The first thing Pablo did when he arrived in Paris was head to the Cabaret of Père Pelletier to look for work. But the cabaret no longer existed; in its place was an orthopedic shop. Then he went to the hostel on Rue Lecourbe, where he had lived during the Great War, to see if they had any free rooms, but it had been converted into a brothel. Little by little the country was starting to recover from the damage of the conflict, and it was in the capital that people showed the greatest desire for a clean slate. Paris had been chosen to host the eighth Olympic Games of the modern era, and the motto citius, altius, fortius had seduced the Parisians, who were eager (and proud) to be the capital of the world. How else can one understand the infernal contraption that rose up proudly between the boulevards Saint-Denis and Sebastopol to regulate traffic? A total absurdity, to tell the truth, because people idled there slack-jawed, looking at the little red light, causing more accidents than it prevented—not to mention the bothersome, noisy whistle that announced clear passage for pedestrians. Finally, Pablo thought, looking at this primitive traffic signal, things of modern life. And when he turned the corner he suddenly collided with a pair of sexagenarians had also been gawking at the novelties.
“Oh, pardon,” they said.
“Excusez-moi,” said Pablo.
The man readjusted his top hat, which had slid down his bald pate, while his wife, covered with powder and gemstones, stood looking at Pablo with surprise:
“Monsieur Martin?” she finally asked, pronouncing his name à la française.
“Madame Beaumont? Monsieur Beaumont?”
Wonders of life, those two sexagenarians were the Beaumonts, whom Pablo had met at their estate in Marly at the end of the Great War. For a few seconds they did not know what to say to each other, until the woman proposed that they go have a coffee at La Petite Porte, which was close by. In fact, they had come down to Paris for the wedding of a nephew, and had nothing to do until the next day. It was then that Pablo learned that the lieutenant aviator Joseph Beaumont had died struck by lightning and that the ethereal Annabel, la petite chouchoute of Benjamin Poulain, had been carried off by the Spanish flu.
“We live in Lille now,” said Madame Beaumont, dissimulating a groan, “and we only come down to Marly for the weekends.”
They stood for a long moment in silence, until Pablo broke it by saying that he had arrived in Paris that very morning and was looking for work and lodging. Then the Beaumonts looked each other in the eyes, shook their heads in silence as if they had been expecting such a confession, and made him an offer: their caretaker in Marly had informed them that he was thinking of quitting, and so sooner or later they would need someone to take care of the estate during the week when they weren’t there. Maybe that would interest you, they said, until you can find work more suited to your skills. They would give him lodging and a modest wage; a wage of any kind in those days was nothing to scoff at. He would only have to take care of the dogs and the garden, and maintain the house in good condition for when they came to spend the weekend. “Thank you, I will think about it,” said Pablo, and before saying goodbye he wrote down the number of the Beaumont estate’s recently installed telephone line.
But the day had yet more wonders to reveal. Leaving the café, Pablo bought Le Quotidien, the new leftist newspaper founded by Henri Dumay to fight against journalistic corruption, and the twenty cents he paid for it were well spent: not because the paper made a call of protest against the death sentence for two of the three anarchists accused of assassinating the Spanish prime minister, Eduardo Dato, nor because the front page carried a photograph of Eugenia Gilbert, “the most beautiful woman in Los Angeles,” but because on the inside his attention was caught by two articles that would decide his fate. The first congratulated (not without a dose of irony) the inexhaustible imagination of the Parisian bourgeoisie, who, ruined after the war, had found an emergency solution to their economic problems by killing two birds with one stone: firing the domestic help and renting out their rooms, the so-called chambres de bonne, generally cold, miserable little hovels on the top floor, accessible only by the service stairs, ideal for poor students or penniless laborers arriving in Paris to look for work. For twenty-five francs a week, one could have a more or less dignified room, said the article, and Pablo suddenly imagined himself living up among the chimneys. It wouldn’t be so bad, he thought, surely the views are excellent. And the idea made him smile, there in the middle of the street. The second article was even more interesting, announcing the plans of Sébastien Faure (a well-known anarchist writer and editor) to start publishing a weekly newspaper in Spanish, intended for the large Spanish community living in Paris, which was sure to keep growing in the wake of Primo de Rivera’s coup. This Faure had been one of the main proponents of French pacifism during the European war, and Pablo had even written him a letter offering to collaborate on his anarchist newspaper Ce qu’il faut dire, just before it was permanently banned by the censors. I’ll have to stop by to see him, thought Pablo, maybe he can give me some work. And he wrote down the address of the print shop, called La Fraternelle, located at 55 Rue Pixérécourt, in the middle of the Belleville neighborhood.
The next day, Pablo was renting a chambre de bonne on Rue Saint-Denis for thirty francs a week, and two days later he came to an agreement with Sébastien Faure to work as a typesetter at La Fraternelle, where he would be responsible for composing everything written in Spanish, especially the weekly Ex-Ilio: Hebdomadario de los Emigrados Españoles, the first issue of which was slated for early November. It mattered little that it had been nearly a decade since Pablo had set foot in a print shop, ever since his time as a linotypist at La Belladona in Buenos Aires: for Faure it was enough that he knew the job and he espoused the anarchist creed, the only faith worthy of being professed on the face of the earth. In any case, at first he would be under the supervision of Célerin Didot, an old typographer who would help him brush up on the tricks of the trade.
“One thing, though: I can only offer you work on the weekends,” Sébastien Faure informed him, twisting the tips of his mustache, “because from Monday to Friday the Albatross and the Minerva are running at full steam. But two days is enough to compose a four-page issue, don’t you think?”
“Of course,” replied Pablo.
Leaving the print shop, the sky had clouded over. He looked at the time on his pocketwatch, but the hands had stopped moving: between one thing and another, he had forgotten to wind it that morning.
“Excuse me,” he stopped an aged man who was walking down the street, “do you have the time?”
The man looked at him through thick spectacles and said only the following before continuing on down the street:
“There at the base of the clock, there is death. But fear not, lad.”
A thunderclap tolled and the sky poured forth a heavy rain.
XXIV
(1923–1924)
PABLO SOON LEARNED THAT SÉBASTIEN FAURE was better known around the print shop as Monsieur Fauve, or “Mister Savage,” for his hot and sudden temper. In any case, he would not suffer much from Monsieur Fauve’s spontaneous fits of rage, because the old anarchist was very clear on two points: that God was an invention of the rich to keep poor people in line, and that Sundays were made for rest (something even the Lord acknowledged). And what goes for Sunday is good for the whole weekend. So Faure left La Fraternelle every Friday afternoon and did not return until Monday morning, leaving Célerin Didot in charge of the print shop. This Didot was an affable typesetter, advanced in years and proud of his snow-white mustache and illustrious surname.
“An erratum injures the eye like a false note in a concert injures the ear,” was the first thing he said to Pablo, after giving him his typesetter’s coveralls. And, so he would not forget that maxim of the mythical Firmin Didot, he had him compose the sentence, print it and hang it over the door as a test of his knowledge of the trade.
But the miserable salary of a part-time typesetter would barely allow Pablo
to cover his rent, so he had no choice but to call the Beaumonts and accept the job as caretaker of the estate. Until I find something better in Paris, he thought, not suspecting that he would end up staying in Marly for a whole year. He went up on the first Monday of November, agreed to the terms of the contract with Mr. Beaumont, fixed up the shack next to the pond, and decided that he may as well enjoy the chance to breathe the fresh air, hard to come by in the capital. It was also a chance to resume a former pastime that he had completely forgotten: writing letters to his old friends. The first he wrote was to Robinsón, with whom he had lost touch since the bearded one left Paris to live in Baracaldo. Then he wrote to Vicente Holgado, hoping that after so many years he would still be living on Calle Cayena with Luciana, the tango dancer. He also wrote to Graciela, the wife of Rocafú, and to their son Leandro, who must, by then, have been a full-grown man. He wrote to Ferdinando Fernández, with whom he had lost contact since his press credentials were revoked after the episode in Verdun. And he even wrote to Father Jerónimo, who had saved his life at the Fountain of the Wolf when everyone else had given him up for dead … But of all the letters he sent, only two received a reply: the one to Father Jerónimo and the one to Graciela. The priest in Béjar was happy to hear from him again and told him about the rumor that had been going around the village for a few years: that Angela was living in Madrid, where she had gotten married and had a daughter. Congratulations, thought Pablo, who couldn’t help feeling a pang of nostalgia.
Graciela, for her part, gave him two bits of news, one good and one bad. The good news was that her son Leandro was now living in Paris, following in Pablo’s own footsteps (Pablo’s last letter, written at the start of the Great War, carried the stamp mark of the City of Light), and she included Leandro’s address and asked Pablo to go by and visit him to see how he was. The bad news was that Vicente Holgado had died in Buenos Aires four years before, during the bloody events of Argentina’s own Tragic Week. Following a metal workers’ strike for an eight-hour work day, a terrible face-off had occurred between the forces of order and the workers, ending in hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries. But Vicente had not been killed by the police, but by the boys of the Argentine Patriotic League, a xenophobic nationalist attack force that had shown that Mussolini’s fascism had a twin brother on the other side of the Atlantic. He was riddled by twelve bullets in the doorway of his home and died in the arms of Luciana, the tango dancer, who heard the gunshots and came running down the stairs just in time to hear him say “I love you,” followed by an agonized “Sons of …” which Vicente left unfinished.
A few days after receiving the letter from Graciela, Pablo went to see Leandro, taking advantage of having finished his work at La Fraternelle early in the afternoon. It was a sad, rainy Sunday, one of those Sundays that seem to be made for suicides and gravediggers. Leandro was living in a hostel on Rue des Beaux Arts, just across from the Hôtel d’Alsace, where Oscar Wilde had died toasting with champagne, leaving an unpaid debt of more than two thousand francs, after claiming that “in this world of ours, there is no spectacle more lugubrious than a rainy Sunday afternoon in Paris.”
Pablo rang at the door, but no one answered. He tried again and heard a groan coming from the bedroom.
“Leandro?” he asked, speaking through the crack in the door.
“Who is it?” roared a hoarse voice.
“It’s Pablo, Pablo Martín, your mother wrote to me to tell me—”
The door opened suddenly and the silhouette of a giant appeared:
“Pablo!” exclaimed the silhouette, leaping on the visitor, strangling him more than hugging him. “Come in, che, come in. A real pleasure to see ya …”
The son of Rocafú had turned into a big man, over six foot four, broad and strong as a windmill. He was wearing pajamas and his hair was mussed.
“Pardon the mess, I had a long night. Care for some yerba maté?”
Leandro brewed the bitter herb in a little gourd, and Pablo burned his tongue on the first sip. Then they caught up, and it turned out that the son of Graciela was working as a waiter at the Point du Jour, a bar near the print shop of Sébastien Faure.
“Don’t tell me you’re working for the old crank!” the Argentine wondered. “Did ya know he was friends with my daddy? Pen pals, really, because they never got to meet each other in person. But they wrote each other every month, Papa in Spanish and Faure in French, don’t ask me how they did it, but they understood each other. I suppose that deep down they spoke the same ‘language’—the language of Proudhon, Bakunin, Ferrer Guàrdia, and Malatesta. It was Malatesta who put them in touch with each other. So when I arrived in Paris I went to see him and said, ‘Monsieur Faure, I’m the son of Ataúlfo Fernández and I’m looking for work.’”
“And he didn’t give you anything at La Fraternelle?”
“Yeah, he did, he took me on as an apprentice, but I didn’t even last two weeks. I’m not cut out for it, Pablo. Haven’t you seen my hands? Look at these fingers! When I try to grab a letter I grab the whole tray!”
Over the head of the bed there was a photograph of a soccer team, framed and with a crack in the glass.
“Remember that?” Leandro asked.
“Of course,” replied Pablo. “Argentinos Juniors, the proletariat team.”
“Formerly known as the Martyrs of Chicago. Did you know they’re playin’ in the premier league now? This photo is a relic, ’cause the jersey’s not red and white anymore, now it’s green and white.”
They filled their gourds again and went on talking.
“I imagine you’ve heard about Vicente,” said Leandro.
“Yes, I learned from your mother’s letter.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“I came to Paris after they killed him,” Leandro finally said. “I couldn’t take it in Argentina anymore … My old man always said that a conservative is someone who prefers injustice to disorder. And my country is full of conservatives, Pablo. You know what? Those sons of bitches from the Patriotic League were fixin’ to kill me too. Look,” he said, lifting his shirt and showing a bullet scar: “I got out of there with this in my side, but there are two of them who will never forget my face … if they can remember anything at all! You know what I did to them?”
Pablo arched his eyebrows.
“I grabbed them by their necks and knocked their goddamned heads together, so hard their skulls split open like a couple of ripe watermelons. They left a hell of a mess on my shirt.”
For a moment all that was heard was the sipping of the mate straws. When seven o’clock rang out from the nearby church, Pablo got up to leave.
“Wait,” said Leandro, “D’you have a bicycle?”
“No,” said Pablo, putting on his coat. It had started to rain.
“Then I’ve got a present for ya,” said Leandro, with a giant smile. He shuffled through the junk in the corner until a handlebar appeared, then a seat and finally an entire bicycle.
“Voilà!” he exclaimed with joy. “It’s old, but it’s not just any bike. It’s a Clément Luxe from ’96, a real antique. So treat ’er gently, like she was yer granny. Also, the scrap dealer I bought her off of told me she used to belong to one of those famous bohemian painters or writers, I can’t remember who—”
“But you’re not going to need it, Leandro?”
“Me? You want me to smash it to bits? The day I tried it out I nearly killed myself. Tell the truth I only bought it ’cause I felt sorry for the scrap dealer …”
Pablo and Leandro embraced, or rather it was Leandro who embraced Pablo while Pablo let himself be squeezed by that soft-hearted giant.
“Come by the Point du Jour whenever you want. I work there every day except Sunday, because I told the boss my religion wouldn’t allow it … We’ll see if he ever finds out that I’m more of an atheist than Galileo! It’s on Rue de Belleville, by Place des Fêtes.”
“We’ll see each other there for sure, Leandro. All three of u
s.”
“Three?”
“Yeah, of course. You, me, and Clément here.” He smiled and stroked the seat of the Clément Luxe.
He left with an old bicycle and a new friend.
THE MONTHS PASSED WITH THE PHLEGMATIC precision of a Swiss watch. The Military Directory went about consolidating its power in Spain, and for Pablo the idea of returning home seemed ever more remote. In France, on the other hand, it was the left that took power, and the new Cartel des Gauches turned a blind eye to the groups of Spanish exiles, ever greater in number, who were holding meetings to protest against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The activities were well documented in the weekly Ex-Ilio, which Pablo was now solely responsible for editing, since the aged Célerin Didot had had to retire after suffering an embolism which left half of his body paralyzed. The print run was modest, but it got as high as two thousand copies during the Olympics, because many Spanish workers had worked on the construction of the shiny new Stade de Colombes and the Piscine de Tourelles, and they passionately followed the results of their compatriots in the contests of track and field, tennis, swimming, soccer, and boxing. And when the Olympic Games reached their end (without a single miserable medal in the locker room of the Spanish sporting army, as one journalist called it), it was the first anniversary of Primo de Rivera’s coup d’état that filled the four pages of Ex-Ilio.
At that time, Paris had turned into a boiling pot of anarchists, communists, Republicans, and Catalan separatists, conspiring in broad daylight with the insolence and resolution of those who believe they have justice on their side. September was beginning, and La Fraternelle was invaded by groups, associations, collectives, and clubs of Spaniards who wanted to publish pamphlets, brochures, fliers, and posters announcing meetings, talks, colloquia, or theatrical performances to protest against the situation in Spain and to mark the upcoming anniversary of the military uprising.
The Anarchist Who Shared My Name Page 52