Home » Spain » Pablo Martín Sanchez, » El anarquista que se llamaba como yo(The Anarchist Who Shared My Name)
Pablo Martín Sanchez,: El anarquista que se llamaba como yo(The Anarchist Who Shared My Name)
Pablo Martín Sanchez decided one day, as people do, to Google his name. He came up with an quite a few assorted people sharing his name, but what attracted his attention was an anarchist of that name. though with relatively little information about this man so he decided to do a bit more exploration.
He contacted people and visited libraries and eventually, with a bit of luck, tracked down his birth certificate. Further research let him to a niece of the anarchist who was still alive, age 90, in a care home. He visited her and she gave him some more information. She died but left him an envelope containing a photo of the anarchist.
This book tells the story of the anarchist. We start with two parallel stories. The first is his story as a child and young adult and in the second we follow his political career.
His parents were poor but educated and his father was a teacher. Pablo himself did not speak till he was Three when, to his parents surprise he saw his newborn sister and commented pretty. He continued to limit his conversation to his parents but told his baby sister all sorts of imaginary stories.
His father Julián had an opportunity to become a schools inspector and had to go and take an exam in Madrid. His parents decide it would be good for the six-year-old Pablo to accompany his father. Somewhat surprisingly, the father goes off to do the exam leaving his six year old son alone in the capital city. However, Pablo does discover one thing – he goes. He goes to see an early cinema film, the films of the Lumière Brothers.
The father gets the job and it is decided that his wife and daughter will stay behind in Bilboa while Pablo will accompany his father to Saalmanca. The job involves him going all around the region inspecting the schools. At the same time he is educating his son who learns among other things what an anarchist is. Father and son get stuck in a village as a result of a heavy snowstorm and it is here that he meets Roberto, who prefers to be called Robinson as he is a devotee of Robinson Crusoe. As well as Robinson, with whom he becomes very friendly, there is another interest and she is called Angela. It is clear that Pablo has fallen for her and his feelings are reciprocated.
Meanwhile, we have been following his later life. He is working as a printer for a revolutionary group in Paris. The Spanish government is right wing and there is a lot of plotting on going on to overturn the government. Pablo does his bit but he is not too enthusiast icto be involved unlike some of the others, including Robinson, who turns up.
Robinson and Pablo once again become close and share a room. We now get involved in the very complicated situation of Spanish politics in the 1920s. Primo de Rivera is in charge with a monarch, AlfonsoXIII. Spain remains a very poor country and we follow a host of Spaniards who are now in France including both real ones and fictitious ones. Pablo is on the edge of all this but he does print material for them, often behind behind the back of his employer who is in theory sympathetic also a businessman.
The plan is to send a troop of Spaniards from France to meet up with revolutionaries within Spain and to overthrow the government. We follow the stories of how they try to collect money, arms and men to carry out this mission.
Not surprisingly, the French government is not too enthusiastic about having an armed force on its territory and their attempts often met by opposition from the French authorities. However, their main enemy seems to be the lack of organisation.
Eventually, a plan is afoot and they all pile on a train heading south. Initially Pablo has decided not to participate but then, following a dream which involves liberating Angela, he decides to join forces with them and heads south with Robinson.
Meanwhile, we are following his earlier career and he becomes a journalist and gets involved in all the murky doings going on in Salamanca. However, he does get to go back to Madrid as the King AlfonsoXIII is marrying another royal and this will be a big event. While he’s there he bumps into the young lad who helped him go to the cinema on his previous visit and it is apparent that this young lad is now older and more revolutionary and is involved in the assassination attempt. There were five attempts on our Alfonso’s life and all failed, but Pablo and his colleague do get to report on this one.
Pablo is determined to win the hand of Angela but her father totally rejects him and has another, in his view much better candidate to be her husband. She of course prefers Pablo. It all gets complicated. He meets an old woman who forecasts that he’s going to die twice and he is challenged to a duel by Angela’s intended and is shot. We know and, of course he knows that, unlike most of us, his heart is not on the right side so while the bullet hits him where his heart is expected to be, it is not. Nevertheless, he is wounded and rescued by monks and they look after him until he recovers. Meanwhile, Angela’s father has lost track of Angela who had run away,Moreover. He does not know what happened to Pablo as he expected to hear he had committed suicide as the duel was be staged to look like suicide.
Pablo heads for Salamanca, looking for Angela but has no more success than her father and he moves to Barcelona. While still looking for her, he is called up to the army though, does not have to actually go into the army immediately. In the meantime there is a riot in Barcelona because of the war in Morocco. Pablo, joined by Robinson is looking for Angela without success and he does end up doing his three-year stint in the army. On his release, he continues a search for Angela and considers assassinating. The king ends up as a waiter on a ship going to New York and then spending considerable amount of time in Argentina with the anarchists there. On return, World War I has started and though Spain has remained neutral it is difficult for to him remain in Spain as it seems that the police are after him so he goes to France and becomes a war correspondent and sees the horrors of Verdun.
Of course, eventually, the two stories collide. We have followed Pablo’s story to Paris and now we learn that there is a plan for uprising in Spain, particularly with the new right wing government. Plans are a foot for both uprisings within Spain and the Spamiards in France to go to Spain and assist. Not surprisingly, the whole thing goes drastically wrong and the government remains intact. Pablo and his friends get to Spain but, for them to it all goes wrong.
This is a long book – six hundred pages – and Martín Sanchez gives us a long and complicated story of our hero and his associates. We also learnabout anarchism in Spain and what is happening in Spain and, indeed, in France in the political arena in the early part of the last century.
There is one interesting question. Did this?Pablo MartínSanchez exist? MartínSanchez is an Oulipian so we must expect a certain amount of trickery.
On the Spanish Wikipedia page for Vera de Bidasoa (but not on the English one) where the anarchists entered Spain there is a mention of this incursion. In the afterword, artínSanchez also mentions that he found his namesake by Googling. Of course I did the same and did not find any reference to his namesake. If you Google his name you will get a lot of references to our author, a few references to a footballer of the same name and one or two others of the same name but who have no connection with the anarchist. Therefore, I’m assuming that his namesake is essentially fictitious. To make it more complicated, he has not one but two twists right at the end of the book more or less justify the fact that his namesake.was real but disappeared from history. Regardless of the fact that this story may or may not be true, it is nevertheless an excellent story and also fascinating in the account that he gives political life in France and Spain during the early part of the last century,
Publishing history
First published in 2012 by Acantilado
First English translation in 2025 by Deep Vellum
Translated by Jeff Diteman