I stood up, my mother and my wife stood up as well, and I was still saying goodbye to my aunt when, suddenly sitting up again on the sofa, my uncle gripped my arm with an unexpected strength.
“Wait a moment, Javi,” he begged me. “I have to tell you something about my uncle Manolo.” My Uncle Alejandro’s words put an immediate stop to our leaving, or perhaps it was the dramatic way he delivered them. “It’s about the war,” he said. “He said it, I’ve just remembered. I’m sure nobody else has told you this.”
An abnormal silence fell over the dining room. My uncle Alejandro looked at me, his pupils dilated by curiosity, as if intrigued by his own memory; as he did so, two contradictory intuitions crossed my mind. The first was that my uncle was trying to bribe me, that his words were a ploy to keep us there with the bait of an insignificant or invented story, a decoy to alleviate a few more minutes of his solitude and prolong the pleasure of the conversation and the company. The second intuition was that my uncle had an enormous interest in my writing the story of Manuel Mena, perhaps because for him Manuel Mena was also Achilles, and because, in the way of humble people, he felt that stories exist only when someone writes them down. I don’t know if the second intuition was mistaken; the first one undoubtedly was.
“You told me you never heard him talk about the war,” I reminded him.
“And it’s true,” he said. He had just stood up with the help of my aunt and he was looking straight at me, his face inches from mine; suddenly he didn’t seem so old, or so skinny, or so shrunken; his curiosity had turned into exaltation, and even his voice sounded more solid. “What I’m going to tell you is not something I heard him say, but it was he who said it. I was told this, and I’m sure it’s true.”
My uncle, in effect, hadn’t been present at the scene. He didn’t remember who told him; nor did he know when it happened, although from its contents we can deduce that it must have happened during one of the last furloughs Manuel Mena spent in the village. My uncle did know, however, that it had happened during a family lunch or dinner at his grandmother Carolina’s house. Maybe it was a celebration, perhaps in an aside or small group that formed during the celebration. My uncle could not be more precise. According to the person who had told him the anecdote, what happened was that Manuel Mena and his brother Antonio had got involved in an argument about some trivial matter, and the argument grew gradually more heated and changed topic even though it was ostensibly about the same subject, like in one of those classic family disputes when people seem to be talking about one thing when they’re actually talking about something else; until at a certain moment Manuel Mena settled the controversy with the words that had just now surfaced in my uncle’s astonished memory. Look, Antonio, said Manuel Mena (or my uncle Alejandro said that Manuel Mena said), this war is not what we believed at the beginning. Manuel Mena said the war wasn’t going to be easy, that it was not going to be a matter of a little effort and a little sacrifice, were the exact words my uncle Alejandro used. He said it was going to be hard and it was going to be long. He said that many people were going to die. He said that many people had already died but many more still were going to die. And he said that he felt he had done his duty. He said he felt sure he had done his duty. To himself, to his family, to everyone. I’ve done my duty, Manuel Mena repeated. It’s over, he said. I’ve had enough, he insisted. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t go back to the front, he stressed. But he also said, in spite of everything, that he was going back. And do you know why? he asked his brother Antonio, squaring up to him, and the silence that must have met his question couldn’t have been much different from the silence that met it now, almost eighty years later, in my uncle Alejandro’s house, in my presence and in the presence of my mother, my aunt, and my wife. According to my uncle Alejandro, Manuel Mena answered his own question; what he said was: “Because if I don’t go, the one who has to go is you.”
“And he was right, Javi,” my uncle Alejandro said. “According to their ages, the one who should have been at the front was not my uncle Manolo but my uncle Antonio, who was older than him. If he hadn’t been called up it was because my grandmother already had two sons in the army, my uncle Manolo and my uncle Andrés, and by law she couldn’t have more. But, if my uncle Manolo came home, the one who would have had to go to war was my uncle Antonio, even though he had a wife and children. That was the problem. You understand, don’t you?”
