Blind Sunflowers

by Alberto Mendez

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

A captain in Franco's army renounces winning the war - on the very day of the victory; a young poet flees with his pregnant girlfriend and is forced to grow up quickly, only to die within a few months; a prisoner in Polier's jail refuses to live a lie so that his executioner can be held accountable; and, a lustful deacon hides his desires behind the apostolic fascism that clamours for the purifying blood of the defeated.

Four subtly connected tales, narrated in the same spirit but with the individual styles of the different voices; these are stories from silent times, when people feared that others might discover what they knew. The line between the victorious and the defeated is blurred - whatever one's affiliation, nobody survives unscathed.

Release date: July 9, 2008

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 160

Sample

We know now that Captain Alegría chose his death blindly; he did not peer into the rabid eyes of the future facing all those whose lives are being counted down. He chose to approach death without passion or melodrama. Only as he began to cross no-man’s-land did he raise his voice, hands held high enough to avoid seeming as though he were begging for mercy. At that moment he shouted over and over again to a disbelieving enemy: ‘I’m a prisoner.’

The night was as warm and transparent as perfume. Madrid lay wrapped in a melancholy silence broken only by the dull thud of shells beating out a rhythm more akin to a church service than a battle. ‘I’m a prisoner.’ We know that Captain Alegría had spent several nights going over this moment in his mind. He probably rejected the idea of saying ‘I surrender’ because that would have suggested a fixed moment in time, whereas in reality he had been surrendering for a long, long time. First he surrendered, then he turned himself over to the enemy. When he had the chance to talk about it, he defined his gesture as a victory in reverse: ‘Although all wars are paid for by the numbers of the dead, we have been profiteering from this one for a long time now. We have to choose between winning a war and conquering a cemetery,’ he concluded in a letter written to his fiancée in January 1938. We know now that unconsciously he had already rejected both options.


Knowing what we now know about Carlos Alegría, we can state that on his walk between the two front lines all he could hear was the screech of panic inside his own head. The silence of the night swallowed all other noises, the explosions and cries of the world around him. Madrid rose in the background like a stage set, the outline of a blacked-out city reluctantly lit by moonlight jutting up into the warm air. The Spanish capital lay cowering in darkness.


This was how Captain Alegría’s defeat began. For three long years he had observed a ragged civilian army stoically accepting that another army – his army – would inevitably crush this immobile, silent city whose haphazard limits were drawn behind trenches where for many months nobody had been expecting any attack.

‘With time, violence and pain, rage and weakness all bond together in a religion of survival, a ritual of waiting where the same melody is sung by killer and killed, by victim and executioner. The only language spoken is that of the sword, the only tongue that of the wound,’ Alegría wrote to his professor of Natural Law at the University of Salamanca two months before he gave himself up to the enemy.

Three years of war during which he performed his duties as quartermaster with all the manic zeal of a land surveyor, the obsessive obstinacy of an only child. Nobody was issued a round of ammunition without proper authorisation, nobody lacked the rations to enable them to carry on fighting. Three years spent studying defeat through the matt-green field glasses the quartermasters regularly distributed to the strategists of war, the combat watchers, the spectators of death. The horrors he had not seen for himself he had heard about from others.


From his parapet he had observed the enemy, watched him come and go from office to front, from army to family, from daily routine to death. At first he thought it was an army entirely lacking in warlike spirit, and therefore deserving of defeat. As time went by he came to a different conclusion (and this was reflected in his letters). It was a civilian army, ‘which is like being a bird underground or an angelic weasel’. In the end, when he saw them fight as though they were helping a neighbour care for a sick relative, the conviction that they were born to be defeated turned the Republican militiamen into an inventory of corpses. Whoever buries the most dead is always more likely to be the loser.

The first time Captain Alegría came anywhere near danger was precisely the day this story begins. He had decided not to go over to the enemy, but to turn himself in. A deserter is an enemy who is no longer an enemy; a prisoner of war is a defeated enemy, but he is still the enemy. When accused of treason, Alegría repeatedly insisted on this point. But all that was to come later.


In an ill-judged confession used by the military prosecutor to call for the death sentence for cowardice, Alegría told an innocent sergeant that the defenders of the Republic would have caused Franco’s army greater humiliation had they surrendered on the first day of the war rather than hanging on so stubbornly, because every death in the years of fighting that followed, on whichever side it occurred, served only to glorify whoever did the killing. Without any dead, or so he claimed, there would have been no glory, and without glory everyone would have been defeated.

Although he joined the rebel army in July 1936, at first his commanding officers did not know what to do with him. They could see no warrior qualities in this acting lieutenant, and so finally posted him to the quartermasters’ section, where his meticulousness and education would be more useful than on the battlefield. We know from comments to his comrades-in-arms that a deep-seated weariness from the endless procession of the dead turned him into what he called a creature of habit. Despite this, as a reward for his efforts at the end of 1938 he was promoted to the rank of captain.


I am a prisoner of war.

It is likely that the printer who pushed aside the roll of barbed wire to take custody of a captain from the rebel army never even suspected this was the start of another story of chaos which only incidentally had anything to do with the war.

Nobody shot at him. When he reached the top of the Republican trench, several terrified but threatening-looking men dressed in workday clothes pointed their rifles at him. In the darkness someone took the pistol from his belt. He made no attempt to resist. The weapon was clean, oiled, brand new: he had never even fired it. To Captain Alegría, throwing away his gun would have been to go against regulations. He was turning himself in, but in best parade-ground order.

There was nothing fierce or warlike about his appearance. He looked more like a lawyer’s clerk dressed up as a soldier. A round, puffy face behind an equally round pair of glasses sat atop a body which, when deprived of its peaked cap, looked diminutive. All the statements we have seen speak of a certain disdain in his demeanour despite his submissive air. He obeyed all the orders he was given as though he had been anticipating each and every one of them.


First of all he kneeled down with his hands clasped behind his neck, then lay on his stomach, hands still clasped. After that he had to walk, hands on head, through a maze of trenches where ragged-looking men kept watch on a dark, invisible horizon. Finally he came out, hands behind his head, into a clearing among the trees. A captain in a felt greatcoat looked him up and down by the light of a carbide lamp. Until then, all the orders he had received had been whispered by his captors, but now this shipwrecked captain staring at him had no hesitation in shouting, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’


‘Madrid’s Defence Committee will surrender tomorrow or the day after,’ said Alegría, in a tone that contrasted sharply with that of his questioner.

‘And that’s why you’re surrendering? Don’t give me that shit.’

‘Yes, that’s why.’

The conversation dribbled away into whispered phrases and comments among these soldiers in civilian clothes, although all Alegría caught were their curious looks and condescending smiles. They thought he was mad.

He would have liked to explain exactly why he was quitting the army that was about to win the war, why he was surrendering to a defeated army, why he wanted no part in the victory. But these men looked so rough and uncouth that he lost heart and decided to stay silent.

How could the lives of these pathetic creatures be worth enough to pay for a war? Could they not see the usurers were condemning them to death? Did they not realise that an implacable discipline would sweep away all resistance?

He was taken through the pine woods of Dehesa de la Villa to Calle Francisco Rodríguez. There they waited for a truck coming back from distributing ammunition to Madrid’s north-western front. It was almost three in the morning. They put him on top of some bundles on the back of the open lorry. Two men clambered up to guard him, and they set off. He was a prisoner.

At the intersection of Calles Bravo Murillo and Alvarado, a patrol stopped them. They had a wounded man with them whom they lifted up onto the truck and settled next to Captain Alegría. A bullet had smashed his right shoulder, and the emergency dressing could not stop the blood seeping through the gauze. The man groaned softly, as though he did not want to disturb anyone or hoped to go unnoticed. It is thanks to him we know that the captain tried to help stem the flow of blood.


When he saw Alegría, he asked:

‘What’s this man doing here?’

‘He’s a deserter,’ one of the guards said.

‘I’m a prisoner,’ Alegría corrected him.

‘Put him out of his misery,’ the wounded man wryly suggested.

‘Tomorrow or the next day, Segismundo Casado is going to surrender,’ explained Alegría.


‘I see. And that’s why you’ve surrendered. Don’t give me that.’

The truck pulled up in front of the General Hospital at Cuatro Caminos. Two soldiers, this time in proper uniform, helped the wounded man down. When one of them noticed Alegría’s nationalist uniform, he asked:

‘Who’s this?’

‘He’s a deserter.’

Silence.

Nobody listened to him. The wounded man’s agonised movements, the smashed shoulder and the noise of the truck’s engine prevented him trying to explain. They set off at a ragged march to Military Headquarters. Madrid was in darkness, but it was not deserted. Even though it was gone three in the morning, a lot of people were out on the streets. As they drew closer to the city centre, the flow of passers-by increased still further, until by the time they reached Puerta del Sol so many soldiers and civilians were criss-crossing the square it looked like an anthill.

They turned into Calle Mayor and only came to a halt when they were inside Military Headquarters. Everyone there was in uniform. They saluted their superiors in a proper fashion, and each person’s rank was clearly indicated by the stripes or stars on their shoulders. Captain Alegría relaxed when he realised he was among professional soldiers again: he knew how to behave in this milieu, he understood their gestures and codes. An army, of whatever persuasion, was like a roadmap for a traveller: they all had their proper places marked, and all distances were defined.

To him, that courtyard must have seemed like a cloister disrupted by an entirely inappropriate rush of activity. One of his guards went up to an officer and informed him about their prisoner, but Alegría could not make out what they were saying. Although there was more than enough light to see what was going on, nobody was keeping an eye on him, nobody was taken aback at his odd uniform. He was not tied up, or kept under close guard. He was neither feared nor hated. So it was true, Casado was about to su. . .