'I have to get out of this place,' he said, sounding hysterical. 'Help me escape.' He clutched my arm. 'You have to help me escape.'
'You cannot escape,' I said, my own stomach clenching at the thought. It was an odd reaction, and I realised in that instant that I desired him.
'But I must. I must.' His voice became shrill.
'Calm down,' Jorge said.
Manuel pulled his hands from his face and glared at Jorge indignantly.
'I can't do this anymore. That man Brito is insane. We'll be next. He'll start burning us on pyres before long. Burning us alive, probably.'
'Stop being melodramatic, darling.'
I shot Jorge a censorious look then turned to Manuel.
'He won't. Not even Brito will do that.'
'How do you know. He was wild up there. I thought I saw froth at the corners of his mouth.'
It was true. The guy was a complete maniac.
'Please, help me, José. Help me get out of here.'
I reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze.
'There is nowhere to go. Antonio will tell you. His friend tried, remember. Or was that before you arrived? Look, even if you manage to run off this plain, there is only one way off the island. You would need to get a boat at Puerto Cabras, and no one is going to let you do that. They have spies everywhere. This is an island that loves Franco. Don't you understand? These campesinos think he is just wonderful. Believe me.'
'Surely they do not. Not all of them.'
'And how would you know which do and which do not. And even if you could tell that, they are all Catholic, and they all hate us. You see the way they look at us. Have you ever seen any one of them wave or smile? No, you haven't. You haven't because it has never happened. Don't you see, Manuel? You would need help to get off the island, and no one is going to help you. Believe me. If you try to escape, you will be punished. After he was re-captured, Antonio's friend was taken to another prison. Antonio overheard the guards talking about it.'
All my words fell on deaf ears.
'I can't stay here. I can't do this.'
'You have to stay here, and you can do this.'
'I had to stop myself from bolting to the fire for a piece of charred dog,' Raphael said grimly, and thankfully changing the subject.
'Same,' Jorge said. 'I was salivating.'
'I can hardly believe we have been reduced to this,' I said.
'Better than goat droppings.'
'True.' It was my turn to sound grim.
'Or rancid food parcels.'
'At least you know your family cares,' Manuel said plaintively.
Manuel could have had no idea that no one had received a visit from a family member in all the time I had been incarcerated – ten months now – and no prisoner in our cell had ever received a letter from his family.
'I miss my mum so much,' he said. He looked set to burst into more tears.
I stroked his back.
'We all do.'
'We do?' Jorge said.
'Or our sisters or our brothers or our friends,' I said quickly. I didn't want to get into a conversation about Jorge's mother.
'You mustn't think like this,' I said softly. 'We are your family now. You must be strong. It can't go on forever. Three years is the maximum.'
'And Brito will hold us all for that whole time. I bet he will.'
'You don't know that.'
'He sends reports back to the authorities. He has complete control of us.'
Manuel pulled away and started pinching the skin of his arms.
'What's the matter with me?' he said with disgust. 'Why did I have to be born this way? Why can't I just be normal like everyone else.'
'Darling, shut your mouth!'
I gave Jorge a rigorous shake of my head.
'Is it my biology, like the priest says?'
'Some say we have overly pampering mothers,' Raphael said, his tone mockingly philosophical.
'My mother never pampered me.'
'Jorge, we are all sorry you had such an awful mother.' I hoped that would satisfy him.
'They think we are perverted hedonists,' Raphael said, 'relishing our carnal pleasures.'
'So what if we are?' Suddenly, Manuel was defensive, and I was pleased and relieved to hear defiance in his tone. That was the energy he needed to survive here. Nothing else would see him through.
Our conversation waned as the sun, now on its afternoon descent, started to bake the front wall of the cell, its heat radiating inside. Little escaped out the shuttered windows and there was no through breeze. The room soon became an oven, stuffy and oppressive, and as the afternoon wore on, the stench of the urine and the shit that had accumulated in the bucket by the other door grew ever stronger. Many of us lay down on our cots to ride out the worst of it half comatose, covering our noses or burying our heads in the stink of our own armpits, which was a preferable sort of stench to the one emanating from our defecations.
