Читать книгу The Anarchist Who Shared My Name - Pablo Martín Sánchez - Страница 10

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You, my people, whom they kill with work in the factories, in the fields, in the mines or in the war, seek justice. Endure no more the tyranny of the executioners who oppress you. Rebel. One life is worth nothing, even less when it is predestined to vegetate and to feel only animal pleasures. Rise up, for it will only take one gesture from you to make those who seem so brave and boastful run away. The military are cowards, as are all those who need to be armed to live.

España: Un año de aictadura, a manifesto published by the Grupo Internacional de Ediciones Anarquistas.

NOW SIX YEARS HAVE PASSED BETWEEN their farewell at the Gare d’Austerlitz and this afternoon in early October 1924, when Roberto, known to all as Robinsón, crosses the threshold of the printing house where Pablo works, limping slightly from a childhood bout of polio, and sporting long red hair and a beard worthy of his namesake. He is still wearing his perennial suit with its elbow patches, his shirt cuffs stained with chalk, and a bowler hat that some suspect to be stitched to his scalp, because he never takes it off, even on entering a church, where he goes from time to time not to take communion, but to seek the cool air and take a nap. The bowler is an integral part of Robinsón’s physiognomy, and he will readily tell anyone willing to listen the story behind his passion for a hat more appropriate to the bourgeoisie than to the proletariat: in his youth he belonged to a naturist commune that chose the bowler hat as its emblem and standard, and since then he has been faithful to it in honor of that group of friends, with whom he passed some of the best moments of his life. Behind him, tail wagging, comes Kropotkin, his faithful wiener dog.

The two friends look at each other for a few moments, with their arms extended and holding each other’s shoulders, as though evaluating the changes time has wrought over the years since they last saw each other.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” says Robinsón. “You still look like a twenty-year-old boy.”

“Those gray hairs in your beard almost make you look intelligent,” says Pablo.

And with smiles like two gondolas, they pounce on each other, half-hugging and half-sparring, while Kropotkin barks confusedly, perhaps from joy, perhaps envy.

“How did you manage to find me?” Pablo asks.

“Pure luck,” Robinsón answers. “I thought I saw you last night at the Community House, talking with Teixidó at the end of the meeting, but when I went over to talk to you, you had already disappeared. I asked him about you and he told me your name was Pablo, that you work in a printing house on Rue Pixérécourt and that you’d left in a hurry because you had to get up early today. I was sure that it was you. Actually, I thought you were still in Spain. Otherwise I would have tried to find you sooner.”

“And I thought you were still in Lyon. Now I understand why you didn’t answer any of my letters—”

“No, that’s because I moved to a new house, I had problems with the landlady. I only arrived in Paris about a month ago.”

“And where are you living?”

“Well, you know how I love nature,” says Robinsón with an enigmatic tone, “and since the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is so lovely and welcoming, and we’re still having such fine weather …”

“Fine weather, you say? But it hasn’t stopped raining for weeks! Tonight you’re coming home with me. I have a little loft on Rue Saint-Denis. Also, I go out of town during the week, so you can come and go as you like. But where’s Sandrine? Didn’t she come with you?”

Robinsón wrinkles his forehead and says:

“Apparently she took the free love thing quite seriously. And Angela? Have you found out anything about her?”

Now it is Pablo who twists his face:

“She’s gone with the wind. Forever.”

The two friends look at each other, and take some time to build up another smile.

“Come on, let’s get something to drink and you can tell me what’s brought you to Paris,” Pablo finally says, “I’m up to my ears in work, this damned weekly is coming out tomorrow and I have to finish it today. But it’s not every day you get to see your blood brother … Hold on a second, Robin.”

