Free Blind Sunflowers by Alberto Méndez Page A

shiftsto carry out the cleaning of the cell, which in spite of their best efforts always remained as filthy as when they had started. In addition, that morning he had to sit with other prisoners to listen to a talk Eduardo López gave on profit accumulation and its consequences for the international proletariat. Juan liked to describe the participants in these talks (whispered with all the intense connivance of a religious sect) as the ‘educated corpses’.
    Dark night crashed down around them. The air was filled with freezing reflections. None of them had any carbide for their lamps.
    Juan was awakened when the list of names being read out in the yard came to him on the freezing air. Nobody moved, even though they all heard the names read out one by one, with no reply: Luis Fajardo, Antonio Ruíz Abellán, José Martínez López, Alberto Mínguez… The loud, monotonous voice was like the sound of a match being scraped against the edge of a box: it lit up reality.
    After the malt they were occasionally given for breakfast, a group of prisoners came up to Juan. Eduardo asked him point-blank why he was always brought back to the second floor.
    ‘They haven’t finished trying me. I must be hard to classify.’
    ‘Couldn’t it be that you’re telling them more than you should?’
    This was the last question Juan had been expecting.
    ‘I don’t know a thing, and nobody has asked me anything. It’s that crazy judge who is trying to please his mad wife. She wants at all cost to know what happened to her son.’
    ‘And what did happen to him?’
    ‘We shot him. He was scum. I tell them as little as possible, to see if they’ll let me live a few more days. That’s all there is to it. The day they find out I’m stringing them along, I’ll be sent to the fourth floor, don’t you worry.’
    Unlike the other prisoners on the second floor, who were thin and skinny so that they did not have to bear their own weight, Eduardo López was slender by birth. His breastbone stuck out and, combined with his hook nose, it gave him the two-dimensional look of a giant ant-eater. Black as a hymnal, he went unnoticed even in the groups where they spent their time condemning those who condemned them, vanquishing the victors.
    Juan considered the conversation closed. He could not understand how the sense of hierarchy of the war years could still exist. How could dead men demand an explanation from other corpses?
    All trials were suspended for two days. The lad with nits shared memories and secrets with Juan. The outbreak of war had been the start of Eugenio Paz’s life. Until then, he had merely existed in Brunete, threshing the corn in summer, ploughing in the cold months and sowing oats before the spring rains came. He had never gone to school but could tell just by looking which hens were good layers and which were only fit for the stewpot, which ewe was going to have a difficult lambing, which greyhounds could catch baby rabbits without killing them. His mother had been made pregnant by the owner of the local inn – El Ventorro, he was called – who boasted of not having left any girl a virgin from Villaviciosa to Navalcarnero. He never allowed Eugenio to call him father.
    In return, Juan tried to talk to him about his brother and their life in Miraflores, but whenever he tried to recall how it had been, the only image that came to mind was of snowstorms. Everything else had been swallowed up by oblivion.
    Whenever for one reason or another the hearings presided over by Colonel Eymar were suspended, a timid air of celebration took hold of the second floor. If in addition, as on the second day now, there were no dawn lists of people who had to climb on board the lorries of death, hope seeped through the cracks of fear and spread like a balm that could ward off the cold and hunger. Almost without noticing it, slight smiles appeared on some of their faces, and their gestures were calmer, helping to soothe their panic.
    It was a day to