Only the walls talked, at first. Certainly only the walls talked about ETA. No-one talked politics to strangers when I first arrived in the Basque Country, in October of 1975, and anyway I spoke no Spanish and less Basque.
But the streets were eloquent, in their own way. Staggering blearily out of a gloomy hostel that first morning, I found the the walls of San Sebastian chanting angrily in a dawn chorus of conflicting graffiti. The most common refrain, it seemed, was ETA.
Gora (long live) was a word I learned quite quickly, though it never lasted long. Gora ETA Militarra! a wall might say at 5 a.m., but before the paint was dry it would have been crossed out in a flurry of clumsy brush strokes. Then, in the same paint that erased it, a new slogan would appear: ETA, asesinos! This one would last all day.
If there was one thing more dangerous than painting up an ETA slogan, it was painting out a slogan put there by the police. Or by their paramilitary support groups, who rejoiced in names such as the Warriors of Christ the King.
Those were days of iron, nights of lead. After 40 years of dictatorship, General Franco was on his last legs, but he was still kicking. He put Guardia Civil checkpoints on every Basque road. A young man was arrested for singing a Basque song in a village street after a party. He was dead by morning. Detainees were tortured as a matter of routine. Demonstrators were frequently shot dead.
ETA, which had embarked on an armed campaign in 1968, responded with its own ferocity. Twelve civilians died when a bomb was left in a Madrid cafe in 1974. The genie of indiscriminate terrorism was out of the bottle.
The spiral of violence took another turn in September 1975. The dying dictator had two young members of ETA shot by firing squad. "My son was a man, and they shot him down like a dog. All the world should know this," one of their mothers said. The Warriors of Christ the King beat her savagely for her impudence. The elements of tragedy, as a Basque writer has put it, were well served in every twist of this cycle of retaliation.
Three Maoist militants were executed on the same day. The Basques were not the only victims of Franco's death agony. Andalusian communists, Catalan nationalists, democratic Catholics, and many others, all felt the lash. But the Basque wound ran much deeper, for complex reasons. Self-inflicted or otherwise, it would continue to bleed, and to clamour for blood, for more than two decades, long after Spain had changed into a liberal democracy.
Three years after my first encounter with the talking walls of San Sebastian, I returned to the Basque Country just as Spain was taking the final steps in its momentous transition from dictatorship to democracy. This was in itself a kind of peace process, in which the victors and the vanquished of the 1930s Civil War sat down at the same table and, by a remarkable process of consensus, hammered out a democratic constitution.
I could speak Spanish now, and could manage a cupla focail in Basque, but the walls were again my first point of contact with this brave new world. One phase in particular caught my eye: Konstitutuzoia Honi, Ez Ezkerrik Asko - This Constitution, No Thanks.
Vexed questions were carefully balanced in the proposed constitution. For the consensus to work - with the unthinkable prospect of a replay of the Civil War if it didn't - it was often necessary to have it both ways. So, the sentence which proclaims the "indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation" was qualified by the recognition of minority "nationalities" (like the Basques and Catalans). They had the right to form autonomous governments with extensive regional powers.
This autonomy fell short of what most Basques wanted: the right to self-determination, with an option on full independence. The Spanish people as a whole approved it by 88 per cent of voters, two thirds of the electorate. But only 69 per cent of Basques supported the constitution. More significantly, this figure represented less than a third of the electorate, following a campaign for abstention by the moderate nationalists. (ETA supporters voted No.). A fissure had opened up between the Basque Country and the rest of the Spanish state at the dawn of the new democracy. Basque radicals argued - as they do to this day - that the constitution has not been endorsed by the majority of their people. In their view, therefore, ETA's violent campaign is a legitimate resistance to the "undemocratic" imposition of an alien state.
So the Basque war went on. ETA killed 75 people in 1978, five times as many as any previous year. In 1980, with an autonomous Basque government in place, they killed 110, putting the fragile new structures under almost unbearable pressure. More freedom, in the eyes of the Spanish right, meant more terrorism. Sabres rattled, and in 1981 the comic opera coup of Col Tejero was very nearly a deadly serious success.
People talked now, though, as well as walls. They could talk, of course, because democratic liberties had become the norm. I remember especially clearly an exchange between an Irish friend and an ex-Etarra (a former member of ETA), who had returned from exile in France and now ran a first-class restaurant in the village where we lived. He used to join us at our table in the early hours, after enormous helpings of red sea bream washed down with dry cider. The conversation, typical of a hundred others, ran like this:
Irishman: Why does ETA continue to use violence now that the Franco dictatorship has been replaced by a democracy?
Ex-Etarra: Because that is an illusion. There is no democracy here, nothing has changed since Franco.
Irishman: Is there not a danger that ETA's attacks on the army will provoke a military coup?
Ex-Etarra: Not at all. A military coup is impossible in the present situation.
Irishman: But didn't you just say that nothing had changed since Franco, that Spain was still a dictatorship? How could we be having this conversation in a public place if that were so?
Ex-Etarra: You don't understand. The Basques have been denied their democratic rights as a people. We are facing a silent genocide under this so-called democracy. That is why we must keep on fighting.
