Simple

This article was published at Financial Times:

On the trail of Basque delights

Kieran Cooke

It’s a busy night at the Café de Bilbao. The city is celebrating the end of the working week and, at 8pm, people are crowding round the marble-topped bar.

“The Basque language is very simple,” says my friend Txanton through the hubbub. “You just need to think in a different way.”

When someone says something is simple it’s a sign – as sure as thunder follows lightning – that life is about to become complicated.

An elderly gent is reaching for the pintxos – a mouth-watering selection of savouries that adorn the top of the bar. In the act of grabbing a skewer full of octopus and peppers, he inadvertently thrusts an elbow into my back. This causes me to lurch sideways, launching a domino-like movement among the gathered drinkers. Each Bilbaino tilts a little further. A man dressed in a large black beret sitting on a bar stool at the far end of the counter catches the full force of the wave and crashes to the floor.

A plateful of prawn and aubergine goes flying. A bottle of Txakoli – the slightly fizzy white wine of the Basque region – cartwheels through the air. All eyes turn to me. Suddenly, I think of George Campbell.

Campbell, who died last year, aged 92, was a remarkable Scottish linguist who spoke and wrote fluently in more than 40 languages and had a working knowledge of at least 20 others. (Once, in a cinema watching a western featuring a battle with the Sioux, he shouted out: “They’re talking the wrong damn language.”)

However, Campbell, whose linguistic skills have been noted in the Guinness Book of World Records, was forced to admit that Basque was one of the few languages that defeated him. I’m proud to be in concert with Campbell. All I can muster in Basque are irrelevant phrases from the guidebook. “Ni John naiz” (my name is John) and “Eskerrik asko” (thank you very much). Neither is much good in the present circumstances.

Txanton shouts apologies. Coats are brushed down, berets adjusted, shoulders shrugged. Normal service is quickly resumed.

“We Basques have more – how you say – phlegm than the rest of the Spanish,” says Txanton. “We are not so exciting, we are quieter.”

To escape the noise we go to the Boulevard round the corner, one of Bilbao’s oldest cafés, full of gleaming brass and art nouveau. Remarkably, the Boulevard is also full of the other drinkers from the Café de Bilbao, going about their pre-dinner perambulations around the city’s favoured watering holes.

We do not stay long. Txanton ushers me on to a tram. We pass the Guggenheim, rain splattering off its giant shimmering titanium shell, sculptured shapes showing through its skin. We are off to Donastia – the Basque name for San Sebastian – for dinner. In Basque country, as in the rest of Spain, the evening meal is a late affair.

The bus takes an hour. The perfect, enclosed bay in San Sebastian is buffeted by a hail storm. People struggle along the esplanade, bending into the wind. By 10.30pm, dripping wet, we are sitting in a small restaurant in the parte vieja, or old quarter, of the city.

“San Sebastian boasts the most Michelin stars per square kilometre in the whole of Spain,” says the guide book. The Basques – a bit of a mystery when it comes to their origins and cultural roots – have, it seems, built a civilisation on good food and wine.

The maitre d’, a man whose corpulent frame and rosy face are testimony to the heartiness of the local cuisine, addresses me in old-fashioned, elegant French. San Sebastian is only a few miles from the French border: serious gastronomes think nothing of popping over to Basque country to indulge themselves.

My meal is chosen for me. First, says Txanton, I must have some anchovies to brighten up the pallet, followed by txipirones en su tinta (squid cooked in its own ink). Waitresses dressed in black with starched white pinafores rush about.

Txanton’s friend, Eguskina, attempts to lead me through the dark corridors of Basque history. There is talk of Visigoths, Moors and Carlists. “We are the real aboriginal people of Europe,” she says. “No one knows where Euskara, our language, comes from. It is a bastard, like no other.”

A smattering of squid ink decorates my shirt. We move on to the bacalao. It’s after midnight when we leave and it’s snowing. Eguskina laughs, saying her name, translated, means “sunshine”.

San Sebastian fills the mind – and stomach. Next morning we stand in the rain at the city’s small port and toss down delectable grilled sardines, followed by a bracing walk round the high headland that dominates one side of the bay.

There is a British cemetery: Colonel Tupper ended his days in the mid 19th century fighting in Basque country. Not a bad place to finish up: it was in those times that San Sebastian became fashionable among Europe’s aristocracy. Lords and ladies and the odd king and queen would come to take the waters and potter along the promenade, doffing hats and bowing. It’s that sort of place.

Eguskina takes me off to the San Temo museum to view what she describes as a naughty painting. Antonia Ortiz Ecague was an Argentinian artist who lived in Europe in the early 20th century. A canvas dominating one wall at San Temo, once a Dominican monastery, features a supine nude woman, looking over her shoulder with a cheeky look on her face. There are vivid colours and flowers but, to one side, there’s also a dark, priestly figure – the face of the painter himself, staring at the woman.

“It is very like the earth,” says Eguskina. “Very lovely, very complex.”

“Just like the Basques,” I say.

“No,” she says. “We are simple people.”

I hold my breath. Somehow, I know life is about to become rather complicated.

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