The exaltation in my uncle’s eyes had suddenly turned into anxiety or something resembling anxiety. I was as perplexed as I would have been if he’d just exhumed a chest full of gold that had been buried at sea for almost a century. For a second I looked away, towards the window: under the perpendicular June sun, the children had disappeared and now there was just the yellow expanse of grass in the vacant lot. When I looked back at my uncle I realised that what was in his eyes was not anxiety but joy.
“Are you saying that Manuel Mena was fed up with the war?”
“Exactly,” my uncle answered. “Fed up.” And he added: “If he could have, he would have come home. But he was trapped, and he couldn’t.”
All of a sudden I understood. What I understood was that Manuel Mena had not always been an idealistic young man, a provincial intellectual dazzled by the romantic and totalitarian sheen of the Falange, and that at some point in the war he had ceased to have the notion of war that young idealists have always had and had stopped thinking that it was the place where men find themselves and show their true worth. For a moment I said to myself that Manuel Mena had known not only the noble, beautiful, and ancient fiction of war as Velázquez painted it, but also the modern and horrifying reality that Goya painted, and I said to myself that the feverish condensation of his fleeting soldier’s life had allowed him to travel in a handful of months from the exalted, utopian, and lethal impetus of his youth to the clear-eyed disenchantment of a premature maturity. I also understood that those words discovered by chance in the derelict memory of my uncle Alejandro did not refute the Manuel Mena I had imagined or reconstructed or invented over the years, but rather completed him: thinking of David Trueba, I understood that I’d just witnessed a small miracle; that resuscitated memory of Manuel Mena, along with the notes Manolo Amarilla had entrusted me with the day before and that I had deciphered in the middle of the night, were much better than any recording of Manuel Mena I might have found, much better than any home movie where I might have seen Manuel Mena moving and talking and smiling, I understood that those few words written by Manuel Mena and kept by Manolo Amarilla and that tiny piece of my uncle Alejandro’s memory were a thousand times more valuable than a thousand animate images, they had a thousand times more evocative power, and only then did I feel that Manuel Mena was no longer a hazy, distant figure for me, as rigid, cold, and abstract as a statue, a mournful family legend reduced to a portrait confined to the dusty silence of a dusty loft of the deserted family home, the symbol of all the mistakes and responsibilities and guilt and shame and misery and death and defeats and frights and filth and tears and sacrifice and passion and dishonour of my ancestors, but had become a man of flesh and bone, a simple self-respecting muchacho disillusioned of his ideals and a soldier lost in someone else’s war, who didn’t know why he was fighting anymore. And then I saw him.
Outside, my son and my nephew Néstor were waiting for us.
“Did you behave yourself, Blanquita?” they asked my mother.
During the drive back to Trujillo I told them both the story of Manuel Mena.
14
This was the biggest battle in the history of Spain. For one hundred and fifteen days and nights in the summer and autumn of 1938, two hundred and fifty thousand men fought to the death the length and breadth of a barren, inhospitable, and wild terrain that extended along the right bank of the River Ebro on its course through southern Catalonia: a region called Terra Alta, a land of rocky hills, deep ravines, bare cliffs, villages of farm labourers an
d grain crops, vineyards, almonds, olives, and Aleppo pines and fruit trees, which that summer registered temperatures of almost sixty degrees Celsius in the sun and almost eighty years later has still not recovered from the furious firestorm that raged over this place. There, in several of the most decisive episodes of the struggle, Manuel Mena went back into combat.
