Bilbao–New York–Bilbao

1

BILBAO

Fish and trees are alike.

They’re alike because of the growth rings. Trees have these in their trunks. Cut through a tree trunk and there will be the rings. A year for each ring, and that’s how you know what the tree’s age is. Fish have them, too, but in their scales. And just as we do with trees, we know by those growth rings what the animal’s age is.

Fish are always growing. Not us, we start shrinking once we’ve reached maturity. Our growth stops and our bones begin to knit together. A person shrivels. Fish, though, grow until they die. Faster when they’re young, and as the years go by more slowly, but fish always go on growing.

Winter creates the growth rings of a fish. It’s the time when fish eat least, and that time of hunger draws a dark trace in the fish scale. In that winter season when the fish grows least. Not in summer, though. When there’s no hunger there’s no trace at all left behind in the fish scale.

The growth ring of a fish is microscopic, you can’t see it with the naked eye, but there it is. As if it were a wound. A wound that hasn’t healed up.

And, as with the growth rings of fishes, terrible events stay on in our memory, mark our life, until they become a measure of time. Happy days go fast, on the other hand – too fast – and we forget them quickly.

What winter is for fish, loss is for humans. Loss makes our time specific for us, the end of a relationship, the death of a person we love.

Each loss a dark growth ring deep down.

The day they told him he had a scant few months left to live, our grandfather didn’t want to go home. Our mother, his young daughter-in-law, accompanied him to the doctor’s office that morning. Granddad listened calmly to what the doctor was saying. He heard him out without a peep and, afterward, shook his hand and courteously said goodbye.

When they left the consulting room, Mum didn’t know what to say. After a long silence, she asked him if they’d be heading along to the bus to Ondarroa now. He said no.

We’re not going back yet. We’ll spend the day in Bilbao. I want to show you something, he said to her, and made an effort to smile.

Granddad took Mum to the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. She would never forget that day, how on the very day they told him he was going to die Granddad took her to a museum. How he attempted to place beauty above death, without success. How he attempted to make that terrible day have another kind of memory for her. Our mother would always remember that gesture of his.

That was the first time she’d ever set foot in a museum.

Forty-five years later I went to the same museum myself. I wanted to find out about a certain picture, and so I went. I was on the trail of a picture by the painter Aurelio Arteta, as if following a half-erased clue, in some totally intuitive way. An inner voice kept telling me that that picture was important, that it would turn out to be an essential piece in the novel that I was writing.

The picture is a mural, painted, as it happens, in the Ondarroa country house the architect Ricardo Bastida had built to spend summers in. It was in the summer of 1922 that Arteta painted the mural, there in the living room. In the nineteen-sixties, though, a few years after Ricardo Bastida died, his family sold the house. The buyers razed it to build apartments. But the mural was saved, by good luck. Aurelio Arteta’s artwork was taken down and to the museum in Bilbao. It’s been on exhibit ever since, in one of the upstairs galleries.

Jose Julian Bakedano, one of the museum’s curators, showed it to me. In its day the mural took up three walls of the Bastidas’ living room. In the museum, though, it’s hung on one wall as a triptych. In the very center is the representation of an outing to a country fair, that’s the largest of the pieces. And on the outer wings come the two other pictures. One is of a woman of the era, posed just like a Renaissance Venus. The other is of a young couple, talking with each other in the shade of a tree.

At first sight, the mural’s colours are the surprising thing about it. Arteta uses very bright colours to portray the boys and girls on their way to the fair: greens, blues, lilacs. And in a way that had never been done before.

At the outset, a number of critics didn’t have much regard for Arteta’s work, Bakedano told me. Mocking him, they said he wore coloured spectacles to paint in. The years he spent studying painting in Paris were plain as day in Arteta’s work. He took a house in Montmartre and there he fell in love with the work of Toulouse-Lautrec and Cézanne. But he never wanted to make a complete break with tradition. It’s precisely because of this, I think, that his pictures put me in mind of an old tavern that’s been painted in bright colours – they’re modern but without losing their charm.

In the mural two worlds appear, together at one and the same time. On one side are the baserritarrak, the people of the farmsteads, and on the other the townsfolk. The farm girls are in traditional dress. Their skirts come down to their ankles, scarves on heads and their necklines modest. The city girls, though, don’t look like that at all. Their dresses are lightweight, the wind moves them. Their hemlines are shorter, their knees allowed to show, and their necklines are wide open. What’s more, on their breasts they sport jewelry. Compared with the baserritarrak, the city girls look beckoning, as if they were courting the onlooker. The Art Deco effect is as clear as can be here, that nineteen-twenties optimism wells from these paintings.

This picture represents the leap from old world to new, Bakedano explained now, and the contrast between farm folk and city folk intensifies the city girls’ eroticism.

The Bastida-house mural was actually just a rehearsal. Aurelio Arteta had not yet mastered mural technique and the architect let him use his living room to try things out. The real work would come a bit later. Ricardo Bastida himself designed the headquarters the Bank of Bilbao was going to have in Madrid. In its day, that building, to be built right on the Calle de Alcalá, would be unique. Of necessity it would be a symbol of the bank and, more broadly, of the city of Bilbao. A gesture of power and modernity. The work would make the careers of both Bastida and Arteta, and win them recognition outside the Basque Country.

Bastida wanted Aurelio Arteta to be the artist for the bank’s great hall. The two of them had known each other ever since they were children, and their lives were strikingly alike, one in architecture, the other in painting. For the rotunda of the bank’s entrance hall Arteta would paint an allegory of Bilbao. The stevedores, the workers from the steel mills of the era, the baserritarrak, the fishmongers and more. It was a taxing job, more than ten murals, and moreover on an irregular surface.

Arteta took the commission but wanted to get himself well prepared beforehand. He was exacting, it was hard for him to consider a work finished. Once, years later, during his exile in Mexico, a prospective buyer attempted to look at an unfinished canvas that was hidden under a cloth, lifting the covering. When Arteta saw him at it, he took up his palette knife in a rage and slashed the man’s face. It was the one thing said to drive him wild.

A perfectionist to a fault, Arteta took great pains with every detail. He didn’t care much about signing his paintings, often enough left them with his name off, as if he couldn’t be bothered. With money matters, too, he was sloppy. Nevertheless, while he was painting he went at it body and soul. And, even to paint the mural in Ondarroa, he had the water brought in from Madrid, so that when it came time to start work in Madrid the water would be sure to have the same density. He chose the best materials. The sand would be ground from genuine Markina marble.

I had heard a lot of things about Arteta, and also about his character. He was a beloved painter in his lifetime. He was well regarded by conservatives, nationalists, and socialists alike. His bashful nature may have influenced that, Bakedano added.

I’d also heard about how he fled to Mexico during the civil war. After the aerial bombing of Guernica, Spain’s legitimate government commissioned Arteta to paint a meaningful picture for the Paris Exposition. The whole world would know then what had happened in Guernica, what kind of massacre the Nazis had committed there. It would have been his life’s great work. Arteta refused the commission, however. He explained that he was sick of the war, he would prefer to join his family in exile in Mexico. The commission later fell to Pablo Picasso. And we all know what comes after that. Doing the Guernica picture would have been a huge advance in Arteta’s career, but he turned it down. He chose life over art. He preferred being with his family to being remembered in the future.

Many people will see Arteta’s choice as an error. However could he miss out on his chance of a lifetime because of a fleeting emotional reaction. How had he placed the people he loved above his art. There will be those, too, who will never forgive him for it, in the belief that a creator’s obligation is to their creative gift above all else.

More than once I’ve wondered what I’d do if I were in Arteta’s predicament. Which way I’d choose.

You can’t tell, you have to live through the same situation to do so. But it’s the very crossroads an artist often ends up facing. Personal life or creation. Arteta obviously took the first route, and Picasso the second.

Jose Julian Bakedano went off to his office and back to work, but before he did he gave me the documentation the museum had on the Arteta mural: how their conservators effected its removal from Bastida’s house.

In any event, he gave me a piece of advice. The person who knows the most about the mural is Carmen Bastida, the architect’s daughter, the best thing would be to call her, and he handed me her phone number on a Post-it, saying, Tell her you’re calling her because I said to, and went back to his work.

I stayed behind on my own, staring at the mural, thinking. The optimism that emanated from it attracted me most of all. That energy made by the brushstrokes of Arteta’s hand. Back in that summer of 1922 Arteta and Bastida had great hopes for their work, they had no fear of the future. That strength dazzled me. Not knowing what would happen to them in just a few years’ time.

—

About my grandfather I don’t know too much. Liborio Uribe. By the time I was born he was dead and our father didn’t talk to us a lot about his father. He wasn’t big on the past, himself. A seaman by nature, he preferred to look to the future. About the people in our mother’s family, on the contrary, yes: we know a thousand tales from Mum’s side, stories about one relation and another. But on our dad’s side very few. Maybe because of this, that grandfather made me curious.

Among the few things our father did tell was a memory from his childhood, about the way of life in the summertimes. I’d heard him say how when he was little he’d be on the beach the whole day, at the wooden changing rooms Granddad kept for the summer people. He’d help his parents with any number of chores: taking basins of water to the summer people, helping them rinse off, getting the sand off their legs and hanging their bathing clothes on the drying poles. I imagine him entirely silent at this work, carrying water and picking up clothing and, between times, paying attention to the things the summer people said to each other.

I remember your father very well, he was a graceful boy and a worker, Carmen Bastida said to me when I paid her a visit at her house in Bilbao. Those were the best years of my life. Life held no worries for me then, no adversity.

The Bastida family had three bathing cabanas on the beach. They used to set them up high on the sand, close to the cliffs. Next door was the stretch of beach for the people who engaged in therapeutic nudism, shielded by a tall length of dark cloth. The beach days come gathered together in black-and-white photographs. Showing me the photographs, Carmen tried to explain who each person was. To go by what Bastida’s daughter said, painters, musicians, architects, astronomers met up on the beach at the Bastidas’ cabanas. Most of them coming from Bilbao and Madrid. But what I loved best was a man from the town, Liborio, the stories he used to tell us.

Keeping the cabanas was not Granddad’s only way of making a living. He had a small boat, too, to take out fishing, by the name of Dos Amigos. The name of the boat always made me wonder: Dos Amigos – Two Friends. Why ever had he named his boat that, how had he come up with that weird name. And if Granddad himself had been one of the two friends, who had the other one been.

I wanted to unearth that other one, discover why all trace of him had been wiped out. Whether Granddad had gotten angry at his friend. Wanting to answer those questions, several years ago I started tracking down the clues. I felt that Dos Amigos had a novel somewhere inside it, a novel about the fishing world that’s in the process of disappearing. But this was the plan only at the outset. And the search for facts for the novel has taken me down several roads I hadn’t expected, I’ve met up with many surprises.

To find out fishes’ age you need to count the growth rings on the scales, and add one year. When they’re larvae, fish don’t have any scales. In the case of eels, you have to add four years. Since eels spend four years as larvae.

They likewise need four years to cross the Atlantic. The tiny elvers make the trip from the Sargasso Sea to the Bay of Biscay in that much time.

My plane will cover the same distance in seven hours. I’ll be taking a flight to New York on this very day, from the Bilbao airport.

2

A COFFEE AT THE AIRPORT

I get to the airport from Ondarroa before I thought I would. The sky over Bilbao a double-dyed blue. Even though it’s November it’s clear the south