“The comrades of the FORA are based in Buenos Aires,” said Vicente as soon as they embarked, showing off his mental world map marked with black flags.
“What’s the FORA?” asked Pablo, less versed in international anarchism.
“The Federación Obrera Regional Argentina,” Vicente recited. “Pepín told me to go there and ask for a Spanish fellow by the name of Rocafú, who can introduce us around in the movement and find us some work.”
Their first stopover was in Havana, the second in Puerto Cabello, and shortly thereafter they crossed the equator, a pretext for a raucous party among the first-class passengers, with a dance and a masquerade ball, which nearly ended in tragedy: Vicente Holgado seduced the daughter of a wealthy rancher from Rosario, and he couldn’t think of anything better to do at the end of the party than to consecrate the flirtation in one of the lifeboats. But the ring bolt fastening the aft of the dinghy gave out under the strain, and they nearly fell into the sea to be swallowed by the waves. The young woman’s cries caught the attention of those few passengers who were still on deck, and the stunned lovers were rescued, but were not spared punishment for their outrageous behavior: the girl was confined to her cabin for the rest of the trip (under the pretext of a terrible headache) and Vicente was demoted from the first-class waitstaff, assigned to clean the latrines in third class for the rest of the voyage.
Before arriving in Buenos Aires, they made stops in Recife and Rio de Janeiro, where Pablo tried to find out if what his father had told him was true: in the Southern Hemisphere water spirals down the drain in the opposite direction as in the Northern Hemisphere. Unfortunately, he found it impossible to test it, because he had forgotten which direction water spirals in Spain. Then, as they grew nearer to Río de la Plata, they started to feel the onset of the austral winter. And when the tugboats dragged the Victoria toward the wharf at Puerto Madero, Pablo and Vicente went up to the bridge to tell the captain that they planned to stay in Argentina. The man took a few quick puffs on his Cuban cigar, while rubbing his hands together for warmth and shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
“I knew it,” he sighed. “You little Spaniards always do this to me.”
He paid them what he owed them and wished them good luck.
IT WAS NOT EASY TO GAIN the trust of the anarchists of Buenos Aires. The Argentinian government had conducted a brutal policy of repression three years beforehand in response to the assassination of the police chief, Ramón Lorenzo Falcón, at the hands of the young Ukrainian Simón Radowitzky, who was seeking revenge for the bloody repression of the so-called Red Week; but now, after a period of clandestine operation, the Argentinian anarchists who had not landed in the prison of Ushuaia were starting to surface again, little by little, and did not want to have to go back into hiding on account of the arrival of more trigger-happy European exiles. What is curious is that Pablo’s disembarkation in Buenos Aires was the end result of a chain reaction set off by the tossing of the bomb at the chief of police: 1) emergency order requiring the deportation of nearly three hundred foreigners under the Residency Law; 2) among the deportees is the Spaniard Manuel Pardiñas; 3) Pardiñas returns to Spain; 4) Prime Minister Canalejas is assassinated by Pardiñas in Puerta del Sol; 5) Pardiñas gets his name in all the newspapers and inspires the film starring Pepe Isbert; 6) Pablo discovers the way to get Angela’s attention and decides to go to Madrid; 7) Pablo sees Angela, with daughter and husband, on Calle Alcalá, which interrupts his planned regicide; 8) Pablo flees the capital with an old acquaintance, Vicente Holgado; 9) after crossing the border into France, they decide to travel to America; and 10) they arrive in Buenos Aires and the anarchists of the FORA receive them with suspicion, because the Radowitzky mess is still fresh in their minds, and everyone knows that in Spain someone has (once again) tried to bump off Alfonso XIII.
Nevertheless, when Pablo and Vicente disembark in Puerto Madero, they have an ace up their sleeve that will ultimately open the door to the inner circle of Argentine anarchism: a letter signed by Pepín Gómez and addressed to the attention of Ataúlfo Fernández, aka “Rocafú.”
Rocafú had been born in a farmhouse on the Catalan coast, in the municipality of Premiá, but very close to Teiá, where he shared a school desk with the one and only Ferrer Guàrdia, in one of life’s little coincidences that are not so coincidental after all. At eighteen years of age, fleeing an arrest order issued against him in Barcelona, he filled his suitcase with more ideals than clothing and managed to cross the Atlantic as a stowaway on a cargo ship. And although he was now living as a retiree in the town of General Rodríguez, together with his wife and the youngest of his five sons, among the anarchists of Argentina he still enjoyed the prestige that he had earned as one of the founders of the first anarchist journal in the country, El Descamisado, and as a member of the group of the mythical Errico Malatesta, who a quarter of a century before, during his exile in the New World, had organized an expedition to the south of Patagonia to find gold and foment the anarchist movement. The undertaking ended up a fiasco, but at least it served to propagate anarchist ideals and to lay the necessary groundwork for the birth of the FORA, Argentina’s largest labor federation, dominated by anarchists, the general secretary of which was now looking at the two Spaniards who had entered his office asking for Rocafú. The walls were hung with a great number of newspaper clippings, and Pablo could not keep from smiling when looking at one of the most yellowed of them, documenting Malatesta’s arrival in Buenos Aires: underlined in graphite, there was a sentence that the Italian had borrowed from Josiah Warren, the same saying Pablo had scrawled on the cathedral of Salamanca, earning him his first arrest: “Every man should be his own government, his own law, his own church.”
“So you have a letter for Don Ataúlfo,” said the secretary of the FORA looking at the envelope that Vicente was holding. “He doesn’t come here very often. His health has been a bit precarious lately. But if you give me the letter, I’ll make sure it gets to him.”
“We prefer to give it to him in person,” Vicente declined the offer.
“As you wish, but in that case you’ll have to go to Once and take the train to General Rodríguez.”
“Is that very far?” Pablo asked.
“About fifty kilometers.”
The station of Once was a neo-Renaissance-style building, new and imposing, with an opulence that contrasted with the pack of “whelps” hanging around outside, those shoeless, half-naked boys stinking of the orphanage and crying out to sell newspapers. Vicente, seeing them, remembered his childhood as a newsboy in the streets of Madrid, and he shook his head bitterly. They boarded the train and crossed the suburbs of Buenos Aires, until the landscape opened up to countryside. When they reached General Rodríguez, they asked around for directions to the house of Don Ataúlfo. His wife, Graciela, opened the door for them and invited them into the bedroom, where they found Rocafú smoking in bed, wrapped in a wool sweater that he wore to keep from catching cold, although the weave was so thin that tufts of white hair poked out everywhere. He wore glasses without frames and a beard in the style of Proudhon, jumbled and unruly like a swarm of bees. Seeing them enter, he welcomed them with a few lines of revolutionary poetry:
“‘What a joy to listen / to the anarchist troubadour / who gives a sideways glance / with a certain look of horror./ If joy comes to your face / when he tells you who we are / then in the name of anarchy / he greets you with amour,’” he recited in a hoarse voice and a peculiar Spanish accent, getting up from bed to extend to them a withered, chapped hand with elephantine skin. “Do you know those verses?”
Pablo and Vicente shook their heads, but it was Graciela who spoke:
“These men are from Spain, Ataúlfo. They have come to see you.”
“Oh, what an honor! So they will want to know how the poem ends: ‘We are those anarchists / that they call assassins / because we urge the worker / to seek his liberty./ Because when they oppress us / we turn against the tyrants / an
d we always rebel / against all authority.’ Let’s see, let’s see. What news do you bring me from my dear Spain?”
There were two photographs over the head of the bed: in the first, a young Rocafú was embracing Errico Malatesta, who was holding in his free hand an enormous block of ice; in the second, he was looking proud with Graciela on their wedding day, in one of the first civil weddings ever performed in the country. Though surely Emma Goldman would have made a disapproving face.
“Not much from Spain,” said Vicente, “but we have a letter for you from New York.”
“A letter? From New York? Let’s see, let’s see … Well would you look at that, it’s a letter from Pepín! His father and I were great friends … Says here you boys want to try your fortune here in Argentina. I’ll see what I can do. But first, we have to celebrate this meeting, that’s what I say.”
He went to the window, poked his head out and shouted:
“Leandro! Come here for a minute!”
A lad entered who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old, but tall and built like a brick house.
“Go get some firewood and stoke the fire. Let’s brew up a nice bitter yerba maté for these Spanish friends.”