Pablo goes down to the basement and finds Julianín snoring in peaceful slumber atop a few crates of books. He wakes him rudely and leaves him in charge of the print shop and Kropotkin, then heads out for a glass of wine with Robinsón at the Point du Jour, on the nearby Rue de Belleville. His friend Leandro works as a waiter there. Leandro is a tall, heavyset Argentinian from the city of General Rodríguez, always keen for a joke or a prank. Seeing them enter the bar, which is strangely empty at this hour, he exclaims:

“Check you out, buddy, you found Jesus Christ. I hope ya brought along a crowd of thirsty apostles.”

“Stop messing around, Leandro. We’ll have two glasses of wine. This is Robinsón, my childhood friend. Robin, this is Leandro, an old friend I met in Argentina when he was still a kid dreaming of becoming a soccer player.”

“Enchanté,” responds Robinsón, mimicking a perfect French accent, “but no wine for me, thanks. I’ll be happy with a glass of water.”

Robinsón is a teetotaler, in addition to being a vegetarian, environmentalist, and naturist. A rare breed, a man ahead of his time, a practitioner of a mystical, even pantheistic sort of anarchism, a special way of understanding the world and relating to his surroundings. He is one of those who believe, for example, that all of humanity’s ills come from wiping our asses with toilet paper rather than lettuce leaves. He has come to Paris on an assignment from the Spanish Syndicate of Lyon, with the aim of helping to organize a revolutionary plot to overthrow the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. But Pablo still knows nothing of all this.

“I see some things never change,” Pablo says. “You drink his wine, Leandro. We have to celebrate this reunion.”

“Nonsense. I’m not participating if he’s gonna toast with water.”

“Merde alors, so let’s not toast then, if you don’t want to, but drink the wine, for the love of God.”

“You mean for the love of our friend Jesus here,” says Leandro.

So it is that the strange trio of Pablo, Robinsón, and Leandro sip their respective glasses, while the abstemious anarchist starts to tell them what has brought him to Paris, after making sure the big lackadaisical Argentine can be trusted.

HOWEVER, IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE story Robinsón is now recounting, we need to know a little back story. The movements against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera started shortly after the military uprising, both in France, where many syndicalists, communists, anarchists, and republicans of all stripes have immigrated, and in Spain—mainly Barcelona, where Catalan separatists have managed to foment a significant clandestine movement. At the end of 1923, various meetings took place on the French side of the Pyrenees and, shortly thereafter in Paris, the Consejo Nacional de Trabajo (CNT) and other syndicalist groups founded the Committee of Anarchist Relations, in charge of promoting and preparing an insurrection against Primo de Rivera’s Directory. At the start of May, the Committee appointed an executive commission comprising the so-called Group of Thirty, including former members of known anarchist groups such as El Crisol, Los Justicieros, and Los Solidarios, responsible for some of the most famous actions of Spanish anarchism in the last several years, including the assassination of the archbishop of Zaragoza in retaliation for the death of Salvador Seguí, known as “Sugar Boy,” who was riddled with bullets in Barcelona in a plot organized by the Machiavellian Martínez Anido, a proponent of the scandalous Ley de Fugas authorizing authorities to use a prisoner’s escape as a pretext for a summary execution. Other members of this Group of Thirty include the young Buenaventura Durruti, Francisco Ascaso, and Gregorio “Chino” Jover, whom the French police have taken to calling “the Three Musketeers,” and other, less well-known but equally enthusiastic members such as Juan Riesgo, Pedro Massoni, Miguel García Vivancos, Ramón Recasens, Mariano Pérez Jordán (known as “Teixidó”), the brothers Pedro and Valeriano Orobón, Augustín Gíbanel, Enrique Gil Galar, Luís Naveira, and Bonifacio Manzanedo, some of whom will end up departing for the border and playing a decisive role in the attempted revolution.

