‘My grandfather was imprisoned here once, just like me.’
Javier’s hands moved in front of him in quick, confident motions, like a card shuffler’s, giving shapeless form to the ideas and thoughts bubbling up in his neat round head while he spoke. He had barely stopped since he’d sat down, a torrent of words and gestures as he took full advantage of this unexpected visit and the limited time available to us. Few people came to see him at the prison – it was too far away, and meant a day’s drive there and back at least. Not that the remainder of his family cared much for him anyway. Kiki had been coming the most: an old love affair that had ended years back had turned into a bond of loyal friendship. Kiki, Javier insisted, was the most real person he had ever met.
Perpignan prison was unrelentingly grey, as though autumn had come too soon to this derelict little place just over the Pyrenees: the sky, the blank concrete walls, even the windows of the waiting room all radiated a dull grimness, like a fog. It was strange to think that until the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, this area had once been part of Spain – the mountains formed such an obvious frontier you felt nature herself had had a hand in deciding where one country ended and another began. But the previous owners had left an imprint of sorts in the local penitentiary, and while the prison guards were mostly blond and dressed in dark-blue uniforms spattered with the tricolour, the occupants of the prison and their relatives harked back to a previous age. Spanish inmates doing time in France were often transferred here to be as close to home as possible, while the imprisoned locals themselves looked as if they’d be more at home in the Triana district of Seville. Gypsies almost to a man, they crowded out the drabness of their surroundings with a collective colour and energy that almost made you want to commit some crime so you could join them on the inside.
I’d come across the women first, chatting and singing in the draughty waiting room while we waited for visiting hour to arrive. While their children climbed over scratched tables and chairs bolted to the floor, they’d sat down on the hard wooden benches, talking and bustling like a gaggle of geese. It was just another day – a chance to catch up with friends and have a natter. Those over forty came as they were, with house slippers and their hair tied back with bright elastic bands. The younger ones, though, had gone to town on their appearance, their faces freshly painted and navels exposed to the harsh wind, with skin-tight trousers and open-toed stiletto sandals. You sensed they were keen to show that looking good for their menfolk inside still mattered to them – a way of affirming fidelity by saying, ‘I still want to be attractive for you.’ They spoke in a curious patois that seemed to be a mixture of Castilian Spanish, Catalan, French and Caló. In their own minds, though, it was definitely Spanish.
‘What’s the matter?’ I’d heard one of them say to a woman from Madrid who’d come to see her husband. Communication between them was proving difficult. ‘Don’t you speak Spanish?’
‘They’re crazy,’ the woman had later said to me. ‘God knows what they’re speaking but it’s not like anything I’ve ever heard before.’
It was one of the few times of the year when visitors were allowed to bring food parcels for the inmates. Kiki had warned me in advance – no chocolate liqueurs or alcohol of any sort. And nothing could be taken through in foil. I hurriedly helped the Madrid woman unwrap all her Ferrero Rochers one by one and place them in a plastic bag in the last few seconds before we were ushered in. A minute longer and she would have missed her chance to go through. It was her first time there and the guards had only just told her about the rules.
‘They’ll give him a few moments of pleasure, at least,’ she said.
She handed the chocolates over to the guards with the other food she’d brought and rushed through as the doors were closing, smudging her make-up as she wiped away a tear welling up in the corner of her eye.
We’d filed through, eventually getting to the visitors’ room after being made to stand for another ten minutes in an open courtyard that smelt of sewage. As a friend or relative of a criminal you were somehow made to feel guilty by association and suffer some degree of punishment in your turn. We passed a row of offices lined against one of the walls, knocked up from a collection of scrap windows and doors that someone must have picked up off a skip. Planks of oddly shaped wood held the complex together where it looked most in danger of falling down. A terrace of broken, grubby lockers stood along the adjacent walls, their doors hanging off or simply missing altogether. The gypsies, confident, assured, buffered by their weight of numbers, were untouched by it all. The Madrileña woman, chewing nervously on the inside of her mouth while she wrapped her white plastic coat tightly over her chest, looked close to breaking down. Sorry people in a sorry world. At least, I thought, there were walls and a roof here: in the past Spaniards had been imprisoned in this part of France on nothing but a piece of bare frozen ground – and purely for being Spanish.
