Blind Sunflowers Page 6

  ‘So you met Miguel Eymar in Porlier jail…’ He made as though to search for something among his papers while waiting for the affirmative answer, colonel sir. ‘And why do you remember him in particular among all the other prisoners?’

  ‘Because he was very good at doing conjuring tricks.’

  ‘Colonel sir!’ boomed Rioboo.

  Colonel sir. But at that precise moment the colonel’s eyes were searching out somebody else at the far side of the room, and the look on his face was as helpless as that of an abandoned puppy. He raised his eyebrows to no one in particular, then again turned his troubled gaze on Juan Senra.

  ‘Why was he in jail?’

  Juan had known the moment of truth would arrive, and that he would have to answer precisely this question. He felt very weak. It was hard to think straight and ignore his aching body. He knew Miguel Eymar had been arrested for crimes that had nothing to do with the war.

  The charges against Eymar were for profiteering from the supply of contaminated medicines that had caused several deaths, armed robbery from military food stores, illegal trafficking of petrol and fuel, and other offences made possible by the chaos of war in a city like Madrid, where all the attention was focused on its defences.

  Youngsters were dying in the trenches. Shells were raining down on the city suburbs, while the fear of losing the war and the need to hide that fear were the chief concern of so-called authority.

  Miguel Eymar had also committed murder.

  ‘Because he belonged to the fifth column,’ lied Juan Senra. ‘Colonel sir.’

  ‘Because he was a hero, you bastard, because he was a hero!’ shrieked Rioboo, hoping to win the tribunal president’s nod of approval. Juan was taken aback at the way the lieutenant’s face had changed. When he was shouting at him, his eyes became bloodshot, but then in a matter of seconds, as he looked askance at Colonel Eymar seeking his approval, his anger dissolved into a look of unctuous submission. But on this occasion, a slight, almost pontifical movement of the hand protruding from its sleeve cut short his subordinate’s effusive gesture. At the same time, the colonel’s eyes were once more seeking someone else’s face at the far end of the room, and stayed gazing there for some time. The colonel’s nostrils palpitated as he breathed in and out. Juan could see that the hairs sticking out of them were coated in a thick, sticky substance. Could he be crying?

  ‘And is that why you killed him?’ the colonel asked at length. As if speaking to no one in particular, Juan Senra said he had only been a member of the prison nursing corps. He had not arrested Miguel Eymar, had not judged him, and above all had nothing to do with his death, colonel sir.

  ‘I did talk to him quite often though,’ he added.

  This was not true. Juan had a clear memory of who Miguel Eymar was because it was one of those cases that not even the horrors of war could erase. He had murdered a shepherd in the village of Fuencarral in order to steal his lambs and sell them on the black market. But the shepherd’s son, who was little more than a boy, had jabbed his pitchfork into Eymar’s stomach, and almost killed him. Juan Senra had attended him after he had been operated on with all the skill that war gives people who do not want to lose any soldiers. While he was recovering, Miguel Eymar offered to talk if it would save his life. He told them all he knew about the criminal gangs in Madrid, including the one he led, and also gave them information that allowed them to arrest many fifth-columnists operating inside the besieged city. After that, they shot him anyway.

  ‘What did you talk about?’ The question came from the old lady in the threadbare astrakhan coat at the back of the room. Juan turned and saw her approaching him slowly, staring straight at him. She was clutching the bag as if it were a defenceless object she had to protect.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Violeta!’ the colonel pleaded. But she insisted.

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  Juan Senra turned towards the president of the tribunal for permission to speak, and waited for a gesture authorising him to do so. The colonel waved his hand briefly. Juan was being tried for treason, but when confronted by the pain of a murderer’s mother, he found himself almost taking her side.

  ‘I don’t know, a bit of everything,’ he said. ‘About his childhood, his parents… things about the jail. Sometimes we talked about the war.’ These vague generalities led Juan into a long and complicated web of deceit born of this moment of pity, a prolonged lie that quickly became his way of clinging to life.

  That shadowy woman, silhouetted against the light filtering in through the window, and still clutching her bag as if to stop it flying away, asked him questions with a severity that was completely unlike the peremptory curtness the judges displayed. She was not there to condemn or acquit, simply to distinguish between true and false. And perhaps to learn. The questions emerged from her wan, unmoving lips without any trace of anguish or even desire to hear the answers.

  Her harsh features and prematurely white hair robbed her of anything resembling a mother’s tenderness. Dressed in black, she looked like a parody of grief posing for the portrait of an avenging angel. And yet there was something about the intensity of her gaze, her lack of interest in anything apart from her son’s memory, the obstinate way that she pursued a lie, that made her seem almost exactly like a grief-stricken mother.

  ‘He had a burn that he got from a pan of boiling oil when he was a child. Where was it?’

  ‘On the inside of his right thigh. I know because I had to inject him with painkillers after the operation.’

  ‘What operation?’

  Juan replaced the shepherd’s son’s pitchfork with peritonitis or something similar. By the time he had reached Porlier, Eymar had been well on the way to recovery. Once again, hoping to cast the right spell, Juan Senra sought the magic formula:

  ‘He was a good patient.’

  And sesame! The cave opened. The shadowy woman silhouetted against the daylight like an icon of vengeance stared at him in disbelief. Everyone in the room was silent as she came to a halt between Juan and the albino clerk. When Colonel Eymar tried weakly to protest, with his ‘For goodness’ sake’, his ‘Violeta, please!’ she ignored him: she was far too accustomed to his bogus displays of authority. She wanted to hear about her son, because all she knew was that his name was third on a list of prisoners shot after the most summary of trials. Now she could find out exactly what had happened, and she would probably have satisfied her thirst for all the details there and then, had not a strange guttural cry that came out like a sound that does not exist in Spanish but belongs to the language of animals in pain, prevented her from asking any more questions.

  She did not come up to Juan, or stretch out her arms towards him, but the two of them were suddenly all alone in the room, without judges or assistants, with no albino clerk, no guards. The light shone full on her face now, but still she remained shadowy. Eventually, she managed to pronounce the words: ‘He was my son.’

  The colonel clambered down from the platform and skipped incongruously over to his wife’s side. They were more or less the same height, but somehow she seemed to have more substance. Colonel Eymar did his best to seem firm and in control. ‘That’s enough for today.’

  Second Lieutenant Rioboo gave the order for the prisoner to be taken away, and the two lackadaisical guards who had brought him there brutally now marshalled him out. They threw him into the cell where all those already condemned to death by Colonel Eymar were waiting. Like everyone else, Juan said nothing.

  Silence is a space, a cave where we can seek refuge but where we are never really safe. Silence does not end, it’s broken; its basic quality is fragility, and the subtle membrane around it is transparent: everyone can see through it. Juan had to bear the looks of all the others in the second-floor cell when to his great surprise he was returned to the place where death still required a rubber stamp.

  However, due to the amount of work the victors had to get through that day, he was returned to the cell too late to eat.
He picked up his bowl – or the bowl of someone who had been taken to the fourth floor to die – and curled up by the dark wall with his hunger. He tried to cope with his confusion by imagining he was a single thing – anything, but just one thing: an animal, water, a stone, earth, a worm, a teardrop, a coward, a tree, a hero… and fell asleep without having to try to find the reason why he was still alive. Everybody respected his silence. Nobody asked him anything. He conjured up impossible ideas and thought of smells and sounds while another part of his mind was dreaming of shapes and colours. He considered all these sensations as a way of learning how not to be alive. He tried to imagine what language the dead use.

  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.

  My dear brother Luis,

  I wrote you a letter saying goodbye, and now I’m glad they didn’t let me send it because perhaps that meant my moment had not yet come. As long as I can still write to you, that means I’m alive. I’ve been tried, but not yet sentenced. I’m detained on the border.

  I know that when I can no longer write to you we’ll both be alone, even though Miraflores is a small place and all the neighbours are relatives of one kind or other. I’m sure they’ll give you a hand. Try to find a job, but not in the sawmill, because your lungs would not withstand all the dust floating in the air. Perhaps Uncle Luis could take you on in the bar. I’m really sorry I won’t be able to pay for your studies, but if some day you succeed in selling our parents’ land, make sure you spend all the money on your education. The teacher Don Julio can help you in this.

  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 hi
de 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…