gave thanks for this, their father remained plagued by thoughts of those who had spurned his son that day.
It was something for which he could never forgive them, especially the
In a clear and vindictive break with tradition it was their father, not the
In August he abruptly announced to the boys that they were moving away—to America. This news wasn’t as startling as one might have imagined, even to their young ears. Basques had been crossing the ocean since the Middle Ages, voyaging to the rich cod fisheries of the Grand Banks and pursuing whales into the treacherous subarctic waters off Greenland. Indeed, John Cabot’s celebrated discovery of Newfoundland in 1497 was greeted by the Basques with something approaching wry bemusement, for it was hardly a new-found-land, two of their own captains having dropped their anchors off the very same coast over one hundred years before. The Basques felt no need to justify this claim, nor did they doubt for a moment that the Vikings had been there well before themselves. Amerika had made rich men of many Basques over the centuries; and the belief that it still could was firmly embedded in their culture.
The boat and the gear sold promptly and well to a fellow tuna fisherman. The house would have gone for more had the highest bidder not happened to be the same individual who’d leveled his rifle at Antton less than a year before.
They sailed from Bordeaux on a converted whaling ship mobbed with American servicemen returning from the War, still drunk on victory. The crossing was rough, enough to blunt the merry-making and fill the narrow steerage compartments with the rank odor of sea-sickness. Sixteen days after she put to sea, and following a brief stopover in Havana, the
On disembarking they were immediately ferried from the quayside over to Ellis Island. Conrad could only recall brief moments of the lengthy processing. He remembered being tagged, doctors prodding and poking, sticks of blue chalk raised menacingly, those marked with a cross screaming in protest as they were led away. And he could remember thinking, his heart drumming a terrified tattoo in his breast: What if they mark me and not Antton or Papa? They’ll take me away, I’ll never see them again, and then there’ll be nobody, not till I die and we all meet again in heaven. And the prospect of seeing his mother again washed through him, and suddenly things didn’t seem quite so bad.
Then there was the vastness of the Registry Room with its seething mass of outlandish humanity—men in dresses, others with whiskers that reached to their waists, women with their faces shrouded in veils, children with pointed shoes that curled at the end—the deafening clamor of their unintelligible voices rising to the rafters as they slowly shuffled forward. A man behind a tall desk fired questions at their father, and then they were out, down the stairs, into the rain.
They were greeted warmly in their own tongue by a man with a kindly face. He ruffled the boys’ hair and thrust candy into their hands, helped them recover their baggage then led them over to the Manhattan ferry. Valentin Aguirre was something of an institution for Basque immigrants, many of whom passed through his New York boarding house, Eusko-Etxea, on their journeys westwards to Nevada and Idaho. Most of the guests were single young men, looking to make their fortunes in the New World. Others were married, with wives and children back home, who would be joining them once the cost of their passage had been earned out west. A widower with two young sons was a novelty, drawing bucket-loads of sympathy from the serving girl in the dining room, who kept seizing Conrad and Antton to her ample bosom, until one joker proclaimed, to everyone’s amusement, that his mother was also dead.
Guests tended to stay no more than a few days, time enough to recover from the crossing while Valentin arranged their railroad tickets for the onward journey. And it would have been no different for them if their father hadn’t struck up conversation in the barroom with a fellow by the name of Eusebio Landaluce. He was tall, with a stooping gait and a feral expression that belied his good nature. He laughed heartily at the slightest inducement and he was immensely proud of his black Borsalino hat, which, he swore blind, was made from the hairs of wild Argentinian rabbits. He plucked coins from behind the boys’ ears, stuffed his silk kerchief into his fist only for it to vanish before their disbelieving eyes. He made his ears dance, his nose wiggle, and he could break wind on command.
After they had been dispatched upstairs to bed, Eusebio regaled their father with tales of woe out West. He told of Basques reduced to little more than slavery by the owners of the big sheep companies, pitchforking hay and mucking out lambing sheds from dawn till dusk. The winter camps of the sheepherders were a sight to behold, he said. He had seen families dumped in the mountains with no more than a patched tent, some bedrolls, a pot-bellied stove and a 30/30 rifle for fending off the bears, wolves, coyotes and cougars. And when you weren’t defending yourself or the flock against wild animals, there were the cowboys to contend with. Fierce feuds raged between the ranchers and the sheepherders over the best pastureland. Then there were the kids in the street, the ones who’d spit on you and call you ‘black bascos’ or ‘dirty Catholic’. And so he went on, misery heaped upon hardship and suffering, a grim catalog of wretchedness.
When their father woke them the next morning and announced that they would be staying in New York, that Eusebio was going to find a place for them to live, they greeted the news with enthusiasm. Of course they did. They hadn’t laughed so much in over a year, not since their mother died. Even when they set eyes on the pitiful little apartment that was to be their home, their opinion of Eusebio never faltered. It later emerged that he had vacated the place that very morning, that the sums he took off their father by way of rent were excessive, to say the least, and no doubt more than covered the cost of the improved accommodation to which he’d decamped. All this they forgave him, and more besides, for he was true to his word.
He found a woman, Irena, to care for the boys during the day, to cook for them and teach them English. She was a spry little Lithuanian with a fierce temper and a questionable grasp of the language, but she quickly grew fond of them and let them know it. Obsessed with personal hygiene, she was always dragging them off to the public showerbath on 11th Street between A and B Avenues. It was Irena who introduced them to the neighborhood, pointing out the whores and the hustlers, the crazies and the pickpockets as she scuttled along, her bag clutched tightly to her breast.
On her days off, the boys would roam further afield, heading for South Street, the East River waterfront, with its forest of masts, the windjammers and clippers gathered cheek-by-jowl, their bowsprits sticking out over the street, sailors and longshoremen scuttling to and fro, offloading cargo or filling their bellies with chowder at the small eating places across from the pierhouses. They didn’t know what drew them here, not at the time. Only later did they realize that the sea was already in them.
Irena’s presence lent a much-needed order to their lives, as well as freeing their father to pursue his ‘business’ with Eusebio. It was an improbable partnership, almost comical—their father grave and thoughtful, Eusebio a
