Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  “People used to have a very different idea of war,” my friend said at one point; combined with the brightness of the dashboard, the intermittent light from the streetlights created an unreal atmosphere inside the car, as if we were in a tank or an aquarium. “We’ve forgotten, but it’s true. Actually, people have almost always thought wars were useful, that they solved problems. That’s what men have thought for centuries, for millennia: that war is terrible and cruel but noble, the place where we get an authentic measure of ourselves. Now this seems fucking stupid to us, moronic ravings, but the truth is even the greatest artists thought like that. I don’t know, you look at The Surrender of Breda, with the battlefield still smoking and all those people so gentlemanly, so dignified in defeat and so magnanimous in victory, and you want to be there even on the losing side: fuck, even the horses look intelligent and generous! On the other hand, you look at The Third of May 1808 or The Disasters of War, and your hair stands on end and the only thing you want to do is run away. Of course, we know that Goya is much closer to reality than Velázquez, but we haven’t known it for long; or perhaps it’s simply that Goya paints war as it is, while Velázquez paints it as we wish it was, or as we imagined it was for centuries. Whatever the case, I’m sure when he went off to war Manuel Mena had an idea of it much less like Goya’s than like Velázquez’s, which is the idea of war young men have always had before going to war.”

  That was when David brought up a story by the Serbian writer Danilo Kiš, titled To Die for One’s Country Is Glorious. He did so, I’m sure, because Manuel Mena’s story reminded him of it, although I don’t know exactly why it reminded him; he did so because the protagonist of Kiš’s story is a young warrior who dies young and violently, like Manuel Mena, although perhaps he also did so because he wanted to tell me something he hadn’t finished telling me or that he didn’t dare tell me or had told me but not openly and which in that moment I didn’t understand. I insist that I don’t know. What I do know is that he loved the story and that years earlier he had thought of adapting it for the screen, which is why he’d read it many times.

  “The story takes place in an undefined place and time,” he began, choosing each word carefully. “Undefined on purpose, of course: we’re in Europe, there is talk of an empire and Emperor, and there is an insinuation that both are Spanish, but there is also a mention of sans-culottes and Jacobins, who existed when there was no Spanish empire in Europe. Anyway…The protagonist of the tale, or rather the apparent protagonist, is named Esterházy, is a count, and is the same age as Manuel Mena when he died. More or less. Esterházy belongs to a family as noble and as ancient as that of the emperor who has sentenced him to hang for having been involved in a mass uprising. The action begins shortly before the sentence is carried out. One day Esterházy receives a visit in his death-row cell from his mother, a haughty aristocrat proud of the eminence of her lineage. They speak for a while, and the boy announces to his mother that he is prepared to die. That’s what he says. Although it’s possible his mother doesn’t believe him. The proof is that she cheers him up and tries to instil courage in him so he won’t despair, so he won’t collapse and so he’ll maintain his dignity in this terrible moment; more than that: she assures him that she is going to beg the emperor to pardon him, that she is ready to throw herself at his feet; and she tells her son that, if she obtains a reprieve, on the day of his execution he will see her dressed in white on a balcony, as they take him to the scaffold, and that will be the signal that he is saved and that the emperor’s pardon will arrive in time.” David paused here, as if he’d forgotten how the story went on or as if he’d just realised something that he’d overlooked until then. “The thing is that, during his stay in prison,” he goes on, “Esterházy’s main preoccupation consists of upholding aristocratic manners until the end; what obsesses him is that no one should see him collapse or show fear or reveal signs of weakness when the moment of death arrives. And so on the day of his execution the count rises at dawn, after a sleepless night, and does all he can to maintain his composure: he prays, smokes one last cigarette, allows them to tie his hands behind his back as if he were a highwayman, and climbs into the carriage that conducts him to the gallows. And, yes, during the journey to the scaffold there are moments when he feels fear is going to get the best of him, but the young man controls himself and overcomes them. That’s what happens in one of the best scenes of the story, when Esterházy reaches a crowded boulevard, the rabble begins to shout and raise fists in hatred while he feels his courage deserting him, and around him the mob grows excited and cheers at his weakness. But everything quickly changes again, and the count straightens up and recovers the noble and brave aspect of the Esterházys. And do you know why?” Although it was obvious he wasn’t expecting a reply to his question, he paused. “Well, because at the head of the boulevard he sees a blinding white spot on a balcony. It is his mother, in a white dress, leaning over the railing with the saving signal she had promised her son…So the young count understands he is not going to die, that his mother’s entreaties had moved the emperor and at the last moment his pardon will arrive; so he mounts the scaffold and confronts death with the dignity expected from a man of his lineage. Nice, isn’t it? The only problem is that in the end the pardon does not come. And Esterházy dies at the hands of the hangman.”

  David fell silent, as if allowing time for the conclusion of the story, or what seems to be the conclusion, to take effect on me.

