Agent Garbo Read Free

“complicit expression in his ironic gaze”that the British operative Desmond Bristow would catch years later. A younger sister, Elena, followed two years later, after Juan Sr. and Mercedes had married.
    The ironic gaze and his small stature were about all Pujol took from his mother. He looked strikingly like his thin, elegant father and he would inherit Pujol Pena’s liberal outlook on the world, as opposed to Mercedes’s stark Catholicism. When Juan was four, his father finally accepted the young boy and his two older siblings as his legitimate children. It was a fortunate moment for Juan: to be a bastard in status-conscious Barcelona in 1912 was a serious matter.
    Yet most of the turmoil that churned Pujol’s early years had an inner origin. As Pujol grew up in a house full of nannies, chefs, seamstresses and chauffeurs, with vacations to the shore in his father’s gleaming Hispano-Suiza, his parents quickly saw qualities in their second boy that they couldn’t trace to either of their personalities. Pujol was wild, very wild, or as his mother saw it, bad, very bad. “In my house,the name ‘Juan’ was constantly ringing,” he remembered, “followed by ‘ What have you done this time? ’” Pujol banged into walls, scraped his limbs raw, crashed into banisters and, in one memorable incident, plowed straight through a floor-to-ceiling window on his tricycle, sending glass crashing into a thousand pieces all around him.
    Miraculously, he emerged unscathed. “I really believedthat Don Quixote in his adventure with the windmills was not so destroyed as I was,” he later wrote. But that day was the exception. “I was constantly coveredin bandages through my whole boyhood.” Though they loved him, Pujol’s brothers and sisters would hide their toys from Juan, convinced that anything he touched would soon be shattered.
    His family despaired. Mercedes, especially, couldn’t understand her son. He was incorrigible: threats, punishments, near-mortal injuries seemed to have no effect on a trail of destruction that stretched wider and longer the older he grew. But what looked like sheer mayhem to his parents and the rest of his family were, for the boy, marvelous and exuberant adventures that he saw in his mind in blazing, sharply defined color, always with him as the hero of the tale. As Pujol tore around the mansion, he became a knight, a desperado, a daredevil, an explorer or, his favorite role model, Tom Mix of the Hollywood westerns that he attended as faithfully as Mercedes did Catholic Mass. “That cowboywas doing these wonderful things, and I decided that I should imitate him.”
    Pujol would later describe his boyhood imagination as something that he had no real control over. Like some alien host, it compelled him to do things. “The contents of my fevered fantasies,”he wrote, “ran my imagination.” Whatever bloomed in his brain, Pujol would set out to do. Most boys have adventures spinning through their heads at all hours of the day, but Pujol actually seemed to live solely in his dreams, lost to the real world. “I wanted to be the beloved heroof a Hollywood silent movie.” But no one else saw the sets and the props, only Pujol with the crazy look in his eye, approaching at top speed. On the soccer field, he was even more terrifying; his nickname was Bullet.
    He wasn’t malicious, and in fact he had a good heart, always rushing in to help when the neighborhood runt was losing a fight. “I didn’t hurt anybody,I was just very, very naughty.” Pujol’s mother tried to snatch him out of his fantasies and mold him into a nice Catalan upper-class boy, a boy she could fully love. “Punishments and retribution”rained down on Pujol’s head one after the other, but they rarely had any effect. Pujol’s genial father could only sigh.
    When he was seven, Pujol was sent away to a strict boarding school, run by the Marist Fathers. Pujol’s older brother, the “sturdy and straightforward”Joaquín,