“It’s an outrage!” I roared. “And, at the same time, very surprising. That network of caves occupied by outsiders and downright outlaws harks back to the era of bandits, and exudes a great sense of mystery.”
“Are you embellishing a case of social degradation as though it were the basis for a novel?”
I blushed. “No, I was just thinking aloud. Those places you showed me did not meet even the lowest acceptable standards of hygiene. The city ought to do something, without question. I will indeed write about this.”
“I could tell that you weren’t an entirely lost cause. Though reactionary, you exhibit a certain humanitarian sensibility that does you credit.”
“Listen, Lacalle, don’t caricaturize me. You cannot judge someone entirely based on his political convictions, because people are much more than their ideologies.”
“That’s true. In addition to our ideologies, we are the product of our experiences, but our convictions also arise from those experiences. Look at me, for example.”
After La Rambla, Paralelo is Barcelona’s most bustling avenue. Legend has it that when the astronomer José Comas provided his former cook with a dowry so that she could marry and open a tavern in the area known as Pueblo Seco, on Montjuïc’s most developed side, he asked her to call it “El Paralelo” in honor of the French geometrician Monsieur Méchain, who in 1794 had visited the city in order to measure the Mediterranean Arch from Dunkirk to our coasts. And the avenue of the Marquess of Duero would forever be dubbed Paralelo, a Barcelona bohemian hotbed lined with theaters, cabarets, music halls, cafés, taverns, and establishments which varied in their levels of taste but which always infused the atmosphere with a characteristic cheer and celebration of a way of life which may have been dissolute, but which also offered up the kind of escapism every large city requires.
Paralelo is hopping at all hours, but I remember how Lacalle’s sincerity seemed to enclose us in absolute silence that day he came to see me and really opened up.
The anarchist leader shared with me how he had been born and had grown up in a mining town in Asturias. His father, a miner, was prone to beating his wife and two children. The violence grew so frequent that one day the man woke up to find his wife had fled along with Lacalle’s sister, leaving nothing but a terse note behind. The future anarchist grew up with his father, following him to the mines where he worked in Asturias and León, watching how his health gradually failed and receiving brutal thrashings from him. His father did, nevertheless, insist that he learn to read and receive an education so that when he was older “he wouldn’t end up working like a pack mule as had happened to him.”
After years drifting from one dump to the next, each one more miserable than the last, his father died of silicosis and complications from a urinary infection when Lacalle was twelve years old. By then he had already been accompanying his father down the mine for a year, taking water to the men, squeezing through cracks grown men could not.
“He died at dawn, after three days of agony, and I was left alone,” Lacalle recalled. “Some of his friends offered to help me, while others disappeared into thin air. I was penniless, and even owed the landlady twenty-six pesetas in back rent left by my father. I decided to go it alone and struggle to handle things any way I could. I stayed there and began to work collecting chirta, the mineral which is often left over in the mines. That was my first real ordeal in life. The bosses were despotic and fights could break out among the men over anything. Never before had I been witness to man’s ingratitude and the hardened hearts which poverty engenders.”
There Lacalle remained until the age of sixteen, when a mentor of his, a former union man who acquired books for him and in whom he confided, encouraged him to move to Barcelona.
“You’ll find better work there but, above all, people who can provide you with an education,” he’d told him.
At Barcelona’s reading clubs for workers, in the union associations during the first decades of the century, and in the writings of Eliseo Reclús, Pedro Kropotkine, and other anarchist theorists, Ángel Lacalle had found both the inspiration to educate himself and something to fight for in his life: improved conditions for his class, the struggle for a future in which men would be free of yokes and chains, without bosses and overseers, and in which the only law would be that of love. He had found a creed which suited him perfectly, one that was ethical, redemptive, and somewhat naive.
“I understand what you are saying, and I am touched by your candor,” I replied, “but you will agree with me that nobody is served by boycotting work systems, placing bombs, and striking. On the contrary, thus is destroyed the general prosperity of which workers are the first beneficiaries. You criticize fiercely, and with justification, the inequality in Barcelona, but when there is prosperity there is also hope that the least fortunate may improve their lot, whereas when there is no wealth, nobody can escape poverty. As I have said, I have been a fervent supporter of Don Eduardo Dato and, like him, I believe that social justice can be achieved through reform. The pension and social security systems which Don Eduardo has implemented, with the king’s endorsement, do more for social justice than a thousand of your anarchists’ bombs.”
“That may be so, and that’s why I have always been opposed to the use of violence by my counterparts, the anarchists of action, who have sometimes employed it without realizing just what they were getting themselves into. I remember how a young friend of mine cried; he was just a kid. I met him at an anarchist association. He believed in the movement and in universal brotherhood more passionately than anyone. One day they put a pistol in his hand and told him that, in the name of his ideals, he had to go out and kill a certain boss. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Lucky for him …”
Three men walking down the sidewalk stopped next to our table and addressed my companion.
“Lacalle, when will the next general strike be?”
My acquaintance got up to talk to them, conversing in the calm and clear manner which I now realized was his hallmark.
