“Very good, but what we don’t know is if the thing is ready in other parts of the peninsula, especially Catalonia,” says the ever-cautious Juan Riesgo.
“Indeed,” Naveira concedes, “and that’s why we need to wait until the telegram comes giving the green light for the incursion.”
“Clearly,” Max agrees. “I suppose it will be a coded telegram.”
“Of course,” confirms Riesgo. “And the less people who know the key, the better.”
After a discussion that protracts until stomachs start to groan, it is agreed to abandon the plan to send three emissaries for the time being, because now they have an idea of the situation on the other side of the border. Provided that Max is telling the truth, of course. Because although the majority of them succumb to the charms of this curious revolutionary disguised as an aristocrat, not everyone trusts him. Including Pablo, who doesn’t miss a detail of what El Señorito says and does, trying to remember where he has seen that face, observed that demeanor, heard that velvety voice before. And so it is that, instead of going to eat with Robinsón, Leandro, and Julianín (sorry, Julián), he mingles into the group surrounding Max, which also includes the four gamblers from Villalpando and the curious pair formed by the toothless Perico Alarco and the deaf-mute Manolito Monzón, who hope to cash in on El Señorito’s aristocratic airs. But they are quite mistaken, as he not only takes them to eat at a wretched shack, but he won’t even pay for cigars. But then, after a few glasses, he offers to take them to a portside brothel with an outlandish wager, improper for a man in a silk scarf and top hat:
“I’ll pay for a whore for any man who’s got a bigger one than me.”
Some of them cheer at the notion and follow him out, who knows whether out of confidence they’ll win the bet or spurred by the dark presentiment that this could be the last chance they have to embrace a woman. Pablo lets himself be dragged along with the group, more obsessed with trying to remember that turquoise gaze and velvety voice than with attending to venereal urges.
The brothel is a nondescript establishment located on the far side of the port of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, classier than one might think, frequented by melancholic sailors and traveling salesmen, workers from the nearby Portland cement factory, and police on their rounds. From outside, visitors can perceive the lattices of the wide windows with their slats discreetly lowered. Entering the vestibule, which stinks of camphor, the building’s elderly porter has them wait a few minutes, because there is a respectable client coming down the stairs at this very moment, who doesn’t want to be seen by anyone. He also informs them that guns are not allowed upstairs, and Max gives him his pistol, setting an example for the others, although apart from him, the only one who’s armed is Casiano Veloso, one of the Villalpando clan, who reluctantly hands over his Browning. When an electric bell sounds, the old porter allows them in, pocketing a gratuity from Max. The group of some ten-odd revolutionaries flock up the stairs, dazzled by such decadence, accustomed as they are to the bedbug-infested bordellos of old Spain or the Parisian quartier chinois.
Upstairs, they are welcomed by Madame Alix, an obligatory coquettish mole painted on her upper lip, who greets them with a panache that would inspire envy in many a queen, giving Max a wink of complicity as if he were an old friend. She invites them into a shadowy salon, where a handful of half-naked young women are mingling with clients who are drinking beer and covering their crotches with their hats as they try to decide which one they will take. Madame Alix seats the group around a large table at the back of the room and pops a bottle of champagne on the house. The revolutionaries, unaccustomed to such luxuries, receive the generosity with hurrahs and kisses, and empty the champagne within a few minutes drinking straight from the bottle. Max takes a few condoms from the pocket of his blazer and offers them to the others, but most of them refuse, despite El Señorito’s arguments that they are made of latex and not lambskin, that they are the only sure way to avoid syphilis, and that this is the latest model from Bell & Croyden, one of London’s top brands. But indifference or ignorance carry the day and, one by one, the incautious revolutionaries let themselves be dragged away by the ladies, most of whom are French but some of whom are Antillean mulattas, probably from the French overseas territories, who strut their exuberant exoticism with colonial pride. One of them appears to be sending Pablo insinuating looks from the next table, where she is seated between the legs of a boxer-looking chap with whom she ends up disappearing, but not without locking her gorgeous almandine eyes with those of the disconcerted typesetter. There is also a Spanish girl, from Guadix, with peroxide-blond hair in the latest fashion, who makes up for her paucity of teeth by flaunting her Andalusian charm among the tables, and finally snags the toothless Perico, perhaps drawn together by their symmetry of gaps.
After a short while, the only ones left at the table are Max, Pablo, Casiano Veloso (with his musketeer’s mane neatly parted and bags under his quarrelsome eyes), and Anastasio Duarte (a sideways-looking man from Cáceres, former chairman of the United Syndicate of San Sebastián, from which he was expelled for being constantly drunk).
“What are you waiting for, boys?” asks El Señorito, lighting a Khedive cigarette, one of his many snobbish habits. “You’re not fairies, are you?” And he lets out a raucous laugh that brings Pablo to the brink of remembering where he has seen him before.
“On the contrary,” replies Casiano Veloso, a bit offended, “what I’m hoping for is some free pussy.”
“Me too,” adds Anastasio.
“Oh, my little devils,” Max muses, half-smiling, and he gestures with his hand to catch Madame Alix’s attention. “What about you?” he asks Pablo, staring steadily into his eyes. And the typesetter is again just at the brink of remembrance, but his memory fails him at the last moment and hunkers down in some corner of his hippocampus.
“Heh? No, I’ll pass,” he says, as if he were playing poker.
And the others observe him with quizzical eyes, thinking maybe a fairy has slipped in with them after all. But before anyone can say anything, Madame Alix arrives to save Pablo from their hazing. El Señorito whispers something in the madam’s ear, and she silently nods and gestures for them to follow her. Max, Casiano, and Anastasio stand up, leaving Pablo seated at the table.
“Sure you don’t want to play?” El Señorito asks laconically before he leaves the room, obscenely caressing his cane’s mother-of-pearl handle.
Pablo merely nods his head, as he watches the trio depart with Madame Alix, who gestures to a few of her girls to join the group. The party disappears through a scarlet curtain on the other end of the room, and the former typesetter of La Fraternelle remains for a few minutes wavering, trying to fight off the obsession that has been tormenting him ever since he first saw Max this morning in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, because there is no greater torture than the feeling of a remembrance that grazes the memory, yet refuses to crystallize in it. But you’re not really going to give up, are you, Pablito, just when you’ve almost remembered? Consider this: the best way to get rid of an obsession is to dive straight into it, so let the alcohol carry you away, get up and walk toward the scarlet curtain, you still have time to lift up your head and see the three men cross through the double-framed door at the end of the hallway, preceded by as many half-naked young women.
Madame Alix closes the door from the outside and disappears down a stairwell at the end of the hallway, leaving it empty and in shadows. Pablo abandons his refuge behind the curtain and enters the hallway, flanked on both sides by thick doors that do not quite stifle the moans and sighs. He stealthily makes his way toward the last room. And as though in a novel by the Marquis de Sade, he crouches and peers through the keyhole at the obscene scene inside. But he only has time to see three male backsides in a row and hear a chorus of female laughter at the curious competition of weights and measures, because suddenly he hears at his back a soft Caribbean voice, very much like Angela’s when she would put on her Cuban accent:
“
What are you doing down there on the floor, my child?”
Pablo stands up, surprised, and turning, discovers that the reprimand comes from the young mestiza who had been giving him the eye in the salon and whom he had assumed was a native of Guadeloupe or Martinique.
“Come here, sweetheart, and stop snooping in other people’s business.”
Pablo can barely put up a fight as she pushes him into the room across the hall. This room is decorated with dubious taste, darkened with flower-print curtains, a motif repeated on the bedspread and on the upholstery of the chaise longue, as well as that of the easy chair next to the bed. The floor is covered with a fringed rug, and a clock on the wall appears to mark the rhythm of fleeting amours. Under the bed, although Pablo cannot see it, there is a washbasin for intimate hygiene. But the surprised revolutionary does not have time to amuse himself admiring the landscape, because the mestiza has already tumbled him into bed, with no more warning than a wink rehearsed a thousand times, and has started to strip off his clothes, after removing her peach-colored satin knickers. Her teeth glow white in the darkness, and her generous breasts oscillate arhythmically as she removes Pablo’s boots, with him barely participating in the operation.
“But, my love, you have to do your part, I can’t do it all by myself,” says the Cuban girl, not losing her good humor, as she removes his trousers. As she tosses them on the flowered armchair, a few francs tumble out of the pockets and scatter on the carpet. “Don’t worry, sweetie, I’ll give them all back to you,” she whispers in his ear as she removes his shirt, revealing his good luck amulet. “My goodness, what are you doing with this peeper around your neck?”
The crystal eye stares steadily at the young woman, who is spellbound by its greenish light.
“It’s my good luck amulet,” says Pablo, opening his mouth for the first time.
The girl presses her lips to Pablo’s and kisses him with the kisses of her mouth, as if in an impious version of the Song of Songs. When their mouths separate, the amulet is around her neck and the crystal eye appears to have found lodging between her breasts. No, it’s not magic or enchantment, it’s the art of the street, studied under the tutelage of Master Hunger and Mistress Poverty.
Then, hypnotized by the glass eye swinging to and fro with the Cuban girl’s thrusting, Pablo’s body starts to abandon him, loosening up until he completely loses all notion of time and space. Then, without knowing how much time has passed, he returns little by little to reality.
“Well, well, kid,” the girl’s distant, quiet voice reaches him. “No one’s ever fallen asleep on me like that before. How old are you, my sweet?”
“How old do you think?” Pablo answers with a question, still a bit groggy.
“No more than twenty-five, you must be a child of the Cuban War, like me. Want some, love?” she asks, showing him a small Moroccan leather case containing a small bottle and a hypodermic syringe.
It is then that Pablo finally sees the light that he’s been looking for all day: his mind does a backflip to the past, bangs against the walls of the tunnel of time, and lands fifteen years ago in the city of Barcelona, during the violent events of the Tragic Week. In a fraction of a second he sees churches burning. He sees people running and screaming. He sees people dead on the barricades. And he also sees himself, barely nineteen years of age, hiding on a rooftop and refusing the morphine offered by a syndicalist with turquoise blue eyes, a sculptor with a velvety voice and thin fingers going by the name of Emilio Ferrer, who will turn out to be a police informant. The same eyes, the same voice and the same hands as this man who now goes by the name of Max Hernández, “El Señorito,” and uses Bell & Croyden condoms.
Pablo leaps out of bed and runs from the room without putting on his pants, before the dumbstruck gaze of the Cuban girl, who is surprised by her client’s sudden burst of energy. Pablo bounds across the hallway and opens the opposite door, provoking screams from the three girls inside, twisted between the bodies of Casiano Veloso and Anastasio Duarte.
“What the fuck is going on?” asks Casiano, his eyes all glassy. “Don’t you see you’re frightening the ladies?”
“Where’s Max?” asks Pablo.
“Why? Has the revolution started, or what?”
“Where is he?” Pablo insists.
“He left.”
“What do you mean he left? Where?”
“How should I know, buddy? I’m not his mother,” responds Casiano, returning his attention to the plump blonde in his clutches. “Come on, relax and enjoy yourself with us, there’s enough to go around.”
But Pablo is in no mood to party.
“You’re sure he didn’t say where he was going?”
Neither man answers.
“And you didn’t ask him anything?”
Again, silence.
“What a couple of idiots,” Pablo mutters as he leaves the room and goes back for his pants. But the beautiful mulatto girl has disappeared, not without taking her fee in the form of the francs scattered on the floor, and, by way of gratuity, the crystal eye, the good luck amulet that has accompanied Pablo for over fifteen years.
“Shit!” he exclaims, putting on his pants in a hurry.
He returns to the salon, gathers up his overcoat and beret, and runs down the stairs, surprising the sleeping elderly doorman. When he emerges into the street, night has fallen, and there is no sign of El Señorito.
“Shit!” Pablo howls again, and he doesn’t even know that Anastasio Duarte has told Max the telegram key in exchange for an injection of cocaine.
XI
(1909)
HE WOKE UP TO SHOUTS OF “Long live this year’s conscripts!” He looked at the wall clock hanging on the glass door of the director’s office, the same door through which the plump Obdulia had led him years before to steal his virginity: it was a quarter past seven in the morning. He went out on to the balcony and saw a group of young men walking toward the Plaza Mayor amid songs and jokes, trying with booze-soaked revelry to exorcise the dire future that awaited more than one of them.
The night before, after leaving Madam Crow’s inn, Pablo had headed for Calle Zamora looking for Ferdinando Fernández. But halfway there he realized it was Saturday, and that there would probably be no one at the office, because the law prescribing a weekly day of rest had been adopted by some newspapers, including El Castellano, which no longer came out on Sundays. So he stopped in a cantina to fill his stomach with a bland, reheated stew. It was there that he read the letter from his mother, who lamented her son’s absence during the Christmas holiday, and the letter from the newspaper, informing him that he had been fired for missing work with no excuse; and also the form letter from the City of Salamanca, convening him to the lottery slated to take place the next day. Just what I needed, thought Pablo, crossing his fingers in the hope that destiny, for once, would cut him some slack.
The Constitution of 1876 had decreed mandatory conscription for all Spanish lads (an obligation lasting a mere twelve years: three years of active service plus nine more in the reserves), but not all young men were condemned to leave their families in their nineteenth springtime, since the government set a quota for recruiting for each province, and it was the infamous lottery that determined who would be chosen. There were also other options to get out of recruiting (not counting more drastic measures such as fleeing or mutilating oneself): to start, almost anyone under five foot three was excluded, as well as anyone suffering from any disease or physical defect that would prevent him from fulfilling God’s command to protect his sacred homeland. However, Pablo’s anosmia was not on the list of pardoning disorders, and although he had still not entirely recovered from the bullet wound, that too would not get him out of service. It would have been easier to claim that he was the son of a widowed mother and the only support for his family, but the time had already passed for such excuses. Of course, he also didn’t have the money to afford the so-called “metallic exemption,” the legal bribe that well-heeled lads used
to dodge their obligations, so legal in fact that it was even announced the same day on page 3 of El Castellano, as Pablo could read on a copy in the cantina: Previsión Andaluza (a simplified shares corporation specializing in credit and insurance) offered parents a military exemption for their sons, for the modest price of eight hundred pesetas, with no hidden costs, to be rendered in two, three, or four payments.
“Sons of bitches,” murmured Pablo, feeling the revolutionary blood rush to his head.
And he wasn’t the only one thinking that way, as he would soon discover. He paid for his dinner with the little money he still had, and set out for the office where he had worked for the last five years, with the remote hope of finding Ferdinando. Someone had taken the sign down from the door, but he could see light in the writing room, so he tapped gently on the door with his curled middle finger.
“It’s open!” shouted an unmistakable voice.
Not even three months had passed since he had been there. However, Pablo felt like it had been an eternity: the furniture was in the same place, and so were the spittoons, and even the stuffed owl was still watching over the room from its corner with the same undaunted look as ever, but he had the impression that a patina of time had covered everything. Ferdinando himself, alone and bent over the typewriter, appeared to have put on a few years. It must have been the effect of surviving by a miracle; returning from the gates of Hell, the world always looks different.
“I’ll be damned!” exclaimed the journalist as Pablo entered, with the face of someone who has just seen a ghost. “Come to my arms, boy, so I can see that you’re flesh and blood.” And he began to palpate Pablo’s body as if frisking a thief. “We heard you were dead.”
“Well, now you see I’m not—” smiled the revenant.
The Anarchist Who Shared My Name Page 25