Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  During those nine months the combat activity of the Third Bandera of the Falange was very infrequent. Supposing that they ever actually fought in Madrid, they returned very promptly to Extremadura, and were soon stationed in the zone of Miajadas, Rena, and Villar de Rena, in the province of Badajoz, where the Extremadura front had been established after the chaos of the early weeks of the war with the cemetery-like peace imposed by Yagüe’s African columns making their way through the zone. It was an inactive front, which barely registered anything but inconsequential skirmishes until July of the following year, just when Manuel Mena left it. Everything indicates that in those first months of hostilities, vibrant with martial exaltation and collective enthusiasm, Manuel Mena was a soldier as eager for glory and battle as Lieutenant Drogo in The Tartar Steppe, a young idealist intoxicated with shiny speeches on the romanticism of combat and the purifying beauty of war; everything indicates that the passivity and lethargy that reigned over the Extremadura front where Manuel Mena spent that year waiting for the Republicans must not have been too different from the lethargy and passivity that reigned over the Bastiani Fortress, where Lieutenant Drogo spent his life waiting for the Tartars. This was not Manuel Mena’s idea of war, this was not why he’d enlisted as a volunteer, so he must have begun very soon to look for a posting more in line with his expectations.

  If that’s how it was, it didn’t take him long to find it. Franco’s army suffered from a damaging shortage of officers and commanders from the beginning of the war; to mitigate this he improvised a corps made up of young university students who, after a short course lasting barely two weeks, were awarded officer rank. Almost thirty thousand provisional second lieutenants were created in this way over the three years the conflict lasted, almost two-thirds of the Francoist campaign’s officer corps. Surrounded from very early on by an epic fame, in Francoist propaganda the provisional second lieutenant quickly became the prototypical hero: he was young, brave, idealistic, generous, and dashing, and, with his permanent readiness for sacrifice, he constituted the backbone of the rebel army. “Provisional lieutenant, corpse in waiting,” ran the accurate saying: during the whole war more than three thousand provisional second lieutenants died, 10 per cent of the total. In March 1938, months before Manuel Mena fell in combat, José María Pemán, Francoism’s official poet and honorary provisional second lieutenant, premiered a play at the Argensola Theatre in Zaragoza titled Theirs Is the World, in which he tried to immortalise the figure of the provisional lieutenant with verses that would soon be spreading by word of mouth:

  Provisional…second lieutenant.

  Sad and handsome

  in his own fragility.

  Like a flower in the wind,

  like a crystal glass,

  I am Spanish, and more so

  for being provisional.

  Here I am, offering you, Spain,

  my twenty years, as if they were

  twenty fresh dahlias,

  and Death

  the gardener.

  At the beginning of July 1937 Manuel Mena enrolled in the Granada Military Academy, from which he emerged at the beginning of September with the rank of provisional second lieutenant; that’s how long those preparatory courses lasted at that time: not two weeks, as they had at the beginning of the war, but two months. By then Manuel Mena had turned eighteen and had spent half a month at the front, two of the requirements demanded of those who aspired to that rank; the other was to have graduated from secondary school, which Manuel Mena had done the previous summer. After the tedium and inaction of the Extremadura front, he must have enjoyed military life in Granada, surrounded by students like himself and flattered by the city’s residents, who stopped to admire the cadets and applauded them as they paraded along the Gran Vía towards the Academy or the training field as they sang:

  When the cadets—come out of training

  all the girls—come out on their balconies.

  If you look up—you’re going to see suspenders,

  you’re going to be reprimanded—run, run, run down to the sea.

