Free Blind Sunflowers by Alberto Méndez

surprise he was returned to the place where death still required a rubber stamp.
    However, due to the amount of work the victors had to get through that day, he was returned to the cell too late to eat. He picked up his bowl – or the bowl of someone who had been taken to the fourth floor to die – and curled up by the dark wall with his hunger. He tried to cope with his confusion by imagining he was a single thing – anything, but just one thing: an animal, water, a stone, earth, a worm, a teardrop, a coward, a tree, a hero… and fell asleep without having to try to find the reason why he was still alive. Everybody respected his silence. Nobody asked him anything. He conjured up impossible ideas and thought of smells and sounds while another part of his mind was dreaming of shapes and colours. He considered all these sensations as a way of learning how not to be alive. He tried to imagine what language the dead use.
    Such are the advantages of near-starvation.
    The next day, he woke up obsessed with the idea of writing to his brother again.
    He knew how to get hold of a pencil and paper to write the letter, and somehow knew he had the time. All at once he discovered a similarity between writing and caresses, words and affection, memory and complicity.
    In that prison of the defeated, there were two victors. They were in jail like the others, but did not have to face trial. They both wore Franco army uniforms, and made it a point always to wear their caps with the redtassel that swung to and fro as they marched up and down. They were as skinny as the rest of the prisoners, but there was a spring to their step that immediately distinguished them. A former English teacher, a friend of Negrín’s who found the hunger and the winter in the jail unbearable, called them Tweedledum and Tweedledee, because although there were two of them, they always behaved like a single person.
    In fact, they were being punished. They had committed some grave offence (which they never commented on) and were being kept on the second floor, where they exercised a certain authority over the other prisoners, and colluded in a fawning way with the jailers.
    They were at the centre of a wretched system of bartering: through them the prisoners could obtain fresh carbide for their lamps, a pencil to write with, a ration of tobacco, cigarette papers, as well as an arbitrary array of favours that Tweedledum and Tweedledee doled out in return for equally wretched gifts: a wedding ring, a flint lighter, a gold filling – anything that had more value than a human life.
    With Tweedledum, Juan exchanged a sock for three sheets of paper and an envelope. Tweedledee lent him a carpenter’s pencil for three days.
    My dear brother Luis,
    I wrote you a letter saying goodbye, and now I’m glad they didn’t let me send it because perhaps that meant my moment had not yet come. As long as I can still write to you, that means I’m alive. I’ve been tried, but not yet sentenced. I’m detained on the border.
    I know that when I can no longer write to you we’ll both be alone, even though Miraflores is a small place and all the neighbours are relatives of one kind or other. I’m sure they’ll give you a hand. Try to find a job, but not in the sawmill, because your lungs would not withstand all the dust floating in the air. Perhaps Uncle Luis could take you on in the bar. I’m really sorry I won’t be able to pay for your studies, but if some day you succeed in selling our parents’ land, make sure you spend all the money on your education. The teacher Don Julio can help you in this.
    Despite the fact that Juan spent all day on his letter, he only managed to write one paragraph. This was because although time in jail seems never-ending , it is filled with inflexible periods of waiting and routines: endless queues for a ration of boiled potatoes, to go to the latrines, or to collect soup for dinner; forming up three times a day for roll call; fluctuating