The Anarchist Who Shared My Name

by PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ

  “That’s what’ll happen to you if you don’t tell us what we want to hear,” the guard who had previously kicked Pablo said menacingly.

  But Pablo would have better luck than his friend. Not because he was less guilty, nor because he was more intelligent, nor because they had already gone through their whole repertoire of tortures that night, but because he was the son of Julián Martín, a former professor of Captain Lorca, who was in charge of the interrogations.

  “Pablo Martín Sánchez,” said the captain, ruffling some papers and parsimoniously stroking his prominent chin, “son of Julián Martín Rodríguez and María Sánchez Yribarne. Let’s see, let’s see … I had a teacher at school in Baracaldo who went by that name. He wouldn’t be your father?”

  “My father died a long time ago,” Pablo responded, sitting in the chair that the captain offered, “but he was a teacher in Baracaldo before becoming an inspector, yes.”

  “So he reached inspector? Very good, I’m happy for him. It’s a shame he died. He’s one of the few teachers I remember fondly. What was it he always used to say?” Captain Lorca made an effort of memory, biting his lower lip and rubbing a hand over his shaved head. “Oh, yes: when you find a good move, look for a better one! This is something I’ve always tried to put into practice in all facets of my life. And it hasn’t hurt me any, I assure you … You, for example, you’re a good move, Pablo: I have here a warrant for search and capture that reached this office a few years ago, on the thirteenth of April 1913. Let me think … Wasn’t that the day they attacked His Majesty in Madrid, right in the middle of Calle Alcalá? But that was a case that closed quickly. We’re not going to dig up the past, surely there’s a better move …”

  Pablo looked at him with eyes as cold as the steel beams he had been cutting in the factory.

  “Don’t look at me like that, friend,” the captain blurted, smiling. “You remind me of your father when he used to scold us. I’m ready to believe you, young man, all you have to do is tell me the truth. Being the son of Don Julián, you can’t be bad people. Look, I’m going to be sincere: this is a matter of teaching the anarchist riffraff a lesson about what happens when they take the law into their own hands. But of course you don’t have anything to do with those scum, right? I’ll bet anything they force you to pay union dues, like so many others, am I right? You would be surprised at the number of honest workers who end up joining because of threats. I don’t want to elaborate, but the other day I ran into a neighbor, his eye looked like ground meat. And I stopped him and I asked him, ‘Tomás, by God, what happened to you?’ and he goes and tells me, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, ‘Nothing, I didn’t pay my dues.’ We can’t let these kinds of things happen, Pablo. That’s where all the trouble starts. It starts with beating up the guy who doesn’t want to pay union dues, and it ends with killing the manager. You get me? That’s why you have to nip it in the bud, crush these vermin, cut off the hands of anyone who rises up in arms. Don’t you agree?”

  From the yard came a long, acute, howling lament.

  “Of course you agree,” the captain replied to himself, taking out a list of names. “But let’s get down to brass tacks. Let’s see, let’s see … Macías, Madero … ah, here: Martín. Martín Sánchez. It says here that at eighteen o’clock on the eleventh of January, which is the time at which Don Manuel Gómez was shot, you were working in the factory La Vizcaya belonging to Altos Hornos, because that day you had the afternoon shift. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perfect, that’s all I wanted to hear. You see how it wasn’t so difficult, Pablo? Your father always said: when you find a good move, look for a better one! Go on, sign here and get out of here before I change my mind.”

  Outside the station, he could still hear the screams of Jesús Vallejo coming from the yard. Pablo clenched his teeth and tried to pull himself together, not suspecting that a few days later the poor man would try to commit suicide by throwing himself repeatedly to the floor from the window of his cell. But Pablo had too many of his own problems to think about to be able to worry about others. Because although he had gotten lucky on this occasion, he suspected that everything had started to get tangled. When he got home, his mother opened the door, having been notified by Julia. She took him into her arms, crying, and when she recovered her composure she said:

  “From now on I’m going to live here with you. And if they come to get you again, first they’ll have to drag me away by the ankles.”

  Pablo kissed his mother, hugged his sister, and sighed to see little Teresa, who had fallen asleep next to the fire and appeared to be having a nightmare, to judge by the expression on her face.

  “She didn’t want to go to bed,” explained Julia. “She kept asking, ‘When is Uncle Pablo coming back?’”

