Agent Garbo Read Free Page A

was forced to go along to watch over Bullet. In the Spanish expression, it was Pujol who broke the dishes but Joaquín who paid for them.
    The priests did their best, but Pujol would always be a mediocre student. He hated the boarding school, and waited impatiently for his wonderful father to arrive on the train, as he did faithfully every Sunday, to take Juan and Joaquín for walks by the sea. There Juan Sr. would tell his boys entrancing stories about the world and dispense advice about life. “He taught me to respectthe individuality of human beings, their sorrows and their sufferings. He despised war and bloody revolutions, scorning the despot, the authoritarian ..." The Marist discipline wouldn’t stick, but the seaside lessons would. In Pujol’s four “interminable” yearswith the Marists, however, he did manage to become fascinated by history and especially languages. Eventually he would be able to speak five: Spanish, Catalan, French, English and Portuguese.
     
    The elder Juan had more to worry about than a high-spirited boy. Barcelona in the 1920s was a prosperous city known as “the Unrivaled,” with nearly one million citizens and heavy industries that led the world. The city’s cotton industry was second only to mighty Liverpool’s, and the first railway engine in the world had been built in its thriving factories. The young Pujol loved going to the train station, where he would watch the steam engines blowing and hissing as they pulled out of the grand terminal. “My imagination would travel with themas they sped away to remote destinations to the echoing sound of a whistle.”
    But there were good reasons for a young boy to want to escape Barcelona: it was a combustible, highly dangerous place to grow up in, a place where the leftists’ idea of a jokewas to soap the stone steps of churches so that the hated Catholic bourgeoisie would slip and break their necks when leaving Mass. The Catalan capital often seemed on the verge of tearing itself apart: waves of riots, strikes and violence left dozens of mutilated bodies on the streets; radicals burned down churches and convents, fascist gangs responded with kidnappings and mass murders. Political coups seemed to be the city’s leading industry. “One day a right-wing factionsitting outside a coffee-bar would be machine-gunned,” Pujol remembered, “the next day it was the turn of the left.” Anarcho-syndicalists battled Catholic workers, proto-fascists shot communists, military supporters bombed antimonarchists. Assassination became so common that when a politician or union leader was found dead on the street, it was said almost casually that he’d “been take for a paseo, ” a stroll.
    As a leading industrialist and a progressive, the elder Juan was a potential target of several factions. “Every morningmy father went to work, he said goodbye to us as if for the last time; each parting was heart-rending.” The paterfamilias despised the violence and poison-tipped rhetoric that had become so common in Barcelona. He was a committed humanist who believed in science, progress and, above all, tolerance. (Mercedes’s sympathies no doubt lay with the Catholic traditionalists who backed Franco.) Finally, the tension became so thick that Juan Sr. moved his family away from the city center to the northern suburb of Putxet, where after living in a succession of apartments they settled into a magnificent homeon Homero Street.
    Pujol grew up strong, athletic, “a hefty fellow of fifteen,with an incipient beard,” as he boasted later. He was charming, loved to dance and quote Catalan poetry, to hike in the mountains and sweet-talk the local girls. But he found his lessons to be “endless and dull,”and after one particularly loud fight with a teacher, he marched home and announced that he was dropping out. Cannily, Juan Sr. agreed, with one proviso: the impulsive teenager had to go out and get a job. Pujol agreed, promptly marched off and talked his way