Attention, Guard! (128 pages) is a collection of eleven short stories that focus on marginalized groups within society and their mistreatment at the hands of others. There is a second, revised and enlarged edition of this book, published in 2015.

In “The Coffin”, a carpenter can be heard inside the walls of a prison banging nails into a pine coffin. Inside the coffin is the corpse of an inmate who has died. The carpenter is actually a university graduate, but didn’t want to help the prison schoolteacher because he was a Fascist and so chose to join the carpentry workshop, where the master carpenter is an anarchist like himself. The governor of the prison oversees his work. He has grown fat by diverting the funds for feeding the prisoners and using them to build himself a new house. He has also got the prison carpenters busy making new furniture for his house. The carpenter feels furious that the inmates are undernourished and dying of hunger; he has to build a new coffin almost every day. Banging in the nails is a kind of torture the governor of the prison directs at the other inmates, as if to tell them they will only ever leave the prison when they are dead. The carpenter has been losing his hair; he tries to find some kind of resistance in the other prisoners, but in vain. They all crumble before the governor’s authority and won’t stand up to him. They know they are doomed. The other jailers won’t stand up for them, either, because they’re just Reds, and the priest, when he prays for the dead, does so with a lack of conviction, he’s pretty sure they’re already damned. The governor standing over him, watching him bang in the nails, reminds the carpenter of a painting by Goya, “Saturn Devouring His Son”. Unable to resist the temptation, he uses the hammer to whack the governor on the head; the next day, it’s his body inside the coffin.

In “Why’d You Kill Her?”, a scene from a play, an older and a younger inmate are standing in the corner of the prison enclosure. The older inmate insists on sniffing the clothes worn by the younger inmate because his own clothes smell of prison; he wants to smell the real smell of cloth, of wool. The younger inmate asks him why he’s in prison, and the older replies that he killed his wife. She used to do everything he asked of her, to cook, keep the house clean, fetch his things, but one day she didn’t want to look at him, and this made him suspicious. Then she started cooking the food not in the way that he liked, and this made him angry. He threw some food at her, and she lost her temper, shouting at him that she wasn’t going to put up with his demands anymore, she was going to leave him, even if she had to go begging from door to door. So the man picked up a stool and whacked her over the head. He then went out to the local bar to drink a few cups of wine and, when he returned, it was to find that his wife had died. The man justifies himself, saying he has a right to keep order in his own home.

In “Attention, Guard!”, the governor of the prison is a strict man who worships Franco and adheres closely to the regime’s demands. He has a particular dislike for homosexuals and won’t permit any homosexuality in his prison. One day, a man in his twenties is stripped naked by the other jailers. The young man remembers the first time this happened to him, when he was still at school. He was nicknamed “Goldilocks” because of his golden locks, which were his mother’s joy (and his own humiliation). His classmates accused him of not having a willy and forced him to strip naked. Later, when his parents found out he was homosexual, they employed a psychologist, who claimed his homosexuality had been triggered by this event. Now, in the prison, he is taken to the punishment cell, known as the “dovecote”. Excrement covers the floor. He is not allowed to drink, sleep or lie down for two days and is on the verge of exhaustion. The prison governor returns home to find his wife is not there. When she returns, he is angry that his son’s dinner is not ready. His daughter fears the worst and lies in bed that night, listening to the watchmen’s shouts of “Yes, sir!” in the prison next door. She then hears the shouts and insults coming from her parents’ bedroom. She goes in to find her mother lying on the bed and her father pointing a gun at his temple. She doesn’t know who to save first. Her father returns to the prison, where he would like to stick his gun up the prisoner’s bottom, while his daughter remains at home, attending to her mother and hearing the last cry of “Yes, sir!” pierce the night.

In “The Leader’s Wife”, some people who are opposed to Franco’s regime have gathered in secret. They are led by a young man who believes it’s time to stand up to the regime in defence of freedom. At a certain point, they start to sing, and the secret police, known as the “greys”, immediately lay into them with their batons, causing everybody to flee. Only the leader’s wife remains behind, trying to protect her child; it is her immobility that saves them. She is reminded of a scene from the Soviet silent film Battleship Potemkin, in which the crew of a Russian battleship rebel against their officers.

In “Law of Flight”, a woman feels trapped in her marriage, just as if she were a prisoner. She likens her state to that of prison inmates, who are not allowed any privacy, who cannot communicate with the outside world, whose only real desire is to escape, but they have to hide their intentions from others. The woman has to put up with all her husband’s complaints; her husband mounts her whenever he feels like it. She doesn’t even know what an orgasm is like, but pretends she does in order to keep her husband happy. One day, she announces to him that she wants a divorce; he raises his hand against her for the first time. Soon he starts to beat her. The woman wonders how she can get away, just like the prisoners, who build a tunnel from under a shower. She doesn’t have any money of her own, the bank account and the house are in her husband’s name; she determines to sell her jewellery. She seeks refuge in her best friend’s house, but her best friend encourages her to return to her husband, they’ll sort it out. She escapes into the street only to see that her husband has followed her. The prisoners escape through the tunnel they have dug, timing their escape to coincide with a football match, but the exhilaration of feeling free is their downfall, one of the prisoners and the woman are shot as they escape.

