A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  Although political meetings were prohibited, Elías had reached an agreement with other groups, especially those controlled by the CNT, allowing him to hold meetings and organize sit-ins and strikes in order to demand better conditions, and they had a few small victories. The Mobile Guard trucks, for instance, had established the practice of hurling bread at the hungry masses as though they were animals, laughing at the desperate who fought tooth and nail for a moldy loaf. One day, when the trucks rolled in, the people, although famished, turned their backs. No one responded to the guards’ imprecations, nor were there crowds pushing or fighting. Amid tense silence, surrounded by thousands of quiet, angry faces, Elías’s men—with the help of some well-disciplined Austrian and Yugoslav brigades—demanded that they, and not the gendarmes, be put in charge of distribution. Miraculously, the prisoners formed long orderly lines and all calmly received their share. From then on, trucks brought in the bread already cut into hunks, and the distribution was dignified. In addition, they organized a mail system, with friendly residents of Argelès supplying paper and stamps and picking their letters up from the camp.

  Within a few weeks, long rows of triangular wooden barracks—the locals referred to them as “Spanish-style”—were visible from the road. Someone with a typically Spanish sense of humor had even tacked up a sign: WELCOME TO ARGELÈS, THE FRENCH COAST’S MOST LUXURIOUS HOTEL, COMPLETE WITH OCEAN VIEWS.

  At the same time, however, the fissures that were partially responsible for the defeat of Catalonia quickly emerged there too: As they had in 1937, anarchists clashed with Communists, and POUM Trotskyists with PSUC Stalinists, only now not with gunfire but with subterfuge. They created miniborders within the camp itself, organized exclusionary committees, and launched initiatives that splintered—sometimes torpedoed—their adversaries. These internal struggles exasperated the civilians, who wanted only to be reunited with their families, heal their wounds, regain their strength, and try to forget about the past and future.

  The French had just acknowledged the legitimacy of the Burgos government, with General Franco as chief of state. There was no longer a Republic, even if some in the camp continued to defend the government in exile and the Republican tricolor flag outside their barracks. Once a symbol of hope, the tattered flag was now simply an ideal that had been lost forever in the vast majority of people’s hearts. So many dreams had been shattered, so many people’s eyes opened to the cruel reality, that it was no longer possible to deny the obvious truth—and yet some still tried.

  But none of this deterred Elías in the slightest. His orders were clear. He was to defeat their pessimism, round up all the comrades he could find, regroup, and organize them. Needless to say, it all had to be done behind the backs of the military and police forces who were in charge of everything—food, supplies, medicine, and education. He was to salvage what he could, foster the idea that any moment now Europe would be at war, and France would begin taking back Spanish soil with the help of the defeated Republican soldiers. They had to keep their spirits high because their experience would be critical when the time came. This was his primary role and he threw himself into it with renewed vigor, giving talks, circulating from group to group, listening to people, learning, and trying to remain informed about absolutely everything. Within a short time, Elías was in charge of something very similar to the MIS, monitoring the lives and activities of a good percentage of those living in the camp, and doing it with the same detached efficiency he’d shown in Barcelona.

  One of his most pressing problems was informers. Rumor had it that there were spies in the camp, Francoist agents pretending to be prisoners, men who went from hut to hut carrying a secret list of key names. If they found a man of interest, a Senegalese guard would appear and lead him from the camp, probably to the border, where he’d be handed over to the Guardia Civil. Elías resolved to put a stop to these undercover agents. Whenever he suspected someone, a group of men found a way to silently drag the man off in the night to one of the hutches on the beach—miniature bunkers that had been dug in the sand and covered with tarps to protect people from the vicious north winds. There, much like in the old clandestine prisons, the subject would be interrogated. It was not uncommon for a body to appear the following morning, washed up with the debris that the tides brought in.

  Also requiring Elías’s attention was a disgraceful predicament, as problematic as that of the informants. There were men, even among the vanquished, determined to prosper at the expense of others. Thieves, blackmailers, and hustlers of all sorts came out of the woodwork like rats to gnaw at any scrap they could find. In a transit area parallel to the beach they set up a sort of bartering zone, a place where anything could be bought or sold. People called it the Barrio Chino, after the Barcelona neighborhood where similar things went on. They even set up a shop that doubled as a brothel, which the authorities essentially turned a blind eye to. Almost all stolen goods ended up there, and if anyone recognized a watch or piece of jewelry belonging to them, the most they could hope for in exchange for protesting was a black eye. Elías couldn’t combat the black marketers, because the gendarmes and Senegalese were the ones who most benefited from their existence—often a single pack of French cigarettes could go for a gold ring—but he did know how to command respect. Every once in a while, he would confiscate something from the Barrio Chino, and anyone who objected too strenuously or tried to confront him would end up with a broken hand or a few amputated fingers. And when that happened, people knew who was responsible and kept quiet, occasionally complicit but more often simply terrified. If anyone affiliated with the Communist Party or the PSUC was robbed, all they had to do was let Elías know.

  Within a few months, he had an efficient internal police force of enthusiastic young men who knew of his reputation and admired him with blind enthusiasm; although this made him cringe, it also came in handy. These men were his eyes, his ears, and his enforcers. At times he couldn’t help but see the parallels between himself and Igor and his pack, and it made him feel he’d actually become all that he most detested.

  “It’s not the same,” Esperanza said one night. “Your intentions are completely different.”

  All along the fence separating the men’s camp from the women’s were areas patrolled by sympathizers; they cut through the wire, allowing families to spend a few hours together at night. Elías came to these buffer zones to see Esperanza. Paradoxically, their physical separation made him feel closer to her than ever. After spending all day surrounded by nothing but men and filth, he found being with her at night—touching her, making love to her in silence, or simply talking about what they’d do when they got out—the only truly human part of his life.

  “My intentions? I was ordered to come here to organize our men, but it’s like trying to empty the sea with a pail full of holes. At the end of the day, intentions translate into actions, and mine aren’t much different from Stern’s: I’m using violence to impose my will.”

  “The Party’s will,” Esperanza stressed.

  Elías sighed in frustration. “The Party, the cause…It’s all a form of power, of control. That’s what it always comes down to, no matter where you are.”

  “We’re fighting for our dignity, Elías. This is not Nazino, you are not Stern…And I am not Irina.”

  “How can you be so sure? You weren’t there. It makes no difference what language we speak, or where we are, or why we treat one another like dogs. It’s the same thing, Esperanza. Beneath it all lies the same hatred, the same disdain for human life, for our equals.”

  He hadn’t forgotten about Irina and Anna, Esperanza knew that. In his pants pocket she’d found the locket containing their photo, now badly damaged by the salt and humidity. Irina’s face was fading, and in that Esperanza saw a sign of hope. Fighting the memory of a ghost was exhausting, but Esperanza had an advantage: She had a body, hands, and a heart with which to love and touch Elías, desperate to wipe out that shadow.
She embraced her husband, in his military coat, and gazed at his profile in the moonlight. Elías was only twenty-eight, but he looked old and tired. He’d seen so much horror in that time that he had nothing left inside. What had become of his dreams of a better, more just society? Where were the ideals his father had instilled in him from the time he was a boy?

  Death, suffering, conspiracies, and power struggles; half of his time spent running away or locked up; fighting like a dog for every ounce of life—all of it had taken its toll. He had nothing left. She had only to look at him to know he was suffering one of his attacks, the terrible headaches and searing pain in his eye that drove him to distraction. Elías had nightmares about Anna and Irina, was plagued by horrific memories of Nazino, of the things he’d done there to survive and the atrocities he’d seen, and all of that blurred with what he was living through now, in Argelès. He couldn’t relax, was unable to get the opiates that it took to kill the pain, nor could he lay his hands on enough alcohol to dull it. The only thing that curbed his fits of rage was to head to the sea, find some secluded spot and stay there, hoping his head would not explode. So Esperanza led him by the hand to the shore. There they sat and she held him like a little boy, stroking his hair and rocking him until she felt his breath deepen, his heart slowly return to its normal rhythm.

  Elías kissed her fingers. Without her, he would have lost his mind long ago, would have done something stupid just to get himself shot by the guards patrolling the perimeter.

  A baker in town who went by the name of Pierre was Elías’s contact with Party authorities outside the camp. Pierre—Elías never knew the man’s real name—was a member of the French Communist Party and passed Elías all of his orders and instructions. Despite his jovial appearance, typical of Catalans from the north, Elías had no doubt that he was an NKVD agent.

  From time to time, Pierre would slip him a piece of paper with a name and date written on it. If the paper was red, the man in question—perhaps a Trotskyist with the POUM, a follower of Andreu Nin, or someone suspected of being a Francoist agent—was to disappear. The war was still being fought, only now in the form of targeted assassination. If the paper was blue, the man was lucky: Elías was to organize his escape. His success rate was astonishing. The camp had become increasingly difficult to get out of: barbed-wire fences two and three layers thick, and internal camp guards as well as outside guards who were much-hated Moors. But Elías always managed to “deliver his package” on the specified date. Sometimes he was rash and other times discreet, biding his time and slowly laying the groundwork, retreating when he feared being caught, advancing when the time was right. But he nearly always managed. Before winter descended on the camp, he had broken out over forty people.

  That morning, the slip of paper Pierre handed him was red. When Elías saw the name, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Pierre simply shrugged and offered him a Galoises cigarette.

  “You know as much as me.”

  Tristán was a young man full of life. Elías had taken the kid under his wing when he was transferred from the camp at Saint-Cyprien. He still wore his bomber jacket proudly, and had explained to Elías that he’d survived a suicide mission against Franco’s air force, over Vilajuïga airstrip. He’d been charged with protecting a convoy transporting works of art from Figueres to Geneva. Tristán’s plane was hit in the wing just a few miles from the border, and he’d managed to crash onto French soil. The plane caught fire, and he’d lost his right hand.

  “But I’ll always be able to say I saved Velásquez’s Las Meninas,” he said proudly, holding up his infected stump. The kid was only seventeen years old.

