Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  'I'm glad it's not going to be a novel.'

  'Why's that?'

  'No reason,' she answered. 'It's just that — well, honey, I don't think imagination is really your strong suit.'

  'You're a real sweetheart, Conchi.'

  'Don't take it like that, darling. What I meant to say was . . .' Since she didn't know how to say what she meant to say, she picked up another piece of pita bread and said, 'Anyhow, what's the book about?'

  'The battle of Salamis.'

  'The what?' she screeched.

  Several pairs of eyes turned to look at us, for the second time. I knew the story line of my book wasn't going to appeal to Conchi, but, since I didn't want her to kick up a fuss and call everyone's attention to us, I tried to explain it briefly.

  'What are you like?' was her comment, accompanied by a look of disgust. 'How can you want to write about a fascist with the number of really good lefty writers there must be around! Garcia Lorca, for example. He was a red, wasn't he? Ooh,' she said not waiting for a reply, reaching under the table: alarmed, I lifted the table cloth up a bit and looked, 'God, my pussy's so itchy.'

  'Conchi!' I scolded her in whisper, sitting up quickly and forcing a smile while glancing around at the neighbouring tables, 'I'd appreciate it, when you go out with me, if you'd at least wear panties.'

  'What an old fart you are!' she said with her most affectionate smile, but without bringing the submerged hand out into the open; I felt her toes creeping up my calf. 'Don't you think it's sexy? Anyway, when do we start?'

  'I've told you a million times I don't like doing it in public toilets.'

  'I didn't mean that, dummy. I mean when do we start on the book?'

  'Oh that,' I said as one flush went up my leg and another down my face. 'Soon,' I stammered. 'Very soon. As soon as I finish the research.'

  But it would actually take me a while yet to reconstruct the story I wanted to tell and to get to know, if not each and every one of its hidden aspects, at least what I judged its essential ones. In fact, for many months I spent all my free time at the newspaper studying the life and work of Sánchez Mazas. I reread his books, I read a lot of the articles he published in the press, many articles by his friends and enemies, his contemporaries, and also everything I came across about the Falange, fascism, the Civil War, and the equivocal, changeable nature of the Franco regime. I scoured libraries, newspaper archives, public records. I travelled to Madrid several times, and constantly to Barcelona, to talk to scholars, professors, friends and acquaintances (or friends of friends and acquaintances of acquaintances) of Sánchez Mazas. I spent an entire morning at the Sanctuary of Collell, which, as I was told by Mossen Juan Prats — the priest with the shiny bald patch and devout smile who showed me the garden with its cypress and palm trees and immense empty halls, low corridors, stairways with wooden handrails and deserted classrooms where Sánchez Mazas and his cellmates had wandered like premonitions of shades — had, once the war was over, gone back to being used as a boarding school for boys until, a year and a half before my visit, it was reduced to its present lonely status of a conference centre for pious associations and occasional lodging for sightseers. It was Father Prats himself, only just born when the events in question occurred in Collell, but not unaware of them, who told me the real or apocryphal story according to which, when Franco's regulars took the Sanctuary, they left not a single prison guard alive. Father Prats also gave me precise directions to get to the spot where the execution took place. Following them, I left the monastery by the access road, arrived at a stone cross commemorating the massacre, turned left down a path which snaked through pines and came out in the clearing. I stayed there for a while, walking beneath the cold sun and immaculate, windy October sky, not doing anything other than sounding out the leafy silence of the forest and trying in vain to imagine the light of another less crystal clear morning, that inconceivable January morning, sixty years ago in the same place, when fifty men suddenly faced death and two of them managed to evade its grasp. As if a revelation by osmosis might await me, I stayed there a while . . . I didn't feel anything. So I left. I went to Cornellá de Terri, because the same day I was having lunch with Jaume Figueras, who that afternoon took me to see Can Borrell, the Ferré's old house, Can Pigem, the Figueras' old house, and the Mas de la Casa Nova, which had been Sánchez Mazas', Angelats' and the Figueras brothers' temporary hiding place. Can Borrell was a farm located in the township of Palol de Rebardit; Can Pigem was in Cornellá de Terri; the Mas de la Casa Nova was between the two villages and in the middle of the woods. Can Borrell was uninhabited, but not in ruins, so was Can Pigem; the Mas de la Casa Nova was uninhabited and in ruins. Sixty years before they'd surely been three quite different houses, but time had virtually equalled them, and their common air of abandonment, of stone skeletons among whose fleshless ribcages the winds groaned in the autumn evening, held not a single suggestion that anyone had ever once lived in them.

  It was also thanks to Jaume Figueras, who finally kept his word and acted as diligent intermediary, that I got to speak to his uncle Joaquim, Maria Ferré and Daniel Angelats. All three were over eighty: Maria Ferré was eighty-eight; Figueras and Angelats, eighty-two. All three still had good memories, or at least they still remembered their encounter with Sánchez Mazas and the circumstances surrounding it, as if it had been a determining moment in their lives and they'd often recalled it. Their three versions differed, but weren't contradictory, and at more than one point they were complementary, so from their testimonies, and filling in the gaps they left by means of logic and a little imagination, it wasn't difficult to reconstruct the puzzle of Sánchez Mazas' adventure. Perhaps because no one has time any more to listen to people of a certain age, much less when they start remembering incidents from their youth, all three were anxious to talk, and more than once I had to channel the disorderly flow of their recollections. I can imagine they might have embellished some secondary factors, some lateral details; not that they lied, because among other reasons, if they had, the lie wouldn't have fitted into the puzzle and would have given them away. In all other respects, the three of them were so different that to my eyes the only thing that linked them was their condition as survivors, that deceptive added prestige the protagonists of the bland, routine inglorious present, often concede to the protagonists of the past, which because we only know it through the filter of memory, is always extraordinary, tumultuous, heroic: Figueras was tall and well-built, with an almost youthful air checked shirt, sailor's cap, well-worn jeans a travelled man, possessing an enormous vitality and a conversational manner erupting with gestures, exclamations and hearty laughs; Maria Ferré who, according to what Jaume Figueras told me later, had coquettishly visited the hairdresser's before receiving me in her house in Cornellá de Terri a house that at times had been the village bar and general store, and still at the entrance, almost like relics, stood a marble counter and a set of scales —was slight and sweet, digressive, with eyes that at one moment were mischievous and the next would brim with tears at her inability to dodge the tricks nostalgia set for her in the course of her tale, young eyes, with the colour and fluidity of a summer stream. As for Angelats, my interview with him was crucial. Crucial for me, I mean — or, more precisely, for this book.

  For many years, Angelats ran a boarding house in part of a decrepit and beautiful country house in the centre of Banyoles with a large pillared courtyard and immense gloomy lounges. When I met him he'd just survived a heart attack and he was a morose, diminished man, whose gestures, of an almost abbotlike solemnity, contrasted with the childish innocence of many of his observations and the deliberate humility of his Catalan small businessman's demeanour. I don't know if I'm exaggerating here, but I believe that Angelats, like Figueras and Maria Ferré, felt flattered in a way by my interest in him; I know he very much enjoyed remembering Joaquim Figueras — who'd been his best friend for many years and whom he'd not seen for quite some time — and their shared adventure during the war, and
while I heard him make an effort to present it as a youthful escapade without the least importance, I guessed it meant all the world to him, perhaps because he felt it had been the only real adventure in his life, or at least the only one he hadn't needed to fear feeling proud of. He spoke to me about it at length; then he told me about his heart attack, how his business was going, his wife, his children, his only granddaughter. I realized he'd needed to talk to someone about these things for a long time; I realized I was only listening to him in compensation for him having told me his story. Ashamed, I felt sorry for him and, when I felt I'd repaid my debt, I tried to say goodbye, but since it had started to rain Angelats insisted on seeing me to the bus stop.

  'Now that I think of it,' he said as we crossed the puddle-strewn plaza under his umbrella. He stopped, and I couldn't help but think that this memory was nothing but a last minute decoy, to make me stay. 'Before he left, Sánchez Mazas told us he was going to write a book about all that, a book with us in it. He was going to call it Soldiers of Salamis-, strange title, don't you think? He also said he'd send it to us, but he didn't.' Angelats looked at me now: the light from the street-lamp put a yellow reflection on the lenses of his glasses, and for a moment I saw in his bony eye sockets and in the prominence of his forehead and cheeks and in his open jaw the outline of his skull. 'Do you know if he wrote the book?'

  A cold shiver ran up my spine. I was about to say yes; I thought just in time: 'If I tell him he wrote it, he'll want to read it and discover my lie.' Feeling I was somehow betraying Angelats, I said brusquely:

  'No.'

  'No, he didn't write it or you don't know if he wrote it?'

  'I don't know if he wrote it,' I lied. 'But I promise I'll find out.'

  'Do that.' Angelats started walking again. 'And, if it turns out he did write it, I'd appreciate it if you'd send it to me. It's sure to mention us, as I told you he always said we saved his life. I'd really like to read that book. You understand, don't you?'

  'Of course,' I said and, not yet feeling completely rotten, I added: 'But don't worry: as soon as I find it I'll send it to you.'

  The next day, as soon as I got to the newspaper I went to the editor's office and negotiated a leave of absence.

  'What?' he asked ironically. 'Another novel?'

  'No,' I answered smugly. 'A true tale.'

  I explained what I meant. I explained what my true tale was about.

  'I like it,' he said. 'Have you got a title yet?'

  'I think so,' I answered. 'Soldiers of Salamis.'

  * Quiso Dios, con su poder,/ fundir cuatro rayitos de sol/ y hacer con ellos una mujer,/ y al cumplir su voluntad/ en un jardin de España naci/ como la flor en el rosal./ Tierra gloriosa de mi querer,/ tierra bendita de perfume y pasion,/ España, en toda flor a tus pies/ suspira un corazon./ Ay de mi pena mortal,/ porque me ale jo, España, de ti,/ porque me arrancan de mi rosal.

  Part Two

  SOLDIERS OF SALAMIS

  ON 27 APRIL 1939, the very day that Pere Figueras and his eight comrades from Cornellá de Terri were sent to prison in Gerona, Rafael Sánchez Mazas had just been named national advisor to the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS and Vice-President of its Leadership Council; a month had not yet passed since the definitive collapse of the Republic, and four more were yet to go by before Sánchez Mazas would become Minister Without Portfolio in the first post-war government. He had always been an unpleasant, arrogant, despotic man, but was neither petty nor vindictive, and so during that period the waiting room to his office teemed with relatives of prisoners eager to gain his intercession on behalf of old acquaintances or friends who the end of the war had left confined in the cells of the defeat. Nothing leads us to believe he did not do what he could for them. Thanks to his insistence, the Caudillo commuted the death sentence hanging over the head of the poet Miguel Hernández to life imprisonment, but not the one which, one November dawn in 1940, led a firing squad to end the life of Julian Zugazagoitia, a good friend of Sánchez Mazas and Minister in Negrín's government. Months before this pointless murder, just back from a trip to Rome as National Delegate of the Falange Exterior, his secretary, the journalist Carlos Sentís, brought him up to date on matters pending and read him the list of persons he'd granted an audience for that morning. Suddenly alert, Sánchez Mazas made him repeat a name; then he stood up, strode across his office, opened the door, stopped in the middle of the waiting room and, scouring the frightened faces crowding it, asked: apos;Which of you is Joaquin Figueras?'

  Paralyzed by terror, a man with a bereft look and travelling clothes tried to answer, but only succeeded in breaking the solid silence following the question with an indecipherable burbling, while reaching a desperate hand, claw-like, into his jacket pocket. Standing in front of him, Sánchez Mazas wanted to know if he were related to the brothers Pedro and Joaquin Figueras. 'I'm their father,' he managed to articulate with a strong Catalan accent and frantic nodding that didn't abate even when Sánchez Mazas crushed him in a relieved embrace. After the effusive greetings, the two men chatted for a few minutes in the office. Joaquim Figueras recounted that his son Pere had spent the last month and a half in prison in Gerona, groundlessly accused, along with other young men of the village, of taking part in the burning of the Cornellá de Terri church at the beginning of the war and of having been involved in the murder of the Municipal Secretary. Sánchez Mazas didn't let him finish; he left his office through a side door and came back a few moments later.

  'That's settled,' he proclaimed. 'When you get back to Cornellá you'll find your son at home.'

  Figueras left the office in a euphoric state. On his way down the steps he noticed a piercing pain in his hand and realized he still had it thrust inside his jacket pocket, clutching, with all his strength, a piece of paper torn out of a notebook with green covers where Sánchez Mazas had recorded his debt of gratitude to Figueras' sons. And when he arrived in Cornellá days later and dry-eyed embraced his recently freed son, Joaquim Figueras knew he hadn't been wrong to undertake that hallucinatory trip across a devastated country to see a man he didn't know and whom he'd consider till the end of his days one of the most powerful men in Spain.

  He was only partly mistaken. Although he'd always considered it an occupation unworthy of gentlemen, Sánchez Mazas had by then spent more than a decade in politics and would take another few years to leave it, but never in his whole life was he to accumulate so much real power in his hands as right then.

  He'd been born in Madrid on 18 February, forty-five years earlier. His father, a military doctor originally from Coria, whose uncle had been royal physician to Alfonso XII, died a few months later, and his mother, Maria Rosario Mazas y Orbegozo, immediately sought the protection of her family in Bilbao. There, in a five-storey house beside the Deusto Bridge, on Henao Street, cajoled by an army of childless uncles, he spent his childhood and adolescence. The Mazas were a clan of hidalgos of liberal traditions and literary inclinations, related to Miguel de Unamuno and solidly anchored in the cream of Bilbao society, from which Sánchez Mazas drew inspiration to construct a few characters for his novels, and from whom he inherited an irrepressible propensity to lordly idleness and an obstinate literary vocation. The latter had once similarly tempted his mother, a clever, illustrious woman who poured all her untimely widow's energy into facilitating her son's career as a writer, a career she herself hadn't wanted or been able to pursue.

  Sánchez Mazas didn't let her down. It's true he was a mediocre student, who wandered through various upper-class Catholic boarding schools with more shame than glory before ending up at the Central University of Madrid, and finally the Augustinian Maria Cristina Royal College for Advanced Studies at the monastery in El Escorial, where in 1916 he graduated in Law. It's equally true, however, that he began to show obvious signs of literary talent quite early. At the age of thirteen he wrote poems in the styles of Zorrilla and Marquina; at twenty he imitated Rubén Darío and Unamuno; by twenty-two he was a mature poet; at twe
nty-eight his poetic work was essentially complete. With typical aristocratic disdain, he barely bothered to publish them, and if we know his work in its entirety (or almost) it's largely owing to the vigilance of his mother, who transcribed his poems by hand in small notebooks bound in black oilcloth, recording beneath each one its place and date of composition. Moreover, Sánchez Mazas is a good poet; a good minor poet, I mean, which is about all a good poet can aspire to. His verses have only one chord — humble and ancient, monotonous and a bit sentimental — but Sánchez Mazas plays it masterfully, drawing from it a clean, natural, prosaic music that can only be sung by the bittersweet melancholy of time that flees and in its flight drags down order and the reliable hierarchies of an abolished world that, precisely because it is abolished, is also an invented, impossible world, almost always equivalent to the impossible, invented world of Paradise.

  Although he published only one book of poems in his lifetime, it's possible that Sánchez Mazas always considered himself a poet, and perhaps that's what he essentially was; his contemporaries, however, knew him primarily as the author of chronicles, articles and novels, and especially as a politician, which is exactly what he never considered himself and perhaps what he never essentially was. In June of 1916, a year after publishing his first novel, Brief Memoirs of Tarín, and having recently graduated in law, Sánchez Mazas returned to Bilbao, then a headstrong, self-satisfied city, dominated by a buoyant bourgeoisie enjoying a period of economic splendour derived from Spain's neutrality during the First World War. That bonanza found its most conspicuous cultural expression in the magazine Hermes, which drew together a handful of Catholic writers, admirers of Eugenio d'Ors, Spanish nationalists, devotees of Roman culture and the values of western civilization, whom Ramón de Basterra baptized with the pompous title, 'Roman School of the Pyrenees'. Basterra was one of the more notorious members of that group of writers, the majority of whom would in time go on to swell the ranks of the Falangists; another was Sánchez Mazas. They would meet for discussions at the Lyon d'Or, a cafe located in the middle of Gran Via de López de Haro, where Sánchez Mazas dazzled, as a cultivated, circumspect and rather bombastic conversationalist. José Maria de Areilza, then a boy, whose father took him to the Lyon d'Or for hot chocolate, remembers him as 'a tall and very thin young man, with tortoiseshell spectacles, his eyes both ardent and weary, with a voice which sometimes became strident when emphasizing some point in an argument'. At that time Sánchez Mazas was already writing assiduously in the newspapers ABC, El Sol, and El Pueblo Vasco, and in 1921 Juan de la Cruz, editor of the latter, sent him as a correspondent to cover the war in Morocco, where he began a lasting friendship of drinking sessions and long nocturnal conversations — which would withstand the rancour of living through a war on opposite sides — with another correspondent from Bilbao called Indalecio Prieto.