by Carlos Rojas
“I’m very tired.” He sighs, shrugging his thin shoulders. “I don’t think I really understood everything you said, but I can’t accept your fatalism. If it were true, the staging of our drama would never end, and the war would keep repeating another identical war that occurred earlier. It makes no sense.”
“That’s what you say, though I didn’t expect you to understand. You’re too rational, and you’ll never be able to hide that from the eyes of God.”
He crossed his arms on the desk and presses his forehead between elbow and wrist. His hair, combed with a part, is thinning in the middle of his head, and long white strands, all very recent, cover his temples with ash.
“I can’t stay awake anymore,” he murmurs. “What happens now in the play, according to your premonitions? Do you grab my pistol and shoot me while I doze off? That’s what I’d do if I were you.”
“I don’t, and we can’t change our roles. In the final analysis, we’re as different as our gods.”
“Then call the soldier standing guard and ask to be returned to your cell,” he whispers with difficulty, his words enveloped in sleep. “It won’t be for long. Tomorrow you’ll go back to the Rosales family’s house. Tell the soldiers to wake me in half an hour.” It becomes more and more difficult to understand him, but I’d swear that suddenly, as he was sinking into sleep, he mumbles: “You’ve cheated me. You refused to think I was crazy and you refused to shoot me. My regards to Pepe Rosales.”
“All right,” the man of flesh agrees, perhaps disconcerted. “I suppose from now on I ought to be grateful to you for the favor of my life. But I’m not sure I’ve received it. When I left Madrid, I thought every step I took had been foreseen. Now I’m not sure about anything. Couldn’t we have moved away from what had been arranged without realizing it? Couldn’t we have insisted on improvising an outcome very different from the only one possible?”
He doesn’t argue or respond. Dozing face down on the desk, he slips into sleep like a stone rolling down a hill. Occasionally his back shudders beneath his tunic and he stifles an unconscious groan. Then he is completely motionless, and one might say he falls, fully dressed, to the bottom of an invisible ocean.
Look at him look at him look at him as you saw him so frequently on the stage of this theater of yours in hell Look even if you don’t want to see him again and very unwillingly think of him so often Look at the man of flesh in me the one who stopped being afraid in the Civilian Government building when Valdés pleaded with him to think he was crazy Yes look at the man of flesh in me who came with me to the bottom of this spiral Look at him and don’t cover your face with handkerchiefs In the elegy to Ignacio Sánchez Mejías he also asked that his face be left bare and uncovered so one might peer into his eyes as one peers into the hard air or the eyes of the anonymous corpse in a thirteen-line-poem that was the premonition of everything you see now Look at him and don’t become lost in oblique memories or verses like tangents because at that dawn everything concluded on earth absolutely everything for you man of flesh for me who am your right or your wrong side your heads or your tails and for the poems we conceived of and signed with my name You’ll never know whether Ruiz Alonso denounced you or not Whether he was confessing the truth or telling a lie when he said he had carried out the orders of Lieutenant Colonel Velasco the man without a face and almost without a name who appears and disappears in this tragedy of yours as if he had not existed You’ll never know whether Valdés called Sevilla as he had promised (“My dear sir, you too have my final word. I told you I’d talk to Sevilla about releasing you tomorrow, and tomorrow you’ll be free”) to tell them of your release You’ll never know whether Sevilla replied that he ought to kill you right away who knows why for being a red a queer a poet a Mason a Gypsy a Jew a friend of Fernando de los Ríos for having voted for the Popular Front for having asked for the freedom of Prestes or as Ruiz Alonso said to Miguel Rosales simply for having done more harm with the pen than others do with a pistol In any case and though you can’t explain it to yourself with any certainty you have the retrospective presentiment that Valdés told the truth at least in part In any case never again never no never again because everything concludes now With kicks and rifle butts they open the door to the room that serves as your cell The one with the boy’s eyes and another soldier identical to him as alike as the same image in two facing mirrors burst into your cell throw you face first against the wall and tie your hands behind your back with an esparto rope that cuts off the circulation in your wrists You shout that the governor will not tolerate this abuse that the governor has sworn yes sworn to release you tomorrow and one of them you don’t whether it was the one who tried to hit you with his rifle (“How do you dare, wretch? In my presence!”) or the other one slaps you across the mouth Your palate and tongue taste of blood man of flesh before you feel the mordant bitterness of the blow The blood tastes of India ink and shards of broken glass on frost Two identical laughs welcome your scream of pain and panic Now you would like to be Ignacio even if you’re only my right or my wrong side my heads or my tails man of flesh To be Ignacio yes because he grew up defying death (“If a broken body has to enter my house, let it be mine and not my son’s”) though he would grovel and yield in your presence like a wounded bull With shoves and kicks they take you along the corridor the stairs the lobby while you (Je ne suis un péderaste! Je suis une tapette!