Читать книгу The Anarchist Who Shared My Name - Pablo Martín Sánchez - Страница 13

III

(1896–1899)

“THE LUMIÈRE CINEMATOGRAPH.” AND UNDERNEATH, IN smaller letters, the price of entry: “One peseta.” Pablo and the newsboy had arrived at 34 Carrera de San Jerónimo with their hearts racing, after passing the offices of La Época on Calle Libertad, and now they found themselves standing in line to see the never-before-seen, the unthinkable, the unimaginable: moving pictures. The first session was going to take place at ten o’clock and they did not want to miss it for anything in the world, even if they had to spend everything they had in their pockets. When their turn came, the older boy asked:

“Children pay half price, right?”

The ticket man shot them a grumpy look through his monocle. “If you’re less than ten years old, yeah,” he said curtly, stroking the thick beard sprouting from his cheekbones.

“Ten years between the two of us, or ten years each?” the boy asked.

The man was so surprised by the question that he said, “Go on, give me a peseta and get inside before I change my mind.”

Pablo placed his two reales on the counter while the newsboy rummaged in his pockets producing small coins until coming up with half a peseta. The clerk gave them two tickets and muttered a few incomprehensible words, while the sky suddenly went overcast, envious of the two boys’ happiness.

Inside the building, a few men and women were discussing the virtues of the new gadget. The optimists claimed that the cinematograph would improve people’s lives and contribute to the development of human thought. The pessimists seemed to be convinced that it would never be anything more than a sideshow gag, like so many others that had appeared and disappeared with more pain than glory. The doomsayers predicted that it would shrink children’s brains and end up another petty entertainment like the theater and the opera. But there they all were, expectant, impatient to attend the event of the year. Soon, a side door opened and a sharply dressed little man entered; he walked beneath the great white cloth dominating the end of the room and sat down in front of a splendid German Spaethe piano. Only then, with rigorous punctuality, did the room lights go down, and everyone ran to get a seat. In the darkness, the thick cloud of cigarette smoke appeared to condense and the spectators all held their breath when a humming sound started up behind them. Almost immediately, a spotlight illuminated the white cloth and before the spectators’ eyes appeared the image of a Parisian street, with its cars, its houses and its inhabitants frozen, immobile. A murmur of disappointment spread through the room, but then, suddenly, the crowd all hushed at once, a shiver running down their many spines as the image began to move, like a black-and-white version of real life. The carriages traveled from one end of the screen to the other; people got into and out of the cars and disappeared beyond the white cloth; some children were playing with a dog, which barked silently and leapt wildly in the air; a few cyclists passed in front of the camera, smiled, and waved at the astonished spectators in Madrid, who instinctively raised their hands to return the wave. All of this enlivened by the joyful music of the sharply dressed little man.

“Oooohh!” said a few voices when the reel was finished, after running barely a minute.

But there was not much time to discuss the clip, because immediately, another gray image took over the screen and started moving. This time it was a train, approaching the spectators at high speed.

“Aaaaahh!” shouted some, ducking their heads or holding tightly to their chairs.

Fortunately, the train passed by, disappearing to the left side of the screen, and those who had been most startled breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, the train stopped, and several people got into and out of the cars. After a few seconds of darkness, an image appeared of a gardener watering some flowers, followed by a street urchin who entered the scene silently and stepped on the hose without realizing it, cutting off the flow of water. The gardener, surprised, looked into the end of the hose and at that very moment the child lifted his foot and the man received a gush of water full in the face.

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” some spectators laughed, including Pablo and the young newsboy.

After the gardener, there appeared three men playing cards around a table. Then, various people walking by the sea. Later, there were lithe horses galloping in an equestrian show, followed by workers coming out of a factory. Finally, the spectators of Madrid were treated to an idyllic family breakfast: a father and a mother feeding an adorable infant, who smiled like an angel, cheeks bulging with porridge.

The lights suddenly came on, as the final notes from the Spaethe piano faded out. But the moving images lingered on in the retinas of the spectators; for some, like Pablo, this would end up being their fondest childhood memory.

