THE COFFIN

Bang, bang, bang, the hammer blows echoed inside the prison, bang, bang, bang, they echoed and crept desperately along the rough stones, trying to find their freedom.

         The walls were high. The first one encircled all the prison buildings like an all-encompassing, rigid girdle. Five meters away from it, the second wall ran parallel to the previous one, forming a trench. The walkway of packed down, colorless dirt that separated the stone walls was called the compound. It was completely bare. Nothing grew in that deserted gray space where only armed civil guards circulated on their watches. Locked iron doors were the way out of the oppression that everything was wrapped in.

         Where were those hammering sounds that echoed in the arid solitude of the compound coming from? From a high point looking down, only a few human figures were visible. They were bent over a wooden box. From the box, the only object visible in that desolate place, come the echoes of the blows it’s receiving, and they climb like hoarse moans along the stones of the walls. At ground level there’s a man, dressed in the rough brown suit the inmates wear. He’s pounding enormous nails around the edge of the box, while the prison director and an employee are supervising. Close up, the large box can be identified as a rough pine coffin. Inside it is the cadaver of a prisoner who’s gone through the first door of the compound for the last time, but before he goes through the second door, where he can reach the space of freedom, they nail down his coffin. The director has verified that he was really dead; the doctor confirmed his death. They don’t trust the eyewitness statements. The regulation is very strict. That enormous doorway must never be traversed by any prisoner. There nobody reaches freedom, not even after death. The nails that seal the coffin are testimony to the fact that a dead prisoner is inside, and there’s no hope of resurrection.

         The pounding of the hammer spreads along the cold of the walls. The cadaver imprisoned there, as cold and lifeless as the stones, doesn’t feel how the nails are penetrating the wood a few centimeters from his body. For the director who watches the scene with the expression of a leech, the pounding noises are boring. He’s anxious for the job to be over and the box to be carried out so he can go smoke a Chesterfield. Later, he’ll have to go with his wife to mass, before going for a stroll along the promenade, where his “better half” wants to show off a new Astrakhan fur coat, before heading to have coffee at the Royal Café.

         The carpenter who’s pounding on the coffin has beads of sweat on his forehead even though the afternoon is chilly. He’s already lost track of how many coffins he’s had to nail shut. Also the ones he’s had to make in the carpentry shop. The cabinetmakers, who thought they were artists, did the important work, furniture of precious wood. The apprentices like him got the simple jobs like the boxes for the dead, rough and scorned like the bodies that were going to go into them. Rough wood, unsanded and unvarnished, was the coffin material. He made them in a jiffy. He had lots of practice.

         He’d never thought he’d end up doing carpentry. When he entered the prison, because he’d studied some, his normal destiny should have been the school. But the teacher was a fascist, like most of the officials who were employed there, and he knew he was going to have a lot of problems helping out in the school. Education there was a farce and, refusing to collaborate with the teacher, he’d frequently end up in the punishment cell. He’d preferred to avoid the torture and look for something that required less involvement. He managed to get the master carpenter, an anarchist like himself, to admit him and recommend him for the shop. In his application to the director, before the part about “hoping to be granted this favor from his great generosity of spirit, may God grant him a long life,” he stated his liking for the trade and explained how manual work would calm his nerves – all because he wanted to escape the continuous contact with the Francoist teacher and being forced to recommend books of regime propaganda to the prisoners. In truth, the director cared little for the reasons behind the request. The petition was granted because they needed more hands in the carpentry section, where they were working nonstop to make the furniture for his new house.

         Bang, bang, bang… While he pounds the nails, he thinks about his work making coffins. He’d lost track of how many he’d had to make that winter. Almost a casket a day. Some days, two or three. Afterward, he still had to nail them shut. Bang, bang, bang, those nails were already driven into his brain. The guys from the carpentry shop always had to do that job. They must have thought not just anybody could do it, because those guys might hammer the nails in crooked. Idiots. He knew full well the nails were symbolic; he knew the dull blows were intended to echo in the minds of the prisoners like a warning, like proof that they’d never get out of there alive. They were just the prisoners’ notifications that they were going to die. And they kept on dying, from liver problems, kidneys, lungs, heart attacks, as the medical report stated. The truth was, though, that they died of starvation, weakness, from eating little and badly. That wasn’t food they were given; it was dishwater. The pigs in his village were fed better than that. He knew, they all knew, that the corrupt director and the corrupt prison employees were starving them to death. The director, whom everybody called the “Dobre”, the Lookalike, who was more of a thief than the worst thief who was in jail, was getting rich off the money meant to feed the prison inmates.

         Bang, bang, bang, the dull clangs called to the inmates as if they were being summoned from the other world. While he pounded, he too could see himself, already stiff and inside the coffin. For a while he had the feeling he too was being laid out. He wasn’t far from it.

         His physical deterioration had been noticeable for some time now. He’d been losing his hair. In recent months it had been falling out in clumps and his scalp was scruffy. In his cadaverous face his bleary, blood-shot eyes bugged out of their sockets. It was a good thing he didn’t have a decent mirror to see himself so he wouldn’t scream at the death mask he wore. He knew that indignation was eating away at him even more than his ruined body. But he couldn’t forget, even for a minute, that that criminal, Lookalike, was leading the prisoners to a fatal trap while fattening his own pockets, that their lives were being sucked out of them by a corrupt spider nobody could defeat and against whom it was useless to scream or beg.

         Nobody was going to listen to their cries. They had no recourse for complaining or denouncing him. They were like Jews in the Nazi concentration camps. Trapped. Silenced. In that place, freedom, their motto for their lives and their political organization, had been replaced by tyranny and oppression. At first he’d tried to speak with some of the inmates he trusted most. He always saw the fear hidden deep in their eyes. They avoided him. He felt indignant at their cowardice. They were just waiting to die. What was there to be afraid of? Nevertheless, they were afraid, they were terrified. Outside the prison, in his free life, he’d already thought about fear, both in the work place and in his party cell. People who seemed willing to fight lost their courage when it turned dangerous. Probably the most belligerent in private matters, or those who were always the loudest with their gestures and speech, were the biggest cowards when facing the police or bowed their heads when confronted by the authorities. He’d also discovered that fear is irrational. Now, in prison, he knew it for a fact. Why was it that some men could watch their companions starve to death, could feel their own bodies grow weaker, could feel or imagine the rottenness running through their intestines, wouldn’t risk rebelling, wouldn’t try to get rid of the criminals that managed the prison, and most of all, the head despot? They must have hated the sight of him, corpulent and arrogant. They had every reason to hate him and maybe they did hate him, but even so, fear, respect, and admiration are stronger than hate. Nobody dares look straight at the droopy gaze of his beady eyes out of fear of getting stuck inside it; nobody went against his orders. Can you hate and admire something or someone at the same time? Perhaps. You run into that ambivalence in the face of authority. So the anarchist who was forced to make coffins and nail them shut had to accept the fact that there was nothing to be done in the case of those inmates who were defeated, just waiting to die. It was useless to try and reason with them. They didn’t want to listen to a word he said when he spoke to them about their rights. There, the law was a hollow term; justice was a pipe dream; rebellion resulted in the punishment cell. It was useless to try. His impotence ate away at his guts as much as the pangs of hunger did. Seeing the submissiveness of the majority increased his indignation even more. Weakness made them accept death and he would see them walk docilely so they could rest their heads in a charming coffin. Only the strongest, toughest organism would survive.

         Bang, bang, bang, he pounded the nails in, feeling the weakness in his arms. That morning when he’d gone to the latrine he’d seen that his urine was stained with blood. He had the feeling that the time was near when he’d go out through the big door in a box like that one, the one they were going to take to the hearse with no fanfare of any kind. He was the only one saying a silent prayer for that cadaver, so silent that it was almost for himself.

         While he was painfully hammering those nails, in the carpentry shop they were busy making the director’s new furniture. The skilled cabinetmakers outdid themselves, trying to reproduce the model he’d presented to them: the scrolls and bumps on the headboard for the bed frame, the dining room chairs with the high backs, all worked like cherry-colored Madeira lace. Excellent craftsmanship. They took their time with each piece. This time he’d been assigned a detailed job: the careful sanding of the openwork on the backs of the chairs. His slender fingers entered and came out the holes in the wood, smoothing down the surface. The trained carpenters’ fingers were thickened by years of work. “Come on, Graduate, sand this down, stick your fancy pants fingers in these little holes, get going! The wood needs to be as smooth as your skin.”

         They hadn’t finished the dining room furniture yet when Lookalike already had another job for them: an Isabelline style dresser he’d requested, showing the photo to the master carpenter. The director had bought a big chalet where he was from and wanted to use it during vacation. So he was pushing the carpenters to finish the furniture quickly. But the Graduate, as they called him, didn’t get to spend a lot of time doing fine woodworking, turning out fancy furniture for the director’s new home. He always had to conjure up a new coffin.

         While he was hammering away in a not-so-skilled manner, he began thinking about how those two carpentry jobs complemented each other. There was a dialectic between the pieces of furniture produced from good quality wood, ones the cabinetmakers strove to create, and the rough box for the dead men that the apprentice made. They were the heads and tails of the same coin. A corrupt coin. Like all the speeches, he thought he could hear those of his comrade Florián, the anarchist they’d killed when he’d been detained. Sometimes he felt overwhelmed when he stood looking at the director’s furniture. The others in the workshop thought he was admiring the work. “So! You like it, Graduate? You’re educated, you have good taste… Maybe you’ve slept in a bed like this, right? Well, now everybody’s in the same bed. This prison makes everybody equal,” said the carpenters with resentment. They really didn’t know what he was looking at. He was watching how worms were coming out of the holes and twists of the furniture and the wood took on the appearance of rottenness, similar to what awaited the boxes for the dead. The director bought houses, had chalets built, and filled them with furniture using the money he stole; he got rich pocketing the money he received for the prisoners’ food. Because the grub they got was scarce and lousy, the weakened prisoners ended up dying and they had to make the boxes in the workshop to bury them. It was as if in the workshop the tasks merged with the conditions in that deadly prison where things grew progressively worse. The director’s greed had no limits. He’d found a way to get rich. The administrator also siphoned off his share and the rest of the employees got their kickbacks too and they also slacked off on services without anybody holding them to account. It wasn’t worth it, thought the jailers, getting mixed up in problems or confronting the authorities about the living conditions of those Red villains – they were people who deserved to die. The chaplain would carry out his duty, saying prayers over the dead with little feeling and little faith.

         His God was an implacable avenger who could not, should not, forgive those heathens, people who’d strayed from divine and human law. Looking at those souls that had been summoned by Satan, he muttered words of hope with little conviction, knowing their souls were already damned.

         Bang, bang, bang, back in the compound again, hammering a box in the dry trench. Instead of getting used to it, those nails, like snakes, kept driving into his gut and were poisoning him. Between nails he looked up and observed the director’s face – a puppet acting like he was the master of ceremonies. There wasn’t an ounce of feeling in his protruding eyes. Did he ever think even for a moment about his responsibility in causing those deaths? He probably hadn’t allowed himself that thought. His scruples were armored cars. Nobody could touch them. Which was the same as not having any.

         Bang, bang, bang, he pounded furiously on the boards, sensing the director’s presence like that of a colossal clown, watching without seeing what was happening. He ended up seeing him as a monster that caused the death of the prisoners, an aberration like the painting by Goya where a hideous being is devouring a child. Bang, bang, bang, he’s trying to focus on his task, nail down his conscience, stop the madness, but his fury bubbled up in his throat like vomit and that same bubbling forced him to raise the hand holding the hammer and slam it down on the director’s head.

         The Graduate was the cadaver that left the prison the next day in the coffin.

WHY’D YOU KILL HER?

(Scene from a Play)

The scene takes place in a corner of the prison’s patio. A middle-aged prisoner and a younger one, dressed as inmates. The younger one is a recent arrival. They’re talking. The older one happily starts sniffing the younger one’s suit. He keeps sniffing.

“Buddy! What’s going on? Why are you sniffing at me?” He pulls back and looks the other man up and down. “Are you crazy? Are you a fag or what? They told me the prison was full of fags. But not this, nope, damn it…”

         “Don’t give me that, boy, because nobody’s more of a man than I am. When you’ve had to smell the garbage for a while you’ll appreciate a real scent. This still smells like cloth.” And he sniffs the new man’s suit again. “Like wool. It won’t be long before it smells like the stench everything has around here. Here, look.” And he moves closer so the other fellow can smell it. “Smell mine.”

         “Hey, buddy, knock it off…!” says the younger man, moving back.

         “Don’t be a jerk! I told you there’s nobody who’s more of a man than I am. Smell it, you’ll see…”

         “Ughhh! Haven’t you taken a bath since you got here?”

         “It doesn’t do any good. The smell of the prison sticks to everything. I couldn’t keep my food down. Eventually you get mixed up with all this shit.”

         Calmer now, the new arrival asks:

         “So what are you in for?”

         “Because I killed my wife.”

         “Goddamn! Why’d you kill her?”

         “Because she got uppity with me. I already told you there’s nobody who’s more of a man than I am. The truth is, she was well-behaved. She wasn’t one of those hussies. Nope. She never raised her voice. ‘Bring me such and such!’ I’d say, and not a peep out of her. Meals, always on time. The house, spotless. Everything was great. But one day she started to avoid looking me in the eye. Is anything wrong? ‘No, nothing,’ she said, but without looking at me. That got my goat a bit. What was eating at her? And you know, my friend, nothing was wrong. Nothing was bugging her. It was a serpent, the very same serpent from the Garden of Eden… I already had an inkling that something was going to happen. And of course it did happen. A few days later, I was eating some pout fish and they weren’t prepared right, dammit, they weren’t the way I like them. She knew full well how I liked my fish prepared. ‘So, you don’t know how to prepare fish, fat ass, they look like they’ve been boiled instead of fried, fuck, they look like they’ve been fried on your mother’s cunt!’ Then I threw a pout in her face. That’s all I did. I didn’t even touch her. And you can’t imagine how she reacted. Those eyes of hers that she always kept lowered bugged out like she was some harpy. They looked at me as if they were looking at a horrible beast. I’ve never seen anything like it! After all, what’d I actually said to her? You tell me… It wasn’t a big deal. She glared at me, daring me, while words came out of her mouth like belches. Damn tyrant! Then she threw the rest of the pouts in the garbage. Get yourself another maid to wait on you. This pack mule is getting out of here! I don’t care if I have to beg from door to door! Enough is enough! You see that, my friend? She got uppity with me! I had to show her who was the boss of the house. I grabbed a damned stool that was nearby and hit her on the head with it. She bled like a stuck pig. It made me sick to my stomach… so I left. When I returned from having a few drinks in Tito’s tavern, there were people at my house, and one of my wife’s cousins, who couldn’t stand me, came out to the railing and began to scream at me. ‘Murderer! You’ve killed her! I always knew you were no good, you assassin you!’ So, that’s how I found out I’d killed her. But she’d deserved it, hadn’t she? If a man can’t be the boss in his own house, where can he be the boss, my friend?”

ATTENTION, GUARD!

In Don Fermín’s mind, and he was the prison director, there were no fissures. His conscience was a bunker that only the guiding principle of Spain’s Generalísimo – Spain, One, Great, and Free – the person he most respected could penetrate. Franco was his God, and his opinions were the dogmas Don Fermín followed. He sat in front of the radio every time Franco gave his propaganda speeches, and he might as well have listened to them while kneeling because he adored Franco so much. Sometimes the emotion he felt brought tears to his eyes. He took in every word and lived it as if it were his own. It was impossible to know, and he was the least certain of anybody, to what extent his own criteria coincided with the rules established by the dictator, or whether he listened and followed them with no remorse whatsoever. His slim readings, which consisted of religious texts or regime propaganda, did not contradict each other; instead, they simply supported the same one-sided, rhetorical mentality of National Catholicism.

The severity of Don Fermín’s criteria was reflected not only in his rigid behavior, but also in the rigidity of his body, in his stiff posture and his incisive gaze. Even though he behaved in an impeccable manner as prison director, according to current regulations and fascist ideas, and his rectitude led him to impede corruption or bribes inside the prison, the feeling he created, in both the inmates and the employees, was not one of admiration: it was one of fear.

The ones who were the most afraid of the director in the various jails he directed were the homosexuals. If Don Fermín had been a man accustomed to self-analysis, which was something quite far from his character, he would have had to ask himself why he had such an obsession. Most likely, something far from his conscious mind, an intimate problem or a trauma that could never be revealed, guided that obsession, that persecution complex against gays. The fact was that in a corrupt environment like that of the prison, Don Fermín thought there was no perversion as bad as homosexuality. And he fought it implacably. The gays who were the most out and obvious, who were the most effeminate, who played the mother role in sexual relations, who in many cases were victims of the queers, were targets of the director’s witch hunt more than anybody else, because he thought being macho meant being coarse and crude.

Several jail keepers who agreed with him in that obsession or simply wanted to ingratiate themselves with the director for their own benefit collaborated by keeping an eye out for behaviors that might go against the rules according to the director’s criteria.

One day a young man in his twenties, from the Rías Baixas, with an accent and the Galician “s” sound that helped intensify his effeminate way of speaking, was frisked roughly by the employees. They made him take off his clothes in front of everybody. Standing before their disgusted stares, the youth tried to cover his genitals with his hands and his effort made all the spectators laugh and insult him.

It was the second time he’d had to suffer that humiliation. The first time he’d been a boy still. He could see himself again, naked and surrounded by mean boys, during school recess. He’d suffered so much at school when he was a boy. His mother didn’t understand why he didn’t want to go. He was forced to. His schoolmates made fun of him, calling him Goldilocks, because his mother, proud of his beautiful hair, didn’t cut off his curls and dressed him like a Little Lord Fauntleroy. Her friends’ comments – “What a cute little boy! He looks like an angel!” – fed her maternal pride, but they earned the disrespect of the boy’s playmates. His mother’s need to show off made for the boy’s humiliation. Children’s cruelty can reach incredible extremes. A little tattletale boy said, “Goldilocks doesn’t have a pee-pee.” They decided to prove it as a group. He’d had a terrifying experience that he’d never forgotten. When he was older, when his parents found out he was a homosexual and forced him to go to a psychologist to correct that condition, the psychologist determined that the childhood trauma, the attack on his body and his pee-pee, made him afraid of not being able to have a sexual relationship with a woman and was the reason why he hadn’t been able to achieve an erection with a female partner. That was why he avoided heterosexual relations, pronounced the psychologist. What the specialist could not explain, but he wasn’t concerned about, was why the boy didn’t have problems with his body when he was with men, since it had been boys who’d shamed him in school.

Now, once again, like a recurring nightmare, he found himself naked inside a circle of men, in jail, hearing the ridicule for what felt like an eternity. Like he’d done in the past, he put his hands over his genitals and the golden locks that now tumbled from his head and created the matted curls that covered his pubic area. The men knew, like the boys had sensed earlier, how well clothing can protect a man. With his clothing removed, it was as if his identity had been taken from him, his human condition destroyed.

At that moment, the young man, red-faced with shame and anger, thought he wouldn’t have to put up with anything worse than the insults he was receiving. He was wrong. When they tired of humiliating him, he was led by order of the director to the punishment cell. Among the prisoners it was known as the “dovecote” because of its circular shape. Inside the circle there are “American” cells, as they’re called, because they’re only closed off by a grate that acts as a door, open cells where intimacy is impossible. In the punishment cell the degradation was placed on display. A circular corridor separates the cells from the other wall, similar to the external area of the prison but smaller, where only one jail keeper makes his rounds, as if it were a circle of hell, constantly monitoring the inmates’ situation.

The initial relief the prisoner felt when he got away from the hateful stares and the insults to which he’d been subjected immediately disappeared when they chained him up so cruelly in that filthy room. Between his own disorientation and the lack of light it took him a while to realize what that sewer was like. At first, a nauseating, sticky stench hit him full in the face and heightened his confusion. Then, through the fog, he glimpsed a cement bench and the hole that served as a latrine, the only things there were between the three humid, blackened walls. The hole was filled to overflowing with excrement. First they’d taken away the chain to flush the cistern in order to avoid suicide attempts and then they’d removed the cistern itself. He realized that in that sewer, stinking and cold, he’d never be able to relax enough to sort out the confusion in his head. The jail keeper, phlegmatic and big-bellied, who’d ended up as a watchman in the dovecote, was watching him from the other side of the grating. From his appearance he seemed to be an easy-going man. The prisoner soon realized his mistake and saw that the man had evil intentions.

“Well, well, they told me they were bringing me another pervert who needed straightening out,” says the jailer, dragging the key along the iron bars of the grating and increasing the man’s anguish.

“Why did they put me in here? What did I do wrong?”

“What? You don’t know? Get ready! You’re not going to want to screw men for the rest of your life,” the jail keeper threatens.

“What are you going to do to me?” and he can’t help the trembling in his high-pitched voice.

“Oh my! Everything. Hasn’t anybody told you about the bad things that go on in the punishment cell? Oh my!” says the jail keeper as if he were trying to play the bogeyman. “You’ll wish you’d never been born, mark my words,” he ends on a convincing note, because one of his main duties is to scare him to death.

The director didn’t recommend beatings and physical torture; he didn’t want blood or marks made on the inmates’ bodies. They were brutal procedures, and too direct. Much easier to carry out and easier to forget. He wanted them to use more subtle methods, which didn’t leave visible marks on the body, but gradually silenced the prisoner and marked his personality. The scars became indelible.

The inmate had gone two days without sleeping or drinking anything, two days without lying down. When he collapsed like melted wax on the cement, the watchman would come with the baton and make him get up; if he closed his eyes, even while he was standing, the jailer would run the keys along the bars, making an unbearable sound; if he desperately begged for water, it was refused and at the same time a faucet somewhere outside was opened, letting the water come out full force. The refusals were accompanied by insults or dirty comments. “Scaredy cat! Coward! Fag! You can’t take it. Wait until you see what’s in store for you! This is just the beginning.” And a litany of the torments to come washed over the prisoner’s ears.

The director went by the dovecote before heading home. The employee, after his usual comments, informed him:

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to take care of him much longer, Don Fermín. These shitheads always check out on me at any moment.”

“He has to make it through tonight,” and the youth, from the dark, saw the director’s eyes shine like gunshots. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

“At your command, Don Fermín,” says the guard as a farewell.

The director leaves through the big door of the prison and goes through another door nearby that belongs to his home attached to the prison. At the kitchen table a teenage girl is doing homework, and a little boy stops riding a hobbyhorse to run to greet him, crying “Papá! Papá!” The director immediately notices his wife isn’t there.

         “Your mother, where is she?”

         The girl tells him she’s gone out to run some errands.

         The director’s wife hasn’t returned and her husband starts pacing back and forth impatiently in the hallway.

         “What the devil can that woman be thinking? It’s time to serve her son his supper!” And he keeps looking at the clock.

         The girl, who wasn’t doing her homework, just reading a novel, gets very tense and can’t get further than the first line. She silently begs her mother to come home right away so one of those angry episodes won’t occur.

         Finally they hear Dona Finita’s lilting voice, and the girl runs to the door. Her mother enters, all sweaty. It’s obvious she ran when she noticed the time. The director’s wife, a woman who is rather plump, with pink cheeks and a quick laugh, is his opposite. As dry, stiff, and rigid as Don Fermín is, she is friendly and open.

         “Where have you been?” her husband asks with a grating tone.

         “I went to buy a skein of yarn for the jacket I’m making for Ferminciño… “

         “The stores aren’t going to be open at this hour,” continues her husband with a penetrating look.

         The woman, who is all flushed, is even more beautiful. Her ruddy cheeks are a sign of good health. Far from pleasing her husband, this seems to make him even more unhappy. His wife, hanging her coat in the closet and wiping the sweat off her forehead, explains what she’s done as if it were a child’s game:

         “Well, you see, dear, I ran into the medical assistant’s wife and you know what a gabber she is, she starts to talk and doesn’t let up. She told me all about her son’s illness. It seems he was really sick, and I couldn’t just turn and walk away…”

         “You’re the one who can’t stop running off at the mouth,” says her husband scornfully. “You’re good for nothing. You lose track of time. Get going, get some supper for the boy – he’s falling asleep!”

         His wife put an apron on right away and sent a conspiratorial glance at her daughter, a glance that seemed to say, “Uh-oh, now it’s coming.”

         Don Fermín went into his study and responded with silence to his wife when she called him to supper. When aggravated, he used silence both as an example of an unyielding ethic and a way of punishing his family. His wife couldn’t eat. The daughter went to bed feeling terrified. When she felt like that and couldn’t sleep, she heard with greater anguish the shouts of “Attention, guard!” to the watchmen in the guard posts around the prison, trying to keep them from falling asleep.

         “Attention, guard!” shouted the commander.

         “Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Yes, sir!…” They responded from the guard posts, and the response got weaker the further the guard post was from the house. It didn’t matter that she heard the same shouts every night; she could never get used to them. When she was worried and couldn’t sleep, the shouts of “Yes, sir!” wormed their way into the pit of her stomach.

         In the punishment cell the shouts of “Yes, sir!” aren’t audible. Sounds from outside don’t reach in there. If they did reach that far, they’d transmit the sense of time. But no. Inside there time doesn’t exist. The absence of light makes it impossible to distinguish day from night. Time is a deathly process.

         The jailers had a series of tortures they could inflict, with a lot of gruesome features, to make the inmate panic. In the dark, in bone-chilling humidity, the stench that clogged his senses, the degradation that entered through every pore, all tortures were possible. Thirsty and in agony, greater pain and discomfort awaited. And waiting was the worst of all.

         The girl also waited for the argument that was moving in like a thundercloud, chased by the phantom “Yes, sir!” of the jail guards. Unavoidably, like a natural phenomenon, the shouts and insults start and continue. A muffled “ay!” from her mother, and the silence that follows alert her like a sentinel is alerted. She gets up quickly from the bed and peeks into her parents’ room. Her mother, wearing a nightgown, is stretched out on top of the bed. By the looks of it, she’s fainted. He’s walking around the room muttering about his bad luck. The girl goes over to her mother and speaks to her, shaking her. The woman looks like she’s dead. She can’t be dead because she’s warm, the little girl reasons. “Mamá, mamá!” She wants to go to her father to get him to help and then she sees him walk determinedly to his bed stand and grab the pistol he keeps in the drawer. With a dramatic gesture, interpreted by the girl as a fatal decision, he puts the barrel of the black pistol up to his temple. The girl, terrified, leaves her mother, goes around the bed to pull on his arm and scream, “No! Please don’t kill yourself!” He doesn’t even look at her and keeps on holding the pistol, resolute. Worried about keeping him from shooting himself, the girl can’t see that from the bed her mother’s giving her husband a quick glance and then twitches a few times, while a bit of white foam dribbles from her mouth. Now the girl definitely looks at her, horrified. She thinks these are death throes. She’s never seen anybody die, but she’s read that people about to die gurgle and stretch out their limbs before they die. She gets into bed next to her mother, “Mamá, you can’t die, you can’t, mamá!” She caresses her cheek. It’s warm. She can’t be dead because the dead – she’d never touched anybody who was dead – but they say the dead are cold. Suddenly, the little boy cries and screams for his mother. The girl doesn’t know whom to turn to next, but she has to avoid the boy coming and seeing his mother dead and his father killing himself. She can’t let him come in and goes running to him. The little boy is crying and scared. Undoubtedly he’s had a nightmare; maybe he saw half asleep what is happening in his parents’ room. She sings him a lullaby, close to his little face, dampening it completely with her soft tears, then kisses him tenderly. For a moment she feels alive. Suddenly she thinks that there can’t possibly be two dead bodies in the room next door.

         She hurries as fast as her heart is beating. When she arrives, the situation was no longer the same. There was still tension in the air, but he’d put the pistol back in its holster and in his hand now he’s holding the false teeth he’d taken out of a glass of water on his nightstand. He slips them in and a sly, fox-like expression appears on his twisted mouth. He enters the bathroom and dabs a bit of hair cream on his head. He puts on his gun belt and goes out, alerted by a piercing cry from the guardsman.

         “You’re up early, Don Fermín,” the guard tells him when he sees him appear in the area of the punishment cells. “That’s good, because I can’t keep this faggot on his feet anymore.”

         “Water, water,” murmurs the prisoner, his tongue like cardboard.

         “He gave us a real tough time last night, Don Fermín!” says the employee.

         “You see, García, what we have to do to maintain morality in prison. But there’s the satisfaction of a job well done,” says the director, as if they’d just made a huge sacrifice for the sake of the prison population.

         The director enters the tiny, fetid space where the prisoner totters like a zombie, his eyes all squinty, looks at the Lookalike and still has reflexes enough to shudder in fear.

         “You see what happens to faggots in the prisons I run. You can tell the others, because I know you all know one another. But I also find everything out,” he says, bugging his eyes out of their sockets like a zoom lens and forcing the prisoner to shrink with all his might against the wall, as if struck by lightning.

         Don Fermín, driven by the terror he notices in the prisoner, wants to grab his weapon.

         The girl can’t erase the image of the pistol placed on the temple while she’s putting cold cloths on her mother’s forehead and pressing them on her temple with her little hands. Following her instructions, she takes a basin of cold water to the nightstand and starts wetting the cloths to relieve her mother’s head pain. Her mother moans continuously. “Oh my head! Oh, it’s spinning so hard!”

         “Yes, sir!” the guards also echo, buzzing.

         The director grasps his pistol again, but his gesture and the aversion on his face are quite different and this time he’d gladly put a bullet up the ass of that faggot. The prisoner, on his knees, his mouth shredded, makes some confused noises begging for clemency. A nauseating stench emerging from the kneeling form forces Don Fermín to put his weapon away and go out. It’s the second time he puts his pistol back in its holster that night. The memory of the first time makes his hand tremble a little.

         “Take him to the shower,” he orders the employee, and exits stiff as a statue.

         “At your command, Don Fermín.”

         “Come on, shithead!” he says to the prisoner, twisting his mouth. “So you believed everything I said? Scared you, didn’t I?” The jailer swaggers as he leads the inmate to the shower. “I’m a real pro at these gigs. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’d be a real star on the stage.”

         The girl notices that her mother’s moans are weakening. The painkillers she took must be starting to work.

         “Honey, go on, dear, go to bed. You must be tired,” says her mother, urging her quickly. “Go on.”

         The girl takes the basin to the kitchen. When she returns, her mother is sleeping, her mouth open.

         Dawn’s light is a thorn that sticks into the sky’s palate. The girl, worn out, goes to bed. Sleep wounds her less than her sense of desolation. More than sleep, she needs to cry. She stretches out on her bed and lets her tears flow like a fountain of stars.

         The last “Yes, sir!” splits the clear dawn, the shroud of a night of terror.

THE LEADER’S WIFE

On the upper esplanade, a group of people who were rebelling against the system was gathered, united by their similar ideas and their desire for vindication, urged on by their hatred for the dictatorship and their opposition to the repressive system of the government. It was a police state that prohibited political and personal freedoms.

         An attitude against the regime had been developing. It promoted the desire and determination to carry out the political changes the country needed. This commitment had been developed with great difficulty because any sort of political activity was dangerous. The government maintained a secret police force, dressed in civilian attire that kept a record of anybody who opposed the regime or who was a friend to or had any type of relationship with the opposition. In this repressive system, meetings had to be clandestine and contacts had to be made with utmost caution. Incarceration was the least that could happen to the members of the clandestine groups when their activities were discovered.

         That was a special day. Taking advantage of a date with historical significance, they organized a demonstration. There were well-known personalities of the traditional opposition in attendance as well as members of the younger generation, one of whom was a young fellow devoted to the cause, who was on the way to becoming a political leader because of his deep, firm convictions, his love for his country and his vigor in defending the rights of the people. He was convinced that it was necessary to organize and already many young people, as well as others not so young, shared his ideas. He insisted that the time had come to stop being afraid and to stand up to the dictatorship. They had to work clandestinely and form a political party.

         The illegal meetings were risky and the participants lived in continuous fear of being discovered. This created a stressful, anxious situation for its members and they’d had to learn to control it. The more romantic among the group tried to hide the tension behind mysterious behavior, copied from literary or film prototypes. But that uneasiness produced by the danger of daily life was in no way comparable to the emotion they felt when they were all together in that spot, gathered on the high part of the esplanade and feeling the collective bond even in their bated breathing. When people feel they share an emotion, it produces a sensation that alters their body rhythms and a current of solidarity connects people’s consciousness. Shared enthusiasm makes that opposition group gathered there forget for a brief moment that the police, known as grises, grays (for their gray uniforms), were watching the event and had them surrounded. For the time being, the forces of order were laying low.

         Somebody began to sing. It was a song of hope and optimism that was echoed by everyone. Perhaps it was the determination that came from those voices, the inner force that drove them, that incited the order to attack. Suddenly, those grises, who’d been standing silently at the event, came to life as if they’d been touched by a magic wand, and they obeyed the captain’s order. With no apparent emotion as they reacted to that stimulus and without any change in facial expression, they began to beat the people gathered there. They especially attacked the ones who’d protested with the greatest indignation against the unexpected attack. The crowd felt real terror and everyone fled down the long stone stairway that descended from the esplanade. Stumbling, pursued by the police batons, they ran down the stairs. A woman with her baby in a stroller tries to protect him the best she can. At the same time, unable to control her imagination, she can see a scene from Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, in which, in a similar flight down a stairway, a baby stroller is knocked over. She thinks about taking the baby out of the seat and running with him in her arms, but the child weighs seventeen kilos and she wouldn’t get far or she might even end up rolling down the stairs with him. When she tries to cover the child’s body with her own, and as the child senses danger and cries, she watches as the police attack the demonstrators. The police are acting like animals when they’re pursuing a moving prey. The dispersion of the crowd continues. The leader and his friends are incensed and keep singing while they flee.

         The voices cease and silence settles in. The police return to their barracks and the demonstrators, their meeting dissolved, are scattered through the city. The afternoon draws to a close. Up there, on the esplanade, symbolizing the desolation that remains after the show of political fervor, only the leader’s wife and child remain, waiting.

LAW OF FLIGHT

In prison you have to live an organized life. This is an order the political prisoners receive from the upper echelons of their parties, but everything gets in the way of carrying it out. The prison authorities, infringing on the rights of the accused, make life in jail a torment, especially for political prisoners. Contact with the world and information are forbidden. They have to endure the restriction of all contact with the outside world, press censorship, systematic prying into their mail. In addition, during the dictatorship, the repression specifically related to prison would be increased by the repression of the political police. Every three or four weeks they arrive suddenly at the prison and force the inmates to stand in the courtyard with a machine gun pointed at them for hours, while others plunder their cells, destroy their possessions, tear up their letters and family photos, destroy their notebooks, their writing, everything they own, personal and loved. In their place they leave anger and impotence. Nobody stops the vandalism. The prison authorities collaborate in this punishment; they watch every movement and limit the living space the inmates have. Under these circumstances it’s difficult for political prisoners to lead an organized life.

         There’s a weight on my chest that makes it hard for me to breathe. I’m really suffering and the worst part is I can’t talk about it. People think my life is pleasant and I have to admit that I help create that impression. I hide things. Even my best friend thinks I’m a happy, satisfied woman.

         “Lovely coat. It must have cost a lot. Your husband’s a good guy, isn’t he? You’ve got nothing to complain about…”

         Complain? I’m not complaining. Why would I complain? Because I’m petrified… It’s better not to say anything. But where could I go with this coat? Not very far. I can only move around in a very tight space.

         “We’re lucky. Our husbands are like men should be. They do what they’re supposed to. Considering the assholes that are out there nowadays. They’re respectable gentlemen. We can hold our heads up…”

         He goes around with his head high. I have to keep mine lowered all the time. But I’m the only one who knows this. To the public I’m Mrs…. I walk with my arm through his, like a wife, cuffed to him.

         “And not like the others – good heavens – they have such idiots for husbands. Ours are real men…”

         Ah, yes, they’re real men. Mine is like an ogre, especially when he comes home furious from work because he had some sort of run-in, when a coworker has looked at him the wrong way, another wants to beat him up… He sees enemies everywhere he looks. I serve as the dumping ground for all his frustrations and always have to agree with him. “Don’t pay any attention to them; they don’t even come up to the soles of your shoes. Their problem is they’re jealous…” Such blind solidarity we wives have to show! I’m fed up with it!

         “My moral behavior is impeccable. We can be proud, because I don’t know how some women aren’t embarrassed to walk on the arms of such jerks. What a theatrical show, in public!”

         In public I’m the wife of…; in private, I’m the maid of… I never even dared to think that, to confess it, even to myself. I’m living a lie. I don’t even tell my best friend, who’s right here with me. I say nothing. I lie. I’m so used to lowering myself that I’ve lost track of reality.

         “And we also get respect through them. I don’t like to be the topic of conversation for everybody out there or have him running around with somebody else, some of those women, you know, broadcast their men’s affairs, ha-ha. Our men aren’t the whoring type, like so many are…”

         No. My husband is not a whoremonger. Why would he be? He’s got a whore in his own house. Jesus! What the hell! What am I thinking? That’s horrible! But in fact, it’s true. He screws when he wants. If he wakes up in the middle of the night and, who knows, maybe he’s dreamed something sexy, he starts feeling me up and all of a sudden he’s on top of me. He screws me whenever he wants.

         I don’t really like it. I never liked it and always thought I was frigid. But at least before I didn’t have to fake it. Nowadays, with all this stuff about striptease shows and how they’ve started talking about sex so openly, and with the discovery of the orgasm, the situation has changed. I didn’t know what an orgasm was. I didn’t even know the word. It was better that way. Knowing there’s a pleasure I’ll never experience makes me really pissed off. And worst of all is I’ve got to fake it. That really gets my goat! Before, it was no big deal. Before he just focused on having a good time and I didn’t matter. I was a body without a soul. Nowadays, with all the little sex scenes on TV and in the movies, where women scream and writhe in pleasure… he wants to be seen as a good lover too, wants to feel really good about his performance. It was better when he didn’t worry about that. Now I have to moan and fake it to keep him happy. “Was it good?” he asks after he’s finished his ride. So I lie again. It makes me sick to my stomach, but if I want to keep the peace, I have to play along with him. Peace! Peace has such a high price! To keep the peace I began lying as a way of life. I lie with words, and I lie with my body… I lie with my body. I lie in order to survive.

         Everybody thought life was unbearable in jail, under that murdering, destructive system and on top of it all to have to remain silent in the face of continuous humiliation. The inspections, the itemized lists, the searches, the jailers’ rounds, therules, the fetid environment, the rotten food. In the morning, they gave them that beverage they liked to call coffee with milk. It was dishwater and dirty to boot, and they could even see garbanzos left over from the stew served the day before. The guards treated the inmates like animals and they were losing the sense that they were human beings. They were afraid their families would notice when they came to visit, that they’d see their emaciated, lifeless faces, see how their eyes were beginning to look like mountain cats’. It’s true that in the visiting space, among bars and dusty gratings, what could be seen was limited. Their mothers and their wives, with their own tears and the old, worn gratings, couldn’t see much of their plight. To be suffering such repression and, even more, to be aware of their helplessness and the impossibility of defending themselves tortured the prisoners in a very profound way.

         I don’t want to go on with this; I don’t want to lie anymore. My life is a big empty hole. I’m not a woman, I’m a marionette. I have no projects, hopes, or life of my own. I’m a captive in my own home. A prisoner. I repeat the word like I did the catechism when I was a little girl – a prisoner – and just like air it’s been seeping into my body all over and now it’s completely absorbed. Prisoner. If I’m a prisoner, I rationalize, I have to escape, that is, to get a divorce.

         The idea, and I’d been mulling it over, grew stronger and I started putting it into action. The lawyer has informed me of my very minimal rights, the few options, the causes I might allege in order to get the divorce and how much money it would cost me. The savings account is in my husband’s name. So’s the house. I don’t own anything. He gives me money to go to the store, to buy things, in dribs and drabs, as I need it. How could I get some money? It occurred to me to sell my jewelry. It’s going to be really painful to give up the antique jewelry that belonged to my grandmother and my mother. I like them for their craftsmanship, because those old pieces had a unique style, but more than anything, they have such sentimental value. Parting with them is like cutting myself off from the past, breaking ties with my roots. Even so, I have to do it, I have to get money to pay the divorce costs, if I want my freedom.

         Escape. The first responsibility of a prisoner was to escape, and that rule became a permanent obsession for the group. They ruminated all day and all night about how to do it. They knew every corner of the jail, the courtyard, the system of gatehouses, the changes of guards on watch. That’s what they had to do, keep an eye out for their opportunity. And the golden chance came unexpectedly in the form of a loose shower tile. Upon consulting with the experts, they found that it would be possible to reach the sewer network for the city through that spot. They needed to form a team and start calculating. Measure with their strides, figure out the angles, analyze the distances on the outside by counting the steps the civil guards walked. They have precise, calculating minds. The units of measurement in prison are different than those on the outside. You have to start with steps, tiles, bricks, roof tiles, bars, windows. It requires organized minds to design the plans of the adjoining buildings, the compound, the gatehouses, the surrounding fields, the closest roads. To determine the orientation, the sun and shadow, and the time, hours and minutes. To make it so the whole puzzle fits together and prepare the escape plan requires intelligence, a method, and above all, imagination.

         It seems incredible. Since I made the decision to get divorced, I’m a different woman. Even other people tell me that. They think I look prettier, my face looks better. I’m thinking it’s looking forward to freedom that’s showing in my smile. It must be something hard to hide, like the expression you see on the faces of people in love.

         When I told my husband I wanted a divorce he looked at me as if I were crazy. After that, his surprise turned into indignation. He’d gotten married according to God’s law, for life! And he wouldn’t accept anything else. We argued. I stood up to him. I’d never done that before. That day was the first time he hit me.

         One basic aspect in the plan to escape was keeping it secret, because you can see it in the faces of the prisoners right away, the way they act, that they’re planning to escape. Their mood gives them away. They have to keep it under wraps. They already know about escapes that failed because of this, because their body is in jail and at the same time outside it. The secret code is they have to keep acting in prison as if nothing were going to happen. They have to control themselves.

         I stopped lying and that was the end of peaceful existence. He went from the slaps to beatings; I went from respect to terror. He was defending the proper moral and social order. He was the guardian of the norm, of social law; I was the transgressor, the monster woman who wanted to destroy the family, the most sacred thing of all.

