Uncontrollable

Uncontrollable

By Kevin Eady

Copyright 2015 Kevin Eady

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Chapter One - Accidental Birth of an Anarchist.

Chapter Two - Childhood in the House of Mud.

Chapter Three - The Old Houses.

Chapter Four - Love and Harmony.

Chapter Five - One Generation Away.

Chapter Six - Six Fingers on the Black Hand.

Chapter Seven - Loose upon the World.

Chapter Eight - The Little Father.

Chapter Nine - Bricks of Shame.

Chapter Ten - A Column of Iron.

Chapter Eleven - Days Mournful and Overcast.

Chapter Twelve - My Guardian Angel.

Chapter Thirteen - Edelweiss Piracy.

Chapter Fourteen - Death to the Cows!

Chapter Fifteen - Voyage to the Archipelago.

Chapter Sixteen - Bitch Wars.

Chapter Seventeen - Dreams for Reality.

Chapter Eighteen - A Propos de Marseille.

Chapter Nineteen - The Monster of Amsterdam.

Chapter Twenty - The Conquest of Bread.

Chapter Twenty One - True Journey is Return.

Chapter Twenty Two - Postscript by Raoul García.

Glossary.

Notes on the Chapter Headings.

Acknowledgements.

Chapter One. Accidental Birth of an Anarchist.

My name is Buenaventura García. People call me 'El Coco'. I am one hundred and one years old. I am an uncontrollable.

The day of my birth was the first day of a tragic week, both for Spain and for my family. On Monday the 26th July 1909 I was born in a tiny two-roomed apartment in a tenement building in the El Raval district of Barcelona. My father, Luis García, was out at work. Whilst preparing some food my mother slipped on a mat on the floor, bashing her head against the table leg and almost instantly became unconscious. She was heavily pregnant, and quite possibly her contractions had already started. Oblivious to the world, she somehow managed to produce a healthy, noisy baby boy. Probably, she flitted in and out of consciousness just enough to give me that final determined push. I have always hoped that she managed to avoid the pain of the delivery.

I arrived in the world all alone. There was no-one there to hold me and no-one there to comfort me. No-one to whisper quiet words of love and reassurance. I howled in protest at the injustice of it all. On that same day Antonio Maura, the prime minister of a pestilential government, called up the reservists in the city to fight in his colonial adventures in the Moroccan Rif. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church gave their whole-hearted support to the enterprise, blessing the ships earmarked for the mission to North Africa and roundly praising the call-up as the work of God. This was to be a Holy War. The men of cloth once again betrayed their flock. The anarchist union Solidaridad Obrera called for a general strike, and the dice were cast. My father returned from work early because of the strike to find our new neighbour, Angelica, desperately trying to revive my mother. Angelica had heard my crying and come to my rescue. She had cleaned me up and found a wet-nurse to keep me content for the time-being. For my mother things were not looking so propitious.

On the Tuesday the anarchists, the socialists and Lerroux's Radicals began the strike in earnest. The protests were spontaneous and spectacular. Trains were halted in their tracks and railway lines blockaded to prevent the transportation of the army reservists to the port. Trams were overturned and the city burned, particularly the churches and other ecclesiastical buildings. Rumours had spread about torture-chambers in the convents and monasteries, where recalcitrant novices were treated abominably, mutilated or even murdered. Poverty and class hatred contributed to an indignant rage which swelled up within the denizens of the city. Seemingly incoherent yet directed, their anger was vented on the first and most obvious target to hand. There was already a widespread loathing for the symbols of the Mother Church. Her brazen championing of military aggression led to such a profound indignation and revulsion that the religious became the primary object of the people's wrath. Workers and students broke open catacombs, despoiled altars and holy places, disinterred bodies of nuns and monks and blasphemed the whole panoply of Catholicism. Barricades were thrown up in the Ramblas, the broad waterfall of an avenue which sweeps through the centre of the city, and the side-streets became no-go areas for the authorities. For a short while no-one ruled. My mother's bleeding continued apace, quietly but consistently, despite the intervention of a local wise-woman.

By Thursday the government had declared martial law and sent in the troops. They were conscripts from Barcelona to a man and refused to fire on their fellow citizens. It was not till the next day, the Friday, that 'loyal' troops from Valencia and elsewhere were sent in, and the real killings started. That was also the day my mother, Dolores García, died from what they called 'complications' after giving birth. None of it seems complicated to me. She was simply poor and unfortunate, and the victim of circumstance. She did not properly regain consciousness at any stage, so she never knew she had delivered of herself a strong and vigorous son. One of my aunts, María González, later maintained that she would have been saved were it not for the strike, if they could only have got her to a doctor's or to a convent hospital. My father Luis said she was an interfering superstitious old woman and as crazy as a goat. He could not have afforded a doctor, and the nuns would probably have poisoned her anyway when they discovered that she was not married, or had me adopted for the benefit of the barren wife of some high-class merchant.

My great-grandson Raoul Rodriguez wonders why he has never heard about any of this. He comes from Madrid, which may have something to do with it. He also asks what any of this has to do with me, as I was barely alive when all this happened. As I recount my tale, I think it will become apparent just how important those momentous days were in my life and Raoul will learn a lot from me about matters long forgotten and buried.

Chapter Two. Childhood in the House of Mud.

I don't remember the Tragic Week in Barcelona, of course, but the events of those five days resonated down through the decades and affected the lives of everyone in the city. The working people knew that they were no more than cannon fodder. They were of no concern to their 'superiors' and they were as much the foe of the government of the day as were the Moors of Spanish Morocco. The upper classes, the industrialists and the church knew that the people held them in contempt and regarded them as parasites and robbers. There was never going to be anything but strife between the two opposing camps.

I never met my mother, Dolores García, and I never knew much about her. I never even possessed a photograph. Whenever anyone was asked they always sang her praises, in the way that people will about relatives, or indeed most people who have recently died. You have to be a really bad individual for people to tell the complete and honest truth about you when you have just been buried. The only thing of any great interest I did discover, a long while later, was how my parents met. It was during the great strike of 1902. They both independently went to an expensive restaurant to eat a meal and both independently refused to pay after they had sated their appetites. This was a relatively common form of protest at times of unrest, and a way of filling empty stomachs. They were both present at the same time in the same court, the proceedings of which were interrupted by a variety of angry protesters. Both their cases were adjourned by the court officials as they became worried for their own personal safety. Thus did their romance begin.

My first memory is of snails. I must have been about five or six. They were in a bucket carried by a gypsy girl in her late teens, and they were for sale. They kept on remorselessly climbing up the sides of the bucket that contained them, making their bid for freedom. When they reached the top, Rosario, the young gypsy woman, would knock them back down again. Then they would start the whole laborious process of escape and defeat all over again. I loved snails after that, but it was probably because I loved it when Rosario came to call, always out of the blue, smiling and chatting and dispelling the black moods into which I sometimes descended. She would sell the live snails or cooked snails in a hot sauce, or any tasty titbit which was available and in season; olives, peppers, mussels and anchovies. She was from the south somewhere, and her brother Daniel was always in the background watching over her. El Raval was not the safest part of Barcelona for an attractive young woman outsider to be wandering the streets on her own with money on her person, and the gitanos were very watchful of their women among us Spaniards. I was no threat at my tender age, however, and Rosario was always friendly and playful. She gave me my nickname, El Coco, by which I am still known today, and she read my future from my palm when I was eight years of age. I was told that I had the longest lifeline she had ever seen, that I would live to be very old, travel to faraway places and have three life-changing reunions with loved-ones during my time on earth. What all that was supposed to mean I didn't have the faintest idea, and I don't believe any of that nonsense now in the slightest. Nonetheless, my life has surprised me and taken me unawares in many ways over the years.

My great-grandson Raoul informs me El Raval can still be an area to be wary of. He says he was nearly mugged there a couple of months ago when visiting Barcelona, out on the town with friends. It was only when the mugger realised how many were with him that he backed away. Growing up there I didn't notice that side of things too much, but I have always been a bit rough and ready, and prepared to stand up for myself. That was something you had to do in Barcelona in those days. It was a big, noisy, dirty, volatile city. There was always something happening, for good or for ill.

El Raval was nicknamed Chinatown by some, and was thought by the upper classes to be composed almost exclusively of opium dens and brothels. It was nothing like that, merely a run-down part of town replete with overcrowded housing and a few immigrants from different parts of the globe. The streets were lined with second-hand and pawn shops. Illegal traders would sell their wares on the pavement, everything from clothes and tools to food and alcohol. There were far worse parts to live in, such as the shanty towns which had grown up on the fringes of working-class districts. In those places nobody had electricity or running water or sewers, yet the inhabitants were as well-behaved and ordinary as anyone else in the city. True, there were gangs everywhere and some of them, particularly the TB pandillas, had a fearsome reputation. It was mainly reputation. You were more likely to be killed by tuberculosis itself than by the TB gangs. After all, they acquired their name from the fact that they supposedly looked so thin and ill. Besides, we were all too poor to be worth stealing from, and people banded together against threats from outside without needing to be organised. We all knew there was no point going to the police for any help. They were the enemy. So we looked after ourselves and after each other. If you were part of the indigenous population, El Raval was a safe place to live.

There was more than one police force in Barcelona back in those days, just to reinforce the point that we all needed to be kept in our place and punished for our poverty. There was the Guardia Civil, who occupied and oppressed the whole of working-class Spain and who were hated throughout the length and breadth of the land. Then there was the Sometent militia, who hailed in the main from the surrounding countryside and were brought in at times of tension to cower the native inhabitants. Lastly, the Sindicatos Libres, trades unions run and financed by the employers, had their own paramilitary wing. They were all pretty nasty and vicious, and they all represented the rich and the industrialists. Even a young boy such as myself would come into contact with these hooligans, who acted as though they had the right to push everyone around just to exercise their authority and show who was in charge. You learnt to steer clear of that sort of person, to ostracise them, ignore them and despise them. I never understood what motivated people to turn their back on their own class in that fashion, in such a visible and public way. Their uniforms clearly told the world that they were on the side of the powerful and mighty and some of them would feel the full fury of the underdog as a result, whenever the pendulum swung in that direction.

I was friendly with a lad called Pedro Ramírez from one of the neighbouring alleys. I'd known him for some years and we got on fairly well. He was a gentle soul, always kind and considerate and anxious to avoid trouble of any sort. Then his father was made unemployed and in desperation joined up with an employers' militia. This must have been when I was about nine years old. That was the end of our friendship. The other boys I knew stopped talking to Pedro. Before long his family's windows were broken and his parents were sworn and spat at in the street. I saw Pedro in tears several times during that period. He was not as resilient as I was. After a while he and his family moved away to another area, almost a police ghetto, in another part of the city. That was how things were. Life was harsh and conflict happened. When it did, people were hurt, physically and emotionally. You had to make hard choices and live with the consequences. I felt bad about the treatment meted out to my one-time friend. Pedro had not joined up with the militia, so why should he suffer for his father's actions? Nevertheless, these anti-police tactics worked. Some who enlisted with the police would resign when the feelings of the population became apparent, and they would then be accepted back into the community, albeit with some reservations. It was also true that large areas of the city were in effect police-free zones as a result of these manifestations of the people's anger.

My father worked long hours at the docks, and was always tired when he came back from work. I spent much of my time when I was little with our neighbour Angelica, who fed me and kept me clean, and with her son Pepe. As I grew up Pepe and I gradually extended our realm to other parts of the city, particularly Sant Pere, Santa Caterina and La Ribera. These districts were time-worn, filled with narrow alleyways and secret places. Some parts were threatening and the air could be heavy with intimidation. On other days the same districts would be lively, bustling and friendly. I loved it all. The only thing I wasn't so keen on was school. That didn't happen very much in those days, only when the unions managed to arrange for some temporary teacher to hand down the blessings of literacy and numeracy to us poor unfortunates. By the time I left Barcelona, when I was ten, I still couldn't read and write very well. All that would come later.

Childhood memories are very patchy. At my advanced age they become patchier still, yet certain things stand out as clear as day down through the decades. I can still picture old Mr. Romero from the tenement next-door as if it were only yesterday. He was probably no more than sixty or so. I thought he was ancient. He gave me some coconut shells to play with one time, which became favourite toys for a while, and he taught me to play marbles and dominoes. I took great pleasure in his company and he in mine. He would spend hours telling me stories about his life and the adventures he had got up to. When I think about it now I realise he made most of it up, especially the bits about working as a chef for the emperor of China. I suspect that he never actually left the country in his life. I lapped it all up when I was little.

We were always short of money. As soon as I was able to I made the effort to make a little bit extra here and there, although my father was in two minds about it. He welcomed any additional income, but he was reluctant to see me misused in any way. So he never let me take on any full-time work, or slave away in some factory or sweat-shop like some children I knew. That kind of thing could wait until I was old enough to be exploited properly, was how he put it. He let me sell newspapers when I was about nine years of age, and that was great fun, making a racket in the street to attract attention. I would sell any old paper to anyone. It didn't matter what political line the publication adopted, so long as I made my money. It was a joyful time, and I look back on my early childhood with affection. I think children mostly enjoy themselves whatever happens to them, so long as they are not abused physically or emotionally.

The last time I saw Rosario in Barcelona was in the spring of 1917. I was playing with the coconut shells in the street outside when she came around to say goodbye. As usual, she was the recipient of admiring looks from the men standing around and reproachful glances from some of the older women. I was confused and upset. I didn't want her to leave, and didn't understand that nothing in life is permanent. I suppose that's why I hung on to the nickname so stubbornly after she left. 'El Coco' wasn't normally the kind of nickname that you gave a boy in my neighbourhood, but I made people call me that ever afterwards. I realised later that things were hotting up in Barcelona at that time. There was revolution afoot in Russia and elsewhere in the world, and the potential for violence was ever-present. That's why the gitanos left for Andalucía so hurriedly, and who can blame them? Why should they get involved in other people's arguments, when no-one else ever looks out for them?

My father was a cenetista, that is, he belonged to the C.N.T., the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, the big new anarcho-syndicalist union. For a while in those times they thought they had the world in their hands, that they could turn society on its head and create Libertarian Communism. He was always being called out on strike and there were always demonstrations and riots. I loved it, because when he was on strike he spent time at home, with me. We didn't go on the demonstrations. My father said it was too dangerous, so instead we would go fishing, or go for walks, or play games, or cook food. It didn't matter, as long as he was there.

Mind you, sometimes when my father was at work I did get involved on the sidelines in some of the goings-on. Angelica looked after me when I was younger and she took part in quite a few interesting activities herself at one time. I distinctly recall the events of what was called the 'women's war'. Prices of even the most basic foodstuffs sky-rocketed towards the end of the Great War in Europe, so a certain amount of redistribution and price adjustment was called for. I can still picture Angelica and some of her friends stopping a coal truck in the street, disabling the vehicle and then proceeding to unload the contents into wheelbarrows and carts. Her hands and face were as black as a wolf's mouth by the time they had finished. Another time hundreds of women stormed and looted a big bakery, handing out the loaves to all comers. I watched that one with my friend Pepe, as well. You learnt from these events that there was strength in community, that we were not always pawns in the great game of capital.

All that came to an end for me in July 1919. The employers and the government wanted to crush the workers and their unions. So they employed gangsters, pistoleros, to kill off the militants and union leaders. Only they didn't care who they actually shot. If they were union members, that was good enough for those animals, and one morning my father was selected, deliberately or accidentally, I don't know. He was walking to work at the docks for the early shift when a man jumped out from an alleyway and pulled the trigger on his pistol, at point blank range. That was it. My father’s death was instantaneous.

When I heard the news I couldn't believe it. Angelica was crying, Pepe was crying and so was I, while a handful of men stood around looking uncomfortable, shocked and scared. No-one knew what to say. What can you say to a young boy in that kind of situation? That day seemed never to end, but it did and I slept long and hard from sheer exhaustion.

Raoul asks me what kind of a man my father was. That's one of the trickiest questions I've ever been asked. He was my dad, first and foremost. He'd always been there for me and I loved him so much that it hurts to this day when I think how he was taken from me so cruelly. He was not a big man, but his generosity was immense. He would share what little we had with friends and neighbours in times of need. To be fair to them, they would do the same for us. Above all, what I remember most about him was his laugh, soft and subtle and with a subversive edge to it. I heard my dad's laugh every time he came back from work, no matter how weary he was, and I can still hear it now echoing over the years. All I have to do is close my eyes and listen very carefully.

The funeral proved to be a bizarre affair. My aunt María insisted that my father be buried with full Catholic rites, and so he was, but none of his comrades from work would attend the service. They joined the procession to the cemetery but stopped at the gates. Their consciences would not let them proceed. Luis García had despised religion whilst alive and they would not let his death give the clergy any unearned respect. I have a vivid memory of him railing one night against the imagery of the cross and its widespread use, damning the idea that a depiction of torture should be so readily venerated in society. I want no crosses on my grave when I am dead! His words had rung in my ears at the time, and they now came back to me as we stood outside the cemetery. At that last minute I decided to join his work colleagues in their boycott, as I knew my father would have hated all that sanctimonious praying. This caused a big row in public with aunt María. I stuck to my guns and refused to participate in the proceedings. The whole episode left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. In case anyone had ever doubted it, I had proved that I could be more than obstinate when