The sound of doors being opened, keys in locks, bolts being drawn back and other urgent noises dragged Captain Alegría from the confines of his memory. The cell door swung open and an officer came in, escorted by three soldiers. They were astonished to find people still inside the abandoned building.
‘What are you two doing here?’
We are imagining this question, because our informant – the puny sergeant – no doubt neglected to mention his own craven attitude (‘After all the war I’d seen, I was on nobody’s side,’ he told us) but he did recall that our protagonist insisted he was a prisoner of war.
‘Who did you surrender to, captain?’
‘To the Republican army.’
‘When?’
‘This morning, colonel sir.’
The colonel turned to his companions as though to check he had heard correctly. They did not so much as raise an eyebrow. In the army, it was for those in command to deal with anything out of the ordinary.
The colonel asked to see Alegría’s military papers. As he glanced through them he looked increasingly perplexed, searching for some explanation when all that he could read were the captain’s name, rank and a brief record of his army career. He put the papers in his coat pocket and asked, still more astonished than angry:
‘Did you really surrender this morning?’
‘Yes, colonel sir, I surrendered this morning.’
‘Then you’re a fool and a traitor. You’ll be put on trial for it.’
With that, the three men slammed the door shut again, leaving the two prisoners inside. The sergeant did not raise his eyes from the floor: he knew that being kept a prisoner could be his salvation. And so it proved.
For a while, everything fell silent. Time went slowly by, but the silence soon came to an end, as prisoners began pouring into the cell like water from a spring.
Captain Alegría made a mental inventory of this stock of the defeated as they were herded into the basement, until finally he recognised one of the prisoners: the man who had been brought with him from Dehesa de la Villa to Cuatro Caminos General Hospital. The only things Alegría recognised about him in that pen of shadows were his bandaged shoulder with the uselessly dangling arm, and his gesture of desperate pain. Alegría went over and asked if it hurt. As soon as he had posed the question, he felt as embarrassed as an adolescent: of course a shattered shoulder and defeat would hurt.
‘Can I help you in any way?’
‘Shit! The prisoner of war!’
Alegría must have felt a glow of satisfaction at hearing those spontaneous words describing his real situation, because – at least according to the wounded man, who survived because he was having his arm amputated the day he should have been sentenced to death – all he said was ‘Thanks’, then turned his back and sought out an empty corner. At last Alegría was what he had wanted to be: his own enemy.
A flood of prisoners soon swamped the cell. Fresh amazement, new fears, different kinds of resignation to fate. At the end of three days when the air inside the cell had become unbreathable, they began transferring prisoners. After this, we have only sketchy information about Alegría’s route to the firing squad.
The documents the jailers of that labyrinth eventually produced and the few letters Alegría wrote are the only real facts; the rest is the truth. Although he had the chance to tell his story, the captain preferred to remain silent. He was settling his account with the usurers of war.
We know he was transferred to one of the hangars at Barajas aerodrome, where the victorious army and its justice interned the commissioned officers before carrying out summary trials which invariably ended with the death sentence.
During the time Alegría was kept in Barajas, the Republican officers seem to have ignored and shunned him. In another letter to his fiancée Inés, which somehow arrived three months later, he cryptically describes his situation as that of ‘one of Leibniz’s monads’. No one spoke to him. They mistrusted Alegría as one mistrusts an enemy, keeping their distance at a time when they were thinking more about what they were leaving behind than what lay ahead of them. Everything had happened so quickly that Captain Alegría’s life faded in the midst of twilight emotions, hostile solitudes, irreverent fears. Alegría did not dare pray, for fear of awakening God and his wrath.
He was in the unwelcoming hangar at Barajas from the fourth to the eighth of April, growing ever weaker, shrivelling like a dried-out wineskin, his imperturbability leaching away every time he vomited, fainted, shivered uncontrollably, or found his stomach wrenching with hunger. A group of Falange soldiers noted each prisoner’s rank. Forced to stand to attention, they were insulted, beaten and humiliated before having their insignia torn from their uniforms, and all their documents and personal effects confiscated. Colonel Luzón – we have no more details about him – refused to hand over his stars because he said he had won them honourably on the field of battle. A pistol shot from point-blank range stripped him of rank, stars, and life. ‘Shot while trying to escape,’ states the scant report on the cause of death.
On the eighth, the moment Captain Alegría had so anxiously been awaiting finally arrived. At mid-morning, when daylight had converted the hangar into a cage of nostalgic memories whispered like prayers, and silence hung heavy over the hundreds of men packed inside, they heard the sound of the first names being called out.
This is the most real document we have of what actually happened, the only truth that can back up our story – which probably did happen in a very similar way to the one we are describing. Were it not for fear our narration could be misinterpreted, we would simply have transcribed the official record of the trial at which Carlos Alegría was sentenced to death by firing squad on charges of desertion and treason.
We will omit the preamble of the summary trial, which refers to the military code of justice applicable in times of war. It then goes on to state that Captain Alegría was stripped of his rank and cashiered, and described as a deserter from battle.
