The Fyffes Prison

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary fragments · Year: 1969 · Authors: José Antonio Rial

The Fyffes Prison is a novel based on the author's own experience who spent seven years in Francoist prisons, part of them in the improvised prison that had until then been a packing and storage facility of the British company Fyffes dedicated to fruit export.

The novel is one of the best literary examples describing the dark years of repression after the Civil War in the Canary Islands.

«Mauricio did not expect Fyffes to be that damp and overcrowded den, deep, lit by mean high bulbs, and so "ragged".
From the walls and the iron straps of the roof, in multiple waters, hung clothes, rags, and thousands of dusty objects, like in a filthy market of old things.
And the first impression, upon entering, was that of having descended into a putrid underworld of sewers and gutters, where hundreds of ragged subjects moved, restless and expectant.
It smelled intensely of damp and sour bread. The rags that patched up the large warehouse, in twilight; the sticky floor, trodden by hundreds of feet wearing wooden "cholas", and the noisy crowd, in incessant bustle, gave the den, at first sight, a brutal expression, between infernal and cheerful, as if it were a purgatory in flames and at the same time a stinking and vibrant collective laundry.[...]
Although the ceiling was high, slate, the scarce light kept it lost above, among gaps and crosses of beams, and its shadow weighed on the reddish and dusty atmosphere of the underworld where the prisoners moved.
Before entering the "rooms" of the locked up, other halls of the large and ramshackle warehouse were crossed, in which the military guard camped, on alert, sad, bored and distrustful.
The prison had inherited the name of the English company "Fyffes Limited", to which that ramshackle and spacious warehouse had belonged, and where the powerful commercial company packed tomatoes and bananas from the region, which were two important articles of the island's export trade.
From fruit warehouse, "Fyffes Limited" became a prison by transfer made by the important company to the insurgents, to help the Falangist cause.
As the war had interrupted fruit shipments to England, "Fyffes Limited" had no objection to cramming republicans where colourful and select fruits had previously been stored.» [...]

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