Read an Excerpt
ON CAPTIVITY
A Spanish Soldier's Experience in a Havana Prison, 1896–1898
By MANUEL CIGES APARICIO
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1769-0
Chapter One
I
"This is your room," the military commander of Artemisa said to me with a hint of irony in his tone of voice.
I stepped forward and entered the provisional jail, a wretched room situated in the yard behind a place that served meals, an inn, as they grandiosely call those taverns in Cuba.
They must have arranged for me to be confined in a place apart from the jail before they arrested me because there was a pile of useless items stacked before the door: old trunks, rickety tables, broken dishware. The room's earthen floor still bore the marks of a recent thorough sweeping with stout brooms, and gray webs fashioned by patient spiders in the months or even years during which the dwelling was uninhabited hung from the ceiling.
I was still contemplating the narrow space they had given me as my compulsory accommodations when I heard the rhythmic tapping of boots made by marching troops followed by the sonorous voice of the officer in charge: "Halt!" and then immediately after, a vibrant "Haaaaalt ... !" that put an end to the marching.
Moved by curiosity, I went to the door. Nearby, eight soldiers and a corporal stood at attention. The military commander drew aside the officer in charge of the detachment and, judging by his gestures, I understood that he was giving orders to his subordinate, who bent his head with that compliant deference every subaltern assumes when speaking to a superior officer. The corporal saluted the commander, stepped back two paces, and called out the guard. Followed by the first soldier, he came to the door and, speaking in a very low voice so that I could not understand him, he passed on the orders he had received to the sentinel. Because of the distrustful, curious glances directed at me in turn by the soldier and the corporal, I suspected that something serious was afoot.
Once the guard was in place, the soldiers proceeded in orderly fashion to another room not far from mine. The superior officer withdrew after advising them in a loud voice to watch me closely.
They hadn't left anything in the room that would allow me to rest: there was no bed, table, or chair. Although I was extremely tired, I paced back and forth in the small room, never thinking to consider the unfortunate situation in which I found myself.
In the face of irreparable misfortunes, my melancholy soul has always fallen into a state of vague dreaminess. I walked around the room abstracted, like an automaton, without connecting one idea to another. My wandering gaze slid indifferently along the old dirty walls, down to the holes rats had gnawed open at their base, or rested incuriously on the wretched roof of rotted cane and dried palm fronds through which I could see the pure blue sky. When I stopped my monotonous pacing for a moment, only trivial thoughts occurred to me, interrupted by involuntary shudders, secret hints of future calamities.
The corporal came in, followed by a soldier. "If you need anything, this man will provide it for you."
It was three in the afternoon and I hadn't eaten since the night before, but my body only craved rest.
Each soldier had his own hammock. Since it was necessary for someone to watch me at all times, they gave me the hammock that was not being used. It was ripped, stained with the red soil of the Cuban countryside. Perhaps blood spilled in an act of bravery accounted for some of the stains. I tied the ends of the cords to big nails driven into the walls and lay down exhausted in that moveable bed of the tropics.
Hammocks predispose you to a dreamy state with their measured rocking back and forth, submerging the senses in a placid drowsiness. Soft sensations like the caresses of invisible fingers move over the skin and disappear into the intimate places of one's being; ideas emerge unformed like larvae, reminiscences become confused, and images float by without clear outlines, like the clouds of mist that sway formlessly in the twilight sky. Everything is vague, tenuous, and engagingly capricious in that condition of happy unconsciousness.
I don't know how long I remained in a state of beatific abstraction. When I regained the use of my faculties, I saw that it was light in my jail. Through the ruinous roof the sun was sending me its yellow beams, which shattered on the transparent spider webs, crowning them with luminous halos.
Although I am passionate about freedom, I felt a deep satisfaction in the quiet of the captivity I was experiencing. I could read there, and books would afford discreet expansion to my meditative spirit, which loves the ineffable phantasms that dwell in printed pages. The nomadic life of the military campaign, on the other hand, bored me unbearably. The good fortune of others did not elicit envy in me, nor did the prospect of showing off crosses and rank inspire me with ambition. I hate war and I have always been a detestable soldier. I have never been able to bear the ignorant superior officer who hands down arbitrary orders; and military regulations, written with the point of a bayonet dipped in blood, have always struck me as a ferocious code that reduces the spirit to eternal servitude.
I was a bad soldier because I have always felt deep pity when I reflect on the budding lives uselessly sacrificed in defense of some allegedly lawful claim or other that I cannot explain to myself. And in the short time I've been in the Antilles, how many tragic scenes have I witnessed! If the river Lethe possessed the benign virtue attributed to it by the ancients, all its waters would be insufficient to wash from my memory the dolorous recollection of Mariel, which I piously retain in my mind to this day. How can one fail to abhor the cause of so many calamities?
