The coop was a mess of feathers and blood. The dog had savaged every bird and eaten most of its kill. All that remained of the ten birds were feet and severed heads, mangled wings and entrails.
In the nesting-box shed, we were hidden from the guard's view. I scanned around. Two other guards were making their way down the hill, but they veered to the cells on another matter. I turned and leaned my back away from our solitary sentry and whispered to Jorge to stand in the shed doorway. Realising in an instant what I meant, he obliged.
Some flies had come to join us.
I ripped feathers from some chicken skin and shoved it in my mouth, scarcely chewing the raw, blubbery, squelchy mass before swallowing it down. The entrails were easier to chew, to bite into, but the desire to do so was slim. I downed whole what I could. Raphael and Manuel, seeing me eat, did the same. Manuel blenched on a mouthful of chicken liver and whatever it was attached to. I hissed at him to swallow. When I had eaten what I thought my share, I stood at the entrance to the shed and let Jorge eat his fill. Raphael wrapped entrails in some skin and stuffed it in his pocket. I looked over in alarm. 'For Ruben,' he mouthed. Manuel found the blood-drenched sawdust easier to consume. Jorge had managed to find some flesh.
Our feast ended as fast as it began. We left the worst, the meat encrusted with chicken shit, the skin trampled into the dirt, the heads; we left enough to convince the guards we had not feasted on the dog's leftovers.
'Hurry up, whores!'
A fork or a rake would have helped. As it was, we had to gather up by hand the blood and shit encrusted feathers and bone shards off the floor of the shed and the outdoor area of the coop, and as we did, we were bent over like chickens ourselves.
'Filthy bitches, get your asses out of there.'
We were almost done. I backed out of the coop, full bucket in hand, as the guard brought his rifle down on my shoulder. I winced, the blow unexpected. Realising they would each be in for the same treatment, my friends flinched as they exited the coop.
Three heavy whacks.
With the guard growling insults behind us, we trudged up the hill and deposited the bloody garbage in the incinerator.
The sun beat down on our faces as we walked back down to the cells. The wind, as though summoned into action, roared across the plain, blowing the fine grit kicked up by our footsteps and hurling it into the faces of those who were behind. The howl, and I no longer heard the rhythmic crunch of shoes on the gravelly ground. The cells buffered the wind and as we drew closer and entered the narrow strip of shade cast by the buildings, I welcomed that brief moment of still cool air, pausing, not wanting to re-enter the cell. Not that outside was much better. The site was exposed, the hillside strewn with dried-out weeds. There was nothing in the landscape to commend it. Even the mountains with their sculpted shapes stood as reminders of the sort of place Tefía was. Nowhere I wanted to be.
The reprieve vanished. We were shoved inside by the surly guard to swelter in the gloom, to wait it out as the sun rose to its zenith. And from then, as the sun arced towards the west and baked the walls of the cells, we would sit on the floorboards and sweat. It was hard to know if a day of rest in summer amounted to any rest at all.
When it came to tolerating the heat, Raphael fared the worst. He was from the cool northwest of Tenerife, from the wine region of Icod. Powerful ancient families owned the vineyards there, some of them nobility. Raphael's family were not among them. He came from a poor working family, and when he realised he was gay, he knew he couldn't stay in Icod. He fled to Santa Cruz where he got work in a bar. He managed to keep a low profile and got through his national service without anyone detecting his sexuality. It was when he was back in Santa Cruz, working in a different bar, one frequented by some of the more prominent maricones, that the trouble started. He was twenty-two when he got caught in the act of fellatio in a cinema.
There was nothing to do but sit or lie around and talk softly. As the minutes passed, my thirst grew ever more urgent, a thirst I had been ignoring since I woke, a thirst made all the stronger by the impromptu vulture's feast, and I got up and went to the other end of the cell where a bucket of water sat on the floor. I dipped in the communal tin mug and braced myself for the salty tang. I drank fast in large gulps. No one watched. No one wanted to watch. As I walked back down the aisle to my cot, not one man looked up at me. No one wanted to be reminded of the foul brackish water that sat in that bucket, or the resultant waste that had come out of each of us that sat festering in the bucket beside it.
We heard Brito outside, berating the guards. A door creaked open to the adjoining cell. Curious, I went and peered through the keyhole.
At first, all I could see was Brito's broad back some five yards away. He had his hands on his hips and looked typically pompous in his uniform. The guards appeared, manhandling a reluctant Paulo between them. Paulo let himself go limp, and the guards were forced to drag him up to the main compound. What on earth had he done?
Paulo was from La Palma and had been at the prison among the longest. Brito, it seemed, had found a target for his wrath. I cast my mind back to the day before, to the chicken coop and Paulo working nearby in the field beyond the compound. He could have had nothing to do with the dog savaging the chickens, but in Brito's deranged mind, being close, being the last prisoner seen in the vicinity, would be enough. I thought those guards dragging Paulo away looked relieved, relieved the pressure was off them. Or maybe they were looking forward to giving their own violent natures another airing.
There was no sign of the other guards. In this slender moment of relative freedom, I caught Raphael's eye and glanced at Ruben. Raphael nodded. I then nudged Manuel, whispered to him to follow me without question across the room, and together we sat on Ruben's bed, crowding over him.
Raphael took his chance and ferreted in his pocket for the chicken scraps. I shook Ruben and when he looked up at me, I pressed my fingers to my lips. I then directed my gaze at Raphael. Ruben did the same. The moment he cottoned on to the offering in Raphael's hand, he let out a soft groan. I coughed loudly to mask it. Manuel started tapping his foot on the floorboards as though beating a rhythm. I appreciated his effort to mask the sounds coming from Ruben, but it wasn't helping. If anything, tapping would only draw the attention of the others and no one must know of our illicit feast. If they didn't rip open our guts for a share, they might tell the guards out of spite.
Ruben devoured the offering in several large chews and swallows. When he was done, I went and fetched him some water. Manuel returned to his cot and Raphael to his. I joined Manuel, who had managed to acquire a copy of Lorca's Poem of the Deep Song which he had inserted into the covers of his Bible, the only book Brito allowed us to have, and we read the words together as though we poured over scripture.
The men at the other end of the cell sat in small clusters, some playing games they had created out of scraps of paper and pencils, others talking quietly.
A sudden glint and I saw Jorge was checking his face for chicken blood in the small mirror he kept hidden in his mattress. My eyes darted around the room. If the guards caught him, I would not want to see his back after the beating. The sudden movement of my torso shot me a stark reminder.
Jorge was the most demonstrably gay of the five of us. He liked to put on airs. I put his at times outrageous behaviour down to his upbringing in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Santa Cruz. His family, like mine, was not beholden to rich landowners. He was the son of a modestly wealthy export merchant trading in bananas. Back in the 1930s, his father had staunchly opposed the banana workers' strikes at Fyffes and backed the ensuing repression and the disappearances of the ringleaders. Like all the other men in the business class of Santa Cruz, his father supported the governance of the day. When the Second Republic was replaced with the fascism of Franco, Jorge says his father had not batted an eyelid. It was business as usual. At least it was until the day he realised his son was not quite right. In fact, his son was much more than not quit
e right in his father's eyes. Rigorous schooling, endless counselling by priests, nothing made a jot of difference. In the end, his father gave him a small allowance and told Jorge to rent a room in the centre of the city and never darken his doorstep again. Jorge's mother was distraught at the time, but there was little she could or would do. Jorge said his father's strong reaction had more to do with his own private leanings than those of his son. Alone and free, Jorge managed to get himself arrested and sent to Tefía on the eve of the day he was due to begin his national service. Raphael, in one of his more acerbic moments, told me he thought Jorge had contrived his arrest to avoid the military. And a brutal time of it he would have had.
Jorge was still staring at his reflection in the mirror.
'Put it away,' I hissed.
Just then, the door swung open. I turned to see which guard it was as Jorge inserted the mirror back into a slit in his mattress. All eyes looked nervous as Brito himself stood in the doorway and bellowed for us all to get off our filthy asses and go and line up in the quadrangle. The men were slow to move. Ruben lifted his head off his pillow and his face contorted in dismay. Brito stormed out and was replaced by a guard who reinforced Brito's command with one of his own. 'You heard. Get your sleazy asses off those beds, whores!'
It was the same guard who had ordered us to clean out the chicken coop. A short and stocky man with narrow hips and wide shoulders and a malicious curl at the corners of his lips, his face arranged in a permanent snarl.
Raphael helped Ruben to his feet and the two men headed out, Raphael making sure he was on the left of Ruben to take the blow he anticipated. The guard whacked the butt of his rifle at Raphael's shoulder as the two men went by. I filed out next and Jorge and Manuel followed. We each received a blow as we passed the guard, the rifle butt landed on our shoulders as it had before, adding to the bruise that never went away.
Prisoners of the other cells were already lined up two-deep on the quadrangle. We were about to head behind them, but Brito had other ideas and made us stand in front. Raphael and Ruben were ahead of me. Third in line, I got to stand in front of Paulo, who stared blankly from his bloodied face. Manuel came and stood beside me, then Jorge. None of us dared speak.
The sun bore down on the quadrangle, baking the concrete beneath our feet, the low buildings which fringed the quadrangle trapping the heat. The temperature was raised still further by a desert-dry wind that blew in our faces. Already, I felt the sweat build in my armpits.
The moment he had us all lined up as though to fry in the full blast of the sun, Brito began his tirade.
It was our fault, apparently, that the dog had found its way into the chicken coop and massacred those poor chickens. Our fault for being the filthy scum we were, not worthy to be called human, the scourge of the planet, filled with an evil so corrupting only the most severe rehabilitation would drive the beast from our souls.
'A pestilence lives in all you men. In you and you and you. You are diseased, do you hear me? All of you, diseased! And you must be purged. God knows it is my burden to purge you and the task is as onerous today as it was the first day I set foot in this camp. God will smite thee down, you heathen whores.' Brito signalled to a guard who walked off and disappeared down the side of the main building.
'Now you filthy bastard whores, you will sing the national anthem and show yourselves to be the proud Spaniards you are not.'
We remained silent.
'Sing!' Brito roared.
Someone at the back sang, 'Facing the sun in my new shirt,' and slowly we all joined in.
'Louder,' Brito yelled over our voices as we got to, 'If they tell you that I fell,' and we opened our chests and we sang with a heartiness none of us felt. And when we got to the end of Cara el Sol Brito made us start over.
When we were halfway through the second time, the guard reappeared and our gazes were drawn to the military figure who had a dog in his arms.
Brito bellowed to us to keep our eyes straight ahead and sing. The stocky guard stepped in from the wings to act as maestro of our bedraggled choir, urging us on with his glare and his arms that bounced a rhythm in the air.
The guard handed Brito the dog. An emaciated Podenco, brown and white with over-sized upright ears, a farm dog I had seen roaming the fields around the camp. It was doubtful this was the dog that had killed the chickens; its belly was hollow, not bloated or plump.
Not the guilty party, just the sacrifice, Brito the irate headmaster determined to find someone or something to blame.
We kept singing. Brito gripped the dog. I caught the dog's whimpers in the brief pauses between the verses of the song.
What happened next was not unexpected. Flashing into my mind as Brito held the dog aloft on outstretched arms was a similar image, of a goat that time. A goat Brito had savagely slaughtered after his olive grove, a grove of five hundred saplings we had laboriously planted and tended at his behest, an olive grove we had protected with scarecrows made out of newspaper, an olive grove we guarded on pain of a beating, shooing away the rabbits and birds and lizards, was finally destroyed by goats and a hail storm while we were all at church. Brito couldn't punish the hail so he punished the goat.
High in the air, the dog held its tail between its legs. It was trembling, eyes wild with fear. Brito held it there like an offering to some god and as an example to us all of the cruelty that beat in his heart. At the end of the anthem, he brought the dog down and held it to his chest as though in a cuddle. That was no cuddle. Brito was attempting to squeeze the life out of the poor canine. When he got fed up with that technique, he stretched out his arms to the horizontal and ceremoniously dropped the dog on the ground. Then he raised his foot and brought it down hard on the poor animal's rib cage.
The dog was not dead. It cowered and trembled, ears thrust back and it tried to raise its head.
I could scarcely look at what came next.
Not satisfied he had meted out enough cruelty, Brito kicked and stomped on the poor animal. He was an animal himself, arms thrashing about, his eyes wild with a sort of frenzied insanity. His mouth hung open and he let out soft grunts as his steel toe capped boots landed on the sack of bones that was the dog. And all the while we sang. We sang at the tops of our lungs, our throats dry and hoarse. And the guard waved his arms as though he were in a fancy auditorium, and the dog lay still. There was no sign of life in that battered and bleeding body. I thought of Paulo behind me. I dared not look around, but I sensed him there, sensed the pain in his own battered body.
At last Brito stopped his brutality, but our torment did not end there. Brito ordered the singing to stop. He picked up the dog and walked down the line of men, forcing us each in turn to take a long hard look at the dead creature.
'Let this be a lesson to you all. This is what will happen to criminals like you. I command this prison, let there be no mistake, and if any one of you steps out of line just remember, what happened to this dog will happen to you.'
While Brito continued on with his gruesome presentation, two guards rushed forward and built a pyre of twigs and logs and newspapers and anything else they could find that would burn. Brito joined them and ordered the pyre lit. Once the wood had caught and the fire blazed, he threw on the dog, and we all stood bearing our faces into the fiery wind, forced to inhale the wood smoke and then the stench of scorched dog fur and eventually its burning flesh.
Our ordeal was over when the fire died and all the charred remains of the dog were taken to the incinerator. Brito left the guards to take us back to our cells, while he stormed off back to his office, no doubt to gloat over a job well executed.
Once the guards had gone back up to the compound, we all sat on our cots or on the floor subdued. At first, no one spoke.
Then Antonio, one of the Gran Canaria men, said, 'That man is a monster.'
His comment sparked an outcry and soon everyone was talking at once down that end of the cell. At my end, Jorge sat on his cot hugging his knees, and Raphael was slump
ed on the side of Ruben's bed. His hand gripped Ruben's. Manuel, who had begun to shake from the trauma, burst into tears.
I watched his face redden, the tears making clean streaks on his cheeks. New to Tefía, Manuel was having a hard time adjusting.
He was from Santa Cruz, and had been a prostitute since he was about fifteen. He spent a year in Gran Canaria's capital, Las Palmas, where he hung out in the bars around the Santa Catalina Park. The area was near the port and it was known to be seedy. He went there for the drunken lustful orgies, for the money the foreigners who frequented the port city splashed around, foreigners hungry for pretty Canarian boys like Manuel. He told me he had existed in a perpetual state of fear combined with an insatiable desire for clandestine sex. That he was paid for his nightly trysts only added an extra layer of danger, for the parks and cinemas and urinals around the port were raided from time to time and then things turned violent.
Having narrowly avoided arrest for the umpteenth time, a friend and fellow prostitute told him to get away from Las Palmas fast. The authorities were on to him, and it was only a matter of time before he was caught. He returned to Santa Cruz and continued in his chosen line of work, partly because he genuinely enjoyed the thrills, and partly because he could do nothing else.
Watching him sob and shudder was too much to bear and, risking a beating should a guard walk in, I went and sat on his bed and put an arm around him and smoothed back his hair. Not that my efforts had any effect.
A Prison in the Sun Page 20
