The Rope

A Story by Allan Seager

IT WAS hardly a trial. They seemed to want to establish accurately who he was, that the man before them was he and no other, that was all. They knew what he had done, better than he did himself (for the last months had run fluidly together in his memory, and only a few things, irrelevancies, stood out). He was there to answer questions, they said, not to make any statements; not that he intended to, not that he had any statements to make. There was a sergeant who kept telling him to stand at attention, although it was only a captain who was questioning him. He had never seen any of them before, which was perhaps just as well. It would be hell to be condemned by your acquaintances.

They had commandeered the nunnery for a prison. (What had become of the nuns?) And they were using one of the medical rooms for the tribunal, the surgery perhaps. The captain sat at an enameled table. There was a metal sink in the corner, and the comrade acting as stenographer sat on an adjustable enameled stool with his pad on his knee. The place smelled faintly of formaldehyde, but he did not think they had selected it because he was to be cleansed of anything here. It was just chance.

Now that he was captured, the nervous tension of the last weeks began to loosen, and he was not able to fix his attention on the proceedings very clearly, although he knew he ought to. At last the captain said he would be held in solitary confinement until current investigations could be completed. This meant he had become a person of importance. They expected ransom or an exchange, otherwise they would have set a term, ten years, perhaps twenty-five. He straightened himself and stood looking over the captain’s head. Any open contempt and he knew they would beat him up, casually, and that was pointless now. He had already begun to wait.

“One last thing, Foz,” the captain said. “Try to commit suicide, and we’ll shoot you.”

“Sir,” he said, still looking six inches above the other’s head.

Before the two guards could lay a hand on him he walked toward the door, and they did not touch him all the way to his cell. The door was open, a plain oak door, but it had a chest-high opening in it with a hinged cover. It was freshly cut. The Reverend Mother would have had no reason to come spying on her nuns. They did not shove him in. They let him walk. The door shut, and he heard the bolt thrust to.

In the cell was a bed with an inch-thick pad on it, a rolled blanket, and a bucket in the corner. He lay down on the bed and pulled the blanket over him. He was exhausted, he discovered. Only two nights of the last thirty had he slept in a bed, the others in the open, often without cover. Without thinking further, he went to sleep at once.

He woke up. He got up off the bed to look out the window. It had been about eleven in the morning when he had left the captain, and he wanted to see the light so he could estimate how long he had slept. He found that his window opened into a corridor, and craning his neck, he could not see any windows on the far side of it. He touched the stone wall. It was not cold.

He had known many who had been captured, a few who had come out again, some escaped. but not from this prison, one or two set free. They had told him it was important to know what day it was. Some sort of order had to be kept. You could not let yourself sink into the recesses of your mind.

Every bit of metal had been taken from him, and they had refused him even a weak string to use as a belt. He stood on one foot and tried to see the heel of his boot. He glanced up at the ceiling, but he realized he had already noticed there was no electricity. He ran his linger carefully over the boot heel. There were two protuberances, nails. He moved the bed away from the wall and felt along the dim stone blocks. On the second one above the floor, the second one from the corner, he scratched the first number, a 2. Then he bent down. With his eyes close to it, he could make it out. He finished the date, 2/3/38. He would make one scratch after each two feedings.

The cell was six steps long, and he could not quite touch both walls it he spread his arms out wide. The door was solid. There was no use for further inspection. He had never been in this nunnery before. He had no plans to escape.

They had said — the former prisoners — it was necessary to establish a routine, to find certain things to do each day, and, above all, to occupy one’s mind so as to glide into the future without thinking about it, to eat it up without tasting. Very well, he would be fed twice a day. As soon as the food had had time to digest, he would do the calisthenics he had learned in the sports club. At once he saw himself on the soccer held, Luis with his knobby knees in front of him, bending as he himself was bending to touch his left toe with his right hand, and Carlos beside Luis bending also, a bright day. Luis had died in the Guadarrama, and Carlos had escaped to France after the first gunshots on the Rambla, the bastard. Never again would he be as lithe and full of hope as then.

He caught himself, seeing the danger. You must not think of the future because hope was bound to the future. The past was all you had, but you must not color the past with feelings. You could act it over again in your head, but you must keep it pure. If you could not make a documentary movie out of your past, plain, uncut, uncolored, black and white, with the emotion kept out of each frame of this odd film, you would find yourself, they had said, wallowing in anger at your own stupidity in being caught, or in fear that they might want some information they thought you had, and you might end with your eyelids cut off, like the fellow who got back to his unit before he went blind. Any or all of these led to pity for yourself, and that fried your brains.

He heard someone call “Supper!” in the corridor and the banging of tin plates. In a few minutes he got his, beans and rice and a small stale piece of bread. He ate, cleaned his plate with the bread, ate that. He had slept only six or seven hours, and he could feel himself getting ready to sleep again. The guard knocked and took the plate and spoon.

“What day is it?” he asked.

The guard merely grinned. It was this confusion of time they were counting on. They wanted him damaged, even dead. Why, then, hadn’t they shot him at once, out of hand? It might be that there was a difference between the official policy, which set forth that he, a guerrilla leader, was valuable for ransom or exchange, and the personnel who executed the policy, and who hated him because he might have shot up a brother or a cousin. He might have, at that.

IT TOOK him a week to get rested. He slept seventeen or eighteen hours a day and dozed the rest of the time except when he was doing his exercises or eating. During this time it was no problem to know what to do with himself.

Then one day, after pulling and stretching himself, he found that he was not sleepy. He was ready for that. He had decided to walk every place he had ever been. He began with his earliest memory, walking along the shore in the sand, but after a few hundred steps, six and turn, six and turn, his memories of his early boyhood overlapped those of his school days when he had run down the beach, leaping and throwing sand with a group of boys, and later, chasing girls down it. In the interest of efficiency he determined to walk twenty miles and let that stand for all his travel beside the great tideless sea. “But why am I being efficient? I have plenty of time,” he said to himself. “It is to prevent confusion, to keep off the bugbears of love and friendship.” To walk the ten miles south from the harbor and back took him two days in his cell, and he walked barefoot to save his boots. He would need them later, for he did not suppose his family was still living to give him money for boots, and his friends would be dead or suspicious.

Abruptly on the tenth day his cell door opened and a lieutenant he had never seen came in with two guards. The break in the routine was almost like a holiday, and he had to guard himself, he realized suddenly, against being glad to see the strangers. The lieutenant had a flashlight. By its glow he inspected every block of stone and the mortar around it while the guards shook the blanket and worked every inch of the mattress through their fingers to find anything he might have hidden. Then they made him strip, shook out his clothes, and turned out the pockets of his trousers. The lieutenant snapped off the flashlight and went out with the guards. They had spoken only once. If the lieutenant had seen his calendar on the wall, he had taken no formal notice of it.

He continued walking, at first to school, looking sternly at the remembered faces of his friends as if he had never seen them before, then the errands for his mother and grandfather, the street play, and the way to the soccer field, to the classrooms at the high school, the first surreptitious trip to the bullring to see Lalanda, and the nighttime strolls past the houses of girls. The train journey to Madrid and the few car rides he had taken gave him trouble he couldn’t recall the countryside well enough to walk through it plausibly, although he did walk up the shore road nearly to Port-Bou, a jaunt he had taken when he was seventeen.

Ten days later the lieutenant made his second inspection and left without speaking to him. He realized he would be inspected regularly, perhaps until he came to expect it at ten-day intervals, and then they might fool him. But he would be able to laugh at them afterward, for he was doing nothing that required their searches.

He found that he would have to stop walking. It was the food, not enough of it. He could feel his ribs stand out under his shirt, and the day they took him to the bath, he looked his naked body up and down. The walking was taking too much energy.

He was ready for that, also. He lay on his bed hour after hour playing over all the soccer games. When he had exhausted them, he reviewed the guerrilla actions, beginning when he was a private when seven men would waylay a truck and shoot it up. If it exploded, they would not bother to go near it. If it did not, it meant that it contained food or sometimes clothing and medical supplies, and they would return loaded. Later, the trains, stayingclose in gullies or on ridges so they could get in the grenades, then retiring to wait for the emergency repair outfit and blowing that, too. And when he was a lieutenant, the false roadblocks to learn passwords so they could fool the sentries at airfields or supply dumps, and the night attacks there. At first he tried to divert the satisfaction he had felt at his successes — he had been very good — but after a month of this, he gave up and said, “What harm can it do? It’s all I have.”

Perhaps it was this letting go of his emotion that led him to the girls. He had not known many, and he could recall in splendid clarity every moment, every shade of expression, every night he had spent with each. Sitting on the edge of his bed, thumping a fist into his hand, he wondered if he would ever again be clean-shaven, in fresh linen, with a girl who would be laughing beside him while they walked somewhere they could be alone. He pulled the bed away from the wall and counted the marks. He had been there four days over seven months. This had been time enough for a ransom or an exchange. Had all the attacks failed? Were they losing the war? Worse, had they forgotten all about him? He jumped up and began to beat on the door, shouting.

After a minute he heard the bolt shot back, and the door opened. It was the little fat guard who fed him every day. He had a Mauser pistol in his hand, and he was grinning his usual sly grin.

“How goes the war? Who is winning?” he shouted.

The guard motioned him backward with his pistol.

“Have you bastards taken Madrid? Tell me!” he shouted.

Still grinning, the guard tapped his own ear and shook his head. The guard shut the door, bolted it, and went up the corridor scuffing his feet.

