Cordoba was great. I didn’t stay long. Met a girl from Bristol in the Mezquita and impressed her with my knowledge of mihrabs and caliphs culled from your Rough Guide to Spain (thanks). She was a bit shocked that Charles V had built a Catholic cathedral bang in the middle of a mosque and said something about the whole building being, like, a metaphor for what’s going on right now in the Middle East’ and I said: ‘You know what? You’re right’ and then lied about being late for a train.

One bit of bad news. You remember Kate’s friend, Hesther? She’s apparently got cancer. Had just met a really nice bloke, they were probably going to settle down and get married, and now she’s got to deal with this. Anyway, she asked after you and I told her you were fine and she said to say hi.

Don’t know when I’ll be back. Might well take you up on the idea of going to Fez/Morocco.

Have heard nothing from Heloise.

Take it easy pal -

Saul

Hesther. Someone I haven’t thought about for years. She was one of Kate’s friends from acting school who used to flirt with me and fall asleep after two glasses of wine. The random strike of incurable disease. It occurs to me that statistically my own chances of avoiding cancer have probably improved as a result of her illness: if one of my peers has it, then I should be OK. Sadly it no longer appals me that I am capable of such thoughts. I pay the attendant and leave.

There’s a busy restaurant with a decent menú del día on Calle de Serrano Jover, just opposite the big Corte Inglés supermarket in Arguelles. I go there for an early lunch at 1.30. The articles have been badly translated into barely comprehensible Spanish and I feel like registering a complaint with the website. However, it’s still possible to get the gist of their meaning and I quickly conclude that there is little about Arenaza that I did not already know. Mostly he is a rent-a-quote spokesman for Batasuna on any number of issues. I find the story in which he pledges to ‘analyse’ ETA’s murder of the six-year-old girl in Santa Pola, and discover that he was arrested for un alterador del orden público – basically a ‘breach of the peace’ – during a Batasuna rally in 1998. Even the lecture at Bilbao University was on nothing more significant than voting patterns. Trying a different tack – and to give me something to talk about at Chicote – I cross the street after lunch and buy a paperback about ETA by an Irish journalist, heading home to read it on the sofa.

According to the book, Basque nationalism as a political movement stretches back more than a hundred years, to the foundation of the PNV in 1895. Its founding father, Sabino Arana, who would nowadays be called an out-and-out racist, was concerned that Basque ethnicity was being diluted by peasant labourers flooding into the north-east from impoverished Andalucía and Extremadura. Arana, who is still regarded with almost saintly reverence in the region, essentially made eugenics a cornerstone of the party’s manifesto. Hardline nationalists to this day will tell you that the blood types of ‘pure’ Basques are different from those of Europeans from other regions; indeed, in its early years, the PNV would accept only those members who could prove that they had four ethnically Basque grandparents.

Until the Civil War, the PNV was the dominant party of nationalism across the region, convinced that Euskal Herria was a country under occupation by Spain. That occupation became a reality in the Civil War when Bilbao fell to fascist troops in 1937. In the ensuing years the PNV banked everything on the fall of Hitler and was dangerously isolated when the Allies failed to kick Franco out in the aftermath of World War II. Instead, as the Cold War took hold, the West lifted a series of economic and diplomatic sanctions against Franco, forgave him his dalliance with Nazism and embraced him as a loyal anti-communist. It comes as no surprise to learn that the CIA worked briefly alongside members of the PNV with the idea of toppling Franco. For a while, the nationalists believed they might be part of a US-backed coup d’état, until Eisenhower cut the rope and swung behind the General.

According to the book, the roots of the armed struggle can be traced back to Franco’s brutal thirty-year suppression of Basque culture and identity. The General, motivated by a profound political and ideological contempt for Euskal Herria, and keen to punish the region for supporting the Republicans during the Civil War, banned all nationalist movements, forbade parents from giving their children Basque names, and made it illegal to speak Euskera in the streets. ETA was forged in this atmosphere – a country of checkpoints and police brutality, of torture and abuse – though at first the organization was little more than a small group of non-violent Catholic students who met in conditions of almost total secrecy in the 1950s. Dedicated to outright independence for all seven provinces in the region, ETA drew inspiration from anti-colonial struggles all over the world and had developed a military wing, inspired by the examples of Mao and Che Guevara, by the early 1960s. The organization claimed its first victim by accident, in the summer of 1968, but thereafter the killings became more discriminate. When they blew up Franco’s right-hand man and heir apparent, the deeply unpopular Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, ETA suddenly found itself on the world stage.

The plan was stunning. In 1973, a comando unit led by José Miguel Beñarán Ordeñana dug a tunnel under a street in central Madrid along the route that Blanco passed every morning on his way to celebrate Mass. On 20 December, in an operation codenamed ‘Ogre’, the comando detonated three dynamite charges, killing Blanco and two of his bodyguards instantly, and blowing their car over an entire city apartment block into a neighbouring street. Committed today, such an act would be considered an outrage; thirty years ago, sympathy for ETA was running high, and Blanco’s murder was welcomed, even in international circles. Until recently you could still see the remains of the vehicle in the Museo del Ejército on Calle de Méndez Núñez. It was just a short walk from the Prado.

When it rains in Madrid, it rains for days on end, driving people from the streets and changing the character of the city. These aren’t the thin, bloodless showers of England; these are subtropical storms accompanied by punchy, umbrella-inverting winds. When I step outside the flat at half past nine on Saturday night, en route to meet Arenaza at Chicote, gusts of rain are sweeping down Princesa so hard that it is an effort to cross the street in search of a cab. I wait in vain under the ineffective shelter of the bus stop and then make a run uphill to the metro at Ventura Rodríguez, shoes and trousers already soaked by the time I make it to the station.

Seven high-school students – two girls and five boys – are smoking cigarettes and listening to music on a concrete bench beside the Legazpi platform, cartons of cheap red wine and litre bottles of Coke littering the ground around them. There is nothing unusual about this: smoking on the metro in Madrid takes place right up to the point at which passengers step onto the trains, and underage weekend drinking – known as the botellón – is a norm. Until they reach an age when they can afford to drink in bars, Spaniards will inebriate themselves on cut-price alcohol and then pool their money for entry into a late-night discoteca. On a (dry) Friday or Saturday night, particularly in summer, Plaza de España comes to resemble the location for a small, informal music festival, as vast numbers of students armed with stereos and bottles of J &B converge around the statue of Cervantes, drinking and snogging themselves into oblivion. Tonight they have been driven underground, and it will only be a matter of time before some jumped-up station attendant barrels along the platform and orders them to move on.