Javier had been in for almost a year after being caught with a right front tyre stuffed with cocaine as he was driving on a courier run to Italy. It was his second and supposedly last trip as he secretly tried to get some money together to pay for a risky new operation in the States that might just save his mother’s life. The police had pulled him over and gone straight to where the drugs were stored, not even bothering to check the rest of the car. Pleading guilty from the start, he was tried and sentenced in less than a week, condemned to ten years and a half-million-euro fine for keeping quiet about whom he was working for. It was the state-appointed lawyer who explained how the supplier – an old friend of Javier back in Madrid – had probably been the one to tip the police off in the first place. In the pretend war on drugs, dealers often handed over little guys to the authorities, keeping the pressure off themselves while allowing politicians to show the public that ‘something was being done’. In the meantime, a month afterwards, Javier’s mother had died of her illness, condemning her son as a criminal on her deathbed, unaware of the sacrifice he was making. The rest of the family, equally ignorant, now blamed him for sending her to an early death. The only good thing that had happened in the past weeks was a reduction in his sentence and the fine. Those too, it seemed, were meant more for public consumption than anything else. With any luck he might be out and back in Spain in just over another year.
Kiki had told me little about Javier other than what had happened to him and that she went up to Perpignan to see him. She’d promised to go this time but the dates of her gigs at the club had been changed at the last minute, and so she was sending me instead, calling me in Badajoz where I was meeting Manolo. I’d like Javier, she said, and he’d appreciate a visit, whoever it was from. And with that, and a brief physical description – twenty-five, very thin, dark hair, prominent nose – I’d set off, travelling across country to Barcelona and then on to Perpignan.
After everything that had happened to him, I’d expected to find a lonely young man, mourning his mother’s death and his bad luck to have ended up in such an awful situation. No one benefited from him being locked up in here – stopping someone driving across Europe with seven kilos of party powder crammed inside his front tyre didn’t seem like a particularly effective use of police time, especially when the authorities could have been after the person who had shopped him in the first place. Javier was a pawn in a game that seemed to move by itself – no one was actually in control.
He was, though, surprisingly cheery when I was shown to the table where he was waiting for me.
‘Jason, my friend,’ he said with a big smile. Forbidden by the world-weary guards from touching each other, it was the closest thing to an embrace he could give me. I noticed his big shiny white teeth framed by dark gums. Thin and dark-haired as Kiki had described, he also had a strong physical energy about him which seemed to radiate from his body like an electric field. He might not be well built, I thought in the fraction of a second when I first caught sight of him, but he was not the kind of person you’d ever want to get into a fight with.
We talked about Kiki at first, our common point of contact.
‘Meeting Kiki was the best thing in my life,’ he said simply. ‘She – and now you – are the only people who have come to see me here.’
I warmed to him immediately, catching something of the incongruity of this spirited young man being in this loveless place. There was a light about him, immediately distinguishable from the rest of the prisoners in the room. The gypsies had street smarts, but there was a different kind of quickness in Javier’s eye which you didn’t often find, even outside prison.
I gave him bits of news from Madrid, as well as a private message from Kiki. He thanked me for bringing the food parcel.
‘How are you getting on here?’ I said. Expecting to hear about his mother’s death and how he’d been unjustly put away, I put on my most sympathetic voice, shifting mentally into listening and comforting mode.
‘Oh, it’s a laugh!’ he said. I gave a look of surprise.
‘Don’t get me wrong – wouldn’t want to spend my holidays here every year, but there’s plenty to be getting on with.’
‘Fantastic,’ I said, trying to adjust to this unexpected burst of enthusiasm.
‘I’m learning to be a car mechanic. There’s a workshop here and they let you do stuff. Just mucking about, really. Thing is, I’ve realized a lot of it is dead simple. You can fix all kinds of things in a car with a soldering iron and spanner. Most car mechanics are taking you for a ride.’
His hands moved restlessly in the space between us as he spoke.
‘As soon as I get out I’m going to set up my own workshop and do it properly – you know, fixing people’s cars for virtually nothing. None of this sending off for expensive parts from God-knows-where. Sorry, my love, your new alternators still at the suppliers in Uzbekistan. The yaks are on strike. If you do it cheap people will always come back. I’ll be up and running in no time.’
There was no point going back to Madrid, he’d decided. Even though he’d told the police nothing about the operation, he was always going to be seen as a problem for the dealers back home: they’d assume he’d be asking them for money all the time to keep quiet, and would do all they could to run him out of town anyway. Now that his mother had died there were no family ties to take him back either. No, he was going to Seville, where his family had come from originally. He was picking up new skills and meeting new people: a new life was about to begin. It was almost as if coming to prison had been the best thing that had ever happened to him.
It was heartening to see him seemingly unbroken like this, even if I did wonder for a minute what kind of contacts he might be making behind bars. I quickly glanced around the room: the gypsies, with their mullet haircuts, were all talking seriously and manfully to their wives, who were giving them adoring looks. They could take this, you felt – it was part of life. The Madrid woman’s husband, though, looked distraught and lost, his eyes like saucers in an expression of fear and shock. The woman had her back to us. From the hunching of her shoulders and position of her head, she seemed to be crying.