  Uncle Pablo took the child in his arms and gave her his special goodnight kiss, rubbing noses. The girl woke up and, after seeing her uncle, fell back asleep, but now without the worry in her brow. Pablo brought her to the bed and then told the two women about all what he had been through.

  “So you might say,” he said in conclusion, “Papa saved me from Heaven.”

  “Thank the Lord,” exclaimed María, putting her hands together.

  “Yes, for once,” Pablo conceded. “Hopefully he’ll be just as merciful with the rest of my workmates.”

  Spain had turned into a powderkeg and sooner or later it would explode. The unions and the owners were at each other’s throats and every day the newspapers greeted the morning with a slew of obituaries. Just one day before the manager of Altos Hornos was riddled with bullets in Baracaldo, a cork boss named Enrique Barris had been assassinated in Sevilla, and the next day it was the metals magnate Juan Abelló who went on to meet his maker, in Tarrasa, where the violence of nearby Barcelona was spilling over. The situation in Barcelona was really nasty: there the bosses had managed to turn the Sindicato Libre into a nest of paid gunmen, aiming to wage war on the anarcho-syndicalist groups that were predominating in the working class. And as if that weren’t enough, General Martínez Anido, the military governor of Barcelona, had pulled from his top hat a poisoned rabbit that would end up provoking another assassination: the so-called Ley de Fugas, or “Flight Law,” according to which a policeman had the right to shoot freely at any prisoner who tried to escape. And use turned into abuse: if a man didn’t want to run, all they had to do was give him a little shove.

  On the eighth of March, almost two months after the Altos Hornos attack, three men riding a motorcycle and sidecar in Madrid shot at the automobile of the prime minister of the government, Don Eduardo Dato, who that same day had said to his wife: “If they kill me, that’s just an occupational hazard.” Three bullets proved his fears: the first lodged in the chest at the seventh rib; the second destroyed the mandible; and the third pierced the cranium, the meninges, the cerebellum, the annular protuberance, the medial ventricle, and the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere. And although the investigation was more difficult than expected, it was finally found that the perpetrators of the attack had been three young Catalan anarchists who came to Madrid with the sole intention of ending the prime minister’s life. One of them, Pedro Mateu, would end up confessing: “I didn’t shoot Dato, I didn’t even know him. I shot a prime minister who authorized the cruelest and bloodiest of laws, the Ley de Fugas.” Decidedly, the rabbit in Martínez Anido’s top hat came out scorched.

  Learning about the assassination, Pablo feared the worst. Madrid was very far away, it is true, but as an old saying goes, the scalded cat fears even cold water: he also had had nothing to do with the death of the manager and he had nearly ended up tied upside-down. When he returned to the factory, he thought about his mother, ready to be dragged off by the ankles if anyone wanted to take away her son. He thought about Julia, who still hadn’t recovered from the fright of two months ago. He thought about little Teresa, who was still asking who those men were who had come into their home so late at night. And t
he thought of exile occurred to him. But reaching home, the three women wouldn’t hear of it. Don’t leave, said his mother. Don’t even think about it, said his sister. If you leave, his niece threatened, I think I’ll never speak to you again. So he opted to create a hiding place. For this purpose, he chose the little dressing room at the back of Julia’s bedroom, sliding the armoire over so that it would hide the entryway, and making a hole in the armoire’s rear panel, a sort of human doggie door. In case of unexpected visits, he could simply open it, slide the clothing out of the way, and crawl through the trap, which would only take a few seconds. His chance to test it would arrive sooner than he thought. The next day, in fact.

  They were having dinner in the dining room when the doorbell made them jump. Pablo leapt from his chair and ran to Julia’s room, opened the armoire, pushed on the panel and disappeared into his hiding place. He held his breath in the darkness until he heard the voice of his niece saying:

  “You can come out now, Uncle Pablo.”

  The three women waited for him, seated on the bed, with their hands on their knees, and could not keep from laughing when they saw him come out from between the clothes in the armoire, like a mole poking its head out of a molehill:

  “False alarm,” said Julia. “It was the neighbor bringing Easter eggs.”

  “To hell with those eggs,” grumbled Pablo.

  And the three women all laughed heartily again, breaking the tension. When they went back to the dining room, the soup was cold.

  “Next time,” said Pablo, “don’t forget to hide my plate before you open the door. The police know how to count to four.”

  But there would be no next time. The trial for the assassination of the manager of Altos Hornos did not begin for another year and a half, and would end in the middle of 1923 with the pardon of the four accused (including Jesús Vallejo, who in the meantime had tried to commit suicide again), as the jury was given to understand that the confessions had been obtained under torture. Even so, the trial had an effect on Pablo’s spirit, and he gradually became more and more distant, focused, taciturn. He stopped going to union meetings. He stopped walking along the banks of the Nervión. He stopped going to the community library. He stopped drinking wine with his workmates. He even stopped going out with Celeste, his sister Julia’s friend, giving a lame excuse: I have to take care of my family, otherwise I’m not the man you deserve, but to do so I’m probably going to have to leave the country soon. Deep down, for all those years, the greatest joy in his life was a child, curious as no other, who never stopped asking about the divine and the human, putting him in more than one predicament:

  “Uncle Pablo, if God is everywhere, is he also in Hell?”

  Damn kid.

  “Uncle Pablo, is it true that fish don’t sleep?”

  Her curiosity had no limits.

  “Uncle Pablo, Grandmother says that you can’t smell flowers. Is that true?”

  That’s how the personal questions started.

  “Have you ever been in love, Uncle Pablo?”

  And Uncle Pablo had no choice but to tell her his whole life story.

  “Well, I’d say that if God exists, Hell must be where he spends most of his time,” answered the anticleric.

  “I don’t know if fish sleep, but I know they dream. Because you can live without sleeping, Teresa, but you can’t live without dreaming,” replied the romantic.

  “Of course it’s true, don’t you know that Grandmother never lies? I can’t smell smells, good ones or bad ones, not the smell of a rose or the smell of a fart,” responded the anosmic.

  “I only fell in love once and I almost didn’t live to tell about it,” replied the vampire with no heart.

  So it was that by age nine Teresa knew her uncle’s story better than the tale of Little Red Riding Hood.

  “Uncle,” she asked him one night, “what’s your first memory?”

  “The Lumière Cinematograph,” replied Pablo, after thinking for a moment.

  And the next day he decided to take her to the movies, in the hope that the Lumière brothers’ invention would do a bit to slake her unquenchable thirst for knowledge. The hard part wasn’t convincing his niece, who jumped for joy at the idea, but rather her mother, who had never been able to forget the tragedy of the Teatro Circo movie house in Bilbao, where a false fire alarm had led to the death of forty children, smothered under the stampede. But that was many years ago, and the halls were better prepared now. So they left the house at dusk, a peaceful mid-September twilight. And the film that they went to see was Nanook of the North, by Robert Flaherty. El Noticiero Bilbaíno had published an enthusiastic review that morning: “This is a film shot at the North Pole, with interesting and curious scenes of the life of the Eskimos. The viewer will surely be astonished at the labors and tasks that Nanook the Eskimo performs in order to hunt walrus, seal, and bear and to catch salmon, as well as seeing the hunter hack apart a harpooned walrus and eat its raw flesh with apparent pleasure. Nanook of the North is one of the best reels being projected this season.”

  “What do you say we all go to see the Eskimos together?” Pablo had said. His mood had improved a bit since his colleagues from Altos Hornos had been pardoned. “Maybe that way you’ll believe me when I tell you that they kiss by rubbing noses.”

  When the lights went out, Pablo again felt the same emotion as that day long past when he went with Vicente Holgado to Madrid’s avenue of San Jerónimo and paid two reales to see the magnificent, the incredible, the extraordinary invention of the Lumière brothers. Now the movies lasted an hour instead of a minute, but the emotion that one felt when the lights went out was still the same. The first reel left them gobsmacked, especially little Teresa, who had to snap her mouth shut to keep from dropping the caramel her uncle had bought her at the concession: a kayak approached the camera, conducted by Nanook handling a double-bladed oar with the skill of a swordsman. A five-year-old boy was traveling on top of the boat, clutching tight to the prow to keep from falling in the water. But the best part was when Nanook got out of the canoe and started pulling members of his family out through the narrow hole, as though the kayak were a great monster spitting up Eskimos: the mother, Nyla, with her weeks-old infant; Cunayou, the bright-smiling teenager; and Comock, a husky puppy with feet white as snow.

  “Close your mouth,” Julia told the girl again and again.

  But there was no way. Especially not when Nanook and the other men hunted a walrus and cut it up to eat it raw. Nor when they discovered a baby polar bear hidden in a cave. And even less when they all started building an igloo with large blocks of snow cut out with sharpened walrus tusks: and the best thing was that the igloo had windows made of ice to let in light! But Pablo started getting worried, because the film had been running for almost an hour and he still hadn’t seen what he wanted to see.

  “Look!” he was finally able to exclaim, overjoyed. “There you have an Eskimo kiss!”

  Indeed, the beautiful Nyla and her little were rubbing their noses together in a gesture of tenderness. And little Teresa looked at her uncle and smiled beneath her nose.

  When they left the theater it was night. And although the film had ended with a frightening snowstorm, there was a big smile on Teresa’s face, and another, fainter, on Julia’s, and a third, barely perceptible, on Grandma María’s; and Pablo looked at them, unable to keep from cracking a smile himself, a glimmer of joy or hope. But soon their smiles would turn to clenching teeth, because at that moment, at Ciudad Condal, a military coup was being planned.

  – 25 –

  That same month of November, the case was in the hands of Attorney General Don Carlos Blanco. And he saw something terrible in those documents, as ten days later he resigned from the case on the pretext of illness. Did it seem monstrous to him to accuse a few innocent men, a few poor abused men, perhaps turned over to the government by agents of the government itself who were themselves involved in shady, unspeakable dealings? Carlos Blancos did not say. But
he resigned from the prosecution, and abandoned that commission that would have to issue a sentence sure to be excessive and unjust.

  JOSÉ ROMERO CUESTA

  La verdad de lo que pasó en Vera

  TWO WEEKS, TWO LONG, INTERMINABLE WEEKS will pass until the next trial begins before the Supreme Tribunal of Madrid. Two weeks in which more detainees will continue arriving at the Provincial Prison of Pamplona, accused of having participated in the revolutionary insurgency in Vera: among them, a pair of indigents named Perico Alarco and Manolito Monzón. Two weeks in which Pablo will continue choking down the mess, which seems to be some sort of concrete, and suffering fleas like leeches, and the shouting and singing of the general population prisoners in the yard. Two weeks in which the former typesetter of La Fraternelle will have time to think about what has happened and what has not happened, and what could happen if the Supreme Tribunal finds in his disfavor. Two weeks imagining a thousand and one ways of escaping, without ever trying any. Two weeks listening to the dull hammering of footsteps in the corridor and enduring it when the trap door of the cell opens suddenly and his privacy is invaded by the eyeball of the guard. Two weeks shivering just thinking about the remote possibility that the absurd American fashion had arrived in Spain of offering guided visits to ladies who want to see the prisoners. Two weeks confessing his fears to the blind starling in the window and patiently listening to the prison chaplain Alejandro Maisterrena, who insists on speaking to him of God and the Holy Trinity.

  “Look, Father,” Pablo finally says, “I’ve always thought that the best Christian is not the one who talks most about God, but the one who offends Him the least.”

  Two weeks also unintentionally memorizing the obscene phrases and drawings that decorate the walls of his six-square-meter cell. Suffering from prisoner’s syndrome, in which the mind travels continuously to the past and future but avoids as much as possible dwelling on the present. Reading outdated newspapers to learn that Charlie Chaplin is going to marry Lita Grey, the teenaged fellow actor he has already impregnated, and a few others, not so long outdated, that Ferdinando Fernández manages to sneak in for him, such as this copy of Le Petit Parisien in which Blasco Ibáñez continues to deny any involvement in the events, although at least now he is showing solidarity with the accused: “My heart is with those involved in Pamplona and Barcelona. They were victims of their own good faith and enthusiasm, and there is no doubt that they will be avenged.” Two weeks hearing the sounds of Gil Galar slamming himself against the wall of the adjacent cell, and remembering, despite himself, comrade Jesús Vallejo, who tried to commit suicide in Sestao by tossing himself from the window of his cell, with his hands in his pockets. Two weeks, finally, in which Pablo will receive two letters that will further deteriorate his already shattered nerves.