Tryant Banderas

by Ramon del Valle-Inclan

  The old man with the blanket gave him a lingering glance. His fat lip trembled and he let out a goatish cackle. “This bastard of a life doesn’t merit so much grief.”

  Nachito puled and whimpered. “It’s so wretched to be innocent and to die! I am the victim of appearances. A terrible thing. I’ve been wrongly arrested!”

  The old man’s mocking mien turned to an insulting scowl. “Aren’t you a revolutionary? At least you’ll come to an honorable end, even if you don’t deserve it.”

  Nachito relapsed into despair. He looked imploringly at the old man, who frowned and studied the geometric pattern of a patch on his blanket. Nachito tried to ingratiate himself with the weather-beaten veteran: chance had brought them together under the fig tree in the corner of that courtyard. “I have never supported the ideas behind the revolution. I deplore them. But I can understand you are heroes who have earned a place in history: Martyrs to an Idea. You know, my friend, Dr. Sánchez Ocaña is a brilliant speaker!”

  The student concurred, somber yet passionate. “The best brains in the republic fight on the side of the revolution.”

  Nachito fawned: “The best!”

  But the irritable old man kept stitching away at his blanket. He spoke with contempt. “It’s plain there’s nothing like a visit to Santa Mónica if you want to know what’s happening. Seems like this young pup is no revolutionary either.”

  Marco Aurelio rose to the occasion. “I should have known better. I will be one, if I ever get out of here.”

  The old man knotted off a thread and laughed his goatish laugh. “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

  Marco Aurelio looked at the old conspirator, and what he’d just said sounded so sensible to him that he wasn’t outraged in the least. He sounded perfectly reasonable. His words were irrefutable in that jail crammed with political prisoners who were proud to die.

  VI

  The sea crashed against the fortress wall and the waves chorused a hymn to the victory of death. Black birds circled in the distant blue, and the shadows of their fluttering wings flickered over the flagstones in the courtyard. Marco Aurelio felt ashamed of the cosseted life he’d led, clinging to his mother’s skirts, absurdly unaware, like a doll dropped after a tea party: he couldn’t shake the remorse he felt for his lack of political commitment. Those walls, that prison stuffed with real-life revolutionaries, filled him with sorrow and with a sense of how petty his own existence was and how infantilized he’d been by his family and his studies, with nothing to show for himself except some laurels from the lecture hall. He was filled with shame as he hung on the words of the old man who went on plying his darning needle. “Have you come to this pit for respectable reasons, or are you a spy? That needs to be cleared up. See if you can find someone who will speak up for you. You say you’re a student? Well, there’s no lack of university folk here. If you want a friend here you need to justify your own presence. We don’t trust armchair revolutionaries.”

  All color drained from the student’s face. Nachito, doggy-eyed, sniveled for mercy. “I too am horrified by Tyrant Banderas. He’s so bloodthirsty! But it wasn’t easy to break the chain. I’m hopeless when it comes to fisticuffs, and completely hopeless when it comes to earning a living. The generalito gave me a bone to gnaw on. He had fun making fun of me. Deep down, I think he may even have a certain regard for me. Yes, yes, I was wrong, I’m a shit and it was all bullshit. Yes, human dignity has its claims. Yes, yes, yes. But please consider the situation of a man who, thanks to the inheritance laws, lacks any options. My dad was an alcoholic! My mom was crazy. A real madwoman! And though the generalito made fun of me, he still liked the silly things I said. People envied me. How the mighty are fallen!”

  Marco Aurelio and the old conspirator listened silently, glancing at each other from time to time. The old man summed up: “Some people are lower than whores!”

  Nachito choked. “That’s the final straw! That’s really beyond the pale. No one’s ever said that to me. To take pleasure executing a wretched orphan is worthy of Nero. I’d be grateful to Marquito and to you, my friend, to put me out of my misery. Enough! What’s the point of living a few more hours if sheer terror drains life of all pleasure! I know what lies in store for me, the Spirits warned me—yes, believe me, the Blessed Souls are behind this fracas. Marquito, go on, stick the knife in, twist it, spare me this nerve-racking torture. I renounce life. Old man, why don’t you lance me with that darning needle? Thrust it into my heart! What do you say, friends? If you’re afraid, at least try to make my lot easier.”

  VII

  A mixture of pity and scorn marked the old man’s death mask and the student’s restless pallor as the two of them listened to the nincompoop gush pusillanimous pleas. The disgraced buffoon’s meltdown reminded them of those grotesquely pompous burials that are put on at carnival to prepare the way for Lent. Buzzards on the fig tree flapped their scabby wings.

  Book Two

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  id="heading_id_57">The Number Three
  >

  I

  Cell number three was a former stable. Lamps behind bars set in the high ceiling brought a dim light to a place that stank of alcohol, sweat, and cigarettes. On each side of the room prisoners’ hammocks hung in rows: most of them were politicals, though there was also space in that joint for the occasional gray-haired thief, bloodthirsty madman, stupid hothead, or spineless hypocrite. Since these fellows made life miserable for the politicals, Colonel Irineo Castañon, the man with the peg leg, enjoyed ditching them there. Dust-specked light slid down the dirty, whitewashed walls, desolate, arid, and a perfect match for the prisoners’ emaciated features. Shirt cuffs flapping, arm defiantly raised, vituperative Dr. Sánchez Ocaña declaimed against tyranny: “The funereal phoenix of colonial absolutism rises anew from ashes cast to the four winds, summoning the shades and spirits of our illustrious liberators. They were illustrious, and their exemplary lives will enlighten these hours that may be our last. The sea returns its heroes to the land; the voracious monsters in the blue depths are more merciful than General Santos Banderas...Our eyes—”

  He broke off. The peg leg approached along the passageway. The governor walked by, smoking his pipe. The warning tap of his limping gait faded away.

  II

  Lying in a hammock a prisoner pulled out the book he’d hidden away. From the adjacent hammock Don Roque Cepeda’s shadowy form asked, “Still reading Famous Escapes?”

  “One must study the classics.”

  “That book fascinates you. Are you dreaming of making an escape?”

  “Well, who knows?”

  “It would be good to get one over on Colonel Peg Leg!”

  The reader sighed and closed his book. “It’s not even worth thinking about. Most likely we’ll be executed this very afternoon.”

  Don Roque shook his head, burning with conviction. “I don’t know about you, but I’m sure that the revolution will triumph and I will see it triumph. Perhaps later it will cost me my life. Perhaps. There’s no escaping fate.”

  “Any idea what fate has in store for you?”

  “I’m not destined to die in Santa Mónica, I know. I’m half a century old and I’ve achieved nothing. I’ve been a dreamer all these years. I must be reborn as one who toils for the people’s cause—and dies when the people are reborn.”

  He spoke with the feverish glow of a dying man receiving final sacraments, clinging for comfort to the afterlife. His face glowed, his hand on the pillow was that of a crude wooden saint, his torso swelled out under the shroud-like blanket: resurrection was already here. The other prisoner gave him a friendly, skeptical, somewhat mocking smile. “If only I shared your faith, Don Roque! But I’m afraid they’ll execute us both in Foso-Palmitos.”

  “That will never be my fate. But stop this gloomy nonsense and go back to dreaming of escape.”

  “We’re opposites. You sit waiting for some unknown force to open these bars. I plan my escape tirelessly, certai
n all the time that the end is nigh. Which is what keeps me going. To avoid total collapse, I keep an eye open for a lucky breakthrough that of course won’t ever happen.”

  “We can defeat Destiny, if we know how to summon our spiritual energies to fight it. There are forces latent within us, powers beyond knowledge. Given your state of mind, I’d recommend reading something more spiritual than Famous Escapes. I’ll get you The Path of Theosophy. It will reveal new, unknown horizons.”

  “Like I said, we are polar opposites. These esoteric authors of yours leave me cold. I guess I don’t have a religious bent. That must be it. As far as I’m concerned, everything ends in Foso-Palmitos.”

  “But if you acquiesce in this lack of religious fever, you will prove a most mediocre revolutionary. You must believe that life is a holy seed given to us to nurture for the benefit of mankind. The revolutionary is a seer.”

  “I can accept that.”

  “And who gives us this existence with its specific burden of meaning? Who seals it with an obligation? Can we betray that with impunity? Can you really think there’s no such thing as retribution?”

  “After death?”

  “After death.”

  “I don’t try to resolve such matters.”

  “Perhaps you don’t formulate them zealously enough.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And doesn’t the enigma of life obsess you?”

  “I prefer not to think about it.”

  “And does that work?”

  “So far, so good.”

  “And now?”

  “Prisons are contagious places...If you keep talking in this vein, I’ll end up saying the Creed.”

  “If I annoy you, I will forebear.”

  “Don Roque, I find pleasure in what you say, but your bouquet holds a thorn and the thorn pricks. Why do you believe my revolutionary actions will always be mediocre? What, in your view, is the relationship between religious awareness and political ideals?”

  “My dear friend, they are one and the same!”

  “One and the same? Possibly. I don’t see it myself.”

  “Through profound contemplation you’ll grasp many truths that can’t be revealed otherwise.”

  “Each individual is a world unto himself, and we’re just very different. Don Roque, you soar to great heights; me, I cling to the ground. But when you dub me a mediocre revolutionary, you’re the one who’s lost in the dark. Religion and our political struggles have nothing in common.”

  “The intuition of eternity marks every man. Only men who light their every step with its flame shall enter the annals of history. The intuition of eternity! This is religious consciousness, this is our burden as intellectuals! Its cornerstone is the redemption of the Indian, a profoundly Christian sentiment.”

  “Liberty, equality, and fraternity were, in my book, the touchstones of the French Revolution. Don Roque, we may be good friends, but we’ll never agree on this one. Didn’t the French Revolution preach atheism? Marat, Danton, Robespierre—”

  “Profoundly religious spirits, although they may have preferred not to know.”

  “Blessed ignorance! Don Roque, grant me that and pluck out that thorn you stuck in my side.”

  “Granted. Please don’t bear me any ill will.”

  They shook hands and fell silent, each reclining in his hammock. At the back of the gallery, Dr. Sánchez Ocaña went on haranguing a group of prisoners. The man’s tropes and metaphors flowed freely, but his manner was frosty. In cell number three, reeking of sweat, booze, and tobacco, there was no mistaking that.

  III

  Don Roque Cepeda lay in his hammock surrounded by a group of adepts. Hope and optimism imbued his soft patter. He smiled a brightly seraphic smile. Don Roque was profoundly religious, his religion fashioned from mystical intuitions and Hindustani maxims. He lived in a state of red-hot bliss and his worldly pilgrimage presented him with arcane duties as inevitable as the stars’ circuits overhead. A devotee of theosophy, he sought to forge a link with universal consciousness in the profoundest depths of his soul. In a burst of divine inspiration it had come to him that humanity was answerable for all its actions in eternity. For Don Roque, men were angels in exile: guilty of a crime in heaven, they paid for their theological guilt along paths of time that were paths in this world. Every step, every minute in human life provoked eternal reverberations sealed by death in a circle of infinite responsibilities. Souls, stripped of their terrestrial wrapping, acted out their mundane past in the limpid, hermetic vision of pure consciences. And this circle of eternal contemplation—whether full of joy or of pain—was the immutable grand finale of human destiny and the redemption of the exiled angel. A sacred number sealed the pilgrimage through the clay of human forms. Each life, even the humblest, created a world, and when it passed beneath the archway of death, cyclical consciousness of this creation took possession of the soul, and the soul, imprisoned at its center, became contemplative and still. Don Roque was a man who had read widely and disconcertingly, in ways that linked theosophy with the cabala, occultism, and the philosophy of Alexandria. He was on the cusp of fifty. He had the broad forehead and gleaming pate of a Romanesque saint, to which dark black eyebrows lent an austere energy. His body disclosed a sturdy skeleton and vibrated with the fortitude of the olive and the vine. His revolutionary preaching shone with the light of early-morning walks down hallowed paths.

  Book Three

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  id="heading_id_58">Prison Pack
  >

  I

  Eight or ten prisoners were playing cards in the light from a barred window. Chucho the Hobo shuffled: he was a thug, renowned for rustling, kidnapping wealthy landowners, holding up mail coaches, wreaking havoc, and petty crimes of all sorts; also for his cursing, his gangster’s swagger, his love life, and his bloodthirsty jealousy. His lean hands shuffled slowly; there was a knife scar on his cheek and he was missing three teeth. Jailbirds of a very different stripe were also in the game: down-and-outs and doctors, guerrilla fighters and night watchmen had all gathered around to bet. Nachito Veguillas was around: he hadn’t joined in the game yet, but he was keeping an eye on the pack while he fingered the money in his pocket. A jack turned up and he exclaimed ecstatically, “Got it right again!”

  He swiveled around and smiled at the hesitant, deadpan gambler at his side: a specter in a flaccid drill jacket that hung from him as if from a meat hook. Nachito focused on the cards again. On an impulse he produced a fistful of sols and threw them down on the flea-bitten blanket that serves for green baize in a jail. “Ten sols on the fucking king.”

  Chucho the Hobo signaled. “You’ve just doubled the stake.”

  “Cut.”

  “Here we go!”

  Hobo cut the pack and the king of clubs tumbled out. Nachito was thrilled to have won and went back for more. From time to time violent arguments broke out. Nachito beamed like a saint as he kept on winning; the hesitant, jaundiced specter wore a tight smile, which soon turned to an ominous scowl. Nachito returned his stare. Now his grieving heart cried out. “What does it matter if we win or lose? Foso-Palmitos levels all.”

  The other guy disagreed, hissing biliously like a punctured bladder. “While there’s life, there’s brass. That’s all that counts. And don’t you forget it!”

  Nachito sighed. “If you’re on death row, what consolation can money bring?”

  “Well, at least gambling helps you forget...And money counts to the very end.”

  “My friend, are you also under sentence of death?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Won’t they kill us all?”

  “Who knows?”

  “It’s a ray of light! I’m betting fifty sols on the fourth cut.”

  Nachito won, and the other guy’s pallid face wrinkled up. “Are you always on a winning streak?”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  “How about a two-way five-sol stake? You play it your way.”

  “Five bets.�
��

  “Whatever.”

  “Let’s go for the jack.”

  “You seem to like that card.”

  “It’s all a crapshoot.”

  “It’s going to break us.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Chucho the Hobo shuffled slowly, then cut the deck so everyone could see; he kept his hand in the air for a moment. Out came the jack. Nachito raked in his winnings and split the column of sols into two, whispering to his yellow partner, “What did I tell you?”

  “It’s as if you can see through the cards!”

  “Now we’ll switch to number seven.”

  “What’s your system?”

  “‘Love you; love you not.’ I bet on a card I like, and then I bet on a card I don’t like. Now I’m betting on the seven. I don’t like seven.”

  “First time I’ve heard of that system: ‘Love you; Love you not’!”

  “I just invented it.”

  “We’re gonna lose.”

  “Look, it’s a seven.”

  “I’ve never seen such a run of luck!”

  “Let’s put our third bet on the queen.”

  “You like the queen?”

  “No, I’m just grateful. Look, we’ve won! Time to divide the spoils.”

  “We said five bets.”

  “We’ll lose.”

  “Or win. The ‘love you’ card is the five, now it’s the turn of the ‘love you not’ card.”

  “This is risky business! Let’s hold on to half of our kitty.”

  “No, I’m keeping nothing back. Eighty sols on the three.”

  “It’s not going to work this time.”

  “Can’t always win.”

  “You can opt out.”

  Chucho the Hobo, keeping one eye on the pack, sized up the difference between the two cards at the top. He whistled contemptuously. “Wow wee...Same difference.”

  He put the pack on the blanket and wiped his brow with a handsome silk handkerchief. He could see the gamblers were on tenterhooks. Scowling sarcastically, his scarred face all twisted up, he began to shuffle. Out came the number three. The specter at his side was shaking. “We’ve won!”