Saturday, February 23, 2013

A Pagan Christian


A note on Carabanchel:

Carabanchel was a prison in Spain that was built by and for political prisoners in Franco's Spain after WWII. The prison was used for political prisoners until  Franco's death in 1975. The Franco regime censored news and denied there were political prisoners after the war: Basque Separatists and progressive politicians were labeled common criminals. Thus, Carabanchel housed only "common criminals" until 1998 before it was closed.

   The abandoned buildings provided graffiti artists a remarkable canvas transcending political scribblings into a public art piece that stood by its own merits. It was finally bull-dozed in 2008, replaced with apartment buildings and "green" space, but not without a public outcry.


****

     A guard opened the food tray slot in the iron door and ordered, “Strip off your filthy rags.” Then the door opened as two guards entered. One stood by the door while the other blasted with a hose; cold water on his naked body. The water pricked his skin like piercing needles but he didn’t shy away from it because he too was weary of the stink of several weeks on hold in these cells. This might be the only hygiene he might enjoy. 

   His mind went back to cold mountain streams where he stood naked under the falls after a two day hike from the Val d’Aran… he imagined the cool air on his flesh and had to snap his attention back to the commands of the guards as a jump suit of sorts was thrown in front of him onto the concrete floor. The door clanged shut.

   Alesander was able to count the days by the changing of the guards. A single bulb above in the middle of the cell was on all day and night so that it was impossible to tell one day from another.


   It must have been a couple of weeks when Alesander was taken back to the interrogation room. The inquisitor reappeared and dropped a tablet and pencil on the table.

   “My name is Martin, Alesander.” He spoke softly, “You know and I know that you are beyond help… but I might be able to make your stay here more comfortable.”


   “Gracias Martin… but why?” he asked, knowing full well that any kindly gesture had a price... was this a clue his life would be spared?


   “Are you a Christian, Alesander?” Martin waited for an answer and then continued, “Or, are you a Basque pagan?”


   Alesander almost laughed at this repeated question but held back. This man could never become an ally. Alesander knew that it was more important to make friends rather than enemies. He would see where this man stood… where Martin was going with this line of interrogation, “I suppose that I am…”


   His mind drifted back to his religious studies before he left for Madrid in ’36 at sixteen. The poetry of San Juan de la Cruz spoke directly to his soul and he longed for something of a mystical union with God. He would not feel anything like it until he met with death’s face at the barricades of Madrid or the unrestrained horrors and violence of ambushes in the Pyrenees. Once again his thoughts returned to the fields; of pausing in the shade of an ancient megalithic stone bull in the fields of Mingorria where he’d felt a union with the past, but his mystical experiences were of the martial variety, that razor’s edge where life and death sliced through the moment of truth… not at all scholarly or so refined as in the cloisters of the Church.


  “What, a pagan or a Christian?” Martin insisted.


   His thoughts then went to Avila where he’d arranged to meet with the Bird Dog for an alliance with the American to transport him out of Spain.  It was a welcome rest in a crypt of the Cathedral at Avila among the long dead saints. Then the door crashed open and several guidari flooded into the room before he could reach for his pistol. He had been beaten and dragged to the plaza in front of the Cathedral between the lions by a militia of the Civil Guard. He didn’t respond to his guard’s question but his silence was interpreted as an answer.

  
The voice of his the inquisitor broke through the cloud of his mind, “Spain is old and her Saints are old too. I am a Christian and I am bound by Christ to show mercy.”

   “And you expect mercy in return?” Alesander remarked in a low voice but the tables had turned and he was now, for a brief second, the inquisitor.

   Martin’s composure was quickly regained as he spit out the words. “I would prefer cooperation.”


   “From me… or from Christ?” Alesander didn’t care any longer. If the tortures were to begin it … he was ready to bite the capsule.


   Martin’s face became confident as he set the familiar cyanide capsule on the table, “We found this in your cell. When the electrodes are attached to your cojones, you won’t have this at your disposal.”


   Alesander watched it roll to the side of the speckled Formica top to stop at the chromed strip in front of his hands, “Are you saying I should take it now?”



   “No, senor, I am a Christian and I would prefer that you confess your sins. Suicide, according to the teachings of the Church,opens only the gates of Hell for you,” he said as he tucked the capsule into his vest pocket.


"So,are you here to save me from Hell," Alesander was nearly glib,"or to save my body from torture?"
He no longer cared either way.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Inquiry of Asses

Inquiry of Asses
   It was peculiar to Alesander that he was almost glad the hunt was over. He had been dodging in and out the length of the Pyrenees and stealthily maneuvering through friendly villages and side streets and alleyways of cities successfully for so long… he had been captured more than a few times since Madrid... to the camps in Vichy  France... slipped  through the barbed wire to caves in the mountains... but now he sighed, “At last it is over.” He then slept.

   The cells at Carabanchel were dark places. There were no bars or communication with other prisoners if one had the misfortune to be placed in solitary confinement. A small concrete enclosure with a steel door was it. Alesander's cell had a window like the others but it was blacked out with a thick coat of paint. A single dim light bulb, protected from behind a clouded glass above a thick screen, was on or off at his keeper’s discretion. “Off” meant almost total darkness, except for a sliver of light from under the door or the slot with a steel flap hinged on the outside of his cell where a tray could be slipped through to him if his guards thought it kind to feed him.

   He passed time doing exercises and running in-place to keep distracted from longing as much as it was for staying in shape. This prison was fairly new. It had been built after the war as a maximum security facility after the passage of the Law for the Repression of Banditry and Terrorism (Ley para la represiĆ³n del Bandidaje y el Terrorismo) on April 1947, which targeted the maquis. Thus, there were no decaying bricks to scrape through or bars that could be loosened as in the older jails in the villages.

   Other than mild flirtations with the idea of escape, when he lay down on the steel bunk that still had no mattress, his visions of Iniga became clearer… he could smell her scent and feel her firm breasts in his hands while he slept. Sometimes his thought rested on Baker… Harry Baker, his betrayer, back to when Baker was with him in the Pyrenees as a young O.S.S. agent to his last meeting with the C.I.A. contractor; or, a better word, assassin.

   Ah, sleep… he had to fight the lethargy of sleeping. In the dark of his cell he caught himself excited at the prospect of food waiting waited for a tray to be passed through the slot in the door... waiting for the days to pass... days that were counted by the changing of shifts. Alesander figured it had been about two weeks. The bulb in the cell above him had been off for three or four days before boots approached with purpose, his door slam open, and light stream in.

   His eyes ached at the light… a halo of white light around the shadow of the tall man gave off a contradiction as in saintly aura of the angel of light, Lucifer. Two guards entered and gruffly pulled Alesander off his bunk and led him past the tall man into the eyeball assaulting light of the corridor, beyond the hub of the prison and on to the administrative wing. Arriving at the same room he was interviewed in at first he was put in a chair at the Formica topped table.

   “Ah, Senor Gotson… times have changed,” lighting a cigarette and passing the pack to Alesander, he continued, “Women… girls… they are on the beaches in France wearing their underwear. The call these swimsuits bikinis…. Ah, excuse me, I forgot.”

   “That I don’t smoke?” Alesander pushed the cigarette pack away.

   “No,” the tall man’s smiled suddenly turned grim, “No, I forgot, you are a bandit and, therefore, an immoral man, why should you care that times have changed elsewhere?”

   Alesander braced his spirit for the sinister and dramatic change in tone. He then thought of the stone megaliths he had rested under the shade of so many times and wondered… It was one of those flashes of thought compacted into a fraction of a second… He wondered how hunter/gatherers passing those monuments or watching those who planted those stones, living in agricultural settlements and also planting grain in the fields, felt about the changes that were going on then and wondered too if they tried to hold on to the good old days.

   There was no use in arguing the point. What was he going to say at this time? What could he do about this situation? He had accepted that the war was over for him and his only option now was to surrender his will to that reality and not the madness of the man across from him at the table.

   “My first question for you, Alex,” he blew smoke in Alesander’s face, “Where is Iniga?”

