For Juanba Berasategi (1951-2017)
Pioneer in Basque animation, teacher and friend.
THE DITCH
She's 80 years old and her face is lined with wrinkles.
Euxebi has not had an easy life.
For cruel paradox of life...
just as she embraced life, her father met his death.
Even at five or six, she seemed a bright little girl.
She often used to ask her mother:
Mother, where is Father?
All the others have a father, but I don't.
All that I have is a photograph.
She cried so hard at school!
Her old schoolteacher was so mean.
From today on, you will wear the ring of punishment.
The viper stays close to its own kind.
The little girl turned into a woman, and although she often asked
the reply was always silent tears.
She heard talk about dates, places, names...
with which the ghosts of her childhood took shape.
"The day Franco's soldiers entered...
in the ditch on the way out of town...
at daybreak, when there were no witnesses..."
They were painful splinters that dug into her brain.
It was hard to know where her father lay.
What could Euxebi do but to go out and look for him?
If the wind began to gently blow
the poplar leaves shook violently.
Just searching helped to relieve her curiosity.
A tree stirred up something deep inside her.
When she was in that place, her heart beat fast
in a way that she only felt there.
A pile of bones as witness in a history full of lies,
oblivion was finally coming to an end.
Euxebi thought this resting place would do
and she left a photograph at her father's grave.
Buried with a shovel, unearthed with a brush...
bones are not merely bones
they reflect the ideas of those murdered
and the feelings of those who mourn them.
Eighty years after the war, with more than 114,000 missing people,
Spain continues to be one of the countries
with the largest number of victims of enforced disappearances
whose remains have not been recovered or identified.
Traces of Franco are still deep, also in the Basque Country.