A Barcelona Heiress (6 page)

Crowned by a fortification built four centuries ago and which has undergone successive refurbishments and seen various military uses, Montjuïc is also a mysterious place crossed by winding paths and covered with almost impenetrable forests.

Our car pulled up on what was called the Morrot Highway in an area full of thickets through which wandered a group of cadaverous figures. Lacalle, who had grabbed a carbide lamp, began to make his way up a dusty path which wound around and around up the slope until we found ourselves some twenty yards above the place from which we had started. The trail skirted one of the sheerest escarpments in the area, and it was there where Lacalle, after lighting the lamp, slid through a cleft in the rock; a mineshaft entrance leading into a murky and foul-smelling grotto.

“And now, my friend, remember that we are in the twentieth century, and not in the Pleistocene.”

As we walked in, I could not believe what I was seeing by the weak and flickering light. Inside the Barcelona mountain was a labyrinth of passageways and corridors carved out of the rock, God knows when—perhaps in medieval times or perhaps more recently, by the miners. With an array of refuse and rubbish, boards and barrels, drums and sheets of metal, amid worms, reptiles, rats, and bats, I realized with astonishment that there below in the darkness dwelled a whole horde of destitute souls: old men wrapped in rags and clutching bottles, women with deformed faces and, most disturbing of all, a group of half-clothed children moving about in the shadows between the torches. As we passed by them, some of them clutched our legs and begged.

“Money, money … ,” they pleaded.

Although the air was pestilent, there was a draft and one could breathe without difficulty, which led me to believe that there must be an opening to allow for ventilation. Being in that place filled me with the most profound distress.

“But … what is this?” I asked.

“The Powder Keg caves. Inside this mountain there are other caverns that are more difficult to access, such those at La Escala. In all of them reside everyday people; poor immigrants who come to the city and have no work or place to live, cripples …”

“They look scared.”

“These people are very wary. You will only see them if they want you to. When strangers approach they take off running, as they’re afraid of the police. Keep in mind that there are other caves too, higher up, such as at L’Argenter, where all sorts of criminals live: thieves,
counterfeiters, smugglers. Here they are safe from bourgeois law. And now I am going to introduce you to a good friend: El Capitán.”

A one-eyed, almost toothless man approached us out of the darkness. Lacalle introduced me ceremoniously.

“El Capitán is the guardian of Montjuïc’s caves. Nobody comes or goes without him getting wind of it. I brought my friend Pablo here so that he could see what this place was like. I would like him to help secure some decent places for all of you to live.”

“Better not rock the boat, Don Ángel, better not rock the boat. They’ll take what little we have.”

With grim faces we returned in silence to the car, where the driver was waiting for us.

* * *

“Now you’ve seen it, my good lawyer and journalist,” Lacalle said to me a while later as we sat on the terrace of a bar on Paralelo Avenue where Julián had dropped us after resuming his driving duties. “I haven’t yet taken you to some of the many insalubrious settlements on the outskirts of the city, casting a shadow over its optimism. I’ve shown you something worse: the troglodytes of District II who, believe it or not, also inhabit this city of electric lighting, pioneering railway systems, Modernist architecture, and tennis and polo clubs. In our most modern Barcelona there is a place where life is even more dismal than in the worst shanty towns for miners, than in the caves of the Albaicín in Granada, or the slate shacks of the Pyrenees. All of those modes of construction are more sophisticated and, I would dare say, more sanitary and hygienic than those these troglodytes have used to create their makeshift dwellings.”

“It’s an outrage!” I roared. “And, at the same time, very surprising. That network of caves occupied by outsiders and downright outlaws harks back to the era of bandits, and exudes a great sense of mystery.”

“Are you embellishing a case of social degradation as though it were the basis for a novel?”

I blushed. “No, I was just thinking aloud. Those places you showed me did not meet even the lowest acceptable standards of hygiene. The city ought to do something, without question. I will indeed write about this.”

“I could tell that you weren’t an entirely lost cause. Though reactionary, you exhibit a certain humanitarian sensibility that does you credit.”