It was dusk before we ate. The guards threw open the door, letting in a sudden rush of hot dry air. One guard stood in the doorway as the other delivered us each a tin bowl filled with cornmeal and raw onion porridge. The prison version of gofio escaldado and delicious when traditionally cooked. Gofio escaldado was made from roasted maize flour combined with broth to form a smooth paste. Garlic, onions, salt and the all-important olive oil were added for flavour and consistency. I adored the dish the way my family prepared it, served with a spicy sauce. Here, all the vital ingredients were missing. The result was a flavourless stodge that was almost impossible to swallow. It was an insult to our culture and only marginally better than the rooted sweet potatoes and peas shot through with weevils that we were also given to eat. The only way to eat the gofio slop was to chase it with gulps of water. Knowing this, once the guards had left the cell, Antonio went around with the bucket, and we each scooped out water with our tin mugs. Meals were the only times we felt driven to slake our thirsts with the salt-tinged water from the well.
I spooned the grainy, tasteless porridge in my bowl and sipped my water with each mouthful and swallowed hard, forcing the contents of my mouth down my throat as best I could. As I did, I relived the episode in the chicken coop, tasted the raw flesh and skin and entrails. The blood. None of those flavours or textures were pleasant but they were no worse than our daily repast. I watched Manuel and Jorge and Raphael and Ruben struggle through their food, willing them to eat every scrap, not give cause for puzzlement as to why any of us was off our food. For the conclusion would be obvious, even to those dim-witted numbskulls outside, that we had feasted on the scraps left by the dog.
And then I was back to thinking about the Podenco and the awful stench of its incineration. I almost gagged.
The guards returned half an hour later to collect our bowls. Antonio was ordered to remove the stinking bucket that served as our communal toilet and empty it over the stone wall. It was the only time the bucket was emptied. We all knew the guards chose that time of day on purpose, to make us endure the stink of our own excrement for the longest possible time and make our mealtime even more unpleasant than it already was.
At sunset, came the mandatory and daily religious instruction meant to make us repent and change our carnal ways. With the guard standing at the back of the room, we were lectured by another prisoner, Miguel, who came from a religious background and had been appointed the role. It was the same every night. We had to gather round. He began by instructing us in the First Letters. Then he spoke of the story of Jesus. After that he read selected Bible passages. Then came the Rosary prayers. It was like going to Mass every single night. We all knew the stories of the faith, and we all knew the subtext embedded in the instruction. We were sinners, and we needed redemption. We had a disease for which there was no cure, we would never be saved and would be condemned to hell once we died, and all we could think of as we listened was we were already in hell, right here in this cell, and why didn't God strike us down and relieve us from this misery.
&n
bsp; As Miguel spoke, my mind drifted. I pictured Mass at the church in La Laguna. How I confessed to the priest my homosexual desires and he told me I would struggle my whole life and never find acceptance and it was best to bury my desires and never act on them. I listened and I didn't, but my gaze betrayed me and here I was anyway, regardless.
Next, I pictured the walk we faced in the morning, the three-mile walk to the church in Casillas del Ángel and the three miles back. A pointless, fruitless walk across the dry and rocky plain to hear the priest talk his talk of sanctity and purity and Christ. And then I will confess and be lectured yet again that I had been separated from society because I was, we all were, a danger to our families, our neighbours, to all who came into contact with us. We were child molesters and prostitutes, a menace to society for which there would never be a pardon. And as we walk, there and back, the people in the houses we pass will stare and their children will point at us and say 'look at the prisoners' and their families will close the doors and windows.
And on the long walk back, we will pass the field where the olive grove stood, and I will picture the goats and the hail storm that ruined those sapling trees. And picture Brito and his rampage that culminated in the sacrificial slaughter of a goat.
Once, I told the priest our Carmelite prison director was a repressed homosexual and that he was deranged. We all tried to tell the priest, but our words fell on deaf ears.
And I blocked my mind to the days ahead. To the hours and hours we would spend in the fields breaking rocks. The hoeing and the carting of rocks and dirt. The toil out in the baking sun and the roaring wind and the relentless tirade of insults from the guards who made the smallest thing our fault. Never allowed even once to pause lest we suffer the whip, the lash, the beatings.
With the fading light, the lecture ended, and the guard left us. We talked softly, someone sang a song. Eventually, all went quiet, and I heard sobbing, the gentle sobbing not from Manuel, but from another man further down the aisle.
I closed my eyes on the horrors of the day. I closed my eyes on the demented Carmelite who had been put in charge. I closed my eyes on his henchmen guards who had not one ounce of compassion between them. I closed my eyes.
* * *
Raven, why do you eye me with such an inquiring look. A war was fought to put an end to the sorts of atrocities that went on at Tefía, a war fought by an alliance of the good guys, yes the good guys who were from Britain and France and Canada and the USA. And those nations, what do they do now that the war is long past? They surely have no intention of having another war to oust Franco. Not in this new era in which the enemy as they see it is not fascism but communism. Franco suits them. Franco and his hatred of communists and Republicans and gays.
As for the futility of my incarceration, futile because it turned me into the gay man that I am – oh birdy love, you with your wings and your freedom, you could never know the effect a caged life has on the soul. No one cages a raven.
How I yearned for the comfort of home in that place. How I begged and pleaded for a chance to atone. How I wept quietly at night for a loving familial embrace. I wanted to claw back time until I was but an egg and a sperm and beg God to make me heterosexual.
And no one wrote and no food parcels came and it felt as though my own flesh and blood had washed their hands of me. Maybe they had. To this day I have no idea. I cannot see them. I wrote and told them I was free, but they did not reach out to me and wish me well even then.
In Tefía, we all felt abandoned by our families. And many of us had been. But what were they to do? What could they possibly have achieved? The answer to that is simple. Nothing.
It was only when I was set free from the camp and sent to Gran Canaria that I learned of the struggles of a mother desperate to free her only son. How no one lifted a finger to help and especially not the rich gays whose aberrant needs were met by impoverished prostitutes. This mother spoke to the mayor, to police officials and business leaders, the colonial director and the comandante of the guardia civil. Doors were slammed in her face. No one did a thing. They were all indifferent to her plea. She was told her son was a maricon and was better off in prison. This woman was a housekeeper. She worked for a wealthy don. He was also a maricon.
Jorge was fond of saying we were all lucky not to have been assassinated or deported to the mainland, or kidnapped or murdered in the night – hurled off a cliff or shot – as many political dissenters had been. Jorge, who upon his release went and hurled himself off this very cliff. He had always been dramatic, and it was his final flourish, yet with his feminine ways which were ingrained into every cell of him, he had no life in this world.
Now I feel nothing. My family are estranged to me. Six years have passed since I last saw them, yet what has changed in the world to allow me to return to Santa Cruz? What can possibly change? It's 1961 and Franco has been in power for more than two decades. He will never leave. His spies keep him in power. The condemnation of my kind will go on. And on. Through the eyes of my family, I am contemptible. I am bad seed. I cannot return and ask for their forgiveness because that would be asking them to accept me for who I am. I cannot prove to them that I have changed. I have not. I am the same as I ever was. Worse.
I could pretend. It occurs to me often to pretend. I could follow in the footsteps of Ruben and find a woman and marry her and do what the rich maricones do. Ruben, who recovered from his illness and was released three months before me. He moved to Las Palmas where he met a peasant farmer's daughter and poured what charm he had on her, convincing her to marry him and dooming himself to live a lie.
Or I could find some rich old maricon like Raphael who, I heard, had prostituted himself to servitude in La Palma.
Then there was Manuel, my beloved Manuel, who was taking the biggest risk of all. He lived on the streets down by the docks of Las Palmas, giving himself to those tourists crawling by, risking further imprisonment and even his own life.
But, Raven, I cannot marry a woman or prostitute myself to an old maricon. I must be true to myself. For I have learned what it is to love another man and to lose that love. I have learned what it is like to hate your own flesh, to want to claw at your insides, rip out whatever it is inside that warps the lusts. If being gay is abnormal, then being gay is the embodiment of a kind of torture worse than Tefía.
There is only one way to end this torment, raven. When you leap off this cliff edge, you will spread your wings and soar on the thermals.
Me? I have no wings. Like Jorge, I will die.
Part Three
A Long Walk
I leaned back in my seat, rolled my shoulders and then stretched my arms behind my chair, feeling the release of the tension. On the laptop screen, the cursor flashed below the last sentence. There was no more to be made of the Spanish script, and nothing more to be gleaned from my frenetic research. The draft, the best I could manage, was sitting on just under twenty-thousand words, which was too short, much too short to be even a novella, but too long to be a short story. A novelette? Novelettes were just about unheard of. Who wrote a novelette? Besides, they were typically light and romantic and frivolous, not heavy and charged with significance as the draft on my laptop. I had no idea what to do with a novelette. Did novelettes win prizes? I wondered if there might be ways to expand four-fold on what I had and turn the draft into a novel. I would need to sit on it for a while, probably some months. Even then, there was every danger whatever I added would be padding. Still, I really ought to lengthen the narrative. But I did not want to embellish on the tortured introspection any more than I had previously wanted to expand on José's childhood. What interest was any of that to English-speaking readers? The original Spanish version ended abruptly with José jumping off the cliff and, abrupt as that was, I wanted to keep it that way. Looking back over what I had, I could see it was no prize winner.
The Clenbutoral had worn off and left me feeling harried yet not in the least bit tired. Before I closed my laptop, I logged onto
my emails. There, as anticipated, was one from Angela. I didn't need to open it. The subject line told me all I cared to know. Sandra Flint had won the prize.
Of course, she had won the prize. My jaw set picturing her grin, the triumphant sparkle in her eyes, her, a woman short on conscience, a woman who had failed to so much as offer gratitude to her ghost throughout the entire process. She had either erased my efforts from her memory or was too scared I might pipe up and lay claim to the work in some public fashion. In denial? A coward? Which was it? Both? I was glad I didn't live in her skin.
In the kitchen, I filled the kettle and prepared myself an omelette. I hadn't eaten since sometime last evening when I shovelled a whole litre tub of strawberry yoghurt into my mouth. And I had been up all night. Whether my stomach felt like food or not, it was getting some.
An hour later, and I had cleaned the breakfast things and showered and donned fresh clothes, and I stood around not knowing what to do next. My flight wasn't until the following day, and it was too soon to pack. My mind was fuzzy from hours and hours of mental exercise, and my body had had too little sleep. I needed to get out of the farmhouse, that much was clear, and into the fresh air, and I needed to make a move before the day grew too hot. I thought of the rucksack and decided if Paco and Claire planned on stealing it or claiming it, they would have done so, and they hadn't. I guessed theft and confrontation wasn't their style. More likely they would leave well alone, especially if Mario had told them Juan had been involved in a drug deal gone wrong and that Javier had been after him.
I considered a drive. After all, I had not seen that much of the island, and I was meant to be on holiday. Morro Jable was said to be nice, and then there was the southern heel of the island beyond. Although when I studied the map, I saw I would need to drive through Tiscamanita or Puerto del Rosario to get to my chosen location, unless I went up and over the mountains of Betancuria which would take forever and require too much concentration on twisty windy roads. When I considered all the driving there and back in my current sleep-deprived state, I decided using my own feet would be less of a risk to my life. Besides, I felt a niggle, an internal itch. I had spent much of the last week deeply immersed in the story of the concentration camp, and I wanted to pay homage to those men, those gay men, all one hundred of them who had been incarcerated and suffered unspeakable deprivations.
A Prison in the Sun Page 21
