10.09.2026
Jail
In the early eighties I was a brahmacari, a celibate monk, and my job was selling books on the street.
One afternoon I was in a square in Murcia with a companion. I stopped a woman to offer her a book, the way we stopped hundreds every day. She went on her way. A while later a crowd gathered, they grabbed me by the arms and called the police.
The woman had ten thousand pesetas in her bag. She spoke to me, got home, and they were gone. She put the two things together. I never opened her bag or touched it, but by then it made no difference. Ten thousand pesetas was serious money back then.
The National Police came. My companion walked over to explain who we were and they took him too. The blows started in the car, on the assumption of what we were. At the station they put us against the wall: fists to the face, to the stomach, insults. We said we were monks, which was the truth. They said: you’re not monks, you’re pharisees.
Then to the courthouse cell. They wanted fifteen thousand pesetas to let me out and the boys didn’t have it, because everything collected went in at the end of each day. So they went out to sell books until they had it.
The trial was left pending and I went on travelling around Spain.
Months later, asleep in a boarding house, the police came at two or three in the morning. They had been calling the farm to notify me of the trial and nobody there could account for me. Wanted on a warrant. That means you go straight in.
A police cell is nothing. When you walk into a provincial prison the whole mental scaffolding of being a decent citizen comes down, and from then on you can’t tell yourself that any more. They took everything and printed me. In there they call that playing the piano.
The first few days I was alone. I didn’t go up to the yard, for reasons you can imagine, but it made no difference: at yard time the doors stay open and people come into your cell. Instead of me going out, they came in.
Then they gave me a cellmate. He had just come in. He’d been out six months, and in those six months he’d done twelve armed robberies. He took to me. They called me the priest, or the little priest.
One day I went down to the yard and what had to happen happened. Back then there were cardboard vouchers you exchanged for tobacco, food or toilet paper. Before going down I put some in my socks and some in my pocket. Look how sharp you get. The moment I came out they surrounded me and invited me to share. I resisted a little, so it wouldn’t look easy. When the pressure went up I gave them the ones in my pocket.
But that isn’t what stayed with me. It’s the noise. The gallery doors closing, one after another, metal and padlock, fifty of them at least. That is the noise I identify with hell. And the count: every day they open up, you have to be on your feet, they say your name and you answer.
Every so often I had the prison psychologist. The first thing he asked was what I was doing there; he saw a young lad with no malice in him. I started explaining why I lived the way I lived, and by the second or third session he was the one asking. They ended up being classes.
I was in two months. Remand. The judge saw there was no flight risk and let me out. I came out in December, cold, and at the gate there were two civil guards in their capes. Young as I was, I said see you later. And one of them answered: what do you mean, see you later? Don’t ever come back here.
I told you not long ago that at fourteen I forced a temple door and took a drum and two books. I stole once and nothing happened to me. I didn’t steal, and I paid two months.
What I learned is that the truth doesn’t save you for being true. It needs somebody to have some reason to believe you, and in there I gave nobody one: I was the man who had stopped the woman. The only one who asked was the psychologist, and he asked because he felt like it, not because I had anything to convince him with.
He’s the one who found out.