As soon as Valls found out that David Martín had been sent to La Modelo, he requested his transfer to Montjuïc Castle and didn’t rest until he saw him behind the bars of one of his cells. My husband Juan knew a young lawyer, a customer at the bookshop, called Fernando Brians. I went to see him to find out what I could do to help David. Our savings were practically nonexistent, and Brians, a good man who has become a great friend in these difficult months, agreed to work for free. Brians had contacts in Montjuïc, especially one of the jailers, Bebo, and was able to discover that Valls had some sort of a plan regarding David. Valls knew David’s work, and although he never tired of describing him as “the world’s worst writer,” he was trying to persuade David to write, or rewrite, a sheaf of pages bearing Valls’s name, with which Valls believed he could establish his own reputation as an author, backed up by his new position in the regime. I can just imagine David’s reply.

Brians tried everything, but the charges brought against David were too serious. The only thing left to do was to beg for Valls’s clemency, that the treatment David received in the castle not be what we all imagined. Ignoring Brians’s advice, I went to see Valls. Now I know that I made a mistake, a very serious mistake. By going there, if only because Valls saw me as one more possession belonging to the object of his hatred, David Martín, I made myself the focal point of his greed.

Like so many of his sort, Valls was quickly learning how to take advantage of the anxieties of his prisoners’ relatives. Brians kept warning me. Juan, who suspected that my relationship with David and my devotion for him went beyond a noble friendship, was concerned about my visits to Valls in the castle. “Think of your son,” he would say. And he was right, but I was selfish. I couldn’t just abandon David in that place if there was something I could do. It was no longer a question of dignity. Nobody survives a civil war with even a scrap of dignity to boast about. My error was not realizing that Valls didn’t want merely to possess or humiliate me but to destroy me. He’d finally understood that this was the only real way he had to hurt David and bend him to his will.

All my determination, all the naïveté with which I tried to persuade Valls, was turned against us. It made no difference how much I praised him, how much I pretended to respect and fear him, how much I humiliated myself by begging for his compassion toward his prisoner. Everything I did was just fuel for the fire inside Valls. I now know that in my attempt to help David, I ended up condemning him.

When I realized all this, it was already too late. Bored with his work, with himself, and with the slow arrival of his days of glory, Valls filled his time with fantasies. One of them was that he’d fallen in love with me. I thought that if I could convince him that his fantasy had a future, perhaps Valls would show some magnanimity. But he also got tired of me. In despair, I threatened to unmask him, to make public who he really was and how far his cruelty went. Valls laughed at me and at my ingenuousness, but he wanted to punish me. To wound David and deal him his fatal blow.