The Prisoner of Heaven: A Novel (8 page)

‘Sure, so you can jerk off like a monkey,’ answered the hostile voice.

‘Fermín, my friend,’ Martín announced from his cell. ‘Let me introduce you to Number Twelve, who finds something wrong in everything, and I mean
everything
, and Number Fifteen, insomniac, educated and the cell block’s official ideologue. The rest don’t speak much, especially Number Fourteen.’

‘I speak when I have something to say,’ snapped a deep, icy voice Fermín assumed must belong to Number 14. ‘If we all followed suit, we’d get some peace at night.’

Fermín took in this peculiar community.

‘Good evening, everyone. My name is Fermín Romero de Torres and it’s a pleasure to make all your acquaintances.’

‘The pleasure is entirely yours,’ said Number 15.

‘Welcome, and I hope your stay is brief,’ offered Number 14.

Fermín glanced again at the sack housing the corpse and gulped.

‘That was Lucio, the former Number Thirteen,’ Martín explained. ‘We don’t know anything about him because the poor fellow was mute. A bullet blew off his larynx at the battle of the Ebro.’

‘A shame he was the only one,’ remarked Number 15.

‘What did he die of?’ asked Fermín.

‘In this place one just dies from being here,’ answered Number 12. ‘It doesn’t take much more.’

3

Routine helped. Once a day, for an hour, the inmates from the first two cell blocks were taken to the yard within the moat to get a bit of sun, rain, or whatever the weather brought with it. The menu consisted of a half-full bowl of some cold, greasy, greyish gruel of indeterminate provenance and rancid taste which, after a few days, and with hunger cramps in one’s stomach, eventually became odourless and thus easier to get down. It was doled out halfway through the afternoon and in time prisoners came to look forward to its arrival.

Once a month prisoners handed in their dirty clothes and were given another set which had supposedly been plunged into boiling water for a minute, although the bugs didn’t seem to have noticed it. On Sundays inmates were advised to attend mass. Nobody dared miss it, because the priest took a roll call and if there was any name missing he’d write it down. Two absences meant a week of fasting. Three, a month’s holiday in one of the solitary confinement cells in the tower.

The cell blocks, courtyard and any other areas through which the prisoners moved were heavily guarded. A body of sentries armed with rifles and guns patrolled the prison and, when the inmates were out of their cells, it was impossible for them to look in any direction and not see at least a dozen of those guards, alert, their weapons at the ready. They were joined by the less threatening jailers, none of whom looked like soldiers; the general feeling among the prisoners was that they were a bunch of unfortunate souls who had been unable to find a better job in those hard times.

Every block of cells had a jailer assigned to it. Armed with a bundle of keys, he worked twelve-hour shifts sitting on a chair at the end of the corridor. Most of the jailers avoided fraternising with the prisoners and didn’t give them a word or a look beyond what was strictly necessary. The only one who seemed to be an exception was a poor devil nicknamed Bebo, who had lost an eye in an air raid when he worked as a nightwatchman in a factory in Pueblo Seco.

It was rumoured that Bebo had a twin brother jailed in Valencia and perhaps this was why he showed some kindness towards the prisoners. When nobody was watching, he would occasionally slip them some drinking water, a bit of dry bread or whatever he could scrounge from the hoard the guards amassed out of packages sent by the prisoners’ families. Bebo liked to drag his chair near David Martín’s cell and listen to the stories the writer sometimes told the other inmates. In that particular hell, Bebo was the closest thing to an angel.

Normally, after Sunday mass, the governor addressed a few edifying words to the prisoners. All they knew about him was that his name was Mauricio Valls and that before the war he’d been an aspiring writer who worked as secretary and errand-boy for a well-known local author, a long-standing rival of the ill-fated Don Pedro Vidal. In his spare time Valls penned bad translations of Greek and Latin classics and, with the help of a couple of kindred souls, edited a cultural pamphlet with high pretensions and low circulation. They also organised literary gatherings in which a whole battalion of like-minded luminaries deplored the state of things, forecasting that if one day they were able to call the shots, the world would rise to Olympian heights.

His life seemed destined for the bitter, grey existence of mediocrities whom God, in his infinite cruelty, has endowed with delusions of grandeur and a boundless ambition far exceeding their talents. The war, however, had recast his destiny as it had that of so many others, and his luck had changed when, in a situation somewhere between chance and fortune-hunting, Mauricio Valls, until then enamoured only of his own prodigious talent and exquisite refinement, wedded the daughter of a tycoon whose far-reaching enterprises supported much of General Franco’s budget and his troops.

The bride, eight years his senior, had been confined to a wheelchair since the age of thirteen, consumed by a congenital illness that mercilessly devoured her muscles and her life. No man had ever looked into her eyes or held her hand to tell her she was beautiful and ask what her name was. Mauricio, who like all untalented men of letters was, deep down, as practical as he was conceited, was the first and last to do so, and a year later the couple married in Seville, with General Queipo de Llano and other luminaries of the state apparatus in attendance.

‘Valls, you’ll go far,’ Serrano Súñer himself predicted during a private audience in Madrid to which Valls had gone to plead for the post of director of the National Library.

‘Spain is living through difficult moments and every well-born Spaniard must put his shoulder to the wheel and help contain the hordes of Marxists attempting to corrupt our spiritual resolve,’ the Caudillo’s brother-in-law announced, looking resplendent in his pantomime-admiral’s uniform.

‘You can count on me, Your Excellency,’ Valls offered. ‘For whatever is needed.’

‘Whatever is needed’ turned out to be the post of director, not of the wondrous National Library in Madrid as he would have wished, but of a prison with a dismal reputation, perched on a clifftop overlooking the city of Barcelona. The list of close friends and protégés requiring plum posts was exceedingly lengthy and Valls, despite all his endeavours, only made the bottom third of the queue.

‘Be patient, Valls. Your efforts will be rewarded.’

That is how Mauricio Valls learned his first lesson in the complex national art of elbowing ahead after any change of regime: thousands of supporters had joined the ranks and the competition was fierce.

4

That, at least, was the story. This unconfirmed catalogue of suspicions, accusations and third-hand rumours reached the ears of the prisoners – and of whoever would listen – thanks to the shady machinations of the previous governor. He had been unceremoniously removed from office after only two weeks in charge and was poisoned with resentment against that upstart Valls, who had robbed him of the post he’d been fighting for throughout the entire war. As luck would have it, the outgoing governor had no family connections and carried with him the fateful precedent of having been caught, when inebriated, uttering humorous asides about the Generalissimo of all Spains and his remarkable likeness to Dopey. Before being installed as deputy governor of a Ceuta prison he had put all his efforts into badmouthing Don Mauricio Valls to the four winds.

What was uncontested was that nobody could refer to Valls by any name other than ‘the governor’. The official version, which he himself put about and authorised, was that he, Don Mauricio, was a man of letters, of recognised achievement and cultured intellect, blessed with a fine erudition acquired during the years he’d studied in Paris. Beyond his temporary position in the penitentiary sector of the regime, his future and his mission lay in educating the ordinary people of a decimated Spain, teaching them how to think with the help of a select circle of sympathisers.

His lectures often included lengthy quotes from his own writings, poems or educational articles which he published regularly in the national press on literature, philosophy and the much needed renaissance of thought in the Western world. If the prisoners applauded enthusiastically at the end of these masterly sessions, the governor would make a magnanimous gesture and order the jailers to give out cigarettes, candles or some other luxury confiscated from the batch of donations and parcels sent to the prisoners by their families. The more desirable items had been previously expropriated by the guards, who took them home or sometimes even sold them to the inmates. It was better than nothing.

Those who died from natural or loosely attributed causes – on average between five and ten a week – were collected at midnight, except at weekends or on religious holidays, when the body would remain in the cell until the Monday or the next working day, usually keeping a new tenant company. When prisoners called out to announce that one of their companions had passed away, a jailer would walk over, check the body for pulse or breath and then put it into one of the canvas sacks used for this purpose. Once the sack had been tied, it remained in the cell until the undertakers from the neighbouring Montjuïc Cemetery came by to collect it. Nobody knew what they did with them and when the prisoners asked Bebo about it, he refused to answer, lowering his eyes.

Once a fortnight a summary trial took place and those condemned were shot at dawn. Sometimes, owing to the bad state of the rifles or the ammunition, the execution squad didn’t manage to pierce a vital organ and the agonised cries from the wounded who had fallen into the moat rang out for hours. Occasionally an explosion was heard and the shouts would suddenly cease. The theory circulating among the prisoners was that one of the officers finished them off with a grenade, but nobody was sure whether that was strictly accurate.

Another rumour making the rounds was that on Friday mornings the governor received visits in his office from wives, daughters, fiancées, or even aunts and grandmothers of the prisoners. Having removed his wedding ring, which he hid in the top drawer of his desk, he listened to their requests, considered their pleas, offered a handkerchief for their tears and accepted gifts and favours of another kind, after promising them better diets and treatment for their loved ones, or the review of dubious sentences, which regrettably were never addressed.

On selected occasions, Mauricio Valls served them teacakes and a glass of muscatel, and if, despite the hard times and poor nutrition, they were still attractive enough to pinch he would read them some of his writings and confess that his marriage to an ailing spouse was a trial of sanctity imposed upon his manhood. He’d then go on about how much he deplored his job as a jailer and how he considered it humiliating for a man of such high culture and refinement to be confined to that shameful post, when his natural destiny was to be a part of the country’s higher echelons.

The advice from the more experienced prisoners was not to mention, and if possible not even think about, the governor. Most of them preferred to talk about the families they had left behind and the life they remembered. Some had photographs of girlfriends or wives which they treasured and would defend with their lives if anyone tried to snatch them away. More than one prisoner had told Fermín that the first three months were the worst. Afterwards, once you lost all hope, time began to go faster and the senseless days deadened your soul.

5

On Sundays, after mass and the governor’s speech, some of the prisoners would gather in a sunny corner of the courtyard to share a cigarette or two and listen to the stories David Martín would tell them, when his mind was clear. Fermín, who knew them all because he’d read the entire
City of the Damned
series, would join the group and let his imagination fly. But often Martín didn’t seem to be fit enough even to tell them the time of day, so the others would leave him alone while he wandered around talking to himself. Fermín observed him closely, following him at times, because there was something about that poor devil that broke his heart. Using all his cunning and wily tricks, Fermín would try to obtain cigarettes for him, or even a few lumps of sugar, which Martín loved.

‘You’re a good man, Fermín. Try not to let it show,’ the writer would tell him.

Martín always carried an old photograph on him, which he liked to gaze at for long spells. It showed a man dressed in white, holding the hand of a girl of about eight. They were both watching the sunset from the end of a wooden jetty that stretched out over a beach, like a gangway suspended over crystalline waters. Usually, when Fermín asked him about the photograph, Martín didn’t reply. He would just smile, before putting the picture back in his pocket.

‘Who is the girl in the photograph, Señor Martín?’

‘I’m not sure, Fermín. Sometimes my memory lets me down. Doesn’t that happen to you?’

‘Of course. It happens to everyone.’

It was rumoured that Martín was not altogether in his right mind, but soon after Fermín started to befriend him he realised that the poor man was far worse than the rest of the prisoners assumed. There were moments when he proved more lucid than anyone, but often he didn’t seem to understand where he was and he spoke about people and places that obviously existed only in his imagination or memory.

Often Fermín would wake up in the early hours and hear Martín talking in his cell. If he drew stealthily up to the bars and listened carefully, he could hear him clearly arguing with someone he called ‘Señor Corelli’ who, judging by the words he exchanged with him, appeared to be a notoriously sinister character.

On one of those nights Fermín lit the remains of his last candle and raised it in the direction of the opposite cell. He wanted to make sure Martín really was alone and that both voices, his own and the other voice belonging to the person called Corelli, were coming from the same lips. Martín was walking in circles round his cell, and when their eyes met, Fermín realised that his prison mate couldn’t see him. He was behaving as if those walls didn’t exist and his conversation with that strange man was taking place far from there.