The Anarchist Who Shared My Name

by PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ

  Perched up in a tree, Pablo contemplated the scene from a certain distance, awestruck by the queen’s beauty, as she waved her graceful gloved hand at the crowd of admirers, while the sun glinted golden sparkles on the tiara that crowned her wavy coiffure. Suddenly, he felt guilty. Guilty to be enjoying this decadent spectacle, while people were dying of hunger in half the villages of Spain. Guilty for having admired the beauty of a queen who symbolized the might of the powerful and the marginalization of the oppressed. Guilty for working to document this event rather than working to combat it, as the anarchists were doing.

  “We are what our father taught us in his free time,” he heard an old man behind him saying. “When he wasn’t trying to educate us.”

  For a moment, Pablo thought the old man was talking to him, but when he turned around he saw that the man was blind and babbling. Nonetheless, he started mulling over these words as if they had been said especially for him, and he managed gradually to forget his feelings of guilt. When he snapped to attention, the procession was already turning down Calle Alcalá and starting its way back toward the palace. He jumped down from the tree and mingled into the crowd, advancing in fits and starts to try to catch up with the royal carriage. Reaching the Puerta del Sol, he went to meet back up with Ferdinando, who was yawning in the shade of a coach parked on a street corner.

  “What a goddamn hassle, boy,” he groaned. “And on top of everything, this sun burning like a thousand devils. You know what? I think I’ll walk with you for a while. My knees, feet, and soul are getting tired of standing here.”

  Together, they went down Calle Mayor, the last leg in the royal procession’s itinerary. The troops of the Wad-Ras Regiment formed two impenetrable lines on either side of the avenue, forcing the public to squeeze onto the sidewalks. Two bells rang out from the nearby church of Santa María, drowning out the rumbling of Pablo’s stomach, which hadn’t received any visits in several hours. Just then, someone collided with them, trying to push in the opposite direction of the procession.

  “Whoa there, young man!” creaked Ferdinando, grabbing the youth’s arm. “Be a little more careful, pal.”

  “Let me go!” shouted the lad, wrenching free from the grip, and beneath the brim of his hat glowed the steely eyes of Vicente Holgado.

  “What the devil?” he murmured, recognizing Pablo. “Get away from here right now!”

  And he continued off in the opposite direction from the procession.

  “You know that guy?” Ferdinando asked, clicking his tongue.

  “Yes, an old friend,” said Pablo, distracted, his mind going a mile a minute.

  “Well, your friend has lousy manners, boy. Alright, shall we go on, or what?”

  Pablo hesitated for a moment. He observed the royal sedan continuing its path, and King Alfonso XIII waving at the crowd from the window. Then he had a premonition.

  “No, Ferdinando. I think it’s better if we don’t go on.”

  Taking him by the arm, he led him back the way they had come. The reporter barely had time to protest, because at that instant there was a deafening explosion that made them jump in the air. Broken glass rained down on their heads, and the air filled with smoke, dust, shouts, and whinnies. An intense acidic smell seized the atmosphere and someone shouted:

  “They’ve killed the king and queen!”

  But the doom-crier was mistaken. Just as he had a year before in Paris, Alfonso XIII made it through unscathed, adding to the legend of his immortality. In all, five attempts would be made on his life, but not even the republic would manage to finish him off. At His Majesty’s side, huddled inside the royal carriage, the newly proclaimed Queen Victoria Eugenia Julia Ena de Battenberg was trying to hold back tears as she assessed the bridal gown spattered with horse blood. Within an hour of her marriage, she had learned the price she would have to pay for being the wife of the king of Spain.

  A few yards away, Ferdinando shook the dust from his waistcoat and looked at Pablo with his pupils more dilated than ever.

  “Run and telephone the office,” he said, his voice trembling, “and tell them that someone tried to assassinate the king. Then hurry back here, because you have some explaining to do.”

  And before the boy took off running, he added:

  “Oh, and Pablo, I must say. Nice work.”

  It was the first time he had called him by his name.

  – 8 –

  When word got around Paris of the revolutionary stance adopted by Blasco Ibáñez, all the malcontents flocked to him—well-meaning fanatics, revolutionaries who romantically believed in his radicalism. And one evening, in a Spanish-owned restaurant up on Montmartre, the conspiratorial cabal was held.

  EL CABALLERO AUDAZ,

  El novelista que vendió a su patria

  OUTSIDE NUMBER 8, RUE DANTON, A stone’s throw away from Île de la Cité, a rather large group of people throngs together, trying to get inside the building. Today is Friday, October 31, 1924, and there is a capacity crowd at the Salle des Sociétés Savantes: within a few minutes the much-anticipated meeting between Blasco Ibáñez and Miguel de Unamuno is going to start, in another attempt to raise public awareness about the need to overthrow the authoritarian government of Primo de Rivera. There are more French citizens in attendance than there were at last month’s meeting at the Community House, where Blasco came out to the acclaim of a multitude of Spanish exiles, because this latest meeting has been organized with the help of Parisian leftists from the League of the Rights of Man, including a few distinguished members of the French freemasons. The people complain loudly and incessantly outside the building, despite the concierge’s polite insistence that no one else can enter the hall for safety reasons, and that he has just been informed that the meeting has already begun. Despite having taken the metro here from the printing house, Pablo is among those stuck outside. Seeing the situation, he decides to turn around and go home. After all, he doesn’t have much desire to be shut in to listen to those two paper revolutionaries, after everything Robinsón told him at lunchtime. As he makes his way through the crowd, a French militant tries to sell him a stamp: “Pro-liberation of Spain.” He makes an excuse and breaks away from the youth and starts walking along the sidewalk toward the Pont Saint-Michel, and at that very instant a side door of the building opens and someone grabs his arm, dragging him inside.

  “You didn’t think you’d get away so easily, did you?” Robinsón smiles at him in the darkness. “Your Lordship always has a seat reserved at the Salle des Sociétés Savantes.”

  And Robinsón leads him via steep stairs to a loge from which he will be able to hear the speakers. A luxurious hanging chandelier illuminates the baroque salon and the hundreds of attendees, including many members of the Committee of Anarchist Relations. Below, next to an obscure door at the back of the room, Pablo recognizes Durruti and Ascaso, accompanied by two women with haircuts à la garçonne: Ramona Berri and Pepita Not, the only two female members of the Committee, former members of Los Solidarios. He also thinks he sees, among the people in the first few rows, Juan Riesgo, Massoni, and Vivancos with his arm in a sling, as well as the elder Orobón brother. Alone, next to the entrance, Recasens stands guard, his mien Napoleonic. Neither Jover nor Caparrós is present, of course, having left this morning for the border. There are also a good number of communists and syndicalists, many of whom have been recruited by Robinsón to take part in the revolutionary expedition. And in the press area, Pablo discerns the scrawny writer from Ex-Ilio, his hair pomaded and mustache recently trimmed, ready to take notes for the feature that will appear in next Monday’s issue.

  “Pablo,” says Robinsón, stepping into the loge, “I think you know Anxo, Carlos, and Baudilio.”

  These are the three vegetarians Robinsón recruited at the restaurant on Rue Mathis.

  “Yes, of course, how are you?” Pablo greets them, shaking hands.

