Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  “How do you know?”

  “Because in that hospital there was only one room for officers,” he said. “And because my mother was a nurse there.”

  “What?”

  “What you heard.”

  “Your mother told you?”

  “And she’ll tell you whenever you want.”

  “Don’t tell me she’s still alive.”

  Cortés laughed.

  “Alive and kicking,” he said, grabbing my arm and forcing me to walk. “Come on, I’m going to show you the house where your great-uncle died.”

  Turning at the first corner, we walked a few feet down a street, and when we got to the next corner we stopped before a three-storey mansion built of large blocks of brown stone: on the ground floor there were several lattice-covered windows and a big wooden door under a semicircular arch, above which, carved into the stone, was a noble coat of arms; on the second floor were three large balconies, and the third was an open loft with a series of arched windows linked by a cornice with mouldings. It was more of a palace than a mansion.

  “Here you have it,” Cortés said, pointing proudly. “It’s the only example of civil architecture in the village.”

  For a few seconds I stared at it in silence; then I asked:

  “And you’re sure it was here where—”

  “Completely,” Cortés interrupted me.

  “It looks abandoned,” I said.

  “It doesn’t just look it: it is.” He explained that the house was the property of the richest family in Bot and had been up for sale for many years. “The descendants of the butler are the ones who show it to prospective buyers. They live in Tarragona, but if you want to see inside I can talk to them and get them to open it for us.”

  “Would they?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, I’d be very grateful if you’d ask them.”

  Cortés put his hands on his hips and scowled. It took me a second to realise I’d thanked him again.

  “What I meant to say is that I’d be delighted if you were to ask them,” I corrected myself.

  Cortés moved his head from one side to the other, as if scolding me, and at last grudgingly stopped scowling. Then, suddenly, his lips, almost hidden by his moustache, spread into a frank smile.

  “Well, do you want to talk to my mother or not?” he said.

  “Right now?” I answered, perplexed again.

  “Of course,” Cortés said. “She lives just over here.”

  I walked beside Cortés and wondered what would be the next surprise he had in store for me and, as we went through the village without meeting anyone, my host told me that all his known ancestors were from Bot, that his father had died the previous year and had fought in the war and was from a Francoist family, while his mother was from a Republican family; he also told me his mother didn’t like talking about the war.

  Cortés’s mother was a shrunken little old lady, as plump and wrinkled as a raisin. She answered the door herself; she was dressed completely in black and looked at us strangely, as if irritated or dazzled by the spring sunshine. Cortés had told me his mother had just turned ninety-one and was named Carme. Carme Manyà.

  “Mother,” Cortés said in an almost ceremonious tone, while I shook her suspicious, chubby hand. “This gentleman is a writer and wants to talk to you about the war.”

  The woman screwed up her inquisitive eyes even further, but did not ask us in. Feeling scrutinised and uncomfortable, not knowing what to say, I asked her if she remembered the Battle of the Ebro. Now I think that, especially after her son’s announcement, for a woman of that age born in Terra Alta the question was so obvious or so redundant that she must have thought that I could only be as ingenuous and inoffensive as my words.

  “I believe I do.” She laughed. Her brow cleared suddenly and I recognised in her expression a foretaste or a sketch of her son’s expression. “Much better than what happened yesterday.”

  Only then did she let us in and, walking with difficulty but refusing her son’s help, led us to a living room with thick walls of bare stone lit by deep windows, where we sat down. For the next two and a half hours the three of us stayed there, talking and drinking coffee. I told Cortés’s mother what I knew about Manuel Mena’s death and she told me that when the war broke out she was twelve, that she lived across from Ca Paladella, and during the Battle of the Ebro she had worked every afternoon in that improvised hospital together with a group of friends. Their job was not to attend to the patients, a task reserved for the professional nurses, but to cut bandages, put them in containers to be sterilised, make beds, wash dirty clothes in the river, and do whatever Dr. Cerrada ordered them to do; he was in charge of a fluctuating team of doctors and acted as head of the hospital. I asked her if they only looked after officers in that hospital; she said no, that they also looked after ordinary soldiers, but added that all officers were looked after there.

  “In other words, you’re absolutely sure that my mother’s uncle died in Ca Paladella,” I wanted to know.

  “Absolutely sure,” she said.

  I looked at Cortés, who smoothed his moustache in satisfaction but didn’t say a word, sticking to the subordinate role he had decided to play in that interview or that he always played in his mother’s presence. He continued explaining that many more wounded soldiers arrived at the hospital than wounded officers, and that the officers had a room reserved for them on the first floor; I asked her if she knew which room it was and she answered of course, although she added that she didn’t often go in there.

  “So, in other words, you’re absolutely sure my mother’s uncle died in that room.”

  “Absolutely sure,” she said again.

  Marvelling at her reply, this time I didn’t look at Cortés but kept looking at her, and at that moment she seemed identical to the remote little old ladies in mourning of my childhood summers in Ibahernando. I don’t remember much more of the conversation except that, thanks to her, I was also able to clear up certain points about Manuel Mena’s death (I understood, for example, the reason he had died while waiting for urgent surgery: because Ca Paladella had only one surgical team, which was insufficient on that ill-fated night for the 13th Division, with several officers wounded); I also remember that from a certain moment on I couldn’t rid myself of the suspicion that this energetic and diminutive old lady unknowingly held in her memory the last living image of Manuel Mena, and the conviction that, if the suspicion were true, when she died that unconscious memory would die with her.

  I said goodbye to Cortés’s mother at the door to her house with a kiss on each cheek and told her I was very happy that she had agreed to answer my questions.

  “I was told that you don’t like talking about the war,” I added.

  “It’s not that I don’t like it,” she said, waving one hand to get rid of an invisible nuisance while holding on to the doorframe with the other. “What happens is that I have only very bitter memories of that time.” Without a trace of drama, she explained: “Look, if they told me I had to choose between going through that again or dying, I would choose to die.”

  I said goodbye to Cortés beside my car and asked him to call me when we could visit Ca Paladella.

  “I’ll bring my mother,” I promised. “She will be very pleased to see the place where her uncle died.”

  He told me he’d let me know as soon as he heard anything, and I was about to thank him, but stopped myself in the nick of time.

  * * *

  —

  Cortés called me at the beginning of July, shortly before Ernest Folch and his team were going to film their television programme in Ibahernando, and told me he’d made an appointment to visit Ca Paladella. A few days later my wife and I drove to Gerona to pick up my mother.

  “Well, Mamá” was the first thing I said after helping her i
nto the passenger seat and doing up her seatbelt. “You’re finally going to see Bot.”

  “Yes, son,” she said, crossing herself as she always did at the beginning of a drive. “It’s hard to believe: it seems like I’ve been waiting my whole life for this moment. If Grandma Carolina were alive…”

  During the trip my mother told us two things I’d never heard her tell before. The first is that on one occasion, when I was six or seven years old, I had gone with her and my father to the home of Don Eladio Viñuela, in Don Benito, a city in Badajoz where the doctor had moved with his family after leaving Ibahernando. It was a spur-of-the-moment visit. When we arrived, Don Eladio was not home, but his wife, Doña Marina, was, and we spent the whole afternoon with her having cakes and soft drinks and waiting for her husband, until night fell and we had to leave and I missed the only chance in my life to meet the man who had civilised Ibahernando. The other story had to do with Bot. My mother had always known that the village where Manuel Mena had died was in Catalonia and, according to what she said, when we moved to Gerona in the mid-sixties she thought of visiting it; in fact, during the first years she made a vague effort to find out where it was, but her all-consuming work as a housewife and mother of five, dispossessed of the patrician privileges of her village, obliged her to give up on the idea of finding it. For my part I told them, her and my wife, how I had discovered the exact place where Manuel Mena died, told them about Cortés’s mother and about Cortés himself.

  “He’s a really nice guy,” I warned them. “He hasn’t stopped doing me favours since I met him, but don’t even think of thanking him. He gets angry.”

  It was getting dark when we crossed the Ebro at Mora d’Ebre and entered the plateau that seventy-seven years earlier had been the scene of the battle. While I tried to give them an idea of its development, my mother looked out of the window as if she was not in the slightest bit interested in what she was listening to, or as if what really interested her was the succession of rocky, inhospitable, and desolate hillocks rising around us. We’d been driving for two hours and she seemed tired or bored. To distract her, as we passed by a signpost to Coll del Moro, I commented, almost in the tone of a tour guide:

  “Look, Mamá: that’s where Franco had his command post during the battle.”

  “Sainted Virgin of Perpetual Sorrow!” she lamented, indifferent to my commentary: “Did my uncle Manolo have to come all this way to die?” With a single gesture she took in the whole landscape. “But this looks like the end of the world, son!”

  That night we slept in the Piqué Hotel, on the way into Gandesa, where my wife had reserved a room; just one: my mother needed to sleep in company. After freshening up a little, the three of us went downstairs to the restaurant, and my wife and I had a few tapas while my mother did justice to a two-course menu plus dessert. She still hadn’t finished her main course when I heard her say something I was surprised not to have heard her say during the whole trip: that one of my sisters had explained or insinuated to her that we had to sell the house in Ibahernando; arming myself with patience, I answered what I always answered: that she shouldn’t worry, and that, as long as she was alive, we wouldn’t sell the house. I saw the next question coming.

  “And when I die?” she asked.

  “And why are you so keen to die?” I said.

  “Keen, me?” She was shocked. “Not at all, son. But one day Our Lord God will take me, and then—”

  “Mamá, please!” I cut her off, irritated, and resolved not to allow myself to be blackmailed by her spontaneous tendency to catastrophic melodrama. “If you really want God to take you, make more of an effort…”

  She looked at me without understanding; I pointed to the rack of lamb she was polishing off and clarified, implacably, as if I had been a victim of postwar hunger:

  “It’s just that, if you keep eating the way you eat, Our Lord won’t even call you on the Day of Judgement.”

  Back in the room, my mother and my wife went straight to sleep and I sat down to read the translation of The Odyssey that I had taken from my mother’s house in Ibahernando years before and that, since I finished rereading the translation of The Iliad, had accompanied me on my trips on the trail of Manuel Mena. I had been reading it for quite a while when unexpectedly I realised something I hadn’t noticed before. What I realised was that the protagonist of The Odyssey was the exact opposite of the protagonist of The Iliad: Achilles is the man of a short life and glorious death, who dies at the youthful peak of his beauty and his valour and thus achieves immortality, the man who defeats death through kalos thanatos, a beautiful death that represents the culmination of a beautiful life; Odysseus, on the other hand, is the polar opposite: the man who returns home to live a long life blessed by fidelity to Penelope, to Ithaca, and to himself, although in the end he reaches old age and after this life there is no other. I was still under the effect of this revelation when I reached, towards the end of Book Eleven, the only episode in which Achilles appears in The Odyssey. Odysseus visits him in the house of the dead and tells him that he, who was the greatest of all heroes and defeated death with his beautiful death, the perfect man admired by all, who in the light of life was like a sun, now must be like a king in the realm of the shades and must not lament his lost existence. Then Achilles replies:

  Illustrious Odysseus, don’t try to console me for my death, for I would rather toil as the slave of a penniless, landless labourer, than reign here as lord of all the dead.

  I read these lines. I reread them. I looked up from the book and for a while I thought of the hero of The Iliad’s regret. Then I turned off the light and went to sleep wondering if, like him, Manuel Mena (the posthumous Manuel Mena, but also the Manuel Mena of his last days, the taciturn, absorbed, disenchanted, humble, lucid, aged, and fed-up-with-war Manuel Mena) would not have preferred to be a slave to some poor serf, breathing vital air, than a dead lord, wondering if in the realm of the shades he had also understood that there was no other life than that of the living, that the precarious life of the memory is not immortal life but barely an ephemeral legend, an empty substitute for life, and that only death is certain.

  The next morning we parked in Bot’s main square just before ten, and, as we were doing so, I saw Cortés talking to a woman at the door of a café. He said goodbye to her and walked over to us, and I introduced him to my wife and my mother. The first thing my mother did was thank him for his hospitality; the first thing Cortés did was get angry.

  “But what’s wrong with this family?” he asked, opening his impotent arms and looking to my wife for an explanation. “Can’t they stop saying thanks or what?”

  I feared the visit was going to fall through, but my wife and I managed to paper over the mess with a thick cloud of excuses and we all started walking towards Ca Paladella, my mother holding on to my arm with one hand and her stick with the other, Cortés recovering from his initial indignation while he explained that he had put the people who were going to show us the house in the picture about the reason for our visit. When we arrived at Ca Paladella Cortés knocked on the door and a dark-haired, middle-aged woman soon opened it, and we were still tangled up in introductions when another woman appeared, this one blond and somewhat younger, wearing glasses and a necklace of red glass beads; at her side was a teenage girl in a very short blue summer dress. The blond woman urged us to come in.

  “It’s just that if the village people see the house open, they’ll want to come in and look around,” she apologised.

  Her name was Francisca Miró; the other was Josepa Miró (the teenager, whose name was Sara, was her daughter). As Cortés explained as we entered, they were both granddaughters of the last butler of the house, which had been built at the end of the seventeenth century or the beginning of the eighteenth by the village’s wealthiest family and had been abandoned at the beginning of the war, although in the postwar years the owners used to spend a lot of
time there.

  “But for at least forty years nobody has come back to live in this house,” Cortés said.

  We were standing in the vast entrance hall with peeling walls, with light coming through a little cobweb-covered window and from a paraffin lantern. Two huge doors like the entrance opened from the hall: one led to the storehouses, which, according to Cortés, had been used as a mortuary during the war, when the house was turned into a hospital; the other allowed a glimpse of steps leading up to the darkness of the first floor. The feeling of abandonment was total: there was dust and newspaper everywhere, cardboard boxes, empty gas cylinders, old junk. Suddenly, while I was listening to the explanations Cortés and the Miró sisters were offering, I noticed that several people had come into the entrance hall, and I wondered if they were intruders or relatives or friends or acquaintances of the Miró sisters, taking advantage of the chance to visit the mansion. At some point my mother’s voice broke through the various overlapping conversations.

  “And this is where my uncle Manolo died?” she asked.

  “Not here, señora,” Cortés responded. “On the second floor. Let’s go upstairs.”

  I thought my mother would be daunted when she saw the dark, dusty, cracked stairway she would have to climb, but she was not daunted. We left her stick in the entrance hall and began the ascent in a procession, with Cortés, Josepa Miró, and her lantern in the lead and my wife and the rest of the retinue in the rear. My mother went up heavily, resting on each step, with one hand on my arm and the other on the dirty iron handrail. When we got to the landing she was sweating. I asked her if she was alright and she said she was; I asked her if she was sure and she again said yes. Still following Cortés and Josepa, we turned left, crossed a dark parlour, and arrived in a living room or what seemed to have been a living room illuminated by a skylight. We were still there, listening to Cortés and looking around at the damage caused by forty years of neglect, when Cortés’s mother appeared, tiny and dressed in mourning and accompanied by Francisca Miró. I said hello and introduced her to my mother.