Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  It was the journalist Fernando Berlín who, more or less a year ago, dug up the events I am preparing to relate. At the time Berlín had created a segment on a radio programme where he invited listeners to tell their Civil War stories. One of the first listeners to call in was a woman: she was a little over forty and her name was Delia Cabrera; she called in to tell a story of her grandfather’s, Antonio Cabrera.

  The story is the following:

  On July 18, 1936, Cabrera was the socialist mayor of Ibahernando, a village in the region of Trujillo, in the province of Cáceres. Barely a month later the troops of the Army of Africa commanded by General Franco arrived there after having crossed the Strait of Gibraltar thanks to the Nazi aircraft and having razed hundreds of miles and villages and whole cities, leaving in their wake thousands of corpses. The village had fallen into rebel hands a few days after the uprising, so Franco’s soldiers were welcomed with enthusiasm and, after stocking up on supplies and resting for a time, they took with them some local Falangists and obliged a few Republicans and sympathisers or members of left-wing parties to join the ranks of their service corps. One of those Republicans was Antonio Cabrera, who spent the rest of the war as a foot soldier in the army of his enemies. He was not a young man at the time, but he was strong, so he managed to survive those three years of inhumane forced marches all over the geography of Spain, dragging a mule loaded with supplies. The Republic’s final defeat caught him in Talavera de la Reina, about ninety miles from his village; surprisingly (or maybe not: maybe they’d simply forgotten his Republican past, or considered that he’d redeemed himself in the war), they discharged him, told him he could go home, and for several days he searched for a means of transport in order to do so, until one morning he happened to meet someone from Ibahernando. Cabrera had aged, he was skinny and scraggy and exhausted, but his fellow villager recognised him; Cabrera also recognised this fellow from Ibahernando: although they were not friends, he knew his name was Paco, knew he was a few years younger, knew that in the early years of the Republic he’d been a socialist and before the war broke out he had joined the Falange, he knew his family. The two men talked. The man from his village told Cabrera that the following day a truckload of soldiers would be leaving for the region of Ibahernando, and Cabrera asked if there would be room for him. “I don’t know,” answered the villager, but he gave him a place and a time. When he showed up the next day at the agreed time and place, Cabrera saw that the truck was overflowing with euphoric victorious soldiers; he also saw, with apprehension, that some of those soldiers were from Ibahernando, and that they recognised him. For an instant he must have hesitated, he must have thought it would be more prudent to wait for another vehicle; but when Paco urged him to climb up, his impatience to return home was stronger than his caution, and he got in.

  At first the trip passed without scares, but the increasing proximity to their native land turned their triumphal euphoria to intoxication and their intoxication to a quarrelsome boastfulness that found its perfect victim: those who knew Cabrera revealed to the rest that he had been a Republican and socialist and the village mayor, made fun of him, insulted him, made him celebrate the victory, made him sing “Cara al sol,” the Falangist anthem, made him drink till he was drunk. Finally, when they were about to cross a bridge over the Tagus, some soldiers decided to throw Cabrera into the abyss. Horrified, at that moment Cabrera thought he was about to die, and he felt it was unjust or ridiculous or absurd to meet this fate after having escaped three years of war with his life, but realised he no longer had the strength to oppose his executioners. That was when, as the truck drove onto the bridge and he felt many ferocious hands lifting him up, he heard a question behind him: “What do you think you’re doing?” Cabrera recognised the voice; it was that of his fellow villager Paco, who a second later added: “We told this man we were going to take him home, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

  That’s how it ended: the soldiers let go of Cabrera and he arrived safe and sound in his village.

  That was all: that’s all that Delia Cabrera told Fernando Berlín. Well, not quite all. When she finished her story, Delia added: “The man who saved my grandfather’s life was Francisco Cercas, everyone called him Paco and he was the paternal grandfather of Javier Cercas, the author of Soldiers of Salamis.”

  Soldiers of Salamis is a novel that revolves around a tiny episode at the end of the Civil War, in which an anonymous Republican soldier saves the life of Rafael Sánchez Mazas, poet, ideologue, and Falangist leader.

