'The invisible line', ETA's first step towards the abyss

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Thus begins the novel The Good Soldier . In it, Ford Madox Ford recounts without fuss two suicides, two ruined lives and the descent into madness of a young woman. Sad no doubt, but not insurmountably sad. Just watch TV and, amid the devastating breakdown of figures, attend to the imminent presence of another even sadder story. Suddenly, ETA. The coronavirus, always him, has prevented two perhaps complementary series from coinciding on the screen. For that of the easy rhymes, one could well say that one is reflected in the mirror of the other. "Ours looks at the present from the past; Patria , on the contrary, looks at the past from the present," says Mariano Barroso , director of The Invisible Line , which will be released at Movistar on April 8 . The adaptation of Fernando Aramburu's novel that tells the relationship of two families, victim and victimizer, will take longer. The confinement has surprised the team, like everyone else, in the final stretch of post-production.

Even the worst nightmare may start with a dream

To put ourselves, the six-chapter proposal that opens in the middle of the pandemic travels to June 7, 1968. The exact day that it all started. Everything sad. Txabi Etxebarrieta murdered the first of the 853 victims that would come later. The Galician civil guard José Antonio Pardines , 25, was shot almost by mistake. A few hours later, Etxebarrieta himself was killed, also by something similar to another mistake, in a confrontation with the Civil Guard. It was the first, as it is read in the frontispiece of the series, "to kill and also to die". Then, perhaps as revenge, Inspector Melitón Manzanas fell. And then, error after error, it was all crashes. So sad.

Antonio de la Torre, who plays Inspector Melitón Manzanas, in a moment of 'The invisible line'.

"I am fascinated by the idea of ​​even getting to know how it all started," says Barroso by way of introduction. "We wanted to abstract what we know now and tell that dark area of ​​our history. Our history, in fact, is full of dark areas," he adds, taking a second and showing off with a phrase perhaps too bright: "Until the worst nightmare may start with a dream. " The invivible line tells the story of the officially declared first martyr of the cause. Kepa Aulestia , politician, writer and signatory of the Ajuria Enea Pact against terrorism, reasons that his figure was so exceptional and different that, quickly, "he became a sacrificial hero for much of nationalism." And he continues: "He was a very unique personality who was not at all like those who later joined the band. He was a brilliant student, concerned about computers, a poet and coming from a family more or less well. In an environment Agraph, he writes. He is the man who could have been many things and allows himself to be killed. We are in an environment of a deeply rooted Catholic culture and activism is considered the answer to the sin of omission. "

The series tells an outline of his life, but also draws that of the victim, Melitón Manzanas. The first person in charge of the Catalan Àlex Monner is in charge of more than remarkable and the second, in an absolutely outstanding way, the Andalusian Antonio de la Torre . The places of origin, because of the universality of the stories that matter, matter. And in the story of each life, the series, as it appears in the white paper of the screenwriter Michel Gaztambide , stays at a distance from both Manicheism and the ever-guilty equidistance. "It is impossible," says the librettist, "to work from hostility to the characters. Approaching them in a human way does not infect you with evil but, on the contrary, allows you to know it."

He was a brilliant student, poet and from a well-to-do family.

"It is compatible," adds Barroso to his side, "to be a perfect villain and at the same time to be an adorable guy. It is not about distributing posters of good and bad, but about getting closer to the origin of the trivialization of others' pain, how the inability to empathy can destroy a people. Apparently, Melitón Manzanas spoke Basque and the leader of ETA, no. It is only a detail of to what extent when you look closely at a problem, the topics, the preconceived ideas and slogans stop working. " And one more from the screenwriter: "It is true that this is a tragedy in the form of a thriller , but it is no less true that a first impulse to make the series was the certainty that a society needs to digest its ghosts. That obsession is a mistake for encouraging oblivion as if it were a pill that cures ... does not cure anything. "

Demonstration in Bilbao in memory of ETA member Txabi Etxebarrieta in June 2018.ARABA PRESS

And now, the question both naive and, again, sad: if what happened had not happened, would the history of ETA, the Basque Country and Spain as a whole have been different? The series, which is not documentary, remains apart from a clear answer, but, in its own way, and by the very mechanism of the dramaturgy that moves it, it lets it be seen. Yes, everything is so exceptional that, in fact, that instant, that broken line, decided everything. Historians and scholars of the subject are not so clear. The aforementioned Aulestia, as an expert because personally involved in politics at the time and deputy for Euskadiko Ezkerra , is convinced that everything could be different. And in addition it is it for the danger that entails, in his opinion, to maintain the opposite: "It is necessary to overturn the theory of the suffering of ETA and the inescapable future. Carlist Wars. It is absolutely false. It is not even true that the Civil War was bloodier in Euskadi than, for example, in Catalonia. Also, I perfectly remember how that was a 'shock'. I was a child, but I saw nationalists, I come from a nationalist family, who couldn't believe it. People looked at each other and said to themselves before Melitón's death: 'No, we Basques don't kill'. That attack changed everything . "

