Adrienne: The Chaos of Desire

Adrienne: The Chaos of Desire

by G. B. Couper

Smashword Edition

*****

PUBLISHED BY:

George B. Couper II

Smashword Edition License Notes

This is a book of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locals is entirely coincidental. This ebook is not to be sold to other people.

Adrienne: The Chaos of Desire

Table of Contents: Book I

The Maquisard

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Legacy of Secrets

Chapter 2: 1934 - The Asturias Miners’ Strike

Chapter 3: 1936 - Civil War

Chapter 4: 1943 - The Smatchet

Chapter 5: Dalliance and Deceit

Chapter 6: Harry’s Dark Deals

Chapter 7: 1957 - Negotiations: Iniga’s Release

Chapter 8: 1965 - Iniga Quits

Chapter 9: 1973 - Boise Idaho

Chapter 10: 1999 - The Legacy

Chapter 11: 1999 - The Homecoming

Book II

The Tyranny of Chaos

Chapter 1: New Beginnings - Old Behaviors

Chapter 2: The Coincidence of Fate

Chapter 3: Return to Santa Barbara

Chapter 4: A Conversation without Words

Chapter 5: A Vegetable Conspiracy

Chapter 6: Abscess and Abuse

Chapter 7: Mad Max - Crime & Punishment

Chapter 8: Navigating the Brown Water Navy

Chapter 9: Mad Max - The Crime

Chapter 10: The Punishment

Chapter 11: Nick’s Deal

Chapter 12: Loose Affiliations Let Loose

Chapter 13: The Plot Thickens

Chapter 14: The Morton Bay Fig Tree

Chapter 15: The Gathering Storm

Chapter 16: El Gato’s Tower

Chapter 17: Teresa’s Place

Chapter 18: The Message Table

Chapter 19: Three Samurai

Chapter 20: At the Gates of Hell

Chapter 21: The Worm is Bait

Chapter 22: The Dick of Despair

Chapter 23: Officer Down

Chapter 24: Basque Country

Epilogue

About The Author

Other Books By G.B. Couper

Acknowledgements

Other Books by G.B. Couper

Contemporary Novels by G.B. Couper

Available on Amazon Kindle

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The Book of Job Revisited

Nonfiction Memoire

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Adrienne: The Chaos of Desire

Book I

The Maquisard

Prologue

A group of villagers were huddled at the side of the tracks leading into a mining town nestled between the precipice of an arroyo below and the steep crag of the mountain above. A woman patted a young girl on the head and slipped the girl behind her skirts as the Guardia Civil ordered the group to line up. The girl scurried away and down into the arroyo behind. The woman raised her fist in the air as a distraction and a last gesture of defiance with a shout, Viva la Revolucion!

A man joined her with raised fist, as did the others in the group. Viva la…

The girl scurried away; a loud volley of Spanish Mausers barked like angry dogs and echoed from the arroyo. Some of the bodies were neighbors she had known since birth. She crawled under the corpse of her mother. Then came a horrible silence except for a restrained moan, a few pops and cracks of pistols. Once the Guardia Civil left, she waited from another hiding place beneath a boulder in a hollow dug out by a badger as the refrain from an old lullaby passed softly from her lips: Los pollitos dicen los pollitos dicen pío, pío, pío cuando tienen hambre tienen frío. Tears clouded her vision. It would be the last time she afforded tears to wash her face for over thirty years.

In English the whole verse is: The little chicks say, ‘pio, pio, pio,’ when they are hungry... when they are cold. The hen looks for the corn... gives them food, and gives them shelter. Under her wings sleeping chicks huddle together to hasten another day!

Chapter 1: A Legacy of Secrets

Monte de Alduide and Mendilaz are not great mountains. There is nothing Alpine about their contours except that they are a part the Basque Pyrenees serving as God’s fence between Spain and France. Like the Basque people, they have been where they are before there ever was a France or Spain. So gentle in some parts, that sheep are pastured on their nude meadows and the unimposing contours that drop down into beech forested folds skirting northward towards France. It is on the voluptuous North side of the fence that their bodies undulate into creases in which runlets join the streams Lohitzeko Erréka with Egurtzako Erréka. These streams braid themselves across the frontier into France, splicing into the rivers La Nive des Aldudes down through the communes of Urepel and Aldudes and onto Banka becoming a steady flow that rolls across a rich green landscape.

