A Barcelona Heiress Read online

  The Turó Park incident was much celebrated in those publications on the far left that were still in existence, to which someone had conveyed the facts: “The old marchionesses, all done up in their perfumed silk and tinsel, ran for cover by the parterres as their husbands hid behind the military men present, who did not quite know how to react. The only ones missing were the parasitic clergy, but at that hour they were probably sleeping off their hangovers or still engaged with their mistresses,” wrote a certain “Fermín” in the daily El Ácrata (The Anarchist). It was a wonder the publication had not been shut down. Perhaps it was so small that the authorities did not detect its presence. That was not the case with my building’s superintendent, who read the paper assiduously and was in the habit of telling me all about it. The papers more inclined to support the establishment, including my own, reminded their readers that Barcelona was looking more and more like the Wild West, arguing yet again that the situation could not go on.

  * * *

  Shaken by the attack, the second such violent affair in which I was personally involved in a short time period, I reconsidered López Ballesteros’s proposal and decided to look beyond my reservations regarding his reliability as a source of information, convincing myself that using his dossier did not mean that I shared his radical views. Rather, I told myself, I had been afforded an exclusive and constructive opportunity to promote civic harmony. I went to see the general and told him that I would, in the end, write the article he had asked me to.

  Hunkering down in my office for an entire day without receiving visitors, I studied the Civil Government’s papers in detail, and two days later I presented the editor of El Noticiero Universal with an extensive report entitled, “A vigilante seeks to avenge trade union crimes which the courts leave unpunished.”

  I made an effort to be thoughtful and objective, expressing the reservations I harbored about that regression to the law of “an eye for an eye,” which rendered irrelevant the verdicts of the courts, however warped and flawed I often found them. But it was all for naught. The upshot of my article was that the vigilante was praised as a hero by Barcelona’s respectable classes, who were sick and tired of the war being waged by the unions and of the attacks plaguing their existence, such as the one carried out at Turó Park. To all of them, Danton had become a shadowy figure who struck by surprise and became ever more frightening the longer his identity remained a mystery. The director of El Ciero himself congratulated me on behalf of the paper’s owners.

  “Stay with the story, Vilar. This enigmatic vigilante is going to sell a lot of papers.”

  6

  After dining on the delicious monkfish and vegetables Lucinda had prepared for me before retiring for the day, I went to rest in the sitting room which I had furnished according to ideas I had culled from an article in the magazine Blanco y Negro, a publication I collected back then. There was a gray velvet sofa with two cushions and two throw pillows, with a slanted back for greater comfort; a wooden lamp with a stained-glass shade adorned with a flower pattern and a plain base; and a two-level round table carved out of a single, thick tree. I read for a while and found myself nervously fidgeting, so I decided to go for walk. I put on my hat, slipped a carnation into my jacket lapel (I always had a vase full of them at home), and stepped out the door whistling a Boston waltz.

  It was Easter Saturday and one of those rare nights of the year when there were more people out on the street than there had been during the day. After the asceticism and silence of the preceding days of Holy Week, when even carriages and cars were forbidden from circulating, the city had surged back to life. I headed down Paseo del Borne and under the gothic shadows cast by the Santa María del Mar church, continuing along Vía Layetana and into the ancient and somewhat dismal stone alleyways leading to city hall. Many pastry shops and bakeries were still open, and people were buying the last monas de Pascua, those delightful chocolate cakes traditionally eaten on Easter Sunday and the following Monday.

  Along the way I came across groups of young men wearing white scarves around their necks, espardeñas of the same color on their feet, and traditional Catalonian barretina caps on their heads. One carried a giant spoon that rested on his shoulder, another bore a massive basket on his, a third toted a grill … Together they made up traditional caramellas, bands of young bachelors who on that special eve serenade marriageable young ladies (and those from wealthy families), and are bestowed with Easter gifts, generally foods offered to them. All of this leads up to a picnic the next day at which they use the utensils they carry on their shoulders. Flowers, bells, and festive sashes imbue the group with truly intense local color.

