Recently disembarked, Pablo witnessed the outbreak of the conflagration with a mixture of rage and stupor. France, a country that had seen the birth of men like Proudhon and newspapers like La Révolte, had always been an emblem of struggle to anarchists, an example for the working class to follow. Its participation in a capitalist war could only be seen as a failure of the revolutionary ideas inherited from the Jacobins, and irrefutable evidence that chauvinistic nationalism was winning out over proletarian internationalism. So Pablo decided that the best thing he could do was to stay in France and try to spread the pacifistic ideas of the cruelly assassinated Jean Jaurès, even at the cost of putting his own life in danger. And he could think of nowhere better to go than Paris, the city where he had been conceived, reasoning that the anarchists there would be better organized than in The Hague. The first thing he did was to contact two old friends: Robinsón, who was still living in his commune in Lyon, and Ferdinando Fernández, the old writer for El Castellano. He wanted to convince the former to join him in his anti-war crusade, and to the latter, he wished to offer his services to the Salamanca-based newspaper as a correspondent, a position that was beginning to come into fashion at that time, and which the Great War would help to establish. After all, it could be a way to make a living and a perfect soapbox to denounce the horrors of the war. The idea was less far-fetched than it might sound; those days saw a rise in classified advertisements posted by young men who were willing to go to the scene to cover the conflict, and the Spanish were no exception: “Intelligent, educated young man,” reads one ad that appeared in La Vanguardia in August. “Speaks French, English, and Italian, with experience traveling in Europe, offers service as war writer for major newspaper.” The Barcelona-based newspaper itself was the first in Spain to send correspondents to the capitals of the countries involved in the war.
However, ever since the war broke out, the postal and telegraph services were compromised, so the letters that Pablo sent to his friends took some time to receive replies. When they finally arrived, at least they brought good news. The first was from Robinsón. It closed with, “You know what? I will come as soon as I can. It has gotten unbearable around here lately.” The letter from Ferdinando took even longer, but for good reasons: El Castellano had been published on a weekly basis for several years, and the old blind poet Don Cándido was no longer the editor, but with the outbreak of war it was now possible to start publishing daily again, because readers were avid for fresh news. Ferdinando passed Pablo’s offer on to the new owners of the press and waited for them to make a definitive decision, which did not come until the Battle of the Marne, when the French troops repelled the German offensive on Paris and disrupted the Schlieffen Plan, a sign that the military campaign would last much longer than had been expected. Finally, El Castellano resumed daily publication starting on the first of October, and Ferdinando himself wrote the editorial, with his usual inflammatory, emphatic style: “For some time now,” he started, “we have been ruminating on the idea of making El Castellano a newspaper worthy of our beloved Salamanca. Finally, today, the first of October, we have fulfilled these longstanding, passionate dreams, allowing us to be in daily communication with our dear subscribers, to whom we remain ever indebted and whom we must defend and serve in their legitimate aspirations, regardless of what it may cost us.” And he concluded with a lofty proclamation, in keeping with those bellicose times: “We shall fit into its columns all that is propitious to the wellbeing of our dear forgotten Salamanca and all of its inhabitants, in accordance with the motto that we have been shouting far and wide since the very first issue of El Castellano: Independence, Order, Progress, Morality, and Justice. And now to fight for this creed, as there is plenty of fighting to be done.”
By then, Pablo had already obtained his credentials from the school at Quai d’Orsay as a war correspondent on the Western Front, although the conditions imposed by El Castellano were more than spartan: the salary would be the same as if he were working in Salamanca, but he would have to pay for his own lodging, and he would not even have his name in the byline, as his job would be to send the information so that others could put it into shape. “That’s the best we can offer,” read the telegraph from Claudio Gambotti y Ragazzi, the new director of the press. “Take it or leave it.” And he took it, because what else could he do? He was no Edwin Weigle, and El Castellano was no Chicago Tribune. In Spain, a small handful of men would divvy up the glory: men such as Gaziel, Salvador de Madariaga, Ramiro de Maeztu, Julio Camba, Corpus Barga, and Armando Guerra, the cynical pseudonym of Francisco Marín Llorente, a lieutenant colonel and a Germanophile historian. The vast majority, however, would have to be satisfied with struggling to fulfill the duties of a journalist in conditions of poverty and anonymity.
In any case, Pablo never liked to brag about his ordeals during the Great War, or to talk about his experiences as a correspondent. Indeed, in the captivating tales of his life that he recounted to little Teresa years later, he would speak very little of those dark times. “I could barely make out Mars’s face,” he would say with a certain poetic irony, dismissing the significance of the matter. But reading the articles in El Castellano, you can perfectly imagine the horrors that he must have witnessed. Luckily, he had his best friend Roberto Olaya near at hand. Olaya had let his hair and beard grow out even longer, so his nickname was all the more appropriate. Toward the end of October, he arrived in Paris and between the two of them they managed to keep their feet on the ground and their heads on their shoulders. That is, between the three of them, and not because Robinsón was accompanied by Darwin, his faithful water spaniel who had gone on to a better world, but because he appeared arm-in-arm with his “emotional companion,” as he called her:
“Pablo,” he said after their perfunctory boxing-match greeting, “I’d like to introduce you to Sandrine, my emotional companion.”
“Enchantée,” said the young woman, extending her hand and giving a slight curtsy, very theatrical. Her eyes were of that dull blue the English call gray, with hair the color of fire and a strange, deep, velvety voice, probably because she had been born with two uvulas, or really one uvula that split into two when she spoke, but Pablo knew nothing of that.
“Come in, come in, don’t just stand out there.”
Pablo had rented a squalid little room in a hostel near the Victoria Palace Hotel, the center of operations for foreign journalists who had arrived in Paris to cover the war. He invited them to sit down on the two mismatched chairs in the room and he sat on the iron bed flanked by an old pine bureau and a shelf with a few books. Completing the scene, a table and a washstand with a basin, a water pot, and a soap dish.
“Avez-vous eu des problèmes pour arriver?” Pablo asked in halting French.
“You can speak Spanish,” said Robinsón.
“Yes, my grandfather was Galician, from O Grove,” said Sandrine in Spanish, with a more than acceptable accent.
“Ah, muy bien,” said Pablo with relief, because his French was still not as fluent as he would have liked.
“Problems, buddy,” Robinsón replied to the question, “We didn’t have any problems per se. But, not being French, they did check our bags several times. Seems there’s quite a bit of freelance espionage going on among citizens of neutral countries—”
“Oh, so you’re not French?” Pablo asked Sandrine.
“No, I’m Swiss.”
Sandrine’s story was a juicy one. The daughter of a rabbi from Geneva, she ran away from home when she was just a teenager and, after traveling through half of the world, she finally ended up in Lyon. Without a franc in her pocket and with more hunger than hope, one night she decided to end her life by jumping off the Pont de la Guillotière into the black waters of the Rhône. But Robinsón, who at that time was earning his living as a portrait artist in the Alpine city, caught her by the belt at the last second. That same night, Sandrine went with him to the vegetarian commune where he had been living since he left Barcelona. But the out
break of the war had finally disrupted the group of naturists: some fled France, others hid out in the Alps, and one of them even enlisted in the army, arguing that one can only live freely in a free country. Even Robinsón, despite his obvious limp, had been pressured to enroll as a foreign volunteer in the offices of the Amitiés Françaises, which saw a wave of enlistment during the first few days of the war. So when he received Pablo’s letter, he didn’t think twice: he discussed it with Sandrine, they packed their bags and took the next train to Paris.
“And have you found out anything about Angela?” Robinsón asked.
Pablo had been expecting that question, as he had never mentioned the subject in his letters from Argentina. But it had to come up sooner or later. Without going into much detail, he recounted the scene in Calle Alcalá, and then dropped the subject for good. Angela had turned into a dangerous memory.
That same day, Robinsón and Sandrine rented a room in the same hostel, and they soon found a way to earn a living; Robin continued to take advantage of his knack for drawing by setting up in train stations and outside recruiting offices, where young soldiers had their portraits done for a few francs, to be immortalized together with girlfriends, mothers, or sisters before being sent to the slaughterhouse, and Sandrine started serving drinks in a cabaret on Rue de Montmartre, until one day they heard her singing as she mopped the floor, and she became a real vedette, with the very provocative and Jewish-sounding stage name Sanhédrine.
During the first few months of the conflict, Pablo learned his new job in a trial by fire. The battles of the Somme and Yser, which he had to cover without being able to leave Paris, taught him that the war correspondent’s worst enemy is not fear, nor powerlessness, nor fatigue, but the censorship imposed by the countries in conflict. In order for the war to be able to continue its course, the patriotic spirit among the citizens had to be kept aflame, and this could only be done by hiding the truth of what was going on in the battlefields, especially on the Western Front, which rather seemed like an extermination camp. The newspapers of the neutral countries soon understood the game, and many of them agreed to accept money from the propaganda ministries of one side or the other. Despite everything, foreign journalists were prohibited from going near the front, but instead were given the special privilege of access to the telegraph services that had been established, provided that they wrote their dispatches in French so they could be reviewed by the censors. So Pablo had no choice but to improve his skills in the language of Rabelais, and to accept that he would not be able to do much to support the cause of pacifism with the official communiqués that journalists received twice a day and the strict press laws of the French government, which prohibited “any information or article containing a message that could support the enemy or exert a harmful influence on the morale of the army or of the populace,” under penalty of fines or even incarceration. And given that advocating for antiwar positions could only be interpreted as an unequivocal sign of harmful influence, Pablo had to learn to write between the lines.
It was not until mid-November that he was able to participate in his first “excursion” to the battlefield, organized expressly for a group of international journalists by the foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, one of the primary architects of the pacts that culminated in the Triple Entente, the alliance between the French, Russians, and British. But there was a hitch: they would not be covering active engagements, but visiting the aftermath of the Battle of the Marne, on territory safely in the hands of the allies. The gates of Paris were still decorated with barbed wire and steel parapets, vestiges of the days when the German army had nearly taken the French capital. Six sentinels scrutinized the reporters’ papers before letting them get into the military vehicle which would take them to the crime scene (war being nothing but a state of generalized crime). The first few kilometers were strangely peaceful, the deceptive calm before the storm, but arriving in the vicinity of the Marne, the view changed dramatically, from the picturesque string of villages to houses in ruins, ransacked homes, charred roofs. The inhabitants had been caught off-guard like the victims of Pompeii by the volcanic onslaught of the Germans, leaving whatever they were doing suspended, halfway done: food in the oven, clothing on the line, a rag doll by a washbasin … At first, very few people, here and there an elderly woman with the dazed, sullen look of one who has lost everything overnight. Only arriving in the more densely populated areas, such as Meaux or Montmirail, was he finally able to talk with witnesses of the events, who were eager to tell the journalists about what had happened during the days of the German occupation, probably to exorcise their demons. It was then, hearing the brutal tales of those poor people, that Pablo understood that war is the greatest poison mankind has invented.
“I thank God,” said a former schoolteacher from Meaux, who had been blinded years before, “that I was unable to see the horrors of this war. If I had, I would have gouged my own eyes out like Oedipus.” Two thick tears ran down his cheeks as he continued: “I wish they had taken all my senses, because wine now tastes like blood to me, and bread tastes like death, and the rooster’s crow sounds like the screaming of women being raped.” He took a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose noisily, and his voice trembled as he took his leave with these bitter words: “When he was a young man, Montaigne believed that philosophy should teach you how to die. But when he was older, he discovered that no, it was just the opposite, philosophy should teach men how to live and let live. I wish the men in power had read more Montaigne and less Napoleon.”
These words rang in Pablo’s ears during the rest of the trip, not only when looking at the valleys riddled with holes by artillery or when counting the innumerable miniature French flags signaling the dead buried under the wet earth of the trenches. At that moment, more than ever, he was certain that the black flag of the anarchists, the flag that is the negation of all flags, is the only one that deserves to be raised in this life. And from that day forward, for nearly two years, he woke up every morning with the old man’s words ringing in his ears. Until, that is, the Battle of Verdun.
After that, words failed.
– 22 –
In the early dawn hours on Sunday morning, in two automobile trucks sent expressly to Vera and duly guarded by the forces of the Civil Guard, the detainees arrived at the city’s penitentiary. The prisoners were put into cells in the third gallery of the ground floor of the prison, and were visited by the chaplain, Don Alejandro Maisterrena, who learned that ten of them professed the Catholic faith and four of them professed no religion.
El Pueblo Navarro, 11 November 1924
WHEN PABLO AND HIS THIRTEEN COMRADES are incarcerated in the Provincial Prison of Pamplona, popularly known as the “Triple-P,” the predominant penitentiary system in Spain is what is known as the “progressive system,” tried for the first time in the prison of Ceuta in 1889, generalized throughout the national territory at the turn of the century, and confirmed after the recent decree of 1923. This system is based on a gradual improvement in the prisoners’ situation as they approach the end of their sentence, taking into account their behavior and the seriousness of the crime, and includes four phases: first, the phase of solitary confinement, when the prisoner is kept under strict control and surveillance; next, a phase of communal living with other prisoners, with educational and vocational activities aimed at reintegration; then a phase of preparation for release, during which the prisoner enjoys temporary passes to leave; and finally, a phase of conditional or probationary freedom. And so, in keeping with standard procedure, all of the detainees from the incident at Vera will receive the first degree of punishment at Triple-P, placed in individual cells while they await their trials. Although some of them will never see the end of the first phase.
It is still nighttime when the two paddy wagons arrive in Pamplona, slowing down to twenty-four kilometers per hour, the citywide speed limit. Five minutes later, the trucks pass through the black steel gates of the prison and ente
r the large yard, waking up the prisoners sleeping in the south wing of the building. The night watch has been reinforced with fifteen soldiers, and there is an increased police presence along the avenues and roadways leading to the jail. A few civil guards, wrapped in their black cloaks and with their chinstraps quivering beneath their jowls, assist the soldiers and prison guards in removing the prisoners, arms cramped and wrists bruised, from the trucks. In silence they lead them at gunpoint, hands and feet in chains, to the booking room on the ground floor of the prison, where the well-mannered prison warden, Don Daniel Gómez Estrada, is waiting to greet them, leaning on his cane. He opens with an allusion to his counterpart in Burgos:
“I will not say, as some of my colleagues do, that one prisoner is shit, two prisoners are two shits, and more than two prisoners is a shit storm, although that may be true in some cases. You boys just keep in mind that this detention center is governed based on three fundamental principles: the discipline of a barracks, the seriousness of a bank, and the austerity of a monastery. If you can behave accordingly, we’ll get along just fine.”
The Anarchist Who Shared My Name Page 42