The Things We've Seen, page 4
I went into my room, putting the cookie and the milk down on the table. Getting into bed, I closed my eyes. I hesitated over turning off the light. I picked up the book, Physics at the Residencia de Estudiantes. I tried to read the rest of the ‘Stellar Universe’ chapter, the talk by Sir Arthur Eddington on the Belgian priest Lemaître who, as I’ve said, discovered the fact of the universe’s expansion, but I found I couldn’t get beyond the phrase, ‘There are some stars so dense that a tonne of their matter would fit inside a matchbox.’ I got up, opened the minibar, totally empty, and put both cookie and milk inside. I got back into bed. The rustling of the palm trees served to amplify the noise of the wind once again.
Day Three: Departure
Breakfast. The boat isn’t due to come until 12.30 p.m. Julián and I, our heads splitting, decide to deal with the hangover by going outside for some air, taking coffee and cupcakes with us. We set out with no destination in mind. As he kicks pebbles along, I ask if he knows that Venus takes 243 Earth days to rotate about its axis, but only 224 to orbit the sun, which means a day on Venus lasts longer than a year on Venus. No, he didn’t know that, says Julián. We come to the shore. ‘You look like the Saint Roch inside the chapel, but with glasses,’ he laughs. ‘At least nobody’s stolen my hands,’ I say, making mine tremble, nearly spilling the coffee. We sit on the neatly sawn stump of a eucalyptus. I start counting the rings but lose count at thirteen. We drink the coffee while still eating the cupcakes. A song starts up. It’s coming from some far-off place, but the acoustics mean we somehow hear it with complete clarity, as though we’re sitting inside a struck note. We both look out across the water. It turns out to be a small fishing boat, low to the water, that’s coming across the strait; the fisherman, I suppose, has a portable hi-fi on board. It’s a rap song, but seeing as I don’t like rap I have no idea which one. I watch as the boat sails past a plinth which, out in the water, stands at least a metre clear of the surface. The day is particularly clear and I’m able to make out a human figure standing on the column, whether of stone or metal I can’t tell; it’s the first time I’ve noticed it. I point it out to Julián. He tells me it’s Jules Verne, a statue of Jules Verne, whose Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was inspired, in part, by the island. ‘At high tide, the head only just pokes out,’ he says, ‘maybe that’s why you haven’t seen it yet.’ I drain my coffee cup. I’d love another one but haven’t got it in me to go and actually get it. Julián says he’s staying put too. The boat is soon lost from sight, the beats in the rap song mixing, intermingling with the lapping of the waves. The sun is squarely ahead of us now. Julián picks a small stone up from between his feet and throws it out to sea. I do the same, with a slightly larger stone. Neither of us saying anything, we take it in turns to throw stones. Within a few minutes, we’ve joined forces to pick up a rock the size of suitcase; we each take an end, rolling it to the edge before hurling it out into the water. After the splash, it gives off a low, muted sound as it sinks to the depths. So it is very deep here.
‘Julián’, I say, ‘I’ve a feeling we’re not on the island any more.’
Solo residency
When I got back to La Coruña, rather than taking the plane I was booked on to Mallorca, I stayed in the family home which, as I’ve said, is uninhabited at that time of year. I spent a few days working out all the clothes, books, food items, electronics and toiletries I’d need to see me through a minimum of two months on the island. Having dealt with the question of supplies, I contacted a boat hire firm; for the date I had in mind, they only had yachts available. I knew that travelling by car to the coast near San Simón, and arranging a boat from there, would mean someone finding out about my plans before I’d even set off. So, at 7 p.m. on 5 November, the captain of a forty-foot yacht and I set sail from the city port. The Costa de la Muerte treated us kindly: the ocean like a millpond, the night sky clear. Looking back, the coastal towns and villages resembled an uninterrupted, if decaying, set of teeth. I pointed this out to the captain, who pretended to see it as well, and said he’d been thinking the same thing, though I could tell he was lying. I also mentioned the fact I’ve never understood the supposed luxury of pleasure boats or the social status they confer; to me they’re nothing but caravans on water, and not even with the benefit of an ejector button for making a quick escape. This the captain roundly disagreed with. The sun was coming up when, as we passed the town of Ribeira, it started to rain and a west wind picked up, tossing the boat around. I went to my cabin.
