The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  `You are behaving abominably to tie the hands of an unarmed man. I dare you to tie my hands,' holding out my wrists.

  `I am an officer and have to obey orders.'

  `I also was an officer in the British Army, and I know about orders. But you can try to be a gentleman.'

  But that I think was beyond him. Meantime Tomas had slunk away.

  I asked Luis if I were a prisoner.

  `It is necessary for us to take you both away. I am going to lock up your house. We shall come later on to search it.'

  The two servants were ordered to go. I insisted that they must be allowed to take their personal clothing and the poor meal that was cooking on the kitchen stove. The villa was locked up, and Koestler and I were ordered to go down to the waiting motor car. Koestler was put in the front seat, his hands still tied, between the armed driver and the younger officer, with his revolver in his hand. I was placed uncomfortably in the back seat between Luis Bolin and the fat man, each with revolvers ready. And so I left the villa, perhaps for the last time, the garden drenched with the scent of jasmine, the bougainvillea hanging down in purple glory, the servants, as always when I left, grouped at the top of the steps, but this time sorrowfully.

  We drove up the lane, past my garage, the doors of which were still locked, and turned down into the Camino Nuevo. As we reached the first wide curve, the car stopped and was at once surrounded by a mob in untidy uniforms of all descriptions among which the Requete caps were the most striking. They peered into the windows, yelled `Red', brandished weapons, shook their clenched fists. No order, no discipline. Simply a herd united by ferocious glee. Against the wall to the right I saw, still as huddled bodies, but whether dead or still alive, I do not know, the men I had seen thrown there in the morning. Clearly an execution ground. Luis Bolin got out and an officer came forward, and they talked for some minutes. I expected that at any moment we were to be dragged out and shot, and I still think that that was the prepared plan, but something, possibly the presence of Tomas, had interfered with it. There could be no doubt about the intention to be rid of us, and no one except they themselves would have known what had happened. A couple of extra unidentified bodies are not noticed in the middle of wholesale executions, and in a time like that the disappearance of Koestler and myself could have been explained in many ways.

  But presently Bolin came back, and to the disappointment of the rabble the car drove off with us, down the Camino to the main street, and so along to the centre of the town.

  The car stopped at a large building between the Alameda and the market. Its doors were closed, but sentries were pacing in front. Bolin and the fat man got out; Koestler, his wrists still bound; was made to stand up outside and was photographed from every point of view. Then he was ordered back into the car. I was told to stay in the back seat, both of us still guarded by the armed driver and the younger man who kept his revolver in his hand. I lighted cigarette after cigarette, and gave them to Koestler, and also got the two guards to take one each. I suggested that it was nonsense for them to keep Koestler's wrists bound, and showed them a red, raw mark where the wire was chafing. The driver was prepared to agree, but the other said he could not disobey orders. We talked in English, Koestler, in the kindest way, continuing to say that he was sure I at least was safe. I did my best to comfort him, but I was terribly anxious. We waited and waited. The street gradually filled with Civil Guards and Requetes, and nuns and priests stalked about, all having come in with the troops or having emerged from where they had been sheltered. The shops were still shut, and I saw my own grocer standing in front of his shuttered windows, arguing excitedly with two or three Guards. He must have seen me, because the car with two guarded prisoners was conspicuous, but I took care to avoid his eye in case of compromising him....

  It was now two o'clock; we were worn out and hungry. Bolin and the fat man suddenly reappeared. We were ordered out and stood in the street for a few minutes, again under drawn revolvers. Then Koestler was marched off.

  XXXIII. The Hours by the Window

  THE chronological sequence of events during the next four months was as follows.

  I was arrested on February 9, kept for four days incommunicado in the prison of Malaga, and was transferred on February 13 to the Central Prison of Seville. I was kept in solitary confinement for three months, and during this period was on hunger strike for twenty-six days. For the first sixty-four days, I was kept incommunicado in my cell and not permitted exercise. After that I remained in solitary confinement but was permitted two hours exercise a day in the company of three other prisoners. I was exchanged against a hostage held by the Valencia Government on May 14, after ninety-five days of imprisonment.

  I was neither tortured nor beaten, but was a witness to the beating and execution of my fellow prisoners and, except for the last forty-eight hours, lived in the expectation of sharing their fate.

  I was never officially informed that sentence of death had been passed on

  me. The Franco authorities made ambiguous and contradictory statements, with the apparent intention of confusing the issue. The only authentic information that I was able to obtain later on is the account published by Dr. Marcel Junod, delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who negotiated my exchange, and who had been officially informed that I had been sentenced to death by General Franco.' On the other hand, a few days before the exchange was agreed upon, the British Consul in Seville was allowed to visit me in prison and told me that the Foreign Office had asked General Franco for an assurance that I would not be shot, which the latter had refused on the grounds that my case was still sub judice. I was only interrogated once, immediately before my release, on the capital charge of `complicity in a military rebellion', but that interrogation was obviously a formality. '

  The only direct communication regarding my fate that I received while actually in prison, reached me on the eleventh day after my arrest. On February 19, three officers of the Phalange, one of them a young woman, visited my cell, identifying themselves as members of General Franco's Press and Propaganda Department. They informed me that I was or would be (the alternative was left in suspense) sentenced to death for espionage, that General Franco might, however, commute my sentence to life imprisonment as an act of clemency. This was followed by an invitation to make a statement concerning my feelings towards General Franco. In momentary weakness I dictated a statement which said that I believed General Franco to be a man of humanitarian outlook whom I could trust implicitly; but when it came to signing it, I had sufficiently recovered to cross the statement out and substitute another to the effect that if General Franco granted a commutation of the sentence I would assume that he was acting from political considerations, and that I would continue to believe in a Socialist conception of the future of humanity.' According to yet another version which Burgos gave out (either to the News Chronicle or to a British parliamentary delegation), sentence of death for espionage had already been passed by court­martial in Malaga before I was transferred to Seville.

  I have put these contradictory versions down for the record although they were mostly unknown to me at the time; if I had known the details they would only have confirmed me in my expectation that some night or other I would be taken out of my cell and stood against the cemetery wall. During the first few days after the fall of Malaga, prisoners in that town were taken out in batches and shot at any hour of the day; later on in Seville, things settled down to a more orderly routine, and executions were carried out three or four times a week between midnight and 2 a.m. During March, altogether forty-five men from our prison were shot. During the first thirteen days of April, there were no executions, but during the next six nights, between Tuesday, April 13 and Monday the 19th, fifty men were executed, the greatest number in any single night being seventeen (on April 13). After that I lost count as I had worked out a technique of sleeping through the critical hours.

  The proceedings were as a rule smooth and subdued. The victims
were not forewarned, and mostly too dazed or proud to make a scene when they were led out of their cells by the guards, accompanied by the priest, to the waiting lorry. A few of them sang, some wept, muffled cries of 'Madre' and `socorro' were frequent.

  Sometimes I saw the whole procession--the priest, the guards and the victim--quickly pass in front of my spyhole, but mostly I only heard them, ear pressed against the cell door. Sometimes the victims were fetched from the mass detention cells on the second floor, or from a different wing; sometimes from among the incommunicados of the death row where I was housed; it was impossible to discover the system. On one night, Thursday, April 15, the inmates of cells 39, 41 and 42 on my left and right were all marched off, with only my own cell No. 40 spared, after the warder had put his key, no doubt, by mistake, into my own lock, and then withdrawn it.

  Most of the victims were recently captured militiamen on whom a membership card of the Anarchist or Communist Party or Trade Union, or some other compromising document had been found. They had appeared for a few minutes before a court martial, and had then been taken back to prison before sentence was passed. The sentence was mostly death by shooting. This was in a number of cases commuted to long-term imprisonment, in which case the prisoner was officially informed, and transferred to a penitentiary. If, on the other hand, the sentence was confirmed, the prisoner only learnt it when they came to fetch him at night. Sometimes his uncertainty lasted several weeks or months. The record was four and a half months, held by a militia Captain.

  Another form of execution which Franco had revived, as Hitler had revived the Axe, was the vile garotte, the strangling machine familiar from Goya's drawings. The victim, tied to a post in a sitting position, was slowly choked to death between an iron collar round his throat and a vice being turned through the post against the back of his neck. The man who in Dialogue with Death is called `The Consumptive' was executed by this method a few days after I was released. He was one of the three men with whom I took my exercise, the former leader of a group of vigilantes in Madrid, Garcia Attadel. I know of no other case of execution by the vile garotte. It was Garcia who told me that the garotte had been revived, but he pretended not to believe that it was actually used.

  Nobody was tortured or beaten within the prison of Seville during my stay: these practices were confined to police stations and Phalange barracks. The guards were on the whole humane, the food adequate and, except for those of us who were kept incommunicado, the prisoners were permitted during most of the day to take exercise and play games in the open patio.

  This, I believe, is about all that I need to repeat here regarding conditions and events of the period covered by Dialoque with Death, and I can now proceed to those internal developments which I have not discussed in the earlier book.

  Firstly, during the whole period of solitary confinement in Seville (though not during the previous four days in the prison of Malaga), the anxiety-neurosis and the accompanying feeling of guilt were suspended. I was, of course, often apprehensive and fearful, but it was a rational and, as it were, healthy fear, not the obsessional and morbid variety. I slept well, except on the nights when I listened to my comrades being led to execution, and even on these nights I found sleep later on. I had consistently pleasant dreams, often of Grecian landscapes and beautiful but sexless women, although under normal conditions my dreams range from the unpleasant to the nightmarish. I had hours of acute despair, but these were hours, and in between were entire days of a newly discovered peace and happiness.

  This paradox may perhaps be explained as the effect of a satisfied craving for punishment. The neurotic type of anxiety is the irrational anticipation of an unknown punishment for an unknown crime. Now retribution had come in a concrete, tangible form for a concrete tangible offence; the cards were on the table. Whether I was technically guilty of espionage or any other crime before the law was beside the point; I had gained entry to the enemy camp through deception, and I had done everything in my power to damage their cause. My condition was thus a logical consequence of a consciously taken risk, the whole situation was clean, proper and equitable.

  Two years after Spain, I was interned for six months in a French concentration camp, and another year later detained for several weeks in an English prison. These later imprisonments involved no danger of life, and regarding privileges and physical comfort, conditions were less harsh than in Seville. Yet on these later occasions I knew that I was innocent and that my confinement was stupid and unjust; this knowledge made these relatively comfortable detentions mentally unbearable and spiritually sterile. In Le Vernet and in Pentonville I knew that I would eventually get out and resume life. In cell No. 40 in Seville the best I could hope for was commutation of the death sentence, and an amnesty after three or five years in a penitentiary; yet I was much happier and at peace with the world and myself in cell No. 40. I am stressing this contrast because it seems to indicate that the craving for justice is more than a product of rational considerations; that it is rooted in layers of the psyche which a pragmatic or hedonistic psychology cannot penetrate.

  It could not even be said, I mused, while pacing up and down cell No. 40, that the punishment was out of proportion to the offence. A civil war, like a revolution, applies harsher standards than international law. The deception I had used in Lisbon had been a particularly infamous one. In L'Espagne Ensanglantee I had accused the opponent of committing certain atrocities though I doubted the authenticity of the documentation that I used; it seemed quite proper that I should now be called to verify the missing evidence through first-hand experience. The chapter in the book on General Queipo de Llano, based on a fraudulently obtained interview, was a portrait drawn with a poisoned pen. Now it formed part of the dossier against me on General Queipo de Llano's desk, on whose jurisdiction my fate depended. There was in all this a neat, symmetrical design. A design, however, does not necessarily presuppose a designer. The symmetry of crystals is the product of electro-chemical forces. Nature favours symmetry, tends organically towards symmetry. Justice is a concept of ethical symmetry, and therefore an essentially natural concept--like the design of a crystal.

  Thus justice began to assume in my musings a new, double significance as a biological need and as an ethical absolute based on the concept of symmetry. It was independent of utilitarian considerations, but equally independent of any theological assumptions. The notion of `divine justice' appeared as a lamentable caricature of it, with its dangling carrot and its whip--the ultimate, unconscious source of all angst. I congratulated myself on the disappearance of anxiety, and attributed it to this newly discovered concept of justice as an inherent dimension of the space-time continuum. Some die with their boots clean, some with their minds clean; I did not want any mystic mud splashed over the mind's polish. The memory of the house on the lake, and of Maria's end was not a tempting one. Even less tempting was the thought of Dostoievsky's sudden conversion in front of the firing squad. That classic episode came, of course, often to my mind; I regarded it as an example of the cowardly surrender of the intellect, not to divine grace but to the trembling fear of the flesh, and compared my own reactions to it. My prison diary in Dialogue with Death contains this half-serious prayer:

  `Grant me, 0 Lord, the right to continued discontent, to curse my work, not to answer letters, and to be a trial to my friends. Am I to swear to grow a better man if this cup is let to pass from me? We both of us know, Lord, that such vows, extracted under duress, are never kept. Do not blackmail me, Lord God, and do not try to make a saint of me; Amen.'

  The reflections that I have put down so far were all still on the rational level; they form only one aspect of the process under discussion, and its most superficial one. But as we proceed to others in an inward direction, they will become more embarrassing and more difficult to put into words. They will also contradict each other--for we are moving here through strata that are held together by the cement of contradiction.

  I shall now speak of a series of expe
riences of a different type. These were caused by certain incidents which I must first relate.

  On the day when Sir Peter and I were arrested, there had been three occasions when I believed that my execution was imminent. The first time in the sala of the Villa Santa Lucia, with three guns digging into my ribs, when Bolin had called for a rope in such a threatening voice that I thought he needed it to hang me (though he only wanted it to tie my hands); the second time, when the car had stopped on the improvised execution ground on the Camino Nuevo; the third time, a few hours later when, after Bolin had told me that I would be shot at night, they took me out of the police station at nightfall and put me into a lorry, with five men behind me, their rifles across their knees; so that I thought we were driving to the cemetery, whereas we only drove to the prison.

  On all three occasions I had benefited from the well known phenomenon of a split consciousness, a dream-like, dazed self-estrangement which separated the conscious self from the acting self-the former becoming a detached observer, the latter an automaton, while the air hums in one's ears as in the hollow of a seashell. It is not bad at all; the unpleasant part is the subsequent reunion of the split halves, bringing the full impact of reality in its wake. Much worse was another episode on the same day: being photographed for the rogues' gallery against a wall in the street, hands tied, in the midst of a hostile crowd. This time the anaesthetic of self-estrangement did not get to work; instead, a painful childhood memory was suddenly revived. I felt as helpless as at the age of five when, in a doctor's surgery, I was without preliminary warning tied with leather straps to the operating chair, then held down and gagged by way of preparation for a tonsillectomy. I have described this scene in Arrow in the Blue, and have explained how the sensation of utter helplessness and abandonment to a hostile, malign power, had filled me with a kind of cosmic terror. It had been my first conscious acquaintance with `Ahor', and a main cause of the anxiety-neurosis.