Agent Garbo Read Free Page B

into an apprenticeship at an enormous hardware shop just off the world-famous Rambla.
    His duties were to sweep the floor, run errands, deliver packages and replace the tools that the shop assistants had left out after demonstrating them for customers. It was his first real job, and the long hours and menial tasks quickly wore him down. As his father had no doubt foreseen, Pujol lasted only a few weeks before quitting the shop. Then he zoomed to the opposite extreme, locking himself in the family library and delving deep into the arcane philosophical and literary texts that lined the walls. Pujol was searching for a vocation, and like everything else, he pursued it at top speed. The teenager was all velocity and no direction.
    The young man’s intense, headlong nature also propelled him into a series of mad love affairs. “I’ve always adored romanticism,and I’ve always been a slave of what is usually called the weaker sex.” When he met Luisita, a vivacious dance-crazed girl from Andalusia, he pursued her all the way to Granada, begging his father to drive him there in the family’s Hispano-Suiza. In Granada Pujol discovered that his beloved had a violently jealous boyfriend. Pujol sent Luisita poem after poem and declared his everlasting love, but the girl chose the brute, and Pujol’s father had to drive back to Barcelona with his heartbroken son weeping in the passenger seat. “I was destroyed; the chef of the house couldn’t find anything to make me happy. A few months after I left, Luisita married that abominable cretin.”
     
    One day when he was nineteen, Pujol began to feel knife-like pains in his abdomen that doubled him over. His appendix had burst. He was rushed to the hospital and into the operating room. The surgeon successfully removed the appendix, but three days later, as Pujol recovered in bed, the incision became infected. The young man raved with fever, wavering between life and death. In between hallucinations, he would awakento find his father by his side, day and night, holding his hand and saying nothing, only crying. It was the first time young Pujol had seen his father’s tears.
    The fever seemed to burn something out of Pujol. After he recovered, he made another hairpin turn in his life: he would stop dreaming of romance and foreign travel. He gave up studying Aristotle. Instead, he began taking classes in—of all things—poultry management. After a six-month course at the Royal Academy of Poultry Farming at Arenys de Mar, Juan Pujol became a fully certified chicken farmer.
    This about-face was clearly a major capitulation to his family, and to reality. “I felt my stubbornness,my not studying and continuously disappointing my father were going to bring me to a bad end,” he later explained. He even took up with Margarita, a sensible and tender Barcelona girl who was very like his mother: “prudent, very religious”—and afraid of sex. The mad charms of girls like Luisita, as well as the adventures of Tom Mix and Don Quixote, were quietly put on a shelf.
    In 1933, Pujol reported for compulsory military service. Soon he was sporting around town in the tailored officer’s uniform of the 7th Light Artillery Regiment, sworn to serve the leftist Republican government against all enemies. After a few months, Pujol had learned to ridea horse and salute correctly. It was of his last successes before death and war darkened his life.
    After a series of small strokes, his sixty-seven-year-old father soon took to his bed. The 1934 flu epidemic had struck Barcelona, and Juan Sr. was sick with the virus. In another room, Pujol was also laid out with the flu, and the two of them spent their days only yards apart, their faces burning with fever. On January 24, a doctor was called. Half delirious, Pujol listened from his room as the physician examined his father, the only sound the murmuring of his mother and sisters. Though sleepy and dazed, Pujol heard the doctor say that an injection was