by Mathew Carr
It was only eleven years since he had watched the Army of Cuba marching up the Ramblas in the opposite direction after the great disaster of 1898. They were as wretched a collection of soldiers as he had ever seen: dirty, malarial, dead on their feet, and marching out of step with their dusty uniforms hanging from their scrawny bodies. Nothing had changed since then to make it any more likely that the expedition to Morocco would not have a similar outcome. The army was stuffed with officers and generals like Iglesias’s friends, who were more familiar with restaurants than battlefields. The rank and file consisted largely of men from the slums, who had no more interest in fighting than their officers. Yet men like his father-in-law and the gentlemen of the Hispano-Africa Society still continued to believe that Spain could carve out a glorious African empire in the Rif from the crumbs that France and England had left them.
“Well Mata,” Quintana shook his hand as they reached the Calle Hospital. “I hope the information I gave you was worth that lunch.”
“Just your company was worth it, Ferran. As it always is.”
Quintana laughed and turned away toward the hospital, and Mata took the next turn right into the Calle Sant Pau. There had been a time when he had known the Raval reasonably well, when he and his friends had often roamed its brothels and absinthe bars in search of pleasures that were easily available in the neighborhood. In those youthful years the old city held an exotic fascination for students who had read too much Huysmans and Baudelaire—coupled with a refusal to acknowledge the risk of syphilis that some of them had paid dearly for. At that time Pablo Picasso had been an occasional member of their group. Mata remembered him hunched over his sketchpad in many a downtown whorehouse, drawing whores and their clients. Now Picasso was in Paris, his own bohemian days were long gone, and the streets that had once seemed dangerous and alluring seemed sleazy, dirty, and devoid of glamor.
In the daytime there was nothing romantic at all about the gaunt, famished men lurking in doorways with faintly predatory expressions or the whores in their garish lipstick, their spots of rouge, and their lacy boots, many of whom looked ready to lift their skirts right there in the street at the drop of a ten-cent coin. Some of these women had clearly been working in their profession for far too long, while others looked too young to have ever embarked on it. Both kinds seemed to think he had come there to seek their services, and Mata politely rejected their overtures as he walked on resolutely through the narrow evil-smelling streets with clothes hanging from balconies. He had to make some inquiries before he found the address that Bravo Portillo had given him, and he walked in through the main entrance and up the dank, greasy stairs, taking care not to touch anything with his hands. He knocked tentatively on one of the two doors, and a crone in a black dress opened the door and peered out myopically into the gloom.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Good day, Señora.” Mata took off his hat. “I’ve come to see Hermenigildo’s woman.”
“For business?”
“Information. Which I’m willing to pay for.”
“Angela!” The old woman called. “A gentleman to see you.”
“What is it?” A younger woman appeared behind her, holding a baby with a dirty face. She might once have been pretty, Mata thought, but her bloom was already beginning to fade.
“I want to talk to you,” he said. “About Hermenigildo.”
Angela immediately looked wary. “Hombre, I’ve already spoken to the cops.”
“I know. But I want to speak to you.” Mata reached for his wallet and counted out some coins, which Angela immediately accepted. She stood back to let him in. The apartment was typical of many workers’ flats in downtown Barcelona, consisting of two dark little rooms that gave off a pungent smell of olive oil, urine, paraffin, and fried fish. There were at least seven children and adults milling around the little kitchen. Through the open doorway at the opposite end of the flat he saw four mattresses on the floor, where Angela and her aunt had presumably expected him to have intercourse. Angela handed the baby to the old lady, and shooed the children away from the little table. She sat down and invited Mata to do the same.
“What d’you want to know?” she asked.
“Let’s start with why your compañero blew up the Bar la Luna.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“The police said they found bomb materials in your apartment. And other things.”
“I knew about the pamphlets and newspapers. But not the other stuff they found on the roof. I never saw it.”
“But you knew he was an anarchist?”
Angela shrugged. “Most of the time I knew him he was more interested in money. Then about a year ago he starts running with some of Rull’s old crowd.”
“The Sons of Whores? I thought they broke up ages ago.”
“Not according to Hermenigildo. That’s when he started talking about revolution. Oh capitalism is so terrible. Down with the church. Down with the state. Power to the workers. I thought it was just talk. Hermenigildo always talked a lot of shit, especially when he was drinking. And he drank a lot.”
“So you never noticed anything unusual about his behavior before the bombing? Any nervousness or excitement?”
“The only thing he was excited about was the motorcar.”
Mata looked at her. “What motorcar?”
“About two weeks before the bombing, he comes back looking all happy and pleased with himself. Says he’s just been in a motorcar. A fancy car driven by a foreign gentleman. I said what gentlemen do you know? He says a mate introduced him—an anarchist mate. He says he’s going to do something big—and make some money, too. I thought of course you are. On the day of the Luna bombing he never came back. I didn’t think anything of it. I thought he’d left us. Next thing I know the Brigada is on my doorstep.”
“Lieutenant Ugarte?”
“Him and some others. That’s when I knew Hermenigildo did this crazy thing. And then they told me he was dead.”
“This friend—the one who introduced him to the foreigner. Do you know his name?”
