Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  All this I could imagine. But I shall not imagine it or at least I’ll pretend not to imagine it, because this is not fiction and I am no literato, so I must confine myself to the safety of facts. I do not regret this, not too much: after all, no matter how much I fantasise I’ll never manage to imagine the most important thing, which always escapes. And here the most important—or what right now seems most important to me—would be to determine what kind of feeling Manuel Mena experienced that night, when he was finally withdrawn from the battlefield after his first real experience of combat and when he was admitted to the division’s field hospital and found out that all the awfulness he’d been immersed in for the last twelve hours had been futile because not only did the umpteenth attack on La Losilla fail but the great Teruel offensive had been called off, the last Francoist stronghold there had just fallen into Republican hands.

  9

  At the beginning of 2015, exactly a year after I’d learned of the Shearer’s death from my mother, and two or three since I’d started collecting information about Manuel Mena, a film producer called to say she was preparing a television series about Catalans born in other parts of Spain and to propose that one of the segments should be about me. As usual when I’m asked to appear on television I remembered for an instant what a friend of Umberto Eco’s told him on one occasion (“Umberto, every time I don’t see you on television you seem more intelligent”), so I said no; the next instant, however, I remembered my mother and Manuel Mena and the Shearer and I said yes. With one condition: that we would film in Ibahernando and with my mother.

  The producer accepted, and for three days at the end of June 2015 we were filming in Ibahernando. By that time I knew Manuel Mena’s story quite well, I’d spoken to lots of people who knew him or knew things about him, I’d explored archives and libraries, I’d travelled to the places where Manuel Mena had fought during the war—around Teruel, Lérida, the Bielsa Valley, and the sites of the Battle of the Ebro, near the municipality of Terra Alta—and I had been in contact with professional historians, with amateur historians, with local experts, with historical associations and aficionados of local history, with the locals themselves. In spite of all that, I still couldn’t see Manuel Mena; I mean Manuel Mena was still for me what he’d always been: a blurry, distant, schematic figure, without humanity or moral complexity, as rigid, cold, and abstract as a statue. Apart from that, at the beginning of my investigations I’d had a few shocks. I remember, for example, my first exchange of e-mails with Francisco Cabrera, a retired Civil Guard officer who possessed in his house in Gandesa, the capital of Terra Alta, an archive of documents collected over twenty years of almost exclusive dedication to the history of the Battle of the Ebro, and who had published several stout studies on the subject. I got his e-mail address from a friend and collaborator of his whom I’d met by chance in a Barcelona library, and I succinctly told him what I was looking for. Cabrera responded immediately, as if he’d been waiting for my question or as if his only job was to respond to questions like mine. “I regret to disagree with what you’ve so far been able to discover about your great-uncle,” he wrote. “According to my database, he died on January 8, 1938, in the Battle of Teruel, and not September 21, 1938, in the Battle of the Ebro. I hope you won’t be angry with me because my documents do not confirm what you thought you knew until now about the death of your ancestor.” After that, beneath his reply, he added a page from a history of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen where the armed clashes Manuel Mena’s unit was involved in from January 3 to 27, 1938, in the vicinity of Teruel, were summarised, and where Manuel Mena figured among the fatally wounded casualties of the combats during those horrific days.

  More than perplexing me, the news provoked an instant of vertigo. Immediately, however, I reconsidered. It had not been a long time since I’d begun my investigations into Manuel Mena and, although it is possible that I already knew he’d fought in Teruel, or that I’d heard people talk about it, I didn’t know what he’d done in that battle; what I had undoubtedly seen, conversely, was Manuel Mena’s death certificate, which was in the archives of the Ibahernando parish church and which I’d already thought to photocopy on one of my visits to the village. I went to look for it and it didn’t take me long to find it: the document was dated September 1938, in the middle of the Battle of the Ebro, and not January ’38, in the middle of the Battle of Teruel. Relieved in theory, but still anxious to get to the bottom of the misunderstanding, I explained to Cabrera what the death certificate said; Cabrera replied in short order. “Hello again, Javier,” he wrote, phlegmatically. “I can confirm what I told you about the date of death for Second Lieutenant Manuel Mena Martínez (8-1-1938), in Teruel and not at the Ebro.” He added: “See attached.”

  I opened the file he’d sent me and examined it. It was a fragment of an inventory of the casualties suffered by the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen during the entire war; it was divided into five vertical columns: as clarified in a horizontal strip that ran across the top of the document, the first column reading left to right gave the victim’s job, the second his number and the third his name; in the fourth and fifth it was specified whether the victim had been killed or wounded, as well as the date on which he’d been killed or wounded. I read through the list of names from top to bottom, and almost at the end I found that of Manuel Mena: on the left was his rank of second lieutenant; on the right, that he’d died on January 8, 1938. It seemed irrefutable proof that Cabrera was right. Now it all turns out to be false? I wondered. Now it turns out that Manuel Mena didn’t die at the Ebro but at Teruel? Is it possible that his death certificate is mistaken and everything my mother has always told me about his death and his body’s arrival in the village had not happened when she said it did but almost a year earlier? Of course, it was perfectly possible that whoever had drawn up Manuel Mena’s death certificate had made a mistake or a series of mistakes, not to mention that my mother’s memory had confused the dates; but if both things were true and the place and date of Manuel Mena’s death were false, what other parts of the story were false as well? Was the whole story perhaps false? I was still trying to recover from my astonishment when another message appeared in my inbox from Cabrera. In this one the former Civil Guard officer had pasted a page from the Operations Diary of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen, corresponding to the first days of 1938, where an official certified that Manuel Mena had been wounded in the vicinity of Teruel. “It is possible that he was wounded at first and died subsequently, as recorded in the inventory of dead and wounded,” surmised Cabrera. Only then did I react: incredulous, thinking that the death certificate could not be mistaken and Manuel Mena’s whole story couldn’t be false, I insisted, I begged my correspondent to consult the 20th and 21st of September of the same year in the Operations Diary of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen. “Very well,” he answered, with some impatience. “This case has the makings of a novel.” He was mistaken: a few minutes later he replied, attaching another page of the Operations Diary where it said that Manuel Mena had fallen mortally wounded on September 20, 1938, fighting in the Battle of the Ebro on Hill 496, and had died soon afterwards. “The inventory of casualties was mistaken,” concluded Cabrera, without hiding his disappointment. “Instead of listing your great-uncle among the wounded at Teruel, they listed him among the dead. And then they expect you to trust in documents. Anyway: case closed, as Inspector Gadget would say.”

  I loved that Cabrera quoted a cartoon character (for a moment I imagined him watching television surrounded by a din of grandchildren and thinking, say, about the attack by the Montserrat Regiment on Punta Targa, Hill 481, defended during the Battle of the Ebro by the 60th Republican Division and one battalion of the Third), but the case was not, of course, closed; actually, it was only just beginning to be opened, at least for me. And that it had begun to do so with a document containing a flagrant error inspired a total distrust of documents, a very vivid awareness of their fallibility and
of how difficult it is to reconstruct the past with any precision. The distrust was justified: it was not just that, as I often established, historians’ texts were riddled with inaccuracies and falsehoods; it was that the documents themselves were.

  I’ll give another example. A historian of the Napoleonic wars says that a historian who doesn’t bother to visit battlefields is like a detective who doesn’t bother to visit the crime scene; investigating Manuel Mena, I discovered that the simile is correct. The Operations Diary of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen is not the only document that gives evidence of Manuel Mena’s being wounded at Teruel; there is also a medical report written in Trujillo by a major in the medical corps named Juan Moret. I found it in the Ávila Military Archive, some time after the frenetic exchange of e-mails with Cabrera I’ve just described, and in it one can read, among other things, that Manuel Mena was wounded on January 8, 1938, on Hill 1027 of the Teruel Front. The date is correct, but not the place. To discover this error I had to travel to Teruel and spend a weekend walking around and around the outskirts like a detective going over a crime scene. I did this in the company of Alfonso Casas Ologaray, a Teruel lawyer who knows every inch of the battlefields and who showed me on the ground that Manuel Mena could not have been wounded on January 8 on Hill 1027, as the medical report claimed; the reason is simple: Hill 1027 had fallen into Francoist hands days earlier, during the night of December 30 and early morning of December 31, due to the ineptness and haste with which forces of the 68th and 30th Republican Divisions relieved Líster’s 11th Division, allowing Sagardía’s 62nd Division to take that position with barely a hitch. In this way I understood that, actually, Manuel Mena was not shot on Hill 1027 but rather on 1207, better known as La Losilla, where on January 8 two heavy clashes had taken place, and the man who’d drawn up the report had accidentally switched the number of the place and instead of 1207 had written 1027: a tiny mistake, perfectly understandable and without apparent importance, except that it situated the battle in which Manuel Mena was wounded in an absurd place, several miles from where it really happened, which falsified that crucial point of his story.

  Anecdotes like the one I’ve just detailed explain the wariness and suspicion that pestered me every time, over the years, between one book and the next, or at the same time I was writing other books, I took up again the pursuit of Manuel Mena’s vanishing traces through the vanishing geography of the war, trying to step exactly where he’d stepped, to see exactly what he’d seen, to smell exactly what he’d smelled and feel exactly what he’d felt, collating with obsessive detail the information contained in books, documents, and memories relative to him or to his unit, as if in that personal story I could not trust anything other than my personal experience. It’s possible that this maniacal urge for veracity explains in part that, when the television producer proposed filming a programme about me, I accepted almost immediately, on the condition that we would film in Ibahernando: for one thing, it had been more than a year since I’d been back to the village; for another, I wanted to interview three people who had known Manuel Mena and speak to another two who knew things about him and about Republican and wartime Ibahernando. Now I think that something else might have also influenced my decision. Three years earlier, when David Trueba came to Ibahernando with me to film the Shearer, my friend had unknowingly violated a self-imposed prohibition, which had kept me from opening that private, opaque, and shameful territory to anyone up till then, but the violation had been confidential, had gone almost unnoticed, and hadn’t had any consequences, and it’s possible that three years later I was wondering whether a noisy gang of strangers armed with television cameras and prepared to broadcast images of the village in every direction might not finish off the prohibition once and for all, or would at least turn the prohibition into something else. Now I’m wondering if that’s not what happened.

  They were slightly unreal days. The producer took a team of six people there, all very young and led by the programme’s presenter, a versatile editor named Ernest Folch whom I’d known for years; he was accompanied by a director of photography, a cameraman, a sound technician, a scriptwriter, and a production manager. For its part, my team consisted of four people: my wife, my mother, my son, and my nephew Néstor. I was the one who asked them to come along. My wife comes with me whenever she can; from the beginning I had the feeling my mother would be indispensable: in our conversations before the trip, I had tried to explain to those responsible for the programme that, if they wanted to explain emigration from the rest of Spain to Catalonia by way of my biography, the secret protagonist of the programme should be my mother, because it was my mother who had deeply experienced emigration and who had become, because of it, I explained to them, a living variant of Lieutenant Drogo in The Tartar Steppe, settled into the perpetual waiting for an impossible return; those responsible for the programme understood this, or at least worked as if they’d understood it. As for my son and my nephew Néstor, they were both close to twenty years old, got along really well, had just finished their exams at university, and adored their grandmother: they both laughed at her barbarous postwar appetite and her granite-like Catholicism, both loved her idiosyncratic Spanish, the expressions she used, her incorrigible Extremadura accent, and, although neither of them knew who Manuel Mena was—which didn’t prevent them from reminding me physically of him more with every day that passed, perhaps because they were both close to the age he was when he died—both called her Blanquita, which is what Manuel Mena called her, and both always left her with a raised finger and a warning: “Behave yourself, Blanquita!” All this turned them into the ideal white knights to look after my mother during those days, while my wife and I were busy with the filming and my investigations into Manuel Mena.

  Both teams set up base in Trujillo: the producer’s in a local hotel; mine in the Parador, a renovated former convent in the old quarter (we had decided for such a few days it wasn’t worth opening up the Ibahernando house, which in any case is habitable only in the summer). As was expected, the presence of the six young strangers from the television crew exhilarated the village a little; the young people themselves seemed exhilarated: everything surprised them, everything intrigued them, everything fascinated them. As for me, ten days before embarking on that trip I had resolved to take a break from the novel I was writing to immerse myself in the sea of information about Manuel Mena that I had collected in recent years. The consequence of that immersion was that when I arrived in Ibahernando I was so steeped in Manuel Mena’s story that during the filming of the programme I did not stop thinking about him for a single moment, nor did I stop putting myself in his shoes, sometimes identifying with him (and now I think the consequence of that consequence was the unreality of those days). I mean that, while the television crew was filming Ernest Folch and me walking along the white streets of the village through the residents’ expectations, at times I must have been imagining myself to be Manuel Mena walking along those same streets almost eighty years before, with his bearing of an officer of the Regulars combined with his slightly lost air, pale, apart, and so young, trying to appear as cheerfully extroverted as ever but darkly swollen with violence and death, attempting to be faithful to the victorious, idealised, and romantic image a Francoist second lieutenant was obliged to project while he was struggling with an incipient and diffuse sensation of disenchantment, and I must have wondered, for example, if that adolescent who already knew or guessed that he didn’t fit into his village before he went off to war wouldn’t have been feeling an alienation multiplied by a thousand every time he came home from the front, as if he were returning from another world or rather as if he were returning to a world that was no longer his, and never could be. I mean that, while they were filming Ernest Folch and me talking in the Field of Holm Oaks—a piece of land on the outskirts of town that still belonged to my mother—with the ruins of a sheepfold behind us and with the teams’ cameras and microphones in front of us in the gleaming afternoo
n heat, I must have been wondering, for example, if during those fleeting returns to the village Manuel Mena would have felt better or worse than those around him: did he feel worse than the rest because he had killed people and had witnessed atrocious and degrading scenes and had participated or felt that he had participated in them, or that he hadn’t prevented them? Or would he have felt better because he’d been able to risk the best he had for a cause he considered just, for something he considered superior to himself, and had more than done so, because he’d demonstrated that he was equal to the task and measured up and was not daunted, that he was capable of risking his life and of defending his ideals, his family, his fatherland, and his God? Or would he have felt at once worse and better than the rest? Would he have felt clean and bright on the outside and dark and filthy on the inside?

  These were the sorts of questions I was undoubtedly asking myself, these were the sorts of things I must have been thinking. And it’s odd: as far as I remember, over the course of the many hours of interrogation Ernest Folch submitted me to in Ibahernando I never once mentioned Manuel Mena, not even when we passed the street that bears his name; or perhaps it’s not so odd: after all, the essential tends to be invisible, not because it’s hidden, but because it’s out in plain sight. Be that as it may, it was during those few days of filming that I thought I understood some things about Manuel Mena that up till then I hadn’t understood. Two in particular. The first I have already insinuated, and it’s that, from the end of his childhood or the beginning of his adolescence, Manuel Mena had suffered a growing alienation or estrangement from his village. At first the estrangement had been intellectual and had revealed to him, to a great extent under Don Eladio Viñuela’s influence, that his real interests were far from those of the people of his village; later, during the year of his stay in Cáceres, the estrangement had been physical and had allowed him to glimpse a horizon beyond the minuscule horizon of his village, which had accentuated his intellectual alienation; finally, the estrangement had been moral, an estrangement provoked by the war that had revealed unknown aspects of himself and of the world and had carried him to a fleeting culmination of his previous estrangements.