It was a totally absurd battle; also totally unnecessary. At the beginning it didn’t appear to be, or not completely, especially on the Republican side. As with the Teruel offensive, as with so many offensives of that war, the Ebro offensive had both a military and a propaganda objective for the Republic; in theory, the military objective was the most important, but in practice propaganda ended up taking priority. The military objective consisted of crossing the River Ebro, breaking through the front line, and then going as far south into Francoist territory as possible with the aim of reestablishing communications between Catalonia and the rest of Republican Spain, in the best of cases, and, in the worst, of alleviating the increasing pressure the rebel army was putting on Valencia (and therefore Madrid, since Valencia was the principal source of supplies for the capital). The propaganda objective consisted of a dramatic strike that would attract the world’s interest to Spain and create the universal illusion that, in spite of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s massive support of Franco, in spite of the passivity of the Western democracies before that fascist onslaught, the magnitude of their own mistakes and of two years of defeats, the Republic could still win the war, or at least could carry on resisting; that was the final aim of Juan Negrín, the President of the Government, in unleashing the attack on the Ebro: to provoke a foreign intervention to force Franco to negotiate for peace or, failing that, to gain time until the forecast European war allied the cause of Spanish democracy to that of the Western democracies. The first aim was unreal, because Franco would not accept a victory that was not unconditional; the second was not quite as unreal, or at least it didn’t always seem so in that summer when insatiable Nazi expansion was threatening to finish off Czechoslovakia and the shortsighted and fainthearted pacts of the European powers.
And so, on July 25, after meticulous weeks of preparation during which the Republic assembled its last great army of a hundred thousand men as well as the remains of their artillery, a great part of its air force, and numerous tanks, six Republican divisions under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Modesto crossed the Ebro at twelve different points. At that moment the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen were camped not far from the river, in the olive groves on the slope of Montsià, between Ulldecona and Alcanar. Along with the entire 13th Division, they had been transferred from Lérida two weeks earlier due to rumours of activity on the other side of the Ebro, and since then had remained in the reserves of the 105th Division, which was guarding the front line around Amposta. By then, at the age of nineteen, Manuel Mena was already an old hand at war. He had a new orderly, of whom all we know is that he was from Segovia and that the Manuel Mena he knew was not very similar to the Manuel Mena they knew back in Ibahernando: according to what he himself would tell them weeks later in the village, that Manuel Mena was (or seemed to be) a humble, melancholic, solitary, withdrawn man, with no trace left of the enthusiasm of the early days of the war; in spite of that, the orderly also described him as one of those people who always took responsibility for what happened around them, an officer on whom his commanders and his soldiers always knew they could count, who was always in the front line, who never buckled. He had been wounded by enemy fire on more than one occasion and, in spite of not yet having been promoted to the rank of lieutenant, the day the Ebro offensive was triggered he commanded the machine-gun company of his Tabor, including six heavy machine guns, twelve regular machine guns, six mortars, and a staff composed of clerks and orderlies. Although the Republican attack had begun in the early hours of the morning, it was not until dawn that Manuel Mena’s Tabor received news of the offensive, and it was not until eleven that two of their companies under the command of Captain Justo Nájera, among them that of Manuel Mena, left in trucks for the combat zone in Amposta, near the Mianés apex, where the almost four thousand men of the XIV International Brigade under the command of Major Marcel Sagnier had been stopped, after crossing the river, by the 105th Division and by an irrigation canal that ran six hundred and fifty feet from the riverbank, the existence of which the Republicans were unaware. The two companies of the First Tabor of Riflemen arrived there at around one o’clock in the afternoon, after leaving the trucks at mile 70 of the Valencia road, rushing to Mianés and crossing an open zone, battered as much by the Republicans trapped between the canal and the river as by those still lying in wait on the other side of the river and expecting to cross it, hidden among the trees and reed beds.
