that.” “One clear space, natural all ’round, but hell no, don’ like dat, dey build one thing dere.” “We do that, don’t we?” “Damn right.” We didn’t cross the bridge and didn’t see others pass over it. I couldn’t tell how a car reached it. I wondered if the country had built the bridge, like the 69 cement tree sculpture, to fill up space, or if it provided an important functional purpose. Seeing a replacement of nature’s aesthetics with a stylized bridge reminiscent of the Guggenheim’s modern architecture made me think that humans, even with efforts like the Guggenheim, still had a terrible time improving on nature. Down a final winding road, we came to San Vicente. Already I sensed a remarkable beauty, not unlike that of the red clay roofs against the glowing green as we dipped over the last hill into Gernika...