The Anarchist Who Shared My Name

by PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ

  The menu is the same as yesterday and the day before and every day: two hundred grams of bread and a stew of garbanzo beans, lentils, or fava beans, as hard as stones, followed at seven in the evening by a cloudy broth or a purée of uncertain flavor. So it is throughout the year in the Triple-P, except for Christmas and September 24, the day of the Virgin of Mercy, patron saint of prisoners. Then the prison doctor complains that there are more prisoners suffering from constipation than from tuberculosis! But Pablo will not be around long enough to taste the Christmas menu, and for the moment he chokes down the broth, trying to trick his palate with the help of the newspaper, as reading helps distract from the distasteful flavor of the ration: “And it is in vain to pretend to be indifferent and smile after having read,” the article goes on. “The poison remains in our spirit, and when the moment arrives when we need to know whether the lessons of magical science are true, we feel a profound disquiet. I am not saying that fortune-telling is an exact science. Perhaps it is nothing more than a millenarian fantasy, but it is also possible that it is a thing quite worthy of being taken into consideration. What was of concern to such as Socrates could very well concern us all. History itself is an unending study of the Occult: if Caesar had only listened to his wife’s dreams, we tell ourselves, he would not have succumbed to the dagger of Brutus. And little by little, as we turn our gaze backward, we stop smiling.”

  The article goes on for a few more paragraphs, and when Pablo finishes reading it, he remains pensive for a while. He looks at the palms of his hands, remembering the fortune-teller who years ago told him he would die twice, and wonders if he would have the courage to open the Almanac of Omens.

  In the middle of the afternoon, the four prisoners receive a visit, no less unpleasant for being foreseen: a few journalists, taking advantage of the lateness of deliberations, have asked the warden’s permission to visit the prisoners. The first to appear, with his little mustache and his pomaded hair, is the cub reporter from El Pueblo Navarro, who reminds Pablo of one of the writers from Ex-Ilio, the one who asked him to cover the meeting of Blasco Ibáñez in the Community House so he could go see Raquel Meller:

  “Good evening,” he says as he enters the cell, preceded by an armed guard. “Cigarette?”

  Pablo accepts the offer in silence.

  “It seems that the council is inclined to benevolence,” the reporter tries to cheer him up. “At least that’s what the rumors say.”

  “Rumors are rumors,” Pablo replies laconically, stretching out on the cot. And the poor reporter won’t get more than a few bitter monosyllables out of him.

  Half an hour later, another journalist arrives, but Pablo doesn’t even bother to look at his face. Only when he hears his unmistakable voice does he lift his head in surprise:

  “Good morning, boy,” says Ferdinando Fernández, editor of El Castellano from Salamanca.

  “Ferdinando! I can’t believe it!” says Pablo, recognizing in this aged man his journalistic mentor.

  “I can’t believe it either.”

  And they look into each other’s eyes, trying to see a glimmer of hope, as Pablo is attacked by memories, images racing before his eyes as if on a sped-up Lumière Cinematograph, visions of moments experienced with this journalist with his perpetually dilated pupils: the corpses floating in the river Tormes, the churros that they ate at Café Pombo, the bomb tossed by Mateo Morral which nearly blew up under their noses, the old Sherlock Holmes-style gabardine coat that Ferdinando gave him after the attack, the advertisement that El Castellano agreed to run when Angela disappeared …

  “Were you in the courtroom?” Pablo asks, trying to shake the flood of memories from his head.

  “No, I didn’t arrive in time. But I managed to talk to one of the jurymen, Captain Granados, a friend of an old acquaintance of mine.”

  “And?”

  “Well, it appears that the defense was brilliant and there’s disagreement among the tribunal. They’ve been in the meeting for hours and still can’t agree on the verdict. And the longer it takes, the better for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there won’t be unanimity on the sentencing. And this is good. It will be one more reason to protest if they find you guilty. Active forces, especially here in Pamplona, have already started to mobilize in case they need to ask for a pardon, God forbid. And you can be sure that I’m going to do whatever I can to get you out of this mess you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  “Thanks, Ferdinando.”

  “It’s nothing, my friend.” And he adds, letting out a sigh: “If anyone had told me when I first saw you walk into my office that you, of all the reporters, would end up on the front page—”

  “Well, when I wrote the Josiah Warren quote on the front of the cathedral, more than one newspaper mentioned it.”

  “Yes, even then you were finding ways,” smiles Ferdinando. “What was the quote again?”

  “Every man should be his own government, his own law, his own church.”

  “Look where being so much your ‘own’ has gotten you.”

  The guard at the door clears his throat to let them know that the visit has come to an end.

  “Thanks again, Ferdinando.”

  “It’s nothing. I’ll keep you informed … if they let me.”

  And the two old friends shake hands in goodbye.

  At ten o’clock that night, the four accused men are taken from their cells and brought to the attorney conference room, where Nicolás Mocholi is waiting for them, his six-foot-three frame crowned with a face that is tired but comforting:

  “I had you called here to inform you, unofficially, of the result of the deliberations. I don’t want you to have to wait all night. You should know that about twenty minutes ago, after spending over eight hours in deliberations, the members of the tribunal finally left the prison, and tomorrow the sentence will be sent to Burgos—”

  “And what’s the verdict?” asks Santillán, impatiently.

  Mocholi hesitates an instant and then says:

  “You’ve been acquitted for lack of evidence.”

  The four men look at each other in emotion and surprise.

  “But,” Mocholi notes, pointing his index finger at the sky, as if pointing to the crucifix on Calvary, “the sentence means nothing unless it is approved by the captain general. If he disagrees with the verdict, the case will move on to the Supreme Tribunal of War and Marine. If he approves it, the sentence will be firm and not subject to appeal, but you will still be subject to possible prosecution in civil court.”

  “Thank you so much, Commandant,” says Santillán, aware of the great effort the defense counsel has put into the case.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Mocholi warns. “To be honest with you, I have a feeling that the captain general is going to overturn the sentence.”

  Don Nicolás Mocholi’s feeling is well founded: the verdict was not unanimous. Both the president of the tribunal, Don Antonio Permuy, and the speaker, Señor Espinosa, disagreed with their colleagues’ findings, formulating a dissenting opinion on the grounds that there is indeed sufficient proof, at least to condemn Pablo Martín and Gil Galar.

  “Don’t jinx us now,” Santillán implores as they are led out of the conference room and back to their cells.

  Pablo is the last in line down the cement floor of the third gallery, and on entering his cell he is seized by the desire to find a copy of the Almanac of Omens. Maybe it would indicate whether the stars will align favorably in the office of the captain general of the Sixth Region of Burgos.

  THE END OF THE WEEK APPROACHES with exasperating slowness. Those who have never been locked up have the false impression from bad novels that the prisoner eventually loses all notion of time. Nothing could be further from the truth. In prison, one is aware of every passing hour, every minute, every second. The trumpet refrains, as precise and reliable as a cuckoo clock, announcing muster, latrine, yard, mess, shift change, head count, bedtime, or silence, regulate the
prisoners’ rhythm of life such that, if one day the trumpets were to disappear, they would be completely lost. Even the prisoners in solitary confinement, who are not very much affected by the alerts, end up depending on them to order their daily life.

  But apart from the trumpet music that reminds him of his years of military service, the only company Pablo has in his dungeon is the faithful starling in the window, who is still there between the rusty bars, despite the cold and damp. Pablo knows that it is the same bird, not by the beautiful glints of green on its chest, nor by the elegant white marks on its throat, nor by the cheerful song that announces its waking, which after all are nearly identical traits in all starlings, but by the veil that clouds its eyes: the starling is blind. Perhaps some cruel prisoner poked its eyes out with a pin, and the poor little bird had no choice but to live in this place from which everyone wants to escape. Ever since discovering its blindness, Pablo has taken care of it and gives it bits of bread, lentils, or the occasional half-chewed chickpea, and as the hours become interminable toward the end of the week as he awaits the verdict of the captain general of Burgos, Pablo passes the time by building a nest for the little bird. He has read the outdated newspaper twice in its entirety, and meals and walks in the yard are but fleeting distractions, only taking up a fraction of the time. Not even Sunday with its mandatory mass, shower, and change of clothing offers respite from the heavy daily routine. So Pablo, using pieces of straw from the threadbare bedroll and the splinters of wood from the old rickety cot, spends the weekend weaving together a tiny nest for his cellmate, following the technique his father taught him for building castles out of toothpicks.

