We find ourselves in the French capital, in the year 1924, at the start of a rainy autumn that has not washed away the memory of the summer’s successful Olympic Games featuring swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller, Hollywood’s future Tarzan. The sun came out unexpectedly today, Sunday, October 5, but now it is already sinking; Pablo was concentrating on his work when the knocks at the door disturbed his concentration. His employer is a small, dilapidated press called La Fraternelle, located at 55 rue Pixérécourt, in the middle of Paris’s Belleville neighborhood. This is one of the most lively working-class areas of the city, and the one with the most Spaniards. Pablo is employed as a typesetter, but in reality he also does the work of an editor: he corrects, designs, and lays out all the Spanish content, which is no small amount since Primo de Rivera’s coup d’état and the growing influx of immigrants to Paris from the other side of the Pyrenees. Since then, La Fraternelle has been printing Ex-Ilio: The Spanish Immigrant’s Weekly, a four-page publication that all summer long has been reporting the breaking news on the Spanish team’s Olympic standings, from the star role of the boxer Lorenzo Vitria to the disappointing performance of the soccer team, which, led by Zamora and Samitier, was eliminated in the first round by Italy, after an own goal by the defenseman Vallana.
Pablo’s salary barely covers the thirty francs a week he pays for the hovel he lives in, since he only works at La Fraternelle from Friday afternoon to Sunday: during the rest of the week, the press is reserved for publications in French, overseen by the owner, Sébastien Faure, an old anarchist, well respected and short-tempered, bald as a cue ball and with great skyward mustache-tips, usually busier with litigation than with monitoring his employees’ work. This arrangement is quite suitable for Pablo, who can do as he likes without running much of anything past “Monsieur Fauve,” “Mr. Savage,” as some call him behind his back in reference to his wild temper. In any case, Pablo only crosses paths with him on Friday afternoons, since the boss is equal parts anarchist and bon vivant, and it would never occur to him to come by the print shop on a weekend. The drawback is that some other employees take advantage of Monsieur Fauve’s absence, and it falls on Pablo to pick up the slack. One such incident occurred last night, when he had to cover a protest meeting marking the first anniversary of Rivera’s coup d’état—held three weeks late, as if to confirm the well-earned Spanish reputation for tardiness.
The event took place in the legislative chamber of the Community House on the avenue Mathurin-Moreau, adjacent to Parc des Buttes-Chaumont and about twenty minutes’ walk from La Fraternelle. In attendance were people from the most diverse backgrounds, though nearly all united by two common interests: being Spanish and living in exile. The majority were anarchists and left libertarians, Paris being the hotbed of Spanish anarchism, but there were also many communists, republicans, and Catalan separatists, as well as various syndicalists and intellectuals, including fugitives and deserters—all those who, for one reason or another, had to seek refuge in France, fleeing persecution and torture by the Spanish Civil Guard. Some of the great political figures of the time were also there, such as Marcelino Domingo or Francesc Macià, and even Rodrigo Soriano—the politician and journalist who fought a duel a few years ago against Primo de Rivera himself—showed up, despite his bitter enmity toward Blasco Ibáñez. Renowned intellectuals were sure not to miss the event, such as José Ortega y Gasset, who had to seek refuge in France for having shouted “Viva la libertad!” upon hearing the announcement of Miguel de Unamuno’s banishment to Fuerteventura. Unamuno, for his part, seated in a corner, seemed to be keeping himself busy drumming his fingers while he waited for the meeting to start, probably counting the syllables of some poem. Also in attendance were men of action who have been fomenting revolutionary sentiment in the Parisian henhouse, such as Buenaventura Durruti, with the stern countenance of a lazy-eyed gunman, or Francisco Ascaso, who insists, with his Andalusian charm, on denying the rumored half-secret that he was the one who shot Juan Soldevila, the Archbishop of Zaragoza, one year ago. Finally, discreet and evasive, Ángel Pestaña, the dapper new general secretary of the National Labor Confederation, appeared, having come to Paris expressly for reasons intimately related to the course of this story.
In fact, Pablo had planned to attend the meeting as just another exiled Spaniard, but in the end he had to do it for work reasons as well. In the last hour of the workday, when he was already getting ready to close the press, one of the writers of Ex-Ilio came running in, a thin, dapper man, with his hair slicked back and a recently trimmed little mustache:
“Listen, Pablo, you’re going to the General Meeting tonight, right?”
“Yes,” he replied, instantly regretting that he hadn’t bitten his tongue.
“The thing is, it’s my turn to cover the meeting—you know that Vicente Blasco is going to give a speech commemorating the anniversary of the coup. They say it’s to promote the pamphlet he’s planning to distribute halfway around the world … and, thing is, see, I have a date with a lady friend to go see Raquel Meller tonight, and the event goes on a long time, you know. So, I was thinking, since you’re going anyway, maybe you could take the notes yourself, and tomorrow I’ll come in first thing in the morning and write the article.”
“It’s fine, don’t worry,” said Pablo.
“Merci, camarade,” the writer said as he exited the building smelling of cheap patchouli.
So there he was, the typesetter of La Fraternelle, playing the role of a journalist amongst the thick smoke of cigarettes and Cuban cigars, when Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, with his shirt starched for the occasion, took the podium to deliver his keynote address. Pompous as a peacock and sweating like a pig, he cleared his throat audibly, raised his hands a few times to quiet the crowd, and adjusted his monocle to read the careworn papers that he had taken out of the pocket of his blazer. Pablo opened his notebook and leaned against a column at the back of the room, next to a poster announcing the very same concert of Raquel Meller, the great Spanish cabaret singer of the Parisian stage. The poster showed Meller dressed in black, with the traditional mantilla y peineta head covering. Someone had drawn a large mustache on her face.
“My Spanish brothers working in France,” the Valencian writer began his exhortation, “our reasons for meeting here today are rather unpleasant. As you all know, last September 13 marked one year of government (or, I should say, misgovernment) of our dear country by the tyranny and idiocy of a handful of bastards unworthy to call themselves Spanish. This is why, from exile, we find ourselves obligated to raise our voices to the world in protest of the dire situation our country is going through. Fortunately, in other places, such as here in sweet France which has taken us under her wing, it is still possible to express oneself freely without fearing that the henchmen of General Martínez Anido will take off their masks and come out from the crowd to brutally arrest us—”
At this point, someone shouted “Down with Anido!” and Pablo took advantage of the interruption to take a few hurried notes, before the applause died down and Blasco Ibáñez aimed his poison darts at Alfonso XIII and Primo de Rivera:
“These two court jesters, wagging their tongues, cause more harm to the nation than all the weapons of our enemies. For Alfonso XIII, poor Spain is a box of tin soldiers, and the whoremonger Miguelito has been trying to imitate Mussolini, but daftly, like a buffoon, proclaiming denunciation to be a public virtue and tampering with the mail, condemning citizens for what they’ve written in their letters. This is why I declare, with pain and with shame, that Spain is at this time a nation in bondage: it cannot speak, because its mouth is stopped by the gag of censorship; it cannot write, because its hands are tied.”
The devoted crowd listened attentively to the writer’s words as he modulated his speech with the bravado of a classical orator or one of those American actors he met in his time as a Hollywood screenwriter. Next, he laid into the war in Morocco, and started spewing his bile against the army:
“And what do
you think of this worthless army that’s using up most of Spain’s resources and invariably gets defeated in every action it takes outside of our borders? You might say that the word ‘army’ is not quite appropriate. It might be better to call them military police, because the only victories they manage to win are in the streets of our own cities, where they use machine guns and cannons to threaten the masses, who have at most a lousy pistol in their pocket.”
A few angry shouts went up: “Hear, hear!” And so Blasco went on pontificating for nearly half an hour, until he had condemned every imaginable enemy. When he stepped down from the podium, sweaty and clammy, he went directly to the venue’s exit, where Ramón, his private chauffeur, was waiting for him, ready to take him in his Cadillac to the Hôtel du Louvre, where he lived comfortably in a spacious suite on the top floor with excellent views of Paris.
But all this happened yesterday, and today in the morning, the mild-mannered writer did not show up to the print shop as he had promised, so Pablo himself has had to write the story so it can come out tomorrow in the weekly Ex-Ilio. It is not the first time he has written an article, although Monsieur Faure has explicitly forbidden him from doing so. While he is composing the headline, “Blasco Ibáñez Stirs the Consciences of Spanish Immigrants in Paris,” two loud knocks at the door make him jump and spill the type he had been lining up.
“Julianín!” shouts Pablo, collecting the characters scattered on the floor, “Julianín, the door!”
But Julián, the seventeen-year-old boy who has been the shop’s assistant since summer, does not appear.
“Julianín, damn you!” the typesetter shouts, unexpectedly losing his temper. His irritability might be due to an incident from last night, when, at the end of Blasco Ibáñez’s speech at the Community House, someone approached him while he was taking his final notes. He was concentrating so hard on what he was writing that he did not realize until he heard the offer:
“You want some?” said a raspy voice at his side, as a little tin of snuff entered his field of vision.
“No, thanks,” Pablo replied, lifting his eyes from the notebook. The voice belonged to an extremely thin man with a pocked face.
“Interesting speech, huh?” the man continued, taking a sizable pinch of snuff between his finger and thumb, “Blasco knows how to hit where it hurts. I saw more than one person squirm to hear him criticize Spain. Some people would rather keep their blinders on, don’t you think?”
“Well, nobody likes to hear a mother insulted, even if the one doing it is a brother—even if the brother is right.”
“Yes, I think that’s exactly what it is,” the man conceded, before clarifying, in a quieter voice, “especially if you’re an infiltrator.”
Pablo stared steadily into his eyes. The other man returned the gaze for a few seconds. Then, moving closer and lowering his voice even more, he added:
“That’s why it’s better not to speak of certain things here. Come by afterward to the café La Rotonde and join our discussion group—”
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” Pablo cut him off, excusing himself, “I have to wake up early tomorrow for work.”
“A shame. What’s the world coming to when not even la France respects the day of rest?” And with a hint of a smile, he bid Pablo farewell, giving him a card with the address of the café La Rotonde. “Come by one of these days, but don’t wait too long.”
That last bit sounded more like a threat than an invitation, thought Pablo as he watched the man rejoin a group dominated by the voice of the secretary general of the National Labor Board, Ángel Pestaña. Pablo slipped the card along with his notebook into the inside pocket of his coat. Making his way through the smoke and the crowd, he left the building and went out into the street. His trusty bicycle, an old secondhand Clément Luxe, was there waiting for him. He pedaled furiously under a threatening sky, and only upon arriving home did he realize that someone had written on the back of the card: “We need your help, friend. Contact us immediately.”
“The door, Julianín, for God’s sake!” Pablo shouts desperately, while trying to pick up the type. “Where the hell have you run off to?”
Receiving no response from the kid, Pablo wipes his hands on his typesetter’s coveralls, crosses the distance to the door with long strides, goes up the two steps, and looks through the peephole. His surprise could not be greater: upon opening the door, he embraces his childhood best friend, Roberto Olaya, known to all as Robinsón, whom he has not seen since the end of the Great War, back in 1918, when they went their separate ways at the Gare d’Austerlitz with lumps in their throats.
I
(1890–1896)
NO. PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ WAS NOT BORN in 1899, as the newspapers will claim several decades later, but on the night of January 26, 1890, the feast day of Saint Timothy and Saint Titus, Saint Theofrid and Saint Theogenes—all bishops—as well as Saint Simeon the hermit. The thermometer in Barcelona marked four degrees centigrade, and the humidity was 82%. However, the sky was clear, and Julián Martín Rodríguez could see the stars of the constellation Cassiopeia glowing in the celestial canopy, as he firmly squeezed his wife’s hand hoping that their newborn son would lift his head and take his first gulp of air.
At that time, King Alfonso XIII was barely four years old, so it was his mother, the regent María Cristina, who held the nation’s reins. The presidency was going back and forth between liberals and conservatives, according to the shameful arrangement they had reached in the Pardo Pact, and now the turn of the liberal Práxedes Mateo Sagasta was over. Who cares who’s in charge of the government, Julián thought as he looked at the stars and waited for the birth of his first child. We’ll still be the poorest country in Europe. All he had to do was look at the view through the window, faintly illuminated by the moonlight: the inaptly named neighborhood known as the Desert, a chaotic conglomeration of unsanitary residences that had been piling up on the left bank of the Nervión River since 1876, when, at the end of the Third Carlist War, the area had undergone a rapid process of industrialization and population growth, without it ever crossing the mayor’s mind to come up with an urban development plan. The hard, dangerous work in the iron mines, the local population’s primary means of sustenance, had driven the life expectancy of Baracaldo to one of the lowest in Spain; at the time of Pablo’s birth, it was only twenty-nine years.
Julián heard his wife’s moaning announcing the end of the labor, but still he did not dare to look. He noticed her hand gradually slackening, and he heard the midwife spanking the newborn. He waited to hear the cry, and, hearing nothing, closed his eyes angrily and gnashed his teeth, fearing a stillbirth. Only when he felt his wife’s hand on his back did he dare to turn his head. It was a boy. And he was alive. But, incomprehensibly, he wasn’t crying; or, more accurately, while he made a face like he wanted to cry, nary a sob escaped his throat, as if this were one of those silent films that would arrive in Spain a few years later. The three adults in the room looked at each other worriedly in the candlelight, but at first no one said anything. Then, the old midwife wrapped the child in a towel and placed him in the arms of his mother, wiped her hands on her skirt and left the house in a hurry, without finishing the job, making the sign of the cross and murmuring spells, taking the silent crying as a bad omen. “Lagarto, lagarto,” were the last words the midwife pronounced before her shadow disappeared through the doorframe. My God, thought Julián, that witch is known to tell stories—we’re going to go from undesirables to pariahs. But something more urgent demanded his attention, and he pushed the bad thoughts out of his mind. He took his knife from his pants pocket and in one movement cut the umbilical cord, which had already stopped pulsing. No one would have said it was his first time.
Julián Martín Rodríguez and María Sánchez Yribarne had met three years beforehand, a few months after the royal birth of Alfonso XIII. She belonged to the new Biscayan bourgeoisie, not the class of landed gentry fallen on hard times, but that of the visionaries who
at the start of the century had hopped on the industrialization bandwagon and managed to get rich overnight, such as her grandfather, the mythical José Antonio Yribarne, founder of one of the country’s most powerful industrial dynasties. Julián, for his part, came from an extremely humble family of Zaragoza, was the youngest of nine brothers and the only one who had been able to go to school, thanks to the fathers of Escuelas Pías, who had welcomed him into the seminary with an enthusiasm that was quick to raise suspicions. He excelled in algebra, physics, natural history, as well as Latin, Greek, and modern languages; however, theology, history, and philosophy stymied him from the start. When he felt he had learned enough, he left the seminary without saying goodbye to anyone and took off traveling all over Spain offering his services. And so it happened that at the end of 1886 he reached Baracaldo and was hired by the Yribarne family as a tutor to their young, misbehaving daughter, María.
Love took a bit longer to blossom than it tends to in the pulp novels from the time, but Cupid finally showed up with an ample quiver full of arrows. And when he came, he came with a vengeance. Even the couple themselves did not know if it was while practicing declensions, memorizing the list of Gothic kings, or speculating about the transubstantiation of the soul, but what is certain is that one fine day they found themselves kissing passionately on the table, crumpling quadratic equations and the poems of Victor Hugo. When María’s parents got wind of it, they threw the shameless tutor out into the street with no severance pay. What they did not expect is that their daughter was prepared to follow him to the ends of the earth.
The wedding took place early in the spring of 1889. Only one member of the bride’s family attended: Don Celestino Gil Yribarne, the black sheep of the family and María’s favorite uncle, who had always treated her as the daughter he’d never had. People in Baracaldo whispered the most outlandish slander against him, accusing him of everything from bestiality to practicing Satanic rituals in his mansion at Miravalles. None of this was true, however. The only eccentricity he allowed himself—not without some trepidation—was collecting the pubic hair of the women he slept with, classifying it in a fetishistic, methodical manner, like a lepidopterist with his butterflies or a numismatist with his coins. As for the groom’s family, no one was able to afford the cost of the journey, so all they could do was to send their best wishes by mail, in the form of a collective letter covered in grease stains and spelling errors.
The Anarchist Who Shared My Name Page 2