Contrary to what is happening in Spain, since last summer much of Europe (with the exception of Mussolini’s Italy) has been experiencing moments of leftist euphoria: the socialists are in charge in France, the communists in Russia; in Germany the Republican Democrats have put the young Adolf Hitler in jail, accusing him of high treason; and in England the Labour Party has taken power for the first time in its history. In Spain, on the other hand, the CNT is virtually banned, and its general secretary, Ángel Pestaña, has traveled to Paris to renew the dialogue with the Committee of Anarchist Relations, which has cooled in the last few months due to disagreements regarding the planning of the revolutionary attack, and to personally learn how the preparations are going. The committee has assured him that they will be able to mobilize up to twenty thousand men ready to enter Spain and participate in the overthrow of the regime, provided that they can count on the necessary organization and support on the Spanish side of the border. Pestaña does not seem to have been very convinced by these optimistic predictions, but he has nevertheless agreed that preparations should continue, with fundraising efforts and attempts to obtain weapons, as well as propaganda campaigns among the exiled population. He has even given his support to the International Group of Anarchist Editions, founded by Durruti and Ascaso with the idea of publishing the pamphlet Spain: One Year of Dictatorship, which claims that the country is prepared for regime change and that all that is needed is a trigger to set off the revolution. But the pamphlet still has not been printed, because that will require the involvement of a young typesetter named Pablo Martín Sánchez, the very man who is now listening attentively to what Robinsón is explaining at the Point du Jour:

“They sent me from the Spanish Syndicate of Lyon to serve as a liaison with the Committee. But the truth is that the comrades in Paris view us with suspicion.”

“Why is that?” asks Pablo.

“Because of Pascual Amorós.”

“Ah, that.”

As Leandro’s face indicates that he does not understand, they explain the matter to him. Pascual Amorós was a syndicalist from Barcelona who had to run away to France a few years ago, supposedly fleeing prosecution. He started living in Lyon with a few of his comrades in arms, and soon began collaborating with the Spanish Syndicate. But one day someone discovered that he was actually the right hand of Bernat Armengol, known as “the Red,” an infiltrator from the police who had worked in Barcelona on orders from the impostor Baron of Koenig and Bravo Portillo, the ringleaders of a band of gunmen on the bosses’ payroll. The slogan “Viva la anarquía” tattooed on his arm fooled no one: with his life threatened by his own comrades, he had no choice but to return to Spain, where a few months later he was condemned to death by garrote for robbing a bank in Valencia.

“And since some of his old friends are still members of the Syndicate of Lyon,” Robinsón concludes, “Durruti and company don’t trust us. All in all, it’s understandable; things being the way they are, you can’t take any risks.”

“But, then, why’d the guys here agree to have you come?” the Argentine asks, somewhat lost.

“For money.”

“For money?” Pablo and Leandro both wonder at once.

“Yes, for money. Even an anarchist revolution requires money, as much as it pains us. The Committee is not doing well in terms of financing. The French comrades are still recovering from the war and the Spanish expatriates have a hard enough time just trying to feed themselves, let alone contributing money to the cause. The Solidarios haven’t got a cent left from the robbery of the Bank of Gijón, even though that brought in more than a half-million pesetas … between the rifles they bought in Éibar and the creation of the Group of Anarchist Editions, they’ve spent it all, so most of them have had to find work in Paris. The fact is that in Lyon the Spanish Syndicate is doing well at the moment, and at the start of the summer Ascaso and Durruti came to ask us for money for the publishing project. We told them we were sorry, but in Paris we had already made donations to the newspaper Le Libertaire and to the International Bookstore on Rue Petit. So they had no choice but to tell us the truth: they needed the money to finance a revolutionary movement to overthrow the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. We reached an agreement: we gave them the money and in exchange they accepted our collaboration in the mission. This is why I came to Paris, to join the Group of Thirty.”

The three men sit pensive for a few moments, until the silence is broken by two regulars who come in laughing loudly, say hello and sit down at a table at the back of the tavern. While Leandro goes to wait on them, Robinsón lowers his voice and confesses:

“I didn’t just come to visit you, Pablito: I also came to ask you to work with us.”

“…”

“We need help from people like you.”

