My literary brain snatched the idea with vulpine relish. Another chapter for the novelette? Enough content to tip the scales in favour of a novella?
I snarled inwardly at myself for even having the thoughts. I was reminding myself of Flint. This was about the men, not the ruddy book.
Every week, those men tramped to the church in Casillas del Ángel, and even if I chose not to include a chapter in the novelette depicting their weekly ritual, it seemed the least I could do was follow in their footsteps and walk to the church and back. I would walk cross country just as they had and feel for myself some of their suffering. After all, I had not only translated that script, I had transformed it, given it shape, and I would continue to do so. And maybe a touch of the experiential was all I needed to further expand on the work. Through me, English speakers might read about this overlooked prison, and a piece of history would be known and acknowledged.
It didn't escape my notice that my literary self had once again taken possession of the noble act of pilgrimage, but I felt more comfortable with the way I had my rationale framed.
I studied the map. There was a dirt track I could pick up near the eco-museum. A couple of doglegs to look out for, but the track pretty much took me straight to Casillas.
Wisdom had me slathering myself in sunscreen, and I found the blue, canvas hat I had packed and had so far never worn. Then I pulled on my plimsolls, filled my water bottle and grabbed some fruit. As I closed the front door, I had to shoo away a twinge of anxiety about the rucksack. I reminded myself yet again that Adonis drug-dealer Javier didn't know me. Paco and Claire definitely knew too much, but they probably didn't know Javier, and they certainly wouldn't tell him even if they did. They were not the type to land a poor author in that kind of trouble. The most they might have done was nab the rucksack for themselves through some twisted sense of entitlement, but they were dripping in wealth – that was obvious from the house they owned – and they had that trouble-free air that comes from being wealthy. I really needed to stop worrying.
Then there was the fact – and it was unequivocal and so out of character that I went so far as to call it such – that what I was about to do was more important than the money.
A curious sensation washed through me. I did not recognise the feeling, but if I had to name it I would call it goodwill. And I surprised myself with my own resolve. I had never before acted with such an altruistic purpose.
A paltry twenty-thousand-word novelette might not cut muster in the literary world, but that draft represented something more, something personal. On the one hand, I needed to atone. I needed to atone for not wanting to rise to the challenge of writing a novel based in or on the prison. I needed to atone for my dismissive attitude which I saw now as remarkably self-centred. On the other hand, I needed to pay my respects to those men who had suffered so terribly for being gay, whereas I, Trevor Moore, had dithered and fretted and toyed with my own sexuality as though I were cat boxing in front of the telly.
What a difference in social morés forty years could make! That, and democracy. Although values had not shifted that much in many quarters, and it was only my own – what? – vanity, or maybe self-indulgence which had provided the impetus to even consider my own sexual preference. That, together with a couple of wet dreams, my lesbian best friend and ex-wife, and Vince. For many, being gay was as big a deal now as then. Lesson learned.
The sun had already started its assault on the plain when I set off, joined by a fearful wind blowing me along from behind. I soon traversed the strip of narrow footpath and carried on along the roadside until the turnoff for the museum, ignoring the grit in my shoes. From there, the going was easy. With the exception of a handful of small farmhouses dotted here and there on the plain, there was nothing to observe other than the mean-looking mountain I was walking towards, steep-sided with a peaked cap of dark brown. To the south of the mountain, a long saddle made a gradual descent. A low hill rose up behind. Once I had navigated a couple of doglegs, all I needed to do was stick to the track. The going was easy, although I saw up ahead that the flat path across the plain would soon come to an end.
I had been walking for about twenty minutes when the track started its ascent. What had been a reasonably pleasant – for Tefía – walk, suddenly became strenuous. The mountain, with its dark cap, towered above me. Below the cap, twin gullies resembled a pair of hooded eye sockets, the ridge between them a long and fanning nose. A grim visage, like a monolithic overlord, one that suggested something menacing about the entire landscape. I started to feel I had entered a fantasy novel, and at any moment, some strange magical creature would appear.