   Alesander was glad he actually didn’t know where she was. What was coming next didn’t matter. He knew nothing of the location for any enlaces of the resistance because he worked alone or with only a few… very few, trusted, tried and true, friends. Even those he knew of, he only knew of most of them by their nom de guerre. They met by a markings on a tree, rock, a weather report or skewed lyrics of a song on the radio at a certain time of the day. He had let his guard down once for an O.S.S. agent turned independent contractor, Bird Dog… Harry Baker, and thus he was here before an arrogant interrogator.

   “I haven’t seen her in years.” He said without taking his eyes off his inquisitor.

   Another lean, weasel looking, character entered the room. It was nothing other than El Strapo who stood leaning against the far right corner behind the tall man. Alesander knew the man as a black marketer and extortionist who’d come in handy more than once for cash transfers, ransoms and any other sleazy task. He was nothing more to Alesander than a tool of the trade.

   The tall man left the room and El Strapo immediately took the chair across from Alesander and took one of the cigarettes from the pack left on the table, tore it open, shook the tobacco onto the table, and with a folder of cigarette papers of his own, rolled one, lit it with one hand and tucked the folder of wrappers into the pack, blowing the smoke out the side of his mouth away from Alesander. After a few minutes passed he  pushed the cigarette pack to Alesander and said, "Take should up smoking to pass time. You look well fed enough but….” Waving a hand past his nose, “Whew, you need a change of clothes.” he then asked compassionately, “How are you being treated, amigo?”

   “Are you with the Red Cross now, El Strapo?” Alesander said sarcastically. However, his sarcasm was for show because both knew the room was wired up. Alesander didn't wonder what the ruse with the cigarette paper was about. He was glad to see El Strapo just because El Strapo was El Strapo. He was used by both sides in this peculiar war against Franco. If there was a way for El Strapo to make things easier for him, Alesander knew he could, for a price but it was hard to tell what....

   “You might say so,” he winked. “I’m here as a favor to the proprietors of this fine hotel. But, if I can help you in any way, let me know. Even here I have influence of a sort.”

   “And your debt to our hosts might be?” Alesander kept up the appearance of distaste for the benefit of the microphones. He sensed the stealthy El Strapo squirm… a shift of the shoulders and eyes that darted ever so slightly around the room.

   “It seems that our beneficiaries here have this interest… er… Iniga in particular… I don’t know why but they have no sense of humor about it. I can promise you that.”

   ‘Times have changed and there is little support for the Resistance, El Strapo. I haven’t seen or heard from Iniga in years. She is probably in France.”

   “The Resistance isn’t given such an exalted name. You are billed in the headlines of the papers as common criminals… and so is she!”

   This wasn’t news to Alesander. It had always been this way since the Republic had fallen. He changed the subject, “Who is this tall man, El Strapo?”

   “His name is Martinez de la Rosa but he is the Grand Inquisitor as far you are concerned. He is a wise man and quite efficient at what he does. That is why you haven’t been subjected to the usual torture and, frankly, it is why you’re still alive,” El Strapo spoke almost gleefully for the benefit of the bugs but with contempt shown only by a slight lift of his upper lip.

   “The Rose, yes, I’ve heard of him.” Alesander was glad to have an image of this shadowy character known up to then only by name. “So, did he send you to persuade or to trap me?”

   “You, Alesander, are already trapped… in case you haven’t noticed.”

   “Then, don’t waste our time on persuasion, El Strapo.” He then let El Strapo slip the pack of cigarette papers between his cuffed hands. He then awkwardly twisted to reach down with cuffed hands to put the pack in his rear pocket. As he did so he thought, El Strapo always comes through.

   De la Rosa entered the room just as soon as Alesander put his hands back on the table. El Strapo obediently lifted himself by pushing his bent body from the table. “May I leave now, Senor de la Rosa?” he deferred.

   Stay where you are for now, El Strapo.”

   Alesander looked up as the Rose stood over the table… looming like an eagle… a bird of prey. “Get up,” the Rose ordered.

