by David Rees
Relieved, he made his way out of the old city, and hurried back to the hostal. He thought from time to time that he was still being pursued ― Miguel’s footsteps had a distinctive sound ― and he paused in the shadows. Miguel did not appear. My fevered imagination, Stephen concluded.
At the hostal the patrona greeted him with a friendly ‘Buenas noches’ ― everything was as usual: he had wondered if he’d find the house swarming with police. ‘Your friend is not with you?’ she asked.
‘Isn’t he here?’
‘No.’
Stephen ran up to their room: it was locked. He opened the door. No Pedro, no indication that he’d returned and gone out again. What does this mean, he said to himself as panic began to rise again; did Miguel bump into him? Has he been arrested? Or … has he simply stopped on the way home for another drink? He went onto the balcony and stared down into the street. There were geraniums here in the window-boxes, still in bloom though it was December, and almost Christmas. Christmas! He hadn’t given the matter a thought. He would have to buy cards to send to his parents, his friends, Professor Potts … at least to let them know he was alive and well. He stood for a long time on the balcony watching the street, smoking cigarettes. No Pedro.
He went downstairs and told the patrona he was going out to look for his friend. ‘If he comes back while I’m gone,’ he said, ‘tell him to wait here for me.’
She laughed. ‘A handsome man like that one! He’s probably found a girl.’
Stephen forced a smile.
He soon realised he was searching for a needle in a haystack. It was late; people were going home. He went into a bar and ordered a brandy. There was a newspaper on the counter, and he picked it up ― he hadn’t seen any news for nearly a week. It was old, Wednesday’s. He was horrified by what he read on the front page: Zahara’s cathedral, the most beautiful building he had ever seen, had been burned to the ground, and Bishop Guzmán was dead ― shot by the same gang, the paper presumed, who set fire to the cathedral. He had been sitting at his desk, working, when he was assassinated Tomás, the great survivor, the man who had saved him and Pedro … dead! It was unbelievable! Appalling! There was a photograph of the ruined cathedral and another of Tomás, stern and unsmiling, taken, Stephen thought some years ago. The obituary said nothing bad or equivocal about him: a humble, godly, erudite man: a scholar a historian, an excellent administrator; a friend to the whole world ― the poor, the sick, the well off, the successful. In death Bishop Guzmán had been canonized. He was now a Fascist saint.
Stephen trudged back to the hostal with the paper; he’d show it to Pedro. But Pedro hadn’t returned, the patrona told him. ‘Why are you so worried?’ she asked, when she saw the expression on his face. He went upstairs, undressed, went out onto the balcony, and stared into the shadows below. In the distance a dog howled, a woman laughed. Footsteps ― not Miguel’s, not Pedro’s. They went on by.
At five he fell into a deep sleep, from which he was woken ― minutes later, he thought, but it was in fact nearly two hours ― by a thunderous knocking, and cries of ‘Open up! Police!’
This is it, he said to himself: the end. With shaking hands he pulled on his underpants and walked to the door. His legs were jelly. He unlocked it. Three armed policemen burst in, shouting, ‘Where is he? Where is he?’
One of them pointed a gun at Stephen’s head; the others ran onto the balcony. ‘Where is he?’ they shouted again. They searched the wardrobe, and grunted with surprise when they found soldiers’ uniforms and pistols.
‘He didn’t come back here last night,’ Stephen said. ‘I don’t know where he is.’
It’s true!’ the patrona cried out. She was hovering in the doorway.
They told him he was under arrest and handcuffed him― the crime: assisting the enemy, in particular offering help and protection to the Lynx, Red Pedro Badajoz, a notorious anarchist guerrilla. There might well be further charges, such as impersonating an officer, and stealing army property. They thrust him out of the room and down the stairs. ‘Can’t I get dressed?’ he pleaded.
‘You’ll do as you are,’ one of them said. But they took with them all his clothes, and Pedro’s, including the lieutenants’ uniforms, even the sheets from the bed; ‘Evidence,’ they explained.
He was bundled into a car. A little crowd of spectators had gathered at the door of the hostal, their expressions grim or blank. The car drove off at speed, tyres screeching on corners. In a few minutes they were at the prison. He was pushed, still handcuffed, into a tiny unlit cell, and left there for two days. He was the only occupant, and the only object in the room was a bucket. He had to sit on the floor, and sleep on it. It was freezing cold. A jailer brought food from time to time ― a mug of hot water with a few grains of coffee in it, bits of bread, a bowl of rice ― but he wouldn’t remove the handcuffs. Stephen had to eat off the floor, like a dog. He begged to be allowed his clothes: he couldn’t stop shivering, and his teeth chattered incessantly. All in good time, the jailer answered.
The concrete floor and the intense cold made sleep virtually impossible, though he managed to doze in fits starts. At least, he thought, they hadn’t just taken him to the nearest cemetery wall ― a common practice still with suspected Reds ― and shot him. There was, presumably, going to be a trial.
The jailer told him Pedro was still at large and nobody knew where he was. What did it mean? One thing, and one thing only: betrayal. Pedro had realised (and he hadn’t) the risk involved in returning to the hostal. Pedro knew that Don Miguel ― ex-chief of police, and therefore master in tracking down his prey ― would not be easily fooled; Pedro knew it was utter madness to stay there for the night. But why hadn’t he re turned, just for a minute, to warn Stephen of the dangers, to insist that they both went elsewhere? Because Miguel might see them and follow? Pedro, in order to save his own life, had sacrificed his.
The consequences of love. What did Pedro mean by love? Not what I mean, Stephen said to himself ― living without counting the cost, realising that happiness lay in seeking another’s. It’s blind, uncalculating, committed, total. I would never in a million years have done what Pedro had done. I would have risked everything for him. I must be more wary next time. It was a sad lesson to learn ― it diminished the totality of loving. If there would be a next time. Death by firing squad, or years in one of Franco’s jails, was the immediate prospect. Love might have to be postponed for ever.
He felt enormously hurt: crushed, utterly insignificant, without point. What had been the point of any of it? The whole history of his relationship with Pedro now seemed shallow and sordid. What could one expect of a man who murdered in cold blood for a principle? The milk of human kindness? He’d been used. Betrayed! Betrayed: the word rang in his ears like a shot.
The anger and the pain took his mind, just a little, off the terror of execution. As did the freezing cold, the shivering, the stabs of hunger. On the third morning, after a breakfast of weak coffee and bread, his handcuffs were removed and his clothes were given back to him. ‘Get dressed,’ the jailer said. ‘You’re to be tried in an hour by the military court.’
Stephen’s wrists and fingers were so numb he could not do up his shirt. ‘Will I have a lawyer?’ he asked.
The jailer was vastly surprised. ‘Why on earth should you need a lawyer? If you’re innocent, you’re innocent. If you’re guilty, you’re guilty. Which you are will be obvious to the judges. They’re not cretins.’
There were three judges and one witness ― Miguel Goicoechea, who, it appeared, had been living in Cadiz since he crossed the lines. No jury: the judges decided. Apart from theft and helping Pedro Badajoz, who had already, in his absence, been sentenced to death, Stephen was accused of involvement in the disappearance and presumed deaths of Lieutenants Alvarez and Badía, and unnatural sexual practices. On the first and third counts Don Miguel had nothing to say, but on the second and last a great deal ― though not much of it was hard fact. The sheets from the bed at the hostal
were produced as evidence of unnatural sex and examined by the judges. It’s only my own dried sperm, Stephen said to himself: Pedro’s had come inside him and was long since flushed down the toilet. Even if it was Pedro’s mixed with his, how could they tell? And was masturbation a crime? If so, every teenage boy in Franco’s Spain would be in prison.
‘Are you Pedro Badajoz’s lover?’ one of the judges demanded.
What would it profit to say yes? Once upon a time he would have said it proudly to anybody who asked, would have yelled it joyfully from the roof-tops. (He had, in fact, literally done so one evening when he was on the roof of Zahara’s Arab fort; there was nobody to hear him, and the words in any case were in English: only the mountains had listened ― impassively.)
‘No,’ he answered, and knew that this too was a betrayal, denying the most important thing that had ever happened to him. Like Peter denying Christ Peter, Pedro ― same name. Pedro had denied him. He half expected a cock to crow. Cock? That was what it was all about, the start of it, the middle of it, the end of it: cock. In two ways ― prick, and rubbish.
The whole trial lasted about twenty minutes, which was somewhat longer, he was told later, than the trials of most Reds. This was because the judges repeatedly questioned him about where Pedro might be; they were convinced he knew. The court would be lenient, they urged, perhaps extremely lenient, if he told them the hiding-place. It was possible Stephen had not been a witting accomplice, had been led astray by Badajoz’s ability to manipulate him. He had only to say where. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied again and again. And if he did know, he asked himself, would he tell them? Even now the answer, arrived at without any struggle, was ‘No.’ Whatever Pedro had done to him, he couldn’t condemn Pedro to a certain death.
The verdict was guilty on all charges. He would be shot by a firing squad.
When?’ he asked.
You’ll be informed at the due time,’ the presiding judge snapped.
He was put in a cell with three other men who were also sentenced to death. Two of them, villainous-looking creatures, had unsuccessfully tried to blow up a car that belonged to the Mayor of Cadiz. One had broken teeth, a squint and smelly breath. The other, dirty and unshaven, had lost an eye and his right arm, The third man was a Catalan lawyer, middle-class and dressed in a suit and tie. His ‘crime’ was that he had defended anarchists in trials before the war and had not taken any fees. They all knew why Stephen was there, and looked at him incredulously when he said he really did not know of the Lynx’s whereabouts. The car-bombers seemed more interested in Stephen’s homosexuality than in any daring exploits he might have shared with Pedro; their attitude was unpleasant ― they thought a queer was a great joke. ‘But it could be useful having a woman with us,’ Squint-eye said, and he made an obscene gesture.
The Catalan was more welcoming. Not announcing the date of execution, he told Stephen, was common practice, a favourite torture. Thousands had been condemned to die and they did not know whether tomorrow would be their last day on earth. Sometimes the death sentences were commuted to various terms of imprisonment ― it could be anything from thirty years to as little as one. It was quite arbitrary: nobody knew why some men and women were shot and some were reprieved. It was very unlikely, the Catalan said, that Stephen would be executed. The fascists had an interest in keeping him alive: they thought he knew where Pedro was. The death sentence in his case had been passed in order to make him talk.
The cell was an improvement on the previous one. Stephen was allowed his clothes and he wasn’t handcuffed; and there were other human beings ― however uncongenial two of them were ― to share it. But it was icy cold and extremely cramped. When they slept the whole floor space was occupied and their bodies were in contact all night. Shitting in the communal bucket was a very public affair.
By Christmas Day Stephen was suffering from diarrhoea, and had caught fleas and lice. And was each morning to be his last? His sleep was constantly punctured by nightmares of execution ― the blindfold, the shot, then crumpling to the ground. He wondered how long he could stand it: would he eventually yearn for the bullet to finish him?
Worse was to come. Thinking a little torture might prompt him to reveal Pedro’s whereabouts, his captors twice a week took him out of the cell to a bathroom, then stripped him naked, bound him hand and foot and threw him into freezing cold water. When he was half dead, they beat him savagely with a leather belt not unlike the one Pedro had wanted to use on him in the cathedral. Sometimes they merely knocked him about with their fists, on one occasion returning him to his cell with his eyes so blackened and bloodied he couldn’t see. His answer to the question ‘Where is he?’ was always ‘I don’t know!’ If he did know, he’d tell them now. The torture had that effect. But no bones were broken, nor were his eyes permanently damaged.
In Aragón the Republicans captured Teruel, the first major city to fall to them in the entire war. But to Stephen this news was of no interest.
ELEVEN
Conditions eventually improved. They were put in a larger cell that had benches on which they could sleep, and they were each given a couple of blankets. There were only three benches, so every fourth night one of them had to lie on the floor. This problem was solved, however, when the Catalan was taken out and shot. The food was better, too. There were bits of meat sometimes, or fish, and there were more grains of coffee in the hot water. And the beatings stopped. These changes were the result of a tour of the prison by the mayor, who had the reputation of being a decent and kind-hearted man. He had heard screams of agony ― the leather belt reducing Stephen’s arse to a pulp.
But the cold continued, and despite the better food, Stephen was always hungry. He was now extremely thin, and after his head was shaved because of the lice, he looked like a skeleton. He learned the histories of his two cell-mates, and they his. Their stories were of abject poverty: sons of landless farm-workers whose whole lives had been a struggle simply to exist. They were illiterate. As teenagers they had gone to Jerez to look for work, and when that proved impossible petty crime was the easy alternative. At the outbreak of the war they had been in a pueblo to the west of Málaga that declared for the Republic. For months afterwards they were members of a gang that wandered about the countryside plundering houses whose rich owners they beat up or killed. When Queipo’s advancing army put a stop to this, they made their way to Cádiz and staged their futile attack on the mayor’s car.
Stephen didn’t grow fond of either of these two, but he began to understand them. His own background ― the English middle class, boarding school, the University of Cambridge ― they found incomprehensible; it was as if they were learning of beings on another planet. But they were much more interested in this, and in Britain generally, than in what Stephen considered the most exciting part of his life― his months in Zahara with the Badajoz family and his experiences with Pedro. He taught them English, and they turned out to be willing, apt pupils. At night they used him for sex, though they frequently told him they’d have preferred a real woman. He didn’t mind ― they were at least human bodies. Love, having proved false, meant the receptacle of love was no longer precious; it didn’t matter who went into it.
As each day passed and none of them was taken out and shot, they dared to begin to think they would survive. This feeling had been slow to take root ― the Catalanhad been shot ― but as the months went by they felt the authorities would not continue to keep a cell occupied, and to feed them, if killing them was the ultimate intention. But Stephen asked himself constantly, how long would they be there? Decades? For ever? If the Republic won the war they would be saved, of course. But it didn’t look as if the spring of 1938 would produce a Republican victory. The Nationalists recaptured Teruel in February and drove on to the sea. They reached the Mediterranean at Vinaroz, thus cutting the Republic in two. They advanced through Aragón, threatening Catalonia, and drove south towards Valencia. But their attack, by July, was bogged down on every front. A great stalemate
began. It now seemed as if the war was far from over: it might go on for years.
In August, when the Republic was launching its huge counter-offensive across the River Ebro ― the biggest battle of the war, though it resulted in no real gains for either side - a letter arrived at the jail for Stephen. ‘Do you know this handwriting?’ a member of the prison staff asked him. The most sadistic of his torturers: he had enjoyed holding Stephen’s head under the bath water until he was nearly drowned, then fixing clamps to his nipples and brutally jerking them.
‘Yes.’ His heart leaped: it was Pedro’s. The stamp on the envelope was French.
Pedro was alive and free! In France! Stephen was amazed to feel nothing but happiness at this thought. Was the letter an apology? A totally convincing explanation for why he had never returned to the hostal? A plan to organize an escape?
He didn’t find out. The prison officer stared at the letter, then lit a match and burned it.
Next morning another prison officer came to their cell and gave them a chess set.
No reason was ever given for these two acts ― the one gratuitously cruel, the other arbitrarily kind, both completely unexpected.
When he was not talking to his cell-mates or playing chess with them — they, all three, became experts at the game ― Stephen passed the time thinking his own thoughts. He’d got used to prison life: the constant hunger, his thin appearance and ragged clothes, his cropped hair, the loveless sex, the unvarying routine of all days being exactly the same. He often wondered, should release ever happen, if he could cope again with the complexities of freedom, of choice. And how did Pedro know he was in a fascist prison? Did anybody, apart from Pedro, know where he was? José and Cristina? Were they doing anything to get him out? Had they contacted his parents? The British consul in Cadiz? The Foreign Office in London? Unanswerable questions. José and Cristina might be dead, and Pedro incapable of doing anything.