The Condemned

The Condemned (La condenada) is a book of short stories by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. It deals with various topics with a realistic style. Among the stories stands out La condenada, which gives the book its title. The text ends with the reaction of a woman, to learn that her husband, in prison, receives a pardon, in exchange for suffering a life sentence to prison in Ceuta.
It is also worth mentioning “Venganza Moruna”. It is a black tale in every sense of the term. In it a family believes they have avenged one of their own through a strange revenge.
Beyond our comments and the fact that we point out these narratives, readers have here the book of a great writer.

Raphael had been in the cramped cell for fourteen months.
He had for the world those four walls, of a sad white of bone, whose cracks and chippings he knew by heart; his Sun was the high ventanillo crossed by irons that cut the blue stain of the sky; and of the eight-paced floor barely half of it, because of that scandalous and garish chain, whose ring, embedding itself in his ankle, had almost become amalgamated with his flesh.
He was condemned to death, and while in Madrid they leafed through the papers of his trial for the last time, he spent months and months there buried alive, rotting, like a lively corpse, in that mortar coffin, wishing, like a momentary evil that would put an end to other elders, that the time would soon come when they would squeeze his neck, finishing it all at once.
What bothered him most was the cleanliness; that ground swept every day and well scrubbed, so that the moisture, seeping through the mat, got into the bones; those walls, in which not a speck of dust was allowed. Even the company of dirt was taken from the prisoner. Complete loneliness. If rats entered there, I would have the consolation of sharing with them the scarce food and speaking to them as good companions; If he had found a spider in the corners, he would have entertained himself by taming it.

Fragment of the work