II
It was in Mariel where I visited the quarters of the reconcentrados. Next to a dirty beach whose grayish, stagnant standing water exuded a deadly miasma rose up the wretched barracks constructed of sun-scorched palm fronds. It was as silent as a cemetery: not a voice or a groan was heard. The sea slept hypnotized beneath the sky, its surface pierced by the immense fiery shafts that the midday sun cast into it. Vivid reflections sprang from its smooth, opalescent surface, a golden burst of burning metallic sparks that hurt your eyes and drained your spirit. When I reached this cursed and nightmarish place, I stopped to listen. Not a single sound from the sea was audible, not one sigh from a human voice! I only sensed a warm, disgusting vapor passing silently over my face. It was death, the quiet and invisible sovereign of the vast necropolis, that was disdainfully brushing past me.
I did not know what to do. If respectful curiosity led me to examine that modern site of punishment where so many human beings were dying every day, prudence urged me to withdraw quickly from it. Undecided and exhausted, I walked around the barracks listening carefully, yet a sepulchral silence reigned in every one of them. Gasping for air, I stopped again. The desolate site, which was making me anxious, and the heat, unrelieved by any movement of air from the nearby sea, scarcely allowed me to breathe.
Compassion prevailed over fear and I pushed aside the bit of rag draped over a wretched door.
Except for Dante—who visited the gloomy region where spectral shades suffer eternally—who could describe this new circle of Hell, abode of pain and a pathetic repulsiveness? Inside the hut, in the still, lethal air, I saw a jumble of rags, skin, and bones: men, women, and children; whites and blacks; the living and the dead. What was left of a woman lay fighting for breath on a bare, broken-down cot, without bedclothes or headrest. Her only covers were the tatters of a soiled blouse that would serve her later as a shroud, for silent death had marked her whole being with its ineffaceable stigma. It was visible in the convulsive trembling of her limbs, in the contractions of her pus-covered mouth, too weak to dislodge a nagging fly that had alighted there; in the wide red rims that bordered the deep sockets in which her weary, dying, glassy eyes rolled helplessly.
A child clung to her who, obstinately persistent in getting milk, was sucking blood from her flaccid breasts. The dying woman's daughter was seated on a box at the edge of the bed. Neither chronic hunger nor a devastating fever could efface the traces of an authentic Creole beauty from her thin face, beauty enhanced by her enormous black eyes with their profoundly sad gaze. She was bent forward, her thin, yellowish, waxen fingers clasped under her emaciated knees so that the contact of one part of her body with another might lend mutual warmth to counter the recurrent, icy chills brought on by fever. An old man lay stretched out on the floor. A black man had just died a few feet away from him. Through his torn clothing you could see the African's bones rigid in the immobility of death. No pious hand had closed those eyes that would no longer see the iniquity of men, and you couldn't read anything in his fixed pupils, neither hate nor love. They were terrible because they were terribly indifferent. There were other people in that gloomy hole: two disheveled women in ragged blouses moving about with great difficulty and some hungry, wretched children who held out hands shaking with fever to beg me for alms.
How can I convey what they said to me in weak, querulous voices? Near neighbors of eternity, they all confidently awaited the death that would relieve their unending torture. There was no medicine, food, or provision for hygiene in that place. No one came to console them in their irreparable abandonment. It was not Christian resignation or stoical wisdom but rather the slow decline of vital forces that taught them not to fear death. Nothingness, total rest was now a necessity for those creatures already erased from among the living ... They were all condemned to perish in a short while, their lives extinguished by yellow fever ...!
I also felt feverish. A cold, copious sweat covered my forehead and I felt a tightening in my throat caused by a deadly sense of anguish. I went to the door to get a breath of air. How anxiously I contemplated the blue sky and the wide sea, which remained imperturbably calm in its placid slumber! Beyond the distant round horizon where sky and sea met, would there be a more compassionate homeland for the many victims who were groaning inside, forgotten by mankind?
The dying woman's daughter approached the door and after a long pause asked me for some coins for food. In exchange she offered me an act of love I could not accept.
Later I learned that lust frequently led soldiers to that place in order to profane the flesh that already smelled of the grave.
I only had the heart to look at three more huts and in each one I saw the same repugnant abandonment. When I left, I was convinced that I was leaving two hundred people condemned to death, a number that would be renewed for as long as the war lasted.
These painful memories were causing me great distress and, in order not to dwell on them further, I jumped down from the hammock, which let out a groan and collapsed to the floor.
III
Shadows began their dreaded invasion of the room. In the distance I heard the guard commenting on the war news in an animated voice. Lost in thought, the sentinel was pacing back and forth before the door, waiting to be relieved.
The patio lit up with a reddish glow and the owner of the hostelry, followed by the corporal, entered the room and placed an old tin oil lamp on the floor.
The man told me that he was Catalonian, a republican, and a strictly consistent freethinker. I do not know how he found out that I had written for radical newspapers before going to Cuba, but that information was enough for me to win his sympathy. The fact is that when the time came to pay him for the meals he served me, I noted that far from being liberal with me, he charged me more than the fair price.
Despite the strict prohibition against visitors, the head of the guard permitted two old companions to enter my room.
The first one was an intelligent and warmhearted sergeant who threw himself into my arms with brotherly enthusiasm. When the initial transport of emotion had passed, he looked at me with a mixture of sorrow and severity. Guessing the cause of the unfortunate situation I was in, he asked, "It was some article you wrote, isn't that right?"
"I don't know the reason."
He immediately began to curse newspapers and my temerity, which had to lead to a bad end. One by one he reminded me of my previous acts of rebellion: the insults I had hurled at a captain when everyone was standing at attention, the short pieces I had written in the Barcelona press against a lieutenant colonel who beat soldiers under his command. He was not unaware of the fact that before and after going to Cuba, I had written against the campaign, that I had harshly refused to obey orders that I considered inhumane ... And that antimilitary conduct—my systematic, constant acts of rebellion—necessarily had to land me in jail.
Shortly after the sergeant left, an old soldier from Valencia came in swearing and cursing. With his tanned hide, his broad-brimmed hat pulled down, a ferocious look on his face, and his thick, trembling Berber's beard, that bravo could just as well have passed for a bandit as a hero.
"Don't shout," I said to him.
He lowered his voice but kept on swearing.
And he proceeded to make rash promises. He had spoken to the soldiers from my company, the veteran soldiers from my part of the country on whose behalf I had worked so diligently, and all of them were prepared to assault the wretched hostelry at midnight, snatch me from captivity, and flee to the nearby uninhabited countryside. It was an easy thing to do and only needed my assent.
This proof of fidelity in the face of my misfortune moved me deeply. I was tempted to accept his risky assurances, but I was restrained by the sudden thought of a possible failure with its terrible consequences: the execution of several men by firing squad, the despair of their parents, the curses of their sweethearts, the impossibility of their ever returning to the places where their attachments lay if the enterprise should prove successful.
I embraced him with gratitude, trying hard to contain my emotion, and, as I assured him that we would soon meet again, we separated.
Adverse fortune did not permit it. A few months later, that generous man, to whom I shall always dedicate one of my warmest memories, died alone in a hospital.
IV
Thanks to the sergeant, who sent me a hammock, I was able to rest for a long time. When I awoke it was still dark. The sentinel was in a deep sleep, seated at the door with his rifle leaning against the wall.
The melancholy traveler, beloved of all those who are sad, flooded the wide patio with a cool stream of serene light. In the august peacefulness of the night, I listened to the sounds of the fields and forests: the trembling of leaves, the rustle of branches, the strident concert of invisible insect wings, the muffled beating of swift wings. From time to time a rolling "Alert!"—sharp, low, or penetrating—sounded along the road, disturbing the religious solemnity that enveloped the land, and disappeared into the distance until it died away slowly in the hollow of space, a remote echo barely perceptible to the ear.
Who doesn't dream awake in these moments of supreme majesty? While my wandering gaze was absorbed in the brightness of the moon, my spirit floated over that luminous cascade of light, and my whole being was subtly overtaken by the placid soul of the natural world that encircled my place of confinement. In this identification of nature with my being, I felt the motions of nocturnal life, which in turn evoked vivid recollections of times gone by: loves I had experienced in my distant childhood, desires for principled struggle, pure illusions not yet violated by misfortunes. My past as a liberal and an enthusiast rose up before me in my prison and filled me with anguish.
How long would my enslavement last? And only a few hours earlier I had found it agreeable! An ardent desire for freedom swelled my breast. I would have liked to flee in a mad dash through the broad fields, assault the shady fronds where happy wood nymphs murmur, tremble joyously in a moonbeam like the spirits in ancient northern legends, or slip in the form of a pure spirit along the silvered dust of eternal space.
Reduced to the condition of a forlorn suppliant, I looked around the patio. The wall surrounding me was about two meters high. Everyone was sleeping, and within my reach were the tables and boxes that had been removed from the room and that I could use to make my escape.
And if the sentinel woke up?
I turned to look at him. The machete, fastened onto the rifle, gleamed sharp and tempting. A thrust of the blade! One thrust!
This idea took possession of my brain, and my temples began to throb. I pressed my hand to my heart to contain its sudden, violent beating; and my eyes bulged, drawn to the hard glimmer of the deadly weapon. A secret, inner voice called out, "A single thrust! Only one thrust!"
I bent over the sleeping man and the hot breath from his open mouth struck my face. How far he was from suspecting that death was threatening him at that moment!
He moved slightly but did not wake up. His head slid gently along the wall, bending in such a way as to show me his bare and fragile neck, which my clenched hands were going to grasp with no fear of the blood that would flow from it ... I leaned over him more closely ... His head bent over further, as if he wanted to avoid my burning stare ... The moon fully illumined him ... How pale he was! How easily you could read the exhaustion brought about by his wretched life in his forehead, which was furrowed by premature old age! Slave, descendant of slaves, why should you wish to live when the passage from sleep to death is so brief!
A sudden wave of pity flooded my heart as I stood before that weak creature marked with gentleness, who was, perhaps, voyaging in a golden dream to the home where two aged parents awaited him with open arms.
I cast a final glance of pity at him and climbed into my hammock, at peace now, having renounced the chance to obtain my freedom at the price of a crime.
At seven the relief guard awakened me.
My friends had left at dawn in an unknown direction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ON CAPTIVITY by MANUEL CIGES APARICIO Copyright © 2012 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