  The Academy was located in an old Jesuit seminary surrounded by woods. The future officers were trained there under strict discipline and an invariable routine. Manuel Mena got up at dawn every day, and at six in the morning was already out doing field exercises, target and tactical practice in the hills that rise behind the Alhambra, with views of the city below and the Sierra Nevada above. At noon he returned to the Academy and had lunch with his comrades in a vast refectory with a pulpit meant for readings, which was never used. The morning classes were practical and imparted by German instructors who spoke very broken Spanish, while the afternoon ones were theoretical and imparted by Spanish instructors who taught tactics, logistics, procedural rules, military justice, morality, and religion. The cadets earned 320 pesetas a month; Manuel Mena once said that a veteran warned him when he received his first month’s salary: “The first one’s for the uniform, pirulo; the second, for the shroud.” Pirulo was the name the veteran cadets reserved for the green ones, who they tortured during the first few weeks with hazing pranks; padrecito was the name the veteran cadets reserved for themselves.

  The final days at the Academy were normally filled with great nervousness, because one of the rules of the institution was that nobody was allowed to repeat the course, so candidates who aspired to be officers had to pass all the exams on their first attempt; fortunately for the cadets, these exams were not excessively demanding, so most of them passed. Manuel Mena was religious without being sanctimonious, but it is more than likely that, once he had passed the course, he would have gone with his classmates to the sanctuary of the Virgin of Anguish to offer her their lieutenant stars and ask her for strength for themselves and their families, because cadets considered this visit almost obligatory. I don’t think he would have requested the Ifni Riflemen posting, as it was a virtually unknown unit, but it is possible that he requested the Regulars, a corps created in Africa and formed essentially of native troops, to which the Ifni Riflemen belonged: the corps of Regulars was after all one of the most coveted by the second lieutenants; in any case, whatever he might have requested, in the end it was not him but the army who, according to its own needs, chose the posting. He undoubtedly swore allegiance to the flag during a ceremony with an open-air Mass, military music, patriotic speeches, and a parade, but I don’t know where (it might have been in Granada itself, though it could also have taken place in any of the capital cities of Andalucía), and it is almost certain that General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, commander of the Army of the South, would have attended. It is also almost certain that after the oath a banquet of brotherhood would have been held for the recently designated officers and their instructors, and that at night, after the party ended, Manuel Mena would have set off for Ibahernando to enjoy a week’s leave before joining his new unit at the front.

  I managed to rescue two anecdotes from Manuel Mena’s first visit home as a second lieutenant; more than two anecdotes, they are two scenes, two moments, which, almost eighty years later, still survive in the memories of two of their witnesses. The first was seen by Blanca Mena, mother of Javier Cercas, in her grandmother Carolina’s house during the happy afternoon when Manuel Mena arrived from Granada with his officer’s diploma under his arm. At eighty-five years of age, Blanca Mena still retains an intact memory of the dining room exhilarated by the dazzling appearance of her uncle, by her grandmother Carolina’s tearful reception, and by the hubbub of Manuel Mena’s friends and acquaintances—Isabel Martínez, María Ruiz, Paca Cercas—who came from every corner of the village to celebrate the recently arrived hero, girls the same age as Manuel Mena who swirled around him like a chaotic harem, nervous and smiling, pestering him with questions about the Academy and Granada and the war while her grandmother tried to accommodate them and share with them the exultation at the return of her son; Blanca Mena reme
mbered herself taking hold of his jacket in one hand and the handle or sheath of his lieutenant’s sabre in the other, delighted with that tumultuous welcome, and remembered Manuel Mena with his unpacked bedroll at his feet, tall, young, and as distinguished as a prince, wrapped in his impeccable and very white uniform—peaked cap with the officer’s gold star, black tie, black chevrons with gold stars and buttons, the jacket without a single crease and the trousers straight, the golden set of buttons and shiny shoes—lavishing smiles in the midst of the din, playing down the importance of his months of instruction at the Academy, his brand-new rank of second lieutenant, and the horror of the war, and making jokes at which everybody laughed uproariously. As for the second anecdote, it was Alejandro García, Javier Cercas’s uncle, who told it to the novelist not long ago. I have already recorded that Alejandro García was Manuel Mena’s nephew and shared a room with him for years in his grandmother Carolina’s house; also that, when Manuel Mena returned from studying in Cáceres or from combat at the front, he accompanied him everywhere, holding his hand and as faithful as a dog: Alejandro remembered, for example, that he sometimes went with his uncle to listen to the radio at the house of a man nicknamed Rabbit, the only or almost only person in the village who owned one, and that other times, at lunchtime, he accompanied him to Don Eladio Viñuela’s house, on the plaza, or to Paco Cercas’s, on Fontanilla, and that, following his instructions to the letter, he would return to pick him up after an hour and a half, or after two hours, when the meal had finished or when he estimated it would have finished. He must have done more or less the same during that week of leave Manuel Mena enjoyed in the village. Alejandro remembered two things about it. The first is that Manuel Mena brought him a gift from Granada: a plaster model of the Alhambra. The second is the anecdote I was referring to.

  It happened two or three days before Manuel Mena returned to the front, now as an officer of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen. That afternoon Alejandro was playing in the doorway of his grandmother Carolina’s house while Manuel Mena was reading in the courtyard. All of a sudden, Alejandro told me, he felt that something out of the ordinary was happening in the air or in the sky—as if the clouds had briskly covered the sun and had changed the colour of the afternoon, provoking a premature nightfall or a lambent foreboding of a cataclysm—and turned towards the west. What he saw left him astounded. In spite of the hours remaining before night, the sun seemed to be trying to hide behind the last rooftops of the village; its brilliance, however, had not disappeared, or not entirely: to the right there was still a brushstroke of yellow, unreal light, but most of the horizon was dyed red, a red less unreal than the yellow, pink at the left and very intense in the distance and in front of him, increasingly intense and invasive, just as if a storm of blood was gestating in the sky. All of a sudden, Alejandro snapped out of the spell and shouted to raise the alarm, which brought a handful of relatives and neighbours; among them, naturally, was Manuel Mena. Alejandro said that at first the group was dumbstruck by surprise, but soon people began to comment on the spectacle, to risk hypotheses, to argue; the only one who remained still and silent before the incandescent horizon was Manuel Mena. Alejandro approached him and took his hand. More anxious than intrigued, he asked:

  “That’s the war, isn’t it, Uncle Manuel?”

  “No,” answered his uncle. “It’s the aurora borealis.”

  7

  “Did you notice?” David Trueba asked me. “Each time you mentioned Manuel Mena, the Shearer got nervous.”

  We’d left the Shearer’s house a while ago and driven out of Ibahernando, crossing Pozo Castro and the square lit up at that hour by a couple of streetlights and the bright squares of the bar windows, through which I glimpsed men standing at the counter and seated men playing cards. Later we got into the deep darkness of the narrow road to Trujillo and took the highway to Madrid at the intersection by La Majada, the restaurant where we’d eaten lunch. We had planned to sleep in Trujillo, but it was not yet nine and we calculated that we could get back to Madrid at a reasonable hour, so when we got to the Trujillo turnoff we decided to stay on the highway as we passed the Cabeza del Zorro, the headland on which the town is built, with its medieval walls, towers, and castle floodlit in the darkness. Until then we hadn’t said a word about the two and a half hours of conversation we’d just had with the Shearer, in the presence of his daughter and son-in-law, and I had attributed David’s silence to a lack of interest in what he’d been filming; from his observation I deduced that the opposite was the case, so I immediately answered that I too had noticed what he’d noticed.

  “He kept moving his crutch from one side to the other,” I added.

  “Not that it should surprise us,” David said. “They kill your father like a dog, and you don’t know who or why, and you have to bury him in secret without anyone saying a lousy prayer. How horrible. And then Manuel Mena goes off to war because he wants to, dies fighting like a man, and the whole town turns out for his funeral. In Ibahernando, Manuel Mena was a hero, and the Shearer’s father was nothing, less than nothing, a Red who’d got what he deserved. Poor Shearer: almost eighty years without telling anyone that story, almost eighty years carrying that around inside him. I don’t know about you, but I had the impression the whole time that I was in front of a man who’s been ill for his entire life and doesn’t even know he’s ill.”

  “I had the same impression,” I said. “And I also had the impression that he was talking about the war as if it were a natural disaster.”

  “Could be,” David said. “Lots of people who lived through the war talk about it that way, especially in small towns. But I think the Shearer was doing it on purpose, as a cover-up.”

  “As a cover-up?”

  “Your family was one of the right-wing families of the village, right? In other words: the people who had taken Franco’s side; in short: the people who had killed his father. As well as the Shearer speaks of them, as much as he appreciates them, that’s what they were. And you want him to say what he really thinks about the war and about Manuel Mena to a member of that family, which is what you are? But he’s never even told his own daughters…! That’s why he talks with the hand brake on, man. And don’t tell me it’s been almost eighty years since the war, because for that man the war’s not over; or at least Francoism, which was, after all, the continuation of the war by other means. He couldn’t have put it any plainer.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think that man knows more than he told us too.”

  “Not more: much, much more,” he emphasised. “At least about the war and about Manuel Mena.”

  I agreed again and, perhaps fearing that David might change the subject, added the first thing that popped into my head:

  “Didn’t it seem like he might burst into tears at any moment?”

  David took his eyes off the road to give me a look of incomprehension or surprise.

  “Who, the Shearer?” David said; he quickly turned back to watch where we were going. “I’d bet my balls he never cries.”

  I thought of my mother, who’d cried so much when Manuel Mena died that she used up her lifetime’s supply of tears, and understood that David was right.

  “You’re right,” I said. “That man must have used up all his tears when they killed his father.”

  “For sure,” David said, nodding. “And by the way, haven’t you thought of something?”

  In silence I wondered if the fundamental difference that divides people might not be the division between people who can still cry and those who can no longer cry; also in silence I wondered how many people had run out of tears during the war. Out loud I asked: “What?”

  “That maybe the Shearer hadn’t agreed to talk to you to tell you the story of Manuel Mena.”

  I tried to process David’s assertion, but in vain.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  He clicked his tongue wi
th an annoyed look on his face.

  “Let’s see,” he began pedagogically. “That man has spent almost eighty years in silence, without talking about the war even with his daughters, and you really think he’s going to start talking about the Francoist hero of the village just like that, willingly, and to top it off with you, the great-nephew of the village’s Francoist hero? The hell he is. He agreed to talk to you to tell the story of his father, so the story of his father’s murder won’t remain untold, so you’ll take on that story and tell it. He might not have been entirely aware of having done it for that reason, but he did. No doubt about it. Or wasn’t it him who brought it up? And, by the way, who was talking about responsibility? Hannah Arendt? Well, take responsibility.”

  The highway was almost deserted. The moon wasn’t up, and to the left and right the holm-oak woods were submerged in an almost hermetic darkness. Tall as giraffe necks or gigantic sunflowers planted at the roadside, the streetlights gave off a butane-coloured light, but there were stretches without lighting, or where the streetlights were not on, where the darkness completely colonised the asphalt and where only the headlights of our car seemed to fight against its tyranny and the few other cars that occasionally broke through the darkness, coming towards us in the opposite lane, before disappearing again behind us, or the even sparser cars that overtook us in the fast lane. David had set the cruise control at 75 miles per hour and was driving in a relaxed way, leaning back in his seat, holding the steering wheel at the bottom (or caressing it), with his gaze fixed outside, on the road, although the impression he gave was that he was not looking out but inward: not at what he was seeing but what he was thinking. He must have turned on the radio or put in a CD, because there was a melody playing very softly that sounded familiar but that I didn’t recognise. We’d finished talking about the Shearer and were talking about Manuel Mena.