Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  'This city's fucking pathetic'

  I asked her why.

  'Look,' she said and, with a grimace of utter disgust, pointed to a plaque which read: 'Avinguda Lluis Pericot. Prehistorian.' 'They could've named the street after someone who'd at least finished university, don't you think?'

  Conchi loved the idea of dating a journalist (an intellectual, she'd say) and, although I'm sure she never finished reading a single one of my articles (or only the odd very short one), she always pretended to read them and in the place of honour in her living room, flanking an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe raised up on a pedestal, she had a copy of each of my books exquisitely sheathed in clear plastic. 'He's my boyfriend,' I imagined her telling her semiliterate friends, feeling very superior to them, each time one stepped into her house. When I met her, Conchi had just split up with an Ecuadorian called Dos-a-Dos González, whose name, it seemed, had been chosen in honour of a football match when the team his father had supported for his entire lifetime won their national league for the first and only time. To get over Dos-a-Dos —whom she'd met at a gym, body-building, and who in good times she affectionately called Two-All and in bad ones, Brains, Brains González — Conchi had moved to Quart, a town near by, where, almost in the middle of a forest, she'd rented a great big ramshackle house very cheaply. In a subtle but insistent way, I kept telling her to move back to the city, and my insistence was based on two lines of reasoning: one explicit and another implicit, one public and another secret. The public one was that the isolated house was a danger for her, but the day two individuals attempted to break in and Conchi, who unfortunately was home at the time, ended up chasing them through the woods throwing stones at them, I had to admit that the house was a danger for anyone who tried to break into it. The secret reason was that, since I didn't have a driver's licence, every time we went from my house to Conchi's house or from Conchi's house to my house, we had to go in Conchi's Volkswagen, a wreck so old it could well merit the attention of the prehistorian Pericot and which Conchi always drove as if she might still be in time to prevent an imminent break-in at her house, and as if all the cars moving around us were occupied by an army of delinquents. So, any car journey with my girlfriend, who needless to say loved to drive, entailed a gamble I was only willing to undertake in very exceptional circumstances; these must have occurred fairly often, at least at the beginning, because I risked my neck quite a few times back then going from her house to mine or my house to hers in her Volkswagen. Moreover, although I fear I wasn't willing to admit it, I think I liked Conchi a lot (more in any case than my colleague at the newspaper and the girl from Pans and Company; less, perhaps, than my former wife); enough, in any case, that to celebrate going out together for nine months I let her convince me to spend two weeks in Cancún, a place I imagined as truly frightful, but which (I hoped) the pleasure of being with Conchi and her amazing cheerfulness would render at least tolerable. So the evening I finally managed to arrange to meet Figueras I was already packed and impatient to be off on a trip that I sometimes (but only sometimes) considered rash.

  I sat down at a table in the Núria, ordered a gin and tonic and waited. It wasn't eight o'clock yet; in front of me, on the other side of the glass walls, the terrace was full of people and beyond them every once in a while a commuter train went by on the viaduct. To my left, in the park, children accompanied by their mothers played on the swings, under the sloping shadows of the plane trees. I remember I thought of Conchi, who not long before had surprised me by saying she wasn't planning to go to her grave childless, and of my former wife, who many years before had judiciously refused my suggestion that we have a child. I thought if Conchi's declaration had also been a hint (and I now think I understand that it was), then the trip to Cancún was doubly ill-advised, because I now had no intention of ever having a child; the idea of having one with Conchi struck me as laughable. For some reason I thought of my father again, and I felt guilty again. 'Soon,' I surprised myself thinking, 'when even I don't remember him, he'll be completely dead.' At that moment, as I saw a man in his sixties come into the bar, who I thought could be Figueras, I cursed myself for having arranged two meetings with strangers, in just a few months, without previously agreeing on a way to recognize each other: I stood up, asked him if he were Jaume Figueras; he said no. I went back to my table: it was almost eight-thirty. I looked around the bar for a man on his own; then I went out to the terrace, also in vain. I wondered if Figueras had been in the bar all that time, near me and, fed up with waiting, had left; I decided that it was impossible. I didn't have his mobile number with me, so, choosing to believe that for some reason Figueras was running late and was about to arrive, I opted to wait. I ordered another gin and tonic and sat down at a table on the terrace. I nervously watched the tables around me and those inside; while I was doing so, two young Gypsies came up — a man and a woman — with an electric keyboard, a microphone and a speaker, and started playing for the customers. The man played and the woman sang. They played mostly paso dobles: I remember very well because Conchi loved paso dobles so much that she'd tried unsuccessfully to get me to sign up for a course to learn how to dance them, and especially because it was the first time in my life I heard the lyrics to 'Sighing for Spain', a very famous paso doble I didn't even know had lyrics:

  God desired, in his power,

  to blend four little sunbeams

  and make of them a woman

  and when His will was done

  in a Spanish garden I was born

  like a flower on her rose-bush.

  Glorious land of my love,

  blessed land of perfume and passion,

  Spain, in each flower at your feet

  a heart is sighing.

  Oh, I'm dying of sorrow,

  for I'm going away, Spain, from you,

  for away from my rose-bush I'm torn.*

  Listening to the Gypsies play and sing I thought it was the saddest song in the world; also, barely admitting it to myself, that I wouldn't mind dancing to it one day. When they finished their act, I tossed a hundred pesetas in the Gypsy woman's hat and, as the people started leaving the terrace, I finished off my gin and tonic and left.

  When I got home I had a message on my answering machine from Figueras. He apologized and said something unexpected had arisen at the last minute and kept him from turning up to meet me; he asked me to call him. I called him. He apologized again and suggested another meeting.

  'I have something for you,' he added.

  'What?'

  'I'll give it to you when we see each other.'

  I told him I was going on holiday the following day (I was embarrassed to tell him I was going to Cancún) and wouldn't be back for a fortnight. We arranged to meet in the Núria in two weeks' time and, after going through the idiotic exercise of superficially describing ourselves to each other, said goodbye.

  The Cancún thing was unspeakable. Conchi, who'd organized the trip, had hidden the fact that, except for a couple of excursions into the Yucatan peninsula and many afternoon shopping trips to the city centre, the whole thing amounted to spending two weeks trapped in a hotel with a gang of Catalans, Andalusians and North Americans ruled by a whistle-wielding tour guide and two monitors who had no understanding of the concept of rest and spoke not a word of Spanish; I'd be lying if I denied it had been years since I'd been so happy. And strange as it may seem, I believe without the stay in Cancún (or in a hotel in Cancún) I'd never have decided to write a book about Sánchez Mazas, because over the course of those days I had time to put my ideas about him in order and came to realize that the character and his story had over time turned into one of those obsessions that constitute the indispensable fuel for writing. Sitting on the balcony of my room with a mojito in hand, while watching how Conchi and her gang of Catalans, Andalusians and North Americans were relentlessly pursued, the length and breadth of the hotel, by the fury of the sports monitors ('Now, swimming-pool!'), I couldn't stop thinking about Sánchez Mazas. I
soon arrived at a conclusion: the more I knew about him, the less I understood him; the less I understood him, the more he intrigued me; the more he intrigued me, the more I wanted to know about him. I had known — but not understood and was intrigued — that cultured, refined, melancholic and conservative man, bereft of physical courage and allergic to violence, undoubtedly because he knew himself incapable of exercising it, had worked during the twenties and thirties harder than almost anyone so that his country would be submerged in a savage orgy of blood. I don't know who it was who said: no matter who wins a war, the poets always lose. I do know that, just before my vacation in Cancún, I'd read that, on 29 October 1933, in the first public act of the Spanish Falange in the Madrid Drama Theatre, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was always surrounded by poets, had said 'people have never been moved except by their poets'. The first statement is stupid, not the second: it's true that wars are made for money, which is power, but young men go off to the front and kill and get killed for words, which are poetry, and that's why poets are always the ones who win wars; and for this reason Sánchez Mazas — who from his position of privilege at José Antonio's side contrived a violent patriotic poetry of sacrifice and yokes and arrows and the usual cries that inflamed the imaginations of hundreds of youths and would eventually send them to slaughter — is more responsible for the victory of Francoist arms than all the inept military manoeuvres of that nineteenth-century general who was Francisco Franco. I'd known but not understood and was intrigued —that, at the end of the war he had contributed more than almost anyone to starting, Franco had named him to a ministerial post in the first government of the Victory, but after a very short time had dismissed him because, rumour has it, he didn't even show up to the cabinet meetings and that from then on Sánchez Mazas abandoned active politics almost entirely and, as if he felt satisfied with the regime of grief he'd helped install in Spain and considered his work to be done, devoting the last twenty years of his life to writing, squandering his inheritance and filling his extensive leisure hours with rather extravagant hobbies. I was intrigued by that final era of retirement and peevishness, but most of all by the three war years, with their inextricable peripeteia, astonishing execution, militiaman saviour and forest friends, so one evening in Cancún (or in a Cancún hotel), as I whiled away the time before supper in the bar, I decided that, after almost ten years without writing a book, the moment to try again had arrived, and I also decided that the book I'd write would not be a novel, but simply a true tale, a tale cut from the cloth of reality, concocted out of true events and characters, a tale centred on Sánchez Mazas and the firing squad and the circumstances leading up to and following it.