  On Sunday night, the nest is finished. Pablo climbs up on the latrine and opens the filthy lattice, causing the little bird to lift its head in expectation of its ration. He places under its beak a handful of bits of bread and water, and gently slides the bird to the other side of the sill so he can deposit the agglomerate of wood and straw in the bird’s favorite corner, between the left side wall and the first of the three vertical bars. But the starling seems annoyed when it returns to its spot and finds it occupied. It pecks at the object, as though trying to fend off the forces of an invader, so furiously that its fragile weave starts to come apart.

  “Hey, don’t do that,” Pablo whispers, standing on the latrine.

  But the blind starling will not listen to reason, and within a couple of minutes the much belabored nest is in tatters. Pablo closes the window cover and lies down on the cot, covering himself with his blankets. He hides his head beneath the blanket corner and starts to cry, releasing the tension built up over these many days, until, curled and whimpering, he gradually falls asleep. When the trumpet plays muster in the morning, he will get up and find that the starling has proudly resumed his preferred spot on the windowsill. Starlings are not nest dwellers, little Pablo; it’s hard to believe you forgot the ornithology classes your father gave you in the fields of Castile.

  ON MONDAY APTERNOON, TWO GUARDS COME to take Pablo out of his cell and bring him to the conference room, together with the three other men facing summary trial. There waiting for them are the investigating judge, Castejón, and Don Nicolás Mocholi, with an expression on his face that does not foretell good news:

  “The captain general has dissented on the verdict,” Mocholi tells them without ado as they enter the room, averting his eyes. “The case has been sent up to the Supreme Tribunal of War and Marine, which will have to hand down a firm and definitive sentence within fifteen days.

  Neither Pablo, nor Julián, nor Enrique, nor José Antonio knows what to say. Only Gil Galar speaks up, muttering a stream of incomprehensible syllables.

  “The hearing will be in Madrid,” says Judge Castejón, “but you all will stay here, so I advise you to choose a defense attorney as soon as possible.”

  The four men look to Mocholi, who again averts his eyes:

  “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to take a different case … I have some health problems that prevent me from traveling to Madrid … I advise you to choose Commandant Don Aurelio Matilla, who lives there and is an expert defense attorney—”

  “Tell us the truth, Commandant Mocholi,” Santillán interrupts him. “I beg you.”

  Don Nicolás hesitates for a moment, clears his throat, and concludes: “That’s all I have to say. Commandant Matilla will put together an excellent defense, no doubt about it. If you’ve been acquitted once, I don’t see why you can’t be acquitted again.”

  But you don’t have to be very perspicacious to hear the deep indignation in Mocholi’s words, disguised as false hope. Sometimes even God’s plans follow higher orders.

  XXII

  (1921–1923)

  “OPEN UP, OPEN UP IMMEDIATELY:” SOMEONE shouted as Pablo lay in bed, while a rifle butt rapped insistently on the front door.

  Two years had passed since his return to Baracaldo, two years since he had decided to end his life of exile, two years of normalcy which the knocking of that rifle butt would put an end to once and for all. It is well known that we are all slaves to our past, and ghosts can appear at any time: even at three in the morning of a freezing winter’s day, while we are sleeping tranquilly, cheek nestled snugly in the pillow. Or perhaps not so tranquilly, in Pablo’s case, as he had been having nightmares for the past several days.

  “Open the door or we’ll tear it down!” the shouting on the landing came again, menacingly.

  Pablo jumped out of bed, put on pants, and went out to open the door. In the hallway, he passed his sister and niece, also awakened by the disturbance.

  With a gesture, he instructed them to go back into their bedroom. When he opened the front door, two civil guards grabbed him and put him in handcuffs, while two others searched the room: the judge had ordered his arrest for involvement in the assassination of the manager of Altos Hornos.

  Things had started to get complicated a week before, when the company fired thirty-eight workers and threatened the Sindicato Unico to sack another five hundred if they did not stop their attitude of passive resistance, asking for pay increases that the management was not inclined to grant. The union men met at the Casa del Pueblo in Sestao. Tempers flared in the assembly, and they ended up divided into two camps: on the one hand, those in favor of teaching a lesson to that “son of a bitch who started out as an intern and now thinks he’s the king of the world,” as someone said, and, on the other hand, those of the opinion that violence would do nothing to improve the situation (and would probably have the opposite effect). Among the latter there was, curiously, one member who had tried to end the life of Alfonso XIII, though no one knew it. It was not that Pablo had lost faith in the struggle, nor that the responsibility of taking care of his family made him fear for his job, but that in the end he had understood what Cicero wrote about Julius Caesar: it is not wise to kill a tyrant, it is preferable to let him fail so he does not become a martyr. And the authorities would surely take advantage of any attack to carry out ruthless repression against the unionists, no doubt about it.

  The next day, the automobile of Don Manuel Gómez Canales, general manager of Altos Hornos de Vizcaya, was shot as he left his offices in Baracaldo, and that same night the detentions began. For several days, the screams of the tortured were heard in the barracks of the Civil Guard of Sestao, and many workers stopped coming in to work: some because they had been arrested, others because they had skipped town. Some even managed to board a boat bound for Mexico or Argentina to avoid the canario, that torture device that made even those with the steeliest resolve sing like a bird. But Pablo kept coming in to work, despite the dark premonitions of his sister Julia:

  “Ay, brother dearest, one of these days Spain’s finest are going to come for you …”

  “I have nothing to fear,” Pablo would reply. “This time I didn’t do anything, and I can prove it.”

  In fact, he has the best of alibis: at the time of the attack, he was in the factory cutting steel beams. But then, three days aft
er the shooting, Don Manuel Gómez died as a result of his wounds, and the police discovered a terrorist plot led by Hilario Oliver, José Manzaner, and Francisco Hebrero, alias Malatesta, colleagues of Pablo’s in the boilermaker shop. At the first man’s home they found a dozen bombs, fifty anarchist books, and the well-known Browning pistol, signature of the anarchist tribe. Another wave of arrests began, ending up with 150 syndicalists infesting the jail cells.

  “Leave my sister and her daughter in peace,” Pablo begged as they forced him down the stairs. “It’s not their fault.”

  “Then it must be yours, right, cretin?” asked one of the guards, delivering a kick to his behind. “Go on, shut your mouth and keep movin’.”

  In the street there was a police wagon waiting to transport him to the barracks of the Civil Guard of Sestao. But when they tried to open the rear door of the vehicle, the lock was stuck.

  “Goddammit, not again,” murmured the driver, and he took from under his seat a hammer and a chisel. “There,” he said after smashing the lock with three blows, “you can put the birdie in his cage.”

  But the cage was not empty: inside the wagon, his eyes met the frightened eyes of Jesús Vallejo, a syndicalist and boilermaker like him at Altos Hornos de Vizcaya.

  Arriving at the barracks, they locked them in a cell where bloodcurdling screams could be faintly heard. On the wall of the cell someone had written over and over: “I love you, Mama,” until his pencil or his patience broke. In the next cell, a woman in a white chemise and wet hair started murmuring “the rain, the rain, the rain,” in a monotonous dirge.

  “Shut up, you crazy bitch!” shouted the sentinel, before turning to the new arrivals: “You know what this filthy whore did? She threw one of her clients’ clothes out the window! And then she went to the cemetery to eat dirt from the graves …”

  The first they called was Jesús, who came out of his cell trembling and with a look of terror on his face. Half an hour later, they came to fetch Pablo. Then, as if reluctantly, they took him to the interrogation room, taking a little tour of the yard: there, naked and hanging upside down from a stairwell, Jesús was being whipped with a riding crop.