A Barcelona Heiress (11 page)

* * *

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 frightened 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.

“Now that is what you call having everything stacked against you. When did you realize he had disappeared?”

“Ángel and I had dinner two Sundays ago. He was more nervous than I’d ever seen him. He’d received a tip that Danton, the killer who is going after union leaders, had set his sights on him. And I haven’t seen him since. I’ve asked at the union and the boarding house where he normally stays, but they don’t know where he is.”

She took a dramatic pause, I suspect in order to hold my attention.

“Pablo, only you can help me. With your position and your contacts you’re the only one capable of getting the word out in Barcelona and bringing my brother back to me safe and sound. Pablo, tell me that you’ll do it. I fear for my brother’s life,” she finished, with a feverish look in her eye.

“I will try,” I replied. “I promise you that I will try.”

María Nilo was truly one of a kind; she put such passion and energy into her actions. And yet, she was also not one to be trusted, as evidenced by the fact that she had kept from me something as relevant as her relationship to Lacalle.

I accompanied her to the door, and when I closed it Lucinda besieged me.

“This girl is trouble. You be careful with her.”

“But …”

“She’s a snake in the grass, that’s what she is. Who does she think she is? Barging in here like that on a holiday, as if she owned the place! And the way she looked at you! Why she almost devoured you with those eyes!”

After calming my hysterical housemaid, always so maternal and protective of me, I went out to attend Midnight Mass at the Barcelona Cathedral.

The rumors that another general strike was brewing, which was bound to sink the city into a state of darkness and chaos, had Barcelona’s ruling class willfully bracing itself. When word spread of the call for another strike, the gentlemen of nobility and high bourgeoisie, who had been put on edge by episodes like that at Turó Park and other, bloodier incidents that continued to befall the city at that time, proffered their services on behalf of the counterrevolution.

They did so by strengthening their ties with the somatenes, those civil militias that professed their devotion to General López Ballesteros. In theory, most of the men belonging to Barcelona’s privileged classes were registered among their ranks, but in practice, the leading figures, out of caution and complacence, tended to designate people in their service to conduct patrols for them. When they did not do so, comical situations tended to arise. On one occasion the members of a somatén assigned to Doctor Andreu Avenue heard bullets whistle by and everyone took off running. Only the old Count of Lavinia remained right there, next to a lamppost, undaunted, until the skirmish ceased. When the scare was over, the neighbors gradually emerged from the gardens of their mansions and walked out onto the street. Everyone was heaping praise on the count for his bravery, when his wife suddenly put an abrupt stop to all their raving. “Brave? Good grief, don’t you know that Tomás is as deaf as a post?”

This time around, the revolutionary strike organized by the General Union was set to begin with a total walkout in the transport sector. So the Marquess of Malet, president of the city’s streetcar company, decided to go on the offensive.

* * *

As Barcelona began to grow exponentially in the nineteenth century, it quickly became evident that its citizens required a sound transportation network. At first there were three lines featuring horse-drawn carriages running in three directions, followed by a period of steam-powered streetcars which sent up clouds of vapor over the city and, from time to time, ran over a careless child (the San Andrés line was popularly known as “the guillotine”). At the turn of the century the streetcar network went electric thanks to the work of English, Belgian, and German companies refitting section after section of track. The system’s multiple managers muddled operations, leading to abandonment, dirtiness, and poor service until the different companies were finally fused into a single enterprise over which the Marquess of Malet presided. Strong in character, this military man and aristocrat imposed order among the workers and renovated and maintained the company’s fleet of cars, to which he brought uniformity by painting them a distinguishing mustard color. During the era in question, the city was served by seventy-one lines transporting tens of thousands of passengers each day.

Malet, who considered the company a kind of personal fiefdom, was riled by the threats of a strike. Reacting with a martial air, he announced that, despite the strike plans, service would not be interrupted. He decided to lead by example, and thus proclaimed that he would personally drive a streetcar. And he didn’t stop there: he called for volunteers among his friends and
associates to assist him. After being urgently contacted by telephone, amid all the agitation inherent to any conspiratorial undertaking, many young men from leading families followed his example. Once these men had received accelerated, and possibly insufficient, training from drivers loyal to the marquess, the city was soon teeming with streetcars moving about somewhat erratically and, in a couple of cases, derailing, though without any casualties.

But these accidental drivers were, even in those circumstances, among the well-to-do, which gave rise to the kind of humorous scenarios that could only be expected. It was not uncommon to see a chauffeur-driven luxury Dodge Brothers sedan behind an overloaded streetcar, complete with a butler on the passenger side carrying a basket full of sandwiches for the brother of the Marquess of Mataró, who braved the fury of the commoners as he piloted the Sagrera–Horta line. Nor was it shocking to see the Count and Countess of Piedrahita’s Lincoln Cabriolet cruising alongside the streetcar bound for Plaza Tetuán in order to provide its operator, one of the couple’s sons, with bottled water.

Only one woman was so bold as to join the effort as driver. Isabel Enrich adeptly worked the levers of the electrical traction vehicles as if she had never done anything else in her life. Julián Pérez Carrasco had asked me to write a story for
El Noticiero Universal
about what he dubbed the “aristocratic counterstrike” and, because the courts at that time were at a virtual standstill, I acceded to his request and decided to accompany my friend on one of her routes at the helm of the roofless streetcar covering route 168, from Plaza de Cataluña to the Josepets church, continuing on to the Plaza de la Rovira in the Gracia district before completing its run at the Coll terminal.

Many of the young volunteers had been issued revolvers but, as Isabel refused to go armed, in addition to the ticket seller she was accompanied by a security guard the Marquess of
Malet had assigned to her. The sentry wore a long jacket and a helmet, and he rode in the front row of the vehicle. He made no effort to conceal his boredom, and from time to time he would stare at the people coming and going up and down the stairs that led to the upper platform, all the while clutching his Winchester repeating rifle with calloused hands.

“What I don’t understand,” Isabel said to me, dressed in a dark green trench coat and panting as she worked the controls, “is why you don’t volunteer to participate as well.”

I reflected for a moment before responding to that irresistible young lady whose daring constituted, for those of us who were close to her, an evident call to action. Her attention was now riveted to the rails sunk into the pavement and earth of the city streets, upon which our vehicle slid, between bicyclists and pedestrians in bowler hats rashly darting right in front of us.

“I feel more comfortable as an observer,” I responded. “I believe that in this way I can offer a more impartial view of the conflict, both as a journalist and a lawyer. I maintain a certain distance from social struggle, for at this time it would be too easy for me to adopt radical positions, which is precisely what I have always striven to avoid. I do not wish to end up participating in the kind of exchanges of gunfire that take place every day, although, watching you at the helm of this car, I am tempted to follow your example.”

“‘The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayers of the righteous.’”

“The Book of Proverbs is wonderful, isn’t it? ‘As righteousness tendeth to life, so he that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death.’”

“And ‘By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted: but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.’ Sir, get out of the way!”

After leaving behind the bourgeois terraces and lush plane trees on Paseo de Gracia, we headed down Salmerón Street, which was much more humble, yet full of local color. Two
donkeys burdened with milk had pulled up right over the rails as the milkman struggled in vain to get them out of the way. Isabel honked loudly, but the animals wouldn’t budge, and a group of curious onlookers were soon drawn to the scene. A few men sporting classic worker caps began to insult my friend.