  Back from Cancún, I went to the Núria on the agreed evening to meet Figueras and arrived early as usual but hadn't yet ordered my gin and tonic when I was approached by a solid, stoop-shouldered man in his early fifties, with curly hair, deep blue eyes, and a modest rural smile. It was Jaume Figueras. Doubtless because I'd expected a much older man (as with Aguirre), I thought: The telephone puts on years. He ordered a coffee; I ordered a gin and tonic. Figueras apologized for not having shown up last time and for not being able to stay long this time. He explained that work piled up at that time of year and since he'd also put Can Pigem, the family house in Cornellá de Terri, up for sale, he was very busy putting his father's papers in order; his father had died ten years ago. At this point Figueras' voice broke: with a moist glimmer sparkling in his eyes, he swallowed, then smiled as if apologizing again. The waiter relieved the awkward silence by bringing the coffee and gin and tonic. Figueras took a sip of coffee.

  'Is it true you're going to write about my father and Sánchez Mazas?' he sprung on me.

  'Who told you that?'

  'Miquel Aguirre.'

  A true tale, I thought, but didn't say. That's what I'm going to write. It also occurred to me that Figueras was thinking if someone wrote about his father, his father wouldn't be entirely dead. Figueras insisted:

  'I might,' I lied. 'I don't know yet. Did your father often tell you about how he met Sánchez Mazas?'

  Figueras said yes. He admitted though that he had no more than a vague knowledge of the facts.

  'You have to understand,' he apologized again. 'It was just one of those family stories. I heard my father tell it so many times . . . At home, in the bar, on his own with us or surrounded by people from the village, because we had a bar in Can Pigem for years. Anyway. I don't think I ever paid much attention. And now I regret it.'

  What Figueras knew was that his father had fought the whole war for the Republic, and that when he came home, towards the end, he'd met up with his younger brother, Joaquim, and a friend of his, called Daniel Angelats, who had just deserted from the Republican ranks. He also knew that, since none of the three soldiers wanted to go into exile with the defeated army, they decided to await the imminent arrival of Franco's troops hidden in a nearby forest, and one day they saw a half-blind man groping his way towards them through the undergrowth. They stopped him at gunpoint; they demanded he identify himself: the man said his name was Rafael Sánchez Mazas and that he was the most senior Falangist in Spain.

  'My father knew who he was straightaway,' said Jaume Figueras. 'He was very well-read, he'd seen photos of Sánchez Mazas in the newspaper and had read his articles. Or at least that's what he always said. I don't know if it was true.'

  'It could be,' I conceded. 'And then what happened?'

  'They spent a few days hiding in the woods,' Figueras went on, after drinking the rest of his coffee. 'The four of them. Until the Nationalists arrived.'

  'Didn't your father tell you what he talked about with Sánchez Mazas during the days they spent in the forest?'

  'I suppose he must have,' Figueras answered. 'But I don't remember. Like I told you, I didn't pay much attention to those things. The only thing I remember is that Sánchez Mazas told them about the firing squad at Collell. You know the story, right?'

  I nodded.

  'He told them lots of other things too, that's for sure,'

  Figueras continued. 'My father always said that over the course of those days he and Sánchez Mazas became good friends.' Figueras knew that, after the war, his father had been in prison, and that his family had begged him many times in vain to write to Sánchez Mazas, who was then a Minister, to ask him to intercede on his behalf. He also knew that once his father had got out of jail, he heard that someone from his village or from a village nearby, aware of the bonds of friendship between them, had written a letter to Sánchez Mazas in which he'd claimed to be one of the forest friends, and requested a gift of money as payment for the war debt, and that his father had written to Sánchez Mazas denouncing the impostor.

  'Did Sánchez Mazas reply?'

  'I think so, but I'm not sure. I haven't found any letters from him among my father's papers so far, and I shouldn't think he'd have thrown them away, he was a very careful man, he kept everything. I don't know, maybe they got misplaced, or maybe they'll turn up one of these days.' Figueras put his hand in his shirt pocket: slowly and deliberately. 'What I did find was this.'

  He handed me a small, old notebook, with blackened oilcloth covers which had once been green. I leafed through it. Most of it was blank, but several of the first and last pages were scribbled on in pencil, with hurried but not entirely illegible handwriting that barely stood out against the dirty cream-coloured, squared paper; my first glance through it also revealed that several pages had been torn out.

  'What's this?' I asked.

  'The diary Sánchez Mazas had with him when he was in hiding in the forest,' Figueras replied. 'Or that's what it looks like. Keep it; but don't lose it, it's like a family heirloom, my father was very attached to it.' He looked at his wristwatch, tutted to himself and said: 'Well, I have to be off now. But call me another day.'

  As he stood up, leaning his thick callused fingers on the table, he added:

  'If you want I can show you the place in the woods where they h
id, the Mas de la Casa Nova; it's just a half-ruined farm nowadays, but if you're going to tell the story you'll want to see it. Of course if you're not thinking of telling it . . .'

  'I still don't know what I'll do,' I lied again, caressing the oilcloth covers of the notebook, which burned in my hands like a treasure. With the aim of spurring Figueras' memory, I added quite honestly: 'But, the truth is, I thought you'd have more to tell me.'

  'I've told you all I know,' he apologized for the umpteenth time — but now I seemed to glimpse a touch of guile or distrust on the watery surface of his blue eyes. 'Anyway, if you do plan to write about Sánchez Mazas and my father, you should really talk to my uncle. He definitely knows all the details.'

  'What uncle?'

  'My uncle Joaquim.' He explained: 'My father's brother. Another one of the forest friends.'

  Incredulous, as if he'd just announced the resurrection of one of the soldiers of Salamis, I asked:

  'He's alive?'

  'I should think so!' Figueras laughed uneasily, and an artificial hand gesture made me think he was only pretending to be surprised at my surprise. 'Didn't I tell you? He lives in Medinya but he spends a lot of time at the seaside in Montgo, and in Oslo too, because his son works there, for the WHO. I don't think you'll find him now, but in September I'm sure he'll be delighted to talk to you. Do you want me to suggest it to him?'

  Slightly stunned by the news, I said of course I would.