Read The Liverpool Basque Online
Authors: Helen Forrester
The Liverpool Basque
The Liverpool Basque
This novel is dedicated to my friend,
Doroteo Vicente Elordieta, a Basque from Liverpool,
whose wonderful stories about the city
inspired me to write it
Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined
Epistle i, line 149
Moral Essays
Alexander Pope, 1688–1744
Ignoring the pouring rain, he came out of the house, and then turned to check that the front door had closed properly behind him. Satisfied, he walked slowly down the path between the flowerbeds, empty except for a few winter aconites cautiously beginning to open.
When he reached the two steps which led down to the pavement, he paused before carefully descending them. As the wind off the Strait caught him, his shiny black oilskin flapped against his lean frame. A fringe of white hair fluttered round the edge of the black beret set firmly on his head; the beret had been arranged so that it had a small peak to protect his forehead and encourage the rain to fall down his cheeks instead of veiling his sight.
Safely on the narrow pavement, he lingered for a moment to look across the Juan de Fuca Strait. The Olympic Mountains were obliterated by the downpour, but nearer to hand a freighter was stubbornly butting its way through the sheeting rain towards Victoria Harbour. With a seaman’s eye for weather, he looked up at the louring clouds, pursed his lips and muttered, ‘Cold enough for snow.’
Water was trickling down his neck, so he heaved his collar up higher and then proceeded along The Esplanade towards the cemetery. He walked with his head bent, his shoulders slightly hunched, as if expecting to hit his skull on a door frame if he straightened up. Though his gait was light and steady, his old Wellington boots made an intermittent squishing sound as he slopped through muddy puddles.
In the large inside pocket of his oilskin was a single pink rose wrapped in damp tissue paper. He had bought it yesterday from the florist in Cook Street; throughout the winter he had a standing order with her, to purchase the flowers four at a time. He kept them fresh in a cut-glass vase on the dining-room table, and, regardless of the weather, he took one each day to the cemetery to lay on the grave of his wife, Kathleen.
Sometimes the florist was not able to obtain the pink or white blooms which he requested, and he would have to make do with red ones, which Kathleen had not loved quite so much. In summer, he cut roses in shades of pink or cream from the bushes which she herself had planted in their garden when first they had retired to Vancouver Island. While she had the strength, she had tenderly pruned and fertilized them herself. Then, when she had begun to fail, he had pushed her wheelchair on to the lawn, and had learned to look after them for her, doing his best to hide from her the agony of mind he had felt, as he watched her suffer the multiple infections to which leukaemia laid her open.
Seamen don’t get much chance to garden, he ruminated, as he gazed down at yesterday’s offering, which lay, tattered and sodden, on the grave in front of the memorial stone. But Kathleen had loved her garden, and every day he made this small pilgrimage to tell her that he was caring for it and for her household icons, and that he loved her still. Mostly, however, he came to ask her forgiveness for having failed, when she was so ill, to keep her out of pain. Mixed with the rain, tears ran down his face; no matter how the years since her death rolled along, they failed to obliterate from his mind the torture he had watched her endure. There were, of course, days when he took the walk to the cemetery from force of habit; but all too often he went in the hope of easing his own haunting memories. Today, his nightmare was very close.
He bent down carefully to avoid the dizziness which, nowadays, sometimes bothered him, and picked up yesterday’s battered bloom. Regardless of its wet condition, he stuffed it into his outside pocket. His chest felt tight, and he paused to take a few short breaths of the cold, damp air, before slowly opening his oilskin to retrieve the slightly flattened fresh rose from his inner pocket. He unrolled the tissue paper from it and laid the flower in front of the headstone. The wind was strong and capricious, so he picked up a small rock and laid it on the stalk to hold it down. Most people had a vase into which they put their flower offerings, but he laid them on the ground; in his mind’s eye he always saw the roses as lying between his wife’s perfect white breasts.
Then he addressed the marble headstone. He did not see the words cut into it,
In loving memory of Kathleen Echaniz, beloved wife of Manuel Echaniz, born 3rd June, 1914, died 20th January, 1984. At peace
. His first words were, as always, ‘Forgive me, my darling, forgive me.’ He paused, as if waiting for a reply. Then he swallowed hard, and lifted his head a little, to look out towards the heaving waters of the Strait. He saw his wife’s smiling face, her eyes unclouded by illness; he felt her fullness beneath him, before suffering reduced her to a skeleton; and, as he had always done, either by letter from distant ports or when they lay comfortably in bed together, he told her all that had happened to him in the previous twenty-four hours, all the funny things, all the small disasters. Today, he said that he had washed her Royal Doulton figurines in the cabinet in the sitting-room and had set them back exactly as she had left them, that last night he had cooked himself some fish for supper, and that Veronica Harris, her friend from next door, had brought him in some homemade cookies, as she did each week.