“Wow!” exclaimed the newsboy as they left the room.

Pablo responded with the most eloquent silence. The screening had lasted barely five minutes, but his eyes were now shining in a new way. Outside, the clouds had lost their composure and it was raining violently.

“How do I get back to Plaza de Santo Domingo?” Pablo asked when he regained the ability to speak.

“This way. I’ll show you,” the other boy replied.

And they took off running in the rain, their heads filled with moving images. By the time they reached the square, it had stopped raining and the sun was shyly peeking through the clouds.

“What’s your name?” asked Pablo.

“Holgado. Vicente Holgado,” the newsboy replied. “What’s yours?”

“Martín. Pablo Martín.”

And they shook hands like men, without suspecting that they would meet again years later.

When Julián returned to the square, he found his son huddled in a corner, shivering badly but with a gleam in his eyes that his father had never seen. He placed his hand on the boy’s forehead and felt that he was burning up. They took a mule-drawn taxi back to the inn. Julián gave Pablo some quinine tonic to drink and put him to bed. The fever subsided overnight.

The next day, the feast day of Saint Isidore, they returned to the teeming North Station and boarded the train for Bilbao: the adventure in the capital had come to an end. The Martín Sánchez family spent the next few days waiting impatiently for the results of the competitive examinations. Meanwhile, in Madrid, the Lumière Cinematograph made a huge splash—such an impression that the royal family requested a private viewing, attended by the boy king Alfonso XIII and his sisters, the teenage infantas María Teresa and María de las Mercedes, as well as their mother the Queen Regent María Cristina of Austria. Finally, in early June of 1896, the much-anticipated letter arrived in Baracaldo: Julián Martín Rodríguez had obtained the position of Inspector of Elementary Education in the province of Salamanca. Although it was only a third-rank position, it paid three thousand pesetas a year.

“We can’t turn it down,” said María.

“We can’t turn it down,” Julián repeated.

“Also, it might help Pablo’s condition,” María added.

“Yes, it might help Pablo’s condition.” Julián echoed her again.

And so it was that the Martín Sánchez family agreed to the following: the two males would move to Salamanca to start the new path while the mother and daughter would remain for the time being in Baracaldo, since the life of a provincial inspector involved constant travel, from town to town, hotel to hotel. Later on, in any case, if Julián managed to save up enough money, all four would be able to set up home in the city of Salamanca, although he would have to continue migrating all over the province. The summer passed, September arrived, and Pablo and Julián packed their bags, preparing for the hard winter of the Castilian Plateau. At the train station, as though repeating the same scene from three months before, Julia and María waved their handkerchiefs while Pablo pressed his nose to the window and silently murmured, “Pretty, pretty, pretty.” This time, however, it would be a longer wait before he would see his sister again.

The first thing that the Martíns did when they arrived in Salamanca, after taking a room in a humble little hostel near the new railway station, was to visit the former inspector, Don Cesáreo Figueroa. This man, a widower, was living in retirement in Villares de la Reina, a tiny village abutting the capital. He welcomed them inside, wearing sandals and constantly spitting gobs of mucus due to the chronic bronchitis that had plagued him for years.

“Those damned Filipinos are getting out of line,” he said by way of greeting, brandishing a copy of El Adelanto. “And it’s all because of the damned Cubans, setting a bad example! But please, please come in.”

Don Cesáreo Figueroa led them into the sitting room and offered them a glass of red wine, which Julián politely declined.

“The first thing you need to do,” the old man said, speaking to Julián while Pablo busied his mind staring at the spots on a cowhide that served as a rug, “is buy yourself a donkey or a mule to get from town to town, because the longest road between two points is usually the right one.”

Julián nodded politely, without really understanding those last few words.

“If you want, I can sell you mine, since I don’t need him anymore. What’s more, he already knows the way!” he added, erupting in a great laugh that then transformed into a coughing fit.

When he recovered, Don Cesáreo brought them to the stable at the rear of the house.

“Careful on those steps,” he warned, “they’re so old that they whine like strangled cats every time I go down to feed Lucero.”

The mule lifted its head to greet its master as he arrived with the two strangers.

“I bought him three years ago at the fair in Béjar. He’s smart as a whip,” he said as he stroked the beast’s mane. “Lucero, please meet Señor Martín, and—” But the introductions were cut short as Don Cesáreo burst into another coughing fit.

Two hours later, Pablo and Julián were on their way back to Salamanca mounted on Lucero the mule.

THE FIRST FEW YEARS WERE DIFFICULT. For work, Julián had to travel around to schools all over the province, including those of the capital, and monitor the work of the primary school teachers. This included both phases of primary school: early education, mandatory for all children between six and nine years of age, intended to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic; and advanced education, not mandatory in those days, where children learned history and geography, as well as specialties such as surveying and geometry for boys and domestic skills for girls, and of course lessons on Christian doctrine. Since most schools were not mixed (mixed schools were allowed only in the tiniest towns), Julián had to leave Pablo at the inn when he went to inspect girls’ schools, but brought him along to the boys’ schools so he could play with kids his own age while Julián spoke with the schoolmaster, reviewing him using a questionnaire covering seventy guidelines that were meant to be followed scrupulously. If they were found to be out of compliance, he noted it in his inspection log, a large notebook with a green cover, feared and loathed by the schoolmasters. He would then warn them:

“I hope that by the time of my next visit, you will have found solutions for these minor deficiencies.”

After the end of the workday, Julián devoted the late afternoons to Pablo’s own education. Pablo avidly absorbed his father’s knowledge, undeterred by having to receive it one day in Ciudad Rodrigo and the next in Cantalapiedra, Alba de Tormes, or Guijuelo. So, for the first few years, he learned grammar and spelling, mathematics and geography, a little Latin and bit of French, a notion of natural sciences, and the four basic rules of the catechism, but that was as far as the theology lessons went. Deep down, Julián was anticlerical, and always found an excuse to put off teaching Catholic doctrine. If the weather was fine, he took Pablo out to the country and taught him to distinguish between a Lactarius deliciosus (the delectable saffron milk-cap) and a Lactarius torminosus (the poisonous woolly milk-cap), or between a starling and a blackbird:

“Look, pay close attention. Starlings don’t build nests. They sleep wherever they find shelter, usually in holes in trees. Blackbirds are different, they take advantage of anything they can find to build their house: roots, branches, leaves, fur, even chestnut shells if they have to, and then they reinforce the whole nest with mud so it will be stronger. What would you rather be, Pablo, a blackbird or a starling?”

If the weather was foul, they would stay at the inn and Julián would teach his son to play chess or build castles out of toothpicks, or tell him fantastic stories, often inspired by the biography of historical characters:

“Have I ever told you the story of Évariste Galois?” he asked as he prepared an herbal tea or stirred the logs in the wood stove. As Pablo sat silent, he began for the hundredth time retelling the tale of that mathematical genius who had died in a duel in 1832, at only twenty years of age. “Poor fellow, to think what he might have accomplished if he hadn’t had such bad luck. He tried twice to get into the École Polytechnique, which was the most prestigious mathematical academy in France, and both times they annulled his examination. Years later, there was a great French mathematician, and do you know what he said? That he had failed the test because he was smarter than the judges. Apparently, when they rejected him, Galois said: ‘Hic ego barbarus sum quia non intelligur illis.’ Since they can’t understand me, to them I’m a barbarian.”

Pablo always listened attentively to his father’s stories, as if they were Aesop’s fables.

“By age seventeen he had already made some fundamental mathematical discoveries, so he wrote a thesis with all of his theories and sent it to the Academy of Sciences. And do you know what happened? They lost the manuscript! But that wasn’t the worst thing: two years later he submitted another work that he hoped would win the top prize in mathematics of the Academy of Sciences. The secretary of the academy took it to his house to review it, and he died that very night! When they tried to get the manuscript back from the dead professor’s house, they couldn’t find it anywhere. So Évariste Galois, disappointed with the world and the stupidity of humanity, gave up on mathematical glory and decided to start a revolution. ‘If it takes a corpse to wake people up, I’ll give them my own,’ he said.”

