Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  On April 29, 1939, shortly after the end of the war, my grandfather Paco, who was then leader of the Ibahernando Falange, had sent a notification in his handwriting and bearing his signature to the military governor of Cáceres in which he declared succinctly that Agustín R.G., a neighbour imprisoned in the Trujillo concentration camp as a Republican prisoner of war, had confided to him that Higinio A.V. was the perpetrator of a murder in a village in the province of Córdoba during the war. My grandfather did not clarify that Higinio A.V. was also a neighbour from Ibahernando and that, like Agustín R.G., he was also in the Trujillo concentration camp as a prisoner of war. He only concluded: “This is as much as I can inform you in honour of the truth.” Immediately following this in the brief is a declaration by Agustín R.G., dated a month later in Trujillo, in which he confirms his accusation and specifies: it was Higinio A.V. himself who had confessed the murder to him—the paseo, or “stroll,” he called it, in the slang of the day—he’d committed it in Villanueva de la Serena, Badajoz, at some point in 1936 and in the presence of four other people, two of whom, he stated, were also incarcerated in the Trujillo camp. Next the two witnesses mentioned by Agustín R.G. endorsed his tale (only one of them added a detail: Higinio A.V.’s confession had occurred in the winter of ’36, when he was on leave). Then came a series of declarations from various Ibahernando authorities—the judge, the municipal police, the Civil Guard—as well as the odd neighbour; in these was information on Higinio A.V.’s membership in the Communist Youth, his participation in “many abuses against people of order and properties that were committed” before the war, according to the brigade’s report, and his escape to the Republican camp as soon as the war broke out; some repeated rumours of his participation in several murders, among them the one reported by Agustín R.G. All these reports are dated October 1939. In November—November 11—the accused made his declaration, in which he denied all the charges imputed to him, although he admits having been a member of the UGT, the socialist trade union, and having passed over “out of fear” to the Republican zone after the outbreak of the war. This was the last item in the examining magistrate’s file. On December 4 the court-martial tribunal met for the first time in Cáceres; its first request was that Agustín R.G. and one of the two witnesses who had backed up his testimony in Trujillo confirm it in Cáceres. They both did so, eight days later: they once again accused Higinio A.V. of having committed the murder or, more precisely, of having claimed to have committed it. On January 27, 1940, the court-martial tribunal met for the second and final time and, after declarations from the prosecuting and defending counsel, sentenced the prisoner to death. The sentence was carried out: on June 8 of the same year, Higinio A.V. was shot by firing squad at dawn at a firing range on the outskirts of Cáceres.

  Those are the events registered in the brief. I already said I began to read them trembling, lying beside my wife in our room in the Parador; then, still with my heart in my mouth, I got out of bed and carried on reading standing up; finally I finished reading sitting at the desk, with a strange mixture of horror and relief. “So you can see that everything is even more complicated than you think,” Manolo Amarilla had told me when he gave me a copy of the brief. At first, when I recognised my grandfather Paco’s name on the first report, I thought Manolo was referring to him, and I remembered an article I’d written years before when I found out that during the war my grandfather had saved a socialist mayor from Ibahernando from being killed, and I said to myself in anguish that I was about to discover that in war the same man is capable of the best and the worst; when I finished reading the brief I understood that in this case, at least, I was mistaken. My grandfather had not reported a political crime but a common crime: the murder of a man, or rather the presumed murder of a man. In fact, he hadn’t even reported a crime; he’d reported a report, that of Agustín R.G., he had recorded a request to investigate, which he would have been obliged to do from any point of view, beginning with the ethical one and ending with the judicial (he was not obliged, however, to register in the report his opinion of Higinio A.V., even if it was fair or even if he considered it fair: he was not obliged to say of Higinio A.V. that he was a “very revolutionary, troublesome element, who was always insulting people of order”): what my grandfather had done was an imperative of the penal code, as much that of the victors as that of the vanquished, as much that of Francoism as that of the Republic or of any democracy. Or, to put it another way, it’s possible that my grandfather might have been unsure whether or not to deal with the report against Higinio A.V., out of fear of the consequences his action could have; but the fact is he was obliged to do it and that, if he hadn’t done it, he would himself have been committing a crime: he would have become an accessory to murder.

  Now, then, I wondered at this point, what about Agustín R.G.? Why had Agustín R.G. denounced Higinio A.V.? I didn’t know anything about Higinio A.V., I’d never even heard his name mentioned, but I had read the name of Agustín R.G. in a multitude of documents conserved in the village archive and I often heard people talk about him, a man who according to the brief was then thirty-six years old (Higinio A.V. was twenty-seven) and who I knew had been an important socialist leader of the village during the Republic and had filled in for people at posts at the town hall and had acquired a universal reputation as a fair, honest, worthy, efficient, reasonable, and conciliatory politician. There was no doubt this man had known my grandfather Paco, or that when he presented his report he knew that he was the local head of the Falange, or that, perhaps out of fear for his family, he had managed to get my grandfather to go to see him in Trujillo to report what he knew and to get my grandfather to process the report; but why had he done that? Of course, Agustín R.G. was just as obliged as my grandfather was to report the murder or the presumed murder, but why had he not reported it to the Republican authorities at the time it happened, when he heard of it from Higinio A.V. himself? Why had it taken him almost two years to report it? Had it been out of fear of denouncing a very common practice at the beginning of the war in the Republican rearguard—though less so in the Francoist—the practice of the paseo, uncontrolled murders? Or had it been in order not to harm a comrade-in-arms? But, in that case, why denounce him now, when it was much more compromising for the accused? Did he do it because he could no longer bear that bloody secret on his conscience? Had he done it to earn the favour of the Francoist authorities? I knew that Agustín R.G. had returned safe and sound to Ibahernando around 1946, after years of forced labour, and that he had died of old age there: had he saved his own life with that report? Had he been looking for at least some reduction in his sentence or some sort of advantage at that moment of his fate, like that of so many other Republican prisoners of war, depending on the arbitrary cruelty of the victors? Perhaps he was seeking revenge against Higinio A.V. for personal or political differences (in theory Agustín R.G. and Higinio A.V., who in the brief admitted that he had belonged to the socialist union, shared political affiliations, but it was probable that Higinio A.V., nine years younger than Agustín R.G., belonged to the radicalised young socialists who joined up with the communists before the war: that would explain why, in the brief, several people said he was attached to the Communist Youth)? Or was Agustín R.G. pursuing all these things at once, or several of them? It struck me as impossible that Agustín R.G. would have invented the story of Higinio A.V., that he would have reaffirmed it on two occasions and that another two Republican prisoners would have confirmed its veracity, so I took it as true that Higinio A.V. had told them he had committed that crime; but had he committed it or had he just boasted about having committed it? The tribunal of Francoists who had rebelled against Republican legality who had tried Higinio A.V. had condemned him to death, with the criminal duplicity with which so many Republicans were condemned in those times, for the crime of “adhesion to the rebellion” and, although they had reinforced the reasons for the sentence with aggravating factors of “social danger and sign
ificance of events,” the truth is that nobody took the trouble to investigate whether Higinio A. V. had actually committed the crime he was accused of. Had he really committed it?