“Santamaría. Salvador Santamaría. Hermenigildo says he used to run with Rull. I told all this to the cop—he didn’t seem interested. Didn’t even write it down.”
“This Santamaría, do you know where he can be found?”
Angela shook her head. “Hermenigildo never said. I didn’t ask. I don’t understand why this happened and I don’t care. I’m going back to the village as soon as I can afford the fare. There’s nothing there, but nothing is better than this shithole of a city right now.”
Mata reached into his wallet once again and gave her a ten peseta note. “Maybe this will help you to get back there,” he said.
Angela looked grateful, and Mata hoped that she really would use the money to get out of the filthy apartment. As he descended the dank stairwell once again he wondered why Ugarte appeared to have had so little interest in a possible foreign connection to a bombing that he was supposedly investigating. No sooner had he stepped out onto the street when he heard a sudden noise coming from an alleyway a few yards away on the other side of the street.
Mata generally considered himself to be a sensible and rational man, but now he thought of Pau Tosets lying in an alley and he felt the same fear that he had once felt as a child when his parents blew the candle out and left him alone in his bedroom. In the same moment he heard a low growl that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He turned and walked quickly away. Even as his footsteps echoed around the murky streets he continued to look over his shoulder, and it seemed to him that something he could not see was moving toward him in the shadows. Soon he came alongside the whorehouses once again, and he slowed down and wiped his forehead in an attempt to regain some dignity. Some of the women laughed at the large bearded man with the floppy hat who looked as though he were being chased by something.
It was not until he reached the Ramblas that he began to relax once again. And even as
he smiled at his own ridiculousness, he promised himself that the next time he came into the Raval, it would be better to have company.
10
Ever since she had embraced the Idea, Esperanza had yearned for the great strike that Pau and the other comrades talked about—the strike that would turn the country upside down and usher in the possibility of a revolutionary transformation. She had been too young to participate in the February 1902 general strike in Catalonia for the nine-hour day. She remembered hearing the sound of shots for the first time, and seeing cavalry riding down the Mayor de Gràcia. But it was not until she joined the movement five years later that she learned of the lockouts and battles between the pickets and the forces of order in which dozens of workers had been killed. Most of the comrades who had participated in the strikes agreed that they had been a defeat for the trade unions and the movement as a whole. Pau used to say the same, even though his mother had been one of the organizers of the strike and had spent a year in jail as a result.
The strike had not been prepared properly, Pau said, and its defeat had allowed the Catalanistas and Lerroux’s party to gain ground at the movement’s expense. But Pau also believed that the Catalan unions were beginning to recover their confidence and strength. Now, as a result of the call-up and the fighting in Morocco, the possibility of another general strike seemed suddenly likely.
There was no doubt that Maura had made a mistake in calling up the Catalan reservists. Even in Gràcia, Esperanza heard women complain that their sons and husbands were being called up to fight the Moors and that there would be no one left to feed their children. In her lunchbreaks she went out into the Ramblas to join the protesters shouting at the troops heading for the harbor. In the evenings she attended meetings at the offices of the Soli or the Athenaeum, in preparation for the forthcoming annual meeting of the Catalan Workingmens Federation. On that day delegates from all over Catalonia would be gathering in Barcelona, and it was already clear that Morocco would be on the top of the agenda and that the conference would vote on a general strike.
Esperanza knew what Pau would have wanted, and she was conscious of his invisible presence as she went from one meeting to another. On Wednesday evening, one week before the federation conference, the Invincibles met at the Athenaeum once again, where Ruben and Arnau reported back from their meeting with Ferrer at Montgat.
Esperanza was disappointed to hear that Ferrer would not be attending the conference because he did not believe there was sufficient national support for a strike. Ferrer had become a kind of counselor as well as an inspiration to the group, and Esperanza could not understand why he would hold back, when even the socialists were discussing the possibility of a strike. The other members of the Invincibles seemed equally deflated, and Arnau tried to reassure them.
“Ferrer will come around,” he said. “For now we’re better off without him. He attracts too much attention. We don’t want any coppers around here—not the ones we can see or the ones we can’t.”
The others nodded, and Esperanza remembered what Mata had told her: that someone from her affinity group must have told Pau’s kidnappers where he was going to be on the night he was taken. She had not even known herself that he intended to walk her home, and she found it difficult to believe that any of the Invincibles had known—let alone that any of them could have turned such knowledge into betrayal. Arnau was out of the question. Pau had always told her that he was as unbreakable as steel, and he spoke with the same quiet authority and strength that Pau himself had once exuded.
Once, she might have suspected Ruben, but Ruben was no longer the man he had been a few weeks ago. She listened now, as he insisted that the Invincibles play their part in promoting the protest strike in factories, workplaces, and houses across the city. Arnau agreed that such action was necessary to ensure that the delegates at the conference made the right decision. Once again he turned toward the chair that they had all agreed to keep empty in memory of Pau. “You remember the words of Comrade Tosets,” he said. “ ‘The movement is recovering. The grass is dry and needs a spark to light it.’ Comrades, Maura has lit that spark, and now it’s up to us to set the city on fire.”
Esperanza felt a knot in her throat as she looked around the table at the little man with the yellowed face who had endured so much and the earnest expressions on her comrades. In that moment she felt privileged to be in a movement that could produce such men, and she felt sure that Mata must be wrong, The meeting broke up shortly afterward, and Esperanza was about to go home when Ruben came over to speak to her.
“Do you have a minute?” he asked. “I need some advice.”
“My mother’s expecting me back.”
“It won’t take long. I’ve written something. I need someone to look it over for me—preferably a teacher.”
Ruben seemed so earnest that Esperanza could not refuse. She followed him upstairs into the library, and out into the deserted gallery, where the two of them sat down on the little cane sofa.
“A pity about Ferrer,” she said.
Ruben shrugged. “He’s being watched all the time now. There was a copper at the station when we were there. And another one at his house—from London.”
“From London? What did he want?”
“No idea.” Ruben took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. “Here it is. I thought it might go in the Soli.”
Esperanza read the barely legible scrawl that looked as though it had been written by a child. Despite the numerous misspellings and crossed out words, it was essentially an extended version of the call to action that he had just made. On paper, it lacked the passion and conviction that had accompanied his surprising transformation into a persuasive orator.
“Can I be honest with you?” Esperanza asked.
“That bad, eh?”
“No. But in my opinion you should do what you do best. You’re a good speaker. You speak from the heart. You win people over.”
“Do I?”
“Yes, you do. And you should leave the writing to others.”
For a moment she thought she had offended him, then Ruben nodded and gave a rueful smile. “You know what? You’re right. Pau was always the writer, not me.” He looked at her intently, and his hooded eyes looked suddenly guarded once again, as though he were trying to make up his mind about something. “Did you watch the procession last year? During the royal visit?”
Esperanza was surprised by the question. Like all the schools in the city, she had been obliged to take her class to watch the great parade on the Passeig de Gràcia. She had watched the soldiers kissing the Spanish flag, the Army of Africa marching in formation in their flat round caps, the cavalrymen with their sabers and horsetailed helmets, the young King Alfonso on his white horse with Maura riding beside him.
“I was at the parade, too.” Ruben lowered his voice. “With a gun.” He smiled grimly at Esperanza’s shocked expression. “I hadn’t been back from the penal colony for long. My head was a mess. I wanted to pay the bastards back for what they’d done. And to be honest with you I’d had enough of this world. So I got hold of a pistol from one of the comrades. Of course I expected to die. But I thought if I take down the king and maybe the president then at least I’ll have achieved something. You know who stopped me? Pau. He heard what I was planning. He came to look for me.”
Esperanza was too astounded to respond, and Ruben explained how Pau had guided him away from the crowd even as the king was approaching, and persuaded him to abandon the assassination attempt.
“A few more minutes and I would have taken a shot at the king,” Ruben said. “And even if I hadn’t killed him I would have got the rope or the garotte. So it’s thanks to Pau that I’m still here. And now he isn’t. And that’s why I want to do this strike. Not just for the movement, but for him. But there’s something else you need to know—I still have that gun.”
Esperanza had the feeling that she had entered into a peculiar intimacy now that was not like an
ything she had experienced. “Do you?” She asked nervously. “What for?”
Ruben leaned closer. “Pau was often right. He was right about the king. He was right about assassinations—they don’t achieve anything anymore. But not everything can be resolved through strikes and mass action. You and I know the coppers aren’t going to find who killed Pau. They won’t even look. But I can tell you this. If I find the son of a bitch, I will see that justice is done. So if your journalist friend finds out who he is, you’d do better to let me know, not the police.”
Esperanza looked back into the dark intense eyes and remembered Michele Angiolillo, the Italian anarchist who had shot prime minister Cánovas in 1897, less than a year after her father’s death. It was Cánovas who had ordered the repression that killed her father, and even then, at the age of eight, she remembered how the nuns had asked her class to pray for the prime minister’s soul. Instead she had secretly offered her prayers to Angiolillo, the man who had traveled all the way from London to gun Cánovas down at a Basque spa town, and waited calmly with his wife for the arrest that he knew would lead him to the garotte.
Now she heard Pau’s voice telling her, as he had told Ruben, that the age of assassinations and attentats was over and that revolutions were the result of the collective efforts of the masses, not guns and bombs. Then she thought of his bloodless body lying in an alley like a piece of meat, and her mouth tightened with anger. Ruben was still looking at her intently, as if he were gauging her reaction.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asked.
Esperanza nodded and said that she understood very well.
* * *
At an early age, Lawton had understood that the surface of the world was subject to sudden unexpected fluctuations that threatened his well-being and survival. It was a lesson he had first acquired in childhood, watching out for the little shifts in his father’s moods that preceded one of his rages. Sometimes these signs were obvious. It was generally preferable to stay out of the old man’s way when he came home from the pub cursing instead of singing, or when he smelled of whiskey rather than beer. At other times such eruptions could come from nowhere. One minute the old man would be laughing or talking normally, and then there would be the sudden change of tone or the stone-cold stare into the distance, before he lashed out and hit someone or broke something.
