Patria: the terror of terror

Occasionally, I come across a book that so vividly conjures up an experience I’ve never had, that I feel I’ve actually been there.

That’s the case of Patria, or Homeland as it’s translated into English. The author is Fernando Aramburu, a native of the Basque country and fluent speaker and writer of the language. He opens his novel with one of its principal characters, Bittori, deciding to return to her home village from San Sebastián where she has been living in voluntary exile. 

Why was she in exile? The Basque armed group ETA had executed her husband. Or, to put it in less charitable but arguably more accurate terms, the terrorist group ETA had murdered him.

Why has she decided to go home now? Because ETA has just announced that it is definitively abandoning the armed struggle without victory. It’s a background theme throughout the novel that years of terrorism ultimately served no purpose. Victims were murdered or maimed, perpetrators were killed or gaoled for long terms, on both sides lives were broken, and all to no good. 

One of the secondary themes of the book is that writing and broadcasting in the Basque language, as is the case of one of the characters, and indeed of Aramburu himself, does more for the culture than ETA ever did.

In her childhood, Bittori’s best friend had been Miren. When they were approaching adulthood, they decided they wanted to be nuns. That came to nothing, though, and instead the two best friends married two best friends. As they told each other, now only an axe could separate. 

Only an axe or terror, as it turned out. Because Bittori’s husband, Xato, was a small businessman and when he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, keep up with ETA’s increasingly steep extortion demands, the organisation mounted a campaign against him, with graffiti around the town denouncing him as an oppressor and, even worse, a snitch. 

This is where the novel most powerfully showed me the terror of terror. Because as the campaign intensifies Xato’s friends drop away from him. Even his best friend, Miren’s husband, Xosian. The cycling club no longer wants him on its outings. He’s not welcome in the bars. And his wife, too, finds herself increasingly isolated. Perhaps one of the most searing moments of the book, and of the fine series developed from it by Netflix, is a flashback to her in the rain over her husband’s dying body, while no one from the apartments around dares to come to help her.

Bittori alone in the rain with her dying husband Txato
Elena Irureta playing Bittori,  José Ramón Soroiz as Txato
in the TV series of Patria

What makes things worse for Bittori is that one of Miren’s sons joins ETA. He’s seen back in the town, after years away, at just the time Xato is killed. So did Bittori’s husband die at the hands of her former best friend’s son? That’s one of the questions that haunts her and she wants answered, so that she and her husband – with whom she has regular if rather one-sided conversations at his graveside – can at last rest in peace when they are reunited in the tomb.

In the meantime, Bittori and Miren’s friendship can’t endure. Miren becomes politically radical to stand by her son, after he’s arrested and condemned to a long sentence in gaol. But how can Bittori, widow of an ETA victim, possibly be close to sympathisers or members of the organisation that murdered her husband? 

Families as well as friendships are destroyed by the terror. Miren’s other two children not only don’t share their brother’s ETA beliefs, they find them abhorrent. But how can they speak out? To their mother, the disagreement would look like treason, but to the organisation, it would look like an offence punishable by death.

Opposition to ETA isn’t permissible. But even neutrality is impossible. That’s what Xato discovered. He took no action against the terrorists, but because he failed to provide the support they demanded of him, he had to die. Similarly, the ETA militant’s brother and sister find they have to leave town in order simply not be sucked into activism themselves. Sitting on the edges won’t be tolerated. Showing sympathy to a target won’t be either. That’s why Bittori can count on no one after her husband is murdered, and moves away.

Until the end of the armed struggle. When she comes back looking for answers. Then the town, and the two families, have to start facing up to some of them.

It’s a compelling novel, with excellent characters, deep and complex, flawed and damaged but often also noble and generous. They’re also funny, despite their sadness, with the tragedy underlining the humour. And, as well as the problems of the terror, they also have to face the many problems of ordinary life, some of them serious, such as terrible illness, or being gay in a society in which many still regard homosexuality as the worst of sins (ironically, that includes ETA itself, despite its pretensions to being left-wing and modernising). 

A rich, moving, amusing and charming book, turned into a TV series that does it justice. With a powerful lesson. Strongly to be recommended.