Three of the company had huddled round the door kept ajar by an old sleeper and were playing cards on the lime-whitened floor. Lime lay all over. Not only the wagon but our boots and uniforms and hair and faces. It scratched at our throats. One player used the dusting on the wall to keep score with a licked forefinger; judging by the figures, it was a protracted game of chinchón.
Whenever the railroad led us chuffing into a shaded valley, the solitary shard of sunlight would extinguish. Then some disembodied voice would invariably put in, “¿Is this a knight or a knave? ¡Can see less than Pepe Leches, now!”
As the hours wore on, I began marvelling through the gap in the door like a member of a strange subterranean society feasting his eyes on the surface world for the very first time. Little could be made out. Just a narrow smudge of ballast and railing and grass and sky. Nothing would have offered more relief than to ride with the doors gaping. Bask in air and light and scenery. ¡But we were so sardined our superiors were afraid we would tumble out! At least they had the benevolence to jam a sleeper in the door, granting us a means of urinating outside instead of all over one another.
For what seemed an eternity I held out. Eventually, the water from the canteen I had been knocking back since the march to the station swelled my bladder to bursting. ¡The urge was irrepressible! I pushed through the throng apologetically, trampled all over the playing cards, and warily poked my member through the gap.
¡Such bliss! Not just to drain my bladder but press my face to the gap and widen my field of vision. Everywhere I looked grasslands stretched, scattered with holly oaks and pinprick cattle. ¡What a sight for sore eyes!
When the train veered into a long arc, the profile of the locomotive came into view, then the wagons laden with more, gloomy, human cargo. Cinders fluttered. An impatient card player tugged at my trouser leg. But I released my urine ever so slowly, stealing every moment possible.
As the railroad straightened out, we crawled alongside a finca. It had a rickety house and tobacco in flower and white chickens and an old crone beating a rug to death.
We exchanged glances.
¡How serendipitous it was that the train should issue a sharp, shrill, drawn out whistle to muffle my mad, mad, howling laughter!

Should Boris Hallvig have to write a bio, it, like the man, will be short and—bitter.