The Anarchist Who Shared My Name

by PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ

  During the months following the revolutionary attempt, detainees kept arriving at the Provincial Prison of Pamplona, with a total of thirty-three defendants in the ordinary trial. Among them were Unamuno, Blasco, Ortega, and Soriano, who were declared rebels by association. But the trial would not begin until January 1927, so many of the detainees would end up spending more than two years in prison despite their innocence. In the meantime, in April 1925 La Fraternelle published a minor opus titled La tragedia de Vera: un crimen jurídico, edited by the Comité Pro-Presos and signed with the pseudonym El Duende de la Cárcel, which would ultimately encourage another revolutionary attempt in Vera de Bidasoa on May 26, 1925, although with limited impact: twenty armed men tried to cross the border between markers 24 and 25, but they were discovered by the carabiniers, who welcomed them with a hail of gunfire and stopped them before they set foot on Spanish soil. Some claimed that it was a plot intended to avenge the death of the anarchist comrades; others said, without much basis, that the rebels’ aim was to get revenge on constable Enrique “The Dandy” Berasáin, who had received many death threats since the events of November. But it is also likely it was a plot concocted by the police under Martínez Anido (“that epileptic pig with blood on his hands,” as Unamuno called him). Such was the case in an incident at the end of 1926, denounced by the brave captain of carabiniers Juan Cueto: a group of police, apparently commanded by Luís Fenoll Malvasía, the director of security in the government of Primo de Rivera, bought some firearms in France, brought them up Mount Larrún and fired several shots into the air in the middle of the night; then they slept in a barn and the next morning went down to Vera to report that a large number of communists had tried unsuccessfully to cross the border, leaving behind two crates full of pistols (which were precisely those which the police themselves had just bought in France). The aim of the ruse was obvious: to maintain latent fear among the Spanish populace and thus legitimize an unpopular dictatorship.

  Finally, on January 10, 1927, the ordinary trial began for the thirty-three men accused of having organized or participated in the bloody events of Vera. Despite the large number, I will list their names here, so as to leave a written document of all of them. We have already met many of the men prosecuted by the ordinary war tribunal: the four abovementioned intellectuals accused of sedition; José Antonio Vázquez Bouzas (who escaped the garrote by the skin of his teeth), Bonifacio Manzanedo (who was not brought in to the Triple-P until March 1925, when he had fully recovered from the two amputations that saved him from the garrote), Julián Fernández Revert (Julianín, who entered prison a boy and would leave it as a man), Casiano Veloso (the musketeer from Villalpando, whose statements condemned Pablo), Anastasio Duarte (the man from Caceres with an averted gaze, who sold his country for a shot of cocaine), Juan José Anaya (the Douglas Fairbanks of Madrid), Justo Val (the carpenter from Santurce who shared a cell with Vázquez Bouzas in Vera), Francisco Lluch (the deserter of the regiment of Sicily who wanted to return to Spain to see his dying father), Eustaquio García (the afflicted young man who shared his tears with Julianín), Angel Fernández (another of the Villalpando clan), Pedro Alarco (the toothless informant, better known as Perico), and Manuel Monzón (Manolito, the deaf-mute). The rest of the men prosecuted in the ordinary trial were: Francisco Jáuregui Tellechea (a native of Vera de Bidasoa, accused of concealing the fugitives), Manuel del Río Menéndez (from Órdenes, Coruña), Inocencio Clemente Ansó (from Santa Engracia, Huesca), Isidoro Lorente Delgado (from Tobillos, Guadalajara), Alejandro Díaz Gazco (from Getafe, Madrid), Mateo Palme Barranco (from Tudela, Navarra), Felipe Crespo Martínez (from Armañanzas, Navarra), Domingo Bocos Pernía (from Pampliega, Burgos), Ángel Ramos Pina (from Fitero, Navarra), Antonio Pingarrón Magaña (from Madrid), Ángel García Pellisa (from Monzón, Huesca), and Manuel Zulaica Caramés (from San Sebastián, Guipúzcoa). To these, we should add José Manuel López Martínez (from Castril, Granada, who died in prison before the trial was held) and Bienvenido Vázquez Gustiñas (whose case remained separate from the principal trial because the latter was already in plenary session by the time he was arrested). The majority of them were in prison when the trial took place, with the obvious exception of the deceased López Martínez and those who had been released on bail, such as the young Eustaquio García, the ineffable Perico Alarco (although the toothless one would end up going back to jail shortly thereafter on charges of robbery), and the deaf-mute Manolito Monzón (who would also be tossed back in the slammer for begging on a public street).

  Is anyone missing from this long list? Yes, in fact: what about Leandro, the Argentine giant, son of Rocafú, who nearly killed old Dubois, and who fell in puppy love with little Antoinette, the crypt keeper’s daughter? If he is not included it is simply because he does not appear on any official list of the men prosecuted in 1927. This is one of the great unsolved mysteries of this story: after the execution, he disappeared from the face of the earth. The last thing we know of him is that he went up to the chapel to say goodbye to Pablo. After that, the newspapers of the time do not mention his name again, and history books are silent about him.

  In any case, in Leandro’s absence, the ordinary trial began on January 10, 1927. Many of those prosecuted chose Don Nicolás Mocholi as their defense attorney, and the illustrious commandant rose to the occasion, managing to convince the tribunal to acquit all of them of the crime of armed aggression, due to lack of evidence. What he could not prevent was that some were accused of rebellion against the government: Bonifacio Manzanedo, Casiano Veloso, and Manuel del Río (each condemned to twelve years in high-security prison), as well as José Antonio Vázquez Bouzas, Anastasio Duarte, Julián Fernández Revert, Justo Val, Gregorio Izaguirre, Tomás García, and Ángel Fernández (ten years and one day of high-security prison). Inocencio Clemente and Gabriel Lobato were found guilty as accomplices and sentenced to two years, four months, and one day in jail. The rest were acquitted or declared rebels. However, none of those condemned for rebellion completed their sentences: between the twelfth and the fourteenth of April, 1931, they were released, some by the frenzied masses who attacked the prisons after the advent of the Republic and others by the amnesty decreed by the new government. Also, in September of that same year, the City Hall of Vallejo de Mena (Burgos), the birthplace of Gil Galar, asked the Congress of Deputies to review the trial in which their native son had been prosecuted. The petition was accepted, and investigations began, but the process took longer than expected and the Spanish Civil War cut short the chance to posthumously exculpate the three men. “So the men executed in December 1924,” the historian José Luís Gutiérrez Molina would write, years later, “will remain stigmatized forever. It was never proved that they were the perpetrators of the killings, but they died for the dictatorship’s need to mete out exemplary justice against its adversaries.” Who knows if some day, now that the spirit to dig up the shadows of the past is starting to awaken, someone will engage in the magnificent madness of looking back at the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and exhuming the files on that ludicrous trial. Who knows, indeed, if the last chapter of this story remains to be written.

  For their part, those who were not detained by the Spanish authorities had mixed fortunes, although the tragic destiny that awaited many of them is surprising, as though the failed plot hatched in Paris had marked them with some sort of curse. We have seen how Anxo “El Maestro” García ended up crushed by a train between the stations of Urrugne and Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the day after the events in Vera. The next to fall was Recasens, aka “Bonaparte,” guillotined in summer 1925 after an attempted robbery in Bordeaux. He was followed shortly by Teixidó, the man who handled revolutionary propaganda in Paris, with his snuff and his hoarse voice, shot down by the police in the bar Bruselas on Calle Urgell in Barcelona, in a settling of accounts that was not even investigated. The next to fall was Piperra, the guide from Zugarramurdi who could not convince his aunt and uncle to shelter Pablo and Robinsón: after spending nearly a month
hiding in the farmhouse of Eltzaurdia, he started life over in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where he found work as a bricklayer’s assistant and was buried in a ditch after falling from the wall he was working on. Years later, during the Civil War, it would be Francisco Ascaso and Buenaventura Durruti who would die tragically, after spending more than a decade trying to change the world: shortly after being detained by the French police in December 1924, they managed to embark at the port of The Hague for America, where they began robbing banks for the cause of anarchy. They returned to Spain during the Republic and participated in the Civil War, becoming true revolutionary legends, which surely contributed to their legendary deaths: first Ascaso, who took a bullet square in the forehead when trying to suppress the fascist uprising of July 1936 at the barracks of Atarazanas in Barcelona; Durruti would die four months later, at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid, after receiving a bullet in the heart trying to stop the advance of the nationalist troops.

  But not all of the men met so foul a fate. Gregorio Jover and García Vivancos, for example, lived to be old men, despite also participating in Durruti’s American adventure and the Spanish Civil War, where they led the column Los Aguiluchos of the Twenty-Eighth Division of the Republican Army. Jover, the third of the three musketeers, would end up dying in Mexico during the years of Franco’s dictatorship, in 1964, after having been secretary of the subdelegation of the CNT in exile. Vivancos, who had been in charge of obtaining weapons for the failed insurgency at Vera, would die shortly before the arrival of democracy in Spain, after having lived a cinematic life: after the Civil War, he fled to Paris, where he was imprisoned by the Nazi army and interned for four years in the concentration camps at Le Vernet and Saint-Cyprien, but he was finally rescued by the Resistance and went on to participate in the liberation of France, where he stayed to live. Postwar poverty forced him to make a living painting colorful scenes and landscapes on handkerchiefs and selling them to wealthy tourists. He ended up meeting Picasso in 1947; the master took him under his wing and found him a patron. From then on, he had considerable success as a painter, showing in famous galleries and selling paintings to celebrities such as Greta Garbo and François Mitterrand. He finally died in 1972, in the Andalusian city of Córdoba, enjoying a well-deserved vacation during the death throes of the Franco dictatorship.

  Finally, Roberto Olaya, aka “Robinsón,” childhood friend of Pablo Martín Sánchez, mystical anarchist and bowler-hatted vegetarian, moved to Belgium after being deported by the French authorities in 1924. No one knows how Kropotkin, his faithful wiener dog, managed to convince them to let him come along, but it is certain that he did so, because he was with Robinsón on his return to Spain after the proclamation of the Republic in 1931. One of the first places Robinsón went after arriving in Spain was Baracaldo, where he spent a few days visiting Pablo’s sister Julia, leaving a big impression on little Teresa, who would never forget the long red beard and the fascinating stories told in prophetic tones by this old friend of her uncle the anarchist. When the Civil War broke out, Robinsón declined to take up arms: his philanthropic anarchism had evolved into an ecumenical pacifism, and so he fled to Panama, where he would die of typhoid fever. Before he left, however, he wrote a letter to Julia to say goodbye, accompanied by a watercolor by his own hand, titled “Vera. Synthetic Vision?” The drawing was awkwardly surrealistic, depicting an old pedal-driven printing press (the Minerva at La Fraternelle?), with a drainpipe emerging from it, pouring into a barrel filled with blood and a jumble of severed heads, hands, and feet, anticipating Picasso’s Guernica by a few years. A civil guard and a judge were overseeing the operation of the machine, while various prisoners with their hands tied behind their backs were waiting to be dismembered. The scene was completed by a nude woman, looking at the viewer from a window at the back of the room as she let a bird escape from her hands.

  And what happened to Angela and her daughter Paula after their visit to Pablo at the Prison of Pamplona? They simply disappeared. They disappeared just as Angela had done fifteen years before: without a trace. Angela’s husband, Paula’s putative father, overturned heaven and earth looking for them, but he never managed to locate their whereabouts. Perhaps they fled abroad, to Africa, America, or Oceania, where Angela always dreamed of traveling with Pablo Martín Sánchez, her childhood friend, her eternal love, her heartless vampire.

  AND THAT’S ALL, DEAR READER: THE stevedores have finished their work and the time has come to say goodbye. I only hope that the bitter taste that the tragic ending of this tale has left in our mouths will last long enough to keep us from making the same mistakes again and again. If these pages serve to save from oblivion a group of men whose lives were cut short by the desire for liberty, it will be one more reason to think that the time that I have dedicated to reconstructing their history has not been in vain. And if, in eighty or ninety years, somewhere in this immense world that keeps incessantly filling up with human beings, another Pablo Martín Sánchez stumbles upon the history of an anarchist who shared his name, he will always be able to put his hand on this book written by another namesake, which will perhaps give him some direction in the work of seizing a memory from where it lies glowing in the moment of danger. Although, truth be told, patient reader, I will be satisfied if I have managed to bring you to the last page and you have enjoyed the journey, because writing is nothing but a stroll you take with someone you do not yet know. Because if I am glad of anything, deep down, it is that I was able to share this story with you, the story of an anarchist who shared my name, the story of Pablo Martín Sánchez, a story I hope was worth telling.

  ADDENDUM

  I WISH TO APOLOGIZE TO MY editor, Jaume Vallcorba, and sincerely thank him for giving me the opportunity to include this final note, considering that the book is already in galleys. And if I apologize to him it is so I won’t have to apologize to my conscience, which has been gripped by unease for a few hours now. Let me explain. A few months ago, after I finished writing this book, and when I had already signed the publishing contract, I had a few copies sent to various people, hoping that they would give me their sincerest opinion and help me clear up certain doubts that I still had not resolved: I sent the text to a couple of historians, a few trusted friends, and to a handful of people I had met during my fieldwork in Vera de Bidasoa, Paris, or Baracaldo, including the “geriatric bloodhounds.” Many of them responded kindly to my appeal, giving me their opinion or pointing out certain geographical or historical errors. What I did not expect is that those copies would pass from person to person until they reached the one who has set my conscience ill at ease.

  Last week I received an email from someone I do not know saying that he had read the draft of my novel. He claimed to know firsthand the story of what happened in Vera, and, although it was generally in keeping with my account of the facts, he didn’t understand how I could believe the official version of the suicide of Pablo Martín Sánchez. At first I thought it was a joke or the delirium of a conspiracy theorist. But I could not keep a glimmer of doubt from persisting in my thoughts. And since it is always better to fret in doubt than to rest in error, I tried to contact the person responsible for this delirium, but in vain: he did not respond to any of my messages. So, since time is not on my side (the publication of the book is now imminent), I have decided to include this addendum before it is too late. And not because it seems necessary to me to air my last-minute worries, but because I consider it my responsibility to reproduce here the words of this message, even if only to avoid depriving the reader of the right to know another possible version of this story, as outlandish or fantastic as it might seem. Here, verbatim, are the words that have caused me such anguish:

  Forget everything you’ve read about the last night the prisoners spent in the Prison of Pamplona. Don’t believe a word of it: it’s a sack of lies, a pathetic reproduction of the official version that the authorities gave of the facts. Everything was distorted and machinated so the hypothesis of Pablo Martín Sánchez’s suicide would b
e believable. I don’t know what actually happened, but what I’m sure of is that Pablo didn’t kill himself, though everyone insists on claiming he did. Don’t tell me you didn’t see the number of incongruities that can be deduced from your own account of the facts. Do you really believe that a man condemned to death, properly guarded, can escape from his guards, enter an office, open a window, and launch himself into the void without anyone stopping him? Do you really believe this tall tale that Pablo Martín was last in line, at the rear of the pack, and that he started running just when there were almost no witnesses, flanked only by a chaplain and two brothers of Peace? And why is it that during the last night he always keeps his head down, barely talks to anyone, and covers his face with a cap and his body with a blanket? Doesn’t it seem suspicious to you that the medical examiner Eduardo Martínez de Ubago was replaced due to illness by the doctor Joaquín Echarte the night before the facts? And doesn’t it seem strange to you that Leandro, the Argentine, does not appear again among the defendants, that the last we know of him is when he comes to visit Pablo the night before the execution? And doesn’t it seem even stranger to you that Pablo wanted to say goodbye to him and to Julián Fernández Revert, putting them in danger by revealing that they were together at the time of the shootout? Doesn’t it seem odd to you that they set up two garrotes, considering that there were three condemned men? Doesn’t it seem very strange to you that it only took them three minutes to pronounce the suicide and go on with the procession? And why was there any need to perform an autopsy on Pablo if we can assume that everyone had seen what happened? And, in the event that they actually performed one, doesn’t it seem strange to you that no one mentioned that the victim’s organs were on the opposite side from normal, due to his situs inversus? And, what’s more, since when does it take two days to do an autopsy? And why do you think Pío Baroja repeats the rumor that it wasn’t Pablo Martín Sánchez who was buried in his grave? And what will you tell me about the tremendous censorship imposed on Spanish newspapers during the days following the tragic events? Unfortunately, I do not have the answers to all these questions, but what I do have is the conviction that Pablo did not commit suicide in the Provincial Prison of Pamplona. And, if not, let me ask you one last question: Haven’t you stopped to wonder about the identity of the “Duende de la Cárcel” who wrote the essay published by La Fraternelle in April 1925?