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PROLOGUE
On 29 June
1931 two young children in the Basque Country of northern Spain said they saw
the Virgin Mary. That initial vision led to many others. Indeed, for many
months visions took place on a nightly basis. In 1931 alone, about one million
persons went to the apparitions on a hillside at Ezkioga and people began
having visions in a score of other towns. The hundreds of seers at Ezkioga
attracted the most observers for any visions in the Catholic world until the
teenagers of Medjugorje in the 1980s.
This book is
about two kinds of visionaries and their interrelations: the seers (videntes in
Spanish, ikusleak in Basque) who had visions of Mary and the saints and the
believers and promoters who had a vision for the future which they hoped Mary
and the saints would confirm. Almost all are now dead, but they left behind
words on paper, images in photographs, and memories in people who believed
them. The protagonists included nuns, friars and priests, writers and
photographers, military officers and civil servants, housemaids and
aristocrats, farmers and textile manufacturers, and
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many, many
children. Starting in 1931, they made a long, concerted attempt to convince a
skeptical world that heavenly beings were appearing on the Iberian peninsula.
I have
immersed myself in their lives, retraced their steps, hunted down their papers,
attempted to reconstitute their world. When I began to write, the pleasure of
telling their story mingled with regret that my time with them would soon be
over. I am not one of them, as I never failed to tell their present-day
survivors and successors. But while their efforts to arouse the world failed,
the efforts of others like them in the past did not fail and most certainly
have affected our world. How visions occur and who believes in them is
everybody's business.
At this
moment I am watching from my window exotic birds called hoopoes, sandy with
black and white stripes, their crests flaring as they clash and play in the
red-brown field of young, blue-green cabbages. They swerve, chatter in the air
around each other, then separate to bob and feed in the shallow furrows. I have
told stories of lives that begin before the visions, loop into them, intersect,
and then loop out, each to a separate destination. In the first half of the
book I tell the tales separately, building the picture of events layer on layer
from the perspective of the different protagonists. For the people would not
let me go. Through my immersion in this unusual world, their story has also
become mine. This is not earthshaking history. It is small, intense, poignant,
sometimes fierce, often funny. Its lasting lessons, I think, are about human
nature itself. Like a novel, this book has a cast of characters, here listed as
a separate index of persons at the end of the book. Unlike a novel, the story
is a true one—at least as true as I can make it. For me, as I entered the
story, Benita Aguirre, Padre Burguera, María Recalde, Mateo Múgica, and their
contemporaries became quite familiar, a little larger than life. I hope readers
too will get to know and enjoy them.
Readers
seeking a narrative of the events can turn to four chapters: "Mary, the
Republic, and the Basques," "Suppression by Church and State,"
"The Proliferation of Visions," and "Aftermath." Three
other chapters about promoters and seers cover the events at Ezkioga through
the lives of the principals.
The second
part of the book uses the visions to detail the often secret ways that seers
and clergy connected, the landscape seers imagined and constructed, and the
trancelike states seers entered. The visions linked women with priests, the
rural poor with the industrial wealthy, and the living with the dead. The
events at Ezkioga show how much people welcome the chance to go beyond the
world around them, see what the gods see, and know what only the gods can know.
José Donoso
suggested that I stick with a few key characters and tell the events through
them. But by then I knew too much about too many people. I had to tell
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what I knew
to resolve my story as well as theirs. I regretted starting to write, but I
have no regrets at coming to the end. The hoopoes have gone. Men are outside
sending shafts of water curling down the furrows of cabbages, shouting
instructions, opening and closing passages of dirt.
TAFIRA BAJA, GRAN CANARIA
1 SEPTEMBER 1994
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