A Barcelona Heiress (7 page)

El
Ciero
belonged to founder Francisco Peris Mencheta’s family, the members of which I was well connected to, and was run by the Valencian journalist Julián Pérez Carrasco, a disciple of Blasco Ibánez and a capable man if there ever was one. Upon returning from one of my stays in Madrid, I was recruited as an editorial writer. I asked Pérez Carrasco what I was to do on my first day, and he handed me a stack of papers and gave me the following order:

“The government is a stinking mess. Develop this idea.”

When I arrived to the
El Noticiero Universal
newsroom that afternoon I explained my day’s visits to Pérez Carrasco who, over the course of the years, would both protect and admonish me. After listening to me closely, he fished his watch out of his waistcoat, glanced at it, and told me to lead with the idea of the troglodytes, giving it the headline “Picturesque Barcelona,” for example, and that I had two hours to do so. I obediently dipped my pen into my inkwell and began to write.

“The idle visitor who one day strolls down the former Port Highway will come across pathetic pedestrians clad in rags who, abandoning the road, climb up the mountain ridge and disappear between the rocks …”

The next day the “Troglodytes of District II” were all the city was talking about.

Although the innumerable incidents of violence attributed to political motives did not always end up in court, and when they did I made an effort to avoid them, as an attorney I wasn’t able to entirely extricate myself from them. Thus was the situation with the “El Chimo case,” which was destined to be a landmark event of the era, though those of us who were involved in the trial were not fully aware of its significance at the time.

At age fifteen, Joaquín “El Chimo” Caballé had descended as far as one could into the dregs of a large city like Barcelona without selling his own body. But he enjoyed telling stories in which he portrayed himself as the king of the world. In reality he was damaged goods; a case of flotsam jettisoned by society, a cheat, a puppet, and a child. His case, widely covered by the press at the time, was one of the most prominent my practice saw during those years. It was also one of the saddest.

I’ll summarize the story the newspapers dubbed “The Las Cortes Street Bomb.” Said explosive went off in August 1919 in front of the palace of the Marquess of Marianao on Las Cortes Street, today’s Gran Vía, on the corner of Paseo de Gracia. This palace, built in the style they called
neogriego
, or Neo-grec—a sort of neoclassical style inspired by German Romanticism—was the most luxurious in Barcelona’s center and one of the most distinguished structures in the Ensanche district, with its magnificent marble staircase and lavish decorations,
produced by the preeminent upholsterers, cabinetmakers, and wood-carvers of the day. Its owner, the marquess Don Salvador Samá, a Spanish grandee, was a major landowner who had served as the mayor of Barcelona for a few years. An equestrian enthusiast, the marquess enjoyed taking rides in his open, horse-driven carriage. Upon reaching their destination, a footman accompanying him would open the door, and the aristocrat would solemnly descend as his coachman raised his whip to salute him. At a time when automobiles had started, little by little, to take over the city’s downtown streets, the marquess’s rides did not go unnoticed.

The bomb to which I refer, however, had nothing to do with the marquess as a figure, but rather with his home’s status as a city landmark. The explosive went off a few yards from one of its walls, causing serious injuries to two men walking by, less serious ones to another three, and minor damage to the building.

As cited by the public prosecutor, the police investigation yielded provisional conclusions which established that a forty-four-year-old woman by the name of Rosa Mestres who had criminal records for robbery, the production of counterfeit bills, and petty theft, and who was the owner of a flophouse that was under police surveillance because a number of suspicious characters were lodgers there, had summoned El Chimo, to whom she regularly gave odd jobs, to her home, asking him to go and rent a cart. In that cart “someone” placed what is known as a timed bomb, a device made up of pieces of cast iron and packing high-power explosives. El Chimo supposedly pulled the cart, covered with a burlap sack, from Basea Street, where Rosa Mestres resided, to the point on Las Cortes Street in front of the marquess’s palace where every day at one o’clock a group of construction foremen would gather to do their hiring, and left it there. It exploded a few minutes later “with the numerous constituent fragments being converted into projectiles,” which struck Antonio Sanz Salas, Miguel de Miguel Fuertes, José Martorell
Gironés, José Cabredo Sáenz de Villeda, and Bernardo Bel Boet, inflicting the aforementioned wounds. It was a miracle that it exploded at a time when there were few people on the sidewalk. If it had happened just a few minutes before, right in the middle of the foremen’s gathering, the device could have caused a large-scale slaughter.

In his statement the public prosecutor, Don Crisanto Posadas, asserted that, in exchange for his services, Joaquín Caballé, El Chimo, had received from Rosa Mestres fifty pesetas in five-peseta coins—three of which turned out to be counterfeit. El Chimo and Mestres were the two parties indicted in an attack endangering both human lives and property, and for this the prosecutor asked for life imprisonment.

It was an aunt of El Chimo’s, a barmaid at a tavern near my home and office, who asked me to defend the boy. At first I refused to take the case due to the extremism with which it was associated, but my maid, Lucinda, who was essential to my domestic organization and a friend of the barmaid’s, hounded me for days until I caved in and agreed to speak to El Chimo at El Modelo prison.

Speaking to him was a poignant experience. El Chimo was an apple-cheeked child who had grown up too fast; he had chestnut hair, fiery eyes, and a spindly frame. He related to me a long series of misadventures on the street since his mother had abandoned him at age nine (he had never known his father), and the endless stratagems he had had to invent just to survive living in Barcelona’s tragic and seamy underbelly. His aunt at the bar gave him food and shelter from time to time, but he spent his days on the streets, pilfering and purloining, running errands for burglars, decoys, and pickpockets, finding customers for a couple of brothels, and working as an errand boy for certain owners of seedy cabarets, who paid him in
aguardiente
. “But I have never, ever killed anyone,” he assured me, “and I never took any bomb anywhere—at least, not
knowingly.” It was difficult to believe him entirely, however, as he had a pronounced tendency to contradict himself and offer conflicting versions of the same events. Because the entire case rested upon his confession to the police, I insisted again and again that he explain to me why he had confessed if he had really not been involved in the incident, but I was unable to get a clear answer about what happened. This was not surprising because, as he explained to me, he had been drinking hard liquor all morning before he ended up at the police station.

His stay in the prison was proving to be an ordeal. On the first day, when the inmates were released into the yard, a group of veteran convicts had surrounded him and backed him against a wall. The strongest and most terrifying of them all had abused him. “He raped me,” El Chimo confessed, with tears in his eyes. After our conversation I went to protest in the strongest terms, paying a visit to my friend Oteyza, the prison warden, who told me that until a center for minors was created these incidents were as unfortunate as they were “almost inevitable,” promising me that they would keep a closer eye out in order to protect my client. I am not sure to what extent that promise was ever fulfilled.

El Chimo’s trial was held in the Provincial Court of Barcelona, located in the Palace of Justice, where I was a frequent visitor. The imposing building, the work of architects Enrique Sagnier and José Doménech, had been constructed in order to house numerous courts of varying levels which had hitherto been scattered around the entire city. It had been functioning for a dozen years, and I liked to hear the clacking of my shiny shoes as I crossed the Salón de los Pasos Perdidos, with its allegorical paintings in green, golden, and ochre tones, dressed in my lawyer’s garb on my way to one of my appearances in court.

Presiding over the trial was magistrate Felipe Gallo, a most dour character. It was a jury trial, and the kind that attracted public attention. On the first day the prosecutor, who began by
evoking the motto of the
somatenes,
the volunteer police corps: “
pau, pau i sempre pau
,” (peace, peace, and always peace), presented as evidence the statements of twenty witnesses, four doctors and two experts. It took two sessions just to hear all of them.

The defendants gave their statements under shafts of light pouring in from the large picture windows. Their testimony lay at the crux of the whole trial, especially that which related to the confession El Chimo had given the police immediately after being arrested, as the other defendant, Rosa Mestres, never admitted to having anything to do with the placement of the bomb, and the other statements shed no light on who had built it or who could have had a motive for placing it.

El Chimo was arrested because he had boasted about having been behind the bombing to a friend, who turned out to be a police informant. After ratting out the boy, his so-called friend, and fellow rapscallion, Marcelino, received from a policeman—a certain Officer Quintela—a dinner, some clothes, and twenty-five pesetas for his work. Once in custody, El Chimo started talking, recognizing that he had transported the bomb and that Rosa Mestres had put him up to it.

The case against him was, in my view, very flimsy, overseen by a military judge—as Barcelona was at that time under martial law—and had a great many holes in it. During the trial, following my advice, El Chimo recanted his original statements, saying that he could not recall exactly what he had done the day of the incident, though in the morning he had been with a kid named Moreno, with whom he “went robbing” (
sic
), and swore that he had given his initial testimony “in order to appear in the newspapers.” In response to my questions he reported that his informer, Marcelino, had come up with the bomb idea, and realized when the explosive went off that he hadn’t been in Rosa Mestres’s house in two months.

Everything was rather convoluted, with diametrically opposed testimony given.

I gave my closing statement in the trial’s fourth session. After acknowledging the magistrates, the jury, and the prosecution, I began by describing the trial underway as a process arising out of vanity, for it was vanity—his desire to see himself portrayed and appearing in the papers—which spurred El Chimo to declare himself guilty of a crime that he did not commit.

I railed against the “special” treatment my client had received from the police, at which point the chief magistrate called for order in the court. I explained that I had taken the case in response to the entreaties of an aunt of the accused, and because I was convinced of El Chimo’s innocence (as Caballé had nothing to do with trade unionism), and that he had had nothing to do with the attack. I added that, after taking charge of the defense I had received many anonymous letters (which was true) to which I had paid no heed.

I then reviewed the facts attributed to Caballé in detail, paying attention to all the records on the case. Although one of the witnesses said that he recognized El Chimo as the one who had left the cart next to the palace, other reports and statements contradicted this, stating that the person who took the cart with the bomb in it to Las Cortes Street was a tall, slender man with a dark mustache wearing a blue suit and espadrilles.

“Is this any description of the defendant?” I asked rhetorically. “No.” Only one of the witnesses said that he looked like the one with the cart, from the back.

With regard to the statement that landed my client in jail, I argued that Marcelino Ferrer, the informant, had been compensated for his testimony with money and clothing, which called entirely into question the veracity of his words.

I described El Chimo as a victim of social marginalization, and urged the jury not to hand down a punishment on someone against whom there was no evidence at all. “The prosecutor
began his statement with a triple request for peace, evoking the motto of the Catalonian somatenes. I, then, ask for justice, justice, and always justice.”

I continued by exclaiming, “I cannot believe that Barcelona as a society wishes, in response to the attack it has suffered, to take revenge against a child, a braggart, a puppet, and a swindler like El Chimo. I cannot believe,” I insisted, “that tomorrow the criminal hands which placed the bomb will be making paper airplanes with the newspapers reporting the defendant’s conviction!” The whispers that spread throughout the chamber led me to believe that my argument had struck a nerve.

But it was my colleague assigned to defending Rosa Mestres (a volatile redhead who did not seem in the least fazed by the charges brought against her) who was most able to exploit the incoherencies of the prosecution’s case. In reality there was no real evidence incriminating her except for El Chimo’s testimony, and her counsel was able to demonstrate that, before accusing Miss Mestres, my client had denounced others who were clearly innocent. The boy’s statements were rife with contradictions and, her attorney argued in a somewhat ironic tone, under no circumstances would his client have given an individual such as El Chimo a bomb, as he was bound to squeal on her.

The chief magistrate issued his summary of all that had been said during the trial; he read an article of Criminal Proceedings Law that applied to cases in which the defendant on trial recants formerly provided depositions, and told the other magistrates, “It lies with you to decide what you ought to say with regard to the defendant’s contradictions. If his deposition contains omissions, it is no fault of the court’s.” Gallo finished by reminding the court of its evident obligation, often not met, to issue a conscientious verdict.