Blind Sunflowers by Alberto Méndez Page A

floor, while the ones who had already been sentenced spent their last hours on the fourth.
    The cell was a corridor that had been crammed with prisoners. When they saw him come back in, more than half of the almost three hundred men gathered round, wanting him to explain the inexplicable. Did they acquit you? What happened? How did you manage to escape? What did they do to you…? There had to be some urgent reason why he had been allowed back to the second floor.
    ‘No, I fainted, and then they brought me back here.’
    ‘Did they torture you?’
    ‘No, I think I passed out from fear.’
    If he had been able to breathe properly, he would have tried to explain what had happened, but a sense of shame kept him quiet. When something cannot be explained, offering a plausible explanation is the same as lying, because those who need to deal in the truth see confusion as lies. So he kept silent, knowing that Eduardo López could classify what had happened without having to understand it.
    Eduardo López was a member of the Communist Party politburo. His work as one of the organisers of the defence of Madrid had won him a certain popularity during the final months of the war. He was taken prisoner on the southern front, and had no doubts as to what his fate would be. Despite this, he tried stubbornly to organise the prisoners’ lives, to share out the tasks of looking after those most in need, and above all, to give a political explanation for their suffering.
    To do this, he made sure there was discipline in the collective talks he himself organised, insisted the better-educated gave lectures to instruct the others, and tried to ease their despair by promoting the idea that they were all there because they had defended a just cause. This was no real comfort to any of them, but they were all thankful there was somebody who went to the trouble of trying to keep their dead souls alive.
    When López seemed satisfied with Juan Senra’s replies, all the other pallid, emaciated, and frozen men accepted the explanation too. Fear can explain almost anything.
    Juan Senra went to huddle up next to his companions, clutching his aluminium food bowl close to his chest. It was the proof that he would eat another meal, which was tantamount to meaning he was still alive. The pain from the albino clerk’s blow to his back blended with a thousand other aches and pains. His memory only offered more useless suffering, and he slipped into a state of deep melancholy.
    Earlier, he had written a farewell letter to his brother without properly saying goodbye; now he regretted it. He had a lot to say to him, and yet had done nothing more than list memories they shared, as if complicity existed only in memory. Now that he had appeared before this travesty of a court, now that he had glimpsed the mouth of hell, he knew he had been wrong not to talk about emotions.
    He missed his adolescent brother, who was outside all this, who was old enough to observe all the horrors but still too young to feel them as part of his life.
    Silence crowded in on silence as all the conversations in the cell faded into a darkness filled only with distant echoes. There would be no more life until dawn, and life then began as the harbinger of death. They all knew that at five in the morning they would hear names being called out in the yard, and that those named would be herded up on trucks and taken to La Almudena cemetery. They would not come back. But the names called out were for those on the fourth floor; the prisoners on the second were still one step away from death. They had to appear before Colonel Eymar, who would be sure to condemn them. This meant that time existed, and time exists only for those who are alive.
    They knew from the army chaplain that not all of those who were condemned to death were in fact shot. As the months went by, thanks to pleas by family members, special recommendations, or arbitrary acts of mercy, the number of those actually facing a firing