From My Notebooks In 1974: Fortaleza Part Two

This is Part Two of a dispatch I sent to the Sunday Times after my detention by the Federal Police. If you didn’t read last week’s episode, please do that first:

>>> Fortaleza Part One

At two the team drifted back. There was nowhere to sit. I tried walking about. There was an older sergeant figure with a hard-boiled face. He pointed to the wall. “Fica!” (Stay) he commanded. I protested. Eloquently he mimed a spy taking photographs. His face expressed total disgust. “Fica” he roared and thrust me back to the wall. Nobody raised an eyebrow. At four I was summoned along a corridor and down some back stairs to a cellar to have my own photograph taken, then my fingerprints, each finger and thumb separately, then in groups, all repeated five times. “Do you play the piano?” joked the agent. To me it evoked a quick picture of crushed fingers.

By six I was alone again, with another dish of rice and beans. The hours stretched ahead endlessly. It rained. I noticed two walls were very damp. I tried taking my mind off my predicament but couldn’t. There was nothing to do but think. I slept with a second mattress on top of me to keep off the wet draught.

Saturday began without hope. The office remained empty. There was no work there on Saturdays and as the minutes piled up into hours I slipped further into dejection and fear. Fiercely I studied my prison. I counted the floor tiles (1,520 including fractions). Then the tiles on the wall (1,108). I invented escape plans. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I was expected to escape. What better pretext for doing away with me altogether? This led easily to the notion that perhaps I was being observed and I began to look surreptitiously for a concealed camera or spy-hole.

Only two events interrupted the day. Rice and beans at twelve, and a strange radio message at four. It blared out loud and clear from the second floor. Each phrase was carefully repeated, so that I could understand several words and the general drift. The words were “Ingles . . . Marcello . . .to Rio . . .then . . . to Inglaterra.” The operator replied that he now had the “films of Africa and the coast.” The films could only be mine. The priest in whose company I walked around Iguatú was known as Marcello. I could no longer doubt they had convinced themselves of his guilt and deported him. The little hope I’d kept alive evaporated. I felt sure they suspected me of subversion. They “knew” something was wrong about me. (No.1 confirmed this to a third party later saying, “he smells.” But they would never find evidence. There was none. Eventually, I felt, they would be bound to try to force some out of me and that process, once started, might be irreversible.

Over the next six hours I came to terms with the idea. and wrote a letter to one of the two people I love most (on a scrap of paper I’d saved) and felt calmer as though I had talked to her. That evening Fortaleza had its heaviest cloudburst in 60 years. Water came through the roof and walls, and gurgled in the drains below.

Then the hatch opened and a bearded face appeared, framed in it.

“British?” it asked. I nodded. “Mathews,” it said. “I’m the British vice-consul in Fortaleza.” Nothing I’ve ever heard sounded so sweet as those few words. Spectres which only a few moments before had born down on me with stifling weight shrivelled and faded in the presence of Her Majesty’s representative. God bless consuls everywhere. Mathews could do little to alter the course of events but it was enough to know I could no longer vanish without trace. He tackled his duties squarely and insisted on telephoning No.1 at home. He was told that I was involved in “something very big,” which would be explained on Monday. Meanwhile I was only being retained “with full rights.”

I described what such privileged retention was like and begged him to fetch clothing and shaving things from Sâo Raimundo, and above all news of what was going on. Mathews was tired after a long journey but he slogged out to the parish and came back with some things and the welcome news that everything at São Raimundo seemed perfectly normal. No police had been there yet. Pleased but puzzled I let him go home to sleep.

He came back just before lunch on Sunday with some Agatha Christies from the twenties and told the “agente” on duty that I was permitted to go out to eat. As though amazed that I hadn’t thought to ask myself the agent said, “Of course” with a wide smile and we drove together to a restaurant on the beach. The moment I stepped into the sun for the first time in three days was a physical shock. My clothes had been saturated with moisture. I had a heavy cold and was slightly feverish. The sun boiled the water vapour off me in seconds. I felt it reach into my bones. Only then did I realise what an unhealthy hole I’d been locked up in. We sat at a table with a white cloth, looking across at the sea, eating good food, drinking cold beer, and I couldn’t help feeling the whole ordeal had ended. In fact it had just changed gear.

Altogether it was 12 days before I was released. There were endless pretexts and procrastinations, and I came to resent bitterly the wanton abuse of my life but I soon learned it was useless to complain. None of the agents appeared to place any value on personal liberty. The Consul’s intercession had broken through their indifference and some of the younger agents were interested now and tried to talk but were clearly bewildered by my impatience. An English-speaking girl came to chat at lunchtimes, and I tried to explain my anger at being imprisoned. She laughed at the idea. “Everyone is in prison,” she said. “Fathers, husbands, children, they all make prisons.”

On Wednesday Mathews left Fortaleza for four days. He had been “guaranteed” that my fate would be resolved before my return. No.2 insisted that he was still waiting for routine replies to his cables.

At lunch on Friday I was walking with a policeman when a black limousine rushed up alongside and slithered to a halt, Chicago style. The driver shouted and gestured wildly, ordering us into the car, and then shot off, spinning his wheels on the wet cobbles, in the direction of Sâo Raimundo. “This is it,” I thought wearily. Then, as suddenly, he took a sharp left turn and we were in front of the police station again.

We were rushed into No.1’s office, where he was standing, talking on the telephone. He paused and said, “The secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to talk to you.”

He went on talking and I heard him say I had been in custody four days.

“Eight days,” I said angrily, raising eight fingers. He ignored me. I had a long civilising conversation with the diplomat in Brasilia. I felt sure that his involvement would end my detention.

After the call N0.1 became quite effusive, slapping me on the back and practising his English as we left for our separate lunches. In the afternoon everything seemed to be happening. The Consul appeared a day early, with a Scotsman from the Bank of London. They went in to see No.1 and then came to talk. They seemed confident I would be out that day. Then Mathews went back alone and returned with the depressing news that they were still determined to hold on to me. I was outraged and cursed long and loud. Then he told me: “They say they are after another Englishman for subversion, and he has the same names as yours but in a different order. “In my more fanciful moments I had wondered whether there could have been another Englishman going about to explain the strange fragments of information I had heard. But with the same names?

On Tuesday afternoon I was finally delivered into the hands of the Consul, with the Bank of London acting as midwife. I had been put back on rice and beans the previous day and during the last 24 hours had nothing to eat.

The priests received me back into Sâo Raimundo with great good humour. My belt was still under the fridge, exactly as I’d left it. There were many stories to tell, and they told theirs with scabrous joy. If one didn’t know, one could mistake them for a rather high-class construction crew. When my cold died I got dysentery, and by the time I felt well enough to leave I’d been in Fortaleza more than a month. Was it worth it? One of those Irish stories seems nicely relevant. A stranger, lost in the heart of Ireland, asks the way from a passing local, who struggles with directions and becomes more and more confused himself, until admitting defeat, he says: “You know, if I were you, Sorr, I wouldn’t start from here at all.”