Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  “The war must have been terrible.”

  As soon as he hears these words, the Shearer glances towards where I’m sitting but doesn’t say anything, as if he doesn’t understand what he’s just heard or as if he’s just heard the observation of a child or a lunatic. It’s Carmen who now comes to my aid. She says:

  “May it never return.”

  Then it’s obvious that I want to keep the interview going no matter what, because I change the conjecture into a question; the problem is that I don’t change anything else, and the result is that I add another solemn obvious fact that now, for some reason, doesn’t sound so stupid:

  “The war is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, isn’t it?”

  It’s at this moment that, glancing quickly at me again, the Shearer laughs for the first time, sincerely, and that I hear in his unexpected laughter his total inability to explain what he wanted or should explain to me and that I glimpse or sense in his crinkled-up eyes the intact joy of the boy who could never even imagine that one night his father would be murdered, the joy of the Shearer before the war who knew Manuel Mena. I don’t know if I heard or sensed or glimpsed that then, while I listened to the Shearer in the front hall of his house, but I’m sure that I hear or sense or glimpse it now, years later, while watching the images that David Trueba filmed. Once this instant has passed, the Shearer lowers his gaze again and sinks back into his usual sadness. The silence that follows is again solid, and so long that as I watch it I am reminded of the limitless silences of Big Brother, of the limitless silences of L’Avventura. This time it’s not Carmen but the Shearer who breaks it, looking at the camera with his dry, inexpressive eyes and murmuring as if the interview had ended for him a while ago:

  “Okay, okay.”

  After another silence, much briefer this time, I state:

  “You don’t like talking about the war.”

  “No,” says the Shearer. “Not a bit.” And he adds: “Fuck it.”

  “You don’t like it or it scares you?” I ask, half-seriously and half-joking.

  The Shearer almost smiles.

  “I don’t like it and I’m careful,” he answers.

  “But nothing’s going to happen now, Dad!” exclaims Carmen, recovering her cheerful lilt. “That was before.”

  “You didn’t even talk about this with your wife?” I insist.

  “Not even with my wife,” says the Shearer, without abandoning his attempt at a smile.

  “It’s true, Javi,” says Carmen. “My father never talks about the war. My mother did. I remember she told us that, during the war, they shaved the heads of the wives of the Reds and made them walk through the village. Things like that. But my father never told us anything. Never. Never. Never.” And she tells us again, “It’s the first time in my life I’ve heard him talk about these things.”

  6

  On July 20, 1936, three days after Franco’s army revolted against the legitimate government of the Republic in their garrisons in Africa and almost at the same time as rebel officers in Cáceres took power in the regional capital and declared a state of war in the entire province, the right in Ibahernando joined the rebellion and took charge of the village without the slightest resistance. We know quite well what happened in Spain when the war broke out. We know quite well what happened in Extremadura, including in Cáceres. But we barely know what happened in Ibahernando: no historian has been interested in finding out; the acts of the plenary sessions of the Council written up longhand by Don Marcelino—Manuel Mena’s old teacher and then municipal secretary—allow the reconstruction of only a few events; the majority of the people who might be able to remember the rest are dead, and the minority who are still alive do not remember or barely remember. As with most of what pertains to this story, those terrifying days sank into oblivion as fast as they could.

