The Anarchist Who Shared My Name

by PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ

  “What languages you speak?” he asked them in macaroni Spanish, his head tilted forward as he took short, quick puffs from a foreign-smelling cigar.

  “Any language you need,” replied Vicente Holgado, audaciously.

  “Have you ever worked as waiters before?”

  “Since the cradle,” Vicente assured him.

  “Alright then,” the captain conceded, wincing and stroking his intricate double chin, the faithful mirror of his soul. “I’ll try you out. But if you don’t work hard, your trip ends in Bilbao, understood?”

  “Understood,” they both said at once.

  And so it was that they became crew members of the Victoria.

  The first days were calm, except for the first few hours, during which Pablo stumbled more than walked, his handkerchief constantly pressed against his mouth. But once he had adjusted to the smooth rise and fall of the waves, a strange calm came over him, as though all the distasteful things he had been through in the last few years were being dissolved by the stirring of Neptune. The waiter’s uniform made him feel as though he were acting in the theater, and he set out to play his role to the best of his ability. Arriving in Bilbao, the captain informed them that they would be kept on until the end of the voyage, and Pablo took advantage of his leave time to go to Baracaldo to see his mother and sister, despite the objections of Vicente, who preferred to remain onboard to avoid unwanted encounters with the police. When his family saw him come through the door, they smothered him in kisses. Then his mother said, with tears in her eyes:

  “The Civil Guard came by looking for you. What have you done, my son?”

  “Nothing, mother, don’t worry,” Pablo tried to calm her. “If they come back, tell them I’m on vacation in America.”

  But the joke was only funny to Julia, who smiled with a sweetness that Pablo remembered from long ago. However, she was no longer a child: she had turned into a woman, no doubt about it, and she must have had plenty of suitors. So Pablo was not surprised to be met by silence when he suggested that, if they could, they should come to meet him in America. They looked at each other, and a smile came to Julia’s face, this time more knowing than sweet.

  “Did I miss something?” Pablo asked, pretending to be offended.

  “Oh, dear brother, don’t you think we have our own lives?” Julia replied with a certain sarcasm. “You think that while you’ve been out gallivanting all over the world, we’ve just been at home sewing and waiting for your return?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve both taken lovers—”

  “No, not me, for God’s sake!” exclaimed María, smiling for the first time. “But your sister … well, you tell him yourself, Julia.”

  It turns out Julia had gotten engaged to a young man from Bilbao, a student in his last year of law school who was planning to take her to the altar as soon as he was done with his studies, because he had a job lined up as a lawyer in his uncle’s firm.

  “Well, well, my little sister,” said Pablo. “Now, maybe she’ll lift us all out of poverty.”

  The three laughed heartily and, for the first time in a long time, Pablo felt a glimmer of happiness. He was not even thinking about Angela, but about Julián, his long-lost father, the fourth leg of this table, which has been rickety since his death: how the humble inspector would have liked to share in these brief moments of familial joy.

  “Pretty, pretty, pretty,” said Pablo in the end, stroking his sister’s hair and quoting himself.

  Then he embraced them for the last time and went running back to the Victoria—he was not about to stay on land, all dressed up with nowhere to go. The journey lasted twenty-one days, and apart from coming to terms with his own life and admiring the infinity of the ocean, Pablo used the time to get to know a fascinating character: a young Pole who went by the name of Meister Savielly, traveling in first class with his wife. He was a thin fellow with a robust build; he usually wore a bespoke black suit, replete with various folds, pockets, buckles, and buttons. He was neither an adventurer, nor an eccentric musician, nor a politician trying to go unnoticed, but a famous chess player on his way to participate in the international tournament in New York. Every night, after dinner, he sat at a table in the game room and had a magnificent alabaster board brought out, on which, with the firm delicacy of a watchmaker, he placed his marble chessmen, black and white, beautifully carved. Behind him formed a line of gentlemen eager to bet a bit of money to challenge the master, knowing that the more they wagered, the more time he would spend on them. Throughout the whole trip he never gave up more than a handful of pawns, and that was merely to avoid discouraging his rivals completely and leaving himself without clients. He also offered simultaneous games, including some he played blindfolded, leaving the onlookers dumbfounded. If that were not enough, he also acted as an impresario, seducing passersby, uttering quips and clever phrases like a gallant at court, in exquisite French: “The winner is always the one who makes the second-to-last mistake,” he warned one of his rivals before starting the game. “If they ever outlaw chess, I’ll become a criminal,” he said to another, vehemently. “You can’t live from chess, but you might die from it,” he sighed from time to time. “Castling is the best path to an orderly life,” he usually declared before saying goodnight and going to bed. During the day, he locked himself up in his cabin with a travel board and spent his time analyzing papers covered with glyphs, while his wife entertained herself in the first-class dining room or in the party room talking with the other passengers and with crew members, especially Vicente Holgado, who at thirty years of age and with his dapper garb produced sighs among the young (and not-so-young) ladies onboard.

  “Keep an eye on your friend,” Savielly said to Pablo one day, after ordering his umpteenth vodka. “My wife is very dangerous.”

  Savielly had chosen Pablo as his personal waiter since the night when a more-than-usual rocking of the boat had scattered his chess pieces while he was waging an interesting game against a little old man with a white beard bearing a certain resemblance to Sigmund Freud. Pablo had just served him a vodka and had grown absorbed watching the game, when the boat gave a sudden lurch, scattering drinks and pieces. Savielly’s pants were soaked, so he retired to his cabin to change in order to continue the game. When he returned to the lounge, he was surprised to see that the pieces were set up in exactly the same position they had been in before the upheaval:

  “I see that you have a good memory,” he said to the old man with the white beard.

  “It wasn’t me,” confessed the man, pointing to Pablo, “It was the youngster.”

  Indeed, Pablo had picked up the spilled glasses and ashtrays, as well as the chessmen, putting them back in their spots on the board.

  “Commendable,” the master nodded, looking at him with curiosity. “Do you know how to play chess, or do you have a photographic memory?”

  Pablo did not really understand the question, so he merely replied:

  “I learned to play when I was a boy, with my father.”

  From that day forward, Savielly requested that it should be Pablo who brought his vodkas to his cabin, and, in addition to good tips, he plied him with a few master lessons in chess, adorned with this and that memorable aphorism. And when they finally spotted Long Island, and the Statue of Liberty greeted them with her torch held high, Savielly gave him his travel chessboard, with a dedication scrawled on the back: “Someday, if I become world champion, this board will be worth its weight in gold. Warmly, S.T.” Under the signature he had stamped his particular ex libris, a little coffee mill, a symbol of how he planned to grind up all of his rivals.

  The Victoria was moored for three days at the mouth of New York’s East River, to resupply before it continued on its way to Buenos Aires. At that time New York was a city seething with life, receiving constant arrivals of boats stuffed with Italian, Jewish, and Eastern European immigrants brought to Ellis Island, where, after a Darwinian selection process, their fate was decided: only the strongest
could stay, while the elderly, the lame, and the nearsighted were marked with a stamp bearing the humiliating initials L.P.C. (“Liable to become a Public Charge”), to be sent home as quickly as possible. While the government was wasting its jail cells on campaigns against public spitting, the country was filling up with wretches and beggars. Thus, the third-class passengers of the Victoria were loaded onto pontoon boats bound for Ellis Island, while those in second class were interrogated by officials of the immigration service and inspected by doctors to certify their health before they were allowed to disembark; the first-class passengers, on the other hand, merely had to give their word that they met the legal requirements. Finally, those crew members of the Victoria who wished to get off the boat had their papers confiscated just in case they got the idea to stay in New York, in the spirit of the old saying: opportunity makes the thief.

  When Pablo and Vicente finally set foot on terra firma they felt something like the opposite of seasickness: the impressive equilibrium of the concrete blocks holding up the gangway nearly pitched them to the ground. Then, little by little, they got used to it and walked toward the center of Manhattan. The imposing skyscrapers of Wall Street, the dangerous streets of Chinatown, and the immensity of Central Park left a great impression on them. But Vicente Holgado did not come to America for sightseeing, and it did not take him long to make contact with the central core of the American anarchist movement, which had grown markedly since the nineties, after the arrival of many European immigrants with radical tendencies, people whom President Theodore Roosevelt had called “enemies of humanity,” forbidding them entry into the country shortly before leaving office. That same afternoon, after the depths of the island to experience for the first time the wormlike feeling of riding in a subway, they went to Greenwich Village, where an old friend of Vicente’s was living after having fled from Madrid following the attack by Mateo Morral. When he opened the door, Pablo recognized in this man the pocky, pale journalist from the Café Pombo, the former writer from Tierra y Libertad whom he had met the night before the royal wedding.

  “My dear Vicente Holgado!” the man exclaimed, sticking out his neck like a plucked duck.

  “My dear Pepín Gómez!” replied Vicente.

  And they embraced. Then they had a glass of wine to celebrate the reunion and went to the Café Boulevard, in the East Village, where that night the Sunrise Club had invited the famous activist Emma Goldman to give a talk. Goldman was the former lover of the equally famous Alexander Berkman, the same man who years before had awakened the anarchistic conscience in an adolescent named Pablo Martín Sánchez. When they arrived, she had already started her speech, and Pablo was surprised by the vitality of this tiny bespectacled woman who spoke with equal passion about the dramas of Ibsen, the anarchist commitment, and the hypocrisy of puritanism, flying the banner of sexual freedom as the standard of the feminist movement.

  “Marriage and love have nothing to do with each other: they are as distant as the poles,” she was saying at that moment, as Pepín Gómez translated for his Spanish friends. “It is friendship, not marriage, that should govern human relations. Two of my former lovers are in attendance here today, and what is it that still binds us all together? The love of humanity, the ideal of a better future in which men and women no longer establish relationships of servitude. Yes, yes, I said servitude: the prostitute who puts a price on her services is more free than the downtrodden wife who marries to serve her husband for a lifetime!”

  The silence in the café turned into a buzz more exciting than applause.

  “Why is it that you cannot accept your own freedom?” she continued. “Why do you have to chain yourself to another person to survive?”

  But this was the last bit that the former contributor to Tierra y Libertad could translate, because the people nearby hushed him. In any case, Pablo was no longer listening, because the final words had stirred up two distant memories: on the one hand, Robinsón’s ideas about free love, and on the other, what Ferdinando Fernández had said at the office of El Castellano, quoting Berkman himself: The only love that a revolutionary can allow himself is the love of humanity. And between one thing and another, he could not keep himself from thinking about Angela. Only when the speech was finished did he emerge from his reverie.

  “Come on,” Pepín said, standing up, “I’m going to introduce you to Emma Goldman.”

  When they reached her, “the most dangerous woman in America” (as FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover would later describe her) was already surrounded by friends and admirers, enjoying the glaring absence of the blue coats of the police. But when she learned that two anarchists recently arrived from Spain wanted to meet her, she excused herself and went to greet them:

  “Welcome to the USA, amigos!” she gushed, extending her chubby hand for a vigorous handshake. Under her arm she held several copies of her book Anarchism and Other Essays, which sold like hotcakes after these gatherings, and a little treatise in French titled Petit manuel anarchiste individualiste, by Emile Armand, because she was so used to being arrested after her speeches that she came prepared with quality reading for the jail cell. Emma Goldman had closely followed the trial of Ferrer Guàrdia and never missed a chance to bring up the subject whenever she met someone from Europe.

  “What news do you bring me from the land of Ferrer?” she asked in English, and Pepín translated for her.

  “The last we heard before we left,” responded Vicente, “was that someone tried to assassinate the king as revenge for what they did to Francisco.”

  “Very good,” Goldman replied.

  “I saw them shoot Ferrer with my own eyes,” Pablo started to say, but at that moment an elderly Alexander Berkman appeared and swept the star attraction away, under the pretext that they had to travel to Denver the next day. Two years later, at the same venue, for the first time in America, Emma Goldman would explain to an audience of six hundred how to use a contraceptive, earning herself an arrest and several days in jail.

  “You never told me about the Ferrer Guàrdia thing,” Vicente reproached Pablo as they were leaving the Café Boulevard, while Pepín led them back home. “Did you really see the firing squad?”

  “You and I really don’t know much about each other, Vicente,” Pablo defended himself. “I only know that you once saved my life, and that we once went to see the Lumière Cinematograph together, back when nobody knew what it was.”

  They both smiled, and Pablo’s mind started reliving the scene at Montjuic Castle, until Pepín Gómez stopped in front of a building lit up with red lights, its façade plastered with a poster bearing an image of a young woman with golden curls, under a sign proclaiming “America’s Sweetheart.” Pablo looked up and wondered what Emma Goldman would think about these new film actresses who were starting to light up the torrid dreams of the American male.

  “What say we check out Mary Pickford?” he ventured.

  But the other two were already gone from his side, at the ticket booth digging coins from their pockets.

  – 20 –

  One of the detainees was brought to the barracks of the carabiniers. He did not mention that he was injured, but over the course of the afternoon it was discovered that he had a bullet wound in his leg. He was brought to the hospital, where he was examined. His thigh had been pierced by a bullet.

  El Pueblo Navarro, 11 November 1924

  THE INTELLIGENT GRAY EYES OF Julián Santillán, the gray-haired former civil guardsman, take some time to adjust to the darkness of the cell. When they finally do, he recognizes his cellmate. They greet each other silently, and Pablo offers him his spot on the bedroll so that he can relax for a bit, but Santillán declines by shaking his head.

  “Those sons of bitches didn’t take you to the hospital?” he asks, remembering the bullet Pablo took in the skirmish. But it is Splitface who responds:

  “Silence in there, goddammit! The next one to open his mouth gets it shut permanently!”

  And the two men have to wait u
ntil lunchtime before they are able to exchange a few words, though silence in company is doubly unbearable. It is two in the afternoon when they hear footsteps on the stairs, followed by the smell of burnt food that somehow overcomes the reigning stench, permeating through the cracks in the doors.

  “Royal fare for these rats,” protests the guard when he sees a pair of his colleagues enter with a large steaming pan, following two others armed with rifles. “I’d give them nothing but bread and water to teach ’em a lesson.”

  The carabiniers talk amongst themselves while the mess is served on plates made of peeling iron, the rust mixing with the food in those spots where the original enamel has flaked away. Pablo and Santillán take advantage of the noise and chatter to exchange a few words in hushed voices:

  “What a goddamn disaster,” Pablo murmurs.

  “Don’t lose hope,” Julián tries to console him. “When the revolution succeeds, they’ll come get us out of here, you’ll see. Do you know if more of us have been arrested?”

  Pablo nods in the darkness:

  “There were already people in the cells when I arrived, I assume that they’re our guys. And I thought I saw Casiano upstairs. Also, if they’ve started putting us two to a cell, there must be a reason—”