A Barcelona Heiress Read online

  A Barcelona Heiress

  Sergio Vila-Sanjuán

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Original Title: Una Heredera de Barcelona

  copyright © 2010 by Sergio Vila-Sanjuán

  Translation: A Barcelona Heiress

  copyright © 2012 by Justin Randal Peterson

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-6402-7

  This 2012 eBook published by:

  Barcelona Digital Editions, S.L.

  Av. Marquès de l’Argentera, 17 pral.

  08003 Barcelona

  www.barcelonaebooks.com

  This 2012 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  Prologue

  After my father passed away in 2004, I came across a few folders in his office containing papers of his father’s, some of which came as a surprise and prompted me to reconsider certain aspects of my grandfather’s life and career.

  Pablo Vilar, a lawyer who was active as a journalist until the very end of his life (he died at age 90 in December 1982, and had published his last article just a few months before), had always seemed to me a very serious, rigid, and extremely formal man. I didn’t have much of a relationship with him, as he rarely visited our home. Over the course of my childhood, my father had taken me a few times to have lunch with my grandfather at the exclusive restaurant in the Hotel Manila, where he resided. The owner, an old friend of his, offered him special treatment there and, in exchange, my grandfather organized an annual series of lectures. As a teenager, I went to see him several times in the members’ library at the Ateneo de Barcelona, where he used to spend a good part of his day working. Despite his gracious ways and the supposedly interesting life he had led, communications between us were a bit strained. With his head held high, his receding hairline giving him the air of a Roman senator, his stiff, starched collars, and wide, perfectly done neckties, he was always elegant, even during the toughest of times. His manner of speech, marked by its perfect vocalization and florid adjectives, inspired more respect than affection. He struck me as one fitting all too well the archetype of the “Barcelona gentleman,” which is how all those who knew him would remember him: a social type which at that turbulent time, back in the 1970s, I found almost incomprehensible.

  With the petulance typical of youth, my long hair, blue jeans, and countercultural books in tow, back then I viewed my grandfather’s world and the writings he left as not just antiquated, but completely obsolete. Maybe that’s why I never considered sitting down with him for a few hours and really asking him about his life, nor did it ever occur to me to record his memories (I was soon to become a journalist myself), things which I now profoundly regret not doing.

  My grandfather published many articles and a few books that enjoyed less success than his work in the press. Among them was an essay he wrote as a young man on the politician Eduardo Dato, who had been his mentor, and, much later, a biography of his friend the actor Enrique Borrás. Among the faded folders with rusted clasps I found in my father’s desk, the first three contained the original, typed copies, with corrections written in by hand, of some one hundred of my grandfather’s submissions, especially those which he sent in the 1960s and 1970s to El Noticiero Universal (the newspaper he had written for since his youth and which he practically never stopped working for), La Vanguardia (for which he wrote with great success from 1956 until his death), and La Gaceta Ilustrada, in which he was published for a while.

  I compared these writings, kept in folded pieces of paper that indicated where they had been sent, with those which were ultimately published in the papers and the magazine. This was an easy task when it came to La Vanguardia, where I myself have been working for some time (I started a few years after my grandfather’s death), thanks to the digital records the paper’s journalists have access to, which are also available to the public. I was able to confirm that there were no significant differences.

  What I found in another three folders was entirely different: several hundred pages, handwritten with a fountain pen, following different and, from what I could tell, faulty numbering systems. The ink had faded, and many pages had gotten wet and were barely legible.

  There were numerous paragraphs that could not be understood, several unfinished chapters, and an uncountable number of pages on which much of the text had been crossed out and redrafted, possibly during a subsequent revision.

  However, the most intriguing aspect of all with regards to this material was the genre in which it might be classified. On the one hand, it seemed to be a kind of autobiography—the narration of a series of childhood memories—with many sections that sounded like pure journalistic reporting. On the other hand, the nature of some passages—including the beginning, which was reminiscent of the typical openings of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures—clearly read like a detective novel, with a bit of political intrigue added to the mix. I soon realized, however, that the plot turned out to be more complex than it seemed to be at first, encompassing the personal lives of the protagonists and the pulse of an entire city.

  We tend to forget that old people weren’t always old, and this period of my grandfather’s formative years gripped me, for what it revealed about his character, for the light it shed on certain circles during his time and, above all, for the spirited innocence it transmitted, which I found endearing.

  When I was able to unravel a minimally comprehensible core text, I established two things. First, at least a good part of what my grandfather described was completely factual, and had actually happened in Barcelona from 1919 to 1922. Second, for some reason he had opted to change the names of several of the main characters, even though anyone who knew anything about the era could have easily told who they were.

  I decided to compare the unpublished document with other sources, and turned once again to my newspaper’s useful archives, as well as to the digitized records of El Noticiero Universal on the years prior to the Civil War, which can be viewed at Barcelona’s Historical Archive. Using names and surnames, I found many references to the cases in which my grandfather had participated as a lawyer in the 1910s and 1920s, and verified that they coincided with those appearing in the text. A visit to the provincial court archives of the Audiencia de Barcelona would confirm this correlation.

