Free Blind Sunflowers by Alberto Méndez Page B

celebrate. Eugenio Paz and Juan exchanged secrets again. The lad with nits confessed he was worried. Before, he said, it had always been as stiff as a flamenco singer’s throat, but now it never even got hard. Juan thought, ‘That’s because you’re dead already,’ though he comforted him by saying it must be because he was missing his girlfriend.
    The next morning, while he awaited his turn in the latrines, Juan tried not to think of anything, not to see or smell anything. The latrines were always flooded and humiliating, and consisted of a row of concrete slabs, each one with the outline of a pair of feet on it, with no walls or doors for privacy. The prisoners queued up in front of the holes, trying to hide their sense of shame with dirty jokes or sarcastic comments.
    ‘You’re a nurse, aren’t you?’ a sergeant asked Juan while he was waiting. He had a list in his hand. ‘Follow me.’
    Juan barely had a chance to tell him he was lined up because he needed to go to the toilet: ‘Do it on yourself,’ was the other man’s onlycomment as he led him out. They went through the guard-room and came to another, closely-guarded cell. The sergeant ordered them to open the door, then pushed Juan inside.
    ‘This fellow has to be alive tomorrow morning at six. If he dies, we’ll shoot you in his place. It’s up to you.’ With that, he slammed the door shut. The darkness inside the room made Juan’s eyes useless, although when he was shoved in he thought he had seen the outline of a body on a camp bed.
    ‘Who’s there?’ he asked, not daring to reach out and touch him.
    ‘I’m Cruz Salido. And you?’
    ‘Juan Senra.’
    Cruz Salido had been the editor-in-chief of El Socialista newspaper at the end of the war. At the very last moment, he had managed to escape to France. From there he had attempted to reach Oran on a freighter that had called in at Genoa. He had been arrested by some black shirts who a month later despatched him back to Spain. After being interrogated about exile organisations, General Lister’s plans to return to Spain with an entire army corps, and a thousand other things about which he had not the remotest idea, he was tried and condemned to death.
    Surrounded by all the ceremonies of death and exhaustion, Salido’s life was leaking away. He was concentrating so hard on trying to breathe with a pair of lungs eaten away by consumption that he never knew exactly what his crime was meant to be. He only knew they seemed determined he should face the firing squad alive.
    ‘Count de Mayalde wants me shot in public. I want you to do all you can to help me die beforehand.’
    ‘You can’t really ask me to do that, can you?’
    Cruz Salido agreed it was not something he could ask of him. Instead, since talking wore him out, he decided to go on speaking until the end came. He remembered everyone, shedding tears for Besteiro, who was dying in Carmona jail, for Azaña – what a great man he was, silenced forever in some remote, forgotten corner of France subject to Hitler’s whims, and Machado, our Machado, silent too in Collioure…
    ‘We’re an accursed people, don’t you think?’
    ‘No, I don’t think so. That would be to shift the blame onto others.’
    Panting, gasping for breath, falling silent, the editor-in-chief told Juan what had happened to all his friends, the people he had defended in the columns of his newspaper, but was too much of a professional journalistto tell his own story. He went on and on with an interminable description of the war and its devastation, and yet by the end he was still breathing . He was freezing, but would not allow Juan to warm him with his body. His back was raw flesh, but he did not want Juan to help him change position. He choked on all his memories, but all he wanted to do was remember. By first light, death was gnawing at his words, and yet he kept on talking and only allowed himself respite in order to draw breath for a voice that was ever fainter,