The signal for the lunch break was a cannon shot from the Castillo. The iron gates of the prison opened with a hideous grating sound and a decrepit pickup truck drove out, bringing the food for the prisoners and guards. My uncle and I were given a portion from a large aluminium dish, invariably a greasy stew of rice, meat, beans and bananas. I took only a few mouthfuls. I preferred one of the hard biscuits from the basket, although they always gave me hiccups.
In the afternoon everyone worked at half-speed. The sun burnt even fiercer and the heat became almost unbearable. The pickaxes went into the ground at longer intervals, the wagons were filled more slowly and the wheelbarrows were pushed even more languidly. The guards sat on the mounds and the sweat marks around the armpits of their shirts grew larger and larger. The only one who did not malinger was my uncle. He spoke just as fervently about Our Lord in the afternoons as in the mornings.
Towards sunset, when it was time to go, my uncle would discover yet again that the basket was still full, and would ask me reproachfully, “Why didn’t you distribute the things among the prisoners?” But he never waited for an answer. He took the basket and hurried over to the prisoners already lined up waiting to be counted before marching back to the Castillo.
Once on our way home I asked my uncle about the thin man with the dead eyes and about what crime he had committed, and my uncle answered abruptly, “That’s El Verdugo. He’s driven by the forces of darkness. His soul is damned. You mustn’t bother with him.” This noncommittal reply only increased my sympathy for the man on the boulder.
After those trips to the Castillo I would lie in bed in the evening utterly exhausted, my back aching from all the sitting. Yet it took me some time to get to sleep. I would listen to the guitar music that drifted into my room almost every evening from the alleyway behind our house. It was usually a sombre, monotonous melody unaccompanied by any singing, which I found strange, as most people who play the guitar seem to feel that they have to sing as well. Between the strumming I heard other sounds: the cannon shots from the Castillo, the whistles of the guards, the sharp hissing sound when the air compressor was switched off, the loud clang when the tailgate of the pickup was dropped, the ceaseless clatter of pickaxes on the rocky ground, the rattling voice of my uncle, who could speak at such lightning speed about God in the work area of the prison. And once again I smelt the odours of the day: the freshly baked bread at the bus stop in the mornings, the starch from my uncle’s clothes as he sat bolt upright beside me on the bus, the orange and pineapple that rose from the basket, the reek of rum on the guards’ breath as they talked to my uncle, and most of all the smell of newly dug earth and crushed blocks of stone. I also saw an unending succession of images floating towards me: the curious grimaces my uncle made when he talked to the prisoners; the sweating, trembling flesh of the workers as they thrust their pneumatic drills into the earth; the clouded eyes of the man who never spoke, the man my uncle had called a “thug” and who exhaled cigarette smoke in spiralling wisps that dissolved like question marks in the windless afternoon; the long shadows of the convicts as they marched back to the Castillo in the twilight. Then I would shut my eyes even tighter, trying also to close my ears to all sound and to breathe as gently as possible: I strained to keep my body still, avoiding even the slightest movement and banishing all thoughts except those of falling asleep. It was on an evening such as this, when it was already dark and deathly quiet, that my boy’s hands discovered the taut hardness and the unfamiliar warmth in my loins. But then at once I heard my uncle speaking, in a voice more thunderous than the cannon of the Castillo, of the hellfire that awaited all sinners.
SIX
I was often left by myself during the twenty months I spent on the mainland. After lunch my uncle always went out to declaim biblical texts or to convene mysterious meetings in derelict houses. He did not return until the evening, sometimes very late. His wife was constantly travelling into the city or out into the countryside to sell her contraband to wealthy people and plantation owners. This was how she supported her husband. I was left at home with an elderly maid who left at four in the afternoon. Yet I did not feel abandoned. That was the time when I learned to love solitude and books. Even now I look back on the reclusive years of my youth with a certain fondness.
On the frequent days when there was no school, my uncle would sometimes teach me math, Spanish, biblical history and chess in the mornings. In the afternoons, when he had gone out, I secretly read the books in his bookcase. This wasn’t too easy at the start, but soon Spanish ceased to present any great difficulty. With few exceptions they were religious books, and I could not always understand the difficult passages. Eventually, because I was reading so much about religion and matters of faith and how man should live, I developed an intense curiosity about the other side of the coin. I yearned for “bad” books — but I was to have a long wait. In the meantime, however, I indulged my own fantasies, creating characters that I made do things I myself had never done. These fantasies, which sometimes lasted for hours and to which I was constantly adding new episodes, gave me great satisfaction and at the same time a sense of sinfulness, a contradiction that I blamed on the empty, silent house. I lived in a no-man’s-land seemingly equidistant from bad and good. The image of my uncle would loom up before me, dressed in immaculately pressed clothes, each hair on his head kept in its place by the green pomade that he rubbed in each morning, its musty smell still reminiscent of candles that had just been snuffed out. His starched clothes emphasised the tenseness in his body. At his side, his cool, calm, stately wife was always in her Sunday best. At such moments I felt sorry for my uncle and his wife; I almost hated them and longed to be home again.
Naturally, I did not spend the entire twenty months cooped up in the house like a monk. I had two friends at school whose houses I sometimes visited, and I also went for walks through the city. I went into the country a few times too: our ten-day visit to Chimbarí was particularly memorable.