Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

They took the plates away (mine with abundant remains of rabbit; Aguirre's again so clean it shone). He ordered another carafe of wine, a piece of chocolate cake and coffee; I ordered coffee. I asked Aguirre what he knew about Sánchez Mazas and his stay at Collell.

  'Not much,' he answered. 'His name appears a couple of times in the General Prosecution Records, but always in relation to his trial in Barcelona, when they caught him after he escaped from Madrid. Pascual also mentions him once or twice too. As far as I know the only one who might know more is Trapiello, Andrés Trapiello. The writer. He's edited Sánchez Mazas and written some really good things about him; he's always mentioning Sánchez Mazas' family in his diaries, so he must be in contact with them. I think I may even have read an account of the firing squad incident in one of his books . . . It's a story that circulated extensively after the war, everyone who knew Sánchez Mazas then used to tell it, I suppose because he used to tell everyone. Did you know lots of people thought it was a lie? In fact, there still are those who think so.'

  'Doesn't surprise me.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because it sounds like fiction.'

  'All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction.'

  'Yeah, but doesn't it still seem incredible that a man who's not particularly young, forty-five years old by then, and extremely short-sighted . . . ?'

  'Well, of course. And who would have been in a pitiful state besides.'

  'Exactly. Doesn't it seem incredible that a guy like that could manage to escape from such a situation?'

  'But why incredible?' The arrival of the wine, cake and coffees didn't interrupt his reasoning. 'Surprising, yes. But not incredible. But you explained all that so well in your article! Remember it was a firing squad en masse. Remember the soldier who had to turn him in and didn't. And remember we're talking about Collell. Have you ever been there?'

  I told him I hadn't, and Aguirre began to describe an enormous mass of stone besieged by thick pine forests on limy soil, a vast, mountainous, rough territory, scattered with isolated farms and tiny villages (Torn, Sant Miquel de Campmajor, Fares, Sant Ferriol, Mieres); during the war years numerous escape networks operated in these villages that, in exchange for money (sometimes out of friendship or even political affinities), helped potential victims of revolutionary repression to cross the border, as well as young men of military age who wanted to evade the compulsory conscription ordered by the Republic. According to Aguirre, the area was seething with runaways as well, people who couldn't afford the expenses of escape or didn't manage to make contact with the networks, and stayed under cover in the woods for months or even years.

  'So it was the ideal place to hide,' he argued. 'By that point in the war the locals were used to dealing with fugitives, helping them out. Did Ferlosio tell you about the "forest friends"?'

  My article finished at the moment the militiaman didn't give Sánchez Mazas away, not a word about the 'forest friends'. I choked on my coffee.

  'Do you know about them?' I inquired.

  'I know the son of one of them.'

  'You're kidding.'

  'I'm not kidding. He's called Jaume Figueras, he lives right near here. In Cornellá de Terri.'

  'Ferlosio told me the lads who helped Sánchez Mazas were from Cornellá de Terri.'

  Aguirre shrugged his shoulders as he picked up the last crumbs of chocolate cake with his fingers.

  'You know more than I do then,' he admitted. 'Figueras just told me the gist of the story; but then I wasn't all that interested. I could give you his phone number and you can ask him yourself.'

  Aguirre finished his coffee and we paid. We said goodbye on the Rambla, in front of Les Peixeteries Velles Bridge.

  Aguirre said he'd call me the following day to give me Figueras' phone number and, as we shook hands, I noticed two smudges of chocolate darkening the corners of his mouth.

  'What are you thinking of doing with this?' he asked.

  I was verging on telling him to wipe his lips.

  'With what?' I said, instead.

  'With the Sánchez Mazas story.'

  I wasn't thinking of doing anything with it — I was simply curious about it so I told him the truth.

  'Nothing?' Aguirre looked at me with his small, nervous, intelligent eyes. 'I thought you were thinking of writing a novel.'

  'I don't write novels anymore,' I said. 'Besides, it's not a novel, it's a true story.'

  'So was the article,' said Aguirre. 'Did I tell you how much I liked it? I liked it because it was like a compressed tale, except with real characters and situations . . . Like a true tale.'

  The next day Aguirre called me and gave me Jaume Figueras' phone number. It was a mobile number. Figueras didn't answer, but his voice did, asking me to record a message, so I did: I said my name, my profession, that I knew Aguirre, that I was interested in talking to him about his father, Sánchez Mazas, and the 'forest friends'; I also left my phone number and asked him to call me.

  For the next few days I anxiously awaited a call from Figueras, which didn't come. I called him again, I left another message, and went back to waiting. In the meantime I read I was Murdered by the Reds, Pascual Aguilar's book. It was a truculent reminder of the horrors experienced behind Republican lines, just another of the many that appeared in Spain when the war ended, except this one had been published in September 1981. The date, I fear, is not coincidental, for it can be read as both a sort of justification of those involved in the comic-opera coup on 23 February of that year (Pascual quotes several times a revealing phrase that José Antonio Primo de Rivera used to repeat as if it were his own: 'At the eleventh hour it has always been a squad of soldiers that has saved civilization'), and as a warning of the catastrophes to come with the imminent rise of the Socialist Party to power and the symbolic finale of the Transition; surprisingly, the book is very good. Pascual, who'd not had a single one of his 'old shirt' Falangist convictions eroded either by time or the changes that had occurred in Spain, nimbly recounts his adventures during the war, from the moment the military uprising catches him on vacation in a village in Teruel, which falls in the Republican zone, up to a few days after facing the firing squad in Collell — to which he dedicates many pages and fierce attention to detail, including the preceding and following days — when he's liberated by Franco's army, after having spent the war leading the life of a combination of the Scarlet Pimpernel and Henri de Lagardére, first as an active member and later as leader of a Barcelona fifth-column group, and having spent time locked up in the Vallmajor checa. Pascual's book was self-published; it contains several references to Sánchez Mazas, with whom Pascual spent the hours leading up to the execution. Following Aguirre's suggestion, I likewise read Trapiello, and in one of his books discovered that he too told the story of Sánchez Mazas facing the firing squad, and in almost the exact same way I'd heard Ferlosio tell it, except for the fact that, like me in my article or my true tale, he didn't mention the 'forest friends' either. The exact similarity between Trapiello's tale and mine surprised me. I thought Trapiello must have heard it from Ferlosio (or one of Sánchez Mazas' other children, or his wife) and imagined that, having been told so often by Sánchez Mazas in his house, it must have acquired for the family an almost formulaic character, like those perfect comic stories where you can't leave out a single word without spoiling the joke.

  I got hold of Trapiello's phone number and called him in Madrid. As soon as I revealed the reason for my call he was very friendly and, although he said it had been years since he'd dealt with Sánchez Mazas, he seemed thrilled that someone was taking an interest in him; I suspected that he didn't consider Sánchez Mazas a good writer, but a great writer. Our conversation lasted over an hour. Trapiello assured me he knew no more about the Collell incident than what he'd written in his book and confirmed that, especially just after the war, many people recounted it.

  'It used to turn up quite often in the Barcelona newspapers just after Catalonia was occupied by Franco's troops, and in
those of the rest of the country, because it was one of the last outbursts of violence in the Catalan rearguard and they had to take full advantage of it for propaganda,' Trapiello explained. apos;If I'm not mistaken, Ridruejo mentions the incident in his memoirs, and so does Laín. And I must have a Montes article somewhere that also talks about it . . . I imagine that for a time Sánchez Mazas went around telling everyone he came across. Obviously it's a brutal story, but, well, I don't know . . . I suppose he was such a coward (and everyone knew he was such a coward) that he must have thought this tremendous episode redeemed his cowardice in some way.'

  I asked him if he'd heard anything about the 'forest friends'. He said he had. I asked who had told him the story he told in his book. He said Liliana Ferlosio, Sánchez Mazas' wife, whom it seemed he'd visited frequently before her death.

  'It's odd,' I remarked. 'Except for one detail, the story coincides point by point with what Ferlosio told me — as if, instead of telling it, they'd both recited it.'

  'Which detail is that?'

  'A minor one. In your telling (in Liliana's, that is), when he sees Sánchez Mazas the militiaman shrugs his shoulders and then he walks away. In mine (in Ferlosio's, that is), before he leaves the militiaman looks him in the eye for a few seconds.'

  There was a silence. I thought the line had gone dead.

  'Hello?'

