The Anarchist Who Shared My Name

by PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ

  “Hey, hey you!” shouts Santillán, running after the fugitive, unholstering his pistol. But the guy seems to know the terrain, because the darkness swallows him before the ex-civil guardsman has covered ten yards.

  “Easy, boys,” says the baker from Saint-Jean-de-Luz, shining his flashlight on the parcel the man dropped. “Just a smuggler.”

  Perico Alarco draws near, takes out a knife and scratches the canvas covering the package. Kropotkin writhes free of Robinsón’s arms and comes to sniff the parcel, receiving a kick in the ribs as a reward for his petulance. The inside is full of packets of sugar and coffee. But when Perico prepares to put them in his backpack, Santillán steps in with his pistol drawn.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he says, pointing his gun at Alarco, “This could be the means of sustenance for an entire family.”

  Clenching his gums for want of teeth, Perico leaves the parcel on the ground, and the group sets off again, not knowing that the smuggler is crouching in the undergrowth and thanking God that they thought of his family.

  Half an hour later, reaching a point where the stream widens a little, Martín Lacouza nearly trips over marker 18. He lights his flashlight, and the party can see the stone’s inscription: “R-18.” The baker shines his light across to the other side of Inzola Creek and finds marker 19 covered in moss. It is not yet ten o’clock and they have reached the border. Everything seems calm.

  “From now on we have to be more careful,” warns Santillán. “If you haven’t loaded your pistol yet, load it now. We’ll rest here for ten minutes and then we’ll keep going till we reach the towers at Napoleon’s Pass, where we’ll meet up with the other groups.”

  “Excuse me, Julián, but the Inzola Inn is just up ahead,” Martín Lacouza interjects, “Maybe we can warm up there for a few minutes and find out what’s going on in Spain, before we continue on to the towers.”

  But the ex-civil guard snorts and answers abruptly:

  “This isn’t a honeymoon, Lacouza. It’s a revolution. If your dick is cold you should go home. I mean it, go home now, ’cuz once we’ve crossed the border, I’ll put a bullet in any deserters. Get me? Anybody who wants to cut out, do it now!” Santillán barks, directing his words to Perico and Manolito.

  But both men stay steadfast. On the other hand, the two vegetarians Carlos and Baudilio, after a moment of hesitation, step away from the group, mumbling “Sorry,” and “Good luck, comrades,” and retrace their steps down the mountain with their tails between their legs. Robinsón looks at Anxo, “El Maestro,” and though the darkness obscures his face, he can sense his smile.

  “Nobody else?” asks Santillán, annoyed. “Alright then, we’ll rest here for ten minutes. Martín,” he says to the guide, “go to the inn and find out what’s going on.”

  The rest take off their backpacks and sit down on the side of the road, surprised at the two vegetarians’ desertion, which has only increased the general feeling of confusion and anxiety among the revolutionaries. It has stopped raining, though the leaves that remain on the trees are still letting treasonous drops fall. Some of the men load their pistols, others take the opportunity to smoke a cigarette. Leandro jumps over to a little islet in the middle of the creek, where a majestic alder tree is growing, halfway between the two markers. He takes out his knife and starts scratching into the tree’s bark. Pablo feels tempted to shine his flashlight on the tree to see what Leandro is writing, but he opts instead to take out his Astra 9mm and give Julianín a quick lesson on the function of a semiautomatic pistol (although he would have preferred not to have to do it). If he had chosen to shine the light, he would have seen that Leandro has inscribed the tree with an L and an A, both separated and united by a heart.

  “Look, this is the butt,” Pablo says to his former assistant, who takes out the Star pistol that luck has granted him and follows the instructions. “You insert the clip in here, give it a good smack so you hear the click. Like this, see? Once the pistol’s loaded, release the safety and hold the grip firmly with your right hand. If you want more stability, hold your wrist with your left hand. To aim, you have to line up this front sight with this notch at the back here, but don’t spend too much time aiming or they’ll blow your brains out before you can get a shot off,” Pablo warns Julianín, who seems apprehensive or intimidated. “When you pull the trigger, it activates the hammer and it strikes the bullet in the chamber, and it shoots out. Release the trigger and aim again. If you’re still alive, that is. Any questions?”

