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mistake but the SS kept delaying their verdict and until the matter was settled they gave him a broom, a bucket of water, and a scouring brush and set him to sweep the barracks and scrub the huge, oblong wooden structure where all kinds of prisoners were interrogated and tortured. Without resigning himself entirely to the situation, but performing his new duties conscientiously, the Sevillan watched the time go by from his new barracks, eating much better than he had before and safe from any fresh threat. Then, in the dark recesses of his mind, the word recruit began to appear again. I’m a recruit, he said, a raw recruit, and I must accept my fate. Little by little, the word cantor vanished, though some evenings, under an endless sky that filled him with Sevillan longing, it still echoed, lost who knows where. And one fine day the inevitable happened. The barracks of the SS battalion were attacked and taken by a regiment of Russian cavalry, according to some, or a group of partisans, according to others. The result was that the Russians found the Sevillan hiding in the oblong building, wearing the uniform of an SS auxiliary and surrounded by the not exactly past-tense horrors perpetrated there. Caught red-handed, as they say. Soon he was tied to one of the chairs that the SS used for interrogations, one of those chairs with straps on the legs and the seat, and every time the Russians asked him a question, the Sevillan replied in Spanish that he didn’t understand, he was just an underling there. He tried to say it in German, too, but he hardly spoke a word of the language, and the Russians didn’t speak it at all. After beating him for a while, they went to get another Russian who spoke German and who was interrogating prisoners in one of the other cells in the oblong building. Before they came back, the Sevillan heard shots and realized that they were killing some of the SS, and he almost gave up hope; but when the shooting ended, he clung to life again with all his might. The German speaker asked him what he did there, what his duties and his rank were. The Sevillan tried to explain in German, but to no avail. Then the Russians opened his mouth and with a pair of pliers that the Germans used for other purposes they seized his tongue and yanked. The pain made tears spring to his eyes and he said, or rather shouted, the word coño , cunt. With the pliers in his mouth the exclamation was transformed, coming out as the word kunst . The Russian who spoke German stared at him in surprise. The Sevillan shouted Kunst, Kunst, and wept in pain. The word Kunst , in German, means art, and that was how the bilingual soldier heard it and he said that the son of a bitch was an artist or something. The soldiers who were torturing the Sevillan removed the pliers along with a little piece of tongue and waited, momentarily hypnotized by the discovery. Art . The thing that soothes wild beasts. And just like that, like soothed beasts, the Russians took a break and waited for some sign while the recruit bled from the mouth and swallowed his own blood mixed with big doses of saliva and choked and retched. The word coño , however, transformed into the word art , had saved his life. The Russians took him away with the few remaining prisoners, and later another Russian who spoke Spanish came to hear the Sevillan’s story and he ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia while his accidental comrades were shot. It was well into the 1950s before he left Siberia. In 1957 he settled in Barcelona. Sometimes he opened his mouth and told the story of his little war in great good humor. Other times, he opened his mouth and showed the piece of tongue he was missing. It was hardly noticeable. When people told him so, the Sevillan explained that over the years it had grown back. Amalfitano didn’t know him personally, but when he heard the story the Sevillan was still living in the concierge quarters of some building in Barcelona.

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