  'It's funny,' Trapiello reflected. 'Now that you mention it, that's true. I don't know where I got the shrug of the shoulders, it must have struck me as more dramatic, or more like Pío Baroja. I think, in fact, Liliana told me the militiaman stared him in the eye before he left. Yes. I even remember her saying one time, when she was reunited with Sánchez Mazas after the three years of separation during the war, he often used to talk to her about those eyes that had stared at him. The militiaman's eyes, I mean.'

  Before we hung up we talked a bit more about Sánchez Mazas, about his poetry and his novels and articles, his difficult personality, his friendships and his family ('In that house everyone speaks badly about everyone else, and they're all right,' Trapiello told me González-Ruano used to say). As if he took it for granted that I was going to write something about Sánchez Mazas, but out of some scruple of decency didn't want to ask me what, Trapiello gave me a few names and some bibliographic leads and invited me to come and see him in Madrid, where he had manuscripts and photocopies of newspaper articles and other things by Sánchez Mazas.

  I didn't visit Trapiello until several months later, but I immediately began to follow up the leads he'd provided.

  That's how I discovered that, especially right after the end of the war, Sánchez Mazas had indeed told everyone who'd listen the story of his firing squad experience. Eugenio Montes, one of the most faithful friends he had (a writer like him, like him a Falangist), on 14 February 1939, just two weeks after the events at Collell, described him 'in a shepherd's jacket and bullet-ridden trousers', arriving 'almost resurrected from the other world' after three years of hiding and jail cells in the Republican zone. Sánchez Mazas and Montes had been joyfully reunited a few days earlier in Barcelona, in the office of the then National Chief of Propaganda for the rebels, the poet Dionisio Ridruejo. Many years later, in his memoirs, he still recalled the scene, just as another illustrious young Falangist hierarch of the moment, Pedro Laín Entralgo, did in his, somewhat later. The descriptions the two memoir writers give of Sánchez Mazas — whom Ridruejo knew a little, but whom Laín, later to loathe him, had never seen before — are noticeably similar, as if they'd been so impressed that memory had frozen the image in a common snapshot (or as if Laín had copied Ridruejo; or they'd both copied the same source): for them too he had a resurrected air, skinny, nervous and disconcerted, his hair cropped close and his curved nose dominating the famished face; they both also remember Sánchez Mazas telling the firing squad story in that very office, but perhaps Ridruejo didn't entirely believe him (and thus mentioned the 'rather novelistic details' with which he adorned the tale for them); and only Laín hadn't forgotten he was wearing a 'rough, dark sheepskin'.

  Because, as I found out by chance and, after a few unusually simple procedures, was able to verify sitting in a cubicle of the Catalan Filmoteca archives, Sánchez Mazas in that same rough dark sheepskin and with that same resurrected air — skinny and with close-cropped hair also told his firing squad story in front of a camera, undoubtedly around the same time in February 1939 when he'd told his Falangist comrades in Ridruejo's office in Barcelona. The film — one of the few remaining of Sánchez Mazas — appeared in one of the first post-war news broadcasts, among martial images of Generalisimo Franco reviewing the Armada at Tarragona and idyllic images of Carmencita Franco playing in the garden of their residence in Burgos with a lion cub, a gift from Social Welfare. Sánchez Mazas is standing throughout, not wearing his glasses, his gaze a little lost; he speaks, however, with the aplomb of a man accustomed to doing so in public, with the pleasure of someone who enjoys the sound of his own voice, in a tone strangely ironic at first — when he alludes to the execution — and predictably exalted at the conclusion — when he alludes to the end of his odyssey — always a bit bombastic, but his words are so precise and the silences which govern them so measured, that he too at times gives the impression that instead of telling the story he's reciting it, like an actor playing his part on stage; otherwise, the story doesn't differ substantially from the one his son recounted to me . . . So as I listened to him tell it, sitting on a stool in front of a video player, in a Filmoteca cubicle, I couldn't suppress a vague tremor, because I knew I was hearing one of the first versions, still rough and unpolished, of the same story Ferlosio was to tell me almost sixty years later, and I felt absolutely sure that what Sánchez Mazas had told his son (and what he'd told me) wasn't what he remembered happening, but what he remembered having told before. Also I wasn't in the least surprised that neither Montes nor Ridruejo nor Laín (supposing they even knew of his existence), nor of course Sánchez Mazas himself in that news bulletin directed at a numerous and anonymous mass of spectators relieved by the recent end of the war, mentioned the gesture of that nameless soldier who had orders to kill him and did not kill him; the fact is understandable without need to attribute forgetfulness or ingratitude to anyone: suffice to remember that the doctrine of war in Franco's Spain, as in all wars, dictated that no enemy had ever saved anyone's life: they were too busy taking them. And as for the 'forest friends' . . .

  A few more months passed before I managed to speak to Jaume Figueras. After leaving several messages on his mobile phone and not receiving a single reply to any of them, I had almost given up hope that he'd get in touch with me, and on occasion surmised that he must be only a figment of Aguirre's overwrought imagination or, for reasons unknown but not difficult to imagine, that Figueras simply did not welcome the idea of recalling for anyone his father's wartime adventure. What is odd (or at least it strikes me as odd now) is that in all the time since Ferlosio's tale first awoke my curiosity, it never occurred to me that any of the story's protagonists could still be alive, as if the event had happened not a mere sixty years ago, but was as remote in time as the battle of Salamis.

  One day I chanced to run into Aguirre. It was in a Mexican restaurant where I'd gone to interview a nauseating novelist from Madrid who was in the city promoting his latest flatulence, which took place in Mexico; Aguirre was with a group of people, celebrating something I imagine, as I can still remember their loud, jubilant laughter and his tequila breath hitting me in the face. He came over and, nervously stroking his bad-guy goatee, asked me pointblank whether I was writing (which meant whether I was writing a book: like almost everyone, Aguirre didn't consider writing for a newspaper actual writing); a little annoyed, because nothing irritates a writer who doesn't write as much as being asked about what he's writing, I said no. He asked me what had happened with Sánchez Mazas and my true tale; even more annoyed, I said: nothing. Then he asked me if I'd spoken to Figueras. I must have been a bit drunk too, or m
aybe the nauseating novelist from Madrid had already got me worked up, because I said no, and petulantly added:

  'If he even exists.'

  'If who even exists?'

  'Who do you think? Figueras.'

  The comment wiped the smile off his face; he stopped stroking his goatee.

  'Don't be an idiot,' he said, focusing his astonished eyes on me, and I felt a tremendous urge to slap him, though probably it was really the novelist from Madrid I wanted to slap. 'Of course he exists.'

  I restrained myself.

  'Then he doesn't want to talk to me.'

  Almost remorseful, almost excusing himself, Aguirre explained that Figueras was a builder or contractor (or something like that) as well as a town planning advisor (or something like that) in Cornellá de Terri, that he was, in any case, a very busy person and that undoubtedly explained why he hadn't responded to my messages; then he promised he'd speak to him. When I went back to my seat I felt awful: heart and soul I despised the novelist from Madrid, who was still holding forth.

  Three days later Figueras called me. He apologized for not having done so sooner (his voice sounded slow and distant on the phone, as if the man it belonged to were very elderly, perhaps unwell), he mentioned Aguirre, then asked me if I still wanted to talk to him. I said yes; but arranging a date wasn't easy. Finally, after going through every day of the week, we decided on the following week; and after going through every bar in town (beginning with the Bistrot which Figueras didn't know), we settled on the Núria, in the plaza Poeta Marquina, very close to the station.

  There I was a week later, almost a quarter of an hour before the time we'd agreed. I remember the afternoon very clearly because the following day I was going on holiday to Cancún, in Mexico, with a girlfriend I'd been seeing for a while (the third since my separation: the first was a colleague from the newspaper; the second, a girl who worked at a Pans and Company sandwich shop). Her name was Conchi and her only job I knew of was that of fortune-teller on the local television station; her stage name was Jasmine. Conchi intimidated me a little, but I suspect I've always liked women who intimidate me a little, and obviously I made sure no acquaintance would surprise me with her — not so much because I was embarrassed to be seen dating a well-known fortune-teller, as for her rather flashy appearance (bleached blonde hair, leather mini-skirt, tight tops and spike heels); and also because, why lie, Conchi was a little bit special. I remember the first time I took her back to my place. While I was wrestling with the lock on the main door, she said: