Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  “Well, I’m not going to write it.”

  David looked at me as if he’d just noticed me standing there beside him at the bar.

  “Don’t fuck around.”

  We walked back to the car and, as we went on our way, I explained my reasons for not writing the book about Manuel Mena and reminded him of the ones he’d outlined over the phone, or the ones he’d scolded me with. I also told him that I’d already written a novel about the Spanish Civil War and I didn’t want to repeat myself. Trying to anticipate his objections, I added that, if I was going to talk to a witness to Manuel Mena’s childhood anyway, it was because I wanted to collect as much information as possible on Manuel Mena before it all vanished.

  “And then?” he asked. “When you have all the information, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Then I’ll think about it. Maybe I’ll give it to someone less involved in the story, so they can tell it. Maybe I’ll leave it untold. Or maybe, who knows, I might change my mind and end up telling it myself. We’ll see. In any case, if I did finally decide to tell it I wouldn’t bind myself only to the truth of events. I’m sick of true tales. I don’t want to repeat myself on that score either.”

  David nodded several times, although he didn’t seem too satisfied with my explanations. I told him so.

  “The truth is I’m not,” he admitted.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know: I have the impression you’re less worried about your novel than about what people are going to say about your novel.”

  “You’re not going to tell me that’s not a reproach.”

  “Not this time,” he admitted again. “Look, what I mean is that it’s not books that should be at the service of the writer, but the writer who has to be at the service of his books. What’s this about not wanting to repeat yourself? If you start worrying about your literary career, what suits or doesn’t suit your literary career, what critics are going to say and stuff like that, you’re dead, man; worry about writing and forget the rest. All Kafka’s novels are more or less the same, and all of Faulkner’s as well. And who gives a fuck? A novel is good if it comes out of a writer’s guts; nothing else: the rest is rubbish. And as far as not wanting to take on Manuel Mena’s story, it’s laughable: we go on and on about how this country needs to accept its past as it was, once and for all, with all its complexity and as harsh as it was, without sweetening or embellishing or sweeping it under the carpet, and the first thing we do when the time comes to take on our personal past is exactly that: sweep it out of sight. Fucking unbelievable.”

  After a while we caught sight of Trujillo, with its medieval fortress perched on top of Cabeza de Zorro and the city stretching out around it. We passed the city centre and shortly afterwards left the highway and parked in front of La Majada, a restaurant set between the highway and the old Madrid-to-Lisbon road, very close to Ibahernando by then. On the patio of La Majada there were three tables set with checked tablecloths, but only two of them were occupied by diners who were defying the November weather with the help of a hard, bright sun. We sat at the free one and, as soon as a waiter appeared, ordered two urgently needed glasses of beer. Then we ordered a salad; a double portion of moraga, a local dish of grilled pork; and a bottle of red wine. It was half past two; our appointment in Ibahernando was at five: we had no need to rush our meal.

  When they brought the bottle of red, David noticed the label.

  “Habla del Silencio, speak of silence,” he read. “Nice oxymoron.”

  “It’s local. The wine, I mean. My grandfather Juan used to make it at home; it was terrible, but there wasn’t any other back then.”

  David tasted the wine.

  “Well, this is good,” he said.

  “We’ve learned how to make it,” I admitted. “The problem wasn’t the land: it was us.”

  “Your grandfather Juan was Manuel Mena’s brother?”

  “He was the oldest of the siblings. Manuel Mena was the youngest.”

  We were sitting across from each other, with our coats on, him facing the restaurant and a farm that blocked the view of the highway, and me facing the old Ibahernando road, along which not a single car passed. The air was dry, vibrant. Around us spread a green and silent plain, out of which rose dusty holm oaks, stone fences, and huge boulders; above us the sky was a uniform, cloudless blue. The waiter brought us the salad and the double portion of moraga, and while we ate I told David about the history of Ibahernando, of its secular dependence on Trujillo and its importance in the region until emigration decimated its population in the fifties and sixties and in a very short space of time it went from having three thousand inhabitants to having five hundred; I also put him in the picture about the man we were going to interview: I told him his name was Antonio Ruiz Barrado but everyone knew him as El Pelaor, because his job had always been to shear the sheep, told him he had always been a neighbour of my family in the village, talked to him about the school photograph where he appears together with Manuel Mena, told him that, although he lived between Cáceres, Bilbao, and Valladolid, where his three children had moved to, he was spending a few days in Ibahernando with his youngest daughter, explained that I hadn’t talked to him on the phone but to his older daughter, who at first gave me little reason to hope that he might want to speak to me, because, she assured me, she had never heard her father speak of the war, and for whom it was a surprise when the Shearer agreed to the interview. We had almost finished off the salad and pork when David brought up the subject of my novel again.

  “I can’t believe you’ve given up the idea.”

  “Well, it’s true,” I said. I repeated the arguments I’d used last time, perhaps I added one or two. “Besides,” I concluded, “I’ve never written about my village: I wouldn’t even know how to.”

  “Why not by writing about Manuel Mena?” he asked. “After all, you didn’t choose this subject: the subject chose you. And those are always the best subjects.”

  “You might be right, but this case is different. I’m not saying I’m not interested in Manuel Mena. The truth is he always interested me. I mean, I always wanted to know what kind of man he was. Or what kind of adolescent, rather…I always wanted to know why he went off to war so young, why he fought with Franco, what he did at the front, how he died. Those kinds of things. My mother has spent her whole life telling me about him, and I suppose it’s natural: a little while ago I discovered that she was more like his little sister than his niece, she was living in his house when he died, for her he was the greatest, the brave young man who had saved the family, who had sacrificed everything for her. And the strangest thing is that, even though I’ve heard people talk about him for my whole life, I still don’t know him as a character, I can’t imagine him, can’t see him…I don’t know if I’ve explained it very well.”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Of course I’m sure my mother doesn’t know him either. What she knows is just an image, a few anecdotes: the legend of Manuel Mena, more than his story. And yes, the truth is I’ve always been intrigued that there is truth and there are lies in that legend.”

  “Are there papers, letters, things like that?”

  “There’s nothing left.”

  “How many times does his name appear on the Internet?”

  “As far as I know, twice. Once in an article I wrote about him and once on some forum where some guys take me to task for having written that article.”

  David smiled: he’d finished eating. He ran a hand through his hair, which was long, messy, and streaked with grey, like the three days’ growth of stubble on his chin.

  “Time buries everything,” he pronounced with disappointment. “And seventy-four years is an eternity.” All of a sudden he seemed to brighten up. “Can you imagine if you found a recording of Manuel Mena, a home movie or something like that, with Manuel Mena moving and spe
aking and smiling? Then you could see him, couldn’t you? Just as you’ll be able to see the Shearer after I film him.”

  Half-closing my eyes and shaking my head, I ruled out the mere possibility of such a miracle. David shrugged and added:

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right and not writing the book is for the best. But it’s a shame: I’m sure your mother would have liked to read it. Me too.”

  The waiter took our plates and we ordered coffee and a couple of shots of orujo and asked for the bill. It was almost half past four. The sun was much less warm by then, and although it wasn’t cold, we were the last diners on La Majada’s patio; there was just over half an hour until our appointment with the Shearer: we had to start thinking about leaving the table.

  A waitress brought our coffees and the shots, David let me pay the bill, and, when we were left alone again, I thought of what my friend had just said about my mother and drained my glass in one swallow. David didn’t know my mother, or only superficially, but while he was talking, I don’t remember about what now, I was distracted thinking that perhaps the best reason not to write a book on Manuel Mena was that my friend was right: my mother would have loved to read it. I write to not be written, I thought. I don’t know where I had read that sentence, but it suddenly dazzled me. I thought my mother had spent her whole life telling me about Manuel Mena because for her there was no better or higher destiny than Manuel Mena’s, and I thought, in an instinctive or unconscious way, that I’d become a writer to rebel against her, to avoid the destiny she had wanted to confine me to, so that my mother couldn’t write me or not to be written by her, in order not to be Manuel Mena.

  “Hey, Javier, there’s one thing that intrigues me,” David said, jolting me out of my reverie.

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you feel guilty for having had a fascist uncle?”

  Now it was me who smiled.

  “An uncle, no,” I specified, a little drunkenly. “The whole family.”

  “Yeah right: more or less like half this country. Did I ever tell you that my father also fought on Franco’s side? And totally convinced he was doing the right thing…Besides, even those who didn’t fight for Franco during the war put up with him for forty years. No matter what they say, here, apart from four or five guys with guts, for most of the time Francoism lasted almost everyone was a Francoist, by commission or omission. What else could they do? By the way, aren’t you going to answer my question?”

  “Hannah Arendt would say I shouldn’t feel guilty, but I should feel responsible.”

  “And what do you say?”

  “That Hannah Arendt is most likely right, don’t you think?”

  David stared at me for a second, finished drinking his liqueur, and, leaving the empty glass on the table, said:

  “What I think is that you shouldn’t feel guilty of anything, because guilt is the supreme form of vanity, and you and I are already vain enough.”

  I laughed.

  “That’s true.” I pointed to my watch and said: “Shall we go?”

  * * *

  —

  As we turned a corner I saw in the distance the first houses of the village rising up white against the blue sky, with the yellow mass of the silo in the foreground, and as usual I thought of my mother. The fatherland, I thought. Also as usual, I remembered that passage in Don Quixote almost at the end of the book when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza return to their village after a long absence and, catching sight of it on the horizon, the squire falls to his knees and gives free rein to his emotions on recovering his fatherland. Then I thought that my mother’s fatherland was the same as Sancho Panza’s, but also that this lowercase fatherland was not the uppercase Fatherland that Manuel Mena had died for, although they both had the same name.

  I was still thinking about my mother, Sancho Panza, and Manuel Mena as we passed the silo and Civil Guard barracks on the right and the new cemetery and the lake on the left. Then we left the highway and drove into the village. There the silence was total; not a soul was to be seen on the white and very clean streets. There was barely a car parked in the square, but the bar was open, or seemed to be. As we drove down towards the Pozo Castro I asked David to stop the car at a corner. I pointed to a plaque. “Calle Alférez Manuel Mena,” it read.

  “Here’s our hero,” David said. “Steadfast and true.”

  We crossed the Pozo Castro, drove up as far as calle de Las Cruzes, and parked in front of the entrance to my mother’s house, a big wooden door protected by a wrought-iron gate closed with a padlock. The house was only inhabited in August, but it didn’t look abandoned, in part because not long before we’d whitewashed the façade and in part because the rest of the year some relatives and friends looked after it, among them Eladio Cabrera, a neighbour who for years had worked as a tractor driver for my family. Now Eladio acted as the informal guard of the house, and my mother had told me to ask him for the keys to take a look inside. I was intending to do so, but not before doing what I had come to Ibahernando to do.

  So David and I arrived at the Shearer’s house, which my mother had told me was almost directly across the street from Eladio’s, and we knocked on the door. The metal knocker clattered noisily in the quiet of the village, but nobody opened the door. Although we looked left and right up and down the street, we didn’t see anyone except an old man sitting on the steps of a distant house, one arm leaning on a crutch, watching us with the brazen curiosity that village people reserve for strangers (or that was the impression he gave me). I wondered in silence if at the last moment the Shearer had regretted granting me an interview, and had decided to remain faithful to his habit of not talking about the war; David asked me out loud if I was sure that was where the Shearer lived. Since I wasn’t sure, we knocked on Eladio Cabrera’s door. Eladio himself soon opened it and celebrated our appearance with huge displays of happiness and regret that his wife, Pilar, wasn’t there, as she’d gone to visit her sister. I asked him about the Shearer. Eladio confirmed that his house was the one I thought it was, told us he was spending some time in the village with his daughter Carmen, supposed that he must have gone out for a walk and bet he would be back soon; in turn, I proposed to David that we wait for the Shearer’s return by fulfilling the task my mother had assigned me.

  He accepted. Eladio offered to accompany us, and the first thing he did upon entering my mother’s house was turn on the light in the entrance hall, disappear into the darkness of the living room, and open the shutters after wrestling with the latches for a few seconds: filtered by the slats of the blinds, the afternoon autumn sun invaded the living room, revealing its elaborate skirting tiles, its walls decorated with Talavera ceramics, its chairs, armchairs, and sofas of disparate styles and ages, its antediluvian television set and its sideboards full of inherited dishes and tablecloths, on their shelves family photographs and trophies from my sporty adolescence; myriad particles of dust floated in the stagnant silence of the living room. Preceded by Eladio, we walked through the ground floor in the semidarkness, the dining room, the kitchen, the bathrooms and bedrooms, with their tiled floors convex from the damp and motley confusion of furniture and wooden, china, and bronze ornaments, with their beds with their rickety bases and wardrobes of different sizes, with their still-lifes and hunting pictures and religious images hanging on walls blotted with damp patches. At the door to my mother’s bedroom I said to David:

  “Come here: I’m going to show you something.”

  We crossed the bedroom, walked into a storage room, and I switched on the light. A bare bulb shone on a shelf filled with books and a pile of old junk, including various trunks with black hinges and domed lids; on one free wall hung the framed portrait of Manuel Mena. David and I stood looking at it while Eladio opened a small window and switched off the light.

  “Is that him?” asked David.

  I said yes. There was silence as Elad
io joined us, in front of the portrait.

  “Shit,” David said. “He’s a kid.”

  “He’s nineteen there,” I said. “Or just about to be. It was a few months before he died.”

  I tried to decode the portrait for them, or rather Manuel Mena’s dress uniform—the solitary second lieutenant’s stars on the chevrons, and on the peaked cap, the infantry insignia on the cap and the lapels of the jacket, and the Ifni Riflemen insignia, the Suffering for the Nation Medal and the ribbon with two stripes—and Eladio told us what he’d heard about Manuel Mena. When we were on our way out of the room I thought I saw some books I’d never noticed there before and, as Eladio and David left, I stayed for a moment looking through them. Among the books was a Spanish translation of The Iliad and another of The Odyssey, published in two snug volumes; I leafed through them thinking of Achilles and of Manuel Mena. Then I closed the small window and took them with me.

  We finished walking around the house (the entrance gate, the yard with its well and lemon tree, the stables and cowshed with its roof half caved in, the mangers and troughs overflowing with rubble, the empty hayloft, the old kitchen where animals were butchered), and, by the time Eladio closed the door and put the lock back on the iron gate, he and David were talking as if they’d known each other for years. In the street, before saying goodbye, Eladio warned me:

  “Your mother is worried, Javi.”

  We looked at each other without speaking for a second. Eladio had pale eyes and skin burnt by the sun.

  “Worried? Why?”

  “Why do you think?” answered Eladio. “About the house. She’s got it into her head that when she dies you kids will sell it.”

  “And what are we supposed to do?” I asked him. “My sisters live six hundred miles from here, and so do I. The village is hard to get to and none of us ever come here anymore, except with my mother, in the summer. What should we do, Eladio? Keep the house to spend one weekend a year here, if that?”