the earth.
The wedding took place early in the spring of 1889. Only one member of the bride’s family attended: Don Celestino Gil Yribarne, the black sheep of the family and María’s favorite uncle, who had always treated her as the daughter he’d never had. People in Baracaldo whispered the most outlandish slander against him, accusing him of everything from bestiality to practicing Satanic rituals in his mansion at Miravalles. None of this was true, however. The only eccentricity he allowed himself—not without some trepidation—was collecting the pubic hair of the women he slept with, classifying it in a fetishistic, methodical manner, like a lepidopterist with his butterflies or a numismatist with his coins. As for the groom’s family, no one was able to afford the cost of the journey, so all they could do was to send their best wishes by mail, in the form of a collective letter covered in grease stains and spelling errors.
The nuptials were held in the old church of San Vicente Mártir, with a very austere ceremony, although Julián had passed the qualifying examination for the title of teacher and was giving classes at a public school in Baracaldo. María, for her part, in an act of carelessness or brave defiance, had sought work in steel factories not belonging to her family, such as those in Santa Águeda or Arlegui y Cía. But as soon as they found out that she was the disowned daughter of the Yribarne family, no one dared hire her, and one after another they invented excuses to show her the door. Fortunately, Don Celestino defied the family patriarchs and helped pay for the costs of the ceremony, which the young lovebirds’ scant savings could not cover. As if that were not enough, he also gave them a magnificent wedding gift: a trip to Paris to attend the opening of the World’s Fair commemorating the centenary of the French Revolution. Hearing this, the newlyweds could not contain their excitement, and they recited in unison the famous lines of Victor Hugo that had been crumpled under their first kiss: “Oh! Paris est la cité mère! / Paris est le lieu solennel / Où le tourbillon éphémère / Tourne sur un centre éternel!”
The train that was to take them to the City of Light left Bilbao on the fifth of May, the night before the start of the fair. At the border, there was a transfer to get on the French track gauge, and from then on a horde of passengers pushed into the train at every stop, filling all of the cars—not only first, second, and third class, but also the freight cars. No one wanted to miss the great event. When they arrived at the Gare Saint-Lazare, the day was starting to clear up and the passengers exited the train hoping to be welcomed by the gleaming, massive skeleton towering a thousand feet high, designed especially for the occasion by a certain Gustave Eiffel, who was still ruminating on how to get out of having to take the tower down after the Fair, as had been planned. Unfortunately, the buildings surrounding the station blocked the view, and a slight disappointment spread through the crowd. The newlyweds went first to the Hotel Español, conveniently located on the Rue de Castellane, where Uncle Celestino had reserved them a room, because what could be better than staying in a hotel of compatriots? However, they soon realized that the only thing Spanish about the hotel was its name, apart from a few old copies of El Imparcial and El Liberal scattered around the lobby. The room had no closets, no shelves, not even a measly wash basin, nor a candle on the bedside table. But all this nothingness was costing ten francs a day.
Julián and María went to the Champ de Mars, where the Eiffel Tower served as the main entrance to the fairgrounds, which held over 120 acres of pavilions. On the way they ate French fries sold in a paper cone and drank glasses of sugar water flavored with orange blossoms. The streets of Paris were decked out in their Sunday best, adorned with wreaths of flowers and golden garlands, along with a vast, inebriated crowd waving patriotic flags. Now that’s what I call iron—thought an astonished Julián when they arrived at Place de la Concorde and got their first view of the impressive tower—a far cry from what they dig up in the mines of Baracaldo. Then, walking along the bank of the Seine, they arrived at the Pont d’Iena, just when the president of the republic and his wife were getting ready to cross it in an official carriage pulled by four horses and flanked by a peloton of bodyguards. Sadi Carnot looked impeccable, dressed in the trappings of high ceremony, but it was the first lady who received the highest praise, with a bold tricolor dress designed for the occasion: a blue silk skirt, a white bodice of Alençon lace, and pale red trim. When the carriage passed under the giant arch of the Eiffel Tower, the bands struck up the Marseillaise, making way for the French president’s predictable speech to officially inaugurate the World’s Fair. Who then would have thought that five years later the Italian anarchist Santo Caserio would take the president’s life, stabbing him with a knife and shouting “Long live anarchy!” Fortunately, the young couple enjoyed a peaceful and pleasant afternoon, and that same night, in the bare room of the Hotel Español, while the Parisian sky turned into a bacchanal of fireworks and multicolored lights, a sperm bearing the seal of the Martín Rodríguez family jubilantly united with an ovum produced in the Sánchez Yribarne factory, to create an embryo destined to bear the name Pablo Martín Sánchez.
“It’s strange that he’s not crying,” said Julián when he had finished tying the umbilical cord.
“He is crying, but silently,” replied María with a sigh, as her contractions continued, working to expel the placenta.
The very next day, with no time to lose, Pablo Martín Sánchez was baptized at the church of San Vicente Mártir, the very place his parents had been married nine months before. Again at the baptism he did not cry, not even when the young priest Ignacio Beláustegui put the holy water on his head, accompanying the gesture with three loud, poorly timed sneezes to complete the baptismal ceremony. What a brave Christian, Don Ignacio seemed to say to himself, without imagining that decades later he would find himself seeking a pardon for this brave child.
This act of silent rebellion marked Pablo’s first steps in this world, and soon word spread around Baracaldo that the Martín baby was incapable of crying. The rumor was false, of course, because while it is true that the child wept rarely, he did indeed cry from time to time, but so subtly that only a keen observer could detect it. What was true, on the other hand, was that Pablo did not seem to be in any hurry to start speaking: he turned one year of age, then two, and when he reached the age of three years he still had not uttered a single word, despite his parents’ desperate attempts to get him to say papa and mama. Until the day his sister was born. This was in 1893; in Saint Petersburg, Tchaikovsky was composing his Pathétique Symphony No. 6, while in Madrid the National Meteorological Institute was producing its first weather maps; María Sánchez Yribarne gave birth to her second child in the same room where little Pablo had been born three years before, but this time her husband did not have to get out his knife: the new midwife took care of everything. A beautiful, energetic sister was born and was named Julia, apparently intent on making up for all the crying her brother had not done. When the infant was finally asleep in her mother’s arms, they let Pablo come into the room so he could see her. He approached the bed, looked wide-eyed at the newborn, and pronounced his first word out loud, to everyone’s surprise:
“Pretty,” he said nonchalantly.
The little girl changed Pablo’s life. All the words he had not been saying before started gushing out of his mouth, like a river after the spring thaw. He would spend long hours telling Julia the most extravagant stories, in a language full of invented or incomprehensible words that the weary parents found both entertaining and worrisome. However, when his sister was not nearby he retreated into a strange muteness from which no one could extract him, so in the minds of misinformed or malicious neighbors the child who didn’t cry transformed into the child who didn’t speak, although both claims were strictly false. In addition to all that, there was an episode that would end up revealing a real deficiency in the firstborn, one that would impact his immediate future.
It happened in the spring of 1896, when Pablo was six years old and little Julia was about to turn three. The industrialized countries were starting to emerge from the economic depression, and, although Spain would soon lose its overseas colonies and plunge into a crisis with uncertain consequences, new winds of bonanza appeared to be blowing in the West. The Martín Sánchez family’s economic situation had improved significantly, despite the fact that Uncle Celestino was no longer able to help them: a sudden aneurysm had ended his life while he was collecting butterflies at his little castle at Miravalles, and the Yribarne family had conspired