Читать книгу The Anarchist Who Shared My Name - Pablo Martín Sánchez - Страница 9

I

(1890–1896)

NO. PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ WAS NOT BORN in 1899, as the newspapers will claim several decades later, but on the night of January 26, 1890, the feast day of Saint Timothy and Saint Titus, Saint Theofrid and Saint Theogenes—all bishops—as well as Saint Simeon the hermit. The thermometer in Barcelona marked four degrees centigrade, and the humidity was 82%. However, the sky was clear, and Julián Martín Rodríguez could see the stars of the constellation Cassiopeia glowing in the celestial canopy, as he firmly squeezed his wife’s hand hoping that their newborn son would lift his head and take his first gulp of air.

At that time, King Alfonso XIII was barely four years old, so it was his mother, the regent María Cristina, who held the nation’s reins. The presidency was going back and forth between liberals and conservatives, according to the shameful arrangement they had reached in the Pardo Pact, and now the turn of the liberal Práxedes Mateo Sagasta was over. Who cares who’s in charge of the government, Julián thought as he looked at the stars and waited for the birth of his first child. We’ll still be the poorest country in Europe. All he had to do was look at the view through the window, faintly illuminated by the moonlight: the inaptly named neighborhood known as the Desert, a chaotic conglomeration of unsanitary residences that had been piling up on the left bank of the Nervión River since 1876, when, at the end of the Third Carlist War, the area had undergone a rapid process of industrialization and population growth, without it ever crossing the mayor’s mind to come up with an urban development plan. The hard, dangerous work in the iron mines, the local population’s primary means of sustenance, had driven the life expectancy of Baracaldo to one of the lowest in Spain; at the time of Pablo’s birth, it was only twenty-nine years.

Julián heard his wife’s moaning announcing the end of the labor, but still he did not dare to look. He noticed her hand gradually slackening, and he heard the midwife spanking the newborn. He waited to hear the cry, and, hearing nothing, closed his eyes angrily and gnashed his teeth, fearing a stillbirth. Only when he felt his wife’s hand on his back did he dare to turn his head. It was a boy. And he was alive. But, incomprehensibly, he wasn’t crying; or, more accurately, while he made a face like he wanted to cry, nary a sob escaped his throat, as if this were one of those silent films that would arrive in Spain a few years later. The three adults in the room looked at each other worriedly in the candlelight, but at first no one said anything. Then, the old midwife wrapped the child in a towel and placed him in the arms of his mother, wiped her hands on her skirt and left the house in a hurry, without finishing the job, making the sign of the cross and murmuring spells, taking the silent crying as a bad omen. “Lagarto, lagarto,” were the last words the midwife pronounced before her shadow disappeared through the doorframe. My God, thought Julián, that witch is known to tell stories—we’re going to go from undesirables to pariahs. But something more urgent demanded his attention, and he pushed the bad thoughts out of his mind. He took his knife from his pants pocket and in one movement cut the umbilical cord, which had already stopped pulsing. No one would have said it was his first time.

Julián Martín Rodríguez and María Sánchez Yribarne had met three years beforehand, a few months after the royal birth of Alfonso XIII. She belonged to the new Biscayan bourgeoisie, not the class of landed gentry fallen on hard times, but that of the visionaries who at the start of the century had hopped on the industrialization bandwagon and managed to get rich overnight, such as her grandfather, the mythical José Antonio Yribarne, founder of one of the country’s most powerful industrial dynasties. Julián, for his part, came from an extremely humble family of Zaragoza, was the youngest of nine brothers and the only one who had been able to go to school, thanks to the fathers of Escuelas Pías, who had welcomed him into the seminary with an enthusiasm that was quick to raise suspicions. He excelled in algebra, physics, natural history, as well as Latin, Greek, and modern languages; however, theology, history, and philosophy stymied him from the start. When he felt he had learned enough, he left the seminary without saying goodbye to anyone and took off traveling all over Spain offering his services. And so it happened that at the end of 1886 he reached Baracaldo and was hired by the Yribarne family as a tutor to their young, misbehaving daughter, María.

Love took a bit longer to blossom than it tends to in the pulp novels from the time, but Cupid finally showed up with an ample quiver full of arrows. And when he came, he came with a vengeance. Even the couple themselves did not know if it was while practicing declensions, memorizing the list of Gothic kings, or speculating about the transubstantiation of the soul, but what is certain is that one fine day they found themselves kissing passionately on the table, crumpling quadratic equations and the poems of Victor Hugo. When María’s parents got wind of it, they threw the shameless tutor out into the street with no severance pay. What they did not expect is that their daughter was prepared to follow him to the ends of the earth.

The wedding took place early in the spring of 1889. Only one member of the bride’s family attended: Don Celestino Gil Yribarne, the black sheep of the family and María’s favorite uncle, who had always treated her as the daughter he’d never had. People in Baracaldo whispered the most outlandish slander against him, accusing him of everything from bestiality to practicing Satanic rituals in his mansion at Miravalles. None of this was true, however. The only eccentricity he allowed himself—not without some trepidation—was collecting the pubic hair of the women he slept with, classifying it in a fetishistic, methodical manner, like a lepidopterist with his butterflies or a numismatist with his coins. As for the groom’s family, no one was able to afford the cost of the journey, so all they could do was to send their best wishes by mail, in the form of a collective letter covered in grease stains and spelling errors.

The nuptials were held in the old church of San Vicente Mártir, with a very austere ceremony, although Julián had passed the qualifying examination for the title of teacher and was giving classes at a public school in Baracaldo. María, for her part, in an act of carelessness or brave defiance, had sought work in steel factories not belonging to her family, such as those in Santa Águeda or Arlegui y Cía. But as soon as they found out that she was the disowned daughter of the Yribarne family, no one dared hire her, and one after another they invented excuses to show her the door. Fortunately, Don Celestino defied the family patriarchs and helped pay for the costs of the ceremony, which the young lovebirds’ scant savings could not cover. As if that were not enough, he also gave them a magnificent wedding gift: a trip to Paris to attend the opening of the World’s Fair commemorating the centenary of the French Revolution. Hearing this, the newlyweds could not contain their excitement, and they recited in unison the famous lines of Victor Hugo that had been crumpled under their first kiss: “Oh! Paris est la cité mère! / Paris est le lieu solennel / Où le tourbillon éphémère / Tourne sur un centre éternel!”

The train that was to take them to the City of Light left Bilbao on the fifth of May, the night before the start of the fair. At the border, there was a transfer to get on the French track gauge, and from then on a horde of passengers pushed into the train at every stop, filling all of the cars—not only first, second, and third class, but also the freight cars. No one wanted to miss the great event. When they arrived at the Gare Saint-Lazare, the day was starting to clear up and the passengers exited the train hoping to be welcomed by the gleaming, massive skeleton towering a thousand feet high, designed especially for the occasion by a certain Gustave Eiffel, who was still ruminating on how to get out of having to take the tower down after the Fair, as had been planned. Unfortunately, the buildings surrounding the station blocked the view, and a slight disappointment spread through the crowd. The newlyweds went first to the Hotel Español, conveniently located on the Rue de Castellane, where Uncle Celestino had reserved them a room, because what could be better than staying in a hotel of compatriots? However, they soon realized that the only thing Spanish about the hotel was its name, apart from a few old copies of El Imparcial and El Liberal scattered around the lobby. The room had no closets, no shelves, not even a measly wash basin, nor a candle on the bedside table. But all this nothingness was costing ten francs a day.

