For Fermín Romero de Torres,
who came back from among the dead
and holds the key to the future.
13
‘That night I only told you a small part of the story, Daniel.’
‘I thought you trusted me.’
‘I would trust you with my life. If I only told you part of it, it was to protect you.’
‘Protect me? From what?’
Fermín looked down, devastated.
‘From the truth, Daniel … from the truth.’
Part Two
From Among the Dead
1
Barcelona, 1939
New prisoners were brought in by night, in cars or black vans that set off from the police station on Vía Layetana and crossed the city silently, nobody noticing or wishing to notice them. The vehicles of the political police drove up the old road scaling the slopes of Montjuïc and more than one prisoner would relate how, the moment they glimpsed the castle on top of the hill silhouetted against black clouds that crept in from the sea, they felt certain they would never get out of that place alive.
The fortress was anchored at the highest point of the rocky mountain, suspended between the sea to the east, Barcelona’s carpet of shadows to the north and, to the south, the endless city of the dead – the old Montjuïc Cemetery whose stench rose up among the boulders and filtered through cracks in the stone and through the bars of the cells. In times past, the castle had been used for bombarding the city below, but only a few months after the fall of Barcelona, in January, and the final defeat in April, death came to dwell there in silence and Barcelonians, trapped in the longest night of their history, preferred not to look skywards and recognise the prison’s outline crowning the hill.
Upon arrival, prisoners brought in by the pol
itical police were assigned a number, usually that of the cell they were going to occupy and where they were likely to die. For most tenants, as some of the jailers liked to refer to them, the journey to the castle was only one-way. On the night tenant number 13 arrived in Montjuïc it was raining hard. Thin veins of black water bled down the stone walls and the air reeked of excavated earth. Two police officers escorted him to a room containing only a metal table and a chair. A naked bulb hung from the ceiling and flickered every time the generator’s flow diminished. He stood there waiting in his soaking clothes for almost half an hour, watched by a guard with a rifle.
At last he heard footsteps, the door opened and in came a man who couldn’t have been a day over thirty. He wore a freshly ironed wool suit and smelled of eau de cologne. He had none of the martial looks of a professional soldier or police officer: his features were soft and his expression seemed pleasant. To the prisoner he came across as someone affecting the manners of a wealthy young man, giving off a condescending air of superiority in a setting that was beneath him. His most striking feature were his eyes. Blue, penetrating and sharp, alive with greed and suspicion. Only his eyes, behind that veneer of studied elegance and kind demeanour, betrayed his true nature.
Two round lenses augmented them, and his pomaded hair, combed back, lent him a vaguely affected look that didn’t match the sinister decor. The man sat down on the chair behind the desk and opened a folder he was carrying. After a quick inspection of its contents, he joined his hands, placed his fingertips under his chin and sat scrutinising the prisoner, who finally spoke up.
‘Excuse me, but I think there has been a mistake …’
The blow on the prisoner’s stomach with the rifle butt knocked the wind out of him and he fell, curled up into a ball.
‘You only speak when the governor asks you a question,’ the guard told him.
‘On your feet,’ commanded the governor in a quavering voice, still unused to giving orders.
The prisoner managed to stand up and face the governor’s uncomfortable gaze.
‘Name?’
‘Fermín Romero de Torres.’
The prisoner noticed disdain and indifference in those blue eyes.
‘What sort of name is that? Do you think I’m a fool? Come on: name, the real one.’
The prisoner, a small, frail man, held out his papers for the governor. The guard snatched them from him and took them over to the table. The governor had a quick look at them, then clicked his tongue and smiled.