The Prisoner of Heaven: A Novel Read online

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Fermín Romero de Torres.’

  The prisoner noticed disdain and indifference in those blue eyes.

  ‘What sort of name is that? Do you think I’m a fool? Come on: name, the real one.’

  The prisoner, a small, frail man, held out his papers for the governor. The guard snatched them from him and took them over to the table. The governor had a quick look at them, then clicked his tongue and smiled.

  ‘Another Heredia job …’ he murmured before throwing the documents into the wastepaper basket. ‘These papers are no good. Are you going to tell me your name or do we have to get serious?’

  Tenant number 13 tried to utter a few words, but his lips trembled and all he managed to do was stammer something incomprehensible.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, my good man, nobody’s going to bite you. What have you been told? There are plenty of fucking reds out there who like to spread slanders around, but here, if people collaborate, they get treated well, like Spaniards. Come on, clothes off.’

  The new tenant seemed to hesitate for a moment. The governor looked down, as if the whole situation was making him feel uncomfortable and only the prisoner’s stubbornness was keeping him there. A second later, the guard dealt him another blow with the rifle butt, this time in the kidneys, and knocked him down again.

  ‘You heard the governor. Strip down. We don’t have all night.’

  Tenant number 13 managed to get up on his knees and remove his dirty, bloodstained clothes. Once he was completely naked, the guard stuck the rifle barrel under a shoulder and forced him to stand up. The governor looked up from the desk and grimaced with disgust when he saw the burns covering his torso, buttocks and much of his thighs.

  ‘It looks like our champion is an old acquaintance of Fumero’s,’ the guard remarked.

  ‘Keep your mouth shut,’ ordered the governor without much conviction.

  He looked at the prisoner with impatience and realised he was crying.

  ‘Come on, stop crying and tell me your name.’

  The prisoner whispered his name again.

  ‘Fermín Romero de Torres …’

  The governor sighed wearily.

  ‘Look, I’m beginning to lose my patience. I want to help you and I don’t really feel like having to call Inspector Fumero and tell him you’re here …’

  The prisoner started to whimper like a wounded dog and was shaking so violently that the governor, who clearly found the scene distasteful and wanted to put an end to the matter as soon as possible, exchanged a glance with the guard and, without saying a word, wrote the name the prisoner had given him in the register, swearing under his breath.

  ‘Bloody war,’ he muttered to himself when they took the prisoner to his cell, dragging him naked through the flooded tunnels.

  2

  The cell was a dark, damp rectangle. Cold air blew in through a small hole drilled in the rock. The walls were covered with crudely etched marks and messages left by previous tenants. Some had written their names, a date, or left some other proof of their existence. One of them had busied himself scratching crucifixes in the dark, but heaven did not seem to have noticed them. The iron bars securing the cell were rusty and left a film of brown on one’s hands.

  Huddled up on the ramshackle bunk, Fermín tried to cover his nakedness with a bit of ragged cloth which, he imagined, served as blanket, mattress and pillow. The half-light was tinged with a coppery hue, like the breath of a dying candle. After a while, his eyes became accustomed to the gloom and his ears sharpened, allowing him to pick up the sound of slight movements through a litany of dripping leaks and echoes carried by the draught that seeped in from outside.

  Fermín had been sitting there for half an hour when he noticed a shape in the dark, at the other end of the cell. He stood up and stepped slowly towards it: it was a dirty canvas bag. The cold and the damp had started to get into his bones and, although the smell from that bundle, spattered with dark stains, did not augur well, Fermín thought that perhaps it contained the prisoner’s uniform nobody had bothered to give him and, with a bit of luck, a blanket to protect him from the bitter cold. He knelt down and untied the knot closing one end of the bag.

  When he drew the canvas aside, the dim light from the oil lamps flickering in the corridor revealed what at first he took to be the face of a doll, one of those dummies tailors place in their shop windows to show off their suits. The stench and his nausea made him realise it was no dummy. Covering his nose and mouth with one hand, he pulled the rest of the canvas to one side, then stepped backwards until he collided with the wall of the cell.

  The corpse seemed to be that of an adult anywhere between forty and seventy-five years of age, who couldn’t have weighed more than fifty kilos. A tangle of white hair and a beard covered much of his face and skeletal torso. His bony hands, with long, twisted nails, looked like the claws of a bird. His eyes were open, the corneas shrivelled up like overripe fruit. His mouth was open too, with his tongue, black and swollen, wedged between rotten teeth.

  ‘Take his clothes off before they come and fetch him,’ came a voice from the cell on the other side of the corridor. ‘You won’t get anything else to wear until next month.’

  Fermín peered into the shadows and spied two shining eyes observing him from the bunk in the other cell.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, the poor soul can’t hurt anyone any more,’ the voice assured him.

  Fermín nodded and walked over to the sack again, wondering how he was going to carry out the operation.

  ‘My sincerest apologies,’ he mumbled to the deceased. ‘May God rest your soul.’

  ‘He was an atheist,’ the voice from the opposite cell informed him.

  Fermín gave another nod and decided to skip the formalities. The cold permeating the cell was so intense it cut through one’s bones and any courtesy seemed redundant. Holding his breath, he set to work. The clothes smelled the same as the dead man. Rigor mortis had begun to spread through the body and the task of undressing the corpse turned out to be much harder than he’d anticipated. Once the deceased’s best clothes had been plucked off, Fermín covered him again with the sack and closed it with a reef knot that even the great Houdini would have been unable to tackle. At last, dressed in a ragged and foul-smelling prison uniform, Fermín huddled up again on the bed, wondering how many prisoners had worn it before him.

  ‘Much appreciated,’ he said finally.

  ‘You’re very welcome,’ said the voice on the other side of the corridor.

  ‘Fermín Romero de Torres, at your service.’

  ‘David Martín.’

  Fermín frowned. The name sounded familiar. For five long minutes he shuffled through distant memories and echoes from the past and then, suddenly, it came to him. He remembered whole afternoons spent in a corner of the library on Calle del Carmen, devouring a series of books with racy covers and titles.

  ‘Martín the author? Of City of the Damned?’

  A sigh in the shadows.

  ‘Nobody appreciates pen names any more.’

  ‘Please excuse my indiscretion. It’s just that I had an almost scholarly devotion to your work. That’s why I know you were the person writing the novels of the immortal Ignatius B. Samson …’

  ‘At your service.’

  ‘Well, Señor Martín, it’s an honour to meet you, even if it is in these wretched circumstances, because I’ve been a great admirer of yours for years and …’

  ‘Are you two lovebirds going to shut up? Some people here are trying to sleep,’ roared a bitter voice that seemed to come from the next-door cell.

  ‘There goes old Sourpuss,’ a second voice cut in, coming from further down the corridor. ‘Pay no attention to him, Martín. If you fall asleep here you just get eaten alive by bedbugs, starting with your privates. Go on, Martín, why don’t you tell us a story? One about Chloé …’

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

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nbsp; ‘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 inclu
ded 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.