rojo

I suppose, as I sit here wiling away my time counting the cracks in the floor, I should be remembering my life in tears. I should be depressed; I should recall the feel of the sea against my bare legs, the taste of my mother’s cocido, the scent of my lover’s hair with anguish. I should recall these things with bitter contempt. After all, I am a prisoner. To my captors, I am barely human. I am a number, I am nothing. I am in tattered clothes. I have forgotten what I my face looks like. I see my hands, the hands of a poet, now cracked and calloused. There is dirt beneath my fingernails. What once was is no longer, however, I am indeed who I once was. I was then, I am now, and I will be until I die.

            Somehow, 1936 seems like a hundred years ago. I often wonder if I have died. Somewhere far off, my body lays, tortured, rotting in the sun and all that is left of me now is my spirit. My hands are mist, perhaps. The thought of this makes me glum until I think that perhaps in a year, spring’s first poppies will bloom from my chest. But, no. I know I am not dead. I know my hands are still flesh. But, I find it hard to believe fewer than two-hundred years have passed since my imprisonment by the Nationalists. I cannot see sun or sky. I do not know how many hundreds of hours have passed.

To look back to 1936 seems to look back a life time. Recalling the last goodbye to my love is akin in my mind to recalling a childhood visit to Málaga. 1936 is a distant, fading memory and all I have learned from wasting away on this stone floor is that time is entirely relative.

I have not yet learned to cease thinking, as perhaps they wished I would. I have not yet learned to disregard the pain of others. I have not learned to disregard hunger and poverty where it is rampant and I have not learned to turn a blind eye to disappearances. They call us “los rojos”. “The reds”. They call us this as though it were something soiled, as though the word were dank and caked in filth. I would like to cut my arms and show them that my blood is red. Whether or not they would believe me, their blood, too, is red. I would like to show them that the matador’s capote is red. Red as our flag; have they forgotten our flag is also red? Have they forgotten we are all one? We are all red on the inside.

They say “red” with contempt, the same contempt missing from my voice when I say the “freedom”. Just like they have stolen everything else, they have stolen my contempt, my hate, my restlessness and I am left with nothing. Nothing but memories that I know I will never experience again in this life. These things are gone.

And yet, I come to the realisation that I am not angry. In the wake of such horror and in my current degraded state, I face death with a solemn happiness. There are hundreds of thousands of people who live their lives dead before death, not realising what lies at their numbed fingertips. They hurt without hurting, they cry without crying, they make love without loving and they say they are free.

I am free.

I am behind bars, imprisoned by wayward ideals, but I am free. I am in possession of nothing, yet I have everything.  I am thankful for the life I have lived and despite being behind bars, my thoughts are still mine; in fact, they are my only possessions. My pain is my own, the tears I’ve shed are my own, as well. The passion I’ve felt, the laughter I’ve let spill from my lips, the memories I’ve kept; all of these things set me free from my prison. When I die, it will be only after having lived until deserving death. And once I do, the reddest poppies in all of Spain will bloom from the hollow of my wasted breast.