In “Hunger Strike”, a Communist worker in prison has decided with her comrades to go on hunger strike, it is their only way to protest against the regime. She is in a cell, where she remembers how a friend, Chariño, was killed in an ambush, but she got away. She becomes delirious and imagines the jailer bringing her a delicious breakfast; she starts to remember the stew her grandmother used to prepare in the village, the cakes she used to make with her mother, when she would stick her fingers in the cake mix and lick them. Her urine has started to become dark, she is worried there may be blood. She imagines a plate of lamb, or the lamprey her mother used to prepare. She tries to bolster her courage by thinking of the others on hunger strike, by remembering the slogans they used to quote each other by philosophers such as Frantz Fanon or Hegel. But then it occurs to her that perhaps the truly difficult path is not to die, but to live on, to continue with the resistance. She rushes to the door of her cell and calls out to the jailer to bring her king prawns, pancakes, Albariño wine.

In “Hilario”, Hilario is an inmate with broad shoulders and long arms, who helps with everything. He is called to the centre, the place in the prison where tasks are handed out, and is asked to unload a truck that has just arrived with potatoes for the kitchen. He wishes there was something to take to the governor’s wife, whose melancholic smile reminds him of his mother. The other inmates joke at his expense, they think he’s in love with her and wants to get his large hands on her tits. But that’s not the case, though he is grateful for the glasses of wine she gives him. He does not want to return to his village. His father was a Republican farmer who was in favour of land consolidation, working together, not as individuals; his mother, a kind-hearted woman. Everything was fine until the Fascist uprising caused his father to take to the hills. His mother leaves food for him on a rock where they used to sit, but Hilario has seen animals eating it; his father is possibly already dead. He goes to town to buy a new axe and, when he comes back, his mother and elder brother are lying dead in front of the house. A neighbour tells him who did it, and he goes straightaway to kill those who were responsible for the crime. The jokes in prison continue and reach the ears of the governor, nicknamed the “Tyrant”. Even though Hilario is just an innocent, the governor cannot bear his reputation being tarnished and locks Hilario up in the punishment cell before being transferred to another prison. By the time the new governor orders Hilario’s release, he has become delirious.

In “The Mass”, the female inmates of a prison are in the care of nuns. They do not have nearly the same resources as the male prisoners; their yard is much smaller, and they all sleep in a dormitory. The inmates are washing the floor tiles in preparation for Sunday’s Mass. There is Pilar, the Communist who doesn’t attend Mass, but goes outside; Manola the Gypsy, whose husband, Sebio, is due to be pardoned and sings the saeta, an Andalusian sacred song, beautifully; the sisters Liberdade and Flora, whose father was an anarchist lawyer who taught them that religion went against all knowledge. He was shot in 1936. Liberdade and Flora then opened a school for young ladies, but this was closed down; Flora then married a man who was renting a room in their house, at her mother’s request, but, when she failed to become pregnant, her husband started to beat her, and the sisters planned and carried out his murder, only to be spotted by a priest, who denounced them. And there is the half-blind Chicha, who washes the clothes of the guards, including the man she is in love with, Oropesa, the father of her child, Ana, who was born in prison. The chaplain comes to celebrate the Mass. Pilar has gone outside, but Flora is bed-bound and cannot go out. During the Mass, she dies, and Liberdade is convinced it is the priest’s fault, he has put the evil eye on her. She attacks the priest, who is comforted by Puri, an ex-prostitute, and only manages to get out of there by the skin of his teeth.

In “The Sodomite”, a man, Moncho, has been married for less than a week when he is arrested for having given refuge to a Communist friend on the run. In prison, he attracts the attention of a cruel criminal, Rúper, who takes pleasure in inflicting pain on others. He used to kill women he slept with who were too submissive, though he would also kill women who showed a more rebellious spirit. He then started to go with men, again to experience the pleasure of inflicting pain on others. Now, in prison, he threatens to sodomize the young and innocent Moncho, and does so on numerous occasions in the washroom. Moncho cannot understand why he would do this; most people take pleasure in giving pleasure, not pain, to others. When Moncho is finally released, he cannot bear to return to his pretty home, with his pretty wife, and throws himself under a train.

In “The Boots”, two sisters are kept at home and educated by their mother. It seems they are already grown up and even have grey hair. They only ever emerge on a Sunday, when it’s time to go to church. When their mother is out, they seek refuge in their mother’s bed and indulge in pleasure as a way of escaping the anguish they feel. Their father used to wear boots. He would take people outside, shoot them by the roadside, then return home with blood on the soles of his boots and, still with his boots on, mount his wife. The children could hear. Their father died, but, whenever she goes out, their mother takes his boots with her, in a bag. The sister who is narrating the story says this is because she likes to sleep with other men while they are wearing her husband’s boots. When their mother comes home one day with the shopping, this sister determines to leave the boots outside with the rubbish, where they will be taken away by the waste collectors and torn to shreds by the mechanical operation of the dustcart.

In “Burqa”, a woman feels trapped inside her burqa, which gives her a cubiform view of the world.

In this book of eleven short stories, the author, María Xosé Queizán, stands up for those who feel marginalized in the world, unable to communicate or protect their own privacy, women caught in unhappy marriages with heavy-handed husbands, Communist and freethinking political prisoners under Franco’s regime, an innocent who is simply reminded of his mother or the wife of a revolutionary leader who is simply trying to protect her child. Those wielding power are authoritative, grey and cruel, faceless. They lack feelings or any concern for those they deem to be weaker or inferior. It is a world in which people’s basic human rights are not respected. María Xosé Queizán has received numerous awards for her career as a writer of fiction and as a feminist thinker, including from the Galician PEN Club and the Galician Booksellers Association.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne