The War Was Over

If Alesander was asked, and he often was, he would say that he was never tortured in Carabanchel because no one applied battery cables to his balls or any of the more excruciating methods that evolved in Spain from the times of Goya to Franco's dictatorship; even though Alesander had been awakened and brought to a room to sit on the chair of the garrote with his neck clamped for hours at a time on several occasions. He never considered those to be torture. The garrote goes back to the times of the Grand Inquisition of Torquemada. It was a chair with a metal strap attached at the top of a post that ran up the back around the victim’s neck. A screw from behind would be turned ever so slowly so that the strap constricted the neck of the pour soul condemned to end up strangled or, if done quickly, simultaneously had his spine snapped off at the base of his skull. He never thought being taken out to be placed against a wall to face an execution that never came to be torture. It was frightening... a terror... but torture? no, he'd heard the screams from adjoining cells too often to call it that. Nor did the days, weeks, months and years of sensory deprivation in solitary confinement appear to him to be equal to the horrors he heard from behind adjacent walls of his confinement. Alesander had a focus throughout those four years that held his mind intact. That focus was only strengthened throughout that time. He knew the battle was over for him and he had no reason to hate Harry Baker, Generalissimo Franco, or any other of his so-called enemies. Towards the end of his captivity he was released from solitary confinement into the general population.

   He was treated cautiously by other prisoners… even political prisoners, whose connections with him went back to the battle for Val de Aran or to 1936 in the final street fighting and betrayals of Madrid. Only the young men who weren’t born yet in those times approached him with respect and honor: holding him in the highest esteem as though he was a sacred idol. Though he never said anything about it, his disillusionment with this new generation was affirmed as he heard them boast of murderous campaigns and bombings in the name of “the cause”. What had sustained him in those previous years alone in his cell was that he had let go of his humanity in the sense that it no longer mattered.

   The war was over for Alesander and he saw that his campaign had become a solitary one that had no real effect. He saw that the Generalissimo was old and his regime now functioned only in the sense that it had become a shell of an archaic bureaucracy decaying from within. Even so he knew the bureaucracy was so entrenched that even if his fellow Basque resistance fighters won they would win only the nothing that was left. His fight had always been as much against so called allies as against Franco.

   The one thing that his capture did to Alesander, the nettle under the saddle of the Generalissimo’s white horse for two decades, was this realization that the battle was over. The battle was over but not because he’d given up. The battle was over because the cause he’d been fighting for wasn’t his any longer and the war was won. Most of his fellow maquisards had been executed by order of Franco’s Law of the Fugitives or the PCE Central Committee Stalinists: one was as bad as the other. The battle was over when Eisenhower put a submarine base at Rota with cool cash and CIA contractors such as the Bird Dog to help bolster Spain’s economic stability. There is nothing like prosperity to undermine a regime based on oppression.

   It seemed to him that the young Turks he saw coming into Carabanchel had no real agenda beyond body counts and blowing things up… the means were justified no matter what the end and the end was endless. Alesander and lone wolves like Caracamada were isolated exceptions. To Alesander the struggle no longer mattered because decay was built into what was left of the regime and the rest would take care of itself without his help.

   All the time he’d spent in the field caused him to become detached but not hardened. There was no righteous cause set in stone for him (as it was for the likes of the PCE’s Central Committee Stalinist who’d executed most of the Los Novatos maquisards and CNT Anarchists of the FAI he’d fought along side of since Madrid and the Val de Aran).

   Iniga was one whose thirst for revenge and blood was another thing altogether. She had come of age at a time when the struggle was a matter of life and death against oppression at the hands of the Civil Guard and in the camps of Vichy France from Gur to the towers of Drancy. To her it was about getting even and paying back the ilk of those who had raped and tortured her.  His loyalty for her never wavered because she was not only among the best of the maquisards, despite her small frame, but she reciprocated his with a loyalty that could be depended upon in matters of spy-craft, sabotage and assassination.

   No, Iniga was more than that. She was a vision he held in his mind as best he could. From memory he would recite the first three verses of La Fonte from San Juan de la Cruz in his darkened cell and in doing so she evolved into a sacred icon that kept him sane:


Que bien se yo la fonte que mana y corre,
   aunque es de noche.

Aquella eterna fonte esta ascondida,
que bien se yo do tiene su manida,
   aunque es de noche.

Su origen no lo se, pues no le tiene,
y que cielos y terra beben de ella,
   aunque es de noche.


How well I know that flowing spring
   in black of night.

   The eternal fountain is unseen.
How well I know where she has been
   in black of night.

I do not know her origin.
None. Yet in her all things begin
   in black of night.