Chapter 7. The Grand Inquisitor (pt. 1)

Closed in 1999, Carabanchel was built to
house Franco's enemies: Communists, Anarchists,
Union leaders, homosexuals, Basque Nationalists,
and so on.. long after Franco's regime passed
with him in 1975.

It was demolished in 2008.

He came around to consciousness; to the clanging of steel doors, and, to the sound of boots approaching outside, accompanied by the discordant percussion of heels on concrete, and the metallic clank of keys jammed in the door. His eyes ached from behind their orbs from the light cascading into the door creaking open, hammering a cacophony into his head. The shadow cast by the guard gave Alesandro’s eyes little relief as they adjusted to the harsh light.

The guard gestured, “Get up. You can leave your shoes.”

Alesandro turned to say something to Poncho Villa, “Good-bye, my little friend.”

Led up through the central security hub and down several hallways into the administrative part of the prison, with rooms where clerks clacked away at typewriters, he thought it peculiar to feel embarrassed at being barefoot. His feet padded along on the cold, polished linoleum, to a small sparse room furnished with space for two chairs at a bare table.

Mind still, with no anticipation or expectation, he was ready for this. He had been ready since the old days and now, after decades in the Pyrenees, he’d escaped capture in the camps of Asturias and held in Camp Gurs a short while during the Occupation, he had known after two decades he was living on borrowed time. Suddenly aware that his feet were cold, his mind could focus on nothing else. None of it mattered. He had not one care in the world about why he was there at a chrome and speckled formica table in a dimly lit room awaiting what would be the first of many interrogations. His feet were cold and that was all that mattered at all.

The door opened to the vision of a tall man; and, despite his very long falcon's nose, he was handsome and distinguished looking, meticulously groomed in a pinstriped suit, who entered with a file in his hands and flopped it on the table. He pulled the only other chair in the room to the opposite side of the table from Alesandro without a greeting of any kind. It was several minutes before the tall man spoke. Alesandro’s eyes ached at the light… a halo of white light shone in his eyes obscuring the image of the tall man behind the light… an aura emitting contradiction… as in the saintly nimbus of the angel of light, Lucifer.

“Ah, Señor Otxoa… we finally meet. Oh, but times have changed since Asturias,” the Falcon Nose said to show familiarity, trying to impress Alesandro that the Falcon Nose knew his murdered father’s sir-name. Lighting a Russian Sobranie cigarette, he continued, “Women… girls… they are on the beaches in France wearing only their underwear. They call these swimsuits bikinis, Si?" He offered, "Smoke?”

“No,”

The Falcon Nariz smile turned grim, “Why should you care that times have changed or that women have all become putas on the Riviera? I forgot, you are the bastardo bandit, Gotzon. You don’t even go by your father’s name: regardless, I believe you… you might be a moral man.”

Alesandro returned the compliment sardonically, “May I call you Falcon Nariz?”

The hawk nosed man glared at Alesandro a minute and the laughed and though speaking to a child, “No importa en absolute, lo que me llama.”

Alesandro knew it didn’t matter and braced his spirit for the confusing, sinister sympathy, and dramatic change in tone. Mind-memory, imagery flashed back to pastures and to stone megaliths on the plains of Mingorria he had rested under in the shade of so many times… a thought compacted into a fraction of a second. His native tongue preceded the times of those monuments unknowing who, why, or when, those stone bulls, or pigs, were planted.  Knowing nothing about living behind the gates of agricultural settlements, his ancestors were puzzled by the harvesting of grain in the fields. How did they fear the changes that were going on then? Did they too try desperately to hold on to the past… the good old days… before everyone lived in boxes within the walls of villages… religion segregated by priests and chieftains? Alesandro’s people had deep roots going back as far, or further than, those times.

There was no use in arguing the point. What was he going to say about bikinis from his prison cell? He had accepted that the war was over for him and his only option now was to surrender his will to that reality and not the madness of the man across from him at the table.

“Alesandro… ‘Gotzon’,” sliding a Sobranie pack across the Formica top of the table.

“…. Ah, excuse me, I forgot.”

Alesandro pushed the pack away, locked eyes, and declined the offer, “Forgot what, my name? Or, that I don’t smoke?”

“Too bad,” the man apologetically said, “foreign cigarettes are about the only help you’ll get from here. You might have died a Maquis ten years ago but you will die a common bandit now, Gotzon. That is your nom de guerre, isn’t it, Alesandro Gotzon?” The man pushed the thick file across the table before he continued, “I was in Madrid too… on the opposite side of the barricades. Open it. We know this much about your activities up to now.”

“The question you must answer for me then, Alesandro… perhaps my last today, my only question for you today, tomorrow, and maybe the next day, if you live that long,” he blew smoke across the table towards Alesandro’s face, “Where is the puta, Iniga?”

Alesandro had no idea where she was but he protested, “Ella no es una puta!”

The rules of machismo dictated Alesandro defend her honor if he cared at all for her and Falcon Nariz knew that and would use anything to provoke a reaction and catch him off-guard. Alesandro was embarrassed to fall for the pricking of the needle. He actually had no idea where she might be but suspected that his interrogator knew that too. What was coming next didn’t matter. He knew nothing of the location for any enlaces (safe houses) of the resistance because he’d worked alone or with only a few… very few… trusted, tried and true, friends. Even those he had some idea of, he knew of them only by their nom de guerre. They’d met by a markings on a tree, rock, a weather report or the lyrics of a song on the radio at a certain time of the day. Wounded and unable to do anything else, he had let his guard down for Bird Dog… Harry Baker. And thus, he was here before this arrogant interrogator.

“You have an exaggerated opinion of me, señor, I am no longer the leader of a band. My associates have all been imprisoned or murdered. I haven’t seen her in years. I assume she has been dispatched via the ley de fugas by now,” he said without taking his eyes off his inquisitor.

“You are the brother of one of the murderers granted amnesty by Frederica Montoya’s reprobates…” He paused long enough for Alesandro to see that he was being baited; to test his zeal. “We care what you know, Alesandro,” the man didn’t wait for the answer he wasn’t going to get. “I can make things easier if you can tell us what we don’t know… eh?”

“Why should I care what any burócrata knows of my activities?” he challenged, but he could guess where this conversation was going. He’d sat in similar chairs across similar tables in front of the gendarmes before going to Camp Gurs in Southern France during the War. He knew that, if they wanted him dead, he’d be dead. His feet were cold, his arm was sore and, though he was through the worst of it, fever still had him sweating.

Alesandro waited to hear out of genuine interest. He wanted to tell Falcon Nariz to check with Harry Baker but that would have been counter-productive sarcasm… and somewhat of a petty disclosure that he knew of his betrayer’s attraction to Iniga. It was important then, for him, to picture in his mind what they wanted to know and what did he need to bury deep in his heart where it would never be found no matter what they decided to do with him.

The Falcon Nariz paged through the file for Alesandro, whose arm was plastered in a cast, and his free hand cuffed to the chair’s steel arm. It had names… names and wallet size black and white pictures of maquis that had been imprisoned or killed. Red check marks were aside the names of those he knew were dead. Others had blue checks… He dared not let his eyes rest on the only one of Iniga… dear Iniga. Some of the others went back as far as Asturias, Madrid and the Aran valley… bitter sweet memories… in and out of safe houses from the hills of Leon to the Catalonian coastal plains with the infamous lone wolves like him, el Quito and el Cara Quimada.

The names and pictures passing his gaze were names that evoked good times… of old comrades resting in the crisp fall breezes of the Pyrenees, or of drinking water from fresh mountain springs cooling parched throats. He wanted to drink the water. He thought he could smell Iniga’s hair, feel the softness of the nape of her neck on his lips, for they had shared a bed before he went down to Ávila. No, he’d have to bury those thoughts. He’d have to bury them for her sake, not his. He was a dead man already as far as his circumstances foretold. There was always a higher purpose to hold on to and that purpose was to protect those in his fold.

Alesandro’s attempt to hide the flicker of emotion, of longing, must have been noted by the Falcon Nariz, “If you can help me with any information of her whereabouts it will be easier on you here.”

“Easier on me? I’m no fool Nariz. Easier, sure. But, no, she has been out of my life since the CNT called all of us back to France in nineteen fifty,” he lied. The lie was transparent, but he wasn’t going to give up anything so soon.

“You do admire her, I can see that,” the Falcon Nariz said as casually as though they had been flipping through wedding pictures.  He stopped at another full page picture of her with a group of women holding rifles.

Alesandro smiled for the first time since his arrest, “If you knew her you would admire her too.”

“Ah, I think not, Gotzon. To you she is a maquisard but to me she is but … un delincuente común… un asesino… A murderer! You see, we can account at least fourteen of our Civil Guards directly to her murderous hands and several more respectable civilians that she is highly suspected of...”

Somewhat distracted, Alesandro answered, “Whether she is a maquis or a murderer is of no concern of mine.”

He knew of her penchant for blood and he also knew of some of the most murderous of Franco’s men. They were called civilians whom she’d dispatched for the cause; or rather, for her cause. It was hard to tell the difference after so many years of one atrocity traded for another.

“What does concern you, Gotzon?” the Falcon Nariz paused a minute… mostly for dramatic effect; “That depends on whether you consider yourself a murderer or a maquisard.”

“Neither is of any concern of mine. I am here now and that is the depth and breadth of my concern.”

“You go ahead and hold on to your delusion, Alesandro.” He snuffed out a gold tipped cigarette on the table, contemptuously adding, “You have been betrayed and betrayal is the norm for your kind now. The Americans have joined us and they have assets far more sophisticated than we do.”

The Falcon then left the room and a guard Alesandro hadn’t notice before, pulled him up off his chair. Escorted back to his cell, the guard slammed the steel door, leaving Alesandro to wince at the noise of prison and his eyes adjusting to the darkness.

The Falcon Nariz was right. Betrayal had been with them on all sides from before Madrid. The power struggles between Durati and the Soviets, while Hitler’s Blue Legions were only yards from the barricades dismayed him. Hitler’s Heinkles had been dropping 500 pound block-busters on the city while chess moves sacrificed pawns in the trenched for moves orchestrated by masters in the Kremlin. Stalin weakened whatever strength the Republic had of the coalitions and loose confederations. It was too poignant of a reminder of Lyon when Jean `Moulin was taken by the Gestapo. It was Jean Moulin who had nearly singlehanded united the small scattering of clandestine groups of the resistance into what would become known as The Resistance. He had accomplished the near impossible just so that Stalin’s minions would take over what Moulin had built. It burned into Alesandro’s heart as a reopened wound. Assassinations coupes, executions of rivals and factions… there was no end to it. Yes, as far back as Madrid, he had become as anti-Soviet as he was violently opposed to Franco’s Falangists or as anti-Communist as were the Americans.

Alesandro fantasized, between forays and bombings, about meetings with an interrogator like the Falcon Nariz. There would have been a Dostoyevskian dialogue between himself and the Grand Inquisitor… existential philosophical musings bantered about… but, he was forty-one now and he knew better. In or out of prison, such philosophical discourse would be nil and the prisoner quickly dispatched via an assassination or a firing squad. But for Alesandro it would most likely be a wearing down process… planting a seed of doubt… weeks into months… months into years… a wearing down with sensory deprivation and alternating interrogators working in shifts. The most philosophical any of it would come to would be short and sweet. When all questioning was exhausted, confessions were extracted via battery cables attached to his gonads, finger nails ripped out, and so many more low-tech methods of torture, his spirit would most likely be broken like the chess players in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four… “Under the spreading Chestnut tree… I sold you and you sold me.”

It is said that torture is counter-productive but, in skilled hands, the facts prove that torture to be most effective. This is especially so when extracting information without the victim knowing it was being done. Alesandro was well aware that a reflexive blinking of the eyes, or perhaps an unconscious tic after the right question, was at times all that is needed to open a door to a weakness. Any Texas Poker player of the least ability knows this. God only knows how much the hawkish man got from him.

Back in the cell, he gathered his thoughts. He did know that time was on the side of his keepers. This was only the first few days that would end with, either a bullet in the nape of his neck, or a day that could drag on for months or years. There’s little that could be extracted of any value. Alesandro operated alone since ’52, after the CNT withdrew and the enlaces diminished. Most everyone he knew fled over the Pyrenees to France or, the ones that could, joined the so-called Sindicato Vertical corporate labor unions to try, however vainly, to influence change from within. The rest who stayed had already been imprisoned or killed before he was captured. The best he could do then would be to distract, mislead or otherwise confuse whatever information the Civil Guard had on his movements. There were a few influential minions of Franco he could falsely name as collaborators. He delighted imagining them squirming before the inquisitor. In this paranoid society of Franco’s Spain, an accusation was enough to condemn damned near anyone to a cell in Carabanchel no matter how prestigious their family connections.

He was content with knowing the hunt was over. He was done with dodging in and out the length of the Pyrenees. He’d been stealthily maneuvering through friendly villages, side streets and alleyways of cities, successfully for so long. Looking over to where the cockroach cell-mate had just scurried, he laughed, “Where have you gone now? We have much in common, Poncho.”