   Standing across from the table Alesander resigned to what was coming next. He went inside his mind where there was nothingness. He was taken to another room that had only a drain in the middle. Left there alone for a few minutes he pulled out the cigarette papers where a short note was written that he could barely read in the dim light that said, “Faith, Bird Dog and Fournier watch”. He crumpled it up and swallowed it wondering what it meant. It promised no guarantee that he wouldn’t be tortured but it did hold a glimmer of hope that he was somehow protected. A string of hope was all he needed to keep from popping the cyanide capsule tucked away in his cell… if he would ever get back to his cell.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Progress on "Adriane"

I began writing “Adriane” because of a dear friend from the Basque side of Southern France, and inspiration for the sequel to “A Taxi Romance”, who grew up in the region of Biarritz. My story was originally to be about drug addiction and recovery but it soon took a sidestep into an entirely different direction as  I delved into the background of her fictional forbears. I let my imagination run wild about the French Resistance that was strong in Southern France during WWII and, as I researched, I came upon a deeper understanding of the Basque Separatist resistance after the fall of Madrid in Spain against Franco. Throughout my youth, from the comfortable suburbs of Spokane Valley, I’d heard of Basque Separatists. The subsequent years after the war and the USA’s relationship with Franco’s dictatorship from the Eisenhower years on had not entered my consciousness until I began writing “Adriane”. I had never heard of, the prison Carabanchel or the resistance hero, Ramon Vila, a.k.a. Cara Quimada. Peculiar though, I invented the character of Alesander because I wanted a loner, independent of the Communists and the Anarchists. I envisioned Alesander as a lone wolf anarchist ranging the hills of the Pyrenees but I had no idea that there actually was one in Ramon Vila who had single handedly stuck a thorn in the Franco regime’s side throughout the fifties until he was killed in the early sixties. His specialty was blowing up electrical transmission towers in the Pyrenees and targeted assassinations of key Francoist militia death squad leaders. It just figured that there had to be independents in the resistance after all the disillusionment with the organized Anarchists, Socialists, Maoists and Stalinists of the early fifties. Alesander Gotson is an entirely fictional character that led me into this story rather than the other way around as he took me through the Pyrenees of Southern France and Spain from the fall of Madrid in the Civil War to the late fifties under the oppression of Franco. Furthermore, I had no idea how oppressive the Franco Regime had been and how long after his death clear into the 1980s that his policies continued in Spain. In particular the adoption of children born in prison to so-called miscreants… or, as Basque Separatists were referred to as “common bandits” made it into the narrative of this tale.


Carabanchel

   Alesander eyes adjusted to the light in his cell. He had been led there after his capture without the usual interview and preliminary torture of the infamous Carabanchel. He hadn’t been searched. He still had on his own shirt, boots, trousers and even a box of matches, “This is good.” He said as though there was someone else to hear him… then he lit a match to check out his new abode. His mind was calm… his senses sharp… he was always and at all times centered. A cockroach scurried from the revealing light.
“Say, little friend, you will be here long after I’m gone… should I make it ‘til morning we shall be friends.” The light from the match faded and he laughed. Then his thoughts turned to where he sat and whether or not he’d ever get out.


   “Do you ask, what do I mean, make it ‘til morning?”


   He paused, as though expecting an answer, “No, my friend, I will likely be shot before morning and then your brothers, the worms, can do with me what they will.”
 

   He then took off his boots, tucked them under his head to make a pillow of them and drifted off to sleep.
 

   He slept soundly, waking shortly before hearing the clanging of steel doors and the sound of boots coming towards his cell outside the door. The metallic jangling from the turning of the keys scraped and scratched against the walls of his skull. From behind their orbs his eyes ached from the light cascading into the door as it creaked open until the shadow cast by the guard entering the cell gave his eyes relief from the harsh light for a minute and allowed them time to adjust.

   The guard gestured a get up motion, “You can leave your boots.”


   Alesander rose up, padded barefoot out of his cell and turned to say, “Good-bye, my little friend.”
 

   The guard took him by a shoulder, putting Alesander’s arm behind him in position for hand cuffs. He was led up several hallways and into the administrative part of the prison with rooms of clerks and the sound of typewriters. He thought it peculiar that he felt embarrassed at being barefoot as his feet padded along on the cold, polished, linoleum. Then he was put in a small sparse room furnished with space for only two chairs and a bare table. Mind still and no anticipation or expectation, Alesander was ready for this. He had been ready since the old days and now, after decades in the Pyrenees, interment camps in France and two wars, counting the barricades of Madrid, he had known he was living on borrowed time.
 

   The door opened to the vision of a tall man in a pinstriped suit entered with a file in his hands. He pulled the other chair to the opposite side of the table without a greeting of any kind. The two sat silently for several minutes before the tall man spoke.
 

   “Alesander Gotson,’ he slid a pack of Lucky Strikes across the Formica top of the table.
 

   “No thanks, I don’t smoke,” Alesander didn’t take his eyes off the man’s as he declined the offer.
 

   “Too bad,” the man apologetically said, “American cigarettes are about the only help you’ll get from there. You might have died a hero ten years ago but you will die a common bandit now, Mr. Gotson.” The man pushed the thick file across the table before he continued, “I was in Madrid too… perhaps on the opposite side. Open it. This is what we know about your activities up to now.”
   

   “Why should I care what you know?” Alesander asked but not out of curiosity. He knew where this conversation was going. If they wanted him dead he’d be dead.
 

   “Because, Alex, may I call you Alex?” the man didn’t wait for the answer he wasn’t going to get. “I can make things easier if you can tell us what we don’t know… eh?”
 

   Alesander waited to hear more as a practical matter. What did they want to know and what did he need to bury deep in his heart where it would never be found no matter what they decided to do with him? He flipped through the file. It had names… names and wallet size black and white pictures of guidari that had been imprisoned or killed. Red check marks were aside the names of those he knew were dead. Others had blue checks… He noted but dared not pause at one of Iniga… dear Iniga with the smatchet. Some went back as far as Madrid and the Aran valley… bitter sweet memories… in and out of safe houses from the hills of Leon to the Catalonian coastal plains with the infamous el Quito and el Cara Quimada.
 

    The names he read and pictures that passed his gaze were names that evoked good times… of old comrades resting in the crisp fall breezes of the Pyrenees…  of water from a fresh mountain spring cooling his parched throat. He thought he could smell Iniga’s hair and feel the softness of the nape of her neck on his lips. No, he’d have to bury those thoughts. He’d have to bury them for their sake, not his. He was a dead man already as far as his circumstances foretold.
 

   A manicured finger on the picture of Iniga, stopped him as he tried to flip the page before he could turn it. His attempt to hide a flicker of emotion was noted. “If you have any information of her whereabouts…”
 

   “No, she has been out of my life since nineteen fifty when the CNT called her back to France,” he lied and the lie was transparent but he wasn’t going to give up anything so soon.
 

   Very often, back when Alesander was a teen in Madrid, he fantasized about the inevitability of such meetings and perhaps having a Dostoyevskian dialogue between himself and his inquisitor with all the existential philosophical musings bantered about… but even then he knew better. No, it would be a wearing down process lasting several weeks with sensory deprivation and alternating interrogators working in shifts. The most philosophical any of it would come to would be short and sweet… “Tell us more about…” names, dates and places weapons are stashed. Or when those questions were exhausted confessions were extracted via battery cables attached to one’s gonads and so many more low-tech methods of torture. He knew in his heart that he would tell all he had retained… all that had not been obliterated from his mind.
 

   Back in his cell, Alesander gathered his thoughts about why the interview was so short and why so few questions were asked of him in the twelve hours he sat at that table. He knew time was on the side of his keepers and this was only his first twenty-four hours of a day that would end with, either a bullet in the back of his head, or a day that could drag on for months or years. He still had a cyanide capsule in the lining of his trousers and took it out, held it up in the dim light, rolled it a few times between his grimy forefinger and thumbs thinking:  He knew there was little that could be extracted from him of any value now, not only because he operated alone for the most part, but that the safe-houses and most of the people had all fled to the Pyrenees or France. The few who had been with him had already been killed that day. Furthermore, he could distract, mislead or otherwise confuse, whatever information the Civil Guard had on his movements and that he could do more harm than if he snapped the cyanide capsule with his teeth.
 

   “Keep an eye on this, my friend,” he whispered to the cockroach on the wall a foot from where he tucked it into a gap between the steel side of his bunk and the concrete wall where… “Just in case, you never know.”