“I’m not a pederast! I’m a fairy!”) cry and pray and they disregard you Outside the strangely cold night waits for you in the middle of an August filled with indifferent crickets You fall to your knees and beg that please in the name of God they return you to your cell and allow you to speak with the governor You repeat that you had prayed for the triumph of the military and are prepared to give everything for their cause including your life A Buick as black as daybreak is waiting parked at the curb and they drag you to the car open one of the rear doors and throw you onto the upholstered seat Suddenly with the unexpected ease with which you change time or persons in dreams you think that if you hadn’t refused to drink or eat in the Civilian Government building you’d urinate now with fear and you congratulate yourself for being so prudent In the Buick are two men with their hands tied behind their backs One beside you and the other facing you on one of the folding seats Beside him on the next extra backless seat you recognize Juan Trescastro In the front are two Assault Guards one at the wheel and the other armed with a Mauser that he holds dejected or asleep Trescastro also has a pistol in his hand though now he seems to have dropped it on his lap The prisoner facing you squints when he looks at you and says your name Then he asks whether you’re the writer You nod and he tells you in a quiet, calm voice “I’m Paco Galadí This friend beside you is Joaquín Arcollas though we all call him Cabezas a comrade from the bull-ring a banderillero like me They’re murdering us without a trial because we’re Anarchists and were armed when they arrested us” Cabezas excuses himself for having to look at you over his shoulder since his hands are tied behind him Then as if you were at a picnic instead of going to your deaths he continues “I met Ignacio Sánchez Mejías and almost fought in his cuadrilla When he learned I came from Granada he told me you were a good friend of his and were a genius at writing modern ballads” “All right just shut up once and for all!” growls Trescastro “This isn’t a festival” Galadí laughs at him “They’re going to kill us and tortured us almost to death What else can an untalented rich kid like you who belongs to Gil Robles do to us? When you suffer this much blows don’t hurt anymore and bullets will be a blessing “Olé!” Cabezas agrees “Very well put! Even tied up we’re stronger than you!” The truth is that Trescastro falls silent turns around and at a signal from him the police officer starts the car You go up Calle Duquesa and cross the Calle del Gran Capitán Gradually you leave behind a Granada deserted and silent under curfew Above you the stars flicker and ignite before they go out with the first lights If anyone is watching all of you from one of those remote worlds he would feel as indifferent to your fate as yo
u would be to the ants crushed under your feet Yet if an ant said to you “I think I feel I’m mortal just as you are” would you destroy it as they’re going to destroy you now? Granada is behind you and you enter the countryside It smells of orange blossoms and mint Frogs sing in a pond A shooting star crosses the windshield Suddenly you’re absolutely convinced you’re living a farce In spite of all appearances to the contrary these people aren’t going to murder you The presence of Trescastro a very well-known member of Popular Action supports your unexpected certainty You see him again in the Rosales family’s courtyard while Ruiz Alonso had a snack of biscuits and café con leche with the napkin tied around his neck and spilling down the front of his blue coverall like a bib looking at him with a mixture of embarrassment and contempt This man wasn’t born to kill anybody He does no more than go along on arrests like yours protected by the Assault Guards posted even on the roofs just as certain people must have watched autos-de-fé even though they didn’t have an executioner’s calling He’s with you in the Buick to prevent this mockery of an execution from becoming reality It’s all a cruel comedy staged by Valdés for your benefit At the last moment when these police officers pretend to be ready to kill you with a bullet to the back of the head Trescastro will stay their hand like the angel of the Lord and order them to take you back to the Civilian Government offices offering absurd reasons Orders received at the last moment following his call to the governor from a farmhouse telephone or simply the Dostoevskian revelation that it was all arranged as a sinister game with the three of you Galadí Cabezas and you as inadvertent protagonists “The mercy of the governor is infinite and this time he decided to give all of you the gift of life though you will spend the rest of it in prison contemplating behind bars the most devout and very military flowering of the new Spain that your revolutionary liberal Marxist Masonic and Judaizing baseness attempted to prevent under orders from Russia” In the Civilian Government building they’ll take you to Valdés again You’ll find him paler and more ashen than ever more corroded by insomnia and lack of sleep like two acids He does have cancer and is going to die very soon Precisely for that reason the savage burlesque to which he subjected you must cheer him in a particular way “You’re a man of the theater” he’ll say not looking you in the eye as usual “give me your opinion of my little farce and its direction Do you or do you not believe now that I’m insane and my derangement will be the best proof of my innocence in God’s judgment?” Perhaps they’ll carry their monstrousness even further and kill Galadí and Cabezas (“They’re murdering us without a trial because we’re Anarchists and were armed when they arrested us”) exempt you and return you to Valdés In that case it’s also possible you won’t even understand his questions those of a dying man obsessed with proving his insanity because you yourself have become a raving madman after this sarcastic Calvary when they grant you your life as a taunt The shooting star extinguished and having passed the frog pond we cross a small bridge Then the moon outlines olive groves on both sides of the highway “Where are we going?” Cabezas asks aloud looking at the countryside and not addressing anyone “This is the bridge over the Beiro” Galadí replies while Trescastro and the Assault Guards say nothing “We’re going toward the town of Víznar where my mother came from God rest her soul Granada is south of us now” He’s cut off by a chorus of barks beyond the river and the olive grove Gradually you recognize the places that the night obscured in your memory The palace of Archbishop Don Juan Manuel de Moscoso y Peralta is in Víznar A few days after Fernando Villalón summoned the souls of dead dogs to the horror of Rafael María Teresa and you the three of them came with you to Granada and you took them to Víznar along this road to admire that eighteenth-century building If in the South Station you were convinced that present past and future eventually fused in a higher reality here you had no presentiment of the tragedy and the joke that together oblige you to live now You remember very well that before the massive door studded with large nails and then in the porticoed courtyard of the palace you told them that Moscoso y Peralta Archbishop of Granada was the child of American-born Spaniards from Arequipa A nephew of his you said to the astonished surprise of María Teresa and Rafael Mariano Tristán de Moscoso had a daughter out of wedlock with a French aristocrat who had fled the Revolution That girl Flora Tristán would be the grandmother of Paul Gauguin and a sentence of hers “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” was plagiarized with great success by Engels and Marx in the Communist Manifesto Fernando Villalón was silent his eyes and broad humanity gathered in as if he were totally absentminded and at the same time found himself very far from all of you In a kind of aside while Rafael was taking pictures of María Teresa in the palace garden you asked him what was going on behind his interminable silences He placed his palm on his chest and said “Do you remember the dead dogs whose barks you heard in the grove when I summoned them? Now I hear all of them howling here in the middle of my chest” “How much longer to Víznar?” Cabezas asks Galadí his voice touched by a slight tremor “Not far We’re almost there If it weren’t so late we’d have seen the lights a while back” The Buick stops at the door of the palace Trescastro gets out and for a few moments seems to hesitate between speaking to the Assault Guards or proceeding in silence He leaves finally without opening his lips At the entrance to the building he speaks with a sentry posted there and then the large studded door closes behind him Then the Guards both turn toward you at the same time as if moved by a single spring “We aren’t volunteers and never would’ve done anything like this” murmurs the one with the musket “They forced us because we’re suspected of being for the Republic” Like Valdés his accent is from Old Castile Perhaps he’s from Logroño or maybe La Montaña The other one nods “I always pray to become a raging lunatic I’d prefer it to this” Galadí spits at his feet “A real man would shoot himself before shooting a defenseless person in the back” “Olé” Cabezas agrees “Well said and absolutely right!” “We’re both married and I have two young kids” the Guard who’s driving replies “I can’t abandon them and leave them stranded Try to understand” “I have a little girl and I’ll die at peace with my conscience because I know that one day she’ll see libertarian communism in this country” “Olé! Olé! I have a son and hope he can forgive you because you’re dogs and dogs don’t know what they’re doing” You would like to tell them that tonight nobody will kill anybody because the moment for the crime hasn’t arrived yet Perhaps it was last night and will come again tomorrow but it will never be this morning There are prescribed times for the murder of innocents and other times chosen for satanic carnivals to the greater glory of a man whose only hope is to be seen as insane in the eyes of God But your voice strangles in your throat like a river of ash Your heart beats so fiercely in your throat you’re afraid it will burst like a pomegranate or shrink into the blood that burns your soul as if it were lava (“To die or not to die. That is the question. The bullring is a theater Shakespeare would’ve understood perfectly”) said Sánchez Mejías when someone asked him to describe bullfighting precisely and succinctly To die or not to die Back when la Argentinita thought she had been abandoned by her lover she called one afternoon to ask you to her house got rid of the maid the cook and the old woman who ironed She was alone with you and stated that she didn’t want to live convinced as she was she had lost Ignacio You tried to comfort her with old lies that bored and debased you when you repeated them when suddenly she embraced you kissed you on the mouth and said she was going to bed with you my boy this afternoon That she had always desired you in a distant but persistent way like those ideas that assault you several times every year in the half sleep of a summer siesta or when you make up your eyes in the dressing-room mirror while you feel very alone far from home and outside the snow of New York or Paris is falling Yes desired since the days of the failed premiere of The Butterfly’s Curse when you weren’t much more than a little nobody so innocent and so serious with those Moorish eyes of y
ours and that blue shawl She asked you straight out if you’d ever been with a woman and you said no with a gesture saying only with men not adding that you had loved one and bought the rest She replied that you shouldn’t be ashamed of what she called your inclinations because one comes as one is to this vale of tears and you were as responsible for coming out queer as you were for being born for in neither case were you asked if you wanted to be a macho man or simply be since the ideal my boy would be if they didn’t bother to have us or at least didn’t do it without our permission when we suffer afterward the way we do Then as now it was impossible for you to reply because the words burned like embers before turning into dust into nothing and your heart seemed to split open with each beat or turn into porous worn stone like the fossilized birds trapped in amber before man walked the earth that you saw once in Edem Mills the night before the aurora borealis You couldn’t tell her you loved her more than your own life though it was true but could never go to bed with her or any woman because in the shredded depths of your being you would have felt you were committing incest with your own mother You fled down the stairs with the words petrified behind your palate and pursued by the shouts of la Argentinita That night she called you again to reiterate her dejection and despair far from Ignacio but never tried to comment on what occurred in her house or what never happened there that afternoon And now the doors of the palace open and Trescastro returns holding his pistol but with a hurried step and bowed head as if he had just received orders to put an end to this farce or been reprimanded for his part in so absurd a burlesque He gets into the Buick and slams the door shut The car pulls away and on the left the olive trees continue but thick pine groves stand on the other side of the highway You feel lost because you’d never left Víznar through this countryside Never until this incredible dawn The sound of water on the side of the olive groves disconcerts you but Galadí as if reading your forehead says “It’s the Ainadamar irrigation channel that comes from Fuente Grande” and Cabezas observes in the most indifferent tone “It sounds full even though it wasn’t a very rainy winter” “I told you once to shut up” Trescastro repeats without looking at us “Hell no!” shouts Galadí “The one who ought to shut up is you so you can kill us once and for all if you have the balls to do it!” Trescastro lowers his eyes and his gaze is lost in his lap where he still holds the forgotten pistol At each curve in the road his knees push against yours They’re round and hard like the knobs that indicate the landings on staircases Suddenly as if two hands pulled away the stray clouds the full moon appears in the sky It whitens the irrigation channel and Cabezas’s smooth face The water restores the scent of jasmines and morning glories Nothing however is excessive in this countryside A sense of suitable calm governs heaven and earth though they seem to burn in white-hot fire on all four sides In no time the same measured prudence will constrain even a monster like Trescastro He’ll put the pistol in his pocket and give the order to return to the Civilian Government building (“The mercy of the governor is infinite and this time he decided to give you the gift of life … ”) Even a satanic farce like the