From the ecstasy of the ceiling to the white bulge of the folder. Plans. Names. Statements. A list of the personal effects found on Fernando Garrido. Gold watch with an inscription by Kim Il-Sung, a packet of light tobacco, a wallet with three thousand pesetas, an identity card, a Party card, a postcard from Oriana Fallaci, a handkerchief, a latch key, an agenda, shreds of light tobacco, a lighter, a diary. When the Lafargues committed suicide, Lenin wrote: ‘If someone no longer has the strength to work in the Party, he must have the courage to look reality in the face and to die like the Lafargues.’ Santos Pacheco, old Indian Chief, white man kill Black Eagle.
Carvalho drew a diagram of the room, allocating people to the places indicated to him. Names, ages, distances. He paced the room at various speeds. At the speed of hatred. Of resentment. The transcript of the tape-recording:
‘Let’s get it over quickly, because you know I can’t keep going without a smoke.’
‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’
‘Ah, just what we needed. A short-circuit.’
‘The fuse has blown, you ignoramus.’
‘Those Workers Commission people are always on strike.’
‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’
‘Steward! Someone should go and have a look.’
The sound of an earthquake nearby.
Sighs of relief.
A sudden silence that becomes deeper and deeper.
Fernando! Fernando! (Santos’s voice)
Tower of Babel.
Santos Pacheco had foreseen that Carvalho would be puzzled: ‘Don’t be surprised that the tape continued after the lights went out. The main recorder was out of use, but there’s a small battery one on standby, at least during the political report and the ensuing discussion.’
José Martialay Martín, construction worker, leader of Movimiento Obrero: ‘It was a normal meeting, with no dominating theme. Garrido was the same as usual. I was too. I didn’t realise anything until the lights went on, even though I was sitting on Fernando’s right.’
Prudencia Solchaga Rozas, a miner from Almadén: ‘It seems now that everything lasted a long time, but in fact it was only a few seconds. Garrido was smoking, and that was all the light there was. Now I remember that even that light soon disappeared. It must have been when Fernando fell on the table. I couldn’t see anything and I heard nothing special. People were talking and making jokes about the situation. Who could have guessed what was happening?’
The light emitted by Fernando Garrido appeared in seven of the statements. ‘Let’s get it over quickly, because you know I can’t keep going without a smoke.’ Either Garrido had violated his own code, or seven members of the central committee had auto-suggested a cigarette between his lips. It was now six in the morning, too early to get Santos Pacheco out of bed and ask him whether Garrido had been smoking at the meeting.
Luis de la Mata Requeséns, a dentist from Requena (Valencia): ‘There was another doctor in the room who was more suitable for what had happened: Comrade Valdivieso from La Paz, a hospital specialist in cardiovascular surgery. But the diagnosis took no more than a couple of seconds. A gaping stab wound, clear and straight to the heart. Death was instantaneous. No doubt the work of an expert, particularly because the room was dark and because it is hard to stab someone in front when he is sitting at a table. The assassin must have the eyes of a cat. Some people can move easier than others in the dark, but it’s no more than a minimal difference.’
Ezequiel Hernández Amado, a priest: ‘My first thought was to give him absolution. I did this in a very low voice, not because I was afraid of any comrade’s reaction—my self-proclaimed atheist comrades accept that I and many others have the faith—but because absolution is an intimate ceremony between three beings: the priest, the sinner and God. I said these words ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in the firm belief that Fernando Garrido had few sins to be forgiven. I am convinced that a man who has dedicated his whole life to the struggle for human dignity has a boundless credit in heaven. Maybe my professional bias played tricks on me, and maybe prayer and absolution stopped me concentrating on other things. No two individuals are alike, and there has to be some of everything in the Lord’s garden.’
Carvalho sifted through his notes, converting them into a series of questions. Then he picked out a number of the questions. He tried to sleep, if only for half-an-hour. But he saw people in the street when he went to draw the curtains. Was that the smell of fritters, the click-clack of cups of coffee on saucers? He took a shower.
Toy-like silhouettes on the flat roofs of the Carrera de San Jerónimo, Fernaflor, Marqués de Cubas, Plaza de Canovas. All the police in Spain seemed to be circling or massing at the Madrid crossroads, forming a brown, festoon-like cordon around the zone of popular homage. A real armed enclosure sketched out a trapezium with its base in the Paseo del Prado, its sides in Atocha and Alcalá streets, and its top in Espoz and Mina streets and the Puerta del Sol. A jeep stood at every major intersection, and each little square had its barred police-van crammed with brown figures, guns at the ready. A helicopter flew overhead like a bird of ill omen. Garrido was shouldered from the Cortes by members of the executive committee of the Communist Party of Spain. As they appeared, the applause was held in check by an imperative ‘ssh!’ rising from the depths of the crowd.
