The Anarchist Who Shared My Name

by PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ

  “Hey! Hello! Does anyone hear us?” shouts Julián Santillán with all his might.

  “Comrades! Is anyone there?” Bonifacio Manzanedo shouts in turn.

  But the noise of the machinery prevents anyone inside from hearing them.

  “We’ll have to wait for a shift change,” someone proposes.

  “Or for the foundry’s security guard to go on his rounds,” suggests a man who knows the drill, because he worked as a watchman at Renault in Boulogne-Billancourt.

  “And why don’t we jump the gate and force our way in?” says Gil Galar.

  “Maybe if we walk around the factory we can enter through the back,” offers another.

  But no one takes the initiative. Just in case, Pablo throws a bundle of pamphlets over the wall and slides a few more under the main door.

  “Che, what if we stop and rest a while, while we decide what to do?” proposes Leandro, ever the pragmatist, saying out loud what many are thinking.

  Of course, we should not forget that these men have spent hours trekking through the mountain forest, while most of them have spent many months only walking on the paved streets of Paris or other cities in France. Santillán and Naveira again try to get the attention of the laborers working inside the factory, but when they fail, there is nothing left to do but accept the Argentinian’s idea and follow the group walking away from the factory, again hugging the wall in the direction of the Bidasoa River, where they can rest and have a bit to eat or drink while a decision is made. But before they reach the river, on the other side of the street, there is a quarry that promises better shelter than the wet banks of the Bidasoa, so that is where the troop heads, already removing their backpacks.

  And what has Don Enrique Berasáin, the well-groomed constable, been up to all this time? He exited his house as the church’s bell struck one, and, cursing his luck, followed Calle Leguía until he reached the barracks house of the Civil Guard. The door was locked and he had to bang the knocker insistently. Finally, a female voice came from inside:

  “Who’s there?”

  “The constable, Don Enrique Berasáin,” the Dandy replied, bundling himself in his overcoat.

  The woman opened the peephole.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I need to talk to the guardsmen on duty.”

  “Come in,” the woman said begrudgingly, closing the little window and opening the door. “They must be about to arrive from the patrol office to change shifts.”

  Indeed, not five minutes passed before the arrival of the pair formed by the corporal Julio de la Fuente, a native of Tiebas, Navarra, and the guardsman Aureliano Ortiz, born in Espinosa de los Monteros, Burgos, both unmarried, both twenty-six years old. The corporal’s thick, nervous mustache, with points like battering rams, is the first to enter, followed by the corpulent Aureliano, panting like a bulldog before its prey.

  “What’s going on?” asks the corporal when he sees the constable, losing no time with niceties.

  “A troop of forty or fifty men just passed through the village via the Calle de Altzate, sir,” says the Dandy, solicitously. “Perhaps they are smugglers.”

  “Smugglers?” barks de la Fuente, charging at the constable with his Kaiser mustache. “Have you ever seen smugglers travel in a herd?”

  “No, sir,” Don Enrique practically apologizes, “that’s exactly what I thought, but seeing them pass right under my window, at this hour, and what with the looks of them—”

  “What do you mean, ‘the looks of them’?” the corporal cuts him off.

  “I don’t know, there wasn’t much light, but they had a bad look about them, so I came to inform you immediately.”

  “You didn’t stop to inform the carabiniers on the way?”

  “No, sir, the truth is that no, I thought it best to come straight here—”

  “Fine. Come with us,” the man orders, not taking off his puttees, and with a tone that suggests that he is thinking that the constable might have had the decency to arrive ten minutes later, after the shift change. “Which way did they go?”

  “I don’t know, it seemed like they were coming from the direction of Itzea,” the constable replies uncertainly.

  “I didn’t ask you where they came from, I asked where they were going,” the corporal says gruffly, slinging his rifle over his shoulder and going back out into the street.

  Don Enrique takes a few seconds to reply.

  “I would say that they must have taken the Carretera de Eztegara—”

  “Then they must have gone toward Lesaca or toward Irún,” the guardsman Ortiz speaks up for the first time, satisfied to have made this utterly obvious deduction.

  “What time did you see them pass by?” asks de la Fuente.

  “Couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes ago—”

  “Well, then they’ve probably already left the village. Let’s go.”

  The three men make their way in the darkness, guided by Ortiz’s flashlight, and go up Calle Leguía toward the church. They stop when they reach the Plaza del Fuero, where the street splits toward Irún or Pamplona.

  “And now what?” asks Ortiz, but Corporal de la Fuente only raises his mustache as if trying to sniff out his prey. Ortiz continues, “Should we split up?”

  “Not a chance!” barks the corporal. “Have you forgotten regulations, Ortiz?”

  The hulk from Burgos shrinks before his superior’s reprimand.

  “We’ll head toward Lesaca,” orders the corporal, “because if they took the road to Irún, they’ll be detained in Endarlatsa.”

  But Julio de la Fuente would have been better off if the herd, as he called it, had headed toward Irún. Because sometimes the distance between life and death depends on a decision as trivial as choosing whether to go right or left at a crossroads, and the reality is that the three men took the same route that had been taken moments beforehand by a group of revolutionaries who had come to Spain bearing the hatchet of war. In the distance they can already see the lights of the foundry, the sparks that erupt from the smokestacks like fireworks, and the glow of the ovens in the large windows, and soon they hear the sound of the machines, growing louder and louder as the men approach. When they reach the main entrance, not noticing that the ends of the seditious posters left by the rebels are still poking out from beneath the door, Corporal de la Fuente says to the constable:

  “Go home, Don Enrique, we’re leaving the village and this is out of your jurisdiction. We’ll take a look around and ask the carabiniers from the post in Lesaca if they’ve seen anything. Thank you for your cooperation.”

  “I wish I could have done more,” replies the Dandy, as he turns on his heels and gives thanks to God.

  De la Fuente and Ortiz continue on and have barely taken a few steps when they think they hear voices coming from the quarry of Argaitza. Then, as if a spell has been cast, they switch roles. The corporal halts, filled with doubt, and it is the stocky subaltern who takes the initiative, advancing without hesitation. De la Fuente has no choice but to follow his colleague, until, suddenly, twenty or thirty yards off, a light turns on and shines on them. The first to react is Aureliano Ortiz, who lifts his Mauser rifle and shouts in a voice worthy of Isidoro Fagoaga, the famous tenor born in Vera:

  “Halt in the name of the Civil Guard!”

  And the echo bounces off the walls of the quarry, surrounding the revolutionaries.

  XV

  (1912–1913)

  IF THE BARRACKS IS THE SCHOOL of life, Pablo would have preferred to go uneducated. Because as for learning, what most people call learning, there was much he did not learn in those three years that he spent serving the country. All he learned was that when you enter the barracks, you leave your balls outside (Sergeant Hansen’s favorite saying). On the other hand, he became an expert in getting used to things: sleeping on straw mats and having his head shaved; the chalky taste of mess and the farcical idea that a man could get by on potatoes, chickpeas, lima beans, rice, bacon, and bu
tter; eating from tin plates and drinking from tin cups; washing pots without soap or a scrubber, using only hands, water, and sand; wearing the clothing of a new recruit, as stiff as mummy wrappings, with his cape, his army hat, and his puttees; the metallic voice of the trumpet playing reveille, retreat, silence, mess, squadron, section, company, battalion, or troop; the hysterical shouts of “Formation!” and “Present arms!”; punishment and the fear of punishment, hitting before being hit, robbing before being robbed; fixing shoes and cartridge belts, pointlessly polishing his rifle, his leathers, and his combat boots; eternal patrols, imaginary patrols, rounds, counter-rounds, and watches; guarding the munitions depot without resting on his laurels; treating his feet with salt and vinegar after military marches; the monotonous rhythm of one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four; loading and unloading a Mauser, the clip, the hammer, the trigger, the chamber; military music in general and the “Marcha Real” in particular; learning to sing “Girl, don’t fall in love with a soldier,/ a sergeant or an officer, tra-la-la,/ a sergeant or an officer, tra-la-la,/ Because when they march off to the front,/ You’ll be left all alone, tra-la-la,/You’ll be left all alone, tra-la-la”; taking advantage of Sundays and leave days to visit anarchist hangouts, or to catch up with his old love, the movies, or to go to the Fountain of Canaletas to wait hopelessly for a miracle, or to write to his mother and Father Jerónimo with the vain hope of receiving news of Angela, or to walk along the beach with Robinsón, before the latter ran off to live in a commune in Lyon, from which he would send him various books “to counteract the harmful effects of military instruction,” as he will write in one of his dedications: the Manual of the Perfect Anarchist, author unknown; the Catechism of a Revolutionary by Sergey Nechayev; Free Love by Carlos Albert; and various books by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer; living in fear of being sent to Morocco, although the order never came, or of being arrested and losing his mind, as happened to a conscript from Teruel who took his own life by smashing his head over and over against the wall of his cell; going to the fortress of Montjuic for periodic shifts, never forgetting the defiant goatee of Ferrer Guàrdia in the ravine of Santa Amalia; or listening to the green recruits swearing allegiance to the flag after the standard question: “Do you swear to God and promise the king that you will always follow his flag until the last drop of blood falls, and never abandon the one who orders you into battle or in preparation for it?” In sum, becoming a better soldier and a worse person with each passing day.