  Most of them were headed for Plaza de San Jaime, which was already occupied by the choirs participating in the city-organized contest. A festive air filled the streets. Curious, I paused to observe the groups gathered there. The Catalunya Nova Choir had brought a cart with a forge and bells to accompany Clavé’s piece La Maquinista. The Casal de la Familia Choir was made up of more than one hundred singers, brandishing flags symbolizing Catalonia’s four provinces.

  It was a warm spring night and I was wandering through the narrow streets packed with whole families, lovesick couples, and all kinds of idle loiterers, letting myself be swept away by the human tide as I gave in to a certain melancholy.

  On the corner of Princesa Street and Vía Layetana, on my way back home, I thought I glimpsed Isabel Enrich walking arm-in-arm with a tall man whose face I could not make out. She seemed cheerful, and I was struck seeing her out and about at those hours taking part in what was a folk tradition. As I was conscious of the fact that Isabel had the custom of stepping out, depending on her mood any given day, I did not pursue her, returning home instead. I spent the whole night tossing and turning, sweating and angst-ridden.

  * * *

  “You’re not going to sleep all morning. Now get up!”

  “Five more minutes.”

  “It’s been an hour now since you first woke. On your feet!”

  It was close to ten o’clock and Lucinda was affectionately but forcefully shaking my shoulder.

  “Sunday mornings are not for sleeping but for going to Mass—especially on Easter. Come on, I already made your breakfast. It’s on the table.”

  * * *

  I ate in the light-filled sitting room, letting my gaze wander to the scrollwork and garland designs gracing the floor. My parents had refurbished the apartment while I was studying in Madrid. When I came back I found it both beautiful and comfortable. They bought dark, sturdy furniture, which I kept for my office, plastered the ceilings, upgraded the bathrooms and laid floors in every room adorned with different mosaics: warm central motifs of bright colors, like rugs, framed by friezes around the edges. They had also installed a Körting central heating system that ran on water.

  When I opened my practice, those recent improvements gave the place a bourgeois touch which was quite advantageous—though the truth is that my cases did not yet justify them. In reality I accepted all kinds of litigation, and I learned from all of it. In 1919, for example, I defended Agustina García in an oral hearing on charges of battery. Working on Badalona’s beach, this woman had engaged in a fight with a certain Manuela Querol, assaulting the latter with a stick and inflicting wounds to her head from which she required thirty-nine days to recover. I asked for my client to be immediately released, arguing that she had been provoked, and had attacked the victim in a blind rage after being insulted by her. She was acquitted.

  Juan García Jiménez was accused of stealing skeins of cotton valued at 70 pesetas from the widow Puntí’s factory. I managed to reduce the sentence to attempted robbery, and he was ordered to pay a 500-peseta fine. As he had already spent time in jail considered more than equivalent to the fine, he was set free.

  Emilio Olterstaff was accused of stealing 450 pesetas, breaking a lock, and breach of trust. I was able to get him off, even though the prosecutor was seeking three and a half years of prison for him (and I k
new that he was guilty).

  Lorenzo Borredá Miquel was accused of stealing liquor from the Café Colonial, with the prosecution alleging that he was a repeat offender. I spoke with the owner of the café, Juan Durán, and managed to convince him to testify on the accused’s behalf. I pleaded for a conviction on an attempted robbery charge, and the jury granted it. The sentence was for three months’ imprisonment but, as Borredá had already been in custody for eight, he was immediately released.

  Antonio Sánchez and Rosa Fuentes had been living together for years since the latter had left her husband, Evaristo Benítez, in the town of Overa (Huesca). One day Rosa grew tired of Antonio, abandoned him too, and disappeared. The man had searched for her everywhere until he found her in the town of Tiana, in the Los Mallorquines neighborhood, where she was working as a maid. He asked her to come back and she insulted him. The jilted lover had been carrying a small knife, which he then used to attack her, slashing her right cheek and inflicting wounds which took twelve days to heal. Once Antonio was arrested and jailed, I took up his defense. Despite having everything against him, Rosa’s obnoxious attitude and Antonio’s passionate explanation of his actions played in the accused’s favor. The case was thrown out and my client, the assailant, was freed.

  Ernesto Tortós was traveling without a ticket on the train from Tarrasa to Sabadell, when he made the acquaintance of a like-minded miscreant, Mariano Agulló. Together the two stole some sections of copper pipe from one of the train’s cars. They were apprehended, and the prosecutor was seeking a sentence of three years and eleven months of jail time for each of them. And he got it.

  The same day I defended Enrique Tormes, who had allegedly threatened Don Francisco Solé, waving a knife at him and telling him that he would kill him if he did not give him five hundred pesetas. The prosecution was calling for four years, six months, and one day of imprisonment. As Solé himself conceded that he could not state with certainty that the accused was the man who had threatened to kill him, the prosecution withdrew its charges and my client was immediately released. The whole system may seem absurd, but that is how it was.

  Alejandro Giner Ejarque, arrested for the third time and with a long and shady history of disreputable behavior, had stolen from a car parked down Montcada Street twelve two-hundred-candlepower Nitra lamps, valued at nine pesetas. The prosecution was seeking a sentence of two years, four months, and one day of correctional confinement. I sought an acquittal. He was found guilty.

  There were misdemeanors for which the state prosecutor sought outrageously long sentences, cases of men attacking women in which juries were lenient because there was a question of honor at play, deplorable stories of corrupted minors, outbreaks of senseless violence born of poverty and despair … Above all, there were many cases in which nobody was completely innocent or guilty and, for all the honest and capable judges, there were others who were negligent, ignorant, or downright corrupt.

  During these years as a criminal attorney I often asked myself what good my work did, who it benefited, and to what extent the functioning of the legal system served justice and was based on reason. Was it true that every suspect had a right to a competent defense? Was it fair that my arguments led to reduced sentences and even acquittals for individuals I knew to be guilty? I recalled how the great politician Antonio Maura, speaking to us about the profession, cited the Latin precept: “Honeste vivere. Alterum non laedere. Suum cuique tribuere. Live honorably. Do no harm to others. Render to each his own.”

  When racked with doubts, which was quite often, I consoled myself with the words of my former professor of civil law, Don Joaquín Dualde: “Law is the only guarantee which civilization offers man in his fight for life. A people which loses its faith in the law due to the nature of those administering it is doomed, while a people with a vision of what is fair and, consequently, a strict sense of duty, is saved. No religion in the world has lost its precepts due to the misconduct of its leaders. They may lose followers, but this does not destroy the essence of their principles.”

  In reality, despite what Rocabert had said, my practice had yet to prosper. The public defending work and the two-bit delinquents I defended brought me little in the way of fees—just barely enough to pay my rent, and the modest salaries of Basilio and Lucinda, and to allow me to live with a modicum of dignity. I had inherited little from my parents, and I was spending it, as my work as a journalist only slightly augmented my income. My dedication to criminal law and my articles in the press had already allowed me, even as a young man, to enjoy a certain level of prestige in the city, but it had become high time that I represented more affluent clients if I were to advance in my career.

  * * *

  All these thoughts were running through my head when a very angry Lucinda announced a visitor: María Nilo. I asked her to show our guest into the office and, shaking off my ruminations, went to get dressed. A few minutes later I was behind my sturdy desk arranging a bouquet of flowers in the red clay vase I always kept full, and fussing over lining up my elegantly carved glass inkwell, blotter, pen, and art deco lamp, just so.

  With brusque movements the cabaret artist peeled off her four-button, faded orange overcoat with its velvet collar (which was definitely excessive given the warm weather we were enjoying, and even a bit garish), and tossed it with indifference over an armchair. I could not help but notice the curvaceous contour of her breasts under her blouse.