‘Long live the Communist Party of Spain!’ a woman shouted in broken voice. A fiery viva licked the walls and caused the tin-police silhouettes to shimmer on the rooftops.
There was a silence for the historic photo as the Party, family and state representatives took their places. Santos stood at the front of the Party delegation, his head bowed to cover the burning tears. The state officials were the head of government representing the King, the commander of the military First Region, the chairman of the Cortes, three ministers and the presiding judge of the Constitutional Court. The general secretaries of the Communist parties of Italy, Portugal, France, Japan and Romania carried their respective national flags, alongside delegations from every country with more than five communists on the electoral register. Then there were the general secretaries of the Socialist parties of Italy, France, Portugal and Greece, as well as representatives of the Sandinist Front and the Mexican PRI. Behind them came a slow, red moraine. Red flags against the arduously blue sky of a November morning; red kerchiefs in hands and jacket pockets. Red, too, seemed the fists that rose and fell with the power of hammers and the precision of mechanical pistons. A bitter-sweet woman’s voice started up:
‘Arise, ye starvelings from your slumbers!
Arise, ye prisoners of want!’
She was joined by the whole of the long, broad mop of red hair that followed the coffin. At the Plaza de Cánovas, the singing began to recede to the back of the mass procession, for the Madrid City Band greeted the front section with the strains of the Royal March, playing it slowly as if at the funeral of a pale young tubercular prince. After the early display of tolerance, the communist baritones were now shouting more than singing the Internationale, the march divided between tactical respect for the royal anthem and the emotional compulsion of the Internationale. Tierno Galván, the mayor of Madrid, resolved the dispute by mounting the rostrum and slowly delivering a short funeral oration.
‘At the burial of a man who was not religious, there can be no better oration than to mark our respect for his heroism in denying himself the comfort of resurrection. Life and History are as one in Fernando Garrido. Ever since he was born, he believed that each man’s hopes can only be realised through collective emancipation, and he became a revolutionary because he believed in man. There can be no closer or more ethical identity than that which exists between socialism and humanism. Socialism has left ethics to the philosophers and devoted itself to the working class, just as Prometheus stole fire from the gods in order to give it to men. You all know the story of Fernando Garrido’s life, particularly those of you who are aware of your own history and of the role played in it by the anti-fascist struggle for freedom. I salute our old frien
d, our old companion of those times of despair in which he never gave way to despair. He was a strong man, the son of a strong people and social class. I was never able to call him “comrade”, but I always knew that we were comrades and that tactics and strategies could never separate us. He looked to a future, already not so far away, in which communists and socialists would be forced to build socialism with freedom and to guarantee freedom with socialism. He put you communists on the path of that truth. He showed to us socialists the end of a still long road. Someone once said that the final struggle will be between communists and ex-communists. I say to you that there will be no such final struggle, for examples like Fernando Garrido give the Internationale its full meaning as the song of spirit and unity.’
Once again, applause nearly perverted the meaning of the ceremony, but shushes and sobs drowned it out. Santos climbed the rostrum and stood looking at the crowd. ‘Comrades!’ he began and immediately fell silent, as if he had just discovered that Garrido was dead and felt his anguish harden into a ball of nothingness in his throat. ‘Comrades!’ he repeated, his voice stifling from grief. He lowered his head and raised his fist, so that a forest of fists gripped the noble compass of the square under the serene yet puzzled gaze of the distant statues showing through the Prado museum gates. Santos made way for the last speaker.
Rafael Alberti went up to the platform with slow legs but a swift body, the oblique majesty of his face preserved in the syrup of a bewitching poet’s long white hair.
‘Fernando Garrido shudders
Loneliness shudders water
Shudders with rage the soil
That has to save Spain
The soil of the working class
With clenched fists as a flag
A red red red red flag
Like the blood and the mist
That has plunged the olive-tree
Into grief and shaken the harvest
With the disorder of evening
In the very midst of morning
A disorder of shadow bitten
By the blue of black hounds of death
Fascism does not go out to fight
It kills by stealth it kills by blows
And is born again from its foggy air
‘Fernando Garrido was
The guide of coexistence
Between river and water
Fire and flame voice and tool
‘They’ll come from future skies
Archangels or planets
To behold the beauty
Of this world constructed
With your earthly words
Fernando Garrido death
To death long live life
Death to death! Long live life!’
‘Death to death!’ the crowd repeated, while the slogan ‘The real terrorists are you, the fascists’ grew until it took over the square. The various groups of representatives mingled with one another. Santos embraced ministers and foreign delegates, and gave a martial handshake to the Madrid army commander. The stewarding force cleared a path for the cars that were to bear Garrido’s remains to the civil cemetery.
‘They’ll let you through. Tell Santos I have to speak to him today if possible.’
Carmela advanced, greeting some and rebuking others. She came back just as people were moving en masse to the Party’s hired coaches and cars that were to take them to the cemetery.
