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Authors: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
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nous qui brisons les barreaux de prisons pour nos freres.
La Mancha cheese, cheap wine and chorizo, discussions about attacking first-level contradictions, furtive contacts between hands and brains. Then came the first ideological differences, and the first acts of political militancy. ‘Colonel Parra’ was arrested a few weeks before Carvalho, only to be set free seventy-two hours later. Then he told his epic tale, and most people found it very impressive, particularly when he told how he had deliberately stubbed out a cigarette on his hand to test how he would react to torture. ‘Colonel’ Parra wrote a report, and it was read religiously at all the student meetings, where it was generally well received. For Carvalho, the incident would have made an excellent sequence for an anti-German film with James Cagney and Richard Conte. Later he was to discover for himself that torture creates an entirely personal and unshareable dialectic, where the only rule that applies is one’s ability to resist and not say anything that might destroy one’s own dignity. Once your dignity is broken, you become a plaything in the hands of your torturers.
And what a quantity of culture! All the books that you had to have read, and the intellectual debates that had to be followed! The polemic in the French Communist Party between Naville and Lefebvre. To hell with the pair of them! The act of parking his car at the gate of his villa converted all this into a handful of broken images, as if a mental magic mirror had fallen to the floor and shattered. One hand for his mail and the other to keep his balance as he climbed the muddy steps. The first smells arising from the earth and the shrubbery with the approach of rain. He opened the door and dumped what he was carrying. Wide awake and relaxed, he contemplated the bookcase in the corridor, where an irregular array of books was taking up space, sometimes upright and tightly packed, and sometimes falling allover the place, or with their titles the wrong way up. He hunted out Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason , Sholokov’s Quietly Flows the Don and Sacristan’s Essays on Heine . He went over to the fireplace, tearing up the books with the relaxed expertise of one who is well practised, and arranged the dismembered tomes in a little pile, on top of which he placed dry twigs and kindling wood. The flames caught at once and spread rapidly, and as the printed matter burned it fulfilled its historical mission of fuelling fires that were more real than itself.
To eat or not to eat, that was the question.
‘Cholesterol, boss. . . !’
Two in the morning. It was raining gently, and the night was filled with the smell of damp pine-leaves and the sound of flames crackling and the rain falling on the ivy that covered most of the garden like a green mantle.
A contortion of his bowels drove him to the toilet. As he went, he picked up a thriller by Nicholson— The Case of the Smiling Jesuit —and a newspaper. The advantage of living on your own is that you can shit with the toilet door open, Carvalho thought to himself as he strained his bowels. Having overcome his intestinal resistance, as he awaited a second offloading of faecal detritus he read ten lines of one of the most contrived detective stories ever written. The murder of an ex-girlfriend from his youth provides the narrator with a pretext for a long journey through his past as a British soldier in India. A dog’s dinner made up of bits of Bromfield’s And the Rains Came , Hesse’s fascination with oriental religions, and Agatha Christie. A curious book altogether. Final intestinal peace coincided with his arrival at the end of a chapter. He filled the bidet and went in search of the arts review pages in the newspaper, and on recent trends in Polish theatre by Fernando Monegal, who was Carvalho’s favourite, partly because of the absorbent qualities of the paper, but also because of the equally absorbent qualities of what was
La Mancha cheese, cheap wine and chorizo, discussions about attacking first-level contradictions, furtive contacts between hands and brains. Then came the first ideological differences, and the first acts of political militancy. ‘Colonel Parra’ was arrested a few weeks before Carvalho, only to be set free seventy-two hours later. Then he told his epic tale, and most people found it very impressive, particularly when he told how he had deliberately stubbed out a cigarette on his hand to test how he would react to torture. ‘Colonel’ Parra wrote a report, and it was read religiously at all the student meetings, where it was generally well received. For Carvalho, the incident would have made an excellent sequence for an anti-German film with James Cagney and Richard Conte. Later he was to discover for himself that torture creates an entirely personal and unshareable dialectic, where the only rule that applies is one’s ability to resist and not say anything that might destroy one’s own dignity. Once your dignity is broken, you become a plaything in the hands of your torturers.
And what a quantity of culture! All the books that you had to have read, and the intellectual debates that had to be followed! The polemic in the French Communist Party between Naville and Lefebvre. To hell with the pair of them! The act of parking his car at the gate of his villa converted all this into a handful of broken images, as if a mental magic mirror had fallen to the floor and shattered. One hand for his mail and the other to keep his balance as he climbed the muddy steps. The first smells arising from the earth and the shrubbery with the approach of rain. He opened the door and dumped what he was carrying. Wide awake and relaxed, he contemplated the bookcase in the corridor, where an irregular array of books was taking up space, sometimes upright and tightly packed, and sometimes falling allover the place, or with their titles the wrong way up. He hunted out Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason , Sholokov’s Quietly Flows the Don and Sacristan’s Essays on Heine . He went over to the fireplace, tearing up the books with the relaxed expertise of one who is well practised, and arranged the dismembered tomes in a little pile, on top of which he placed dry twigs and kindling wood. The flames caught at once and spread rapidly, and as the printed matter burned it fulfilled its historical mission of fuelling fires that were more real than itself.
To eat or not to eat, that was the question.
‘Cholesterol, boss. . . !’
Two in the morning. It was raining gently, and the night was filled with the smell of damp pine-leaves and the sound of flames crackling and the rain falling on the ivy that covered most of the garden like a green mantle.
A contortion of his bowels drove him to the toilet. As he went, he picked up a thriller by Nicholson— The Case of the Smiling Jesuit —and a newspaper. The advantage of living on your own is that you can shit with the toilet door open, Carvalho thought to himself as he strained his bowels. Having overcome his intestinal resistance, as he awaited a second offloading of faecal detritus he read ten lines of one of the most contrived detective stories ever written. The murder of an ex-girlfriend from his youth provides the narrator with a pretext for a long journey through his past as a British soldier in India. A dog’s dinner made up of bits of Bromfield’s And the Rains Came , Hesse’s fascination with oriental religions, and Agatha Christie. A curious book altogether. Final intestinal peace coincided with his arrival at the end of a chapter. He filled the bidet and went in search of the arts review pages in the newspaper, and on recent trends in Polish theatre by Fernando Monegal, who was Carvalho’s favourite, partly because of the absorbent qualities of the paper, but also because of the equally absorbent qualities of what was
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