A Long Petal of the Sea(74)
Together with other political prisoners, Victor Dalmau had been taken in a caravan of trucks that traveled a whole day and night. They ended up at a camp for saltpeter miners in the north that had been abandoned for decades and was now converted into a prison. These were the first two hundred men to occupy the makeshift installations in huts that had once accommodated the saltpeter workers. The camp was surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences and tall watchtowers, with soldiers carrying submachine guns, a tank patrolling the perimeter, and every so often air force planes. The commander was a police officer who barked orders and sweated in a uniform that was too tight for him. He was a stone-hearted bully who announced over the loudspeaker that he intended to keep the prisoners in a fist for the crimes they had committed and those they were thinking of committing. As soon as the prisoners climbed down from the trucks they were forced to strip and left in the hot desert sun for hours without food or water, while he walked along insulting and kicking them one by one. From the outset he doled out arbitrary punishments to break his victims’ morale, and his men imitated him.
Because of the months spent in Argeles-sur-Mer, Victor thought he was better prepared than the other prisoners to resist, but that had been years ago, when he was young. Now he was about to turn sixty, but until the moment of his arrest he had never had time to think about his age. There in the north, with burning hot days and icy nights on the saltpeter flats, he longed to die of weariness. It was impossible to escape: the camp was surrounded by the immense desert, hundreds of kilometers of dry earth, sand, rocks, and wind. He felt like an old man.
CHAPTER 11
1974–1983
Now I’ll tell you:
my land will be yours,
I’m going to conquer it,
not just to give it to you,
but to everyone,
to all my people.
—PABLO NERUDA
“Letter on the Way”
THE CAPTAIN’S VERSES
DURING THE ELEVEN MONTHS VICTOR Dalmau spent in the concentration camp, he didn’t die of weariness as he had expected. Instead, his body and mind were strengthened. He had always been thin, but there he was reduced to nothing but skin and bones. His skin was burned by the unrelenting sun, salt, and sand, his features sharpened: he was a Giacometti sculpture in cast iron. He wasn’t defeated by the absurd military exercises, pushups, races in the scorching heat, the hours lying still in the freezing night, the blows and beatings, being forced to work at pointless tasks, humiliated, ravenous. He yielded to his condition as a prisoner, abandoning all pretense that he could control anything in his existence. He was in his captors’ hands: they had absolute power and impunity, he was master only of his emotions. He repeated to himself the metaphor of the birch tree, which bends in a storm but doesn’t break. He had already endured this in other circumstances. He protected himself from the sadism and stupidity of his jailers by withdrawing into silent memories, certain only that Roser was searching for him and would one day find him. He spoke so little that the other prisoners nicknamed him “the mute.” He thought of Marcel, who had spent the first thirty years of his life saying next to nothing because he didn’t want to talk. Victor didn’t want to either, because there was nothing to say. His companions in misfortune kept their spirits up whispering out of earshot of the guards, while he thought of Roser with great nostalgia, of all they had lived through together, how much he loved her.
To keep his mind sharp he obsessively went over the most famous games in the history of chess, as well as some of those he had played with the president. He once dreamed of carving chess pieces from the camp’s porous stones so that he could play with some of the others, but that was impossible due to the guards’ despotic surveillance. These soldiers came from the working class. Their families were poor, and perhaps most of them had been sympathetic to the socialist revolution, but they obeyed orders with great cruelty, as though the prisoners’ past actions were personal insults.
Each week, inmates were taken to other concentration camps or were shot, their bodies blown up with dynamite in the desert, and yet many more arrived than left. Victor calculated there were more than fifteen hundred altogether. They came from across the country, were of different ages and occupations; the only thing they had in common was the fact that they were being persecuted. They were enemies of the fatherland. Like Victor, some of them had not belonged to a party or held any political position; they were there due to a vengeful denunciation or a bureaucratic mistake.
* * *
—
IT WAS THE START of spring, and the prisoners were already fearing the arrival of summer, which turned the camp into a hell during the daylight hours, when an abrupt change came in Victor Dalmau’s fortunes. The camp commander suffered a heart attack just as he was giving his morning harangue to the prisoners, who were lined up in the yard barefoot and in their underwear. The commandant fell to his knees, managed to gasp for breath, then slumped to the ground before the nearest soldiers could catch him. Not a single prisoner moved; no one made a sound. To Victor it was as if everything was happening in slow motion, in silence and in another dimension, as if it were part of a nightmare. He saw two soldiers trying to lift the commandant, while others ran to call the nurse.
With no thought for the consequences, he stepped forward through the lines of prisoners as though sleepwalking. Everybody was staring at the fallen man, and by the time they noticed Victor and ordered him to stop and throw himself facedown on the ground, he had already reached the front of the ranks. “He’s a doctor!” shouted one of the prisoners. Victor continued to trot forward, and in a few seconds reached the unconscious commandant. He kneeled down beside the commandant without anyone stopping him: the soldiers stepped back to give him room. He checked that the commandant wasn’t breathing. He signaled to one of the closest guards to loosen his clothing, while he gave him artificial respiration and pressed down hard on his chest with both hands. He knew there was a manual defibrillator in the sick bay because it was occasionally used to resuscitate torture victims.