  Shortly after Delia Cabrera told Berlín the buried story of her grandfather Antonio and my grandfather Paco, I spoke on the radio with her, with Berlín and with Iñaki Gabilondo, producer and presenter of the radio programme in which Berlín’s segment aired. At a certain point in the conversation Gabilondo asked me if I’d been inspired by that story of my grandfather’s to write Soldiers of Salamis. I said no. Then he asked me if I knew the story before Delia Cabrera had told Berlín. I said no. Then he asked me if my father knew it—I said no—or anyone in my family—I said no. Perplexed, Gabilondo then asked: “And why do you think your grandfather never told anyone that story?” For an interminable second I didn’t know how to answer. I remembered my grandfather Paco shut up day and night in his shed, at the back of the yard of his house in Ibahernando, very old and sinewy and engrossed in his meticulous task of making useless miniatures of carts, ploughs, and other farming implements. I remembered an evening thirty-five or forty years ago, when I was a child: my grandparents, some of my sisters, and I were in a taxi from Collado Mediano, a town near Madrid where my uncle Julio lived, on our way to Ibahernando, and at some moment, when we passed Brunete and night was falling and I was dozing off on my grandfather’s lap, he pointed towards the horizon and emerged from his silence as if he weren’t emerging from his silence but as if he’d been talking to me for a long time: “Look, Javi,” he whispered. “That’s where the trenches were.” I remembered another evening, more recent, but not that much, more or less in the years when Spain was beginning to emerge from the chasm of decades of a dictatorship that my grandfather had contributed in his way to digging and was peering out insecurely and fearfully at democracy: as on every summer evening, while my grandfather remained shut up in his shed, at the gateway of his house, relatives, friends, and neighbours all gathered to chat; that evening we were talking about politics, and near dusk my grandfather appeared at the gate, ready for his daily stroll, and as he stopped a moment to greet those of us who were there, someone asked him what he thought about what was happening in Spain. Then my grandfather made a face or a slight gesture, which I couldn’t decipher (something, I thought, halfway between a shrug and a cheerless smile), and before carrying on his way said: “Let’s see if it turns out well this time.” I remembered all that while Gabilondo waited for my answer, while I was wondering, like Gabilondo, why my grandfather had never told anyone that once he’d been brave and saved a man’s life, and it was at that very moment when I understood that novels are like dreams or nightmares that never end, just transform into other nightmares or dreams, and that I’d had the implausible fortune of having one of mine end, because that was the real ending of Soldiers of Salamis. So, joyfully, with immense relief, I answered Gabilondo: “I don’t know.”

  So much for Cercas’s article. Or almost: I have left out superfluous passages, made the odd indispensable correction for accuracy, toned down some sentimental emphases; I chose not to omit, however, five glaring factual errors, which should not be attributed to its author’s natural tendency to embellish, to his incurable literato’s predilection for imprecise legend over certain history, but to his negligence or his ignorance. First error: Antonio Cabrera was not the socialist mayor of Ibahernando in July 1936, when the war broke out; he was the mayor, but from 1933 to 1934, halfway through the Republic, and for almost three months of 1936: exactly from February 21 to May 16, 1936, when, shortly before the coup
d’état, he was replaced by Agustín Rosas. Second error: on their march to Madrid, Franco’s troops never passed through Ibahernando, but rather through Trujillo, and they didn’t do any of what Javier Cercas said they did in the village; it is true, however, that the former socialist mayor was forced to accompany his enemies and work for them in the service corps, although he didn’t do so for the entire war—this is the third error—but just for a few months, which explains why his return to the village would have coincided with that of Paco Cercas and his compañeros, at the end of 1936 or the beginning of 1937. Fourth error: there is no record that Paco Cercas, who undoubtedly knew the man whose life he saved much better than his grandson thought, was before the war a card-carrying socialist, or even that he then joined the Falange; there is, however, a record that he did so later, and even that on April 14, 1937, a few months after returning home, he was named leader of the local branch of the Falange. Fifth and final error: Paco Cercas did not fight in the Battle of Brunete, as Javier Cercas always believed, undoubtedly because he deduced it from the fact that, in that childhood twilight the article evokes, his grandfather was able to show him where the trenches were, and because he never made any effort to find out whether that deduction was accurate, and nobody ever refuted it; the reality is that Paco Cercas was only at the Battle of Madrid, and if he did know the trenches of Brunete it was because, many years after the war ended, he visited the ones preserved between Villanueva de la Cañada and Brunete several times with his son Julio, who lived near them, in Collado Mediano. In other respects, these errors do not exhaust the ignorance Javier Cercas has of his grandfather’s life, or at least that he had when he wrote his article. At that moment he did not know, for example, that his grandfather had actually been the local leader of the Falange for quite a brief period: more or less two years, from the first half of 1937 until the first half of 1939. Nor did he know that, when the war ended, around the time his grandfather gave up the leadership of the Ibahernando Falange another war had been unleashed in the village, a political war between old and young, between pure Falangists and pragmatic Francoists, a merciless battle for power that the former, including his grandfather, ended up losing. He didn’t know that until the end of his days his grandfather considered the victors to be a gang of unscrupulous upstarts, if not crooks, and that he never stopped professing an unconditional contempt for them. He had no idea that, before or after that defeat, his grandfather had not only left his position in the Falange but also the Falange itself, and that in his whole life he never again belonged to the only party there was. And much less did he know that his emphatic rejection of the Falange had turned into an emphatic rejection of politics, that he never held another political post, and that, while the victors of that war among victors of the war monopolised power in the village for the rest of the dictatorship, his grandfather left Ibahernando with his wife and children and, although he always kept his house in the village, he lived first in Cáceres and later in Mérida, renting parcels of arable land here and there which he worked from dawn to dusk to satisfy his determined desire to send all three of his children to university. He didn’t know that, after his disillusionment with the Falange, he never allowed his sons to join that organisation or have anything to do with it, in spite of it being the first instrument of youthful socialisation during the dictatorship. He did not know in short that, as well as being disappointed by Franco, his grandfather grew disappointed with the ideas that led him to go to war (supposing that it was ideas and not a much more basic impulse that led him to war), although it is impossible to know how deep those two disappointments ran. Not knowing, he didn’t even know that, in spite of being almost twenty years older than Manuel Mena, at some point in the war his grandfather had established a strong enough friendship with him that he was invited over for a meal every time he was home from the front on leave.

  * * *

  —

  Manuel Mena was in Ibahernando when the war broke out. He was seventeen years old, had just graduated with brilliant results from the final year of his baccalaureate in Cáceres, and was preparing to start his first year of law school in Madrid. He was spending the summer holidays at his mother’s house, with his three unmarried siblings and a niece and a nephew: Blanquita, who was five, the daughter of his brother Juan, and Alejandro, who was seven, and the son of his sister María, and with whom he was sharing a room. The year in Cáceres had ended up distancing him from his childhood friends, so his summer must have gone by between conversations with Don Eladio Viñuela, reading books and magazines borrowed from his library and walks with his mentor and with Alejandro, who went everywhere with him; he had also become inseparable from a kid his age, named Tomás Álvarez, who was the younger brother of the Ibahernando priest and who had been spending long stretches of time in the village since before the war. It is impossible that, no matter how isolated he might have been living in Ibahernando, Manuel Mena did not sense there the prewar atmosphere that was present throughout the country, that he would not have guessed such a situation could not last long and that he wouldn’t have felt the imminence of the outbreak of violence or a military coup that everybody was feeling; there is no doubt that, when the army finally rose up against the government, he approved of the uprising and celebrated the end of Republican legitimacy in the village; nor is there any doubt that he decided to go off to war as soon as the failure of the coup triggered it.

  His mother guessed that immediately and, perhaps knowing that she could not prevent him, tried to prevent him. For years the dialogues between mother and son during those early weeks of war constituted one of the largest chapters of the legend of Manuel Mena. They say that his mother repeated that he wasn’t old enough to fight in the war and that she was a poor widow and still had two as yet unmarried daughters, and that he couldn’t abandon her in those circumstances; they say that she reminded him that he was the family’s great hope, that she and his brothers had spared him from working in the fields so he wouldn’t get trapped in the village like them and could go out into the world and study for a university degree and would have a dignified future, and that he was going to risk all of that if he went off to the war; they say that she told him he was her favourite son and her shoulder to cry on, and asked him what would become of her if he were killed; they say she insisted, she begged, she implored, she coerced him with all the measures at her disposal. They also say that Manuel Mena remained serene and resolute and that, although he tried to assuage her concern, he never gave her the slightest hope that he might give in to her pleas. They say that Manuel Mena answered his mother that his obligation was to go to war, that he couldn’t hide at home while others like him were risking their lives at the front, that he had to be equal to the task, had to measure up and not get scared, that he was going to defend her, his sisters, his brothers, his nieces and nephews, that he was only going to do what others were already doing, to fight for what’s right, for his family, for his nation, and for God; they say that he told her: “Do not worry, Mother: if I return, I’ll return with honour; if I do not return, a son of yours will have given his life for the Fatherland, and there is nothing greater than that. Furthermore,” he concluded, “if I get killed, they’ll give you such a bonus payment that you’ll never have to worry about anything.” All this Manuel Mena said to his mother, but the phrase he most often repeated to her was not an anticipated attempt to console her but a request.

  “Mother,” he’d say, “I ask only one thing of you if I get killed: let nobody see you cry.”

  Manuel Mena finally left for the front one early morning at the beginning of October 1936, more than two months after the start of the war. I don’t know if anyone saw him leave the village; I don’t know if he went on his own or if someone else accompanied him on his flight. I do know that, before he left, he tried in vain to persuade his friend Tomás Álvarez to accompany him. I know that he left in secret, without asking anyone’s permission or saying goodbye to anyone in his fa
mily: neither his mother nor his siblings, nor his nephews and nieces. Hours or days later, on October 6, he joined the Third Bandera of the Cáceres Falange as a volunteer, precisely the same unit that, months earlier, the village’s first twenty-five volunteers had joined, among them Paco Cercas. I don’t know if the fact is a coincidence. There are some who claim to have heard him (or someone close to him) on occasion talk about his presence at the Madrid front at the beginning of the war; there are some who maintain that Manuel Mena and other young volunteers like him were sent to Madrid to relieve Paco Cercas and the other old but early volunteers; there are some who maintain that was when and where he and Paco Cercas became friends. I don’t know that either. This is the least certain stretch of Manuel Mena’s life. The only thing we know about him is the little that is known about the events of the war in which his unit took part from October of that year until July of the following year, when he was transferred.