  And so, by the time he left the barracks, Pablo was twenty-two years old and more lost than ever. Not only had he not heard anything from Angela, but he had no station, no pension, and had just wasted three years of his life, years during which the world kept up its old tricks: while hostilities continued in Morocco, a republic was proclaimed in Portugal, revolution broke out in Mexico, and the European powers were carving up the cake of sub-Saharan Africa. Even the skies had started to be colonized by airplanes, and the fashion for automobiles had become so widespread that it was not unusual to see dogs and cats mowed down by the side of the road in the big cities. A few proper nouns had made their way into the newspaper headlines, leaving readers stunned at their epic or tragic acts: in 1910 Luigi Lucheni, the anarchist who had assassinated Empress Sisi, committed suicide in his jail cell; at the end of 1911, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole, one month before his British rival, Robert Scott; and in 1912, the transatlantic ship the Titanic sank after crashing into an iceberg, turning the Atlantic Ocean into an aquatic mausoleum with over one thousand corpses. But the fact that would change Pablo’s fate was going to happen much closer to home.

  A cold, disagreeable wind was blowing the Sunday morning when the doors of the barracks of Atarazanas were opened to release the discharged soldiers who had completed their three years of active service. Waiting outside were the girlfriends of some of those lads with whom Pablo had spent the endless, useless hours, without ever really developing a friendship with any of them. Then, the scene filled with kisses and hugs, reunions and goodbyes. Not really knowing what to do, with no one there to greet him, Pablo stood, his bundle under his arm, like someone waiting on a train platform for a visitor who will never arrive. He leaned against the wall of the barracks and closed his eyes, letting the wind caress his face, while the people started to disperse, leaving him there alone. Twice he told himself that he would count to ten and then open his eyes, but both times he counted and both times he did not dare to open them. The third time he counted, he felt a cold, smooth, feminine hand on his face. For a moment he believed that miracles exist, and he quickly opened his eyes. However, it was not Angela, but a young woman with an athletic figure and catlike features.

  “Don’t you remember me?” the girl asked, with a tentative smile.

  Until Pablo stared directly into the eyes that were looking at him, his memory did not recover the remembrance of that summer afternoon: the left eye was blue like Chinese porcelain, the right gold as a doubloon.

  “Sorry, I didn’t recognize you. It’s been a long time …”

  “Well, I have thought a lot about you,” said the girl, with candor that sent blood to Pablo’s cheeks. “You’re blushing,” she smiled again.

  “Who, me?”

  “Who else? But don’t worry: they say a blush always fades within a minute and a half—”

  “What are you doing here?” asked Pablo, trying to change the subject.

  “I came to look for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Who else?” she repeated. Seeing Pablo’s surprise, she added, “Just kidding. I was passing by on my way home.”

  “Oh, I see. And where do you live?”

  “Hey, that’s not something you just ask a proper young lady.”

  “I’m sorry. Barracks life makes boors of us.”

  “It’s alright, I’m an emancipated woman,” she said proudly. “Haven’t you read Soledad Gustavo?”

  Pablo shook his head.

  “Well, you should … I live right over there, on Calle Carrera.”

  “And may I ask your name, or is that also something one shouldn’t ask a lady?” Pablo tried to joke.

  The girl thought about her answer, then replied:

  “Call me Cuzanqui.”

  “Cuzanqui?”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I don’t know, it’s strange.”

  “I like it.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Nothing. Does Pablo mean anything?”

  The wind appeared to stop suddenly.

  “And how do you know my name is Pablo?”

  The girl made a contrarian face:

  “I’m sorry, I’m late getting home,” she said, and began walking toward El Paralelo.

  “Wait, wait,” Pablo stopped her. “How do you know my name?”

  “You told me the other time.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Completely.”

  The two young people looked into each other’s eyes, cut off from their surroundings. He observed her curiously and she returned a burning look. Pablo then understood that life is a storm governed by chance, a storm in which everyone ends up drowning, even the smart ones, although they might manage to stay afloat a bit longer. And without really being aware of his words, he heard himself saying:

  “We are toys in the hands of fate, aren’t we?”

  The girl (let’s cooperate and call her Cuzanqui) took his hand and dragged him toward El Paralelo. When they reached Calle Carrera, she stopped:

  “Wait for me a moment. I’ll be right back.”

  And she ran up into her house. When he looked up, Pablo had a déjà vu moment: three years beforehand, he had made the same movement in the same place, on the way to the fortress of Montjuic. The girl soon appeared on the balcony of the second floor, as if to make sure that Pablo was still down there, and waved to him. Five minutes later, she came back out the door, with her eyes shining and her hair tied in a bun.

  “L
et’s go,” she said. “I’ll take you to a place where you can see all of Barcelona.”

  They went up the piney slopes of Montjuic, until they reached a promontory on the north face of the mountain.

  “Wait,” said Cuzanqui, covering Pablo’s eyes with her hands, “Don’t look yet.”

  They walked another few paces, like a blind man and his guide dog, until the girl took away her hands and said joyfully:

  “Now you can look!”

  The image seemed like the work of an urban landscape painter: all of Barcelona unfolded at their feet, making them feel like the king and queen of the world. They sat down on the grass and stayed there until the sun set, talking and contemplating this spectacle without noticing their hunger or the cold.

  “We should be getting back,” he finally said.

  “Yes,” she said begrudgingly. “But wait a second. Close your eyes again.”

  Pablo did as he was told, asking:

  “Are there still more things to see?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  And taking him by surprise, she kissed him on the lips. Pablo felt a shiver go down his spine and an acute pain in the pit of his stomach.

  “I can’t,” he blubbered, his eyes still closed. And when he dared to open them, Cuzanqui had disappeared.

  PABLO PROMISED HIMSELF HE WOULD NEVER see that girl again, but the episode at Montjuic wormed its way into his consciousness. “Do you really think a man should be tied for life to the first woman he loves?” Robinsón had asked him shortly before going into seclusion. “I’m going to make the search for her the meaning of my life,” Pablo had replied. But after four years without any word of Angela, his conviction was starting to waver. It was then, as he walked down from the mountain with an unsteady gait, that an unexpected solution started to take shape in his mind: if I can’t manage to find her, maybe I can get her to find me. How? By doing something crazy, something that grabs the attention of half the world, even if I have to risk my life doing it. After all, he thought, for Angela I’m already dead, so it doesn’t make much difference. With such errant thoughts he reached the house of Abelardo Belmonte, Ferdinando’s nephew, who received him with open arms and invited him to stay in his house as long as he needed. Two days later, Don José Canalejas was assassinated in Madrid, and Pablo found the way to get his name in all the newspapers.