"Layret could have changed our history, but he was murdered."
Xavier Vidal writes a novel about the last 48 hours of the deputy and lawyer who was shot dead in 1920.
Barcelona"Francesc Layret deserves institutional recognition. No political party has claimed it," laments journalist and writer Xavier Vidal (Alginet, la Ribera, 1966). In the novel Seven bullets in the night (Column), Vidal delves into the last forty-eight hours of the lawyer, councilman and deputy who was murdered on November 30, 1920, in front of his house. The novel combines historical research with thriller to take the reader to a turbulent historical moment that, in Vidal's opinion, has many parallels with the present.
"Layret, for me, was a street until I went to see the exhibition The red thread of Catalanism, in Sabadell, and I discovered not only a person but also a character from a novel. I was amazed that someone with no mobility in his legs, who spent from the age of two to sixteen locked up at home, could terrify the most powerful in Catalonia and Madrid," he says.
Vidal was fascinated by Layret, an important lawyer and political figure, along with Lluís Companys and Salvador Seguí, of the first worker. When he was assassinated, he was working on a candidacy of socialists, communists, members of the Partit Republicà Català (PRC) and other republicans, which wanted to include trade unionists from the UGT and the CNT. This joint agreement between the labor movement and the Catalan left was a great leap, because until then they had worked in history. As a lawyer, he helped many workers for free and fought hard for the Catalan language," says the journalist, who has documented himself, above all, with the book Francisco Layret. Life, work, and thought (Paper Tiger), by Vidal Aragonés, where the historian brings to light the names of Layret's murderers and who paid them; with the biography made by Joaquim Ferrer, and with The last twenty-four hours of Francisco Layret, published by journalist Francisco Madrid in Argentina in 1942.
The Perfect Bad Guy
Vidal recounts Layret's last 48 hours, which he spent mostly trying to free trade unionists and politicians, such as Seguí and Companys, from prison. To discuss the consequences of the murder, he jumps back in time to the Civil War and uses Andrés Rodríguez as a witness, who almost never left Layret's side because the latter had to walk on crutches.
"I have the perfect villain, Severiano Martínez Anido," says Vidal. Civil governor of Barcelona between 1920 and 1922, Anido was responsible for the brutal repression of the labor movement, which had put the bourgeoisie and the state on the ropes with the 1919 Canadiense strike. "He was a despot, a drunkard, and a sadist," Vidal recalls. The writer Pío Baroja described Martínez Anido as the "bulldog of the monarchy." Instead, the journalist had to invent female characters. "Women don't appear enough in history books, and I created a female character who is a spy and confidant of Martínez Anido, and another who is the wife of the president of the unions," she explains. Another key figure in the novel, Mercè Micó, Lluís Companys's first wife, is real. In fact, when Layret was murdered, Micó was waiting for him in a taxi because they were supposed to meet with Martínez Anido and the mayor of Barcelona, Antoni Martínez y Domingo, to discuss the prisoners they wanted to transfer to Maó.
