Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  Sixty years have passed since the death of Antonio Machado in the last days of the Civil War. Of all the stories contained in that history, one of the saddest is no doubt Machado's, because it ends badly. It has been told many times. He came to Barcelona from Valencia in April 1938, accompanied by his mother and his brother José, and stayed first in the Hotel Majestic and later in the Torre de Castaner, an old mansion on Sant Gervasi avenue. There he kept doing what he'd been doing since the beginning of the war: using his writing to defend the legitimate government of the Republic. He was old, weary and ill, and he no longer believed in Franco's defeat. He wrote 'This is the end; any day now Barcelona will fall. For the strategists, for the politicians, for the historians, it is all clear: we have lost the war. But in human terms, I am not so sure. Perhaps we have won.' Who knows if he guessed right about that last bit; without doubt he was right about the first. The night of 22 January 1939, four days before Franco's troops took Barcelona, Machado and his family left in a convoy for the French border. Other writers accompanied them on that nightmarish exodus, among them Corpus Barga and Carles Riba. They made stops in Cervia de Ter and Mas Faixat, near Figueres. Finally, the night of the 27th, after walking 600 metres through the rain, they crossed the border. They'd been obliged to leave their luggage behind and they had no money. Thanks to the help of Corpus Barga, they managed to make it to Collioure and get rooms in the Hotel Bougnol Quintana. Less than a month later the poet died; his mother survived him by three days. In the pocket of his overcoat, his brother José found a few notes; one of them was a verse, perhaps the first line of his last poem: 'These blue days, this childhood sun.'

  The story doesn't end here. Shortly after the death of his brother Antonio, the poet Manuel Machado, who lived in Burgos, learned of it through the foreign press. Manuel and Antonio were not just brothers, they were intimates. The uprising of 18 July had caught Manuel in Burgos, rebel territory; Antonio, in Madrid, Republican territory. It is reasonable to assume that, had he been in Madrid, Manuel would have been loyal to the Republic; it would perhaps be idle to speculate what might have happened if Antonio had chanced to be in Burgos. The fact is, as soon as he heard the news of his brother's death, Manuel procured a safe-conduct and, after travelling for days across a Spain that had been reduced to ashes, arrived in Collioure. At the hotel he learned his mother had also died. He went to the cemetery. There, before the graves of his mother and his brother Antonio, he met his brother José. They talked. Two days later Manuel returned to Burgos.

  But the story — at least the story I now want to tell —doesn't end here either. At more or less the same time that Machado died in Collioure, Rafael Sánchez Mazas faced a firing squad near the Sanctuary of Collell. Sánchez Mazas was a good writer; he was also a friend of José Antonio, and one of the founders and ideologues of the Falange. His adventures in the war are shrouded in mystery. A few years ago his son, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, told me his version. I don't know whether or not it is strictly true; I'm just telling it as he told me. Trapped in Republican Madrid by the military uprising, Sánchez Mazas sought refuge in the Chilean Embassy. He spent most of the war there; towards the end he tried to escape hidden in the back of a truck, but they arrested him in Barcelona and, as Franco's troops approached the city, he was taken towards the border. Before crossing it they assembled a firing squad; but the bullets only grazed him, and he took advantage of the confusion to run and hide in the woods. From there he heard the voices of the militiamen pursuing him. One of them finally found him. He looked Sánchez Mazas in the eye. Then he shouted to his comrades 'There's nobody over here!', turned and walked away.

  'Of all the stories in History,' wrote Jaime Gil, 'the saddest is no doubt Spain's, / because it ends badly.' Does it end badly? We'll never know who that militiaman was who spared Sánchez Mazas' life, nor what passed through his mind when he looked him in the eye; we'll never know what José and Manuel Machado said to each other before the graves of their brother Antonio and their mother. I don't know why, but sometimes I think, if we managed to unveil one of these parallel secrets, we might perhaps also touch on a much more essential secret.

  I was very pleased with the article. When it was published, on 22 February 1999, exactly sixty years after Machado's death in Collioure, exactly sixty years and twenty-two days after Sánchez Mazas faced the firing squad at Collell (although the exact date of the execution I only learned later), my colleagues at the paper congratulated me. I received three letters over the following days; to my surpriseI've never been a polemical columnist, one of those names that abound in the letters to the editor, and there was nothing to suggest that events of sixty years ago could upset anyone very much — all three referred to the article. The first, which I imagined was written by a university student from the literature department, reproached me for having insinuated (something I don't think I did, or at least not entirely) in my article that, had Antonio Machado been in rebel Burgos in July of 1936, he would have taken Franco's side. The second was worse; it was written by a man old enough to have lived through the war. He accused me of 'revisionism' in unmistakable jargon, because the question in the last paragraph following the quote from Jaime Gil (Does it end badly?) suggested in a barely veiled way that Spain's story ends well, which in his judgement is completely false. 'It ends well for those who won the war,' he said. 'But badly for those of us who lost it. No one has ever even bothered to thank us for fighting for liberty. There is a monument to the war dead in every town in Spain. How many have you seen with, at the very least, the names of the fallen from both sides?' The letter finished: 'And damn the Transition! Sincerely, Mateu Recasens.'

  The third letter was the most interesting. It was signed by someone called Miquel Aguirre. Aguirre was a historian and, according to what he said, had spent several years investigating what happened during the Civil War in the Banyoles region. Among other things, his letter gave details of a fact which at that moment struck me as astonishing: Sánchez Mazas hadn't been the only survivor of the Collell execution; a man named Jesus Pascual Aguilar also escaped with his life. Even more: it seemed Pascual had recounted the episode in a book called I Was Murdered by the Reds. 'I'm afraid this book is virtually unobtainable,' concluded the letter with the unmistakable petulance of the erudite. 'But if you are interested, I can place a copy at your disposal.' At the bottom of the letter Aguirre had put his address and a phone number.

  I phoned the number immediately. After a few misunderstandings, from which I deduced that he worked for some sort of company or public institution, I managed to speak to Aguirre. I asked if he had information about the execution at Collell; he said yes. I asked if he was still willing to lend me Pascual's book; he said yes. I then asked if he'd like to meet for lunch; he said he lived in Banyoles, but came to Gerona every Thursday to record a radio programme.

  'We could meet next Thursday,' he said.

  It was Friday and, at the thought of a week's impatience, I was about to suggest we meet that very afternoon, in Banyoles.

  'Okay,' I said, nevertheless. And at that moment I thought of Ferlosio with his innocent guru air and fiercely cheerful eyes, talking about his father on the terrace at the Bistrot. I asked: 'Shall we meet at the Bistrot?'

  The Bistrot is a bar in the old part of the city, with a vaguely modernist feel to it, marble and wrought-iron tables, rotary fans, its balconies brimming with flowers and overlooking the flight of steps leading up to the Sant Domenech Plaza. On Thursday, long before the time I'd agreed with Aguirre, I was seated at a table in the Bistrot with a beer in my hand; around me bubbled the conversations of the professors from the literature department who usually ate there. As I flipped through a magazine I thought how, making the lunch arrangements, it hadn't occurred to either Aguirre or I, since we'd never met, that one of us should have mentioned some way of recognizing each other, and I was just starting to try to imagine what Aguirre might look like, solely from the voice I'd heard over the phone a week before, when a short, stocky,
dark-haired individual wearing glasses stopped in front of my table with a red folder under his arm, his face barely visible under three-days' growth of stubble and a bad-guy goatee. For some reason I'd expected Aguirre to be a calm, professorial old man, not this extremely young individual standing before me with a hung-over (or perhaps just eccentric) look to him. Since he didn't say anything, I asked him if he were him. He said yes. Then he asked me if I were me. I said yes. We laughed. When the waitress came, Aguirre ordered rice á la cazuela and an entrecôte au roquefort; I ordered the rabbit and a salad. While we waited for the food Aguirre told me he'd recognized me from a photo on the back of one of my books, which he'd read a while ago. Recovering from the initial spasm of vanity, I remarked grudgingly: 'Oh, you were the one, were you?'