  Below, on the stage, the evening has just been opened by Charles Richet, an old and well-known profes
sor at the Sorbonne, a mason, spiritualist, and expert in metempsychosis. His words are punctuated by shouts from the audience, railing against fascism, against Mussolini and Primo de Rivera, and even against the French government led by the Cartel des Gauches. After him, a Portuguese orator takes the stage, dressed in a tuxedo, and makes a brief but sincere homage to the memory of the tragic, unjust death of Ferrer Guàrdia. Then it is Ortega y Gasset’s turn. He delivers a bold, uncompromising speech. But the main course arrives when the former professor of the University of Salamanca, Don Miguel de Unamuno, takes the stage, with his close-trimmed, bright white beard, and he inflames the audience with a passionate speech, an equal mixture of wrath and irony, such as this very moment when he provokes a wave of laughter with this superb attack going right for Primo de Rivera’s jugular:

  “You will have to excuse my language, but this stupid idiot says I’m a wayward son of Spain. Me, a wayward son? But what if I’m not a son of Spain? What if, like any good professor, I am its father?”

  Aged by exile, the septuagenarian Unamuno appears to be reinvigorated by the audience’s laughter and applause.

  “Not that that drunken, whoring general is totally empty, no: it’s that he’s full of emptiness, which isn’t the same thing. And now that other epileptic pig, with blood on his hands”—here he is referring to Martínez Anido—“Now he wants to call me a conspirator. But I do my conspiring in the light of day, gentlemen, not like them. I want everything I say to be known. And if I say it, it’s precisely because I want it to be known …”

  He goes on with attack after attack on Primo, relishing the well-known anecdote about Caoba, the dictator’s goddaughter, whom he ordered to be set free after she was arrested for cocaine possession.

  “A fine example of the little charlatan Buddha’s professed respect for law and order!”

  Then the slings and arrows rain down on the monarchy:

  “And what do you think about that big-nosed idiot fate has given us for a king? Alfonso XIII is a wicked man and the main person responsible for what’s happening in Morocco. You can’t go to war as if you were challenging someone to a duel! Do you know what the Moorish king Abd el-Krim said after our audacious monarch accused England and France of selling arms to the Moroccans? He said why would they need to buy weapons from the other European countries, since they get plenty from the retreats and defeats of the Spanish army! We’re the laughingstock of Europe!”

  Unamuno has gotten hot under the collar, so he takes a breath and drinks some water.

  “And what can we say about his spawn?” the diatribe against the monarchy goes on. “The prince of Asturias inherited his mother’s hemophilia, the second son is deaf-mute since birth, and who knows what’ll be wrong with the third. The Republic is the only alternative! And if it takes a revolution to get it, then I say there will have to be a revolution!”

  A deafening wave of cheers and applause fills the room. The professor, emboldened, continues his jeremiad against the dictatorship and the monarchy. He leaves the stage to a standing ovation, waving like a bullfighter. It is then that Pablo sees Luís Naveira enter the hall, accompanied by the concierge, who appears to have begrudgingly allowed him in, but only to give someone a message. Must have been a handsome bribe. Naveira looks very out of sorts, and he erupts into wild gesticulations when he finds Recasens, who gestures to follow him to the back of the hall to talk with Durruti and Ascaso. The two men elbow their way through the packed crowd and finally reach the anarchist leaders. They exchange a few words and disappear through the rear door. Robinsón, who hasn’t missed a thing, suddenly stands up.

  “I’m going to go see what’s going on,” he tells Pablo, and he exits the loge, leaving Pablo sitting there with the three vegetarians.

  After Unamuno, it is Blasco Ibáñez’s turn. Blasco goes up to the podium straightening what’s left of his hair, which is that flat black color of cheap vegetal dyes; he settles in behind the rostrum, fills a glass of water, and winds his Roskopf pocket watch as he waits for the applause to die down. The Valencian writer has not prepared his speech very much, because he has spent the last few days revising the French translation of his incendiary pamphlet, done by a young philosophy student and regular at his discussion group at the Café Americain. But although it is merely a hasty rehash of what he said a month ago at the Community House, his eloquence and his presence will be enough to inflame the audience’s spirit, and they will not think twice to interrupt him constantly with shouts of “Anarchy!” and “Down with the bourgeoisie!”

  “Republicans,” Blasco begins, and a few protests are heard, “or maybe you are monarchists?” he asks, with obvious irony, leaving more than one person in confusion. “Spaniards, then,” he continues, but once again he can’t please everyone, for many in the audience are not Spanish, “Fine then, friends: I want to start by telling you that I don’t like to beat around the bush. I aim straight at the trunk. And my axe chops right into the tree until it falls!”

  A chorus of shouts and applause breaks out to echo his every phrase, pronounced with such belligerence that the more moderate audience members are shocked. We shall not reproduce them all here, for we’ve already heard them, mutatis mutandis, at the Community House, but we cannot resist recording his exchange with a heckler who, taking advantage when Blasco pauses for a sip of water, shouts:

  “When you people take over, you’ll shoot us just like the ones who are in charge today!”

  To which Vicente replies in an energetic voice: “We will shoot those who rebel against the Republic, whether they’re right or left, but we’re especially going to shoot agents provocateurs,” and he points an accusatory finger at the heckler.

  And between the audience’s bursts of applause, the Valencian writer rounds out his speech with a declaration of intentions that raises the temperature of the room by a few degrees:

  “I’m not here for my health, nor to have a good time with you all. No, no, absolutely not. You want to know why I’m here tonight?” and after an expectant silence, he concludes by raising his fist: “I’m here to start the revolution!”

  After the wild applause from most of the audience, a young communist from the front row climbs onto the stage and shouts, “Long live the social republic! Long live Russia!”

  To which Blasco responds, inviting the young man to get off the stage, “Yes, my boy, long live the social republic indeed. But let’s start with the democratic republic …”

  The famous author’s words are followed by chaos as the meeting breaks down into a heated debate, with some defending the Bolshevik revolution, others advocating democratic revolution, still others espousing anarchist revolution, and the craziest of the lot calling for capitalist revolution. When the meeting ends and Blasco comes down from the podium, an aged Spaniard from the front row reproaches him for endorsing Bolshevik communism. The writer looks at him kindly, steps closer, and whispers in his ear: “Don’t worry, grandpa. A communist republic will never triumph in Spain. Let’s let these young people help us achieve a democratic republic, and then we’ll sweep the rug out from under them.”

  As Robinsón has not returned, Pablo exits the loge with the three vegetarians. In the street, he says goodbye to them and starts walking home. Crossing the Pont Saint-Michel, he hears a loud discussion between two tramps fighting over a spot that both claim to be their own. It appears that the ideology of private property has taken hold even among the least fortunate. Fifteen minutes later, arriving at the hovel, he tumbles into bed without taking off his shoes and falls into a deep sleep.

  Robinsón wakes him up after a while, but Pablo doesn’t know if he’s been asleep for one minute or for hours.

  “What, what is it?” he asks, stunned, as he sits up in bed.

  “Take your shoes off, man. That’s no way to sleep.”

  Pablo groans, takes off his shoes, and throws them at Robinsón, who miraculously dodges them.

  “Come on, man, don’t be that way. When all I’m trying to
do is help you sleep better. You know what?” the vegetarian asks.

  “What?” barks Pablo, covering himself with his blanket and hiding his head under his pillow.

  “Nothing, nothing. Well, actually,” he finally says, “I’m going to miss you.”

  But Pablo has fallen asleep and his only reply is a long, sibilant snore. When he wakes up in the morning, Robinsón will be gone.

  SATURDAY’S WORK SHIFT PASSES UNEVENTFULLY. At noon, Pablo takes the risk of having lunch at the Point du Jour. After all, he reasons, he personally has nothing to fear, and perhaps he’ll find a way to talk with Dubois and ask him to withdraw his complaint against Leandro. But the proprietor is not in, because he’s already found a replacement for the Argentine: a quiet, ethereal Japanese waiter who floats between the tables like the shadow of a samurai. Pablo tries to convince some of the patrons to go talk to Dubois, and they all appear ready to help the young Argentine, who is well liked by the clientele. But when he proposes that they should take up a collection to mollify the elderly proprietor, they all turn their attention back to their meals.