A Barcelona Heiress (12 page)

“Come on, baby, get down from there. You’re much too pretty to be one of the bosses’ lackeys.”

“Aha … so the rich have discovered the streetcar, but just to annoy the poor.”

“Just what we needed: a woman taking a job from a driver who needs to put bread on the table.”

“Get back to your pots and pans before you run someone over.”

Isabel leaned out and shot back at them, “Hey you loudmouths, and what are you doing? I know you don’t need to use the streetcars because you aren’t working now, nor does it look like you will be any time soon. You knock me because I’m helping the city function, and its people get around? And because I’m a woman? Some brave lovers of progress you are!”

A group of ladies waiting for the streetcar took Isabel’s side and were soon embroiled in a loud squabble with the workers who had harangued her. Before long everyone on the corner was shouting, and the passengers riding on the top deck eagerly joined the dispute.

At that point the troublemakers began to rock the car, pushing it from the right side.

“Turn it over! Let’s flip it!”

Isabel grabbed my hand.

“Shouldn’t we get out?” I asked, shaken by the vehicle’s swaying. Several passengers had jumped off.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said firmly.

Things were getting ugly when, finally, the guard seemed to snap out of his fog, and stood up with his Winchester clutched in both hands.

“Who here wants trouble?” he bellowed.

The rabble-rousers backed off and, resigned, drifted away from the vehicle. Meanwhile, the donkeys had finally gotten out of the way. My friend vigorously honked the horn again, and her streetcar surged forward, continuing on its winding path toward the city’s higher ground.

We resumed our chat while from the sidewalks we caught gazes from street vendors and shoe shiners, maids pushing baby carriages, traveling barbers, mop merchants, water sellers with tin cups, and knife sharpeners with their spinning lathes. A band of blind musicians playing violins and
bandurrias
banged out their tunes in front of a wall plastered with placards and posters advertising upcoming plays and shows.

Our vehicle was hounded by small, sporadic groups of hostile hecklers who, without going so far as to attack us, let loose with the occasional barb. “Scabs!” “Bourgeois tyrants!” “Vermin!” Crippled by the strike, the city was operating in a kind of stupor, as if it had been placed under sedation.

From time to time Isabel halted the car at designated stops. I helped her make sure that the boarding passengers either showed their pass or paid the five-cent fare.

“We believe that we’re in the right, and historically we have been,” Isabel said out of nowhere. “But our inability to listen to those on the other side will be our undoing.”

“When you say ‘we,’ to whom are you referring?’”

“Well, us—the aristocrats, the bourgeoisie, the businessmen, and the enterprising people who built this city, creating companies and raising buildings that are the pride of this impoverished and dejected Spain. Without this ‘us’—a group in which I include your parents and
mine, Barcelona would continue to be a sleepy and shabby provincial town. We were the ones who breathed life into it, but we don’t know to be generous, and, in order to keep our workers from destroying us, we’ve had to turn things over to characters like López Ballesteros, who is a brute …”

“Yes, but an effective and possibly honorable one.”

“And aided by a cruel and villainous accomplice, his boss the police chief, that Beastegui, with his heartless blue eyes and his tie pin … always so prim and proper, yet exuding unpleasantness. That man is a torturer.”

“A torturer? What makes you say that? How do you know?”

“I have my sources,” she replied; an evasive response from which she did not retreat, despite my insistence. “Barcelona is a city of haves and have-nots, plagued by injustice.”

“That is so, and just what do you do to address these issues?”

“Come with me tomorrow afternoon and you shall see.”

* * *

The next day Isabel picked me up in her car, and minutes later we were in front of a tall building on Pasaje Lloveras. A maid escorted us to a waiting room crowded with women with small children wailing, running around the table or, in some cases, sitting there motionless with sickly faces. The walls were lined with shelves full of lavishly bound tomes on a range of medical fields, and taking a prominent position in the room was a white marble bust of a gentleman with a smartly trimmed mustache and a goatee.

“This,” my friend announced, gesturing toward the sculpture, “is the eminent Dr. Vidal Solares, Barcelona’s finest pediatrician, and this is his private practice, where he treats the children of the city’s wealthy.”

A nurse came out to receive us and escorted us to a foyer. The door was open a crack, allowing us to overhear the doctor’s conversation with a mother who seemed rather irksome.

“But, Doctor, my daughter begins to cry every time we put her in the bathtub. Please tell me what we can do about her.”

“It’s very simple, ma’am. Your daughter is slovenly.”

“Oh!” The lady fell silent, but only for a moment. “You see, we’re following the advice of a friend of my husband’s who told us that the best thing for children is to give them lots of liver and lamb brains, but our little Martita just refuses to eat them. What do you think?”

“Do you like brains and liver?”

“Goodness no! The truth is that I don’t like them at all.”

“Well, neither does your daughter. Give her some sole and a good piece of beef, and she’ll eat. And have her take some vitamins too.”

A few seconds later an obese midwife emerged with a placid baby girl in her arms. Behind her came the doctor. Corpulent and with a closely cut beard, his booming voice must have caused his tender young patients to cry at the mere sound of it. His expression transformed when he spotted my friend.

“Countess! What a pleasant surprise that you can accompany us this afternoon! You can see the new wing we have opened.”

After the customary introductions, the doctor put a coat on over his white smock and showed us to his car. His chauffeur, who was already waiting for him, drove us to a three-story building relatively nearby, at 467 Consejo de Ciento Street.

“This is where we treat the poor children whose parents cannot afford private care,” the doctor explained. “For years I paid for it myself. Over time, given the refusal of our government institutions to fund my initiative, I decided to turn for help to a number of well-to-do ladies, who responded to my appeal.”

We toured the building. The ground floor housed a ward known as The Drop of Milk, where sterilized milk was distributed to children who could not be breastfed by their mothers. On the same floor was the dispensary along with rooms for surgery, electrotherapy, hydrotherapy, and massage therapy. Each bore a plaque indicating the name of the person who had funded the facility: the Marchioness of Bañolas, the Countess of Benabarre, Mrs. Lefinur …

When we reached the ear, nose, and throat dispensary, Isabel Enrich pleaded, “Don’t make me blush, Doctor. Don’t show him this one.”

“And why not? It is only right that this area should bear your name; if it were not for your assistance this hospital would be in even more dire straits than it already is. Your friend here,” said Vidal Solares, turning to me, “has gone to great lengths to obtain funding for us, often drawing upon her own assets, and also had a hand in the modest subsidy which the city finally agreed to grant us.”

“My family has some influence with the previous mayor, and was able to bring some pressure to bear. Later, I also did what I could. We shall continue to implore them for aid, Doctor. What they give us is but a pittance.”

“Tell me, Dr. Vidal Solares,” I cut in. “What inspired you to undertake this effort?”

The doctor scratched his goatee before replying.

“Listen, my friend, today’s children are tomorrow’s men. The ancients believed that infants exhibit, as if molded in wax, the vices and virtues of the adult, in such a way that the former is a reflection of the latter, who simply proceeds to reveal over time what was inborn from the very beginning.

“Today we know that it is just the other way around: the character of our adults depends entirely on how we raise our children. If we take care of and bring them up properly, they will be responsible. If we neglect them and leave them to fate, we will have delinquents.”

“You speak like a psychologist.”

“But I’m not. I am a children’s doctor, a pediatrician. My obsession is maximizing the attention they receive so we no longer hear stories of children dying or suffering irreparable damage because their families didn’t have the means for care. That is an injustice and a disgrace for those of us who can help prevent it. In England they passed the first legislation protecting child workers in 1802. Here it took us eighty years to do the same, and it is evident that the results of this delay have been dreadful. One day, twenty years ago, a distraught woman came to my practice, crying uncontrollably, with two children stricken with pneumonia. Their condition was serious. If they had not received attention, they could have died. Unable to stomach that idea, I took them into my own home, and the patients slept in the cribs that had belonged to my daughters. First I established a free service for nursing infants, and then we created The Drop of Milk; the first facility of its kind in Europe, as recognized by the 1906 International Convention in Brussels, and little by little we have continued to expand. This year alone we attended over seventy thousand patients!”