‘He says he normally passes by the university campus every evening. Six o’clock at the entrance to the faculty of philosophy and literature. I’m just telling you what he said. Don’t stand there gaping.’
He couldn’t stay surprised for long. An explosion swept the air like a wave on the ocean, and bodies were carried away in a frantic rush to escape anywhere and nowhere. Another explosion echoed out from Atocha Station. Carvalho pulled Carmela along as he ran towards the Hotel Ritz doorway. They turned to watch how the crowd, briefly transformed into a disorderly mob, was stubbornly regrouping in a dense pack of raised fists. It was singing the Internationale.
Ambulances could be heard in the distance speeding to the Puerta del Sol, where one bomb had exploded, and to Atocha Station, where it was reported by word of mouth that another explosion had killed two people and injured twelve.
‘No, I’m not going to the cemetery. I don’t interfere in private family matters.’
‘Shall we fix up to eat somewhere?’
‘Do you know where you can eat cocido in Madrid?’
‘Not really, but I’ll find out after the funeral is over. Shall we say two o’clock?’
‘Right. At my hotel.’
He had to avoid the pockets of demonstrators in order to leave the area encircled by the security forces and reach the normal traffic. He hailed a taxi and asked for Calle Profesor Waksman.
‘Let’s hope we get there before the end of the league cup final. There’s one hell of a jam up there. It’s just not possible.’
The cars seemed to be driven by paralytics or gripped by a strange force rising from the rain-darkened tarmac. The driver knew all there was to know about the recent outrages. A small bomb in the Puerta del Sol passport office and a huge one at Atocha.
‘Do you follow me, mister? Am I making myself clear? One small bomb and one monster. Right? It can’t be, it just can’t be. Even bombs are signed.’
They reached Calle Waksman with the rain hard on their heels. Carvalho just had time to locate the doorway before the first drops of cold autumn rain fell on his back.
‘Señor Jaime Siurell.’
The porter did not even look up as he pointed out the floor, all the time scratching his balls with a hand lazily placed inside his uniform. The apartment was opened by an old lady straight from the society column of a stylish American magazine.
‘Tell him I’m an old friend from the States. I’d like to speak with him about James Wonderful.’
She did not return. The cream-coloured double door, with rims of gilded bronze, opened to reveal a wheelchair pushed by the large hands of James Wonderful. His flabby face muscles seemed under the control of oceanic eyes, wide open behind the lenses of his spectacles. His lower lip drooled down to the tip of his chin, perfectly in accord with a body that was crumbling right from the head to a pair of feet more flung than rested on the footboard of the wheelchair. Nothing remained of the physical hardiness of that fifty-year-old gymnast he had known twenty years before.
‘Carvalho!’ The word struggled from a lower lip tortuously attached to the muscles of a mouth that seemed to despise it.
Carvalho thought he could detect a smile and an emotional mist in the eyes of James Wonderful, assistant chief executive in the Second Republic,[8]* instructor of CIA agents, regional chief for Latin America at the time when Carvalho was assigned to ‘the area of presidential surveillance’. The old exile, who had survived such great physical and ideological collapse, was now a hemiplegic suffering from an obscure disease. He stretched out his hands for Carvalho to shake.
‘How we hated each other!’
‘Well enough.’
An attempted smile intensified the breaks in the geometry of his face. He put his hands back on the wheels and, inviting Carvalho to follow, skilfully manoeuvred the chair inside the flat. They entered a spacious living-room, full of Philippine cane furniture, flower-carpets and bright indoor vegetation. Carvalho abandoned himself to the depths of an over-large sofa, remaining below the water-line of Wonderful’s sunken face, whose speech-muscles moved like stiff pieces of a precarious machine.
‘I haven’t heard anything about you for twenty years.’
‘There hasn’t been much to hear.’
‘I live cut off from everyone and everything. Ten years ago, I took my pension so that I could write my memoirs. Are you still in the Company?’
‘You know very well I’m not.’
‘Yes, it’s true. I asked for the sake of asking. I guess you haven’t just come here to pay me a visit. Galicians never waste time. You are Galician, aren’t you?’
‘A cross-breed.’
‘There is such a thing as genetic inheritance, particularly in survival cells. Help yourself to whatever you fancy. I can’t drink anything. You can see I’m a wreck. At least I look one. But the whole of history and the whole of the world is inside my head. How did you find me?’
‘Five years ago I bumped into Olson in Barcelona. We talked about old times, about you. He gave me your address.’
‘Olson. He was here not so long ago. Now he’s a farmer. He grows avocados in Malaga, I think. A fitting destiny. After fifty you’re no longer fit for this work. What are you doing?’
‘Private detective.’
‘You live in Madrid?’
‘No.’
‘Are you here on business?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have I got anything to do with it?’
‘Maybe.’
Murder in the Central Committee Page 10