  “It’s a great story,” I said, sincerely.

  “Yeah,” David responded. “The best thing about it is its ambiguity, don’t you think? Or its ambiguities, rather, because the story has several: one explicit, one apparent, and another real one. Kiš himself describes the apparent and explicit ambiguity in a sort of epilogue. There he says that the story he’s just told has two possible interpretations. The first is the heroic interpretation, which is that of the poor and the losers; according to this one, Esterházy died bravely, with his head held high and fully aware he was about to die. The second is the prosaic interpretation, which is that of the victors; according to this one, it was all playacting on the part of his mother.

  David turned to me for a moment and smiled only with his eyes. Or that’s what it seemed like to me.

  “But all this is a story, as they say, and never better said,” he went on. “I mean that it’s a lie, that the ambiguity is only apparent. Because we know that the heroic version of the story is the imaginative and legendary (in other words: false) version with which the poor and vanquished console themselves for their poverty and their defeat, or with which they try to redeem themselves, and the truth is that it was all a clever bit of playacting by the mother, that was what really happened even if it is the version the victors and official historians tell in order to prevent the birth of a heroic legend. Kiš is implacable, ferocious, leaves not a glimmer of consolation or hope: as well as having power, power has the truth. So that’s not where the ambiguity of the tale lies, or its true genius. The ambiguity is in the mother, in the attitude or strategy of the mother, who is the story’s authentic protagonist. Because her attitude does allow for two interpretations. The first is that she goes up to the balcony dressed in white and deceives her son by making him believe that the emperor has reprieved him because she loves him as only a mother can love and wants to spare him the agony of knowing his last few seconds of life will really be his last, because she wants him to die calm and happy, convinced until the last instant that the emperor’s reprieve will eventually arrive. The second interpretation is that the mother deceives her son because she loves him, but not only because she loves him: she deceives him so he’ll be worthy of his name and his lineage, so in the final moment he will not falter and will confront death with the integrity of an Esterházy.

  “So he’ll have a beautiful death,” I interrupted. “Kalos thanatos, the Greeks called it. That’s what the mother wants for her son.”

  �
�Exactly,” David said.

  “The Greeks thought that was the best possible death,” I said. “The death of a noble and pure young man who demonstrates his purity and nobility by dying for his ideals. Like Achilles in The Iliad. Or like Count Esterházy.”

  “Or like Manuel Mena,” David suggested.

  Only then did I realise that my friend had not begun to talk about the Kiš short story in order to stop me talking about Manuel Mena. I said:

  “Assuming he was a noble and pure young man,” I added rapidly. “Incidentally: can you be noble and pure and at the same time fight for a mistaken cause?”

  David reflected for a moment before answering; when he did I had the feeling that he’d spent a long time thinking about this, perhaps ever since he’d adapted my novel about the war for the cinema.

  “You can,” he answered. “And do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because we are not omniscient. Because we don’t know everything. It’s been almost eighty years since the war, you and I are over forty, so for us it’s dead easy to know that the cause Manuel Mena died for was unjust. But was it so easy for him to know, when he was just a kid, who didn’t have the perspective of time and didn’t know what would happen afterwards, and to top it all had barely even left his village? Incidentally, was the cause Achilles died for just or unjust? It seems totally unjust to me: didn’t poor Helen have every right to take off with Paris and leave Menelaus, who was a bore as well as an old fogey…You think that’s reason enough to wage war, especially one as brutal as the Trojan War? I’m serious: we don’t judge Achilles by the justice or injustice of the cause he died for, but for the nobility of his actions, by the decency and bravery and generosity with which he behaved. Should we not do the same with Manuel Mena?”

  “We’re not ancient Greeks, David.”

  “Well, maybe we should be, in this as in so many things. Look, Manuel Mena was politically mistaken, there’s no doubt about that; but morally…would you dare to say you’re better than him? I wouldn’t.”

  In order not to answer his question I posed another:

  “And if he was neither noble nor pure?”

  “Then I’d take back what I said,” he replied, emphatically. “But first you have to prove to me that he was neither one thing nor the other. Because otherwise…”

  At that point we were overtaken by two speeding cars, one right behind the other; their red taillights raced away ahead of us until the darkness of the highway closed over them, as if the night had devoured them. David swore at the two drivers and said something about his son Leo or about one of Leo’s friends. Then he asked what we were talking about.

  “About kalos thanatos,” I said. “The beautiful death, which was the Greeks’ ethical ideal and the guarantee of immortality. But it all stemmed from the Kiš short story.”

  “Of course,” David said. “Of the two interpretations of the story, right? Why the mother deceived her son when she appeared on the balcony dressed in white. In the first interpretation, the mother acts solely out of love, so her son won’t suffer; in the second she acts out of love but also honour, out of family pride, to ensure that her son would be worthy of the Esterházy name. Which one do you prefer?”

  Looking at the almost opaque blackness extending beyond the area illuminated by the car’s headlights, with the white centre line running like an intermittent flash to our left, I tried to concentrate on David’s question, but for some reason I once again remembered the phrase that had occurred to me that afternoon in La Majada (“I write so I won’t be written”) and I thought that Esterházy’s mother had decided Esterházy’s fate, that it had not been the young Esterházy who had written his hero’s fate but his mother who had written him, and then I wondered if the same thing hadn’t happened to Manuel Mena, if it hadn’t also been Manuel Mena’s mother, in spite of the fact that according to family legend she hadn’t wanted her son to go to war, who had driven him to go, even if secretly or unconsciously, if it hadn’t been her who, in order that her son would be worthy of his lineage of patricians of the village, had written his fate as hero. I thought that and then said to myself again, as I had done while we were eating in La Majada (except that now I told myself with a sort of pride), that by writing I had freed myself of the fate of Esterházy and Manuel Mena, that I had become a writer so I would not be written by my mother, in order that my mother would not write my fate with the fate she considered the highest, which was the fate of Manuel Mena. Perhaps a little ashamed of what I’d just thought, or of the pride with which I’d thought it, I went back to concentrating on the Kiš short story and on David’s question. Then something occurred to me.

  “There’s another possibility,” I ventured.

  “What possibility?” David asked.

  “It’s not the mother who deceives her son, at least not on purpose,” I said. “It’s the emperor who deceives the mother.”

  David took less than a second to absorb my speculation, which led me to believe he’d considered it already. He asked:

  “Are you saying that the mother went to beg the emperor to pardon her son, that she humbled herself to persuade him to grant it and that, even though he granted it, in the end the emperor did not fulfil his promise to pardon him?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s not a possibility,” David said. “If it were, the emperor wouldn’t be the emperor, and the mother wouldn’t be an Esterházy: a woman who humbles herself before no one. Not even the emperor. Not even to save her son.”

  David said this last bit with a conviction that allowed no reply. I did not attempt to offer one. There was silence, and only at that moment did I recognise the music that had been playing the whole time on the radio or on a CD: it was Bob Dylan, or a good imitator of Bob Dylan. I thought David had no more to say about the story of the Esterházys; I was wrong.

  “I don’t know about you, but if there’s one thing I detest in a short story it’s those judgmental, conclusive endings that clear everything up,” he said. “Kiš’s story seems like it has one of those but it doesn’t, because in reality it doesn’t clear anything up. I like it so much that I know it by heart. ‘History is written by the victors,’ it says, and then goes on: ‘Legends are woven by the people. Writers fantasise. Only death is certain.’ ”

  David went on talking, although I no longer remember what about, in any case not the Kiš story but something the Kiš story or maybe the ending of the Kiš story suggested to him, and those four sentences remained floating around in the car like a diaphanous enigma and, while I listened to my friend’s voice mixed in with the music of Bob Dylan or the Bob Dylan imitator and with the monotonous noise of the car gliding along the nocturnal and uneven asphalt, I distracted myself by thinking that it was true that we writers fantasise and that death is certain, but that it was also true that, even if Manuel Mena were a victor of the war, people have told nothing but legends about him and nobody had written his story. Did that mean that Kiš was not right and that sometimes the victors don’t have history either, even if they’re the ones who write it? Did that mean that after all Manuel Mena was not a victor, even if he’d fought on the winning side?

  I was still thinking about Kiš’s sentences when we stopped for a coffee at a roadside restaurant, a little way past the Talavera de la Reina exit. There, unexpectedly (or at least I didn’t expect it: I had no reason to expect it), David began to talk about his broken marriage and his ex-wife, or perhaps he’d been talking about it for a while and I hadn’t noticed until then. The thing is when we got back in the car he was still talking about it. He did so for a long time, and I listened to him turned sideways in my seat, to face him, as if observing the grey stubble that covered his cheeks and his two hands on the steering wheel and his gaze fixed on the road allowed me to forget Manuel Mena and concentrate on what my friend was saying. It had been several years since he and his
wife had separated, but I’d never heard him talk about their separation like this, with that real serenity, without pain or without the pain showing through in his words. At one point he said:

  “Do you know what I miss?” He waited for me to ask him what it was. “Being in love,” he said. “It sounds like the lyrics of a silly summer pop song, but the fucking truth is that everything is much better when you’re in love.”

  At another point, after describing in detail the happy new life his ex-wife leads with the well-built, reluctant Hollywood star, a thoughtful silence began.

  “I can’t understand it, Javier,” he said finally; and, with the vehemence of one denouncing an enormous injustice, he exclaimed: “Can you just tell me what the hell Viggo Mortensen’s got that I haven’t got?”

  Turning a little bit to his right, he looked at me for a second with perfect solemnity; a second later we both burst out laughing.

  “Congratulations, man,” I told him, unable to stop laughing. “You’re cured.”