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