Authors: Alberto Méndez
In the intense, abstracted manner of someone pronouncing a spell, Juan Senra, cello teacher, said yes, and without realising it saved his life.
‘Did you really know him?’ asked Colonel Eymar, roused from his somnolence. He leaned forward to examine the accused with the kind of distant interest an entomologist shows in a tiny bug.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, colonel sir!’ said the colonel in his reedy voice.
‘Yes, colonel sir.’
Juan Senra had been on his feet since dawn, dressed in blue overalls and a threadbare jersey that let the cold in and his fear out. He was so thin, with his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously up and down each time he swallowed, and so crushed, that his shoulders curved so far forward he looked like a convex mirror. The scar of a man, incapable of resting his eyes on anything without feeling nauseous.
‘Where?’
‘In Porlier jail.’
Colonel Eymar was tiny. His hands poked out of the ends of his sleeves just far enough for him to hold a cigarette between the first and middle fingers, where his nails had been toasted a dirty amber by the constantly burning tobacco. A scrawny neck like some bird of prey’s projected above the stiff collar of a tunic that was so loose and tattered it did not seem to belong to a real soldier. And yet, contrasting in a virile way with all this decrepitude, he sported a thin, horizontal moustache, its line in perfect parallel with the courtroom floor. This gave the colonel a look that made
him appear not exactly fierce, but at least incapable of smiling. There were medals too: a whole panoply of them seemed to be armour-plating his chest rather than honouring it.
‘In Porlier jail, colonel sir!’
‘In Porlier jail, colonel sir!’
‘When was that?’
‘He was transferred there from the interrogation centre at Chamberí in May 1938, colonel sir.’
Even though the tribunal was made up of three officers, Captain Martínez and Second Lieutenant Rioboo made no attempt to intervene. Instead, they leaned back in their seats, demonstrating they were leaving everything to the higher-ranking officer.
Alongside the accused, whom only fear kept on his feet, sat Lieutenant Alonso, the court clerk. Stirred out of his bored lethargy by the prisoner’s replies, he paused momentarily over his multicoloured drawings of national flags standing out stiffly one on top of another as though the wind had never existed. Alonso was sitting at a school desk, and it was perhaps because it was too small for him that he looked like a studious pupil. He squinted up at Colonel Eymar, but when their eyes did not meet, he returned to the complicated task of shading the spear-tip crowning the topmost flag. He was a thickset albino, qualities which rarely go together but which in his case gave him the appearance of a plump snowman.
‘And what is your name…?’
Juan Senra told them, did not mention his rank, and explained he had been one of the orderlies attached to the Republican prison service. It was not the whole truth, but neither was it a lie. ‘In 1936 I was studying music in the
conservatoire
and was in my third year of medicine, so I was posted there. Colonel, sir.’
But the colonel was not paying him much attention. Instead he was looking for the accused’s name on the list of prisoners in front of him. He was not playing for time – why would he? – but wanted to know more about this defeated man he was going to condemn to death and who had known his son. Juan Senra Sama, mason, organiser in the Republican jail, communist. Unmarried, a war criminal. Born in Miraflores de la Sierra, Madrid, in 1906. Son of Ricardo Senra, mason, and Servanda Sama, deceased.
‘Did you speak to him?’
‘Yes, on several occasions. The last time was on the day he was shot.’
‘Colonel, sir!’ the colonel shouted, despite his consternation.
‘On several occasions, colonel sir.’
At this, Eymar’s gloomy thoughts crystallised, with all the jagged menace of smashed porcelain. Every morning when his wife Violeta helped him on with his faded cape, she would say to him: ‘Don’t forget Miguelito.’ As his adjutant drove him in his sidecar to court where he presided over the Tribunal of Repression of Masons and Communism, his thoughts were always on Miguelito. How could he forget him? The hero of the family, whose death clamoured for revenge.
The colonel’s habit of reducing court proceedings to a minimum meant he never stopped to consider subtleties. Military justice is only black and white, and yet he found himself flushing as he told the prisoner that Miguel Eymar was his son.
‘What did you talk about?’
‘About you, colonel sir.’
‘About you, your honour!’ the moth-eaten officer corrected him harshly, to demonstrate that he was a judge first, a father second.
‘About you, your honour,’ Senra repeated submissively. For a few moments, time stood still. The three members of the tribunal sat
motionless
, as though caught in a flashlight of silence and stillness, betrayed only by a slight quivering of the colonel’s chin. The only other thing that moved in the courtroom was Juan’s Adam’s apple, which went on bobbing up and down as he tried to stifle the dry sensation in his mouth.
‘Did he not speak about the fatherland? Did he speak of Spain?’ asked the colonel, trying to conceal the anxiety that gripped his throat and made his stern voice tremble.
Senra was worried about allowing some truth into his replies, as if the contrast might give the game away, but he admitted that no, he had never spoken about Spain, colonel sir. At this, time started to flow again: the albino clerk went back to drawing flags, the other members of the
tribunal
leaned back in their chairs and glanced inquisitively at each other, allowing themselves a few moments’ reflection. They had interrogated and condemned many hundreds of enemies of the fatherland to death. All of them had been asked at some point if they had known Miguel Eymar. The answer had always been negative. They had no idea how to respond to Juan Senra’s affirmative reply.
Second Lieutenant Rioboo, worthy of more glorious assignments, cut in with a ‘Listen, you shit-filled Red, are you going to explain what you mean or should we send you straight to La Almudena?’ He turned to the colonel for approval, which he received with a silent nod that betrayed a mix of severity and bewilderment.
The empty-headed clerk had stopped drawing flags, but sat staring down at the sheaves of paper on the inclined desktop. Juan Senra also needed time to reconstruct a memory that did not exist, because neither his weak state nor his feelings of panic would let him forget the real story of Miguel Eymar.
General Franco, wearing his military cap, stared fiercely down at them from the back wall of the courtroom, next to a wooden crucifix. The empty room, which to judge by the huge blackboard on the end wall must once have been used for classes, echoed to the sound of constant activity outside – doors being slammed, barked orders, hurried footsteps. But inside there was complete silence. Three guards stood at the back like statues, although their frozen poses suggested weariness rather than any warlike or epic qualities.
All at once, Juan was flooded with memories, and felt too afraid to remain standing upright. He leaned his right hand on the clerk’s desk, trying not to let his dizziness overcome him, but a pitiless swipe from the flag-illustrator made him lose his balance and collapse onto the papers. This time he took a blow in the back, as the albino shouted, ‘Stand to attention, you bastard!’ Juan struggled awkwardly to push himself up. Yes, sir, he managed to say, before he found himself falling in slow motion like the eyelids of an ether addict. He lay flat on the floor, curled up like a liana.
It was so cold.
The cold, hunger, pain and fear, added to his sense of utter defeat, all conspired to keep him in a state of semi-consciousness. He could make out people moving around him, but could not hear anything being said. Two men dragged him out by the feet and flung him into a dank, dark room where several other motionless people lay slumped. The door slammed, and just before he passed out completely, somebody put an arm round his shoulder and asked: ‘Juan, what have they done to you?’ Hearing his name gave him the comforting feeling he was being protected, and so he slid into unconsciousness.
At nightfall, when he was led out as part of a line of prisoners being taken back to jail, he had no idea why all the others were sent to the fourth floor while he was taken back to the second. There was a perfectly established hierarchy in the prison: those still waiting to be condemned to death were kept on the second floor, while the ones who had already been sentenced spent their last hours on the fourth.
The cell was a corridor that had been crammed with prisoners. When they saw him come back in, more than half of the almost three hundred men gathered round, wanting him to explain the inexplicable. Did they acquit you? What happened? How did you manage to escape? What did they do to you…? There had to be some urgent reason why he had been allowed back to the second floor.
‘No, I fainted, and then they brought me back here.’
‘Did they torture you?’
‘No, I think I passed out from fear.’
If he had been able to breathe properly, he would have tried to explain what had happened, but a sense of shame kept him quiet. When something cannot be explained, offering a plausible explanation is the same as lying, because those who need to deal in the truth see confusion as lies. So he kept silent, knowing that Eduardo López could classify what had happened without having to understand it.
Eduardo López was a member of the Communist Party politburo. His work as one of the organisers of the defence of Madrid had won him a certain popularity during the final months of the war. He was taken prisoner on the southern front, and had no doubts as to what his fate would be. Despite this, he tried stubbornly to organise the prisoners’ lives, to share out the tasks of looking after those most in need, and above all, to give a political explanation for their suffering.
To do this, he made sure there was discipline in the collective talks he himself organised, insisted the better-educated gave lectures to instruct the others, and tried to ease their despair by promoting the idea that they were all there because they had defended a just cause. This was no real comfort to any of them, but they were all thankful there was somebody who went to the trouble of trying to keep their dead souls alive.
When López seemed satisfied with Juan Senra’s replies, all the other pallid, emaciated, and frozen men accepted the explanation too. Fear can explain almost anything.
Juan Senra went to huddle up next to his companions, clutching his aluminium food bowl close to his chest. It was the proof that he would eat another meal, which was tantamount to meaning he was still alive. The pain from the albino clerk’s blow to his back blended with a thousand other aches and pains. His memory only offered more useless suffering, and he slipped into a state of deep melancholy.
Earlier, he had written a farewell letter to his brother without properly saying goodbye; now he regretted it. He had a lot to say to him, and yet had done nothing more than list memories they shared, as if complicity existed only in memory. Now that he had appeared before this travesty of a court, now that he had glimpsed the mouth of hell, he knew he had been wrong not to talk about emotions.
He missed his adolescent brother, who was outside all this, who was old enough to observe all the horrors but still too young to feel them as part of his life.
Silence crowded in on silence as all the conversations in the cell faded into a darkness filled only with distant echoes. There would be no more life until dawn, and life then began as the harbinger of death. They all knew that at five in the morning they would hear names being called out in the yard, and that those named would be herded up on trucks and taken to La Almudena cemetery. They would not come back. But the names called out were for those on the fourth floor; the prisoners on the second were still one step away from death. They had to appear before Colonel Eymar, who would be sure to condemn them. This meant that time existed, and time exists only for those who are alive.
They knew from the army chaplain that not all of those who were condemned to death were in fact shot. As the months went by, thanks to pleas by family members, special recommendations, or arbitrary acts of mercy, the number of those actually facing a firing squad was diminishing. They had heard that a lot of the men kept on the fourth floor ended up in jails at Dueso, Ocaña or Burgos. That is why the second-floor prisoners thought constantly of the passage of time, of it crawling by as slowly and painfully as it liked, so long as there might be another week, another day, even another hour for them. That was the reason why they all tried to go unnoticed, as if they had been absorbed into the filthy grey of the walls of their collective cell.
In the early months, before the cold got into their bones, there had always been someone who would cling to the bars of the window that
looked out over the yard and shout ‘Long Live the Republic!’ as the men from the fourth floor were led out to the trucks at first light. Farewell comrade, farewell brother. We will avenge your death! But little by little these gestures faded out, became as subdued as the early morning light.
The next day, Juan Senra was not called to appear in court. Others went, and none of them came back. Juan could eat the lukewarm broth twice more. He helped delouse a smooth-cheeked youngster who was scratching his head so much it was full of sores. If you carry on like that you’ll end up bald, Juan told him. The lad said something about a skull that Juan Senra did not understand, but he smiled anyway as though he had got the joke. Somebody told him that Sergeant Sánchez had a nit comb, so Juan borrowed it and started carefully combing the boy’s head. In return, the youngster showed him a photo of his girlfriend.
‘She’s a good-looker, isn’t she? She’s from Segovia, but she came to Madrid to work as a maid, and as you can see…’ He gestured in a way that was both suggestive and rude.
Their conversation was interrupted because someone called Juan to the barred door at the cell entrance. A first sergeant, stooped by fear and toothless from hunger, handed him an opened envelope. It was the letter Juan had written to his brother before appearing in court. It was being returned open and censored.