(1914–1916)
PROLOGUE
THERE IS SOMETHING EXCITING AND AT the same time terrifying about the idea that chance can govern our lives. Exciting, because it is part of the very adventure of living; terrifying, because it produces a dizzy feeling of lack of control. When it comes to writing, chance tends to play a smaller role than most people think—although some authors have made it the protagonist of their whole body of work. The story you hold in your hands, however, would not have been possible if chance had not knocked insistently at the writer’s door. Or, to put it more accurately: this story would not exist as it is retold here. Most of the facts can be dug up in archives and periodicals libraries, those flowerless cemeteries of memory. But an untold story is a story that does not yet exist: someone has to weave together the thread of the events. And chance or coincidence intervened in my path so that I would be the one to do so. Because this is the story of someone who may have been my great-grandfather. It is the story of an anarchist who shared my name. It is the story of Pablo Martín Sánchez, a story that is perhaps worth telling.
IT ALL BEGAN THE DAY I googled my name for the first time. Back then, I was a young, unpublished author who blamed his failure on the ordinariness of his name. And the search engine proved me right: I entered “Pablo Martín Sánchez,” and the screen vomited up hundreds of results. References to me did show up here and there, amid the motley list of surfers, chess players, and reckless drivers facing prosecution. But there was one entry that particularly grabbed my attention, perhaps because it was written in French: “International dictionary of anarchist militants (from Gh to Gil),” said the title, followed by this stub: “Captured, condemned to death and executed with other participants in the action including Julián Santillán Rodríguez and Pablo Martín Sánchez …” Intrigued, I opened the page and discovered that it was an article about the anarchist Enrique Gil Galar, with a passing mention of Pablo Martín Sánchez. I then tried to access the letter M for Martín, but the dictionary was under construction and only went up to G. However, the entry on Gil Galar shed a bit more light on the text of the stub: “Member of an action group, Enrique Gil Galar participated on November 6 and 7, 1924, in the Vera de Bidasoa expedition in which one hundred comrades coming from France penetrated Spain.”
I was unable to find any other references online, but for a few months I kept going back to the anarchist militants page to watch the progress of their dictionary. Unfortunately, their pace of work was hopelessly slow, and it seemed it would take years for them to reach the letter M. Finally, I wrote to them asking for more information about Pablo Martín Sánchez. Their polite reply, which I have kept, reads: “Hello and thank you for your letter. However, I do not have any more information about Pablo Sánchez Martín [sic]. Perhaps you should look in Spanish newspapers from the time and in the legal archives. Sincerely yours, R. Dupuy.” And that is exactly what I did: I tracked down periodicals from the time at the National Library, consulted dozens of books about the events in Vera de Bidasoa, and traveled to the very site of the incidents. Only then did I understand that I had to write the story of this anarchist who had stolen my name.
However, it didn’t make much sense to limit myself to recounting what had happened in 1924. Other, more prominent writers had already done so, including Don Pío Baroja in La Familia de Errotacho, written in his study in the farmhouse of Itzea, with a view overlooking the path that the revolutionaries took on November 6 and 7. What I needed to do was something that no one had ever done before: reconstruct the biography of Pablo Martín Sánchez. But the task was not going to be simple, because, although his participation in the events in Vera was well documented, little was known about his previous life, perhaps due to having been unremarkable, like the lives of the vast majority of people, although his end made its way into the newspapers. In fact, one of the few pieces of information I had was that he was born in Baracaldo, so I decided to start my search at the beginning: the civil registry. And that’s where I went one rainy autumn day.
There was a line at the registry. I waited impatiently for my turn. When I reached the window, I asked for the birth record of Pablo Martín Sánchez. “Date?” asked the young woman behind the window. “I don’t know exactly,” I replied. “Well, without the date of birth, we can’t do anything.” Then I remembered that the chronicles of the events stated that Pablo was 25 years old at the time of the incursion. “Around 1899,” I ventured. “I’ll go check,” said the woman, and she stood up to consult an enormous binder. She came back, shaking her head: in 1899 there was no one registered with that name. “What about 1900?” I asked. But although the woman looked in all of the volumes between 1895 and 1905, the closest match she found was a certain Pablo Martínez Santos, who died from respiratory collapse just a few days after being born. When I noticed that the people in the line were starting to grow impatient, I said thank you and left, without paying much attention to the face of the woman who had helped me. That’s why I didn’t recognize her when, that same night, she walked up to my table at the bar Txalaparta, where I was ruminating on the strategy I would use the next day, and, with a mischievous smile, snapped me out of my reverie, saying, “I didn’t think you’d survive till evening.” Seeing my confused look, she continued, “Man, you left the registry so depressed, I thought you were going to commit suicide as soon as you got home.” I invited her to sit down, but she was celebrating a birthday with some girlfriends, so she said she would only linger a few minutes. I told her the story that had brought me to Baracaldo, trying to explain my frustration that morning, and she told me to look at the parish baptismal records, which were sometimes more reliable than the data in the registry. She wished me luck and said goodbye with a pair of cheek kisses. Only then did I realize that I hadn’t even asked her name.
The next day, I went back to the registry, but instead of the young woman with the mischievous smile, I was assisted by a chubby, sweaty guy. I asked after her, and he told me she was ill. So I wrote a note on a piece of paper, signed it with my email address, and asked him to leave it somewhere for her, if he would be so kind. Two days later, after running around to all of the churches, I returned to my hotel room empty-handed. I didn’t know where to look next. Just when I was about to give up, a message came that renewed my hope: it was the woman with the mischievous smile (I will keep calling her that, out of respect for her desire for anonymity). She said that she had taken an interest in my story, and since the hours at the registry seemed interminable, she had been poking around in the archives and had found a certain Pablo Martín Sánchez born on January 26, 1890. She didn’t think it was the person I was looking for, but who knows, maybe it was. In addition, she had told the story to her grandfather, making him promise that he would ask around at the community center to see if anyone had heard of him. I wrote her back immediately, thanking her and thinking that,