Delusional ideology on one side and brutal repression on the other announced the certain possibility of wild conflict

For the sociologist Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca - whose latest book, The Historical Roots of Political Violence (Cambridge Studies), establishes a comparative analysis of all the terrorist movements of the 1960s -, the thesis, and for different reasons, is rather the opposite: "There were conditions for the spark to jump for any other reason. On the ETA side there was a fixation with what happened in Algeria , which reached an agreement with the French state after maintaining an armed struggle, and they began to analyze their relationship with the Spanish state as a colonial conflict. The Vietnam insurgency also had an influence. And that was already there, independently of Txabi. And on the state side, there was the fact that any activity by the gang generated a very strong reaction. The police he went on to arrest 3,500 people in a raid. They were casting the nets and seeing what fell. That generated very deep resentment dynamics. That is, delusional ideology on one side and the brutal repression of the other announced the certain possibility of a wild conflict as it was ".

File photo of Commissioner Melitón Manzanas.

Luis De la Calle, political scientist and author of Nationalist Violence in Postwar Europe , highlights the fact that the murder of Melitón Manzanas was already planned months before Etxebarrieta's death, as, indeed, the series illustrates. And he remains with this data to underline that the passage, the crossing of the line, was already given. "There is a book by Xabier Zumalde, called El Cabra , who was in charge of ETA's military commandos in the late 60s and early 70s. It tells how they carried out military indoctrination in the mountains. His most famous action was the takes for a few hours from a small town belonging to the municipality of Durango, before the astonished gaze of the local people. Well, Zumalde could well have been the martyr instead of Txabi if in one of those walks they had crossed paths with civil guards. Etxebarrieta's act was anecdotal , even counterproductive, because he burned several of the organization's best militants at the time. "

Be that as it may, and faced with the impossibility of imagining history in another way, what remains is the need - or, at least, the opportunity - to return to it; to return to the past. And why now? Why do The Invisible Line and Homeland coincide, or almost precisely at this moment? "For a long time and after the dictatorship," Aulestia takes the word, "fiction went through a process of empathy or understanding with armed struggle or terrorism, as you like. I think of the film La fuga de Segovia , by Imanol Uribe. The victims were completely forgotten. Until the 80's, as surprising as it may be now, they were not discussed. ETA was discussed through activists and because of what it had of political conflict. Now, and thank you Above all, to the extreme realism of a novel like Patria , it is time to talk about everything and everyone, but without losing the moral north. "

I was one of those scared Basques who stayed at home and, for that reason perhaps, the obligation to return and understand

In Sánchez-Cuenca's opinion, Aramburu's novel is once again the key to the vault: "It is the first novel that can afford to tell every angle of the matter. While ETA was active, what abounded was, understandably, trench or sentiment literature. The fish of bitterness , for example, which is an earlier text by the same author, does not have the same success and in many respects reflects the same pain as Patria , but the other part, that is absent that it was not possible to count while there were murders. Any attempt to portray the world of the ETA members could be understood as a way to justify them. Let's say that now, and from a clear moral position , it is time to reflect calmly and clearly. "

For De la Calle, what is settled, and hence the abundance of supply, is a fight for the legitimacy of the story. And he clarifies it: "I feel that there is a need for culture to solidify the generally accepted version that ETA ended up defeated by the strength of the State against the efforts of various authors to highlight the opposite hypothesis; that of the defeat of the victors " . And there, without further precision, he leaves it. Gaztambide, the screenwriter, talks about the serenity of now and the fear of then: "I was one of those scared Basques who stayed at home and, therefore perhaps, the obligation to return and understand." And Barroso, finally, is left with a detail and a phrase. The detail is seeing people from his team cry, Basque people, with at the time of shooting each of the deaths. "Of the two", this is important. And the phrase is from Gandhi: "I read it before starting the series and I think it is the correct one: 'For a cause you have to be willing to die, but never to kill.' " Was it or was it not the saddest of stories?

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• culture
• movie theater
• Series
• ETA

TV series Quarantine series: fever and disgust in the coronavirus pandemic

CultureCultural agenda for the weekend: Killing Eve, Vetusta Morla, The report, World Digital Library ...

CinemaWorld cinema paralyzes filming and premieres due to coronavirus