Jesús Irurre has a basketball at home. “I’m still pretty good at it,” he says. Now she mainly uses it with her granddaughter in the park just below her house. It was also in front of a basket, but on a completely different stretch, that he spoke to Salvador for the first time. It was November 1973. He, a prison guard, had arrived in Barcelona a few weeks earlier. He was 23 years old and had two children. Puig Antich had been in the model for months. He had been sentenced to death for killing a police officer and spent 23 hours a day in solitary confinement. “What a bug,” thought Jesus.
The yard was gray cement, the walls were stone, and there were bars on the ceiling. Puig Antich tried to score. Irurre looked at him leaning against a wall. Until the ball fell at his feet. Salvador had failed. He tried. He says he can’t remember if he scored or not. The fact is that without really knowing how, they ended up playing basketball together.
The game gave way to words. Salvador told him about his family and his doctor brother who lived in the United States. Jesus opened up to share concerns. “My son can’t read well. Mixing up words.” It’s called dyslexia, Salvador told him. “We have to correct that. We’re also trying to get him to stop being left-handed.” They both sat on the bed. Puig Antich told him it wasn’t necessary, to correct that. He told him about places where techniques were being used to treat dyslexia and assured him that the boy could continue studying. “Those were different times,” says Irurre, “but luckily we listened to him. My son is still left-handed. He’s an architect. It’s gone well for him.”
Jesús started lending him a small transistor radio at night. And Salvador talked to him about the music he liked. “Especially singer-songwriters. For example, he discovered me, Patxi Andión, whom I have followed all my life.” And he also discovered something fundamental. Something that changed Jesus’ life forever: books. “I had many, I think one of them was Erich Fromm’s fear of freedom.”
He bought it after Salvador’s death. After the dramatic dawn of March 2, 1974. “I will remember it for the rest of my life. Cell 443. His courage and strength. The sisters’ screams. His “quinta putada, això is a putada” when he saw the abominable club. The dead silence of the next morning. Sigh, drink water and move on. “I started screaming, ‘Frank Hurensohn murderer, Franco Hurensohn!’ Two companions took me to a room. “You’ve gone insane?” They told me. They managed to calm me down. A few days later I told my wife that I was leaving him. I felt like I was playing a macabre game.”
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But instead of leaving work, he recalled a conversation with Puig Antich. “There is a bookstore called Leteradura. They have political texts, books banned by the regime…”. So he went to 80 Passeig de Gràcia and started to read. “First Fromm, then books on trade unions. I read about the CNT, about anarchism. It changed me forever.”
He began to sound out his companions. “The ones that didn’t look very Francoist,” he adds. And he talked to them about the possibility of organizing. He visited all the prisons in Spain to try to add followers. And they formed a secret national coordinator that would later become the first union of prison officials. Irurre was its first general secretary. He also attended meetings held by criminal defense attorney groups to push for prison reform. And he hid a camera given to him by journalist Xavier Vinader to photograph the torture in prison. “Now I can say that nothing will happen to me.” A tiny device that recorded what was happening within the four walls of a room called El Palomar. “A closed and padded cell where no screams could be heard, where the prisoner could not bang his head against the wall, and where their faces were submerged in buckets of water.” These photos were published on the front page. They caused a stir.
He keeps that cover. He shows it to me in his apartment in Valencia, the city he moved to after retiring in 2012. “He was 42 years old. I was already tired.” After the model, he had passed Malaga and Ibiza. They decided to move with his wife to Burjassot, where one of the children lives. And most importantly, two granddaughters. “That’s what I enjoy the most at the moment. “
It keeps a lot of press clippings: prison breaks, riots, hunger strikes. The life of Jesus gives for a book. In fact, he’s started sorting through the memories. And he says he wants to write a story about his life and at the same time about the prisons in Spain. “And I’m aware that my life shaped the model’s gallery number 5 and the encounter with Salvador. Because I had an image of anarchists that he changed because he encouraged me to read books. And because I, who lived without ideology, without questioning the regime, I realized that everything had a political meaning.”
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