The Anarchist Who Shared My Name

by PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ

  “And then?” asks El Maestro, holding the doctor’s bag.

  “Then we’ll head toward Irún, where it’s to be hoped that the comrades from the interior will already be organized and we can combine our forces. From there we’ll go to San Sebastián to consolidate the victory of the revolution. Any other questions?”

  Since no one answers, someone shouts at the top of his lungs:

  “¡Viva la revolución!”

  “¡Viva!” most of the men shout back, with a level of enthusiasm that will gradually wane with the passing of the hours, for while revolutions always start with a profusion of hurrahs, they usually end with a profusion of blood, as the gathering dusk seems to be trying to tell the would-be heroes, bidding them farewell with a violent salvo of crimson and orange rays, in a spectacular battle against the enemy darkness.

  The first group sets off, commanded by Luís Naveira and guided by one of the two smugglers on the revolution’s payroll; this group also includes the Villalpando four, led by Casiano Veloso. A few minutes later, Gil Galar’s squadron departs, infected with their leader’s zealous, romantic spirit, singing “La Internationale” and whooping with more vivas to the revolution; serving as their guide is a carpenter named Piperra, a native of Zugarramurdi with intimate knowledge of the area. A little later comes the group led by Abundio Riaño, “El Maño,” mostly comprising anarchists from Bordeaux, Bayonne, and Biarritz, and guided by a nephew of the priest of Lesaca, a tiny village adjacent to Vera. The second-to-last to leave is the squadron commanded by Bonifacio Manzanedo and guided by the other smuggler from Ciboure. Finally, when the full moon is starting to peek through the clouds in the sky, it is time for the departure of the group led by the ex-civil guardsman Santillán, to whom Robinsón has turned over leadership, knowing that he has a tendency to lose his reason when surrounded by nature. “You’ll have to tie me up like Ulysses,” he told Pablo and Leandro when they arrived at the golf course. “Otherwise I’ll start climbing trees.” Of course, the typesetter and the Argentinian are also in this last squadron, as is the greenhorn Julián and the group of vegetarians led by El Maestro. The guide is a young man from Lizarraga in Navarre, with red hair and a freckled face, named Martín Lacouza, who works as a bread baker in Saint-Jean-de-Luz and is known for his affinity for war stories. But the improvised squadron will increase its ranks at the last moment, when they start to skirt the golf course to get on the road to Oleta:

  “Hey, hey, wait for us!” shouts Perico Alarco, panting, followed a few paces behind by Manolito Monzón, who arrives flapping his arms. “Weren’t we supposed to meet at seven?” asks Perico, feigning ignorance so as not to have to explain that the only reason they decided to join the expedition at the last moment was because they’ve been caught stealing chickens in Ciboure and have had to flee like a soul bitten by the devil.

  And so the toothless Perico and the deaf-mute Manolito join up with the last group of luminaries setting off to liberate Spain with a handful of old pistols and a decent supply of revolutionary posters.

  XIII

  (1909–1912)

  AFTER THE ENCOUNTER IN BLANES, ROBINSÓN made the decision to move to Barcelona. He had spent more than a year communing with his group of libertine naturists, who advocated vegetarianism and nudity as the paths toward a more just society, in which the ingestion of meat would be considered barbaric and clothing an unacceptable sign of class discrimination. In fact, the members of the commune all wore bowler hats simply as a means of subverting bourgeois sartorial codes: if the habit makes the monk, they reasoned, we’ll all wear a tailcoat so its privileges disappear. Or, even better, let’s all go naked as long as the body can handle it.

  But Pablo’s arrival was a turning point in Robinsón’s life: for his soul brother, he would have worn a frock coat and cravat if necessary. That afternoon in early April, after their happy reunion, Pablo was invited to partake in a vegetarian dinner with the members of the commune, who did wear clothes for the occasion, not out of deference to the new arrival as he thought, but because sundown brought a goosebumps-raising chill to the air. The camp was located in the middle of the pine forest above the cove and it was there, over a crisp salad of radishes and carrots, that Pablo explained to Robinsón that Angela had disappeared:

  “You haven’t heard anything from her, have you?” Pablo inquired.

  “No, nothing.”

  “Then you’re going to have to help me look for her,” he told him.

  Robinsón did not think twice:

  “You can count on me. Whatever it takes.”

  After dinner, the two of them went alone to the beach and, smoking his first cigarette in ages, Pablo told his friend the story of the duel at the Fountain of the Wolf.

  “What was the first thing I told you when we met?” Robinsón asked, hardly believing his ears. “Stay away from Angela or her cousin will kill you.”

  “And I’ll be damned if he didn’t almost do it,” Pablo avowed, showing him the scar near his left nipple. “It’s a good thing we vampires don’t have hearts.”

  The two friends smiled, as the sunset painted the sky with color. And, the next day, they caught the train from Blanes to Barcelona.

  Their first project on arrival in the city, after convincing the management of the municipal hostel on Calle del Cid to give Robin a bed, was to formulate a search plan. If they wanted to find Angela, they had to be methodical. They only knew that she had fled Béjar in November and had appeared shortly thereafter in Barcelona, asking after Robinsón at the Vegetarian League. Because there was no doubt that it was she who had spoken with Dr. Falp i Plana. Who else could it have been? Therefore, there were two possibilities: either she was still in Barcelona, or she had left. If she was in the city, they would find her sooner or later. If she wasn’t in the city, there were two more possibilities: either she was still in Spain or she had gone abroad. If she was in Spain, they would find her eventually, even if it took a lifetime. If not … if not, it was better not to think about it. In any case, the first thing they had to rule out was that she had returned to Béjar, which was unlikely but easy to test: Pablo wrote a letter to Father Jerónimo, and Robinsón sent a telegram to Don Veremundo and Doña Leonor, his beloved progenitors. And the responses were rather similar: no one in the village had heard anything about Angela, although gossip held that she had gone abroad with Pablo, since some of the neighbors had seen the former inspector’s son hanging around the Gómez house the day before she disappeared.

  “If only!” Pablo mused as he read Father Jerónimo’s letter, written in elegant gothic script. “Too bad gossips always lie.”

  Once they had ruled out that remote possibility, they set about the task of doggedly searching for Angela all over Barcelona. Robinsón, who had not given up his fondness for painting, sketched a faithful portrait of the young woman with the big, sparkling eyes that had dazzled Pablo in the Church of Saint John the Baptist so long ago. At La Neotipia, the anarchist cooperative of typographers, they made some copies which they distributed in the busiest parts of the city: Las Ramblas, the Plaza de Cataluña, the cathedral, the markets, the cafés in the city center, and even the modern, elitist neighborhood of Ensanche, in case Angela had taken work as a servant to a rich family. Below the drawing, there was a brief text explaining that the woman in the portrait was Angela Gómez Nieto, eighteen years of age, from Béjar in Salamanca, and asking anyone who had seen her to contact La Neotipia, Rambla de Cataluña, 116. And just in case Angela herself came across the flyer, Pablo added his signature to the bottom of every copy, along with some words in his unmistakable handwriting: “I’ll be waiting for you every Sunday at five p.m., at the Fountain of Canaletas.” Once they had distributed the first copies in the central parts of the city, they took a map, divided it into twenty parts and spent their time running from one to the next, combining their search for Angela with a search for work, which they badly needed. A few days after arriving in Barcelona, Robinsón managed to find a job as a busboy
in the kitchen of a restaurant called El Dropo, where, despite its name (a Catalan word meaning “vague,” “slovenly,” or “lazy”), he was driven to work like a mule. The one most pleased by this arrangement was surely Darwin, the spaniel that accompanied Robin everywhere and had spent a year eating turnips and spinach. For his part, Pablo continued doing piecework for the anarchist typographers’ cooperative, hoping that someday they would see fit to offer him a regular job with a steady salary. If he didn’t run off, that is, which was also possible.

  For the next three months, Pablo never once missed his Sunday appointment at the Fountain of Canaletas, and he impatiently waited for someone to show up at La Neotipia with good news. But Angela only appeared in his dreams and his thoughts, and he grew more and more desperate, as if he had been infected with the growing political and social unrest that was blowing around the country, felt even more acutely in the City of Bombs. The origin of the conflict, however, was more distant: Morocco, to be precise. The Spanish economic interests in the region had been threatened for a while now by the hegemonic ambitions of Moroccan potentates and by the colonial aspirations of neighboring France, but Antonio Maura, the president of the conservative government, had for the time being declined to engage in any sort of military intervention. However, pressured by bankers with holdings in the mines of the Rif, as well as army officials and King Alfonso XIII, who was getting bored collecting slippers and wanted to get into action, the president finally dissolved the courts at the beginning of June to prevent parliamentary opposition to the bellicose operations that were about to take place in Morocco. The Council of State authorized an extraordinary line of credit of more than three million pesetas, intended to reinforce the army in North Africa, and hostilities began.

  But public opinion was not keen to repeat the colonialist adventures that had led Spain to the disaster of 1898, still fresh in the memory of the working class, tired of risking their lives in wars organized by and for the bourgeoisie. The unfair recruiting system, which allowed moneyed young men to get out of military service by paying eight hundred pesetas, had only fed the anti-military sentiment among the proletariat. So, when the reservists started to be mobilized, along with recruits who had nearly completed their three years of active service, the people came out into the street to protest the war. And in Barcelona the revolt was most fervent, because the port of Ciudad Condal was the point of embarkation for the boats headed toward Melilla—boats that, ironically, were exactly the same ones that had gone into the inferno of Cuba eleven years beforehand, owned by the aristocratic clergyman, the Marquis of Comillas, who must have been rubbing his hands together thinking of the profits.

  On the afternoon of Sunday, the eighteenth of July, while Pablo made his way under a scorching sun to his weekly appointment by the Fountain of Canaletas, an event occurred that would have a great impact on Barcelona’s immediate future. A group of soldiers passed in front of the Palace of the Vicereine on their way to the port to embark for Africa: this was the Hunters’ Battalion of Reus, one of the last to be mobilized by the minister of war, the steel-nerved General Arsenio Linares y Pombo. Then, unexpectedly, as if the sun had unleashed the spirits of the people watching the parade of troops, the soldiers were surrounded by the crowd, hugging them and cheering them, violating protocol. The recruits joined in the celebration, breaking ranks and following the avenue of the Ramblas in the embrace of family, friends, and other citizens of Barcelona opposed to the war. Even Pablo was swept up in the fervor of the crowd: a young woman walking by grabbed his elbow and dragged him into the middle of the peloton before he had a chance to protest. When their eyes met, he saw that the girl’s eyes were two different colors: one was blue like chinaware, the other as gold as a doubloon. And although it meant running the risk of missing his Sunday appointment for the first time, he ended up following the battalion down to the port.

  At the wharf they waited for the civil governor of Barcelona, Don Angel Ossorio, and the captain general of Catalonia, Don Luís de Santiago, flanked by a host of police. Seeing the battalion arrive in such an informal manner, they ordered the recruits to immediately board the Cataluña, which was to take them to the battle front. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was the behavior of a group of aristocratic women who surrounded the gangway and distributed little Catholic good luck patches called detentes, along with medallions and cigarettes, in an act of hypocrisy so flagrant that some of the soldiers defiantly threw the gifts into the water.

  “Throw your guns in too!” shouted one mother.

  “Let the rich go off to war!” proposed another.

  “Or the priests, they’ve got no mouths to feed!” a third woman shouted desperately.

  “Yes, exactly!” the crowd shouted, all worked up.

  The captain general gave the order to heave the gangway, and the security forces fired shots in the air to disperse the crowd. The girl with the bicolored eyes bid Pablo goodbye with a kiss on the cheek and ran off down the jetty, leaving him standing there like a statue. Tears as thick as mercury erupted from his eyes, tears of impotence, rage, and desperation, tears for the injustice committed against those unfortunate young men whom he would perhaps soon have to join, tears fit to silence forever the viperous tongues that, back in Baracaldo, used to say that the Martín boy was incapable of crying, tears that were perhaps also those of a hopeless lover, tormented, consternated, downcast, defeated, wracked with pain for having lost his one true love in the most foolish, idiotic, outlandish, absurd way possible. Tears that would have pushed him to take out the handgun he always carried, to unholster the pocket pistol that had been placed in his nearly dead hand by the hateful lieutenant colonel of that other overseas war, and to manifest his anti-authoritarian rage through violent vengeance, if Abelardo Belmonte had not appeared out of nowhere to drag him away from there before the police read him his rights.

  Arriving on Las Ramblas, having barely recovered from the emotion, Pablo looked at the time: it was almost five thirty. He thanked Ferdinando’s nephew and took his leave, crestfallen. Arriving at the Fountain of Canaletas, he thought he saw a young brunette run off in the direction of the Plaza de Cataluña and disappear among the crowd enjoying a leisurely Sunday stroll in the city center, despite the sweltering sun. He only saw her for a moment, from behind and at a certain distance, but her hair and her gait reminded him of Angela. His heart skipped a beat as he set off running up the Ramblas.

  “Angela! Angela!” he shouted with all his might, weaving his way through the crowd, who looked at him as if he were mad or suicidal.

  But when he arrived at the square the young brunette had disappeared. Pablo scanned in all directions, then gave up and tossed his coat on the ground in rage and guilt. Only then did he catch sight of the young woman getting on a tram. When she sat down next to the window, he could see her face.

  She was beautiful, but she wasn’t Angela.

  AFTER SUNDAY AFTERNOON’S UNREST, MAURA’S GOVERNMENT decided that no more boats would depart from Barcelona. However, the fuse had been lit. Over the next few days there were repeated protests, with people shouting “Down with war!”

  “Death to Comillas!” and “Send the priests to Morocco!”, growing more and more violent as the news arrived of the large numbers of Spanish losses in the Rif. There was also unrest in Madrid: at Atocha Station, women threw themselves on the tracks to prevent their sons or husbands from leaving the capital. On Wednesday, a large meeting held in Sabadell ended with the drafting of a text that left no doubt about the position of the working class with regard to the conflict in North Africa. It read:

  Considering that war is a fatal consequence of the capitalist system of production, and that, given the Spanish system of army recruiting, it is left to workers to fight the war and the bourgeoisie to declare it, this assembly energetically protests: 1) against the action of the Spanish government in Morocco; 2) against the methods of certain aristocratic ladies, who insult the pain of the reservists, their wives, and
their children, by giving them medals and scapulars instead of granting them the means of subsistence which the departure of their breadwinners has deprived them; 3) against sending useful, productive citizens, most of whom are indifferent to the triumph of the cross over the crescent, off to war, while the regiments could just as well be populated by priests and monks who not only have a direct interest in the success of the Catholic religion, but also have no wives and children, no households, and no usefulness to the country; and 4) against the attitude of the Republican representatives, who have not made use of their parliamentary immunity to stand up for the masses on the front lines of the war protest. And it promises the working class that it will focus all of its efforts, if a general strike is declared, to compel the government to respect the rights of the Moroccans to maintain their country’s independence.

  IN RESPONSE TO THAT MEETING, THE government prohibited any public protest against the war, whether in the street or in the newspapers, even issuing a proclamation in Barcelona banning the formation of groups and prohibiting telegrams and long-distance telephone calls, with the obvious aim of preventing the organization of a strike anywhere on Spanish territory. But the worst was yet to come: the Friday morning newspapers carried the news that ten soldiers from the Reus battalion had been indicted on the boat to Melilla as a consequence of the disturbances that took place on the wharf that Sunday afternoon. And when the rumor got around that they had been condemned to death, the people went up in arms.

  Pablo followed all these events in a state of shock. The first week of August he was supposed to go to Salamanca for enlistment and to find out where he would be deployed, but after the commotion on the wharf and the subsequent disappointment at Canaletas Fountain, he was plunged into a trancelike state from which not even Robinsón could rouse him. It was as though he had given up the fight. He stopped going to work at La Neotipia, he stopped eating, stopped sleeping at the municipal hostel on the Calle del Cid, and stopped paying attention to what was going on around him. He merely wandered around the city looking lost, his ears deaf, and his face more and more crestfallen. It took a blood-soaked man dying in his arms for Pablo to open his eyes and look around himself: Barcelona was in flames, and an infinity of barricades had turned the city into a battleground, in what would go down in history as the Tragic Week.