Yet most of the turmoil that churned Pujol’s early years had an inner origin. As Pujol grew up in a house full of nannies, chefs, seamstresses and chauffeurs, with vacations to the shore in his father’s gleaming Hispano-Suiza, his parents quickly saw qualities in their second boy that they couldn’t trace to either of their personalities. Pujol was wild, very wild, or as his mother saw it, bad, very bad. “In my house, the name ‘Juan’ was constantly ringing,” he remembered, “followed by ‘What have you done this time?’” Pujol banged into walls, scraped his limbs raw, crashed into banisters and, in one memorable incident, plowed straight through a floor-to-ceiling window on his tricycle, sending glass crashing into a thousand pieces all around him.
Miraculously, he emerged unscathed. “I really believed that Don Quixote in his adventure with the windmills was not so destroyed as I was,” he later wrote. But that day was the exception. “I was constantly covered in bandages through my whole boyhood.” Though they loved him, Pujol’s brothers and sisters would hide their toys from Juan, convinced that anything he touched would soon be shattered.
His family despaired. Mercedes, especially, couldn’t understand her son. He was incorrigible: threats, punishments, near-mortal injuries seemed to have no effect on a trail of destruction that stretched wider and longer the older he grew. But what looked like sheer mayhem to his parents and the rest of his family were, for the boy, marvelous and exuberant adventures that he saw in his mind in blazing, sharply defined color, always with him as the hero of the tale. As Pujol tore around the mansion, he became a knight, a desperado, a daredevil, an explorer or, his favorite role model, Tom Mix of the Hollywood westerns that he attended as faithfully as Mercedes did Catholic Mass. “That cowboy was doing these wonderful things, and I decided that I should imitate him.”
Pujol would later describe his boyhood imagination as something that he had no real control over. Like some alien host, it compelled him to do things. “The contents of my fevered fantasies,” he wrote, “ran my imagination.” Whatever bloomed in his brain, Pujol would set out to do. Most boys have adventures spinning through their heads at all hours of the day, but Pujol actually seemed to live solely in his dreams, lost to the real world. “I wanted to be the beloved hero of a Hollywood silent movie.” But no one else saw the sets and the props, only Pujol with the crazy look in his eye, approaching at top speed. On the soccer field, he was even more terrifying; his nickname was Bullet.
He wasn’t malicious, and in fact he had a good heart, always rushing in to help when the neighborhood runt was losing a fight. “I didn’t hurt anybody, I was just very, very naughty.” Pujol’s mother tried to snatch him out of his fantasies and mold him into a nice Catalan upper-class boy, a boy she could fully love. “Punishments and retribution” rained down on Pujol’s head one after the other, but they rarely had any effect. Pujol’s genial father could only sigh.
When he was seven, Pujol was sent away to a strict boarding school, run by the Marist Fathers. Pujol’s older brother, the “sturdy and straightforward” Joaquín, was forced to go along to watch over Bullet. In the Spanish expression, it was Pujol who broke the dishes but Joaquín who paid for them.
The priests did their best, but Pujol would always be a mediocre student. He hated the boarding school, and waited impatiently for his wonderful father to arrive on the train, as he did faithfully every Sunday, to take Juan and Joaquín for walks by the sea. There Juan Sr. would tell his boys entrancing stories about the world and dispense advice about life. “He taught me to respect the individuality of human beings, their sorrows and their sufferings. He despised war and bloody revolutions, scorning the despot, the authoritarian …” The Marist discipline wouldn’t stick, but the seaside lessons would. In Pujol’s four “interminable” years with the Marists, however, he did manage to become fascinated by history and especially languages. Eventually he would be able to speak five: Spanish, Catalan, French, English and Portuguese.
The elder Juan had more to worry about than a high-spirited boy. Barcelona in the 1920s was a prosperous city known as “the Unrivaled,” with nearly one million citizens and heavy industries that led the world. The city’s cotton industry was second only to mighty Liverpool’s, and the first railway engine in the world had been built in its thriving factories. The young Pujol loved going to the train station, where he would watch the steam engines blowing and hissing as they pulled out of the grand terminal. “My imagination would travel with them as they sped away to remote destinations to the echoing sound of a whistle.”
