A Barcelona Heiress

by Sergio Vila-Sanjuán

  “Or him for you, right? Not to mention myself. I see that you have become a real opportunist. I had thought you more principled.”

  “You’re also very important to me, though in a different way,” she whispered. “You always have been, and I shouldn’t like to lose you. I’ve been honest with you, I didn’t deceive you, and I gave myself to you, which makes you one of the most important people in my entire life, but I never wanted to take our relationship down a dead-end street.”

  “You gave yourself to me while you were with another man.”

  “That’s why I asked you not to ask me for things that I couldn’t give you. And that’s why I’m asking you to continue to help me. I want to find Lacalle before they kill him, and assist him. We might need to get him out of the city.”

  I mumbled a reluctant “very well,” and asked her if she had any idea of where he might be.

  “He asked to be dropped off in Plaza de Cataluña, and gave Manolo a note that I don’t understand.”

  She handed it to me and I studied it carefully: “Vi trovos min sur la montojovo.”

  “I think I know who can translate this. Can you lend me a car?”

  I asked Manolo to stop the Daimler in front of the laundry on Muntaner Street. Inside, amid the vapor, was Floreal Gambús, in his usual state of feigned drowsiness. Stunned to see me, the seasoned anarchist jumped up.

  “Vilar! What a pleasant surprise!”

  “Floreal, the situation is critical. I need you to translate this for me.”

  “Vi trovos min sur la montojovo. It’s in Esperanto.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “‘You will find me on the mountain path.’ What mountain do you think he’s talking about?”

  * * *

  Isabel’s driver sped up Montjuïc at a reckless speed. We took the Port Highway until we reached a spot where I asked him to stop.

  “Follow me,” I instructed Isabel. “The driver should come too, just in case. And have him bring a lamp.”

  “Manolo, grab it, and the revolver too—we might need it,” she ordered.

  The three of us began our ascent on the narrow and dusty path winding through the bushes which I had walked through with Lacalle months before until we reached the half-hidden mouth of the Morrot cave. We stopped there.

  “Hello?!” I shouted. “Anybody there?” In response came the barrel of a rifle, aimed right at me.

  “You just go back the way you came.”

  “Capitán? Do you remember me? I came with Lacalle. We got to talking.”

  The man looked me up and down. By his side appeared another figure, even more menacing than the first.

  “Aha. Yes. The writer. What do you want?”

  “We know that Ángel is with you and we want to take him with us. They’re looking for him and he’s in danger here.”

  “You’ll have to wait. Paco, keep an eye on them.”

  A few minutes later he resurfaced and told us to follow him. He led the way as we wound through the maze of passages, grottos, and, from time to time, larger chambers in the caverns. It smelled of acid. Every few yards we came across individuals, each more unsavory than the last, wandering about or lying on cots. But this time I saw no children or old men. It looked like they had cleared the place out, leaving only the most dangerous elements to inhabit it. Finally we came to a larger cave, lit with oil lamps and furnished with chairs, tables, and a rudimentary bed. And there was Lacalle.

  “As you can see, my friends,” he said to us, “the hospitality shown to me by my esteemed captain of thieves is worthy of anything to be found at the city’s finest establishments.”

  “Angel, General López Ballesteros has launched a draconian sweep of the city. You have got to flee Barcelona,” Isabel said.

  I could sense a tension between them reflecting more than the situation in which we found ourselves, probably due to their paths crossing again in a place different from that sole space in which the two lovers had always dwelled.

  “I don’t think so, my friend. I’ve been in hiding for too long. Now that I’ve come out I think it’s time to go downtown and face them,” Lacalle declared.

  “An admirable position,” I remarked, “but not at all practical. If you do that there’s a very good chance that you will be carried out feetfirst. Be reasonable and pay attention to Isabel … What’s happening?”

  Shots rang out from the entrance, and the lamps suddenly went out. I realized that we must have been followed. I grabbed Isabel by the arm.

  “Let’s go, fast,” I said, and then turned to the anarchist. “Ángel, the car is on Casa Antúnez Road. Let’s meet there.”

  “All right.”

  Unable to see almost anything, the four of us started back, feeling our way along the walls, bumping into people running away from the shots and toward us. Even in the widest of the tunnels we struggled to stick to the walls, lest we became easy targets for any bullets shot our way. When we reached the exit we ran into two figures in the dark.

  “Stop, police!” they shouted at us.

  “Run!” I yelled.

  But Ángel was already engaged in a fistfight with one of them as the other rushed to his partner’s aid. I held him back while Manolo, the driver, jumped in to help Ángel fend off his assailant. A shot echoed through the narrow passageway.

  “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Ángel shouted as he kicked one of the officers in the stomach and Manolo knocked the other over the head with the lantern.

  As fast as we could, tripping and thrashing our way through the brush, we bolted down to the road. Covered with scratches, bumps, and bruises, we dove into the car as Manolo got it started.

  “Oh my God,” Isabel sighed, pointing to a large red stain on Ángel’s side. The anarchist’s face was colorless and his eyes were closing.

