of Bilbao, where he spent most of his day trying to alert the aspiring educators to the importance of reducing the number of illiterates, which stood at over ten million in Spain at the end of the century. For her part, María stayed home to take care of the children. One midday in early April, while the woman was making food in the coal-fired kitchen, she heard the knife sharpener go by, his horn whistling its unmistakable melody. She looked at the knife she had used to peel the potatoes and decided it was time to have it sharpened.
Look after Julia, she said to Pablo, I’ll be right back.
She took twenty cents from a jar and left the house with her knife in her hand, leaving the food on the fire. In the street, she saw the sharpener turning at the next corner, dragging his wheelbarrow. He took no more than five minutes to do the task, but when María took the newly sharpened knife and came back around the corner toward home, a speeding carriage caught her by surprise. She managed to avoid being trampled by the donkey, but could not duck quickly enough to avoid being struck in the head by the edge of the carriage seat. She fell to the ground unconscious, and the driver and the sharpener tried to revive her. A neighbor brought her inside, refreshed her face with wet cloths, and called a doctor. When María regained consciousness, she had been out at least half an hour. She had a lump on her temple and a terrible headache.
“What about my children?” was the first thing she managed to say. When no one responded, she went running home. Already from outside she could smell the smoke. She entered the house screaming and found Pablo sitting calmly in front of his sister, trying for the umpteenth time to tell her the story of the three-eyed snail. The house reeked of scorched food, but the child seemed not to have noticed anything; his sister, on the other hand, was wailing at the top of her lungs. María ran into the kitchen and yanked the pot from the fire. There was nothing left inside but a carbonized mass stuck to the bottom, giving off an unbearable stench.
“But, Pablo,” the mother scolded her son, “didn’t you smell the food burning?”
“I don’t smell,” said the boy, laconically.
And so it was that his parents discovered that he did not possess the sense of smell. The local doctor described it as “anosmia or olfactory dysfunction,” and, in addition to prescribing miraculous Climent Hypophosphite Syrup (whose maker claimed it cured all illnesses, including insomnia, pallor, and brain softening), recommended getting him away from the wet climate of the North and bringing him to the drier regions of the interior, where he would probably be able to recover the smell he had never had:
“Don’t forget that the devil’s best trick is convincing us he doesn’t exist,” he offered as a way of saying goodbye, leaving the parents somewhat disconcerted.
Julián and María decided to follow the doctor’s advice. Anything for the child’s health, they said to each other, and started thinking about how to relocate. In a few days the news arrived that Madrid would soon be testing candidates for the Primary Education Inspectors Corps, as three positions had just opened up in the provinces of Albacete, Badajoz, and Salamanca. The writing seemed to be on the wall, so Julián sent in an application to take the test. Two weeks later, he received a convocation to a test that would be held in the capital of the kingdom on the thirteenth and fourteenth of May.
“Why don’t you bring the boy with you so we can see if the dry climate of Madrid does him any good?” María proposed.
“Woman, it’s only going to be two days.”
“But at least he can keep you company.”
“Fine, as you wish,” Julián acceded.
The one who did not welcome the idea was Pablo, who did not want to be separated from his sister Julia, even if it was only for two or three days. But the decision was made, and on the twelfth of May, at eight o’clock in the morning, father and son took the Express Train to Madrid’s North Station. Making their way between the passengers laden with saddlebags and chickens, men and women shouting, smoking, shoving, and spitting on the floor, the two Martíns managed to reach their third-class seats. On the platform, mother and daughter waved their hands, while Pablo pressed his nose against the window of the compartment and quietly repeated the first word he had ever said: “Pretty, pretty, pretty.” A silent tear ran down his cheek. Then the train whistle blew, and the boy understood that this was the start of a great new adventure.
– 2 –
You, my people, whom they kill with work in the factories, in the fields, in the mines or in the war, seek justice. Endure no more the tyranny of the executioners who oppress you. Rebel. One life is worth nothing, even less when it is predestined to vegetate and to feel only animal pleasures. Rise up, for it will only take one gesture from you to make those who seem so brave and boastful run away. The military are cowards, as are all those who need to be armed to live.
España: Un año de aictadura, a manifesto published by the Grupo Internacional de Ediciones Anarquistas.
NOW SIX YEARS HAVE PASSED BETWEEN their farewell at the Gare d’Austerlitz and this afternoon in early October 1924, when Roberto, known to all as Robinsón, crosses the threshold of the printing house where Pablo works, limping slightly from a childhood bout of polio, and sporting long red hair and a beard worthy of his namesake. He is still wearing his perennial suit with its elbow patches, his shirt cuffs stained with chalk, and a bowler hat that some suspect to be stitched to his scalp, because he never takes it off, even on entering a church, where he goes from time to time not to take communion, but to seek the cool air and take a nap. The bowler is an integral part of Robinsón’s physiognomy, and he will readily tell anyone willing to listen the story behind his passion for a hat more appropriate to the bourgeoisie than to the proletariat: in his youth he belonged to a naturist commune that chose the bowler hat as its emblem and standard, and since then he has been faithful to it in honor of that group of friends, with whom he passed some of the best moments of his life. Behind him, tail wagging, comes Kropotkin, his faithful wiener dog.
The two friends look at each other for a few moments, with their arms extended and holding each other’s shoulders, as though evaluating the changes time has wrought over the years since they last saw each other.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” says Robinsón. “You still look like a twenty-year-old boy.”
“Those gray hairs in your beard almost make you look intelligent,” says Pablo.
And with smiles like two gondolas, they pounce on each other, half-hugging and half-sparring, while Kropotkin barks confusedly, perhaps from joy, perhaps envy.
“How did you manage to find me?” Pablo asks.
“Pure luck,” Robinsón answers. “I thought I saw you last night at the Community House, talking with Teixidó at the end of the meeting, but when I went over to talk to you, you had already disappeared. I asked him about you and he told me your name was Pablo, that you work in a printing house on Rue Pixérécourt and that you’d left in a hurry because you had to get up early today. I was sure that it was you. Actually, I thought you were still in Spain. Otherwise I would have tried to find you sooner.”
“And I thought you were still in Lyon. Now I understand why you didn’t answer any of my letters—”
“No, that’s because I moved to a new house, I had problems with the landlady. I only arrived in Paris about a month ago.”
“And where are you living?”
“Well, you know how I love nature,” says Robinsón with an enigmatic tone, “and since the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is so lovely and welcoming, and we’re still having such fine weather …”
“Fine weather, you say? But it hasn’t stopped raining for weeks! Tonight you’re coming home with me. I have a little loft on Rue Saint-Denis. Also, I go out of town during the week, so you can come and go as you like. But where’s Sandrine? Didn’t she come with you?”
Robinsón wrinkles his forehead and says:
“Apparently she took the free love thing