But there were good reasons for a young boy to want to escape Barcelona: it was a combustible, highly dangerous place to grow up in, a place where the leftists’ idea of a joke was to soap the stone steps of churches so that the hated Catholic bourgeoisie would slip and break their necks when leaving Mass. The Catalan capital often seemed on the verge of tearing itself apart: waves of riots, strikes and violence left dozens of mutilated bodies on the streets; radicals burned down churches and convents, fascist gangs responded with kidnappings and mass murders. Political coups seemed to be the city’s leading industry. “One day a right-wing faction sitting outside a coffee-bar would be machine-gunned,” Pujol remembered, “the next day it was the turn of the left.” Anarcho-syndicalists battled Catholic workers, proto-fascists shot communists, military supporters bombed antimonarchists. Assassination became so common that when a politician or union leader was found dead on the street, it was said almost casually that he’d “been take for a paseo,” a stroll.
As a leading industrialist and a progressive, the elder Juan was a potential target of several factions. “Every morning my father went to work, he said goodbye to us as if for the last time; each parting was heart-rending.” The paterfamilias despised the violence and poison-tipped rhetoric that had become so common in Barcelona. He was a committed humanist who believed in science, progress and, above all, tolerance. (Mercedes’s sympathies no doubt lay with the Catholic traditionalists who backed Franco.) Finally, the tension became so thick that Juan Sr. moved his family away from the city center to the northern suburb of Putxet, where after living in a succession of apartments they settled into a magnificent home on Homero Street.
Pujol grew up strong, athletic, “a hefty fellow of fifteen, with an incipient beard,” as he boasted later. He was charming, loved to dance and quote Catalan poetry, to hike in the mountains and sweet-talk the local girls. But he found his lessons to be “endless and dull,” and after one particularly loud fight with a teacher, he marched home and announced that he was dropping out. Cannily, Juan Sr. agreed, with one proviso: the impulsive teenager had to go out and get a job. Pujol agreed, promptly marched off and talked his way into an apprenticeship at an enormous hardware shop just off the world-famous Rambla.
His duties were to sweep the floor, run errands, deliver packages and replace the tools that the shop assistants had left out after demonstrating them for customers. It was his first real job, and the long hours and menial tasks quickly wore him down. As his father had no doubt foreseen, Pujol lasted only a few weeks before quitting the shop. Then he zoomed to the opposite extreme, locking himself in the family library and delving deep into the arcane philosophical and literary texts that lined the walls. Pujol was searching for a vocation, and like everything else, he pursued it at top speed. The teenager was all velocity and no direction.
The young man’s intense, headlong nature also propelled him into a series of mad love affairs. “I’ve always adored romanticism, and I’ve always been a slave of what is usually called the weaker sex.” When he met Luisita, a vivacious dance-crazed girl from Andalusia, he pursued her all the way to Granada, begging his father to drive him there in the family’s Hispano-Suiza. In Granada Pujol discovered that his beloved had a violently jealous boyfriend. Pujol sent Luisita poem after poem and declared his everlasting love, but the girl chose the brute, and Pujol’s father had to drive back to Barcelona with his heartbroken son weeping in the passenger seat. “I was destroyed
; the chef of the house couldn’t find anything to make me happy. A few months after I left, Luisita married that abominable cretin.”
One day when he was nineteen, Pujol began to feel knife-like pains in his abdomen that doubled him over. His appendix had burst. He was rushed to the hospital and into the operating room. The surgeon successfully removed the appendix, but three days later, as Pujol recovered in bed, the incision became infected. The young man raved with fever, wavering between life and death. In between hallucinations, he would awaken to find his father by his side, day and night, holding his hand and saying nothing, only crying. It was the first time young Pujol had seen his father’s tears.
The fever seemed to burn something out of Pujol. After he recovered, he made another hairpin turn in his life: he would stop dreaming of romance and foreign travel. He gave up studying Aristotle. Instead, he began taking classes in—of all things—poultry management. After a six-month course at the Royal Academy of Poultry Farming at Arenys de Mar, Juan Pujol became a fully certified chicken farmer.