“Listen, Lacalle, don’t caricaturize me. You cannot judge someone entirely based on his political convictions, because people are much more than their ideologies.”

“That’s true. In addition to our ideologies, we are the product of our experiences, but our convictions also arise from those experiences. Look at me, for example.”

After La Rambla, Paralelo is Barcelona’s most bustling avenue. Legend has it that when the astronomer José Comas provided his former cook with a dowry so that she could marry and open a tavern in the area known as Pueblo Seco, on Montjuïc’s most developed side, he asked her to call it “El Paralelo” in honor of the French geometrician Monsieur Méchain, who in 1794 had visited the city in order to measure the Mediterranean Arch from Dunkirk to our coasts. And the avenue of the Marquess of Duero would forever be dubbed Paralelo, a Barcelona bohemian hotbed lined with theaters, cabarets, music halls, cafés, taverns, and establishments which varied in their levels of taste but which always infused the atmosphere with a characteristic cheer and
celebration of a way of life which may have been dissolute, but which also offered up the kind of escapism every large city requires.

Paralelo is hopping at all hours, but I remember how Lacalle’s sincerity seemed to enclose us in absolute silence that day he came to see me and really opened up.

The anarchist leader shared with me how he had been born and had grown up in a mining town in Asturias. His father, a miner, was prone to beating his wife and two children. The violence grew so frequent that one day the man woke up to find his wife had fled along with Lacalle’s sister, leaving nothing but a terse note behind. The future anarchist grew up with his father, following him to the mines where he worked in Asturias and León, watching how his health gradually failed and receiving brutal thrashings from him. His father did, nevertheless, insist that he learn to read and receive an education so that when he was older “he wouldn’t end up working like a pack mule as had happened to him.”

After years drifting from one dump to the next, each one more miserable than the last, his father died of silicosis and complications from a urinary infection when Lacalle was twelve years old. By then he had already been accompanying his father down the mine for a year, taking water to the men, squeezing through cracks grown men could not.

“He died at dawn, after three days of agony, and I was left alone,” Lacalle recalled. “Some of his friends offered to help me, while others disappeared into thin air. I was penniless, and even owed the landlady twenty-six pesetas in back rent left by my father. I decided to go it alone and struggle to handle things any way I could. I stayed there and began to work collecting
chirta
, the mineral which is often left over in the mines. That was my first real ordeal in life. The bosses were despotic and fights could break out among the men over anything. Never before had I been witness to man’s ingratitude and the hardened hearts which poverty engenders.”

There Lacalle remained until the age of sixteen, when a mentor of his, a former union man who acquired books for him and in whom he confided, encouraged him to move to Barcelona.

“You’ll find better work there but, above all, people who can provide you with an education,” he’d told him.

At Barcelona’s reading clubs for workers, in the union associations during the first decades of the century, and in the writings of Eliseo Reclús, Pedro Kropotkine, and other anarchist theorists, Ángel Lacalle had found both the inspiration to educate himself and something to fight for in his life: improved conditions for his class, the struggle for a future in which men would be free of yokes and chains, without bosses and overseers, and in which the only law would be that of love. He had found a creed which suited him perfectly, one that was ethical, redemptive, and somewhat naive.

“I understand what you are saying, and I am touched by your candor,” I replied, “but you will agree with me that nobody is served by boycotting work systems, placing bombs, and striking. On the contrary, thus is destroyed the general prosperity of which workers are the first beneficiaries. You criticize fiercely, and with justification, the inequality in Barcelona, but when there is prosperity there is also hope that the least fortunate may improve their lot, whereas when there is no wealth, nobody can escape poverty. As I have said, I have been a fervent supporter of Don Eduardo Dato and, like him, I believe that social justice can be achieved through reform. The pension and social security systems which Don Eduardo has implemented, with the king’s endorsement, do more for social justice than a thousand of your anarchists’ bombs.”