From the east of the incisor tooth of Monte Alduide, and beyond the Roncesvalles Pass, the peak of Mendilaz rises up as its twin where La Nive d’Arneguy Riviere and La Nive de Bethéroble are fed. These are Basque streams that wind down through these creases in the earth towards France. Their dells are flanked with ash and birch, as rich with history as their Basque names. Descending further they tumble over weirs to become La Nive until its progress flattens out, but still embraced, by low and verdant hills almost all the way to L’Adour and the port city of Bayonne.

The Spanish side of their pastoral vales is deceptively passive. Orreaga is the Basque name for the pass where the Roman road crossed from Iberia into the Aquitaine. On this verdant landscape, eleven hundred years before on Roncesvalles Pass, Basque shepherds and foresters waited in ambush with spears and knives before the retreat from their homeland of armed and armored Charlemagne’s knights. And this was where Roland’s knights of the troubadours’ song died, lance and steed useless. It was on these same hills Napoleon’s invincible Grande Armée was harassed and needled into retreat, where the Spanish Maquis held out during and after the Spanish Civil War, and, as Basque Separatists, well into the nineteen-seventies resisted Franco’s tyranny. If the Pyrenees are the hartz baten hortzak, the teeth of a bear in Basque, then this part of the range has been the bear’s molars that grind down armies of occupiers and tyrants. Armed only by the tenacity and perseverance of the Basque language and culture, banned by Franco and revived after he died, the Basque have always been the last thing oppressors confront in the Pyrenees as they are swallowed into obscurity.

On the French side, these mountain rivulets clamor down, then roll into the river, La Nive, that twists her way and skirts past the east bank of the Basque commune of Itxassou. On one of those verdant hills above and beyond the town, a complex nestles inside three hundred acres that was once a modest house with a rich history of its own. From the road nearby it appears to be a typical French farmhouse hidden by hedges lining a narrow lane. It had been remodeled and expanded from the inside out after the Post War, Hungry Years, by the investment banker, Marcel Fournier. Predawn, a light radiated out of the second story window above the garage. It was the light from the window of the former Basque Maquis, Alesandro Gotson Otxoa. In his small quarters, at 84, he prepared for the day ahead by putting on his boots, trousers, scarf, and beret, as he had been doing from the same quarters since the winter of 1957. It was the spring of 1999 and he was still not feeling too old to work.

At the other end of the house... a woman... chills… sweat. She’d been furtively sleeping, arms and legs twisted within the sheets and blankets tossed off. Out of bed and down the hall, she looked out from a window to the light from a dormer above the wing of the second floor over the equipment barn. Other than that light, the house was empty. She needed to talk with somebody to distract, not in the way that idle chatter distracts, but rather to distract from the hunger... the hunger of every cell in her body beyond the hunger of an empty stomach. The light that radiated from the dormer above the garage was from Alesandro’s room. The main part of the house faced east as all the old traditional Basque houses do and Alesandro’s room on the wing above the garage did too. Alesandro was... well, Alesandro, a rock of stability for this woman. He had been more than a manager of her family’s estate and its farm acres spreading almost all the way to La Nive. Officially, he was her Godfather, and always a guardian angel throughout her coming of age and awkward teens. He was there when her paternal father, Marcel, couldn’t be. It was only fitting that she should find solace in the company of this single-most dependable man left for her now that her father was gone.

Alesandro… are you awake? It’s me, she tapped lightly at his door.

He opened the door greeting her warmly, Of course, Adrienne, please… come in.

Her eyes painfully adjusted to the loom of the light of dawn’s sun rising where the Morning Star hovered brightly above the hills from the open window of his small but comfortable room. Contrarily, Adrienne preferred the side of the house facing west because she rarely crawled out of bed before noon. Even so, she’d enjoyed the refuge of modest simplicity in Alesandro’s quarters since childhood. Adrienne appreciated the simplicity of Alesandro’s small sitting room and bedroom barely of size enough to fit a cot. He’d remodeled it with his own good hand and added to the small servant’s quarters to the old laborers loft over the original equipment barn that was now adjoined to the house for him.

Dawn broke from over the river behind the hills beyond. I love your room for this view, she said, though sweat beaded up on her brow. The window faced the open expanse of the horse pasture above the winding Nive through the fields and the looming light of the soon to be rising sun.

Alesandro was officially the estate’s grounds and farm manager. He’d insisted on having a job as a condition for staying on. Marcel considered him a monk, choosing a life of simplicity and solitude. He knew Alesandro had been writing something of a memoir of his years in isolation; his near solitary campaign against Franco; of ranging over and back across the Pyrenees; of his lost companions at arms and, finally; of his imprisonment at Carabanchel. This Marcel knew this was his real vocation.

You’re always up before dawn, even when no one is here, she stood by the window. She looked around the room. Her picture was framed on the wall above his writing desk. It was snapped when she was fourteen; an innocent image, naked in the surf, with arms stretched above adolescent breasts budding skyward. He’d snapped that picture in better days... innocent days. Next to it was a 2 ½ x 3 ½ Kodak Box picture of Alesandro with an arm over her father’s shoulder with Gaudi’s unfinished Cathedral in the background. The two were together during the miners’ Strike in Asturias of ’34; at barricades in Bilboa; in Barcelona; and they fought shoulder to shoulder and house-to-house through the suburbs of Madrid before the Republic fell April Fools’ Day of ‘39. They cut dashing figures, standing in Basque berets. Her father, Marcel, with a boyish grin as though he were a fan standing next to a film star… eyes raised to the lean, taller and lithe-like-a-cheetah hardened veteran..., as though together they were going to bite-off Franco’s balls. Alesandro had the demeanor in that picture that reminded her of an image painted by Orwell in his memoir, Homage to Catalonia: a face of a man who would commit murder for a friend… It was true that Alesandro would have killed for Marcel, or any one of his handful of close associates when he was a young idealist. But Marcel’s face was more ambiguous, he was no longer a novice, but a free-lance journalist, freshly released from a prison in Asturias by then.

She vaguely knew of their ordeal from those times and asked her father only once of his imprisonment. It disturbed her that his eyes darted away as though ashamed. His answer was modest, saying, I was little more than a Civil War tourist caught up in a catastrophe.

Alesandro’s once jet-black hair had turned completely white. Adrienne thought it made him look distinguished. Time had been gracious to the contours of kindness that shaped Alesandro’s face since those days. The chiseled revolutionary Anarchist’s features had eroded with time and hardship. The stone-cold warrior’s eyes of the old photograph had been transformed… a gentle light replaced their fiery intensity. He, and her father, had both survived Stalinist partisans, intramural purges, and Falangist assaults. A cat, allotted more than double the nine lives, Alesandro had also escaped the atrocities of the Albatera detainment by jumping off a transport truck. He had led the street fighting in Barcelona. He had endured Camp Gurs in Vichy France, and survived, after years of traversing the Pyrenees against the Guardia Civil, the four years of imprisoned in Carabanchel. He’d witnessed, with sullen eyes, first-hand the oppression in Spain that followed the Wars.

Reminded of her father by the snapshots, she stood bent over Alesandro’s desk with eyes full of tears for the first time since her father died, I’m so sorry I didn’t love him enough. The words burst out between sobs unexpected. Arising from the midst of her chest where, like a latent volcano awakening from its long dormant magma chamber, emotions raw broke loose.

Standing, Alesandro pulled her to his chest with his good arm and let her cry it out.

Between wiping tears from her face and sweat from her brow, her eyes focused on a familiar picture from under the glass of the desk. It was a fading, wallet sized, black and yellowed white, crumpled photo of a young woman with fierce eyes under a beret cocked jauntily to the side that barely held down a cascade of jet black curls. The words Pío, Pío, Pío were inked across the bottom of the picture where her cupid-bow lips kissed the tip of an odd-shaped knife she held in front of her face, Who is that woman, Alesandro? I’ve been wondering about her.

I’ll have to tell you about Iniga someday.

I think I met her once?

Yes, you met her. His eyes darkened."

Her hair was white like yours but short?

Gloom shrouded his answer, And you were… you must have been eight years old.