“…”

“Our future is at stake. And that of millions of Spanish people—”

“But it’s been years since you lived in Spain, Robin.”

“True, but I would like to be able to return someday without feeling ashamed to look people in the eye. Think about your mother, think about your sister: are you going to let them rot while you’re here, safe and sound?”

Pablo looks his friend in the eye, while his mind fills with images of his mother, sister, and niece, the women he abandoned to their fate when he left in exile. He thinks that perhaps yes, perhaps he’s right, perhaps the time has come to try to change things. But he immediately thinks no, what business does he have getting involved in some crazy plot? Primo de Rivera will soon fall under his own weight, and a failed coup would only serve to reinforce his power.

“In any case,” Robinsón interrupts Pablo’s thoughts, “I’m not asking you to sign up for the mission, only to help us by printing a few posters.”

“Are you going to go?”

“Yes, it seems crazy, but it’s as if I feel an internal voice telling me to go. If Spain rises up in arms against the bandits in charge, I’m not planning to stand around doing nothing. If they need me, I’ll be there. The more of us there are, the better our chances of success.”

“But is the operation ready?”

“No, goodness no, there’s still a lot to do. For now, we’re only getting ready for when the comrades in the interior give us the signal, it would be crazy to go in to liberate Spain if the people in the country aren’t ready to go through with the revolution. I don’t think the thing will be ready until the end of the year. But when the moment arrives, we’ll need to have everything well organized. So, what do you say, can we count on you?”

“I don’t know, I’d have to discuss it with old Faure, the owner of the print shop, to see what he thinks.”

“Don’t bother, we’ve already spoken with him.”

“Really?”

“Yes, he came yesterday to the back room of the International Bookstore on Rue Petit, a windowless little hovel we use for meetings. We wanted him to print an eight-page pamphlet for us called Spain: One Year of Dictatorship, which we’re planning to distribute for free among the Spanish expatriates here in Paris. A good print run, a few thousand copies. At first the old man didn’t catch on, but we finally convinced him by telling him that we’re also planning to publish a trilingual review and an anarchist encyclopedia—”

“So what do you need my help for?”

“For the revolutionary broadsides we want to print for the incursion. When we cross the border, we want to bring posters to distribute among workers and the civilian population, a direct call to revolution against the dictatorship. It’s safer to print them here than there, and the comrades in the interior already have enough difficulty just trying to hold meetings without getting arrested. But old Faure told us no way, he didn’t want to hear another word about it. That he has enough problems in France, he doesn’t need to go looking for them in Spain, and that he didn’t want to lend his press for crazy revolutionary projects. You know that since the Great War he’s become a pacifist, especially since he got to know Malatesta and published his manifesto Toward Peace. I say it’s nothing but the paranoia of an old, washed-up anarchist, because you tell me what has he got to lose publishing the broadsides if he’s going to publish the pamphlet?”

Leandro has now returned to his position in the trench behind the bar, and as he casually prepares two absinthes, he asks:

“Did I miss anything important?”

“No, nothing,” says Pablo, pensive, and when he finishes off his wine with a final gulp, he bids farewell: “I’m sorry, but I have to get back to work. The old Minerva has left me stranded and I don’t want to abandon Julianín too long with the Albatross …”

The Minerva is an old pedal-operated press that, having worked for over thirty years, is ready to retire. The Albatross is not much younger, but it is still capable of printing eight hundred sheets an hour.

“See you later?” Robinsón asks.

“Yes, of course, come find me at the end of my shift so we can go home.”

And, touching his brim with his index finger, Pablo takes leave of his two friends. In the street, night has already fallen, and emaciated specters are silhouetted in the light of the streetlamps. These are hard times in Paris, the euphoria of the Olympic Games having given way to a period of economic recession. The franc is in freefall, but the exiled Spaniards have other worries to fill their bellies. The wheel of the revolution has started to turn, and it seems intent on catching Pablo in its vortex.