“There is a ghost that bears my name and walks around; a ghost that began to grow a few years ago, since they began talking about me without knowing me, and that has survived in the last six years, although I thought I was dying. Newspapers have helped him, because I have been militant and have continued to invent stories, and also people who create myths to bless or condemn, protecting themselves against any question or doubt.” Dolores González Katarain Yoyes, among other things, commented through these phrases how tired he was at having become the protagonist of a public narrative. “They’ve taken my name off, Yoyes is a fiction, an invention, I don’t feel identified with anyone who saves himself from various political positions,” he wrote in his diary: From 1979 until his assassination by ETA in September 1986, he frequently resorted to writing to explain his personal situation and to put on paper his views on various subjects.

Edited by his family and friends in the book Yoyes from his window (Yoyes from his window), reading them is a good way to know what he felt and thought before the murder in Ipar Euskal Herria, in Mexico or on his return home. It is also a good way of knowing Yoyes's faces that conventional political narratives consider irrelevant. For example, your fondness for reading.

Clandestine reading

Your journals are full of comments and references about books. As a result, we know that by the age of 25 I had already read Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Maiakovsky or Gustave Flaubert, among others. He looked carefully at what he had read: In June 1979, for example, reading a book by Anaïs Nin, he says: “A feminist full of contradictions, in my opinion, idealistic; she does not even mention the importance of the social and economic system in this problem, even if she is sensitive to the injustices she perceives.” From the first reading quoted in the newspapers, it can be seen the importance that ordiziarra gave to parenting as a person: “I know that the will is not what it is, but it plays an important role, especially when it serves to change the system; but the idea that constantly revives, the constant evolution, the will of one’s own creativity, to maintain the personality, to know oneself, unconscious and subconscious, that is very well expressed and I like it a lot, of course.”

He began writing at a time of crisis, after the attack that killed José Miguel Beñarán Argala and in the midst of ETA's internal discrepancies, when he began to think about the possibility of going to Mexico, drowned in underground conditions. “I’m obsessed with losing sensitivity to the way I live and I’ve reassured myself reading,” he wrote as a colophon to comments on Nin’s book.

In October 1979, Madame Bovary was rereading “to capture more in the work”, focusing mainly on style and form “because it seems to be the most important thing in the book”. In November, still in hiding but waiting for news about possible outward movements, Alejo Carpentier was “swallowing” The consecration of the spring. “I step at great speed above this only light prose.” He was interested in the tropical atmosphere of the novel and that same month ended another work by Carpentier, The Lost Steps of 1953, a book that tells the story of a musician entering the Venezuelan jungle: “... and I have a feeling of discomfort, anguish, a taste of weird mouth, I admire the value it has given to my protagonist and there is a paragraph in which it is said that ‘the march on unusual roads begins unconsciously ...’, and then the disappointment begins and it has moved me.”

Mexico by understanding, books

He began studying Literature at the Metropolitan Autonomous University of Mexico in 1980, although he finally enrolled in Sociology. A few days after his arrival in America, he quotes for the first time a book: “I have started reading Ulrike Meinhofen’s book that I was given two A. and it has given me a profound impression, what clarity in this woman’s writings!, it is terrible that a woman like her has disappeared and so soon. How it is made to love!, by its breadth, by the understanding of things and by the great respect”. In the late 1970s, three books with texts by the member of the German armed group RAF were published in Spanish in the Barcelonese editorials Icaria and Anagram and probably Yoyes spoke of one of them. But these words today, knowing how old they killed him, show the person who wrote in a mirror.

The next reading marks the desire to know the newly arrived country, as demonstrated by the books on the history of the Mexican revolution held in February 80 or the collection of essays The Labyrinth of Solitude of Octavio Paz. “If I had read it immediately after my arrival, I would have taken away some headaches, it is very demanding and penetrating, it tries to explain the idiosyncrasy and character of the Mexicans,” he wrote about the work of the Nobel Prize.

But he also mentioned the difficulties in reconciling the character of Mexicans with what he brought from Euskal Herria, when in 1982 he referred to the book of Oscar Lewis Pedro Martínez: “I was surprised, but I do not know it positively, because it is a novel that tells the story of a Mexican peasant and tries to explain the idiosyncrasy of the Mexican, and that has surprised me quite a bit. How am I going to relate to these people? I immediately think and feel unprotected about their way of being. They did me differently, and in the medium that I describe, I feel completely lost. I will need prudence.”

Maternity and Julio Cortazar

Despite his concerns to engage with the culture he found in America, the most pressing issue comes from the other side of the ocean. 28 January 1982: “I’ve felt the news that some Mexican newspapers bring, saying that ETA militants are in D like a punch. That at F. we are collecting money for ETA.” He does not understand why he was credited with the militancy he had left in 1979. “I know that throughout the time I have been here they have not stopped talking about me for one or another option, but on this occasion, I was almost convinced that they ended up accepting that I am a normal citizen, that I live here and that they come with those things.” In 1984 the newspaper El País remarked him as a manager of the armed band and, according to a book published by his friends and family, they hoped that he would also return to the organization within ETA.

Yoyes followed his path. The following day on a daily basis is 12 March 1982: “A deep emotion, a huge loneliness, two tears as well. I’m pregnant.” Maternity opens a new phase in the newspapers and books that she reads also raise new doubts. When it comes to the July Cortázar Rayuela, for example: “At a given moment it says “… in these people social action was too much like an alibi, how the children are the alibi of mothers, not to do anything that is worthwhile in this life…”. I have searched for it because it has been recorded; it was an issue that concerned me immediately after Akaitz was born, which often came to my mind that having it could not prevent me from continuing to feel the need to make myself known, to express myself, to seek me, to create myself and to create myself.”

Three years later he read the Book of Manuel to the Argentinian. This is the story of an Argentine revolutionary group that prepares a kidnapping in Paris and makes you think of the following generations: “I don’t know if our children will never understand the fever that once intoxicated us all, with more or less doubt, the truth, but every time with a fever. The Book of Manuel seems made for them, so that some of our dreams remain, even in the way they lived.” When he wrote these lines he realized he was disillusioned with the society he found, but he has not lost his passion for reading and has in his head write a novel, despite the doubts he has about the reception he can have. Speaking of Cortázar, for example, he says: “In the Basque Country, people would devour someone who wrote like him.”

He had started writing novels, as can be seen from an April 86 note that mentions, among others, the Ulysses of James Joyce and the intolerable lightness of the Existence of Milan Kundera. This last book forces him to change the story he wanted to tell: “That’s why I saw that the great protagonists of the novel are two pairs, as in mine. (…) Who should believe me if I had followed and successfully completed my work, that my idea was before reading it? I can’t leave it for that, but the truth is that I haven’t worked for a long time and this really discourages me.”

He left several drafts five months later, before ETA murdered them, but no completed work. His papers have been left for a personal and intellectual journey that did not fit in with political simplifications.