This is a fragment of Giftsby Paco Cerdà, a book that Alfaguara is publishing today and which tells, in parallel, eleven days and ten nights of Spain in 1939. A journey to the heart of our darkness: from November 20 to 30, 1939, when a ghostly procession carried the corpse of José Antonio Primo de Rivera on its shoulders and advanced through the cities between bonfires, frost, raised arms and propaganda – a fascist epic of 467 kilometers, from Alicante to El Escorial – while thousands of humble lives suffered the blow of repression. Prisoners, shot, exiled, forced laborers, inmates in concentration camps, purged teachers, victors unhappy forever. The regime tried to hide them. But they were there: present. Like Eulalio.
Eulalio
The lamp was lit. And there he was, present.
His name is Eulalio, everyone calls him Lalio, and he is almost always there: sitting at the small table, pen in hand, inkwell nearby and writing in his diary. Today the north-east wind is blowing hard. It is cold and boring. The snow is visible on the crests of the Pyrenees. The waters of the sea are agitated in a troubled way while the sand, like the elapsed time of a joyless eternity that has broken the clock, threatens to hit the human shadows that defy the storm. Better to stay inside the barracks, ink the pen and write. First the date, November 20. The place is not necessary: why recall the barbed wire of this Saint-Cyprien concentration camp every time.
It’s a day that started sadly, Lalio writes. Tino hits himself as he crumples a letter from Santander informing him that his brother is going through a difficult time in prison. The one who cries inconsolably is Balsa, that little man who laughs loudly when he wins at chess. He writes with tearful ink a letter that hurts him to the core: he accepts his wife’s request to return to Spain with their three children. It has cost him days of sleep, nervous breakdowns. But he has no choice: he has no right to prolong the suffering of a woman whose wealthy parents are demanding her back in Barcelona.
Today it’s Tino and Balsa. A few days ago I wrote about Marianito, completely devastated when he saw a photo of his two-year-old son. He saw that the child didn’t look well. In the letter, his wife asked him for help. But how. Seeing him desperate, in the grip of a nervous breakdown, his companions gathered fifteen francs and gave them to him. He spent long hours lying on the bunk. Idiot. Always. Eyes closed. The photo next to it. Lalio writes it. Almost everything suggests so. He is nineteen and writing has become a refuge among so many trials. Lice, grass fleas, rat infestation. The plates with fourteen chickpeas. The cup of brown water with pieces of bread. The cold of dawn with two blankets and newspapers on top. The defeats came one after another as they crossed Portbou on foot, like half a million Spaniards. The nocturnal sobs of nostalgia, be quiet now and let me sleep. The impressive spectacle of hunger, with the morning screams. The cries of men who have endured a war and who, suddenly, far from home, go mad. The helpless pain of the mutilated. The agony in the infirmary that precedes the white pyre with a sign in a nameless cemetery; This is how poor Iniesta ended up, with his long face covered in freckles, under this desert land, land of passage, final land for him. The sun above, rows of crosses, a priest and five friends; Pedro Iniesta, rest in peace. Malaria, colitis, anemia. And the nausea. This damn nausea that this smell causes. We smell of shit and we smell of shit. We are in the paradise of shit. We lack the saliva to spit out disgust, writes Lalio. This is how these nine months of confinement began. On the beach of Argelès sur Mer, the corpses of Spaniards who died of typhus are piled up. They were injected with water extracted from a sea fed by its own excrement. They drank what they shit and died for it: it was 1939.
Shit, that was the beginning. It’s still there. But they try not to let it show. Carmona murmurs his flamenco songs. Miguel plays tangos on the accordion. Someone paints on Aurelio’s bald head, with black charcoal, the expired dream that they will not pass. Another unfurls his battalion’s republican flag every Sunday and solemnly shouts: First death to take it down. On April 14, they shouted a vivala republica that sounded like vivalavida, resistance and hope. On May 1, surrounded by barbed wire, the anarchists sang Son of the people, the chains oppress you; The communists answered: Upstairs are the poor of the world, standing are the slaves without bread. On July 14, they all sang La Marseillaise together. And on July 19, a dark day of memories, after a long, slow bugle call, the field observed a minute of silence. Because the news continues to arrive from Spain. Jordi says – Lalio writes in his diary – that the Spanish prisons are full of people and the repression is more brutal than ever. Marching and shooting predominate in all that is called the liberated zone. Is it possible that hatred continues to ravage Spain? We do not understand, we will never understand, how, after a victory that has cost three years of destruction and death, the victors persist in accumulating vengeance.
Lalio chooses hope. For several days, Hope is called Silvia, a seventeen-year-old girl with whom he corresponds. He has never seen her. He does not know her in person. She is the confinement companion of her sisters, who are living badly in another French camp. It all started with a first letter, then a photo. His shows a resalada Asturianuca, a pretty girl, with a reedy silhouette, who smiles at the camera, with a bit of luck at Lalio. Who knows what the photo he sends her looks like. If the one he has as the youngest captain of the Republic, a handsome man from Santander with his tilted flat cap and hope embedded in his clear eyes, or the one that could be made of him now that his body does not reach sixty kilos and his weight has dropped suddenly, says Dr. Ceballos, because of the nervous shock and the devastating effects of the water from the Argelès bomb. This sudden baldness plunges him into worry and sadness. Don Luis, the barber, advised him to rub his scalp with the first urine of the morning. Everyone suggests a remedy. But nothing, the premature baldness is always there. In the end, the best advice is that of the Basque Toyos: resignation. What does it matter to lose your hair if you have kept your life, reminds him the old socialist, a comrade of ideals. It is the only way he accepts it. And to think of her, of Silvia, of the romantic sentences that are written, of that moment of receiving the letter, of reading and rereading it in the barracks, of putting it away and flying freely, now without barbed wire or a blue Mediterranean cage.
Now, Lalio writes, it is already a love correspondence, as if we both needed it. We idealize this relationship with that capacity for sentimental illusion that feeds the distance and lives in us like a secret power. Love by letter is more intense, because it stimulates the imagination in a limitless flight. Guessing his voice, his gait, his gaze: these are unknowns that multiply the sensitivity of love. I love him and I would like to break down all the barriers that separate us to be together, sailing towards the dawn of the ideal of love. I live there; I dream of him. Just as poor Iniesta dreamed of escaping from the countryside, Silvia and Lalio fantasize about seeing each other on the Champs Elysées and walking hand in hand on the cobblestones of Paris. But they are in the captivity camps, the concentration camps.
Lalio has already lived through three of them. First Argelès. Then Bacarès. Now this one in Saint-Cyprien. He has been locked up for seven months. The hours of waiting are exhausting, he writes in his diary. The misery crushes. No one thought that the stay in the concentration camps would last so long. I am living a destiny that was imposed on me and against which I can only wield one weapon, that of hope, he notes. Sometimes, this hope takes the form of an elongated silhouette, a ghost. He discovered it thanks to this militiaman from Extremadura he met in Port-Vendres. In exchange for a packet of tobacco, he gives him this book that transforms him internally. He never stops reading and rereading it. Today, on this almost wintery Monday of cold wind and rough sea, inside the Saint-Cyprien hut, by the light of the lamp, Eulalio Ferrer, for all Lalio, writes: Don Quixote. I dream of him and he makes me dream. He is a familiar character that I believe I greet frequently, from one field to another, from one fence to another. He descends from myth to be a character who lives by our side, who accompanies us in the drama of subsistence against the ideal. Like Don Quixote, one cannot be a man of ideals without an invincible spirit.
Outside the hut, the wind continues to blow. Cold, boring, stubborn. Soon the lamp will go out. Good evening, Lalio. Keep dreaming of that long bread, half cheese and half chocolate. Never stop dreaming. Make the impossible dream come true, fight the impossible enemy, run where the brave have not dared, reach the inaccessible star. This is your destiny.