         I plan to leave honestly, walk out of the house in a very proper way, but it’s turning out to be difficult. I can’t hold out much longer. Freedom is my only obsession. I can only think about escaping. I’ve become an escape artist. To calm myself down, I started to dream. I dream that my husband meets another woman, that he’s found a lover who’s got him head over heels, so much so that he can only think about marrying her. He asks for a divorce and he pays the lawyer. I’m thrilled. Then I wake up petrified and see myself wearing a silk dress, carrying his wedding coins. I’m going mad. Other times, my dreams are more exotic. I’m dancing wildly on a tropical beach among Black women and men. A Black girl wearing a necklace of flowers shows me the dance steps. I put my wedding ring on her finger and the girl runs off to show it to her mother. I wake up feeling desperate. I can’t breathe. I take another dose of the tranquilizer the doctor gave me. I’m going to poison myself yet.

         The tunnel they’re making from the shower grows gradually. It’s not easy to work with those tools they’ve had to improvise. You have to sharpen your imagination. They take turns. Every day tiles are removed and are set back in place. The dirt is scrubbed with toothbrushes so as not to leave a trace of anything. Clothes are washed and hidden to dry. Dirt is put away in the attic, carefully spread out so the floor won’t sag. The tunnel advances and they need light to work inside it. A lamp is improvised, like Aladdin’s, using oil in a can and a lace from shoes as a wick. The tunnel keeps growing. Oxygen is needed so the lamp will burn. They put the batteries of the transistor that turns on the bulb of the transistor’s pilot attached to the cover inside a big tube from some vitamins. They have to wrack their brains. The tunnel is slowly advancing but they can’t let their guard down and they can’t let themselves get demoralized. Nothing prevents them from dreaming. “And if we suddenly were to find the passageway of the mouros, the fairy people? In my village they say the mouros made an underground passage from the mountain where they lived down to the valley.” “Bah! Instead, I prefer the ‘Open Sesame’ story and the stone walls open like paper fans.” “And what if we could move the prison bars as if they were made of dough? My mother used to put little strips of dough on top of the empanada, a meat pie, and make a little grating to decorate it.” “I like the story of Sleeping Beauty better. We could give a magic potion to all the jailers and employees so they’d sleep while we were on our way to safety.” “You don’t have much of an imagination,” says the youngest member of the escape team; “it’s better to be carried in the strong beaks of big birds that would fly us away and drop us off in the beds of our girlfriends.” “You’re a bunch of romantics,” the leader scolds, “I doubt we’ll get out of here with that frame of mind. What we need is a helicopter that would pick us up in the prison courtyard and take us out of the country.” “Right! Just call on our leader James Bond and have him come right away.” And so they amused themselves while they were scraping in the dirt, fantasizing about freedom.

         My husband is engrossed in watching the soccer game on TV. After his angry tirades, he calms down watching soccer. It’s time to escape. I feel like if I continue like this I won’t have the energy to get away. There’s no crag that can’t be softened or toppled by using a hammer. I grab my purse where I keep essential things. With my rheumatism, I can’t lift heavy things. I put my biggest sunglasses on to cover up the bruises on my face and go to my girlfriend’s house, my best girlfriend’s house, to ask her to lend me some money. I can’t get very far with what I have. When she opens the door, she’s afraid and thinks I’ve had an accident. She starts putting salve on my bruises while I’m telling her the whole story. It wasn’t possible. She couldn’t believe it. Such a good man, such a gentleman. How did it happen? What had I done? What had I done? I was furious. “It must have been something serious for him to do that to you… Jesus! He went crazy, he must have been really jealous, lost control, otherwise it couldn’t have happened,” she keeps saying while she treats my wounds.

         “I hope my husband will be back soon. He went to a friend’s house to watch the game, he won’t be long now. You’ll see, he’ll make your husband calm down, don’t worry, they’re good friends, you’ll see, it’ll all work out. Jesus! This looks awful here. I’m going to give you a sedative and you can rest a bit.” What? I don’t need to rest! That’s what you think! You want to put me back in prison! I’m never going back to that house! I realize I’d better get rid of the kindness this friend is showing because it’s as if she wants to put me in a strait jacket. While she goes to get the sedatives, I grab my purse and run down the stairs.

         When I reach the street, I see my husband. Either he followed me or he suspected where I might be. My heart’s pounding so hard it feels like it’s going to burst out of my mouth. I start running to get away from him. Damn it all! I can hardly walk in these high heels. I’m afraid I’m going to sprain an ankle. Don’t fall now! I have to escape!

         They planned the escape for the day of a big soccer game. The guards had organized a big party in front of the TV and planned to leave the prisoners there until the end of the game. The employees would also be very happy if the national team won. It was time. The ones who’d been selected by the group to escape begin to slither like snakes along the hole until they come to the exit. Their instructions were to run and get as far away from the jail as possible before their absence was noticed. The comrades who remained in prison had to create as big a ruckus as possible to celebrate the game and hold off the final head count as long as possible. The longer the escape was in being discovered, the farther they’d get from the prison.

         They emerged from the tunnel. They said good-bye to one another and, without stopping to rest, headed in separate directions. They began taking off their outer clothing, encased in dirt, covering themselves with pepper powder they were carrying in a little container to scare off dogs. Using the powder meant no canine sense of smell could detect them. The main thing was not to leave a trail. It was really cold out. It wasn’t a good idea to stop even for a moment. Walk and walk until their feet were raw. Now they had the chance to put the physical resistance they’d achieved through hours of gym workouts, ball games, strolls around the courtyard to the test. It was also the moment not to lose track of where they were, to follow the rivers or the railroad track, the way they’d studied these routes from the plans they’d carefully crafted.

It wasn’t the right time to celebrate, to be enthusiastic about being free, to feel that breeze in the face like a breath of life. Vento ventiño do norte, vento ventiño mareiro – “Wind, oh northern wind, oh breeze from the sea” – one of them is singing, feeling sentimental. A deep breath. That was the best feeling, the most intense feeling of a whole life. Tears of joy are falling. The passion for freedom is fatal. Halt! Arms spread up and wide like the wings of a bird.

Text © María Xosé Queizán

Translation © Kathleen March