  'I don't understand.'

  I felt obliged to clarify: 'It was a joke.'

  I was anxious to get to the point, but, as I didn't want to seem rude or overly interested, I asked him about the radio programme. Aguirre let out a nervous laugh, showing his teeth: white and uneven.

  'It's supposed to be a humorous programme, but really it's just crap. I play a fascist police commissioner called Antonio Gargallo who prepares reports about the people he interrogates. The truth is I think I'm falling in love with him. Naturally, they know nothing about any of this at the Town Hall.'

  'You work at Banyoles Town Hall?'

  Aguirre nodded, looking half embarrassed and half sorrowful.

  'Secretary to the mayor,' he said. 'More crap. The mayor's an old friend, he asked and I didn't know how to say no. But when this term finishes, I'm quitting.'

  Since fairly recently, the municipal government of Banyoles had been in the hands of a team of very young members of the Catalan Republican Left, the radical nationalist party. Aguirre said:

  'I don't know what you think, sir, but to me a civilized country is one where people don't have to waste their time on politics.'

  I noticed the 'sir', but didn't let it bother me, and instead leapt to grasp the rope Aguirre had just thrown me, catching it in mid air: 'Just the opposite of what happened in '36.'

  'Exactly.'

  They brought the salad and the rice. Aguirre pointed at the red folder. 'I photocopied the Pascual book for you.'

  'Do you know very much about what happened at Collell?'

  'Not very much, no,' he said. 'It was a confusing episode.'

  As he shovelled big forkfuls of rice into his mouth and washed them down with glasses of red wine, Aguirre told me, as if he felt he must put me in the picture, about the early days of the war in the region of Banyoles: the predictable failure of the coup d'état, the resulting revolution, the unconstrained savagery of the committees, the widespread burning of churches and massacres of the clergy.

  'Even though it's not in style any more, I'm still anticlerical — but that was collective madness,' he added. 'Of course, it's easy to find explanations for it, but it's also easy to find explanations for Nazism. Some nationalist historians insinuate that the ones who burned down churches and killed priests were from elsewhere — immigrants and suchlike. It's a lie: they were from here, and three years later more than one of them cheered the arrival of Franco's troops. Of course, if you ask, nobody was there when they torched the churches. But that's another story. What pisses me off are those nationalists who still go around trying to sell the nonsense that it was a war between Castilians and Catalans, a movie with good guys and bad guys.'

  'I thought you were a nationalist.'

  Aguirre stopped eating.

  'I'm not a nationalist,' he said. 'I'm an independentista'

  'And what's the difference?'

  'Nationalism is an ideology,' he explained, hardening his voice a little, as if annoyed at having to clarify the obvious. apos;Insidious in my opinion. Independence is only a possibility. Since nationalism is a belief, and beliefs aren't up for debate, you can't argue about it; you can about independence. To you, sir, it may seem reasonable or not. To me it does.'

  I couldn't take it any more.

  'I'd prefer you not to call me sir.'

  'Sorry,' he said, smiled and went back to his meal. 'I'm used to talking to older people respectfully.'

  Aguirre kept talking about the war; he went into great detail about the final days when — the municipal and Generalitat governments having been inoperative for months — a stampede-like disorder reigned in the region: roads invaded by interminable caravans of refugees, soldiers in uniform of every rank wandering the countryside, desperate and driven to theft, enormous piles of weapons and equipment left in the ditches . . . Aguirre explained that at Collell, which had been used as a jail since the beginning of the war, there were close to a thousand prisoners being held at that time, and all or almost all of them came from Barcelona; they'd been moved there, ahead of the unstoppable advance of the rebel troops, because they were among the most dangerous or most involved in Franco's cause. Unlike Ferlosio, Aguirre did think the Republicans knew who they were executing, because the fifty they chose were very significant prisoners, people who were destined to occupy positions of social or political importance after the war: the provincial chief of the Falange in Barcelona, leaders of fifth-column groups, financiers, lawyers and priests, the majority of whom had been held in the checas in Barcelona and later on prison-ships like the Argentina and the Uruguay.

  They brought the steak and the rabbit and took away the other plates (Aguirre's so clean it shone). I asked: 'Who gave the order?'

  'What order?' Aguirre countered, eagerly surveying his enormous sirloin, with steak knife and fork at the ready, about to attack.

  'To have them shot.'

  Aguirre regarded me for a moment as if he'd forgotten I was there across from him. He shrugged his shoulders and took a loud, deep breath.

  'I don't know,' he answered, exhaling as he cut a piece of steak. 'I think Pascual insinuates that it was someone called Monroy, a tough young guy who might have run the prison, because in Barcelona he'd also run checas and work camps; he's mentioned in other testimonies from the time . . . In any case, if it was Monroy he most likely wasn't acting on his own volition, but obeying orders from the SIM.'

  'The SIM?'

  'The Servicio de Information Military Aguirre clarified. 'One of the few army organizations that was still fully functioning by that stage.' He stopped chewing for a second, then went back to speaking with his mouth full: 'It's a reasonable hypothesis: it was a desperate moment, and the SIM, of course, wouldn't bother with small fry. But there are others.'

  'For example?'

  'Líster. He was around there. My father saw him.'

  'At Collell.'

  'In Sant Miquel de Campmajor, very near there. My father was a child then and they'd sent him to a farm in that village for safety. He's told me many times about one day when a handful of men burst into the farm, Líster amongst them; they demanded food and a place to sleep and spent the night arguing in the dining room. For a long time I thought this story was an invention of my father's, especially when I realized the majority of old men who'd been alive then claimed to have seen Líster, an almost legendary character from the time he took command of the Fifth Regiment — but over the years I've been putting two and two together and I've come to the conclusion that it just might be true. You see,' he began, greedily soaking a piece of bread in the puddle of sauce his steak was swimming in (I thought he must've recovered from his hangover, and wondered if he wasn't enjoying the food more than the display of his knowledge of the war). Líster had just been made a colonel at the end of January '39. They'd put him in charge of the V Corps of the Army of the Ebro, or rather, what was left of the V Corps: a handful of shattered units barely putting up a fight, retreating in the direction of the French border. Líster's men were in the region for several weeks and some of them were definitely stationed at Collell. But as I was saying — have you read Líster's memoirs?'

  I said I hadn't.

  'Well, it's not exactly a memoir,' Aguirre we
nt on. 'The book's called Our War, and it's pretty good, though he tells a tremendous number of lies, as in all memoirs. But the point is he writes that in February '39, on the night of the third to the morning of the fourth (or three days after the Collell execution), they held a meeting of the Politburo of the Communist Party at a farm in a nearby village, attended by, among other leaders and commissars, himself and Togliatti, who was then the Comintern delegate. If I'm not mistaken, they talked about the possibility of mounting a last-ditch resistance to the enemy in Catalonia at that meeting — but that doesn't matter: what counts is that the farm could well be the one where my father was staying as a refugee; at least the protagonists, the dates and places coincide, so . . .'

  Then, without realizing it, Aguirre unwittingly got me entangled in a recondite, filial digression. I remember thinking of my father at that moment, and being surprised, because it had been a long time since I'd thought of him; I didn't know why, but there was a lump in my throat, like a shadow of guilt.

  'So, it was Líster who gave the order to shoot them?' I interrupted.

  'It could have been,' he said, readily picking up the lost thread while scraping his plate clean. 'But it could just as easily not have been. In Our War he says it wasn't him, not him or his men. What else is he going to say? But, the fact is, I believe him — it wasn't his style, he was too obsessed with continuing by whatever means possible a war he'd already lost. Besides, half the things they attribute to Líster are pure legend, and the other half. . . well, I guess they're true. But who knows? What seems beyond doubt to me is that whoever gave that order knew perfectly well who they were executing and, of course, who Sánchez Mazas was. Mmm,' he moaned, wiping up the last of the roquefort sauce with a piece of bread, 'I was so hungry! Do you want a bit more wine?'