The night is black by the time they make their way through Gerona and later Banyoles. Then they turn off on a dirt road that snakes its way through shadowy woods and eventually stop before a stretch of stone wall dotted with lights, like a colossal galleon capsized in the middle of the darkness, which is polluted by the jailers' barked orders. It is the Sanctuary of Santa Maria del Collell. Sánchez Mazas will spend five days there together with the other two thousand prisoners from what remains of Republican Spain, including several deserters from the reds and several members of the International Brigades. Before the war the monastery had been a boarding school where the brothers taught secondary students in classrooms with enormously high ceilings and gigantic windows overlooking earth-floored courtyards and gardens lined with cypresses, where there were long, low corridors and vertiginous staircases with wooden handrails; now the boarding school has been converted into a prison, the classrooms into cells, and in the patios, corridors and staircases the adolescent hubbub of the boarders no longer echoes, instead just the hopeless footsteps of the incarcerated. The prison governor is a man called Monroy, the same one who ruled the prison-ship Uruguay with an iron hand; however, at Collell the prison regime is less strict: it is not forbidden to speak to those who serve the food nor with those met in the coming and going from the lavatories; the food is still foul and scant, but sometimes a furtive cigarette appears in a cell, and is eagerly shared round. The cell Sánchez Mazas occupies is on the top floor of the old boarding school, and it's bright and spacious; along with him and several International Brigadistas who speak no intelligible language, it is occupied by the doctor Fernando de Marimón, the naval captain Gabriel Martín Morito, Father Guiu, Jesús Pascual and José Maria Poblador, who can hardly walk because his legs are covered in boils. On the second day the Brigadistas are released and their places taken by Nationalist prisoners captured at Teruel and Belchite; the cell fills up. Sometimes they let them go out and walk around the courtyard or in the gardens; they are not guarded by SIM agents or Carabineros (although the monastery swarms with both): they are guarded by soldiers as malnourished and ragged as themselves, who make jokes or hum popular songs between their teeth as they kick the garden stones in boredom or watch them indifferently. The hours of confinement and inactivity foster intrigue: given the nearness of the border, and especially from the moment a big shot like Sánchez Mazas joined the string of prisoners, many cherish the hope of being exchanged before long, a hypothesis that weakens as time goes on. The hours they share also give rise to the consolation of friendship. As if magically foreseeing that he'd be one of the survivors of the confinement, and the only one who, years later, will tell the horror of those final hours in a meticulous and Manichean book, Sánchez Mazas became especially friendly with Pascual, who only knew of him from reading his articles in F.E., and to whom Sánchez Mazas recounted his odyssey through the war: he tells him about the Modelo prison, about the birth of his son Maximo, about the uncertain days following the uprising, about In-dalecio Prieto and the Chilean Embassy, about Samuel Ros and Rosa Krüger, about his clandestine trip across enemy Spain in a delivery truck in the company of a rich kid and a prostitute, about Barcelona and the JMB and the fifth column and his trial and finally about the prison-ship Uruguay.
At dusk on the 29th, Sánchez Mazas, Pascual and his cellmates are taken to the roof of the monastery, a place they've never been before and where they are assembled with other prisoners, 500 in total, maybe more. Pascual knows some of them — Pedro Bosch Labnis, Viscount Bosch Labriis and airforce captain Emilio Leucona — but barely manages to exchange a few words with them before a Carabinero immediately orders silence and begins to read out a list of names. Because the hope of a prisoner swap comes to mind again, as soon as he hears the name of someone he knows Pascual desires heart and soul to be included in the list, but, without any precise reason for this shift in opinion, by the time the Carabinero pronounces his name — shortly after that of Sánchez Mazas and immediately following Bosch Labrús — he has already regretted formulating this wish. The twenty-five men who have been named, among whom are all of Sánchez Mazas and Pascual's cellmates except Fernando de Marimon, are taken to a cell on the first floor where there are only a few desks pushed against the crumbling walls and a blackboard with patriotic historical dates scribbled in chalk. The door closes behind them and an ominous silence falls, soon broken by someone declaring that they are about to be exchanged and who manages to distract the anguish of a few of them with the discussion of a conjecture that fades away after a while to make room for unanimous pessimism. Sitting at a desk at one end of the cell, before the evening meal Father Guiu hears the confession of some of the prisoners, and then prepares communion. No one sleeps that night: lit by a grey stoney light that comes in through the window, giving their faces a hint of their future cadaverous appearance (although as time passes the grey thickens and the darkness becomes real), the prisoners stay awake listening through the wall to noises in the corridor or seeking illusory comfort in memories or in a last conversation. Sánchez Mazas and Pascual are stretched out on the floor, leaning their backs against the cold wall, their legs covered by one insufficient blanket; neither of them will remember exactly what they talked about during that scant night, but both will recall the long silences punctuating their secret meeting, the whispers of their companions and the sound of their sleepless coughing, the rain falling, indifferent, assiduous, black and freezing on the paving stones in the courtyard and the cypresses in the garden; and it keeps falling until dawn of 30 January slowly changes the darkness of the windows for the sickly whitish, ghostly colour that stains the atmosphere in the cell like a premonition at the moment the jailer orders them out.
No one has slept, everyone seems to have been awaiting that moment and, as if drawn by the urgency of resolving the uncertainty, they obey with somnambulant diligence and gather in the courtyard with another similar-sized group of prisoners, to bring the number to fifty. They wait a few minutes, docile, silent and soaked, under a fine rain and a sky thick with clouds, and finally a young man appears in whose indistinct features Sánchez Mazas recognizes the indistinct features of the warden of the Uruguay. He tells them they are going to be put to work at an aviation camp under construction in Banyoles and orders them to form into ten lines, five deep; while obeying, unthinkingly taking the first place on the right in the second line, Sánchez Mazas feels his heart bolt: in the grip of panic, he realizes the aviation camp can only be an excuse — senseless to build one with the Nationalist troops launching a definitive offensive a few kilometres away. He begins to walk at the head of the group, unhinged and shaking, unable to think clearly, absurdly searching the blank faces of the armed soldiers lining the road for a sign or a glimmer of hope, trying in vain to convince himself that at the end of that journey what awaited him was something other than death. Beside him, or behind him, someone is trying to justify or explain something he doesn't hear or doesn't understand, because every step he takes absorbs all his attention, as if it might be his last; beside him or behind him, the sickly legs of José Maria Poblador say, Enough, and the prisoner collapses in a puddle and is helped up and dragged back to the monastery by two soldiers. A hundred and fifty metres on from this, the group turns left, leaves the road and goes up into the forest along a path of chalky soil that opens out into a clearing: a wide expanse surrounded by pine trees. From out of the woods booms a military voice ordering them to halt and face left. Terror seizes the group, which stops in its tracks; almost all its members automatically turn to the left, but dread confuses the instinct of others who, like Captain Gabriel Martín Morito, turn to the right. For an instant, which feels eternal, Sánchez Mazas thinks he's going to die. He thinks the bullets that are going to kill him will come from behind his back, which is where the commanding voice had come from, and that, before he dies from bullets hitting him, they'll have to hit the four men lined up behind him. He thinks he's not going to die, that he's going to escape. He thinks that he can't escape to the back because the shots will come from there; nor to his left, because he'd run back out to the road and the soldiers; nor ahead, because he'd have to jump over a wall of eight utterly terrified men. But (he thinks) he can escape towards the right, where no more than six or seven metres away a dense thicket of pines and undergrowth holds a promise of hiding. To the right, he thinks. And he thinks: Now or never. At that moment several machine guns stationed behind the group, exactly where the commander's voice had come from, begin to sweep the clearing; trying to protect themselves, the prisoners instinctively seek the ground. By then Sánchez Mazas has reached the thicket, he runs between pines that scratch his face with the pitiless clatter of the machine guns still ringing in his ears, finally trips providentially and is flung, rolling over mud and wet leaves, into the ravine at the edge of the plateau, landing in a swampy ditch at the mouth of a stream. Because he rightly imagines that his pursuers imagine him trying to get as far away from them as possible, he decides to shelter there, relatively close to the clearing — cringing, panting, soaking wet and with his heart pounding in his throat, covering himself as best he can with leaves and mud and pine boughs, hearing his unfortunate companions receiving coups de grâce — and then the barking of the dogs and the shouts of the Carabineros urging the soldiers to find the fugitive or fugitives (because Sánchez Mazas doesn't yet know that, infected by his irrational impulse to abscond, Pascual has also managed to escape the massacre). For a length of time he has no idea whether to measure in minutes or hours, while he scratches ceaselessly at the ground to cover himself in mud till his fingernails are bleeding and hopes that the incessant rain will prevent the dogs from finding his trail, Sánchez Mazas keeps hearing shouts and barks and shots, until at some moment he senses something shift behind him and urgently turns around, cringing like a cornered rat.