Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  He showed me the war diary carried by his father-in-law, Manuel Mena’s brother, during his time at the front—a not-very-thick notebook filled with neat handwriting—he spoke about the relationship between the two brothers, and then he told me what he knew of Manuel Mena. Finally he put in my hands two books that Manuel Mena had with him when he died on the Ebro front: the first was titled Instruction and Tactical Use of Infantry Machine Guns and was the work of several authors; the second was titled Legislation of the National Government, 1936 and was by a certain José Pecharromán Colino. While I was leafing through the second, I discovered a pressed flower between its pages; holding it extremely carefully so it wouldn’t disintegrate in my hands, I held it up to the camera.

  “It’s a daisy,” my wife said, without stopping her filming. “It’s probably eighty years old, isn’t it?” Manolo didn’t answer, and a dumbfounded silence took over the room while the four of us contemplated Manuel Mena’s daisy. It was my wife who broke the spell. “Hey, Javi,” she said in Catalan, “we should get going: it’s almost seven-thirty and your aunt Francisca and Doña María are probably already waiting for us.”

  I asked Manolo about the handwritten text by Manuel Mena that Alejandro had told me about, and Manolo took out of the bundle of papers he’d just brought out four sheets of A5 paper written with a quill pen in slightly childish handwriting, which began: “Blue shirts of Ibahernando.” Before reading on I asked him if I could photocopy them, and in reply he handed me a cardboard folder in the colours of the Republican flag.

  “The photocopies are inside,” he said. “I’ve also put in a photo of Sara; you’ll see three women: Sara is the one on the right. And I put something else in there for you. Read it as well, and you’ll see it’s all even more complicated than you think.”

  Before we left, Manolo took us up to his study, a loft full of books and disorderly papers, illuminated by a big window that overlooked a brief expanse of chipped roofs. From somewhere he pulled out a pair of gaiters and suspenders of embossed leather.

  “They were a gift for Manuel Mena,” he said while I examined them. “From the family. They were made by a saddler in Trujillo. They had them ready for when he came back from the front, but he never came back.”

  “Didn’t I tell you, Javi?” Alejandro said as we left his friend’s house. “Manolo was happy with your visit. I haven’t seen him that lively for a long time.”

  I didn’t want to ask what Manolo was like when he wasn’t lively, because we were soon arriving at Alejandro’s mother’s house, where the two elderly women who had gone to school with Manuel Mena were waiting for us. Alejandro promised he’d pass by the house in a couple of hours to say goodbye and left us alone with them. When he reappeared we were finishing our conversation. He walked us to the car while pumping us for what his mother and Doña María Arias had told us about Manuel Mena and the Republic and the war. When the three of us reached the car, Alejandro kissed my wife goodbye on each cheek.

  “Shit,” he said, almost relieved. “This talking about the war still turns my stomach.” He stood pensively for a moment while my wife and I observed him, expecting him to go on. It was past nine-thirty at night, but the last rays of daylight still shone on the horizon; the swallows’ cries tore into the silence of the streets like razor blades. Speaking only to my wife, he said: “Do you know why I went into politics, Mercè? Out of shame. I was ashamed that my family hadn’t prevented what happened in this village.”

  “Could they have prevented it?” my wife asked.

  “I don’t know, but they were obliged to,” Alejandro answered. “Or at least to have tried. They were the ones in charge, and those in charge are always responsible.”

  “Then this wasn’t a tragedy either,” my wife said, turning his own argument against him.

  “I guess not,” Alejandro admitted. “You’re right. Whatever the case, I became a politician so this would never happen again.”

