That night preparations were made as on the eve of a great battle. The battle, however, did not take place, or what took place could not exactly be called a battle. It is true that at dawn the Francoists fought for control of the bridges that led into the village tooth and nail with the Republicans of two battalions of the 130th Mixed Brigade and one from the 102nd, which had been left in charge of its defence; but it is also true that there it all ended: in view of the defenders’ resistance, at twelve noon the Heinkel 45s and Heinkel 51s made their appearance in the sky over Bielsa and began to rain down on the village a deluge of bombs, which caused a colossal fire which illuminated the valley and the mountains that surround it all night long, while El Esquinazau gave the final order to retreat and the Republicans fled from the village of Parzán towards France, their way lit by the gigantic glow of the flames. I have evidence that the last Republican soldier crossed the French border at four in the morning on June 16, but I don’t know how long Bielsa kept burning. I have evidence that Manuel Mena lost two comrades in those days, perhaps more or less close friends, two second lieutenants like himself—Centurión, one was named; the other, García de Vitoria—but I don’t know whether they died during the conquest of the Puerto de Sahún, in the firefights in the valley of Gistaín or for Bielsa, or in any of the skirmishes the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen were involved in; nor do I know whether he wept over their deaths, or if he was already so accustomed to death that he no longer cried. I know that Manuel Mena entered the village of Bielsa with the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen, but I don’t know exactly what he did. I also know that what he actually saw with his adolescent eyes, aged by familiarity with destruction and the nearness of death, was not the village of Bielsa but a cemetery of charred buildings in which not a sign of life remained. A stubborn legend maintains that for years after the fall of Bielsa a smell of burning lingered in the transparent air of the valley that not even the tremendous snowfalls of the postwar years could dissipate. I know, however, that it wasn’t a legend, but a fact. Only that the smell wasn’t a smell of burning. It was the smell of victory.
13
The next morning I got up at ten-thirty, my body ravaged by lack of sleep and my mind clouded by the confusion that reading Manolo Amarilla’s documents had produced. But I had arranged to be at my aunt Puri and my uncle Alejandro’s house at twelve, so an hour later I left for Cáceres with my wife, my mother, my son, and my nephew Néstor. Recently, ever since I discovered the childhood relationship my uncle Alejandro had had with Manuel Mena, I had spoken to him several times on the telephone; he always told me more or less the same things, as if his memories of Manuel Mena were fossilised or as if he wasn’t telling me what he remembered but what he had told me on other occasions. In spite of that I was very interested in talking to him, because I was cherishing the hope that a face-to-face conversation and the comparison of his memories with those of my mother would provide us with a surprise or two.
The hope was not unfounded. My aunt Puri and my uncle Alejandro lived on the outskirts of Cáceres, on a street so new it didn’t register on the car’s satnav, so it took us longer than expected to find their house. When we finally found it, my son and my nephew Néstor helped my mother out of the car and then announced they were going to have a look around the city until two, when they’d come back and pick us up to go back to Trujillo. They each gave their grandmother a kiss on each cheek and, while my son fixed her hair and clothes, ruffled by the trip, my nephew Néstor said:
“Behave yourself, Blanquita!”
It was my aunt who opened the door. She was a tiny, fragile, smiley little old lady, wearing a housedress and a pretty pair of silver earrings; behind her, expectant and almost solemn, my uncle waited. There were exclamations, greetings, kisses and hugs, and finally they showed us into a room furnished in the unmistakeable baroque style of Ibahernando dining rooms and inundated by the burning midday sun that poured in through a big window facing a vacant patch of ground, where some children were playing soccer on an expanse of yellow grass. We sat down on a sofa and three armchairs covered with throws, and my aunt served us coffee and water. Like my mother, my aunt and uncle displayed on their bodies the cracks and fissures of their more than eighty years; especially my uncle, a skinny, shrunken man in precarious health who spoke with a weak, raspy voice and looked anxiously out of eyes enclosed by deep circles. The three of them illustrated the inbreeding typical of the good families of the village: my mother was first cousin to both; my aunt and uncle second cousins to each other. They hadn’t seen each other for years, and for a while I listened to them talk, until, ashamed of myself, I felt the same embarrassment I used to feel as a teenager in the presence of my family, the embarrassment that in the village they were or felt themselves to be patricians, but away from the village they were nothing: poor people with good manners, tiny untitled nobles trying to survive their exile with dignity; then I thought that in reality I wasn’t ashamed of them but of myself, for having been ashamed of them.
