‘We’re an accursed people, don’t you think?’
‘No, I don’t think so. That would be to shift the blame onto others.’
Panting, gasping for breath, falling silent, the editor-in-chief told Juan what had happened to all his friends, the people he had defended in the columns of his newspaper, but was too much of a professional journalist to tell his own story. He went on and on with an interminable description of the war and its devastation, and yet by the end he was still breathing. He was freezing, but would not allow Juan to warm him with his body. His back was raw flesh, but he did not want Juan to help him change position. He choked on all his memories, but all he wanted to do was remember. By first light, death was gnawing at his words, and yet he kept on talking and only allowed himself respite in order to draw breath for a voice that was ever fainter, ever more vapour-like.
He died trying to recapture a vague memory.
When the cell door opened and they found Cruz Salido had already died, the sergeant decided to take him out and shoot him anyway. The corporal beat Juan three times with his rifle butt, then returned him yet again to the second floor.
Juan told Eduardo López what had happened, and claimed it was the pain from the beating that brought sudden tears to his eyes. In the cell of the defeated you could howl with pain from being beaten, but could never be seen to grieve.
Thinking it might comfort him, he sought out a corner where he could go on writing.
‘Who are you writing to?’ the lad with nits asked. ‘To your brother?’
‘Towards my brother, which isn’t the same.’
‘You talk really strange! I’m not surprised they want to shoot you.’
…I’m still alive. Several days have gone by, but that’s because everything is so difficult here. What with finding a pencil and paper, and the dazed state I’m in most of the time, the hours go by without my realising it. It’s as though I don’t dare take advantage of them because they don’t really belong to me any more.
I dream all the time without knowing if I’m asleep, and without wishing to, I imagine a world where everyone speaks a foreign language I can’t understand, although I don’t feel like a stranger. When I learn it, I’ll tell you the language they speak in the world of my dreams. The air is the same colour as the summer evening sky in Miraflores, although there are no mountains and the landscape fades into a horizon that is not far off, but which I fear I cannot reach…
The routine in the prison might have been terminal, but it was still a routine. This inertia produced different groups among the prisoners, disturbed only by their steadily diminishing numbers as some of their members were shot, and these loyalties continued as if they all had a future.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee were the only ones permitted to go up onto the roof of the building. They went there whenever they had to beat the woollen mattresses the prison officers slept on. Once a month they were given ash flails about two yards long, bent at right angles at one end. They used these to pound the woollen insides of the mattresses until they were as light and fluffy as whisked egg whites.
Once they were up on the flat roof, their main problem was not the nostalgia they felt for the horizon they could glimpse beyond the buildings of Madrid, nor even for the sky, stretched out over them like a symbol of the past, but how they could attract the famished pigeons fluttering above the city in a desperate search for scraps of food impossible to find in this post-war winter. The two men needed to collect whatever they could to lure the birds down: breadcrumbs, bits of holy wafer that communicants kept for them after mass, cockroaches, bedbugs, chicory grounds, even slices of potato peel that one or other of the prisoners was willing to barter for something even more essential than food.
When the pigeons flew down to inspect these offerings, Tweedledum and Tweedledee would stand stock still until they were sure that the birds’ hunger had overcome their fear and they started to peck at the bait strewn all over the floor. Then the two men would simultaneously bring their flails down on the birds’ heads, leaving them lying flat on their backs with their feet curled across their breasts, as though trying to protect themselves from the sky falling in.
After that, the two men would eat one of the pigeons, and exchange the other with the guards for all the items they could then use as barter with the prisoners. This was how Tweedledum and Tweedledee were able to supply Juan Senra with more sheets of paper in exchange for his belt, so that he could continue writing to his brother.
I’m still alive. I don’t want to fill in time or talk about what’s going on around me, but I find it harder and harder to rely on my memory. To be able to think these things is the privilege of the condemned man, the privilege of the slave.
At this point an argument broke out in the cell. A squad of guards burst in. They threatened the prisoners, forcing them to stand facing the wall with their arms in the air for more than two seemingly endless hours. The two men who had been arguing, an Aragonese trade-unionist and an anarchist from Cadiz, were beaten until they had long since lost their convictions, and their ideas lay splattered all over the floor. Juan spent most of the time he was forced to stand trying to imagine what reasons the chaplain would dream up to censor his letter this time.
By now, some of the prisoners had been allowed visits. Those family members who had connections with the Church, Francoist officers or Falange party officials, were given permission to visit relatives in jail who were not facing serious charges. They brought news which helped relieve the silence in the cells. Hitler had failed in the Battle of Britain, resistance groups were being organised in several northern regions of Spain; there were even rumours that the United States was going to invade the south of the Iberian peninsula. Everyone was longing for time to go by. They learned that by counting the seconds, after sixty another whole minute had passed. But each day still seemed an eternity.
Amongst the prisoners was one prematurely old, silent man who avoided all contact with the others even at night, when everyone else huddled close together for warmth. The others called him the Babe, because they did not know his name. He bore the cold, the hunger, and his companions’ mistrust with the same equanimity. He had a long scar on his forehead that parted his hair in two. The only memorable things about his gloomy face were his silence and his enormous eyes, which never seemed to blink, as though he was in a state of perpetual amazement.
He never spoke. He listened to the voices out in the yard or on other floors, to the sounds floating through the air, but appeared unaware of anything said by those with whom he was sharing his captivity. His name was Carlos Alegría. He was an acting captain in the rebel army. He was from a family of wealthy farmers who lived in a village near Burgos. On 18 July 1936 he had been about to board a train home from Salamanca, where he was an assistant in the Faculty of Roman Law, when he heard rumours that the army in North Africa had risen against the government. ‘Defend what is yours,’ he thought, and looked for a way to join the insurgents. Thanks to his university background, he was immediately appointed to the rank of lieutenant. He was no hero, and never once experienced the terrors of war. He spent the whole time in the barracks supplying stores and equipment to the troops. The most urgent orders he ever gave referred to his stocks, and were given to greedy suppliers whose allegiance to the nationalist cause he always doubted. After three years of devoted service, he had risen to the rank of quartermaster captain.
A few hours before Colonel Casado laid down his weapons and surrendered to the rebel army, Alegría deserted. The war was about to end, and yet he went over to the side of the defeated, unarmed and without equipment. None of the Republicans believed him, and nobody protected him when Franco’s troops entered Madrid. He was arrested, tried and shot at dawn one morning, along with dozens of other poor souls who had no more reason to be the first to die than the fact that they had been taken prisoner first.
The haste to kill means that death is often untidy. A bullet creased Alegría’s skull, but did not sma
sh it. The impact knocked him unconscious, and the need to save ammunition meant his executioners decided not to waste an extra bullet on a lifeless victim whose face was covered with blood. He was buried hurriedly in a mass grave along with all the others, and had a few spadefuls of earth thrown on his corpse.
When he came round, he was half-buried among a chaotic jumble of corpses that still smelled of what they had once been: urine, and everything else that fear produces. The bodies were heaped up in such a way there were pockets of air that he was the only one to breathe – a parting gift from his adversaries. Unaware of what time of day it was, and with only the searing pain in his head as proof that he was still alive, he managed to push the bodies on top of him aside, and dig through the layer of earth covering them. He found that he was in a flat, open expanse of ground (he learned later that this was Arganda del Rey), submerged in the silence and dark chill of a spring that was an uninvited visitor to this makeshift cemetery.
He tried to find help, but all those who saw this blood-stained man with a huge, gaping wound on his head slipped the bolts of their houses in terror. Nobody came to his aid, nobody lent him a shirt to cover the stains on the one he was wearing, nobody fed him or showed him the way back to his parents’ home.
At the end of April, he was arrested again in Somosierra and sent to the barracks at Conde Duque, where he set out once more on the path towards death. When the curt prison officials asked for his details, he always replied the same thing: ‘My name is Carlos Alegría, I was born on 18 April 1939 in a mass grave at Arganda, and I have never won a war.’
That was why he was called the newborn Babe.
Juan felt some sympathy for this solitary, taciturn man. He was attracted by the fact that he always seemed absent – something which gave the lie to the general belief that he had been put among the Republican prisoners as an informer. At nightfall on one of the days when there was no list of names of prisoners for execution, he came over to where Juan was fitfully dozing and whispered in his ear: ‘You and I are living on borrowed time. We have to make sure we owe no one anything.’ With that, he moved off and pushed his way to the bars at the front of the cell. He began to shout: ‘Guard! Guard!’ in a tone of voice that was both despairing and assertive.
All the other prisoners froze in the position the shouts had surprised them in. The Babe beat his aluminium bowl on the cell bars and went on shouting with an energy nobody would have believed possible in this man already tattooed by death. Eventually, two soldiers came up and tried to beat him back from the bars with their rifle butts. But Alegría’s ability to feel pain had been exhausted in front of a hastily assembled firing squad, and he seemed unaffected by the blows on his arms.
In the struggle, he succeeded in grabbing hold of one of the rifles. With a sudden burst of energy, he managed to yank it from the man beating him with it. On one side of the bars stood an armed soldier and an unarmed one. On the other, a collective silence gathered intently behind the Babe, who had the gun trained on the guards.
The silence went beyond the bars, the cell, the early darkness and the panting of the avenger. Not even the soldier made any noise as he dropped his Mauser on the ground in response to an imperious gesture from this madman who had quickly and professionally loaded a bullet in the rifle chamber. Then Alegría slowly turned the barrel on himself, put the tip under his chin, and shouted out that he had never killed anyone and yet here he was, about to die a second time. He pulled the trigger, and the silence shattered. He had paid his debt.
Shouts, whistles, barked orders and bewilderment brought an end to a day which until that moment had seen no deaths. The army chaplain gave extreme unction to a soul smashed into a thousand pieces.