Why would they have a deaf guard? Were they so sure no one would escape that they dared use a deaf man who could hear nothing? He would never see daylight again, no more fighting, no more girls, no more anything. He sat down on the bed, panting.

He noticed his own panting. Why should a little shouting make him pant? He was getting weak, going to pieces. This was what they wanted, of course. Another month, two months, and he would get sick. They would plead no medicines, and he would die in this dim, filthy hole.

He had to find something he could do. Thinking was no good.

IT WAS getting to be cold weather, and there was no heat. He picked up his blanket and threw it around his shoulders. He looked at it for the first time, it was a good wool blanket, tightly woven, perhaps from the nuns. The ends had been left rough, unsewed, and a couple of threads were working themselves loose from the warp. Without paying any attention to it, he began to tease one small thread loose, thinking all the while about what he could find to do, some action that might take his mind off his life, this cell, his future. He realized he had found it. Slowly, painstakingly, he worked on the little thread. He could barely see it, and he pushed it away from the warp threads with his nails. At last he had it free.

He held it up dangling in front of him with a feeling of accomplishment, a few fibers of dirty wool twisted into a tiny thread. He laid it carefully on the floor where he could see it and began work on the other. At the end of the day, after his second feeding, he had the two loose threads free. The next day he would start work on the body of the blanket where the threads were tightly woven. For the first time since his arrest he looked forward to the coming of another day.

It was hard, close work. He learned all about the strength and springiness of wool fibers. In three days, he had seven threads lying side by side on the floor without having broken a one. He forgot to do his calisthenics. He sat hunched over the blanket until his muscles ached. When nine threads lay side by side on the floor, it occurred to him that the guard might possibly catch sight of them, and he spent a whole day twisting the threads into a cord — it kept coming apart, and he had to start over again many times. When it was finished, he tested it. It was quite strong.

The next day he heard voices in the corridor. It was time for the inspection. He shoved the cord under the mattress and pulled it out again at once. One of the first things they did was take up the mattress, and they would find it. His pockets were no good they would find it there. He stood in the middle of his cell, shaking in panic. Just as they shot back the bolt, he stuffed the cord into his mouth. Coiled, it was not big. He was standing at attention with his middle fingers along the seams of his trousers when the lieutenant and the guards came in.

Now that he had found something he could give his whole attention to, he worked more slowly, even more carefully, as if he had a trade. He could hardly wait to finish his morning beans and rice to get to work again. He grew expert, and a thread worked loose seemed to be a reward, a milestone, but a reward for what, or a milestone along which road, he no longer considered. He was getting thinner, but he did not notice it, and sometimes, if he stood up suddenly to stretch, he blacked out, but it lasted only a second or two, and he accepted it as if it were part of his job.

He noticed his dreams, though. His nights became restless and horrible. At a slow gait, sometimes creeping, he crossed hostile landscapes only to end these journeys doing quite simple things that were wrong, things to damn him forever, he knew, yet familiar things on wiry grass, under inimical trees, watched by heavy knowledgeable stones and houses. Often he would wake up sweating and panting. Twice he found the cord around his neck, but he could not tell whether he had put it there or whether the guard had known about it all the time and had tiptoed into his cell and arranged it as a hint. But he laughed at that. If they knew about the cord, they were waiting for him to use it, but he was not going to use it at all.

The cord, twisted tightly, grew almost to the thickness of a pencil, and at the next inspection he again concealed it in his mouth, on his tongue with his teeth apart to make room, and his lips just closed over them.

After this inspection, it took him three days to realize that already the cord was getting too thick to hide another time. He felt as if he had been hit a heavy blow with a club, and he sank on his bed with the cord hanging limply across his knees. At first he felt only the loss of his work.

He coiled up the rope and put it in his mouth. The work of the last three days had made it too big a mass for him to shut his lips over. He poked at it with his fingers, trying to arrange it, but it was useless. He could not close his lips. The lieutenant would notice. He would take it out of his mouth. They were such sticklers for form, they would have another trial. They would point out that a prisoner could have only one use for a rope. They would remind him that attempted suicides were punished by shooting. Fear grew over him like another skin.

He jumped up and looked out the window. If he threw the rope out into the corridor, they would find it. He knew already that no place in his cell would hide it.

“There must be a simple way to hide it. There must be,” he said aloud.

He paced the floor and did not feel his weakness.

That night he did not sleep. He still paced and turned, paced and turned, tears of chagrin running unfelt down his face for all the work he had lost.

“There must be a simple way. Am I going crazy or what? Some simple way.” If he could have got at his brain to squeeze it, he would have done it.

At last he thought of it, the simple way. He sat down, took up the rope and began to untwist it. Before that evening’s supper, he had one tiny thread worked free. He smoothed the blanket over his knees and began to weave the thread back into it.