by Pete Ayrton
A parenthesis. In the newspaper El País, dated 4 November 2006, I read these words spoken by a man from Fuenteguinaldo, in the province of Salamanca:
‘Apparently, the Falangists asked the priest to draw up a list of all the reds and atheists in the village. On 7 October 1936, they went from house to house looking for them. At nine o’clock at night, they were taken to the prison in Ciudad Rodrigo, and at four o’clock in the morning, were told they were being released, but, at the door of the prison, a truck was waiting and, instead of taking them home, it brought them here to be killed.’
By now, the only surprising thing is how long it has taken for these facts to come to light: seventy years. A whole lifetime.
Another parenthesis, an anecdote. Towards the end of 1981, when I was living in a village in Castille with fewer than two hundred inhabitants, I became friendly with a young socialist who was a local councillor. When I met him one day, he was looking positively distraught. He had just found out that in February of that year, on the night Colonel Tejero burst into Parliament and the tanks came out onto the streets, the local priest had gone straight to the nearest military barracks intending to hand in a list of local men who should be arrested; my friend’s name was at the top of the list.
Bernardo Atxaga was born Josebia Irazu Garmendia in Asteasu in the Basque Country in 1951. He is the region’s best-known writer and his works – including Obabakoak and The Lone Man – have been translated the world over. Atxaga himself translates his works into Spanish. This extract is taken from his book De Gernika a Guernica, first published in Basque in 2007. Modelled on Picasso’s painting of ‘Gernika’, the book is structured in a sequence that follows the destruction of the town by German and Italian bombers. Its powerful argument is that it can take a very long time for the crimes of the past to surface and their surfacing requires the efforts of those who know ‘the importance of death’. Only now is the precise, planned nature of the destruction of the town becoming known – from the choice of a market day (Monday) to the waves of bombing sequenced to inflict the maximum number of casualties. Finally, the last remaining eyewitnesses are coming forward to break the silence, a silence first imposed by Franco, who banned the Basque language and claimed that it was retreating Republicans who had destroyed the town!
JAVIER CERCAS
‘THERE’S NOBODY
OVER HERE!’
from Soldiers of Salamis
translated by Anne McLean
AT DUSK ON THE 29TH, Sánchez Mazas, Pascual and his cellmates are taken to the roof of the monastery, a place they’ve never been before and where they are assembled with other prisoners, 500 in total, maybe more. Pascual knows some of them – Pedro Bosch Labrús, Viscount Bosch Labrús and airforce captain Emilio Leucona – but barely manages to exchange a few words with them before a Carabinero immediately orders silence and begins to read out a list of names. Because the hope of a prisoner swap comes to mind again, as soon as he hears the name of someone he knows Pascual desires heart and soul to be included in the list, but, without any precise reason for this shift in opinion, by the time the Carabinero pronounces his name – shortly after that of Sánchez Mazas and immediately following Bosch Labrús – he has already regretted formulating this wish. The twenty-five men who have been named, among whom are all of Sánchez Mazas and Pascual’s cellmates except Fernando de Marimón, are taken to a cell on the first floor where there are only a few desks pushed against the crumbling walls and a blackboard with patriotic historical dates scribbled in chalk. The door closes behind them and an ominous silence falls, soon broken by someone declaring that they are about to be exchanged and who manages to distract the anguish of a few of them with the discussion of a conjecture that fades away after a while to make room for unanimous pessimism. Sitting at a desk at one end of the cell, before the evening meal Father Guiu hears the confession of some of the prisoners, and then prepares communion. No one sleeps that night: lit by a grey stony light that comes in through the window, giving their faces a hint of their future cadaverous appearance (although as time passes the grey thickens and the darkness becomes real), the prisoners stay awake listening through the wall to noises in the corridor or seeking illusory comfort in memories or in a last conversation. Sánchez Mazas and Pascual are stretched out on the floor, leaning their backs against the cold wall, their legs covered by one insufficient blanket; neither of them will remember exactly what they talked about during that scant night, but both will recall the long silences punctuating their secret meeting, the whispers of their companions and the sound of their sleepless coughing, the rain falling, indifferent, assiduous, black and freezing on the paving stones in the courtyard and the cypresses in the garden; and it keeps falling until dawn of 30 January slowly changes the darkness of the windows for the sickly whitish, ghostly colour that stains the atmosphere in the cell like a premonition at the moment the jailer orders them out.
No one has slept, everyone seems to have been awaiting that moment and, as if drawn by the urgency of resolving the uncertainty, obey with somnambulant diligence and gather in the courtyard with another similar-sized group of prisoners, to bring the number to fifty. They wait a few minutes, docile, silent and soaked, under a fine rain and a sky thick with clouds, and finally a young man appears in whose indistinct features Sánchez Mazas recognizes the indistinct features of the warden of the Uruguay. He tells them they are going to be put to work at an aviation camp under construction in Banyoles and orders them to form into ten lines, five deep; while obeying, unthinkingly taking the first place on the right in the second line, Sánchez Mazas feels his heart bolt: in the grip of panic, he realizes the aviation camp can only be an excuse – senseless to build one with the Nationalist troops launching a definitive offensive a few kilometres away. He begins to walk at the head of the group, unhinged and shaking, unable to think clearly, absurdly searching the blank faces of the armed soldiers lining the road for a sign or a glimmer of hope, trying in vain to convince himself that at the end of that journey what awaited him was something other than death. Beside him, or behind him, someone is trying to justify or explain something he doesn’t hear or doesn’t understand, because every step he takes absorbs all his attention, as if it might be his last; beside him or behind him, the sickly legs of José María Poblador say, Enough, and the prisoner collapses in a puddle and is helped up and dragged back to the monastery by two soldiers. A hundred and fifty metres on from this, the group turns left, leaves the road and goes up into the forest along a path of chalky soil that opens out into a clearing: a wide expanse surrounded by pine trees. From out of the woods booms a military voice ordering them to halt and face left. Terror seizes the group, which stops in its tracks; almost all its members automatically turn to the left, but dread confuses the instinct of others who, like Captain Gabriel Martín Morito, turn to the right. For an instant, which feels eternal, Sánchez Mazas thinks he’s going to die. He thinks the bullets that are going to kill him will come from behind his back, which is where the commanding voice had come from, and that, before he dies from bullets hitting him, they’ll have to hit the four men lined up behind him. He thinks he’s not going to die, that he’s going to escape. He thinks that he can’t escape to the back because the shots will come from there; nor to his left, because he’d run back out to the road and the soldiers; nor ahead, because he’d have to jump over a wall of eight utterly terrified men. But (he thinks) he can escape towards the right, where no more than six or seven metres away a dense thicket of pines and undergrowth holds a promise of hiding. To the right, he thinks. And he thinks: Now or never. At that moment several machine guns stationed behind the group, exactly where the commander’s voice had come from, begin to sweep the clearing; trying to protect themselves, the prisoners instinctively seek the ground. By then Sánchez Mazas has reached the thicket, he runs between pines that scratch his face with the pitiless clatter of the machine guns still ringing in his ears, finally trips providentially and is flung, rolling over mud an
d wet leaves, into the ravine at the edge of the plateau, landing in a swampy ditch at the mouth of a stream. Because he rightly imagines that his pursuers imagine him trying to get as far away from them as possible, he decides to shelter there, relatively close to the clearing – cringing, panting, soaking wet and with his heart pounding in his throat, covering himself as best he can with leaves and mud and pine boughs, hearing his unfortunate companions receiving coups de grâce – and then the barking of the dogs and the shouts of the Carabineros urging the soldiers to find the fugitive or fugitives (because Sánchez Mazas doesn’t yet know that, infected by his irrational impulse to abscond, Pascual has also managed to escape the massacre). For a length of time he has no idea whether to measure in minutes or hours, while he scratches ceaselessly at the ground to cover himself in mud till his fingernails are bleeding and hopes that the incessant rain will prevent the dogs from finding his trail, Sánchez Mazas keeps hearing shouts and barks and shots, until at some moment he senses something shift behind him and urgently turns around, cringing like a cornered rat.
Then he sees him. He’s standing beside the ditch, tall and burly and silhouetted against the dark green of the pines and the dark blue of the clouds, panting a little, his large hands grasping the slanted rifle and the field uniform with all its buckles, threadbare from exposure. Prey to the aberrant resignation of one who knows his time has come, through his thick glasses blurred by the rain, Sánchez Mazas looks at the soldier who is going to kill him or hand him over – a young man, his hair plastered to his skull by the rain, his eyes maybe grey, his cheeks gaunt and cheekbones prominent – and remembers him or thinks he remembers him from among the ragged soldiers who guarded them in the monastery. He recognizes him or thinks he recognizes him, but takes no comfort from the idea that it’s going to be him and not a SIM agent who redeems him from the endless agony of fear, and it humiliates him like an injury added to all the injuries of these years on the run not to have died with his cellmates or not to have known how to die in an open field in broad daylight and fighting with a courage he lacked, instead of dying now and there, muddy and alone and shaking with dread and shame in an undignified hole in the ground. So, his mind raving and confused, Rafael Sánchez Mazas – exquisite poet, fascist ideologue, Franco’s future minister – awaits the shot that will finish him off. But the shot doesn’t come, and Sánchez Mazas, as if he were already dead and from death remembering this scene from a dream, watches guilelessly as the soldier slowly advances towards the edge of the ditch in the unceasing rain and the threatening sound of soldiers and Carabineros, just steps away, the rifle pointing at him unostentatiously, the gesture more inquisitive than tense, like a novice hunter about to identify his first prey, and just as the soldier gets to the edge of the ditch the vegetal noise of the rain is pierced by a nearby shout:
‘Is anyone there?’
The soldier is looking at him; Sánchez Mazas is looking at the soldier, but his weak eyes don’t understand what they see: beneath the sodden hair and wide forehead and eyebrows covered in raindrops the soldier’s look doesn’t express compassion or hatred, or even disdain, but a kind of secret or unfathomable joy, something verging on cruelty, something that resists reason, but nor is it instinct, something that remains there with the same blind stubbornness with which blood persists in its course and the earth in its immovable orbit and all beings in their obstinate condition of being, something that eludes words the way the water in the stream eludes stone, because words are only made for saying to each other, for saying the sayable, when the sayable is everything except what rules us or makes us live or matters or what we are or what this anonymous defeated soldier is, who now looks at this man whose body almost blends in with the earth and the brown water in the ditch, and who calls out loudly without taking his eyes off him:
‘There’s nobody over here!’
Then he turns and walks away.
For nine days and nights of the brutal winter of 1939 Rafael Sánchez Mazas wandered through the region of Banyoles trying to cross the lines of the Republican army in retreat and pass over into the Nationalist zone. Many times he thought he wasn’t going to make it; alone, no other resources than his will to survive, unable to get his bearings in unfamiliar territory of wild, dense woods, weakened to the point of exhaustion from walking, by the cold, hunger and three uninterrupted years of captivity, many times he had to stop to gather his strength in order not to let himself just give up. The first three days were terrible. He slept during the day and walked at night, avoiding the exposure of the roads and villages, begging for food and shelter at farms, and though he prudently dared not reveal his true identity at any of them, but rather introduced himself as a lost Republican soldier, and though almost everyone he asked gave him something to eat, let him rest awhile and gave him directions without asking questions, fear kept anyone from offering him protection. At dawn on the fourth day, after more than three hours wandering through dark forest, Sánchez Mazas made out a farm in the distance. Less by rational decision than out of utter fatigue, he collapsed onto a bed of pine needles and remained there, his eyes closed, barely sensing the sound of his own breathing and the smell of the dew-soaked earth. He had eaten nothing since the morning before, he was exhausted and felt ill, because not a single muscle in his body didn’t ache. Until then the miracle of having survived the firing squad and the hope of encountering the Nationalists had given him a perseverance and a fortitude he’d thought lost; now he realized that his energy was running out and that, unless another miracle occurred or someone helped him, his adventure would very soon be at an end. After a while, when he felt a little restored and the sun shining through the foliage had instilled in him a scrap of optimism, he gathered all his strength, stood up and started walking towards the farm.
