Baltasar PORCEL

THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION

(LA REVOLTA PERMANENT)

The Memoirs of Joan Ferrer
Translated from the Catalan
by

John L. Getman

© Getman, 1999

  Our action has to be a permanent
revolution, through the spoken and
written word, through the fist, the riffle
and dynamite, and even sometimes the vote.
          Peter Kropotkin, Revolt, 1880

   INTRODUCTION 

One of the sharpest and least clarified of all the debates which have affected our history and our political passion is that which reflects our recent past, that is, the last fifty years or so of Spanish history. And lacking a general historical consensus acceptable to everyone as the basis for research into specific sectors, our memory has become a constant open wound which influences and affects the present.
              This open wound produces an instability which, in general, barely affects English or French historiography, to mention two examples close to us. And when it has affected the United States, whether by poignantly reopening the question of Indian rights or by re-examining the role of the nation in world affairs—triggered recently by the Vietnam experience—it has created a deep crisis in the collective consciousness, altering university life and life as seen through the cinema, as well as through the changing concept of family.
              I suppose the present instability (1978) has been the principal reason for the ponderous controversy that relentlessly shakes us: today's controversy is due to the tension inherent in any transition period; yesterday's is beyond the supposedly inalterable facade—or perhaps because of it—that Francisco Franco imposed on his regime. And the controversy of the day before yesterday, the horrible and bloody civil war and the collapse of the Second Republic.
       There is also another reason, or rather many more, but I want to limit myself to one: that this whole debate has gone on only at a superficial level. The ideologues, the upper classes, the culture, the bourgeoisie and the capitalists, even the marxists and the socialists in the last decade, have spoken and pontificated extensively on the matter. But the group that has been least heard on the subject has been the people, the immense mass of Spanish citizens. Public education has failed its mission and the electoral process has been deficient. The industrial revolution arrived late and got out of balance here. There has been an almost impenetrable barrier between the people and the classes  installed at the various levels  of effective power, as well as those of the  power-in-opposition.
       The anonymous, common man has been made to fight and work, but he has been practically ignored when it was a question of giving his opinion or enjoying life. The agents of history have manipulated the passive common man, treating him with contempt, forcing him to fight and die.
       This book attempts to deal specifically with that terrain, by bringing the common man's voice to the cultural debate, and by doing it without any restraints whatsoever, without mediations, just as the information, convictions and memory of the collective magma has seen it. The Permanent Revolution, then, is the autobiography of an eighty-two year old man, Joan Ferrer i Farriol, told in his own words.
       Ferrer was born in Igualada, Catalonia, in 1896. He went to work in 1907, when he was eleven, putting in sixty-six hours a week, Saturdays included, in exchange for a paycheck of six pesetas. In 1911, he joined the CNT, the National Confederation of Workers, founded a year before. He was a fellow-worker with the anarcho-syndicalist Salvador Seguí, nick-named Sugar Boy, during the social struggles which bloodied Barcelona from 1917 to 1923. He fought the labor scabs with clubs and was imprisoned for it. He was a tanner by trade and his avocations were to write articles for labor journals and poetry for festive occasions. In 1936, he was named Lieutenant Mayor in the revolutionary city council of Igualada. He worked enthusiastically for the collectives then forming. In 1937, he became the director of Catalunya, the evening newspaper of the CNT. In 1938, he went to the war zone as a correspondent for Solidaridad Obrera. In 1939 and 1940, he suffered as a refugee in the internment camps of Argelers and Barcars, in the south of France. Later he worked with the anarcho-syndicalist guerrilla movement organized in the Pyrenees to continue the struggle in Catalonia. In both Toulouse and Paris, he directed the press of the diaspora. He continues to live in Paris today, in an exile which is already a habit, without ever having wished to accept French nationality.
       This brief résumé gives an idea of what the book is about, but it doesn't explain it. That would require a detailing of each one of the events in his life, the same way they are revealed through the sociological window of Joan Ferrer's confessions on every page of the book.
       What there is here at first glance is the life of a man, his loves, his problems and his ambitions. But what appears through this skeleton is a vast collective odyssey: the working man's struggle for his rights. And that puts us on a new stage: the process of acculturation and civilization, both terms meaning the totality of knowledge that shapes a society and its moral determinants, the stage on which Ferrer and millions of persons who found themselves in the same situation lived and thought.
       This then is anthropological-sociological research, or close kin to it. But it also covers philosophy and politics, because Joan Ferrer was an activist in an anarcho-syndicalist labor union, and speaks to us from that point of view about everything on earth—and in heaven—and rightly so, even if only from the perspective of his own rights. He tells us of Catalonia and of Spain, of his Catalonia and his Spain. They may make us at times indignant or enthusiastic, but the essential point is that they "existed." They existed for Ferrer and the millions of other people who lived and believed in those very real realities.
       That is why, in my opinion, this book should be more than just read; it should be contemplated. First, the reader should find out what is said, then delay judgment and the meditation which provoked it until after the reading is finished. If Ferrer eulogizes Mateu Morral, if he believes that a collectivist regime is the best thing that could ever happen to humanity, if he thinks that Francesc Macià was nothing but a pitiable man, if the militarism, the catalanism of the bourgeoisie—not the fact of being Catalan—or the religion of the times merit his criticism, if he finds the virtue of justice in his fellow CNT members, we have to accept that, for "that's the way it was." And we cannot change the past. This person and that person and other persons further back in time, all form a part of the consensus upon which collective memory is based.
       Whether we like it or not, I must insist that it will only be from that point of consensus that we will ever be able to influence the present, and enjoy more security and less aggressiveness, as we proceed to create a new co-existence for the world of today. All the facts and ideas and ways of life which Joan Ferrer contributes to this effort are derived from democratic rights, with the purpose of leading to a true knowledge of the past, to a knowledge of life itself.
       I recorded these interviews with Ferrer—about fifty tapes—in Paris in 1970. When I typed them up, I found I had more than a thousand pages of text. Joan Ferrer talked on and on, without any need for me to interrupt him, without him having to refer to any books or papers. His was truly a "Proustian memory," for everything that was filed away concerning his efforts and struggles through the years flowed from his mind.
       This book presumes to be neither impartial nor exact. It is a testimonial, witness to a life experience, more than to a culture. What is natural is also often arbitrary, so I have not attempted to correct anything that poured forth from him. What I have done, and a lot of it, is to condense and tie together, seeking the connective thread which drove the narrator, in order thus to discover and polish a style and create an archetype. I suppose that for some readers, as it has been for me, the shadow of Pío Baroja is not far from what is said and how it is said in these pages, that is: simplicity, dryness, abundant inner visions, and an immense world lying behind what is being narrated.
       Another world, the opposite of what normally surrounds us, in which simple things like having some books, sleeping on a soft mattress, having fresh bread, appear here with a unique, unsuspected importance; these are minimal but real achievements, brought about with dignity by human beings who have risen from nothing.
       Ferrer's cultural world is very private: he mentions books and authors which we have hardly ever heard of, at the same time that he relies on oral tradition. His is a culture which is born and develops within itself and is unknown to the official culture around it. But neither that nor anything else affects the tenacity of Ferrer and his companions: faced with the absolute precariousness of the means for day-to-day existence, they respond with exuberant optimism.
       The constant disappearance of so very many anarcho-syndicalists is horrifying, even though accompanied at times by a straightforward, ingenuous, funereal and yet loving commentary. The war, the prisons, the tuberculosis and the assassinations continue to decimate these men who have yet to achieve fulfillment in life. It is an epic which evolves into deep tragedy.
       With the titles that open each section and each chapter, and which are sometimes more or less faithful transcriptions of quotes from classic works on anarchism or other literary works, I have attempted to create a certain atmosphere: that of projecting onto a great romantic fresco—in spite of flashes of desolation—all that is told in The Permanent Revolution, as developments in the world of Joan Ferrer, with all their cordiality, their majesty, and their faith in the destiny of man.
       Baltasar Porcel, Barcelona, 1978

"In the course of the incessant movement and renovation of the generations, the old folks disappear, and with them disappears the ignorance made flesh, the thoughts and worries hardened like muscles which were flexible and elastic in their youth, but become bone-hard in old age; and then come the young, innocent, virgin intelligences, and they receive as a fresh impression the doctrine of the equality and fraternity of man."
Anselmo Lorenzo, The Militant Proletariat, 1901

I was born in 1896 in Igualada, on Retir Street, which everybody called the Aigüeres. My father died when I was only six, and when I heard my friends talk about their fathers, I became sad, for to have had a father must have been very important. I still remember some things, like seeing him coming down the road, or like one time in the courtyard of a house when he made me drink straight from a bucket, and I thought that was the coolest and best water in the world.
       When he was already deathly sick he asked me if I wanted to live without him around. I cried. Then he told me to go to the kitchen and fetch him a plate of orange sections with sugar sprinkled on them that Mother had fixed. When he died, I came home with my aunt, who held me by the hand, squeezing it. Everybody was crying, including me, even though what I really wanted to do was go out and play. I went to the funeral, which was sort of amusing to me, and I wore a new black smock. Afterward, my brother spoke to me often about my father's death: a day laborer worked to death, bent over under a load of shoe leather—hauling all two hundred forty pounds of it on his back.
       I don't think my father had any political ideas. One of his brothers, who was the rich relative in the family, told us, "I am your uncle and the doors of my house are open to all of you." If you went there he would give you advice. He was a good man, but he always told me that I should leave those new ideas alone, that it was all just a joke, that he had had an anarchist working for him who was a scab. "Ideas are stupid things and what's worthwhile is money." He told me how he had got his start: at the time of the Carlist Wars, he would go out to the front lines where the soldiers had been shooting and he would collect the empty shell casings and sell them to the junk man. And you agreed with him, because in those days being rich was like being right. Altogether there were about twenty cousins in the family, and every time one of them got married, our uncle would give them a wooden carving of the Last Supper. When it was my turn, I refused to go see him, in spite of my mother's advice. If I didn't get married in the Church, why did I have to go to his house so that he could palm that junky piece of wood off on me, which didn't cost him much anyway, because he must have bought them by the gross. Anyway, since he's been dead for a long time, I remember him with a certain feeling. After all, he was my father's brother.
       My grandparents on my mother's side were from a little village called Carme, on the edge of a little stream by the same name, which is why there were some textile and paper mills there. Those two industries were typical of that area, and lent Carme a certain air of liberalism, and you even found international anarchists there from back in '70. My mother, who had come with her parents to live in Igualada when she was very little, still thought of her village in a certain mystic light. "Carme attracts me," she used to say. I think that contaminated her beliefs a bit, about the Carlists and the Mass, because whenever we talked about the village she always recalled a weaver whose name was Trabal, and who was a libertarian institution throughout the whole paper-making community. I inherited her nostalgia about Carme, a village I considered the cradle of my family, and without meaning to, I unwittingly became steeped in all the aura of Trabal and his struggles.
       My mother had two sisters and three brothers. Her father, Grandpa Maurici, was a despot and a tightwad with his children. He kept all his pennies in two barretines, or sock-like caps, which he kept hidden in his room. At night you could hear him counting his coins. Once a cousin of mine and I took three pennies from his barretina and gambled them in a card lottery in the village square. We didn't win a thing. The old man discovered his loss and came after us with a club, poking it at us under the bed, but he couldn't reach us.
       But my grandpa had one love: his oldest son, the heir. His name was Josepet and some priest told my grandparents that he was smart in reading and writing. Then Grandpa, making great sacrifices and almost certainly receiving help from some rich folks, sent him off to Vic to study for the priesthood. One day in the seminary they made him take a little barrel of sweet brandy to some road workers outside Vic. But they weren't road workers: they were Carlists. Josepet put on a red beret and took off with them. In 1874, near the end of the war, he was killed at Bellprat as an officer of don Carlos, in a skirmish with the liberals.
       The next son, Joan, disappeared without even saying good-bye to Grandpa Maurici. They heard vague rumors that he had died in Cuba during the flaming days of General Maceo.
       After Joan came Tomàs. He liked music and going on sprees during the festivals in the nearby villages. He, along with the other strapping youngsters of the village, would sneak up to the hams hanging in the attics and the carboys of ratafia standing out in the sun on the balconies of the houses. He was caught and sentenced on minor charges a few times, but the last time was the worst: he got sentenced to a few years in Alcalá de Henares as a repeat offender, and for escaping from the jail at Igualada through a hole in the wall he and his friends had made, so that they could go steal little coffee spoons from the town Athenaeum. They were caught in a thicket playing cards. He was illiterate.
       He came back from Alcalá with tuberculosis, culture and anarchism in his veins. Grandpa Maurici didn't want him in the house, and so my mother took care of him. He died in our house before I was born. In the house of one of my aunts I sometimes saw a pair of socks with an embroidered dedication on them that her brother had sent her from prison. In Alcalá, where the days were very long, Tomàs did knitting.
       I've often asked myself if he didn't connect up with Fermín Salvochea while he was doing time there. There were indications that Fermín might have done time in Alcalá when Uncle Tomàs was there. If that were the case, then there would have been no lack of converts. Salvochea had an enormous influence on the prisoners wherever he was locked up. I found that out through a friend of mine from Igualada whose name was Taixer, an intemperate man. When they let him out, he started a fight with a lieutenant, and of course they stuck him back in jail with a bunch of years to serve, then transferred him to the Hacho prison in Ceuta. And that's where Salvochea was. When Taixer finally got out and back to town, he was full of Salvochea's ideas. He made speeches to us, which always began, "According to Fermín Salvochea...." When he said the name, he invariably took off his cap.
       And there was reason enough to do so. Salvochea was a man who would give you anything, even the shirt off his back. If he saw someone who didn't have one, he would take his off and give it to him. He won over the hearts of the people; they venerated him for his generosity and his humanity. Once when he was making propaganda among the Riotinto miners, one of them even gave him his bed to sleep in. He was sort of anarchism's mystic, even though he came from a good family.
       Furthermore, it was one of those cases of the evolution of a man from republicanism to anarchism. During the First Republic, as a Republican councilman for the city of Cádiz, he became indignant because the federalist Republicans in Madrid wanted to maintain state centralism, and so he promoted the revolt of the province of Cadiz. That's when he became converted to internationalism and anarchism. His self-abnegation earned him many prison terms. The power of his example was so strong that when he escaped from Hacho and headed for Morocco or Algeria—I don't remember which—he even converted some Moors to anarchism, which is the most difficult thing there is to do. If my Uncle Tomàs didn't meet up with him, he surely met others like him.
       I lived with my brother and sister at home. I don't know whether my ideas on equality come from the poverty in which I lived or from a congenital predisposition. My brother was twelve years older than I, and I remember when he used to explain things to me about the workers' struggle, or about the death of my father, ground down by the weight of those huge bundles of shoe leather, or about Uncle Tomàs. I listened to my brother with rapture. He only came home to eat lunch, then he would go right back to work. He would eat a piece of toast for breakfast, and then at night, beside the warmth of the fireplace, sometimes a feeling of tenderness would arise in him and he would talk to me. He was the first to talk to me about Pi i Maragall, about the tanners' strikes in 1900, 1906, 1907.... That's when I began to understand a phrase my mother used to repeat: if we poor don't help each other, nobody else will. My mother kept us fed on one peseta and seventeen centimes a day, which is what she earned working sixty-six hours a week on the looms in a factory owned by a radical republican. Add to that four more pesetas a week my sister had just begun to earn, doing the same thing. My brother was strongly devoted to the idea of winning the fight for the eight-hour day. He was an active striker. In just the leather workers' strike of 1900, they were out of work for twenty-seven weeks. Llorenç—that was my brother's name—started out working eleven-hour days, until he achieved the eight-hour shift in 1915, long before Dato decreed it.
       But before they achieved their goal, they had a minimum of four big strikes. Sometimes scabs were killed, and sometimes even some of ours were killed. It was a violent struggle. What was won from the bourgeoisie was won through sheer strength and through direct action, which didn't mean beating up on people until their livers fell out, nor throwing bombs everywhere as the bourgeois newspapers claimed we did. What that meant was it had to be the decision of the workers themselves to achieve improvements in their lives, without the help of intermediaries of any kind.
       I must have been about four years old when a group of angry men came down Soletat Street shouting threats. My mother grabbed me by the hand and snarled "the scabs," as she looked at them with disdain. They had betrayed the long strike at the beginning of the century, and were trying to pick a fight with the strikers who had killed one of the scabs and wounded another. I still vaguely remember the scene. The Civil Guard was on the alert. My mother, pointing to the prison beside King's Square, whispered to me, "our own people are in there."
       Later I found out that there were about fifty of them in there, and one of them was Forneret, my friend from the CNT, whom they had almost clubbed to death at the Civil Guard barracks in the year 1900. Forneret and my brother had beaten up a couple of scabs one night. Afterwards they ran away, pursued by the night watchman Llacuneta. They ran down a blind alley. They were trapped and Llacuneta came up to them and shouted in their ears: "Goddammit! Get the hell out of here, you guys!" That was solidarity for you.
       The history of Igualada is one of misery and squalor. Apart from the hunger, it was a town on the main road, and during the Carlist Wars the troops from both sides traipsed through it, back and forth, taking captive towns people with them. Of course, we also had gangs of bandits hiding in the mountain caves nearby. But they didn't fare much better as far as hunger went.
       The Carlist siege of the town on the seventeenth and eighteenth of July in 1873 was an important event. My mother was a young thing then, about thirteen; she worked as a weaver, and since her brother Josepet was a Carlist, so was she. The militia that was supposed to confront the Carlists was drawn from the weavers and the tanners, who always had one ear tuned to the street, listening for the sound of alarm trumpets from the tower guard at Fort del Pi. There was also an army battalion billeted there, called the Navarra, made up of five or six hundred Republican government troops.
       A huge number of Carlists were advancing toward the town. They were led by Rafael Tristany, whose field commander was Savalls. Accompanying them was a sister of Don Carlos, the pretender to the throne. They set themselves up outside of town, which was still walled at that time. Then the alarm trumpet sounded. My mother told me the story, and when she spoke of Tort, her voice trembled with grief. Tort was one of her fellow weavers, one of the most energetic. When the trumpet sounded, everyone left the looms to head for their defensive positions. Tort went by my mother and she said to him, "Tort, our boys are going to win." However, the Carlists overcame the resistance in two days, even though the militia defended the town street by street. The took their revenge like animals, aided by reactionary informers: they shot people, they made the town pay a ransom, they set fire to the workers' athenaeum, which was a simple cultural center, because they didn't teach Christian doctrine in there, and they took the mayor and a whole bunch of defenders and citizens as hostages. All that happened because the colonel of the Navarra battalion didn't want to come out and fight; he locked himself and his troops up in the big church. Nobody ever found out why. The people shouted to him, telling him to come out and help them, and he did nothing. Some of the soldiers couldn't stand it anymore and they came out to help the militia. They were shot for their trouble. The Carlists took the colonel with them to Odena when they retreated and shot him there.
       My grandpa and my mother were walking down the street when the Carlists were collecting the last of the ransom, before they began their withdrawal. One of the federal troops said to Grandpa, "what are you doing here, Maurici? You might as well go with the Carlists, because Xic de la Barraqueta is going to come from Can Bernades and avenge the killings one by one." Grandpa got scared and he gathered his family together and left with the Carlists. My mother, innocent as she was, saw Tort was a prisoner in Odena and said to him, "You see, Tort, just like I said, our side would win." And Tort, who was waiting to be shot, which they didn't waste any time in doing, looked at her and said, "Poor little kid." Those words, "poor little kid," remained engraved on my mother's mind the rest of her life.
       But Xic de la Barraqueta didn't arrive in time to hunt down the Carlists. He was a great strategist, a convinced federalist, whom the Republic had appointed colonel of the volunteers. He was born in Martorell. When he entered Igualada, he took reprisals against some of the leaders of the ultras, and he threw out on the street the entire contents of a noodle factory owned by one of them. But I don't believe he ever shot any of them.
       My mother never really changed her ideas altogether, but when she saw that the Carlists, together with the militia and Civil Guards, came to get me—which happened six or seven times—she no doubt lost her faith in that riffraff. She was convinced her son had never defended an unjust cause. I never found out whether she had stopped believing in her ideas; on the other hand, I was certain that right up until her death in 1950, she prayed for me every night.
       Like so many others, she separated her ideas and beliefs from her life.... "I'm a member of the poor people's party," she used to say, at the same time she kept on with her Catholic habits. She was proud of being a societarian, because back then there were still no labor unions and the workers joined workers' societies. And she never missed an opportunity to stand at the strikers' side every time a strike was declared in her trade. I think it was around 1898 that they fired her from the factory.
       She did everything she could to please the rest of the family. Every day she would give my brother and sister half a herring and a piece of bread, without even tasting it herself. Since I was the smallest, she saved a little cutlet for me, which she fried, after boiling it, in order to give more body to the broth. That cutlet was a slice of lamb that people used as a substitute for a chop. It came from right beside the kidney, a little piece of which always stuck to the cutlet, and which I loved to chew on.
       My mother would have preferred that I had gone to school longer, because they had told her I wasn't lacking any of my natural faculties. But necessity has its own demands. My brother and sister kept insisting that I go to work, so I finally had to start when I was eleven. In spite of that, I was still able to go to the rationalist school for a year, thanks to the interest my brother had taken in me. That was in 1906.
       The school had been set up in a Republican center called La Unión. Those people wanted a lay school, and they didn't know the difference between that and a rationalist school. About that time a group of anarchist workers brought in a teacher from Barcelona, one of those supplied by Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia. A man named Vives i Terrades came, one of those who had been imprisoned in Montjuïc during the terrible round-up, the trials and firing squads which followed the bombing in Canvis Nous Street in Barcelona in 1896. Someone threw the bomb into the middle of the Corpus Christi parade, and it mutilated a whole lot of people.
       Vives i Terrades was from Tarragona, a simple, likeable man who didn't make any incendiary speeches, which would have scared the republicans in La Unión. Instead, he acted subtly, in a sort of underground way. Ferrer i Guàrdia never acted like an anarchist either, even though he had definite egalitarian convictions. Every time he went to Paris he got in touch with Malato, Sebastien Faure, Salvador Albert and all the big anarchists of the time, and then he would return to Barcelona with some very advanced books like El Hombre y la Tierra (Man and the Earth) by Elisée Reclus, which had been published in Spanish in six volumes of about five hundred pages each. The covers were cloth and very tastefully done, decorated with pyrography and a silver border.
       They were inductive books, not books that proclaimed ideas. I also remember the books of Jean Grave, translated by Anselmo Lorenzo. Among them was Tierra Libre (Land of Liberty), a kind of adventure novel that the kids would read, sitting spellbound for hours: some sailors were shipwrecked and swam to a deserted isle, where they made a completely free life for themselves. When you closed the book it was something like having your whole brain turned inside out. I remember another book like it, Las aventuras de Nono (The Adventures of Nono).
       In the modernist school they also had us read the correspondence from Carlos Malato's school years. They were letters between a very intelligent student and one who had much to learn yet. The slow student always asked the questions and the smart student gave the answers, which always led to a libertarian point of view. But that always caused a terrible scandal, because the smart student said to the other, "As Proudhon says, private property is theft." When they realized what was going on, the reactionaries started a defamatory campaign that even scared the lay public and the republicans, who didn't want to have anything to do with the school after that. They wanted the workers to be able to wear shoes, instead of rope-soled sandals, and they wanted them to make improvements in their social status, but they didn't want their children to become anarchists and try to abolish property rights. They took their children out of the school and the school teacher got pretty hungry, until they finally closed the school. But that happened after I had already started to work.
       Once, I got to see Ferrer i Guàrdia there. There were about sixty-six schools like ours in all Catalonia,  and the headquarters in Barcelona sent teachers out into the hinterland  to visit these schools and  help keep their spirits up.
       One day Ferrer i Guàrdia himself came to Igualada. I have a vague image of him, as if I were seeing him from far away: a man of medium stature, with short-cropped hair and an affirmative look that implied self-assurance and the ability to command others.

I often think the social movement in Igualada and the degree to which it was connected with the one in Barcelona came through a certain Pere Font i Poc. I think about him and others like him, such as Trabal from Carme. It seems that Font was a mental giant, and morally he had a great reputation among the workers of the period, right around 1850, when they had to put in thirteen-hour days and they knew how to fight with courage. The ones who knew Pere Font described him as bearded, wearing glasses, and said that he expressed himself with a great deal of conviction.
       He operated out of the Friends' Center on Manresa Street in Igualada. There were a lot of organizations like that in Sabadell, Terrassa, Barcelona and everywhere. The truth is, they were really camouflaged anarchist meeting places, because back then if you just mentioned the word "anarchy" it was enough to land you in prison. Later these places became the Libertarian Athenaeums.
       Theater performances and lectures were held in them. They thrived on the workers who wanted to improve themselves, on federalists who were deceived by the Republic and the retreat it was forced to make. Out of this Center came many of the strongest and most useful men we had in our movement, such as Manuel Ars and Pere Marbà, both of them from Igualada, and both of them members of Paulí Pallàs's group.
       Paulí Pallàs was the one who threw the bomb at General Martínez Campos in 1893. He was the general who finished the job of burying the Republic by defeating, but not destroying Xic de la Barraqueta who, when the Alfonsine restoration came along, decided to continue the war all by himself against the Carlists and the new-born monarchy. Xic was defeated at the battle of Tibidabo. Even though he was able to break the enemy siege and escape, the back of the Republican resistance had been broken. But the popular masses in all of Spain were outraged. When it came to blows, they submitted to force, but they cursed in secret, they suffered in secret, and they didn't think like the country's leaders nor like the press.
       Pallàs the anarchist became the focus for all of Spain's restless non-conformity, for he wanted to avenge the assassination of a Republican. Since the one who had beat up on the Republic most crushingly was Martínez Campos, Pallàs threw the bomb at him, not to kill a man, but to destroy a system.
       But the bomb didn't touch the General and he remained standing where he was. Pallàs, in spite of that, didn't run away, but threw his cap up in the air and shouted "Long live anarchy!" They caught him, along with a whole bunch of friends of his like Marbà and Ars, even though Pallàs had acted alone. Marbà was a quiet man, convinced of the worth of the cause, and he didn't like going around to the cafs tipping tables over and raising hell. Ars, on the other hand, was more excitable, and at the police station he was heard to say: "If Pallàs didn't do it, then maybe I should have done it." They wound up shooting Paulí Pallàs, who, before he died shouted, "My revenge  will be terrible!"
    And it was. Several months later, in the Grand Liceu Theater of Barcelona, several bombs exploded while they were singing Verdi's William Tell. One of the explosions killed sixteen people and wounded many more, and then another bomb was thrown, but it landed in a lady's lap without exploding. The police threw themselves on Pallàs' group of friends immediately. Marbà was able to hide, and Ars, who hadn't even tried to escape, was imprisoned along with three other comrades, all of them accused of the attack. But that wasn't the way it really happened, because the real bomb-thrower had been Jaume Salvador, who, after throwing the bombs from the gallery seats above, cleared his way through the crowd at knife-point and took off for his home town of Graus.
       The authorities couldn't solve the riddle, even though they had six innocent prisoners locked up. They were tortured, but they steadfastly denied their guilt. The authorities wanted to make an example of them; they wanted blood. Manuel Ars, irate and indignant, paced back and forth in his cell before the guards and the judges saying, "What happened at the Liceu was not enough! What we need is a revolution!" Marbà, wearing a disguise, went to visit Ars in jail and told him, "Shut up you fool, don't talk that way!" Years later they told me Ars had put the noose around his own neck. They shot him, along with the other five. A short while later they captured Jaume Salvador in Graus.
       When they caught him he said, "Yes, it was me, and the ones you just shot didn't have a thing to do with it." He could have confessed before, the sunuvabitch, instead of hanging around the café in his hometown playing cards all day.
       That Jaume Salvador was very crafty, yessir. A Jesuit came to visit him in prison and said to him, "My son, you have done a terrible thing and you must reconcile yourself with God." And he kept on nodding his head yes, praying and demonstrating his new devotion. And when they were getting ready to garrotte him in the prison courtyard, there in Ronda Sant Pau in Barcelona, he raised his hand and said, "Look, I die satisfied, because I have been able to deceive the smartest people around, deceive everybody including the Jesuits. By lying to that priest—and he pointed to the Jesuit who stood nearby looking at him—they haven't tortured me and I was able to eat and drink my fill." Out on the street there were people who had climbed up into the trees to watch the event.
       Later there was the bomb at Canvis Nous Street, in 1896. A real savagery, that one: the Corpus Christi procession was passing through the old part of Barcelona, where there were some arches, and the bomb blew up right in front of the pall, and five or six people died and many more were injured, among them the soldiers who were carrying that pall.
       The military took over the investigation themselves, and they started arresting whole groups of people, a terrible repression all over Catalonia. In just the little village of Capellades, near Igualada, they picked up twenty-five internationalist anarchists. From my town they got a lot more: Joan Molas, built like a colossus and very much the practical joker who, once when he was serving as coronet player in the army, saw a dog as they were marching along, and he got up close to it and gave it a coronet blast in its ear. Then there was Carbonell and Riba, who later organized that strike when my mother got fired from the factory; Nogués, Alzina, Joan Mas and Tomàs Ascheri... a lot of them... Trabal, the one from Carme. All of them were taken up to Montjuïc and slapped into prison. They also picked up a bunch of well-known people like Teresa Claramunt and Joan Montseny, the father of Frederica Montseny. And our patriarch, Anselmo Lorenzo. And the writer Pere Corominas.
       One of the prisoners was Sebastià Sunyer. He was no intellectual, but still quite clever. He suffered the same torture as the others, such as getting salt for dinner and having a bottle of water hung high above him out of reach, and making him run until he fell exhausted. But they did even worse things to him: they cut off his testicles with a guitar string. I knew him. He died during the Civil War, and his voice had turned thin and feminine. He made a living at a private school he had started, and he invented new educational norms and gave lectures, without ever abandoning his anarchist views.
       With all that torture, they pulled false confessions from a lot of prisoners, but they weren't really able to clear up a whole lot. The trial was a piece of theater set up between Judge Marzo, an army type, Lieutenant Portas of the Civil Guard and Corporal Paco Botas, also of the Civil Guard. In order to extract the confessions they wanted, they shoved the prisoners into cells numbered Zero and One, which were the worst ones in Montjuïc, and the whole prison heard the cries of pain and panic from those being tortured.
       It was so bad that about twenty of the imprisoned militants wrote a petition for clemency, with the intention of taking it to the authorities. They went to Anselmo Lorenzo so that he would sign it too. Lorenzo grabbed a broom, dipped it in the latrine and smeared muck on the petition. Corominas himself, standing before the court-martial, caved in and declared that he had never been an anarchist and that they had mistaken him for one, just because he had given some lectures at the Roadworkers' Center. In moments like that, one has to be understanding of human weakness. But Teresa Claramunt got up and said, "Don't listen to him, that man is a coward. I'm not afraid of anything, and I say I'm an anarchist, just like all the rest. But he denies it because he's afraid they'll throw him into Zero Cell."
       Then they shot five of them. I've already mentioned their names: Ascheri, Molas, Alsina, Mas and Nogués. They suspected that Ascheri had some sort of secret relationship with the police, because, even though he suffered like the rest, he was put in a separate cell from them. It's a complicated question. Just like it was when, through Ascheri and by means of Ramon Santpau's book, the rumor circulated that it was a group of Italian anarchists who had set the bomb off.
       Santpau was a Republican intellectual who died of tuberculosis very young, had known what prison was like, and wrote a book about Montjuïc, titled Los Victimarios (The Executioner's Assistants), in which he limited himself to describing just the facts. But the book had a prologue—even though there were doubts as to its authenticity—attributed to the Austrian Max Nettlau, that extraordinary historian of anarchism—in which he spoke of some Italian anarchists who lived in Canvis Nous Street and who someone heard say "That's it!" after the bomb went off. Who can know for sure?
       Santpau was the same one who committed the outrage against that disgraceful Lieutenant Portas, in Catalunya Square, letting fly at him with a double-barreled shotgun, without killing him. They caught him and had a farce of a trial, ultimately setting him free: it was evident that Santpau had gone after Portas in order to do him justice. The fact that they set him free only serves as more proof of the guilt of all those judges and the military.
       The campaign against Black Spain, as they used to say back then, spread throughout Europe. The one who started it all was Tarrida del Màrmol, another intellectual who was also locked up in Montjuïc as an anarchist, son of a cobbler from Sitges. Since he knew English and other languages, when they freed him he left for Paris and London to spread the news of the barbarities going on in Barcelona.
       There were also protests in Madrid, and it was Joan Montseny, Roberto Castrovido and Alejandro Lerroux who were the most vociferous. Montseny was challenged to a sabre duel by an army officer, to whom he replied, "With rocks or clubs, wherever and whenever you like." The same answer was given by another Barcelona anarchist, Josep Canela, to the Civil Governor of Tenerife a year later when he was exiled to that island.
       Yet another officer challenged Lerroux to a duel, smacking him on the face and everything; but he kept his mouth shut. When he came to Barcelona, the working class received him with great affection, because of the way he had campaigned for their cause in Madrid. Of course, nobody suspected that brilliant demagogue had come to Catalonia, paid by Segismund Moret and backed by Canalejas, to tear the revolution apart and stir up the working class. What a hypocrite he was! He started out by recommending immediate barricades and the rape of all the nuns, "To elevate them to the category of mothers," he said. He railed against all privilege, writing a rousing article titled, "Rebels! Rebels!" It was all a strategy designed to oust the anarchists.
       The people, while they awaited the capture of the streets and society's riches, went to vote. But they had fallen asleep at the switch. The Lerroux revolution of "right now!" became "a little bit of revolution every day," which led him and his friends—who had already been elected City Council members—to raid the strong box in Barcelona City Hall. In 1910, Canalejas issued a death sentence for the sailor Sánchez Moya, who, enthused by the proclamation of the Republic, led the insurrection on the frigate Numancia, anchored in Lisbon harbor. Lerroux supported his secret protector with such shameless words as these, "If I were you, Mr. President of the Government, my hand would not tremble signing his death warrant."
       What Canalejas did to Sánchez Moya was to assassinate him in cold blood. What transcendental importance could there have been in a few sailors, contaminated by Portuguese republicanism, locking up a few of their officers in the brig and proclaiming the Spanish Republic? The rest of the monarchist fleet, which was also in Portuguese waters, subdued them in short order. Sánchez Moya was a poor dupe. And it won't work to say that occult forces required Canalejas to stick to his sentence: he could have resigned, just as Pi i Maragall and Salmerón did during the Republic, and for the same reason: they had both refused to sign death sentences.
       "Why? Why?" the people demanded to know, horrified when they found out about the attack that cost Canalejas his life. It's just that when people are faced with actions of that kind they are only used to considering the immediacy of the brutal act itself, and you can't be so short-sighted in such things.
       It's not that I'm trying to justify the outrage against his person. No, I consider that a sacrilege. Human beings are inviolable. Or at least they should be, because who really respects them? Neither the State nor the monied interests respect them. They extort all they can from the people. There are more crimes committed by them than by any justice-lover or terrorist among the people, take it whatever way you like. What Pardiñas wanted to achieve by killing Canalejas was not to remove the life from that body, but to remove that body from its position as an image of the State.
       All things considered, I think the Canalejas affair was a pity. He was quite a liberal man, without too many ingrained prejudices. He had condemned the injustice of the Montjuïc trials, and later as President of the Government, he corrected some of Maura's repressions of 1909 by declaring a general amnesty. And a few of the laws he proclaimed, even though they were not revolutionary by any means, still had their positive points.
       For example, there was the "padlock law," which somewhat limited the power of the Catholic Church in Spain. Or the law that required the sons of the rich—even though they paid fifteen hundred pesetas as an exemption quota—to serve a minimum of six months in the army. Before that, they didn't have to serve a single day. But the workers' sons weren't freed of anything: they still had to serve two or three years, and if necessary, go off to war. The Government had seriously outraged the Spanish proletariat, specifically the confederals, when the railroad workers struck the Madrid-Zaragoza-Alacant line in 1912. The Government maintained it was a national emergency and that those trains must run, and so they effectively shackled the rail workers by militarizing the lines. The workers lost everything they had struck for.
       At the same time, even though it was suspected that Pardiñas was one of ours, we didn't know him from Adam. He was a loner. He came here from America all alone. He didn't speak with anyone here, and with the same revolver he used on Canalejas, he shot himself and fell right beside the body of his victim. That happened at Puerta del Sol in Madrid, in front of a bookstore window. Canalejas, who was probably a cultured man, was looking at some books there.
       As for military service, I can't say too much, because as the son of a widow, I was initially exempted, even though I was supposed to have spent a certain amount of time in the barracks. But later I drew a high number in the lottery and was totally exempted. Even if I wasn't, they would never have caught up with me. I knew the Pyrenees well, and I would have escaped to France before ever accepting a rifle from them—a rifle that would have been used only to protect the State of the privileged few.
       Angiolillo was able to explain our position very well during his trial for the assassination of Cánovas del Castillo at the Santa Agueda Spa the North. Angiolillo, an Italian anarchist, was a sensitive, intelligent man and stated, "I acted alone; no one from here or abroad had helped or encouraged me. I am aware of what I have done and I await the sentence of this court." Of course, Cánovas was the kingpin in the restoration of the monarchy, with all its implicitly negative effects on the workers. He had tolerated the insulting conduct of Judge Marzo, Lieutenant Portas and Corporal Botas.
       Cánovas had persecuted the free press until he finally destroyed it. However, it's not at all clear why he allowed one little island of freedom to survive: La Federación Igualadina, which was printed in my town around 1883, and was at the time the only really worker- oriented publication in all Spain. In one of its issues there was an article which stated, "Forty years ago in Igualada the first workers' group was organized to resist capitalism." From 1883 then, that takes us back to 1843. And in one of Jep de Jespus' books, A Half Century of Life in Igualada, one of the authors, Serra Costansó—who later went to Barcelona and contributed to La Campana de Gràcia—stated that there was labor strife with the weavers before 1850. Thanks to men like Pere Font i Poc, we were one of the pioneers in the revindication of our freedom.
       In the decade of the 1840's there were manufacturers in Igualada who were already tired of the labor conflicts and the petty jealousies among themselves. So they moved their operations to other towns, like the Muntadas brothers, who set up their factory, which they called La España Industrial, in Sants. But it didn't do them any good. There was an assassination plot, and one of the brothers was killed. Another industry of that period, Industrial Cotonera, when it was just about to open its doors with five hundred new looms, suddenly burned to the ground. The arsonists had left a note that read:

         But a few years later, according to Serra Costansó in A Half Century of Life in Igualada, part of the mystery was discovered: it was the night watchman who had set the fire, and he confessed to it on his death bed, without saying who had induced him to do it.
       The question is, was it instigated by the workers or by one of the other manufacturers, jealous of the increased production mechanization had brought? The bourgeois manufacturers of Igualada were a wretched lot, and incredibly stupid. They were capable of anything. In 1854, the train from Barcelona to the North was supposed to pass through town. Well, our illustrious bourgeoisie opposed it ferociously, without giving any reasons. They preferred to continue transporting their bolts of cloth to Barcelona on horse-drawn wagons over sixty-eight kilometers of miserable roads. On the other hand, the manufacturers of Terrassa, Sabadell and Manresa demonstrated their interest in the project, and so the train was re-routed to pass through their cities, even though it had to make a detour of thirty-six kilometers.
       That narrow-minded attitude was personified by the Godós of Igualada, who became the caciques, or bosses, of the town through the power they derived from their very large textile factory. For years and years they were the most hated of all bosses, and that came about as a result of the very hard strike of 1854. The workers wanted a few pennies more a day and schools for their children. But there was no way they could achieve these objectives while the main resistance continued to come from Godó. It was then decided that a representative group of workers should go to negotiate with Godó, who was also the head of the Federation of Industrialists. Fourteen or fifteen delegates marched to Godó's house, with a large group of comrades shouting encouragement from the street. They came to the door, and the maid tried to stop them from entering. Then Mrs. Godó shouted, "Get those deadbeats out of here! They don't belong here!" Then Godó himself appeared. That's when the lady really got furious and threw herself at the delegates with her claws drawn. The one closest to her, seeing that he was about to be attacked by that fury, pushed her back, and maybe he did scratch her up a bit. The point is, the Godós accused the delegate of a blood crime; twelve of them were imprisoned, tried, found guilty and given sentences of two years, two months and a day, plus fines of one hundred pesetas each.
       One of the group, who was quite young, was left in the Igualada jail, but the others were taken away and never heard from again. It was obvious that Godó had said, "I never want to see them again." Where were they taken? What happened to them? There was speculation that they were killed and stuffed into one of the tunnels of the Canal d' Urgell near Cuestas de Contreras, between Valencia and Cuenca, which was under construction at the time using prison labor.
       In my time, old man Godó was a deputy and his son was the mayor of the town. I and many others often wound up in prison because of him. The old man wanted to settle everything with sabre slashes from mounted Civil Guards. For a long time I knew the names of the workers who had disappeared. The only ones I can remember now are Bag, Llagumet, Gabarró.... Their families were left destitute.
       During the last century, I don't believe the textile manufacturers in Igualada had a professional organization. The thing that united them was mutual connivance, and they easily agreed on labor issues, in spite of their business rivalries. However, the bourgeois bosses of the tanning trade had formed a professional group, The Brotherhood of Sant Antoni de Pàdua, which was linked to the Church, and was really an anti-worker organization advised by the local priest. For us it was very clear that the bourgeoisie, the Church and the Government formed a unified front against us.
       There have always been exceptions, though. I remember very well the case of the carriage maker Sabat, who wasn't afraid of anybody, from Federal troops on up. When the Rationalist School was founded, he gave us the desks as a gift. When the Republicans withdrew their support for the school, he helped pay the teacher's salary. Sabat sent his own workers to join the CNT, and he passed out copies of The Great Revolution by Kropotkin and Man and the Earth by Elisée Reclus. He granted the eight-hour shift to his workers before they ever asked him for it, and he advised them to organize their own union, in order to get all the workers in that industry organized. "If the others don't organize along with you, I'll have to sell more carriages than they do just to survive," he said.
       But a man like that can't prosper materially, and Sabat's money disappeared as fast as he could make it. When he died, one of his own workers whom he had sent to the CNT, bought the shop and put the squeeze on his former fellow-workers as much as he could.
   