The next day there were lists read out in the yard, and trucks full of men going quietly to their deaths from the fourth floor. But no one was called to appear before Colonel Eymar in his courtroom. Juan still could not get the image of the Babe out of his mind. His own acceptance of death seemed to him even more cowardly.
Death? Why death? So far nobody had accused him of anything specific apart from the fact that he had lived in Madrid during the war. Nobody knew he had come back to the city from Elda, sent by Fernando Claudín to try to organise an assassination attempt on Colonel Casado.
He spent time he did not have getting to know Casado’s routine. He carefully noted down what time he came and went from military headquarters, where he lived, what route he usually took…
Just when everything was ready, Madrid surrendered to General Franco’s troops. Juan had not been able to delay the defeat by a single day.
But only Togliatti and Claudín were aware of this, and nobody was going to ask them anything. Juan could still pass for a simple prison orderly. He was too young and unknown to be seen as bearing any responsibility for the war. This was some consolation to him. He could simply be one more on the side of the defeated, an unfortunate loser who had the bad luck to be in Madrid on 18 July 1936.
Perhaps he would be able to hide Juan Senra’s defeat.
Juan heard his name echoing through the cavern of the corridor outside the cell. The echo reached the prisoners before the original cry, and by the time Sergeant Edelmiro called out again from the barred door, everyone was staring at him in their quiet, unmoving, but intrigued way. Death had its allotted times, and this was not one of them.
Juan kept hold of his bowl and raised his hand. An imperious ‘Come here!’ encouraged the different groups to give way so that he could reach the cell door. Preceded by Sergeant Edelmiro and flanked by two worn, frail-looking soldiers, he was led to a windowless room down in the basement next to the kitchens.
In the room were Colonel Eymar and the old woman in the astrakhan coat. She was still clutching her bag as though her hands were the claws of a bird of prey. The two of them were sitting on a low brick ledge, and when she made an effort to stand up, the colonel quickly flicked a hand to stop her.
The sergeant and two soldiers were waiting for further orders from their superior officer, but all he did was wave limply at them.
‘Do you want to be left on your own with the prisoner, colonel sir?’ the sergeant asked in surprise.
This time the colonel’s vague arm-waving became more emphatic, and so with an ‘At your orders, colonel sir’, the sergeant left the room, followed by the other two. They did not close the door however, and remained close enough not to hear what was going on but to be able to see inside the room.
What they saw was that the colonel and his wife were still seated opposite Juan Senra, who stood without moving, waiting for someone to explain what was going on.
Then they saw the old lady in astrakhan slowly take a photograph out of her bag. She showed it to the prisoner, who nodded his head.
But Sergeant Edelmiro could not hear Juan Senra tell Miguel Eymar’s parents what a straightforward, likeable person their son was. What an indomitable spirit he had, and the courage he had shown in refusing to leave Madrid when everything was against him. He could not hear the stories Juan Senra invented for this mother, whose features lit up as the fossils of his lies took the place of the terrible facts.
Nor could he sense – war does not permit such sensitivity for details – how Juan Senra’s instinct for survival gradually gave way to compassion for a woman driven mad by a grief he could recognise in the same way one instinctively recognises a death rattle.
The sergeant did see her get up and walk over to the prisoner Senra who, with unsuspected eloquence, talked and talked in response to short, pleading entreaties from the colonel’s wife. To his astonishment, he also saw how she took him by the arm and coaxed him like a mother across to the ledge, where she urged him to sit down next to the dumbfounded colonel. The ledge was to the right of the door, so Sergeant Edelmiro had only a restricted view of all this. At that point, one of the soldiers asked permission to roll a cigarette, and the three witnesses’ attention wavered from what was going on, although none of them questioned what their su
perior officer might be up to.
When Juan was taken back to the second-floor cell, the woman’s last words were still ringing in his ears, ‘I’ll bring you a jersey, it’s very cold in here,’ as well as the ‘Violeta, please’ from the avenging colonel.
He hardly dared tell anyone what was going on, and apart from Eduardo López, nobody asked him anything. It was only the kind of endogamy that exists in political militancy that made him feel obliged to tell the commissar the truth. López could hardly believe his ears.
Juan was on the point of trying to describe an unfathomable language, but something told him that for López a spade was a spade.
The next day was Sunday. All the prisoners were forced to attend mass, which the chaplain said inside their cell. In his fierce, patriotic homily he talked about the Babe. With all the fury of an archangel, he condemned his suicide, but did not mention any other deaths. The prisoners listened in absolute silence. Those of them with a more highly-developed survival instinct went up to receive Communion. One of them was the boy with nits. When they returned to their places, the communicants covered their faces with their hands, more to hide their feelings of shame than out of any religious conviction.
When Juan asked the boy if he thought that by taking Communion he could change his destiny, the lad said perhaps, but that anyway the wafer was something to eat, and he was always starving.
The chaplain’s sermon led Juan to finish his letter as quickly as possible. There was something in the nature of time passing so slowly which seemed to precipitate and accelerate events, even though every second dragged by with such exasperating slowness.
Blind Sunflowers Page 7