Hot Night in the City

them for letting their ancient Basque traditions wither and drop away, for I understand that the old ways are easily forgotten by those who cozy up to tourists from Paris and Bordeaux, and listen to the outlander's French-speaking radio, and end up desiring his modern machines and his comforts. But the people of my upland village are sustained by those ancient fetes and customs that have marked the joys and tragedies of Basque life since before Roland broke the mountain with his sword not so many kilometers from this very spot. (It was we Basques, you know, who thrashed that proud Roland at Roncesvalles—ancestors of mine, perhaps.)

We of Xiberoa are considered to be backwards and old-fashioned by those coastal Basque who live in the shadow of the outlander. Our accent is imitated to make jokes funnier, and occasionally people come from as far away as Paris to photograph our lera carts yoked to the horns of the russet oxen of Urt and piled high with the dried fern we harvest from the hillsides for animal bedding. Because we are the last people in all of France to use wooden wheels, outsiders smile on us and say that we are charming and quaint, but they shake their heads and tell us that we must inevitably change with the changing world and march to the ragtime rhythms of Paris. And perhaps this is so. Surely things are changing, even here. We are slowly becoming a village of children and old people, as our young women go to work in the espadrille manufactories of Mauleon, or go off to Paris to become maids, and our young men go to the New World to tend rich men's flocks; and they come back only at feast times, the young men riding automobiles that have radios inside of them, and the young women wearing skirts that show the bottom half of their legs.

Well, enough about the village. Perhaps it is old-fashioned, as they say, but any chance for rapid change is ruled out by our cumbersome old Basque style of government: village meetings in which every person may say his piece before he votes, even those who have only a light vote. Not all people have the same vote in our village meetings: some have heavier votes and some lighter; it depends on how much land you have inherited and how well you have done with it. We are told that in the lowlands all people are equal under the law. This seems very foolish, for any man with eyes in his head can see that men are not equal. The role of the law should be to assure equality amongst equals, and to make it possible for someone to become more equal if he works hard and has God's luck with him. Perhaps our way of seeing things is flawed, but we like it because it is our own way and, as the old saying has it, txori bak-hoitzari eder bere ohantzea.* And as the wise old Basque saying tells us: Old sayings are wise.

*Each bird finds his own nest beautiful.

We don't exactly 'make laws' at our village meetings; what we do is come to understandings that are written up in the minutes. And these minutes are sometimes very complicated, because we take every consideration into account and leave no loopholes that might tempt men to do things for which the village would have to ostracize them. Ostracism is a powerful penalty here, for it extends to the offender's wife, who will not be allowed to share the succulent bits of gossip that are exchanged every Tuesday down at the village lavoir where the women laugh and chat to the rhythmic splat of their wooden paddles spanking the laundry clean. A wife thus deprived of the sauce and spice of village life will make a many-faceted hell of the life of the offending husband. In this way, the wife becomes the stick for beating the man; but ancient Basque justice does not allow the ostracism to be extended to the children, for that would be unfair. Wives select their husbands, but children do not choose their parents.

What I want to tell you about is the minutes of a village meeting we held a few years ago, just before the Great War took seven of our young men away to the army, three of whom went on to God, while one came back strange in his head from the gas, and one who left as Zabala-the-Handsome came back as Zabala-One-Leg. I want to show you how careful and clever is our thinking about things—not from pride, which is a sin, but to make a record of ourselves, because I am beginning to accept that the old way of things must pass and, without a record, our grandchildren are doomed to slip into the world of the outlander where, as you know, all people are exactly alike.

But you could not understand the minutes of this meeting unless you knew something about the Widow Jaureguiberry, now gone to God, but at that time still amongst us. So first I will tell you about the Widow Jaureguiberry.

Each day the Widow Jaureguiberry would drive her small flock of sheep from our village to Etchebar, the next village up. And each evening she would drive them back. Now, tradition requires that the shepherd lead the flock so that the beasts will not stray into other people's fields. He is not permitted to follow the flock and allow it to blunder into other people's fields and fatten on their grass. Exception is made in the case of a sudden storm catching the shepherd out, and obliging him to drive his sheep into a field to keep them from wandering. This exception is not easily abused, for everyone knows if the bad weather could have been anticipated by looking for the signs in the sky. All mountain Basques are born with the ability to read the sky, although some are beginning to lose it by listening to forecasts on the radio.

The Widow Jaureguiberry always followed her flock, and her sheep were forever straying into the fields of others and eating their grass, while the widow limped after them shouting and seeming to be at her wits' end, as she managed to scatter the sheep from one pasture to the next. And she would visit each house in turn to chant her prolonged, whining apologies to the owner of the field, complaining about how hard it was to have her house in our village but to have to drive her sheep back and forth each day, because her pasture was up in Etchebar. And all the time the old woman was explaining this, her sheep were eating your grass!

Of course, God makes fools only in the Bearn, and everybody in our village knew that the Widow Jaureguiberry had no fields of her own, neither in our commune nor up in Etchebar. Her husband had not been a good peasant; he had been a dreamer and a drinker, and he had lost all his land before God invited him into His fold by letting a thunderbolt hit him during a storm in the high mountain pastures. His childless wife was left with nothing but the good will of old Aramburu, the wine merchant who had taken their land, one glassful at a time. And so it came to pass that the Widow Jaureguiberry was obliged to sustain herself by allowing her few sheep to feed on the grass of others. But she was fair about it; she let her sheep stray longer into the pastures of the richer peasants, and controlled them so that they bypassed the land of the poor. (Which proves that, in reality, she was as good a shepherd as you or I.)

You see, the Widow Jaureguiberry was a proud Basque woman who could not humble herself to request assistance from the commune. To do so would be to admit that her husband had not been a good provider—which, of course, he had not, but that was her own business, and not the world's. Also there was the matter of shaming her dead father, who had made the unfortunate match for her. She had found a way to live off the commune without appearing to do so. We all knew what she was doing, and everyone was a little proud of her Basque ingenuity. Everybody, that is, except the Colonel, who had fought the Prussians in '70, and who was the richest man in our village and therefore the stingiest, for God punishes the stingy by exposing them to the temptations of wealth, just as He protects the generous by keeping them in the safe haven of poverty—as the ancient Basque saying assures us.

All right then, that is all you need to know about Widow Jaureguiberry to understand the minutes of our village meeting. More would be prying.

The men of the village met at old Aramburu's, the wine merchant, who received us because wine is drunk at these affairs, to strengthen the wit and liberate the tongue. The problem before us was this: it was necessary to put a new roof on the infant-school, for the rain leaked through, and the teacher who came up from Licq three days each week said she would no longer come if the roof was not repaired. Of course, the men of the village would do the work themselves. We would make a fete of it and have a good time. But the tiles must be bought with money, so we decided to levy a small tax on ourselves for the purpose. It would be so many francs per hectare of land owned.

Fine. It would not cost too much, and we could never have lived down the shame of losing our infant-school, particularly as we had recently witnessed the humiliation of the people of Etchebar, who had been forced to close down their church because the priest said he could no longer come and say an additional mass every week for a mere handful of communicants. It was a sad day when two of their young men scaled the church tower to take the hands off the clock that would no longer be running. But this was necessary. They could not allow God's clock to deceive by giving the wrong time.

After this, the pious of Etchebar were obliged to trudge all the way down to our church each Sunday, and over little glasses after mass, some of us tended to commiserate with them rather more than was necessary about how humiliating it must be to live in a village so pitiable and insignificant that it didn't even have a church. So the closure of our school would mean a painful loss of face for us and a cheap laugh for them, for their infant-school,