There began the real combat for the two companies of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen, once they managed to get themselves into a defensive position on the slope of the canal, on the enemy’s north flank. Manuel Mena spread his company out behind the sloping side of the canal, and from that location his machine guns and mortars did not cease all afternoon, covering the Francoists’ assaults and repelling the Republican counterattacks with the support of artillery and air force. A French volunteer from the Paris Commune Battalion of the International Brigade, who at that moment was on the other side of the canal, opposite Manuel Mena, described the skirmish in this way: “On the red sand, our overheated machine guns frequently jam, but our men in charge of the parts perform true wonders and their shots stop the enemy thirty feet away, forcing them to retreat. It is a violent and deadly combat we face in this small redoubt where we find ourselves entrenched. We all know it will be necessary to resist until nightfall; before that, we can expect no reinforcements. In front of us the enemy, at our backs the river; the situation is therefore quite clear and tragic.” The description is very precise: in that bridgehead turned rat trap there were hand-to-hand combats and suicides of desperate soldiers and officers; apart from that, the Republicans did not manage to hold out until nightfall, reinforcements did not arrive and the Paris Commune Battalion was practically annihilated. At six in the evening, under a still-burning sun, a final Francoist assault with hand grenades meant the end of Republican resistance and sent hundreds of terrified International Brigade soldiers into the waters of the river, where many of them drowned. The Republicans left no fewer than a thousand corpses on the tiny river beach during the few hours of a thwarted landing. For its part, the six victorious Francoist battalions reckoned with 311 dead and 289 wounded. Among the wounded were Captain Nájera, who figures in the operational dispatch of that day as a distinguished officer; also commended as a distinguished officer in that day’s dispatch was Manuel Mena, “for his daring and bravery.”
* * *
—
Apart from a demented massacre, the International Brigade’s attack on that section of the Ebro was also a failure, even if it was the only important failure of the great Republican offensive on its first day; besides, it was a diversionary manoeuvre, to a certain extent secondary: its real aim was to divert the Francoists’ attention from the principal manoeuvre, which was taking place at the same time upstream and sought to take the capital of Terra Alta: Gandesa. Be that as it may, the offensive was so successful in its first days that it sparked euphoria among the downcast Republicans and led the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, to the illusory and ephemeral conviction that the unfortunate fate of the war had changed. In fact, during the initial twenty-four hours Modesto’s men captured almost five hundred square miles of Francoist territory and, after taking Corbera d’Ebre, made it almost to the gates of Gandesa. Right at that point they were stopped by a Tabor of Ifni Riflemen, the Ifni-Sahara Tabor, and by the 6th Bandera of the Legion, both stationed on the Pico de la Muerte, on the Coll del Niño; but they were stopped with great difficulty, just short of a miracle, and the emergency situation of the Francoists necessitated that the 13th Division send that very day, without wasting any
time, in support of those two elite units, two of the companies of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen who had just defeated the Republicans in the vicinity of Amposta. Neither of the two was the machine-gun company commanded by Manuel Mena, who was ordered to remain in the recently captured zone in order to secure it. For the Francoists, however, the situation continued to be very critical all along the front: they had to stop the triumphant Republican avalanche however they could and they needed their best troops at the key points of the enemy attack, so the following morning, once the situation in Amposta was completely under control, the two remaining companies of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen—among them Manuel Mena’s—left for Gandesa.
They covered the distance by forced marches. In order to avoid the uncertainties of the front line they took a detour through Horta and then the Prat de Compte road with the aim of going down into Bot and from there entering Gandesa through the rearguard, but when they reached the outskirts of Bot they heard the clatter of machine-gun fire in the distance and approached to investigate. Before they went into the village by the valley of the River Canaleta, someone—a farmer, or maybe a Civil Guard—told them what was happening: a Republican advance patrol from the Sierra of Pàndols had managed to infiltrate as far up as the Shrine of Sant Josep de Bot through the gullies of Font Blanca and the River Canaleta, and a few Francoist soldiers and Civil Guard officers were trying to frighten them off by firing at them from the village, only three hundred feet or so away from them; the same spontaneous local informant also conjectured that there couldn’t be more than a couple of dozen poorly armed and undersupplied Republicans. At that moment, the episodic command of the two Rifle Companies fell to a lieutenant, and he and Manuel Mena could glimpse in the distance, on the summit of a slight hill against the backdrop of a circle of mountains speckled with vegetation, a building with white walls and brown roof tiles surrounded by cypresses: the occupied shrine. The two officers barely needed to deliberate before deciding that they were going to take it by storm immediately instead of continuing to Gandesa.
Lord of All the Dead Page 19
