Blind Sunflowers (3 page)

We can therefore imagine that he felt a certain relief when on the eighteenth, at the height of a merciless rainstorm, he was one of the chosen flock. Jammed together and trying to keep their balance on the back of a truck, all the condemned men stared at each other, felt for their neighbour’s hand, pressed close to one another. Somewhere along the way, a hand sought out his, and his solitude ebbed away in a long, silent handclasp that finally ushered him into the community of the defeated. Beyond the hand, a face peering at him. Then other faces, other eyes bloodshot with despair, and muffled sobs. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, as he plunged into the turmoil of desolate bodies.

It must have been eight o’clock by the time they reached Arganda del Rey. Everything was ready. A plastered wall – all that remained of a ruined stable – a piece of flat ground, a firing squad and a detachment of guards: all that was needed for their execution. More trucks, more condemned men, more expressions of despair. A priest with a purple stole was
muttering
the ritual calls for mercy in Latin. There were at least a hundred of them, and they had to crush together to fit along the length of wall. A few moments’ silence for the priest to end his prayers, a blessing traced in the air like a forlorn goodbye, and then ‘Squad’, silence, ‘Take Aim’, silence, ‘Fire’.

If anyone cried out, nobody heard them.

When Captain Alegría recovered consciousness, he was buried in a mass grave under a mound of dead bodies and earth. It took him a long time, but, ignoring the searing pain, he eventually realised he had yet again cheated the laws of the world which forbid all return. He was alive. A universe of dripping marrow bone, lifeless cartilage, coagulated blood, faeces, lungs, and hearts stopped by death had somehow created pockets of air in which he could breathe submerged among this chaotic jumble of victims. He was alive.

There is one darkness for the living and another for the dead. Alegría confused the two of them, because he did not even try to open his eyes until he heard his own sobs and realised this was not the silence of the dead. He was alive.

Alegría always spoke of that moment as one of birth. Utterly exhausted, it took him an age to distinguish the contours of his own feeble body, crushed under a tangle of other bodies. His skull ached so much he thought it must have been split in two. Slowly, trying hard not to disturb the dead, he drew his arms to his sides. Each time he pulled, he paused so as not to start panting and use up all the air. Little by little, he recovered the strength necessary to escape from the weight pressing down on him. Before facing the firing squad he had seen the grave in which he was buried, and knew that there could not be many bodies on top of him. He shifted his body time and again. Each time he could sense something moving and the load lightening, until at last there was nothing more to push against, and he was out in the open air. Earth tumbled into the gap he had left. He crawled over towards an embankment and rolled down it, trying not to cry out. He was all there, apart from his glasses.

A bullet had grazed his forehead and then furrowed across his scalp, opening a deep wound but not shattering his skull. His face, temples and neck were covered in blood, but the earth had cauterised the wound and although it had started to bleed again, his heart had nevertheless found a reason to beat other than fear.

Night was falling.

This is the start of a journey about which we know little, because although Alegría occasionally allowed himself to talk about what had happened before his resurrection, he rarely agreed to tell anyone how he got from Arganda del Rey to La Acebada, a mountain village on the
southern slopes of the Somosierra range. Granite, rockroses and mountains surround this slate and adobe village blanketed by snow throughout the winter and waking with the first balmy days of spring to tasks such as lavender-picking.

At some point though he did tell one of his prison guards that, except for animals, everyone backed away from him. They could not bear the idea that this filthy, haggard man with such a look of pain etched on his face could really be alive. In those days, only the dead did not instil fear.

Some farmhands found him in the fields outside La Acebada. He was so exhausted and frail that at first they thought he must be dead, but just as they were about to strip the body of its boots, they heard the bloody skull ask for water. He was wearing the uniform of the army that had just won the war, and yet was quaking with the fear of the defeated.

We now know that they considered several alternatives, from burying him alive because they had no idea who might have shot him, to leaving him to die out among the rockroses and then informing the authorities once he was dead. But a determined old woman decided to give him the water he was pleading for, and wiped his face with her petticoat.

‘We’re all God’s children, even that lot,’ she said. That was the
beginning
of three days of caring gestures towards the wounded man which somehow managed to keep him alive. Everything seemed to be
conspiring
to make it impossible for him to renounce life as one renounces a dream on waking.

They kept him there among the rockroses, partly out of fear and partly because they were worried he might die if they tried to move him. They treated his wound with useless ointments, covered him with a blanket, and gave him water and a little food. We now know that at a time like that, all their actions showed a depth of compassion which touched Alegría deeply.

That someone should draw near to a man riddled with worms, smeared in excrement and blood, should lift his head and gently pour water on his lips, should take the trouble to offer him spoonfuls of broth that even a dead man could swallow, muttering a word or two of comfort as they did so: all this, thought Alegría, was a sign that something human had survived the horrors of war. If his parched lips had not been so cracked, he would have smiled. As far as we can tell, this is what was going through his mind at the time.

He further told the orderlies who looked after him in the prisons where he was subsequently held that while he lay stretched out on the ground, refusing to listen to the calls of the earth to reclaim what belonged to it, what most tormented him was not the fear of death, but the shame of his rotting body being seen, the humiliation of his Samaritans having to smell his sickening breath, or soil their hands with the pus oozing from his wounds. When they came to bring food he would wrap himself in the blanket and not allow them near him. We might think now that this was also a way of not having to offer any explanation.

The fourth day dawned in a swathe of fog. His blanket was so sodden with dew that fever did not spare even his dying bones. He wanted to die in Huérmeces, but his life was draining away in these hostile
surroundings
. He gathered all his remaining strength, putting even the shudders of his fever to use in order to get to his feet. He carefully folded the blanket to show his gratitude, and placed the water and boiled potatoes into the sack they used to bring him his food. Then he set off in the direction of his home village, which was somewhere beyond the jagged outlines of the mountains shrouded in mist. He started walking uphill, heading for Somosierra.

This mountain range splits Spain in two, and it seems to us that Alegría’s desperate effort to scale them was yet another way of ignoring all that separates things, of wanting more than anything to be on both sides.

Disorientated by the fever, he searched for a lost path, skirting the road as he climbed to avoid being seen by anyone using it: there were always army convoys transporting the food, soldiers and weapons necessary to keep control over a conquered land. The after-effects of a war which, like many others, came to an end but was never resolved. Only very
occasionally
did a civilian vehicle pass by, and then there was no way of telling whether it had been requisitioned. Alegría knew that anybody who had the authority to move freely around the country could be his adversary. Not that this meant that the silent, immobile ones might not be also against him: he had no way of knowing to which band a soldier who has won a war and at the same time lost it belongs.

Yet even though he wanted to stay hidden, he did not dare move far from the road. He was afraid his life would ebb away completely, and when that happened he wanted to stretch out on it so that someone
would find him and give him a Christian burial, or at least prevent his remains from becoming food for wolves or the feral dogs that loped around him, patiently waiting for his pilgrimage to end. The resurrection of the flesh, he thought, requires a certain cleanliness on the part of the dead, but he was no more than a nauseating, humiliated mess. He stank so badly all he could smell was his own body, above the perfume of heather, thyme, springtime and rockroses.

The precautions he took meant the journey lasted another three agonising days. The boiled potatoes and water were enough for the first of these, but then, when he reached the freezing summit, all he had to comfort him at night was the empty sack. By day, it also protected his gaping wound from the fierce midday sun.

At the end of the third day he reached Somosierra, a granite and slate village which needed its landscape to look beautiful. He arrived at dusk, with a heavy, slanting sun at his back that allowed him to see his way to the tollhouse where the patrol guarding the road had set up camp. These were the soldiers who had won the last battle, dressed in the uniforms, boots, and capes he had been in charge of dispatching all those years. He felt no nostalgia or remorse, only melancholy.

He spent hours observing them with his blurred myopic vision, even after night had fallen and the soldiers had started bonfires to light the road and keep warm. He watched the parody of a change of guard, carried out with a slovenly laziness that seemed to come more from utter boredom than a sense of victory.

This must have been the moment when he had the thoughts he wrote on some sheets of paper found on his body the day of his second, real death. This took place some time later, when he blew his brains out with a rifle seized from a prison guard.

‘Are these soldiers I can see looking so drooped and bored in front of me the ones who have won the war? No, they simply want to return home, and they will not do that as victorious fighting men, but as people for whom life is strange, people who are absent from their own worlds, people who will slowly turn into vanquished flesh. They will fuse with those they defeated; the only difference between them will be the stigma of their warring hatreds. Just like the defeated, they will come to fear the true victor, the one who defeated the enemy army and their own. Only a very few of the dead will be seen as protagonists of the war.’

The fever, hunger and self-disgust he felt must have consumed all his thoughts and memory. He scraped together his last remaining strength, crawling on all fours because he could no longer even stand, and slowly approached the guard house, oblivious to the soldiers’ astonishment and repulsion as they watched this scarecrow slouching towards them.

Choking back his sobs, he said:

‘I’m one of you.’

This text was found in a cabin in the mountains of Somiedo, on the borders of Asturias and León. Also discovered were the skeleton of an adult male and an infant’s surprisingly well-conserved naked body, laid on some cloth sacks stretched out over a palliasse. They were covered in a wolf skin and the fleece of a mountain goat, as well as wild boar fur and dried moss. The two bodies lay side-by-side, and were wrapped in a white bedspread, ‘as if in a nest’, according to the official report. The bedspread was as clean as the rest of the room was dirty, foul-smelling and wretched. The dried but still stinking remains of a cow missing its head and one hoof were also found. In 1952, while I was searching for other documents in the Civil Guard General Archive, I came across a yellow envelope with the letters NN (no name) written on it. The envelope contained an oilskin notebook, consisting of a few ruled pages. The contents were written in a neat, flowing hand. On the first pages, the handwriting is large, but it grows progressively smaller, as if the writer had more to write about than would fit into the book. Comments apparently added later are occasionally scribbled in the margins. This is obvious not only because of the handwriting (which as I said becomes progressively smaller) but also because they clearly reflect very different states of mind. I have nevertheless included these comments on the corresponding pages. A shepherd came across the notebook on a stool, under a heavy stone that could not have been put there by accident. A leather satchel, an axe, a bed-frame with no mattress and two pottery bowls on the cold hearth were the only other items listed in the civil guardsman’s report. A simple black dress was hanging from the ceiling. There were no other signs of life, although the report states (and this is what encouraged me to read the notebook) that a phrase had been scrawled on the cabin wall: ‘Infamous flock of nocturnal birds.’

Elena died giving birth. I was unable to keep her on this side of life. To my surprise though, the boy is alive.

There he is, unravelled, shivering, lying on a clean cloth alongside his dead mother. I have no idea what to do. I don’t dare touch him. I think I am going to let him die with his mother. She will know how to look after an infant’s soul. She will teach him to laugh, if there is a place for souls to laugh. We will not get over the mountains to France. Without Elena I have no wish to reach the end of the journey. Without Elena there is no way through.

How does one correct the mistake of being alive? I’ve seen so many dead people, but I haven’t learned how one dies!

It’s not right that death should come so soon, when life itself has had no time to begin.

I’ve left everything as it was. Nobody will be able to say I interfered. The mother dead, the child restlessly alive, and me paralysed by fear. The colour of flight is grey; the sound of defeat is sadness.

I want to leave everything written down in order to make it clear to whoever finds us that they are also to blame, unless they are victims too. Whoever reads this, please scatter our remains out on the hills. Elena could go no further, and the boy and I want to stay beside her. I am guilty only of having allowed what happened to happen. I had not learned how to avoid grief, and now grief has chopped Elena from me with its scythe. I only know how to write and tell stories. Nobody has taught me how to
talk to myself, or to protect life from death. I write because I don’t want to remember how to pray or to curse.

How can such a beautiful story end on a mountain wracked by the wind? It’s only October, but up here every night autumn becomes winter.

The child cried all day, with surprising strength. He has forced me to think of him, even though all I do is stare at Elena dead beside me, and have paid him no attention the whole morning. I now realise I have not shed a single tear over her, probably because the child’s sobbing is more than enough. And it’s necessary. I would never have managed to cry so helplessly; I would never have succeeded in screaming so angrily. Tears have been shed over Elena’s dead body without any effort on my part. How is it possible for someone to shed tears and fade away at the same time? Now it seems as though the boy has lost consciousness. I went over to look at him. He’s still breathing, although it felt to me as though his skeleton had somehow been removed.

I’ve been studying Elena’s chalky face. She is not as waxily pallid as she was when she died. It’s as though all the colour has drained from her. Perhaps death is transparent. And frozen. For the first few hours, I felt the need to keep her hand in mine, but little by little the sense of her fingers caressing me faded, and I was afraid this would be the memory of her that remained engraved on my unrequited skin. I haven’t touched her for several hours, and am no longer capable of lying down beside her. The boy is though. He’s curled up against his mother. For a moment I thought he was trying to bring some warmth back to the lifeless body that was his shelter through all the droning numbness of war.

Yes. We’ve lost a war, and to allow ourselves to be caught by the Fascists would be akin to handing them another victory. Elena wanted to follow me, but now we know we made the wrong decision. I’d like to think it was the most generous mistake imaginable.

We should have listened to her parents. I beg their forgiveness for having allowed Elena to come with me when I fled.

Stay here, it’s not you they’re after, I told her. I’ll follow you. They’ll kill me. I’m dying. We talked of death in order to take a chance with life. But we were wrong. We should never have started out on such an endless
journey with her eight-months pregnant. The child will not survive, and I’ll let myself fall onto the grass. The snow will come and bury me, and later out of my eye sockets will grow flowers that will enrage those who preferred death to poetry.

Miguel, your prophecy will come true!

Where can you be now, Miguel, why aren’t you here to comfort me? I would gladly sacrifice eternity to hear your liquid verses just once more, your level voice, your friendly advice. Perhaps all this pain will make a poet of me, Miguel, perhaps you won’t have to be so kind in your appreciation of me? Do you remember, you used to call me the proletarian archer? Elena loved you for that, and loves you even after her death, I’m sure.

Would Elena have preferred me to disentangle the child from the placenta, to tie his umbilical with one of my bootlaces, to seek to humble the victors with the seed of revenge? I don’t think she would have wanted a defeated child. I don’t want a son born of flight. My son does not want a life born of death. Or does he?

If the God I have heard about were a good God, he would allow us to choose our past, but neither Elena nor her son will be able to go back along the path that has brought us to this cabin that will be their burial place.

At first light, sleep overcame me, and I dozed off leaning on the table. I was awakened by the boy’s sobs: they sounded less vigorous, more ailing. His anger yesterday left me indifferent, but today’s lament has touched me. I don’t know whether it was because I was dazed from sleep and cold, or because after three days without food I’m also beginning to feel weak, but the fact is that without realising it I found myself giving him the tip of a rag dipped in diluted milk. At first he did not seem to know if he should live or simply allow himself to become part of my plan, but after a while he began to suck on the liquid. He was sick, but then went on sucking greedily. Life seems determined to win out.

I think it was a mistake to pick him up. I think it was a mistake to distance him from death for even an instant, but the warmth of my body and the food he managed to take in have sent him into a fitful but deep sleep.

I used some sacks of hay to make him a cosy cradle. I covered him with the crocheted bedspread Elena’s grandmother made. Elena insisted on bringing it with her, as if all her past were bundled up in it. It’s no longer as comforting as it was when the three of us fled, but it warms the child up. Perhaps it still bears traces of his mother’s smell.

I must confess I find the contrast between life and death unbearable.

To see the two of them in the same bed, flat on their backs, with Elena completely gone and him still so undefined was like drawing a line between what’s true and what’s false. All at once death was death, nothing more, stripped of the body’s innocence, of life’s animal nature. By the end of three days, a dead body is a mineral without the moisture of breath or the fragility of flowers. It isn’t even a defenceless object. It’s not something that could feel under attack, and yet it crouches there as though trying to hide. By the end of three days, a dead body is nothing more than solitude. It doesn’t even have the gift of sadness. The boy’s umbilical cord is drying out. He’s still crying.

I haven’t eaten. I still have some dry bread and tins of fish that we brought with us on our escape. The boy has had some more diluted milk. It seems to fill him up. Today I’ll bury his mother under the oak tree. I don’t have the strength to milk the cows, but they are becoming ill and their lowing also serves to take my mind off Elena. I’d like someone to come up from the valley and round up the cattle so I don’t have to decide whether to feed myself or let myself roll down the slope to death. But in these fearful times, even cattle have to fend for themselves. Until winter arrives, they will be unaware of the existence of wolves, cold, and the natural order of things. As it stands, they and I are facing the same fate. If nobody comes, the four or five of them that need to be milked will die. How could the person looking after them have vanished, just like that? But that is of no importance in such bleak times as these. Anyway, while I make my mind up, I’ll need milk for the boy.

It’s raining. So much the better; no one will dare make the trip up to the cabin in such unsettled weather. I’ve managed to catch two of the cows. One of them has mastitis. I’ll have to kill her to stop her suffering. Today the child ate three times.

Today I buried Elena under a beech tree. It’s less robust than the oak. The sound of the earth falling on her mingled with the smell of her
decomposing
body. I was reduced to such bitter tears that for a moment I felt sure I was going to die too. But dying is not contagious. Defeat is. And I feel I am transmitting that particular epidemic. Wherever I go there will be the stench of defeat. Defeat killed Elena, and it will be the death of my son, whom I have not yet named. I lost a war and Elena, whom nobody could ever have considered an enemy, has died defeated. My son, our son, who is not even aware he was conceived with the flames of fear all around him, will die, mortally wounded by defeat.

I placed a big white stone on her grave. I didn’t write her name on it, because I know that if any angels still exist, they will recognise Elena’s kindly soul among a whole host of other kindly souls.

I’m trying to recall some of Garcilaso’s verses to recite over your tomb, Elena, but I no longer have any recollection of them. How did they go?

I don’t know why I’m writing this notebook. And yet I’m glad I brought it with me. If I had someone to talk to, I probably would not write it; I
derive a certain morbid pleasure when I think that somebody will read it after they have found my dead son and I. I’ve put a stone marker on Elena’s grave so that the sense of remorse will be threefold, even though the time for pity is past. It’s very cold now. Soon it will start to snow, and then all the paths up to the cabin will be cut off. I’ll have the whole winter to decide what death we are to die from. Yes, I think the time for pity has gone.

In the margin are several roughly-drawn faces, obviously meant to be portraits. Three of them show the face of a child, and two that of a woman – the same woman in both cases. There are sketches of old people, both men and women, some of them wearing berets, others with scarves tied round their necks. There’s also a dog, pictured complete. Underneath all these drawings is the phrase:
What graves are you lying in now?

Today it snowed all day. These mountains must be where all winters have their home.

The boy is still alive. The snow round the cabin is like a shroud. The dead cow provides us with meat: I keep some of it smoked, and the rest has been frozen by this early winter weather. Fortunately we get plenty of milk from the living cow, which is now inside the cabin with us. It helps to keep us warm. The sweet potatoes we stole as we went through Perlunes keep perfectly, buried in the snow. To judge by the greedy way
he drinks the soup I make, the boy seems to like them. What’s surprising is the way he is beginning to fill the space. I can remember when he was an intruder in the cabin, something that should not have been there. Now the entire hut revolves around him. On the few days when there is sun, our bed reflects the light like a mirror, and the silence piles up around the noises the boy is constantly making, either because he is crying, or is taken by surprise by his bare leg waving in mid-air, or the sight of the withered, weary cow that has replaced a hearth to warm our family. His gentle, rhythmic breathing helps ward off the loneliness which without him would vanquish me.