Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  'While I'm at it I'll see if I can find out Angelats' whereabouts,' said Figueras not hiding his satisfaction. 'He used to live in Banyoles, and he's probably still alive. Someone who definitely is, is Maria Ferré.'

  'Who's Maria Ferré?'

  Figueras visibly suppressed the urge to dig out an explanation.

  'I'll tell you another time,' he said after looking at his watch again; then he held out his hand. 'I have to go now. I'll call you when I've arranged something with my uncle. He'll tell you everything, chapter and verse. He's got a very good memory; you'll see. Meanwhile, have a look at the notebook, I think it'll be of interest.'

  I watched him pay, leave the Núria, get into a dusty jeep, carelessly parked at the entrance to the bar, and drive away. I stroked the notebook, but didn't open it. I finished drinking my gin and tonic and as I was getting up to go, saw an intercity train cross the viaduct behind the terrace full of people, and I thought of the Gypsies playing paso dobles two weeks ago in the tired light of an evening like this one and, when I got home and started to examine the notebook Figueras had entrusted to me, I'd still not disentangled the hauntingly sad melody of 'Sighing for Spain' from my memory.

  I spent the night mulling over the notebook. In the first part it contained, after a few torn-out pages, a short diary written in pencil. Making an effort to decipher the handwriting, I read:

  . . . settled by forest house — Food — Slept hayloft — Soldiers passed.

  3-Day in Forest — Conversation old man — Doesn't dare have me in house — Forest — Build shelter.

  4-Fall of Gerona — Conversation by fireside with fugitives —Old man treats me better than his wife does.

  5-Waiting all day — stay hidden — Cannon fire.

  6-Meet three lads in forest Night Vigilance [illegible word] shelter — Bridges blown up — The reds are leaving.

  7-Meet the three lads in the morning — Modest lunch from what friends had.

  The diary stops there. At the end of the notebook, after more torn out pages, written in different handwriting, but also in pencil, are the names of the three lads, the forest friends:

  Pedro Figueras Bahí

  Joaqufn Figueras Bahí

  Daniel Angelats Dilmé

  And further down:

  Casa Pigem de Cornelià

  (across from the station)

  Further down are the signatures, in ink — not pencil, like the rest of the writing in the book — of the two Figueras brothers, and on the following page is written:

  Palol de Rebardit

  Casa Borrell

  Ferré Family

  On another page, also in pencil and in the same handwriting as the diary, except much clearer, is the longest text in the notebook. It says:

  1, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, founding member of the Spanish Falange, national adviser, ex-president of the Leadership Council and at present the senior Falangist in Spain and highest ranking in red territory, hereby declare:

  1. that on the 30th of January 1939 I faced a firing squad at the Collell prison camp with 48 other unhappy prisoners and escaped miraculously after the first two rounds, breaking away into the forest —

  2. that after three days' march through the forest, walking at night and asking for charity at the farms, I arrived in the area of Palol de Rebardit, where I fell into an irrigation ditch and lost my spectacles, leaving me half blind . . .

  There's a page missing here, which has been torn out. But the text goes on:

  . . . proximity of front line kept me hidden in their house until the Nationalist troops arrived.

  4. that despite the generous objection of the inhabitants of the Borrell farm I wish by means of this document to confirm my promise to repay them with a substantial monetary reward, proposing the proprietor [here there is a blank space] for an honorary distinction if the military command is in agreement and to swear my immense and eternal gratitude to him and his family, all of which will be very little in comparison to what he has done for me.

  Signed in the Casanova de un Pla farm near Cornellá de Terriat 1 . . .

  That was the contents of the notebook. I reread it several times, trying to give those dispersed notes a coherent meaning, and link them to the facts I knew. To begin with, I discarded the suspicion, which insidiously crossed my mind as I read, that the notebook was a fraud, a falsification contrived by the Figueras family to deceive me, or to deceive someone: at the time I thought it didn't make much sense that a modest rural family would concoct so sophisticated a scheme. So sophisticated and, most of all, so absurd. Because, when Sánchez Mazas was alive, when it could have been a shield for defeated people against the reprisals of the victors, the document could easily have been authenticated and, once he was dead, it lost its value. Nevertheless, I thought that it would be a good idea to make sure the handwriting in the notebook (or one of the handwritings in the notebook, because there were several) and that of Sánchez Mazas were the same. If that were the case (and nothing led me to believe it wasn't), Sánchez Mazas was the author of the little diary, which had undoubtedly been written during the days he spent wandering in the forest, or at most very shortly afterwards. To judge by the last text in the notebook, Sánchez Mazas knew the date of the execution had been 30 January 1939; in any case the numeration preceding each entry of the diary corresponded to the days of the month of February of the same year (the Nationalists had indeed taken Gerona on 4 February). From the text of the diary I deduced that, before availing himself of the protection of the Figueras brothers and Angelats, Sánchez Mazas had found a more or less secure refuge in a house in the area, and this house could be none other than the Borrell house or farm, whose inhabitants he thanked and promised a 'substantial monetary reward' and 'an honorary distinction' in the long final declaration, and I also deduced that this house or farm must be in Palol de Rebardit —a municipality bordering on Cornellá de Terri — and that its inhabitants could only be the Ferré family, one of whom was sure to be Maria Ferré, who, as Jaume Figueras had told me at the sudden end of our interview in the Núria, was still alive. All of the above seemed obvious, just as, once fitted together, the place for each piece of a jigsaw puzzle seems obvious. As far as the final declaration went, drawn up in the Mas de la Casa Nova, the place in the forest where the four fugitives had stayed hidden — and undoubtedly when they knew themselves to be safe — it also seemed obvious that it was a way of formalizing Sánchez Mazas' debt to those who'd saved his life, like a safe-conduct enabling them to cross the uncertainties of the immediate post-war period, without having to undergo each and every one of the outrages reserved for the majority of those who, like the Figueras brothers and Angelats, had swelled the ranks of the Republican army. I found it strange, however, that one of the pages torn out of the notebook should be precisely the one containing the declaration in which, it could be inferred, Sánchez Mazas expressed his gratitude to the Figueras brothers and Angelats. I wondered who had torn out that page. And why. I wondered who had torn out the first pages of the notebook, and why. Since every question leads to another, I also wondered — in fact I'd already been wondering this for quite a while — what really happened during those days that Sánchez Mazas wandered aimlessly through the forest in no man's land. What did he think about, what did he feel, what did he tell the Ferrés, the Figueras brothers, Angelats? What did they remember him having told them? And what had they thought and felt? I was yearning to talk to Jaume Figueras' uncle, to Maria Ferré and Angelats, if he were still alive. I told myself, even if Jaume Figueras' tale couldn't be considered trustworthy (or couldn't be considered any more trustworthy than Ferlosio's), for its veracity didn't depend on a memory (his), but on the memory of a memory (his father's) — the accounts of his uncle, Maria Ferré and Angelats (if he was still alive) were on the other hand firsthand reports and therefore, at least at first, much less random than his. I wondered if those tales would fit the reality of events or whether, perhaps inevitably, they'd be varnished with that gloss of half-
truth and fibs that always augment an episode now distant and perhaps legendary to its protagonists, so that what they might tell me had happened wouldn't be what really happened or even what they remembered happening, but what they remembered telling before.

  Overwhelmed with questions, sure that I'd be lucky if I didn't have to wait more than a month before talking to Figueras' uncle as if walking over sand dunes and needing to step on terra firma 1 called Miquel Aguirre. It was a Monday and it was very late, but Aguirre was still awake and, after telling him about my interview with Jaume Figueras, about the latter's uncle and about Sánchez Mazas' notebook, I asked him if it were possible to obtain documentary proof that Pere Figueras, Jaume's father, had indeed been in prison after the end of the war.

  'Couldn't be easier,' he answered. 'In the City Archives there's a register of all the names of every single person who's been imprisoned since before the war. If Pere Figueras was in jail, his name will be there. For sure.'