  With regards to different figures from the era—politicians, writers, actors, city figures—I also noticed that they often coincided with the series of nostalgia pieces he published in La Vanguardia from 1971 to 1973, entitled “Memorias de un cronista” (Memories of a journalist), for which he won the City of Barcelona Journalism Award in 1974. I attended the awards ceremony with my father and was proud to see the old man, stiff as a board, with his thick glasses announcing his already limited eyesight. He was, without a doubt, the eldest among the twenty or so award winners present, and he received his with solemn dignity from the hands of the mayor. On the many occasions I’ve returned to the Saló de
Cent, the historic Great Chamber within Barcelona’s city hall, memories of that scene have come rushing back to me.

  How much is real and how much is fictional in these pages? An anonymous account, published in the “Lectures” section of La Vanguardia newspaper on March 22, 1963, reported that my grandfather had given a talk entitled “Four Figures of the 1920s: General López Ballesteros, Ángel Lacalle, Isabel Enrich, and the Count of Güell” at the literary tertulia, or round table, held in the basement of El Trascacho. “The speaker,” the text read, “in a presentation exemplary for its amenity and psychological penetration, provided a very quick and objective overview of each of the aforementioned figures, seasoning his depictions of their spiritual profiles with a profusion of curious and unknown anecdotes on the four and providing, in succinct sketches, a good deal on these figures and many others of their time, as well as the political and social events of the 1920s that will be part of the book Mr. Vilar is writing.”

  That book was never to be published.

  Is the work presented here (the original of which I found among my father’s papers) the book my grandfather announced in 1963? I am not an expert in dating such objects, but this manuscript, written by an apparently feeble hand which betrayed its author’s weakened state, did not seem the work of a young man. Thus, it is plausible that he wrote it in the 1960s. Certain revelations about my grandfather’s private life that appear in the story lead me to believe so. Being such a respectable gentleman, I doubt that he would have felt comfortable putting them in writing while his wife was still alive. As he was widowed in 1959, I tend to think that he wrote his account subsequently. My thesis, in short, is that my grandfather, at the age of seventy, decided to share a story that goes back to 1919, when he was twenty-seven.

  But then, why didn’t he publish it during his lifetime, when he had plenty of friends in the publishing business? And why did he seek to give it such a novelesque and, at the same time, autobiographical tone, instead of limiting himself to the objective, historical approach that the account of his lecture would suggest he had employed? I have no answers to these questions. However, in the text presented here, I was able to establish right away that the four figures to whom he dedicated his lecture—López Ballesteros, Lacalle, Isabel Enrich and the Count of Güell—do not receive equal attention nor are they the only characters in the story, though it is true that the relationships between them are essential to understand the events described.

  As for me, I only know that I found the story of Pablo Vilar’s youth absolutely captivating, illustrative as it is of dilemmas that still exist today. His world now seems more tangible and more interesting to me than it ever was before—enough so for me to dedicate months to sorting out and capturing his story and, to be honest, filling in the gaps where I found voids, unintelligible fragments, or overly abrupt endings. I have made use of the aforementioned archives, along with a few others—documents from the era and books available today on the period—in order to pin down details that seemed unclear to me. In terms of the language, in parts I have modernized it while in others I have respected expressions which, though uncommon today, serve to convey the feel of the era. And, for better or for worse, I have not hesitated to cut out certain twists and turns in the plot which I found too disjointed, nor to add some brush strokes in order to create richer depictions of certain characters. I think that someone as meticulous as my grandfather would have approved of or even requested this. I also firmly believe that, had he not wished, from the bottom of his heart, for this text to be printed one day, he would have destroyed it without hesitation.

  SERGIO VILA-SANJUÁN

  1

  Of the many surprising cases in which I was involved as a lawyer in those socially and politically turbulent years between 1919 and 1922, the first to shake up my life was the assault of cabaret artist María Nilo.

  It was just a few days before Christmas when this pert-nosed young lady bursting with energy knocked on my office door and, after blowing in like a tornado, asked me to represent her without stopping so much as to catch her breath. She wore a fur-trimmed, green velvet coat, which she declined to remove but did unbutton to reveal a blue taffeta dress and an excess of jewelry. Although covered in heavy make up, one could still make out deep bags under her eyes and bruises on her cheeks.

  “They took advantage of my trust. And they almost killed me!” she blurted out.

  I gestured for her to sit down, tidied up a few papers on my desk, lit up a Cuban cigar, and encouraged her to continue as I removed the cap from my Waterman pen to take notes. She then proceeded to tell me a rather confusing story.

  Sebastiana Togores Gomila, also known as María Nilo, or María “La Mallorquina,” had been successfully performing for months at the Alcázar Español cabaret bar in Barcelona, an establishment where she had made friends with three regulars: a Frenchman by the name of Albert Blum and two Greeks named David Misan and Abraham Zaccar.

  The three men and the young woman had been out on the town a few times, and had even taken a pleasure cruise once on a boat the Greeks had rented at the port.

  “They treated me really well and were kind,” she said. “And they behaved politely and with respect. If they had any ulterior motives, they did a fine job hiding them. Albert Blum took the lead. The others didn’t talk much. He told me they were traveling salesmen dealing in fine fabrics and were in the city on an extended business trip. Can you give me a light?”

  I quickly lit her cigarette.

  “I like your office. It has a … solid air to it,” she proclaimed brusquely in her husky voice after scanning the furniture as well as the walls, which were decorated with my framed diploma, photos of my graduating class, and a small maritime scene painted by Modesto Urgell in dark tones.

  “Thank you. Do go on.”

  One night they invited her to dinner at the Alcázar Español and, before heading to María’s place of work, they offered to take her to the Hotel París, where Blum was staying. They told her they were going to give her a special dress they had ordered specially for her from one of their European offices.

  “And, when we got to the room, the three scoundrels suddenly pounced on me! Blum stuffed my mouth with cotton while David Misan had me by the throat, almost suffocating me, and Abraham Zaccar held my legs.”

  I noticed the singer grew short of breath as she continued with her story.

  “The three of them were hitting me and tearing at my clothes. First I thought they were going to rape me, but then I realized that they were going to kill me!”

  The vedette paused briefly in her account. She had gotten up and was flitting and fidgeting about the office, turning around and toying carelessly with different objects, pushing an ashtray and opening and closing a small silver box full of candies I always had sitting on a little corner table.

  She had put out her first cigarette when she still had half left and pulled out another. I let her hold it for a moment between her fingers before reaching out to light it with a match.

  “And then what happened?” I asked.

  “Well, I realized that I had to defend myself with everything I had, so I started to fight back. I squirmed out of the grip of the one holding my mouth shut, spit out the cotton as best I could, and bit his hand so hard that I could feel bone between my teeth. Then I started to shout. I flailed about like a lunatic, as if I were having an epileptic fit. Luckily I was able to reach the washstand on the other side of the bed and knock it over. It made a thunderous sound when it hit the floor, with its basin and all. Then I heard knocking on the door, and I fainted,” she concluded, wiping away a tear.

  She took a breath, shook her head as if snapping back to reality, and continued with her story, one minute sitting down and the next getting up again. Just watching her was exhausting.

  “That sound,” she said, “was my salvation.”

  When they heard the commotion, the staff at the Hotel París grew alarmed and hurried to the room. They tried in vain
to open the door while they alerted some officers who were on patrol on Cardenal Casañas Street. They were the ones who forced the door open. When María Nilo came to, her assailants had been arrested and taken to the police station. An officer took her statement, without much tact, and then two others escorted her to her hotel. She was bedridden for a week, shaken and recovering from the beating she took, until she asked for a telephone and called the actor Ernesto Vilches, who gave my name to the feisty, skittish young woman.

  Ernesto Vilches … the first thespian who I became real friends with.

  * * *

  After studying law in Barcelona and Madrid, I opened a practice in Barcelona and handled all kinds of cases (including those to which I was assigned as a court-appointed attorney), specializing in criminal law. I balanced my legal career with my activity as a journalist; since my adolescence I had cut my teeth working for several newspapers, an experience that had allowed me to become familiar with the city’s political and cultural circles—especially those of the theater, which was my passion.

  One afternoon Vilches had come to see me in the company of my friend Blasco—the manager of the Teatro Goya, where the actor had enjoyed a string of successes. He had come to ask me for an odd favor. A Chinese cargo ship had docked at the Port of Barcelona and, not long after mooring, a fight had broken out among the sailors. During the scuffle the boatswain had been killed, stabbed by a messman on the ship. The story had been widely reported in the press. What Vilches wanted was for me to arrange a meeting so that he could talk to the imprisoned killer, as he was preparing for the starring role in a play set in China, and he wanted to do as much research for it as possible. He asked me to accompany him to meet the prisoner.

  The prisons in those days, if one knew the right people, could be really quite accommodating. The director of the facility agreed to our request and arranged for a room to be reserved for us. For one hour Vilches and the incarcerated Chinese man engaged in an intense interview. The actor would later tell me that the sailor had taken him for the examining judge assigned to the case and, given the impossibility of communicating verbally, had resorted to gesticulating to indicate what had happened during the altercation that led to the boatswain’s death. “It was just what I needed,” Vilches told me; he came away armed with an arsenal of gestures and expressions he would be able to reproduce down to the last detail. Thus was born his character Wu-Li-Chang, the protagonist of the work of the same name by Harold Owen and Harry Vernon about a cultured and powerful man forced by his country’s traditions to sacrifice his own daughter, who was in love with a westerner. The play triumphed on stages across Spain and America. And thus was also born a friendship that led me to represent Vilches on several occasions.