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.
– 4 –
The hub of Unamuno’s life in Paris was the Café de la Rotonde. With regard to this establishment, all of the chroniclers of that period repeat the same line: La Rotonde is the café of rebellions.
EDUARDO COMIN COLOMER,
Unamuno, libelista
“EXCELLENT WORK,” SAYS THE RASPY-VOICED, pock-faced man, as he holds out a copy of Spain: One Year of Dictatorship, “really excellent. In one week we’ve inundated Paris with pamphlets. It’s been a total success, and not just in the Spanish enclaves—the French are starting to come around, too. Between the meetings and this, it’s all bright red. I just heard that Blasco Ibáñez already has a French translator for his leaflet, and Juan Durá, his Spanish editor, can’t wait to put it out. It seems Vicentito is really serious about it, and they’re gonna translate it into English too, and distribute it in America. A million copies in all, they’re saying, sponsored by the Russian communists, who want to export their revolution to all of Europe. Some say they sent fifty thousand francs to defray the printing and distribution costs, but Blasco won’t confirm or deny it. Want some snuff?”
“No,” Pablo shoots back, a bit ill at ease in this improvised meeting in a reserved room at the Café de la Rotonde.
Of course, the man who won’t stop talking is Teixidó, the Committee’s director of propaganda, the same one who approached Pablo a couple of weeks ago after Blasco Ibáñez’s speech. At his side is Vivancos, tasked with obtaining arms for the planned revolution. And next to him, Robinsón, with an angelic smile that Pablo doesn’t find at all reassuring.
“Durruti and Massoni will be here soon, I think,” says Teixidó as he lifts a pinch of snuff to his nose and inhales deeply. “Let’s wait five minutes, and if they’re still not here, we’ll tell you ourselves. In any case, I’m glad you’ve decided to work with the Committee.”
“Look, I was just doing my job. The guy to thank is old Faure.”
“No, I’m not talking about the pamphlet. I’m talking about the broadsides we want to print