“And what happened?” Pablo would ask, impatiently, although he already knew the story.

“What do you think happened, Son? They put him in prison. And when he got out, his political enemies were waiting for him. Someone challenged him to a duel and Galois couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or didn’t know how to refuse. Maybe he wanted to die, after all that failure. He spent the night before the duel writing like a madman, recording all of the mathematical discoveries he had made in his life. Every now and again he wrote in the margin: ‘I don’t have time, I don’t have time.’ And when the dawn light entered the window, he wrote a goodbye letter and addressed it to his mother. But I’ve already told you all this, haven’t I?”

At such moments, Pablo would shake his head to say no, and his father would take the opportunity to stir his tea or the fire.

“It was a duel with pistols, at twenty-five paces. The two men turned at exactly the same moment, but only one shot was heard. Galois fell to his knees, shot in the intestines. They left him for dead, and there he lay until someone found him and brought him to a hospital. Evaristo still had time to talk to his younger brother before he died. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said, ‘I need all the courage in the world to die so young.’ And do you know the best part? Those equations he wrote during his last night on earth are still being studied today by the world’s greatest mathematicians.”

In summer and at Christmastime, father and son returned to Baracaldo to spend their vacations with María and little Julia, who was growing by leaps and bounds from one visit to the next. On these occasions, Pablo would spend hours and hours with his sister, telling her what he had seen and learned over the last few months, but mixing equal parts reality and fantasy. His sense of smell never improved, so his parents took him to the doctor again.

“What this boy needs is the dry climate of the interior,” the doctor repeated again and again, sending them off with the same words every time: “Don’t forget that the devil’s best trick is convincing us he doesn’t exist.”

So father and son returned to their itinerant lifestyle on the Castilian Plateau, while the nation was rocked by its overseas wars: in February 1898 the United States declared war on Spain and that same summer they lost the colonies once and for all, an event the prime minister, Antonio Cánovas, did not live to see, having been assassinated by the Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo during a therapeutic visit to the spa at Santa Agueda.

“What’s an anarchist?” Pablo asked, hearing this word for the first time.

“I’ll explain it when you’re older,” his father replied. “You’re still too young to understand.”

But shortly thereafter, another Italian anarchist, Luigi Lucheni, assassinated the Empress Sisi in Geneva by stabbing her with a stiletto. Again Pablo asked:

“Papa, what’s an anarchist?”

And Julián did not know how explain it, so he changed the subject or poked his head out the window and launched into the names of the constellations:

“Look,” he said, pointing to the sky, “That one shaped like a carriage is the Great Bear. And that smaller one is the Little Bear. And over there, the one shaped like an M is called Cassiopeia. That’s right, Son. An M, like in Martín.”

And so they passed the days, weeks, months, and years, and despite the nation’s troubles and the difficulties of homesickness and travel, if anyone had had the crazy idea to ask the Martíns if they were happy, in all likelihood they would have responded that indeed they were. However, deep down, sometimes unconsciously, there was something that Pablo longed for. Something that always came up in the adventure novels he read at night. Something that he had never had, and that the continual movement made even more difficult to find. Something that could be summed up in a single word: a friend. Julián could not fill this role. Nor could Lucero, though Pablo often found himself in conversation with the mule. But what the boy needed was an Athos, a Porthos, an Aramis. It is true that when they stayed in one town for a few days, Pablo ended up getting to know the other children his own age, sometimes joining them in their games in the town square or chasing grasshoppers on the riverbank. But when they returned again a year later, the other children usually did not remember him, so he preferred to stay at the inn reading his adventure novels. And so it would have continued if it had not been for the occasion when, at the end of 1899, shortly before Christmas vacation, he met Robinson Crusoe.