  But there are events that still resist disappearing into it. I have said that, when the military uprising happened, the right immediately took power in the village; I should clarify that they didn’t do so on their own initiative, but at the insistence of the commander of the Civil Guard post, which obeyed orders from Cáceres; I should also make clear that, when I speak of the right, I am actually referring to the family of Javier Cercas, or an important part of his family. On July 20 the village council celebrated an extraordinary plenary in which the last Republican mayor, a socialist leader named Agustín Rosas, handed over power to a management board formed by four members; two of them were related to Javier Cercas: one on his father’s side—his grandfather Paco Cercas—and one on his mother’s side—his uncle Juan Domingo Gómez Bulnes, son-in-law of the village boss: Juan José Martínez. But immediately after that plenary session another was held, in which the four new members elected their chairman by secret ballot; the elected one, by three votes to one, turned out to be Paco Cercas. At the beginning of the war he was a well-informed farmer known as an upright man, endowed with a congenital authority and a congenital capacity to exercise it; he was also a man with an interest in politics: he had been a member of Republican Action—President Manuel Azaña’s progressive party—had been a councillor as a representative of it, and at some point had sympathised with socialism; nevertheless, by the end of 1935 he was presiding over the Agricultural Association, the conservative countryside union, but after the general elections of February 1936 he was removed from his position on the village council by the civil governor and, before the war, imprisoned along with other conservatives or rightists of the village for the illegal possession of weapons. It should be said that the political evolution of Paco Cercas was not the least bit unusual during the Republic and, together with his personal prestige, perhaps constituted an incentive for electing him the first Francoist mayor. It should be added that he lasted barely a few weeks in the post.

  During the days following the coup a hurricane of panic and violence swept over all of Spain. In Ibahernando those on the left took by far the worst of the cyclone, because the village had fallen into the hands of the right. The most reliable investigators maintain that over the course of the war and in the first postwar months, eleven murders were committed from political motives; Javier Cercas has counted thirteen, almost all at the end or the beginning of the conflict. It will be said that, compared with the number of murders caused by Francoist terror in other Spanish towns during the three years of war, it is not a very high number; it’s true, but that truth did not alleviate the terror or spare the victims. Many of them were taken by force from their homes and shot without any pretence of justice; many did not know who was killing them: the material executors of the crimes often came from other places, although those responsible for them—those who pointed out the victims and ordered or encouraged the murders—resided in the village. I do not know whether the family or any member of the family of Javier Cercas was among them; I know that, even in a war (perhaps especially in a war), everyone is innocent until proven to be guilty, and that no honest person would be so abject as to condemn someone without any proof from the comfortable immunity of peacetime, much less when, as in this case, it is virtually impossible to reconstruct events with any precision eighty years on. Having clarified that, it seems impossible to exempt the family of Javier Cercas from any responsibility for the atrocities committed in those days: first, because it was the family holding power in the village and it is difficult to accept that all its members did everything in their power to prevent what happened; and, second, because on several occasions they did protect some leftists from the uncontrolled violence, either by taking them out of the village because they were in danger inside it or by handing them over to justice, as happened with one Republican who, in spite of falling out with some of them, had been their friend and belonged to their class or what they considered their class: Don Juan Bernardo, the doctor and local leftist leader, who was imprisoned in Trujillo and was tried and finally absolved by a military tribunal. As for the mo
tives for the murders, they were of course political, but they weren’t always only political and they weren’t always clear: nobody really understood why at the end of the war they killed Don Miguel Fernández, the state schoolteacher, a man everyone in town considered a good person, unless his friendship with Don Juan Bernardo was enough reason to kill him; nobody entirely understood why at the beginning of the war—to be more precise: on November 26, 1936, on a part of the Trujillo-to-Cáceres road known as Puente Estrecho—they killed, along with three other villagers, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Sara García, though some conjecture that she had been killed because she was engaged to a young socialist leader who after the military coup had escaped Ibahernando for the same reasons other leftists had: to flee the climate of persecution that loomed over the village and join the Republican resistance that was being organised in Badajoz, a province where the coup had not triumphed.

