Blind Sunflowers

Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
First defeat: 1939
Second defeat: 1940
Third defeat: 1941
Fourth defeat: 1942
About the Author
Copyright

We know now that Captain Alegría chose his death blindly; he did not peer into the rabid eyes of the future facing all those whose lives are being counted down. He chose to approach death without passion or melodrama. Only as he began to cross no-man’s-land did he raise his voice, hands held high enough to avoid seeming as though he were begging for mercy. At that moment he shouted over and over again to a disbelieving enemy: ‘I’m a prisoner.’

The night was as warm and transparent as perfume. Madrid lay wrapped in a melancholy silence broken only by the dull thud of shells beating out a rhythm more akin to a church service than a battle. ‘I’m a prisoner.’ We know that Captain Alegría had spent several nights going over this moment in his mind. He probably rejected the idea of saying ‘I surrender’ because that would have suggested a fixed moment in time, whereas in reality he had been surrendering for a long, long time. First he surrendered, then he turned himself over to the enemy. When he had the chance to talk about it, he defined his gesture as a victory in reverse: ‘Although all wars are paid for by the numbers of the dead, we have been profiteering from this one for a long time now. We have to choose between winning a war and conquering a cemetery,’ he concluded in a letter written to his fiancée in January 1938. We know now that
unconsciously
he had already rejected both options.

Knowing what we now know about Carlos Alegría, we can state that on his walk between the two front lines all he could hear was the screech of panic inside his own head. The silence of the night swallowed all other
noises, the explosions and cries of the world around him. Madrid rose in the background like a stage set, the outline of a blacked-out city
reluctantly
lit by moonlight jutting up into the warm air. The Spanish capital lay cowering in darkness.

This was how Captain Alegría’s defeat began. For three long years he had observed a ragged civilian army stoically accepting that another army – his army – would inevitably crush this immobile, silent city whose haphazard limits were drawn behind trenches where for many months nobody had been expecting any attack.

‘With time, violence and pain, rage and weakness all bond together in a religion of survival, a ritual of waiting where the same melody is sung by killer and killed, by victim and executioner. The only language spoken is that of the sword, the only tongue that of the wound,’ Alegría wrote to his professor of Natural Law at the University of Salamanca two months before he gave himself up to the enemy.

Three years of war during which he performed his duties as
quartermaster
with all the manic zeal of a land surveyor, the obsessive obstinacy of an only child. Nobody was issued a round of ammunition without proper authorisation, nobody lacked the rations to enable them to carry on fighting. Three years spent studying defeat through the matt-green field glasses the quartermasters regularly distributed to the strategists of war, the combat watchers, the spectators of death. The horrors he had not seen for himself he had heard about from others.

From his parapet he had observed the enemy, watched him come and go from office to front, from army to family, from daily routine to death. At first he thought it was an army entirely lacking in warlike spirit, and therefore deserving of defeat. As time went by he came to a different conclusion (and this was reflected in his letters). It was a civilian army, ‘which is like being a bird underground or an angelic weasel’. In the end, when he saw them fight as though they were helping a neighbour care for a sick relative, the conviction that they were born to be defeated turned the Republican militiamen into an inventory of corpses. Whoever buries the most dead is always more likely to be the loser.

The first time Captain Alegría came anywhere near danger was precisely the day this story begins. He had decided not to go over to the enemy, but to turn himself in. A deserter is an enemy who is no longer an enemy; a prisoner of war is a defeated enemy, but he is still the enemy.
When accused of treason, Alegría repeatedly insisted on this point. But all that was to come later.

In an ill-judged confession used by the military prosecutor to call for the death sentence for cowardice, Alegría told an innocent sergeant that the defenders of the Republic would have caused Franco’s army greater humiliation had they surrendered on the first day of the war rather than hanging on so stubbornly, because every death in the years of fighting that followed, on whichever side it occurred, served only to glorify whoever did the killing. Without any dead, or so he claimed, there would have been no glory, and without glory everyone would have been defeated.

Although he joined the rebel army in July 1936, at first his commanding officers did not know what to do with him. They could see no warrior
qualities
in this acting lieutenant, and so finally posted him to the quartermasters’ section, where his meticulousness and education would be more useful than on the battlefield. We know from comments to his comrades-in-arms that a deep-seated weariness from the endless procession of the dead turned him into what he called a creature of habit. Despite this, as a reward for his efforts at the end of 1938 he was promoted to the rank of captain.

I am a prisoner of war.

It is likely that the printer who pushed aside the roll of barbed wire to take custody of a captain from the rebel army never even suspected this was the start of another story of chaos which only incidentally had anything to do with the war.

Nobody shot at him. When he reached the top of the Republican trench, several terrified but threatening-looking men dressed in workday clothes pointed their rifles at him. In the darkness someone took the pistol from his belt. He made no attempt to resist. The weapon was clean, oiled, brand new: he had never even fired it. To Captain Alegría, throwing away his gun would have been to go against regulations. He was turning himself in, but in best parade-ground order.

There was nothing fierce or warlike about his appearance. He looked more like a lawyer’s clerk dressed up as a soldier. A round, puffy face behind an equally round pair of glasses sat atop a body which, when deprived of its peaked cap, looked diminutive. All the statements we have seen speak of a certain disdain in his demeanour despite his submissive air. He obeyed all the orders he was given as though he had been
anticipating
each and every one of them.

First of all he kneeled down with his hands clasped behind his neck, then lay on his stomach, hands still clasped. After that he had to walk, hands on head, through a maze of trenches where ragged-looking men kept watch on a dark, invisible horizon. Finally he came out, hands behind his head, into a clearing among the trees. A captain in a felt greatcoat looked him up and down by the light of a carbide lamp. Until then, all the orders he had received had been whispered by his captors, but now this shipwrecked captain staring at him had no hesitation in shouting, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

‘Madrid’s Defence Committee will surrender tomorrow or the day after,’ said Alegría, in a tone that contrasted sharply with that of his questioner.

‘And that’s why you’re surrendering? Don’t give me that shit.’

‘Yes, that’s why.’

The conversation dribbled away into whispered phrases and comments among these soldiers in civilian clothes, although all Alegría caught were their curious looks and condescending smiles. They thought he was mad.

He would have liked to explain exactly why he was quitting the army that was about to win the war, why he was surrendering to a defeated army, why he wanted no part in the victory. But these men looked so rough and uncouth that he lost heart and decided to stay silent.

How could the lives of these pathetic creatures be worth enough to pay for a war? Could they not see the usurers were condemning them to death? Did they not realise that an implacable discipline would sweep away all resistance?

He was taken through the pine woods of Dehesa de la Villa to Calle Francisco Rodríguez. There they waited for a truck coming back from distributing ammunition to Madrid’s north-western front. It was almost three in the morning. They put him on top of some bundles on the back of the open lorry. Two men clambered up to guard him, and they set off. He was a prisoner.

At the intersection of Calles Bravo Murillo and Alvarado, a patrol stopped them. They had a wounded man with them whom they lifted up onto the truck and settled next to Captain Alegría. A bullet had smashed his right shoulder, and the emergency dressing could not stop the blood seeping through the gauze. The man groaned softly, as though he did not
want to disturb anyone or hoped to go unnoticed. It is thanks to him we know that the captain tried to help stem the flow of blood.

When he saw Alegría, he asked:

‘What’s this man doing here?’

‘He’s a deserter,’ one of the guards said.

‘I’m a prisoner,’ Alegría corrected him.

‘Put him out of his misery,’ the wounded man wryly suggested.

‘Tomorrow or the next day, Segismundo Casado is going to
surrender
,’ explained Alegría.

‘I see. And that’s why you’ve surrendered. Don’t give me that.’

The truck pulled up in front of the General Hospital at Cuatro Caminos. Two soldiers, this time in proper uniform, helped the wounded man down. When one of them noticed Alegría’s nationalist uniform, he asked:

‘Who’s this?’

‘He’s a deserter.’

Silence.

Nobody listened to him. The wounded man’s agonised movements, the smashed shoulder and the noise of the truck’s engine prevented him trying to explain. They set off at a ragged march to Military Headquarters. Madrid was in darkness, but it was not deserted. Even though it was gone three in the morning, a lot of people were out on the streets. As they drew closer to the city centre, the flow of passers-by increased still further, until by the time they reached Puerta del Sol so many soldiers and civilians were criss-crossing the square it looked like an anthill.

They turned into Calle Mayor and only came to a halt when they were inside Military Headquarters. Everyone there was in uniform. They saluted their superiors in a proper fashion, and each person’s rank was clearly indicated by the stripes or stars on their shoulders. Captain Alegría relaxed when he realised he was among professional soldiers again: he knew how to behave in this milieu, he understood their gestures and codes. An army, of whatever persuasion, was like a roadmap for a traveller: they all had their proper places marked, and all distances were defined.

To him, that courtyard must have seemed like a cloister disrupted by an entirely inappropriate rush of activity. One of his guards went up to an officer and informed him about their prisoner, but Alegría could not make out what they were saying. Although there was more than enough light to see what was going on, nobody was keeping an eye on him,
nobody was taken aback at his odd uniform. He was not tied up, or kept under close guard. He was neither feared nor hated. So it was true, Casado was about to surrender. Soldiers were throwing endless bundles of papers, files, archives and documents onto a slightly cleaner lorry than the one he had been brought on, while others stuffed them in as tightly as possible to make the most of the space. Other documents were being used to feed a bonfire in the centre of the yard, where civilians instructed soldiers which ones to throw on the fire.

Captain Alegría stood at ease for quite a while, watching the soldiers and officers hurriedly dealing with all the documents. No one even seemed to notice he was there, until two armed conscripts ordered him to follow them.

They took him down to a basement stinking of urine and locked him in a big cell already occupied by one other person. It was only when his eyes became accustomed to the gloom that he saw the other man was wearing the stripes of a Republican army sergeant. He was a weak, scrawny-looking individual, whom Alegría immediately classified as a slovenly mess. Despite the fact that Alegría was his superior, the man was staring at him brazenly, but since this did not seem the right moment for military discipline, Alegría simply said ‘Good morning’ to him in the least martial way he could muster.

Day was dawning.

What is someone who is defeated by the defeated?

Thanks to the other man’s testimony, we know that all Alegría’s cellmate did was ask him half-heartedly for a pinch of tobacco so he could roll a cigarette and then show him utter contempt when he learned the newcomer did not even smoke.

Captain Alegría went to lie down as far as possible from him,
collapsing
in a dark corner of the cell untouched by the daylight already
filtering
in through the small barred windows. We imagine that this sequence of events must have been similar to what he had foreseen, and yet something ignoble was distorting the true meaning of his surrender, something was twisting things, reducing the importance of what he had thought of as being something full of complexity and moral ambiguity to a narrow, selfish gesture.

To imagine what the protagonist of our story was thinking is simply a way of explaining the facts as we know them. We know that Alegría
studied Law, first at Madrid and then Salamanca. From relatives we know he was brought up in Huérmeces, in the province of Burgos, where he was born in 1912 to an ancient family of Christian nobles. They lived in a country house with two stone arches and a coat of arms that
distinguished
his forebears from the johnny-come-latelys who had made their fortunes from the hunger suffered by the peasants in the south of Spain when their cattle, vines, grain and olives had been wiped out by anthrax, phylloxera, weevils, oidium and other pests.

He was an undistinguished but stubborn student. Jiménez de Asúa taught him that Law has nothing to do with Nature, that the lawmaker had to take sides because that was the only way to impart justice. All the powerful needed was power. Later on, in Salamanca, he learned that Law is above the laws, and that this Law does not take sides. He was even told about a sacrosanct law. As soon as the first fuzz appeared on his top lip, he began a formal, stilted relationship with Inés Hoyuelos, the only daughter of a well-off grocer. She has generously helped us in the reconstruction of this story.