“It’s about time, Roberto!” blurts Luís Naveira, one of the few people who call Robinsón by his real name. “We thought something had happened to you, for Christ’s sake!”
“What’s going on?”
“The goddamn telegram arrived, man.”
And the four young men’s hearts all skip a beat. Even Kropotkin starts wagging his tail compulsively.
“Come on, let’s get away from here,” suggests Santillán, the former civil guardsman. “We’re drawing too much attention.”
The sky has started to fill with dark clouds, and the posse starts off in a hurry toward La Nivelle golf course, though nobody feels like singing this time. Some of them talk in small groups, but in quiet voices, as though at a funeral or trying not to bother an ailing elder. Others walk in silence, rendered mute by the knots in their stomachs or by who knows what pangs of conscience, such as Casiano Veloso and Anastasio Duarte, who sometimes look over at Pablo with eyes full of resentment, perhaps remembering his sudden outburst at the brothel. When they finally arrive at the golf course, the men unleash their passions and begin shouting at one another.
“Calm down, my friends!” Juan Riesgo pleads in vain.
“Silence, Goddammit!” howls Gil Galar, more corpse-like than ever.
It takes a portentious thunderclap to momentarily quiet their spirits.
“Friends,” shouts Luís Naveira, taking the floor, flanked by the other members of the Group of Thirty and Santillán, the eldest man present, “it’s been three days since most of us arrived from Paris, where we left our homes, our jobs, and even our families. Others have come from Bayonne, Biarritz, or Bordeaux, making God knows what sacrifices. And those of you who live here in Saint-Jean-de-Luz have welcomed us and let us sleep alongside your wives and children. But the moment of truth has finally come, my brothers. The time has come to see if all this sacrifice was worth it. The time has come to cross the border and liberate Spain from the yoke of dictatorship!”
“Hear hear! Down with the dictatorship!” some shout.
“Down with the monarchy!” others roar.
“¡Viva la revolución!” the most excited blurt out.
“The situation is,” Naveira continues when the voices die down, “the telegram we were waiting for finally arrived this morning in Paris, and from there the Committee has sent it along to us and to our comrades in Perpignan.”
A nervous murmur spreads among the revolutionaries.
“In fact,” El Portugués continues, “the comrades who had stayed in Paris are going to take the train down this afternoon. Most of them will go to Perpignan, because we expect to need more reinforcements in Catalonia. But a few will arrive here tonight around dawn, including Durruti.”
“So,” someone asks, “are we going to have to wait around with our thumbs up our asses until they get here?”
“Right, that’s what we’ve come here to discuss,” replies Juan Riesgo. “I’m in favor of waiting for Durruti and the rest, because though there won’t be many of them, it seems they’re bringing some rifles.”
“But it’s also possible that they’ll never arrive, if they’re discovered with the contraband,” argues Bonifacio Manzanedo, the affable explosives expert from Burgos.
“I think the best thing to do is cross the border as soon as possible,” opines Gil Galar, always eager to make a display of his courage.
“Yes, but with what weapons?” asks one of the contingent from Paris. “Nobody’s even given me a damn handgun yet. What am I supposed to do, start the revolution with my dick?”
Murmurs of agreement.
“Calm down, brothers,” says Naveira, searching the faces of Juan Riesgo and Julián Santillán for approval, knowing that yesterday they traveled to Bordeaux to pick up a trunk full of guns, courtesy of the Spanish Syndicate. “There will be pistols for everyone who knows how to use one, whether or not we ultimately receive the rifles from Paris. We’ll distribute them before we set off, and also ammunition, though I understand that some of you are already armed. Then, once we are in Spain, it won’t be difficult to get our hands on more weapons, especially if the military is in rebellion, as Max said—”
“Of course,” Pablo interjects, unsure whether or not to make his suspicions known, “why isn’t Max here with us?”
“He took the night train to San Sebastián last night,” Naveira informs him. “Right, Bonifacio?”
“Right,” says the man from Burgos. “I ran into him on the street by the train station. He said he prefers to wait for us in Spain, and that once the conflict breaks out it will be more difficult to cross the border by train. Because, of course, he can’t cross the mountains on foot, with his heart condition …”
Another thunderclap booms overhead, as if the sky were growing impatient with all of this hemming and hawing. But revolution is not something that can be taken lightly, and the men who have convened at the golf course are not about to take a rain check when the future of Spain hangs in the balance. So they keep discussing for a good while, despite the drops that begin to fall. When they finally finish their deliberations, a vote is taken by show of hands. And the result is indisputable: only Juan Riesgo and a handful of other men are in favor of waiting until dawn for the arrival of reinforcements from Paris. The rest, including the leaders of the expedition, vote to depart immediately for the border. After all, if the revolution has started, there is no time to lose.
“So let’s meet up again in a couple of hours,” proposes Naveira. “Right here. Those who voted to wait for the group coming from Paris, you can take orders from Juan. For the rest, take advantage of this time to get some rest or eat something if you haven’t yet, because it’s going to be a tough crossing. Don’t fill up your bag with nonsense, pack only what’s necessary. If you’ve got a gun, bring it. Do bring maps, compasses, flashlights, first aid kits. Courage, my brothers!”
And so, without further ado, the revolutionaries return to the village to gather up their belongings and eat something before departing, although many of them have a knot in their stomachs that makes eating difficult. In an even more nervous state than usual, Pablo, Robinsón, Leandro, and Julián, led by Kropotkin, walk toward the cemetery in silence, each thinking about his own worries. Once they reach the crypt keeper’s hut, they set about packing their bags and suitcases, trying to pack only what is essential for the project of the revolution.
“Let’s not forget the broadsides,” Robinsón reminds Pablo.
“Or the tobacco,” Leandro adds, ever the pragmatist.
However, since everyone has a different idea of what is essential, they end up packing a little of everything: personal documents, passports, and birth certificates; coin purses, billfolds, and wallets; switchblades and double-bladed knives; hip flask, cigarette case, matches, and a lighter (Leandro); underwear, sandals, pocket handkerchiefs, undershirts, a leather belt, a waistcoat (Robinsón); a silk scarf (Leandro); a pair of suspenders and a metal shoehorn (Julián); as well as hygiene items: combs, a small mirror, a bar of Heno de Pravia soap, pocket scissors, a shaving kit, a towel, and even a tube of perfumed pomade for hairstyling (Julián); an umbrella, a canteen, and personal items such as photographs, letters, notebooks, a pencil from the German brand Staedtler (Leandro), a Parker writing pen (Pablo), a pocket watch, chain missing (Julián); a tenth share in a lottery ticket from the French National Lottery of the eleventh of July (Leandro); etc. etc. etc.
Pablo is the first to finish packing his backpack, and he sits next to the fire to wait for the others. As he observes them, he realizes that at thirty-four years he is the oldest of the group: Robinsón is a year younger, Leandro is coming up on twenty-five, and Julián is still Julianín, having recently completed his eighteenth springtime. Actually, except for El Maestro and the ex-civil guardsman Santillán, Pablo must be one of the oldest of the whole expedition. And suddenly a fear enters him, a vague fear, a foreboding: something tells him that, if things go wrong, being one of the seniors of the group will not
exactly work in his favor. Unconsciously, he lifts his hand to his chest, where his lucky eye should be, and not finding it, his fear grows even more acute. Then, while the others finish packing, he takes out his passport and his Parker pen and, with the subtle, precise stroke of a publishing professional, draws a tail on the zero of the year of his birth, and as if by magic his birth date changes from 1890 to 1899. Not even Han van Meegeren, the up-and-coming counterfeiter of paintings who will soon sell a fake Vermeer to Hitler’s very own lieutenant, Hermann Goering, would have done better. This is no exaggeration, because tomorrow no one will realize the trick, unlike what will happen with other, sloppier revolutionaries.
“Robin,” says Pablo after completing his artwork, “what year were you born?”
“Ninety-one,” the other responds as he tries to close his kit bag.
“Give me your passport.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, trust me.”
And the one transforms into a seven, presto chango.
Having finished packing, the four friends eat a bit of bread and cheese, washed down with some sour wine that nevertheless manages to warm up their bodies and hearts. Except for Leandro’s, which is oozing sadness from both ventricles and both atria. When they are about to leave, backpacks hefted, the Argentinian says:
“Wait for me outside, I beg you.”
And in the solitude of what has been his dwelling since he met Antoinette, he tears a sheet from a notebook and, with his shiny Staedtler pencil, he draws a heart with an arrow through it. Underneath, he writes this terrible epigraph: “I’ll come back to find you when Spain is free.” And as a seal of love, a tear leaps to its death and serves as a signature.
Before leaving the shack, Leandro takes the photo of Antoinette from his left shirt pocket. This is the photo she gave him the first night they spent together. He lifts it toward the sky, like a priest with communion bread, and brings it to his lips to kiss it. Then he slides it back into his pocket, the image facing inward, and leaves the cabin. Outside, his three companions are waiting, and without saying a word, they set off in the rain.
XII
(1909)
WHEN PABLO ARRIVED THERE, BARCELONA WAS known as the “City of Bombs.” It had been steadily earning this nickname ever since the first device exploded in 1884, announcing the new strategy of anarchism’s radical wing: propaganda by the deed. A series of replicas of that inaugural blast shook the foundations of Catalan society, whose comfortable bourgeoisie was finally discovering the risks of a system that shamelessly rewards the powerful and punishes the powerless. Barcelona at the turn of the century had half a million inhabitants (half of whom were illiterate) and an economy based on industry and trade. But labor conditions tended to be subhuman: ten-year-old children working fifteen- or sixteen-hour days in dark, unsanitary factories at the miserable wage of one peseta a day. So the more rambunctious elements of the working class finally said enough is enough, it’s time we start answering exploitation with explosions, degradation with detonations. Dit i fet.
After a long decade of attacks against the army, the church, and the Rossinian bourgeoisie, the authorities tried to patch up the matter, and almost succeeded with the so-called Trial of Montjuic, which the European press followed with enormous interest between 1896 and 1898: four hundred anarchists (or scapegoats, who cares?) were detained, fifty exiled, twenty incarcerated, and five ended up walking the steps to the garrote. The subsequent lull in violence was only an illusion; while it’s true that for a moment no more bombs went off in Barcelona, when they finally started again they did so with a vengeance, to the point that Antoni Gaudí ended up paying homage to the very popular Orsini bomb (that spherical, spiked explosive used by Mateo Morral and named in honor of the Italian anarchist who attacked Napoleon III) by placing a replica in the claws of the pisciform demon trying to seduce a worker on the rosary chapel of the Sagrada Familia. In fact, when Pablo arrived in Barcelona on March 12, 1909, the city was still reverberating with the echoes of the fifteen bombs that had exploded in the last week, and the controversial Rull case was still fresh in people’s minds—a case in which the authorities had executed an alleged anarchist accused of perpetrating several attacks, although in reality he was a police informant. The city’s psychosis had reached such a magnitude that a royal decree had suspended constitutional rights for more than six months, notwithstanding the claims of Anselmo Lorenzo, a leading figure in Spanish anarchism, who said that “It cannot be sustained that anarchist terrorism exists, because anarchism represents the most perfect ideal of peace and economics, which is to say love and justice.”
The antique Estación de Francia welcomed Pablo, who was coming from four days in Baracaldo with his mother and sister Julia, who had turned into a real lady, svelte and clever as a sphinx. But he was losing sleep over another woman, and he had no plans to give up until he found her. As he was leaving the station, an automobile nearly ran him down, and the driver shouted that he’d better be more careful if he wanted to live to old age. On reaching the other side of the street, the splendid sun shining in the sky compelled him to remove his coat, the same one Don Julián had worn as he traveled from town to town in Salamanca astride Lucero, and which he had just inherited at his mother’s insistence. He took a carefully folded paper from its inside pocket, and for the umpteenth time he reread what Ferdinando Fernández had written when they said goodbye at the office of El Castellano: “Abelardo Belmonte. Plaza Urquinaona, 10, 3 I.a.” It was the address of one of his cousins who lived and worked in Barcelona.
“He’s the black sheep of the family,” Ferdinando had told Pablo before embracing him for the last time and sliding a twenty-five-peseta bill into his pocket. “He’s still a kid—a bit, you know. Excitable. He’s declared himself an anarchist but I don’t know much more. But tell him what you wrote on the façade of the cathedral, and see if he doesn’t help you out.”
Now, following directions from a street vendor selling barquillos, Pablo was making his way through the construction work on what would become the Vía Layetana, and remembering the writer’s words, clutching the piece of paper like a drowning man clings to a life preserver. Fifteen minutes later, he found himself in an open square, full of trees and surrounded by imposing buildings.
“Pardon me, grandfather,” he said to an old man begging for alms, a black patch over his left eye, “Plaza Urquinaona?”
“You’re standing on it, my lad,” sighed the old man, and he shook the four coins he held in a coconut half-shell.
But you can’t squeeze blood from a stone. Pablo merely thanked the man and departed. Door number 10 was manned by a concierge with the look of a lion tamer, one of the lucky ones who had received a job thanks to the last wave of anarchist attacks, after which the authorities had decreed that all of the buildings in Barcelona had to have a doorman to ensure the safety of the residents and to chase off criminals, with fines of up to fifty pesetas for any house that failed to comply with the order. And truth be told, this animal tamer appeared ready to thrash the first hooligan who dared to darken his door.
“Hello,” Pablo got up the courage to say, “I’m looking for Abelardo Belmonte.”
The man twisted his mustache while studying the new arrival.
“Third floor, number one,” he finally conceded, his voice as flat as a gramophone.
And so it was that Pablo made the acquaintance of the nephew of Ferdinando Fernández, as well as his wife and his three children, a trio of hellions who tore through the house like a hurricane. The meeting was fruitful indeed: Abelardo not only found him a place to sleep (albeit in the municipal hostel on the Calle del Cid, in the middle of the Atarazanas district, which city governor Angel Ossorio referred to as “the most sinful quarter in Barcelona”) but also put him in contact with La Neotipia, the anarchist cooperative of typographers, who ended up giving Pablo a little work here and there to live on. And, even more importantly: this saintly man was the one who told him of the Vegetarian Le
ague and put him on the path toward Robinsón:
“It was founded a few months ago by a Dr. Falp i Plana, who was the personal physician to the poet Verdaguer,” he explained one day, seeing that Pablo was starting to get desperate because no one seemed to know anything about this alleged naturist commune where Robinsón had supposedly sought refuge. “It’s not far from here, you can go ask. Didn’t you say your friend is a vegetarian?”
Pablo went that same day to the Vegetarian League, located on the Rambla de las Flores, in the venerable Palace of the Vicereine. A secretary with frizzy hair, bearing a certain resemblance to Obdulia, asked him to wait a few minutes in a little room covered in spinach-green wallpaper. The walls were hung with paintings of bucolic landscapes and photographs of the league’s public acts, and there was even a framed copy of the first menu the members had shared at the Mundial Palace restaurant to celebrate the founding of the league, a menu that seemed to Pablo like something out of a fairy tale: 1) amuse-bouche Brahma, 2) rice Pythagoras, 3) empanadas Esau, 4) beans à la Carthusian, 5) Tolstoy fruit salad, 6) lettuce Lahmann, 7) Kneipp bread, biscuit à la mode, fruits, cheeses, pasta, and malt. And to drink, grape juice.
“Bon dia, què desitja?” came a voice from behind him, giving him a start. It was Dr. Falp i Plana himself, founder of the institution.
“Hello,” Pablo replied, somewhat uneasy despite the doctor’s bonhomie. “You’ll have to excuse me, but I’ve spent several days looking for a vegetarian friend of mine, and all I could think to do was to come here to see if you folks know him.”
“If he’s a vegetarian and lives in Barcelona, I’d be surprised if we didn’t know him,” responded the doctor, switching from Catalan to Spanish and glowing with a beatific smile.
“The truth is that I don’t know if he lives exactly in Barcelona. The last news I had from him is that he was in a naturalist commune on the Catalan coast …”
The Anarchist Who Shared My Name Page 27