Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  The scene happened like this. Shortly after the arrival of Blanca Mena, the funeral procession made its way through the mourning crowd that packed Las Cruces. Manuel Mena’s four relatives and his orderly got out of one car, and then the five of them lifted the coffin out of the other car and set it down in the courtyard of Manuel Mena’s house. Only then did his mother come out, dragged or pushed by her daughters, who almost carried her. She was dressed entirely in black, her face and hands were white, she seemed consumed by suffering and could barely stand. Around her, people were crying, but she must have remembered the request her dead son had made of her every time he went back to war, or perhaps her sorrow was beyond tears, because she did not shed a single one. The only thing she managed to do, in the middle of the crowded silence that reigned over the street, was to raise her arm in a flaccid fascist salute and say with a thread of a voice that welled up from her entrails:

  “Arise Spain, my son.”

  Blanca Mena did not attend Manuel Mena’s funeral: at that time such ceremonies were reserved in the village for adults. During the following days, however, she visited her uncle’s orderly frequently, or at least she often saw him. The orderly was staying in her grandmother Carolina’s house and didn’t leave her side for an instant, or perhaps it was her grandmother who didn’t leave his side for an instant. Blanca Mena saw them whispering while her grandmother was cooking dinner or sewing or doing housework or chores in the yard, but she noticed that they stopped talking or changed the subject whenever she came near. Although she was sure they were talking about her uncle, she never knew exactly what they said. One day the orderly disappeared and they never heard of him again. More or less at the same time Manuel Mena’s mother asked that, when she died, they would put her dead son’s ceremonial sword in her coffin with her.

  The family tried to forget. In spite of Manuel Mena incarnating the paradigm of the Francoist hero, his death in combat had very little repercussion outside of the village. On October 20 the Extremadura, the most important newspaper of the province, published a death notice; two and a half weeks later La Falange, the party’s regional weekly, did the same. The text, signed by the local leader of the Falange, had been written by someone who, although he pretended to have known Manuel Mena, did not know him when he was alive and does not show a great interest in knowing him once he had died (in his idleness he even confuses which Bandera of the Falange he fought in during the first year of the war); unfailingly, he describes him as a “brave Falangist,” a “courageous soldier,” a “glorious hero,” and, after inflicting these hollow, obligatory, and routine expressions on him, he treats him brutally by attributing an idiotic phrase to him: “You can only die once for your Fatherland!” As for the death notice, it was paid for out of the family’s pocket, and did not neglect to record that he had given “his life for God and for the Fatherland.” In Ibahernando Manuel Mena’s memory is still, nevertheless, very much alive. Shortly after his funeral, on October 2, to be precise, the municipal government decided in a solemn session to consecrate a street to his memory. Months later Blanca Mena and her grandmother were sitting in the patio of her house when a man walked past them. Blanca Mena did not recognise him, but her grandmother abandoned what she was doing and stared at him. Blanca Mena was about to quietly ask who that stranger was when her grandmother shouted a question to him.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, with a friendliness that seemed genuine to her granddaughter for a moment. The question rang through the whole street; the man stopped and turned to her with a faint smile. “Are you going home?” her grandmother Carolina asked again, although now Blanca Mena felt that, from one second to the next, her friendliness turned into a cutting sarcasm, full of pain. “You’re going to see your mother, aren’t you? How nice. I bet you’re happy, aren’t you?” The smile had fled from the man’s face, and he was now looking at her grandmother Carolina paralysed with a mixture of perplexity and fright. Her grandmother Carolina spat: “Well, I can no longer see my son, because he is in the cemetery!”

  The final sentence brought a sudden end to the man’s paralysis, and without saying a word he lowered his head, walked away quickly, and disappeared towards La Rejoyada, or perhaps towards the calle de Arriba. Once he had gone, Blanca Mena asked who he was, and her grandmother Carolina answered that he was a Republican who had fought the war with the Republicans. Still shaken by the scene she had just witnessed, Blanca Mena reproached her:

  “And why did you say those things to him?”

  Her grandmother stared at her as if she’d just said something in an incomprehensible language.

  “Ah, I suppose you think it’s good they killed your uncle Manolo?” she asked.

  Blanca Mena was not yet ten when her grandmother asked her that question, and almost eighty years later she didn’t remember word for word the answer she gave her, but she did remember the general sense of her answer. What she said to her grandmother was that she did not think it was good that her uncle had been killed in the war, that she thought it was very bad, that she thought it was a horrible thing and she knew it was. But she also said that her uncle went to war because he wanted to. Nobody forced him to go to war. And the man who had just passed in front of them had nothing to do with his death.

  That was all: all that Blanca Mena said to her grandmother and all that happened that day, or all that Blanca Mena remembers happening. The former Republican did not come near her grandmother Carolina’s house again, at least, Blanca Mena never saw him there again, but for the rest of her life she could never cross paths with him in the village streets without feeling the shame and anguish she’d felt the day her grandmother had shouted at him as if he were responsible for Manuel Mena’s death.

  Blanca Mena also remembers another anecdote. When it happened, seven or eight years had passed since the end of the war and she was a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old adolescent who was now in love with José Cercas. One autumn afternoon, just home from school, she went to visit her grandmother Carolina. The door was not closed and the house seemed deserted; the first thing seemed normal, because in the village nobody closed their doors during the day, but the second did not. She looked for her grandmother in the kitchen, the dining room, the bedrooms, until she found her in the yard with her aunt Felisa and her aunt Obdulia. The three of them had just lit a bonfire and were watching it burn. She said hello to them, looked at the flames, and asked what they were burning. Her grandmother didn’t answer her, but her aunt Felisa did.

  “They’re your uncle Manolo’s things,” she said.

  Incredulous, Blanca Mena looked at the pyre: in effect, the fire was devouring clothing, books, papers, letters, notebooks, photographs, everything. She turned her horrified gaze to her grandmother, who seemed bewitched by the flames.

  “But what have you done?” she asked.

  She didn’t remember if it was her aunt Obdulia or her aunt Felisa who took her by the shoulder.

  “Come on, child.” She sighed, whichever one it was, pointing at the fire. “What do we want all this for? To keep on suffering? We’re burning it and let’s have done with it.”

  Manuel Mena’s mother died of cardiac arrest on August 29, 1953, a decade and a half after her son died. During those fifteen years, the Exterior Bank of Spain in Sidi Ifni had been paying her every month, from the account of the Group of Ifni Rifle Companies and with irregularities that often obliged her to write in complaint, a pension of three hundred and fifteen pesetas and ninety-six centavos, the current equivalent of approximately three hundred and fifty euros. We do not know if when she received those alms she remembered sometimes that before going off to war Manuel Mena told her that, if he died in combat, she would never have to worry about money again, but the truth is that is the price the Francoist State paid to the privileged families of Francoist officers, for surrendering a son to slaughter. On the day of Manuel Mena’s mother’s death someone remembered that
many years earlier she had asked to be buried with her son’s ceremonial sword; the family looked for it everywhere, but nobody could find it.

  15

  I no longer remember when or how or where I conceived the suspicion that Bot was the place where, according to family legend, Manuel Mena had died. I remember that it was a long time before I was sure it was true and a long time after my mother was hit by a car, and I understood that for her, Manuel Mena had been Achilles, and that perhaps he still was; I also remember that, when I asked my mother if the name of the village where Manuel Mena had died was Bot, her exiled octogenarian’s face lit up.

  “That’s it!” she said, radiant. “Bot.”

  I’m lying. Actually what she said was Bos or Boj or Boh: just as twenty-five years of living in Catalonia had not enabled her to understand the Catalan word for “after you,” Endavant, or at least not to confuse it with the Spanish expression “¿Adónde van?” (Where are you going?), half a century in Catalonia had not enabled her to pronounce the Catalan place name Bot, or at least not to pronounce it as Bos or Boj or Boh.

  The fact is it still took me a few years to get to Bot. By then it had been quite some time that I had been following Manuel Mena’s trail and that, like a detective prowling around the scene of a crime, I’d been to Teruel, to Lérida, and to the valley of Bielsa; I’d also been to Terra Alta. By then I had visited the memorial consecrated to preserving the memory of the Battle of the Ebro in Terra Alta several times and I had realised that, unlike what happened in Teruel, in Lérida, and even in the valley of Bielsa, in that region the battle had left an indelible trace: during the postwar years many of its inhabitants made a living selling the scraps of shrapnel that covered their countryside, and even now many of them still bear the battle very much in mind, in a certain sense are still living with it and with its consequences, obsessed by it, some even unhinged by it. By then I knew the battlefields fairly well, I had walked in the same places Manuel Mena had walked, especially at Cucut, Hill 494, the place where Manuel Mena was fatally wounded, where there were still abundant remains of shrapnel in the ground and where time had not destroyed the Republicans’ trenches and shelters (or even some of the much more fragile parapets improvised by the Francoists in the very short time between their conquest of the summit and the Republican counterattack). Otherwise, from the start of my investigations I was aware that I wasn’t searching for the singular trace, but the plural traces of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen, and that and no more was what I was finding: a multiple, shifting, slightly abstract, imagined and almost extinct trace. So it can be understood that the day I finally arrived in Bot I was almost sure I would find nothing less vague than that, and if that wasn’t entirely the case it was because shortly before I had spoken by telephone with the man who, according to a widely held view, best knew the village’s history.

  His name was Antoni Cortés. The first time I called him I got straight to the point: I summed up Manuel Mena’s story and told him that according to my mother he had died in Bot, although I had no proof of that. “It would be strange for your mother to be mistaken,” Cortés said. “Didn’t you say her uncle fought with the 13th Division?” “With the Ifni Riflemen,” I specified. “Who were in the 13th Division.” “Well, the 13th Division had their hospitals in Bot,” he assured me. “So, if her uncle was attended in a hospital before he died, it was almost certainly here.” Speaking very quickly, in fits and starts in a thick dialectal Catalan, Cortés told me that during the battle there were three hospitals in Bot, he mentioned a couple of books about it and about the Civil War in the village; then we were talking about what happened in Bot during the battle and, when I thought he’d told me everything he had to tell me, I thanked him for the information. “Don’t thank me,” he said. “For me it’s a pleasure to talk about the history of my village. Do you know what the worst thing is that can happen to a person? To grow up and realise he doesn’t know anything. It happened to me at the age of thirty-five, and since then I’ve done nothing but study. And now I’m retired. I still don’t know anything, but I hide it better.” “You hide it very well, sir,” I said sincerely. “Bah,” he said, just as sincerely, or that’s how it seemed to me. “I hide it better when it comes to ancient history. That’s what I’m really interested in, because it’s what takes most effort to find out. We know everything about the Battle of the Ebro. And what we don’t know we can soon find out.” “About my mother’s uncle as well?” I asked. “Of course,” he answered. “Drop in here one day and you’ll see.”

  I didn’t believe him, I thought he was just talking for the sake of it or that he was trying to make himself sound interesting, and I hung up thinking I would not speak with him again. A few months later, however, I found documentary evidence in the Military Archive in Ávila that Manuel Mena had died in Bot, and I called him again and made an appointment to meet him in his village when I had to make a trip to Valencia. Cortés said to meet him at noon in the plaza of Bot, so I could leave Barcelona at 9:30 and get to Gandesa two hours later; there I took a windy road that brought me to the village in ten minutes. This turned out to be an even smaller place than Ibahernando, a handful of brown houses clustered tightly around the bell tower of a brown church and surrounded by hills interspersed with rocks and pine trees. The church stood in the plaza and, as I parked outside its door, I saw that the only man in sight was walking decisively over to my car. He was dressed informally in worn jeans and a blue pullover, but his athletic carriage, his silver-framed glasses, and luxuriant grey moustache lent him the eccentric and polished air of a retired British colonel. It was Cortés. I got out of the car and held out my hand while thanking him for his hospitality.

  “Don’t thank me,” he said, with a military handshake. “I don’t like to be thanked. Also, I don’t deserve to be: I’m delighted to help you.”

  I was about to thank him again but I held back and asked if he were a historian. He answered no, that he had been a butcher and then he’d worked at a leather company and then in a wine shop and later in a factory in Gandesa. There was not a soul in the plaza; the silence of the village was total.

  “But let’s not talk about me,” Cortés said. “It’s very boring. Tell me: what do you want to know about my village?”

  I summed up the story of Manuel Mena again and hurried to tell him I’d located his death certificate, on which it stated that he had indeed died in Bot.

  “You weren’t mistaken,” I told him.

  “Neither was your mother,” he said. “Do you remember the name of the doctor who signed the death certificate?”

  “Cerrada,” I said. “A Dr. Cerrada.”

  Cortés looked annoyed.

  “Your uncle was an officer?” he asked.

  “Second lieutenant,” I said, nodding. “But he wasn’t my uncle, he was my great-uncle.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  “That he was my great-uncle?”

  “That he was an officer.” Cortés didn’t give me time to apologise; he said: “Now I know where he died.”

  “He didn’t die in Bot?” I asked, slightly disconcerted.

  “Of course he died in Bot,” he said. “I mean which house he died in.”

  I thought he was joking. I looked into his eyes; he wasn’t joking.

  “He died in Ca Paladella,” he declared. “A house they turned into a hospital during the war.” Pointing vaguely to his right, he said: “It’s just here, right around the corner.”

  “How do you know? I mean: how do you know he died there?”

  “Because that was the only hospital for officers in the village; that’s where Dr. Cerrada worked. I’ll tell you more: I know which room your uncle died in.”

  I heard myself ask again: