“Come closer,” he said when he saw his son, his voice threadbare, nearly inaudible. Apparently, he had been waiting for Pablo’s arrival to die, because he only had time to stroke his hair, leaving his final sentence half-said: “Don’t forget …”
Pablo bit his knuckles so hard that his mouth filled with blood. The killers’ lawyer said at court that they had been driven to crime by hunger. The two wretches had gone five days without eating when they lost their senses and assaulted the inspector. From that point forward, hunger became Pablo’s worst enemy, and Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread became the book he lived by. Two months after the tragedy, María and Julia moved back to Baracaldo, but Pablo remained in Salamanca (now more than ever the city of death) and quickly came into contact with the anarchist and syndicalist groups of the area, feeling that he was honoring his father’s memory with an increasingly fervent ideological commitment. He moved out of the apartment he’d been living in, which was too large and expensive for him alone, and rented a room near the university, in a guesthouse full of stuffy students, run by an irritable old lady popularly known as “Madam Crow.”
His ideological commitment evolved into anarchist activism, and in early 1907 he was arrested for vandalizing the local cathedral with the iconic words of Josiah Warren: “Every man should be his own government, his own law, his own church.” This arrest very nearly cost Pablo his job at El Castellano, where he had been emptying fewer wastebaskets and covering more stories, filling fewer inkwells and correcting more errata with each passing week. Luckily, thanks to Ferdinando’s intervention, he managed to keep the job, with a serious warning: at the first sign of any more hijinks, he’d be out in the street.
But Pablo was not ready to give up his ideals, neither in politics nor in love. So, while his mouth filled with terms like “direct action,” “self-determination,” and “propaganda of the deed,” his heart kept on drinking from the same source: the letters Angela sent him twice a month, which she lovingly perfumed even though she knew Pablo was unable to enjoy the scent. And even though they hadn’t seen each other since that farewell so long ago at the train station in Béjar, the exchange of correspondence was so intense that they were convinced that sooner or later they’d be able to resume their relationship as if no time had passed. Sometimes, they made plans for their future; Pablo fantasized about traveling the world on a honeymoon, and Angela told him that she no longer wanted to be a spelunker, but an anthropologist, and that they would go off to live together in Africa, or America, or Oceania, where she would study the customs of the Jivaros or the cannibals. His correspondence with Robinsón was also regular in the beginning, but was interrupted when Robinsón made good on his pledge to run away from home and struck out on a life of wandering from village to village, all over Spain, sending letters and postcards with no return address, to which Pablo could not reply. On the last one he sent, Robinsón announced his intention to become a vegetarian for good and join a naturist commune on the Catalan coast, where he was planning to be isolated from the rest of the world until further notice.
Between one thing and another, Pablo turned eighteen years old, let his beard grow, and took to smoking cigarettes, holding them between his ring and middle fingers, with a somewhat dandyish affectation. One day he looked at himself in the mirror and felt like an adult, enough of an adult to start a family. Being an anarchist is one thing, he said to himself, but being a proponent of free love is something else altogether. So he wrote a letter to Angela asking for her hand in marriage. He didn’t specify that his idea was to have a civil wedding, an aberration that Pius IX had decried as concubinage, but the details could wait. He awaited her response with a certain nervousness; a week went by, then another, and then another, and still he had received no reply. Pablo blamed the postal service and wrote another letter, again bringing up the question of marriage. And this time he did receive an answer, though not from Angela, but from Don Diego Gómez, ex-lieutenant colonel of the Spanish army in the distant war overseas. They were barely five lines of elegant calligraphy, but they cut like a mugger’s knife:
Señor Martín,
I don’t know if your father (God rest his soul) taught you such manners, but before making a marriage proposal to my daughter Angela, you should have spoken with me. Know this: I already have plans for her marriage, quite different from those you propose. Therefore, I ask, nay, I demand that you stop importuning her with your letters. I hope I have made myself abundantly clear.
Sincerely,
Don Diego Gómez Arqués
Pablo spent three sleepless nights trying to convince himself that Angela’s wishes had nothing to do with her father’s plans. At his most delirious, he imagined her sequestered high in a tower, waiting for her vampire to come rescue her. At dawn on the fourth day, he sent a telegram to El Castellano, announcing that he would be taking his first vacation in four years. Then he went to the train station and bought a ticket for Béjar, prepared to kidnap Angela if necessary. Even if he had to face the whole Spanish navy.
He was welcomed by a sky rippling with big black clouds portending storm or disaster. The birds were practically skimming the ground in nervous, erratic flight. Between the station and the Gómez house, Pablo passed several familiar faces, but no one returned his greeting, as though the four years since his last visit had rendered him invisible or or as though his sparse beard had formed a mask impenetrable to those who remembered him with the smooth face of an adolescent. Whatever it was, feeling more estranged than ever, he arrived at Calle Flamencos and rapped with conviction on the Gómez’s front door. But the only answer was silence. When he was getting ready to knock again, he heard a voice behind him:
“I wouldn’t insist if I were you.”
Don Veremundo Olaya, Robinsón’s father, was avidly puffing on a pipe and smiling sadly.
“I almost don’t recognize you, Pablo. How you’ve changed.”
“For the better, I hope, Don Veremundo,” he replied, returning the bitter smile. “Why shouldn’t I insist?”
“Because tempers have been a bit unsettled in the Gómez family lately. And it seems to me that you’ve had quite a bit to do with it. Come, let’s go inside, don’t keep standing there.”
The inn was the same as ever, with its arthritic wooden stairs that complained at every step and the large oak table dominating the dining room, the same table that had hosted their improvised Christmas dinner ten years before.
“You know how the old Colonel is,” Don Vermundo continued, “when he gets an idea in his head, no one can shake him from it—”
“When ideas are unjust, they are defeated by facts,” Pablo interjected, sounding like an anarchist pamphlet.
“You’ll see what you’ll do, but be careful. Don Diego Gómez is not to be trifled with. He wants to marry Angela to her cousin Rodrigo …”
Pablo felt those words like a deadly blade poised to pierce his chest. Fortunately, as Don Veremundo finished his thought, the sword changed course at the last second:
“But she flatly refuses to accept the marriage. She says that her heart is already promised.”
The deadly blade transformed into a gentle lambskin caress, and Pablo could not suppress the proud smile of a winning suitor.
“Don’t get your hopes up too high,” warned the innkeeper, more versed in such battles, “Don Diego has locked her up in her room until she comes to her senses. The poor thing has been shut in there for weeks now.”
“That son of a bitch,” muttered Pablo between clenched teeth. “I’m going to talk to her right now.”
He left the inn and headed back to the Gómez house, against Don Veremundo Olaya’s warnings. If there was anything that could rile Pablo’s ire, it was injustice perpetrated by the strong against the weak.
“Open up! Open the door!” Pablo shouted over and over, pounding on the door with the brass knocker.
He finally heard the voices of Angela’s parents talking in the hallway. Then he heard a slap an
d the sound of footsteps going up the stairs. When the door opened, its aperture held the silhouette of Don Diego Gómez’s imposing figure, which stepped out into the street preceded by the menacing eye of a Remington shotgun brought over from Cuba.
“If you don’t leave this place right now,” he said in a tone you might expect from a defeated old ex-colonel, “I’ll buy you a ticket to the other side.”
Pablo didn’t budge, so Diego pointed the rifle between his eyes.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“It doesn’t take much of a man to make a girl suffer,” Pablo wanted to say, but his brain was going a thousand miles an hour, which always happened to him in times of danger, and the words that came out of his mouth were quite different:
“Don’t be that way, Don Diego,” he said, stepping back and putting his hands in the air, “I only came to tell you that I’m giving up on my proposal to your daughter. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
He spun on his heels and ran to the station, where he boarded the next train for Salamanca and, making sure that everyone around would hear him, he shouted goodbye to Béjar: “May we never meet again, you foul city!”
But Pablo had no intention of going very far. At the next stop, he discreetly exited the train and made his way back to Béjar on foot. When he arrived, night was coming on and it was getting quite cold. He turned up the collar of the old Sherlock Holmes raincoat Ferdinando had given him after Mateo Morral’s attack and took a detour to Veremundo’s inn to avoid walking in front of Angela’s house. He waited until the dead of night, then knocked softly on the door of the inn. When Robinsón’s father saw him appear again, he shook his head and said, “As stubborn as your father, may his soul in hell forgive me. Come on then, inside with you, you’re going to freeze out there.”
“Do you have any rooms free tonight?” Pablo asked, taking a bill from his pocket.
“Keep your money, son. Roberto would give me hell if he found out I took it. You can stay in his room. You know he ran away from home, right?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s not speak of it again. Just understand that I take no responsibility for what happens to you now.”
After dining with Robinsón’s parents, Pablo went to bed early, or at least pretended to. In reality, he didn’t even undress. When the midnight bells rang from San Juan Bautista’s, he got out of bed and stealthily left the room, lighting his way with the stub of a candle.
The attic was just as he remembered it, although it did seem smaller, as if it had been shrinking with the passing of the years. The decrepit old trunk was still sleeping in the corner, but it was no longer necessary to drag it over to the skylight: Pablo could easily poke his head out the window without even having to stand on tiptoes. He pushed the window open with a squeak, and discovered that the last thing lost is not hope, but habit: Angela still slept with the light on. He couldn’t see into her room because of the closed curtains, but he thought he detected a shadow moving from one side of the room to the other, despite the late hour. He didn’t know if she had been informed that he was in town, but in all likelihood his knocking and shouting had reached her room. No lock or key in the world can stop love from crossing a jail cell’s walls, Pablo thought, paraphrasing Bakunin, who had less carnal forms of love in mind. Carried by this thought, he pushed the upper half of his body through the window and whispered as loud as he could:
“Psst, Angela!”
But the only reply was the stirring of the wind, which penetrated into the loft and snuffed out his candle.
“Angela, it’s me, Pablo …”
Barely four yards separated one building from the other, but a whole world seemed to be intent on keeping them apart. I wish I really were a vampire, thought Pablo, so I could fly over to your room. Then, as if that thought were the password to the door of Ali Baba, the light in Angela’s room suddenly went dark, and the window hinges creaked. Leaning out of the skylight, Pablo held his breath. In the darkness he could make out the sparkling of those eyes he had spent so many years imagining in dreams.
“Pablo …” whispered Angela.
“Angela …” whispered Pablo.
A shiver ran down his spine.
“How did you …” she tried to ask, somewhat upset.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he tried to respond, his voice faltering.
The shiver turned to a choking feeling.
“I can hardly see you,” she said, reaching out her arm.
“Same here,” he said.
An angel passed through the alley as the two youths tried to discern the outlines of each other’s faces.
“I’m going to turn on the light,” said Angela, “so we can see each other better.”
“Won’t that be dangerous?”
“Not at all. I always sleep with the light on,” she said as she disappeared. When she returned to the newly lit window, she said, “Hey, you look good with a beard.”
“So do you,” Pablo replied.
“I look good with a beard too?” she teased.
“Yeah, I mean, no. Eh—you know what I mean,” he said, his blush imperceptible in the faint light.
A second angel passed through the alleyway, even slower than the first.
“Pablo,” Angela finally broke the silence, her voice trembling.
“What?”
“How far are you prepared to go for me?”
The inspector’s son contemplated for a moment before answering:
“To infinity.”
“Alright then. Get me out of here, in the name of all you hold dear, and let’s run away together as far as we can get from here, to Africa, or to America.”
“You know what I’ve been dreaming about these last few days?” Pablo asked.
“No, what?” sighed Angela.
“That you were a princess trapped in a tower and that I was coming to rescue you. It seems I wasn’t too far off.”
“And what happened?”
“When?”
“In the dream, dummy. Did you rescue me, or not?”
“I don’t know. Every time I woke up just when we were about to climb out the window.”
“Well then, this time we’d better wait a little longer before we wake up,” said Angela firmly. “I can’t handle it here anymore, this town, this family, this life. I want to go away from here, Pablo, and I want to go with you.”
“Alright,” he said, noticing that his mind was starting to run at a thousand miles an hour again. “Wait a minute.”
Pablo stepped away from the skylight and relit his candle. His eyes scanned the attic like a tiger in search of prey. His heart started racing when he found what he was looking for: in a corner, covered with dust and time, a pile of planks appeared to be languishing in exile. Trying to make as little noise as possible, he dragged one of these long beams into the light, leaned it against the windowsill, and poked his head through the window again.
“Angela,” he whispered.
“Yes?”
“I’m going to try to reach your window, but I’m going to need your help.”
“Are you crazy?”
“No, listen. I found a plank I can use as a bridge. It’s in good shape and it’s long enough, but it’s very heavy.”
“And what do you want to do?”
“I’m going to push it over from here, but it’ll reach a point where I won’t be able to hold it any more. Then you’ll have to lean out and grab the other end of the plank. You got it?”
“Yes.”
“Alright. Here goes.”
Pablo stepped away from the skylight and picked up the other end of the beam, pushing it with both hands. The sill creaked with the friction, and Angela bit her nails, her heart in a knot, fearing that the noise would wake her parents. The plank was now resting on its midpoint like a scale. There were still two yards to go, and it was growing more and more difficult. Angela reached out her arms, and Pablo kept pushing, straining more and more, the weight increasing expone
ntially with every inch gained. Finally, when he couldn’t push anymore, he had to hang from the beam to keep it from crashing down to the street. But there was no going back, it was only a matter of time before his strength would give out and the plank would slip from his fingers. Just then, he felt the weight subside: it could only mean that Angela had caught the other end! He tried pushing again, and again the sill creaked loudly.
“A little further,” he heard Angela whisper.
After a final effort, all the weight of the plank was supported. Pablo put his head through the skylight and could see Angela’s broad smile illuminating the night: they had done it. Now all he had to do was cross this narrow wooden bridge suspended above the abyss.
“I’ll come across,” said Pablo.
“Wouldn’t it be better if I went that way?” Angela replied.
“Are you crazy? What if you fall?”
“What if you fall?”
“It was my idea. I should take the risk. If I find out that it’s safe, then we can both cross back to this side.”
“Wait a second,” said Angela, disappearing from the window.
When she reappeared, Pablo asked, “What did you do?”
“Nothing, I just blocked the door with a chair.”
The two youths stared at each other in the darkness, perhaps thinking that this was a more exciting game than hinque or hopscotch. And a much more dangerous one, of course.
“Hold it tight on that end,” said Pablo, clambering up onto the windowsill.
“Pablo …” whispered Angela.
“What?” he said as he sat astride the plank and hugged it like a koala.
“Be careful.”
“You got it,” he said, and he started inching his way across the expanse, hugging the beam.
But Angela had not finished her sentence:
“Because if you fall, I’m going to follow you.”
More pressure on poor Pablo.
The Anarchist Who Shared My Name Page 18