‘Drug running,’ Javier said, catching me watching them. ‘Like me. Got caught off the coast in a boat with half a tonne of dope. He gets seven years, the kids buy their stuff from someone else, while the kif growers in Morocco who supplied him carry on as normal. Meanwhile suspicious quantities of his haul make it on to the market anyway, except that he’s not getting any money for it.’
It was hard not to wonder what the point was of locking up people like him. Whom did it protect? And whom did it punish?
‘The police here are corrupt,’ said Javier. ‘So are the guards. But at least they don’t pretend not to be, so you know where you stand. One of the guards is having problems back home – thinks his wife’s cheating on him. The word is, she probably is – with his own brother. But he’s not been an angel himself either.’
‘How do you know all this?’ I asked.
‘We find out about everything in here,’ he said with a grin. ‘Those walls are too thick for a man to get through. Believe me, I’ve tried.’ He winked. ‘But gossip and information seeps through like a sieve. Especially about the guards. They all live next to the prison anyway. Sometimes I think they’re the ones really in jail here. We’ll get out eventually. They don’t get released till they retire. And in the meantime they’re all in and out of each other’s wives like bunny rabbits.’
‘Sounds like a soap opera,’ I said.
‘Oh, much better,’ he said. ‘We’re allowed TVs here, but you have to pay to watch. I don’t bother – what’s going on around is much more interesting.’
‘So what about this guard?’ I asked.
‘Well, I’ve given him a shoulder to cry on, so he’s been helping me out a bit – extra cigarette rations, that kind of thing. Says he knows all about my case and will do everything he can to make sure I get out as soon as I can for good behaviour.
‘Got to be careful, though,’ he added. ‘These guys have loyalty to no one. One minute they’re your friend, the next …’ He gave a thumbs-down sign.
‘I’m so glad you came to see me,’ he said, hardly pausing to take a breath. ‘It’s good to speak Spanish again.’
‘I thought almost everyone in here spoke Spanish,’ I said. And I explained about the people I’d seen in the waiting room.
‘There are Spaniards here,’ he said. ‘But we’re at the bottom of the pile. They treat the Arabs better than us – because they speak French.’
He told me how his cellmate was an Algerian. He was giving Javier French lessons in return for Spanish lessons and cigarettes – hence the usefulness of the guard.
‘You’d think it would be one language for another, right? No. In here, Spanish on its own is not worth the same as French. That’s why I have to give him cigarettes as well. I’m a second-class citizen.’ He laughed. ‘There’s only one direction from here, though, and that’s up.’
Everything, at every turn, was given a positive interpretation. If anyone was going to survive being in prison, it was Javier. He seemed to have the right balance of sensitivity and wit to hang on to who he truly was without falling into despair or hardening his outer shell. Prison often broke you or absorbed you. But Javier seemed to be successfully riding on the surface of it all. There was, though, something of an exotic and elegant wild animal about him, and it pained me to see him caged like this.
‘Kiki told me you’re interested in the Civil War,’ he said.
I nodded, and without any prompting he started telling me the story of his grandfather.
Raimundo had been Javier’s hero – a poet and a Republican, he had been exiled to Mexico after Franco’s victory, but had returned to Spain in the early seventies, shortly before the dictator died, as the regime very slowly began to liberalize and pardon those it had fought against almost forty years before. He brought with him a son – Javier’s father; his Mexican wife had died of emphysema.
‘I’m a quarter Mexican. That’s why there’s an Aztec look about me,’ Javier said with a smile. I hadn’t noticed before, but now he mentioned it there was something about his cheekbones, and a glossiness about his very dark hair.
Raimundo had always been extremely close to his little grandson, and had been more of a father than a grandfather to him as Javier’s own father passed restlessly through a series of jobs and relationships, never quite managing to settle in a country he had always been told was his real home. Eventually he had gone back to Mexico, leaving Javier in the hands of his Spanish mother and Raimundo. He hadn’t been in touch for years. While his mother was out at work, the little Javier would sit with his grandfather, hearing stories about his time in the war, the ideals they had fought for, and his escape and journey to Mexico. Raimundo had been involved in schemes to expand the education system in Spain during the early years of the Republic, bringing schools and teachers to rural areas where no one could read or write. But the war had come and he’d been shipped down to Valencia when the government debunked en masse from Madrid, and had then gone up to Barcelona for the last year of the conflict. He’d been one of the hundreds of thousands who’d walked through the snow over the Pyrenees into France in the final months as Franco’s troops conquered Catalonia. And like so many others, once over the border he’d been imprisoned by the French authorities in a concentration camp not a great distance away from where Javier and I were now sitting.