No doubt a troll.
You could go mad out here. That thought grew prominent as I pressed on, the grit in my shoes prickling the soles of my feet.
Despite the discomfort, I kept up a decent pace but before long, I started to pant. My legs stiffened, and my calves started to burn. I knew the pain had more to do with my poorly stretched muscles than it did the actual activity, and I was annoyed with myself for not heeding Luis's advice and stretching daily.
I took a breather, emptied my plimsolls of grit, stretched my calves and took a swig from my water bottle. Common sense kicked in, overriding my eagerness to get out from under the mountain's gaze, and I continued at a slower pace. There was no need to turn the walk into some sort of marathon, and in so doing make the pilgrimage all about myself when I was meant to be tuning into what it might have been like for the prisoners. And I knew already that even, no, especially for them in their emaciated, starving and beaten state, this walk would have been arduous.
A few paces on and more grit had entered my shoes. I chose to ignore it. The further I went the steeper the path became, until I had to take care not to slip on the gravel. The last thing I wanted was a pair of grazed knees.
As the path climbed the saddle and the mountain was no longer in my line of sight, my gaze was drawn to my right, to the gentle rise and fall of the plain, the patchwork of fields, the various shades of creamy and reddish browns. The view drew me, but I had to keep a careful watch on where I was walking, as the path narrowed and the decline beside me grew higher and steeper. I stopped now and then, not to empty my shoes, but to take in the haunting desert atmosphere, the cruelty of the wind that never relented, the vicious sun from which there was no escape. Not one tree.
About halfway up the saddle, the track curved around a bulge and then went on into the vee of a gully, the flanks rising up steeply to a rounded crest at the apex. Here, the path narrowed still further, and the ground fell away sharply at the side. The prisoners would have had to walk single file. I craved a handrail or some sort of protection to prevent me from toppling over should I slip. The height wasn't dizzying, I couldn't say that much, but there was nothing to break the fall.
Taking tentative steps, I exited the gully and rounded another curve. Here, the path was even narrower, the ascent steady, the track little more than a scratch coursing the side of the saddle. I paused now and then, and leaned into the rocky scree rising up beside me and took in the view below. The further I went, the more challenging those pauses became.
Another curve and the track ascended steeply for a stretch, although it appeared in no hurry to surmount the ridge. Instead, it meandered on its way until the saddle flattened out. The land falling away beside the track had become disconcerting. At the final gully, shallow this time, the side of the saddle was especially steep and the path disappeared beneath a small rockfall. I picked my way along, testing each step, unable to imagine making this trek every week. Never mind the tremendous view, the sense of exhilaration I felt. The prisoners would have been indifferent to these surroundings. They would have lumbered on not looking around, not considering the sense of space except to despise it. And on the way back, their hearts would have sunk as they saw the plain opening up before them, and they knew where they were heading, and they would be in no hurry to get there despite the heat and the wind pushing up hard ag
ainst them. As I trudged on, in my mind so did they, and we walked together as one, me, an overweight Brit with gym-sore muscles and feet pricked by grit, about to return to a comfortable single man's life in which I could choose to be gay or straight and deal with the consequences. Them with no future, no future at all unless they married some woman and held up a pretence, and what kind of life was that?
Then, at last, I reached the top of the saddle, and the land to the east opened up, and I could see the village in the near distance below. I stopped and looked around as I regained my breath. I lost all thought of the prisoners. They would not have been permitted a rest break. They would have carried on walking, heads bowed. The guards would never have let them stand as I was, king of the world, beholding a vista that was panoramic and magnificent, the various ranges in all directions rising up out of the gently undulating plain. Not a patch of green anywhere. All was russet and pinkish brown and creamy stone. I could even see the ocean, a pleasing blue to the east and the west, and I got a sense of the size of the island which was long and rather narrow. Everywhere the mountains, their long ridgelines, and while there was not much to choose between the land to the east and the west, it was plain to see that the mountains sheltered the eastern land from the wind. As those same mountains buffered the wind on the western side, so the wind funnelled and intensified as it made its journey southward. It was basic physics.
I faced into the wind again, holding onto my hat as a sudden gust the very next moment nearly blew me off my feet. Flashing into my mind were those poor parachutists forced to jump and make landfall, and the terror they would have felt being dragged along by their own parachutes. Somehow, standing up on this saddle in my gritty plimsolls, able to survey the entire scene, brought home the full force of the tragedy. What a fated location, as bleak and exposed as anywhere could be, and as I turned to continue on my way, I felt oddly privileged to have taken part – by treading this very track – in some of its history. Others, I thought with a measure of wry cynicism, walked the Camino.
The rest of the walk was downhill and with the wind behind me – a touch less powerful as I dipped below the crest of the saddle – I made good progress across the stony, arid land. The temperature felt hotter in the lee of the mountains, and hotter still when the track cut a deep path between empty fields and I was intermittently cut off from the wind. The village had disappeared from view, and it was a long time before I saw the cluster of white cuboid dwellings again. Tramping on between the empty fields with not a sign of life in sight, I imagined I had taken a wrong turn and become hopelessly lost. I could walk for days and be dead before anyone found me. Or savaged by a pack of Podencos. Were those dogs savage? I heard a bark not too far away, and alarm rang through me. I picked up a rock, just in case.
Then suddenly, there was the village right in front of me, or rather a sprawl of farmhouses on the outskirts. I guessed the village would have been much smaller in the 1950s and perhaps the church visible from where I stood. As it was I felt temporarily lost. I had no idea which streets the prisoners had been forced to tramp, but facing a warren of them, I had to rely on the maps app on my phone to find my way to the church.
On the corner of an arterial road in the village centre, I saw a bar advertising wine and tapas. The smells coming from its kitchen were welcoming and, without thinking, I ventured in, consumed by sudden hunger and an eagerness to escape the sunshine.
The café was cheap and cheerful. I sat down at one of the three empty tables and when the waitress came over, I ordered the tortilla on display and a cold beer. The waitress took my order without a smile or a care and removed herself from my presence. Alone, my mind began to acknowledge my body in sections, first my tired feet, then my stiff calves and quads. I felt a twinge in my left knee, and I realised I was developing a headache.
A few cars went by, but otherwise, the village was quiet. When my order came, I downed the beer quickly, quenching an urgent thirst, the bitter and fizzy liquid disappearing down my throat, and it wasn't until I drained the last dregs that I thought of the prisoners, their thirst, the brackish water they were given to quench it, the exhaustion they would have felt by now having trekked this far, the urge to find themselves inside the church where at least it was cool, and an equal resistance, given they would endure yet further recriminations from the priest for being gay.
It was only when I set down the empty beer bottle I had so urgently consumed that I realised I had inadvertently ruined my experiential understanding of what those men had gone through right at the very peak of their weekly ordeal. Ever the Trevor I was born to be, I thought grimly. Chastened, I hurried the tortilla into my belly, paid and left, emptying my shoes of grit on the pavement outside.
From the café, the church was easy to find. I headed down a narrow lane, and there it was, not a hundred yards thence. I rounded the side wall and noticed two men standing in the shade of a tree on the other side of the small plaza; I thought they were most likely the same men under the same tree as those I had seen the last time I visited the church. The men were chatting and didn't seem to notice me. I headed for the church entrance, and it was then that they both turned and stared. As I made to push against the church door, I noticed one of the men raising his hand. He called out to me, but I had no idea what he was saying. Seeing the door open, he let his hand fall and turned to his friend with a look of surprise.
Entering the church, I resumed my attitude of pilgrimage, albeit ever so slightly intoxicated. The air inside was cool and still and a blessed relief from the heat building in the plaza.
I made my way to the rear pew and, as I sat down, a foul smell hit me. The smell reminded me of rotting meat left unwrapped in the garbage. It was putrid and under other circumstances, I would have left the church. Instead, I remained seated in the pew and tried to ignore the olfactory assault. I was here for the prisoners. I wanted to picture them sitting here beside me and then lining up for confession. I wanted to sense their anguish and hopelessness and despair. I bowed my head and closed my eyes and imagined the suffering, the injustice, the hypocrisy. The unrelenting cruelty. Then I opened my eyes and stared at the altar; I pictured the priest all decked out in his finery, and my upper lip curled in contempt.
Christ spoke of forgiveness and goodwill and loving one's neighbour; he taught parables like the Good Samaritan, and he judged no one. All that judging came later, from the minds and mouths of the new priesthood. Setting the gospels and all the wisdom they contained aside, what remained was an edifice of condemnation and contrivances, built up over millennia, there to rule the masses and keep them in check; a church that would just as happily turn on its own flock should the occasion arise. The Inquisition was not so long ago, I thought, not so long ago at all, although long enough for humanity to forget all about it. And José and his friends suffered another inquisition tailored especially for them. And no one much cared at the time or since, because they had all been taught by the Catholic Church that being gay was a sin and those men who displayed gay tendencies were sick or diseased or corrupted somehow and needed to be banished or cured. Not so long ago. The 1950s, the 1960s, those decades were recent history. My grandparents' generation. All part of the modern era. When I considered even now there were countries and peoples who condemned others for their same-sex choices, outrage stirred, outrage on behalf of Angela, to anyone who was not heterosexual, even Jackie.
The point I had arrived at in my musings disturbed me for another reason. It had taken my literary appropriation, an act borne of opportunism, for these realisations to occur and for this empathy to stir. Could good come from an act that was fundamentally wrong? Obviously, it could. But that did not absolve the act itself, and with my new awareness, I realised I would need to live with the reality of my own shortcomings and strive to improve myself. I pulled myself up, yet again, catching myself falling into the mire of introspection. Where was the empathy when my thinking was all about me?
I sat and I stared and I thought. I con
jured José and his friends in my mind as best I could. But eventually I could not pay my respects to those men. The smell was too distracting.
Hoping to escape the worst, I walked down the aisle to the altar, only to find the smell growing stronger. I anticipated finding a garbage bag left by a vagrant. Or schoolchildren who had used the church as a hangout to have a carnivore picnic and grown bored of the repast.
I looked around but there was no garbage of any kind on the floor, under the altar table, in the confessional, in fact not in any nook or cranny at that end of the nave.
The smell was strongest around the entrance to the sacristy. I knocked on the door. I was answered by a fly determined to enter with me. I knocked again. Silence. I hesitated with my hand on the doorknob, wondering if I were entitled to make such a bold move, unsure of what I would find.
I opened the door and immediately wished I hadn't. All thoughts of a pilgrimage left me the moment my eyes met a large lump of human flesh spread-eagled on the floor.
The corpse faced away from me. I glanced around the room. Cupboard doors and drawers were open. There were papers strewn about. But the worst of things were the flies. The flies, everywhere, feasting, and as my ears tuned into their incessant buzzing, the smell was so intense I blenched and covered my mouth.
Much of the body was thankfully obscured – the priest hadn't managed to take off his vestments – but when I ventured around to the other side of him, the face, the bloated face with its look-of-horror eyes imprinted itself on my mind.
I stumbled out of the room, closed the door and ran back through the nave, pausing at the front door to gather my wits before I stepped outside. I didn't want to appear stricken to whomever was out there. When the lingering stench outweighed my traumatised state, and I pulled open the door and stepped into the bright sunlight, the two old men were no longer standing chatting. The little plaza surrounding the church was empty. I was relieved.
A Prison in the Sun Page 22