Following a variety of considerations less concerned with his military record than offering glimpses of his attitude as reflected by his superior officers’ opinions, the trial record states:
Asked as to the date when he decided to go over to the enemy lines and betray the Glorious National Army, the accused replied, ‘At dawn on the first day of April in this Year of Victory.’
As for the reasons behind such an act of treason, the accused replied that he did it because in November 1937 Lieutenant Colonels Tella and Barrón took the villages of Villaverde and both parts of Carabanchel in Madrid. Also because troops under Asensio and Castejón took the Casa de Campo, which was being defended by the First and Eleventh International Brigades, who then withdrew to the banks of the River Manzanares.
Asked if he considered these military advances sufficient reason to betray the Glorious National Army, the accused replied that he did it also because General Varela ordered Asensio to cross the River Manzanares with his tanks, which he achieved on 15 November 1937, the same day that Barrón took the Military Hospital in Carabanchel Bajo.
The accused then stated he acted in this way because that same day the Popular Front government abandoned Madrid as they considered it had fallen, leaving its defence in the hands of General Miaja, whose army consisted almost entirely of the International Brigades under the command of the inexperienced General Kléber.
He also acted as he did because on that same fifteenth of November, Asensio Cabanilles overran the Ciudad Universitaria of Madrid at the head of a company from the Regular Army of Tetuán, which reached as far as Moncloa Park, while General Asensio Cabanilles himself took the unfinished Clinical Hospital building.
The accused was ordered to be silent and obeyed.
Asked how he was aware of the facts to which he had referred, the accused replied that this was because he was in charge of quarter-mastering for the South and South-Eastern Front, under the direct orders of General Varela. This was how he knew that in November 1937 Colon
el Ríos Capapé and Mohamed el Mizzián reached the upper end of Calle Ferraz in the centre of Madrid, and that there the only fire they encountered was from retreating snipers.
The accused was ordered to be silent and obeyed.
Asked whether the glorious deeds of the National Army were a reason for him to betray his country, the accused replied that no, the real reason was that we had no wish to win the war against the Popular Front at that point in time.
Asked why we should not want to win the glorious Crusade, which was obviously our aim, the accused replied, ‘We wanted to kill them all.’
At the close of the trial, Captain Alegría was cashiered and declared guilty of the crimes of treason and of colluding with the enemy. He was given the death sentence.
The sentence was officially signed and stamped, but neither signature is legible.
All the facts that occurred after this are based on an amalgam of disparate, sometimes contradictory versions, often the product of the hazy memories of witnesses who prefer to forget. We have however also taken account of vague recollections whispered during anguished fantasies. The horror of the truth also has room for this kind of thing, however inaccurate it may be.
Captain Alegría, by now a civilian, a traitor, a dead man, was taken back to the hangar and left with all the others who had been or were about to be sentenced to death. There he wrote at least three letters: one to his fiancée Inés, which is in our possession, another to his parents, whose house in Huérmeces was destroyed when the River Urbel flooded and swept away memory, the country house and the will to live of two old people who, when they heard of their son’s sudden impulse, fixed their eyes on an indistinct point in the countryside and retreated into such a profound silence they refused even to take confession before they died. The third letter was addressed to General Franco, Caudillo of Spain. We know of this last letter because he refers to it in the one he wrote to Inés. ‘I wrote to him not begging for pardon, or to show remorse, but to tell him that what I have seen, others have lived, and it is impossible for all that to be “thrown among the lilies there to fade”.’
In another letter to Inés, who was a primary school teacher in Ubierna, he states cryptically that solitude has reduced him to his bare bones, and just as he had done earlier with Saint John of the Cross, he uses other people’s words to speak of himself, as though he did not have the heart to describe his own emotions: ‘I am a weary used-to-be, will be, and is’. There is no passion in his farewell, no love, merely a vague lament, a reproach for the period he lived in, regret for an untimely life: ‘I had no time to make plans, because other horrors postponed my future, but rest assured that, had I done so, you would have been the mainstay of my existence.’
If we had to imagine what life now became for Captain Alegría, the image would be that of a spreading patch of oil: slow, sticky, inexorable. Wherever he went in that anguished-filled hangar, he took his solitude with him. Enveloped in emptiness, his only companion the distance between him and the universe, he waited for the moment leading to the final one, unsuspecting that the end had yet to be written.
Nine days waiting his turn. At first light each day, inside the hangar a randomly-chosen group of prisoners was herded together like a flock of doves and led in two lines to trucks that disappeared noisily into a warm, desolate landscape. Few of the men said goodbye to each other. Most left without a word. Accustomed as he was to observing the enemy, this unprotesting death probably seemed familiar to Alegría. The fact that to live depended on the lottery of being or not being in the corner from which the day’s victims were chosen must have been unbearable. Alegría rejected chance. He needed order.
We can therefore imagine that he felt a certain relief when on the eighteenth, at the height of a merciless rainstorm, he was one of the chosen flock. Jammed together and trying to keep their balance on the back of a truck, all the condemned men stared at each other, felt for their neighbour’s hand, pressed close to one another. Somewhere along the way, a hand sought out his, and his solitude ebbed away in a long, silent handclasp that finally ushered him into the community of the defeated. Beyond the hand, a face peering at him. Then other faces, other eyes bloodshot with despair, and muffled sobs. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, as he plunged into the turmoil of desolate bodies.
It must have been eight o’clock by the time they reached Arganda del Rey. Everything was ready. A plastered wall – all that remained of a ruined stable – a piece of flat ground, a firing squad and a detachment of guards: all that was needed for their execution. More trucks, more condemned men, more expressions of despair. A priest with a purple stole was muttering the ritual calls for mercy in Latin. There were at least a hundred of them, and they had to crush together to fit along the length of wall. A few moments’ silence for the priest to end his prayers, a blessing traced in the air like a forlorn goodbye, and then ‘Squad’, silence, ‘Take Aim’, silence, ‘Fire’.
If anyone cried out, nobody heard them.
When Captain Alegría recovered consciousness, he was buried in a mass grave under a mound of dead bodies and earth. It took him a long time, but, ignoring the searing pain, he eventually realised he had yet again cheated the laws of the world which forbid all return. He was alive. A universe of dripping marrow bone, lifeless cartilage, coagulated blood, faeces, lungs, and hearts stopped by death had somehow created pockets of air in which he could breathe submerged among this chaotic jumble of victims. He was alive.
There is one darkness for the living and another for the dead. Alegría confused the two of them, because he did not even try to open his eyes until he heard his own sobs and realised this was not the silence of the dead. He was alive.
Alegría always spoke of that moment as one of birth. Utterly exhausted, it took him an age to distinguish the contours of his own feeble body, crushed under a tangle of other bodies. His skull ached so much he thought it must have been split in two. Slowly, trying hard not to disturb the dead, he drew his arms to his sides. Each time he pulled, he paused so as not to start panting and use up all the air. Little by little, he recovered the strength necessary to escape from the weight pressing down on him. Before facing the firing squad he had seen the grave in which he was buried, and knew that there could not be many bodies on top of him. He shifted his body time and again. Each time he could sense something moving and the load lightening, until at last there was nothing more to push against, and he was out in the open air. Earth tumbled into the gap he had left. He crawled over towards an embankment and rolled down it, trying not to cry out. He was all there, apart from his glasses.
A bullet had grazed his forehead and then furrowed across his scalp, opening a deep wound but not shattering his skull. His face, temples and neck were covered in blood, but the earth had cauterised the wound and although it had started to bleed again, his heart had nevertheless found a reason to beat other than fear.
Night was falling.
This is the start of a journey about which we know little, because although Alegría occasionally allowed himself to talk about what had happened before his resurrection, he rarely agreed to tell anyone how he got from Arganda del Rey to La Acebada, a mountain village on the southern slopes of the Somosierra range. Granite, rockroses and mountains surround this slate and adobe village blanketed by snow throughout the winter and waking with the first balmy days of spring to tasks such as lavender-picking.
At some point though he did tell one of his prison guards that, except for animals, everyone backed away from him. They could not bear the idea that this filthy, haggard man with such a look of pain etched on his face could really be alive. In those days, only the dead did not instil fear.
Some farmhands found him in the fields outside La Acebada. He was so exhausted and frail that at first they thought he must be dead, but just as they were about to strip the body of its boots, they heard the bloody skull ask for water. He was wearing the uniform of the army that had just won the war, and yet was quaking with the fear of the defeated.
We now know that they considered several alternatives, from burying him alive because they had no idea who might have shot him, to leaving him to die out among the rockroses and then informing the authorities once he was dead. But a determined old woman decided to give him the water he was pleading for, and wiped his face with her petticoat.
‘We’re all God’s children, even that lot,’ she said. That was the beginning of three days of caring gestures towards the wounded man which somehow managed to keep him alive. Everything seemed to be conspiring to make it impossible for him to renounce life as one renounces a dream on waking.
They kept him there among the rockroses, partly out of fear and partly because they were worried he might die if they tried to move him. They treated his wound with useless ointments, covered him with a blanket, and gave him water and a little food. We now know that at a time like that, all their actions showed a depth of compassion which touched Alegría deeply.
That someone should draw near to a man riddled with worms, smeared in excrement and blood, should lift his head and gently pour water on his lips, should take the trouble to offer him spoonfuls of broth that even a dead man could swallow, muttering a word or two of comfort as they did so: all this, thought Alegría, was a sign that something human had survived the horrors of war. If his parched lips had not been so cracked, he would have smiled. As far as we can tell, this is what was going through his mind at the time.
He further told the orderlies who looked after him in the prisons where he was subsequently held that while he lay stretched out on the ground, refusing to listen to the calls of the earth to reclaim what belonged to it, what most tormented him was not the fear of death, but the shame of his rotting body being seen, the humiliation of his Samaritans having to smell his sickening breath, or soil their hands with the pus oozing from his wounds. When they came to bring food he would wrap himself in the blanket and not allow them near him. We might think now that this was also a way of not having to offer any explanation.
Blind Sunflowers Page 2