  I had not seen her in months, as the trial against her assailants had not yet been held. Barcelona’s courts were fraught with inexplicable mysteries: some trials were heard in a question of months, while others took years. Why were some processed faster than others? Who could say. Political pressures aside, Spanish justice at that time abounded in arbitrary decisions and miles of red tape.

  “Are you aware that today is a holiday?” I asked.

  “For those of us in show business, there are no holidays. Pablo, I must turn to you once again, and it is serious.”

  I mustered my patience. “What is it?”

  “Ángel Lacalle has disappeared. You have to find him.”

  At that point I considered it essential to know once and for all the nature of the relationship between the singer and the anarchist. So I asked her, point blank, if she was his lover.

  “More than that, actually. He’s my brother.”

  Reeling, I digested this revelation as María Nilo took out her silver case and drew a cigarette, which I hurried to light. A long confession followed. As was her custom, the showgirl began to nervously babble, moving about the office constantly and fiddling with every object within her reach.

  * * *

  When Ángel Lacalle and María Nilo’s mother decided to leave their father, a violent man who frequently beat her, she reasoned that she could only survive providing for one of her children, so she left the other with the miner, who in this way would be tied down by his responsibility and unable to take off in search of her. I dread to even imagine the torment she must have gone through to make that choice. In the end, applying the simple criterion of gender affinity, she fled with her daughter, who must have been four or five years old at the time. She left their humble valley home, made her way to a train station, and set out toward her freedom.

  The woman had relatives in Alicante, so it was there she headed first. She worked in taverns and boarding houses, rejecting offers to work as a maid in order not to leave her daughter’s side, and struggled just to get by, escaping from a thousand pinches. Over time she turned bitter. When it seemed that all the work had dried up in Alicante, the pair traced the coast up to Tarragona. There María’s mother found work in a rooming house whose owner was a widower, and both she and her daughter were given shelter. In all this time neither María nor her mother attempted to communicate with the husband and father, who had remained in the coal-mining regions of northern Spain. The showgirl told me that her mother wondered constantly, fraught with anguish, what had happened to her other child, but she was so frightene
d of her spouse that she dared not go in search of him.

  Time passed, and María’s mother died of pneumonia. Some neighbors took the girl in, immediately putting her to work as a housekeeper in the city, where she was terribly mistreated. Singing at a neighborhood festival on one of those rare occasions when she was not working, she met Ernesto Vilches, who took her under his wing and steered her into show business.

  In Barcelona one day, María saw an announcement in the paper for a demonstration that was to be held at the Teatro Bosque and to feature a speech by Ángel Togores, alias Ángel Lacalle—the moniker he had adopted after changing his last name several times and falsifying his identification in order to evade the police. Surprisingly, the columnist, clearly someone close to the union leader, actually explained this entire transformation. Thus, María decided to attend the meeting, at the end of which she looked for the orator. Standing face-to-face, the two siblings recognized each other, their eyes filling with tears. Their parents were dead. They were all they had left.

  But Ángel was a man under suspicion, a figure sought by the authorities. They agreed not to reveal their relationship in order to spare her from the dangers associated with being the sister of an anarchist leader, or so she explained, though I suspected that the silver-tongued anarchist, savior of the humble, was not exactly anxious to make public that his sister was a lowly cabaret singer.

  “Of course, in the end the precautions were all for nothing. Lately Ángel has not ceased to take risks. Juan García Torres, his rival in the union, has labeled him a traitor for proposing that they sit down with the bosses in order to avoid a bloodbath. He has a lot of enemies on the police force and in the military government, who consider him a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a dangerous and deceitful anarchist only feigning pacifism. In recent weeks Ángel was convinced that López Ballesteros had placed a price on his head after he denounced the Civil Government for employing torture, providing proof of it in an anarchist gazette.