The soft words came out like a litany, not in Kathleen’s native English, but in a strange evocative language known
only to a few, a language which Kathleen had never been able to master.
He spoke in Basque, a unique language of farmers and shepherds in the enclaves of the Pyrenees, of fishermen in the Bay of Biscay, of iron workers and factory hands in big cities like Bilbao and smaller ones like Guernica and Pamplona; it was also spoken by lonely, elderly shepherds and their descendants in Nevada, Utah and Arizona, and by small groups of emigrants in Eastern Canada. It was a language so old that it was unrelated to any other language in the modern world, preserved by people shielded by nature’s walls, the Pyrenees, between France and Spain. It had the advantage that anyone in the cemetery who heard his words to his wife would not understand them.
Manuel Echaniz was a Basque. Though he also spoke Spanish quite fluently, he seethed with anger when he was frequently mistaken for a Spaniard. He would occasionally flare up and say that though General Franco had, in the Spanish Civil War, bombed into submission his grandparents’ native city of Bilbao, he had never succeeded in making its Basque inhabitants into Spaniards, any more than Roman and Moorish invaders of Spain had been able to do so in much earlier times.
He himself had been born in England, in the port of Liverpool, and he spoke English with a pronounced Liverpool accent. Nevertheless, he would affirm indignantly that, like his father and grandfather before him, he was a Basque and very proud of it. For the benefit of Canadians, he would add, also, that he was proud to be a Canadian citizen – but he was still pure Basque!
He had married Kathleen Weston, a Vancouver Island girl, whom he had met, during the war, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She had tried several times to learn his native tongue, but had finally given up, arguing that his command of English was so good that they could communicate perfectly in that language. Because he had spoken to her consistently
since babyhood only in Basque, his daughter Faith understood the language – but she would always answer him in English. As for Lorilyn, his only grandchild, now aged nineteen and doing her first year at the University of British Columbia, she would laugh and tell him to stop ‘talking funny’ and speak English.
Sometimes, without his Canadian Kathleen to support him, he wondered why he stayed in Victoria. He frequently longed for the familiar dockside streets of Liverpool, for the warmth and friendliness of the Baltic Fleet or the Flags of all Nations, both pubs that he remembered as being packed with an international gathering of seamen, all talking exuberantly at once. And he wanted to hear again St Peter’s church bell calling him to Mass, a Mass celebrated in Latin. He could go to Mass in Victoria; he could even ease his soul by going to Confession; but it would all be in English, as lately ordained by the Vatican, and would have little of the comforting magic of a Mass chanted in Latin, as it had been when he was young. The Latin Mass, untouched by war or pestilence, unchanging like God himself, had been a dear familiar ceremony, no matter how strange a port his ship had been tied up in. If he had to listen to Mass in the vernacular, he wanted to hear it in Basque – and for that he would have to return to Vizcaya, the province of his forefathers.
He sighed as he turned from Kathleen’s grave and began slowly to make his way homeward under the dripping pine trees. Both Liverpool and Vizcaya were a long way off; journeys to either of them were not to be undertaken lightly by an eighty-four-year-old. Then there was Faith who lived with her Canadian husband, George McLaren, in Vancouver; she was his living link with Kathleen. She did come occasionally, with her family, to visit him, but never frequently enough. He would smile when he thought of her and try to shake off his depression. Yet, sometimes when he could not sleep, a fearful inner loneliness would
overwhelm him to the point of terror, and older voices called him, voices of others whom he had loved, Basque voices, Liverpool voices, people who were part of his very nature, people he had not been able to tell Kathleen much about.
He knew that he dreaded dying in this pretty city on the west coast of Canada, even if they laid him beside Kathleen. It was too lonely – a single Basque name in a cemetery full of British pioneers. Kathleen was amid her own, but he would not be.
He wanted, at least, to lie in a Liverpool churchyard or cemetery, surrounded by headstones with Basque names on them, to be laid to rest by Basques speaking either the thick colloquial English of his childhood friends or the language of his roots, Basque.
As he pushed to one side a rain-dropped branch of Scottish pine, he considered soberly how strange it was that, when he thought about his own death, all that had happened to him in Canada was wiped out of his mind, even the long, contented years with Kathleen. What was left – the essence of himself – was Liverpool Basque; and he wanted to lie with his parents and grandparents and friends in a corner of Liverpool they had made their own. Afterwards, he wanted toasts to his memory drunk in wines familiar to him and funny stories told about him in pithy Basque phrases.
Back on the pavement that led to his home, he shivered. It was not easy to have a conscience formed by Jesuits in the back streets of Liverpool. They taught perfection – but an ordinary man could do only his best – and he had done his best for Kathleen.