This about-face was clearly a major capitulation to his family, and to reality. “I felt my stubbornness, my not studying and continuously disappointing my father were going to bring me to a bad end,” he later explained. He even took up with Margarita, a sensible and tender Barcelona girl who was very like his mother: “prudent, very religious” —and afraid of sex. The mad charms of girls like Luisita, as well as the adventures of Tom Mix and Don Quixote, were quietly put on a shelf.
In 1933, Pujol reported for compulsory military service. Soon he was sporting around town in the tailored officer’s uniform of the 7th Light Artillery Regiment, sworn to serve the leftist Republican government against all enemies. After a few months, Pujol had learned to ride a horse and salute correctly. It was of his last successes before death and war darkened his life.
After a series of small strokes, his sixty-seven-year-old father soon took to his bed. The 1934 flu epidemic had struck Barcelona, and Juan Sr. was sick with the virus. In another room, Pujol was also laid out with the flu, and the two of them spent their days only yards apart, their faces burning with fever. On January 24, a doctor was called. Half delirious, Pujol listened from his room as the physician examined his father, the only sound the murmuring of his mother and sisters. Though sleepy and dazed, Pujol heard the doctor say that an injection was needed. He heard the thump of the front door closing and the rapid footsteps of a servant running off to the nearby pharmacy. A few minutes later, the sound of the door again: the servant had returned with the medicine. There was silence and Pujol imagined the doctor poking his syringe into the vial, then rolling up his father’s sleeve, holding his pale arm as the needle slipped into the vein. And then Pujol heard a scream that he would never forget. “Everybody was crying and shouting. I heard someone cry out, ‘What happened? What happened?’ My mother and my sisters were crying, crying. I could hear the doctor saying he couldn’t understand what had happened, why the injection had that effect.” Finally, someone rushed in and told Pujol the news. His father had died the instant the doctor pushed the syringe’s plunger.
Pujol, too ill to attend the funeral, was devastated. His father had been his closest friend, the ideal of what a man should be. “The flight of his soul from the world left me oppressed and overwhelmed,” he said. “I had lost the one I loved the most, forever.” To make matters worse, his father had died knowing that his son was struggling. As he listened to his family tell how the workers at the dye factory had taken his father’s coffin on their shoulders, tears streaming down their faces, and how children from the San Juan de Dios Hospital had joined in the procession, paying tribute to the man who’d quietly paid for their medicines and their beds because it was the decent thing to do, the wayward son cried and contemplated a hard truth: he’d fallen short in his father’s eyes.
With his father gone, Pujol struggled to find a place for himself in increasingly chaotic and violent Barcelona. Perhaps sparked by boyhood memories of Tom Mix, he bought a movie theater, then sold it and bought a smaller one. Both failed miserably. A trucking company bought and run with the long-suffering Joaquín bled red ink and had to be closed. Then a chicken farm. Everything collapsed in frustrated hopes, costing the family untold sums. “He was a terrible businessman,” says Pujol’s eldest son, who would go on to be a successful entrepreneur and art gallery owner. Pujol simply wasn’t a practical thinker; he threw himself into things with passion but little planning or strategic vision.
Finally, at twenty-four, Pujol took up a sales position with a poultry farm in Llinás del Vallés, just under twenty miles north of Barcelona, and got engaged to the quiet Margarita. Was he in love with her? “I don’t know. She was very nice to me but I was bored,” he would say years later. Pujol had seemingly reconciled himself to a life of anonymous work and family life in a small town in Spain. He owed his family that much. And he needed to eat.
Then, on July 17, 1936, Spanish soldiers in their Moroccan barracks staged a revolt. The Spanish Civil War had begun.
2. The Training Ground
JULY 18 WAS A blisteringly hot Sunday. Pujol had planned a day trip with friends to Montseny, a mountainous region thirty miles northeast of Barcelona. But then fragmented reports of the barracks rebellion came in over the radio: General Franco and his troops in the Canary Islands were joining the fray; officers and men across the nation were swelling the ranks of the coup against the Republican government. As Barcelona tensed, Pujol made his way through empty streets to his fiancée’s house in Calle Girona. There he heard the news of escalations and fresh outbreaks of violence: cathedrals and political headquarters were burning; priests were being hunted down and murdered by leftist radicals; a general strike had been called by antifascist unions; food was already growing scarce and people were killing each other in the streets. Rebel fascist units had stormed the Telefónica building and the Hotel Colon, and marched toward the intersection of Paseo de Grácia and Diagonal, where a workers’ militia waited to oppose them, rifle stocks growing slick in their hands.
Soon it became clear that Barcelona was firmly in the grip of the Republican forces. As a cavalry officer, Pujol was required to report for duty, but he refused to take up arms “in such a fratricidal fight.” Even if he had to die, he wouldn’t kill a fellow Spaniard.
Politically, Pujol was his father’s son. “I loved liberty, tolerance and religious liberty,” he said. He hated the wild rhetoric of the communists and the anarcho-syndicalists, who declared that “nothing great has ever been achieved without violence … the possession of revolvers and machine guns distinguished the free man from the slave.” Franco and his Nationalists were just as extreme in their hatreds, but Barcelona was a leftist city, its buildings draped with communist flags and the red-and-black banners of the anarchists. “Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized,” wrote George Orwell. “Even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black.”
Pujol shared none of the left’s infatuation with the Republicans. He’d seen the massacres, seen the bodies being pulled from the church ruins. His younger sister Elena and his mother were arrested by the Republicans on charges of supporting Franco, but the family managed to contact an anarchist friend, and the pair were “snatched from certain death” and returned home unharmed. Pujol’s older brother, Joaquín, was sent to the Republican front; like his brother, Joaquín didn’t believe in the cause and soon deserted, slipping through the hills of Girona province, starving and near naked. The family’s dye factory, on whose profits the Pujols depended, was taken over by the workers who just a few years earlier had carried his father’s coffin on their shoulders. Pujol despised the vicious war that tore families apart, the massacres in bullrings, the shadowy groups of men known as “uncontrollables” who hunted fascists and their peers on the right. He saw firsthand what one thoughtful anarchist called the release of “a brutish appetite, a thirst for extermination, a lust for blood inconceiv
able in honest men before.”
Barcelona was Pujol’s first experience of war—and of espionage. In Spain, the spy game shared little with the remote gentlemen’s pastime popularized in pulp novels. It was all-pervasive, blind and savage. “A horrible atmosphere of suspicion had grown up,” wrote Orwell, who arrived in the city in late 1936. “Various people were infected with spy mania and were creeping round whispering that everyone else was a spy of the Communists, or the Trotskyists, or the Anarchists, or what-not.” Men and women were executed on the mere charge of “Trotskyist treachery.” Even those who weren’t spying, as Orwell wrote, somehow felt that they were. Pujol would emerge from the Spanish Civil War naïve about the techniques of espionage, but not about its costs. People were put up against a wall and shot in Barcelona on the strength of a rumor.
Not wanting to fight for the Republicans, Pujol took his chances as a fugitive and holed up at his fiancée’s family home, one of many young Spaniards who fled the ranks of both sides. For months he lived there, unable to leave the premises, glued to the radio as gunshots echoed outside and the airwaves filled with reports of massacres. It was too risky for him to speak above a whisper or glance out the window, and every time the doorbell rang he had to hide. Capture could mean being shot as a deserter.
Just before Christmas 1936, Pujol was in the kitchen cracking hazelnuts and walnuts with a hammer, the shells flying everywhere. Enjoying himself, he forgot about the need for silence; in fact, he was making such a racket that at first he didn’t hear the knock at the front door. An informer had turned Margarita’s family in for storing valuables for pro-Franco families who’d fled Barcelona. When the police poured through the front door, they marched straight to the spot where the jewelry was hidden, a lintel between two rooms. Then they began to search the rest of the house. When the police reached the kitchen, they found Pujol, hammer still raised to smash a walnut. He was arrested at gunpoint and marched out of the house, along with his fiancée’s father and brother, into a waiting car.
Agent Garbo Page 2