Finally I reclaimed their attention with a few chimes of my teaspoon against my coffee cup. They fell silent, I reminded them that we had gathered to talk about Manuel Mena, I asked their permission for my wife to film our conversation, and from that moment on I tried to orchestrate a dialogue about Manuel Mena or about their memories of Manuel Mena. It was not difficult. For more than a couple of hours they talked, they interrupted each other and qualified and specified each other’s statements, so I didn’t have to do anything other than spur on their memory when it failed them, correct it when it misled them, or bring it back to Manuel Mena when he got lost in the labyrinth. Aware that he was the protagonist of the gathering, the one who spoke most was my uncle. He seemed to want to satisfy my curiosity, and for some time repeated things he’d already told me over the telephone, or that I’d heard him tell my mother, and he sketched a portrait of Manuel Mena as a calm, discreet boy without arrogance, without enemies, but also without friends. “Except for Don Eladio Viñuela,” he clarified, and here he lingered to consider the doctor who had educated the village. My mother and my aunt joined him in his praises, and the three of them exchanged anecdotes about their time in Don Eladio and Doña Marina’s academy. When they lost the thread I returned it to them. My aunt, who was not related to Manuel Mena at all and who, before we began to speak, had wanted to tell me that she hadn’t known him, now timidly intervened; she said:
“I always heard your uncle was very good friends with the priest’s brother.”
“That’s true,” my uncle hurried to confirm. “They were good friends.”
“I can believe it,” my mother said. As always when she found herself with her cousins, her growing deafness seemed to diminish to irrelevancy, and she grew younger before our eyes; for a while she’d been fanning herself with a black lace fan, but she suddenly closed it energetically and pointed at me with it. “I’ve often told you about the priest’s brother.” I instantly remembered the story, or the legend. “Tomás, he was called. Tomás Álvarez. He and my uncle were the same age. He wasn’t from our village.”
“No,” my uncle said. “He was from a village near Badajoz.”
They all tried to remember the name of the village. My mother continued:
“Tomás spent long periods in Ibahernando, with his brother. That was when he and my uncle got to know each other. When the war broke out he came to live in the village, and my uncle Manolo tried to convince him to go with him to the front; perhaps the poor kid was scared. Anyway, whatever it was, he stayed behind. Then my uncle got killed and then Tomás did go off to the war. He said he was going to take his friend’s place.” She turned to my aunt and uncle and said with a mixture of irony and sadness: “The things boys do, you know…” She looked at me again and concluded: “The fact is, he was killed within a couple of months.”
Suddenly remembering, I asked about María Ruiz.
“Who?” said my uncle.
&nb
sp; “María Ruiz,” my mother repeated, half-closing her eyes without conviction as she opened her fan again and waved some air against her face. “Uncle Manolo’s special friend. That’s what people said.”
“Aunt Francisca Alonso and Doña María Arias told me that yesterday in the village,” I said.
My aunt Puri shrugged.
“That’s what they said,” she agreed.
“I don’t know anything about that,” my uncle Alejandro said, with a sceptical air. “It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
Then he explained, just as he had each time we’d spoken on the telephone, that he always remembered his uncle reading and studying. He still hadn’t finished explaining when he was interrupted by a coughing fit. Concerned, my aunt poured him a glass of water and, as the convulsion subsided a little, her husband drank it down in three gulps while I remembered that as a young man he’d survived tuberculosis and that he’d been suffering from heart trouble for a while; I looked at his hands: they were covered in liver spots, and they were shaking a little. As he set the empty glass down on the table, my uncle asked what we had been talking about; his wife reminded him and I asked him if he remembered the titles of any of the books Manuel Mena read.
“No,” my uncle said. “The only thing I remember is that in our bedroom we had the nine volumes of the Encyclopaedia Espasa. And he was always looking things up in it.”
More or less at this point I began to ask them about the years of the Republic and the war and they began to tell me things that, with a few variations, I had heard my mother talk about. I asked my uncle if, when Manuel Mena returned to Ibahernando on leave, he talked about the war. He said no. “Never,” he added. I asked all three of them if they remembered how many times Manuel Mena had returned from the front. They answered that they didn’t remember, then, as if trying to compensate for his feeble memory, my uncle mentioned two things I hadn’t known: the first was that, when he died, Manuel Mena was about to be promoted to lieutenant for his commendable war record; the second is that he’d been wounded five times in combat.
“I’ve only found records of three,” I said. “Once in Teruel and twice at the Ebro.”
“Well, there were five,” my uncle insisted. “It’s possible he didn’t request leave after one or two of them, but there were five.”
“Are you sure?”
“Completely. His orderly told us when he came to the village after my uncle died.”
“Did the orderly also tell you about his promotion?”
“I think so.”
My mother started speaking at this point to thresh out her memories of the orderly, many of them borrowed from her grandmother or her aunts, all or almost all of them known to me. That day I realised, however, that Manuel Mena’s orderly was not just a legendary character for my mother, but also for my aunt and uncle, who also held indelible memories of his stays in the village: my aunt, for example, said that, since he was a Muslim, he killed every animal he ate with his own hands; my uncle, that he refused to give letters to Manuel Mena’s mother that had arrived for the second lieutenant: he had to hand them to him personally.
“But that was the first orderly,” my uncle specified immediately after. “Later there was another. One who wasn’t a Moroccan. A man from Segovia who was in the village after Uncle Manolo’s death.”
Uncle Alejandro said that the second orderly had been with Manuel Mena during the last moments of his life, had accompanied his corpse to Ibahernando, and had attended his funeral. We talked about Manuel Mena’s funeral, of the arrival of Manuel Mena’s body in the village, of the exact words Manuel Mena’s mother spoke over his corpse and the exact words she had said to Manuel Mena the night before he left for the front. Then I asked the three of them to tell me how they had received the news of his death. To my surprise, neither my mother nor my aunt remembered anything; my uncle Alejandro, however, remembered it all.
“That day we were eating at my parents’ house, on the square,” he began, looking at me with his hands lying still on the throw that covered the sofa, his head leaning against the back. “There was me, my mother, my father, my aunt Felisa, and my uncle Andrés, who had just come back from the front. I don’t think anyone else was there…No, nobody else. So anyway, when we finished eating, my aunt Felisa and I went together to Grandma Carolina’s house, and when we got there we found it empty. We thought this was strange. Then someone, I don’t know who, told us that everyone was at my uncle Juan’s house.” Without lifting his head up from the sofa back, he turned it towards my mother, and clarified: “At your father’s house.” He turned back to look at me: “And so we went there.”
The house was packed with people, my uncle continued, but as soon as they went in they knew something terrible had happened, because the atmosphere inside was gloomy and everyone was trying to console his grandmother Carolina, whose face looked like death. He didn’t remember who gave them the news, if someone actually did, or if anybody told them it had arrived by telegram. What he did remember is that, very nervously, he asked his aunt Felisa if he should go home and tell his parents and his uncle Andrés what had happened, and that his aunt said yes. And he remembered that he ran through the village as fast as his legs could carry him, and burst through the door of his house like a whirlwind with a breathless shout that made his parents and his uncle Andrés jump out of their chairs where they were still lingering after dinner:
“Uncle Manolo’s been killed!”
More than narrate the scene, my uncle acted it out, suddenly sitting up straight on the sofa and imitating his childish shout from eighty years earlier while his sunken mouth opened wide and his hands came alive for a few seconds to mimic the dramatic quality of the moment; then, just as suddenly, he returned to his previous position and continued his story. The next day, my uncle remembered, a family expedition left for Zaragoza to collect Manuel Mena’s corpse. And he also remembered something else: that just before the expedition left, a telegram arrived saying that Manuel Mena was only wounded. I had to compose an incredulous expression on my face before my uncle cleared up the mistake.
“It was an error,” he said. “What happened was that the second telegram had been sent before the first, but had arrived later.”
My uncle told us that the expedition to collect Manuel Mena’s corpse returned accompanied by his second orderly, who stayed for a few days at his grandmother Carolina’s house. This was the man who told them how Manuel Mena had died. My uncle reproduced his story in detail and, when he mentioned in passing that the bullet that killed Manuel Mena had hit him in the hip, I corrected him: I told him it had hit him in the abdomen.
“That’s what the orderly said,” my uncle agreed. “But it wasn’t true.”
“That’s what it says on his death certificate,” I explained.
“I can imagine,” my uncle said. “But believe me: where the bullet hit him was the hip.”
I asked him how he could be so sure and he told me the following story. Many years after Manuel Mena was buried in the old cemetery on the way into the village, a new cemetery was built a little beyond the lagoon, and they had to transfer the remains of the dead from one place to the other. The operation was simple, but laborious—they had to open the tombs, remove the remains, put them in sacks, take them to the other cemetery, and bury them there—and, when the time came to move those of his relatives, my uncle wanted to be present. So he discovered that what remained of his ancestors was placed in an iron-and-concrete sarcophagus; most of them were little more than dust, but some of Manuel Mena’s bones were in very good shape, among them the hipbone, and he decided to take them home to study them. Or rather so that the husband of his daughter Carmen, who was a traumatologist, could study them, and after cleaning up and examining the remains, he came to the conclusion that the bullet that killed Manuel Mena entered from the side, perforated his hip, and lodged in his abdomen.
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br /> “That’s how it was,” my uncle pronounced. “Whatever the documents may say.”
My wife’s telephone had begun to ring before my uncle finished his anecdote and, while she answered it, my aunt went out of the dining room and my uncle and my mother started talking to each other. A little confused by the stampede, I thought that, no matter how much I’d discovered about Manuel Mena’s story, not only was there much more that I didn’t know than I knew, but there always would be, as if it was as difficult to trap the past as it was to trap water in your hands; I wondered if this wasn’t what always happened or almost always, if the past is not deep down an elusive and inaccessible region, and I thought that was another good reason not to try to tell the true story of Manuel Mena.
My aunt came back into the dining room carrying a tray on which were a plate of potato chips, another of olives, and another of cubes of ham, and asked what we would like to drink. I looked at my watch: it was past two. When my wife finished her telephone call, she announced that my son and my nephew Néstor were waiting for us outside. I understood the interview was finished and tried to explain to my aunt and uncle that we had to go. It was impossible: it was no less impossible to convince my son and my nephew Néstor to come in and share my aunt and uncle’s hospitality with us. Blocked between two intransigencies, we chose to make my son and Néstor wait in the car while we had a quick aperitif. My aunt was offering to refill our glasses when my wife’s mobile rang again. It was my son and nephew again.
“This time we really do have to go,” I said.
Lord of All the Dead Page 18
