Guernica Read Free Page B

important to his mother.
    As with many a baserri on a hillside, the house was wedged into the slope. The lower floor, with wide double doors on the downhill side, housed the
     stock in the winter months. The upper floor, with a ground-level door on the uphill side, was home to the family. The housing
     of cows and sheep in the same building protected the animals from the cold, and they returned the favor by warming the upper
     level with their rising body heat.
    Inside, a large central room held the kitchen, dining, and living areas, with rough-cut oak columns supporting exposed quarter-sawn
     rafters. The hearth extended inward from a corner of the kitchen. Seed corn was nailed to the beams to dry, and herbs for
     cooking and medicine cured in the warmth above the hearth. Interwoven vines of red peppers hung from the support column closest
     to the kitchen, next to the dangling links of chorizo that lent a heavy garlic scent to the room.
    An unknown ancestor had carved the lauburu into the lintel above the house’s main door. This four-headed symbol of their race, like a spinning clover leaf, bracketed
     their lives, appearing on everything from cradles to tombstones.
    Each former master of the land inadvertently bequeathed items to Justo. He still stacked hay on tall wooden spikes that had
     been carved generations before. And the iron shears he used in the shed had snipped wool from sheep dead a century. Some of
     the smaller items offered wordless mysteries from the edge of the mantel; there was a small bronze horse with its head reared
     high and an iron coin bearing unknown symbols.
    During Justo’s proprietorship, the apron was likewise memorialized, draped from a nail in the mantel. And before he would
     pass, the mantel also would support a length of braided human hair so dark that it absorbed light.
    Swatting the rump of a reluctant donkey to keep it grinding up the steep trail, Pablo Picasso chuckled when he considered
     how his friends in Paris would react to the vision of him in such a position. That he would think of them now, here in the
     Pyrenees, was a symptom of the problem. There had been too much getting in the way of his art in Paris. And this mountain
     trail to Gósol, with the lovely Fernande on a donkey beside him, was his path away from all that.
    It had been all too much talk of art. And when they talked, their art rose from their heads, not their guts, and their paintings
     went back and forth like day-old conversations.
    He didn’t need Paris now; he needed Spain. He needed the people and the heat and the unshakeable feeling of belonging.
    Fernande would sit for him now and wouldn’t talk about his painting. She knew better. He had come back to Spain for a short
     break, come to this quiet town in the mountains, to tear art to pieces, to make it something it hadn’t been, or perhaps something
     it had been long before. This was a place he could feel art. It came up at him from the dirt and radiated down in waves from the sun. It was time to shatter art and reshape it, as
     one might do with bright pieces of broken glass.
    Justo promised his brothers this: No one would work harder. But even as he made that vow, he conceded to himself that he knew
     very little of the business of operating a farm. So he began making social visits to neighbors, slipping into the conversations
     questions about the timing of planting certain crops or tending fruit trees and managing stock. Most neighbors were sympathetic,
     but they had little time to worry about somebody else’s farm—unless they had a daughter who happened to be his age. Most would
     consider Justo something well short of handsome, but this boy nonetheless owned his own baserri .
    Justo inquired of the neighboring Mendozabels how he might establish hives for bees that would pollinate his fruit trees and
     provide honey. Mrs. Mendozabel informed him that they would be delighted to help him, that in fact they should all visit over
     “a full