“We’re going to try to avoid it. After the last one our reserves are dwindling. For now it’s best to continue to negotiate piecemeal accords, industry by industry, and then sit down again with the authorities, if they stop harassing us. Remember that the constitutional guarantees are still suspended, so they have the upper hand, but we will not back down, you can be sure of that!”
“You can count on us if you need men of action! Give them hell!”
The men walked on, and the anarchist shared a final comment with me before departing. “As you can see, tempers are running high everywhere. We’re going to need level heads to get them back on track.”
* * *
After Lacalle’s departure I found myself reflecting on the shocking scenes I had witnessed, and resolved to search for more information so that I could better comprehend the problem. In the early afternoon I went to see Dr. Juan Vandrells at his offices on Consejo de Ciento Street. He was a contributor to my paper and a sanitarian committed to improving health conditions in the city. When I told him what I had seen, the four remaining hairs on my distinguished friend’s head stood on end.
“I had heard news of it, Mr. Vilar. Montjuïc contains as many man-made caverns as it does natural ones. I believe people have always explored and even dwelled in them. At the end of the last century the discovery of the body of a young boy in one of them caused quite a stir. A short time later the city police found a sickly man there, stricken with severe bronchitis, and just managed to save his life. Not long after that various miscreants were arrested there in a raid. They say that the caves have been the sites of kidnappings and killings. What’s new is that they are now providing shelter for more and more people. But this constitutes just part of the problem. On Montjuïc, in addition to the caves, there are also shacks—ephemeral, dilapidated constructions people crowd into. I have seen some that extend through the areas of Can Valero, Las Banderas, Tres Pins, and Los Huertos. In recent years they have erected
around six thousand ramshackle constructions made from scrap. Most of the occupants pay something to the property’s ‘owners.’”
“So, there are even people profiting from it.”
“Of course! In order to inhabit those shanties one has to practically be a magnate—people pay between twelve and twenty pesetas per month just for a patch of land without running water, electricity, or anything else. They slap up a shack with a few boards and that’s where they settle. More than forty thousand people live crammed into those squalid structures. It’s a problem Barcelona ought to solve, in the name of charity and philanthropy, but also out of self-interest: imagine the Dantean scenario that could arise if an epidemic broke out in that area. As doctors and sanitarians, we’ve already sounded the alarm. Now it’s time for our architects, financiers, and city councilors to act.”
Barcelona had a housing problem, a challenge of how to provide shelter for its people, and Montjuïc represented its most appalling expression. There was no doubt about that. I took my leave of Vandrells, urging him to put his analyses and research down in writing, and I resolved to do the same with my own.
* * *
El Noticiero Universal was—and is—an afternoon daily, which meant that its advantage lay in being able to offer information the morning papers could not. It also meant that the work went on there until late at night, when the competition had already closed its editions, and from dawn until the late morning, as we didn’t have our final copy prepared until then. El Ciero, as the street vendors nicknamed it, had its offices in a two-story building on Lauria Street. The staff worked by the light of a set of desk lamps resting on six long, wooden tables. In a small booth Luis Angulo, our stenographer, would type up the news from Madrid that our correspondents shouted down the telephone lines from the nation’s capital. Angulo had revolutionized the way the news staff worked by introducing this system which, though it was rather loud, successfully supplanted the endless stenographic transcriptions we had used until then. On the wall there were a couple of bookshelves on which sat the Diccionario Enciclopédico Hispanoamericano published by Montaner & Simón, and some twenty volumes of the Espasa encyclopedia, along with a few more such tomes. The printing shop featured four linotypes and a small French rotary press.
El Ciero belonged to founder Francisco Peris Mencheta’s family, the members of which I was well connected to, and was run by the Valencian journalist Julián Pérez Carrasco, a disciple of Blasco Ibánez and a capable man if there ever was one. Upon returning from one of my stays in Madrid, I was recruited as an editorial writer. I asked Pérez Carrasco what I was to do on my first day, and he handed me a stack of papers and gave me the following order:
“The government is a stinking mess. Develop this idea.”
When I arrived to the El Noticiero Universal newsroom that afternoon I explained my day’s visits to Pérez Carrasco who, over the course of the years, would both protect and admonish me. After listening to me closely, he fished his watch out of his waistcoat, glanced at it, and told me to lead with the idea of the troglodytes, giving it the headline “Picturesque Barcelona,” for example, and that I had two hours to do so. I obediently dipped my pen into my inkwell and began to write.
“The idle visitor who one day strolls down the former Port Highway will come across pathetic pedestrians clad in rags who, abandoning the road, climb up the mountain ridge and disappear between the rocks …”
The next day the “Troglodytes of District II” were all the city was talking about.
4
Although the innumerable incidents of violence attributed to political motives did not always end up in court, and when they did I made an effort to avoid them, as an attorney I wasn’t able to entirely extricate myself from them. Thus was the situation with the “El Chimo case,” which was destined to be a landmark event of the era, though those of us who were involved in the trial were not fully aware of its significance at the time.