We could talk, in 1979, but it was not so easy to communicate.
The moderate Basque nationalists - a clear majority - had accepted the autonomy on offer from Madrid, and built up a strong administration with its own education and taxation systems, and police force. The Spanish police did not withdraw from the region, however. Their repression of radical demonstrations remained indiscriminate and vicious. They usually simply laid siege to an area where a demonstration had been called. Anyone under 40 was a legitimate target of these assaults.
On one such afternoon in Bilbao, I was walking alone down an empty street. A police jeep drove towards me, fast. An officer riding shotgun fired a rubber bullet at my head. He missed by a millimentre, and they drove on past, roaring laughing. I found refuge behind the locked doors of a pension, and nursed the skin burn where the bullet had grazed my neck. Next to me, a middle-aged man nursed a serious head wound. As clouds of tear gas seeped through the door, and my guts turned to water, it was a little easier to understand those who said nothing had changed in the Basque Country since Franco.
There were other symptoms of a malaise at the heart of the new democracy. Caught between an unrelenting ETA offensive and a restless army high command, the new Socialist administration unleashed the dogs of a dirty war in 1983. Death squads run by the police planted bombs, machine-gunned bars at random, kidnapped and tortured. There were dozens of victims, but the first casualty was the credibility of the first Spanish government not to contain a Francoist in 44 years. "PSOE, policia, la misma porqueria" said the walls of San Sebastian. "Socialists, police, the same old pigshit."
For all its flaws, however, most Basques gave their support, and their votes, to parties operating within the Spanish constitutional system. As democracy and autonomy were consolidated, ETA began to look more and more like part of the problem, not the solution. But its political wing's support remained more or less steady at around 15 per cent. Its war was going nowhere, however, and it began to turn in on itself.
"Yoyes, traidor!" proclaimed the walls in 1986. Yoyes was the nom de guerre of one of the few really prominent women in ETA in the late 1970s. Disillusioned with the group's blind militarism, she spent the early 1980s in Mexico, studying feminism and bringing up a little boy. She decided to leave the organisation and return home. She gained the very reluctant agreement of ETA's new leadership that she would not be harmed. She made no public statements and gave the Spanish authorities no information.
But her mere presence in the Basque Country was intolerable to the increasingly intolerant radical nationalist movement. "A general cannot go home until the war is over," said the walls. I met her briefly in a pizzeria shortly after her return. She was pleasant but distant. She was unfree to talk to strangers, in her own country. She was silent not because of Spanish oppression but because of what she described, in a private diary, as former friends who "only know how to applaud ETA's actions and ask for more deaths". She was shot dead some months later by an ETA unit, while strolling with her six-year-old son in her native village.
There would be many more deaths. Twenty-two people, including children, died in a fireball in a Barcelona supermarket in 1987. ETA apologised for its "mistake", but kept on killing. Seven children and their two mothers died with two Guardia Civiles in an attack in Zaragoza six months later.
Several waves of arrests seemed to cripple ETA in the early 1990s. But three years ago the group launched a youth-led campaign of street violence which targeted moderate nationalists as well as more traditional "enemies". A lifelong nationalist, not a political figure, told me he now felt more fear than he ever had in the days of Franco.
Despite the close relationship with Sinn Fein, ETA seemed to be moving in the opposite direction to a peace process. Far from forming a united front with other nationalists, and reaching out to non-nationalists, it seemed intent on starting a civil war among Basques. The most honest ETA slogan on the walls was "Pim, Pam, Pum!", the Spanish equivalent of Bang, Bang, Bang!
About this time I spent several weeks interviewing surviving victims of the Socialists' dirty war. Those who had been close to ETA at that time remained unwavering in their support 10 years later. These people were not mafiosi or psychopaths, as the Spanish government like to suggest. They were often sensitive, thoughtful individuals who genuinely seemed to feel for the suffering of ETA's victims. From their perspective, however, there was simply no politically honourable way of stepping off the treadmill of slaughter.
A few weeks after I came home, ETA kidnapped and murdered the young conservative party councillor, Miguel Angel Blanco, and set off an unprecedented wave of revulsion. As hundreds of thousands of Basques demonstrated against their "liberators", it seemed that everything was going to change utterly. The moderate nationalist parties swore they would never again share a platform with the radicals as long as they continued to espouse violence.
To the horror of other democrats, the moderate nationalists soon began to talk to the radicals again, while ETA continued to kill local councillors. Ireland was mentioned more and more often as a point of reference, but ETA did not seem to understand that you have to have a ceasefire before you have a peace process. The moderate nationalists were accused of naivety at best, complicity with terrorism at worst, when they signed a joint declaration with the radicals two weeks ago, effectively seeking self-determination for the Basque Country.
Four days later, to the amazement of everyone not privy to the negotiations, ETA declared an "indefinite ceasefire", for the first time in 30 years. There are huge obstacles ahead, as we know only too well in Ireland, but the silence of the guns means that people can at least hear each other talking, if they want to. They may, and do, disagree on fundamentals, but it is the job of democracy to resolve irreconcilable differences.
And there is a new word on the radical walls of the Basque Country. Pakea means peace. It will be harder to build it than to say it, but saying it is a start.