Bullied by Britain and fearful of civil conflict within France’s own borders, various French governments over the course of the war had failed to give the Spanish Republic the kind of assistance it would have needed to defeat Franco’s army. Despite being of the same political bent as its Spanish equivalent – it was even called the Popular Front – the government in Paris preferred to maintain better relations with London, where the policy of first Baldwin and then Chamberlain was to prevent weapons from reaching Spain’s elected government. Threats were even made at one point that Britain might tear up its historic accord with France and ally itself with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany if the French gave military assistance to the Republicans. And so France, ever the great hope to the north, failed to help its southern neighbour in any significant way and the Nationalists inched their way to victory. Worse, however, was yet to come.
By early 1939 a new government was in power in Paris under Edouard Daladier, a supporter of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy towards Hitler. France now faced the reality of thousands of Spanish Republicans pouring over the border as they fled Franco and his bloody retribution. The refugees were seen as a threat – many of them were armed men who might bring their war with them. And so these tired, wounded, hungry, defeated people were rounded up as they crossed the border, stripped of their personal belongings in many cases, and placed in makeshift concentration camps in the area around Perpignan. Out of half a million Spaniards forced into exile at the end of the war,275,000 passed through French hands. It was mid-winter and illness was rife, but no shelters or decent food were provided. Forced to survive on the bare ground, the refugees had to dig into the frozen earth with their hands to create some kind of shelter, washing themselves if they could in the icy salt water of the Mediterranean. Bread and a few other scraps to eat would be handed out, but there were virtually no medicines or treatment for the sick and wounded. Almost fifteen thousand died in the camps during the first six months. They were simply les rouges espagnoles – undesirables, facing death or destitution in their own country just a few miles away, or rejection in France from those they’d hoped would be their friends. The doors of Europe were closed to most Spanish refugees. There were few places to go.
Some, like Raimundo, were lucky and managed to make it to Mexico, one of the few countries that had supported the Spanish Republic throughout the war. Others were forcibly conscripted into the French Foreign Legion or joined the French in their fight against the Nazis only months later.
Javier told me all this in a hurried voice, aware that our time was short. A guard called out from the corner. They would soon be booting us out.
Stuck in the concentration camp, Raimundo might have ended up like so many others, but was recognized by a Republican government official with contacts, who made sure he was given passage to Mexico. But for that man, Javier said, he himself probably wouldn’t be alive now.
Raimundo had started afresh in Mexico, marrying a local woman and fathering a son. But like so many Spanish exiles, he dreamed of going home one day, and watched the Spanish news avidly for signs that the enemy who had defeated them years before might crumble and democracy be restored once more.
Eventually, after the death of his wife, he had decided to move back anyway while Franco was still alive, sensing that change was on its way and keen to catch it when it came. He was right: he lived to see the death of the dictator and the subsequent rapid collapse of the regime in the mid-1970s.
‘In the end,’ he used to tell Javier as a boy, ‘Franco lost and el abuelo Raimundo won.’ Franco might have had all the tanks and guns, but he didn’t have time. ‘Time,’ he would say, ‘was on our side.’
Javier’s grandfather had died four years earlier at his home. Few things stayed the same for very long, he had said, but Spain was a democracy once more and he had seemed at peace. There was, however, one thing remaining he had always meant to do.
‘Listen,’ said Javier, ‘could you do something for me?’
I picked up the flowers from a florist’s in the centre of Perpignan and caught a train out to the coast. Argelès was a typical Mediterranean resort town, with views to the south of the rich green foothills of the Pyrenees lazily cascading into the water. Restaurants and beach apartments lined the sea front, with decorative palm trees and promenades for the holiday-makers, and playgrounds for the children. Now people paid money to come and lie on these sands, but fewer than seventy years earlier the beach had been a prison camp, a squalid and dirty open space with barbed-wire fences, where a hundred thousand Spaniards had been left to the elements while the world forgot about them and congratulated itself on having prevented another world war.
I walked along the shore, gusts of warm grey wind blowing in from the sea. The place was deserted, just a handful of bars still open at this tail end of the season. Already houses and villas were boarded up in preparation for the winter, adding to the nostalgic end-of-the-holidays feeling. Out at sea, tankers floated like miniature islands on the horizon, barely moving on the still, grey waters. A couple of seagulls cried mournfully overhead.
I tried to imagine the conditions that had existed here all those years ago, when Raimundo, then a young man, had been one of the many thousands held captive on this very shore. I’d seen photographs of the refugees with exhausted, defeated faces, men standing skinny and naked as they tried to wash their few scraps of clothes in sea water. There was nothing, though, like the image Raimundo had implanted in his grandson’s mind. He had made a big impact on Javier. In some ways Javier seemed almost proud to be imprisoned here himself, as though he were following in his hero’s footsteps. The future move to Seville was in the same vein: Raimundo had been born there before the family moved up to Madrid when he was a child. Perhaps in Andalusia Javier might feel at home.
A wounded militiaman had been in the camp, Raimundo had told him, just a few feet from where he and two other friends had tried to dig some kind of shelter. Shot through the lung, the man had developed tuberculosis, and with the cold and the hardship of the trek up to France in the snow, had had little strength left to take care of himself. He lay motionless on the hard, frozen sand, wrapping his greatcoat around him for warmth, his sickly breath hovering above his mouth like a fog. He was in his thirties, Raimundo thought, but his face was tired and grey, lines of defeat drawn along his increasingly pale skin. Gripped tight in his hands was a small framed photograph of a little girl. She was no more than three or four years old, with a centre parting and glossy brown hair falling down to her shoulders, a ribbon tied above one ear. Her face was bright, her large clear eyes filled with an expression of joy.
Raimundo and his friends tried to take care of the man, helping him walk the few paces to the sea to relieve himself during the first days, feeding him odd scraps to eat. But after a time he was unable to get up, even with their help, and he lay quietly on the beach, under a loveless sky, waiting for the illness to take its course. Still, though, he gripped the photograph in his fingers, pressing it to his chest with the little strength that remained to him, savouring the memory of the warmth of his lost little girl. She had used to dance sardanas, he had whispered to them.
There were no doctors or medicines to be had, and no way of getting hold of any from the French authorities. Raimundo and his friends did what they could, but the illness had taken him too far.
On the day the man died, the sun had come out briefly in the morning, tiny rays of light reaching the stiff, chilled bodies of the imprisoned refugees on the beach. For the first time in weeks half-smiles began to break out on people’s faces.
At lunchtime he stopped breathing. The French officials were informed but did nothing for several hours. The face of the little girl stared up into the sky, pressed to her father’s chest, smiling as she always had. Raimundo had never forgotten her.
By the following morning the man and the little girl had gone, her smile and expression of joy lost in the machine of French bureaucracy. By dusk that same day Raimundo himself was leaving the camp, taking his first steps towards a new life in exile in Mexico. He never found out the girl’s name.
I stood by the shore and watched the grey little waves rolling and stroking the sand in their curious, rhythmic motion. With their wrapping crumpled in my hand, I scattered the flowers on the water’s surface, where they were pulled out slowly by the current towards the south, down towards the Pyrenees and the border. Javier would have done it himself, he told me, but he knew when he got out he would be taken straight back to Spain. No time would be allowed for nostalgic visits to the nearby coast on behalf of his dead grandfather. I would be his representative, he’d said grandly, just as I was Kiki’s now in coming to see him. His grandfather, wherever he was, would be watching and would bless us both. Many loose ends had finally been tied up for the old man by coming back to Spain, but this was one thing he had promised to do but never managed. The girl’s face, and those days in the camp, had stayed with him for ever.
I walked back towards the town, past neat trimmed hedges of bougainvillea and carefully mown green lawns, catching sight of the ‘beware of the dog’ signs and security wires meant to keep the unwanted out.
‘There is no such thing as history,’ Raimundo had said to Javier. ‘Only memories and interpretations. And they themselves are fluid. The past, your past, belongs to you: you can make of it what you want.’ And the young man was methodically putting his words into practice. Kiki, in her way, was doing the same: it was what she had been trying to tell me all along, that day at Franco’s grave. And it was what Manolo was doing back in Badajoz. There was no single version of events, either past or present – simply material with which we could choose to shape ourselves.
Over the previous months I had seen much of Spain that I had never wanted or meant to see: the worst of a place I had fallen in love with years earlier, listening to flamenco and with tales of the Alhambra ringing in my ears. Now the romantic image I’d built up had been broken and lay in pieces around me. And yet still, I found, I loved the country as deeply as before, perhaps even more so. I could not forget what I had discovered, nor apologize for it or ignore it: the haze of perfection had gone. Yet the love was there, fuller, and more rounded – neither despite nor because of what I had learned. I had been blind in my search for the essence of the country, imagining it to be something I could hold or possess, a truth that could be expressed in words, like a definition set in stone. But Spain changed, just as I did. Loving it meant exploring it and deepening my knowledge of it, a process that could have no end.