‘You’re very welcome,’ said the voice on the other side of the corridor.
‘Fermín Romero de Torres, at your service.’
‘David Martín.’
Fermín frowned. The name sounded familiar. For five long minutes he shuffled through distant memories and echoes from the past and then, suddenly, it came to him. He remembered whole afternoons spent in a corner of the library on Calle del Carmen, devouring a series of books with racy covers and titles.
‘Martín the author? Of City of the Damned?’
A sigh in the shadows.
‘Nobody appreciates pen names any more.’
‘Please excuse my indiscretion. It’s just that I had an almost scholarly devotion to your work. That’s why I know you were the person writing the novels of the immortal Ignatius B. Samson …’
‘At your service.’
‘Well, Señor Martín, it’s an honour to meet you, even if it is in these wretched circumstances, because I’ve been a great admirer of yours for years and …’
‘Are you two lovebirds going to shut up? Some people here are trying to sleep,’ roared a bitter voice that seemed to come from the next-door cell.
‘There goes old Sourpuss,’ a second voice cut in, coming from further down the corridor. ‘Pay no attention to him, Martín. If you fall asleep here you just get eaten alive by bedbugs, starting with your privates. Go on, Martín, why don’t you tell us a story? One about Chloé …’
‘Sure, so you can jerk off like a monkey,’ answered the hostile voice.
&
nbsp; ‘Fermín, my friend,’ Martín announced from his cell. ‘Let me introduce you to Number Twelve, who finds something wrong in everything, and I mean everything, and Number Fifteen, insomniac, educated and the cell block’s official ideologue. The rest don’t speak much, especially Number Fourteen.’
‘I speak when I have something to say,’ snapped a deep, icy voice Fermín assumed must belong to Number 14. ‘If we all followed suit, we’d get some peace at night.’
Fermín took in this peculiar community.
‘Good evening, everyone. My name is Fermín Romero de Torres and it’s a pleasure to make all your acquaintances.’
‘The pleasure is entirely yours,’ said Number 15.
‘Welcome, and I hope your stay is brief,’ offered Number 14.
Fermín glanced again at the sack housing the corpse and gulped.
‘That was Lucio, the former Number Thirteen,’ Martín explained. ‘We don’t know anything about him because the poor fellow was mute. A bullet blew off his larynx at the battle of the Ebro.’
‘A shame he was the only one,’ remarked Number 15.
‘What did he die of?’ asked Fermín.
‘In this place one just dies from being here,’ answered Number 12. ‘It doesn’t take much more.’
3
Routine helped. Once a day, for an hour, the inmates from the first two cell blocks were taken to the yard within the moat to get a bit of sun, rain, or whatever the weather brought with it. The menu consisted of a half-full bowl of some cold, greasy, greyish gruel of indeterminate provenance and rancid taste which, after a few days, and with hunger cramps in one’s stomach, eventually became odourless and thus easier to get down. It was doled out halfway through the afternoon and in time prisoners came to look forward to its arrival.
Once a month prisoners handed in their dirty clothes and were given another set which had supposedly been plunged into boiling water for a minute, although the bugs didn’t seem to have noticed it. On Sundays inmates were advised to attend mass. Nobody dared miss it, because the priest took a roll call and if there was any name missing he’d write it down. Two absences meant a week of fasting. Three, a month’s holiday in one of the solitary confinement cells in the tower.
The cell blocks, courtyard and any other areas through which the prisoners moved were heavily guarded. A body of sentries armed with rifles and guns patrolled the prison and, when the inmates were out of their cells, it was impossible for them to look in any direction and not see at least a dozen of those guards, alert, their weapons at the ready. They were joined by the less threatening jailers, none of whom looked like soldiers; the general feeling among the prisoners was that they were a bunch of unfortunate souls who had been unable to find a better job in those hard times.
Every block of cells had a jailer assigned to it. Armed with a bundle of keys, he worked twelve-hour shifts sitting on a chair at the end of the corridor. Most of the jailers avoided fraternising with the prisoners and didn’t give them a word or a look beyond what was strictly necessary. The only one who seemed to be an exception was a poor devil nicknamed Bebo, who had lost an eye in an air raid when he worked as a nightwatchman in a factory in Pueblo Seco.