Disregarding his change of mood she asked, Avez-vous été amoureux?

No… yes, in a way, he paused and reflected, Though we might have been lovers… but she was more to me a little sister.

Mocking outrage, she tried to lighten the mood, No, yes, in a way? So, what was it, incest, eh? Alesandro!

He motioned for her to sit with a pendulum swing of his immobile right arm that hung near useless at his side. He was purposely evading the topic altogether. He moved some of his papers and books off the chair at his desk with his left hand, asking, How are you doing?

Oh, I don’t know… she blushed. Moineau, meaning little sparrow. It was his nom de ’affection: she loved it as a child; hated it as a teen, but she strongly, strangely, loved it when he said it then, Things are so bizarre. Rémy tried to take charge of everything. Mama was content to let him run all our affairs at first… what have I to do?

And this isn’t okay with you?

I can’t complain… I’m hardly ever here anyway. Rémy can handle all the lawyers and banks… the estate. I counted on being here for Mama, and that’s all. But he… he swooped in like a falcon and scooped her up before I could do anything.

Yes, I’d heard you were back for a few days…

Just a few… to pay my respects,

Didn’t want to bother you. He handed her a tissue, I saw that you missed the funeral.

Anger replaced grief with this reminder, Funeral services are nauseous for me. It was a sore subject.

Alesandro had good instincts: he read her feelings and laughed lightly, You know the cliché? We are Basque Catholics and we always follow the priests… with a candle or a club.

Adrienne laughed... not exactly a laugh… but a restrained, ha. Nonetheless, it felt good for her to laugh with Alesandro…. Always positive Alesandro… his yin to her yang or the other way around. His quips relieved her angst.

Understood, so, what is it you plan to do now? he held both her hands in his calloused and left hand. It was a comfortable gesture and a fatherly one she longed for now that Père was gone. She loved her father. How badly could she have disappointed him... his junkie daughter. And then there was her gay younger brother, Eder. They had rebelled so thoroughly from father’s influence, always distant Père on business… the business of France. Yet, she also knew his love was unflagging and she knew Alesandro was an angel standing in on father’s behalf. Eder too was like a son to Alesandro. He was named after Alesandro’s father.

Marcel possessed good business acumen, amassed tremendous wealth, and became one of the powerhouses of France’s recovery after the war. Remaining apolitical, between the radical socialists and the moderate democratic socialists, his ideals (though never extreme) eventually drifted towards becoming more moderate and had been instrumental in helping Charles De Gaulle found what would become the Fifth French Republic in ‘58’.

This was all before Adrienne was born. It was happening while Alesandro suffered in Franco’s prisons… his small band of Basque maquis hanging on in the Pyrenees had been wiped out and long gone. Still, in time for her christening, her father managed to bribe, maneuver, and otherwise wrangle the Franco government into releasing Alesandro from the very pit of hell, Carabanchel. For this task he’d employed the help of the mysterious Bird Dog. Ironically, Gotson, Alesandro’s Basque nom de guerre meaning Angel of God, was now termed a terrorist by Interpol, the DST (Directorate of Territorial Security), the RG (General Intelligence Directorate), the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as he sat protected from all those acronyms. Protected, isolated, writing his memoirs in a small room on the estate of the billionaire, Marcel Fournier, his war was over.

I don’t know what to do now, but, truthfully, she barely cared one way or another.

You don’t look well… are you… again? his brow turned down out of concern over judgment.

It is obvious? Sweat beaded on her forehead but she was cold. Every cell in her body ached.

Please, his brow knitted before he spoke, There is the privatklinik in Switzerland; Meiringen… I believe?

No, no, Alesandro… don’t go on like my brother. Rémy taunts me all the time. I can’t go through that again.

But you are so sick …

I can get through this. I’ve done it several times already, this wasn’t just bravado, Adrienne knew she could. Experience told her that, as hard as it was, quitting was easy compared to staying quit from the relentless obsession of its grip. You know, Rémy tried to get Père to have me declared incompetent the last time….

No, though I did suspect something was troubling Marcel after you left.

I am not going to grant Rémy another opportunity. I’m taking this respite to get clean and go back to California where Rémy won’t be watching every move I make.

The odor of fresh coffee caused her stomach to turn, Please excuse me Alesandro, I have to …

Alesandro put a trash can under her chin just in time.

Chapter 2: 1934 - Asturias Miners’ Strike

Sleeping… hung-over… soothed by the lullaby rhythm of steel wheels on steel tracks… chunk-cat-clack…chunk-cat-clack… chunk-chunk… Then noise: a whistle… awake… another town… steam hissed… exploded from pistons, escalated by the chatter and clamoring of another group of volunteers boarding. Alesandro peered through half-shut lids to watch the eager new ones standing in the aisle, falling against each other whenever the train jerked to a start. He’d been crammed into a seat on the wooden bench of the car, shoulder to shoulder, with young men… young or younger than he. Their voices were, from the start in Madrid, loud and boisterous… songs of the revolution… A Las Barricades! Bravado smothered fear and anticipation, driven by the cheers of crowds alongside the tracks. Red and black flags on la locomotora del destino chugged their cars away from the station and from the safety of homes and chalkboards of classrooms. After this disruption of not-thought, his attention turned to the changing Castilian landscape that passed his window… images flashed by. The train wound its way towards Asturias; another country on the far side of Spain. Some aboard were CNT labor unionists, veterans of street fighting, but most were volunteers: metropolitan boys with pink hands. The propaganda posters depict men; masculine men with chiseled chins and muscled forearms, fists thrust skyward over the barricades... men, not boys… boys who hoped to be greeted with cheers and welcomed by the calloused hands of miners holding firm at the barricades of Gijón and Oviedo, they would be heroes; heroes alright, dead heroes.

The train that left Madrid was loaded up with these untrained young and eager faces armed by little more than the enthusiasm and the naivety of youth. Only a few had seen blood from more than a scratch before and were unprepared for what awaited them in the mining towns in and above Oviedo or Gijón on the Biscay coast. From Madrid they crossed north through the heartland of Castile-Leon and into a region of rugged mountains. Towns and stations that prominently posted the red and black flags of the Revolucion flashed by Alesandro’s window like in a dream. The rails were controlled by the anarchist labor union, the CNT, most sympathetic to the cause. But, this was an irony of a civil war full of ironies that, in cooperation with the new Republic in Madrid, the same union trains, controlled by the same union, would fill its cars with experienced and hardened Moroccan troops. Regular Army troops of Colonel Yague and General Ochoa, would steam towards Basque Country after dropping off the volunteers in Oviedo under orders of the Generals of the Republic in Madrid, Francisco Franco and Manuel Goded. Sent to quell the miners’ general strike that had crippled most of the country.

Next to Alesandro snored the fledgling journalist; his brother by adoption and Euskara blood. Euskara blood knows no nation but the Basque Country of the coastline and mountains along the Bay of Biscay and the Pyrenees Range of Southern France and Northern Spain. Their bond, however, was stronger than the fraternity of blood. Alesandro Otxoa was orphaned at one year of age by the pistoleros of the Guardia Civil. Alesandro Otxoa had been embraced and given a home near Biarritz by Marcel’s Basque father out of loyalty to the Otxoa family. It happened during the general strikes at La Canadiense in 1919. One of his earliest memory was that of a door being kicked in… of his father’s shouting… his mother’s cursing… screams… both taken out the door… the sound of clap-crack pistol retorts… their bodies lifeless on the street.

Alesandro took his secondary level education at the Lycée Militaire and thus had an inkling of military experience: little more experience than to know how to load and shoot a rifle, to march in drills, and to study rudimentary military history on his own in the school’s library. Therefore he felt responsible for, and protective of, Marcel, whose military ambitions were next to nil and who wasn’t supposed to be on this train in the first place.

The storm clouds forming in the atmosphere over the Second Republic of Spain were dark with foreboding: a civil war of which the life of Alesandro (Gotson) Otxoa would be entangled, from his first taste of combat in this one week in October of 1934, until his imprisonment in Carabanchel in the mid nineteen-fifties.

Alesandro was determined, and obligated by his heritage, to leave the comfort and safety of Bayonne at fifteen years of age to join the CNT of the anarchist movement rising up in Barcelona. There in Madrid, as soon as he heard the news of the strike, he tried to bid farewell to Marcel who had followed him over wine in a café alongside of other boys eager to become men.

You aren’t going without me, Marcel protested.

There is too much going on here, Marcel. The people need your voice. Someone has to keep an eye on the political wrangling of Euro… Alesandro rattled off his argument staccato knowing his words were falling on deaf ears.

I won’t have it Alesandro, the hottest story in all of Spain is in Asturias. Marcel was sixteen, though his appearance was that of a younger man than Alesandro. He would later say that he had been playing the part of a freelance journalist for the L’Humanité in Paris. L’Humanité was an organ of the PCF (Communist Party in France) whose editors had yet to publish anything he’d submitted until after the miners’ strike in Asturias where his imprisonment for a brief time became the cause celebrity du jour.

Taking a sip, holding the bottle to his lips without mocking, he said sincerely, You’re an academic, Marcel. How well would you… would you be able to kill a man?

Ha, I can. Just as well as anyone. Hell, we are all amateurs! he argued.

The brothers got drunk… so very drunk that Alesandro barely remembered agreeing to board the train singing what would be the anthem of the revolution, La Rhumba La Carmella, and chanting ¡Unidad, Proletaria Hermanos! with the others. His stomach sick, he came to and swore to himself that he’d never get drunk again. It was an oath that he kept except for an occasional toast or to wash down stale bread. Alesandro knew from the time he awoke aboard that train he was going to keep his vigilance guardedly; for, one afternoon, his guard was down and his drunkenness nearly cost the life of his little brother.

The miners were waiting behind the barricades by the time Alesandro and Marcel had gotten through to the hills above Oviedo. An eagle’s aerie of a mining town nestled on the side of a precipice at the end of a snaking narrow track was fortified with makeshift catapults ready to launch crates loaded with sticks of dynamite from behind the barricades against the rails leading up to it. The steep slopes to the sides and behind left no room to be flanked or room for retreat. The engine stopped at the first barricade and backed down the three cars that were left of the train. The brothers reported for duty in an old barracks, an outpost of the Guardia Civil garrison from Oviedo. The miners had overrun it the day before with hardly a fight. The representative, from behind a desk that was made up of a plank over empty ammo boxes, wore a beret with red U.H.P. letters on the front.

Marcel stepped up first. The old gruff miner looked him over. Ever fire a rifle?

Another miner sitting on the crates behind the make-shift desk piped in, It would be better to ask, does he have the need for a razor?

After the laughter died the miner at the desk followed up, Well?

I’m a journalist. I came to cover the story, Marcel admitted.

You’ll need to cover the story with one of these, kazetari... er, periodista. The miner pointed to a stack of old Spanish Mausers for the second miner to pass over the desk.

Alesandro’s union papers he’d obtained before leaving Bayonne, and a certificate from a military prep school, wasn’t enough to impress the old union miner.

A cadet from the école militaire,

Those weren’t enough to impress the old miner. But he spied the pistol tucked in Alesandro’s belt.

The Regulars use a Campo-Giro. How did you get that one?

My inheritance after…

The miner smiled as he saw a familiar name on the documents Alesandro submitted, Otxoa? I know of an Otxoa. An organizer, Eder from the house of Otxoa, twenty years ago. Eder and Izar.

My father and mother.

Ah ha, 1919. The miner’s face softened, Yes, I was in Barcelona during the General Strike. You should be proud.

Alesandro stood silent.

Give this man a new rifle, he called out to the second minor.

You have command of the first rampart, comrade. They send bodies up here from Oviedo with no experience and no ammo or guns, he snarled. All we have is what we seized from this outpost.

I haven’t seen combat either, Alesandro confessed.

Oh? Okay. The miner shook his head and continued boisterously laughing, More than most. You have the house of your father in your blood... eh? and maybe your mother’s spine too.

I didn’t see any artillery except for one field howitzer. Alesandro returned to the subject.

We do have plenty of dynamite. When that’s gone, we’re gone. When someone falls, take what you can… his rifle and ammo belt. Retreat to the second barricade, if you can, when it gets impossible to hold ‘em off. Light these sticks underneath yours first. Have you used dynamite before?

"No, but is looks easy