Winter in Madrid (36 page)

‘Ah, yes, the Marxist metaphysic.’ The psychiatrist nodded reflectively. ‘Our studies show that when intelligent, privileged people are
drawn to Marxism it is because of a character defect. They are unable to understand the higher values, like spirituality and patriotism. They are innately antisocial and aggressive. The
comandante
tells me, Piper, that you reject the camp’s rehabilitative efforts, for example?’

Bernie laughed quietly. ‘You mean the compulsory religious instruction?’

Lorenzo studied him as though he were a rat in a laboratory cage. ‘Yes, you would hate Christianity. A religion of love and reconciliation. Yes, that is quite clear.’

‘We get other lessons as well.’

Dr Lorenzo looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘This is the torture room. That cupboard behind you will be full of rubber truncheons and pails for mock drownings.’

Lorenzo shook his head gently. ‘Fantasies.’

‘Then take the tarpaulin off the thing behind you,’ Bernie said. ‘Go on.’ He realized his tone was becoming insolent and bit his lip. He did not want a complaint to Aranda.

The psychiatrist gave a little grunt of annoyance, then stood and lifted the tarpaulin. His face set as he saw the tall wooden stake with the metal seat, the restraining straps and neck collar, the heavy brass screw with its handles behind.

‘The
garrote vil, doctor
. They’ve had six executions since I’ve been here. They line us up in the yard, bring out the
garrote
and make us watch. You hear the man’s neck break, there’s a loud crack, like a shot.’

The psychiatrist sat down again. His voice was still calm. He looked steadily at Bernie, then shook his head. ‘You are an antisocial,’ he said quietly. ‘A psychopath.’ He shook his head. ‘Men such as you can never be rehabilitated; your minds are abnormal, incomplete. The
garrote
is needed, I am afraid, to keep those like you in check.’ He made a note on the questionnaire, then called out to Agustín. ‘Guard! I have finished with this man.’

Agustín led Bernie away. The sun had gone below the horizon and a red light bathed the wooden huts lining the earthen square. The searchlights in the watchtower above the barbed-wire fence would soon come on. Against the mess hut a large cross stood, six feet high, ropes hanging from the arms. It looked like a religious
symbol, but it wasn’t: they hung men from the ropes as a punishment. Bernie wished he had mentioned that to the psychiatrist.

It was time for roll-call; three hundred prisoners were shambling into lines around the little wooden platform in the middle. Agustín halted, shifting his heavy rifle on his shoulder.

‘I have to fetch another five to the mad-doctor tonight,’ he said. ‘It will be a long evening.’

Bernie looked at him in surprise. The guards were not supposed to talk with the prisoners.

‘The doctor looked displeased,’ Agustín added.

Bernie looked at him, but the guard’s thin face was turned away. ‘Be careful,’ Agustín said quietly. ‘Better times may be ahead, Piper. I can say no more now. But be careful. Do not get punished now, or killed.’

B
ERNIE STOOD
next to his friend Vicente. The lawyer’s thin face, surrounded by its shock of grey hair and matted beard, looked drawn and ill. He smiled at Bernie then coughed, a liquid gurgling sound deep in his chest. Vicente had been having chest infections since the summer; he seemed to recover but then they would hit him again, worse than before. Some of the guards let him do light work in return for helping them fill in forms, but this week the sergeant in charge of the quarry detail was Ramirez, a brutal man who had had Vicente sorting rocks all day. He looked as though he could hardly stand.

‘What happened to you?’ he whispered to Bernie.

‘They’ve got a psychiatrist here, he’s interviewing some of the people from San Pedro. He said I was an antisocial psychopath.’

Vicente smiled wryly. ‘Then that proves what I have always said, you are a good man even if you are a Bolshevik. If one of these people says you are normal, then is the time to worry. You’ve missed dinner.’

‘I’ll manage,’ Bernie said. He must be sure to get a good night’s sleep if he was to be fit to work tomorrow. The rice they fed the prisoners was awful, the sweepings of some Valencian storehouse mingled with gritty dust, but to be able to work you had to eat all you could.

He went over what Agustín had said. He didn’t understand. Better times? Was there some political change in Spain? The
comandante
had told them Franco had met Hitler and that soon Spain would be in the war, but they knew nothing of what was actually going on outside.

Aranda stepped out of his hut. He carried his riding crop, tapping it against his leg. This evening he was smiling and all the prisoners relaxed slightly. He vaulted on to the platform and began calling out names in his clear sharp voice.

The roll-call took half an hour, the men standing rigidly to attention. Towards the end someone a few rows away fell down. The man’s neighbours bent to help him.

‘Leave him!’ Aranda called out. ‘Eyes to the front.’

At the end the
comandante
raised his arm in the Fascist salute.
‘¡Arriba España!’
In the early days of Bernie’s captivity, at San Pedro, many prisoners had refused to respond, but when a few were shot they had complied, and now there was a dull ragged response. Bernie had told the other prisoners about an English word that sounded almost the same as
‘arriba’
and now it was
‘Grieve España’
that many called back.

The prisoners were dismissed. The man who had fallen was lifted by his neighbours and they carried him back to his hut. It was one of the Poles. He stirred faintly. On the other side of the barbed-wire fence a figure, shadowy in the dusk in his long black robe, stood watching.

‘Father Eduardo,’ Vicente muttered. ‘Come for his prey.’

They watched as the young priest came through the gate and walked towards the Pole’s hut, his long
sotana
stirring up little eddies of dust from the yard. The last of the light glinted on his spectacles. ‘Bastard,’ Vicente muttered. ‘Coming to see if he can terrify another good atheist into taking the last rites by threatening him with Hell.’

V
ICENTE WAS
an old Left Republican, a member of Azaña’s party. He had been a lawyer in Madrid, providing cheap services to the city’s poor, until he joined the militia in 1936. It was a romantic gesture, he had told Bernie. ‘I was too old. But even rationalist Spaniards like me are romantics at heart.’ Like all his party Vicente had a visceral hatred for the Church. It was almost an obsession with the Left Republicans; a liberal-bourgeois distraction, the Communists
said. Vicente despised the Communists and said they had destroyed the Republic. Establo, leader of the Communists in Bernie’s hut, disapproved of Vicente and Bernie’s friendship.

‘In this camp you have only your convictions to keep you going,’ Establo had warned Bernie once. ‘If they are eaten away your strength will go too, you will give up and die.’ Establo himself looked as though it was only his beliefs that kept him alive. He was in his forties but looked sixty; his skin yellow and sagging, scarred with the marks of scabies. His eyes, though, were still full of fire.

Bernie had shrugged and told Establo he would end by converting Vicente, that the lawyer had the seeds of a class perspective. He had no respect for Establo; he hadn’t voted for him when the twenty Communists in the hut elected their leader. Establo was obsessed with control and couldn’t bear disagreement. During the war it had been necessary to have such people but it was different here. By the end of the Civil War the parties that made up the Republic had all hated each other, but in the camp the prisoners needed to cooperate to survive. Establo, though, tried to maintain the Communists’ separate identity. He told them they were still the vanguard of the working class, that one day their time would come again.

A couple of days before, Pablo, one of the other Communists, had whispered in Bernie’s ear. ‘Beware of mixing with the lawyer,
compadre
. Establo is making an issue of it.’

‘He can go fuck himself. What’s his authority, anyway?’

‘Why court trouble, Bernardo? The lawyer will die soon, anyone can see that.’

T
HIRTY PRISONERS
shuffled into their bare wooden hut and threw themselves down on the straw mattresses covering their plank beds, each with one brown army blanket. Bernie had taken the bunk next to Vicente when the last occupant died. It was partly an act of defiance against Establo, who lay on his bunk in the opposite row, staring across at him.

Vicente coughed again. His face reddened and he lay back, gasping.

‘I am bad. I will have to plead sickness tomorrow.’

‘You can’t. Ramirez is on duty, you’ll just get a beating.’

‘I don’t know if I can work another day.’

‘Come on, if you can stick it out until Molina is back, he’ll put you on easy duty.’

‘I will try.’

They were silent a moment, then Bernie leaned over on his elbow, speaking quietly. ‘Listen, the guard Agustín said an odd thing earlier.’

‘The quiet one from Sevilla?’

‘Yes.’ Bernie repeated the guard’s words. Vicente frowned.

‘What can it mean?’

‘I don’t know. What if the Monarchists have toppled the Falange? We wouldn’t know.’

‘We’d be no better off under the Monarchists.’ Vicente thought a moment. ‘Better times may be ahead? For who? He might have meant just for you, not all the camp.’

‘Why should they do me any favours?’

‘I don’t know.’ Vicente lay back with a sigh that turned into a cough. He looked ill, miserable.

‘Listen,’ Bernie said, to distract him. ‘I stood up to that bastard quack. He told me I was a degenerate because I couldn’t be converted to Catholicism. I remember that scene last
Navidad
. Remember, the doll?’

Vicente gave a sound between a laugh and a groan. ‘Who could forget it?’

I
T HAD BEEN
a cold day, snow on the ground. The prisoners were marched out into the yard where Father Jaime, the older of the two priests who served the camp, stood dressed in a green and yellow cope. In his regalia in the bare snowy yard he looked like a visitor from another world. Beside him young Father Eduardo, in his usual black, looked uncomfortable, his round face red with cold. Father Jaime was holding a child’s doll, a baby made of wood, wrapped in a shawl. There was a silver circle painted round its brow that puzzled Bernie for a moment until he realized it was meant to be a halo.

As always Father Jaime’s face was supercilious, angry, his hawk-like nose with the stiff little hairs on top lifted as though offended by more than the men’s rank smell. Aranda called the prisoners into
shivering lines then stood on the platform, tapping his crop against his leg.

‘Today is Epiphany,’ he called out, his breath making grey clouds in the freezing air. ‘Today we honour the baby Jesus, who came to Earth to save us. You will offer up homage and perhaps the Lord will take pity on you and shine a light into your souls. You will each kiss the image of the Christ child Father Jaime holds. Do not worry if the person before you has tuberculosis, the Lord will not allow you to be contaminated.’

Father Jaime frowned at the levity in the
comandante
’s tone. Father Eduardo looked at his feet. Father Jaime held the doll up, threateningly, like a weapon.

One by one the men shuffled past and kissed it. A few failed to bring their lips quite to the wood and the priest called them back sharply. ‘Again! Kiss the baby Jesus properly!’

It was one of the Anarchists who refused, Tomás the shipbuilder from Barcelona. He stood in front of the priest, looking him in the eyes. He was a big man and Father Jaime shrank back a little.

‘I will not kiss your symbol of superstition,’ he said. ‘I spit on it!’ And he did, leaving a trail of white spittle on the baby’s wooden brow. Father Jaime cried out as though the baby were real. One of the guards landed a blow on Tomás’s head that felled him to the ground. Father Eduardo looked about to step forward but a glare from Father Jaime stopped him. The older priest wiped the doll’s brow with a white handkerchief.

Aranda jumped off the platform and marched over to where the big man lay. ‘You insult Our Lord!’ he cried. ‘The Virgin in Heaven weeps as you spit on her child!’

The words were outraged but his tone was still mocking. Aranda took his crop and began methodically beating the Anarchist, starting with his legs and ending with a blow to Tomás’s head that drew blood. He called a couple of guards to carry him off, then turned to Father Jaime. The priest had shrunk back, clasping the doll to his breast as though sheltering it from the scene.

Aranda bowed. ‘I am sorry for that insult, sir. Please continue. We shall bring these men to religion if the effort kills us, shall we not?’ Aranda nodded to the next man in line. Bernie was pleased to
see a little fear as well as anger in Father Jaime’s eyes as the prisoner shuffled forward and bent his head to the doll. No one else resisted.

‘I
REMEMBER
how that doll smelled,’ Bernie said to Vicente. ‘Paint and saliva.’

‘Those black beetles, they are all the same. Father Jaime is a brute, but that Eduardo is more cunning. He will be in the sick Pole’s hut now, sniffing out whether he is about to die, whether he is weak enough to be browbeaten into taking absolution.’

Bernie shook his head. ‘Eduardo’s not so bad. Remember he tried to get a doctor for the camp? And the crosses for the graveyard?’ He thought of the hillside, just outside the camp, where those who died were buried in unmarked graves. When Father Eduardo came in the summer he had asked for crosses to mark the dead. The
comandante
had forbidden it; those inside the camp had been sentenced to decades of imprisonment by military courts; in practice they were already dead. One day the camp would close and the huts and barbed wire would be removed, leaving no sign on the bare windswept hill that it had ever been there.

‘What do crosses matter?’ Vicente replied. ‘More symbols of superstition. Father Eduardo’s kindness is fake, it is all to an end. They’re all the same, the black beetles, they’ll try to get you when you’re dying, at your weakest.’