I woke at 6 p.m.; the sun broke intermittently between the clouds, we passed the Ons Islands, skirted the Cíes Islands, the captain pointed them out to me, doing so with arm outstretched and forefinger very straight, as though it weren’t obvious what was staring us in the face – a nautical custom, I supposed, come down from at least as far back at Columbus’s discovery of what we today call the Americas. I told him about a summer when I was in my teens, likely 1982, when La Coruña was awash with hippies who had been ejected from southern Galicia’s first ever communal settlement on the Cíes Islands, established a number of years earlier. All ragged and barefoot, they drifted around the cities with blankets on their backs; all they’d ask you for was cigarettes, nothing else. The hippy moment was over by then, punk was in full swing, so nobody paid them any mind. While I was telling the captain this, the occasional flicker of a smile on his face, I thought about the hundreds of old men who, according to what I’d read in Aillados, had been imprisoned on San Simón towards the end of the civil war with barely anything to eat and almost no provisions made for their hygiene. Their days were spent drifting around barefoot, flea-ridden blankets covering their backs, and their hair matted and shaggy since they weren’t allowed a barber. On we sailed, neither of us saying much. It would have been nine in the evening when we got to San Simón; we moored at the jetty on the rear side of the island, the one facing out towards the estuary mouth. I pointed to Venus and asked if he knew that a day on Venus lasted longer than a year on Venus. No, he didn’t, he said, and I added that this is why Venus belongs to another world, an inverse world, or something of that kind; the captain seemed not to be listening. I got off with my suitcase, we shook hands, and he waited for me to make it along the small jetty and onto dry land before launching. He bid me farewell with arm held high, again as though pointing to something, but this time something up above us, up in the stars.
I found my way to the hotel easily enough. The front of the building shone white under the full moon on the far side of the gardens with their scattering of eucalyptus trees. I had brought a sleeping bag with me just in case. I only had to slide my ID card in between lock and doorframe and jiggle it a little for the door to come open. Taking a torch from my suitcase, I shone it on the pigeonholes in reception: no keys. I pulled open the drawers under the counter: propaganda biros, old pads with details of guest bookings, and an old accountant’s calculator, the kind with very big buttons for which I feel a special dislike. Then, in the largest drawer, I found the keys, all thrown in together. Searching through them, eventually I came up with the one for the room I’d stayed in; there was something reassuring in the known quantity of it. With this now in hand, I turned the reception computer on, its screen instantly lighting up. I knew I wanted to avoid having lights on at night – at least in any of the rooms facing towards the mainland and Redondela – but it was a relief to find the electricity on, which would make it far easier to cook and keep warm. I’d also need to be careful with cigarettes; in the dark, the lit cherry can be seen from a distance of a mile. I checked for internet. After trying a few different things, I saw that it was pointless. I checked my mobile phone, but that wasn’t getting me online either. This absence seemed to me a setback, but a liberating one. I pressed the button for the lift, which travelled down from the fourth floor. Just as I stepped in, I thought better of it; if I were somehow to get stuck inside, I’d end up dying of starvation. I walked up the stairs with my suitcase, which took some doing, heavy as it was with tins, jam jars and freeze-dried foods; I was panting by the time I got to my room. The key worked first time and I went inside. There was a damp smell. I closed the curtains and turned the torch on. The bed made, new soap, clean towels. The thought came to me that it had been readied specifically for my arrival, but that couldn’t have been true. I then accidentally leaned my arm against the light switch for the briefest of seconds, before instantly returning it to the off position. It took a moment for it to dawn on me: the light hadn’t actually come on. I flicked the switch again, and again, and nothing happened. I tried once more, leaving it for longer this time, but still nothing. I went back down to reception, using the torch to light my way, and took out several keys at random; the lights were not working in the corresponding rooms either. I went back to my room. The crossing had left me feeling exhausted. I took out the small chunk of red-mottled black basalt, the one I’d found in a roadside ditch in the north of France years before; I put it on the table, in exactly the same place as before. I got into bed and fell asleep looking over at it, illuminated in a rectangle of moonlight from the window. The shutters open. The palm tree.
I spent my first days there acclimatizing, organizing the food, changing the room to make it my own, and going out for walks wearing the camouflage overalls I’d bought so I wouldn’t be spotted from the coast; they were so big on me that when I looked at my reflection in the pond I was presented with an image of a deep sea diver or an astronaut. I cooked my meals in the kitchens, which had no food stored in them, only what I’d brought. The birdsong at dusk was deafening. Having found none of the lights working anywhere in the hotel, I spent no small amount of time hunting for a general switch for the whole complex; undoubtedly it had been switched off by the last security guard to leave. I didn’t find it. The trees had shed their leaves, which now lay thick along the footpaths. Here and there I came across palm trees with circular scatterings of dates on the ground around them, pecked at by birds or nibbled by rodents. I went inside each of the wings, and experienced the silence inside all of them as a kind of physical substance, very dense. I’d often stop on the gravel esplanade and contemplate the chapel facade. One day I went in. A small mouse ran up the saint and into the hole in one of his wrists, disappearing inside the arm. I went straight back out again. In the latter part of the day, I’d sit in the hotel foyer, which had magnificent views over the bay, and read one of the many books I’d brought, though usually opting for Physics at the Residencia de Estudiantes, which, I have to admit, I hadn’t finished after two years of carting it from place to place. I happened to have some coins with me, and used these to extract cans of Nestea from the dispenser by the entrance. I’d cast the occasional glance down towards the estuary, almost always still and glassy, and in whose waters the statue of Jules Verne was now clearly visible to me, his head always emerged at some point during that part of the day.
I crossed the bridge to the smaller island that first week, pausing to take a look at the silvery-backed fish below. Along they streamed in a disparate mass, like the last time I’d seen them. The former lazaretto building, with its light blue stucco and grates on the windows, and only one storey high, was accessed by climbing a short set of steps. I had only to nudge the door with my shoulder and it swung open. In the main space, the morning sunlight streamed in, lighting up the cobweb that joined tables, computer and chairs into one single net. I sat down at one of the computers. I pressed the On button and, as is usual with Intel 486s, the purring of the hard disk sounded like a chugging steam engine. At that point I noticed the PC had the same number as my room, 486, and had to laugh. I looked up at the window on the rear of the building, and through it at the bridge and the hotel beyond, the window to my room, the palm tree. Looking at the screen once more, I found Velázquez’s Las Meninas as the screensaver, program icons and folders arranged across it. I got up from the chair and turned on the rest of the computers. Within a few minutes I had twelve screens featuring Mari Bárbola, the macrocephalous dwarf in Las Meninas, staring back at me. I began looking through the computer files, all of which were to do with the running of the prison. One, labelled ‘Origin (36)’, contained scanned pages of the prisoner arrival logs between 1936 and 1939, and of material concerning logistics and housekeeping, along with arrest sheets accompanied by short notes from the respective authorities. For example:
It is my honour to inform you that, in accordance with your orders by telephone, the prisoner has been placed under strict surveillance by us, being removed to the lazaretto and there placed in isolation with a pair of guards posted.
These measures will continue as long as the prisoner remains with us here and providing no orders from V.S. to the contrary are forthcoming.
Viva España!
THE INSPECTOR
Pontevedra, San Simón Penal Establishment, 30 September 1937.
I found little else that day.
Late the next afternoon I came across a document, a transcription of what appeared to be a prisoner testimony, that I read straight away:
I have been a prisoner here for two years. At the end of my first year, the old men were brought in one day, and what a sorry sight. They were brought over on the Aurora II in lots, there being too many of them to fit all at once. We were nearly eight hundred inmates then, and with the old men we numbered over a thousand. They have been with us a year and more than half have died. They brought no clothes with them, save what they wore and a blanket they were each given on arrival. They sleep in the same place as us, but during the day keep to themselves. They do not address us, or only on occasion to beg some tobacco to smoke, when there is any, which is rarely. In the nights, we all have to sleep cheek-by-jowl on the floor, where we bunk down with neither mats nor any pillows. The damp gets into you down to your stomach. We are so numerous that many are forced to sleep wedged up against one another. I was imprisoned on trumped-up charges. Even the town notary and a priest testified on my behalf, but all counted for nought. We do not know what this legion of greybeards stand accused of. Their treatment serves only to deaden the life in them. There are those who claim them for the fathers and grandfathers of the inmates at Pamplona prison, while others say that, on account of their age, the Regime has deemed them good for nothing and brought them here to see out their final days. Not long ago, less than a year, the problem of the fleas began. They have always been a feature, but now there are more. No provision is made for the old men to wash themselves and some, their minds addled, cannot look after themselves. But of course the guards do not make them wash either, to them it is all one. The liveliest among them, the most cussed, go around each day collecting the others’ blankets and exterminate the fleas by boiling them in cauldrons beyond the eucalyptus plants near the bridge, down by the shore. A white foam comes up thickly in the cauldrons they use, the thickness of your hand at least, like lard to look at – it is the nits themselves. They then ditch this water in the sea and in such great amounts that more than once has it been mistaken for the foam of the waves coming in. The fish under the bridge congregate the day long in expectation of this moment, for they eat this foam – this I was told by a guard still with some humanity about him who treats us kindly. The old men are given their food apart, and a bowl to eat it from, and made to line up in all weathers at three cauldrons on the esplanade by the chapel. These old men are nothing but skin and bones, such that their feet barely make a sound as they walk over the gravel. We look out at them from the dining hall; it is a sad sight, but one of the other inmates has pointed out that the less they eat the better it is for us. The queues are so long and they shuffle forward so slowly along the myrtle path that it takes the old men who start at the back of the queue hours to reach the cauldrons. The footpath that encircles the island was made by us, with pick and spade. Keeping it to ourselves we named it Avenida de Teruel since its construction coincided with the Republicans taking Teruel. Once, Prado Castro, one of the officers here, lost his temper because the old men were taking very long in queuing for their meal. He flew out of the officers’ wing and kicked over the cauldron, the contents of which spilled across the gravel. A sight it was, all the old men down on hand and knee, eating off the ground. In the dining hall we all stood to get a better view, everyone silent. In the main they appear absent, spittle runs down their chins, they talk to themselves, they walk around waving their arms or with hands deep in pockets scratching their parts, on account of the fleas; they seem bereft of all spirit, or that is what those in charge here believe. Hardly do they talk to one another, as though they cannot see their companions, as though each was already dead and buried. I had the good fortune of completing the first two years of my medical studies at Santiago de Compostela, that was where I was when the soldiers came and dragged me from the lecture hall – I was nineteen years of age – but I have enough knowledge of the human body to tell that these old men are sure to die for want of nutrients, that is if the fleas do not finish them off first. We must make do without bread and milk, but there is far more they make do without. They have no teeth, yet on occasion they are given bones to champ on. These they take with them down to the cove and, placing a blanket on the rocks, crush them all to dust with stones, then drink it down in water. Most do not have shoes. One day they decided to sing together. They congregated in B Wing, the largest of all, for the guards rarely go there, and, according to Gundín, one of our number and formerly a band player in La Coruña, the sound is better in that wing on account of the high ceilings. They sang popular songs, most of these not Galician, since, as I have said, they come from all over. The guards, away in their quarters, at first believed the sound to be coming from a boat bringing officers over from the mainland, one they had been awaiting for several days, for they tend to sing when they are on leave and merry with wine, but they looked out to sea and saw nothing. People have told me the guards were even put in fright by these voices. We were resting after the day’s work, we had been rebuilding the cemetery wall that had been knocked down by high seas, and Gundín himself, sitting eating on one of the graves, said we were hearing the angels themselves in song – rarely had he heard a song of such harmoniousness. A few minutes passed, and the guards entered B Wing and beat the old men roundly. Their ire was not that the old men should sing, but by their own having been mistaken. Apparently there was one who, though not dying there and then, succumbed to his injuries a few days later. After that incident we went on to call that wing, The Wing of the Angels. If the guards were to catch wind of this I do not know what they would do to us. The question of coitus is not resolved. We are allowed visits once every two months, but we are forbidden from physically touching our women. The visiting room is inside a lean-to, with a chicken wire grate before you, and then, two metres away, another grate, with the families on the far side. We may not even touch their hands. The guards walk up and down in the part between the two grates. There have been times when the guards have asked to lie with some of the women in exchange for treats for us, such as food or cigarettes. Everyone refuses, everyone except one whose name I will not mention out of respect for the woman, who is a good woman, but thanks to her the husband now boasts fresh tobacco in his pipe every day. Not including the old men, who only leave this place in a coffin, there is much coming and going of inmates between this prison and other ones. Those of us who remain and do not go anywhere can number no more than two hundred. One of the day visitors, the woman of an inmate from Redondela, says there are people appearing in the ditches around the town every day, and some of them are men who were taken from here. A month ago, in November, they took fifty men, the strongest – for road building, they said. That is something we have always been threatened with, very hard work it is, and with bad tools, but others say at least it is a way of getting out and having shoes on your feet and decent clothes on your back. For myself, I would rather not leave the island, there is nothing good occurring out there. In any case, the old men, in their hunger, kill rats and take them to eat among the rocks, roasting them over a fire, and on account of this the typhus is now among us too. Now they have put more than thirty of them in the lazaretto. Nobody, the guards included, may cross the bridge. Every other day they put food down for them at the far end of the bridge and lock it from this side. The old and sick stand over there banging on the gate. Only once the guards have gone may they open it and come out for the food. They hurry forward, stumbling over one another, and scuffles break out, all within the confines of the bridge. Sometimes the food falls into the estuary and again the fish, waiting below, get a bite to eat. Other guards go by in a shore boat to make sure none of the old men jump into the water. Not that they could reach the mainland swimming – no man can, the currents across the strait are too strong – but it is all one, they keep watch all the same: there is nothing else for them to do. Most of the inmates are here on account of their ideas, only their ideas. There is nothing worse than ideas and the fickle way they have of mutating. Ideas cannot be seen in the way the pages in this typewriter can be seen, ideas cannot be touched or drawn or captured in a photograph either. Once a year a photographer always used to come by my village, Vilagarcía de Arousa, and he took portraits of the families. My father used to recount the man’s tales to us, of his travels far and wide, some of those tales were happy and others were sad, and later he would take our photograph and in our faces you could never tell whether we were happy or sad. A photograph is a thing with a life all its own. Photographs do not depict ideas. Ideas, at best, may be written down, recounted and written down – this is the only way ever to catch a sight of them. I am fortunate, as I say, for I can read, and, thanks to the job I have been given by the assistant to the prison secretary, I have access to this typewriter, which is dangerous, everything being put down here clearly and legibly, but for this same reason typewriters are the best invention there has ever been: whatever you type on them goes on, in ever widening circles, forever after. I prevailed upon them to allow me to bring some poems onto the island, they are the work of a young poet from Granada who goes by the name García Lorca, I do not know if this is his real name or if it is, as is the way among writers and artists, a made-up one. I copied these poems down by hand, using copies that had also been written out, which the head of the Physiology department at Santiago had in his office, naturally with his permission. He had brought them from France, where someone else had let him copy them out. The guards read them but did not understand a word, and this is only the reason they let me keep them. I have underlined them using pencils of three different colours – blue, green and red – the which initially made the guards think the whole thing a secret code, and I a spy, but a guard from Pontevedra with whom I am on good terms, whose name I will not mention so as to avoid compromising him, convinced them that this was not the case, that these poems were trifles, fanciful things I write for my own amusement, and so I am left in peace. A few days ago, here in the offices, I found the guard I am friendly with holding the poems, and he told me to come with him. I feared the worst. He led me to the far end of the myrtle path, ordered me to sit down on some rocks, he stood directly behind me so that I could not see him, and said that I, who knew how to read well, should read him one of the poems, any one, and I did. When I finished he was in tears. He said to me: ‘That poet writes very well, it is a shame for your lot that wars are not won by the pen.’ When I was young my mother told me terrible tales of this island, which, seen from the mainland, above all in spring-time, with the trees all decked in green, is a lovely sight, very lovely. Those tales, to a one, made mention of the typhus; the foreign soldiers brought this sickness with them and were quarantined here, I am talking of the nineteenth century or longer ago. The prison has its own photographer. Every now and then, at no fixed intervals, we are given clothes that look presentable and they take photographs of us. I saw them once, they are kept with all the files in B Wing. Any person seeing them would think we are taking part in town festivities. There we are, all smiles, good shoes on our feet, and it fills me with rage to think we will forever be like that, fixed in the photograph, our faces untroubled. I dislike it greatly, and that is what leads me to write this, to make the situation clear, to make it as clear as can be. I would like to make those photographs disappear, or for no person ever to look at them again. The old men are the only ones not included in the photographs, for they are considered as good as dead. At most, general, group photographs are taken of them, all packed together like a herd of beasts, not posed, none of their features in focus, and this has to do with no one even knowing their names, though at the same time they are not assigned numbers – even that they are not worthy of. Just yesterday they took a photograph of them outside B Wing, The Wing of the Angels, where they sang together that day. The film is taken off in the shore boat to be developed; I get to see the photographs when they are brought back after being developed in La Coruña, which is where the General Headquarters are – they always want to have a look before bringing them back here. Father Nieto is the worst of them. He wears a gun under his cassock. He says that to kill is not by necessity evil, that God allows for the death of insects during harvest and of the lice on our heads. They took a man and led him out to the wall, I do not recall his name, they meant to kill him. They lined him up against the cemetery wall, to avoid having to transport him once dead. When they shot him he fell to the ground but did not die, and, as he lay dying, Father Nieto went over and began to tap him about the face with his stick, as though he were an animal, and said to him: ‘Die now, you heathen red.’ A ship called the Upo Mendi docked just a few days ago; it is a freighter, very large, larger than four fishing boats put together, and it is said that Basque prisoners are being held on it, and in worse conditions than us, but none of us know for certain where they are from. The idea is apparently to leave it there, anchored a few hundred yards offshore, until it turns to rust and sinks of its own accord, taking all those on board down with it. I do not know how those men on board will be able to bear it on there without committing some terrible act. Time will tell. My friend the guard has told me there are rats on board the size of his forearm. There are those among us who have tried to take their lives. I know of no such cases among the old men. I am certain that these old men do not know they are inside a prison, they think they are in a sanctuary, or gone to heaven or hell already, the which with every passing day I feel more convinced there is no telling the difference between. But worst of all is that which cannot be seen: the noise. A noise that comes not from the sea, that is certain, and that keeps us from sleeping. I cannot get used to the waking every two hours and hearing this noise. The guards say they do not hear a thing, but we can hear it very well. Another inmate, Benito, says it is issuing from the earth itself, others say it is the generator for the electric lighting in the officers’ wing; to me it is all one where it comes from, all I know is that thanks to this noise it has been two years since I have slept for more than three hours at a stretch.