  Alejandro’s phrase had the unmistakeable ring of truth, and at that moment I detested myself a little, because I knew that every time I’d heard him say it—and I had heard him say it many times—I’d thought that it was a politician’s phrase, empty words for the gallery. I suddenly noticed Alejandro’s appearance. He was wearing knee-length shorts, sandals covered in dirt, and a dark red T-shirt, which was also a bit dirty; a beard speckled with grey seemed to want to devour a face tanned by the elements. For a moment, in the copper light of that extended twilight, it struck me that he looked like an old farm worker, and I wondered at what point in his life he had decided that his place was at the side of the poor and the losers of the war; I also wondered what Manuel Mena would have looked like if he’d reached his age.

  “I’m not sure I agree with everything you said in Manolo’s house,” I confessed. “I have to think about it. But I am sure of one thing.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “That in the war our family chose the wrong side,” I said. “Not only because the Republic was right, but also because it was the only one that could have defended their interests. I’m not saying that in the circumstances it was easy to get it right, nor am I going to be frivolous and shameless enough to judge them now, eighty years after all that, with a present-day mind-set and comfort and when we already know the disaster that came afterwards.” I remembered David Trueba and said: “They weren’t omniscient. They didn’t know everything. They couldn’t have known. But they were wrong. Of that there is no doubt. They deceived themselves, or they were deceived: their side was the Republic.”

  “There’s not the slightest doubt!” Alejandro exclaimed, opening his eyes very wide and visibly restraining himself so that, in the absolute quiet of the street, his exclamation wouldn’t sound like a shout. “The proof is that our family didn’t do any better after the war than before the war; on the contrary: they did worse. And over time much worse. Just like Ibahernando. Look.” With a gesture that seemed to want to include the silence of the empty streets, the empty houses, the village crowded with ghosts, where the only living beings seemed to be the swallows that zigzagged in the twilight emitting whines of frightened or sick children. “Before the war all this was filled with people, there was life here, the village had a future, or could have had one. Now there’s nothing. Francoism turned Ibahernando into a desert, swept the poor and the rich away from here, those who were able to eat and those who went hungry. All of them.”

  While Alejandro was talking I thought of my mother, who had always lived away from Ibahernando like a patrician in exile, thought of Eladio Cabrera, the caretaker of my mother’s house, who lived in Ibahernando convinced that when he and his wife die, Ibahernando would be finished, and I thought that Alejandro had retired to Ibahernando so Ibahernando would not be finished; I also thought of my son and my nephew Néstor, who were more or less the same age Manuel Mena would always be, and I was glad that they were waiting for me and my wife with my mother in Trujillo. Then I thought: That’s the saddest thing about Manuel Mena’s fate. That, as well as dying for an unjust cause, he died fighting for interests that weren’t even his. Not his and not his family’s. I thought: That he died for nothing.

  Alejandro and I said goodbye with a hug that he prolonged a second longer than normal, or I had that impression. When we stopped hugging he said as he turned to go:

  “Write a good book, cousin.”

  * * *

  —

  My son and my nephew Néstor had been swimming and sunbathing in the Parador pool, and at suppertime had gone to pick up my mother at her sister Sacri’s house in Trujillo, where the two of them had spent the afternoon talking. They told us this that night, while we had a light meal in the Parador restaurant and my mother made short work of a complete Extremadura menu, with a plate of torrijas for dessert. “Blanquita behaved herself very well,” my son and nephew said. During supper we talked about something we had already talked abou
t on the trip from Barcelona: the house in Ibahernando. My mother repeated that she didn’t want to leave without having a look at the house and I answered that we’d go to see it the following morning, which was when we were planning to film there with the television crew. Then my mother said that one or another of my sisters had talked to her again about selling the house; it was something she said to me every once in a while, so that I would tell her again that, at least while she was alive, the house would not be sold. I repeated it.

  “And when I die?” she asked.

  We’ll sell it, I thought, and then I thought, thinking of Alejandro and Eladio Cabrera and his wife: Then the village will disappear. My nephew Néstor came to my rescue: he said he didn’t understand why we wanted that house where nobody could even live anymore; my son also tried to give me a hand.

  “Grandma,” he exclaimed, “not even Bill Gates keeps a house to use for two weeks a year.”

  My mother looked at him in astonishment.

  “And who’s he?” she asked.

  Back in the room my mobile rang: it was Ernest Folch. Ernest explained that, for a number of reasons, they needed to postpone the morning shoot until the afternoon, and he asked me if the change would be inconvenient. I was busy the following afternoon with a meeting, but I answered that if he didn’t hear from me, we’d see each other the next day in the afternoon in Ibahernando and, even though it was past eleven at night, I hurried to call my uncle Alejandro’s house. He was the fifth person I wanted to talk to about Manuel Mena on that trip, and perhaps the most important, because he had lived his first years in my great-grandmother Carolina’s house, as had my mother, and had shared his childhood and bedroom with Manuel Mena. I had already talked to him several times at length on the telephone; and on this occasion I spoke to his wife, my aunt Puri, who told me there was no problem in bringing the meeting that we’d scheduled for the afternoon at their house in Cáceres forward to noon.

  That night I barely closed my eyes. On my investigations about Manuel Mena I usually took with me the translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey that I’d found in my mother’s house on my trip to Ibahernando with David Trueba; I had already reread all of The Iliad, I’d made a start on The Odyssey, and that night I would have continued with it had I not, with my wife asleep beside me in the bed, begun studying the documents Manolo Amarilla had given me that afternoon. The first thing I read was Manuel Mena’s handwritten text, which began: “Blue shirts of Ibahernando.” It went on like this:

  I am going to speak to you with simple and moving phrases, if I can muster some, so you can see once again the significance of this movement and this organisation, which was founded on October 29, 1932, by the martyrs and liberators (as they must be called) Ruiz de Alda, Sánchez Mazas, and José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

  Days have passed, years, and our Spain, our Fatherland keeps going from bad to worse, not forgetting our Chief who taught:

  Enslaved cannot be,

  A people that knows how to die,

  and took to the streets to save us all from the yoke that oppresses us.

  Since his good intentions could not be achieved by any other means than revolution, this was the reason our comrade José Antonio pronounced the following sentence: “Peace must come from war, but war must come from the paths taken by good Spaniards.”

  Desirous as we all were to elevate Spain, to aggrandise her and serve her, the opportune moment arrived to achieve it and this was July 18, 1936.

  This is the hour to flaunt the blue shirt, this is the hour to take off the mask and bare our chests to the enemy, because the Falange does not want ambushes, because the Falange does not want bon vivants: Falange Española de la JONS wants “clean souls and repentant hearts.”

  Let us not forget the words Spaniards, the Fatherland is in danger, come to its defence, and in spite of missing our Unique, Irreplaceable Prophet for a year now, the Caudillo who wrote our doctrine with blood from his own heart, we are not missing thousands and thousands of new shirts to go to the battlefront, although hundreds and hundreds of old, dirty shirts were called home. But always singing “If they tell you I fell, I went to the post I have up there.”

  After all this, we must not consent, nor can we consent, nor shall we consent, to the Falange being annihilated, because it is a healthy organisation, because it is a pure organisation, and because it has known how, like no other, to help the Fatherland when it has needed it.

  But keep in mind that for the Falange to progress it is necessary for you all to unite, because its programme recommends harmony between social classes. For José Antonio, “work in itself, like capital itself, has no worth; only work and capital in the service of the aim we want to achieve are worthwhile.” Because, as he rightly said, “As the priest needs two hands to raise the divine form, two hands are needed to elevate society.”

  And now the only thing we need to ask of everyone is “that the blood spilled by our comrades on the various fronts serves as fertile material for the planting of our ideals” and “that spilled by our enemies as material corrosive to the rotten roots instilled in those hearts.”

  In this way and once and for all we shall make Men, we shall make history, and we shall make Spain One, Great and Free.

  Arise Spain!!

  At the end of the text there was a series of annotations or fragments of annotations; the longest (and the most interesting) read:

  It is now time for the working and owning classes to unite, because, comrades: “Workers, businessmen, technicians, and organisers make up the entirety of production, and there is a capitalist system with expensive credit, with abusive privileges of shareholders and bond holders, without working, that takes the greater part of production and sinks and impoverishes employers, businessmen, and workers alike.” José Antonio (May 19, 1935).

  Here is another fragment: “[…] we must choose ‘the best among the possible.’ ” And another: “We must work ‘until we raise Spain to the stars, where those who taught us to die for our Nation, for Bread and for Justice, keep watch.’ For Spain One, Great and Free.” Here is the last one: “We fight alongside heroes as indeed they are: Aranda in Oviedo and Moscardó at the Alcázar de Toledo.” At the bottom is Manuel Mena’s signature.

  I read those pages a couple of times. The first conclusion I reached is that my cousin Alejandro was right and that, rather than a letter from the front, it seemed like a speech or notes for a speech or a meeting addressed to the Falangists of Ibahernando. The second I deduced from the allusion to the death of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, which happened on November 20, 1936; Manuel Mena says it was a year ago, which means that the text was written and delivered (assuming it was actually delivered) in the autumn or winter of 1937, when doubts over José Antonio’s execution in Alicante were dissipating in the Francoist zone and when Manuel Mena had acquired a certain authority in the village because he’d been at the front for a year and had just obtained the rank of second lieutenant and maybe joined the Ifni Riflemen, but also when he had not yet entered into combat with his unit and had not yet experienced the depths of war and when his political exaltation and bellicose idealism were still intact. The third conclusion was that that text was intended to infuse the village Falangists with spirit and attract new recruits to the party and new volunteers to the front, to encourage former Republicans and leftists to join the cause and preserve the purity and independence of the Falange: a few months earlier, in April 1937, Franco had dissolved or tried to dissolve the party by fusing it with Carlist traditionalism in the nationalist-Catholic slops of the single party, the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS, and in his text Manuel Mena seems to be appealing to the ideological foundations of the party of José Antonio to prevent that political alliance with the Carlists from deactivating its revolutionary potential. My fourth conclusion I gathered from the previous one, and it is the most relev
ant. In the text Manuel Mena appeared, in one part, like an adolescent infatuated with reading, keen to display his repertoire of historical-literary allusions selected from the patriotic vade mecum of the moment: two badly quoted lines from a very famous poem by Bernardo López García (“Ode to the Second of May”), a few words spoken or presumed to have been spoken by the mayor of Móstoles calling for a rebellion against the Napoleonic troops at the outbreak of the War of Independence, perhaps a verse from a biblical psalm (24:4), without doubt two lines from “Cara al sol,” the Falangist anthem, and several lines selected from José Antonio’s speeches. Furthermore, although he made the mistake of putting the foundation of the Falange a year early, in his writing Manuel Mena revealed himself as a pure devotee of José Antonio, not as a Francoist (in fact, the speech makes not a single mention of Franco), as a kid intoxicated by the pernicious idealism of the founder of the Falange and as a true believer in the harmony of classes preached by the revolutionaries of the far right and far left and in José Antonio’s doctrine that consisted of uniting patriotism to extremism and social revolution in an impossible synthesis which nevertheless was the ideological concoction devised by the oligarchy to halt socialist and democratic equality. That was the fourth and final corollary I deduced from reading Manuel Mena’s manuscript: that, read with care, those few words preserved thanks to Manolo Amarilla’s passion for the past outlined a moral, political, and ideological portrait of the character that unexpectedly and partially brought him back to life.

  The second document I studied that night was much longer than the first. It was a fifty-seven-page brief on court-martial no. 2,430, tried at the beginning of 1940 in Cáceres of a man from Ibahernando named Higinio A.V. As soon as I began to read it I was trembling. As deduced from the indictment, the story was the following: