Blind Sunflowers (7 page)

Such are the advantages of near-starvation.

The next day, he woke up obsessed with the idea of writing to his brother again.

He knew how to get hold of a pencil and paper to write the letter, and somehow knew he had the time. All at once he discovered a
similarity
between writing and caresses, words and affection, memory and complicity.

In that prison of the defeated, there were two victors. They were in jail like the others, but did not have to face trial. They both wore Franco army uniforms, and made it a point always to wear their caps with the red
tassel that swung to and fro as they marched up and down. They were as skinny as the rest of the prisoners, but there was a spring to their step that immediately distinguished them. A former English teacher, a friend of Negrín’s who found the hunger and the winter in the jail unbearable, called them Tweedledum and Tweedledee, because although there were two of them, they always behaved like a single person.

In fact, they were being punished. They had committed some grave offence (which they never commented on) and were being kept on the second floor, where they exercised a certain authority over the other prisoners, and colluded in a fawning way with the jailers.

They were at the centre of a wretched system of bartering: through them the prisoners could obtain fresh carbide for their lamps, a pencil to write with, a ration of tobacco, cigarette papers, as well as an arbitrary array of favours that Tweedledum and Tweedledee doled out in return for equally wretched gifts: a wedding ring, a flint lighter, a gold filling – anything that had more value than a human life.

With Tweedledum, Juan exchanged a sock for three sheets of paper and an envelope. Tweedledee lent him a carpenter’s pencil for three days.

Despite the fact that Juan spent all day on his letter, he only managed to write one paragraph. This was because although time in jail seems
never-ending
, it is filled with inflexible periods of waiting and routines: endless queues for a ration of boiled potatoes, to go to the latrines, or to collect soup for dinner; forming up three times a day for roll call; fluctuating shifts
to carry out the cleaning of the cell, which in spite of their best efforts always remained as filthy as when they had started. In addition, that morning he had to sit with other prisoners to listen to a talk Eduardo López gave on profit accumulation and its consequences for the international proletariat. Juan liked to describe the participants in these talks (whispered with all the intense connivance of a religious sect) as the ‘educated corpses’.

Dark night crashed down around them. The air was filled with
freezing
reflections. None of them had any carbide for their lamps.

Juan was awakened when the list of names being read out in the yard came to him on the freezing air. Nobody moved, even though they all heard the names read out one by one, with no reply: Luis Fajardo, Antonio Ruíz Abellán, José Martínez López, Alberto Mínguez… The loud,
monotonous
voice was like the sound of a match being scraped against the edge of a box: it lit up reality.

After the malt they were occasionally given for breakfast, a group of prisoners came up to Juan. Eduardo asked him point-blank why he was always brought back to the second floor.

‘They haven’t finished trying me. I must be hard to classify.’

‘Couldn’t it be that you’re telling them more than you should?’

This was the last question Juan had been expecting.

‘I don’t know a thing, and nobody has asked me anything. It’s that crazy judge who is trying to please his mad wife. She wants at all cost to know what happened to her son.’

‘And what did happen to him?’

‘We shot him. He was scum. I tell them as little as possible, to see if they’ll let me live a few more days. That’s all there is to it. The day they find out I’m stringing them along, I’ll be sent to the fourth floor, don’t you worry.’

Unlike the other prisoners on the second floor, who were thin and skinny so that they did not have to bear their own weight, Eduardo López was slender by birth. His breastbone stuck out and, combined with his hook nose, it gave him the two-dimensional look of a giant ant-eater. Black as a hymnal, he went unnoticed even in the groups where they spent their time condemning those who condemned them, vanquishing the victors.

Juan considered the conversation closed. He could not understand how the sense of hierarchy of the war years could still exist. How could dead men demand an explanation from other corpses?

All trials were suspended for two days. The lad with nits shared memories and secrets with Juan. The outbreak of war had been the start of Eugenio Paz’s life. Until then, he had merely existed in Brunete,
threshing
the corn in summer, ploughing in the cold months and sowing oats before the spring rains came. He had never gone to school but could tell just by looking which hens were good layers and which were only fit for the stewpot, which ewe was going to have a difficult lambing, which greyhounds could catch baby rabbits without killing them. His mother had been made pregnant by the owner of the local inn – El Ventorro, he was called – who boasted of not having left any girl a virgin from Villaviciosa to Navalcarnero. He never allowed Eugenio to call him father.

In return, Juan tried to talk to him about his brother and their life in Miraflores, but whenever he tried to recall how it had been, the only image that came to mind was of snowstorms. Everything else had been swallowed up by oblivion.

Whenever for one reason or another the hearings presided over by Colonel Eymar were suspended, a timid air of celebration took hold of the second floor. If in addition, as on the second day now, there were no dawn lists of people who had to climb on board the lorries of death, hope seeped through the cracks of fear and spread like a balm that could ward off the cold and hunger. Almost without noticing it, slight smiles appeared on some of their faces, and their gestures were calmer, helping to soothe their panic.

It was a day to celebrate. Eugenio Paz and Juan exchanged secrets again. The lad with nits confessed he was worried. Before, he said, it had always been as stiff as a flamenco singer’s throat, but now it never even got hard. Juan thought, ‘That’s because you’re dead already,’ though he comforted him by saying it must be because he was missing his girlfriend.

The next morning, while he awaited his turn in the latrines, Juan tried not to think of anything, not to see or smell anything. The latrines were always flooded and humiliating, and consisted of a row of concrete slabs, each one with the outline of a pair of feet on it, with no walls or doors for privacy. The prisoners queued up in front of the holes, trying to hide their sense of shame with dirty jokes or sarcastic comments.

‘You’re a nurse, aren’t you?’ a sergeant asked Juan while he was waiting. He had a list in his hand. ‘Follow me.’

Juan barely had a chance to tell him he was lined up because he needed to go to the toilet: ‘Do it on yourself,’ was the other man’s only
comment as he led him out. They went through the guard-room and came to another, closely-guarded cell. The sergeant ordered them to open the door, then pushed Juan inside.

‘This fellow has to be alive tomorrow morning at six. If he dies, we’ll shoot you in his place. It’s up to you.’ With that, he slammed the door shut. The darkness inside the room made Juan’s eyes useless, although when he was shoved in he thought he had seen the outline of a body on a camp bed.

‘Who’s there?’ he asked, not daring to reach out and touch him.

‘I’m Cruz Salido. And you?’

‘Juan Senra.’

Cruz Salido had been the editor-in-chief of
El Socialista
newspaper at the end of the war. At the very last moment, he had managed to escape to France. From there he had attempted to reach Oran on a freighter that had called in at Genoa. He had been arrested by some black shirts who a month later despatched him back to Spain. After being interrogated about exile organisations, General Lister’s plans to return to Spain with an entire army corps, and a thousand other things about which he had not the remotest idea, he was tried and condemned to death.

Surrounded by all the ceremonies of death and exhaustion, Salido’s life was leaking away. He was concentrating so hard on trying to breathe with a pair of lungs eaten away by consumption that he never knew exactly what his crime was meant to be. He only knew they seemed determined he should face the firing squad alive.

‘Count de Mayalde wants me shot in public. I want you to do all you can to help me die beforehand.’

‘You can’t really ask me to do that, can you?’

Cruz Salido agreed it was not something he could ask of him. Instead, since talking wore him out, he decided to go on speaking until the end came. He remembered everyone, shedding tears for Besteiro, who was dying in Carmona jail, for Azaña – what a great man he was, silenced forever in some remote, forgotten corner of France subject to Hitler’s whims, and Machado, our Machado, silent too in Collioure…

‘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.’

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.