“That may be so, and that’s why I have always been opposed to the use of violence by my counterparts, the anarchists of action, who have sometimes employed it without realizing just
what they were getting themselves into. I remember how a young friend of mine cried; he was just a kid. I met him at an anarchist association. He believed in the movement and in universal brotherhood more passionately than anyone. One day they put a pistol in his hand and told him that, in the name of his ideals, he had to go out and kill a certain boss. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Lucky for him …”

Three men walking down the sidewalk stopped next to our table and addressed my companion.

“Lacalle, when will the next general strike be?”

My acquaintance got up to talk to them, conversing in the calm and clear manner which I now realized was his hallmark.

“We’re going to try to avoid it. After the last one our reserves are dwindling. For now it’s best to continue to negotiate piecemeal accords, industry by industry, and then sit down again with the authorities, if they stop harassing us. Remember that the constitutional guarantees are still suspended, so they have the upper hand, but we will not back down, you can be sure of that!”

“You can count on us if you need men of action! Give them hell!”

The men walked on, and the anarchist shared a final comment with me before departing. “As you can see, tempers are running high everywhere. We’re going to need level heads to get them back on track.”

* * *

After Lacalle’s departure I found myself reflecting on the shocking scenes I had witnessed, and resolved to search for more information so that I could better comprehend the problem. In the early afternoon I went to see Dr. Juan Vandrells at his offices on Consejo de Ciento Street. He was a contributor to my paper and a sanitarian committed to improving health conditions in the city. When I told him what I had seen, the four remaining hairs on my distinguished friend’s head stood on end.

“I had heard news of it, Mr. Vilar. Montjuïc contains as many man-made caverns as it does natural ones. I believe people have always explored and even dwelled in them. At the end of the last century the discovery of the body of a young boy in one of them caused quite a stir. A short time later the city police found a sickly man there, stricken with severe bronchitis, and just managed to save his life. Not long after that various miscreants were arrested there in a raid. They say that the caves have been the sites of kidnappings and killings. What’s new is that they are now providing shelter for more and more people. But this constitutes just part of the problem. On Montjuïc, in addition to the caves, there are also shacks—ephemeral, dilapidated constructions people crowd into. I have seen some that extend through the areas of Can Valero, Las Banderas, Tres Pins, and Los Huertos. In recent years they have erected around six thousand ramshackle constructions made from scrap. Most of the occupants pay something to the property’s ‘owners.’”

“So, there are even people profiting from it.”

“Of course! In order to inhabit those shanties one has to practically be a magnate—people pay between twelve and twenty pesetas per month just for a patch of land without running water, electricity, or anything else. They slap up a shack with a few boards and that’s where they settle. More than forty thousand people live crammed into those squalid structures. It’s a problem
Barcelona ought to solve, in the name of charity and philanthropy, but also out of self-interest: imagine the Dantean scenario that could arise if an epidemic broke out in that area. As doctors and sanitarians, we’ve already sounded the alarm. Now it’s time for our architects, financiers, and city councilors to act.”

Barcelona had a housing problem, a challenge of how to provide shelter for its people, and Montjuïc represented its most appalling expression. There was no doubt about that. I took my leave of Vandrells, urging him to put his analyses and research down in writing, and I resolved to do the same with my own.

* * *

El Noticiero Universal
was—and is—an afternoon daily, which meant that its advantage lay in being able to offer information the morning papers could not. It also meant that the work went on there until late at night, when the competition had already closed its editions, and from dawn until the late morning, as we didn’t have our final copy prepared until then.
El Ciero,
as the street vendors nicknamed it, had its offices in a two-story building on Lauria Street. The staff worked by the light of a set of desk lamps resting on six long, wooden tables. In a small booth Luis Angulo, our stenographer, would type up the news from Madrid that our correspondents shouted down the telephone lines from the nation’s capital. Angulo had revolutionized the way the news staff worked by introducing this system which, though it was rather loud, successfully supplanted the endless stenographic transcriptions we had used until then. On the wall there were a couple of bookshelves on which sat the
Diccionario Enciclopédico Hispanoamericano
published by Montaner & Simón, and some twenty volumes of the
Espasa
encyclopedia, along
with a few more such tomes. The printing shop featured four linotypes and a small French rotary press.