AT SOME POINT in his captivity, Mauricio Valls had begun to think of light as the harbinger of pain. In the dark he could imagine that those rusty bars were not confining him, that the walls of the cell did not ooze a film of filthy moisture that slid over the rock like black honey and formed a fetid puddle at his feet. Above all, in the dark he could not see himself.
The half-light in which he lived was only barely broken when, once a day, a strip of brightness opened up at the top of the stairs and a figure was outlined against it carrying the pot of foul water and a piece of bread that he devoured in a matter of seconds. The gaoler had changed, but not his manners. His new custodian never stopped to look at him in the face or speak to him at all. He ignored Valls’s questions, pleadings, insults and curses. All he did was place the food and the drink next to the bars and leave.
The first time the new gaoler came down, the stench issuing from the cell and the prisoner had made him throw up. From then on he almost always came down covering his mouth with a handkerchief and stayed as little as possible. Valls no longer noticed the smell, just as he barely felt the pain in his arm, or the dull throb of the purple lines that rose from his stump like a cobweb of black veins. They were letting him rot alive, and he no longer cared.
He had started to think that one day nobody would come down those steps any more, that the door would never open again, and he’d spend the rest of what little life he had left in darkness, feeling his body decompose bit by bit and devour itself. He had often witnessed that ritual during his years as governor of the Montjuïc prison. With luck, it would take a matter of days. He had started to fantasize about the weakness and delirium that would take hold of him once the initial agonies of hunger had burned all the bridges. The cruellest part was the absence of water. Perhaps, when the grip of despair and torment became overpowering and he began to lick the sewage that seeped down the walls, his heart would stop beating. One of the doctors who had worked for him in the castle twenty years ago always said that God takes pity on motherfuckers first. Even in this respect, life was a bitch. Perhaps, at the last moment, God would also take pity on him, and the infection he could feel advancing through his veins would save him from the worst part of the end.
*
When the door opened again at the top of the stairs, he was dreaming that he had already died and was in one of those canvas sacks used to remove the corpses from the cells in Montjuïc Castle. He woke from his drowsiness to discover that his tongue was swollen and aching. He put his fingers in his mouth. His gums were bleeding, and his teeth moved when he touched them, as if they were attached to soft mud.
“I’m thirsty!” he groaned. “Water, please . . .”
The steps coming down the stairs were heavier than usual. A light went on with a roar of white noise. Sound was much more reliable than light in the cell. The world had been reduced to pain, the slow decomposition of his body, and the echoes of footsteps and pipes murmuring between those walls. Valls followed the path of the approaching footsteps with his ears. He became aware of a figure that had stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
He crept up to the metal bars and strained his eyes. A beam of blinding light burned his retinas. A torch. Valls moved back and covered his eyes with the only hand he had left. Even like that, he could feel the light moving over his face and over his filthy body, covered in excrements, dried blood and rags.
“Look at me,” said the voice at last.
Valls removed his hand from his eyes and opened them very slowly. His pupils took a while to adapt to the light. The face on the other side of the bars was different, but it seemed strangely familiar.
“I said look at me.”
Valls obeyed. Once dignity was lost, it was far easier than giving orders. The visitor went up to the bars and examined him carefully, passing the torch’s beam over his limbs and his emaciated body. Only then did Valls realize why the face looking at him from the other side of the bars seemed familiar.
“Hendaya?” he gasped. “Hendaya, is that you?”
Hendaya nodded. Valls felt that his prayers were being answered. For the first time in days or weeks, he could breathe. It must be another dream. Sometimes, anchored among shadows, he held conversations with saviours who came to his rescue. He strained his eyes again and laughed. It was Hendaya. In the flesh.
“Thank God, thank God,” he sobbed. “It’s me, Mauricio Valls. Valls, the minister . . . It’s me . . .”
He stretched out his arms towards the policeman, weeping with gratitude, ignoring the shame of being seen that way, half naked, mutilated, and covered in shit and urine. Hendaya took a step forward.
“How long have I been here?” asked Valls.
Hendaya didn’t reply.
“Is my daughter Mercedes all right?”
Hendaya offered no answer. Valls stood up with difficulty, holding on to the bars until his eyes were level with Hendaya’s. The policeman was looking at him with no expression. Was Valls perhaps dreaming again?
“Hendaya?”
The policeman pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Valls got a whiff of tobacco, the first time he’d smelled it in what seemed like years. It was the most exquisite perfume he’d ever sniffed. He thought the cigarette was for him until he saw Hendaya put it between his lips and take a long drag.
“Hendaya, get me out of here,” he begged.
The policeman’s eyes shone through swirls of smoke rising between his fingers.
“Hendaya. It’s an order. Get me out of here.”
The other man smiled and took a couple more drags.
“You have bad friends,” he said at last.
“Where’s my daughter? What have you done to her?”
“Nothing, yet.”
Valls heard a voice rise into a desperate howl, not realizing it was his own. Hendaya threw the cigarette into the cell, at Valls’s feet. The policeman didn’t bat an eyelid when the prisoner, seeing him go back up the stairs, started to shout and bang the metal bars with his last remaining bit of strength.
Valls collapsed, exhausted, on his knees. The door at the top of the stairs sealed itself shut like a coffin. Darkness closed in on him again, colder than ever.