6

I suppose one day all the newspapers in the country will publish great eulogies of Don Mauricio Valls and sing his praises to the four winds. Our land abounds with characters of his ilk, men who never lack a retinue of flatterers crawling around to pick up the crumbs that fall from their table, once they’ve reached the top. For the time being, before that moment comes, and it will, Mauricio Valls is still just one of many, an outstanding candidate. During these last few months I’ve learned a great deal about him. I know he began as one more bookworm in café gatherings—a mediocre man with no talent or trade who, as usually happens, made up for his failings with an enormous vanity and insatiable hunger for recognition. Estimating that his merits would never earn him a penny or the position he coveted and felt entitled to, he decided to carve out a career for himself, cultivating a clique of like-minded chums with whom to exchange privileges, excluding those he envied.

* * *

Yes, I’m writing in anger and resentment, and I’m ashamed of it, because I no longer know, nor do I care, whether my words are fair or not, whether I’m judging the innocent or whether the fury and the pain that burn me to the core are also blinding me. During these past months I’ve learned to hate, and it terrifies me to think that I’ll die with this bitterness in my heart.

The first time I heard his name was shortly after I found out that David had been captured and imprisoned. At the time Mauricio Valls was a young pup of the new regime, a loyal follower who had made himself a name by marrying the daughter of a tycoon in the business and financial setup that had supported the Fascist Nacionales. Valls had started his days as an aspiring man of letters, but his greatest triumph was to seduce a poor soul and lead her down the aisle: a young woman born with a cruel illness that since adolescence had wasted away her bones and confined her to a wheelchair. A rich and unmarriageable heiress, a golden opportunity.

Valls must have imagined that his move was going to catapult him to the top of the national Parnassus, to some important position in the Academy or some prestigious post in the court of Spanish arts and culture. He hadn’t factored in that there were plenty of others who, like him, had begun to appear like late-blossoming flowers out of nowhere when it was clear which side would win the war, all queuing up for the great day.

When the time came for sharing the rewards and booty, Valls received his with a lesson on the rules of the game. The regime didn’t need poets but jailers and inquisitors. And so, without expecting it, he received an appointment that he considered degrading and well below his intellectual gifts: governor of the prison of Montjuïc Castle. Of course, someone like Valls never wastes an opportunity. He knew how to profit from this reversal of fortune by getting into the regime’s good books, preparing for his future promotion, and while he was at it, incarcerating or exterminating all adversaries, real or imaginary, on his long list, or disposing of them as he pleased. How David Martín ended up on that list is something I will never be able to understand, although he wasn’t the only one. For some reason Valls’s fixation with Martín has been twisted and obsessive.