I started to work in a textile factory which had about seventy workers, and they put me to work in the cotton dyeing section. There must have been twenty-five of us kids who worked there, and they paid us according to how tall we were: since I was quite tall, in spite of being only eleven, they paid me six pesetas a week, or one peseta a day for eleven hours of work. The shortest kids only got four pesetas; the middle-sized kids got five.
       But that place was a den of corruption, and I don't mean it in a sexual sense—which wasn't the case because the boys were separated from the girls—but in the sense of character degeneration and the fact that we were being consumed by every disease there was. I was scandalized when I saw a fourteen-year-old girl swearing like a trooper, and more so when we answered her with the same indecency and bravado. On top of that, little kids were abused by the bigger ones, and there was constant fighting.... I told my mother I didn't want to go back to that factory, but she answered me, "Oh yes you will, my little man; go back and you'll see how you'll get used to it and soon get over it."
       There wasn't any way out of it. We needed the money. And she was right: I got used to the work, which until then I had only seen from a distance; I adapted to the daily slavery from Monday to Saturday; and I turned into the same kind of little beast the rest of them were. Otherwise they would have eaten me alive. In anguish I thought of the school I had had to abandon, and the free time to play which was no more. Every night I would return home tired out and would look at the wooden sword and the toy top I used to play with, abandoned there in the corner. I felt exploited and suffocated, and I began to harangue my companions at work, confused and excited harangues which they sometimes understood and sometimes didn't.
       The wife of the bourgeois owner was a very Catholic lady. When we walked by her house she would often appear on the balcony. Then one of the boys would push another, and that one would shout "sunuvabitch!" or "balls!" or "I shit on God!" She would take note of who had said it and ask him to come up. In order to regenerate our lost souls, she set up a little chapel in the factory, with one of those plaster saints inside, and we used it for target practice, throwing our greasiest rags at it.
       On Sundays, we and a group of neighbor families would get together and go on picnics. Or in the evening, after supper, a bunch of us boys would gather at any one of the many fountains around town: Can Cansalda, Can Macià, Can Massana. Or we would go to the cinema, which was very cheap, and we would watch phantasmagorical films.
       I remember one that was very popular and scary too. It was called "Gang of Bandits." It was French, and in the fight scenes at least fifty gendarmes and sixty bandits died every time. But the leader, who was the smartest and the worst-behaved, was always caught alive, and then they guillotined him and the audience applauded with enthusiasm.
       But that cinema had one grave defect: it was silent. They would explain the film by rolling long scrolls of words on the screen, which everybody read aloud; it was total chaos. One fellow, whose name was Tarregada, would sing out the general meaning of the film, seated between four musicians. It sounded like he was reciting The Crime of Cuenca: "And now the traitor is spying! Don't trust him!" And you'd get goose-pimples all over. It was sort of naive entertainment, but at the time it was new and attractive. First they just had slides, something like the magic lantern shows, and afterwards they made the natural-looking films, with real landscapes.
       The ones I really liked very much were the kind that Max Linder made. Even though they were humorous, it wasn't that kind of humor where they break chairs and mirrors and splatter each other's faces with pies and cakes, but it was something more elevated. He was the aristocrat of humor. I remember in one of his films where a person, desperately in love, had no other solution to his problem than to hang himself. So he went and bought a rope. And they gave him a rubber rope. He headed for a tree. But the forest guard saw him and ran to warn the town. He was the classical French town cop, with the big moustaches, the sabre and the two-cornered Napoleon hat. He went and shouted for the mayor, who cried out for the others, so the whole town knew. In the meantime, the desperate lover went on with his interminable preparations...he could have hung himself ten times by then. Well, everybody came running to the tree, he put the noose around his neck, and instead of swinging, he bounced to the ground on that rubber rope.
       In those days, the sick and the old folks died in squalor. Under the constant drain of sixty-six-hour weeks, their health deteriorated fast. The most common sickness was tuberculosis, which was impossible to cure. A consumptive under normally fatiguing conditions could last twenty years, but a factory consumptive lost the flesh from his bones, turned yellow, and you could see death coming nearer day by day. If he had a family, they would help him along to the end, and he would die at home. Tuberculosis was everybody's terror, and you could say that in a textile factory there were usually about twenty percent who died from it.
       The worst situation, however, was when you could no longer work and didn't have anybody to take care of you. There were no laws protecting you from anything. The only thing we had were health societies and neighborhood societies, where you paid a few coins a month. But a worker who was already hard up for money couldn't even afford that much, so he would have to quit the society, which meant he would lose all he had put into it up till then. Or you got old and the same thing happened. You didn't have enough money to pay the monthly dues. So you'd have to go begging.
       I remember the bunch of beggars in Igualada. And I don't mean they were professionals, but just old or sick folks with no other solution, as well as some simple-minded fellows who had never found out how to make a living. There must have been about fifty in that bunch, and they knew what they had to do every day. On Mondays, they would go to the houses of the rich. There must have been about two hundred tannery owners in town: one had five working for him, another had seven, another ten, and the biggest had about thirty. But they were all well-off and had bank accounts. Yes, what you'd call rich. After them came the investors, the retailers, the textile factory owners.... In order to earn passage to Heaven, they would give five centimes to a beggar every week. Or a five-centime piece to two poor beggars at a time, which provoked furious battles when it was time to divide up the day's take. I remember one in that bunch, blind and strong as a bull. When he heard all that din and racket, he would raise his stick and start flailing it around to left and right. The rich also gave them crusts of bread.
       Our relationship with the sons of the bourgeois was nothing special. We were used to seeing them all our lives. In spite of that, we walked on one side of the street and they walked on the other. In a town where everybody knew everybody else, the attitude was to mutually ignore each other. When we were little kids, you could see that they wanted to be with us and play with us, because they saw us jumping and rolling around enjoying ourselves, while they had to go around in their prissy, stiffly-pressed suits. But after we were fifteen or sixteen, it was different: then they would go to their stores, their offices, or their factories, walking together without paying any attention to us or ever looking us in the eye. We paid them back with the same coin.
       I didn't go to church very much. At home I noticed that the women went to mass and mumbled their Our Fathers. But it always seemed to me an artificial, unreal thing. When they spoke to you about God, I saw right off that it was a thing that you couldn't argue, but had to accept exactly as they presented it to you. And from the times they managed to drag me into church, and made me listen to that priest's sermons, I deduced one thing: those people make you believe. And if they have to make you, that means they are afraid you might think.
       As for the idea of God, this was my childhood concept of him: until they could show him to me in person, I wouldn't believe in him. If the imprint of God can be found in the good things, then there ought to be some trace of it in the bad things as well. And if it is a good divinity, it should fix the squalor we suffer at our house, especially when there's an abundance in other people's houses. Those of us who lived with the day-to-day worry over the endless problems of survival we had to face, felt just a little skeptical about all those divine preachings. What is enigmatic about the silence of the dead is found in the natural cycle we observe in other warm-blooded species and in the flow of plant sap. In the rationalist school, they gave us scientific explanations for all these phenomena. The theologians feed on the fear of ignorant, imbecilic people. And since the silence of the dead is eternal, the more or less transcendental and capricious vagaries of the cultivators of the myth could also seem eternal.
       I believe that God was created by man, and the proof is that he is always presented to us through intermediaries and professionals in the art of religious belief. In the time of the dinosaurs and other antediluvian races, God didn't show himself, nor has he since, and everything goes along according to the caprice of Nature or the mood of man. And if the animals don't have souls and we do, that discrimination makes you lose the sense of equilibrium inherent in the idea of God. If the parrot, the crocodile or the red mullet had invented a god, it wouldn't be the one with the white beard, nor the one bled dry from nail holes in his hands; instead it would be something with scales or multi-colored feathers on it. By despising such elegant birds as the swallow, the intermediary priests invented those strange animals that are half-person, half-bird: the angels.
       My generation had a powerful argument to combat those attacks of ignorance. When we were little kids, in order to make us mind, the grown-ups would scare us with stories of witches and ghosts. There were dark corners at home, and when I had to go by one of them, I would break into a run until I got to the light again. Surrounded by light, I considered myself saved. They would tell you about the flying witch on a broom-stick and about the boogie-man. It was all a universe of uncertain shadows, and fear came to you out of its own vague darkness. But all of a sudden the cinema became popular, which in reality is a constant recreation of shadows. The cinema discredited the whole history of witchery and ghosts, and in time it was even able to speak. And then, once the ghosts of the shadowy imagination were cast out by the films, it was quite easy to apply the same system to the spectral priests, which you only knew through their rhetoric and the colored pictures of saints they showed you.
       In time, my mother got to be a well-paid worker. Even though the factories were almost completely mechanized, there were still retailers with crazy clients who wanted hand- made goods, so they still had to hand-weave those pieces the old-fashioned way. And my mother knew how to do it: she knew how to make the bobbins, which is the rolled-up thread they put on the shuttle; the molletaire, which puts the skein on the spool. She knew how to set up the warp and how to weave. She was a little encyclopedia of everything they used to do in textiles. Then they put her on salary, and she and another man ran that department. She earned fifteen pesetas a week. The other women, those who did piece-work, earned ten or twelve.
       Now I'll explain the work that became my specialty through the years. I picked up the raw hides, I softened them up, burned the hair off with lime, then pulled it out, scraped the flesh off down to the leather so there was only leather left, which I then had to tan. It was a slow, orderly process, because if you tried to tan a hide in a hurry, using strong stuff, it would "come" too soon, as they used to say: it would be tanned on the outside, but raw on the inside. That was called the Moroccan, or fine leather process, from the times when the Moors lived in Spain, and it made a fine shoe sole, the kind that lasted a good long while.
       It was hard work too, because there were operations like the tanning, generally done with pine bark, that burned and caused your eyes to itch a lot. Then you had to make the leather fine and supple. Once it was dry, you spread it out on a bench and it looked like a fossilized animal, as tough and resistant as it was. You had to rub it to make it flat: round it out, thin it down, throw water on it to get the color out, file it.... If you had never done that work before, you would leave your fingers there on the work-bench, in shreds. And you always wound up bent over, sweating blood. In time, the mechanical rollers saved me from that slavery.
       Some of us boys who had gone to the rationalist school formed a libertarian group, and we camouflaged it under cover of a society devoted to playing bezique, drinking coffee and dancing the polka. We called it the Old Choir. The only thing a little special about it was that we did have a modest choir. Even though we felt like foreigners in those café surroundings, we organized the "science table" as they called it, where we didn't play cards like the others, but drank orgéat and discussed a lot of things.
       At the beginning, when the others saw that we looked different from them, they thought we were queer. But when they saw that during the strikes we lit into the opposition with our fists—and not lightly—and when they saw that the police didn't catch us because we were still new at it and they didn't know us, then the others began to respect us. The members of the Old Choir were brick-layers, cart-drivers, tanners, hot-blooded people who got excited when they drank, and wanted to show off their physical prowess. And so, when they noticed our fights with the scabs, they joined in, so they could lay on the punches with us... especially some of them, who didn't have a cent to play bezique.
       In that way, without their noticing it, we would get them talking about the unions, the labor struggle, and anarchism. And they would timidly read Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom), which was published on Cadena Street in Barcelona, and Acción Libertaria (Libertarian Action), from Gijón. I'm referring to the year 1912, or maybe '14. It's not that we were running things all that well by then, but we had an iron will and we were enlightened.
       One of the group, Joan Llucià, had extraordinary abilities. He was the one who was always in the vanguard, because he had memorized all the pamphlets of Malatesta, which were really dialogs between "peasants." Some of the titles in the series were, "In the Café" and "Our Program." Llucià knew the questions and all the arguments that the opposition might present, as well as the libertarian answers. Then we would go into a café or walk down the Rambles, mixing in with people who were having a discussion. We would interrupt them with the story of anarchism, and right away they would square off against us. I also used to read, but all I got from it was the spirit of the piece; I could never remember the words. I would tremble when they attacked our point of view. But not Llucià: Malatesta speaking through him intimidated everyone.
       My generation had to start everything practically from scratch, due to the years of inactivity at the end of the century. But toward 1900, we received an unexpected injection of energy in Igualada: thirty or forty soldiers who had just been discharged from the army in Africa came back converted to anarchism. Sometimes things like that happen in life. And the old folks advised us and passed on the memory of the past: Frederic Carbonell and old man Marbà.
       Marbà, the friend of Paulí Pallàs, lived in Barcelona and only came back to Igualada for the town festival days. It was then, walking around town, that we talked. The poor fellow ended his days in very bad shape, because he had a son who could have been a great leader and wrote very powerfully, but he died in 1915 when he was twenty from a typhus epidemic. Even Anselmo Lorenzo, before he died, said, "I have the hope that Frederic Fructidor will take up where I leave off."
       I joined the CNT in 1911. It had been founded the year before, at the Fine Arts Theater in Barcelona. By the time I joined up, they had already closed the CNT down. This is what happened: in 1911, the UGT, or General Union of Workers, founded in 1888, had started a strike in Bilbao and they were about to lose it. The people in that mining area, even though they belonged to the UGT, were real fighters. The UGT, seeing that they were about finished, demanded solidarity from the rest of the workers. And so the CNT joined them in everything and declared a general strike. But Lerroux, who still had some influence in certain labor sectors in Barcelona, started a campaign against the strikers in his newspaper El Progreso, with the help of his lieutenant Emiliano Iglesias. Since they were agents provocateurs of the Government, they managed to get half the strikers back to work. Then the Government closed down the CNT, leaving the UGT to go on about its business. It's always been the same: the UGT definitely responded to the political interests of the socialists, and we wound up being the antipolitical parliament.
       Since the organization was closed down, we had to pay our dues in secret. But that didn't matter, because my enthusiasm was enormous. In my trade, the first thing I really came to love was my union card. I learned how to do my job well, but that was secondary. A little later, when they allowed the union halls to open again, they chose me as a member of the council...for me that was an extraordinary honor.
       It wasn't that we were specifically anarchists, because our true devotion was to the union struggle. The real anarchists, for example, were those who formed the FAI later on. In practice, we leaned more toward syndicalism. But our ideology, our training, all that we aspired to be was an egalitarian society guided by anarchist philosophy. The National Confederation of Workers, the CNT, was in reality anarcho-syndicalist.
       Nor did we want the pure-bred syndicalists. They lacked perspective, and almost without noticing it, they were capable of slipping into political activity, because there were also "political" factions in the unions. They were the ones who listened to the professional politicians when they said, "Even though the election is a hypocrisy, it's the lesser evil, so let's go vote." But that kind of talk weakened and distracted the workers' movement, because instead o f fighting for their objectives and for real changes in society, they wound up in the reformist movement and the traditional snares of parliament and the city councils. We had to struggle valiantly in order to overcome that vice. And examples were the most convincing argument: let the rest of them see that it was our group that squared off against the scabs, our group that went to prison, that carried on the battle against religion, that would go and sit with a sick fellow-worker. We preached by example and out of sympathy for our comrades and our cause.
       We not only attracted a lot of workers, but our influence even reached the bourgeoisie. I noticed that, because some of them would approach me in secret. I remember the most luxurious dry-goods store in Igualada, where they even sold percale shirts. I remember one day the owner came to me and said, "I'm from a family that used to be anarchists; we were internationalists. But now, since all the bourgeoisie comes to trade at my store, I don't dare say a thing. Anyway, if you have a problem, if you need money for the prisoners, come see me through the back door and you'll find me ready to help you." Later, the barber told me the same thing. When he had customers in his shop, he would talk about anything and everything. But when I was alone with him, he would say, "Don't spread it around, but I'm one with you fellows and I'll help any way I can." Barbers are good psychologists.
       There was even a factory owner who wanted me to come and work for him because he enjoyed his discussions with me. But not those stupid arguments where they'd tell you, "If I give you twenty-five thousand pesetas, will you still be an anarchist?" The man I'm referring to was restless and curious, willing to discuss social issues without trying to knife you in the back. When I left him he was genuinely hurt.
       Another similar factory owner was Albareda, a brick maker, who also had a tannery. He spread the word about anarchy among his own class as well as among the buyers of his shoe-leather. And he did it through Jules Verne. Verne was in essence an anarchist. In his novels, which were really adventures, those who went to discover the Arctic and all that were very proud men. Well, a bad fate always awaited them. On the other hand, the ones who were out to do a job of disinterested research always shone forth in his books. And very often he would create a character who was an anarchist, without saying so, and since society is proud and voracious, he would sacrifice that character. Before he is done in, however, he is given a chance to expound his constructive comments on the evils of society. He also created characters who abandoned our world, overly-organized and corrupt, and threw themselves into the sea, into virgin territories, where they built a new society and even invented a new language. His flag was the black flag. One of his constants was to curse gold.
       I've only read Jules Verne in fragments. But that bourgeois knew the works by heart. Furthermore, as a youth he had been part of the struggle in Barcelona. One day he told me, "I can't do what you're doing, but I covertly pass the word around about our doctrine. And Verne is just as good as Bakunin."
       Even though I was a good worker, I didn't stay long at any one job. I think I worked for more than fifty different bosses, without putting down roots in any one of the shops. In that way, I began to lose my liking for my work, and I worked more out of obligation, and I had to watch out I didn't become lazy. The reason for that was my militancy, my attitude. It wasn't that I behaved irascibly, or that the bosses boycotted me. But at seventeen or eighteen, you can't stand anything around you, sometimes not even your parents, and I rebelled against any little injustice I saw. If a worker bowed even a little more than usual when a boss treated him badly, I would jump to his defense. Then they would fire me, while the guy I had stood up for usually kept his job. And if they called me on the carpet in an inconsiderate way, I would throw my apron on the bench and leave without so much as a by-your-leave.
       If they wanted to make us work a lot without stopping for a break, which left us exhausted at the end of the day, then I would organize work slow-downs. If we had let those people walk all over us, they would have squeezed the last drop of blood out of us. In 1898 there was a strike for the "right to clock time." That was when the boss made you work until he said "O.K., that's enough for today," and it really hurt him to say it. We won that right. On the other hand, in 1900, we lost the strike over the "right to the union card." The bosses didn't want the workers to join the unions, and the twenty-seven-week strike didn't do us any good at all. We had to return to work, and even though we didn't have to hand over our union cards, we had to tear them up right in front of the boss in order to get back into the factory. Of course, afterwards we went to the union hall and got new ones. In 1906, we had the strike for the nine-hour day. We had been working ten. We won a half-hour reduction, with the other half the following year. It was never-ending.
       But in spite of my activities, when I left one factory, it was never hard for me to find work in another. Often the bourgeois would count his money first and then count his moral scruples later. "Let'em sweat," they thought, and closed their eyes to my inflammatory remarks. Maybe it took me a couple of months to find a new job, but since there were about two hundred tannery shops, and during high season the demand for leather was strong, I always got work at one or another shop. However, in the course of time their hate for me overcame their own selfish interests and there were general reprisals: nobody would hire me.
       But that was in 1920, when I was already living with Elvira. I found a simple solution to the problem: I loaded up a rucksack with food and aluminum pots and pans and went off as a peddler through the little villages and to the farmhouses in the district. We made out all right.
       We're still in 1911, right in the middle of my enthusiasm as a new CNT activist. Another surprising item contributed to my fate: when I was a member of the council, I found that one day we had to send a letter to the committee in Barcelona. They said, "Better go get Saparó, so he can write the letter." There in the council nobody, not even the secretary, was able to write anything, but Josep Ramon Saparó was an educated comrade who had read a lot, who wrote articles and who took part in propaganda meetings, even outside Igualada. If he hadn't been so lazy, he could have gone on to the university. When I heard that they were going to get him, I became indignant and said, "What do you mean, Saparó isn't even a member of the council!" "Well, let's see, who's going to write it then?" they asked. "I will," I said. "You?" "Yes, me." "Aw, come on!" And then the secretary said, "Maybe he could. This kid has been to school."
       So they let me write the letter. My handwriting was very round and clear, almost beautiful, even though my taste wasn't very well-developed then. I showed them the finished letter, and they sat there looking at it with their mouths agape. From that day on, in my union as well as in the others, they came to me to write their statutes and their letters. I spent hours and hours on those jobs, and I was happy, even though I got dog-tired doing all that work.
       Now when I think of my daring that first time, I ask myself how I could have been so impudent. It must have been a combination of my inexperience and my enthusiasm for the cause. It was the fire of youth.

When the revolution of 1909 broke out, I was working in a textile factory and I was still a young lad; I must have been about thirteen. Since I was full of ideas, that revolt awoke a lot of positive feelings in me. On the other hand, the feeling was pretty wide-spread, because the people hated their Government's militarism very much, and with reason.
       The consequences of the Cuban War were still being felt, where a lot of Spanish sons had died, and others had returned ill with the fever, turning more and more yellow until they died. The cripples couldn't go back to work and had to beg for alms. The Government had abandoned them. They had lost the war and then they lost their rights as veterans.
       The atmosphere was terrible. And still worse was the shame of having to fill the ranks for all those sons of the rich, who were exempted from service at each troop call-up, by simply paying their fifteen hundred peseta exemption fee. Those who got a high lottery number in the drawing were also exempted, so the sons of the poor wound up filling both those ranks.
       And then the Moroccan War began. By that time I was reading the newspapers, like El Nuevo Mundo and El Mundo Gráfico, plus some that came from Madrid, like El País. The conservative papers from Barcelona commented on the heroism of the Spanish Army and the evil of the Moroccans. "The sons of the workers have to fix that mess," they said, but the people refused to hear of it.
       They sent several battalions and when they saw how badly it was going, they called up the reservists, a good part of whom had married and even had children by then. And that's what provoked the revolution, especially in Barcelona. The married girls accompanied their husbands to the waiting ships, down the Rambla to the port, with their young children in their arms. There are photographs of that scene. Those poor boys were dragged down there against their instincts. And the mothers of the troops said, "Let the mine owners go to the Rif to defend their property, because we don't own a thing down there!" There was a rumor that the mining shares were owned by Romanones, by the Jesuits, by some Germans and by the Güell family. The Güell family was always mixed up in everything.
       Once they got to the port, the officers wouldn't give the troops rifles, for fear that they might be used against themselves. And that's what would have happened, because the people were shouting, "Don't go! Don't go!" It must have been around the twenty-fifth of July. Then the Ladies of Charity came aboard to hand out scapularies and little medals to protect the troops from bullets. The soldiers threw them all overboard and called the ladies whores. And their own wives shouted to them from shore, "Jump into the water! Escape! It doesn't matter if someone drowns, because you'll die over there anyway!"
       The Civil Guards formed a wall in front of the people. The coronet sounded three times, the last being the signal to shoot; that's the order they had. The women, when they heard that, threw themselves against the Guards. There were wounded women and wounded Guards everywhere, and someone had killed a Civil Guard lieutenant. It was a reaction out of desperation. And it grew by the minute: the stevedores joined the fracas, then the people from the Fifth District, from Poble Nou, Sant Andreu; everybody joined in. They said that in a little over an hour Barcelona was filled with barricades, as if a fuse had been lit. And there you have your revolution....
       We in Igualada knew what was going on. The mood was the same all over Catalonia: in Sabadell and in Sant Feliu de Guixols they even burned churches. In Igualada we thought about doing that too, and some of us got hold of rifles, but didn't use them. The measure of our discontent focused on the monastery. The townspeople laid siege to it without daring to assault it, because there were Carlists holed up in there with the monks, neither of whom was very meek.
       The revolution of 1909 broke out first in Catalonia and then spread to the rest of Spain. The General Strike spread throughout Spain; in Madrid women lay across the train tracks so the trains couldn't run. Then Juan de la Cierva stepped forward and convinced the towns in Castile that what was going on in Barcelona and Sabadell was really a separatist revolt. Look, it was as if he had waved a magic wand: the General Strike came to an end and Catalonia was left completely isolated. And Lerroux's supporters went into hiding.
        The mob in Barcelona attacked the barracks of the Volunteers For Liberty, where arms from the last century were stored, since it was mostly used as a museum then. But the weapons still worked, and they grabbed them, along with ammunition. The Civil Guard wasn't even able to enter Hospital Street. The city was boiling; it was an eruption of the people and all Catalonia looked on approvingly. Afterward, when you read in the papers that the historians said it was started by a bunch of hotheads and professional agitators, you could only conclude they were lying. If all of Spain had followed the movement, the monarchy would have fallen then, and that was almost certainly why the Moroccan war ended, because after the uprising they didn't send any more troops over there.
       The real reason for the explosive outbursts of 1909 was the people's anti-militarism, in spite of what the reactionaries said. That's the way it was seen by the international community too, because in 1912, when the Italians set foot in Tripoli, the anarchists from Ancona, with Malatesta in the vanguard, organized an anti-militarist revolution similar to the one in Barcelona to stop the soldiers from disembarking.
       Maura carried out the repression himself personally. Antoni Maura was just like a confessed Jesuit to us. I don't know to what point he was controlled by that brotherhood, but he represented the worst of the right. A comrade of ours, Miquel Artal, during a trip he made to Barcelona in 1907, tried to stab Maura without any luck, because they said he was wearing a cuirasse under his coat. I can't prove that, but Artal got sick in prison and died soon after, while Maura was taken care of by the best doctors available at the time.
       Maura was very unpopular in Catalonia; the fact that he was a Mallorcan, which is almost like being a Catalan, didn't do him any good at all. He was one of the supporters of the regime who had sent many men to their death in the flower of their youth in the Phillipines and Cuba, who had ordered the poet Rizal killed, and sentenced the anarchists in Montjuïc. Surely it was the greatest mistake of his life when revenge led him to the exaggerated repression of 1909. He absurdly ordered a porter from Sant Andreu to be shot; then a poor, simple-minded eighteen-year-old boy, who was reported by a neighbor for dancing in Hospital Street with a mummified cadaver taken from a convent; then Malet, accused of church-burning and of manning the barricades; and then a security guard, who was at home in the Fifth District, for shooting at the Civil Guards....
       All those shootings were in preparation for the firing squad set up for Ferrer i Guàrdia, who was innocent, but whom the Jesuits wanted to destroy. Maura, as the civilian mask of the Order of Saint Ignacio, was the one charged with doing the deed.
       One of the pieces of "evidence" that they used against Ferrer was that he had been seen manning the barricades. That was absolutely false. It was really Francesc Miranda, step-son of Anselmo Lorenzo, a very determined man who knew the prisons inside out, who made speeches about anarchy and rationalism in a strident voice and who got mixed up in all the brawls he could. I remember him perfectly well as a great optimist. In July of 1909, he went around from street to street building barricades and firing up people to defend them. He wore a light beige suit and a straw boater. Just like Ferrer i Guàrdia, whom they called "Quico from Alella" in his home town, and who always went around dressed in the latest fashions from Paris. The spies that worked for Social Defense made him out to be Miranda himself. From 1910 to 1918, he was the best popularizer we ever had of books from the Modern School. In 1912, when the Republican Manuel Posa Roca fired some not very accurate shots at Maura in the Estació de França in Barcelona, the people were long since tired of singing a song all around town that praised Ferrer i Guàrdia and threatened Maura. The verdict of the people had been given: the President of the Government most highly esteemed by Alfonso XIII dared not set foot in Barcelona, because the people abhorred him, and the revolutionaries hated him to the death. Lucky for him he died in bed and his funeral was sumptuous.
       The king always appeared to be a dolt. What happened was he received the brunt of the Republican anti-monarchist propaganda attacks. They were fighting the monarchist tradition through him, even though he was the one who signed the death sentences of the five who went to the firing squad in 1909. In 1896, his mother, Queen Mara Cristina, had done something similar. The people understood that if that family were assassinated, made to disappear, then the way would be clear for the restoration of the Republic, which could only improve their condition. It wasn't as if anybody wished them physical harm. Rafael Sancho Alegre, one of our brothers from Barcelona, said the very same thing when he was on trial.
       That was in 1913. Rafael had gone to Madrid, to a military parade. And when Alfonso XIII, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, appeared on horseback, Rafael Sancho jumped out from behind the ranks of soldiers, stood before the king and fired. The same thing happened when Paulí Pallàs shot Martínez Campos, and the king reacted the same way the general did: he turned his horse toward the anarchist. Sancho Alegre killed the horse, but didn't touch the king.
       He explained himself very clearly before the court: Alfonso XIII was guilty of the Moroccan War, of a repeat of the same in 1911, and of the firing squads in 1909. He stood as the symbol of all that, and Sancho couldn't bear the thought that all those deaths, felt so deeply by the people, should remain unavenged. He wasn't concerned with a citizen named Alfonso de Bourbon, but with the person who represented the State.
       It was a great defense. They didn't dare execute him. Of course they had killed Paulí Pallàs for just the same insignificant crime as he had committed, namely, killing a horse. In any case, Rafael Sancho Alegre was sent to prison from 1913 to 1931. I ran into him again in Marseilles in 1941, when I shared the clothes of exile with him.
       Alfonso XIII was lucky, like Maura. If Serrano's song Sometime the Moors are Going to Win, had happened to Cánovas and Canalejas, what happened to the king and his esteemed president was a disaster. In Paris in 1906, they had attempted to assassinate him, and as usual, Alfonso came out of it unharmed.
       This type of act was seen as typically anarchist, but since an international libertarian movement flourished in Paris at the time, the police didn't know where to turn. They trapped Dr. Vallina—who had published some excellent diaries—and another Spanish companion of his, as well as an Englishman and Carles Malato. But at the trial nothing was proven against them, so they were all set free.
       The following year, Alfonso XIII married that young girl whose name was Victoria Eugenia, and this time it was another anarchist, my friend Mateu Morral, who threw a bomb at them. He threw a bouquet of flowers at the couple, with two bombs in it. It killed other people, but the king wasn't even touched.
       We always thought kindly of Morral when he was around us, before and after the assassination attempt. Everyone felt it was a pity the king should have survived while Morral lost his life. What happened was that Mateu Morral escaped from his boarding house, from where he threw the bouquet at the royal couple, and I think he even shaved off his beard. He hid out in the Casa de Campo; the press had published a supposed likeness of him, and there among the pine trees a security guard saw him and suspected him, and told him "Come with me, and if you turn out not to be Morral, they'll let you go again." Mateu Morral killed the guard then committed suicide.
       The story of that young man was indeed unique. Morral was the son of the wealthiest factory owner in Sabadell. Up to the time when I had to leave Catalonia at the end of the civil war, the house of Morral still stood on the Rambles in Sabadell. I found out a lot about Morral from a friend of mine, who was also from Sabadell, but older than I, and who died in exile in Montevideo. Rosell was his name, and he was a former teacher at the Modernist School, and had gone to school with Morral as a kid. Rosell told me this story: "I attended a working-class school, where we paid very little, and there was no reason why Mateu Morral, from the richest family in Sabadell, should have gone to school with poor people. We shared the same school desk. I always brought my lunch in a little tin lunch pail, just like the ones all the kids used at the time. But Morral never brought any lunch to school, so I shared mine with him. He was under his mother's curse.
       "His mother was an unimaginative woman. From the time he was very young, Mateu had a little herpes sore on his face, and because of that he always wore a beard as a grown-up. Anyway, his mother got it into her head that because of the sore he wasn't her son, that a Gypsy had switched her real son for him at birth, and that's why she loathed him. His father, however, felt quite the opposite.
       "His mother devoted all her affection to Mateu's brother. As Mateu grew up, he began to study textile engineering, and his father sent him off to study in Germany. He came back from Germany an anarchist. I don't know who he was in contact with there, but at the time two of our greatest revolutionary thinkers, Max Nettlau and Rudolf Rocker were in Germany. He must have been influenced by the company he kept. Mateu Morral was a torn personality, predisposed to separate himself from society as it was structured at the time "He returned to Sabadell as an anarchist, and his mother only loathed him the more for it. Everybody was talking about the shocking ideas of the heir to the House of Morral. And when the workers in his father's factory demanded improvements in working conditions, Mateu became their representative, riding roughshod over his father. `You're wrong! ...Do you want to ruin the family?' Old Man Morral would ask him. `You're the one who's ruining all of them, and they're the ones who are doing all the work for you!' shot back his son. Since there was no way they could get along, Mateu finally left.
       "He worked with Ferrer i Guàrdia as a teacher at the Modernist School in Bailén Street in Barcelona. Later, in a moment of inspiration, he made his statement at the king's wedding."
       When those who are alert in the working class see that a son of the rich despises his upbringing and deserts to them, they admire him greatly, much more than if someone from the working class had done the reverse. And that's why the case of Mateu Morral is almost a question of love for us. The enemy has tried to distort his memory with a pack of lies, but has never been able to tarnish the high regard we have always had for him. They have called him an assassin and many other things, but for us he will always be a great figure.
       In Igualada, the revolution of 1909 brought with it other consequences. Those rifles that were used to lay siege to the monastery were mostly shotguns that had been collected— you could even say requisitioned—from the farmers' militia, the majority of them from the outlying area around Odena.
       Once the revolution was over, a military unit arrived in the area to determine whether any repression of the natives was necessary. It was an isolated area, with a train that only reached Igualada, so that whatever happened in one village always had repercussions in the others. The little cacique in Odena, whose name was Roca, and the big cacique God said that during the revolution there had been a lot of confusion and requisitioning of arms and that the instigators were a group of farmers from Odena.
       That was a lie, and furthermore nothing had come of it. But the thing is, in that town the Republicans usually won the elections, and so the caciques had to go to the Provincial Government and make them void the election results three times with the excuse of whatever irregularities they could think of, so that in the end, after the fourth round and a lot of trickery, the little cacique Roca could win. I never got very caught up in those election results, in fact they made me laugh. But what they were doing was abusive. So they took advantage of the military unit's presence to denounce and get rid of the Republicans who were causing them all the trouble.
       They arrested twenty-five farmers. I remember as if it were yesterday, how they tied them all together and marched them down the center of the column of troops. They locked them up in the Igualada jail. Roca and God tried to get the court to shoot them all, and if not that, then have them all banished from the area for the rest of their lives. In the end, they only had to spend six months in prison.
       It was a pleasure to see that prison full of visitors who came and went, chatting with and giving moral support to those farmers. They didn't need much material support, because each of them had their own farm with a full pantry. Their wives visited the prison every day, brought them food and kept their spirits up. The prisoners didn't give in, nor did they let fear beat them down. In fact, they shouted revolutionary slogans from the prison windows to the crowds gathered outside. The result was that by the time they were freed, caciquism in Odena had been brought to an end, because by then everybody openly defied Roca.
       And there was even some poetic justice in it all. Those farmers were used to living in the free and fragrant air of the countryside, among the rosemary, thyme, rue and all the other herbs around there, where nature is wild and very masculine. If you walk along those lanes at dawn, you are almost overcome by the heavy perfume of the wild herbs from the fields all around. The wine they make with the grapes from those fields is the best there is.
       Those farmers felt stifled, locked up in those damp, stinking prison cells that hadn't even had a good whitewashing in at least twenty years. So one day they said to their wives, "Bring us herbs and grasses from the fields!" From then on, the women came every day loaded down with sheaves of sweet herbs, in baskets and sacks. It was as if they were carrying an arch of triumph. They spread the grasses around in the cells and their men were overjoyed at finding themselves awash again in the fruity perfumes of their fields.

The most prestigious man we had in the Confederation was Anselmo Lorenzo. He died in Barcelona in 1914, and one of his last jobs was to make a résumé and an almanac for each year of the magazine Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom).
       Since all of us militants used the informal tu (you) when talking to each other, one day I wrote a letter to Lorenzo saying, "Comrade Lorenzo, I'm enclosing these poems for you to include in the almanac." I don't remember exactly what they said, but I do remember what they meant. They were about a family with seven children whose mother had tuberculosis and whose father bemoaned his fate after they threw him in prison. The eldest son was also in prison for killing a scab, and two or three of the daughters had become prostitutes. The poem ended with this line, "You, the proletariat, faced with this situation: long live the revolution!"
       Lorenzo, who was a punctual man, soon answered me with this, "Look boy, don't write in verse, but try to learn prose instead, and when you're better prepared, start sending me a few short pieces for the newspaper. With the years you have before you, there will be plenty of time for poetry." My obsession was my poetry writing, and when he criticized that, he struck me a hard blow. But I still managed to derive some good from the situation. When I got back together with my friends—I was seventeen and they were about the same age—I said to them, "The Old Man wrote to me," because that's what we called him. "Lorenzo? Lorenzo wrote to you?" "Yes," I answered. I never showed them the letter. They admired me a lot for a few weeks.
       The old patriarch seemed like a grandfather to us. He was born in Toledo in 1841. He wrote in a smooth, natural way, never in a complicated style. He gave advice without it seeming to be so. He was a sagacious man, and had offered his services to the organization. Physically he looked the part of a wise old man: of average height, with white hair and beard.
       On one occasion I decided to go and listen to him speak, and so a friend and I set out for Barcelona. That was sixty-eight kilometers from Igualada, and sometimes we made it on foot and at other times half by foot and half by train. This trip we did half and half, walking until we got tired. If you walked the whole way, it took about eighteen hours and put a lot of blisters on your feet. Sometimes, by the time you got to Molins de Rei you would drop from utter exhaustion, with your feet a pair of open sores. That was alright in the summer, because we were in shape from all the hiking we did. But in the winter, and out of shape, it was a horrible trip.
       Anselmo Lorenzo gave his lecture at the Soriano Theater, which later became the Victoria. The title of the lecture was "Towards Emancipation," a printed copy of which they sold at the door to help him economically. He stood up there on the stage with his beard and glasses, reading in his high-pitched voice, and when he turned the page of the pamphlet, you could hear seven hundred pages turn in the audience seated before him. On another occasion I talked to him in Barcelona, at the Workers' Center on Ponent Street. He liked writing better than he did speaking, because whatever he wrote made the rounds in the form of a pamphlet. He always wrote and spoke in Spanish, although shortly before he died he wrote an article in Catalan, which I later printed while in exile in our magazine Terra Lliure.
       Lorenzo had been a printer, but he never had any formal schooling in that trade. He printed magazines such as Ciencia Social (Social Science). Faced with the bourgeois organization Solidaridad Catalana (Catalan Solidarity), he invented our watchword, Solidaridad Obrera (Worker Solidarity), and was instrumental in converting the weekly paper Solidaridad Obrera into a daily. Vida anarquista (Anarchist Life) and a Biography of Justo Vives are two of his books, and The Militant Proletariat, in two volumes, is his most important work, because it contains the recollections of his life and ideas, the formation of the International in Spain and everything that marked the birth of workers' organizations in the 1880's. Once the International was broken up, he devoted his energies to the resurrection of the Spanish Regional Workers' Federation, with good results, especially in Andalusia, Valencia and Catalonia. Lorenzo spread the ideas of anarchism throughout the peninsula, including Portugal. Lorenzo knew Fanelli, Marx and Engels; he was a friend of Bakunin. At the beginning he had even worked with Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law....
       After the revolution of September 1868, one day another of our founders, Morago, told Lorenzo and some others in Madrid, "I want to tell you some news that fills me with satisfaction: they have come here to found the International." Neither Lorenzo nor the others knew what that was, or at the very outside had only the foggiest idea of what it was. "It's about organizing civilized workers in order to destroy the exploitation of the capitalists," he told them. And so they went to see the representative from the International, Fanelli.
       He was a tall man with a black beard and a vivacious personality. And there in that meeting the miracle occurred that Lorenzo explained in The Militant Proletariat: "The strange thing was that Fanelli didn't know how to speak Spanish, so he sometimes spoke in French, which some of us half-way understood, or in Italian, which we only understood a little by analogy with Spanish, and some of us more than others. But in spite of the language problem, we were able to identify not only with his thoughts, but thanks to his ability to mimic expressively, we came to feel possessed by his great enthusiasm."
       Giuseppe Fanelli was the one who introduced Bakuninism into Spain, since he not only spoke about the International, but also spoke a lot about the Alliance for Social Democracy, which was Bakunin's group. Marx wanted to dominate everything, and so he wrote letters and articles against Bakunin, trying to defame him. Bakunin defended the federalist idea of the workers' movement, with the central council playing only a consultant's role, with total autonomy for everybody. He stayed away from pacts with the parliamentary politicians, all the while working from the sidelines of bourgeois society. Marx was an ambitious but very dissatisfied man, with a lust for power, and he imposed an authoritarian central command and enforced participation in the political game.
       Lorenzo had his eyes opened in London, when he went as the Spanish delegate to the International Conference. He showed up at Marx's house, where he was received with little kisses on the forehead, Marx speaking to him in Spanish about Calderón, Cervantes and all that. Young Lorenzo drooled with pleasure. Later Marx introduced him to his daughters, who were very beautiful and impressed him a lot. He said that "their ideal beauty was incomprehensible to me, since I had never seen similar feminine beauty before."
       But later, in the meetings, Marx revealed himself as he really was, and Lorenzo, every time he recalled it, said it was one of the saddest things he had ever seen in his life. He later wrote, "One can be sure that all the substance of that Conference was reduced to the affirmation of the predominance of one man, Karl Marx, over whom another person not present, Miguel Bakunin, was supposedly trying to gain control. To carry out his plan, Marx made a series of charges against Bakunin and the Alliance for Social Democracy, supported by documents, declarations and facts, the truth of which no one there present could be convinced of."
       Lorenzo became very upset with all Marx's hypocrisy, and wrote to Bakunin, who answered him, clearing up each and every one of the calumnies Marx had tried to bury him with. Afterward, Marx sent his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who spoke Spanish very well, since his mother was Latin American. Lorenzo was still in doubt. Then there was the mess with the daily paper The Emancipation, used by Pablo Iglesias, a marxist, and Morago's paper, El Condenado, which supported Bakunin. A fight raged between the two papers, resulting in a victory for the anarchists after the Congress of Zaragoza in 1872. And that's what opened the struggle between us and the communists, a fight that has never ended since.
       At the same time, our movement began concentrating in Barcelona, while the socialists remained strong in Madrid. That division has also continued to this day. In 1881, the FTRE, or Federation of Workers of Spain was created in Barcelona. It was already an anarchist organization, although they acted cautiously and never openly said so. The CNT, or National Confederation of Workers, was also founded in our city, in 1910, at the Palace of Fine Arts. I always believed that meeting place was offered to us by Josep Prat, who was the son of the concierge at the Palace, and who was one of the best theoreticians we had. He escaped to Argentina during the Canovist repression of '96, where he founded the weekly La Protesta Humana, which in time became La Protesta, the traditional voice of Latin American anarchism. He was a well-documented polemicist, whose pamphlet La política juzgada por los políticos, or Politics Judged by the Politicians, fought those people with their own words. Many of his books were published by Sempere Press in Valencia, such as Demolishing Chronicles and The Bourgeois and the Proletariat.
       He was the first of us who grasped the totalitarian direction of the Russian revolution. The winters were ruinous to his health, and he wound up spending them in bed, where he continued to write. A mutual friend, Herrero, told me about it. He died, probably of cancer, at the beginning of the Republic.
       Apart from the loss of Lorenzo, other things were not going well. In December of 1882, that terrible story of the Black Hand had already started. An agent sent by Sagasta's government held some incendiary rallies in Jerez de la Frontera saying, "If they don't shoot us, we'll be dead of hunger tomorrow." There was so much miserable poverty down there: a worker earned five reales a week; the cacique went to the villages and picked who he wanted to work by pointing, "this one yes, that one no." And when the government found out there were people working for emancipation, they sent the agent in.
       One of those arrested warned, "Watch out for that fellow, he's a slippery one." And the people said, "What the hell do we have to watch out for? Nothing! Do we have to wait forever?" And then they started the social revolution by taking over Jerez de la Frontera. All the farmers and day laborers were unarmed, with the exception of a few blunderbusses and sickles, and they fell into the trap. There were mass arrests and the undercover agents of the police claimed that everything was directed and controlled by the Black Hand, a secret society whose leaders were in Barcelona and Geneva. They tortured and beat the detainees, and "discovered" the statutes of the society under a rock in a field. It was all a farce, but a hundred workers were packed off to prison and seven of them were garrotted in the public square in Jerez.
       Of the thirty thousand members in the Federation of Andalusia, only a couple of thousand remained. People were afraid, and you have to understand that. The labor unions that had started up in Andalusia were closed down. Those setbacks have always cost us a terrible price, but they have never beaten us. And the UGT, or General Union of Workers, which seemed dead to us, began to take on form, send down roots and gain strength. I used to have a whole lot of documents dealing with the time our movement was in full flower. I had even collected the records of the Congress of 1882-83 and maybe even the one of 1884. They were like small pamphlets printed on pink paper. But once, when our syndicate was going through some very harsh times, the concierge sold off all the paper he could find in the office to the ragman. Well, that was the end of that....
       During the times when we were being killed off by government repression, those fellows in the UGT used a very different tactic from ours. We anarchists believed in direct action, which drew the fury of the authorities and the repulsion of the bourgeoisie. The UGT, on the other hand, practiced passive action, what they called "the multiple base." They created a series of social savings banks, whose monies were set aside to cover strikes, illness, forced unemployment and, when you died, payment for your coffin, the funeral and even the niche in the cemetery. Later they started cooperatives, the equivalent of creating some pretty fictitious entities, because it was a question of trying to realize some kind of return every year, though it never was very much.
       What happened was the workers were always hard up for cash, so they joined those mutual societies, which were like a safety net. When some workers affiliated with a Workers' Resistance Society wanted to strike when faced with the provocations of the bourgeoisie, the leaders of the Society, socialists all, told them, "Don't strike, because we don't have enough in the strike fund." If they were miners who didn't want to go down in the mines because the support beams were weak and dangerous, they were told by the Society leaders, "Don't go on strike yet, because there's only enough money to last two weeks." And worse still, "If we lose the strike, we'll be left without the improvements we're fighting for, and there won't be a red cent left in the strike fund."
       Our answer was, "That's stupid. If you manage to save up enough money to resist just six months—and tell me how you're going to even manage that, with the wretched jobs you've got—the bourgeoisie, which is infinitely richer, can endure a strike that is much, much longer."
       What the socialists were trying to do was focus worker attention on the elections: "Vote for this representative, because he favors the workers." The same thing happened in the Provincial elections, then in the Congressional elections in Madrid, "Vote for the socialist candidates because they will provide work and social legislation, the eight-hour day, old age and disability insurance." But if they didn't want to strike, how did they think they were going to square off and face the whole Spanish bourgeois class from the floor of Parliament? They always stretched things out, what with their "long-term programs," which appeared to be reasonable, but which left the present moment unresolved, left all the moments unresolved, for years and years.
       We were just the opposite. When we had to, we shouted, "hit the streets! Then we'll see what happens!" And if we won, the power of that union became quite considerable, and it made the bourgeoisie and the weaker workers—the ones who were afraid of street riots and prison—respect us. The general strike of the metallurgy sector in Catalonia in 1902 represented the recapture of our power, even though it might be lost again, because, in general the mechanics had been weak, or hadn't known how to bring the thing off, apart from the fact that the owners in that sector, drawn together by the Mateu family, were invariably very tough customers.
       It was a difficult strike, with bloody clashes against the scabs and charges against the strikers by the Civil Guard. Ramon Casas painted a picture of the Guards at full gallop against the people. And Ferrer i Guàrdia, who had made money in France, started up a daily paper called The General Strike. He always signed his articles with the pseudonym zero.
       That brought on a bomb-throwing campaign, directed by some shadowy figure whose identity has never been cleared up. That was the Rull case. We thought it was a manipulation designed to discredit the workers' movement. The Catalanists thought it was the Government in Madrid who didn't want Barcelona to grow any larger. The only sure thing was that Rull was right in the middle of it all, tossing bombs all over the place: into public urinals, into newspaper kiosks, into the entryways of homes.... He did it with the help of his mother, who went around town with a wicker shopping basket with the bomb hidden inside, covered with a kerchief. Then she would deposit the basket wherever he told her to, and the first one to arrive there got blown up. That went on from the year 1903 until well into 1905, and in the beginning, people ran to hide when they heard the explosion, but then reappeared to see what had happened. The public gets used to anything.
       The Barcelona police couldn't, or wouldn't catch the bomber. So they brought in an English detective named Mister Arrow, who investigated and asked questions until he began to follow that devilish old lady and finally uncovered Rull as the perpetrator. But they never did find out who was behind Rull; that remained obscure and unresolved. But Rull was garrotted for it.
       A story about Salvador Seguí, the Sugar Boy, is appropriate here. It's a depressing story that tormented him to the end of his life. He didn't lose any sleep over it, but it annoyed him, like a thorn constantly pricking his conscience. Often when we had to pass judgment on someone, when you would claim or say that it was like this or that, Sugar Boy would always interrupt, shouting, "No! No! Let's reconsider," and went on to explain Rull's story.
       When he was very young, Seguí got together with Rull and some anarchist friends and formed a little group they called "The Whoresons." They would wander into the bars and cafés around Theater Arch in the Chinese Quarter of Barcelona, which was full of insolent, cheeky types, real low-life, and tell them "We're the Whoresons, let's see who wants to take us on...." They would brawl with anyone who even looked at them funny. They often held that against Sugar Boy, as if he were guilty of some major sin. But boys will be boys, and Sugar Boy later became a thoughtful, well-read person in history, a man who had risen above his circumstances. It didn't matter that he had been one of the Whoresons.
       Rull left the group about the time of the bombings, and it seems he turned into a police snitch. When they locked him up, they corralled a lot of other anarchists as well. Salvador Seguí, who had a big mouth, was one of the first they arrested. They hauled him before the judge and threw false questions at him concerning the bombings. Sugar Boy answered that yes, he was interested in revolutionary action, but not in killing innocent people with street bombings. Then he told them to stop bothering him.
       Then the judge asked him "What about Rull? He has revolutionary ideas just like you, and you see where it got him..." Then Seguí started to bad-mouth Rull, "If he threw those bombs, then he's a vile, despicable person. Rull would do anything for money." He went on damning him thoroughly, until they opened a curtain and saw Rull sitting there. He looked hard at Sugar Boy and said, "the same to you, Seguí, the same to you...."
       "Dammit! Even if a man's a real animal, I'll never bad-mouth him again! I'll never forget that scene for the rest of my life!" exclaimed Sugar Boy when he told me the story.
       Even though our movement was initially called internationalist, Bakunin had already defined it as anarchist. It's a pity Anselmo Lorenzo never made it clear whether Bakunin had visited Barcelona or not. I haven't re-read The Militant Proletariat for many years now, and I can't recall exactly what it said about that. Or even if it's mentioned in there. In our circles, however, it's always been said that Bakunin was in Barcelona around 1840, and they'll even show you a small hotel on Escudellers Street, behind Theater Square where the monument to Pitarra stands, where they claim he stayed. It's the same hotel where Einstein stayed for a few days when he was in Barcelona, and where he almost joined us. Maybe the stories about Bakunin are only wishful thinking.

One of the real achievements of the Igualada proletariat was the construction of a meeting hall of their own. The one we had before was called the Workers' Federation, located in a rented building. The bourgeoisie tried to close down the workers' societies with the help of the Civil Governor of Barcelona, without success—I'm talking about the year 1910. So then they put pressure on the owner of our meeting hall to evict us and make sure we couldn't find another place to rent.
       Anyway, it was a pretty poorly laid-out place, with only two rooms big enough for meetings. The tanners were the ones who paid most of the rent, because there were a little over six hundred of us. During our most activist times, there were over a thousand of us. The other unions also met there. When they threw us out, we didn't know where to go.
       But if you're a fighter, you don't let yourself get beaten. So we went out and leased a piece of land with the option to buy it when we had enough money. Then we all set to work on it, each according to his talents. We dug a foundation that ran two hundred forty feet on each side. If there was a strike on, or if some of us couldn't find work even during the grape harvest or on the Canadiense line being built to bring electricity from the Pyrenees to Barcelona, then we worked as masons on our building. During the good times we contributed money toward it. And that bourgeois Jules Verne gave us some money we used to buv the wood for the doors and windows.
       The moment arrived when we had everything finished but the roof, and there under the stars, Salvador Seguí gave lectures.
       Since the Workers Federation had over five thousand members, the building committee set about collecting enough to pay off the land, which we did. And we added on to the building too! raising another wing with room for two secretaries and two more unions, as well as living quarters for the concierge we hired. Later we bought another piece of land, which extended our holdings right to the edge of town. We planted plane trees and roses and fenced the land off, so when the good weather came, we could hold our meetings in the open air, among the flowers.
       Our meeting hall was admired by the whole union movement in Catalonia and in the rest of Spain. They copied us. I remember they wrote us from a little town near Seville. It was called Dos Hermanas, and they wanted to know the story of how we had done it. We answered them saying, "If you have the will, you'll have your hall. But if you try to build it by paying wages to those who work on it, you won't succeed." The unions from Mataró came to see us, and since they were rich because there is a lot of industry there, they got their meeting hall in no time. I think those from Vilafranca, who had fewer members, had to abandon their project.
       We had everything so well set up that we even had a little room with a heater for those who were cold. And if there ever was a room we lavished all our love on, it was the library. It wasn't very big because there weren't that many of us who were studious anyway, but it had a set of bookshelves with books on them and a large varnished oval table.
       There was a little bit of everything to read. I was one of the most avid readers, and if I were to tell you what I liked you could guess the kind of books we bought. From the time I was a boy, literature was what attracted me the most, especially the liberal novels. I read a lot of Galdós and Blasco Ibáñez  He wrote a book called The Cathedral, where there's an anarchist who's the brother of a canon priest or something like that, and he says beautiful and daring things. Coming from a man like Blasco, who was a hard-core bourgeois, that was pretty good.
       Then there was Baroja, and Don Quijote, which were unavoidable. I even read La Celestina, but nothing else from the Castilian classics. On the other hand, we devoured foreign literature, especially from the French translated into Spanish. I suppose that's because Barcelona has always seemed closer to Paris than to Madrid. I read almost all of Emile Zola: The Tavern, the trilogy London, Paris and Lourdes.... And I read almost everything there was to read in Catalan. There was Pompeu Gener, Eduard Auls, Puig i Ferrater. The latter was a member of our union, as well as Pere Corominas. A lot of the ideas I absorbed at the time I got from their writings. "The New Novel" was a very interesting collection. At that time there were a lot of short novels published in Catalan. As for great, eternal works, I remember Solitude, by Víctor Català, and The Wild Ravines by Raimon Casellas. As you read them, it seemed as if you were breathing deep in the forest, as if the characters were just some more little wild animals dotting the countryside those authors described. Víctor Català and Casellas not only knew how to portray the instinctual nature of people, but they were also cleverly placed in urban contexts.
       I also attended quite a bit of Catalan theater, because it was put on largely by theater groups from the towns: Rusiñol, Guimerà, Ignasi Iglésias. Even though they hadn't taught us the language in school, since we spoke it every day we assimilated it in a hurry when we saw it written. And keep in mind that since this went on before Pompeu Fabra had reformed the language, every author wrote and spelled the way he saw fit. But the essence was still the same.
       One thing that happened in our movement was that the comrades who came from Castile or other regions where they didn't speak Catalan came up with the idea that Castilian was the norm for the whole country, and so in order for us all to understand each other, we should all speak "Spanish," as they called it. But a large group of us Catalan anarchists had worked hard to promote our own language and culture, without loving any the less the literature and thought from Castile. If the CNT intellectuals expressed themselves mostly in Castilian it's because most of them came from all over the peninsula and from Latin America.
       There have even been anarchist magazines published in Catalan. There was La Tramuntana, which first appeared in the last century and has continued to be published in this one, containing articles by comrades like Josep Llunes, an authentic intellectual force, and Màrius Aguilar, a great Valencian journalist who worked in Barcelona. And Josep Mas Gomeri, who was the editor of the Catalan dailies Avenir and a humor sheet that tried to imitate The Cowbell on the Balcony, called En Titella. Then there was the poet from Aragón, Joan Usón, who wrote very funny verses in our language, which he had studied thoroughly.
       On the staff at Avenir there was Alban Rosell, Rossetti and Felip Cortiella, the most distinguished of them all. He lived a long life and left a solid literary work, as well as having fought with us in the rank and file. His soliloquy, The Tears of Dawn, his book of poems Anarquines and so many other works show him to be a well-rounded author. Anyway, there are very few like him today. If he had been an activist in a political party, he would be talked about today, but because he was an anarchist, he was chucked into oblivion. He also translated works such as Mirabeau's The Bad Shepherds, which premiered in the Parallel theaters starring Rojas, a well-known comic of the time, who was also a CNT member.
       Once, while I was attending the Modern School, an essay contest in Catalan was announced in all the village schools. Our teacher helped prepare us to enter the contest. He liked Catalan and he intuitively set some poems to music and we sang them. Even though our knowledge was rudimentary, we made the extra effort just because they were written in Catalan.
       But when the group of priests who had organized the contest found out, they prohibited us from competing, saying, "Those kids will make poetry from the Devil in Catalan." What they were afraid of was the freedom with which we expressed ourselves, while their pupils sounded like phonographs. Furthermore, they wanted to get back at us. I have already mentioned the specific anarchist authors in our library: Kropotkin, Proudhon, Malatesta, Reclus, Prat, Bakunin....
       Strong support for our new meeting hall came unexpectedly from the female factory workers. Before the revolution of 1909, there had been attempts to organize them, but none succeeded. The women went directly home from work, and they talked among themselves, but it seems they didn't want to have anything to do with the proletarian struggle. Afterwards, in 1913, when they were striking for the eleven-hour day, we decided to recruit them again.
       The movement had spread all over Catalonia, and they wanted us to join their strike. But we still didn't have that union organized. "If you want help, we'll come over and knock some heads together," came the word from Barcelona. "No, man, if that's all we needed, there are plenty of us here to do it. The problem is, those women are stubborn," we answered. And then I had an idea: get the women workers to come to one of our meetings to talk. I proposed it and we went to Barcelona to get them.
       It was Maria Prat who lit the fire under the Igualada women. She came, along with Dolores Iglesias, Puig and the indispensable Sugar Boy. Maria wore her hair like my mother's, gathered up in a bun, or topknot, as they called it. She described the misery in the factories very well, the dirty tricks, the abuse from the bosses, everything. When she finished, the women stampeded up front for their union cards. We ran out of cards and had to order more from the printer.
       A manufacturing union was formed with two thousand seven hundred members, most of them women who defended their rights like lions. They dared stand up to the floor supers, went to the office, everything. The men who worked with them became more cautious, as if they had become the women.
       Soon another general factory strike came along, in which the workers demanded a lot of things and won very few. Six weeks later they returned to work with an important victory for the women: the English week. That is, they got Saturday afternoon off. Until then they actually worked one more day than the men, because on Sunday they had to do the housework: the cleaning, the washing, and the clothes mending. That way, with an afternoon off, they were much more rested. The women's situation had gone on for centuries; it was the tradition. It was just the accepted thing that a woman went to work from the time she had a bit of strength until she was old and useless, without stopping even a single day to rest. Finally she was left destitute and had to go begging, or she was put in an asylum. It was tragic.
       But the bourgeoisie in and around Igualada got so angry at us they decided to mount a counter-attack, and in 1914 they provoked a conflict in one of their factories. It was called Cal Mero and employed about a hundred women. They were told by the bosses: "Saturday afternoons you have to work!"
       We called a meeting immediately. There was a person in town you gave a penny to and he went around town with a trumpet calling out the people. The women refused to accept the conditions at Cal Mero. So Old Man Mero threw them out on the street and locked the factory.
       We decided to support them and supply them their wages, whatever it cost and however long it took. Then all the bourgeois factory owners declared a lockout.
       An inspector, a good man, came from the Institute of Social Reform. But the factory owners masked what they had done by explaining to the inspector that everybody had to work three thousand hours a year, and when the first of May came around, the working class still owed them eight hours. The result was we continued the strike and they continued the lockout.
       Then the women started doing some exemplary things: they took turns guarding the factories so that scabs couldn't get in, and then organized a spectacular and effective system of mutual aid. Instead of giving money to the needy families, they bought sacks of flour, which a baker kneaded and baked for free, along with chick peas, lentils, rice and beans. We had everything we needed at the union, and it was sheer pleasure smelling those halls filled with the aroma of fresh baked bread. There were about fifty women who distributed to the people what they needed. We felt like brothers. And each Monday morning the whistles blew in vain at the factories, for nobody paid any attention to the owners when they said, "If you get rid of your union cards, you can come back to work."
       Until they finally had to say, "O.k., come back to work without giving up anything." And they went back to all the factories except Cal Mero; he still insisted on their working Saturday afternoons. His workers were soon absorbed by the other factories, and that man, who was absolutely evil, had to close down his factory and transfer the work to another town. That victory really strengthened the union.
       The women had another problem: there were floor supers and managers who, if they couldn't make the young girls do what they wanted sexually, made their lives miserable a thousand times over. When we heard about that, we called all the women workers over to the union hall and asked them if it was true. And if they answered, "Yes, it's true. Because we don't want to give in to his vices he treats us horribly," we demanded his removal. If not, a masked man would catch him in the still of the night and beat him up so badly he had to spend the next two weeks in bed.
       The factories were not only guarded against scabs. There was also the question of piece work, which allowed the worker to make more, but it excited the greed in him and led him to make superhuman efforts that prejudiced his fellow-workers. The union, on the other hand, supported rational work under contract. If it was discovered that in such-and-such a factory somebody was working secretly to ten or eleven at night, we went to see him, and did whatever was necessary to avoid any more of that, especially among the tanners.
       A little group of workers—I was often one of them—would stroll down the Rambla in the evening. Up and down we'd go, stopping for a coffee, breathing fresh air, chatting with the girls....
       Then we would suddenly disappear down at the lower end of town, where the irrigation ditch ran and the tanneries stretched out all along it. They were usually old buildings, with their windows either broken or steamed over, propped up with arches so that the walls could support the weight of the water from the ditch. There were no houses, and beyond the factories only open fields and gardens lay. That whole area gave off an air of desolation, of defeat, especially after dark.
       We would approach a factory cautiously, looking to see which window gave off a feeble light. You could see the shadow of the worker, working away. We waited. You could hear the machinery go quiet when he turned it off, and from then on you could guess every movement he made: now he's washing his hands, now he's changing his work-clothes to leave, now he'll turn off the light. He turned it off. Now the rusty gate creaked. A low, shrill whistle was heard....
       We had divided up into two groups. The man appeared, looking fearfully in all directions.
       And you thought, "Will he come my way or will he head toward the other group?" Finally he went off in the other direction. The ones in that group pulled knit ski masks over their heads...and guess who got beat up? Or who got thrown into the irrigation ditch.... The problem with the scabs was a continuous sbuggle. Even though some of them learned their lesson, there were always others. It's hard to believe that there are people who would betray their ideals for ten cents.
       The active participation of the women put more spirit in the union movement than the mere struggle for workers' rights. Up to that time, at least in the villages, they had always insisted on the separation of the sexes. I remember having seen photos of a factory strike at the end of the nineteenth century. There is one photo showing a multitude of people, about two thousand women standing, listening to their president, who is speaking to them from a chair. They are all wearing lace mantillas and long skirts. On the other side of the photo a group of men are holding their meeting, but separately.
       That prejudice against mixing the sexes was a religious thing, with its roots in ancestral church powers. They separated the people by sex at mass, then harangued them with sermons telling them how bad it was to sleep with each other. It got to the point where if a woman were seen walking with three or four men, she was looked at with raised eyebrows. Concepts such as companionship, neighborliness and friendship were overlooked or avoided, were not understood.
       Many a man, if he knew that a girl had been laughing and walking with male friends, would rub her elbow and whisper provocative words to her when he passed by.
       Men are often animals in that sense. Their bestial instincts get the best of them and they don't respect the woman as a person. If a man thinks a woman is loose, then it's impossible for him to ever see her in the subtle light of love. He only wants to possess her brutishly. He holds her in low esteem. On the other hand, if he's in love with her, he minds her like a puppy. Man either makes a woman submit, or submits to her. And the worker who complains that the cacique or the boss treats him like an inferior being, trying to enslave him is unable to understand that what he does to his woman is the same thing. The more unfortunate she appears to him, the more inconsiderately he treats her.
       At the beginning of the massive enrollment of women in the union, you could still see the women seated up front in the meetings, with the men sitting separately in the back. But the more they met, the friendlier they became, and that barrier began to disappear and they mixed as one group.
       Sometimes that separatist mentality reached ridiculous extremes. At the time, a lot of amateur theater was being produced, which had probably had its beginnings at the catholic centers, where they had imposed the rule that only men could acts so that female roles were played by men dressed as women—or by transvestites, who usually did a better job of it. It was scandalous. We also had our amateur theater group, and in it were some brave young women who wanted to go on stage. Watching them play their female roles was a fantastic novelty for us. I suppose these merits are not exclusive to the anarchists. Times were changing, and in Barcelona it was already different. A new, more open society was emerging through change, and it promoted broader participation. Make no mistake about it, in that and in many other things we were always in the vanguard of progress. Soon we introduced mixed hiking on holidays, which was another success.
       The Porvenir Athenaeum, which in reality was a libertarian athenaeum, was the catalyst for all that. There wasn't any separation between boys and girls there. In spite of the sexual attraction, the men respected the women. We played very forthright games, we danced holding each other without overdoing it; desire was surely very present, but a morality derived from a sense of brotherhood established egalitarian norms for getting along together. And if things got out of hand with some of the more excitable temperaments, whether male or female, it never became a situation of complete shamelessness. At least I never saw it.
       Of course, if a couple loved each other beyond the normal Sunday meetings, they could be united without having to go through the church. It wasn't easy, though. A girl who separated from her husband or companion in Barcelona could remake her life through a new relationship, but in the villages that was all but impossible. Even though free love existed, it was very difficult to get to sleep with a woman outside of marriage. There was the natural way, by freely living together, or there was civil marriage, which was more common, because that way the woman got a sort of guarantee, a social contract.
       And even that was an aberration, seen from the ideological point of view. But in a world still immature and egotistical, it was necessary to compromise so that the woman, who gave so much happiness to her man, could feel protected. Women have had so many enemies....

We knew the idea of the eight-hour day had come from Chicago, from the year 1886, when they hung a few anarchists as the result of a strike. Four of them were German immigrants. In Germany there weren't many of us, but when there have been, they have always been very intelligent.
       The eight-hour day was our romantic goal. We struggled and fought for the eleven-hour day, for the ten-hour day, but what we were really shooting for was the eight-hour limit...always struggling for that elusive goal, way out there in the distance, even though we might never get it. So in 1915, in the leather sector, we took a shot at our eight-hour goal with a lot of enthusiasm. And without scabs: no one was going to betray us on the road to a dream we had yearned for so long. Every day the striking workers would come by the union hall to sign in or to put their inky fingerprint on paper. Eight hundred testimonials a day. And whenever a bourgeois boss—there were usually fifteen or twenty of them who accepted our grievances right away—said yes to our conditions, he also went by the union hall and signed, and then we let his workers return, which meant his factory could begin work the next day. We won terrain little by little by calculating or understanding the bourgeois boss, and through our own stubbornness.
       Of course, some problems always came up. Like the time when we tricked some Civil Guards so they walked into a hole full of shit. And then there was the bourgeois who got some scabs to work at night, outsiders who either wanted or needed the money, and who came by the hall during the day to sign up. We suspected them, and put the tannery under surveillance, and when they came off shift at midnight, we fired some shots in the air. The boss was wearing a cape that wound up full of holes. One of the scabs was a neighbor of mine. He thought I was one of the picketers, which wasn't true, so whenever he greeted me he would always stutter.
       The whole sector was paralysed, and I and two young friends went looking for trouble. "Why don't we go help the tanners in Barcelona?" they said to me. So off we went. But since we only had three cents between us, we went on foot. We put on our mufflers and took a six-pound loaf of bread each. When we got to Molins de Rei, we could barely take another step. Our feet were killing us. We rested a while, then off we went again.
       When we got to a town which, like ours, had infrequent gas lights in the streets—good lighting for then—you could see a kind of celestial light, diffuse and very poetic, creating a sort of artificial sky. If we didn't have anything better to do, we would climb up the trees above the height of the street lights to look at the real firmament, deep and black, with the stars twinkling in the background.
       We finally got to Barcelona. We left the darkness of the road behind, after walking it for seventeen hours. The profusion of lights in the suburb of Sants, which must have been ridiculously few compared with today, seemed a miracle to us at the time. Broad streets, lighted windows. "What an immense sight!" we said, as we thought of Igualada. It took two more hours to get to the center of Barcelona, to Paloma Street, where there was a workers' center on the fourth floor.
       I knew that I would find Manuel Andreu there, the secretary of the Electricians' Union and director of El Soli, a weekly he produced almost by himself. He was an intelligent man, absolutely indispensable at union meetings, but he had no order to his life. There he was, at midnight, still writing. We each ate a slice of bread and invited him to share some with us. He ate one piece, then another. He still hadn't had any supper.
       Afterward he took us to a ratty little hotel to sleep. We went to bed terrified, because we thought robbers would come and hold us up, even though we didn't have a cent to our names. We tied our sandals on tightly out of fear. The next morning he introduced us around at the Tanners' Union of Barcelona, which was near the city hall in the suburb of Clot. We stayed overnight there with other comrades, in order to get up early to fight the scabs. We had more bread and a bit of sausage someone produced from nowhere.
       We were supposed to watch the Can Durall factory, where the scabs were getting in by hiding among the sacks on a wagon. "Give the driver a scare, and if need be, kill his horse," they told us. There were about fourteen or fifteen of us. The ones of us from Igualada didn't know Barcelona and so we were disoriented. It was five in the morning.
       We didn't see the wagon, but we did see a mob of people. Some comrades who were cylinder makers were interrogating them in Castilian, making believe they were policemen. They swallowed it and revealed that they were strike-breakers. So we took our cudgels out from under our coats and beat them up. After that we went to Poble Sec in order to stop some others who were trying to go back to work. Later the police chased us. We had a scuffle with them.... And when we got hungry, another slice of bread! We had been there a week before we finally understood that the Barcelona tanners had lost their battle. Besides, we had to get back to our town so that our mothers wouldn't live in anguish. They had gone to the union hall to try to convince them to make us come back.
       There were industrial sectors that had already won the battle for the eight-hour day, such as the bricklayers, who had won it in 1901, after a two-year-long strike. During the strike, they had come to Igualada to build houses, which they later raffled off in order to eat. The carpenters in Igualada also had the eight-hour day after 1908. When I think of the past, what I see is a long string of strikes, an endless chain of them.... Due to another strike the following year, I had to return to Barcelona, but under very different circumstances.
       It was March of 1916, and I remember it was still cold. There were two strikes that had been going on in Barcelona for the past two weeks, one of metallurgists and one of  hod carriers. In order to lend them support, we had planned a general strike. We went around to the towns and villages all over Catalonia, asking them to help by joining us. We did what we could, but it was difficult, because the people weren't steamed up enough yet. It was an unrealistic imposition on them.
       But the stupidity of the mayor, a bearded old man, worked in our favor. He called out the Civil Guards, there were clashes and they arrested five of our men. I was able to escape, thanks to the fact that the on-lookers hid me and covered my retreat. Later the mayor sent a message that I should go see him, that he had to tell me something, and that nothing would happen to me. I talked it over with my comrades and we decided that I should go. When I got there I asked for the mayor, and a city policeman started to laugh and then grabbed me.
       They took all of us in handcuffs by train to Barcelona. I was cuffed to a comrade by the name of Amenós. There was another couple cuffed together, and one who was cuffed to himself. And the Civil Guard, of course. I remember passengers got on at Vilanova del Camí and they gave us food and tobacco, and then warned us, "Above all, don't share it with those characters," referring to the Guards. They had arrested me on another occasion in 1913. There was a factory strike on, and since we couldn't find workers from that sector to form a committee, the tanners came to help. I was one of those who took part. But when the police noticed me—I was only seventeen then—they pushed me aside. I felt very offended.
       When we got to Barcelona, they took us downtown to the Palace of Justice on Sant Joan Boulevard, and threw us into a cell. We found other strikers in there from Sant Vicenç de Castellet and from Mataró, because the strike had been a success there, especially along the Llobregat River valley and along the sea shore: Arenys, Calella and so on.
       After they took our statements, they brought out five shifty characters from the Fifth District—real Chinatown cut-throats—and they cuffed each of us to one of them. The one I was cuffed to was wearing a long robe that came down to his feet. He was short, his hair dripping with cologne, and a lock of it hung down covering one eye. The Black Maria was waiting for us. They were still horse-drawn at the time. It was divided up into cages in which two prisoners barely fit if they were pushed in hard enough. They locked us in. You could only see the roadway underneath, as if you were looking down through a grate. Several guards rode shotgun up top.
        To a young man from a small village, Model Prison was impressive. I had only seen the Igualada jail until then. I wasn't afraid in Model. But I was very curious. They put the youngest three of us in the first floor cell block, where they held the prisoners doing two weeks' time; the other two of us were put in the section they called "the shops," where there were already about fifty strikers.
       When they locked me up in a truly "cellular" cell, I was able to understand how difficult it was to spend years on end in a silent house of that kind. I didn't know whether the poor guy who got sentenced to ten years would be able to endure it or not. They let you read whatever you wanted, and a favor it was at that, because if you broke the tiniest rule out of ignorance, they took away your reading material and your half-hour exercise time in the courtyard. That meant twenty-four hours of isolation a day.
       The wing I was put in must have held about eighty prisoners. In the middle of it there was what they called the hall, surrounded by two corridors of cells. I know that at certain times they had put as many as three and four prisoners in each of those cells, but when I was there they only put one in each. We used to play soccer in the minuscule courtyards, wedge-shaped like sections of an orange, watched over by armed tower guards. Furthermore, the half hour of recreational time included the time it took us to form up and get back and forth to our cells.
       The cells measured about twelve feet by nine, with a little window high up on the wall. It got to the point in there where I would read the newspaper over twice, including the ads. We made a ball out of old clothes we wadded up and tied tightly together, then tossed it up in the air for hours on end. Another important thing about the cells was that the window glass was divided into long thin strips, like blinds, that were controlled by a long steel rod. If you jumped high enough, you could catch hold of the rod and hoist yourself up to the window ledge, supporting yourself on your elbows with a great deal of effort, and in that way talk to the prisoner in the cell facing you on the other side of the courtyard. I often spoke to Pestaña that way.
       Sometimes I would hang there by my elbows for up to two hours, suffering like a man condemned. But the desire to talk and feel yourself among friends was born of desperation. And if you noticed the guard coming, you had to drop to the floor and pretend you were doing something else, because if they caught you at the window, they threw you into a dank, underground cell with pools of water on the floor and only a peep hole to the courtyard.
       They freed my comrades, but not me. I was arraigned before the judge, a fellow named Gervasio Cruces. One day I read an article praising that character in one of the republican papers, El Diluvio. After that I didn't buy it anymore. That judge tried to get me to sign a paper without first letting me read it. I refused. Then he said, "Well, read it then." It was a deposition from the Igualada police stating that I was guilty of inciting rebellion, basing their charges on a manifesto they claimed I had authored, without any proof. They treated me as if I had been convicted of rebellion, resisting arrest, attacks on private property, etcetera.
       If I had signed that paper I would have gotten fifteen to twenty years for simply being in a strike. I asked what would happen if I didn't sign. His lordship Gervasio answered, "We don't have to explain anything to you. For the moment you get preventive detention and a fine of two thousand pesetas, payable within twenty-four hours. I answered, "If I'm locked up, how am I going to get the money?" They shoved me out of the courtroom.
       The strike situation became unsustainable. That was when the CNT regional committee decided to convert the weekly magazine Solidaridad Obrera into a daily, in order to protect the strikers and refute the lies against us from the bourgeois press. It started as a daily supplement to the magazine. It was a modest paper that stated, "Daily supplement to Solidaridad Obrera." In my case, locked up in Model Prison, the daily arrival of that sheet of news made me immensely happy. I felt I was part of a brotherhood, and it gave me courage; I felt I was part of something important. It seemed as if I could touch the whole organization through that paper. When you see that the image, the publicity, and morale are on the rise, it makes your physical pain diminish.
       A bunch of the prisoners wrote for La Soli. One of them, Josep Caneda, was very excitable and enterprising and constantly wrote articles criticizing the prison itself. So when the paper arrived in the office, they cut out the offending articles. It looked like it had been shredded when we got it. But so what. When you saw the guard who sold the paper coming down the corridor, you shouted to him and he would open the window in the door; you gave him a penny and he pushed the paper in to you.
       The first thing I did when I got out was go to the Soli's office, where I had a lot of friends, especially the office manager. "Hey, how's it going? Will we be able to hold out?"
       I asked him. "It's been two weeks since we got paid, but the paper goes on." I knew we would keep at it without giving in. We frequently ate two days in a row, then went two days without eating anything. You could always find something. The important thing was the newspaper.
       Due to the arrests, it got to the point where I didn't have anything to read at home. Reading had become indispensable for me. I could have had a considerable library full of select and varied books, because I enjoyed reading any subject at hand. I wasn't satisfied just to read about anarchism. I've already mentioned the literature I liked. Unfortunately I wasn't a fan of the sciences, except for natural science, which I liked. The thing I missed the most in prison was not having a library at my disposal of the books I liked.
      I used to dream about Man and the Earth, by Reclus, and about the Newest Universal Geography in nine volumes, where they described an infinity of places with snow, rivers and lakes. Réclus was a geographer and a naturalist, a fine observer of plant and animal life, as well as the life in small towns, which he was able to communicate to the reader with feeling. They locked you up to "correct" you, according to their point of view, but all they did was get you dirtier in the process.
       Every time they came to search the house, they would empty my library, until it got to the point where the only thing I had left to read was The History of the Bible, which I had had since I was a little kid attending a religious school run by the Piarists, where I only lasted two months. That was all I could take. I threw temper tantrums, one after the other, until my mother got me out of there. The Civil Guard never took The History of the Bible, instead they would ask my mother, "Why does your son have this book? To make fun of us all?"
       I was finally released after being locked up for about four weeks. Waiting for me at the door outside the Model Prison was an elected deputy to Parliament from the Igualada district whose name was González, I think. He was getting ready to run for re-election. The republicans were backing him, and behind them were the Gerona business interests, which protected them. That firm was the rival of God, the cacique. Vote-buying had become an indecent business by then.
       González was waiting in a car. He invited me in and gave me a cigar while he explained, "You should sign this paper describing what I have done to get you out of here. Your case was very difficult." I answered him: "Thanks for the cigar, but you can keep it because I don't smoke. As for the other thing, I'm sorry for you if you're seeking my signature for electoral reasons. Don't count on it. If you helped me in good conscience, fine. But if you did it to further your own interests, better have them lock me up again." I got out of the car and walked away. Even though I was young, I still had a sense of conscience and dignity.
       Our movement was always concerned with cultural issues. Usually a union is only interested in the material improvement of its members, and a political party is only interested in taking over power. Our goal was to shape the whole person. And if there weren't more people interested in cultural improvement it was because the working man didn't receive any stimulating training in school, nor did he have the time or the money to be able to read. The prisons represented perhaps the physical limitations on liberty imposed by bourgeois laws, but there was also a prison of the human spirit, perhaps worse than the other one. The more ignorant we were, the more docile they had us.
       During the First World War, I was able to do an apprenticeship in journalism and culture which became a decisive factor in my life. I was out of work in Igualada, and they told me I should go to Barcelona where I would find work, because during the war the factories were producing day and night.
       One of our writers whom I admired the most was Fortunato Barthe. He wrote short articles for Tierra y Libertad, in a rich, lean prose that was almost poetry. And he always wrote on meaningful topics that didn't waste your time. For me he was unique from all the rest. One day when I was at the workers' center in Mercaders Street, I saw Barthe. I was deeply moved. I heard him say "I'm out of work." "Are you Barthe?" I asked him. "Yes." Deliriously I added, "Do you want to come to Igualada with me? They need somebody there who can write." He answered, "Let's go. It's all the same to me where I work, as long as I can make a living."
       He stayed at my house until we found work and lodgings for him. He was a very patient man, and I learned a lot watching him write. I asked him for advice, and he gave it.
       He was just the opposite of Saparó, who charged four pesetas to do an issue of the paper, but never stimulated me nor gave me any advice. Saparó  was lazy. It got to the point where, in order to be able to sleep as long as he wanted to, he gave up doing the paper and the four pesetas, even though he needed the money to live on.
       Barthe got busy on the paper and improved it a lot. It had always been a disagreeable thing to read, but now you could go from one page to the other with a sense of satisfaction. Barthe brought other writers on board as well. One of them was a Manuel Giménez, one of those men nobody knew. He was quiet and anonymous but worked steadily, like an ant. Now he's exiled here in Paris and very old, but he keeps on going just as he did before, patient and faithful to his ideas. When he writes he slowly weaves his large letters together, first one, then the other. He consults the books all around him, and he knows a lot about geography.
       In 1920, Manuel Giménez was condemned to death. There was an anarchist revolution in Zaragoza, run by the Chueca family, and they overran the artillery barracks. Angel Chueca died in the courtyard while haranguing the soldiers. Giménez was one of the civilians who took part in the assault and was captured. Several were condemned to death, but they only shot the first five, who were all soldiers. After that they must have thought they might have exaggerated a bit, and so they pardoned the civilians. And that's how Manuel Giménez was saved. One of the soldiers, whose name was Oliva, had been wounded during the rumpus. Since he wasn't able to stand up, they shot him in a chair.

There are some false rumors being circulated that refer to the CNT as a refuge for the poor and the ignorant. And that reflects an unpardonable lack of truth, because there were a lot of bourgeois types who offered us their help in secret, and others who committed themselves to the movement body and soul.
       Even though they had their future assured at home, they opted for a life of struggle, and probably with more knowledge aforethought than we had, because they were able to go to school until they were fourteen or fifteen, whereas we had to leave and go to work when we were eleven. I remember three notorious cases of sons of well-to-do Igualada families who joined us and came to be front-line men in the organization.
       The first one was Josep Gené. He was the son of a goatherd who owned perhaps the most respected dairy in town. He always sold milk with a predictably higher butterfat content than the other dairies did. They fed their animals well at Gené's dairy. The others mixed salt with the fodder so that the goats and cows had to drink a lot more water to slake their thirst. They gave more milk that way, but it was also more watered-down.
       Gené wasn't very interested in that problem. Instead, he preferred to join the struggle for ideas and follow them to their ultimate consequences. He wanted to study, study a lot, and apply it to an immediate rebellion. His first important act in that sense came when he refused his parents' attempt to buy his way out military service. Instead, he joined up, then deserted and fled to France. He had a lively temperament, like a little squirrel. He loved an argument, and had the intelligence to support his point of view. He learned French easily and attended the meetings of Malato and Sebastien Faure; he attended all the anarchist functions and learned from them rapidly. Catalan literature was his special interest; he knew many of the plays by heart. He would have made an excellent actor.
       But eventually, what happened to everybody in Paris happened to him: the police learned of his activities, tracked him down at one of the meetings and hauled him before the judge, who made him leave the country within twenty-four hours. They dumped him off at the Spanish border. Gené was astute enough to avoid the Civil Guard, and got safely back to Barcelona.
       One day I had to go to Barcelona on an errand for the union commission, and I ran into him at the center in Mercaders Street. When he had left Igualada, he still wasn't a total anarchist, although he was well on his way. He hadn't taken part in our incipient operations of 1910 yet. When I saw him at the center, I said, "What are you doing here?" "The same as you, man." he answered with a smile. He had taken on a new name and was working in the Metallurgical Union, for apparently he had picked up a trade in that sector while in France.
       Josep Gené took part in all the resistance against the Free Trade Union, survived the dark times of Martínez Anido and General Arlegui, his life hanging from a thread most of the time. He was a friend of Ramon Ars—poor Ramon, the finest example of confederated strength—who was finally captured; he was lucky they didn't shoot him, since the authorities were going around liquidating committee members. Gen found himself at one time with the whole regional committee in his lap, waiting for replacements to arrive to fill the vacancies created by those who had been eliminated. Barcelona had to replenish its ranks from the provincial towns, due to the constant blood-letting we suffered. Josep fought on unselfishly, and he told me once that life wasn't very important to him. And in Igualada they considered him to be a poor little rich kid.... Well, he did dress like a little lord: tailored jacket and tie, everything very spiffy. When they found out in Igualada that he was a first-rate anarchist, they didn't understand it at all.
       His imprisonment was the result of a betrayal. The lawyers who defended us lived in constant danger. One of them, Francesc Layret, had been assassinated. Joan Casanovas, who had charge of some of our cases, had to leave town to get out of danger. Two more, with the name of Rio del Val—I don't know whether they were father and son or uncle and nephew—also had to get out of town so as not to fall victims of the pistoleros of the Free Trade Union. For a time we were without any lawyer at all; then we went to Madrid and got Barriobero and Serrano Batanero to move to Barcelona, where they valiantly took up the defense of the CNT without charging us anything. Barriobero was our number-one defense lawyer, even more so than Layret or Companys had been.
       Before that, the scarcity of lawyers forced us to accept public defenders assigned to us by the courts. In Gené's case he had one, somebody by the name of Pere Homs, who turned out to be working for the police. They would let him win a case every once in a while, so that he could continue to practice the double game of infiltrating our ranks, especially through the Pro-prisoner Committee, which Gené himself headed for a while. That's how he got arrested.
       After he did time for that dirty trick, he was released and disappeared for a while, until he returned to Igualada. He stayed at his parents' home, but devoted all his energies to the organization. He was one of the most formidable elements we ever had. During the civil war when collectivization was decreed, he contributed his family's cows and was able to supply the whole town with milk. With the defeat in '39, he crossed into France and from there to Mexico, where he settled down without sacrificing his ideals.
       Then there's the case of Codina. He was the same age as Gené who, when he heard that Codina had joined us said, "What's that guy doing here?" I answered, "That guy is more of an anarchist than either you or I." "Hell, he was a Sunday Saint!" Gené replied. So I explained, "You just remember him from when you were both kids, but since then Codina has changed a whole lot." The fact is, when they were kids they had both gone to the same religious school. The kids from well-to-do families were always well-dressed and sent to special religious schools. During his time among that pack of friars, Codina even helped to say mass. That is, until he left home—even though his parents were rich. His father's business was rather morbid, though necessary, for he made coffins. His shop full of "trunks," or rather his funeral parlor, was accredited by the Church. His father was an out-and-out reactionary, but quite sharp at his business. Codina couldn't bear to see his father so dependent upon the church, so he left.
       His life became hazardous because that's the way he wanted it. He was out in search of adventure. He read a lot, until one day he exclaimed, "The hell with this trying to find out what other people think! I'm going to find out what I can do myself!" And so he set himself adrift and turned into a vagabond.
       He wandered aimlessly through the province of Valencia, eating oranges and apples off the trees. Once, as he bent over a river to take a drink, he saw some Gypsy wagons. They started up a conversation. The Gypsies had just stolen some chickens and they told him, "If you want to stay on with us it's o.k." And he answered, "Alright," and stayed on and started to pluck the chickens and help the old lady cook them. That made him popular with the Gypsies. The old lady, he later told me, had a nose as bent as a Moorish scimitar, with tiny beady eyes and a knot of frizzy hair. A truly ugly creature.
       But she had a daughter who was seventeen or eighteen and very beautiful, incredibly so, compared to her mother. So they asked Codina, "Are you used to sleeping alone or what?" "Oh, I can sleep alone...." "But would you like to have this girl?" "Of course I would!" and they gave her to him just like that. The girl undressed there by the river, and she had some pretty dirty knees, because that race never washes. "And so I grabbed her, put her in the water and scrubbed her knees and all the rest of her body until she was completely clean," Codina explained.
       He shared the life of the tribe, but after three or four weeks that got to be old: going around with a cart and horse, singing out in the villages "rabbit skins for sale!" wasn't his cup of tea. "So I bid them good-bye, just as suddenly as I had arrived, with no sadness on my part nor on theirs. Not even that girl was sad. Each of us just went his own way."
       After that, he wound up in Africa, where he did libertarian propaganda work for the Algerians. The French police picked him up, for they were in charge in Algiers, and shipped him back to Spain, warning the Spanish authorities that they were getting an anarchist. He was imprisoned in Málaga. He wrote me from there saying, "Hey, I'm down here." I didn't mention it to anybody, so that his parents wouldn't find out. We sent him some money. In a later letter he explained some things about the mayor of Igualada, Amadeu Biosca, who was a republican. A curious case, because he started some public works projects to give work to the unemployed, and he won elections with bribes he handed out beforehand. Prison officials wrote to Biosca asking about Codina, and the mayor wrote back saying he was a such-and-such and a so-and-so and even a "blackbelly," that is, one of those who pop out naked from behind trees to shock the women.
       The trouble with Codina was that he liked nature; he would take to the woods looking for all the world like a shepherd, then he would strip down and take a sun bath. And your average conservative person just cannot understand that. But almost all of us used to do it.
       He was released from prison and set himself up in Barcelona, where he got in touch with elements of the intellectual anarchist elite, such as Joan Usón, the Aragonese who became a Catalan and a great bibliophile, who knew a lot about old books. Codina then returned to Africa under an assumed name, because they had caught him there before and thrown him out. He moved in with a woman who sold textiles around the country.
       Codina wrote back, ''We spent all our time among camel drivers, and I learned to loathe them. They were short, despicable people. We couldn't make a single good sale because of their incessant bargaining; you were always afraid they would jump you and slit your throat to take your money. You were happiest if you didn't have a cent, because then you knew your life was out of danger. We led the lives of desperados, but we were independent."
       As time went on, he got tired of the nomadic life, and set up a shop in Orán. Everything was going along fine; he had two hired hands and it looked as if he might become a bourgeois like his father, until the Spanish civil war broke out. Codina told his helpers, "Here, take the shop, boys. My time has come. I'm going back to Spain."
       We didn't know he had returned. On a trip I had to make to the front in Huesca to take supplies from Igualada to the troops, I was walking along, when who should I bump into but Codina, who was holding his pants up with a rope. He wasn't among the Spanish troops, but among the Italians and Hungarians, part of the International Brigade. And right beside him was a group of about thirty boys from Igualada. Of course, they were younger than he was. Codina was more of an internationalist than the rest of us, who were only so in theory.
       He told me, "Every once in a while I see those guys from Igualada who, by the way, have two or three worth-while women with them. That there are anarchist women in a town as rustic as ours, willing to come to the front and trade shots—that was very fine indeed! Igualada is beginning to rehabilitate itself." I found out those girls were really there, with their helmets and rifles. I don't know whether they were killing any of the enemy or just shooting rabbits.
       I gave Codina a leather jacket from the hundred or so I had brought to pass out among our troops. But he didn't want it. "Do you think I've come to the war just to dress like a dandy?" I finally persuaded him to accept it. He stayed at the front until they had to evacuate him to a hospital because he was covered with scabies. "You didn't get it in all the time you lived with those Gypsies, and now you get it here," I jokingly told him when I visited him in the hospital.
       When we were in full retreat during the final debacle, he didn't want to cross over into France, so he stayed in Catalonia. And I never knew why. Some time later when I was in France he wrote to me. They had arrested him, but he was able to pass unrecognized among the other prisoners, and then he was freed a a short time later. He opened a carpenter's shop in Barcelona, no doubt a tribute —to his father's coffins. But a Franco-supported mayor of Igualada named Neri, who thought of himself as a good person, recognized Codina at a work site one day, and denounced him to the boss. The boss cancelled Codina's job order, and she had to go to work for someone else.
       People said that Codina was surly and unsociable, but that wasn't true. At bottom he was good-hearted and friendly. When he was old and worn from a life of work, he went to the home of a libertarian comrade who had just been released from prison, Felix Monteagudo, who was on his last legs, in very poor health. Codina helped and comforted him up to the last moment of his life, and poor Monteagudo was able to end his torment in a dignified, even pleasant manner, tucked in and looked after by a friend.
       After that, Codina became paralysed from the waist down and they put him in a hospital in Barcelona, and right away he was assailed by priests and nuns, prayers and confessions. But he told them all to go to hell. His family would come to visit him on Sundays, take him for rides in the car, leave him some money and go back home. One day they moved him to another hospital, and once again it was the same old routine with the priests and nuns, but this time they threatened him to make him come around to their point of view. He answered back, "Do you want to poison me? So much the better; that way I'll be finished with you sooner."
       Toward the end, since they saw they weren't going to get a death-bed conversion from him, they sent him off to the morgue in Ciutadella Park, where they also kept the crazies. There he found his old friend Oliva, whom they had also locked up for some unknown reason. Through one of Oliva's friends I was able to find out this part of Codina's story. Finally they took him to another one of those centers —which one we were never able to find out— and there is where he must have died, for he disappeared forever after that.
       0nce when he was still at Ciutadella Park, I asked a French lady-friend, Mai, to look him up when she was in Barcelona, and give him my book, Garbuix poètic. And he wrote me saying, "What I like about your book, and the only things I like about it, are the poems titled 'Sunsets at Montserrat' and 'Dialog of the Pregnant Virgin'." Now when I look through my little book, what I like most about it are those two pieces, because I know that they were a joy to Codina when he was sick and alone. Codina was more of a sentimentalist than a mystic, a handsome man with a strong character, and he ended up dead in an unknown place. We lost him in such a dreadful, miserable way.
       The third liberal gentleman from our town was Josep Viadiu. Son of a tannery owner, he was the same age as Gen and Codina. He was impulsive and dynamic, and died in exile in Mexico. With his own ideology still undefined, he became an activist in the radical party, within the most revolutionary wing of it. But for a man with an open spirit, those little narrow-minded things don't count against him. He eventually left the radicals, but the healthiest thing he did was to leave his family and the town.
       His eyes were opened when he went to live in Barcelona. He hung around the group at the Café Español, where the intellectuals from the confederation met to talk over the regional aspects of Catalonia. Salvador Seguí was one of them. Another, a very capable individualist whom we called "he basket-maker" —in reality Josep Mas Gomeri—was an excellent writer and an even better polemicist. Our waiter, Joanet, was one of us. If you came in broke, he knew how to slip you a free coffee without the owner noticing. Viadiu learned a lot there, and suddenly changed his viewpoint on politics and joined the CNT.
       While he was still a militant radical, he had become an orator and writer. He was a real special case. He would devour a book every night. He never went to bed until he had finished his book, even though he had to go to work the next morning. His life was quite bohemian, like the rest of us who were devoted to our studies and our propaganda.
       When he worked, he did the work of three. That came from the days when he was learning his trade as a tanner in his family's factory. I used to work alongside him sometimes, and I would say to him, "Just watching you work so feverishly makes me dizzy." He also worked as a tanner in Barcelona, and his bourgeois boss was satisfied with him, but here's what usually happened: out of the six work days in the week, Viadiu only showed up to work half of them, because he always had a meeting, or because he had been reading until six in the morning. Still, the boss accommodated him and often rehired him.
      His revolutionary bohemianism was interesting to watch, and if he had only been a bit more disciplined, he would be a famous writer today. During the war he was the director of the daily Solidaridad Obrera, and it was he himself who, a few years before, in 1921, had been director of the paper in Valencia during the height of Martínez Anido's repression in Barcelona, where the paper was prohibited. That was when Peiró, who was the secretary of the organization, sent him to Valencia without a cent and told him to start up a Catalan regional paper.
        In Valencia he got in touch with a comrade, Juanito García, who had a blacksmith shop and published a vegetarian magazine called Helios. García took Viadiu to his printer, advanced him the cost of the first issue, and there you have La Soli on the street! As the climate in Barcelona became more and more stormy, Viadiu went merrily about publishing his daily paper.
       Anyone else with less drive would not even have attempted it.
       During the times of the Free Union, when I was still half-lost in Barcelona, we got it into his head that I had to come to his house to sleep, so that I would at least have a roof over my head. My sense of pride was so exaggerated at the time that anyone who offered me a favor had to do it in such a way that it looked like it had been I who who was offering the favor to him. Viadiu, with his enormously friendly ways, knew how to massage my pride and get me to come to his place.
       When nightfall came, I would usually crawl into a freight car or sleep in a lumber pile waiting to be loaded at the port. I also slept in the rubble on Layetana Avenue, which was then under construction. Even though everything had been dozed to rubble, you could still find houses half-buried in the debris, with a doorless room where I slept "very well, thank you."
       Josep Viadiu took me to an old flat in Egipciaques Street. There were a lot of us who went in and out of that flat. Salvador Seguí was also a frequent visitor and sometimes slept there.
       The atmosphere you breathed there was one of movement and activity. We never knew what time it was and everybody grabbed the first clothes that were at hand in the morning. Agust, the comrade I shared a bunk with warned me, "Watch your clothes. One day I had to go out in Viadiu's pants, because mine had disappeared, and since he was fat, they hung loose on me to the point where I didn't dare show up for work at the barber shop." So I put my clothes under my pillow every night. Viadiu and Seguí were like brothers to me.
       Bull sessions would go on there all day long. Then someone would say "Hey, you! You've got to be at a rally!" "Damn, that's right!" And you grabbed whatever was at hand and off you went. Sometimes you would see Sugar Boy with Castell's clothes, which were pretty small for Salvador, who was a husky type. He would exclaim, "Man, look at me! I can't go out in these!" And then Teresina would say, "Shut up and come over here; I'll fix them for you." With a few snips of the scissors here, a lengthened cuff there, and Salvador was out the door, looking sharper than ever!

       Then Viadiu's father died. He was a widower and had another son and a daughter. Josep was the oldest. He would often say to me, "You don't appreciate what a treasure your mother is. I practically never had one, she died so young." He and his father had fought, but then the old man died without leaving a will, which under Catalan law means that all of the father's estate goes to the first-born. Between the house, the vineyards, the factory and the bank accounts, the old man must have left about a quarter of a million pesetas, which was a fortune in those days.
       Viadiu went to the lawyer, signed a receipt for the inheritance and then called together his brother and sister. He divided the inheritance in three parts, which he then split with them. His sister bought a shop, for she knew how to handle money. But his little brother was irresponsible and must have spent his part stupidly.
       On the other hand, Viadiu always walked around with thousand-peseta notes in his pockets, and at the time of the Free Union, he used to pass them out to his comrades who had to get out of town. Climent, Puig and Piera—the one from Gràcia— all left with the help of his money. After a couple of years, he had nothing left. Josep Viadiu was a noble man who sacrificed his whole life defending an idea, without the least desire for gain. He knew how to think and debate, and he had a clear vision of the problems of the times. I always thought very highly of him.
       Gené wound up in Paris, Viadiu in Barcelona. I don't know about Codina... probably in some orchard, eating fruit. They were all cultured men with good ideas. All three of them lent honor to a small town that had been vegetating in mediocrity.

Our movement was always inclined more toward the moral than the economic issues, without our ever having disregarded the latter. That means we sometimes attracted certain kinds of people to our ranks that the socialists and the politicians had never seen before.
       We noticed, for example, that in Paris there was an individual—whose name I can't recall—who was carrying out a campaign against the owners of apartment houses. Whenever a landlord wanted to throw a tenant out on the street for one reason or the other, this individual would organize a protest march in the neighborhood to prevent the renter's furniture from being thrown in the street. I myself have seen a photograph of him, pushing a cart full of some evicted tenant's furniture along the street. He would store the furniture in any empty shop he could find—after forcing the lock on several—and he would set the family up in there too.
       That was very logical revolutionary conduct applied to the very moment in which an evil thing was happening. It's very common for poor and humble people to be overwhelmed by need without anyone stopping to help them. And their penury hits rock bottom when the police come to enforce an eviction. That's why it's important for public opinion to know what's going on, so that they can find a favorable solution for these unfortunate people.
       In 1915, the CNT tried to promote a renters' society. But there were already the mutual aid societies, resistance societies, dance societies and all that. People were fed up with so many societies. And in spite of the fact that our members put real effort into it, the renters' society never took root among the people.
       At about the same time, the rumor was spreading that people were suffering from hunger. We were in the midst of the First World War and the Allies had placed a lot of orders in Barcelona; the textile mills were working full-time, as well as the leather and metallurgical sectors. So it wasn't for lack of work. It was true that coal and flour were a little scarce, but that was a transitory situation.
       So we changed our focus from renters' problems to those of the profiteers, the shopkeepers and the capitalists: our press raised its voice and began to thunder out against them. And since there were always poor people lacking food or completely out of it, there was a strong response from the public. Of course we couldn't start a union of the famished, but those who were really hungry, those who were eating less, and even those with full bellies poured out on the streets. When a coal wagon appeared making deliveries to the shops, it was stripped on the spot. Then the people broke into the bakeries and commandeered all the bread.
       Those people made themselves the owners of Barcelona. They milled through the streets, thousands of women shouting at once. When they got to a square, they improvised a rally. Among the orators of the time, Lola Ferrer was outstanding. She was no kin of mine, even though she had the same name. I knew her very well because she was born in Esparraguera, near Igualada. After she moved to Barcelona, she started working as a weaver, and at the same time became one of the best boosters in her neighborhood union. She wasn't very well-known, but when the mess with the food shortages started, she showed herself to be a valiant orator, so attractive and suggestive to the public that they became inspired, and when she finished her speech, they would descend on the nearby bakeries and coal shops and clean them out.
       As so often happened, that kind of action was limited to Barcelona. The rest of Spain didn't respond. In the larger Spanish cities the worker found himself, to his chagrin, influenced by Spanish nationalism, which had inculcated in him the belief that everything that came out of Catalonia meant the threat of separatism. If it hadn't been for that, the whole peninsula, including Portugal, would have become anarcho-syndicalist well before the libertarian collectivizations of July 1936. Spain would have illuminated all of Europe with a society that had nothing in common with the English or the French, nor even with communist Russian society. If the renters' problems gave rise to concern for the hungry, that in turn motivated another movement with even more drive. The workers were contributing mightily to the World War, making their bourgeois bosses fabulously rich, while they were just barely getting paid enough to eat. Sometimes not even that. On payday they left their wages in the grocery store, a fact that brought about a rather unique understanding between the CNT and the UGT.
       They prepared a protest together, against the increasing cost of living and inadequate wages, which probably began in the autumn of 1916. It began with preparations agreed upon unanimously all over Spain. The CNT worked those places where they were strongest: Catalonia, Valencia, a great part of Andalusia, Gijón and the Felguera in Asturias, because Mieres and the rest of the mining and steel mills were under the influence of the UGT. There were also some sectors, such as the stonemasons and painters, who followed us in Aragón, a little bit in Galicia and a few groups in Madrid, where the socialists generally predominated. Of course, the socialists kept working on their people too, and together we raised our claims in a united movement.
       Apart from all that, there were other factors involved in our protest. I'm not saying it was a cunningly contrived situation, because the suffering of the workers was unquestionable. But I'm sure that if we were to search the record, we would find written proof of why things evolved the way they did. What I do know happened was this: the political left separated from Parliament. It was made up of socialist and republican deputies of different shades of monarchic leanings, as well as the Regionalist League. They started out by claiming that Parliament did not comply with the constitutional norms and so on, so they declared a boycott against Parliament. Toward the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917, both the social and the political movements coincided.
       We—the UGT and CNT—had ended 1916 with a strike, which I believe was set for the eighteenth of December. It was a general strike, unanimously agreed upon. The workers' spirits were well beyond politics by then. Anyway, we didn't overlook the protests the politicians offered. The deputies met and formed an assembly of parliamentarians outside the purview of the monarchy's Parliament. It was rather revolutionary to declare the establishment of...let's call it a Popular Parliament. They decided to hold court at Barcelona in a palace which was serving as a museum in Ciutadella Park, and which later on, during the Republic, served as the Parliament of the Catalan Generalitat.
      But the Government warned them, "Try it and you'll have the Civil Guard all over you, in spite of your immunity as deputies." Faced with that kind of talk, the deputies backed off. That's the way they were. Cambó and his Catalanists were incapable of pulling anything off right. Lerroux was all bluff. And the Republicans churned a lot of words, but there were few deeds. The only one left holding the flag of rebellion was Marcel·lí Domingo, who published a daily in Barcelona called La Lucha (The Struggle). Marcel·lí then decided to give the question at hand a little twist, and a very close understanding was reached between his Republicans, the CNT and the UGT. The coalition ripened, as did revolutionary sentiments, at the same time that the failure of the politicians was confirmed, which brings us to the month of August, 1917.
       We started to arm ourselves. I went to Igualada with four friends to pick up two rifles which were relics from the 1850's, hidden by folks from the village militia in an old shed. A night watchman almost caught us. But the worst happened to Josep Climent, as good a friend as he was a propagandist, and a mechanic by trade. He was a clever, inventive fellow who collected old broken arms: pistols and shotguns without triggers or springs, or with rusty barrels. He could fix anything. I went to Barcelona and told him, "Fix me up with a pipe, because I'll be needing it soon." What I was referring to was of course a pistol. Then the word came down the line to start arming ourselves, so I wrote a letter and sent it by messenger to Climent, who then lived in a flat in Egipciaques Street, along with Salvador Seguí, Teresina—who was at first Puig's mate and later Seguí's—Castell and ten others. When you send a letter by messenger, it doesn't have a return address or a stamp, it's just an envelope with the name and address of the recipient, in this case Teresina. I had signed my name to the letter with a pencil, I remember.
       What happened next was that Climent, while working on the weapon in a shop on Lluna Street, let it slip and it went off and killed him dead on the spot. His friends tried to revive him, but everything was in vain. Then they emptied his pockets so he couldn't be identified, and at midnight they carried him to Peu de la Creu Street, left him on the ground, fired a few shots in the air and left.
       Whistles in the night, and the police arrived. When they checked out the corpse, they discovered a letter in the back pocket of Climent's pants—my letter. So the search was on for an unknown Joan Ferrer. No data other than the letter. But there was the address in Egipciaques Street. Over there everybody was in tears: Teresina, Seguí, all of them were crying because they loved Climent so much. One of them told me afterwards: "Imagine, you who loved him so much, now figure as his assassin!" It was Teresina who had to go to the police station four or five times, but for all the questioning they submitted her to, she didn't say a thing about me or Climent. Life isn't always a straight road: the accidental, useless death of such a good person hurts a lot....
       Marcel·lí Domingo, who was a great writer, wrote a manifesto in the form of a flyer, entitled "Soldiers!" It was aimed at the Spanish Army, to convince the soldiers to join the populace, which was about to burst forth into the streets.
       I don't know if this has ever happened before in history, but here was a revolution being prepared in broad daylight, with everyone—including the Government and the police—in the know. They had even announced the date... a revolution that was taking on the air of a village harvest festival. I don't remember if it was the eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth of August. Luckily the Civil Guard detachment was operating with a reduced number of troops, and the conservative rightists hadn't reacted and so stayed home. On our side we had about a hundred and fifty men, almost all of them young, and many of whom we didn't know, because in a case like this outsiders always came to town to help, and they were capable of anything. That gave us courage, for we saw our little army suddenly swollen by this unexpected help.
       We only did a few wild and foolish things, like raid the offices of the Federation of Industrialists and tear everything up inside. That's where I ran into that damn mayor who had me sent to prison. He must have been about sixty-five, with a white beard, and I'm sure they had just given him some type of medal. He still occupied city hall. I was carrying a little bricklayer's hammer which I had used to break up windows, tables and such. When I spotted that individual all huddled up over there, I thought, "He's mine!"
       In moments of confusion like that you can pay back anyone you want, because there are sixty people milling around who could have done it, without anybody being able to pin the responsibility on anybody else. As I worked my way over closer to him, I reached a critical moment in my conscience, for I was actually about to do that fellow in. The reality of ending another human life made me stop short of my intentions. I just gave him a little tap with the hammer instead, just enough to send his cap flying through the air and scare the hell out of him. I watched him run off and hide.
       That day I became convinced that not everyone was cut out to be a butcher. In my fury, facing the one who had sent me to prison, I was able to treat that individual with serenity and honesty, because he was also a human being. And if he had as much conscience as I did, he ought to give serious and frequent thought to the example an anarchist had set for him.
       Even after that I'm not sure whether the enemies of the working class have the same human feelings as the majority of us revolutionaries have. When you smash up things, when you fight behind the barricades, you don't do it to spread destruction, but by appealing to superior force, you attempt to reestablish the true inner order of society.
       From the Federation of Industrialists' offices we moved on to take over city hall, even though at the time it was in republican hands. But we were making the revolution.... And that was when the Civil Guards appeared; they had finally decided to act. Up till then they had dallied under the arches in the square, roughing up the on-lookers.
       Our defense system didn't depend on arms. Nobody dared use the ones we had, for fear they would blow up in our faces, as old as they were. So we just hurled insults at the Guards, trying to provoke them. But they had more sense than we did, so they retreated. As it turned out, we weren't able to test our secret weapon: hand-made grenades.
       Of course they were rather special grenades, or I should say rather rudimentary. A fuse stuck out of them, but they really were a bricklayer's dream: starting with a little tin box with a hole in the middle, like an angel food cake mold, we stuck a stick of dynamite in the hole, then filled in around it with a mix of cement and stones. One of our comrades from Barcelona had arrived with a suitcase full of them, and the rest we made ourselves.
       We milled around there, loaded down with our bombs, cigars in our mouths, matches in hand. After the revolution we wanted to try some of them out, because no one knew how effective they were. We went down to a near-by bridge, lit the fuse on one of the things, heard a thud when it hit the edge of the stream below, but there was no explosion. Not a one of them went off. We would have been better off stoning the Civil Guards than trying to blow them up.
       I suppose they used the same junky grenades in Sabadell. The atmosphere of unity was formidable among the multitudes gathered in the streets. And all of them loathed a lieutenant in the Civil Guards named Quejido, who was worse than the plague itself, because every time there was a strike, he would haul out his troops on horseback, with sabers drawn and raised. We started the revolution using "wooly tactics." We made the barricades out of huge bales of shorn wool, so that if we had to retreat or consolidate, all we had to do was haul the bales further back. It was quick and neat.
       And that's the way the troops kept herding us toward the Workers' Federation Hall. Once there, they telephoned Quejido: "Come and get us in person, if you've got the balls!"
       So he got on his horse and charged those defending the barricades in front of the hall. At that moment, a rain of home-made bombs fell on him from the balcony above. But not a one of them exploded. Quejido, black and blue and covered with lumps, ordered his men to sound retreat. Of course he later came back with mountain artillery and leveled the place.
       In those times there were a lot of crazies who experimented with arms and explosives. Once an innkeeper called me over and mysteriously beckoned me to follow him to his house. He touched a hidden button on a wall and it opened. Inside he had a veritable arsenal and chemistry lab. Incredible. I asked him, "What are you going to do with all that?" He shrugged his shoulders, "Nothing. If you start the revolution and you need it, it's yours," he answered. He was happy with his little game, his little secret. In 1919, an Argentinian internationalist turned up and got in touch with the innkeeper. Days later a bomb exploded and they locked me up. Nobody knew anything about it, not even among ourselves. But I'm sure it was the Argentinian and the innkeeper. Shortly after, while I was still in jail, another bomb went off and so they set me free.
       In Igualada there were no losses of life during the disturbance of 1917. We went to Barcelona by car to see what we could do, and there, even though everything had ground to a halt, they told us, "It's all over, boys." Marcel·lí Domingo, instead of throwing the republicans out and getting the people to rise up, had run off to hide in the house of someone from his village, over on Balmes or Pelayo Street. That's where they arrested him. Marcel·lí was from Tortosa, where they once greeted his return to town with a huge sign that said, "Jesus Returns." At Drassanes one time, an officer gave him a smack that resounded all over Spain.
       In the suburb of Gràcia, in a republican center called "El Banya," about two hundred armed men awaited the signal from Marcel·lí Domingo. It never came. Instead, our men arrived, took over their "tools" and attacked the police, the result of which was one dead captain. There were also a lot of barricades across a lot of streets in the Fifth District, from which you could hear the shouts of "Long Live Anarchy!"
       I was behind one of them on Hospital Street, on the corner with Sant Ramon Street, at a place called "The Arches of Saint Bernard," which were stone arches with iron doors. With those doors plus many sacks of cement, they created a phenomenal wall, which helped us repel the charges of the Guards coming from the Rondes, where they had cannon and a lot of other equipment. But within the narrow streets of the Fifth District, it was the CNT that had control, aided by a few Lerroux supporters, the naive ones. On the Rambles I saw the writer Angel Samblancat brandishing a pistol. Pestaña was also at my barricade. At the "Bombilla," between Sant Pau Street and the end of Cadena Street, a red rag fluttered in the wind. That's where our comrade Jaume Aragó operated, like a fish in water. Like Negre, Aragó must have been the person who had spent the most time in prison. And a good person he was....
       When that revolt broke out, Aragó had a map of the sewers of Barcelona with him. When the mountain artillery arrived—because the heavier pieces couldn't maneuver in the narrow streets—Aragó shouted, "Over here!" Everybody went down a man-hole and reappeared three blocks further down, shouting "Long Live Anarchy!" while they fired in the air. When the police arrived, they disappeared again. They played that game for five days, with no casualties.
       From behind one of the barricades, Josep Viadiu, fired up by the revolution, appeared from amid the piles of junk and harangued the security guards. What a miserable lot they were. They earned only fourteen reales and had to be on duty day and night, half-dead on their feet from lack of sleep. Their faces were a dark, earthy-brown, like mummified masks. Viadiu said to them, "What are you defending for fourteen reales, you wretches? Come over and join us and eat bread and sausage!"
       When I left, I walked up the Rambles, and there I saw two columns of Civil Guards, one on each side of the street, marching down the Rambles, with their lieutenant in the middle. I was wearing blue clothes, the typical uniform of the working class, that is, of a revolutionary. I trembled, but they passed me by like sleep-walkers, looking straight ahead, their faces ashen-pale from sheer exhaustion. People were shooting at them from the rooftops, and they shot back, but as if they were groping in the dark.
       Soon another column appeared, more fiery than the last, marching with purpose. I ducked into a café called Serment, which I often frequented because they had a pianola. You put a roll of perforated paper in and it worked by air pressure. It made great music. We all tried to pull down the steel shutter at the front of the café to protect us from the shots, but since it was open day and night, it had never been pulled down and wouldn't budge for us. We clustered together like grapes at the far end of the bar and nothing happened.
       The strike committee of the socialists went into hiding. They were rounded up from beneath beds and rooftops, without a drop of heroism on their part. Among them were Besteiro, Largo Caballero, Saborit, Cordero and who knows how many more. They were all well-known, and that was why all the publicity, something your common worker never got. Later they went on trial. They only admitted responsibility for the strike, not the revolution. And that was the attitude of the reformers, in a reform that failed. Apart from what happened in Barcelona, there was only a little stir in Bilbao and in a few other places.
       They were all sent to prison. They were photographed in their prison suits, with their little striped hats and all. In the next elections, the socialist campaign propaganda was based on those photos. They were from the opposition, and that's why they were having this wretched time of it. The street people admired them and empathized with them. They presented petitions to become deputies, and then the Government had to free them. Later they were granted amnesty.
       That simply means the socialists used the UGT and the strike for their own political ends. That's what happens to the unions that depend upon political parties. The CNT, on the other hand, had only one obligation, and that was to the worker.
       Macià, colonel Francesc Macià, got in touch with Seguí and the CNT committee when they saw that the strike was failing. I learned this from Martín Barrera, who later became Labor Commissioner for the Generalitat, and was one of ours. Macià offered Sugar Boy two thousand shotgun-carrying troops he said he'd bring in from Lleida, and would accompany whomever of us felt he needed them to get to the French border and out of danger. But Seguí responded, "No, there are already too many people mixed up in this and there's no need to compromise two thousand more."
       In the end, I went to Collblanc, to the hostal there, where I found the comrades I had come from Igualada with, their skin all healthy and shiny. I suspected that instead of going off to fight, they had stayed put where they were, where the food was splendid. They even told me they were very sad, because they hadn't heard from me.
       We had dinner, pork chops and beans, mixed with swiss chard. Then we set off for home. That food made me awfully sick, or maybe it was the disappointment with the failed revolution. When I got to Igualada I was really sick.

PART TWO

Each and every one of us who had distinguished himself during the revolution fled back to Igualada the best way he could. There must have been about sixty of us. I headed toward Manresa with my comrades Oliva and Salvador Ramon by the short-cut through the mountains.
       First we had to go through Odena, where there are a lot of medicinal and aromatic herbs. It's a landscape which doesn't look very Catalan, due to the peculiar stamp put on it by the chalky-white mountains, from which they mine a lot of gypsum. They stand out in stark contrast to the red earth below them, covered with pines and those aromatic herbs, which give off such a formidable fragrance when you walk through them.
       The folks in Odena are good people. When I used to trudge around selling aluminum pots and pans and socks out of my rucksack, they always received me kindly, even though they didn't buy anything. They would say, "Come on in and have a glass of wine with us, peddler." And if it was time for the afternoon snack, they'd give me a slice of brown farmer's bread, compact and heavy with flour that sometimes tasted like hazelnuts...oh, how savory it was! They would lace the bread with a dollop of olive oil, and that was as good as a meal.
       Every time I've had to escape, going through the Odena area always made me feel at home. And if I had to make the crossing at night, sometimes I would be caught still walking as the first rays of the new day's sun began to cast pale light upon Old Odena, the old houses up on the red clay hill.... Many years have gone by since then, but I can still remember, here in Paris and so far away, that enchanted hour of dawn on the outskirts of Odena.
       This time, escaping with Oliva and Salvador, we went through another area called Maians, which is a really sordid village, just like its inhabitants. It's incredible how two neighboring villages can be so different. The people in Maians are wicked. If you meet up with a farmer's wife from Odena on her way to Igualada with a basket of produce to sell , she will say "good morning" to you. If she is from Maians, she won't open her mouth and she'll look at you out of the corner of her eye with distrust. There have been cases of peasants from Maians who have killed beggars with a single shot for stealing a chicken. We ate in a hostal in Maians, and before they would serve us any food, they demanded to see our money. We moved on and slept in Guardiola.
       A route that normally takes five hours took us eight. We got lost in the woods, we laughed, we met some other comrades who were also on the run from other towns, and we probably looked like a protesting mob when we arrived in Manresa. We rented an apartment and eventually had twenty-five anarchists living there. Sometimes we felt sad, like when those from Sabadell told the story of how the blond boy Mir died. At other times, we had a good laugh over just about any dumb thing, like the time when the barber from Sant Vicenç de Castellet, who was also one of us, dry-shaved the lot of us because we had no soap. His name was Joan Jané and in '39 Franco's troops stood him before a firing squad.
       We were careful not to go out of the apartment very often, because the Guards were looking for unknown faces to interrogate. Little by little we dispersed through the province. Guillem, from Terrassa, was being hotly pursued. If they had caught him they would have shot him, so he didn't waste any time getting to France. Salvador Ramon went with him. At the station we saw a train heading for Zaragoza, with Angel Pestaña on it. His talent when traveling was to appear inconspicuous, but we spotted him standing before a window in the train. He had a metric measuring tape in his jacket pocket. He made a conspiratorial sign that let us know he knew we knew, so we acted as if we hadn't recognized him.
       We couldn't go to Barcelona until several weeks after the turmoil and revolt. The bourgeois bosses weren't hiring any strange faces. We wound up in Martorell, where we worked on a dam project for an irrigation canal running parallel to the Llobregat River, which provided water to Sant Andreu de la Barca, Pallejà and Sant Vicenç dels Horts. I wrote to my mother to calm her worries, saying I had work and was eating well. Our work was to carry huge boulders over narrow catwalks above the river. It made your legs tremble. Boring, exhausting work that was.
       We slept at the house of some roadworkers, semi-nomadic people who worked the roads, bridges and dams. They gave us a bed without a mattress, and one night we were awakened by a huge swarm of bedbugs moving down the wall toward us. We found out that Francesc Pujols, that eccentric philosopher, lived in the neighboring house. Nobody had a kind word for him.
       Our next job was in the grape harvest, right there at Martorell. Those work days seemed endless: from four in the morning until ten at night, with the added aggravation that a lot of those workers were pick-pockets, thieves and pimps from the Fifth District in Barcelona. I don't know why, but the only honest work they ever did was work the grape harvest. Then the boss offered to let me trample grapes. I accepted, thinking it would be less exhausting than being bent over in the hot sun all day.
       I took off my shoes and got into the pressing tub. Carts loaded with grapes would come and dump their load, usually on me, and I wound up half-suffocated. And I had to keep on trampling the grapes, all day long. When the juice began to ferment, vapors would rise to my nose and captivate my senses. I had to hold on to a rope in order not to fall down in the soup, while I continued to dance like a looney... I deserted that job soon enough.
       After that, Oliva and I went to Mataró. Those were the times when you could still get around without any identity papers. I had a police record, but only in Igualada, where they surely would have picked me up. But since I wasn't on record with the regional police, I was able to move about with a fair degree of ease. Just in case, I used a false name: Ramon Ollé.
       In Mataró we worked in a chemical factory, El Verdet. It was a very dangerous job. Every day we had to drink a liter of milk to carry off the toxins, so we wouldn't get poisoned. When we got off work, we would walk down to the beach, watch the fish auction—which I had never seen before—and amuse ourselves by burying a duro, or five-peseta piece, in the sand then looking for it. If the waves came up and smoothed out the sand, we would sweat like furies digging up everything until we found the coin. I finally left Mataró to work in a tannery in Poble Nou, on the outskirts of Barcelona. Oliva stayed at the chemical factory, but he got contaminated and became very sick.
       Meanwhile, tempers were subsiding in Barcelona. The revolution had really not solved anything, and the repression afterward hadn't been all that bad either, just prison sentences. I don't believe any one of us had to spend more than a maximum of two years, what with the amnesties that came later. As for the dead, the press mentioned from ninety to a hundred, between revolutionaries and police. Then there were the imprudent ones who would poke their heads out and get them shot up, not knowing from which side the bullet had come. In spite of the fact that the old society had triumphed again, the bourgeoisie was entering a difficult period. The fact is, the bourgeois bosses are thick-witted, not only in their ideology, but even in their business sense.
       I saw it in Igualada during the war. French buyers for shoe-soles inundated the town with orders. They needed shoe leather for the troops, and they carried off whatever they could find. Then the bourgeois factory owners, instead of following the classic "Moroccan" tanning process, which was difficult and required nine months of attention, started tanning with the "rapid" system that took only three weeks.
       But it left the leather incompletely cured: inside it some white strips remained, which were still crude, uncured animal hide. The soldiers in the muddy trenches who wore boots made of that leather soon found themselves without soles: they had rotted off. So, when the war was over, orders ceased completely. Not another single order was received. The stupid bourgeoisie had ruined their own market all by themselves, swindlers that they were. More or less the same thing happened throughout Catalonia. If they had worked well and honestly, they would have won the French market forever.
       For the economy of Igualada, it was like being mauled by the claws of a falcon. Thirty percent of the factories failed, dragging down the banker Catarineu with them. His bank had thrived since his grandfather's time, and he was the richest of the rich in town. The bank had loaned money to the factories and they couldn't repay it, because the factories didn't have any money either. The owners had spent all their war gains buying jewels for their bitchy wives, automobiles for themselves, and had set up one or two apartments for their lovers in Barcelona... and those women are expensive.
       Well, back to the failure of the revolution: in spite of everything, the CNT found itself in a stronger position than before, because the population of Barcelona and the workers noticed that our organization represented not only the most dynamic elements of the proletariat, but we were also the only real power across the whole spectrum of Spanish society.
       We were the first to man the barricades, the first to accept death and sacrifice, all without asking for anything in return. That impressed people and stimulated a broad movement toward our side. The circulation of Solidaridad Obrera, when it reappeared after the repression, shot up from around seventeen thousand copies a day to thirty or thirty-two thousand a day. And when you went to the union halls, where before you knew practically everybody, now you saw a lot of new people. It was a union-joining fever that made you smile with pleasure. From that injection of new militants and prestige, the following year a dynamic bond arose that helped form the Sindicat Unic, or Unified Trades Union, which was to become so important in our future.
       Before 1917, the unions were made up of a very active minority, but the majority of workers were reticent, unwilling to get deeply involved or committed. We would have to go back to the beginning of the century to find a similar level of activity. Along with the growth of the unions, there was an increase in libertarian and rationalist athenaeums, which were basic to the cultural and ideological education of the people.
       The Rationalist Athenaeum of Sants, located in Vallespir Street, was very active, as was the Syndicalist Athenaeum of the Center of Barcelona, in Mercaders Street. A lot of important lectures were given there, not only by our people, but by people who shared advanced liberal opinions, such as Drs. Caralt and Martí Julià, as well as the scientist Comas i Solà. The ideas of many of these lecturers were a mixture of leftist Catalanism and sociology. Dr. Antich, for example, had been a Lerroux supporter, but seemed to have changed sides.
       There were others, including nature lovers, a couple of theosophists and an anarchist who had spent many years in Cuba, named Saavedra; he had seven or eight daughters. He was a deductive thinker, very sure of himself when he spoke, short of stature, with a huge beard.
       Maybe all this gives the impression of a Sunday hobby. Well, it was in fact on Sundays that most of these activities took place. But, I insist, the importance of it all was that it helped prepare a new generation that would have to face the very grave consequences of the social injustices rampant in Spain. I don't mean things as serious as what the generation of '36 had to endure: they got worked up and involved in a moment of fevered excitement, which made them doctrinally weaker than those of 1917, the period when many a strong revolutionary character was forged. In '36, the tornado leveled everything and you risked your life, but I think convictions were more anti-fascist than deeply anarchist then.
       In the final analysis, it was more difficult to move forward with the Sindicat Unic from 1918 to 1923, because you had to maintain your faith alone or with others in a small group against deadly repression and a highly controlled and manipulated public opinion. In 1936, on the other hand, every circumstance led you to act together with the rest. The trouble is that the history of the Sindicat Unic is to a great extent unknown, or has been manipulated by the press and the politicians, both on the monarchical and republican side.
       Outside Barcelona, two factors created pressure on the Unified Union: the reactionary attitude of the monarchy and, on top of that, a wary attitude against Catalonia, so that the Sindicat Unic came to be called "Catalan unionism." It's monstrous to think that many Castilian workers, under the influence of a false sense of nationalism, preferred to see the defeat of their fellow workers in Catalonia, who were determined to create a pre-libertarian force, since it wasn't yet completely anarchist. In the end what those workers did was wind up in the Civil Guard, which in Catalonia was composed of poor Castilians who had no other choice but to join the corps. The irony was that they were then controlled by the same forces that had exploited them as Castilian workers.
       In Catalonia an identical phenomenon occurred, although for other reasons. Cambó and the right, as well as part of the Catalan left, were more in agreement with those who repressed the Catalan worker than they were with the worker himself, who was just as much a son of the same earth, member of the same Catalan society as the leaders were. Patriotism is one thing, and the cash-box is another. As long as you gave support to those claiming their linguistic heritage, then you were alright; but if you were to put the question of social justice above all, then no thank you: you were spurned. They were interested in governing in Catalan whenever they could, but they did not want to transform "their" society into one for "everybody."
       The Catalan nationalists were like the plague to us, for they were an integral part of the capitalist infrastructure. To justify themselves, they called us murcianos, or miserable foreigners, without stopping to think that all the workers who had come from every corner of Spain had just as much right to be there as they did. Furthermore, they were making their bosses rich by working for them. More to the point, we the Catalan anarchists were a sizeable majority of the population. In the towns and villages we enjoyed great influence. But the Catalan nationalists felt uncomfortable if a CNT member's name was Roig, Pagès or Ferrer. They would have had a cleaner conscience if the names had been Andalusian names, like Martínez, Pérez or Fernández.
       There were exceptions, of course. The lawyer Francesc Layret was a catalanist, as was the Mallorcan writer Gabriel Alomar, both of whom, in spite of that, were on our side. But there weren't many like them. And the bourgeoisie of the Lliga Catalana, or the Catalan Regionalist League, when the situation got tense, went and armed themselves with the shotguns of the Sometent (Militia) and formed a picket guard right alongside the Civil Guard.
       In that almost nomadic life you found people of every stripe, from the ignorant militant, who was very enthusiastic and passed like a shooting star destroyed by universal forces, to the man with the spine and guts of a leader, who was or ended up becoming a major supporter of the labor movement. That's the case of Leon Trotski and Angel Pestaña.
       From the early news we received from Russia, Trotski was seen as a man of action, a great leader. And for that reason, our comrade thought it important for the image of his personality and his speeches to adopt the name of Trotski. That Leon Trotski of ours was a noisy fellow and basically ingenuous, who little by little began to take part in all our aggressive and defensive actions. He had a little dog he dressed in red. At the time, everything red meant "hot-headed" to us. Red as a symbol seemed to magnify everything linked to it.
       Trotski was a Catalan boy in word and gesture, and even though he was from Barcelona, he acted like a peasant. During the struggle between the Unified and Free Unions, he acted with valor and constancy, a great fanatic of the revolution. We knew there was a proletarian revolution going on in Russia at the time, but we didn't know the details. We knew that it was a workers' movement, and that was enough in itself to awaken our enthusiasm.
      Trotski was very much present, alongside Lenin. Kropotkin, when he heard of the revolution, abandoned his exile in London and returned to Moscow, and that impressed us also. We still were unaware of the bolshevik dictatorship already in preparation, or that Kropotkin would write—or had already written—some very sad, disillusioned letters when he saw how prison was being substituted for liberty. His anarchist friends were the first to fall. Of course, neither Lenin nor his supporters dared do anything to Kropotkin, for he was too important a personality.
       In the Plaça Reial in Barcelona, small discussion groups used to meet to argue this and that. Trotski was always there, defending the Russian revolution. Even though his vocabulary was small, his daring was enormous. Naturally, the police—who stuck their noses into everything—noticed him and watched his activities until they decided to arrest him and beat him to a pulp. As a result of that, his health declined, and the Trotski from the days of the Unified Union was heard no more. He died before his time, unknown, in some hospital or other. He was a little lamp that burned for a couple of years, then ran out of oil.... Sometimes I think of him and feel very sorry for him.
       Pestaña was an energetic fellow with a lot of willpower who moved to Catalonia from León. As I mentioned, he had taken a very active part in the revolution of 1917. Truth be told, we weren't sure where his ideas had come from. He appeared briefly in Barcelona in 1915, along with some Spaniards who had been scared by the European War and were being repatriated. He wound up in French Africa. I remember him asleep in front of the Estació de França in Barcelona: the whole street was full of people asleep on top of their suitcases.
       He immediately started working as an anarchist with the group named "First of May," in Cadena Street, where Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom) was published. Later he joined the unions, and stood out immediately for his demonstrated talents as a fighter and an orator. His speaking voice was very moderate, well-adapted to the multitude of workers. He made use of anecdotes and jokes, but he lacked the philosophical content, that reserve capacity to convince people that Seguí had.
       Or maybe I was prejudiced against him. I first met him in 1915, in the Herreros print shop, also in Cadena Street. One night he came along with us and three fugitives from Martorell, and he told us anecdotes that were more or less true. After that, I always looked a bit askance at his speeches...but they were alright. In spite of his indolent attitude, he radiated an undeniable dynamism.
       He went from an intransigent anarchist to a union revolutionary. Even though he gave himself body and soul to the Unified Union and to the struggle, even though he talked his way out of several court cases, he was not able to avoid prison. But he was a resourceful character. One day he escaped from the dragnet the police had set up around him, dressed as a priest. And once, after a Lerroux supporter informed on him to Bravo Portillo's assassins, he had to escape from a house in Poble Sec, dodging a hail of bullets, one of which hit him.
       After the attempt on his life in Manresa, which I'll return to later, I think he lost his primitive, peasant simplicity. He began to feel important, even famous. He had been in Russia, and later he published a little book which clearly criticized the situation there. In 1932, he became one of the leaders of the treintistas, the reformers of the CNT who attempted to head it toward a unionism linked to politics. Out of that grew his Partit Sindicalista, or Syndicalist Party. But it's curious: knowing as he did the workers' world of Barcelona, he didn't dare run in the elections as a deputy from the Catalan capital. If he got to congress it was because the republicans in Cádiz offered to petition him in. In spite of all that, when he was lying sick in his death bed during the Civil War, he showed signs of regret for having left the CNT.

At the end of 1917, the noodle-makers and the cabinet-makers announced a tactical strike that continued on into 1918. The bourgeois owners in both sectors got it into their heads that they weren't going to give in on anything, whereas the workers decided to win every point. The Civil Governor of the moment wanted to serve as arbitrator, but his offer was rejected. Ten weeks passed, and the owners began to get uneasy, so they decided to accept the mediation of the Governor, along with the creation of a mixed commission to study possible solutions.
       But the noodle-makers refused to deal with them. They wanted to succeed through direct action, face to face with their bourgeois bosses; they claimed that the authorities were a foreign element that didn't belong in this, their fight. The Governor became furious and had a group of strikers arrested, which unleashed a terrible series of sabotage incidents.
       The carters who delivered the noodles and macaroni were attacked by a drove of strikers, who tipped the carts over and danced on the noodles or threw phenic acid on them...not likely to be eaten after that! They went into the noodle shops, broke the windows and poisoned all the pasta with acid. The noodle barons became exceedingly alarmed.
       The cabinet-makers did about the same thing, smashing up furniture and mirrors with enormous noise and fanfare. Arrests increased in both sectors, to the point where the noodlers, who must have had over four hundred journeymen, couldn't do any more protesting because most of them were locked up.
       By then all the other food sectors had joined the fracas out of solidarity: the bakers, the pastry chefs, the millers all filled the ranks of their fellow members who had been chucked in jail. And the carpenters, the lathe operators and the varnishers—everybody in the woodworking industry—threw themselves into the fray to relieve the saboteurs. The cabinet-makers' strike lasted seventeen weeks, until the owners loosened up a bit. There had been no serious personal injuries or deaths, so the owners resigned themselves to giving in to the workers' demands, since it was clear that what supplies were lacking in Barcelona the shopkeepers were buying from other regions. As for the furniture, the manufacturers in Valencia got wind of what was happening and started shipping to cover the Barcelona market.
       The noodle-makers accepted the proposed solution. The cabinet-makers also accepted, with the proviso that their members be freed from jail. The authorities reluctantly agreed. That point was important, because those who went on strike were the union's most active members. The passive members only obeyed orders to either stay away from work or to return to it. That's why it was always important, leaving humanitarian reasons aside for the moment, to get our prisoners back, since they were our most active members.
       It was a resounding victory. And the lesson in solidarity was, in fact, what led to the creation of the Sindicat Unic de la Fusta, or the Unified Union of Woodworkers—later known as The Woodworkers' Sector—and the Sindicat Unic de  l'Alimentació, or the Unified Foods Union, which included all the unions in that sector.
       In the Woodworkers' Sector it was easy to unify the groups of trades, with the exception of the piano makers. It seems they considered themselves an elite, and wanted to keep their own union, separate from the others. That caused endless rows, especially in the internationally well-known French firm of Eseigne Frères. Those two hundred workers resisted stubbornly, until they finally understood the problem.
       So when the CNT Congress was held in 1918 in the Cultural Center at the Rationalist Athenaeum in Sants, the Sindicat Unic was virtually already a functioning union, in which the Woodworkers' Sector acted as the vanguard, along with the Foods Union, as I mentioned. These two were the only unified unions, so the Congress officially adopted the proposal to create Sindicats Unics in all sectors, since up to that time each union for each trade in each sector had acted on its own.
       While the Congress was meeting, I was in Barcelona as a delegate from the tanners to the Committee of the Local Federation in Barcelona. Whenever the police came after me in Igualada—which was quite often—I always wound up in Barcelona. Sometimes only I would have to leave Igualada; at other times there would be as many as twenty of us....
       The dates of the Congress coincided with the Spanish flu epidemic that decimated Barcelona. People died like flies. I remember we were obsessed with the creation of the unified unions, but when I got off work or left a work group session at the organization's office in Mercaders Street, I always bumped into the trucks loaded with corpses. Once in Carders Street, I watched them haul six dead bodies out of the same house, one after the other. Then I felt like I had been thrown back into the midst of reality, and I exclaimed, "Christ! What a cruel epidemic is on!" But after that, the obsession with the unified union continued and you stepped over the misery around you, which, if it struck you, would surely kill you.
       At the time I was working in a tannery in La Sagrera, and after dinner I would go to have coffee in an old-time tavern called L'Abeurador, which was also a meeting place for radicals. One of the steady customers was Guerra del Ro, at that time a kingpin in the Lerroux party. The tavern-keeper told him, "Don Rafael, I'm not going to let the flu get me; here, look at my medicine." and he pulled out a bottle of rum from under the bar. He cured himself so well that one day delirium tremens caught up with him and he died.
       I remember some of the delegates at the Congress in Sants. The one representing the bricklayers was from Valencia; Governor Martínez Anido's pistoleros later shot him. There was also a group of handicapped, La Oportuna, mostly people with physical birth defects, some of whom had to beg for alms on the streets. Their representative was named Roca and he was missing one leg. Those from the metallurgical sector had delegated Daniel Rebull, a very dynamic fellow and an important supporter of the Unified Union, who later went over to the POUM, where he practically became our enemy. Those from the Woodworkers' Sector had designated Emili Mira, also from Valencia and an excellent speaker who used a persuasive tone, not demagogic shouting.
       Richard Fornells, a former professor, was also there. I don't know whether he had failed at his career or what, but at the time he was working as a glazer. He was quite cultured and wrote for our paper, signing his articles "Ronsard the Student." His speech delivery was very comparable to that of Salvador Seguí. The difference was that Seguí appealed more to the masses, whereas Fornells was more scientific, more literary, and the CNT's simpler members didn't always appreciate that.
       We had a lot of rallies to promote the campaign for a Unified Union. The police would frequently show up; there would be cat-calls, some pushing and shoving, a couple of ripped shirts and then a fist would land in the eye of one of the police. Those incidents were often more interesting than the fellow who was sermonizing on stage, and who by then we were tired of hearing. Those tussles with the authorities warmed your blood; people talked about it all over Barcelona. The press reported it in the regional papers; it was as if we had become famous or something.
       In the surrounding villages all the trades signed up for the Sindicat Unic. Outside Catalonia the example didn't take hold; in fact, it didn't catch on outside the province and city of Barcelona. The power of the confederation then began to deal with conflicts of real importance. The Fomento del Trabajo Nacional, or The Federation of Industrialists, started to tremble with worry. The politicians thought they were well above all that bickering. I remember one speech in which Salvador Seguí remarked that, faced with the importance of the social problems raised for discussion by the CNT, the question of Catalan nationalism became insignificant in comparison. The reality of the power of the workers and the needs they expressed produced panic in the capitalists and even in the political parties. So what they did was to start making pacts among themselves: the so-called "vital forces of Catalonia"
       allied themselves with the Madrid Government in order to plot the disappearance of the Sindicat Unic. The journalists, who had been bought, didn't mention the dark, smoke-filled rooms where the party brass intrigued.
       In 1918, we had two thousand members in Barcelona. We already suspected that they were preparing some surprise against us in Madrid. And we were saddened that the UGT, which had even resisted the use of the word sindicato, didn't take sides with us. Except in the North, where the Mine Workers' Union of Arboleda, covered the whole area around Bilbao and its foundries. Those men felt the class struggle to the very marrow of their bones, just as the Asturian Mine Workers' Union did. They were a Sindicat Unic without knowing it, and that's why they were a s strong as they were.
       But not every move was a victory when the time came to create new locals for the union. The tramways of Barcelona, for example, were against the unified union. We'd get on a tram, give a flyer to the conductor, and he would ostentatiously tear it up and even swat you one. We avoided those confrontations by sending the flyers by mail to the tram workers, many of whom secretly signed on with us. Little by little, they all signed on.
       At that point, we presented our list of grievances to the tram company. Their leader, Foronda, didn't accept them, so the workers walked off and left their trams dead in the streets. The authorities replaced the tram operators with soldiers. Then the Electric Light and Power Union cut off the juice to the trams. We won that test of power handily.
       On other occasions there were some curious muddles. In Poble Nou we held a congress for the tanners' sector, with representatives from Valls, Vic, and Olot, as well as the usual ones from Barcelona, Igualada, etc. Important Castilian towns in this sector, such as Salamanca, didn't send representatives. Others did, such as Zaragoza or Palma de Majorca. The most important item on the agenda was the unification of the work day for all towns, using Barcelona as a basis, since they had already won the eight-hour day. Well, in Palma and other places, they still worked a ten-hour day. The Majorcan delegate seemed a bit out of it, with no ideas in his head. So we promised him help so that they could strike in Palma for the eight-hour day. He agreed and left.
       When he arrived back in Palma he talked to his fellow tannery workers and said, "Let's go on strike, because Barcelona is going to send us fifteen pesetas a week for each worker on strike, as well as a battalion of militants to face off against the bourgeois bosses." There must have been about three hundred of them, and they each earned about twenty pesetas a week. Hearing such sweet promises, they precipitously called the strike for the eight-hour day, and had the brass to demand a wage increase as well. Before they could get an answer, the owners threw them all out on the street. But that didn't bother them, because they had calculated the thing carefully: "We'll collect the subsidy from Barcelona and on top of that, we'll sign on a fishing boat, where we'll be paid fifteen pesetas a week more."
       The first Saturday when they should have collected the subsidy, they were told the ship hadn't arrived from Barcelona with the money. There was some disappointment, but they figured they could get by with their fishing wages. But the following Saturday the Catalan treasure didn't arrive either.... The delegate, fearing what might happen on the third Saturday, sent us a telegram telling us to send the money right away or the strike would be lost.
       We sent him Josep Viadiu instead, who was then secretary of the tanners, along with a friend of Aragó, named Arbonés. All we had promised them in the form of help was someone to set up a rally or something like that. When Viadiu and Arbonés arrived in Palma, they saw that those strikers were a disappointing crew, poor in spirit, and that without money the strike would collapse. And money was exactly what we did not have in Barcelona.
       So then they went to see Llorenç Bisbal, a Majorcan socialist who published El Obrero Balear, and enjoyed a great deal of prestige on the island. He confirmed what Viadiu had told him, namely that those poor devils' strike would collapse without money to support it. "And where will we get it?" Viadiu asked him. Then Bisbal explained the following story to them: "
      I of course cannot give you any money, but I'm going to tell you something you can use if you want to. We have a community house here that was paid for by a gentleman who lives here and is very rich. Nobody knows how he makes his money, but he wields incalculable economic power. All the little money barons in Palma and all over the island are jealous of him, a jealousy which has turned to hate, and he pays them back with the same coin. He operates outside the bourgeois circle here. When he paid for our community house, it was precisely to avenge himself against the petty Palma bourgeoisie. He can also help you. If you like, I'll take you to him to see if you can manage a deal with him." Our answer was, "Let's go!"
       They didn't know that the gentleman in question was Joan March. And even if they had known, it wouldn't have made any difference. March was not at the time the political figure, nor as well-known as he later became. We at least knew that much about him.
       Viadiu and Arbonés had their interview with him and he said, "Yes, of course, if it's a question of sticking it to the Palma bourgeoisie, then I'm ready to do it. What do you need?" They agreed on five thousand pesetas, which they requested be in small coins. March agreed and gave orders, and shortly afterward his servants came in with a whole bunch of little sacks of silver coins: five peseta pieces, eight and four reales pieces.
       Loaded down with the sacks, they entered the CNT union hall and Arbonés poured the silver out on the table, before the strikers' complete stupefaction, which was rapidly converted into shouts of "Long live Barcelona!" But then Viadiu said to them, "Before you can collect this, you'll have to work. You've got scabs in the factories. If you want this money, go clean them out." The workers ran like lightning to the tanneries and threw the scabs out on the street. "Next week there'll be more of the same," promised Viadiu and Arbonés. Which was a lie. But the owners got scared when they saw the delegates and the money which they thought was from Barcelona. Furthermore, the injection of fighting spirit in the Majorcan workers made the bosses give in. But one thing they did insist on: that the Barcelonan delegates be present at the negotiations. They didn't have much faith in their own. They didn't win the eight-hour day, but they did settle for nine.
       I was nominated to draw up the minutes of the Congress. They were incredible when you read them. They were a bunch of indecipherable confusions, because the delegates had spoken in broken Castilian with poor pronunciation. Sometimes it was funny. While I was cleaning up the notes for our secretary in Clot, Salvador Seguí came by to paint the hall. And since the Majorcans, grateful for "our" money, had sent us a monumental sausage, Sugar Boy Seguí and I ate bread and sausage and drank some good long glasses of water. We stored the rest of the sausage in the closet, right beside Réclus' El Hombre y la Tierra.
       Seguí was tall, well-built and honest. His left eye wandered a bit. But he was good-hearted, and could deal with difficult situations. He demonstrated that in a speech in the Athenaeum in Madrid. He confronted those assassins in Parallel and Mendizábal Streets, and he made that formidable speech in the Arenas bull ring on the occasion of the strike against the Canadiense. We could always count on him to do the right thing at the right time.
       Sugar Boy was generous and a bit of a bohemian. He lived in a filthy mess, but deeply enjoyed the company of those he lived with. He was a mixture of cordiality and spontaneity, together with a studious side guided by his astute intuition. His ideology was based on egalitarianism, and that's why he was an anarchist. But he also believed in the necessity of cooperation in temporal matters, and that's what made him an anarcho-syndicalist. Well, that's what happened to all of us, in fact. And even though he was a staunch internationalist, he still felt himself to be deeply Catalan. In 1913, for example, he and a friend of his had tried to revive Tramuntana, that magazine of ours, even though they had to write it in both Catalan and Castilian. They only managed to publish three issues.
       As an orator he was unique: sober of gesture, fluid of word, logical in organization, with a baritone voice and a convincing manner. What we might consider to be his ideological testament is found in the speech he gave in Mahon on the eleventh of September, 1922, half a year before the pistoleros of the Sindicat Lliure assassinated him in Cadena Street. He was the strong, conquering spirit of the Sindicat Unic.
       Professional politics never interested him, neither at the state nor the Catalan level. I remember he had something to do with an alderman, a federalist of the Valls i Ribot stripe, whose name was Oriol Martorell. Martorell offered him the honorary job of street-light guard. There was nothing to guard; the only thing he had to do was come by city hall once a month to collect his pay. Seguí laughed heartily and refused the offer.
       Due to his extensive friendships and acquaintances, some of our group maintained that Seguí was a politician. That was a piece of stupidity based on the crassest envy. And if there were parties that tried to win him over, it was for his inherent value as a person, not because he was a manipulator. He had digested his ideas well, and that gave him self-confidence and a friendliness that many of the blusterers never could attain in their ignorance, or perhaps because at bottom they had no clear idea of who they were.
       I remember a session in the Ateneu Sindicalista in Paloma Street, in which two individuals who had attacked Sugar Boy on other occasions launched out in rowdy voices, shouting slanderous, indecent calumnies at him, all based on suppositions. Salvador, unabashed, heard them out. Everybody else was quiet. Finally, Buenacasa, who was presiding, spoke, "Very well, we've heard all the accusations against The Boy, which are always the same. Now shut up and let him talk." And Seguí answered, "No, I did that in another meeting. Let me propose this instead: let everybody leave except those two, and turn the lights out when you leave. Then we'll see, in the dark and in whatever manner it takes, whether they convince me or I convince them." Both of the hecklers got up and left without saying another word.
       His bohemian habits came from the fact that he found it impossible to settle into a fixed work routine, since on the one hand he had a lot of meetings to attend—often one after the other—or rallies, propaganda planning sessions, strike sites, or whatever had to be done in the towns and villages. He was in demand everywhere. On the other hand, since he was a well-known union leader, the police were always following him, so when he found work they would go in and talk with his boss at the end of the first day and say, "Do you know who that character is? Well, he's a dangerous element and...." The next day the boss would tell Seguí, "I'll pay you two days or a week's wages, but I can't have you here."
       But since he was a house painter—the name Sugar Boy comes from when he was just a kid and worked in a sugar mill—he could get work on his own. He would grab his brushes and a bucket of paint and he always found work at a friend's house or at one of the union locals.
      Those who said he was lazy, just as they used to say about me sometimes, were journalists or nasty bourgeois bosses. Sugar Boy lived for the cause. He risked his life for it every day until they killed him. If the working class has bettered itself in Spain, they owe it more to him than to the king, the politicians or the bourgeoisie.

If those years of struggle between the Unified Union and the Free Union were really harrowing, for me they also had some very pleasant aspects, for it was during that time I began my relationship with Elvira, who finally became my life's companion.
       She was a very attractive girl, in the flower of her twenty-two years, and much in demand by the well-to-do bourgeois boys. In spite of that, she and I came to an understanding... that's the way life goes. When we started seeing each other, it didn't take me long to fall for her, and I thought, "This will either last or it won't, depending on the character of the girl." Usually young girls want to have fun and amuse themselves and laugh... just as long as everything goes as smooth as silk for them. It's not too common for them to make a lot of effort to use their imaginations dreaming about a man they met and liked... they usually get bored first.
       But she suited me, and I felt happy. Once I had to escape to Terrassa, and Elvira even came to visit me there. We kept on seeing each other; the warmth was mutual and that set a passion in motion which grew stronger and stronger, in spite of the adventuresome life I was mixed up in.
       I had never had a real girlfriend before. I would dance with this one and that, but the moment hadn't arrived for me to think seriously about a girl. As time goes by, one goes through a series of amorous experiences, just as others do. Of course there had been a few girls that were charmers, because each village has a few whose beauty sticks out from all the rest. You'd admire them, look at them with pure pleasure, and surely, if you'd had the chance, that opportunity that never comes.... Or if I had said something to them.... But nothing ever happened that way. It's just that when one of those beauties passed you close by, you had the feeling of being crossed by a beam of sunshine.
       I met Elvira in a really silly place. We had organized a Mardi Gras ball which we called "la candela." The girl had come by pure chance. She liked to go to Carnival and other festive dances. She was very young, very lively and very attractive. She was wearing a carnival mask when we met.
       I was arguing libertarian philosophy in the café next door to the ball with a group of comrades who, even though they were young, wanted to sound mature, and so we weren't understanding each other very well. Then a friend came by and said, "Listen, do you want to be the dance partner for a girl who's alone?" And I said yes.... Sometimes some little chance happening creates complications—in this case agreeable ones—that last you the rest of your life.
       So I went over to the dance and they introduced me to her. I didn't know who she was, but she was so full of vitality and from the little bit of her I could see around the mask, she seemed to have a truly classic face. We danced and danced.... During Carnival, the girl can pick the boy, just the opposite of what normally happens, and that masked lady came over and chose me every time, and I followed her, happy as could be. Finally I said to her, "I really like dancing with you very much, but that mask is beginning to bother me." So she took it off. What I saw was really very pretty; her facial features were most pleasant. Then I got an inspiration and asked her, "And why don't we dance the rest of the ball together?" She said yes to that.
       Later I recognized her. I had seen her before, but hadn't really paid much attention to her. She wasn't from Igualada, but from Barcelona, where her father had come from to work as a tanner, and Elvira and her mother had come along too. And I had heard others talk about her a lot; everybody had something nice to say about her, because she was an extraordinary beauty, an irresistible thing to watch.
       Even though she was from a poor family, she missed her Barcelona and wasn't happy here in town. She complained of the narrow streets with mud everywhere; the street lights barely gave off any light; the boys were insipid; the town police were sloppily dressed; the Rambla was too small and there was no Mediterranean to swim in. Of course, she was right. The people in the big cities have more things to enjoy than we country folk have. She was getting used to the town, though, and she had gone to work in a textile factory. And I, who had laid cobble stones in so many streets out of necessity when I had no other work, was proud that on rainy days my girl could go out without muddying up her shoes.
       Naturally there were other women who spoke very badly of me when they saw us walking down the street arm in arm. In town, if you weren't married, you just didn't do that. But Elvira was a girl from Barcelona, and her character was very frank and direct, very open. She wasn't entangled in religious prejudices either. "So you had to get serious with that fellow, especially him: he's a jail bird; you never see him working!" is what the other women said. When she told me that, I answered, "If I don't work it's because I can't find a job. I'm not a lazy-bones. It's the cause, the union, that gets me into these situations."
       Which was true. There wasn't a single bourgeois boss who could say I was lazy. "What happens with you, my boy, is that the moment you start work, you start trouble," they complained. If they didn't throw me out, I usually left on my own. And one day Elvira even had to go to the Civil Guard and make a statement before the judge on my account. That was when she decided she had to deal with our relationship seriously...and she did. She wasn't a militant, but when there was a strike, she stood there beside the strikers just like one of them. She understood my motives for doing what I did; she got a good idea of me and my position on social issues. You can only overcome the opinions of those idiots who give you advice if you have ideas, because at the beginning you doubt, and would like to have your cake and eat it too.
       So she went and found those girls who had spoken badly of me and told them, "I've inquired around about that boy, and though it's true he leads an agitated life with the CNT, on the other hand he doesn't play cards or gamble away his wages like other men do who were married in the Church and have never been arrested by the police; he doesn't drink, nor does he smoke; nobody has ever told me he pays for his women." Of course, those women had to shut up, because the majority of the men they knew had those vices. The worker, unfortunately, has often been less than perfect.
       We went together for a year and a half. And that was a surprise to everybody, because nobody understood why she went with me when there were so many well-to-do boys courting her. Elvira was a special case. There were very few girls as pretty, as attractive as she was...very few. She had a list of dates; she was in demand. They had even taken her—and she had let them, just to have fun—to the Mercantile, which was the bourgeois club in town. And even though she was a working class girl, once inside there, she was a queen.
       She was the envy of all those bourgeois girls who had money, but were witches aesthetically. Rich women and their daughters are generally ugly, at least in our county. There's nothing that sets them apart from bare ugliness, and it's only because of their money that they ever get married. Her companions at work also thought she was superior, and said, "That one is a rich man's woman." In spite of all that, Elvira had a very sweet character and never acted stuck up.
       I used to listen to some of my friends talk all day about women: Pepa, Lulu, the blonde, the brunette...they were attracted to the prostitutes. And they all knew what bezique, brisque, bacarrat, billiards and the finger meant...and they were always smoking.
       On the other hand, I didn't know a thing about that stuff, which granted or lent me a certain degree of moral superiority in their eyes. In the long run that became burdensome, for they looked on me as different from them. And not even the priests dared mix it up with me, because they were always going around with a butt between their lips...I mean, they didn't dare tangle with me and my friends, because we were a gang that reacted against those vices, and when we saw somebody who spent his time smoking and was a militant of the CNT, we would say, "You're weak; you want to fight capitalism, liquidate bourgeois society, and yet you're not able to fight that tyrant tobacco... and it's only a little weed."
       I didn't go to the bordellos either. Not even as a real young kid. I suffered like everybody suffers from the lack of a woman, and sometimes, I don't know... I tried to get some satisfaction. But to go lie with whores, never. Because it was a disgusting vice, and I was afraid of getting a disease.
       Now there are medicines that can cure you, but back then, to get gonorrhoea, or worse yet, syphilis...ugh. I have seen a lot of people die of syphilis. They die a terrible death. And the final symptoms wouldn't show up until twenty years later. They had it in their blood, then they got married. And they would have defective kids, and their hair and their teeth would fall out prematurely, their faces would have a deadly pall, and since they couldn't even work anymore, they would die in a loony bin... insanity was the last thing that attacked them.
       Even though people might say we were lazy dynamiters, that we lived off union money, in the bottom of their hearts they didn't believe that and they would say, "That boy's conduct is exemplary." We, however, didn't glory in our conduct, we just did the simple and right thing, while the priests would repeat incessantly, "I live devoted to Godly matters and am a type of martyr. I renounce earthly pleasures of all kinds." In a large city, an individual's conduct is easy to hide... it gets diluted among the masses. But in a small village everybody knows you.
       I went into a house of prostitution just once in my life. That was a romantic story. Some friends of mine who were clients said that in Ramonet's House there was a girl who seemed to be there against her will, because she was always crying. One of the boys, a real Quijote, said, "Well, we'll have to rescue her!" Ramonet, who was loaded down with debts, demanded five hundred pesetas to cover her meals and clothes. What an extortion that was. And she kept on crying, because they had kidnapped her in Barcelona and brought her to Igualada against her will.
       We planned our rescue in detail. Then we showed up there one night. The owner, when he saw me, suspected something was up. My friends said to the girl, "Don't worry, the anarchists are going to save you." It was nice to work for a cause like that. The girl gathered her courage, stopped weeping and started to laugh and play with my friends. Then I left. Outside there was another comrade of ours from Valencia with an ungodly, outsized horse pistol. I had an old piston-operated weapon. Then the girl, flanked by the other boys, came out into the street. Two servants from the brothel came running after them, but suddenly we popped out of the shadows, guns at the ready. They withdrew, scared. From the point of view of military tactics, we had organized it perfectly.
       We took the girl to my house. When we started up the pitch-black stairs—poor people's houses didn't have light—she whimpered, "Please, don't hurt me." She didn't understand what was going on, because for embittered women like prostitutes, it's hard to understand that kind of generosity. "We're not criminals, but good people," we repeated to her. But I don't believe she slept a wink all night. I saw her happy for the first time the next morning, when another friend and I took her to Barcelona.
       When we entered the house and my mother saw the girl and smelled that wave of cheap perfume she gave off, Mother screamed, "What is this??" And so I explained the case to her and she calmed down "Alright..." she mumbled, and said the girl could stay. Mothers are very forgiving.
       Once in Barcelona, my friend had to run an errand at the Encyclopedic Athenaeum, so I took the girl where she wanted to go in Jaume Girau Street, where a family was keeping her child. But first I had to find some money for her, ten pesetas that Seguí gave me, because she didn't have a cent to her name. And that left me with only three and a half pesetas to get back to Igualada with.
       I don't believe in the way love is structured. Nor in the theories of free love. Love is free of and by itself, otherwise it escapes you. Human instinct betrays all the pacts and laws of love. And the morality of marriage established by the grandparents of our great grandparents doesn't work now, nor has it ever worked. Men and women think they love each other eternally; they sign the contract, but after a few years, all that passion begins to fade. Even though he hides it, he could be attracted by another woman, and she could feel seduced by another man. And if the marriage doesn't break up then, it becomes a web of hypocrisies.
       The ideal solution seems to be to live together as long as the affection lasts. But, of course, what usually happens is that it only lasts for one of them, and the other is left, faithful but bitter. And then there's the question of the children, a problem which is difficult to resolve in society as we know it. The inclinations of the heart and the taste for new flesh complicate things and make ideal solutions impossible. If couples could only love each other forever.... Some individualists think love with many partners is the milestone of sexual liberty, but that can lead to whoredom. Furthermore, giving free rein to carnal frenzy, rolling around in the grass together, is not the be-all and end-all of life. There is also the family to consider, the children, the old folks, and that requires a certain order and stability.
       But boring routine can also have fatal consequences, if you only look at the legal aspect, without considering that instincts are not easy to control. Ah, I remember a seventeen-year-old girl, Serafina, beautiful, svelte, with a broad and charming smile, who died of incontinence, a shameful sin according to her bewildered parents. If they had only let her choose her own fiancé, it's quite possible that Serafina would still be alive and the old parents, instead of exploding with grief, would have lived longer, hugging their grandchildren.
       No, I can't tell you what the perfect solution would be. It's enough to worry about seeing what civilization had done with our sexuality: prostitution, masturbation, unhappy marriages, marriages of convenience, crimes of passion, marriages between idiots and subnormals that make a laughing-stock of the species..... Then there's the shame of having to present a marriage certificate in order to sleep with a woman in a hotel.
       I married Elvira in a civil ceremony. The fatal moment always arrives when you have to compromise. When you discover yourself blindly in love with a girl and she gets pregnant, you marry her: I mean, you commit to her without the legal monkey-business. Or at least that's what used to happen in the small towns and villages. But if she is conservative and inflexibly follows the laws man has laid down, and she says that you'll only have contact with her "after we are married, and not before," you have to adapt yourself to circumstances.
       Even though it's absurd—I repeat—you need a document in order to be intimate with that woman. But you don't have to be so over-scrupulous with the rules that you lose a higher good, the girl herself. You're not likely to renounce your feelings for an ideological scruple. Anyway, ideas don't suffer, but human instincts do. I yielded to the law and she, breaking with tradition, agreed that we not marry in the Church. And she didn't feel bad about doing it that way. I, however, felt a little bad about having to go through the court rigamarol. But it was a case of going along to get along. So I'm really not married "as God commands," but as the law demands.
       Once we were married, we sorted out our mutual fates with our families. I was living with my mother, and Elvira with her parents. But my mother had her other children, and so we arranged for her to go live with my sister, while I moved in with Elvira's parents to help support them. Her father still worked, but he was already pretty old. Soon things changed, and both her parents got sick, and I was being boycotted by the bourgeoisie and was without work, and Elvira, who was a weaver, only worked a couple of weeks a month, because of the recession after World War I. If the situation wasn't desperate—there was a little bit of money coming in—it was beginning to get very difficult.
       I found a solution by going to Barcelona and buying some pots and pans which I set about selling like a peddler on market days in the little towns, and to the farmhouses spread throughout the countryside. That's what saved us from miserable poverty. I would walk from town to town—to the markets in Igualada, Santa Coloma, Capellades—and I made more than working as a tanner or cobble-stoning streets. And I enjoyed a certain degree of freedom. It was a pleasant experience, but I thought that being a petit bourgeois shop keeper, even though only a walking one, was something vile. I sold socks, stockings and aluminum cooking utensils, because they weighed less in my rucksack.
       Then my father-in-law died, our son was born, and Elvira's mother was always sick.... But we had overcome the economic problem, and maybe because of my conduct under those circumstances, the bourgeoisie, or a small part of it, began to think more highly of me in town, because one day a bourgeois boss came to the house and said, "If you want to come and work for me, you're welcome." I didn't know what to do, because as a peddler, even though the work wasn't predictable—today I'd earn eight cents, and tomorrow maybe sixty pesetas—we always had something saved up at home. But working for wages you never had two pesetas to rub together. At the time, a tanner earned forty or fifty pesetas a week. Elvira thought I should keep on peddling pots....
       Anyway, I loved to be out in nature, and I enjoyed that tremendously, walking from farm to farm. It was soothing to be in communion with the grasses and the sun. I've always felt happy when the sun was falling on my shoulders...and to be able to drink in the landscape like that.... But I went back to the factories. That was my world.
       We rented the house we lived in. We've never been able to have a house of our own. For three pesetas and a half a month, they gave you a plaster house: plaster stairs, plaster railings, and the floor covered with big square tiles of baked, unpolishable clay. The windows were like little holes in the wall. And for every room with natural light, there were two without it. We lived in one that had five bedrooms, quite a respectable house, but all the bedrooms faced the air shaft, without a beam of sunlight. It was like a cave.
       The kitchen adjoined the dining area, which was a good arrangement, because with the fireplace right there in the kitchen, you could cook a potato in the coals while you were together with the family, chatting for a while around the fire before going to bed. We told jokes, talked about what had happened that day.... We used to toast big slices of bread and drip olive oil on them. With Elvira at my side, the fire cast a warm glow on her face, so pretty....

The Federation of Industrialists was preparing its attack. Faced with constant pressure from their workers, they decided to act. They declared a lock-out in November with Graupere as their leader, and we hadn't even presented any grievances.
       What it really boiled down to, in truth, was the inevitable collision between two powers that one day or another were bound to clash and try to destroy each other. The bourgeois factory owners from Barcelona got together first—because those out in the countryside weren't as critical—and decided on what had to be done: fire every worker in Catalonia, and if they wanted to come back to work, they would have to give up their Unified Union card. What they were trying to do was break the back of the union.
       But to achieve this they didn't take into account the thousands of workers who were insensitive to or unaware of what was going on—those who really weren't a problem. No matter. Without another thought, they locked everybody out. Capitalism has never thanked the worker for the least concession, nor for his submissiveness.
       The union voted to show up for work, but not to work. They carried this plan out in a very strict manner, because some of the little tanneries in Igualada with six or seven workers tended to develop a certain camaraderie between boss and worker; these bosses had violated that trust by not listening to reason, but instead had strictly followed the orders of the Federation of Industrialists.
       That was a funny week. Each worker came up with his own way of angering his boss, usually by just wandering around the factory without working. The boss felt impotent, and felt worse yet when he thought of Saturday, when he would have to make payroll. I remember walking out onto the roof at my tannery, and all I saw were workers milling around on the roofs of the other factories. It looked like all the buildings had sprouted little human mushrooms on their roofs.
       The Civil Governor became involved and tried to resolve the conflict. I don't remember who he was. It doesn't matter: they were all the same, and they all failed in the same way. At the end of the week a sort of half-way agreement had been reached: the bourgeois bosses said we could return to work on Monday without tearing up our union cards.
       But the rage of Graupere, Sánchez Pastor and the others erupted again. We went back to work, yes, for a week, until they firmly locked us out again. The whole country was paralysed. It lasted four weeks, after which the demand that we tear up our union cards resurfaced. Next Monday morning the factory whistles blew. We had spread ourselves out in picketing groups at the factory doors to keep scabs from trying to enter and weaken our position. We were united to a man, because no scabs showed up. It's hard work to create a spirit of sacrifice like that. Every time there was a strike there were always some workers who, for need of food or because they weren't interested in the social struggle, would walk back and forth in front of the factory, doubting whether to go in or not. It was only through our active vigilance of the factory doors that they were persuaded not to go to work.
       If at the beginning of a labor conflict you managed to dominate the situation, after a while, as tensions mounted, you needed a "tool," a pistol, that is, because the Civil Guard accompanied the scabs. It was hard work for us: you left home in the morning, having slept very little, tired from the previous days of protest, and you didn't know whether you'd see your family again or wind up in prison by day's end.
       Well, we sometimes had some fun too, like when we went to stop the work in a knitting factory. The machinery in them is quieter, and since the girls' jobs were easier, they even went around in silk blouses. They thought of themselves as distinguished, different from the other girls, even though they were all suffocating in the same poverty. Well, we went in there and began to shove the girls around, pinch their butts and push them back and forth between us, while they squealed like stuck sows and we laughed like crazy.
       One day they arrested us. The ones of us with "tools" got away. They found a pocket knife, one of those normal ones from Albacete, and a dirty pistol ammunition clip on me, so they marched us off to Civil Guard Headquarters. There was a Catalan sergeant there, which impressed us a lot, because the Guards were always Castilian speakers. The one who arrested me said, "We found a knife of great dimensions and a pistol on this man." Since I denied it, he raised his rifle butt to give me a whack, but the sergeant interrupted, "Hold it! You can demonstrate your bravery on another occasion. This man has his hands tied." They sent me off to jail anyway.
       Elvira brought me flowers in jail. I was reminded of those peasant farmers from Odena in 1909. Flowers weren't a business then. When you went to a farmer's garden to buy vegetables, they added flowers as a gift. When I saw Elvira nearing me with a carnation in her hand, I thought, "It's worth while getting arrested so I can deserve these demonstrations of love."
       Our resistance, in spite of our efforts, was weakening. Then a bomb went off in the house of the president of the Federation of Industrialists, a fellow by the name of Llansana. It didn't hurt anybody, but it tore up the entryway, which was pretty elegant, with tiles from Valencia and a wrought-iron banister. Even if no one gets hurt, bomb explosions create fear and uneasiness.
       Since I lived only three minutes from Llansana's house and I was a pain in the neck for the authorities, they came to get me. I had always done my best not to get caught at home, so that my mother wouldn't have to see them carry me off, tied up like a hog. I was lucky, because the head of the municipal police, who had been a Civil Guard and was from Graus—the same village where Salvador the bomber of the Liceu was from—and had been the first Guard to enter the theater after that terrorist act, knew me and often warned me, "Watch out, we could be coming for you today," and I would take off. Or maybe I myself could smell them when they were coming.
       It was never wise to talk to my mother in Castilian. She didn't understand it well and didn't speak it. The Sometent, or Militia, and the Civil Guard would say to her, "Say, old lady, where is that wise-guy son of yours?" Some Carlist would translate the question for her and she would have an attack of nerves and begin to curse and insult them. One day she saw the police carrying off two friends who had stayed at the house the night before and she fainted dead away. My mother became very ill from so much anguish. Afterward, at church, since she was a practicing Catholic, she met up with the same reactionaries who had come to get me. If she didn't stop believing in God, at least she became aware of the miserable wretches who served Him.
       Going back to that day: I was home when they knocked on the door. I had fallen deliciously, unguardedly asleep. I escaped through a back window while my mother "entertained" them. I hid on the roof. It must have been three in the morning when they came for me, and when the sun came up they were still there. Since people were waking up and going out on their back balconies to stretch, they could see me, especial ly the bourgeoisie, so I crept back down. My mother wasn't there. Someone knocked on the door while I was packing a bundle of clothes and food. It was a messenger from her. I didn't answer, but instead put my eye down to the key-hole and looked out: another eye was looking at me from the other side. There was a long hatpin there on the table and I thought, "Just pop it through that hole and you'll empty that prying eye on the other side." But I didn't do it. He probably hadn't seen me anyway.
       I managed to get out of town, and once again I walked the country lanes to Manresa. You get to talking to the trees. From there I disappeared into the bowels of Barcelona. When I eventually came back to Igualada, somebody found some explosives hidden in a dry-rock wall. The blamed me again. Since they couldn't find me, they arrested my mother and Elvira, whom they interrogated and threatened for hours. When I found out, I turned myself in and they were released. They interrogated me for seventy-two hours, but they couldn't prove a thing, so I was back on the street again.
       Then we had two months of general strike. We saw that if the struggle didn't become a revolution all over the peninsula, we would have to slack off. And we didn't believe in the revolution either. At the time there were comrades of ours in Barcelona who thought that if they eliminated Graupere, the owners' resistance would collapse. That was a mistake, for Mir i Trepat was still the real president of the Federation, and Graupere was only its aggressive front-man.
       One day Graupere was driving through the city in a chauffeured car, along with Bonet the lawyer. At the corner of Alt de Sant Pere Street, where they were opening the way for Layetana Avenue, a gang of about thirty pistol-packing people of ours stopped the car and riddled it with bullets. The occupants were only wounded. The incident heated up a lot of blood, but was of no decisive value.
       Barcelona, and in fact all of Catalonia, wandered in isolation within the rest of Spain. Except for some comrades from Valencia and Zaragoza who had come to help us. The enemy was terribly strong. Of about three hundred thousand strikers that there should have been in the city, only about five thousand were actively, militantly keeping the general strike going. That was very few, compared with those we had to face: the Army, the police, the Civil Guard, the indifferent public, the bourgeoisie, the pistoleros, the snitches and the terrorists whom they had infiltrated among us, or who attacked us from outside the same law of those who had hired them. They were really scum from the Barrio Chino.
      When the tenth week of the strike came and went, everything was already lost. The workers returned to their jobs; many of them threw their union cards away, while others left theirs at home. What is certain is that the Unified Union had become almost completely dismembered, with just a small group of faithful remaining. The masses give as much pleasure as they do disappointment.... But it really wasn't a case of bad faith on their part, just that poverty and hunger were in control. And I and the others like me wound up boycotted, with no jobs. A neighbor lady even said that I had been bribed with a fifty-peseta bill, which they had left under her door by mistake...I went to her house with a pistol, "Give me the fifty pesetas or you're going to the cemetery." She was horrified. But she gave me the money, out of her own pocket, of course. Then I gave it back to her, because her husband, a cart-driver, was a decent man.
       During that strike Francesc Cambó was seen on Ferran Street in Barcelona with his "cane," his militia carbine in hand. I don't think he wanted to shoot it, but must have been setting an example for his boys....
       The union, apart from being abandoned by seventy-five percent of its members, was officially shut down and prohibited. That's when we adopted the tactic of paying our dues in the factory and on the street. The union went on, but underground. Its headquarters now became the small Rambla in Poble Nou, the Plaça de España in Sants, the Plaça del Sol in Gràcia, the National Boulevard in the Barceloneta, the Quatre Cantons, etc. The whole relationship, the whole operation now took place on the public streets, in small groups, until we saw a policeman coming toward us, then we would just saunter off, admiring the weather.
       But the immense majority of workers formed no part of these meetings, and we would have to seek them out in the factories. And more likely than not, we would run into the pistoleros of the Free Union, the Bravo Portillo gang or Baron de Koenig's gang, which led to violent clashes and corpses on both sides. The results were tragic...if you went to pick up five hundred pesetas in dues from a factory in Sant Andreu, you wound up losing a friend.
       Of course, the other side also lost one of theirs, but it was never the same, because they were just hired thugs, and if they lost one, they hired another. We were people who were struggling to make our lives more decent and just. We saw that revenge tactics were too cruel; they never turned out right.
       That was the time when some comrades came up from Valencia and got together a group of militants and explained to them that there was another way, less painful and more efficient, to resolve the economic problem. They said, "Why expose our lives to danger out there on the street just to collect a few cents? Especially on Saturdays, when everybody is being paid. That's when the police and the enemy gangs are all over the place. Why don't we rob a bank, for example? If you're well-prepared, you can get enough money to equal four Saturday collections, without the assassinations."
       The idea began to take hold, because what five hundred comrades with pistols would normally have to do, four or five could do, and with little or no danger: neither the bourgeois pistoleros nor the Civil Guards knew anything about our plans, so it would be an absolute surprise.
       There are people who would call that robbery. But in reality it should be compared to war: when the enemy lays siege to a town and finally assaults it, they take over all its riches. Assaulting a bank was just another episode in the social war, the only difference being that a military army has fifty thousand men, while ours had only five.
       The first expropriation took place in a tax office near the Captain-General's Headquarters, in a long, narrow street—maybe it was Regomir Street—which led down to Columbus Boulevard. Five men burst in, flashing their tools, and the employees were taken by surprise. They picked up two hundred thousand pesetas and left without incident. A resounding success. Naturally, a project that worked out so well had to continue. So the next assault was on the train at Poble Nou. In reality it was a workers' train that ran on Saturdays. It left the Estació de França and went to the repair shops the company had in Sant Andreu, where there must have been seven or eight hundred workers repairing railroad cars, engines and so on. The Saturday train carried the payroll in the caboose, inside a wooden box guarded by two Civil Guards.
       Everything was planned out beforehand. At a certain point along the way, near Camp de la Bota, some of those on the train who made believe they were working, sounded the alarm and half a dozen of them ran to the caboose, imposed respect on the Civil Guards without hurting them, and grabbed the payroll box. They made their escape by car, firing shots in the air.
       As bad luck would have it, some of the soldiers at Camp de la Bota thought those in the car were firing on the Civil Guards, and so they returned the fire. They killed one of ours, whose name was Quero, and wounded another. I knew Quero, because he lived in Gimnàs Street, where I used to eat my meals. The wounded comrade was taken care of by a doctor who was one of us.
       Another action of the same kind happened at Pla del Palau, at the cattle market held every Saturday, where all the cattle traders from the county met to trade. They never brought the animals, but bought and sold cattle, horses, whatever, with just a handshake and a promise. And they paid each other in cash on the spot. Later they went for dinner at Fonda del Ferrocarril, across from Estació de França, near the Civil Governor's Headquarters. To extort money from that lot required a great deal of audacity, because the whole area was crawling with military personnel and police.
       While the traders were drinking their vermouth and waiting for their dinner, our comrades arrived and blocked the doors with their pistols clearly in sight. Others, who were also armed, went from table to table saying, "Let's have a little voluntary contribution for the Unified Union." The traders gave up their purses, because in those days they still went around with draw-string purses full of silver coins. The haul was substantial.
       My own temperament couldn't adapt to that kind of operation, even though I admired the accomplishments of those companions who risked their lives for the defense of the workers' organization. But let it also be said that there were some individuals devoted to that work who, lacking a moral and ideological base, felt the birth of dark personal ambition. They stopped working for the common cause and went on to robbery plain and simple, for personal gain.
       But that had nothing to do with us. Or does the capitalist community, when a businessman or an accountant runs off with the firm's money, blame the whole bourgeois community? Thanks to the proceeds from those robberies, we were able to help the families of the unemployed, of the prisoners, of the murdered, and keep the CNT alive.
       You could tell what the real meaning of the cause was by just looking into the eyes of those who were dedicated to our ideals. Dozens of names come to mind when I think of those terrible years, which were also, in spite of everything, filled with hope. For example, that little fellow, Salvadoret, the dynamic Valencian cabinet-maker who could neither speak Catalan nor Castilian well—just the Valencian dialect—was always there where courage was needed. Or Grau, who had sailed the seven seas and had written for Solidaridad Obrera, signing his articles "The Great Bohemian," and who, along with Andreu Miquel and Jaume Aragó, took over the organization La Naval, where all the sailors met, and which was under the influence of the UGT. Grau lived facing the sea; he never left the port area. He was always chatting with the sailors about ships from far-away lands. They smoked exotic cigars. Maybe he died of tuberculosis. Or maybe from nostalgia.
       Then there were the Piera brothers from Gràcia, especially Simó. Every time there was a strike in the construction sector, he was there leading it. He always dressed very neatly; he didn't look like a worker. He was great friends with Sugar Boy. In 1936, he belonged to the Esquerra (left) party. After the collapse in '39, he escaped to South America.
       Minguet was living with a girl who was Sugar Boy's cousin. Sugar Boy's surname was Seguí Robinat, and her first surname was also Robinat. Minguet had been an activist in 1912, and he continued to be so in '23. Not only was he always willing and available for anything that needed doing, but he also opened up his house to fugitives from the police, to strike committees, even though he was being constantly watched by the police himself. One of his specialties was to scrutinize members' faces in order to discover their morality. Sometimes at a meeting he would look at someone who had just arrived and say, "Get that guy out of here, he's a police stool pigeon."
       Not only were we active, but some of us also fell in battle. Ramon Ars finally fell, son of that other Ars shot before a firing squad in Montjuïc. They were from Igualada. Ramon was a very careful, prudent lad, but also very violent, and he had such an imaginative and inventive mind that when he applied himself in a fight against the enemy, it became very dangerous for the bourgeoisie and the police.
       In 1910, for example, he put in practice one of his first great ideas. The metallurgists were losing all their strikes because they were up against a united and obstinate bourgeoisie led by one of the Mateu family that owned the iron industry and had a huge foundry. I believe one of their descendants served as an ambassador under Franco. Anyway, on the tenth a strike was scheduled for the metallurgical sector, and Ars thought it could be won by liquidating one of the capitalist enemy leaders. So one fine day he walked over in front of the Maquinista Terrestre y Marítima factory and shot the Chief Engineer who, along with about four thousand workers, made train engines. The engineer's name was Tous, and luckily he was only wounded.
       Ramon got away and fled to France. In Paris he joined the anarchist groups and attended lectures given by Sebastien Faure and practiced free love. At the time of the Unified Union, he returned to Barcelona. I suppose in the meantime an amnesty had freed him from his responsibility in the shooting of the engineer in 1910.
       He soon became the driving spirit of the metallurgical union. The police began to think that if they got rid of him, union resistance would be decapitated. Ars was involved in all the assassination plots at the time. I can't come up with the exact dates now, because those things were planned secretly, and any questions led to suspicions. They had to be careful. But Ars has been dead for many years...all that stuff is water under the bridge now. What I can say is that Ars was involved in the attempted assassination of Dato, and it's quite possible that to him we owe the idea of another attempted assassination, that of the Archbishop of Zaragoza, Cardinal Soldevila.
       One of his most spectacular projects was planned for the day when all the general staff of the military, civilian and church authorities were to celebrate the militia feast day on Gràcia Boulevard. The reviewing stands were set up at the crossing with Grand Avenue, with all the authorities standing around, congratulating each other. And suddenly a driverless car came roaring down Corts Street. The soldiers protecting the authorities got out of the way, and the car crashed into a lamppost. When they searched it they discovered a two-foot tall brass bell full of explosives.
       Ars was always on the move. No one knows how, but one day he turned up dead, stretched out on Vila i Vilà Street. He had some gunshot wounds, but a lot more knife wounds or wounds from another sharp instrument. The worst was that Ars' penis was all cut up, torn and mutilated. There were signs of torture all over his body. His death left a shadow of sadness throughout the workers' organizations. The enemies of the Unified Union celebrated the occasion.

You never knew who you'd run into in our world. Not only from our country, but from everywhere. There were strange people, mysterious people who would arrive unannounced, then disappear through the door into the unknown.... During the years between 1917 and 1923, with death all around you, life became an accelerated experience, and that's when the weird types frequently appeared.
       I remember a Russian, a sort of white-breasted blackbird, whose name was Maximov. He was being pursued by Czarist Russia and landed in France, but noticed right away that Barcelona was an attractive place for revolutionaries to be. Since he was a carpenter by trade, he joined the Woodworkers' Sector whose offices were in Sant Pau Street, right beside the Cinema Diana. Every time you went by there, you always ran into the Russian.
       He used to carry a cane with a silver handle and was always well-dressed; his head was sort of flat and he always wore a hat. He stood out from the other carpenters, who changed after work, but wore simple clothes. The Russian, however, got off work, went home and got all gussied up in his Sunday best, as if he were going to the Liceu Opera House. But where he went was to the union local.
       He didn't take part in the conversations, though he listened attentively. He spoke Spanish with difficulty, which he had learned in France when he was planning to come to Spain. But when he got to Barcelona, he was surprised to learn that they spoke another language there, Catalan. That threw him off balance. You would often see him with a dictionary under his arm, but it did him precious little good because it was in Castilian. Anyway, he made the effort and came to understand us. Those Slavs are very good at languages. Maybe that's why the inventor of Esperanto came from that area. Anyway, he was a quiet man. He would observe our proletariat and then ruminate about them. His libertarian ideas were influenced by Kropotkin. He interpreted things differently than we did, but that was of little consequence. He had a very lively mind.
       So now you have the police, who had noticed him right away, starting to arrest him for this or that reason. Then our comrades worked at getting him out of jail. Layret was his lawyer on several occasions. But the day came when it was no longer possible to help him: the Russian revolution was the blackest of beasts in the eyes of the Spanish bourgeoisie, and when they found out there was a Russian among the anarchists in Barcelona, they thought he was there to set fire to everything.
       He and all the working-class Slavs who were running around Barcelona—and there were many such—were loaded aboard a ship. I think it was the Antonio López, which had been anchored in the port for a long time without any posted destination. It turned out it was being used as a prison ship. Since there was still room for more, the police loaded it up with more exotic types, such as Turks. And then the Antonio López set sail with about a thousand prisoners aboard.
       We never saw Maximov again. The only news we got was that the ship went aground against some rocks and gashed its hull near Turkish waters. Was it an accident or was it planned that way? The Turkish Navy hurried to the rescue, but by the time they got there the water had risen in the hold and killed sixty people. One of them was a sailor from Igualada who was my age, and had been shipwrecked once in Argentina and was saved, he said, thanks to his promise to light a candle to the Virgin. But what ever happened to the quiet and elegant Maximov?
      Kilbachiche was another Russian. He signed his writings with the pseudonym Victor Serge le Rétif. In French, rétif means a crippled, sort of hunch-backed person, physically defective. But Kilbachiche was tall and well-built. He was an individualistic anarchist and had left France after serving four years in their prisons. He had had something to do with Bonnot's famous gang, the one that inaugurated the system of robbery by car in 1912. All of those who worked with Bonnot—Garnier, Raimon la Cience, all of them—were also individualistic anarchists, and committed their robberies based on an ideological proposition that converted them into agents for the recovery of lost wealth for the benefit of the poor. Their specialty was bank robbery.
       When Raimon la Cience was tried in a Paris court, he scientifically demonstrated, if no more than from his own point of view, that the expropriation of money from the capitalists was a natural act. La Cience was a very interesting character, an intellectual.
       In fact, Kilbachiche wasn't a member of the Bonnot gang at all. It seems that Bonnot was a robbery specialist who worked with the others without sharing their ideological convictions. He was motivated by his instincts more than by any ideas. I don't know what they did with all the money they removed from the banks, but they used a good part of it to underwrite the expenses of an individualist newspaper that Kilbachiche edited, called L'Anarchie. The police discovered their operation, and Victor Serge le Rtif went to prison, along with the rest of the gang. He had lived with a girl named Jeannette, who died a few years ago, and who back then was also an idealist, young and capricious, always well-dressed in the latest fashions.
       The gang was broken up, in spite of the heroic resistance of Bonnot. In France he's already a myth. There are books written about his escapades. Raimon la Cience managed to escape on the way to his execution. He scrambled up a roof-top and delivered a polemic to the police and the people below, a magnificent speech on his ideals. When he finished, he leaped into the void and killed himself. He met an end worthy of an opera, but no one will ever write it.
       Kilbachiche served four years as an accomplice and for concealing evidence. But he was afraid Jeannette would be free en sourcis, that is, with a suspended sentence that would only go into effect if she repeated the offense. He didn't believe she would remain faithful while she was free. So he married her in prison. The priest who presided over the establishment performed the ceremony.
       That was pretty ingenuous of Mr. K., as if a marriage certificate would keep the girl from doing whatever she wanted! Back on the street after the ceremony, she set about leading her own life. When he was released from prison, Kilbachiche left France and came to Catalonia out of bitterness. I knew him in Barcelona. I was introduced to him by the anarchist writer, Gaston Laval, whom we knew by the name of Josep Benutti. He was a deserter from the French Army. Both of them hung around all day with a cart-driver named Costa Iscar, a very cultured individualist. They spoke French among themselves.
       Kilbachiche's mind was well-trained. I recall some very interesting articles of his in Tierra y Libertad on Nietzsche. But all of a sudden he returned to France to sign up in the Russian Czarist Battalions headed for the front to defend the Allied positions in the European War. Before he left, he said to Gaston Laval, "I'm going to the war out of desperation, so that they'll kill me. I don't believe in war and I won't fire a single shot. I just want to die. "I guess the shadow of his lost love had destroyed his spirit.
       A mass exodus of escaping Russians reached the Eastern front. The Germans overran Lorraine and began to move into France. The Russian revolution of 1917 erupted in Russia and Kerenski took control and tried to continue to pursue the war. But the war was very unpopular. From what I understand, there really wasn't a Russian revolution, or it wasn't what we usually understand to be a revolution: a populace which overthrows established authority. What happened was that the battle front collapsed, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers escaping or wandering around, with only one rifle for every two men. And that was their revolution: complete disorder.
       What became the real revolution was when Russia fell into the hands of all the Russian revolutionaries together: the anarchists, the bolsheviks, the mencheviks.... Those were the right-wing socialists, among whom stood the great novelist Andrejef. It's not true that the bolsheviks and the Leninists demonstrated any special talent in the overthrow of power.
       Anyway, after that, the soldiers the Czar sent to Europe were put in concentration camps, at least in France, because after the fall of the Czar nobody trusted them. They understood it backwards, but that's what happened. Kilbachiche was among the prisoners, and was later sent back to Russia. So Victor Serge returned, analysed what he saw happening, and concluded that the anarchist cause in Russia was lost.
      Libertarian Ukraine, thanks to the efforts of Makhno and the Makhnovites, was swallowed up by Lenin and his bolsheviks once they were in power. After that came the disaster at Kronstadt: the Navy personnel didn't accept the authority of the dictatorship; they felt that liberty and revolution were synonymous, so they defied both Lenin and Trotski, who ordered everybody shot just in case.
       Kilbachiche was an eye-witness to all that. I don't know whether he was a believer in minimum force or what, but what is certain is that from one day to the next he turned from an individualistic anarchist into an autocrat believing in Trotski's concept of constant revolution. From this experience he regained his self-confidence, for his intellect had been deeply challenged. But things didn't go very well for Trotski, and he was forced to flee to Mexico. Stalin sent a thug to assassinate him, and who should take his place as the visible head of the Trotskiites but our own Victor Serge le Rétif. How the wheel of fortune turns....
       I met Gardenyes in 1919, during the great bourgeois lockout. In a certain way he represented the extreme bohemianism that influenced a great many in our movement. He was an extravagant being, head and shoulders above us average mortals. Josep Gardenyes had also come from abroad. He was Catalan, but the Civil Guard had banished him from his home town of Camarasa. He went to live in France, then Argentina. He knew how to tango and was the first person I ever heard sing vidalitas. He was tall and strong and went around with his shirt unbuttoned down the front, even in the middle of winter. When I knew him he wore a Civil Guard's cape over his open shirt, which he had yanked off a Guard during a clash with strikers.
       He was an interesting individual, but a little crazy. Wherever he went three friends followed him, firmly glued to him, for he had destroyed their personalities and imposed his own will on them. They all lived in absolute poverty. He arrived in Igualada the day we were getting ready for the candela ball, a farce where we all wore masks. We danced and he danced. He looked so outlandish we thought he was in costume. After a while we went to the café next door and that singular fellow followed us there. I got a little irritated and asked him, "Listen, who are you anyway?" "I'm Gardenyes, at your disposal for anything you need, from writing to fighting," he answered. So we accepted him, because people like that are necessary, especially in times of struggle like those times were.
       At that time we were publishing a daily called La Protesta. The Federation of Industrialists had denied us the paper to print it on. So we started using different colored papers: blue, green and pink. Gardenyes peddled the papers until they were all gone. He soon became very popular. Then the police grabbed him, on the suspicion that he had participated in scab-whacking, robberies, etc., the same old story. They grabbed both of us, in fact, and we wound up as cell-mates. It wasn't long before I realized he was master of the situation, because in a flash he had organized the perfect jailhouse routine: at nine, wash and eat breakfast; at nine-thirty, commentary on readings; at eleven, verbal debate.... That was a life-saver, because in the Igualada jail you stayed locked up night and day with no yard privileges.
       While in jail, we had another comrade, a neighbor of mine, one of those who always said, "Don't get me mixed up in that." We were surprised to see him there. He was heart-broken, because somebody running away from the Guards had stuffed a sheaf of leaflets in his hands, and as he stood there staring at them, perplexed, the Civil Guards came up and arrested him for distribution of dangerous and subversive propaganda. The poor fellow was still in jail well after we had been released. Since he always denied everything they accused him of, the judge considered him a stubborn oaf and a cynic.
       Once again they locked Gardenyes up, this time as a "governmental prisoner," a dangerous category, because you were at the mercy of the Civil Guard lieutenant who had you in custody. I did as much maneuvering as I could to get him out, and two months later I got the mayor to make a move. The lieutenant agreed to release Gardenyes. We went down to his cell and the lieutenant told him, "Listen, you, I'm letting you go, but you have to leave town. And I'm doing it thanks to this gentleman," pointing to the mayor. Gardenyes looked at them both and replied, "He's as much a swine as you!" They tied his hands and took him to Barcelona, on foot. Sixty-eight kilometers. There they threw him into prison for seven more months, without any formal accusation.
       But he didn't waste his time in there. He read a lot and wrote, and wrote well. He had articles published in Acción Social Obrera. We corresponded, and I encouraged him to remain strong. Since there were a lot of "social" prisoners, he was living in an atmosphere of "social regeneration." One day there was a knock on my door: it was Gardenyes, free at last. He told me, "I want revenge on somebody. Tell me who the most rotten bourgeois is, and I'll kill him." To calm him down, I took him to the cinema, where he started a scandalous ruckus. He started insulting the bourgeois customers in first-class seating, with his shirt open down the front as always. The next day we gave him some coins and sent him on his way back to Barcelona, because if that lieutenant ever caught sight of him, he'd be locked up again for sure.
       In Barcelona he began to stick out like a sore thumb. He tangled with the police and scabs in all the tussles between the Free and the Unified Union and he sold Tierra y Libertad on the streets. He had an overweening affection for Salvador Seguí. Things happened in which Gardenyes was involved that can now be told, since all the protagonists are dead.
       Seguí used to attend a bull-session of ours at the Café Español. That in itself was daring. In Mendizábal Street they had tried to assassinate him, without success. Then one day a gang from the Free Union appeared at the Español led by a guy named Parnales. They insulted those from the Unified Union and Parnales spat in Seguí's face. Then they retreated with drawn pistols.
       Several days later a few comrades—I think there were five—together with Gardenyes cornered Parnales in Montserrat Street. "Spit now, you turd," they told him. Parnales realized he was in deep, deep trouble. Then you might as well say that our guys turned him into a target, for they just kept firing at him until he fell like a sack of rocks. They set off running, followed by police whistles, up San Ramon Street, down Hospital Street, the Guards in hot pursuit. Then our men turned and fired, killing five Guards.
       The police finally cornered one of them, Larrosa, who barricaded himself behind the marble counter in a butcher shop. He drilled a corporal with twenty rounds and the individual still refused to die. But Larrosa saw his cause was lost. Crazed with fear, he decided to take as many of the enemy with him as he could. A desperate move. So he leaped into the street, blazing away. At the very door a soldier slashed him with a sabre blow that killed him. He was the only one of the five the police were able to catch. The day they killed Sugar Boy in Cadena Street, the deep feelings Gardenyes had for him became apparent. A neighbor piously covered the body with a cloth. Gardenyes was one of the first to arrive, and when he lifted the cloth and discovered that the corpse was Seguí's, he went crazy, running and screaming all the way to Sant Pau. So much feeling, it was creepy.
       During the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera he was locked up a lot of the time, but was eventually released under an amnesty. Then the Republic was declared, and that fellow, together with a gang he recruited from who-knows-where, went out and disarmed more than three thousand militia troops. I can see him now, loaded down with captured arms, going in and out of the Generalitat as if he were right at home. Of course it was lightly guarded, though there were people from the Catalan State at every door...because the winning party, Esquerra Republicana—Macià's party—was an avalanche without form.
       It so happened that a comrade and I went to the Generalitat to demand a list of things for our town during those first days of the Republic, and there I found Gardenyes in Sant Jaume Square. "Where are you headed?" he asked me. I told him, "I'd like to get inside there, but they won't let me." "You want to see Gramps?" he said. They called President Macià l'Avi, or Gramps. "Yes," I said. "Come on, then," and the three of us, he with a package of Tierra y Libertad under his arm, walked right in past the guards. Suddenly he opened a door and we found ourselves in the office of the President.
       "Look, Cisco, these comrades want to talk with you," he said to Macià— Cisco was short for Francesc. And the President respectfully said to us, "My friends, what are you doing here?" And we told him about this and that, and he listened carefully and when we had finished said, "I'll take careful note of it." At his side there were three or four taking notes. Of course, they would forget us as soon as we left, and for good reason. Before leaving, Gardenyes said to the President, "Come on, Cisco, take a Tierra y Libertad, which will cost you ten centimes." And Macià gives him the ten centimes, took the paper and put it on top of a pile of other papers.
       What Gardenyes lacked was devotion to a steady job. In any case, he wrote for a while, then he went to work in a tannery where I got him a job in Poble Nou. But during the Republic he degenerated fast...bad company, robberies, and so on. One day, together with two others, he attacked a poor cyclist near Montcada, because they thought he was bringing the payroll from Sabadell to Barcelona for a big factory. They clubbed him once, took his whole fortune of twenty-four pesetas, shared it between them and then went their separate ways.
       Gardenyes was by then walking along the road alone, looking at the pesetas he had just taken, when the Civil Guard—advised by the cyclist—arrested him. Later, at the station, they learned he was a perpetual delinquent, so off to prison again...until the nineteenth of July, when all the prisoners were freed. He got out and positioned himself at the very front of one of the most dangerous barricades, to stand off any counter-revolutionary attacks.
       Then he left the barricades and hid out in a flat where no one was living at the time, and he took some jewelry, and some of his buddies who had followed him because they didn't trust him, grabbed him indignantly. They hauled him to the foot of a tree and shot him dead...an application of instant justice. I think they should have made him go to the front instead.
       Trulloles was another bohemian who came from America, even though he was Majorcan. To Trulloles, everything that wasn't American was shit. He looked like a tramp, disgustingly so: he went around with dirty old clothes, all torn and ragged; his beard was long and greasy, full of bread crumbs and olive oil drippings. His cap stayed stiff, even when it rained, from all the gunk ground into it.
       He criticized everybody, all the magazines and newspapers. He spoke well enough, but he was bone-lazy. He would eat anything we gave him. One day when we found him a construction job, the boss had to warn him to be careful, because he had to heft huge rocks up the scaffolding on his shoulders. He only lasted three weeks on the job, but with that money he was able to live for six months.
       He'd go around Barcelona with his comrades, making fun of them. Once, during a rally led by Lerroux, he even interrupted the speaker and screamed at him for making grammatical mistakes. They kicked him out of the place. He fixed up a cave in the stone quarry on Montjuïc, and even got his name in the papers because he roasted rabbits over a candlestick up there.
       In Igualada I protected him from himself as much as I could. My friends didn't want anything to do with him, and would stay away from him as much as they could. So I was always the one to walk at his side. I was irritated that they despised him, because he said things that were unique; he was intelligent, he had culture and feelings. The problem was he pursued the idea of absolute freedom, of exacerbated individualism to the point where he acted so strange the others thought him inferior.
       When he was about to leave town, he wanted to give me something as a present. I was the only true friend he'd ever had. But how, without a penny to his name, was he going to do it? I told him not to worry about it, and invited him to have coffee. When we finished, we got up and left. Then he began to sing opera for me. And he sang well, too. Maybe he had learned it in America. We walked around for three hours while that unfortunate lout sang operas for me, and I listened to him in all seriousness, while the people looked at us quizzically. After that he caught the train and I never saw him again.

The strike against the Canadiense electric company was a milestone in the annals of anarcho-syndicalism, and was at the same time a decisive factor in the consolidation of the Unified Union. The Canadiense developed and completed an electrification project in Catalonia that Catalan capitalists should have carried out themselves, if only they had had the vision to do so. They couldn't even imagine the project, and so it was people from Canada who did it. All the engineers and other personalities you saw around 1911 all spoke English.
       It appears that those foreigners studied a map of the placement of Catalan industries and they said, "Their fractionalized electrical industry is absurd. We should be able to build an electrical network that would serve a large industrial complex and give a good return to our shareholders." So they established what came to be known as "Riegos y Fuerzas del Ebro" (Ebro Irrigation and Power Co.) in 1911.
       During that time gas began to be looked down upon as an energy source, because electricity gave more power. So they started to build little electrical generating stations in the towns, and as people began to install it in their homes, industries gradually adopted it too, so that steam power eventually disappeared. The town councils took down the gas street lights and replaced them with little fifty-watt bulbs.
       The Canadians made a hydrographic study of the Pyrenees and discovered rivers with sufficient flow, like the Ribagorçana and the Noguera Pallaresa, so that they concluded, "If we build some big dams here, we could generate a lot of electricity and then run high tension lines that could reach as far as Barcelona, supplying electricity to all the towns and villages on the way as well."
       Of course, when those people think something out, they do it well, because they have a lot of money. So they built the dam at Camarasa and then others. The woods and fields that until then had only witnessed the presence of lizards and rabbits, suddenly saw how teams of men dug holes and planted towers that looked like little Eiffels, on top of which they then strung heavy cables. Nobody knew where they came from or where they went, so huge was the enterprise.
       The towns that had a lot of unemployment or strikers supplied the work force for the Canadiense. Then the company began to buy up the little electrical generating plants along the way and to supply electricity to the villages. Industry electrified little by little. The Canadiense was an authentic giant, and with it came foreign money, which is internationalist. This money had more power than all the armies of Napoleon or Hitler. They held in their hands a good part of the wealth of Catalonia.
       Such an important operation needed a formidable number of workers, thousands in fact, because they had bought up a group of parallel industries such as the gas companies. In each town they had an operations office with its maintenance crew. Such a complex had never been seen before.
       That brings us to 1919. The company workers became aware of the disparity between work hours and wages of those who did the same job in Barcelona and in the small towns. It was chaotic. So they decided to study the problem and write a plan for unifying wages and hours. They did that and presented a judicious set of norms to management in order to solve the problem. But it wasn't accepted, and the negotiations between both sides came to nothing.
       Then the general strike against the Canadiense broke out, running from Barcelona to Camarasa, several hundred kilometers, with the net result that the majority of the factories in the country had to close down from lack of electricity. The only ones to remain open were those of the retrograde owners who had still not converted from steam power. So in practice it became an industry-wide general strike. Everyone wandered around waiting for the Canadiense to make a move.
       The civil and military authorities became involved in the conflict and posted soldiers from engineering battalions in all the electrical generating plants. That action aroused a great fever of antimilitarism, especially in Barcelona, for having brought military pressure to bear on social issues, instead of staying quietly in their barracks. A lot of confrontations arose between the guards, the military and the townspeople.
       And the military soon found out that just because they were the army didn't mean they knew everything. They stuck their hands in where they shouldn't have, and eight people were electrocuted: five in the underground plant in Plaça de Catalunya four soldiers and a captain—and three at the station on Parallel Street. That made them stop and think a bit, but since that kind of bullheadedness never wants to admit a mistake, they began a search for soldiers—women as well as men—who were electrical specialists. The unrest increased and the work stoppage was not resolved. And that's when they militarized the strikers. They made all the employees of the Light and Power Company within the ages of a military reservist wear a yellow armband, which made him a soldier with orders to go back to work. That only made the conflict boil hotter, because other labor sectors then joined the Canadiense workers. The tram operators in Barcelona abandoned their trams in the middle of the street, so the Army had to come out and haul them off to the garages with horses.
       Public opinion sided with the proletariat, whose enthusiasm was enormous. Not even the independent press dared condemn the strikers. The bourgeoisie were the only ones who attacked them. One lackey of the capitalists in particular, a fellow by the name of Sánchez Pastor, wrote for La Vanguardia out of ignorance and in a rage. He had been writing furious attacks against us for years, and now reached his apogee, applauded on by his keepers. That individual didn't even dare leave his apartment, so he sent his articles out by messenger to the paper. Then they applied the "yellow censorship" to him. The technical commission of the union at La Vanguardia prohibited the publication of Sánchez Pastor's articles, causing the poor man to suffer an attack of apoplexy. Both Puig i Ferrater, who was a journalist there, and Viadiu, a proof-reader, explained the story to me.
       The strikers who had been mobilized into the Army refused to go to work. Spontaneous demonstrations churned the streets, as multitudes lent their support to the strikers and screamed at the military. The stubborn Army then militarized the tram operators, who also refused to return to work. So the Army tied up a few hundred of them and marched them off to the military dungeons in Montjuïc. This infuriated the populace even more. The civil governor at the time, Luis Marote, a liberal monarchist and a writer, saw that things were going from bad to worse. Madrid was demanding that he take more repressive measures, but he thought that wasn't necessary, for what the whole populace was crying out for was simple justice.
       He held a meeting with the union and told them, "The problem is now a question of maintaining public order." And we told him, "That's right, but that's your problem and you'll think of something; we're busy enough with the core issue, which is the question of social justice." He then he went to the Federation of Industrialists, the Fomento Nacional del Trabajo, where they told him they weren't going to concede anything until the workers bowed their heads and returned to work unconditionally. But the Canadiense realized what was going on here had nothing to do with the history of the English Trades Unions, who always turned a strike into a picnic. They were afraid the workers might sabotage the high tension lines, so they called a meeting with the strike commission and resolved the issue by acceding to three-quarters of the workers' demands.
       That was not only a victory for the Unified Unions of Light and Power, but also for the tram operators and all the rest of the Catalan workers. I have never again seen such a state of high spirits and happiness through such a broad spectrum of workers. Effusive joy reigned in workers' homes because they had become an institution, they had ceased being destitute animals, a pack of starving dogs. Through direct action they had won their rights and had felt their strength.
       But it didn't end there. The Canadiense strikers logically said, "we won't go back to work until our comrades locked up in Montjuïc are freed." Governor Marote answered, "I can only free—if I do free—the governmental prisoners. As for the military prisoners, the only thing I can do is recommend to the Captain- General that he free them also." Our commission consisted of Salvador Seguí, Simó Piera, Sadurní Meca, a well-known cobbler at the time, and others. Together with Marote they went to see the Captain-General. But the military wouldn't back down, "Let them go back to work first, then we'll release their prisoners from Montjuïc."
       Since the workers had no reason to believe the military, they decided to continue the strike. Things were slipping toward revolution. The military retired their troops to the barracks.... The tension was terrible, and the CNT, in order to decide what steps to take, called for a public assembly in the Arenas bull ring. It was filled to overflowing. The working class was very excited, because they had won something and now wanted to win the rest. In those times there were no public address systems, so the speakers had to have exceptional lung power. Mica opened the assembly, demanding silence and attention to what was said. But his voice wasn't strong enough and was stifled by the braying multitude, who obliged him to step down with shouts of "Shut up! Traitor! Reformist! Out!"
       Then Francesc Miranda stood to speak, the step-son of Anselmo Lorenzo, who was already very old, but a fighter from way back. The more radical groups also shouted him down; he tried several times to start his speech again, but they wouldn't let him. Instead, they filled the air with "Shut up! Out of here! We want the strike!"
       And then Sugar Boy stood up. And from behind him a sensational roar of protest arose—insults, threats, shouting and whistling—because his enemies were afraid that he just might convince the assembly.... He stood there, immutable, looking at the multitude, and when the noise abated, he started to speak. They shouted him into silence again. Again he waited, immutable. And so on and on it went, until the crowd grew silent. Then his oratory lashed out over those thousands and thousands of people and he captured their rapt attention.
       First he praised the strikers and those who, in spite of their military armbands, had had the courage to disobey. He praised the solidarity of the public, of the Unified Union. He said, "I understand the interruptions and the shouts of disagreement. They are not meant maliciously, but only reflect a desire that the victory over the Canadiense be total victory. But the military is armed, and if they are goaded, they will take to the streets. Therefore, if we want to continue to insist on the liberation of the prisoners before returning to work, we shall have to get by the cannons, defeat the Army and free them with our own hands. It's not enough to scream and shout here. If you are ready to make revolution, go ahead, let's start right now. But if the military cannons still pose a threat to our spirit, then we must accept the word of Marote, who assures us the Captain-General will free our prisoners just as soon as we return to work. And it's not that I believe the Captain-General, nor Marote the Civil Governor, but I do believe in Marote the writer!"
       The cries of support put the stamp of approval on his speech. We didn't use applause to show agreement within the union. The cat-calls and whistles of his enemies continued as well, but they were few and were overwhelmed by the approving cries of the crowd. Then Meca said, "Are you agreed, then, to go back to work tomorrow, and if within two days the prisoners are not freed, return to the general strike?" "Yesss!" responded the crowd. And then they emptied the bull ring. Two days later, the prison doors were opened at Montjuïc. Without Seguí's power of persuasion, who knows what would have happened.
       All that went on in the summer of 1919, maybe toward the end of July or first of August. By autumn, worker pressure, and as a consequence, counter-pressure from the owners, had become intense. New grievances and new strikes became more frequent, since by then workers all over Catalonia wanted to improve their conditions. And the bourgeoisie, who had previously defended themselves through local professional groups, began to adopt the tactics of their adversary, and they established an inter-professional network of owners, which later united the small-town factories with the powerful industrial federations in Barcelona. Until then the president of the National Federation of Industrialists had been one of the bourgeoisie, Mir i Trepat. But when the moment for raw-boned fighting arrived, they changed their organization's name to the Federation of Catalan Industrialists, called an assembly of all the bourgeois owners and hired an influential leader as president: Graupere.
       I don't know whether he was a bourgeois owner or not, but he was a greedy money-grabber. In public meetings, with the press present as an eye-witness, he would face off against the workers, hurling insults at them in offensive, apocalyptic language. He became famous for the hate he was able to generate in people. He was a lawyer by profession, a venomous lawyer who clearly demonstrated that his only interest was money, because when the feud between the Federation and the Unified Union was over, and the pistoleros began to speak, Graupere disappeared. He must have taken flight to some far-away corner of the world, because we never heard from him again.
       There was another lawyer representing the Federation, whose name was Bonet. He became the Federation's eminence gris. If Graupere was a wild beast, Bonet was slick, sort of cat-like, for in spite of his fine manners, he wanted to batter labor into extinction if he could. It looked like the owners had chosen two different types to play very different roles.
       In Madrid, the Unified Union was viewed, as always, as a purely Catalan invention. "Catalan unionism," they called it. It seems their collective intellects couldn't distinguish between "multiple-based" socialism and direct-action syndicalism. Be that as it may, the prestige of the Unified Union was enormous, as was the curiosity it awoke. The whole country was feeling the breath of the CNT.
       Then an invitation came from the Madrid Athenaeum for our Union to explain to them what the Unified Union was. It was an honor for us. We held a meeting and decided to send Pestaña, who was good-willed and able, one of our first-line leaders. But he didn't have the talents of a Sugar Boy, nor was he as transcendental a speaker. Pestaña resolved problems by telling anecdotes. He thought he could do anything, but that time he fooled himself—and us. Sending him to Madrid turned out to be a big mistake.
       He arrived at the Athenaeum and gave a two-hour speech, entitled "What Catalan Unionism Is." His picture was in all the papers of the day, but the intellectuals at the Athenaeum told Mauro Bajatierra, who was our representative in Madrid, "Yes, this gentleman is very pleasant to listen to. We enjoyed the speech very much. But we still don't know what Catalan unionism is."
       Bajatierra had represented anarchism in both Castiles from 1908 until 1936. The police always had an eye on him. At the Federal Center in Aguilera Street, where the stonemasons' union was also located, he held court with the ever-so-few anarchists in Madrid, since the socialists and the UGT reigned supreme in the capital. The classical anarchist group in Madrid was "Los Iguales" (The Equals), which consisted of Maura, the poet Moisés López, Pedro Marino García, the noble Feliciano Benito, Pascual—who later sold out to Ortega y Gasset—Antonio Lozano, who turned into a stool pigeon for the police, etc.
       If an attempt were made against the life of Alfonso XIII, or if some President of the Council of Ministers should pass on to a better life thanks to a bomb, the police automatically arrested Mauro Bajatierra. But they were never able to prove anything against him, ever. During the war, he was a correspondent at the front. Tall and tough, he always wore a Sam Brown belt and a pistol, which was a bit of a bluff. But when Madrid fell, he arranged to die proudly at home.
       He had an unquenchable affection for literature. He launched an infinity of newspapers with no future, such as Nueva Senda and El Quijote, in which he wrote in a style redolent of Cervantes. He also tried to write children's literature. After Pestaña's speech, he came to Barcelona and said what we had to do was send Seguí to Madrid, because Pestaña wasn't able to make his point.
       In the apartment on Egipciacas Street, Teresina went wild when she saw Seguí, about ready to set out for Madrid: "Where do you think you're going, you tramp? In the Madrid Athenaeum there are intellectuals and important nobility... Romanones will preside over your speech, and you look like a beggar the way you're dressed!"
       Seguí, of course, was wearing workers' clothes: a cap, a grey workman's coveralls, white rope-soled sandals and a silk kerchief indifferently knotted around his neck. That was the typical Seguí we all knew and loved, not the one in that damn photo where he's wearing shoes, a felt hat, high collar and tie. That was the suit that Teresina put him into. Who knows whether the poor girl rented it or got it from the ragman. Anyway, as he was going down to the Estació de França to get the train, he gave the impression of having become some ridiculous scarecrow. That outfit was a calamity, but he had a distinction all his own, regardless of the clothes he wore.
       Once in Madrid, he had to go through the ritual Pestaña had suffered before him: led by ushers down the aisle to the stage, bowing to certain honey-sweet personalities along the way, who bade him, "please, sir, this way please." Once he stood on the podium, he was in his stride and began by talking about the objectives of the union, also managing to include those of utopia. It was impressive to hear...to such a point that a marquis, whose name I don't recall, but who must have been a strange bird, said, "I say, Mr. President, sign me up for your program." Salvador answered, "Don't you realize what all this leads to, the elimination of the titled nobility and of property?" But the marquis answered, "That doesn't matter. You can count on me." Another count had declared to the press, "I consider Mr. Angel Pestaña to be my leader."
       But despite that success in the Athenaeum, despite the strength of our union, the rest of Spain did not respond. It was clear that a revolution wasn't going to happen on the Iberian Peninsula. Anyway, what I remember was we were all very happy at the time.

Furthermore, that whole world of politics, the authorities and the bourgeoisie were all influenced by many shadowy, vested interests. In 1917, Barret, the owner of a metallurgical factory, had been shot to death, an occurrence that became the object of different interpretations. The police and the Federation of Industrialists claimed the Unified Union had assassinated him. We tried to prove we had had nothing to do with it. There were a lot of factory owners, and the union could not presume to eliminate them all. Even if we had wanted to, we couldn't have done it. However, it's not impossible that some worker, tired of injustice and persecution, might have killed Barret. But it's more probable that Barret was assassinated by agents of the German Consulate.
       In 1917, the European War had been going on for three years; German and Allied spying was rampant everywhere. Just off-shore from Barcelona there were ships whose job it was to supply the Kaiser's submarines, which were busily sinking French and English shipping in the Mediterranean.
       There were powerful German agents mixed in with the citizenry of Barcelona who carried on the job of supplying such ships from the port. There were also Barcelonans who had sold themselves for German gold. As it turned out, Barret's factory produced precision pieces of war equipment for the Allies. Evidently that wasn't convenient for the Kaiser's agents. That may have been reason enough for them to have eliminated Barret.
       The courts were not able to get to the bottom of it. But since Barret was the president of the Metallurgical Owners' Association, why kill him if there weren't any grievances against either his firm or any others in Catalonia? Furthermore, the Catalan bourgeoisie had always favored the Germans, right there beside the rest of the Spanish reactionaries. It's very likely that, all things considered, Spain didn't openly declare itself on the Kaiser's side due to the French ties to the crown: the Royal House of Bourbon.
      The person who really felt affection for the German Triple Alliance was Bravo Portillo, the Barcelona Chief of Police. Pestaña demonstrated that Bravo was playing both sides of the street: maintaining public order through power derived from the Spanish Government, along with a secret affection for the German Consulate. He wanted to palm off on us the assassination of Barret, later linked to the beginning of the fights with the pistoleros of those years. Meanwhile, the anarchists were accused of having begun the street terrorism.
       Bravo Portillo distinguished himself as the principal repressor of the working class. For years he controlled all the agents in Barcelona. He was cheeky, cruel, and during some strikes he even hit women in public, right in front of his own police officers. He gave no quarter. He preferred to kill our comrades than to arrest them. They shot one of our best militants, Segura, as he was escaping over a roof. They came in the night for another of ours, Tero, telling him he was going to headquarters. He was found the next day in a road ditch near Montcada, pitilessly riddled with bullets. The same thing happened to a lot of other people. Those acts were really executions; they went well beyond the legal limits of any police corps. One day at noon when the people learned that Bravo Portillo had been assassinated at the corner of Gràcia Boulevard and Diagonal Avenue, at the door to the apartment of one of his lovers, all Barcelona cheered. None of the witnesses who had seen our men there reported them. The only evidence the police found at the scene was a new cap lying on the ground. None of the hat shops would admit it was one of theirs. Everyone was against that gutless swine. Even the weekly humor sheet, La Campana de Gràcia—usually opposed to the Unified Union—ran a front page cartoon showing a group of people throwing a cap up in the air, shouting "Long live the cap!"
       The assassinations that took place between 1920 and 1923 were the moral responsibility of the Sindicat Lliure, or Free Union, a facade set up by the Federation of Industrialists so that the scabs and the pistoleros would have an excuse for attacking us. Those in the Free Union collected a bounty on every worker they killed from the Sindicat Unic, which increased in value according to the importance of the corpse in union ranks. Those who assassinated Sugar Boy, for example, collected twenty-five thousand pesetas. Faced with that avalanche of death, the only thing we could do was respond in kind.
       There came the time when the Civil Governor, Bas, no longer wanted to be the enforcing instrument for the blind criminality of the Government and the industrialists. So he resigned. Then General Martínez Anido, who was already in Barcelona for some reason or other—maybe stationed at one of the military barracks—stated that he would feel very honored if they were to name him the new Civil Governor. And so they did.
       Bas packed his bags and, before taking the train, asked that a commission of the Unified Union come to see him. He told us, "Don't come here with any more of your grievances. They are being unjust to you, they have hundreds of your men in prison, and they assassinate you. So stop talking and prepare yourselves seriously, because they are plotting something very gross against you. Your lives can no longer be guaranteed."
       The first thing Martínez Anido did was to set Inspector Espejo loose on the city. His style was to kill his prisoners after he was done torturing them. So the Union set the elimination of Espejo as its basic objective. One day our boys suddenly appeared before him in a narrow street near Santa Maria del Mar and shot him. Espejo was such a venomous type that before he expired, laying there on the ground, he accused the first person who happened by and knelt to help him, of being his assassin. Lucky for the passerby, other witnesses denied the truth of what Espejo said. Our boys were never caught.
       Then the police began to wreak their vengeance by killing CNT members. But that wasn't enough for Martínez Anido, so he organized parallel gangs of pistoleros. His aim was to manipulate the situation so the next chief of police would be another general, Arlegui, who had the instincts of an executioner. The pain we felt within the CNT was immense: there had been at least six hundred of our comrades assassinated in the previous three years. The list was endless: Nadal i Gual, Comes Perones, Salvador Seguí, Feliu, Benet Nenacho, Farràs, etc., on and on....
       Martínez Anido and Arlegui used an individual named Salas, a remnant of the Carlists, to organize the Free Union. There was another one, a Carles Baldrich, who was among those who assassinated Sugar Boy. Innocenti Facet was also involved in that killing. He had been one of our militants, and had written newspaper articles for us, until we began to suspect his ties to the police. He found out we knew, and never came back. Then he was spotted among the Free Union pistoleros. Seguí and his comrade Perones were killed together in Cadena Street. The killers suddenly popped out of a doorway, made both of them kneel in a semi-circle against the wall and riddled them with bullets.
       Afterward, during the Republic, when justice was dealt out to a series of members of the Free Union, Facet was able to save his skin. He arrogantly wrote to the press claiming he had had nothing to do with those assassinations. Then he disappeared without a trace. He must have worried they might liquidate him too. Baldrich did the same. Salas, however, was judged by our comrades in Sabadell in 1936.
       The survivors of Baron de Koenig's gang also worked with the Free Union gangs. He was German and apparently without his barony. Mir i Trepat, the president of the Federation of Industrialists, had contracted him in 1918 to stir up the violent repression against us. Bravo Portillo had given police ID's to de Koenig's people. But we made such an effort to eliminate him that finally, seeing his gang decimated, he fled. The drop that made the cup run over was the assassination in Est Street, where the Baron's lieutenant, "el Mallorquin," was killed, along with another pistolero. That lead to a very rowdy trial, and de Koenig disappeared.
       The Free Union gangs were perverse to the point of forcing us, in the meetings of 1917 with Lola Ferrer, to make speeches saying that the Unified Union was authoritarian and the Free Union a blessing for all. They pointed pistols at the speakers from behind the stage curtain to make sure they said the right thing. In Igualada, the Free Union people were less successful in their criminal activities, like when they unsuccessfully tried to kill Fabregat. In town, a Carlist sided with them, along with a young foreman. They went around town flashing their pistols. They managed to scare me a couple of times, but that's all.
       Later, during the Republic, all the other foremen in the area boycotted that young fellow, insisting that the bosses not hire him, or else they would shut the factory down...so he couldn't find work anywhere. The Federation of Industrialists finally gave him a job as gatekeeper at their recreation center. Then after the revolution of '36, when we had taken over the recreation center, he came to me looking for work and I said, "Get the hell out of here and don't let me see hide nor hair of you again!" I thought if the others got riled up, he would be in for a bad time.
       In Copons, in the Segarra area, there was a factory owner named Baldomer Camps, who had fled from Igualada at the time of the bourgeois disaster during the strike of 1914. He was The Federation's stooge. He made believe he had given his factory to the Free Union, and that they were operating it as a socialist enterprise. But the truth was the workers were still being paid for piece work, and the gangs of pistoleros were using the town as a rest center, after a few intense gun battles in Barcelona.
       Martínez Anido went to the extreme of inventing, or having his henchmen invent the "fugitive's law," which consisted of taking four or five Unified prisoners out of Model Prison and killing them cold-bloodedly in the open fields behind it. Later the police would sign a deposition stating that since the prisoners were escaping, they were forced to shoot them. It always happened at dusk, or after dark. Thanks to that, some of the prisoners whom they left for dead were able to crawl away. I knew two of them. One was a linotypist from Figueres who was shot through the lungs. He was always in delicate health after that.
       Martínez Anido's lack of respect for the law was demonstrated in 1920, when his gangs killed the lawyer Layret. He was a cripple from childhood, due to an illness. I think they killed him at the very door to his house. He was a very honorable man, a politician with values. If he had lived to see the Republic, he would have become one of its most significant and progressive supporters. He belonged to the group that included Nicolás Salmerón, Valls i Ribot and Pere Corominas, and attended the meetings of the Federalist Union of Catalonia, where he tenaciously and successfully opposed Lerroux and the Lliga. When he saw that the bourgeois owners were becoming more influential in the Lliga, he placed his liberal, progressive faith in the Barcelona working class. Francesc Layret was one of our best defense lawyers in the courts. And he wanted to found a sort of Catalan workers' party, tied—I don't know to what degree—to the CNT. But we would not have supported him in that. While Seguí, Martí Barrera, Companys and others were being shipped off as prisoners to the Castle Mola in Menorca, Layret was assassinated by cowards.
       The character of the protagonists involved in the three most outstanding CNT actions in response to the gang shootings by Arlegui and Martínez Anido was demonstrated in the assassinations of the Archbishop of Zaragoza, Soldevila; of Eduard Dato; and of the Count Salvatierra in Valencia who, while he was Civil Governor of Barcelona had said, "While I'm in control here, I'll not free any government prisoners." It's not as if the organization had planned those actions. Salvatierra no longer occupied a position of authority—he was living quietly at home. But some of the comrades remembered him for who he had been.... Those who carried out such actions were friends, within whose moral character something undefinable demanded revenge for all the atrocities we had suffered.
       The Dato case was handled intelligently. I repeat, Ramon Ars was the principal organizational mind behind it, but those who went to Madrid were three young and friendly comrades: Pere Mateu, Casanelles and Nicolau, all three of them from the metallurgical sector, like Ars. They left on a motorbike with a sidecar. When they arrived in the capital, they rented rooms in a pension and found work. And they stuck to this seemingly normal routine for about three months.
       Even though they were Catalans, no one suspected them of anything. At the pension they cracked a lot of jokes among their fellow guests. All three of them were funny, with the charm of youth. The owners and other guests thought they were quite nice. Apart from all that, they were studying Dato's habits, one of them in particular. They came to center their plan on the details of Dato's comings and goings from Parliament, and the speed of the President of the Council of Ministers' car.
       Dato's car started to leave Parliament and they followed it on their motorbike. I believe the action took place on Castellana Boulevard. Casanelles drove the bike and sidecar. He then accelerated until he was just a bit in front of the official car. The other two were seated, one in the sidecar and the other behind the driver...both shot at the same time, killing the president almost instantly. Casanelles sped ahead with the motorbike. He was a championship driver who rapidly lost his pursuers in the traffic through those narrow streets.
       The police began a search for the assassins, and little by little the search narrowed to the pension where the young men were staying, maybe because they were looking for three suspects, and it was there that three Catalan mechanics were lodged. The police entered, acting like possible clients. Pere Mateu was there, and they surprised him and jumped him.
       He said, "If you had given me a little more time, we'd have made a western." He meant he would have shot his way out if he hadn't been taken by surprise. Then the police laid siege to the city and put everybody through the sieve who tried to leave. But they never suspected two Valencian crock-peddlers whose papers were in order. They were Casanelles and Nicolau, who had made their escape successfully. In fact, they got out of Spain entirely.
       Casanelles wound up in Russia, and Nicolau in Germany, with such bad luck that the Madrid Government demanded his extradition and the Germans granted it. The poor fellow ended up in prison, just like Pere Mateu. They only got out when the Republic granted a general amnesty to all political prisoners. Pere Mateu was a good friend of mine, a man as men should be. Today, as an old man, he's still that same idealist he was back then...always has been. He did what he did out of conviction, as he has done everything else in his life. He would rather go hungry than to watch someone else starve.
       Eduard Dato was the man responsible for Spanish government policy. It was he who kept Martínez Anido and Arlegui in power in Barcelona. If those two were the "executive" branch of government, Dato was the power that gave them their orders. Those who justified his actions say he was obliged to act in that way. But that does not excuse him. You can't let one part of the Spanish map become a jungle—the shame of Europe—and expect to survive unpunished. He should have resigned.
       Shortly after the assassination, general policy took a turn. Dato's death required it. I seem to remember the president was a well-known political conservative. What I do know is he was replaced by Sánchez Guerra who, even though a politician like so many others, was a man of honor, for a change. He kept his word when he gave it, and had a sense of the value of civilization—Christian in his case—but civilization nonetheless.
       Sánchez Guerra proposed to bring an end to the shame of Catalonia. Another "episode" made a decisive contribution to that proposal: Angel Pestaña went to Manresa to give a speech. Even though the assassinations had become less frequent, Martínez Anido and Arlegui continued in power in Barcelona, and evidently the Federation of Industrialists as well. Around that time a gang of ours had shot four Free Union pistoleros to death in the café "La Gàbia" on Pere III Street. Because of that, a gang from their side decided to take revenge on Pestaña.
       Seguí was already dead, leaving Pestaña as the visible head of the CNT. There was a good price on his head. They shot at him and wounded him, but didn't kill him. Pestaña was taken to the hospital, where the killers tried to get in to finish the job, but the Civil Guard stopped them, apparently on orders from Sánchez Guerra. When he learned of the shoot-out, he became very indignant and ordered that Pestaña's life be protected at all costs.
       Then he fired Martínez Anido, who responded over the phone, "I'm not leaving. Come and fire me here." "Alright, I'll be there," Sánchez Guerra answered. And so Martínez Anido was forced out, dragging Arlegui with him. Sánchez Guerra replaced him with another general, Ardanaz. And the Unified Union was on the road to recovery.
       In Igualada the government told us, "You may open your doors again. Bring your statutes and we will approve them." It sounded pretty much like the same old line.... We didn't believe them and so, before presenting the union statutes, we wrote up some statutes for our Athenaeum and gave them those. Even though they were culturally oriented, the articles still clearly reflected our anarchist tendencies, without mentioning the word. I myself went to the Civil Governor's office in Barcelona to deliver the papers. However, they didn't use the old line, "Come back tomorrow," or "Come by in three days," but instead asked if I could return in a couple of hours. I came back and they returned the statutes, signed and sealed. The new general was just like the others. But it seems he had strict orders from Madrid. There must have been a sense of guilt in Madrid—for all they had done to Catalonia and to its workers—because the Catalan capitalists didn't feel a bit guilty.
       With the statutes in my pocket, I returned to Igualada almost jumping with joy. The stupid local bourgeoisie, when they saw the union open its doors and begin operations again, were bitterly disappointed. What would have surprised more than one of them would have been for them to have found out that it was probably I who saved Martínez Anido's life...his and Arlegui's and the lives of their whole headquarters staff.
       There was an individual in Igualada who was an authentic misanthrope. An extremely cultivated man, but with a shy personality, incapable of any social life with others. He owned half the shares in a cement factory, though he didn't work there. And all his income went for books. His library was formidable. After living for some years in Barcelona, he returned to his home town. His ideas were completely anarchistic, even though he had no relationship with the CNT. He was always studying, even on Sundays. He had analysed the anarchist leanings of the town and, probably because of articles of mine he had read, asked me over to his house once and said, "I'm a comrade of your group. But I don't like the chit-chat and the rows you get into. In spite of that, count on me for anything you may need." Sometimes when I visited with him I would say, "You have to get out and get some air or your character will rot." And he answered, "No, the individual has to live for himself, not for others." He had what later came to be known as an inferiority complex, but he was also uncommonly proud. He was a combination of both things.
       I began to call on him for help when the bourgeois bosses locked us out, the prelude to the struggle between the Free Union and the Unified Union. He would camouflage himself, dressed as a laborer, and go out to scare the scabs, he who always wore a sports jacket. That didn't really matter, because nobody recognized him anyway. His stubbornness worried me sometimes. One day, one of our comrades didn't show up for a meeting. The misanthrope said to me, "I'm going to liquidate that individual. A man who can't keep his word doesn't deserve to live." He didn't do anything about it, but ever since then he couldn't stand the other fellow and always scorned him.
       He returned to Barcelona, but then he showed up in Igualada once again and told me the following, "I can't stand it. I have to do something to calm down. But since killing a cop or one of those characters from the Free Union seems a worthless thing to do, I've thought of something better. They are planning to give homage to Martínez Anido at the Free Union center in the Rambles. I'll join their union and that way get a pass for the celebration. Before I go, I'll fit out a suit full of tubes of dynamite. Then I'll go in and stand there, right in the middle of that crowd of maggots, as close as I can get to the big shots, then I'll light the fuse and blow everybody to hell."
       I had to argue with him for a very long time to get him to drop that idea, insisting on the impracticality of the project and appealing to his sense of humanitarianism. I finally got him to give up on the idea. I've sometimes wondered whether I did right or not. My problem was that I didn't like those bloody jobs of butchery at all.

The weekly newspaper Solidaridad Obrera was born in 1907. The name came from Anselmo Lorenzo's cry for worker solidarity when the pro-Catalan bourgeoisie ran into the streets shouting Solidaritat Catalana, or Catalan solidarity, which wasn't a symbol for anything. Later, in 1915, La Soli became a daily paper.
       The CNT, as I mentioned, was formed in 1910. Lorenzo's slogan had united the workers in Barcelona, and the following year included workers from all over Catalonia, signaling the beginning of what came to be called Solidaritat Obrera Regional Catalana, or United Workers of the Catalan Region. Later, this regional grouping joined with that of Asturias, part of Aragón, Andalusia, etc. And that's how the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, or the CNT, came into being.
       I began to write for La Soli as a humble reporter in 1910. I was fond of the work, but I did it out of a sense of obligation, since no one else would do it in Igualada. Later, writing became for me a need which I have never lost the appetite for. I wrote short articles; I knew they were far from perfect. I took careful mental note of the corrections they made in them... when you haven't had many years of schooling, you need to keep your eyes wide open.
       By 1911, I noticed more fervor in my writings. That was when I left the textile factory for the tannery, where the sense of union struggle was very strong, and I felt right at home. Nobody knew how to write except me, so it was I who gathered the news from Igualada and wrote it up for the weekly. Since I have always been very sensitive, whenever I made a mistake it felt like I'd been hit by a brick. Of course by 1939, publication had ceased, although the paper was later published in exile, and I even served as one of its directors then. During the Civil War—and we'll get to that shortly—I was one of its reporters at the front. I have always been tied to the paper in one way or another.
       We suffered a lot of prohibitions. During Martínez Anido's reign, we had to move the operation to Valencia, as I mentioned before. Under Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, it got to the point where it became impossible to publish the paper. As a result, we printed a substitute, which Pestaña edited, and which differed from the original in that it adopted a certain literary tone, to the point of even including serials. I remember one by Emile Zola. Under Berenguer we were able to return to normal.
       I could talk at length about many of those who came to work for La Soli.... For example, Givanel, a very fine writer; Ramón Sender also; a fellow who called himself David Copperfield, who wrote substantial columns and essays; Emili Vinyes, with his reflective notes touched with a bit of aristocratic humor.... Manuel Andreu was an electrician who gave so much to the organization that he virtually came to control it. I don't know if that was because the others were lazy or in prison: he served in almost every position, from secretary of the Regional Federation to editor of the paper.
       I don't know how he managed to endure. I have mentioned him before: he was one of those thin, nervous types. And apart from the paper, he gave at least ten speeches a week. In order to attract workers to the Electricians' Union, which had very few members then, he put an ad in all the Barcelona papers stating that a millionaire Barcelona electrician who had gone to the front as a volunteer had been killed, leaving all his fortune to the electricians of Barcelona. The union hall in Paloma Street filled to overflowing after the ad came out. When the people discovered it was a hoax, there was a phenomenal uproar. Even so, a few hundred electricians signed up.
       Another was Agustí Castellà, a barber from Sant Vicenç de Castellet. I don't know why, but for a time all the barbers in that town were anarchists. Castellà was married to the woman who had been the companion of Salvador Seguí. Later he disappeared. Antoni Amador, the one who took notes on Seguí's famous speech in Mahon shortly before they assassinated him, was also an excellent journalist. He seemed to have his roots in the middle class, rather than in the working class. He had attended the Modern School for many years, so he was an educated man. While imprisoned in La Mola prison in Majorca together with Seguí, Viadiu, Companys and others, he got to know a girl from there and stayed on with her. That's why he went on to the Mahon conference. Thanks to his notes on those speeches, we were able to challenge those who claimed that Sugar Boy had political ambitions. His anarchist ideology was well thought-out and he was totally committed to it.
       An Argentinian, José Marobio, was one of the first editors of the newspaper. He had a mysterious, magnetic personality. When he finished work at the paper, he would go to the theaters, in order to earn a little extra money hypnotizing people. They accused him of having sold out to the Germans. I don't know for sure, but I would be surprised if that were true.
       And then there was Josep Negre, who became a very important element in the CNT. He was from Valencia, very strong-willed, and participated in all kinds of CNT struggles, either writing or fighting—it was all the same to him. He, Tomás Herreros and the socialist Bueso sustained a verbal battle for nine months against Lerroux's paper, El Pogreso. Even though that paper had an enormous influence over the workers of Barcelona, Herreros and his colleagues won. There were even assassination attempts made against them. And in the 1909 conflicts, he became one of the most intelligent activists to man the barricades. But his excessive public speeches made him lose his voice. He could only speak in a whisper, which sounded like it was coming out of the end of a funnel. In spite of that, he kept on attending the rallies, as well as editing the paper. Give or take a few, he spent eight years in prison.
       A lamentable thing happened to Negre, due to a misunderstanding, I suppose, which led him to hate Sugar Boy. That first editorial board of La Soli when it became a daily had Godayol and Puerto as its accountants, and sometimes there wasn't enough money to pay the help. Sometimes the printers would ask for a raise as well. So the paper was taken to be printed at the shop where they also printed La Publicidad. It was then the conflict broke out. Quemades was the leader of the graphic arts union, very intelligent and a very good friend of Salvador Seguí. But when they brought La Soli over to La Publicidad to be printed, no one knows why, but Quemades accused La Soli of being supported by the German Consulate of Barcelona and of generating propaganda favoring the Triple Alliance.
       Now that certainly wasn't true. The paper was anti-war and criticized both sides. It's possible that some francophile might have gotten angry because some article spoke badly of the "homeland of liberty." The point is that even in the regional assemblies the question of German gold came up and created a very tense situation. The whole editorial board resigned as a result. I don't know whether Sugar Boy corroborated what Quemades had said or not, but as a result, Negre came to hate him terribly. I heard Negre say foul things about Seguí on many occasions. On the other hand, I never heard Seguí say anything bad about Negre. Things came to such a point that Josep Negre quit the organization, even though he continued being an anarchist. He only came back to offer his services—if they were needed—when the war broke out. He finally wound up in the refugee camp at Argelers, France, after the collapse and his escape. He was pretty old by then, and he died a pitiful death, just another anonymous corpse. Life does that to the best of us.
       The matter of German bribery gold arose in many quarters. An Andalusian, Francisco Jordán, worked at the paper. He was no doubt a brain, but also quite a pedant, with little desire to put in a whole day's work. Anyway, he got in touch with two of Lerroux's journalists, Pierre and León Roch, who wrote for a weekly, La Rebeldía. I suppose they paid him something, even though Jordán always denied it.
       What he did do was to go to Seguí and tell him that if he came to an understanding with those two, there was money to be made. Seguí then went to meet them, according to some comrades of ours. The Lerrouxists told him what the deal was, namely to make propaganda for the Germans. The Boy said, "Alright, but that will cost you two hundred thousand pesetas." They were surprised, but finally gave him eight thousand. Seguí then rose to leave, saying, "Thanks, boys, for your donation to the Prisoners' Fund." An article appeared in La Soli, naming that amount as a contribution to the Prisoners' Fund.
       There were many others I remember involved with the paper: Joan Usón, Andrés Fernádez, Josep Prat, and Pestaña, who was its editor for a long time. Another, Paco Ascaso, later wound up as a janitor in a convent at Calatayud. Then there was the French translator, Domingo Tirado Benedí, and Magre Riera, author of little romantic novels where the women sigh and faint dead away. David Reu was one of the most audacious creators of the Unified Union. And a fellow named Boi, from Capellades, who came from a Catholic background: he had worked for the Left, borrowed money from everybody, made his wife wash his feet, and after the war turned fascist and ran away with a cacique's daughter.
       Elias García was another man who was good with his pen. He had written an interesting book, titled Cántigas de montaña (Songs of the Mountain), a very good literary poem. But he wound up an unfortunate victim of his own actions. In 1917, he used to go to a café where all the unemployed hung out. He let it be known that they had fired him at Companyia del Nord. But every month he would go collect his money at the boss's house with a pistol in hand. Until one night, when they came after him and he escaped in a hail of bullets, leaving the guard and two policemen dead.
       He fled to France, but then returned for the street fighting in Bilbao, because he was from there. He wounded a policeman and they brought him to Barcelona. He was condemned to death, but later freed under a general amnesty. But the years of prison and the beatings they had given him left him touched in the head. Later, during the war, he went to the front and was killed in an attack.
       A really important individual at La Soli for years was the linotypist, Bernal. I don't know whether he was a Castilian or an Andalusian, but he knew the Spanish language better than anyone I have ever known since. We would all go to him if we had a grammar or spelling problem. It was as if he carried the dictionary around in his head. He was the only one in the CNT who was ever that sharp with the language.
       The problem was he drank. He loved to walk through the streets in the Fifth District with a few too many under his belt, cursing society and the police. And he always carried that damn bone around with him. It was hell walking with him, because when least you expected it and a cop appeared, he would haul out this bone from his pocket, waggle it in the face of the cop and howl as if he were a dog. Of course, they grabbed him and beat him up, a real mess. But he was incorrigible. I found myself with him in that situation once, and did I ever sweat!
       If only we had a collection of all the issues of La Soli now, we would have a detailed view of the workers' struggle in Catalonia and Spain...even of our thoughts and ideas, through the articles written by our contributors. Some of our intellectuals clearly followed a different course than the paper did...for example, Joan Montseny, or Federico Urales, who had been one of the prisoners in Montjuïc, as I said.
       He was a truly important and intelligent man, as was his companion, Teresa Mañé, or Soledad Gustavo. They were from Reus, but had to flee due to the mess in Montjuïc, and afterward wound up in Madrid. There, in 1905, they left the libertarian movement, closed down the two magazines they published, Tierra y Libertad, and La Revista Blanca, which had been vital channels for our ideological debates, and then their daughter Frederica was born. In spite of what her birth certificate says, Frederica Montseny is eminently Catalan. And I believe it was she who, in 1921, made her parents go back to publishing what they had abandoned, because they later rejoined the movement, but not the CNT. Frederica turned out to be a very impetuous anarchist.
       The Montsenys then launched the weekly El Luchador. Federico Urales was both a businessman and a man of letters. He had been a journalist for El Liberal in Barcelona, and wrote a very interesting book about the state of philosophy in Spain at the time. He revived La Revista Blanca in the '20's, and published some weighty books, such as those by Pi i Maragall. Montseny was also a businessman, so things went well for them. And out of that background came La Novela Ideal. When I was a kid, there weren't any anarchist novels. But Urales brought out that collection of short novels, many of which his daughter Frederica had written, about romance and anarchism. Her father wrote some longer ones, such as Floreal. I was born too soon to be able to enjoy that more or less cheap literature for beginners. Anselmo Lorenzo and Ricardo Mella were the authors on doctrine I read in my youth.
       I also read Mir i Mir, a Menorcan, who published El Porvenir del Obrero (The Future of the Worker) in a fine edition in Mahon, and who also published a book of anarchist short stories. Its title was Dinamita cerebral (Cerebral Dynamite), and was a collection of things out of Tolstoy, Azorín and others.
       Mella went down in our annals as a profound thinker; he lived in Vigo and wrote for Acción Libertaria (Libertarian Action) in Gijón under the editorship of Pedro Sierra, Professor Quintanilla and others. Once Anselmo Lorenzo was dead and Josep Prat in decline, the only remaining writers we had in Barcelona were very average. At that time, the essence of anarchist thought came to us from Asturias. You understand, of course, that the revolution at La Felguera was always anarchist, while the one at Mieres was marxist.
       Ricardo Mella had a sharp, cutting pen, from which never an extra letter came...I mean he was a very dense thinker. If his writings appeared sober, his thoughts were in fact exuberant. He turned out to be the best philosopher of Spanish anarchism, or perhaps the only one.
       In New York we had a Barcelonan intellectual, Pere Esteve, who wrote very good articles for Cultura Obrera (Worker Culture), the magazine the American libertarians put together. In the Basque Countries we had Juan Ortega in San Sebastián, who signed himself "Juan de Easo," and who carried out a brilliant propaganda campaign for us. Galo Díaz was from Eibar and always wore his Basque beret. He was a very courageous writer, even though we were never able to establish a union up there, where everyone was a socialist, except a comrade I remember from Galicia who was crippled, a teacher from the rationalist school....
       During Primo de Rivera's dictatorship there was quite a bit of printed material available on anarchism. In Igualada we published Germinal, a modest venture... to say the least. There were four of us who wrote for it: Josep Anselmo, Jordi Carner, Antoni Massana and I. Carner had gone to a religious school, and he loved to imitate those couplets in honor of this or that virgin; he made a burlesque of it, with his very sharp pen. Massana, on the other hand, would look up high-sounding words in the dictionary and then use them to write an article. Neither he nor Carner had a very solid education. I made fun of "the clerics," as we called them.
       And I continued to write for a new magazine, El Sembrador (The Sower). I created a sort of pious woman whom we called Lesima. Then there was Anselmo, who had run off to France with a girl. They came back with a baby. Josep Anselmo was a very good, honest worker. He wanted to earn his living by writing, and he wrote to Puig i Ferreter, who gave him advice in that direction. I had more than enough to do as a tanner and a cobblestone layer for the town council; Josep Anselmo did not.
       He wrote a story of singular mettle. He could have signed it Edgar Allan Poe. It took place at the Coll i Bas hermitage, a sinister place. The Virgin they had there was ugly and base, and the countryside wild and torturous, covered with very green and frightfully twisted pines. Anselmo developed a normal tragedy within that scenery and brought it to a logical conclusion. The two hermits who cared for Coll i Bas, a married couple with no land of their own, lived a precarious existence on the edge of starvation. They survived on the charity of the visitors who bought scapularies and votive prayers from them. The money in the poor box went to the priest. Solitude is charming when one is sick of the city, but when you have to look at the same landscape out of necessity, day in and day out, you wind up talking to the squirrels and lizards. Nature seems to turn people into beasts.
       The hermits had an idiot son, a creature who was born defective, and whose teeth and nails were ground sharp. He looked as if his only mission in life was to bite and scratch. He seemed to possess the spirit of a wolf or a wildcat, as he lumbered around in his jerky, spastic way.
       I used to get sick just thinking of that boy. Anselmo, on the other hand, wrote an excellent piece based on all that misery. If tragedy had not befallen Catalonia and all of us in it, it's possible my friend Anselmo might well have become a first-rate writer.
       Our spirit remains; it has never fallen. But our lives, our illusions have been smashed so many times.

With our return to the light of day, we experienced a rebirth of the syndicalist movement, even though we missed a lot of our comrades who no longer existed.... Maybe because of that, the friends who years later became members of the POUM, the Marxist Unified Workers' Party, and wanted to establish a marxist syndicalism, set out to take over the CNT.
       But they didn't know the true nature of our membership. They thought it would be easy to absorb us, but it turned out to be an impossible task for them. They started out by denigrating the CNT. If it had been their movement, they would have called it El Castell de Ferro, or The Iron Castle, but since it wasn't, their press called us "the giant with feet of clay." It seemed to us they had got that out of the family Bible of one of their leaders, Maurín, who later joined the POUM. Based on his language, we guessed he must have studied for the priesthood as a youth.
       I remember the CNT held a lot of rallies, all of them significant. The most important of them was the one held in the Palace that later hosted the Universal Exposition of Barcelona. There were a lot of foreign participants, as well as our Angel Pestaña. Among the listening public was that great anarchist historian, Rudolf Rocker. He was a profound student of our movement in Spain, and at that time was studying the possibilities of bringing it up-to-date. Pestaña knew that Rocker would be listening to his speech, so he decided to give it a bit of an historian's slant. But he began to cut loose with so many errors of fact that Rocker asked, "Is that fellow really Pestaña?" "Yes," I answered. "Then I'm leaving." After the session, he took Pestaña aside and filled him in on the real bases of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism. Pestaña was, as all of us were, a self-taught speaker. And what he had learned was laudable. But of course he had his limits. Since there were no university-trained people in our organization, we were always having to improvise. Those who did have university training did their own thing, because even though they shared ideas with us, they were not militants.
       Einstein the scientist had visited Barcelona before the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, and the first thing he did was to find out what he could about the CNT. He arrived incognito, so nobody knew he was there. He lodged in a little pension on Escudellers Street, the same one where tradition says Bakunin stayed. He was accompanied by his wife; he carried a violin under his arm, and his huge shock of gray hair fluttered in the wind. He looked like one of those men who earned his living playing music on street corners.
       Some journalists saw someone walking on the Rambles who looked like Einstein. They also knew he might be in Barcelona at that time. The next day El Día Gráfico printed a full front-page picture of the wise man. The curious thing is that once his presence was discovered, the first public visit he made was to the Unified Union Hall in Carrer Nou, later Conde del Asalto Street. That's right near where Solidaridad Obrera had its offices. He asked for Pestaña, since he knew who the editor was, and said, "You are street revolutionaries, and I'm a scientific revolutionary." The daily published the story with headlines three fingers tall. We were pleased that a man of his stature and courage should visit us first, before giving his attention to the offices and institutions considered to be representative of a country's culture.
       At that time Catalonia was boiling with strikes. We had obtained some improvements in working conditions, and there were others we were just about to obtain, when the years of terror intervened and suspended any genuine union activity. When we became legal again, it was logical that we should want to make up for lost time. The strike that raised the most uproar was the one in Barcelona's transportation sector. It took place in the summer, and affected garbage and body collections. Soon Barcelona began to stink from those mounds of garbage on the streets, as well as the three-day-old bodies whose burial date had become indefinite. All that turned out to be too strong.
       Of course, the Unified Union was accused of being the cause of all the disorder and unhealthiness. But we answered, "Yes, of course, we'll cart all that rot off. But first sign the contract accepting our conditions. We don't want all that refuse to block the city streets either. We only want to improve our standard of living, since working for you—which we do by removing your garbage and your dead—increases your standard of living."
       They were forced to give in. But the bourgeoisie and the authorities were taking note of these worker victories, and they considered them an affront. So in October of 1923, when the dictatorship was proclaimed, they said it was a necessary step because Spain was in chaos due to worker anarchy in the streets, where there was no public order or safety, thereby crying out for an Iron Hand.
       But if the pride of the bourgeoisie and the authorities had sunk to a new low, it was also due to the war in Morocco. When the Spanish Army was about to enter the kabyle of Beniurriaguel, there was a well-organized Moorish counter-attack, and General Silvestre's forces of about three thousand men had to retreat, with the result that most of them had to leave their skins there, including Silvestre himself.
       The Moors, enthused by their victory, took control of the whole Rif. At the siege of Mont Arruit, five thousand Spanish troops died, and the whole General Staff was taken prisoner. If the Moors didn't take Ceuta and Melilla, it was because they didn't want to. If they had taken advantage of the Spaniards' surprise, they would have had no opposition. But their own victory had so surprise d them that they were too surprised to carry on.
       They contented themselves with surrounding Melilla and taking positions on Gurug Mountain, a hill which had cost the Spaniards dearly in 1909. Faced with a collapse of that magnitude, a review of the facts was demanded. Parliament named a Commission of Deputies, chaired by a General Picasso, an expert in strategy. But the conclusions the Commission reached were never made public.
       Primo de Rivera, the Captain-General of Catalonia, justified his proclamation of dictatorship by citing the chaotic situation in Spain, the inanity of politics, the insanity of the administration, and anything else you want, but without making the least mention of the Picasso report.
       That report compromised almost everyone, from the lieutenants—who stuffed the money budgeted to feed the troops into their own pockets—to the ministers and generals, and even the king himself. That's the only way you can understand how King Alfonso XIII could have come to tolerate a military take-over which established a dictatorial regime and made a mockery of a Constitution he the king himself had signed.
       But you have to understand there was a part of the Army that shared no love at all for the king. When the professional officers were captured by the Moors at Mont Arruit, their freedom could have been arranged by paying a large sum of money to the Moorish chieftain and then presenting a bill for the ransom to the king. But when the king saw the bill, he said, "Those yellow-bellied chickens are too expensive." That offended the officers deeply, and if the position of the military had not been so compromised, the king would have lost his crown right then. The ransom was finally paid by a ship builder from Bilbao, a republican by the name of Echevarrieta. Since the Spanish public barely noticed the existence of the dictatorship, the fiction of a "popular dictatorship" was created...about the same as in communist eastern European countries: the subtle pressure of a ferocious State armed to the teeth. All that could have turned into a tragedy, but that was impossible, since opposition to the dictator was not in the least effective, only verbal: café jokes poking fun at Primo de Rivera. That was unavoidable. Since he didn't brandish his sabre or kill people, everybody took him as a big fat joke. A dictatorship earns its stripes by letting blood. General Primo de Rivera not only didn't scare anybody, he was like somebody out of a comic opera.
       In my town only the shop-keepers were interested in the dictatorship, because they always sided with those in power, to see if they could get some of their taxes reduced. They were later joined by the nobodies who wanted to get ahead under the new regime. On the first anniversary of the dictatorship, a great demonstration of support was organized in Barcelona. I was working at the time as a mason's helper for the town council of Igualada, and they wanted to send me to the parade with all the others to carry thirty-six pennants representing the various towns in the area, to make it look as if the whole country had turned out to reaffirm the dictatorship. I said no thank you.
       The students in Madrid took over the University for a few days. At that time it consisted of one lone building called San Carlos. While they occupied it, they shouted obscenities about the dictator without incurring any run-ins with the police. If they had been workers doing the same thing, they would have been cannon-balled by the Army. But the students were sons of the rich.
       Those same students pulled an even dirtier trick on the General. One day, as he was parading down La Castellana in an open car, about two thousand students gathered on both sides of the parade route. First from one side of the street came the shouts of "Viva don Miguel!" and Miguel Primo de Rivera rose in his car, smiled and saluted. Then the other group shouted from the other side "...de Unamuno!" Primo de Rivera sped away in a rage. The well-known Professor, Miguel de Unamuno had been recently banished to an inhospitable little island in the Canaries.
       On another occasion, Primo appeared with a bump on his forehead. "Don't think I fell down drunk, because I only tripped over a chair. I don't drink anything now—I only drank during my first fifty years," he answered. He was sixty then, so.... And in Jerez de la Frontera, the night before the parade, they sawed the legs half-way through on the reviewing stand. Next morning the General and all the notables mounted the stand, and suddenly the thing collapsed under them...among shouts and cries for help, the police appeared. Then Primo de Rivera rose like a specter from the rubble and said, "Gentlemen, the stand has fallen, but the dictator remains standing."
       Leaving the jokes aside for the moment, not a one of the supposedly serious plots to overthrow him ever succeeded. There was one, in which Generals Weyler and Aguilera were implicated, along with Count Romanones and Sánchez García. They called it the "sanjuanada," or Saint John's Day Coup, because it was supposed to happen on San Juan's Day. But it was still-born, and there were arrests and fines. It was a palace revolt. The monarchists had all turned republican, indignant at Alfonso XIII's treason by allying himself with Primo de Rivera.
       On the other hand, the General managed to attract the vast majority of the socialists to his side, through the UGT. Without any intention of doing them wrong, I should mention Largo Caballero, Del Barrio, Saborit—and I think Cordero as well—all of whom accepted the responsibility of managing an organization whose goals were social welfare and cultural improvement.
       In Dato's time they had gotten used to the Instituto de Reformas Sociales, or the Institute for Social Reform, with which their policy of passive action fit quite well. Prieto and some other politicos noticed the trap the dictatorship was setting for them, and had a falling out with it.
       I'd like to add a few thoughts concerning Dato. Even though he was sacrificed by our group, one must admit that he was the most distinguished politician during the Monarchy. He had created the Tribunal Industrial, which was where social conflicts were resolved; he signed the eight-hour workday into law. And he was leaning toward the politics of the English Liberal, Lloyd George, who rose to international prominence thanks to his pro-labor legislation. Dato copied him in that. He was wrong, though, in thinking that by operating from Parliament he would avoid the CNT. In spite of that, Dato impressed a lot of people. His one-eyed politics were taken very much into account by Francesc Layret and Andreu Nin. The latter, who had been involved with the CNT earlier, at that time was a militant in a marxist party.
       The CNT also tried its own form of revolt. Our underground groups instigated an uprising in the Barcelona Army Barracks at Drassanes. Emplaced strategically all around the barracks, our militants awaited the cry to revolution, but none came. So our people started to assault the building. They were welcomed by shots from within. They replied in the same coin. Then the police arrived. The result: two defenders of the public order were killed. Many were arrested, among whom they discovered two anarchists, Llátzer and Montejo. They were both condemned to die by the garrotte. No truly significant defense was prepared for them. Only on the day they were to be executed in Model Prison did their fellow prisoners rise in protest, creating havoc, burning mattresses, breaking down doors, etc.
       Another attempt at anarchist overthrow came from our exiled militants in France. Trained by an ex-Civil Guard named Santillana, about one hundred men secretly crossed the border, using old contraband trails near Irun. On the outskirts of Vera they were surrounded and almost all of them taken prisoner. They were tried by military court-martial in Pamplona and four were condemned to death. One of Santillana's men didn't want to be sentenced, so he jumped from the top of a stairwell in a Pamplona castle. He died, splattered on the stones below. History, when it makes reference to opposition to the dictatorship, doesn't mention facts like that. It only mentions well-known names, fines levied, and the intellectuals involved. If the CNT had allowed itself to be manipulated by the political parties, it would have been better-remembered today. But who wanted to remember the doings of the proletariat?
       Out of that atmosphere came something that would later be of transcendental importance: in 1927, the FAI, or the Iberian Anarchist Federation, was founded in Valencia. The majority of their membership consisted of anarchists who had emigrated to France, though there were also some who had remained in Spain. Up until then it had been impossible to unify the revolutionary, action-oriented anarchists outside the realm of the unions. Attempts had been made at it, but smarting personal antagonisms and excesses of imagination diluted the effort.
       I myself had become involved in one of those projects two years earlier. In Manresa, several groups of us got together from Barcelona, Terrassa, Sabadell, Berga, Rubí, Manresa itself, Igualada and other places. There must have been about two hundred of us. But it was really distressing when we argued and argued without ever reaching agreement. The obsession with retaining the independence of each faction—and even of each individual—was the principal stumbling block. That made the project inoperative, because without mutual comprehension you can't accomplish anything.
       Apart from that, there was the problem of the bombers. A comrade from Manresa believed bombs were the only solution. A true anarchist knows that his first priority lies on the cultural plane, and from a knowledge of it he can derive an idea of what needs to be done about the revolution. But there were those who had a pistol in one hand and a bomb in the other, leaving no hand free to hold a book. That fellow from Manresa wrote me a letter one day saying, "Tell me what arms you need." We answered, "Two batteries of mountain artillery and three of field cannon." He never mentioned it again, and we dropped the project.
       In Barcelona in 1915, I got involved in another similar effort. They had named me to the Secretariat of Propaganda, and I had to take some pretty terrible articles to Herreros the printer, so that he would include them in Tierra y Libertad. He told me they were horrible, and threw them all in the waste basket.
       But the FAI was a serious undertaking. They held out during the dictatorship, and then under Berenguer all the exiled FAI members returned. It was then that the organization acquired its true potential. The FAI was specifically anarchist, and never allowed itself to be watered down or neutralized by the needs of the workers or by daily family problems. They conceived of themselves as finalists in the race, not mere observers of it. Of course, parallel to that stood the wisdom of having all the other anarchists who, either through their own desire for independence or through their social concerns, were not members of the FAI but were still activists in the CNT, founded by anarchists and always guided by libertarian principles. And I was one of them.
       And I say libertarians, because it's a more neutral way of expressing it. If you use the word anarchist, it makes you seem more dangerous. In the trades unions, there are workers who aren't interested in anarchism—worried as they are about the questions of social reform—but who will accept the concept of libertarianism without question. Anarchism will come about of its own accord; it need not be imposed from above. Malatesta said, "The people will be anarchists only within the context of anarchy itself, and not before." As for the FAI, the only objectionable thing about them was that at certain times during the Republic they resorted to an excess of demagoguery.
       Another merit of the CNT, even while they survived underground—a fact revealing their capacity to exert influence in the labor world even under the most dire conditions—was their ability, in the midst of the dictatorship, to block the application of an income tax on the wages of the high-income workers. That's just what happens today to workers' wages in so many so-called socialist and democratic countries.
       In 1928, the Government passed a law ordering such an income tax to be applied. Those were the days when the pavilions were being built on Montjuïc in Barcelona for the up-coming International Exposition of 1929. That's when the bricklayers refused to work. Management had demanded that they do piece-work at contracted prices, since they wanted to present the operation as political propaganda. And they were well-paid for it. Later, when an attempt was made to collect the tax from the factory foremen, they refused to pay it and refused to work as well, leading to the deterioration of machinery, until production slowly dropped and unemployment increased. The Dictator, about to drown in his own juices, repealed the law. The workers didn't pay the tax and the Exposition was able to open on time. Once again, the Barcelona workers had imposed a principle of justice through their will power.
       But the success of the Exposition did not keep Primo de Rivera from falling in 1930. Many Spanish analysts concluded his fall was produced through political and military pressure. In my opinion, it was due to economic pressure exerted by the United States. Spanish domestic opposition had no spirit. On the other hand, the General's rising foreign debt was enormous. The United States economy was experiencing hard times, and they were probably not inclined to put up with that petulant, extremely ignorant old man much longer. The exchange rate for the peseta was at an all-time low. Primo de Rivera realized he could not face the failure of his own economic policies.
       What followed him was another dictatorship—or whatever it was—this time presided over by General Berenguer. The plots and conspiracies, especially in the army barracks, were considerable. We did the same thing, together with the UGT, and we organized a general strike, and then the politicians....
       But the Jaca affair was truly lamentable. The Jaca Army Garrison was transferred to Zaragoza, having revolted in favor of the Republic. It should have been well-received, but the Captain-General of Aragón withdrew his support from the insurgents' revolt and intercepted them on their way to Zaragoza. There was a lot of shooting and the troops scattered. Seven or eight captains were captured, and two of them were shot: Fermín Galán and García Hernández. It was one of Berenguer's clumsy blunders, a special weakness of his. The survival of the monarchy became definitively compromised after that event.
       The sometimes-bloody caprices of Alfonso XIII could no longer escape public opprobrium. The people threw in their fate with the anti-monarchist cause. I don't mean they surged into the streets; in fact, they did restrain themselves. However, the atmosphere was so tense it demanded municipal elections, which turned into a republican festival due to the monarchy's loss of prestige. Of course the politicians and the military were the beneficiaries. They didn't want to see things come to the confrontational extremes at Drassanes or the thing at Jaca. Elections and festivities, yes, because they felt they could still control stuff like that.
       In order to assure themselves that everything would go as they wanted, the politicians had held a secret conference and signed the Pact of San Sebastián, presided over by the cream of Spanish politicians, especially the old-guard monarchists who had become furious republicans. On the other hand, the old supporters of the Republic showed themselves to be more moderate and reticent, and we knew this. The politicians wanted the UGT and the CNT to promise, when the Republic was declared, to refrain from any strikes. If concessions had to be made to the workers, it was the new government that wanted to do it, from on high. We were not to recover our freedom of action until twenty-four months later.
       Pestaña and Peiró were our representatives, co-jointly with those who created the "pact." At about that time Pestaña began to develop a taste for politics. Both of them took careful note of all they saw and heard. And they told us the UGT was in agreement. But the UGT was the right arm of the socialists, while we responded only to the workers' interests. We had contributed to the toppling of the monarchy, not because it was the monarchy, but because it represented the State. We weren't about to commit the stupidity of immediately replacing the monarchic State with a republican State. So we rejected the Pact of San Sebastian.

On the twelfth of April, popular enthusiasm overflowed into the streets, principally in Barcelona, as a result of the overwhelming triumph of the republican candidates in the municipal elections. The monarchy was liquidated in a bloodless, business-like manner.
       On the twelfth, Companys appeared on the balcony of the Barcelona City Hall and spoke of the Republic as if it were already a fact. That was a consequence of the popular enthusiasm. On the fourteenth, Macià proclaimed the Catalan Republic. But that was a senseless—or rather, gratuitous—aspiration, for he had to back off from his proclamation immediately and be content with the Spanish Republic.
       Even though the pro-catalanist historians speak well of Macià, it should be said that it was really Lluis Companys who presided over the dreams of many. He was a man who had never stopped fighting. While Primo de Rivera governed, many politicians were dozing, half asleep. But not Companys. He realized that leftist republicanism didn't really capture much of the people's imagination. People weren't responding to it, and went on grazing the field without offering themselves up to the sacrifice. It was then that Companys, along with others, set up the Organizació de Rabassaires, or Organization of Tenant Vineyard Farmers.
       The statutes of the organization were presented to the Civil Government of Barcelona and approved in the midst of the dictatorship. In that way, by making speeches to the tenant vineyard farmers, Companys demonstrated his ability to form a very powerful political party, which grew to a membership of eighty thousand farmers. And he accomplished all that without the dictatorship ever realizing it. In my opinion, that was the real power Esquerra Republicana of Catalonia—the party of Macià and Companys—had acquired by surfacing in the first few days of the Republic, when it took form and triumphed in the wink of an eye. Those farmers were enterprising men, and they came from all the provinces, from Tarragona, from Lleida, from Barcelona and all the rest of Catalonia.
       That doesn't mean that Companys overshadowed Macià, who came to be president. That ex-military man had awakened a certain warmth among the libertarians in 1912, as a republican deputy in the parliament of the monarchy, when he declared it useless and gave up his seat as deputy. His position fit in well with the anti-parliamentarianism of the anarchists.
       Apart from that fact, the figure of Macià became lost in a silence only briefly broken when, still during Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, he attempted to invade Catalonia from France with a few dozen men. The operation was a resounding failure. Those who had joined his venture were all Spanish anarchists, but the historians don't mention the episode in their chronicles.
       During the Republic, Macià reigned as a respected, but static president. And mono-thematic: he always gave the same speech. Just as in the case of Marcel·lí Domingo in 1917, Macià also allowed himself to be perceived as "the returning Christ." In April of 1931, he entered the Saint Jordi Chapel in the Generalitat, together with President Alcalá Zamora, to pray or do who-knows-what. The mere fact that those who elected both of them were anti-clerical completes the picture of what the Republic and those two men were all about. No one doubted that Macià was a sincere, well-intentioned man of integrity. But he kept the windows that opened onto the future closed, so that the bad odors of centuries past would not leak out of his hermetic Catalonia.
       Naturally, the twelfth of April also had repercussions in Igualada. But the republican spirit there, which had previously been very strong, was now greatly diminished. The event didn't turn out to be anything more than a second edition of the annual village festival, with the people out on the streets, milling around and commenting on what had happened.
       If ever there was a note of liveliness, you could see it in our people, who were still obsessed with the idea of settling the hash of the Free Union, which still functioned, but with neither grief nor glory. So we went to their union hall, threw the old furniture out the windows, set it afire and danced around it. But then the republicans came by and said, "Don't go looking for trouble, because things are just fine the way they are."
       Leaving to one side for a moment what the republicans were doing, we in the CNT were excited about the re-opening of the unions, and started getting ready for the fights that might come. The libertarians never thought the Republic could be a solution to anything. Personally, I have to say that I didn't use my vote, not even to throw the king out. I never have voted, so as not to become an accomplice in the continuation of the State. I didn't even go near the urns to vote for the release of prisoners.
       During those days in April, everybody was surprised that Alfonso XIII had left the country without the threat of an armed force making him leave. It made the revolutionaries look ridiculous, since a simple election was all it took to produce the revolution. Later, history was to prove that everything had been a mirage, and that the Republic was sustained thanks to the support of the banking industry and the armed forces of the monarchy. I won't be the one to say that the leadership of the Republic didn't have progressive ideas that would lead to change. But they discovered themselves facing a fact they had not foreseen: capitalism, in the hands of a bourgeois Republic, was still the master of Spanish politics. Spanish capital, when faced with the proclamation of the Republic, at first withdrew and partially paralysed production. Little by little, industrial activity decreased, the idea being to provoke forced unemployment within many sectors of the Spanish economy. This warning made the Government understand they needed the cooperation of capital. And capital recognized the threat of republicanism, almost surely with the help of Joan March, and it attempted to neutralize republican policy, which at the same time they were slowly undermining. The "sanjurjada," or the General Sanjurjo events, demonstrated that.
       In 1932, the Church and capitalism, holding hands with each other, provoked a military uprising against the Republic in Seville. But the Sevillians reacted unanimously: they declared a general strike; they captured as many arms as they could, and Sanjurjo had to surrender. Then they locked him up and the reactionaries turned him into a martyr. In any case, that martyr was soon able to get out under an amnesty. Workers who had done the same thing remained in prison for years and years.
       At that time, the Republic appeared to have grown in strength. But that wasn't true. It still needed loans from the Bourse and the banks. And when that help failed, it couldn't go forward for lack of resources. For that reason, and with the purpose of satisfying the capitalists, they made some suicidal demonstrations of loyalty to the hand that fed them.
       One of them was the following: a group of sandal-makers in a small town in the Rioja region went on strike. Poor workers who had never struck in their lives, and who suffered as much poverty under the Republic as under the monarchy, surged through the streets, because they thought they now had the right to demand tangible improvements in their condition, and rapidly. The local bourgeois bosses got scared and demanded help from Madrid. The Republican Government gave orders to the Civil Guard—which was not yet the Republican Guard, even though at its service—and they went and shot up the sandal-makers, killing ten of them.
       Such scandalous savagery caused consternation among the public. The Republic said to the capitalists, "Notice how we defend your interests." But the people, who had believed in the Republic, said, "This Republic is not our Republic." The new regime had lost its credit with the public. They lost the labor vote, precisely the vote that had put them in office. The Republic was playing both sides of the street, because it had arrived half a century too late. It's position was no longer logically tenable.
       If they had martyred the people, if they had treated the people so harshly, how could they later ask for their support? Parliament, apart from the windbags, ceased to be a gathering-place for advanced political thought. Even though there were naive deputies like Balbotín or Captain Sediles—people who voted against the Republican Government—they gained nothing by it but to confuse their votes with those of the reactionaries, the CEDA and the extreme right, the would-be monarchists. So, in the end they too renounced their seats in Parliament, when they came to understand that a republic could also be a pile of shit, and that the Spanish people could never achieve redemption through Parliament and its laws.
       Then there was the attitude adopted toward the FAI. The FAI, they said with disgust, had allegedly turned its back on the people who believed in the Republic. But the position of the FAI was normal. If, on the one hand, the anarchist ideology was anti-state—whether that state be bourgeois or soviet—on the other hand, the members of the FAI held to a daring thought: if the monarchy, even when it appeared invulnerable, had been easy to tumble, then the Republic, which still had not consolidated, would be even more easily demolished. Then the way would be clear to set up a regime of libertarian communism. The foregoing may sound exaggerated if viewed from outside the anarchist camp. But for a libertarian, it was within reach and do-able, perhaps a project offering positive results for a change.
       Of course the FAI had not taken into account the fact that the masses, still fascinated by the republican myth, were not about to follow anyone to revolution. The blindness of the idealists made them gaze at reflections from a false mirror, instead of absorbing what they could easily see all around them.
       Anyway, their faith never wavered, and they were the ones who provoked the outbreak of revolution in 1932. The idea, as always, was that libertarian communism should be declared all over Spain. And again, only Catalonia responded, apart from a single town in Aragón, called Maella, where the Army carried out a terribly brutal repression: they killed four or five citizens senselessly, when it could have been avoided.
       The revolution centered in the Llobregat and Cardener river valleys. The CNT unions were faced with a big predicament. In the towns of Fígols and Sant Corneli, the people decided to abandon money as a medium of exchange and began to practice living as a cooperative. The local miners didn't doubt for a minute. From the river valleys it spread through the rest of industrial Catalonia. Our supporters in Terrassa wanted to turn the town into a libertarian commune. They took over the town hall. The Army set up artillery in front of them, and they had to surrender. In Ripollet and Cerdanyola they also raised the black and red flag, symbol of the CNT, in both town halls. But they also were obliged to desist, just as the towns along the Llobregat had given up to the Army, not to the Civil Guard. On the Rambles there was shooting, and a comrade of ours named Blanco was killed. The revolution, isolated and partial, was again aborted.
       The authorities decided to impose strong punishment on the people, to serve as an example. They deported Bata and more than two hundred comrades of both the CNT and the FAI, because they couldn't tell which was which. They were stuffed in the prison ship Antonio López. Our people were afraid they might sink the ship, since it already had a bad name, but nothing happened.
       A strike was declared to protest brutal government action against the working class, who were being stifled in their attempts to express their opinion. If there had been people who were initially against the strike, they soon joined in solidarity with the strikers when they saw t heir neighbors being arrested for no reason at all. The workers became indignant when they saw their comrades being sent off in chains to distant lands under unhealthy conditions, without their knowing whether they were guilty of anything or not. All Catalonia joined the strike. In Igualada, the strike was unanimous and spread easily among the people. Only the reactionaries applauded the deportation, because it served their anti-republican interests. The only difficulty we had was getting the shops to close, but we did it by beating up the shop-keepers and breaking their shop windows. The Civil Guard defended the shop-keepers. There were very strong clashes in the streets.
       My friend Josep Anselmo was one of those who got the worst of it. A Guard jabbed him so hard with his rifle barrel that it penetrated his chest, creating tremendous pain. We tried to get him out of sight of the Civil Guard in a button shop, but the owner was a reactionary and slammed the door in our faces.
       Anselmo's brother-in-law and I decided to take him to Lleida. I also wanted to escape, because they always threw me in jail after every street brawl. It was a very hard winter, and it snowed until the whole countryside was buried under almost three feet of the stuff. We started off by car, but by the time we reached the Panadella Pass, all traffic was stuck in the snow. We were lucky enough to be able to get the car turned around and head for Calaf to await the train. Josep Anselmo was suffering, but we hid his wounds. We rested, or rather hid out, in the leftist center for seven or eight hours. Horrified, we overheard them say, "If it were up to me, I'd sink that damn ship full of revolutionaries." We didn't say a word about our anarchist leanings. It was then we realized that even the so-called progressives were far from a true understanding of what social change meant to us.
       We finally boarded the train. We arrived in Lleida very late; it was almost dark. I thought that town was a fiefdom of what later came to be called the POUM, because its leader Maurín had come from there, along with a lot of his supporters. Our newspapers jokingly called it "Mauringrad," a play on Leningrad. When we got off the train, I thought of that name again, because of all that snow on the ground.
       We walked from one end of town to the other, looking for the Workers' Center. It was open, as if nothing had happened. It must have been about eleven at night, and Josep was feeling worse all the time. In that workers' hall not one of the comrades offered to give him shelter. They didn't even offer him a room in the center. One of them said, "Try to find a room at an inn." Those individuals must have been only half-baked CNT members. Their lack of solidarity and basic humanity made us very sad. Someone offered to accompany us. He sounded Argentinian. Anselmo was slipping and falling on the icy snow. We could barely hold him up. We must have looked like puppets. It was colder than hell.
       Finally, at midnight, we were able to find shelter in a tavern. They gave us potatoes to eat, and at one in the morning, with Anselmo painfully concealing his wound, a couple of kids and a man, all of them with guitars, took us under their wing and started singing and dancing tangos for us. I never did like that sugar-coated music. But there's a song they sang, titled Se va la vida, or "Life is Fading Away," that I have engraved on my mind. Every time I hear it, I see visions of Anselmo and his suffering before my eyes.
       In the morning, a pharmacist prepared a pomade for us, which we applied to the wound after first cleaning it with alcohol. Then we loaded him into a little train run by a sugar mill, and got him to his uncle's house. And there we finally left him, cozily bunked down.
       We caught the train again. Its tiny compartments were beastly cold. In ours there was a man who was constantly scraping the frost off the window with a razor blade. On all the station roofs we passed, bright shiny icicles hung two feet long. In Mollerussa we had to transfer. You could barely see the tracks, covered as they were with the dirty, trodden snow.
       I said to Anselmo's brother-in-law, "We'd better get something to eat and find a bed for the night." He answered, "You go ahead, I'm staying here; I'll come later. I want to get some sleep now." He was hunched over, shivering from the cold.
       I remember similar scenes I had read in a book by the English sea captain, James Cook. There was a scene in Tierra del Fuego, a place that wasn't hot, but cold. They had given it that name, "Earth of Fire," because they had observed Indian bonfires there. Cook explained the case of a black man who died laughing. To die of the cold, yes, but to die laughing...he really froze to death, but with a smile on his face. When they lie down, they experience an enormous sensation of pleasure, without understanding they are on the threshold of death.
       So then I started slapping and kicking my companion. He protested, but finally, like a little kid, he followed me to an inn where he regained his strength. A long time later, when I reminded him of that night, he couldn't believe it. If I had left him there in the train, he would have died with the black man's smile on his face.
       Three days later I returned to Igualada. Elvira and my son were in Vilanova. I showed up for work; at the time I was working for the town council, as part of a small group of street maintenance workers. The foreman didn't know how to tell me, but the fact was I had been laid off. "Don't give it a thought, I'm used to it," I replied.
       I went to have a snack in a café. I was still eating when a sergeant came in and took me away, "still not arrested," he said. Once in the barracks, a lieutenant explained to me that the driver of the car had claimed I had taken Josep Anselmo to a house in the province of Lleida. I stoutly denied it. He insisted, "I have sent a communiqué to Barcelona explaining what happened, stating there was a wounded person. Now they want me to produce that person. It was silly of me to tell them, but now I've got to find Anselmo. I won't hurt you, really, but just tell me, please, where he is and I promise you he'll be back on the street in a matter of days. If you don't, I'm in trouble."
       I continued to deny everything. I felt sorry for the lieutenant, but I was able to overcome the sorrow I felt for him. I surely couldn't give away the whereabouts of my comrade just to accommodate him. I reflected, however, that the lieutenant was a gentleman. And when I stop to think about it, there have been times when Civil Guards have treated me courteously. Just as I wrote in an article in La Soli; sometimes they are afraid of the publicity. But the thing is, I was treated with respect. Even though I'm a libertarian—and I feel bad saying this—it pays to be sincere. Our life under the Republic was not much different from what it had been under the monarchy.

