“Julianín!” shouts Pablo, collecting the characters scattered on the floor, “Julianín, the door!”
But Julián, the seventeen-year-old boy who has been the shop’s assistant since summer, does not appear.
“Julianín, damn you!” the typesetter shouts, unexpectedly losing his temper. His irritability might be due to an incident from last night, when, at the end of Blasco Ibáñez’s speech at the Community House, someone approached him while he was taking his final notes. He was concentrating so hard on what he was writing that he did not realize until he heard the offer:
“You want some?” said a raspy voice at his side, as a little tin of snuff entered his field of vision.
“No, thanks,” Pablo replied, lifting his eyes from the notebook. The voice belonged to an extremely thin man with a pocked face.
“Interesting speech, huh?” the man continued, taking a sizable pinch of snuff between his finger and thumb, “Blasco knows how to hit where it hurts. I saw more than one person squirm to hear him criticize Spain. Some people would rather keep their blinders on, don’t you think?”
“Well, nobody likes to hear a mother insulted, even if the one doing it is a brother—even if the brother is right.”
“Yes, I think that’s exactly what it is,” the man conceded, before clarifying, in a quieter voice, “especially if you’re an infiltrator.”
Pablo stared steadily into his eyes. The other man returned the gaze for a few seconds. Then, moving closer and lowering his voice even more, he added:
“That’s why it’s better not to speak of certain things here. Come by afterward to the café La Rotonde and join our discussion group—”
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” Pablo cut him off, excusing himself, “I have to wake up early tomorrow for work.”
“A shame. What’s the world coming to when not even la France respects the day of rest?” And with a hint of a smile, he bid Pablo farewell, giving him a card with the address of the café La Rotonde. “Come by one of these days, but don’t wait too long.”
That last bit sounded more like a threat than an invitation, thought Pablo as he watched the man rejoin a group dominated by the voice of the secretary general of the National Labor Board, Ángel Pestaña. Pablo slipped the card along with his notebook into the inside pocket of his coat. Making his way through the smoke and the crowd, he left the building and went out into the street. His trusty bicycle, an old secondhand Clément Luxe, was there waiting for him. He pedaled furiously under a threatening sky, and only upon arriving home did he realize that someone had written on the back of the card: “We need your help, friend. Contact us immediately.”
“The door, Julianín, for God’s sake!” Pablo shouts desperately, while trying to pick up the type. “Where the hell have you run off to?”
Receiving no response from the kid, Pablo wipes his hands on his typesetter’s coveralls, crosses the distance to the door with long strides, goes up the two steps, and looks through the peephole. His surprise could not be greater: upon opening the door, he embraces his childhood best friend, Roberto Olaya, known to all as Robinsón, whom he has not seen since the end of the Great War, back in 1918, when they went their separate ways at the Gare d’Austerlitz with lumps in their throats.
I
(1890–1896)
NO. PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ WAS NOT BORN in 1899, as the newspapers will claim several decades later, but on the night of January 26, 1890, the feast day of Saint Timothy and Saint Titus, Saint Theofrid and Saint Theogenes—all bishops—as well as Saint Simeon the hermit. The thermometer in Barcelona marked four degrees centigrade, and the humidity was 82%. However, the sky was clear, and Julián Martín Rodríguez could see the stars of the constellation Cassiopeia glowing in the celestial canopy, as he firmly squeezed his wife’s hand hoping that their newborn son would lift his head and take his first gulp of air.
At that time, King Alfonso XIII was barely four years old, so it was his mother, the regent María Cristina, who held the nation’s reins. The presidency was going back and forth between liberals and conservatives, according to the shameful arrangement they had reached in the Pardo Pact, and now the turn of the liberal Práxedes Mateo Sagasta was over. Who cares who’s in charge of the government, Julián thought as he looked at the stars and waited for the birth of his first child. We’ll still be the poorest country in Europe. All he had to do was look at the view through the window, faintly illuminated by the moonlight: the inaptly named neighborhood known as the Desert, a chaotic conglomeration of unsanitary residences that had been piling up on the left bank of the Nervión River since 1876, when, at the end of the Third Carlist War, the area had undergone a rapid process of industrialization and population growth, without it ever crossing the mayor’s mind to come up with an urban development plan. The hard, dangerous work in the iron mines, the local population’s primary means of sustenance, had driven the life expectancy of Baracaldo to one of the lowest in Spain; at the time of Pablo’s birth, it was only twenty-nine years.
Julián heard his wife’s moaning announcing the end of the labor, but still he did not dare to look. He noticed her hand gradually slackening, and he heard the midwife spanking the newborn. He waited to hear the cry, and, hearing nothing, closed his eyes angrily and gnashed his teeth, fearing a stillbirth. Only when he felt his wife’s hand on his back did he dare to turn his head. It was a boy. And he was alive. But, incomprehensibly, he wasn’t crying; or, more accurately, while he made a face like he wanted to cry, nary a sob escaped his throat, as if this were one of those silent films that would arrive in Spain a few years later. The three adults in the room looked at each other worriedly in the candlelight, but at first no one said anything. Then, the old midwife wrapped the child in a towel and placed him in the arms of his mother, wiped her hands on her skirt and left the house in a hurry, without finishing the job, making the sign of the cross and murmuring spells, taking the silent crying as a bad omen. “Lagarto, lagarto,” were the last words the midwife pronounced before her shadow disappeared through the doorframe. My God, thought Julián, that witch is known to tell stories—we’re going to go from undesirables to pariahs. But something more urgent demanded his attention, and he pushed the bad thoughts out of his mind. He took his knife from his pants pocket and in one movement cut the umbilical cord, which had already stopped pulsing. No one would have said it was his first time.
Julián Martín Rodríguez and María Sánchez Yribarne had met three years beforehand, a few months after the royal birth of Alfonso XIII. She belonged to the new Biscayan bourgeoisie, not the class of landed gentry fallen on hard times, but that of the visionaries who at the start of the century had hopped on the industrialization bandwagon and managed to get rich overnight, such as her grandfather, the mythical José Antonio Yribarne, founder of one of the country’s most powerful industrial dynasties. Julián, for his part, came from an extremely humble family of Zaragoza, was the youngest of nine brothers and the only one who had been able to go to school, thanks to the fathers of Escuelas Pías, who had welcomed him into the seminary with an enthusiasm that was quick to raise suspicions. He excelled in algebra, physics, natural history, as well as Latin, Greek, and modern languages; however, theology, history, and philosophy stymied him from the start. When he felt he had learned enough, he left the seminary without saying goodbye to anyone and took off traveling all over Spain offering his services. And so it happened that at the end of 1886 he reached Baracaldo and was hired by the Yribarne family as a tutor to their young, misbehaving daughter, María.
Love took a bit longer to blossom than it tends to in the pulp novels from the time, but Cupid finally showed up with an ample quiver full of arrows. And when he came, he came with a vengeance. Even the couple themselves did not know if it was while practicing declensions, memorizing the list of Gothic kings, or speculating about the transubstantiation of the soul, but what is certain is that one fine day they found themselves kissing passionately on the table, crumpling quadratic equations and the poems of Victor Hugo. When María’s parents got wind of it, they threw the shameless tutor out into the street with