But for now we went wandering through the murky halls of the air terminal. I thought of buying some reading matter for the flight. At the news stand a magazine named Times turned out to be a religious tract. I picked up a newspaper call The Jewish News but that proved to be several sheets of advertisements for furniture removers. And the pages were yellow and coated with dust. A little further along the vast mezzanine floor a young lady tried to tempt us with some souvenirs: she wanted to sell my wife a nose-ring of dull silver encrusted with several tiny green emeralds. At this my wife wrinkled her nose and sniffed disdainfully.
Yes, it was time to set out for the airfield. We walked out to the car parked by the kerb. But here Father stopped us. Don Espejuelo, he announced, has gone missing and would have to be found before we may continue. It is not done to discard one’s family en route. Nobody knows where he’s disappeared to, no, not a living soul. And with this he got into the car, adjusted his wide-brimmed hat and smoothed down his double-breasted suit, and drove off with a laugh.
The warder stood in the entrance hall looking down at his shoes with a sorry expression. One black shoe was snub-nosed and high, the other one — black too — was very long and limp and creased. He lifted his mournful gaze to us: no, he felt obliged to declare, Don Espejuelo will never be found, nor will he ever come back. Because he has absconded with the shoes. (Damn.)
Max Sec (Beverly Hills)
1. He gets up after a restless night. Brigadier-General Murphy. Slicks down his yellow hair. Looks in the mirror, into his red-rimmed eyes. Worms the moustache around. He has a secure establishment in his care. All gates mastered, guards posted in watchtowers. Dead areas locked at both ends and key-carrier cooped up within. But safe enough? Those minds, those hearts. What if. .? Bastards!
So he has a high wall built around the no-go terrain, with TV-controlled steel-plated double gates the only egress. Now it is truly a maximum security. (Young deer let loose to roam over green lawns between wall and fort. He has a weakness for life.)
2. He gets up after the nightmares of half-sleep. What if? One never knows with these traitors and terrorists, these rapists and assassins. HQ was adamant about that: “Let one, just one bandit get away and you might as well run with him!” The perspiration is chilly on his back. They are always scheming, these dogs; they have visions of freedom; turn away and they start digging, climbing, feinting, thinking, corrupting the boere.
He has the roof torn from the prison to be replaced by a grid of steel, a catwalk permitting the armed guardians to keep a constant eye on their charges. Now, ah, this boop is break-proof.
3. He surfaces gagging from the tortures of sleep. The yellow hair all tousled. Brigadier-General Murphy. Small blood vessels darken his vision. The trembling of his legs. Careful, you may nick yourself with the razor. This damn stubble. My God, what if? It takes just one suicidal escape, one only, to have this whole magnificent impregnable maximum-security possy crumble to ridicule.
He has an electronic eye installed in every cell. We shall have surveillance twenty-five hours a day. Snoop lenses sweep the corridors, eliminate the blind angles. Tape recorders are connected to the toilet bowls. From the ramparts he goes to the catwalk. Squints down at the vestiges of humanity below. There’s a rash around his neck, just inside the collar, itching terribly. “I want those courtyards covered by wire netting im-me-diate-ly! You think the sly sonsabitches can’t scale four metres of sheer wall? And if a helicopter were to — Jesus Christ!”
4. He orders, reviews, refines. Every prisoner must be escorted by a guard-with-dog at all times of the day or the night.
5. No more contact between inmates.
6. The warder-with-dog shall get into the bath with the prisoner. Yes, man, of course the State will issue you with overalls for the purpose!
7. All eating utensils shall henceforth be of plastic. No mirrors anywhere. No exercise outside. (Or inside.) No more smoking. Quiet there! And your grandmother’s cunt!
8. Listen. The dogboer-and-dog shall spend the nights in bed with the convict, man on man, a second warder with FN and baton and whistle and walkietalkie outside the locked, mastered, bolted, padlocked, padlocked, padlocked, steel-reinforced cell door and inside grill. Changing of the shift at midnight.
Ah, but it is good to run a rehabilitation centre fulfilling its first and foremost function: to keep the wards of the State in safe-keeping.
9. The night was an agony. Behind his eyelids, even with orbs staring into the dark, he visualized all the horrors. The headlines. The sanctions. The total breaking. Today, at noon, an escapee from Maxim um Security. . Oh sweet dear compassionate cruel merciless God. What if? What the fuckin’ hell if, for instance. .! He is an old wreck, crushed by responsibility, by the spectre of overthrow.
He has the prisoners, the blind worms, taken out into the central courtyard, stood against a wall, one by one, murmuring, shot.
Now the prisoners are in maximum security, sir.
10. He struggles up, suffocating through layer upon layer of not having slept at all.
The Break
The “Terminus” — so called because it is the worst degree of a series of detention places and for the large majority of those landing there it also means the final point of their peregrination (but the correct name is the Calabozō) — is housed in a tent of enormous proportions. The roof of this tent, one can call it a circus tent, is very high. From up top banners descend, long dark-dyed flags, trapezes on oily ropes, and tatters of another material. The inside space is entirely occupied by cages made of steel bars in which the prisoners are held, two storeys high but without solid floors (everywhere the grid only) so that people can spy on one another from every angle. Between the stacked cages, every stack consists of a block covering nearly 100 x 100 metres, there are streets wide enough for lorries to pass. The streets are slushy with pools of water. High above all this the sombre roof of the tent sings and blows as if it were a membrane moved by breathing, an infundibulum perhaps. It is so high that all sounds caused by it are inaudible. Only rarely a dull ruffle is understood, or a sudden bang. It may be a flock of angels, involved in a quick accident or an altercation — you then think. Nobody underneath this roof, in any event certainly not the prisoners, can know whether it is day or night outside, grey-time or sunshine, summer or winter or autumn. In strategic places along the miry streets poles have been erected, with pale light bulbs burning permanently. But it is always too gloomy to be able to see from one end of the tent to the other.
The lorries come to remove those condemned to die when it is the time to execute them. (In the tent one referred to “prisoners of death” or PODs.) The place of dying is apparently somewhere in the city. On the flat bed of the truck is a steel cage exactly like the units in the tent itself. Armed guards in khaki overalls make the reprobates climb on to the lorry and then into the cage. The prisoners have their wrists handcuffed. While they are being led to the lorry, often with blows and curses, they sing their leave-taking songs. Usually they are already in a trance and the corners of their mouths are stained by a whitish froth. The prisoners remaining behind swing like apes from their own bars to shout good-byes and other encouragements, hasta la vista compadre, vaya con Dios! or to sing in company nearly as defiantly as those being removed. Some just look on with stiff jaws and the knuckles of the hands clenched around the staves white also.