In the waiting rooms were throngs of overwrought mothers cradling wailing infants to whom nature seemed to have been especially heartless. The doctor explained the cases to me: tuberculosis and ringworm, blindness and deafness, scrofula and rickets—evils that afflict a fragile humanity, striking such defenseless little creatures with particular mercilessness. Unfortunate souls, victims of penury and unwanted pregnancies. In the corridor a couple stood silently, hand in hand, as tears ran down their cheeks, while another woman broke down, crying hysterically over the loss of her child. In a chair, yet another woman covered her listless, crippled son with a diaper made from a rag.

On the mezzanine level right above the ground floor was an X-ray room, and another room for chemical analyses. The lower level and first floor, designated for use as a children’s hospital, housed more than fifty beds. On the second floor there was an operating room with a skylight, and a photo gallery presenting images of surgical treatments.

“Children,” the doctor continued, “are not protected in our society. The legal working age is ten. They can send young ones of that tender age off to work; until recently ten- to fifteen-hour shifts were legal, and in many places they are still the order of the day. Doesn’t that seem barbaric to you?”

On our way out the doctor invited us to write something in a guest book for friends of the hospital. Inside were messages such as: “Philanthropy cannot be studied. One is born with it. It is a supernatural faculty which Nature grants to the most fortunate, to give life and succor to those ill-fated souls beset by hunger and disease. Praise to you, Dr. Vidal Solares, priest presiding at the altar of charity!” And: “In this refuge from the saddest kind of pain you will experience compassion and interest in those innocent victims who suffer, and you will embrace its founder, saying to him, as I did: Vidal Solares, you are a redeemer!”

What more could be said? I scribbled down my simple signature and walked out alongside Isabel Enrich into Barcelona’s Ensanche district, breathing in the fresh air.

“You’re full of surprises. Why didn’t you ever tell me about all this?” I asked in a chiding tone.

“‘But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.’ Isn’t that the golden rule of charity?”

“Then why show me now?”

“Because I need some professional counsel from you. The truth is that I am giving considerable sums of money to this and other charitable causes. For now I want of nothing. My inheritance, thank God, was large, and the plantations in Puerto Rico are well run and continue to yield handsome profits. But if I carry on spending at the rate I am now, in a few years I could be seriously strapped. The thing is that a few weeks ago …”

And Isabel Enrich began to tell me the story of her aunt, the Marchioness of Sensat, and her problematic inheritance: a fortune which could end up distributed among a dozen different relatives, or land in the hands of Isabel, who did indeed require some sound legal advice.

In order to carry out the charge María Nilo had given me I had to resort to pulling some questionable strings and enlisting the assistance of some of my former clients. Even Basilio, my assistant and clerk, was forced to pay visits he would have preferred to avoid, to dark taverns in the Gracia district with walls lined with rotting casks, and inexplicably dismal dives in the Atarazanas quarter where fabulous card games were held.

With roots as deeply Galician as those of Lucinda, Basilio’s father was a postal worker who had brought his family to Barcelona in the hopes that they would enjoy more opportunities there. But he died young, leaving his widow and children to fend for themselves. Basilio had ended up at my practice when I opened it, three years prior. At that time he was eighteen, and he fast proved himself a bright and efficient employee, whether sorting out bewildering paperwork or tracking down individuals whose testimony we needed. He was also quite the athlete, frequenting the Barcelona Swim Club and not hesitating to dive into the chilly waters of the port on Christmas Day in order to take part in the organization’s traditional competition. And every Sunday morning in the winter he would take the train to Puigcerdá to go skiing at the slopes in La Molina.

Basilio and I combed the city in search of contacts who might be able to shed some light on Ángel Lacalle’s whereabouts. Several of our sources agreed that, if anyone knew something,
it would be José García Torres, but he, in turn, though not entirely missing, lived in a quasi-clandestine state, and it was no small task to find him.