If asked about torture,
as he often was by those who wanted to hear firsthand from any real victim of
the atrocities of Franco’s oppression, the Maqui Alesandro Gotson Otxoa, wasn’t
one to sate salacious curiosity. Though he had suffered days, weeks, and months
of sensory deprivation in solitary confinement, and often brought to a room to
be placed in the execution chair of the garrote for hours at a time, or taken
to a wall, pock-marked by hundreds of executions, to await his own, he never
thought facing immanent death, to be
torture. He had already released the fear and had reached a point where he
could welcome, and resign, to fate.
Because of his profound resignation these weren't torture to him. No more than
his remorse for the past. These didn't appear to him to be equal to the horrors
he could hear echoing down the concrete halls outside his cell so vividly at
the darkest hours of the night. To Alesandro, even the darkness of his cell was
a blessing as it was nothing compared to the solitary confinement where the
black night of his soul had imprisoned him.
The Spanish garrote
chair is an ingeniously evil means of execution that goes back before the times
of the Grand Inquisition of Torquemada in the fifteenth century. It was a
highbacked chair with a metal strap attached at the top of a post. That strap,
clamped under the chin, held the victim’s neck in place for a screw from behind
to be turned by the executioner ever so slowly so that the strap constricted
the neck of the pour soul condemned so that
the screw's point would snap the cervical vertebrae at the back at the
base of the skull.
He had to focus
throughout those three years to hold his mind intact. That focus was only
strengthened throughout time. He knew the battle was over for him. There was a
freedom in the resignation to death… to giving up even the faintest thread of
hope. Furthermore, no longer fearing death released him from any hatred for his
betrayer; Harry Baker, Generalissimo Franco, or any other of these so-called
enemies.
Remembering San Juan de
la Cruz, the verse came to him several times, “The endurance of darkness is the
preparation for great light.”
Something subtler than
a visitation or beam of light in the darkness, happened while he was alone in
his cell. The times when silence overcame hope… where all expectations to be
released was reduced to a timelessness of no longer waiting. No longer waiting
he waited for nothing. For nothing to happen filled his days in ways he
couldn’t relate to anyone. Iniga might understand… she would know what it was
to let go completely of all expectations. She said it so many times: “They day
the filth of those Moroccan bastards was washed off my body I became a dead
woman.”
He knew that, with the
exception of the young Soldado above Roncesvalles, there was no sense of
compassion in her heart arising from the depths of this apocalypse. There could
be no explaining this sorrow to anyone and in that sorrow there was no room for
compassion and therefore no redemption. That was her unforgivable sin. Though
Alesandro was in a dark prison cell, compassion was awakened and a lightness in
his heart overcame his detachment from it beyond empathy.
Towards the end of
captivity Alesandro was taken out of solitary confinement to join the general
population. He was treated cautiously by other prisoners… even political
prisoners whose connections with him went back to the battle for Val de Aran in
‘49… or to ‘38 in the final street fighting and betrayals of Madrid. Some of
the young men, who were in diapers in those times, approached him with respect
and honor. These regarded him in the highest esteem as though he was a sacred
idol. Others, the orthodox Anarchists,
Marxists and Trotskyites, stood aside warily contemptuous when he passed
by. Some considered him a heretic for
his distrust of orthodoxy but he was tolerated. Some feared he had been turned
by torture. Prison forces enemies to become allies out of necessity...
differences set aside. There were common criminals among the inmates too who
would shank him for a price. He never said anything about it, but was
disappointed with this new generation of sabiotearos and asesinos. He heard
them boast of murderous campaigns and bombings in the name of “the cause”. What
had sustained him was that it no longer mattered... just for his sanity’s sake…
in order to survive.
The war was finally
over for him and he saw that this campaign of sabotage was a solitary one that
no longer had any real effect. He saw that the Generalissimo was getting old
and his regime now functioned only in that it had become a shell of an archaic
aristocracy of apes decaying from within. Even so, Alesandro knew the
bureaucracy was so entrenched that, even if his fellow Basque resistance
fighters won, they would win only the nothing that was left after the monkeys
changed large hats for small ones but sat behind the same desks. His fight had
always been as much against so called allies as against Franco… the spoils of
war had all been spoiled long ago. The one thing that capture did to him, a
nettle under the saddle of the Generalissimo’s white horse for two decades, was
the realization that the battle was over.
The battle was over but
not because he’d been broken by torture. The battle was over because the cause
he’d been fighting for wasn’t his: the war was done. Wars are over when one
side wins and the other loses. There are no draws in war… in every case a truce
is broken and the war continues until one side or another is smashed. It could
be months or it could be decades. After several hundred years the crusades
aren’t over. Alesandro merely survived the war and that was enough for him….
let the young Turks take on the legacy of death.
The light of his
newfound compassion opened up to something only a warrior can have any
understanding of. As a lone-wolf prowling with no discernable purpose… nothing
left to save and nothing left to lose, he resigned his commission to his
fellows. Most of his maquisards had been executed by order of Franco’s Law of
the Fugitives or the PCE Central Committee Stalinists: one was as bad as the
other.
The War was all but
over as soon as the American President, General Eisenhower, injected cold cash
and a naval base at Rota into the ailing façade of the Falangist stranglehold
on Spain's economic blight. CIA contractors such as the Bird Dog helped bolster
Spain’s political stability by eliminating opposition as Franco tried to keep
his grip on power. There is nothing like prosperity to pry open the fist of
totalitarian autocracy and undermine a regime based on oppression. He had
little reason to believe it would have been any better and, from what he’d seen
of them, had his fellow maquis, communists, Anarchists or Stalinists won.
The young Basque
Separatists he saw coming into Carabanchel now had no real agenda beyond body
counts and blowing things up… the means were justified to the young no matter
what the end and the end was endless. Alesandro Gotzon Otxoa, and lone wolves
like the infamous Caracamada, and El Quito, still ranging the Pyrenees were,
like him, isolated exceptions. What good would it do to blow up another power
line, liberate a village for a day or two, or assassinate a Guardia Civil
Capitan? The struggle no longer mattered because decay was built into what was
left of the regime and the rest would take care of itself without his help.
All the time Alesandro
spent in the field brought him detachment. There was no righteous cause set in
stone for him as it was for the likes of the PCE’s Central Committee
Stalinists. The Stalinists had executed most of the Los Novatos maquisards and
CNT Anarchists of the FAI he’d fought alongside of since Madrid. He had escaped
concentration camps and the sure death of firing squads several times. Resigned
to awaiting his immanent execution, perhaps by one of these young Basques
seeking the approval of such infamy from of what would become the ETA, he lived
each day beyond that inevitability. El Galopo’s visit, three years before,
promised ever so remotely the possibility of a miraculous release: the note
that read, “Faith, Bird Dog, Biarritz watches.” Not so much hopelessness as
non-hopefulness comes in little notes just as dismay sneaks in the back of the
mind when hope is delayed or denied.
The urchin, Iniga, was
one whose thirst for revenge and blood was another thing altogether. She had
come of age at a time when the struggle was a matter of life and death against
oppression at the hands of the Guardia Civil and in the camps of Vichy and
Occupied France from Gurs to Drancy. To her, it was about getting even and
paying back the ilk of those who had raped and tortured her in Asturias.
Alesandro’s loyalty to her never wavered because she had become, not only among
the best of the maquisards, but she reciprocated loyalty with loyalty, one
orphan to another, and her loyalty could be depended upon in matters of
spy-craft, sabotage and assassination. No, Iniga was more than that. She was a
vision he held in his mind as best he could. From his darkened cell she evolved
into a sacred icon that kept him sane as he sardonically sang the lyrics of Ay
Carmela to pass time in the darkness of his cell:
Pero igual que
combatimos,
Rumba la rumba
la rumba la.
Pero igual que
combatimos,
rumba la rumba
la rumba la
prometemos
combatir,
¡Ay Carmela!
¡Ay Carmela!
prometemos
combatir,
¡Ay Carmela!
¡Ay Carmela!
… disregarding his
safety at the great consternation of his guards. He would then sing it in
English:
But as well we fight
Rumba, la
rumba, la rumba la.
But as well we fight
Rumba, la rumba, la
rumba la.
We promise to fight
Ay Carmela! Ay Carmela!
We promise to fight
Ay Carmela
Alesandro’s guards
assumed the isolation cell had robbed him of his sanity as he would burst into
maniacal laughter after a chorus… especially at Rumba la rumba la!
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