Nothing to Report

by Juan José Linz, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Thursday, 18 November 1976

There were three keys to the parish hall of Fuentecerrada, and it is worth being exact about who held them.

The first was on the ring of Father Tomás Ibarrola, with the keys of the church, the sacristy, the rectory and a padlock whose lock nobody could any longer identify. The second belonged to Benigno the sacristan, who was seventy-four and wore it on a bootlace round his neck under his vest. The third hung on a nail behind the counter of the Bar Castilla, across the square, between the calendar from the agricultural bank and a photograph of the 1959 Palencia football team. It was there so that the women of the parish clothing circle could let themselves in on Tuesday afternoons without climbing to the rectory, and Remedios, who kept the bar, had been told by the priest in 1968 to give it to anyone who asked for it in the name of the parish.

Nobody else asked for it. In particular Corporal Eusebio Garrido, commander of the Guardia Civil post of Fuentecerrada, three guards and one corporal, did not ask for it, though on Thursday nights he sat at the table under the nail, close enough to touch it, with his cape over the back of the chair and his tricorn on the seat beside him.

From that table he could see the two windows of the hall. On Thursdays they were lit from nine until about half past eleven. He could count the men going in, and he counted them, as a matter of professional habit and not because the number was asked for: eleven, as a rule, in the beet campaign, when the night shift at the refinery down the valley took some of them, and up to nineteen in summer. He knew them all. He had known most of them since he came to the post in 1971: day labourers, two tractor drivers, three men from the refinery, Saturnino Pajares, who had been a prisoner in the war and worked other men's fields ever since, and, this year, Julián Merino, back from five years on an assembly line in Stuttgart with a German radio, a German overcoat and opinions.

On Fridays Corporal Garrido wrote his weekly report to the company in Palencia. Under the heading Reuniones he wrote Catequesis de adultos en el salón parroquial. Sin novedad. Adult catechesis in the parish hall. Nothing to report. He kept the carbon copies in a shoebox in the post's office, on top of the filing cabinet, because the regulations said copies were to be kept and said nothing about where. There were, by that Thursday, two hundred and nine of them.

It should be said that he was not a brave man and did not think of the reports as courageous. He thought of them as accurate in a certain sense. Father Tomás was in the hall every Thursday, and on the wall above the men's heads there was a crucifix, and the bishop had issued a pastoral letter in 1971 on the duty of Christians to concern themselves with the conditions of labour. The corporal had read the letter. He had read it twice, in fact, at his desk, with a pencil, the way he read the circulars from Madrid, to find out exactly how far it went. In another kind of state he would not have needed to sit in the bar at all; one of the eleven men would have been writing the report for him, and a different office would have been reading both. Here the arrangement was simpler. The church had a hall, and the hall had a door, and the Guardia Civil sat on the other side of the square.

That Thursday the radio above the counter had been giving the vote since the evening news. The Cortes in Madrid, the same Cortes that Franco had appointed, had voted on the government's law for political reform, which provided for a parliament elected by universal suffrage, and the Cortes had approved it, four hundred and twenty-five to fifty-nine, with thirteen abstentions. The men at the bar had listened to the figures without comment. Remedios turned the volume down.

"They've signed their own death certificate," said Ramiro, who drove the post bus to Palencia and was the only man in the bar who said things aloud.

"Then it's the first certificate they've signed properly," said Remedios.

The corporal said nothing. At a quarter to nine Julián Merino crossed the square in his German overcoat and went into the hall, and then the others, in ones and twos; Saturnino last, slowly, with his hands in his jacket pockets. The windows lit. Corporal Garrido drank his coffee, and at half past eleven, when the lights went out, he put on his cape and his hat and walked back to the post through the cold, which in Tierra de Campos in November comes off the plain with nothing to stop it.

Saturday, 20 November 1976

The first anniversary of the death of the Caudillo was marked with a mass, said by Father Tomás at the request of the mayor, Don Faustino Recio, who was also local chief of the Movement. Don Faustino owned the largest holding in the municipality and the only Seat 1430 in it, and he had been appointed mayor in 1964 by the civil governor, who had been at school with his brother. He sat in the front pew in a dark blue shirt under his jacket. The corporal stood at the back, by the door, as protocol required.

After the mass the mayor waited in the sacristy while the priest took off his vestments.

"For the referendum," Don Faustino said, "the Movement in the province is organising information meetings. For the yes. Speakers from Palencia. I want the hall for the evening of the tenth."

"The hall is for parish uses," said Father Tomás.

"It is for informing Catholics about a law the Catholic Church has not opposed."

"Then the speakers from Palencia can inform them in the Town Hall, which has more chairs."

Don Faustino was not a stupid man. He knew how many chairs the Town Hall had, and he knew also that the bishop, who answered to Rome and not to the civil governor, would support the priest if the priest wrote to him, and that Father Tomás wrote letters very quickly. He looked at the vestments being folded into the press.

"And on Thursdays?"

"Catechesis."

"For adults."

"For adults, Don Faustino. The children come on Sundays."

The mayor nodded and went out into the square, and from the sacristy window the priest watched him walk not to his car but to the Guardia Civil post, a two-storey house with the motto of the Corps over the door, Todo por la Patria, everything for the fatherland.

In the office the mayor did not sit down. He took the shoebox down from the top of the cabinet himself, which nobody had ever done, and lifted the lid, and looked at the top copy, and then at the next one, and put the lid back.

"Two hundred," he said.

"Two hundred and ten, Don Faustino."

"Signed."

"Every one."

"Listen to me, Eusebio. In a year there will be an election. You heard the radio. Do you know who reads these?"

"The company."

"Today, the company. When there's an election, who knows. Perhaps a commission. Perhaps a newspaper. Perhaps," the mayor said, and here he lowered his voice, though there was nobody else in the building, "perhaps some colonel who thinks this whole business has gone far enough, and wants to know which posts were asleep while it was going on." He put on his gloves. "I am only telling you that a signature lasts longer than a government. I would think about that before the next Friday."

The corporal thought about it. He thought about it that evening, and on Sunday, and on Monday at the fountain when his wife asked him what was the matter and he said, the cold. He was forty-four years old and had twenty-two years of service. He had a son in the seminary at Palencia and a daughter who wanted to study nursing in Valladolid. On Friday the twenty-sixth he wrote under Reuniones: Catequesis de adultos en el salón parroquial. Sin novedad. He put the carbon in the box. It was the two hundred and eleventh.

Wednesday, 15 December 1976

The polling station was the boys' school, a single room with a stove, the map of Spain rolled up and tied with string so that it could not be said to influence anyone, and the portrait of the King on the wall where the portrait of the Caudillo had hung until the previous winter. Its rectangle was still visible on the plaster around the new one, paler, slightly larger. The ballot box was glass. The electoral roll of Fuentecerrada, on a trestle table, listed four hundred and twelve persons.

Corporal Garrido stood at the door from nine in the morning in his greatcoat, as the law required, and the voters went past him.

The opposition in Madrid and in exile had called for abstention, on the ground that a reform drawn up by the regime's own Cortes was not the break the country needed. The corporal knew this because Ramiro had read it aloud in the bar from a newspaper. He did not know what had been said in the parish hall about it on the previous three Thursdays, but he could see the result arrive, in two kinds.

The first kind were the men who did not come. Julián Merino did not come. At eleven o'clock he was standing on the other side of the square in his German overcoat with his hands in its pockets and his back against the wall of the bar, where the sun reached, and he stayed there most of the day, not speaking to anyone, so that his not voting could be seen. Three of the men from the refinery stood with him for an hour, and then went home.

The second kind came. At half past twelve Saturnino Pajares came across the square in a black suit that had been made for his wedding in 1946 and let out twice. His shoes were polished. He had not voted in 1947, when there was a referendum on the succession, because a clerk at the Town Hall had told him that men with his record were better not seen at the table, nor in 1966, when there was another, because on the day of that one he had gone out to the beet field and worked till dark, alone, to make a point that nobody but his wife understood. He was sixty-one. He gave his name to the table, and the secretary of the Town Hall found it on the roll and read it out, Pajares Bermejo, Saturnino, and he went behind the curtain, which was a blanket hung from a wire, and came out with his envelope and held it for a moment over the slot of the glass box before he let it go.

Then he walked out past the corporal, and the corporal touched the brim of his hat, which he did for every voter that day, and Saturnino looked at the hand on the hat as if it had never been done for him before, which, by a Guardia Civil, it had not.

The count was at eight, with the doors open, as the law also required. Three hundred and thirty-one had voted. Three hundred and nine yes, nine no, thirteen blank. The secretary read the figures twice and wrote them on the form and the presiding officer signed, and the corporal walked to the bar with the secretary, who had to telephone them to Palencia from Remedios's telephone, the post's line being out again.

Julián Merino and Saturnino Pajares were both at the counter. They were standing a yard apart and not talking. Saturnino was still in the black suit. When the secretary had shouted the figures down the telephone and hung up, Saturnino put a coin on the counter, and Remedios poured a brandy and put it down not in front of him but in front of Julián, and Julián looked at it for some time and then drank it.

The corporal, at his table under the nail, did not hear anything that either of them said, because neither of them said anything.

Saturday, 9 April 1977

At seven in the evening of Holy Saturday the radio in the Bar Castilla interrupted its music for a statement from the Ministry of the Interior. The Communist Party of Spain had been entered in the register of political associations. It was legal.

Remedios turned the radio up, which she had never done for any news before. There were seven men in the bar. Ramiro said, "On Holy Saturday," and laughed until he coughed. Nobody else said anything. Two of the men, who had been in the hall every Thursday for four years, finished their wine and went out separately, one of them to the right and one to the left, as if it were still necessary.

Corporal Garrido was not in the bar. He was at the post, where the telephone, which was working that day, rang at a quarter past eight. It was the lieutenant from the company in Palencia, who said that there had been no instructions, that there would perhaps be instructions, that a great many officers in Madrid were extremely unhappy, and that in the meantime the corporal was to do nothing and report everything. The corporal wrote on his blotter, Nada. Todo. Then he put on his best uniform and walked to the church, because the Easter Vigil began at eleven, and he had gone to the Vigil every year since it was moved back to the night.

The new fire was lit in an iron brazier at the church door, in the dark, as the rite prescribed, with the lights of the church out and the people of the parish standing round it in their coats. There were perhaps a hundred of them. The mayor was not among them; the Seat 1430 had been seen leaving for Palencia at nine. Father Tomás in his white cope blessed the fire, and Benigno the sacristan held the great candle, the paschal candle, with its five grains of incense pressed into it in the shape of a cross, and the priest lit it from the brazier and carried it into the dark church, singing Lumen Christi, and the people lit their small candles from it, each from the person in front.

The corporal lit his from the candle of Saturnino Pajares, who stood in front of him. Behind him, when he turned to pass the flame on, was Julián Merino, who had been brought by his mother and was holding an unlit candle in his German glove as if it were an instrument whose use he had been told but did not believe. The corporal tipped his flame against the wick. It took. Julián did not thank him, and the corporal did not expect it, and they went into the church one after the other.

Friday, 15 April 1977

On Thursday the fourteenth the windows of the parish hall were lit from nine until after midnight, and the shutters, for the first time, had not been closed. From the table under the nail the corporal could see the men inside, standing, and Julián Merino on a chair pinning something to the wall beside the crucifix: a sheet of paper printed in red, a hammer and a sickle at its head. There were twenty-three of them. Some he had never seen in the hall before.

On Friday morning at his desk, with the shoebox on top of the cabinet, Corporal Garrido took a fresh report form and a sheet of carbon and wound them into the typewriter. Under Reuniones he sat for a while with his hands on the keys. Then he typed, with two fingers, as he always did: Reunión de la agrupación local del Partido Comunista de España, partido legal, en el salón parroquial. Asistentes: veintitrés. Sin novedad.

He signed it, and put the carbon in the box. It was the two hundred and thirty-first.

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Iōanne Iōsēphō Linziō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Juan José Linz, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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