I felt redeemed when writing for the barracks newspaper during my military service back home in Spain. I found something that was going to help me, then and for a long time to come. The park grass of the barracks looked greener, the canteen food tasted better, sentry duties were shorter, and even the perennially parched flowers seemed to be trying harder.
Maybe my stories weren’t fair to the ridiculed captain, but anyone who aspired to becoming a career soldier in the Spanish Army had to have something wrong with them in the first place, I thought. The feeling was electrifying. It was then that I knew I wanted to be a journalist.
Emboldened, I determined to tighten the screw even further by using my stories to reveal sensitive information about the more bizarre habits of the higher-ranking military commanders, information leaked to me by a private moonlighting as a bartender in the officers’ club. He would tell me which colonels regularly drank themselves into a blind stupor, which one had an unquenchable taste for prostitutes, and of the general who would place his loaded gun menacingly on the table whenever he was playing cards.
New fictional characters were born, based on the first-hand information I had gluttonously acquired about our most senior-ranking commanders. The subsequent effect was that very soon a weekend edition of the paper was ordered by the captain, who ignored (at least at the beginning) the very real people the characters were based on.
Finally, and almost inevitably, I was caught – and sent to a military prison for six long months and a day. It was a terrible time for me. They wouldn’t allow me to write anything, but I managed to get access to a small library that was being restored by volunteers from the construction brigade. It wasn’t really a library, rather a depository where books that had been censured or confiscated under Franco were stored.
It was there that I discovered two treasures that were to make my life more bearable during my incarceration. In fact, they would change my life forever. I’m referring to Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I read those two books in a week and I remember as if it were yesterday how I felt while reading Steinbeck’s very last sentence, when Rose of Sharon is breastfeeding a starving stranger: “She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously…”
Then suddenly the clouds parted, the storm passed and I knew what I wanted. All that time, the adventures I wanted to live, the tales I wanted to tell –I could write them now. The feelings in my blood, they would mix with ink and stretch themselves across the fields of white paper. I could be a reporter and travel the world writing for the dispossessed and deprived. I wanted to be just like Steinbeck and Orwell, and somehow I knew that no matter how long it could take, I would be a multicultural reporter. Fifteen years later and here I am, ready and at your service.
Sergio Angulo Bujanda is an MA student in journalism at Dublin City University.