Julián and María went to the Champ de Mars, where the Eiffel Tower served as the main entrance to the fairgrounds, which held over 120 acres of pavilions. On the way they ate French fries sold in a paper cone and drank glasses of sugar water flavored with orange blossoms. The streets of Paris were decked out in their Sunday best, adorned with wreaths of flowers and golden garlands, along with a vast, inebriated crowd waving patriotic flags. Now that’s what I call iron—thought an astonished Julián when they arrived at Place de la Concorde and got their first view of the impressive tower—a far cry from what they dig up in the mines of Baracaldo. Then, walking along the bank of the Seine, they arrived at the Pont d’Iena, just when the president of the republic and his wife were getting ready to cross it in an official carriage pulled by four horses and flanked by a peloton of bodyguards. Sadi Carnot looked impeccable, dressed in the trappings of high ceremony, but it was the first lady who received the highest praise, with a bold tricolor dress designed for the occasion: a blue silk skirt, a white bodice of Alençon lace, and pale red trim. When the carriage passed under the giant arch of the Eiffel Tower, the bands struck up the Marseillaise, making way for the French president’s predictable speech to officially inaugurate the World’s Fair. Who then would have thought that five years later the Italian anarchist Santo Caserio would take the president’s life, stabbing him with a knife and shouting “Long live anarchy!” Fortunately, the young couple enjoyed a peaceful and pleasant afternoon, and that same night, in the bare room of the Hotel Español, while the Parisian sky turned into a bacchanal of fireworks and multicolored lights, a sperm bearing the seal of the Martín Rodríguez family jubilantly united with an ovum produced in the Sánchez Yribarne factory, to create an embryo destined to bear the name Pablo Martín Sánchez.

“It’s strange that he’s not crying,” said Julián when he had finished tying the umbilical cord.

“He is crying, but silently,” replied María with a sigh, as her contractions continued, working to expel the placenta.

The very next day, with no time to lose, Pablo Martín Sánchez was baptized at the church of San Vicente Mártir, the very place his parents had been married nine months before. Again at the baptism he did not cry, not even when the young priest Ignacio Beláustegui put the holy water on his head, accompanying the gesture with three loud, poorly timed sneezes to complete the baptismal ceremony. What a brave Christian, Don Ignacio seemed to say to himself, without imagining that decades later he would find himself seeking a pardon for this brave child.

This act of silent rebellion marked Pablo’s first steps in this world, and soon word spread around Baracaldo that the Martín baby was incapable of crying. The rumor was false, of course, because while it is true that the child wept rarely, he did indeed cry from time to time, but so subtly that only a keen observer could detect it. What was true, on the other hand, was that Pablo did not seem to be in any hurry to start speaking: he turned one year of age, then two, and when he reached the age of three years he still had not uttered a single word, despite his parents’ desperate attempts to get him to say papa and mama. Until the day his sister was born. This was in 1893; in Saint Petersburg, Tchaikovsky was composing his Pathétique Symphony No. 6, while in Madrid the National Meteorological Institute was producing its first weather maps; María Sánchez Yribarne gave birth to her second child in the same room where little Pablo had been born three years before, but this time her husband did not have to get out his knife: the new midwife took care of everything. A beautiful, energetic sister was born and was named Julia, apparently intent on making up for all the crying her brother had not done. When the infant was finally asleep in her mother’s arms, they let Pablo come into the room so he could see her. He approached the bed, looked wide-eyed at the newborn, and pronounced his first word out loud, to everyone’s surprise:

“Pretty,” he said nonchalantly.

The little girl changed Pablo’s life. All the words he had not been saying before started gushing out of his mouth, like a river after the spring thaw. He would spend long hours telling Julia the most extravagant stories, in a language full of invented or incomprehensible words that the weary parents found both entertaining and worrisome. However, when his sister was not nearby he retreated into a strange muteness from which no one could extract him, so in the minds of misinformed or malicious neighbors the child who didn’t cry transformed into the child who didn’t speak, although both claims were strictly false. In addition to all that, there was an episode that would end up revealing a real deficiency in the firstborn, one that would impact his immediate future.

It happened in the spring of 1896, when Pablo was six years old and little Julia was about to turn three. The industrialized countries were starting to emerge from the economic depression, and, although Spain would soon lose its overseas colonies and plunge into a crisis with uncertain consequences, new winds of bonanza appeared to be blowing in the West. The Martín Sánchez family’s economic situation had improved significantly, despite the fact that Uncle Celestino was no longer able to help them: a sudden aneurysm had ended his life while he was collecting butterflies at his little castle at Miravalles, and the Yribarne family had conspired to keep María from receiving her share of the inheritance. However, Julián’s lucky star was still looking after him, and he had obtained a position at the Escuela Normal Elemental of Bilbao, where he spent most of his day trying to alert the aspiring educators to the importance of reducing the number of illiterates, which stood at over ten million in Spain at the end of the century. For her part, María stayed home to take care of the children. One midday in early April, while the woman was making food in the coal-fired kitchen, she heard the knife sharpener go by, his horn whistling its unmistakable melody. She looked at the knife she had used to peel the potatoes and decided it was time to have it sharpened.

Look after Julia, she said to Pablo, I’ll be right back.

She took twenty cents from a jar and left the house with her knife in her hand, leaving the food on the fire. In the street, she saw the sharpener turning at the next corner, dragging his wheelbarrow. He took no more than five minutes to do the task, but when María took the newly sharpened knife and came back around the corner toward home, a speeding carriage caught her by surprise. She managed to avoid being trampled by the donkey, but could not duck quickly enough to avoid being struck in the head by the edge of the carriage seat. She fell to the ground unconscious, and the driver and the sharpener tried to revive her. A neighbor brought her inside, refreshed her face with wet cloths, and called a doctor. When María regained consciousness, she had been out at least half an hour. She had a lump on her temple and a terrible headache.

“What about my children?” was the first thing she managed to say. When no one responded, she went running home. Already from outside she could smell the smoke. She entered the house screaming and found Pablo sitting calmly in front of his sister, trying for the umpteenth time to tell her the story of the three-eyed snail. The house reeked of scorched food, but the child seemed not to have noticed anything; his sister, on the other hand, was wailing at the top of her lungs. María ran into the kitchen and yanked the pot from the fire. There was nothing left inside but a carbonized mass stuck to the bottom, giving off an unbearable stench.

“But, Pablo,” the mother scolded her son, “didn’t you smell the food burning?”

“I don’t smell,” said the boy, laconically.

And so it was that his parents discovered that he did not possess the sense of smell. The local doctor described it as “anosmia or olfactory dysfunction,” and, in addition to prescribing miraculous Climent Hypophosphite Syrup (whose maker claimed it cured all illnesses, including insomnia, pallor, and brain softening), recommended getting him away from the wet climate of the North and bringing him to the drier regions of the interior, where he would probably be able to recover the smell he had never had:

“Don’t forget that the devil’s best trick is convincing us he doesn’t exist,” he offered as a way of saying goodbye, leaving the parents somewhat disconcerted.

Julián and María decided to follow the doctor’s advice. Anything for the child’s health, they said to each other, and started thinking about how to relocate. In a few days the news arrived that Madrid would soon be testing candidates for the Primary Education Inspectors Corps, as three positions had just opened up in the provinces of Albacete, Badajoz, and Salamanca. The writing seemed to be on the wall, so Julián sent in an application to take the test. Two weeks later, he received a convocation to a test that would be held in the capital of the kingdom on the thirteenth and fourteenth of May.

“Why don’t you bring the boy with you so we can see if the dry climate of Madrid does him any good?” María proposed.

“Woman, it’s only going to be two days.”

“But at least he can keep you company.”

“Fine, as you wish,” Julián acceded.

The one who did not welcome the idea was Pablo, who did not want to be separated from his sister Julia, even if it was only for two or three days. But the decision was made, and on the twelfth of May, at eight o’clock in the morning, father and son took the Express Train to Madrid’s North Station. Making their way between the passengers laden with saddlebags and chickens, men and women shouting, smoking, shoving, and spitting on the floor, the two Martíns managed to reach their third-class seats. On the platform, mother and daughter waved their hands, while Pablo pressed his nose against the window of the compartment and quietly repeated the first word he had ever said: “Pretty, pretty, pretty.” A silent tear ran down his cheek. Then the train whistle blew, and the boy understood that this was the start of a great new adventure.