Frequent clashes between the Republic and the working class were inevitable because they were clearly antithetical, especially if we take the FAI into account, which was urging the people toward communist libertarianism, as opposed to the bourgeois government and authoritarian Russian communism. The FAI wanted to test a new system of collective living throughout the whole peninsula, in both Spain and Portugal.
       Of course there was a backlash within the CNT, in the form of the trentistas, or the thirty, so named because there were thirty of them who signed a very moderate manifesto, not with respect to the libertarian program, but to the revolutionary situations that would allow the Spanish people to make great strides forward. Their position could be criticized not so much for what it said, but for what it implied.
       Pestaña and Peiró led the list of signatories. The FAI reacted in a very violent spirit. I thought at the time that Peiró had signed to support a different idea than that which had motivated Pestaña. I had known them both quite well. Pestaña was quite unselfish and sincere. He had evolved toward a position of leadership, which he actively sought. Joan Peiró, on the other hand, was a man totally lacking in political ambition. He was completely devoted to the cause; he had exposed his life, the peace of mind of his family and his economic stability to the vicissitudes of the cause. In a word, he did everything the rest of us did, but we didn't have his name. Pestaña was looking down the road to the future....
       These tensions resounded throughout the CNT, and in the towns there were some who left the movement, even in Igualada. About four thousand members left, but thanks to the freedom of the republican regime, we got a lot of them back. Some of them were "political" workers who favored the Republic and a CNT willing to negotiate, one that never knew where it was going to end up, even though it was always headed down hill. And then there were the intransigent workers who followed the beck and call of the FAI. They tended to be dogmatic, and in spite of their revolutionary purity, they were often wrong. Soon they had converted the FAI into an absolutist operation. Everything Mother FAI decided to do was done, with no room for discussion, by several groups of comrades all over Catalonia, usually the young ones without experience. Those of us who had always battled for the integrity of the organization tried everything we could to resolve differences, but it was an impossible task. We were pushed by one group and then another, back and forth. Finally, the trentistas founded the Sindicats Autònoms, or autonomous trade unions, which were always at the mercy of the political winds. After a while, they began to work together with the POUM, and they set up new unions with marxist leanings.
       We in the CNT were left in the company of the "stridents." That produced a huge loss of militants, either because they had gone over to the autonomous unions, or because they had been ostracized by our group. They didn't like the FAI very much at all. It was considered a victory to have defeated the trentistas. But there was no triumph, only the pernicious radicalization of all concerned. I stayed in the middle, between the two tendencies. I wrote an article in Catalan in our daily, El Sembrador, titled "This Is Not Anarchism," which lost me the friendship of a group of FAI comrades with whom I felt very close. But I was only criticizing the dogmatic aspects of the FAI, not its essence. But for them, anybody who wasn't a FAI member either wasn't important, was a counter-revolutionary, or had to be eliminated. A blinding force drove them, and that never reflects reality. I also wrote polemical articles about Peiró's and Pestaña's points of view, which were published in their own paper, called Cultura Libertaria. It came out in Barcelona under the editorship of that bohemian, Gibanel. At first, they let me speak my mind, but then that authoritarian beast burst forth in them, and they cut me off. I was distressed by that, but I've never been one to let my spirit be broken. I noticed that a CNT publication in Sants had printed my article translated into Castilian. It was satisfying to see there were still people who used their own personal criteria, not those of a group.
       Peiró published a very violent article against Dr. Isaac Puente, a doctor from a town in Vitoria. It said, "In the FAI there is a certain rabid quack, a frenetic revolutionary who was a provincial deputy during the dictatorship." Peiró, who was basically a good person, often suffered from those excesses of the pen. I knew Dr. Puente as a very honest person. He gave me a critique of my article, "This Is Not Anarchism" in a letter in the form of a dialog. He explained, "What Peiró writes about a medical quack/deputy he does to destroy a man. Previously, I didn't have anarchist ideas, but rather humanitarian ideas. I accepted the job of deputy in order to be in charge of the department of social services. But after two months, I concluded I would not be able to accomplish anything, because the government denied me the money to work with, so I left. I continued studying the problems of humanity, and eventually found myself sharing the ideology of the anarchists." I wrote to Peiró and explained what Puente had told me. Peiró then wrote him and changed his position. In spite of that, he didn't publish the retraction, which is what I had suggested he do.
       The Carlists shot Puente during the Civil War...a man who had done nothing but good. He calmly accepted his death. Even the executioners were disturbed by their crime. On the other hand, those same Carlists guided the novelist Baroja safely to the border, a noble thing to do. In his novels he had actually treated the Carlists quite badly. Some things are hard to understand.
       On the eighth of January, 1933, the revolt in Casas Viejas began. The most important revolution had broken out in Barcelona, but once again it turned out to be a failure, with only a few groups protesting in the streets, and the rest watching from their windows as bursts of gunfire peppered the Rambles. It was an extremist call to battle that had no popular roots, and therefore was unable to get the people involved.
       After the failure of the revolt along the Llobregat, the FAI had prepared this new revolution, again with the purpose of overthrowing the Republic before it became sick. The poverty in Andalusia was monstrous. There was no industry down there, so most everybody was a farm hand, and they only worked part-time. Twenty-five percent of the workers had work all year, whereas the rest only worked during the grain harvest, the gathering of the olives and the grapes. The rest of the year, their families wandered about the countryside begging.
       The more resourceful men had a shotgun and made their bullets out of hard-packed brown wrapping paper. They were so short of money that when they sneaked onto the landowner's property to kill a rabbit, they only fired if it was a sure shot. If not, the loss of the bullet meant another day with no food on the table. And if they weren't careful, the Civil Guards would shoot at them.
       The life of those people was pure desperation, which predisposed them to a revolutionary mentality. In Catalonia the revolution materialized thanks to the French Revolution: first it influenced the intellectuals, and on the rebound it influenced those with the most social consciousness in the working class. That's why the anarchists in Catalonia were so inclined: not out of poverty, but out of conviction. In Andalusia, the driving force toward libertarianism was poverty. For centuries, the life of the Andalusian had been that of the cockroach: they emerged from the ground, made a few moves, and were promptly stomped on and squashed.
       However, it should be mentioned that there were also illustrious Andalusians who worked for the anarchist cause, either through their own direct participation or through their books: Salvochea, Díaz del Moral, Sola, Sánchez Rosa.... The latter was a great orator, almost as good as Seguí. During the last century, he had been imprisoned for participating in what was then called the Black Hand, during the revolution at Jerez de la Frontera. He edited some pamphlets which had a great influence on the farm laborers of his province, even though they seemed ingenuous to the Catalans.
       After that revolution had failed all around, only those at Casas Viejas could, or wanted to continue it. A prestigious anarchist, Seisdedos, lived there and took charge of the situation. He said, "The hour has come" and, surrounded by his family, he went into the streets to do battle. All the peasants who had been influenced by the anarchists followed him. They were armed only with their rabbit-hunting shotguns and their paper bullets. There were about five thousand inhabitants in the town, and they took control of it. The few Civil Guards available barricaded themselves in their barracks. Even though they were themselves well-armed, they were afraid of the laborers' aim, which necessity had refined. The Guards' position weakened. They made a pact with Seisdedos, allowing their wives and children to get safely out of the barracks. The women and children were respected and they found refuge wherever they could. Then the shooting started up again.
      The revolutionaries could have set the barracks on fire, but they didn't want to do that. They only wanted the Guards to give up, with a minimum of losses. But from Madrid, Cádiz and other towns, assault troops were sent to the aid of the Guards. Seisdedos said to his comrades, "We're surrounded by the enemy. They're going to machine-gun us. I've been very late in starting the revolution, but I'm determined to do it well. All of you, get out of here. I'll be the one to put the finishing touches on this battle." The others didn't want to leave him alone, but he resorted to insults and cursing to make them leave. They finally did so, but his family refused to leave his side. So they barricaded themselves inside their house, prepared to face the armed authorities.
       They decided to allow Seisdedos' little grand-daughter to leave the barricaded house, just as the anarchists had done with the families of the Civil Guards. Everybody agreed. The beautiful little girl walked out. Pictures of her appeared in all the papers. They called her "La Libertaria." Once out of the house, she confronted the reactionary forces of public order and called them despotic enemies of the people.
       Then the combat resumed. It's possible that Seisdedos' troops had a few lead bullets, but the majority of their ammunition was wadded paper. Even so, they managed to drop a few Guards.... Until the captain in charge ordered his troops to set fire to the house. They threw gasoline on it, and the whole family was burned alive.
       So much has been said about the martyrs of Numancia, but the people of Casas Viejas did exactly the same thing. That captain, who was an assassin and not a hero, wasn't satisfied with that savagery, so he grabbed twenty men from town who were supposedly revolutionaries, stood them atop the smoking ruins of the house and shot them dead. That was the Republic's worst crime, and it finally sank them. They were no longer credible in the eyes of the people.
       The rightists were able to make plenty of political hay out of that inconceivable barbarity. That is, Gil Robles and his crowd. The incident was useful to him in his political strategy. The republicans didn't know how to defend themselves, except for a few honest ones who were sorely shocked by that terrible abuse of authority.
       Naturally, when the next elections were held, the Republic was mortally wounded after their leftist elements—those morally guilty of the atrocity in Casas Viejas—were soundly beaten at the polls. That was when the rightist government took over, with Gil Robles, Lerroux, etc. One thing they used to their advantage in the election campaign was a phrase supposedly uttered by President Azaña to Captain Rojas, when he sent him to Casas Viejas: "Aim for their bellies." A republican later told me that wasn't true. There was also speculation that Rojas himself had invented it, or that Azaña had said it in a private conversation. Since the tape recorder hadn't been invented yet, there was no way to prove what had really been said. It was also known that Rojas was a furious reactionary, a monarchist with a desire for revenge. When his rage boiled over against the people, he was fulfilling his own anti-republican vision of the apocalypse, or maybe just following orders from the right. Between one thing and another, the Republic had taken one hundred eight lives. The figure was often repeated in our press.
       The FAI then spread the word not to vote. But I don't believe that was the determining factor in the results of the election. The decisive factor was the contradictory conduct of the Republic itself, which always wound up acting against the interests of the people. For the politicians, the FAI no-vote order didn't affect them at all. But it did affect other people. When the left lost in the November election, the mission of the FAI suddenly acquired new force.
       Thinking they had caused the defeat of the leftists with their campaign, the FAI started to strut around. But they also had to justify themselves. This was their reasoning: "The Right has won. So that we don't fall under their power, we must act responsibly on our platform, which was that if the left lost, we would declare the revolution."
       Those revolutions decreed from the secretariat of an organization may be very important for the militants themselves, but the people just turn their backs on such nonsense. It was all the same to them. For the third time in the life of the Republic, the order had been given to raise the flag of revolution. And for the third time it failed. It was only slightly successful in Zaragoza and Teruel. There had been attempts at setting up a sort of libertarian communism in Calanda, Vall-de-roures, Calaceit, and the Maestrazgo. They were able to hold out for five or six days.
       The consequences of the republican and anarchist failures brings us to the date of October 6, 1934. Bear in mind that the atmosphere was overheated. Due to the attempted revolutions in 1933, there must have been about nine thousand people in jail. From towns with heavy libertarian leanings like Vall-de-roures, hundreds of their citizens languished in prison. And so in Catalonia a paradoxical situation arose.
       The CNT had had its disagreements with the trentistas. The marxist-socialist elements of the POUM considered us their natural enemies, and wanted to set up their own trade unions. The FAI had won the exalted enmity of the Generalitat because they did not want to submit to the power and control of the little pro-catalanist groups. Out of all that, there arose a sort of political coalition, half-voluntary and half-implicit, which included the parties of Esquerra Republicana, Estat Català, Acció Catalana and Unió de Rabassaires. It was called the Partit Socialista, or Socialist Party, which was not yet the communist PSUC party. It also included the CNT dissidents, the trentistas and pestañistas.
       All of them together produced a brew called Aliança Obrera, or Workers' Alliance. Its mission was more an attack on the CNT than on the bourgeoisie. The new party wanted to destroy the CNT, because it clouded the political waters and wouldn't leave the Government of the Generalitat in peace. The new party was all a fiction, an empty vessel, but since it had many propaganda resources at its disposal, along with a highly-trained staff who confected their own arguments in accord with their own needs, it appeared they controlled the Catalan workers' opinion, for a while at least.
       Even though the revolutionary failures were in reality the fault of the FAI, the shadow of guilt had also fallen over the CNT, and our drop in membership confirmed it. We were, in effect, put to one side. The blind fury of the Workers' Alliance against us in order to be able to manipulate us, kept them from realizing who their real enemies were.
       In Madrid, the CEDA and Lerroux's party governed. We received the consequences, as well as the Basque Government and that of the Generalitat who were, of course, only affected politically. And that's the reason why, outside of Catalonia—especially in Asturias—the approaching revolution of the sixth of October was being prepared in a truly revolutionary fashion. In Catalonia the Generalitat held a strictly political and very myopic view of conditions.
       We could have given them control of the streets, a thing the Catalan separatist movement—their only support—couldn't provide. Without the CNT, how did they presume to confront the central government in Madrid? On the other hand, they kept our locals closed, which were the responsibility of the Generalitat. They even had a police unit that was trained as anti-anarchist specialists. Meanwhile, they gave a complete proletarian guarantee to the trentistas and the Aliança Obrera.
       In Asturias, discontent became social revolt, under the acronym UHP, Unión de Hermanos Proletarios, or Union of Proletarian Brothers. They were united with the CNT confederals, the communists, with everybody. And they challenged the government troops. The thing lasted about fifteen days. Galicia, Aragón and the Catalan part of Barcelona joined the revolt. In Madrid, there was only a general strike.
       The Government then mobilized the troops, placed them where they were needed, and gave orders to those already quartered in each town. In Catalonia the troops were not moved, nor were they sent to Asturias, nor did they appear on the streets. The Government knew what was happening was a mere parody, but they had their troops at the ready, just in case. Without the CNT and the FAI, the Generalitat and the catalanists were powerless.
       I was in Barcelona on that sixth of October. Until six in the afternoon on that day, all the riff-raff of the Esquerra Militia, of the Assault Police and other armed groups were directed at the CNT. They appeared at all the locals we had opened and closed them down again. I myself witnessed one of those operations in the Parallel area, on Roser Street. The same troops were sent to close down Solidaridad Obrera. They stood in fanned-out formation in front of its offices.
       The Generalitat and the parties that advised it were completely disoriented. "You have to proclaim the Catalan Republic!" they said to Companys. So he went out on the balcony—Macià had died and Companys was now president—and in front of about two hundred on-lookers he shouted, "Citizens! from this moment forward I proclaim Catalonia an independent Republic. So be it." Realizing all that was an absurdity, a cold, still-born idea with no future, he turned around, went inside and said to those who had manipulated him, "O.K., that's it. Are you happy? And now what?" The answer came from General Batet, waiting outside in Saint Jaume Square with a complement of troops and mortars, just in case he might have to defend the Republican Government he had sworn to defend. After loosing a few rounds at the halls of government, those inside the Generalitat scurried around to find a white flag and ran it up the pole.
       The Civil Governor of Barcelona, who was the most fervent of separatists, had already mapped out his escape through the sewers. It was so minutely prepared that it took him right to Italy. So that's where the leader of Estat Català wound up, pushed there by events on the sixth of October. He landed in a fascist state, which fit him to a "T."
       How simple it would have been for the Catalan politicians to have reconciled their differences with the CNT and then been able to face the Army as one, which is what did happen, in part, after 1936. But those Catalan politicians had always assumed all of Catalonia thought as they did, instead of listening to what the people were really saying.
       The POUM supporters tried to offer a bit of resistance behind a barricade in the Portal de L'Angel, but it came to nothing. The only hero's tale was to be told by Jaume Compte and a group of his comrades who had fortified themselves inside the Industrial and Commercial Retail Clerks' Center in the Rambles. They were offered terms of surrender but refused. They were pro-catalanists, but the stubborn kind. So the troops fired off some mortar rounds and rifle volleys. The Compte group tried to defend themselves, but were cleaned out. Six of them were killed. The others probably escaped over the roof-tops. I don't know of any who were arrested.
       Compte and Simó Llacuneta, whom I also remember, had already tried to kill the king in Garraf. After that, they founded the Catalan Proletarian Party. Even though it was a minority group, it carried the seal of valor of that pro-catalan fanatic. It was he, Jaume Compte, who defended the Catalan flag that day the Generalitat and that group of parties made asses of themselves.
       So that was the leftist republican policy which was supposed to save the Republic, but which ended up decapitating it. Azaña was an example of what never should have been born. No doubt he was a very intelligent man, but he was in love with the State. When a politician is a Statist to the very marrow of his bones, he is capable of committing barbarities. Thus the human being disappears, leaving only the principal functionary of the State. And since the State is a cold, inflexible organism, by serving only the State, Azaña ceased to serve the people who had elected him in the first place.

Everything was left hanging in the air after the sixth of October. Companys and other leaders—both from the parties and the Generalitat—were put in jail. The strike was left without leadership once the Aliança leaders were gone, which was like losing next to nothing. We had supported the strike, but only out of a sense of solidarity, without taking any initiatives ourselves.
      Then the Regional Committee of the CNT made an imprudent move. They wanted to recoup their lost strength among the working masses, and since they had hardly been persecuted at all—even though there were still a lot of our comrades in jail—the Committee took to the radio and told the workers the way things had worked out, it would be better for them to return to their factories.
       The people on the Committee were all responsible men, but the person who read the message on the radio was Patrici Navarro, and they should have given him some advice before he spoke. The workers would have returned to work whether or not the CNT had told them to. There was nothing else they could do, faced as they were with the need to feed their families. But the fact that we used a radio station controlled by the military and the extreme right could have been interpreted as a Governmental subterfuge, or even as anarchist collaborationism, designed to create confusion. Shortly afterward, the regional assembly met, and those involved in the radio announcement put their resignations on the table, now well aware of their mistake.
       As for that part where we wanted them to leave us alone, I experienced a really curious episode. One day when I was at the workers' center in Igualada, it was invaded by Army troops. A sergeant spoke to his captain, while pointing to a picture on the wall portraying the triumph of the social revolution, with a red and black flag waving in the background. He said, "These people must be from the FAI." The captain answered, "We're looking for separatists, not FAIists." We had hidden our "tools" under the theater stage at the center. But they didn't discover anything. All they were after were separatist flags.
       It's interesting to point out that in the repression of the sixth of October, two of the generals who had most opposed the monarchy were involved, to the point of having taken all kinds of risks. Batet and López Ochoa were out there doing their jobs, bloodying up all of Asturias. Like good Africans, and the same as all the Spanish generals of the period who had acquired a certain renown, they chose tertiaries, that is, Legionnaire Regulars, a group made up of foreigners and Moors assigned to Melilla. And with those bloody-minded troops, they set about the reconquest of Asturias in the name of the Government of Madrid.
       They were forced to fight for every foot of ground, and as they continued making gains along the way, they left a trail of corpses they had shot and mutilated. Another expedition occupied the region from Galicia. It seems incredible, having suffered the blood bath they did, that the Asturians could rise again in '36 with so much vigor.
       Batet wasn't as cruel with the losers as was López Ochoa. The fact is, anyone who joins the rightists is always hated. The attitudes and actions of both of them proved that they were doing the work of the reactionaries, whether they were Republicans or not. They also demonstrated that the real revolution we were awaiting could not count on support from the top military ranks.
       In both Igualada and Barcelona the same thing happened: Catalan separatist riflemen handed over their weapons to us when their uprising failed. They were afraid of being searched. We hid the weapons well, along with the ammunition. With all that pile of tools, we were happier than cooties. All in all, we had forty kilos of arms. The authorities interrogated us frequently, but we told them nothing.
       The same thing happened in a lot of other towns. In some, when our comrades found themselves with new arms, they tried to start a new revolution. In Vilafranca del Penedès, aided by those from Sant Sadurní d'Anoia and those from Arboç, they attacked the town hall, captured the church and proclaimed communist libertarianism. The same thing happened in Vilanova i la Geltrú. They only managed to hold out for a day. That was the FAI's dream. The CNT militants in Granollers resisted Batet's troops for two days, without any losses. Then they hid their arms and disappeared. In '36, all those hidden arms came in very handy indeed.
       The left was forced to submit to this kind of persuasion. We even thought that Gil Robles was an agent of the Vatican, and that he had only declared himself a republican in order to hide his true papal spirit. In order to oust people like him, the CNT and FAI tried to recruit more militants, and, where possible, arms. We couldn't see any other solution than the use of force. The politicians kept on maneuvering. In Catalonia they were trying to create the image of Companys as a martyr to their cause, just as they had done in '17 with Domingo. It was sort of sad to watch. But in spite of that, Companys was a good, responsible person who wasn't afraid to stand his ground. Of all those Catalan separatists, there were very few you could say that about.
       The thing is, the politicians were taking advantage of the sentimentality of the people, the prestige of Gil Robles and the Lerroux faction, in order to win the elections. Then Companys and other politicians were freed from prison, with new positions in government. The same old story repeated itself again. A leftist government was formed, a general amnesty was declared, and the people surged through the streets in a mood of euphoria.
       As for the elections of February '36, it's interesting to note the silence of the FAI. In the last elections they had said "Don't vote." But in '36 they were silent. That silence could have been interpreted as their support for a possibly politically advanced government. They must have acted that way in order to be able to free the people we had in prison, or because their previous actions could have been interpreted as favoring the right. Well, all that was circumstantial; on the other hand, ideological concepts remain immutable. People committed to the FAI turned their backs on their own convictions and on the essence of anarchism for small momentary gains. I thought it over a lot, and did not vote. And I repeat, I never have voted.
       In spite of that support, in our group a clear prejudice existed against the Government of Esquerra Republicana. Just as in '31, they thought they had won control over the Republic. They were fooling themselves. Perhaps the only one who saw things at all clearly was Largo Caballero, who did not share the happiness of a Prieto or a Besteiro. Largo thought, the way the world map was being reshaped, and once the domestic situation was analysed, that elections weren't going to fix much of anything, so what needed to be done was to get on with the revolution. That is to say, if there was always going to be the danger of the military, the right and the bankers, who either controlled or influenced the left while in power, then what needed to be done was to arm the citizenry and win a military victory over the military itself. At that point Largo Caballero was in agreement with the CNT. We didn't make any pact with him, but we did cooperate openly...there were currents of warm feelings between us. The premise of the Hermanos Proletarios de Asturias continued in effect.
       The CNT was gaining strength by the minute. The prisoners from all the previously failed revolutions were now back on the streets. Other valuable men were returning from exile. And the support of some of the socialists assured us that Madrid and the North, where they predominated, would not leave Catalonia abandoned and alone. On the other hand, the workers in Madrid were deceived and disappointed with the successive republican governments, and the manipulations of the socialists had caused thousands of workers, especially in the majority of the Construction and Metallurgical Trade Unions to abandon en masse the UGT Casa del Pueblo and join the CNT.
       Our position with relation to the so-called forces vives, or vital forces of Catalonia, was making no progress. Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, Estat Català and all the other parties supported their own little gangs of armed men who systematically set themselves against the CNT, and were therefore playing up to the bourgeoisie. They preached all day about "our Catalonia," but what they meant was their Catalonia, the Catalonia of Guifré el Pelós, or Wilfred the Hairy, and the fables of  "The Year of The Great Itch," when in fact the "real Catalonia" of the times was evolving more toward communist libertarianism.
       The tram workers' strike was an example of the politics of those groups working against a conflict we had started. It must have been around the year 1935. They locked up those whom they thought were the leaders, they sabotaged our strike plans, and on top of that they recruited scabs. They even put armed guards on the trams. Those little gangs were pro-Catalanists who had become plain-clothed policemen with fascist aims. A fellow named Badia was the chief of police and the leader of the gangs. He was later assassinated. Using squads recruited from Estat Català as drivers and ticket collectors, the trams functioned again. Meanwhile, about nine hundred CNT members were jailed in Valencia and Burgos, Buenaventura Durruti and Marianet Vázquez among them. They all spent a couple of months locked up without formal charges against them.
       Since we were desperate by now, we decided to use the garrafa, or jug technique. Actually, our people in Barcelona made the decision; I wasn't involved in that one. What it is, you throw an eight-liter jug full of gasoline into a tram in the heights of Barcelona, set it afire and let it go flying downhill into the center. What a success it was....
       Naturally, we sent them down empty. If we captured a tram with passengers or guards on it, we made them get off. If nobody offered any resistance, our people behaved very humanely. If they proved resistant, we roughed them up. But there were no casualties. Unfortunately, we lost one of our boys, who burned to death while handling a jug of gasoline. There must have been about fifty trams that went downhill in flames. The tram company saw the necessity of re-hiring those who had been laid off and granting them improved conditions.
       On another very different occasion, we had to use convincing force to avoid their attempt to manipulate us into accepting a solution little better than what had existed under the monarchy. In 1918, after much saving and sacrifice, the CNT managed to buy its own rotary press, on which we published Solidaridad Obrera. We had it set up in Tàpies Street. Since we were being suffocated with fines for what we wrote, and we didn't pay them, they came and closed down our printing shop. Then it rained heavily and the roof collapsed. The machinery started to rust up badly, and finally we had to sell it for scrap. The arm of bourgeois justice had turned into injustice for us.
       So once again, through the efforts of our workers, we got together enough money to buy another press. That was during the Republic. This time we installed it in Consell de Cent Street. Then came the failed revolutions, with our leadership in jail, the accusations against us, and the fines. Since we didn't pay them then either, the court took over the press. In order to continue publishing the paper, we had to rent one.
       Then one day they announced the press was to be sold at auction. A group of our comrades went to the auction. There were about forty people there who really wanted the press. The auctioneer sang the praises of the machinery. Then he asked for an opening bid. A voice was heard to say, "twenty pesetas." They thought it was a joke. Another hand went up to offer more. When he felt the jab of a pistol barrel in his ribs, he lowered his hand. The auctioneer kept asking for another bid, and every time a hand went up, pistol in the ribs. So he was left with the twenty peseta bid. The auctioneer, desperate by now, had to give it away for twenty pesetas. Our comrades very politely left the hall, while the bidders who had failed left in a hurry, looking over their shoulders.
       Our metallurgical workers and the bricklayers in Madrid set about declaring hugely conflictive strikes. They took advantage of the presence of a leftist government to stir up complex issues, letting it be clearly known that a project for a great social revolution was in the works. The bourgeoisie complacently refused to compromise. They stood firm, knowing they had a ferocious rear guard backing them. In the military barracks and church sacristies the air of an imminent counter-strike was felt. The Republican Government, for the nth time, found its hands tied, faced as they were with that scene of thousands of workers striking in the streets. They decided to opt for the bourgeois solution, which was to lock up the strikers by the hundreds.
       And that's how the people came to lose their last drop of faith in the Republic. If the military uprising in July of '36 hadn't happened, the PSOE and the UGT would probably have wound up with no workers, since they were joining the CNT en masse. It was the only viable, well-defined solution in the face of the huge incoherencies and delaying tactics of the others. With that in mind, it's possible Largo Caballero adopted our point of view so as not to lose a position of control over the working masses. The war broke those hopes. With control in Madrid, and with its influence over the Northern Provinces and Castile, our libertarian ideas would have dominated the whole peninsula. If all Spain had been at the same level as Catalonia, Andalusia and a corner of the Cantabrian region, then those in Portugal, where we had agents in place, would also have joined the uprising. The peninsula would have given new light to the revolution, to the whole world. And it would have been an exemplary light, completely different from that which flickered darkly in Eastern Europe.
       When the Civil War came, it was no longer possible to instruct the CNT militants in ideology. Our people occupied civil, military and ministerial positions. Politics, military and marxist authoritarianism were all mixed up with incipient libertarianism. There were heroes, yes, people capable and willing to make any sacrifice. But the new, anarchist country was fast fading into the distance....
       The Republic had been a disastrous failure. We functioned among the industrial workers in the urban areas.. But conditions among the peasants turned out to be the same. The Government mortgaged the holdings of the large landlords, which either lay uncultivated or were given over to raising fighting bulls, and they parceled them out to the peasants according to the size of their families. Of course, the new owners had to start paying taxes on the land, and had to start paying back the landlords after the fifth year. That is, during the first five years, the peasant owed the Government, and if he managed to satisfy that debt—a difficult thing to do indeed—then he found himself facing the remaining debt to the landlord.
       But all that didn't get any farther than the initial planning stage. There was neither enough time nor desire to see the reform through. And as everybody knows, land that has lain fallow for years needs to be treated properly, leveled and plowed. A lot of work and no return on it. No, but it wasn't even that...agrarian reform for the farmer came to mean towing a line somewhere between the devil and the deep blue sea.
       As for the forty-four hour week, we had already won that. There were even trades where they only worked forty-two. And we had Saturdays off. The labor legislation of the Republic, as in that of Dato's time, only formalized situations that had already been bitterly won by the workers themselves.
       While some groups were preparing to undermine public order, we were still concentrated on the social order. The CNT opened its Confederal Congress on May 1, 1936, in Zaragoza. From our point of view, it was to be a pre-revolutionary debate. With that in mind, Peiró re-joined the organization. On that occasion, instead of debating partial grievances, as we had done before, we made eminently constructive proposals with the goal of having them implemented in a new social order. After that, on the assumption we would win, we made plans to take over the bourgeois regime, and at the same time declared the validity of anarchist morality, adapting it to the customs and lifestyles of existing society.
       Seven hundred and fifty delegates attended the Congress, each appointed directly by specific Spanish towns and labor sectors. That seemed like a lot of people, and there were heated discussions. But that was precisely the essence of anarchism: the people. No more priests or hierarchies. Iris Park Theater in Zaragoza was filled to overflowing. Those who came from Andalusia were very intelligent and didn't waste a minute arguing about the Republican agrarian reform, but instead went directly to the question of the expropriation of the latifundios, or large holdings, from their owners. At the Congress the famous "ignorant Andalusia" didn't exist. The Andalusians present represented a self-taught culture that focused sharply on the problems and resolved them from the point of view of communist libertarianism. The people from Aragón were rough and unpolished, but positive. On the day the Congress closed, I myself saw three trainloads of comrades arrive from Madrid. It was a pleasure to watch. You really had to examine the very heart of what was happening at that Congress, observe the seeds that were germinating there, because a superficial look would have given the impression of absolute chaos.
       A report was written on communist libertarianism. But since every delegate had his own opinion on the subject, we wound up discussing and arguing for entire days at a time, putting up with the din of seven hundred different opinions. But the résumé that was written up at the end proved very significant. Everybody wanted to have his say on all the topics, because we couldn't go home without having presented what our comrades back there had charged us with...that would have made us look ridiculous. Somebody from Murcia, in order to get the floor, said he was in a hurry because his mother was dying. When the crowd found out it wasn't true, he was whistled and booed off the stage. Those who served as chairmen fell, one after the other, intimidated by the hub-bub and shouting. Only one of them, an Aragonese, was able to impose his will on the chaos, dealing harshly with those who were disorderly.
       Aside from all the distractions, we were able to get a lot of work done. All of Zaragoza seemed to wave as one, filled as it was with the flags of delegates from every region. On the day of the closing ceremony, about three hundred thousand CNT members arrived from all over, along with about forty thousand socialists who had come to demonstrate their solidarity with our cause. The enthusiasm was so extraordinary that, as you sang with all your heart, you felt the revolution was as simple as blowing bubbles. That enthusiasm lasted about two weeks.
       The Government's posture toward the Congress was one of caution. Even considering the revolutionary spirit of Largo Caballero, he had a clear vision of who would replace him. He went to advise the leader of the Government, Casares Quiroga, and told him it was a toss-up between our revolution and that of the troops. Casares Quiroga showed what he was made of when he said, "Fear not, for I ride no white horse...." Following the ellipses: a white horse that should have done what Joan of Arc did, namely a miracle. There was no horse nor was there a miracle: Casares was in limbo. The head of the Government must have believed what Cabanellas or Queipo de Llano said...but he made a mistake in doing so. When they rose up in revolt, he was surprised: what a disaster. And he couldn't stop them, because apart from what was going on inside Spain itself, Germany and Italy were supporting the military and bourgeois causes from behind the scenes.
       We at the Congress in Zaragoza knew this was going on. That's why we were getting ready to play hardball. The moment had arrived. Two months later, in Melilla and Morroco, you could see what kind of republic the military preferred. If the continuation of the Republic had meant the right-wing would continue to lead the country, nothing would have happened. But they couldn't stand the thought of the people wanting to have a say in running their own government.
       In no way is it true that the Army rebellion was caused by the death of Calvo Sotelo. There had been several deaths prior to his, and the rightists were not exactly handing out roses. There were a lot of pistoleros in the Falange. Lieutenant Castillo of the Assault Guards, a man of prestige and a socialist, had also been assassinated. It's almost certain it was his friends who liquidated Calvo Sotelo.
       A series of revenge killings doesn't cause a war. We knew that very well from our experience with the Unified Union and the Free Union. What made the war inevitable was the point to which the social struggle had come. The right rose in revolt. They had been preparing the event since 1933. If it hadn't been them, it would have been our radicals who did it, together with the progressive socialists. I don't mean the Confederation itself. According to the FAI point of view, a wide-spread revolution was guaranteed to benefit the Spanish working class.

On the eighteenth of July I was handing over an anti-political manifesto to the printer, when he said to me, "There's just been an uprising in Morocco, a rightist uprising." Nobody was fooling anybody: it had to be some kind of fascist undertaking, because there was nothing Spanish about it, but rather a reflex reaction brought about by foreigners. For centuries Spain has not had a personality of its own, just knee-jerk reactions to events from abroad, whether in the area of ideology or of capitalism.
      The major influences at the time were nazism and fascism. The uprising didn't bear any Spanish nationalist colorings, as some have tried to make it appear. On the other hand, the FAI movement, which surely would have broken out into open revolt, would have had a clearly national and autonomous origin, because anarchism did not—nor does it now—receive help from abroad.
       Years before, we had received support—moral support from France and the great Russian and French theorists, as well as some support from the odd Italian and Englishman. But during the time we are dealing with, international anarchism was represented almost wholly by Spanish libertarian anarchism. So a confederal revolution would have been irrefutably Iberian. But nobody was paying a great deal of attention to that question. The question wasn't one of nationalism or internationalism, but one of capitalism's struggle to impose its own predominance on the system. And that has always been the eternal dispute.
       In the case of Spain, the Church also found itself assuming a defensive position, since its ideology had become totally discredited. What the Church was seeking was some probability of survival, which it didn't find in its sermons nor its Our Fathers, but in the weapons of the people in power. And for the Church, of course, the people in power had to share their ideology.
       As I analyzed the military uprising, what I was able to observe at first among the workers in Igualada was a mixture of expectation and panic. The leftist parties, like ourselves, wanted to defend themselves. People were looking to Barcelona and Madrid, to see how the authorities were reacting. The regionalist problems in Catalonia and Castile disappeared, because the danger was real and serious, with new problems threatening to destroy everything.
       People of good faith scurried to grab any and all the arms they could. We brought the ones from the sixth of October out of hiding. I remember some people with a deep sense of civic duty who would have gladly died in the defense of liberty. We patrolled the streets while the forces of the right waited at the ready to see what was going to happen in Barcelona.
       With the help of the left, we took over the town hall and other official centers, as well as what belonged to the rightists. In the small towns and villages, the Civil Guard always vacillated in cases like this. They were also waiting to see what would happen in the capital. Having said that, they still systematically sided with the right. While we were in the process of forming up revolutionary committees, the Civil Guard sent us a message from their headquarters telling us to evacuate the town hall or they would come after us. We returned their ultimatum in the same coin: that they should evacuate their headquarters and barracks, or we would come and force them out.
       Neither one of the groups had spoken with much conviction, so a stale-mate developed. We sent a delegation to Barcelona to find out at first hand what was happening. The situation appeared to favor the people. That was when the rightists fled town, without employing the grandiloquent heroism they had bragged so much about. The forces on the right abandoned everything and disappeared. We grabbed their arms. We had saved our lives for the moment, and we were euphoric. If things had gone against us, we would have had to flee to France, or there wouldn't have been anybody left to tell the story. We felt sure the stakes were very high in this game. When we found out what had happened in the towns where the right had won, and the amount of blood they had shed, nobody was surprised. The last focal point of the rebellion in Barcelona was at Drassanes. Sandino, the military aviation leader, reduced it to dust. He only had four junky airplanes that could fly, but he went ahead and used them to bomb the insurgents. Flying over Drassanes, one of his bombs got stuck in the bomb-bay, and he had to return to base, land, free the stuck bomb, take off again and finally drop it on Drassanes. He was a brave man.
       That incident spread fear, making the military indecisive. Another problem was they couldn't trust their own troops. The soldiers felt a strong solidarity with the party militants and the libertarians who were armed and patrolling the streets. I would guess fifty percent of the militants on the streets were ours, from the CNT. The Assault Guards also remained loyal to the Government. The Esquerra Republicana party was also notably visible, along with communist comrades from the POUM.
       But above all it was the CNT and the FAI who employed the tactics that cut the insurrection off at the root. And here I should add something of importance: espionage sometimes wins battles. Even though you might think spies only operated in the military and diplomatic corps, the FAI had its own in all the troop barracks. The comrades were kept up to date on all decisions taken in the military command posts. For example, in Drassanes there was a sergeant named Manzana who kept the FAI informed. And in the Captain-General's headquarters there was a lieutenant who passed military plans on to Esquerra Republicana. Because of that, we were able to create the necessary resistance organizations to intercept the armed forces trying to concentrate in Plaça de Catalunya, the center of Barcelona. The anarchists, aided by the Assault Guards, denied them access.
       At the beginning, the Civil Guard was watching to see what would happen, but finally came over to the side of the people. When the troops abandoned a barracks, they left it wide open, and then the FAIists went in and stripped it of arms. The military had counted on everything, except the people and soldiers disobeying them and taking up arms against them. In the moment of triumph, revolutionaries popped up all over the city like mushrooms...everybody was a revolutionary. That original fifty percent had multiplied five times. It's always the same.
       What really hurt was the death of all those good people at the beginning. They were the real revolutionaries, thanks to whom we were able to continue. Ascaso was one of them. He was taking shelter in a doorway in front of Drassanes with some other comrades, one of whom I knew. When he saw a white flag waving over Drassanes, he stepped out of the doorway and was mowed down by a burst of machine gun fire...a burst meant for him alone.
       It wasn't just his life that was lost, but also the example he had been to the others. Ascaso was able to make thousands of men follow him into combat. He was one of those implicated in the assassination of Cardinal Soldevila in 1922, which was a mere reprisal. He died because he wasn't afraid of anything. Sometimes it's better to be fearful and survive.
       Durruti was the opposite case. He was also a very solid type, who saved himself by defying death. He was able to attract as many men as he wanted to march to the front, for he had won the confidence of the workers. And when he said, "Those cannons we just grabbed have to be hauled to the front; we have to seek out the enemy," four thousand men marched out of the city with him.
       The impatient ones who had left Barcelona on the twentieth, when they thought it was all over, also joined Durruti. Without any visible organization, hundreds and hundreds of men gathered and followed their leader. Some of them wanted to march to Huesca, and others to other places, when suddenly they would run into the enemy, resulting in a pile of cadavers. But they weren't intimidated by that, nor did they retreat. At least the majority of them didn't. When they found columns of orderly militia, they joined t hem. Especially Durruti's columns. New battalions were created: the Red and Black, the Ascaso, the Aguiluchos, etc.
       The Durruti Battalion headed for Zaragoza, while both the Red and Black and the Aguiluchos headed for Huesca. There was another Aragonese battalion which had escaped from the occupied zone. Those columns were the ones that made up the original XXV and the XXVIII Divisions. They were all great fighters, and focused their efforts south of the Ebro River. Even though popular enthusiasm was strong, the shortage of arms was felt by us—a commonplace for revolutionaries. The military professionals always took good care to have reserves of arms and munitions. We had the good luck to capture their supply in Sant Andreu—thousands and thousands of brand new rifles. They were boltless, but we were able to solve that mechanical problem to a certain point, until we ran out of bolts. Soon we were scrambling for munitions as well.
       On the other hand, the rightists had established their maritime and aerial supply routes, as well as land routes through the French and Portuguese borders. Those avenues of supply made it possible for them to have excellent armament. Our people, that is, those fighting for the Republic, had a few airplanes which were mostly trainers. But we had to make do with them to make war. And those who went to the front were told not to waste ammunition, because we couldn't send them any more. In my opinion, if you don't have ammunition when you fight a war, you might as well say the war is lost.
       Little by little we began to get an idea of the situation in the rest of Spain. We learned that the CNT had won in Gijón and in La Felguera. The socialists had done their bit in the Mieres Valley and then set about reducing the defenses at Oviedo. But Oviedo was never recaptured, even after the many attempts we made, perhaps because there were always a lot of troops stationed there, or perhaps because most of the people there were reactionaries.
       In Aragón, our troops were forced to stop due to lack of proper reinforcements. One day a little group of us were talking with Companys and he said, "The Aragonese front is a paper front." And he was right; I had been there. The front was only one line deep, made up of very devoted people, but with no military training. There were a few professionals, people loyal to the Republic, scattered through the line in places of secondary importance. We even had a general near Huesca. I think his name was Saravia. He and the troops under his command had not joined the insurgents, I don't know whether of their own accord, or due to popular pressure. With the exception of that case, the military professionals didn't merit a drop of our trust. On the contrary, they aroused a definite feeling of distrust. The case of Miguel Cabanellas, one of the men who took a serious stand before the issue of the corruption in Morocco, a Republican and a Mason, was totally committed to the rebels. Examples like him made your spirits fall and made you distrust them all.
       At Zaragoza, the CNT men appeared before the Governor to demand arms prior to the uprising. They knew it was coming, and wanted to get one step ahead of it. But the authorities refused their demands. For the politicians, to arm the CNT and the FAI was equally or more dangerous than the events which the rightists finally imposed on everybody. So Zaragoza fell to the rebels. Our people tried to lay siege to the fortress, but they didn't have any artillery at all. Meanwhile, the military elements in Zaragoza, Huesca and Teruel consolidated their situation by linking up with their brothers to the north—Pamplona and all that area. The militia forces were rendered useless.
       West of Teruel, our troops got as far as thirty kilometers from Guadalajara. If they could have just made that last push, the popular forces of Catalonia could have linked up with the socialists from Madrid. But crossing that last thirty kilometers turned out to be an impossible task. That's what made us lose the war. If we had been able to consolidate that line, the little rebel army to the north would have suffocated and we never would have lost the Basque Country. And we would have been able to construct a sort of parapet from Barcelona to Madrid, in order to contain the avalanche of forces pushing up from Andalusia and the Atlantic.
       Out of this error our demoralization was born. Furthermore, Madrid functioned in a slightly chaotic way, defended mostly by militia. Luckily we were able to send them the Durruti and Terra i Llibertat Units from Catalonia, made up of CNT men from the Llobregat Valley. They were well-organized miners. If they had to set up a battery of artillery, they did it, and well-done it was.
       The enemy was constantly re-arming and re-equipping itself. The Berlin- Rome-Tokyo alliance, known as the Axis, sent planes and rifles. They had the luxury of firing until they got tired of it, or of crashing a plane and not worrying about it. As people began to find out about those things in Catalonia, we saw that the so-called revolution—in the Confederal sense—was disappearing. Events were ranging farther and farther from the idealism of the first few days. At the beginning, every action sprang from the people. If it hadn't been for them, and especially the CNT people, we would have lost from the start. The Madrid Government—the "white horse" government—was turning into shit. Early on, Companys called in the FAI and said, "We have to accept the facts. It was your people who won the battle for Barcelona. Count on us for whatever you need."
       But the FAI, notoriously intransigent, in this case wasn't so at all. They answered, "Oh, if the revolution had been won all over Spain, fine. But half of it is now in the hands of the Fascists." So they came to believe they had to accept the classic arrangement of power-sharing, the reorganization of the Army, etc. As the conflict became more international in scope, it was necessary to accept a series of demands that could become key elements in a final victory.
       The social revolution was lost, because the CNT and the FAI needed the other republican groups. And foreign aid was necessary, aid that the Republic was not at all sure of obtaining in any degree comparable to what the Fascists were receiving. It was that revolutionary tone of the uprising in Barcelona and other places on the nineteenth and twentieth of July that made the French and English democracies look at us with suspicion.
       We also suffered the desertions of people who could have been very helpful to us. The concept of libertarian revolution terrified them, and so they chose to side with the rightists. One of them was Ramón Franco, a strident fellow who had represented Barcelona as a republican deputy in Parliament. He was a flying officer in the Republican Air Force. He threatened to fly to Rome and bomb Mussolini. Then suddenly we found out he was in Majorca, serving his brother, Francisco.
       The time came when we had to centralize everything. A regular army was organized, but more to please the foreign powers than to defeat the enemy. The communists began to appoint twenty-two-year-olds as generals. They filled their heads with propaganda. But all that publicity and hub-bub aside, there was no guarantee that they were capable of defeating the enemy. The communists are incredibly good organizers, builders of bureaucracies and manipulators of the media, in order to either build up or tear down somebody. And that's the way they created the new Army. But I insist on asking, what good is all that if they don't know how to lead five thousand men, or devise a strategy for capturing a city? It turned into an absolute fiasco.
       Trying to keep the French and English happy was really of no use, since they didn't help us much anyway. But that effort to please made the FAI and the CNT accept ministerial portfolios in the Largo Caballero cabinet, even though they had always been anti-political supporters of direct action. They acted as ministers in name only, because the only ones to send us aid were the Russians. The real focus of power began shifting toward the communists. In the Army, for example, the mere possession of a communist party card was enough to get you a generalship and control over a battalion or a division. From that point on, control of the Government itself was just a step away. And I'm speaking of August, 1936...words and more words were the stuff under which our miserable reality lay hidden from then on.
       In Igualada the commercial and industrial systems became disorganized. Then we set up collectives. But before I gave myself over completely to that task, I wanted to get to Aragón, to see the "paper front" Companys had mentioned. I went to Huesca to deliver field jackets, among other things, to the troops. Every little town sent a few truckloads of flour, olive oil, or whatever they could spare. What I found at the front was a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of food, but very little ammunition. I headed over to where the boys from Igualada were stationed. They were bivouacked in a hermitage called Loreto, a good position to be in. Between there and Huesca you got a glimpse of the hills from where the enemy frequently shelled us.
       There were militia girls stationed there too, even girls from Igualada. One of them, a very feisty girl, had a mortar. When the enemy irritated her, she would drop what she was doing and lob a shell into Huesca. Those girls were sometimes braver than the men. But there were also the other kind who, instead of shooting off cannon balls, spread their legs to receive them. There were several prostitutes there as well. Even though that might have been good for morale, it was at the same time a plague, because many of them were infected with venereal diseases. They also distracted the men from their job of soldiering.
       Durruti finally got sick of the problem, and threw them all out of the front lines, including the Gypsies who tagged along for the chow. There were about eighty of them, and before he threw them out, he made them dig trenches. But they complained, saying, "Listen, Mr. Durruti, the problem is those guys up ahead of us are bothering us." Of course, it was the enemy taking pot-shots at them.
       I ran into Codina from Igualada there. I mentioned before that one day I got involved in a battle, armed with an old militia rifle, which I fired without knowing where the bullets were going. We prepared the attack, then started shooting. We ran into a woods and came out the other side, chasing the enemy, who left their dead behind. Our guys knew tactics. The militia men fired enthusiastically. Then we came to a stubbled field, full of harvested sheaves of wheat. The enemy hid behind the stacked sheaves and fired back as they retreated. We captured a cemetery, which turned out to belong to Huesca.
       It was your classic Spanish cemetery, walled off in the form of a square, with the typical cypress trees around it. I reconnoitred the wall, and when I got to the east side, I realized that was where the Fascists had shot the people with republican ideas. I found three blood-stained berets. I picked up a belt and a blood-encrusted cap. Inside the cap was a piece of paper: that poor unfortunate fellow had written his good-byes to his family on it.
       Our troops set fire to a gazebo. There were four coffins under it with the bodies of rebel officers. I never did like to look at cadavers, not even family members. I prefer to remember people the way they were. But I remember those officers very clearly: they had been half-cremated. The Fascists must have had to leave in a hurry, with no time to bury them. Foot-soldiers were never very important, neither theirs nor ours. But the officers were. The coffins of those four officers were made of good wood, decorated with metal appliques and little plaques with their names engraved on them. They must have intended to give them full military honors.
       In another part of the cemetery, however, there were a lot of holes filled back up with dirt, marked by just a simple stick of wood with a number on it. There must have been about five hundred of them. I don't know whose dead they were, whether they were troops or political opponents. The dirt was still loose; they hadn't been there long. I went inside a sort of huge niche that had a vestibule and a little chapel, where they had buried García Hernández all alone. There was a great pile of wreathes, many with Catalan inscription on them. None of it had been disturbed.
       The morale of the anarchist troops was formidable. Furthermore, they had among them comrades who had come to help from foreign countries. Even though they all did their own thing, in Barbastro there was a sort of theoretical coordinator, that general we had with us. I observed that the CNT battalions held open meetings, where they elected a war committee, charged with deciding when and where to attack. Then we would notify the battalions on our flanks, because they belonged to other organizations. If they decided to join our plan, fine. If not, then we went ahead on our own. Each soldier wore a little unit ribbon on his uniform. Once I saw a soldier mounted on a donkey, and both of them were wearing the ribbon of the UGT, proudly and without irony.
       On another day, we launched a strong offensive in which everybody participated, led by General Saravia, who came from Barbastro. He ordered all the artillery to fire on Huesca non-stop. We heard how the bells in town rang out under the impact of the shells. But later the order to charge the town never arrived. Maybe the General had decided that the artillery hadn't done enough damage.
       One day while I was walking with Codina through the rubble of the hermitage—or maybe it was a monastery—we noticed a wooden statue of the patron saint of the place lying on the ground. We studied it carefully. It was completely worm-eaten in the back, but the paint on the front part shone brightly, making it appear to be whole...what a fraud.
       We watched as an old lady stealthily came nearer. Codina reprimanded her, saying, "What on earth might the queen of this old manor be looking for? Well, here you have it: a scarecrow." And when he scratched the back of the statue, it crumbled to dust. The old lady didn't answer us, but looked at us out of the corner of her eye, turned and left. I didn't like the war. You try to defend your ideals and suddenly you find yourself in the midst of violence. It's a bad deal for everybody.
       Before I left for Igualada, I made the following speech to my CNT comrades: "That location of yours up there is alright, but it's a stalemate. I don't know whether it will be favorable or damaging to us in the end. I notice a lot of high spirits among you, but what we don't know is whether we'll be able to fight off a strong attack by the enemy. Even though we're not military geniuses, it's easy enough to see that if the enemy overwhelms our first line of defense, there has to be a second to hold them off. Well, as you know, there isn't any second line of defense. So we have to have faith in the strength of our friends. And meanwhile, try to collectivize everything you can."

On the twenty-first of July the situation was very uncertain. Even though we knew we had won in Barcelona, we had no concrete news from the rest of Spain. We decided we had to confront the atmosphere of panic, of "what's going to happen next?" that was running through people's minds, so we called a meeting.
       It was already dark in the town square, and the only light came from some dingy yellow street lamps. We appeared on the balcony of the town hall.