  So in Ibahernando it was only Republicans who were murdered in the rearguard; fear, however, was also felt by the Francoists, especially at the beginning. In fact, for them the initial days of the war were the most worrying. Between the end of July and the beginning of August, Franco had managed to land the majority of his Moroccan troops in the south of the country with the help of Hitler’s air force, and from that moment on columns full of veterans of the African colonial wars commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Yagüe marched up from Andalucía towards Ibahernando, on their way to Madrid, putting the whole region to fire and the sword. Meanwhile, out-of-control violence had taken over the country, in Extremadura the front was not yet stable, and the Republicans from Badajoz were trying to recover the zones that the military uprising had put in rebel hands. That was the fear that spread among the village Francoists during the first days of the struggle: that the leftists who had fled after the coup would return and, supported by their fellow leftists from Badajoz, would retake the village and settle accounts with them. From the provincial capital they received emphatic instructions that, if the Republicans returned, they should do whatever they could to detain them until the troops of the Argel Regiment stationed in Cáceres came to their aid, and the new authorities chose to stand guard at all the main access routes into the village: on the calle del Agua, on Barrero, at the Pozo Arriba, and on the main road to Robledillo. Convinced that a Republican attack was imminent, the conservative families made the decision to entrench themselves twenty-four hours a day in the strong houses around the square, with the men all armed to the teeth and the doors and windows protected by sandbags. An event that occurred on August 2, a couple of weeks after the coup, seemed to endorse those extreme measures. At two in the afternoon on that day, a column of fourteen Hispano-Suiza trucks full of Republicans heading for Trujillo along the Madrid road burst into the village of Villamesías, cheering for the Republic, just a few miles from Ibahernando; the column, under the command of a Captain Medina and guided by a renegade priest known as Father Revilla, was composed of armed militiamen, including miners from Peñarroya and Puertollano. Obeying orders from Cáceres, the Civil Guards posted there and some local right-wingers put up enough resistance to allow three companies of the Argel Regiment under the orders of Commander Ricardo Belda to reach the village, and he had time to set up his machine guns on the outskirts and riddle with bullets that foolhardy detachment of militiamen who were driving around those roads at war like a gang of amateurs, without taking the slightest security measures. The result was wholesale massacre: in less than an hour the Republicans were annihilated and the road that led out of town was littered with more than a hundred dead militiamen.

  The Battle of Villamesías constituted a small military success and a great propaganda success for the rebels, but it unleashed panic in Ibahernando, where over the days that followed the rumour circulated that some leftists from the village had been travelling in the thwarted Republican column. The panic, however, did not last long. On August 11 Yagüe’s columns took Mérida; on the 14th, Badajoz; a little while later Franco set up in Cáceres and on the 25th, the heads of Yagüe’s three columns—Tella, Castejón, and Asensio—met in Trujillo, scant miles from Ibahernando, along with the leaders of another two columns of reinforcements: Barrón and Delgado Serrano. For Ibahernando’s right, the danger seems to have passed, although until the end of the war there is Republican resistance in Extremadura and the village continues to worry about a fairly close front, even if almost always dormant. But for the leftists of Ibahernando the danger persists: many are going to spend the rest of the war fearing that a murderous carload is going to stop outside their door as a sure herald of death.

  Nor have some right-wingers who converted overnight into Francoists or Falangists (or, more frequently, both at once) completely outwitted the danger; for them the war then begins in earnest. At the end of September or the beginning of October twenty-five of them join the rebel army; Paco Cercas is one of them, leaving for the front having been in the office of mayor for just under two months. Javier Cercas’s paternal grandfather is accompanied by two types of men: on the one hand, serfs, labourers with their own land or tenant farmers like him, almost all of whom were Republicans just a few years earlier, as he was, but now scared by the revolutionary drift of the Republic or what they consider the revolutionary drift of the Republic and especially by the atmosphere of violence they’ve been breathing in Ibahernando for months; on the other hand, serfs of serfs, landless day labourers addicted to order, very humble people frightened by the aimless or hopeless outrages being committed by other serfs of serfs like themselves and traumatised by the shattering into a thousand pieces of the peaceful coexistence in the village. The majority of the members of this expedition are of a certain age, starting with Javier Cercas’s grandfather, who at that moment was already thirty-six years old and had to withstand his wife’s tremendous anger when he announced he was leaving for the front: María Cercas shouted at him, asking if he was crazy, if he’d forgotten he was an old man and had three small children, and what the devil was an old man with three small children going to do in the war, she told him he was going to get killed, that young men had to go to war or those who weren’t as old as him, that anyone should go but not him, asked him why it had to be him who went. Paco Cercas seized on that last question to stop the whirlwind with a single answer:

  “Because if I don’t go nobody’ll go, María.”

