Resumo de Sleeping Voices

This immensely valuable work of Dulce Chacon is based on the
accounts of a group of women imprisoned in the Madrid jail, Ventas, immediately after the
Spanish civil war. It tells how they survived, how they retained contact with
the clandestine militants of the outside world and the Maquis, their memories
of the war and finally the conclusions, sometimes tragic, sometimes happy, of
their stories.

The protagonists are, firstly, Tomasa from Extremadura who
rebels against the humiliations they receive at the hands of their gaolers the
nuns ((to the extent that she bites the figure of the infant Jesus which is
held out for her to kiss ?the only condition on which she will be allowed to
enjoy a special Christmas meal), and who never receives visitors or letters since
all her family, including her children, were victims of the Franco repression; Reme, a fifty-year-old with several children,
who is the chief link between the prisoners and the communist party; Elvira,
barely sixteen years old, sister of a small-time Maquis leader called Paulino
who later gets into the prison disguised as a Falangist and takes her out,
under the noses of the guards, together with
a Party leader whom he has been detailed to rescue; and finally,
Hortensia, pregnant, with a husband in the Maquis and over whom hangs a
death-sentence for having belonged to the Party. Hortensia?s execution will be
delayed for a few weeks until she has had her daughter, Tensi, whom she will
entrust to the care of her sister Pepita before facing the firing-squad.
Pepita, who represents the sceptical viewpoint in the political struggle and
never joins the party, will become another of the protagonists. Working as she
does in the house of a doctor, Don Fernando, a one-time communist, she is
approached and asked to take him to where Hortensia?s brother lies wounded.
Through this action she meets the Maquis fighter Paulino and they fall in love,
though they scarcely have time to exchange more than a few kisses. Because of a
letter which Paulino sends her from France, Pepita has to spend a night in the
police station and only escapes the harsh interrogation process thanks to Don
Fernando the doctor, whose family is favourably placed in the Franco regime.
Dismissed from the house where she worked, she manages to do well as she has a
great gift for sewing, bringing up her
niece Tensi and once a year visiting her sweetheart Paulino who was caught when
he tried to visit her and has been sent to prison in Burgos.

Elvira, after her flight and a spell in the Maquis with her brother,
takes refuge in an Eastern European country and ends up marrying a comrade.
Reme is freed after many years in jail and returns to her family. Years later she
gives a home to Tomasa when she too is freed and has no-one to go to. Pepita
and Paulino are able to marry when they are over forty, thanks to a partial
amnesty which releases him from jail.

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