  'Couldn't they have sent him to another prison?'

  'Impossible. Everyone detained in the Banyoles area was sent to Gerona prison.'

  The next day, before going to work at the newspaper, I presented myself at the City Archives, which were located in a renovated convent, in the old part of the city. Following the signs, I went up a stone stairway and entered the library, a spacious, sunny room, with big windows, gleaming wooden tables bristling with lamps, the silence of which was broken only by the typing of an employee almost completely hidden behind a computer. I told the clerk — a man with unruly hair and a grey moustache — what I was looking for; he stood up, went to a shelf and got down a ring binder.

  'Look in here,' he said, handing it to me. 'Beside each name is a file number; if you want to consult one, let me know.'

  I sat down at a table and looked through the index, which ran from 1924 to 1949, for a Figueras who'd been held in prison in 1939 or 1940. Since it's quite a common surname in the region, there were several, but none of them were the Pere (or Pedro) Figueras Bahi I was looking for: no one of that name had been in Gerona prison in 1939 or 1940, not even in 1941 or 1942, which was when, according to Jaume Figueras' tale, his father had been in jail. I looked up from the binder: the employee was still typing at his computer; the room was still deserted. Beyond the windows which were flooded with light was a confusion of decrepit houses which, I thought, wouldn't have looked much different sixty years and a few months before, when, in the final days of the war, a few kilometres away three anonymous lads and an illustrious man in his forties, hid and awaited the end of the nightmare. As if struck by a sudden realization, I thought: 'It's all a lie.' I reasoned that, if the first fact I attempted to confirm independently — Pere Figueras' time in prison — turned out to be false, nothing prevented me from supposing the rest of the tale to be equally untrue. I told myself that there had undoubtedly been three lads who helped Sánchez Mazas survive in the forest after the firing squad — a certainty supported by various circumstances, among them the coincidences between the notes in Sánchez Mazas' notebook and the tale he'd told his son — but certain clues lent credence to the suspicion that it wasn't the Figueras brothers and Angelats. First of all, in Sánchez Mazas' notebook their names had been written in ink and in a different handwriting from the rest of the text, which was in pencil; undoubtedly, then, a hand other than that of Sánchez Mazas had added them. Furthermore, the missing page of the final declaration where, as far as I could tell from studying the notebook, the Figueras brothers and Angelats should be mentioned, because he'd surely have expressed his gratitude for their help, could well have been torn out precisely because it didn't mention them, so that someone would come to the very conclusion that I had reached. And as far as Pere Figueras' false prison sentence goes, it would undoubtedly have been invented by Pere himself, or his son, or by who knows who; in any case, added to the proud refusal to evade captivity by appealing to the favours of a high Francoist dignitary like Sánchez Mazas, and the letter in which he denounced some unscrupulous person who tried to get money out of Sánchez Mazas by pretending to be him, the story amounted to ideal cement for building one of those legends of paternal heroism which — without anyone ever happening to identify their origins — so prosper at the death of a father in the kind of families inclined to their own mythogenesis. More disappointed than perplexed, I wondered who then were the real forest friends and who had fabricated that fraud and why; more perplexed than disappointed, I said to myself that maybe, as some had suspected from the beginning, Sánchez Mazas hadn't even been in Collell, and perhaps the whole story of the execution and the circumstances surrounding it were nothing but an immense swindle minutely plotted by Sánchez Mazas' imagination — with the voluntary or involuntary collaboration of relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers — to cleanse his reputation as a coward, to hide some dishonourable episode in his strange wartime adventure and, most of all so that some credulous investigative reporter, avid for novelties, would reconstruct it sixty years later, redeeming him forever before history.

  I put the ring binder back in its place on the shelf, and got ready to leave the library, feeling embarrassed and conned, when, as I passed the computer, the clerk asked me if I'd found what I was looking for. I confessed that I hadn't.

  'Oh, but don't give up so quickly.' He stood up and, not giving me time to explain anything, went to the shelf and got the binder down again. 'What's the person's name?'

  'Pere or Pedro Figueras Bahi. But don't worry: he probably wasn't ever in any prison.'

  'Then he won't be here,' he said, but insisted: 'Have you an idea of when he might have been in prison?'

  'In '39,' I yielded. 'At the latest '40 or '41.'

  The clerk quickly found the page.

  'No one of that name,' he confirmed. 'But the prison officer could have made an error in writing it down.' He smoothed his moustache and muttered: 'Let's see . . .'

  He flipped ahead and back through the pages of the register several times, running down the lists of names with his index finger, which finally stopped.

  'Piqueras Bahi, Pedro,' he read. 'That must be him. Wait a moment, please.'

  He went out through a side door and returned a short while later, smiling and carrying a document case with faded covers.

  'There's your man,' he said.

  The document case did in fact contain Pere Figueras' dossier. Extremely excited, my self-esteem suddenly restored, and telling myself that if Pere Figueras' prison stay wasn't an invention then nor was the rest of the story, I examined the dossier. It stated that Pere Figueras was a native of Sant Andreu del Terri, a municipality assimilated over time into Cornellá de Terri. That he was a farmer and single. That he was twenty-five years old. That his background was unknown. That he'd been incarcerated in the prison of the Military Government, without any charge being laid against him, on 27 April 1939, and that he'd left it not even two months later on 19 June. It also stated that he'd been released by the General Auditor in accordance with an order included in the dossier of a certain Vicente Vila Rubirola. I looked up Rubirola in the index, found him, and asked the clerk for his dossier, which he brought me. A member of the Catalan Republican Left, Rubirola had been in prison after the revolution of 1934 and had been sent back there at the end of the war, the very same day as Pere Figueras and his eight comrades from Cornellá de Terri; all of them were freed on 19 June, the same day as Figueras, in accordance with an order from the Auditor General, which didn't specify any reason justifying this decision; Vila Rubirola, however, had been sent back to jail in June of the same year and having been tried and found guilty, hadn't finally left it again for another twenty years.

  I thanked the archive clerk and, as soon as I got to the newspaper office I phoned Aguirre. Many of the names of those imprisoned with Figueras were familiar to him — the majority notorious activists of left-wing parties — and especially Vila Rubirola, who in the early days of the war had participated in the assassination, in Barcelona, of the Secre
tary-General of the Municipality of Cornellá de Terri. According to Aguirre, the fact that Pere Figueras and his eight comrades were incarcerated without explanation was perfectly normal at the time, when everyone who'd had any kind of military or political link to the Republic had their past submitted to rigorous albeit arbitrary scrutiny, and meanwhile they stayed in prison; nor did he find it strange that Pere Figueras was released after a short time, as this happened often with those the new regime didn't consider a danger.

  'What does strike me as odd is that someone as well known as Vila Rubirola, and a few of the others who went into prison with Figueras, should have been released with him,' observed Aguirre. 'And what I really just can't understand is all of them getting out the same day without any explanation, and all so that Vila Rubirola — and I wouldn't be surprised if one or two others — were sent straight back in. I don't get it.' Aguirre fell silent. 'Unless . . .'

  'Unless what?'

  'Unless someone interceded,' Aguirre concluded, avoiding the name we both had in mind. 'Someone with real power. A hierarch.'

  That very evening, having dinner with Conchi in a Greek restaurant, I solemnly announced, because I felt the need to announce it solemnly, that after ten years of not writing a book, the moment had come to try again.

  'Bloody brilliant!' shouted Conchi, who was hoping to add a third book to the two escorting her Virgin of Guadalupe in the living room; with a piece of pita bread dipped in tzatziki on its way to her mouth, she added: 'I hope it's not a novel.'

  'No,' I said, very confidently. 'It's a true tale.'

  'What's that?'

  I explained; I think she understood.

  'It'll be like a novel,' I summed up. 'Except, instead of being all lies, it's all true.'