  For hours I mulled over these questions in our room at the Parador. Once in a while I’d go out onto the balcony to breathe the night air of Trujillo or to scrutinise through the window the light-speckled darkness or watch my wife sleeping in the bed. Once in a while I remembered what Manolo Amarilla had said about the complexity of things and what Alejandro had said about the impossible situations those in charge of the country had led its people into eighty years ago. Until at a certain moment I realised I could never answer those questions, that surely it was impossible to answer them, and that at least at this point in history, almost eighty years after the events, the questions were more eloquent than the answers. That was when I remembered the photograph of Sara. I took it out of the cardboard folder in the colours of the Republican flag that Manolo had given me and I looked at it. Actually, it was a photograph of three women, as Manolo had told me, a studio photograph; two of the women are standing and one is seated; I focused on the one on the right. I observed her with meticulous attention, almost with fierceness, from head to toe: I looked at her hair combed like that of a girl, her oval little girl’s face, her eyes and her nose and her mouth, all those of a girl, her little girl’s earrings and necklace, her unmistakable girl’s dress—long and pleated and with a little girl’s wide belt and buttons—her womanly fan clutched in her girl’s left hand, her girl’s long, white knee socks, her girl’s shoes. I imagined her dead of a gunshot wound in a ditch. I felt like crying, but I thought of my mother and the Shearer, who could no longer cry, and I thought that I had no right to cry, and I contained myself. Or tried to. I looked out of the window. Dawn was breaking.

  12

  It is very likely that, once the Battle of Lérida was over, Manuel Mena enjoyed a leave of some days or weeks in Ibahernando; it’s certain that by the beginning of June 1938 he found himself fighting again with the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen, this time against the desperation of thousands of Republican soldiers who had been resisting Francoist attacks for three months in a stronghold lost in the highest reaches of the Pyrenees of Aragón, very close to the French border.

  It was the so-called Bielsa pocket. As a result of the March Francoist offensive against Aragón and Catalonia, which had concluded in April in Lérida, the Republican 43rd Division had been isolated in the north of the province of Huesca. This was a flinty, basically communist unit commanded by Major Antonio Beltrán, alias El Esquinazau, The Slippery One, a local man who knew the area like the back of his hand and had conceived the stupid idea of holing up in the deep valleys and inaccessible peaks of the region of Bielsa until help from France would allow him to launch the decisive counterattack. But the help from France did not arrive, and during the month of March the 43rd Division was gradually withdrawing towards the east of Huesca, hounded by the Francoists of the 3rd Navarra Division, until on April 12 the circle closed on them entirely and El Esquinazau and his men became, for the propaganda of a Republic that privately was beginning to know it was defeated and was feeling an ever more urgent need for heroes, the protagonists of an unprecedented epic, a symbol of indomitable tenacity and resistance to the last against fascism. This explains why after six days the brave men were visited by the head of government, Juan Negrín, and the commander-in-chief of the Republican army, General Rojo, with the aim of raising their morale, giving them instructions and having press photographs taken of themselves with them; it also explains how, a month later, when they had been subjected to two months of daily torment from rebel artillery and occasional attacks from their infantry, Franco decided to finish them off, although it still took them another three weeks to transfer the elite forces that were needed to do so.

  Among these was the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen, Manuel Mena’s unit. It had continued to be stationed in Lérida or on the outskirts of Lérida since the month of April, and one morning at the beginning of June its commanders received the order to leave behind the temporary tranquillity of the second line and head to Tremp, in the vicinity of the Pyrenees. There, over the following days, a special group was formed under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Lombana, composed of the best units of the Moroccan Army Corps and intended to extirpate the Republicans from Bielsa with the help of the 3rd Navarra Division, which had chased them up there but had proved unable to finish them off or expel them into France.

  Mid-morning on June 6 the expedition left for Bielsa. It was a gruelling march. For two and a half days, several thousand men covered just over sixty miles of mountains on foot, along wheel ruts and impassable trails, struggling with the unseasonable spring cold of the Pyrenees, with over fifty pounds on each of their backs and a hundred mules carrying the machine guns, ammunition, medical equipment, and supplies and towing nine pieces of artillery of various calibres: two of 65, three of 105, two 155s, and two 105 mountain guns. So, after passing through Figols de Tremp, Puente de Montañana, Benabarre, Graus, and Castejón de Sos, they arrived at dusk on the 8th in the village of Sahún, in Benasque, one valley before Bielsa, surrounded by a crown of snow-capped peaks six thousand to ten thousand feet high. That night, after the soldiers had eaten, they loaded and readied their weapons and lay down to sleep for a few hours, while Lieutenant Colonel Lombana met with his officers in a house in the village. Manuel Mena attended the briefing. From what was said there that night he must have concluded that the following day’s battle would be unequal, but not that it would be bloodless: the Francoists had gathered more than fourteen thousand combatants to face seven thousand less well-armed Republicans, lacking aircraft and running low on ammunition for their artillery; the only weapons the defenders could count on were the height of their morale, the strength of their discipline, their knowledge of the terrain and skill in taking advantage of it, as well as the defences they had erected during those months of siege in the natural heights that protected them. There is no doubt that Manuel Mena also heard, from Lombana, the plan of operations for the following day; it was simple: basically, it consisted of attacking the Puerto de Sahún, where the Republicans had established a solid defensive line occupied by one battalion of the 102nd Mixed Brigade, at the same time as the Moriones Group, part of the 3rd Navarra Division, was attacking the Puerto de Barbaruens from their left, in the Sierra of Cotiella.

  The battle broke out at dawn. At that moment the cannons of Lombana’s Group began bombarding the enemy positions with the support of the Junkers Ju 52 and the Heinkel He 45s and the Heinkel He 51s of the Hispana Brigade, while the soldiers began to climb up to the Puerto de Sahún, with the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen leading the way. At first, in the paltry light of dawn, they went up along a path across a gentle hillside planted with oaks, but after two or two and a half hours of walking uphill, with the sun now high in the sky, the path had turned into a stony mountain trail, the oaks into pines and the gentle hillside into an almost vertical slope and later into a rocky, snowy, and exposed meadow. It was here that they began to be shot at from the first machine-gun nests and when they had to face combat. This was prolonged for several hours without pause, during which they managed to have the Republican trenches within assault range several times and were driven back to their starting positions while calling for artillery and aircraft to intervene again to soften up the enemy’s defences. Finally, early in the afternoon, the Republicans could endure that martyrdom no longer and the Francoists moved into their recently abandoned positions, taking only a few prisoners. A few oral and written testimonies of the end of that slaughter survive, so I don’t need to resort to the fantasies of a literato to imagine what Manuel Mena saw: in some testimonies we can make out the last wisps of smoke dissolving in the crystalline air of the peak of Sahún and the weapons and supplies abandoned in panic by the breaks in the barbed wire; in another we spy extremely young corpses laid out on the dirty, churned-up snow; in another w
e glimpse the frozen sun of June in the immense cloudless sky. From all of them emanates the same certainty, and it is, just as much for the attackers as for the defenders, that the Republican defeat at that initial point of the Francoist charge predicted an immediate end for the Bielsa pocket.

  The prediction was fulfilled. The following morning the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen and Lombana’s whole Group descended a snowy cliff into the Puerto de Sahún and marched towards the basin of the River Cinqueta, in the valley of Gistaín; there they joined the Moriones Group, which was arriving from the Puerto de Barbaruens, and for the next two days both detachments swept Republican soldiers from the heights of the valley and conquered, after violent clashes in which they suffered almost a hundred casualties, the villages of Plan, San Juan de Plan, and Gistaín. The two groups separated again on June 13: the Moriones headed up to the heights overlooking the village of Bielsa from the south, crossing the Sierra de Cubilfredo, to try to surprise the defenders on their flank, while Lombana’s followed the course of the River Cinqueta towards the left side of the valley until, after several hours of marching past giant outcrops of bare rock during which they were continuously harassed by retreating Republican forces, they arrived at the Salinas crossroads, where the Cinqueta and the Cinca meet. They spent the night there, at the mouth of the Bielsa Valley, just over six miles from the village, and continued their advance through the following morning and afternoon, now beside the Cinca riverbed, always with the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen in the lead, always taking maximum precautions in order not to be surprised by the soldiers of the 43rd Division who had stayed behind to cover their comrades’ retreat. Towards dusk the advance parties got their first glimpse of the houses of Bielsa, and the troops received the order to halt and camp a couple of miles from the village, on the banks of the Cinca.