At age fifteen, Joaquín “El Chimo” Caballé had descended as far as one could into the dregs of a large city like Barcelona without selling his own body. But he enjoyed telling stories in which he portrayed himself as the king of the world. In reality he was damaged goods; a case of flotsam jettisoned by society, a cheat, a puppet, and a child. His case, widely covered by the press at the time, was one of the most prominent my practice saw during those years. It was also one of the saddest.
I’ll summarize the story the newspapers dubbed “The Las Cortes Street Bomb.” Said explosive went off in August 1919 in front of the palace of the Marquess of Marianao on Las Cortes Street, today’s Gran Vía, on the corner of Paseo de Gracia. This palace, built in the style they called neogriego, or Neo-grec—a sort of neoclassical style inspired by German Romanticism—was the most luxurious in Barcelona’s center and one of the most distinguished structures in the Ensanche district, with its magnificent marble staircase and lavish decorations, produced by the preeminent upholsterers, cabinetmakers, and wood-carvers of the day. Its owner, the marquess Don Salvador Samá, a Spanish grandee, was a major landowner who had served as the mayor of Barcelona for a few years. An equestrian enthusiast, the marquess enjoyed taking rides in his open, horse-driven carriage. Upon reaching their destination, a footman accompanying him would open the door, and the aristocrat would solemnly descend as his coachman raised his whip to salute him. At a time when automobiles had started, little by little, to take over the city’s downtown streets, the marquess’s rides did not go unnoticed.
The bomb to which I refer, however, had nothing to do with the marquess as a figure, but rather with his home’s status as a city landmark. The explosive went off a few yards from one of its walls, causing serious injuries to two men walking by, less serious ones to another three, and minor damage to the building.
As cited by the public prosecutor, the police investigation yielded provisional conclusions which established that a forty-four-year-old woman by the name of Rosa Mestres who had criminal records for robbery, the production of counterfeit bills, and petty theft, and who was the owner of a flophouse that was under police surveillance because a number of suspicious characters were lodgers there, had summoned El Chimo, to whom she regularly gave odd jobs, to her home, asking him to go and rent a cart. In that cart “someone” placed what is known as a timed bomb, a device made up of pieces of cast iron and packing high-power explosives. El Chimo supposedly pulled the cart, covered with a burlap sack, from Basea Street, where Rosa Mestres resided, to the point on Las Cortes Street in front of the marquess’s palace where every day at one o’clock a group of construction foremen would gather to do their hiring, and left it there. It exploded a few minutes later “with the numerous constituent fragments being converted into projectiles,” which struck Antonio Sanz Salas, Miguel de Miguel Fuertes, José Martorell Gironés, José Cabredo Sáenz de Villeda, and Bernardo Bel Boet, inflicting the aforementioned wounds. It was a miracle that it exploded at a time when there were few people on the sidewalk. If it had happened just a few minutes before, right in the middle of the foremen’s gathering, the device could have caused a large-scale slaughter.
In his statement the public prosecutor, Don Crisanto Posadas, asserted that, in exchange for his services, Joaquín Caballé, El Chimo, had received from Rosa Mestres fifty pesetas in five-peseta coins—three of which turned out to be counterfeit. El Chimo and Mestres were the two parties indicted in an attack endangering both human lives and property, and for this the prosecutor asked for life imprisonment.
It was an aunt of El Chimo’s, a barmaid at a tavern near my home and office, who asked me to defend the boy. At first I refused to take the case due to the extremism with which it was associated, but my maid, Lucinda, who was essential to my domestic organization and a friend of the barmaid’s, hounded me for days until I caved in and agreed to speak to El Chimo at El Modelo prison.
Speaking to him was a poignant experience. El Chimo was an apple-cheeked child who had grown up too fast; he had chestnut hair, fiery eye
s, and a spindly frame. He related to me a long series of misadventures on the street since his mother had abandoned him at age nine (he had never known his father), and the endless stratagems he had had to invent just to survive living in Barcelona’s tragic and seamy underbelly. His aunt at the bar gave him food and shelter from time to time, but he spent his days on the streets, pilfering and purloining, running errands for burglars, decoys, and pickpockets, finding customers for a couple of brothels, and working as an errand boy for certain owners of seedy cabarets, who paid him in aguardiente. “But I have never, ever killed anyone,” he assured me, “and I never took any bomb anywhere—at least, not knowingly.” It was difficult to believe him entirely, however, as he had a pronounced tendency to contradict himself and offer conflicting versions of the same events. Because the entire case rested upon his confession to the police, I insisted again and again that he explain to me why he had confessed if he had really not been involved in the incident, but I was unable to get a clear answer about what happened. This was not surprising because, as he explained to me, he had been drinking hard liquor all morning before he ended up at the police station.
His stay in the prison was proving to be an ordeal. On the first day, when the inmates were released into the yard, a group of veteran convicts had surrounded him and backed him against a wall. The strongest and most terrifying of them all had abused him. “He raped me,” El Chimo confessed, with tears in his eyes. After our conversation I went to protest in the strongest terms, paying a visit to my friend Oteyza, the prison warden, who told me that until a center for minors was created these incidents were as unfortunate as they were “almost inevitable,” promising me that they would keep a closer eye out in order to protect my client. I am not sure to what extent that promise was ever fulfilled.
A Barcelona Heiress Page 5