one devised to destroy three defenseless creatures by pushing them to the brink of eternity only to hold them back at the edge of the abyss must respect certain limits (“even though you’ll spend the rest of it in prison contemplating through the bars the most pious and very military flowering … ”) You know that between one person and another love extends spider’s threads that would shine like the light of this moon if they were visible When death separates them it leaves something like a thread of blood at the loose end of each strand You’re convinced you won’t die because the spider web between you and your mother in the Huerta de San Vicente is unbreakable The same moon turns different trees white you’d almost say now altering a line of Neruda’s You were a boy in the Huerta before you had carnal knowledge of man and fled la Argentinita before you came across the witches of Albaicín before you found in open pianos wordless romanzas sleeping since autumns crossed with stagecoaches and old mirrors before discovering your power to create another universe precisely constructed of words with their Route to Santiago their Gypsy pilgrims their homosexual saints covered in lace their honeysuckle and knives from Albacete long before Alberti dazzled you by saying that blazing feathers fell to earth and a bird could be killed by a lily Before Before Before You were a sleepwalking boy and in the Huerta de San Vicente Without waking you another full moon carried you to those fields illuminated by the open window of your bedroom You were aware of living asleep and also of walking through a dream that was a world of platinum The fountain in the courtyard where a sobbing fish twisted sounded the way the Ainadamar irrigation channel sounds tonight while other morning glories and other jas-mines identical to these merged their scents in the motionless air You thought you’d pass among smiling dead people barely outlined in the radiance who would open a path for you as the multitude of murderers stepped aside now happy to know it will be the lot of all of you to go on living You reached the fishpond filled with water lilies and went into the water naked You lost your footing and drowned without waking slipping into a more profound dream where the world resplendent with moonlight turned all to gold Old gold next to hammered copper Gold of wheat fields stirred by the wind Innocent gold of virgin decks of cards Gold of wedding rings lost beneath the lilies Gold of thirteen coins stamped with your profile and your mother’s as if you were a king and a queen Gold of cut lemons that many years later would be reborn intact in your poem on the arrest of Antoñito el Camborio Gold of another sun the reflection of the one in the sky at the bottom of the water You were going to the center of that fire when an arm plunged into the water took you by the hand and returned you to the air as in a parody of that miracle this dawn Trescastro will give all of you the gift of existence It was your mother naked and sleepwalking too holding on to you by the spider web of threads that would be silver if love were visible She held you to her breasts and the two of you remained there sobbing very quietly so as not to awaken yourselves Today you have the retrospective certainty of having foreseen on that night in the pond that you weren’t going to die because the silvery net though invisible joined you to life as now it binds you again to the person who will give you your being The Buick stops at a building beside the road It is a two-story villa with three doors and several French windows “I know that place” Galadí exclaims “They call the house the Colony because in the summer school children would come here to the country I suppose nowadays you use it as a slaughterhouse” he concludes turning toward Trescastro He doesn’t answer gets out of the car and slams the door with a dry sound Then what happened at the archbishop’s palace is repeated almost point for point Trescastro talks with two men who guard the Colony and one of them opens the door with no great courtesy “Now or never” Galadí says to the Assault Guards “Start the car and the four of us can get the hell away from here” They look at each other and seem to hesitate for long moments They probably aren’t involved in Valdés’s scheme because the driver shakes his head sadly “Don’t torture us like this I already told you my friend is married and I am too with two children All we’d need is to let you run away or escape with you!” “It’s impossible” the one with the Mauser agrees “Don’t torment us any more In no time they’d catch us and finish off all of us” “Drop it Galadí” advises Cabezas “You’d convince a couple of vipers sooner than these wretches Beg their pardon for having wounded their delicate sensibilities and let’s hope they give us the coup de grâce as if we never offended them” “You’re right” says Galadí resigned “This one’s kids must be sons of a bitch on their father’s side” The Guards pretend not to have heard them and Galadí faces you “I admire you because without being made for danger like this you bear it with so much dignity Cabezas and I are different because we’re banderilleros In the bullring you get used to seeing death close up and in the end you almost forget about it In time being butted and knocked down scares you more than the chance of a fatal goring” “It’s true” Cab
ezas agrees “The señor bears everything with more dignity than we do because he responds to them with his contempt and his silence We ought to do the same” Then he turns toward you and says “Don’t worry this will take only an instant if our police friends know how to do their job and are used to killing the right way I was with Granero’s cuadrilla in the twenty-second year of this century when the bull Pocapena gored him in Madrid You see how things are Granero who was a señor too like you and even had studied the violin he played it like an angel and seemed begging your pardon a queer Nobody ever heard him talk about women or saw him looking at them If they were mentioned in his presence he’d blush like a novice But in the bullring he was the toughest man in the world With more control over himself and the bull than Joselito and courage colder and more measured than Sánchez Mejías’s He had the death he deserved in two seconds with no time to suffer Pocapena caught him in the thigh and tossed him against the barrier He gored him there three times and in one sank his horn into his eye and split open his brain He was unconscious when we picked him up but dead when he went into the infirmary” You wanted to tell them that death is the only thing there’s no need to fear in this sinister burlesque to the greater glory of the governor’s presumed derangement (“You’re too rational and you’ll never be able to hide it from the eyes of God”) But your voice is still petrified in your throat Vestiges of words from other times before the disaster before the God who’ll judge Valdés scorched Sodom and Gomorrah with the fire of His wrath to ravage this land of the unthinking and the rabble where only the executioners preserve their sanity to the greater mockery of all the victims Words like reason moral virtue justice dignity (“The señor bears everything with more dignity than we do because he only responds to them with his contempt and his silence”) honor fellow man nation religion law progress culture revolution which here took on a meaning completely different from and opposed to the one they have in any other country An entire vocabulary devised for dealings among human beings fossilized now in your throat transformed into outlines of scorpions spiders vipers extinct species of fish To tell them we won’t lose our lives but may lose our reason in this ordeal To tell them that perhaps starting tomorrow the three of us will be exhibited in a glass cage as specimens of perfect madmen by the grace of Valdés in this land where good sense is the exclusive inalienable privilege of murderers But your voice has been silenced perhaps forever As in those nightmares where your legs sink up to the knees in a desert that holds all of you and prevents you from walking to a mirror in order to throw you into a chasm that first stifles your shouts between the walls of a pit and then crushes them between its teeth or at the back of its tongue As for the rest they don’t seem to expect answers from you either as if they could read in your eyes exactly the opposite of everything you’re thinking and feeling (“I admire you because without being made for danger like this you bear it with so much dignity”) Can the inability to understand one another while they breathe in this world be the fate of all men? You say this to yourself in your mute despair And now the main door of the Colony opens again and Trescastro returns with the pistol in his pocket Another man his hands tied behind him like the three of you comes limping beside him He’s stout broad-shouldered the front of his head is almost bald and he’s well into his fifties As he approaches and in the headlights of the Buick you see that his shirt is stained with blood on the front and his lips are disfigured as if blows to his teeth had split them “Slide toward Cabezas this guy has to fit in next to you” Trescastro says to you now in a tone that’s almost polite The newcomer struggles to obey him after you’ve moved over next to Cabezas He tries to get into the car sideways but all his efforts are in vain He has an artificial leg his own perhaps amputated above the knee and he can’t flex it to bend over “I can’t get in if you don’t untie me” he states in a very serene tone not addressing anyone personally and as if he had called on heaven to witness his inability “Try it again” Trescastro insists “I’ve already tried and it’s impossible” the timbre of his voice is almost as strong as his shoulders even though a strange whistle like that of someone not yet accustomed to expressing himself with broken incisors slipped among his words Trescastro hesitates but takes a penknife from his pocket and cuts the cords that bind the stranger His hands tremble when he closes the blade that gleams like a fish in the moonlight and puts away the knife Instinctively he moves a few steps away from the crippled man who has the advantage over him in height and heft The Assault Guards are still inattentive their backs turned as if this new act in your tragedy were none of their concern The man with the beaten face and well-separated temples rubs his wrists for a long time without Trescastro hurrying him or interrupting Standing sideways at the car door he takes the prosthesis by the knee and extends its rigidity into the air Then he slips into the Buick and sits beside me while with both hands he bends his artificial leg, which squeaks like very hard recently broken chalk on a blackboard or a very old iron key in an unoiled lock From his seat his hip pressing against yours he calls to Trescastro with a mocking attitude and offers him the empty jump seat next to Galadí’s “Let his highness the executioner make himself comfortable among his victims and friends” Trescastro obeys more terrified now than any of us With a handkerchief he wipes his brow and cheeks and gestures to the Guard to start the engine The car growls and groans like a wounded animal then finally engages shaking us all with an abrupt jolt “What’s happening now?” Trescastro asks anxiously The Guard at the wheel shrugs “I don’t know This Buick is very old It could be the carburetor and the steering Everything at the same time” “All right all right Go ahead and no breakdowns” he insists peremptorily as if it were in his power or the driver’s to prevent them The man with the metal leg smiles and shakes his head “His highness the executioner reminds me of King Canute determined to stop the waves” he says to Galadí Then he introduces himself “Dióscoro Galindo González teacher in Pulianas” Joaquín Arcollas answers for everyone and it surprises you that Galadí doesn’t He tells him in a quiet voice everything his friend explained to you earlier and says who you are The teacher from Pulianas moves his head which was next to yours back a little and greets you almost joyfully “I had the kids in my little school read your Poem of the Cante Jondo Naturally most wouldn’t have been able to buy it but I typed out the poems and had them memorize many of them Why did they arrest you?” He smiles painfully with his swollen lips and adds “I would have liked to meet you under different circumstances and with more time ahead of us” Again it is Cabezas who must think it his duty to answer for the three of them “Galadí here and yours truly were arrested as dangerous Anarchists We are and very proud of it I don’t know why they’re going to kill the señor I suppose because of his prestige since fascism hates the poor and the talented” “Four days ago at about ten at night a couple of armed Falangistas not entirely unexpected appeared at my house in Pulianas” says Dióscoro Galindo González without paying too much attention to him “Through the window we saw two more who never came to the house waiting for them in a car parked by the door The first two introduced themselves very politely by the way and requested permission to search the house as they had been ordered to by the Civilian Government I had no choice and gave it to them and you’ll forgive the obligatory irony but I added that they wouldn’t find anything interesting in the house of a poor public school teacher Then one of them asked me if after the February elections and the victory of the Popular Front people hadn’t paraded past my house shouting ‘Long live the teacher and death to Barreras!’ I said all of that was certainly true even though I wasn’t responsible for what people yell on the sidewalks I didn’t say that in the electoral campaign I had spoken in public in favor of the Popular Front because they didn’t ask me that Gentlemen I was always a republican but never had a calling to be a hero or a martyr only a pedagogue If I confess all this in the presence of our honored executioners it’s because in for a thousand pesetas or a hundred ‘you can take my life from me but
nothing else’ as Señor Calvo Sotelo said gallantly in Congress before he was assassinated I was always respectful of the opinions and above all the dignity of my adversaries” You alone know that tonight no one will die that Galindo González is the last inadvertent actor in the farce conceived by Valdés with you in the lead But behind the back of the civilian governor and his cancer another burlesque no less unexpected with the same cast and the Buick as the stage begins to be acted before your eyes While Galadí so assertive earlier is absorbed in his own silence and Tres-castro who shares with you the knowledge of the truth seems to waste away in the semidarkness of the night’s full moon over the irrigation channel as if through a bitter mistake he foresees that in the end he’ll be the one who is really shot dead Cabezas forgets about his imminent murder though he believes it inevitable and takes a lively interest in the story of the teacher from Pulianas “And who was the Barreras they were shouting ‘death to’ in front of your house sir?” he asks Galindo González “Probably the man who denounced me though that’s another long story I’ll have to summarize for you in a few words Eduardo Barreras was also the secretary of the Council of Pulianas and the political boss of the town When I came there two years ago he gave me a house that was little more than a stable I went to protest to the Civilian Governor himself and the steps I had taken were reported in El Ideal, which took my side though the paper is right-wing After all that the only thing I obtained was Barreras’s Hagarene hatred for in the end sick of sending petitions on papers with seals I rented the apartment they came to search four nights ago” “That’s when they arrested you?” Cabezas persists “No son not then Since apparently we’re proceeding with our drive I’ll explain everything in the order it happened When they finished their search the Falangistas told me they really hadn’t found anything compromising and would state that in their report They added that if nobody came to arrest me in the next forty-eight hours I could consider myself a free man I remember that as they were leaving one of them asked me what my political thinking was just talking you understand I replied that these details were very private and I didn’t believe it was my obligation to reveal them to anyone because what counts is a man’s conduct and not his thoughts Though you won’t believe it he said I was right” “And what about the forty-eight-hour time limit?” “It expired two nights later But fifty-four hours after the search other Falangistas came to my house this time with no courtesy or manners and arrested me with slaps in the face and shoves I’ll spare you the rest because you must know it on your own and my teeth and shirt speak for themselves After the beatings the tortures and the interrogations I had the honor to pass into the presence of Commander Valdés himself the new civilian governor of Granada the Beautiful He spoke to me for only a few moments to ask me again how I thought politically and I repeated what I had said to the Falangista in my house He replied that in any case it didn’t matter to him very much because in the city and the province all the teachers were reds Which was an idiotic point of view but a point of view though I didn’t have the guts to tell him so It’s the one act of my life I regret now” Suddenly and at the end of that speech the car coughs groans and stops coming out of a curve “Why did you stop” Trescastro yells at the driver The Assault Guard shrugs again “I didn’t stop This heap is a wreck After we left the Colony it just gave out” “Try to fix it We’re not going to stay here forever” The two Assault Guards get out and the one with the rifle leans it against one of the trees at the side of the road Another feline spark crosses Galadí’s eyes but he immediately buries himself again in his withdrawn passivity Trescastro opens the door puts one foot on the ground as if preparing to flee when left alone with us Galindo González forces a weary smile “King Canute is afraid of us Sooner or later he’ll get down on his knees and beg our pardon like executioners in the movies” Trescastro looks away and tests the ground with his foot but doesn’t respond “What are you afraid of King Canute? That I’ll strangle you with my bare hands?” the teacher from Pulianas continues “The truth is I could because as a young man I bent a coin with my fingers and the tip of an arrow with my palms Do it in the blink of an eye Before your henchman from the Assault Guard can reach his Mauser and shoot me But I’m not going to try I know that here we all have the stink of gunpowder on us including you Canute because one day you’ll pay for our murders and probably many others in front of a firing squad In the long run I’d only shorten your trip to hell I renounce so high an honor because in spite of my verbosity I don’t want to shorten my life by even a few minutes I told you before I’m not a hero and not a martyr either Just a republican like any other and a public school teacher rather sparing of speech though you may not believe that” “Olé and how well you speak for someone sparing of speech!” Cabezas says in praise Then incapable of resisting an easy joke he adds “If they let you speak Don Dióscoro they won’t hang you” “They won’t hang any of us because Canute here and his henchmen are decent civilized people” the teacher replies quickly “I’ll bet you anything they finish us off with a single very fast bullet right in the back of the neck” He gestures with his right hand as if to erase for an instant the presence of everyone except me and turning with difficulty on his artificial leg he faces me “It’s curious to speak of betting at moments like this when all I have in life is my life and all I leave to the world is reduced to my two sons who are men now and very capable of looking after themselves I never was a dreamer in any sense of the word and couldn’t have imagined a crisis like this If I’d foreseen it I think I would’ve behaved differently though I don’t know how Now I understand those French nobles Michelet talks about who on their last night and almost in the shadow of the guillotine gambled passionately with money they no longer had and goods they had lost” He smiles and nods at his own thoughts “That’s beside the point It’s regrettable we should meet here considering how much I would’ve liked to talk with you about poetry and so many other things It’s a shame there’s no other world where we could discuss them all we liked with immortality ahead of us”