  Tristán was not a liar or a charlatan. There were hundreds of stories like his. Many of them were true, the displays of heroism were countless; but there were also fabrications told by cowards in search of favorable treatment, fantasists, bullshitters, and pathological liars. Not Tristán. He was a good-looking young man, proud and brave, who often snuck past the spahi guards and never got caught when areas surrounding the camp were raided in search of fugitives.

  Tristán had no intention of escaping. He slipped out at night and returned every morning, smelling of wine and women and often bearing cigarettes and food, gifts from his many girlfriends in exchange for his promise to return. Elías had warned him that it was dangerous, but Tristán shook it off with the lightheartedness of a man who had almost died and now wanted to live life as though each day was his last.

  “The only thing I’m sorry about is that I can’t perform all my best moves with just one hand.” He’d laugh at himself, holding up the stump, and sometimes amid their joking, Elías darkened. Tristán reminded him too much of Claude, which is probably why he was so fond of him.

  Elías worried about Tristán, but with all of the other things on his mind and too much on his plate, he hadn’t realized what was really going on until one night when one of his men appeared in the hutch as Elías sat staring at the red slip of paper Pierre had given him. Elías knew what it meant, so he put on his old military cape and walked out.

  Lighting in the camp was practically nonexistent, and very few people ventured out into the impenetrable northern darkness of the beach. The water pumps broke down regularly, mixing groundwater and salt water with the fresh and causing mass diarrhea. The sight of men running into the sea with their shorts pulled down to relieve themselves on this side of the beach was common and in other circumstances would have been comical. But no one was in the mood for this. Dysentery, dehydration, and diarrhea were decimating the camp. At dawn, when the tide came in, lumps of excrement were returned to the sand as though even the ocean rejected it. On this particular night, the smell of shit was slightly attenuated by the sea breeze.

  As he approached, Elías saw a semicircle of legs, viciously kicking a lump on the ground between them. Judging by its stifled cries, muffled by the sound of crashing waves, the lump was a man.

  “Why have you brought him here?”

  “He’s a pansy. He was taking it up the ass; the other guy got away.”

  “For that, you beat him like this?”

  His assistant spat, full of scorn. “The guy on top was a guard, one of the Senegalese bastards that patrols the camp.”

  Elías involuntarily scowled.

  “And it wasn’t rape, it was consensual.”

  He might have felt some sympathy, even compassion, if the man being beaten had been forced. But the Senegalese were pigs, and this wasn’t the first time. They did it at the women’s camp as well, raping women and men both, although people elected not to talk about it. But one of his men voluntarily having sex with the scum that humiliated and abused them daily? This could not be tolerated. Even from Tristán.

  The kid was balled up, naked, covered in blood and sand; he looked half dead. Elías wanted to scream and kick as well, but he contained himself. All of them—himself included—had too much pent-up rage and anger; they had to let it out somehow or they’d lose their minds.

  “Get him up!”

  Tristán’s head lolled to one side. Elías grabbed his chin and lifted his face to get a better look. The kid looked deranged, mouth open, drool hanging, sand and blood all over. His eyes were vacant, he seemed not to be there. There was not a trace of his once beautiful, carefree face.

  “Why?” the young man managed to murmur.

  Elías paled and showed him the red paper.

  He carried Tristán back to his tent and didn’t leave his side for the rest of the night. The boy shivered, refused to turn his face—now a pulpy mass—to Elías, hiding beneath a lice-ridden blanket. Before dawn, his breathing became labored and his wheezing loud, then he started to vomit thick clots of blood. This went on for several hours, and Elías spent the whole time wiping away the blood and pressing a damp towel to Tristán’s lips. It took some time for him to realize that Tristán had died in his arms.

  Elías held the red slip of paper
to the candle flame and watched it burn down to nothing. And then he kept staring for quite some time.

  The following morning, the Senegalese guards appeared, among them the sodomite. The man had a superficial knife mark on his neck, which he craned around in search of those who had attacked him the night before. Seeing Tristán’s body, the guard looked at it like a piece of trash, something he didn’t even recognize. Then he glanced up at Elías and smiled contemptuously.

  “Now you’ll be my whore.”

  Elías had not slept, was trembling from weakness, and was distraught. He glanced out of the corner of his eye at Tristán’s body now being wrapped in the bloodstained blanket. Elías had been ordered to kill this young man and had no idea why. Maybe for being a snitch, maybe for something else that he’d never find out. But he had carried out his order.

  That was the way it was supposed to end, in silence. But slowly he took off his filthy eye patch, exposing the dried-out socket, and glared at the Senegalese guard.

  “I am going to cut you into little pieces and scatter your body all over this camp, you fucking piece of shit.”

  The guard didn’t speak Spanish, or perhaps found it convenient not to, as did his companions, who despite being armed were at a disadvantage. Just one false move, no matter how small, and not one of them would get out of that hutch alive. He held Elías’s gaze and something in the lieutenant’s withered socket made him shiver. There wasn’t a battalion of bayonets that could stop this Cyclops from carrying out his threat.

  “They could have killed you then and there!” Esperanza reprimanded him in a whisper. Racked by sobs, Elías had told her what happened. It was the first time she had seen him cry like this and her heart clenched, frightened and confused.