  Julianín shakes his head, somewhat bewildered by the ballistics tutorial Pablo has just delivered with the tone of a trigonometry lesson. There is a tense silence, which Robinsón breaks by changing the subject:

  “What does the R mean?” he asks.

  “What R?” replies Pablo, confused, thinking Robinsón is referring to the pistol.

  “The one inscribed on the marker, before the number 18.”

  “Oh, yes. R-18 … I don’t know, actually.”

  “It means ‘raya,’” says one of the revolutionaries at his side, a native of Lanuza, in the Pyrenees of Aragon. “At least that’s what I heard a civil guard say once in my village—”

  “It can’t be,” says Pablo. “We share the markers with the frogs, so it has to be a word that starts with an R in both Spanish and French.

  “So what does it mean?” Robinsón insists.

  “Reference,” interjects El Maestro, making an effort to join the conversation and forget the departure of his two friends. “It means reference.”

  But there is no time for more digressions, useful as they might be for calming the nerves and crowding out bad thoughts, as the guide has just come back:

  “The inn is closed and there was no light in the windows.”

  “Fine then, let’s go on ahead,” says Santillán, in a tone that does not invite reply. He decides to bring up the rear of the troop, just in case anyone else gets cold feet.

  The group moves on, and once they are on Spanish soil, one of them kneels and kisses the ground, another clutches a fistful of earth. The contact with the homeland seems to lift the spirits of the party, which shortly reaches the clearing around the Inzola Inn. From here, the road to Vera splits: the left fork goes to Peña del Águila and the straight path goes up to Usategieta (also known as Napoleon’s Pass in memory of the failed incursion), where they have arranged to meet with the other revolutionaries. While they make their way to the pass, Martín Lacouza tries to tell El Maestro about another battle he knows like the back of his hand, but Santillán barks from the back of the platoon demanding silence. So El Maestro never learns about the story that took place here almost a century ago, in the time of the despot Fernando VII, when General Mina reached Napoleon’s Pass at the head of hundreds of Spanish exiles with the aim of overthrowing the monarch and installing a liberal government. Had he heard the story, El Maestro would have thought that Hegel was right when he said that history always repeats itself and that great events always happen twice. Although perhaps it is better that Martín Lacouza does not get the chance to recount the fate of General Mina, because it would be a shame to dampen the revolutionary spirit with past failures. Because Mina did fail, although he managed to save his own skin: when the king’s forces repelled the attack, the general took refuge in a mountain cave before finally reaching the border. Also, what Hegel did not say but Marx added is that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.

  When the platoon reaches Napoleon’s Pass, the other groups have not yet arrived. Although Pablo’s group was the last to depart, it is the one that has taken the shortest route: the Usategieta ridge is not far from marker 18. The men sit down to wait, leaning against the palomeras, wooden towers designed for the peculiar Basque art of pigeon hunting by net, which offer a modicum of shelter from the frozen wind blowing up here. Shortly, the first group from Saint-Jean-de-Luz arrives, led by Luís Naveira. It has been only a few hours since they parted ways, but it seems like years, to judge by th
e effusiveness with which some of them celebrate the reunion. The sky has started to clear up, and the full moon faintly lights up the men’s tired faces as they slap each other’s backs to chase away the cold or the fear. Far below, the village of Vera is hidden among the mountains, which hide the few lights still lit in the village. If Leandro could see them with opera glasses, he would make out one light that was redder and brighter than the others: that of the foundry, where the night shift must be on by now.

  “Well, I’m going home,” says the smuggler from Ciboure who has served as guide to Naveira’s group.

  “Thank you,” says the Galician, giving him his fee.

  “We had two deserters,” Robinsón informs Naveira when the man disappears.

  “We had three,” the Galician laconically replies.

  And they will not be the only ones; as the other groups arrive they will report more desertions. Always the same story: someone stopped to piss or to drink from a spring, or to remove a stone from his shoe, and the moment the others were a few paces away he took off running the way they had come. It appears that the rumor has gotten around that no one is waiting for them in Spain. The night’s darkness, fatigue, and fear did the rest. The last group to arrive is the one commanded by El Maño, but the word “group” is exaggerated, because other than Abundio Riaño, only the nephew of the priest from Lesaca who has acted as guide and two other brave men have managed to reach Napoleon’s Pass. Not all of the groups had a Santillán to keep the faint of heart in line.

  “Don’t get discouraged,” says the former civil guardsman around midnight, hoisting one of his pistols overhead as he starts his way down toward Vera, “You’ll see, this day will go down in history. ¡Viva la revolución! Down with the dictatorship! Long live free Spain, goddammit!”

  “¡Viva!” shouts someone, without much conviction.

  “From here on out,” Santillán repeats his threat in front of everyone, “I’m going to shoot anyone who turns back.”

  Among the seventy revolutionaries who set out from the golf course, only around fifty start the descent to the village of Vera. Well, as the poet said, it’s better to be few and brave than many and meek. Anyone who has come this far must be a true revolutionary.

  XIV

  (1909–1912)

  QUESTION: WHAT IS THE SAFEST WAY to avoid being very miserable in the future?

  Answer: Don’t expect to be very happy in the first place.

  This was the thought that crossed Pablo’s mind as he leaped from one rooftop to another, fleeing the soldiers—a thought that might seem out of place in these circumstances; nevertheless, given the vagaries of the human spirit, where there is no straight line, it turned out to be a blessing: curiously, this thought snapped him back to his senses and saved his life. If he had not had it, he probably would have been caught by his persecutors or tossed himself into the abyss from one of those rooftops. Because that thought led him to another, and the second thought led on to a third. In the end, he said to himself, happiness is to human beings as home is to the drunkard: he doesn’t know how to find it, but he knows it exists. Pablo knew what happiness was, but he had lost it: therefore, it was a matter of having patience, not losing his nerve or his mind, hoping without despairing. Starting now I have to focus on surviving—he promised himself—that’s the best way to honor Angela. And that was how he managed to get out of this adventure he had gotten himself into without really knowing how or why: leaping from rooftop to rooftop, he reached the other side of the block, forced open a door, descended the stairs, and emerged onto a narrow, empty street. He fled the conflict zone as a few scattered gunshots continued to ring out behind him.

  The entry of the troops into the city brought an end to the revolutionary hopes of the thousands of dreamers who thought they were changing the world by burning churches and raising barricades. They held out for just two more days, but that was merely the death spasm. On Friday, two more infantry companies arrived with three hundred civil guards as backup, which practically put an end to the street skirmishes. The people started timidly coming out of their houses, some public services were restored, and, symbolically, a trolley resumed its usual itinerary in the working-class neighborhoods. The captain general, emboldened, gave the order to resume embarkations to Melilla, and that same day an infantry regiment marched down Las Ramblas on the way to the port, under the docile gaze of some of the locals, who appeared to have forgotten the origin of the terrible disturbances that had brought the city to its knees.

  “We’ve seen how you strut with your guns, but you let them drag you to the slaughterhouse!” was the only anti-military shout that was heard among the crowd. The heckler was arrested, and no one came to his defense.

  On Saturday the shops reopened, the barricades were taken down, the paving stones put back into place, and communications reestablished. There were even a few dozen German tourists, who had no trouble as they visited the main attractions of the Catalan capital, though they were accompanied by an escort from the urban guard and by the soundtrack of a few gunshots still whistling from the rooftops. The last bloody episode took place in the ruins of a Lay Dominican convent, on whose fire-damaged walls the rebels had pasted posters with these strange words: “We have great respect for religion and great respect for atheism. What we hate is agnosticism, those who do not choose. Long live the revolution and the schoolteachers of Catalonia!” A morbid multitude gathered at midmorning inside the building, and the Civil Guard gave the order to disperse; the people paid no mind, and the guard lost their patience, a shot rang out, panic set in, the crowd left the building in a whirlwind, and the stampede devolved into a gunfight, leaving six dead and many injured—the bloody epilogue to a tragic week. The next day not one shot was heard in Barcelona, and the florists of Las Ramblas reopened their flower shops, definitive proof that order had been restored.

  Since the municipal shelter on Calle del Cid had closed its doors when the troubles broke out, Pablo spent the last few days of the week in the house of Abelardo Belmonte. Ferdinando’s nephew had suffered a leg injury at the start of the troubles, and so he had no choice but to stay home caring for his three rebellious children, while his wife went out into the street and joined the group of “red women,” who attacked police stations and convents under the leadership of Juana Ardiaca, a young member of the Radical Party whose father had been condemned in the Trial of Montjuic. On Sunday morning Robinsón also appeared, after having participated in the last throes of the rebellion.

  “It’s over,” was the first thing he said upon entering the house on Urquinaona Square, accompanied by Darwin, his steadfast spaniel. “The way it was is over.”

  And he was not mistaken: in the morning, the reprisals started. On Monday, a military tribunal condemned the first rebel it came across to life in prison, as an example and a warning. Then, almost two thousand individuals were prosecuted, one thousand jailed, fifty sentenced to life in prison and seventeen to capital punishment, although only five were finally executed; of them, the first four were mere participants in the rebellion who drew the short straw: the union organizer José Miguel Baró, accused of having rallied the mobs; the delinquent Antonio Malet, alleged to have organized an enormous bonfire of religious objects; the security guard Eugenio del Hoyo, condemned for firing on an army patrol; and the idiot who danced with the nun’s skeleton, Ramón Clemente, prosecuted for building a barricade. In a certain sense, a complete sampling of the crimes committed over the course of the week. But they still had yet to find the mastermind of the revolution. And Maura’s government took advantage of the situation to get rid of its own pest, Francisco Ferrer Guàrdia, founder of the Modern School, whom many already considered guilty since the attempted regicide by Mateo Morral. The educator was shot dead in the castle of Montjuic on the thirteenth of October in that year, 1909. By that time, Pablo was dressing in the uniform of a recruit.

  After spending a few days holing up with Robinsón at Abelardo’s house, talking about the human
and the divine and waiting for the situation to calm down, Pablo wound up convincing himself that it was not worth the hassle to desert: it would have forced him to live a life of secrecy or to live in exile in a foreign country, making the search for Angela even harder. The way things were, absentees and deserters had a rough time of it: most of them ended up getting caught and sent to Morocco to fight on the front line, as punishment for cowardice and treason. It would be better to stay in Spain, accept whatever peninsular destiny fate had in store for him, and not lose hope, never lose hope, because sometimes the drunkard finds home by falling asleep on the first porch he comes to. Also, Pablo’s sympathies for anarchistic ideas had been gathering strength again, perhaps as a result of (or a palliative for) his heartsickness. And, contrary to what one might think, anarchists at that time were not in favor of military desertion, but favored instead a very different tactic: anti-military proselytism in the barracks as a tool to undermine the army from within. The theory could not be more obvious: since the soldiers are workers obligated to serve the country according to an unjust system of recruitment, at times of crisis they will stand beside the people to defend the revolution, provided they are sufficiently educated. A sample of this could be seen during the events of Tragic Week: the army had barely gotten into action by the fourth day of the rebellion, while the Civil Guard had drawn their pistols right away. In fact, the rebels applauded and cheered the soldiers, until the latter were finally given no choice but to quash the rebellion: after all, the people had come out in the street precisely for them, to prevent them from being sent off to a war invented by the ruling classes.