So it was that Pablo and Vicente got to know the mythical Rocafú, who was soon able to find them some work: Pablo joined the linotype operators’ union and within a few weeks started working at La Belladonna, an anarchist-leaning press directed by the Catalan Xavier Nicolau; Vicente, for his part, found work at the port as a stevedore and soon became one of the leaders of the union. They rented an apartment together on Calle Cayena, on the corner of San Martín, and for an entire year they actively participated in the debates held at the FORA, in the general strike of October, and in the protests against the new mandatory voting law, but they never stopped going up to General Rodríguez to visit Rocafú and his family. Well, at least Pablo never stopped; at the onset of spring, Vicente fell sway to the charms of a tango dancer and started spending his Sundays in more lustful pursuits.
“Why do they call you Rocafú?” Pablo asked Ataúlfo during one of his visits, when he finally had the confidence to speak to him personally.
Rocafú looked at him disconcertedly, as though he did not remember the origin of his nickname. But then his smile returned:
“It’s been so long since anyone asked me, that I’d nearly forgotten … Do you see my son Leandro? When I arrived in Argentina I was like him: strong as a rock and full of fire. So they started calling me Ataúlfo Rocafuego; but these Argentinos are lazy, so it wasn’t long before they had shortened it to Rocafú.”
On another occasion, Pablo asked him, “Tell me about the expedition to Patagonia.”
“Haven’t I already told you about that?” Ataúlfo wondered, starting to doubt his own memories. “Yes, but I like that story.”
And then Rocafú told him for the umpteenth time about that adventure, which seemed like a story from a novel by Emilio Salgari: the surprising events of the ill-conceived expedition led by Malatesta, which ended at the Cape of the Virgins, where they built a hut and lived on seafood for a few weeks before returning to Buenos Aires with their tails between their legs and a story to tell until the end of their days.
“And did I already tell you the one about Quico?” he would usually ask.
Quico was Francisco Ferrer Guàrdia, his former schoolmate, whose death led Rocafú to perpetrate one of his great acts: the idea of declaring a general strike in Argentina in protest against Ferrer’s assassination. And see if he didn’t do just that: the FORA convened a meeting the very day of the execution, and some twenty thousand people attended, and the following day they began a general strike that would last for four days.
“It was the least we could do for a fellow worker,” Rocafú would jest, before asking Pablo to recount the great educator’s last moments.
On certain occasions, if Rocafú was feeling exuberant, he would take out his treasure chest: an old wooden trunk full of news clippings, including articles he himself had published in El Descamisado and in La Protesta Humana, under various pseudonyms. He would spread them out on the table and look at them like one looks at a newborn child, and then let out a sigh of nostalgia, followed by one of those questions that implicitly contain their own answer:
“Isn’t anarchy a philosophical theory, Pablo? Isn’t an anarchist simply one who believes that it’s possible to live without the principle of authority?”
But sometimes it also happened that Pablo would arrive at General Rodríguez and Rocafú would be indisposed or still sleeping, and then he would chat with Graciela, who had been one of the first schoolteachers in Argentina to teach about anatomy and sexuality in her classes, or he would play soccer with Leandro in the courtyard, a sport that was already inspiring fervent passion in Argentina, and which they played by making balls out of old, rolled-up underwear, throwing their shirts on the ground to serve as goalposts.
And so summer came, and then autumn, and little by little Pablo found his place in this family which had welcomed him like a son, as he tried, though it was impossible to forget Angela, at least not to get a knot in his stomach every time he thought about her. Sometimes he received happy news from Spain, but as often as not it left a bad taste in his mouth, such as the day he received a letter from his sister announcing that the law student had kept his promise, and she was now a married woman. Not that he wasn’t glad, but that he regretted not being able to share those happy moments with her. So sometimes he felt like what he was: an exile, a refugee, a fugitive. And when he received news that Julia was pregnant, he started to think about going home. Perhaps it was too soon to be able to live in Spain without the risk of being arrested, but he could settle in France and make a quick trip to see his family. Surely Robinsón would welcome him with open arms to his commune in Lyon. Also, it would sure be nice to see him, by God.
However, it was the death of Rocafú that pushed him over the edge in his decision to return to Europe. The old anarchist’s health had been deteriorating recently, especially with the arrival of winter; he had a hard time breathing and developed worrisome gaps in his memory. One morning in early July, Pablo went up to General Rodríguez and found Graciela in a state of despair: her husband had gone out for a walk the previous afternoon and still had not returned home. Just when they were ready to go to the commissariat to report his disappearance, it was the police who came knocking on the door, bringing (as always at that house) bad news: Rocafú had been found dead in a hotel in Buenos Aires, from a bullet to the temple. He had left a fifty-peso bill on the bedside table, along with a note saying: “For the management, in case the bullet goes through my skull and damages the wall.” And in the pocket of his blazer, on the heart side, they found a long letter written to his wife and children, in which he asked them for forgiveness for any harm he might have caused them in his life or in this final act of liberation, which he hoped they would understand:
Someone once said that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Since I can no longer do anything and I’ve become nothing but a burden, I leave way for the youth who want to take the reins of this struggle, which belongs to me and to all humanity. I love you, like no one has ever loved anyone before, your husband and father and friend:
Ataúlfo Fernández, “Rocafú”
The day of the burial, Pablo spoke with Vicente and told him he was going back to Europe. A week later, he boarded a steamship of the Hamburg America Line, the König Wilhelm II, after going to General Rodríguez to say goodbye to the distraught Graciela and her son Leandro, who since the death of his father seemed to have suddenly become a man:
“Che, don’t forget to write us,” said the youngster, taking Pablo aside. “Now I have to take care of Mama, but someday I’ll come see you in Europe.”
Pablo smiled and ruffled his hair, not imagining that Leandro would end up keeping his word. Then he took from his pocket an envelope with the FORA’s handshake emblem and gave it to
the lad.
“What’s this?”
“See for yourself.”
Opening the envelope, Leandro’s eyes glowed: it was a photograph of his favorite soccer team, the Argentinos Juniors, signed by several of the players. The club was not yet playing in the first division, but it had many followers among anarchists, because it had been founded ten years beforehand by militant socialists and left libertarians who gave it the weighty name “The Chicago Martyrs” in homage to the five workers executed after the protests of May 1, 1886, to demand an eight-hour workday. When the lad lifted his eyes from the photograph, Pablo had disappeared.
On the wharf, he said goodbye to Vicente, and neither of them really knew what to say.
“Have a good trip,” said Vicente.
“Take care,” said Pablo.
With no further words, they embraced, each with a lump in his throat, perhaps suspecting that they would never see each other again. And they were not mistaken.
– 21 –
The expedition assigned to invade via Catalonia had no better luck: arriving in Perpignan the anarchists reunited in the outskirts of the city, and some of them crossed the border. It was at that time that the Gendarmerie, who had been informed of the plot by the Spanish police, decided to act: they detained twenty-two men from a party of thirty-eight insurgents armed with pistols, while the rest chose to disperse in disorder, and approximately fifty of them managed to reach the Pyrenees, where they were forced to retreat by the presence of various regiments, stationed all along the border with machine guns and artillery.
EDUARDO GONZÁLEZ CALLEJA,
El Máuser y el sufragio
IT IS STILL PITCH BLACK IN the picturesque village of Vera when, in the cold a.m. hours of Sunday, November 9, 1924, the shouts of Splitface awaken those prisoners who have managed to fall asleep. Today, the two civil guards who died in the skirmish, Aureliano Ortiz Madrazo and Julio de la Fuente Sanz, are going to be buried in graves 19 and 20 of the first parcel of the cemetery of Vera, but neither Pablo nor his thirteen fellow inmates are going to be here to hear the bells of the Church of Saint Stephen ring out in mourning, because Splitface’s shouting is to announce that they will shortly be transferred. And we would do well to note that there are fourteen rebels, because in addition to those who had their photos taken on Friday afternoon, there are also two more who were arrested yesterday: Gregorio Izaguirre, a carpenter from Santurce residing in Paris, with a beard and a surly expression on his face, and Anastasio Duarte, whom we know from his participation in the revelry at Madame Alix’s house, and for having sold himself out for a measly hit of cocaine. So only the most seriously injured (Bonifacio Manzanedo and Enrique Gil Galar, dutifully cared for in their beds at the Hospital of Mercy) will hear the tolling of the funeral bells which nearly the whole village of Vera will hear. Once the funeral is over, the Bishop of Pamplona, Monseñor Múgica, will come to the hospital with his miter still at the ready to give the holy sacraments to Manzanedo, who is in critical condition after the amputation of his leg. However, Bonifacio and Enrique will hear no bells for their friends Luís Naveira and Abundio Riaño, who will spend two more days in the municipal morgue, sleeping the eternal sleep on blocks of solid ice, until the undertakers undertake to give them a burial. The bells will not toll for them, because God’s heart does not beat for those who commit suicide, nor for murderers, nor for unbaptized children: his clemency only offers them the shameful shelter of the commonest of graves.
The Anarchist Who Shared My Name Page 40