Maria Ferré would never forget the radiant February dawn she first set eyes on Rafael Sánchez Mazas. Her parents were out in the field and she was getting ready to feed the cows when a man appeared in the yard – tall, famished and spectral, with his twisted spectacles and many days’ growth of beard, in his sheepskin jacket and trousers full of holes, and covered in mud and weeds – and asked her for a piece of bread. Maria wasn’t scared. She’d just turned twenty-six and she was a dark blonde, illiterate, hard-working girl for whom the war was nothing more than a confusing background noise to the letters her brother sent home from the front, and a meaningless whirlwind that two years earlier had taken the life of a boy from Palol de Revardit she’d once dreamed of marrying. During this time her family hadn’t been hungry or frightened, because the farm lands they cultivated and the cows, pigs and hens sheltering in the stables were enough, more than enough, to feed them, and because, although Mas Borrell, their house, was located halfway between Palol de Revardit and Cornelia de Terri, the abuses of the days of revolution didn’t reach them and the disorder of the retreat brought them only the odd lost, disarmed soldier who, more frightened than threatening, asked for something to eat or stole a hen. It’s possible that at first Sánchez Mazas was to Maria Ferré just another of the many deserters who roamed the area during those days, and that’s why she wasn’t scared, but she always maintained that as soon as she saw his pitiful figure outlined against the ground of the path that ran past the yard, she recognized beneath the ravages of three days’ exposure to the elements the unmistakable bearing of a gentleman. Whether that’s true or not, Maria gave the man the same kind treatment she’d given countless other fugitives.
‘I don’t have any bread,’ she told him. ‘But I could heat something up for you.’
Undone by gratitude, Sánchez Mazas followed her into the kitchen and, while Maria heated up the previous night’s saucepan – where, in a rich, brown broth, floated lentils and big chunks of bacon, sausage and chorizo along with potatoes and vegetables – he sat down on a bench, enjoying the nearness of the fire and the joyful promise of hot food, took off his soaking shoes and socks, and suddenly noticed a terrible ache in his feet and an infinite tiredness
in his bony shoulders. Maria handed him a clean rag and some clogs, and out of the corner of her eye watched him dry his neck, his face, his hair, as well as his feet and ankles, while watching the flames dance amid the logs with staring, slightly glazed eyes, and when she handed him the food she saw him devour it with a hunger of many days, in silence and scarcely forgoing the manners of a man raised among linen tablecloths and silver cutlery, which, more out of his courteous instincts than his recently acquired habit of fear, made him set the spoon and pewter plate down by the fire and stand up when Maria’s parents burst into the half-light of the kitchen and stood, looking at him, with a bovine mixture of passivity and suspicion. Perhaps mistakenly thinking their guest didn’t understand Catalan, Maria told her father in Catalan what had happened; he asked Sánchez Mazas to finish his meal and, without taking his eyes off him, put his farming tools down beside a stone bench, washed his hands in a basin and came over to the fire. As he sensed the father approach, Sánchez Mazas scraped the plate clean. His hunger calmed, he’d reached a decision: he realized that, if he didn’t reveal his true identity, he wouldn’t have the slightest chance of being offered shelter there either, and he also realized that the hypothetical risk of denunciation was preferable to the real risk of starving or freezing to death.
‘My name is Rafael Sánchez Mazas and I am the most senior living leader of the Falange in Spain,’ he finally said to the man who listened without looking at him.
Born in Ibahernando in 1962, Javier Cercas is one of a generation of Spanish writers whose writings mix fact and fiction in an attempt to uncover the ‘historical memory’ of the Civil War. His book Soldiers of Salamis is both about what happened to the Falange leader Rafael Sánchez Mazas, who escaped execution at the end of the war, and a reflection on the nature of historical explanation.