  * * *

  Crying babies and small children were making a racket. In the operating room on the third floor of his clinic Dr. Vidal Solares was extracting the bullet fired by one of the officers into Ángel Lacalle’s side. Isabel Enrich and I waited outside for the doctor to come out and, when he did, we gathered round him, pleading for information.

  “I only take these kinds of risks for you, Countess.”

  “And I appreciate it, Doctor. If we had taken this man to a public hospital, it would have been crawling with police informants, and he wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

  “You can relax. He’ll live. His wounds aren’t critical. I hope that my involvement will serve to promote peace, and not just the contrary.”

  “You can count on that.”

  The doctor excused himself, stating that he was needed in his consulting room, which he had abandoned at once when he’d received word that Isabel had arrived with a wounded man and was asking for him. Isabel gazed at me fixedly while the nurses took Lacalle to his room.

  “I’ll stay by his bedside. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Of course, Isabel. Of course.”

  “You must be tired,” she said, with something akin to affection. “My driver will take you home.”

  “All right.”

  I walked out onto the street where Manolo, who had still not fully dusted himself off after our adventure on Montjuïc, was waiting. He moved to open the rear door for me, but I stopped him.

  “I’ll sit next to you.”

  As we rumbled down the road toward Plaza de Medinaceli, the late afternoon wind had a reinvigorating effect on me, as if my mind were emerging from a fog.

  “You really let those cops have it in the cave, eh Manolo?”

  “Yes, but, were they cops, sir?”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t realize that.”

  “Someone in my position, sir, does not fight the authorities—at least in any way that can be documented. It’s entirely different if, in the privacy of my room, or in the dark of the night, I say or do certain things. But even then I do so following the maxim from the Gospels: ‘Let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doet
h.’”

  “I see that you have learned a thing or two from your employer, Manolo. I congratulate you for your actions.”

  “Thank you very much, sir.”

  “You were great, Manolo.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Just then a motorcycle equipped with a sidecar pulled up alongside us. Without warning, the man in the rolling extension drew a pistol and began to fire. The first bullet blew off part of Manolo’s forehead, spattering blood and brains everywhere. The windshield shattered and the car began to weave, out of control. I felt a terrible pain in my shoulder before I passed out.

  14

  A voice roused me from my stupor in the darkness of an unknown room.

  “Smile, my friend, smile!”

  Rocabert. Barcelona society’s quintessential man about town was sitting on my bed trying to wake me, and I didn’t know why.

  “Where am I?” I asked, my throat parched.

  “The Hospital Clínico in Barcelona. They brought you here after the shooting. You were at death’s door for five weeks. You can count your lucky stars that you’re going to live.”

  “What about Manolo?”

  “He was not so fortunate.”

  I gasped.

  “All right, that’s enough for now. I’ll come back this afternoon.”

  That same day Lucinda and Basilio came by too. Between the two of them they managed to provide me with a fragmented and complicated version of what had happened during the days following the attack. They knew nothing about Isabel Enrich. It was Rocabert, during his return visit in the afternoon, who reconstructed the puzzle of recent events and how they had fit together. I shall strive to reproduce below his condensed but illuminating account.

  “I imagine that the first thing you are wondering is why they shot you two. I regret having to hurt your vanity, but it was not you they were after. Obviously, the man the terrorists were gunning for was Lacalle. They had orders to off him, and when they saw you sitting next to the driver they mistook you for him. That’s why they opened fire.

  “But that was only one of the more than thirty shootings that day. Thirty! Everyone was terrified. On a corner of Paseo de Gracia they found the body of the famous Danton, with a note on his chest reading: ‘The avenger is avenged.’

  “We found out later that police headquarters had ordered a massive purge of leading union figures and suspicious elements. But the operation ran into trouble: in a house on Córcega Street lived a certain Luis López, the leader of the metal union. A group of gunmen came in search of him, but he managed to escape. As his neighbor was Radical Party representative Jesús Ulled, he sought refuge in his house. Ulled then summoned the chief prosecutor of the High Court, Diego Medina, to whom they explained the situation, and he decided to take action.

  “Medina himself called the president of the Council of Ministers, Sánchez Guerra, in Madrid and informed him of what was happening. Sánchez Guerra immediately called López Ballesteros to admonish him for the massacre being orchestrated by Beastegui. The general, however, took his subordinate’s side and tendered his resignation right there, supposing that Sánchez Guerra wouldn’t accept it, but he was wrong.”

  “López Ballesteros is no longer the civil governor of Barcelona?”

  “No, he is not. He’s left the city. But before he departed our business and civic organizations honored him with four or five tributes, complete with banquets and speeches. We even presented him with an engraved sword and silver platters etched with the most effusive praise. Your absence was felt on this occasion. Of course, at these events only the warmest words were spoken for the man, commended as a peacemaker, a protector of labor, a defender of workers’ freedom, etc. Several papers, yours included, published editorials accusing the government of inconsistency in its decision to let such a pillar of order go precisely when his tactics had begun to restore law and order to Barcelona. In reality, however, more than one of them believed that López Ballesteros had indeed overstepped his authority in the most intolerable way.”

  “But, you were the ones who asked him to do so! Or don’t you realize that for a police officer to act in any way that violates the strictest compliance with the law is an overstepping of authority?”

  “Yes, of course, in a perfect world that’s the way it ought to be, but we live here on earth, where reality is tough and complicated. In short, the general was hurt and resented how the government let him fall. Apparently he didn’t know that in Madrid, after being repeatedly denounced by leftist organizations, for months his situation had been considered untenable. He was also galled by the rumors that the attempt to assassinate him was staged.”

  “Was it?”

  “Of course. Everything began when Beastegui hatched a plan to create a singular hero, fighting on behalf of order. He looked for a hapless, common delinquent, one Cándido Fagés, aka Albert Blum, implicated in the assault of María Nilo, who you defended. Fagés agreed to serve him and, in exchange, Beastegui had him sprung from jail. The trial was never even held, and his cohorts must still be in preventive custody at this time. And so, supplying him with a disguise and two Astra pistols, the general sent the criminal out to wreak havoc among the union forces. It’s not very clear to what extent López Ballesteros was privy to his deputy’s maneuver. I believe that he either didn’t know or looked the other way, at least until a certain point in time. At first the stratagem worked, and Danton did prove quite an effective weapon of psychological warfare. His mysterious actions had the top brass at the unions shaking in their boots. And you, my friend,” he explained as his mustache traced an ear-to-ear grin, “were expediently manipulated into publicizing the figure through your paper.”

  Pained by the thought of it, I let out a groan as I lay there.

  “That’s what happened and there’s no use beating yourself up about it. You also rendered a valuable service to the city, which needed the wave of violence to be stopped, at any cost. What happened is that this Fagés—who was really not very stable to begin with and harbored delusions of grandeur—at some point went completely mad, actually identified with his alter ego, and began to eliminate people on the other side.

  “That was when Beastegui decided to take him out. But first he wanted to use him one last time. He had been flirting with the idea of organizing a definitive solution to the violent union unrest. What better excuse could he cite than an attempt to assassinate the civil governor himself? Beastegui, to whom Danton remained blindly loyal, gave him a couple of pistols, this time loaded with blanks, and instructed him to shoot López Ballesteros who, he explained, was corrupt and had changed sides. The vigilante carried out the staged assassination, and Beastegui’s men, delinquents recruited from among the city’s dregs, went to work and began to detain and, in certain cases, kill a series of designated individuals. What ensued were forty-eight hours of criminal impunity until Madrid moved to put an end to it, I suppose due to fears of a new government inquiry, like that spearheaded months before by the socialist leader Pablo Iglesias into the issue of the fleeing suspects law.”

  Rocabert paused to light a cigarette. He offered me one but, frankly, I didn’t yet feel like I was in any condition to be smoking.

  “As I was saying, López Ballesteros, somewhat bitter, abandoned the city of Barcelona. He was convinced, in his rigid way, that he had completed his mission: pacifying a territory that was at war. At one of our tributes to him he took me aside and said, ‘I thank you for your courteous farewell, but I was surprised that you, the employers, did not register the most vigorous protest with the president of the government in response to the underhanded fashion in which I was removed. After all, you were the ones who demanded determination and a vigorous approach.’

  “‘That is so, General,’ I replied. ‘But one must observe certain protocols. Barcelona is not the jungle.’

  “‘Rocabert, you can give me that line when the anarchists head for your house to kill you. Then I won’t be there to defend you. You people, the
ruling class of Catalonia, your hypocrisy knows no bounds. You demand stringency from the nation’s government, but you don’t want to pay the price or be liable for it, and when we finally crack down you want to wash your hands of it all.’ Frankly I didn’t know what to say to him. Then he added enigmatically, ‘In any case, you can be sure that my star has not fallen here. Far from it!’ What could he have been referring to?”

  I smiled to myself.

  “Now, Pablo,” Rocabert continued, “a new era begins. General Primo de Rivera, now heading the Captaincy General of Catalonia, has the will and the resources to infuse the region with optimism. The king will visit Barcelona next month, which will spur our elegant gentlemen and beautiful ladies to honor him with a lavish welcome. It’s time to seriously ponder how to spread a love for the crown among the people. The subversive elements are either dead or locked up. López Ballesteros and Beastegui fulfilled their missions in that regard, one must concede that. We need to be positive and bolster the role of Catalonian industry in Spain today. This is why I must once again implore you: join our forces. You have a bright political future ahead of you.”

  “I’ll think about it, José Maria. Thank you.”

  “One last bit of news, and this on a personal note. I am engaged to Maite Malet, the marquess’s eldest daughter. Between you and me, she does not have that somewhat wild allure of Isabel Enrich, nor is she to inherit a comparable fortune, but she’s a great girl and she adores me. She’s a train I can’t afford to miss, my friend!”

  “Or a streetcar, as it were, given the company her father controls. Congratulations, José María. Congratulations.”

  * * *

  At the end of that first day of my recovery I received a bouquet of lilacs. There was a card on the table. I opened it. “It shall be difficult to ever forget how much you have done for us. Get well soon. Libertad.”

  * * *