Blind Sunflowers
Language: English
Pages: 110
ISBN: 1905147775
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this beautifully translated account of loss and reconciliation set in the time of the Spanish Civil War, four subtly connected vignettes come together to form a cohesive narrative that underlines the horrors of the war in Spain. The stories are narrated in the same engaging spirit but are clearly set apart by the individual voices of the narrating characters: a captain in Franco's army who renounces winning the war on the very day of victory; a young poet who flees with his pregnant girlfriend and is forced to grow up quickly, only to die within a few months; a prisoner in Porlier's jail who refuses to live a lie so that his executioner can be held accountable; and a lustful deacon who hides his desires behind the apostolic fascism that clamors for the purifying blood of the defeated. Combining power and passion with delicacy and literary art, these heartbreaking tales blur the line between victor and conquest until only one thing remains clear-whatever one's affiliations, nobody survives unscathed.
myself, but I imagine I am filthy and humiliated. I am yet another product of the war they tried to ignore but which flooded their stables, their starving cattle, their sparse crops with fear. I remember the poor, silent village of ours that closed its eyes to everything apart from fear. I remember how it shut its eyes when they killed Don Servando, my teacher, when they burned all his books and exiled all the poets whose work he knew by heart. I’ve lost. But I could have won. Will someone else
laid down his weapons and surrendered to the rebel army, Alegría deserted. The war was about to end, and yet he went over to the side of the defeated, unarmed and without equipment. None of the Republicans believed him, and nobody protected him when Franco’s troops entered Madrid. He was arrested, tried and shot at dawn one morning, along with dozens of other poor souls who had no more reason to be the first to die than the fact that they had been taken prisoner first. The haste to kill means
All the other prisoners froze in the position the shouts had surprised them in. The Babe beat his aluminium bowl on the cell bars and went on shouting with an energy nobody would have believed possible in this man already tattooed by death. Eventually, two soldiers came up and tried to beat him back from the bars with their rifle butts. But Alegría’s ability to feel pain had been exhausted in front of a hastily assembled firing squad, and he seemed unaffected by the blows on his arms. In the
was going on, although none of them questioned what their superior officer might be up to. When Juan was taken back to the second-floor cell, the woman’s last words were still ringing in his ears, ‘I’ll bring you a jersey, it’s very cold in here,’ as well as the ‘Violeta, please’ from the avenging colonel. He hardly dared tell anyone what was going on, and apart from Eduardo López, nobody asked him anything. It was only the kind of endogamy that exists in political militancy that made him feel
the two of them began to talk in a leisurely way, gazing out at the sky beyond the bars of the window. Juan told him about Mozart – another of the defeated, and about Salieri. He talked about the scientist Ramón y Cajal – another solitary fighter – and of how clouds are formed. He went on to mention Darwin and how important the thumb was for man to become man, how it helped him climb down from trees and learn to kill his fellows. ‘But everything that took place, the Popular Front, the war, was