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RENATO Emilio-Adolfo Rivero
Punishment
Pavilion
Summer of
1965 The punishment pavilion was isolated from the rest of the penitentiary. Each man had a cell, shorts (his only clothing), and usually a beard lengthened by weeks, or even months, of growth. The jailers subjected us to long periods of food deprivation – their thinking being, that the hunger would break our resistance. Only after prolonged weight loss would they increase our daily rations, probably to avoid the expense of sending us to the hospital. Or perhaps they felt, as many torturers discover, that their methods had reached a point of diminishing returns. By this time, I thought myself immune to the vagaries of mood or feeling. I was beyond grief, beyond afflictions, and impervious to trauma. I had spent years in conspiracies and had seen friends sacrificed in the fight against Batista. Some died under interrogation; some were torn to shreds by Batista’s henchmen. After Batista’s overthrow, I felt triumphant, buoyed by an unlimited enthusiasm. Then doubts crept in. What had our revolution won? I felt anger over another chieftain’s designs and fumed at the totalitarian course the new government was taking. Then I had to make the difficult, heart-wrenching decision to raise arms against what we had thought was our Government. Again, I had gone underground to live; again, I had run the gauntlet of traitors, and dead conspirators. I looked at the ruins of my life, the projects that had crumbled, the fallout that had taken so many friends. I felt the distance from my children and the lack of female companionship. I felt awash in the incoherence of my life. The boundaries of my life had become the G-2 cells, State Security, The Investigations Bureau, La Cabaña and the Isle of Pines prisons. The only human contact I had was either with the guards, debased by their brutality and made idiots by Castro´s sermons of hate, or with the prisoners, confused and alienated from each other by the mutual suspicion that the man you were talking to could be an informer. And now I had reached the ninth circle of hell: the punishment pavilion, playground for the most sadistic and perverted military and militia. Where prisoners resorted to their last reserves to escape moral collapse and to avoid drowning in desperation. Many of us, veterans of the prisons, had learned to dodge any sign of weakness. Every man kept himself under tight surveillance lest a vulnerability peek through. Such constant vigilance bred the strength that allowed men to survive unbroken. We changed cells frequently. By mid 1955, Alfredo Izaguirre was in my hall. Our cells were not far from each other; all the cells faced the same wall a meter and a half away. He and I used to play blind chess. Since we had no paper or pencil, or any materials that might serve as a board or pieces, we used our imagination. We would shout moves to each other, while keeping in our minds the image of the chess pieces on the board. Playing chess despite the squalor, vigorously exercising our imagination to spite the deprivation – these practices helped us feel like human beings. Then one day, Renato appeared. Renato was a little toad, or perhaps a frog, and barely an inch long. One morning, upon waking, I spied him on the edge of one of the aluminum dishes that I kept, filled with water, on the floor. His unexpected company elated me. I took special care, when moving about the cell, not to hurt or frighten him. He was, apparently, a quiet and self-assured being, for even when I sat beside him on the floor, watching him attentively, he remained serene, almost aloof. He seemed untouched and untouchable by anything that might upset his composure. To give him wholeness in our fractured world, I gave him a name: Renato. Watching him became my entertainment. When I received my meager rations, I made sure to leave a grain of rice or a crumb of bread on the floor. But I never saw him touch them. Renato’s appearance was a brief reprieve from my solitude and isolation. That simple creature was, for me, an oasis in the desert of human brutality. In the five or six days that he was in my cell, I barely realized how good his company made me feel. How could the feelings of a rational man, one hardened by years of bloody civil strife, be aroused by the fortuitous presence of a thumb-sized amphibian? A creature that could form no relationship with a human being? Or could it? I know this: with my companions in the punishment pavilion, I shared stories of the little toad like parents share pictures of their children. One morning I realized he was gone. Twenty five years later, I still remember my sadness when, with arms and forehead braced by the iron bars, I confided to Alfredo: “Renato left…”
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