  I don’t know if it happened exactly like that, but that’s exactly how an uncle of Javier Cercas’s named Julio Cercas told it; he had heard his mother tell it many times and might have witnessed it without understanding a word, because he was just a newborn baby at that moment. As for Paco Cercas’s reply, it’s possible that it was an exaggeration, the only argument he could think of offhand to counter his wife’s, but the fact is that some of the men who left for the front in those first days would perhaps not have done so without him and that, in the course of the episode of the war that was just beginning, Javier Cercas’s grandfather exerted over his twenty-four companions, if not military authority, at least moral authority.

  The group joined the Third Bandera of the Cáceres Falange, or rather were incorporated into the groups of volunteers that with time would end up constituting that Bandera. We know nothing or almost nothing about these earliest Francoist units, because nobody or almost nobody has studied them, as if they had never existed or as if they didn’t interest anybody; the archives don’t help either, at least in this case: in the Military Archives of Ávila they keep the Operations Diary of the Third Bandera of the Cáceres Falange, but only from September 1937, which is when it was officially founded. So, here and in other parts of this story of obscurities, we often have to feel our way and rely on hypotheses. Some things, however, seem certain.

  The twenty-five volunteers from Ibahernando were a heterogeneous handful of men without the least preparation for war, badly dressed in civilian clothes and badly armed with hunting rifles, who, as soon as they were positioned in their improvised unit, were sent to Mad
rid with Yagüe’s columns. Their commanders were professional military officers, but their role was secondary: essentially it consisted of advancing behind the colonial troops covering their rearguard and flanks, facilitating provisions and evacuations, and supporting the columns’ progression, which was vigorous until they reached the outskirts of Madrid. Sure the capital was about to fall and that the war would last a matter of weeks, the twenty-five passed through Navalmoral de la Mata, Talavera de la Reina, and Navalcarnero, reaching Madrid in November and taking up positions on the Usera front, south of the capital. There they stayed for a while. It is doubtful that they ever entered seriously into combat; in any case, they had only one casualty to lament: a man named Andrés Ruiz. The campaign, otherwise, was brief, and at some point in that same winter, towards the middle or end of January 1937, they were all back in the village, discharged and with their particular war over. I do not know the cause of such an early return: it is likely that, as the war advanced and galvanised, and as the suspicion it was going to last longer than foreseen intensified, for many of the commanders the ineptitude of those aging, inexpert, and haphazardly armed peasants was increasingly obvious and they decided to relieve them with detachments of younger, better-armed and -trained volunteers; but there is also a possibility that their hurried return was another sign of the ingenuous pretensions of independence that some pure Falangists still nourished at the beginning of the war, obsessed with the ambition of not being gobbled up by the omnivorous Francoist conglomeration: at a certain point in the autumn or winter of 1936, Captain José Luna, one of the earliest Falangists and provincial leader of the party in Cáceres, retired several militia units under his jurisdiction from the Madrid front, without asking permission or giving anyone any explanation, alleging that some officers of the regular army mistreated his men, and the Third Bandera of the Falange could have been among them. It is also possible that both conjectures might not be mutually exclusive but rather complementary and that the military authorities neutralised or masked Luna’s dangerous insubordination and the return of his discharged volunteers who they considered unfit for combat. The fact is that, during that return trip home from the trenches around Madrid, Paco Cercas took part in a strange incident about which he kept silent for the rest of his life, and which only came to light by chance many years later, when almost seventy years had passed and Javier Cercas’s grandfather had been dead for two decades. No, not by chance: through Delia Cabrera, the granddaughter of the other protagonist of the incident. No, not Delia Cabrera: Fernando Berlín, the journalist to whom Delia Cabrera recounted the incident. Be that as it may, at the end of August 2006, Javier Cercas recounted it in an article titled “The End of a Novel,” which goes like this: