Soldiers of Salamis
Page 7
Sánchez Mazas' stay in Morocco lasted barely a year, because in 1922 Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena sent him to Rome as ABC's correspondent. He was fascinated by Italy. His youthful passion for classical culture, for the Renaissance, and Imperial Rome were forever crystallized by contact with Rome itself. He lived there for seven years. There he married Liliana Ferlosio, an Italian recently emerged from adolescence whom he practically carried off from her home and with whom he would maintain for the rest of his life a chaotic relationship which produced five children. There he matured as a man and as a writer. There he gained a deserved reputation as a columnist by way of some very literary articles, sophisticated in style and confidently executed —sometimes dense with erudition and lyricism, sometimes vehement with political passion — that are perhaps the best of his work. There, too, he was converted to fascism. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to claim Sánchez Mazas as Spain's first fascist, and quite correct to say he was its most influential theoretician. Fervent reader of Maurras and intimate friend of Luigi Federzoni who incarnated in Italy a kind of enlightened, bourgeois fascism, and in the fullness of time would come to hold various ministerial posts in Mussolini's governments — monarchical and conservative by vocation, Sánchez Mazas thought he'd discovered in fascism the ideal instrument to cure his nostalgia for an imperial Catholicism and, especially, to forcibly mend the reliable hierarchies of the ancien regimé that the old democratic egalitarianism and the vigorous, new Bolshevik egalitarianism were threatening to annihilate all over Europe. Or to put it another way: perhaps for Sánchez Mazas fascism was simply a way of realizing his poetry, of making real the world it melancholically evoked the abolished, invented, impossible world of Paradise. Be that as it may, the fact is he greeted the March on Rome enthusiastically in a series of articles entitled Italy's Genteel Transition, and saw Benito Mussolini as the reincarnation of the Renaissance condottiere and his ascension to power as the proclamation that the time of heroes and poets had returned to Italy.
So in 1929, back in Madrid, Sánchez Mazas had already made the decision to dedicate himself entirely to ensuring that such a time would also return to Spain. Up to a point he succeeded. War is the time of heroes and poets par excellence, and in the thirties few people pledged as much intelligence, as much effort and as much talent as he did to making war break out in Spain. Upon his return to the country, Sánchez Mazas understood straightaway that to achieve his goal it was not only necessary to found a party cut from the same cloth as the one he'd watched triumph in Italy, but also to find a Renaissance condottiere, a figure who, when the time came, would symbolically catalyze all the forces liberated by the panic the decomposition of the monarchy and the inevitable triumph of the Republic would generate among the most traditional sectors of Spanish society. The first venture took a while yet to come off; but not the second, for José Antonio Primo de Rivera immediately came to embody the figure of providential caudillo Sánchez Mazas was looking for. The friendship that united them was solid and durable (so much so that one of the last letters José Antonio wrote from Alicante prison on the eve of his execution on 20 November 1936 was to Sánchez Mazas); perhaps this was because it was based on an equitable division of roles. José Antonio in fact possessed all that Sánchez Mazas lacked: youth, beauty, physical courage, money and lineage; the opposite was also true: armed with his Italian experience, his extensive reading and literary talent, Sánchez Mazas became José Antonio's most trusted advisor and, once the Falange was founded, its principal ideologue and propagandist and one of the fundamental forgers of its rhetoric and symbols. Sánchez Mazas proposed the party symbol of yoke and arrows, which had been the symbol of the Catholic Monarchs, coined the ritual slogan, 'Arise Spain!', composed the very famous Prayer for the Falangist Dead, and over the course of several December nights in 1935 participated, along with José Antonio and other writers of his circle — Jacinto Miquelarena, Agustin de Foxa, Pedro Mourlane Michelena, José Maria Alfaro y Dionisio Ridruejo — in the writing of the lyrics to the anthem Face to the Sun, on the ground floor of Or Kompon, a Basque bar located on Miguel Moya Street in Madrid.
But it would still take some time before Sánchez Mazas was to become the Falange's principal purveyor of rhetoric, as Ramiro Ledesma Ramos called him. When he arrived in Madrid in 1929, surrounded by an aura of prestige as a cosmopolitan writer with brand new ideas, no one in Spain was thinking seriously of founding a party in the fascist mould, not even Ledesma, who a couple of years later would found the JONS, the first Spanish fascist faction. Like life in general, however, literary life was becoming more radical by the minute, heated by the convulsions shaking Europe and the changes that could be glimpsed on the horizon of Spanish politics: in 1927 a young writer called Cesar Arconada, who had subscribed to the elitism of Ortega y Gasset and before long would be swelling the ranks of the Communist Party, summed up the feelings of many people of his age when he declared that 'a young man can be a Communist, a fascist, anything at all, anything as long as he doesn't cling to old liberal ideas'. That explained, in part, why so many writers of the moment, in Spain and all over Europe, changed in so few years from the playful, sporty aestheticism of the roaring twenties to the pure, hard political combat of the ferocious thirties.
Sánchez Mazas was no exception. In fact, the entirety of his pre-war literary activity consists of innumerable articles of hardened prose, where the moral and aesthetic definition of the Falangists — made up of deliberate ideological confusion, mystical exaltation of violence and militarism, and essentialist vulgarities proclaiming the eternal character of the fatherland and the Catholic religion — coexists with a central proposition which, as Andrés Trapiello points out, was basically limited to stocking up on quotes from Latin historians, German thinkers and French poets that would serve to justify the approaching fratricidal assault. Sánchez Mazas' political activity, on the other hand, was frenetic during these years. In February 1933, having taken part in various attempts to create a fascist party, along with the journalist Manuel Delgado Barreto, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Ilamiro Ledesma Ramos, Juan Aparicio and Ernesto Gimenez Caballero — with whom for years he carried on a not always buried struggle for the ideological leadership of Spanish fascism, which he eventually won — Sánchez Mazas founded the weekly El fascio, which amounted to the first encounter of the various national-syndicalist tendencies which would eventually come together in the Falange. The first and only issue of Elfascio appeared a month later and was immediately banned by the authorities, but on 29 October of that year the founding act of the Spanish Falange took place in the Madrid Drama Theatre, and Sánchez Mazas, who months later would be assigned party membership card number four (Ledesma had number one; José Antonio two; Ruiz de Alda three; Gimenez Caballero five), was named to its Executive Council. From that moment and until 18 July 1936 his influence in the party — a party that before the war never managed to attract more than a hundred members in the entire country, and that never reaped more than a few thousand votes in all the elections for which it stood, but that would be decisive for the future history of the country — was fundamental. During those obdurate years Sánchez Mazas gave speeches, spoke at meetings, designed strategies and programmes, wrote reports, made up slogans, advised his leader and, especially by way of F.E., the official weekly publication of the Falange — where he was in charge of a section called 'Watchwords and Standards of Style' —disseminated, in anonymous articles and others signed by him or by José Antonio himself, ideas and a way of life which, in time and as no one could have suspected — least of all Sánchez Mazas — would eventually become the way of life and ideas, adopted as a revolutionary shock ideology in the face of the urgencies of the war, later lowered to the status of ideological ornament by the chubby, blustering, effeminate, incompetent, astute and conservative soldier who usurped them, finally becoming the increasingly rotten and mean ingless paraphernalia with which a handful of boors struggled for forty gloomy years to justify their shitty regime.
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br /> However, during the time the war was incubating, the watchwords Sánchez Mazas disseminated still possessed a gleaming suggestion of modernity, that young patriots from good families and the violent ideals they cherished contributed to strengthening. At that time José Antonio was very fond of quoting a phrase of Oswald Spengler's; that at the eleventh hour it had always been a squad of soldiers that had saved civilization. At that time the young Falangists felt they were that squad of soldiers. They knew (or believed they knew) that their families slept an innocent sleep of bourgeois beatitude, not knowing that a wave of impunity and egalitarian barbarism was going to wake them suddenly with a tremendous clamour of catastrophe. They felt their duty was to preserve civilization by force and avoid the catastrophe. They knew (or believed they knew) that they were few, but this mere statistical circumstance did not daunt them. They felt they were heroes. Although he was no longer young and lacked the physical strength, courage and even the essential conviction to be one — but not a family whose innocent sleep of bourgeois beatitude he wished to preserve —Sánchez Mazas also felt it, and thus abandoned literature to give himself over to the cause with priestly devotion. That didn't keep him from frequenting the most exclusive salons of the capital with José Antonio, or from joining him in some of his notorious, seigneurial escapades, like the Charlemagne Dinner Parties, extravagantly sumptuous banquets held in the Hotel París to commemorate the Emperor; but especially to protest with their rigorous aristocratic exquisiteness against the democratic and republican vulgarity lying in wait on the other side of the hotel's walls. The most assiduous meetings of José Antonio and his constant entourage of poet soldiers took place downstairs at the Café Lyon, on Alcalá Street, in a place known as La Ballena Alegre, where they would argue heatedly, until the small hours, about politics and literature, and where they coexisted in an atmosphere of false cordiality with young left-wing writers with whom they shared anxieties and beer, conversations, jokes and polite insults.
The outbreak of war was to change this deceptive, affectionate hostility into real hostility, though the unstoppable deterioration of political life during the thirties had already announced the imminence of the change to whomever wanted to see it. Those who months, weeks or even days earlier had talked over a cup of coffee, on the way out of a theatre or at an exhibition of works by a mutual friend, now found themselves embroiled on opposite sides in street fights which disdained neither the crack of gunfire nor the shedding of blood. The violence, in reality, had been around for a while and, despite the protests of victimization by some party leaders, opposed to it temperamentally and by education, the fact is that the Falange had been systematically feeding it, with the aim of making the Republic's situation untenable; the use offeree was at the very heart of the Falangist ideology, which, like all the other fascist movements, adopted Lenin's revolutionary methods, for whom a minority of brave and committed men — the equivalent of Spengler's squad of soldiers was enough to take power through armed struggle. Like José Antonio, Sánchez Mazas was also one of those Falangists who was sometimes, in theory, reluctant to use violence (in practice he encouraged it: having read Georges Sorel, who considered it a moral imperative, his own writings are almost always an incitement) that's why in February 1934, in the Prayer for the Falangist Dead, composed at the request of José Antonio to put a stop to his men's desire for revenge after the murder of the student Matias Montero in a street brawl, he wrote: 'To a victory that's not clear, gentlemanly and generous, we prefer defeat, because while every blow our enemies deal is horrendous and cowardly, each of our actions must be the affirmation of a higher valour and morality.' Time proved these lovely words to be nothing but rhetoric. At a meeting held at the Parador de Gredos on 16 June 1935, the leadership of the Falange, convinced it would never reach power by way of elections and that its very existence as a political party was in danger —for the Republic rightly considered it a permanent threat to its survival — took the decision to embark on the conquest of power through armed insurrection. During the year following that meeting, the conspiratorial manoeuvrings of the Falange —replete as they were with innumerable suspicions, hesitations, provisos, and doubts that conveyed both their scant confidence in their own possibilities of triumph and their leader's prescient fears that the party and its revolutionary programme would be devoured by the predictable alliance of the army with the most conservative sectors of society who would support the coup —did not cease for an instant, until on 14 March 1936, after being decimated in the elections of February that year, the Falange was beheaded when the police closed its premises on Nicasio Gallego Street, arrested its entire Leadership Council and banned the party sine die.
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After that Sánchez Mazas' trail vanishes. One can only attempt to reconstruct his adventures during the months before the conflict and during the three years it lasted by way of partial testimonies — fleeting allusions in memoirs and documents of the time, tales told by those who shared snippets of his adventures, memories of relatives and friends to whom he'd recounted his memories — and also through the veil of a legend shimmering with errors, contradictions and ambiguities which Sánchez Mazas' selective loquacity about this turbulent period of his life did nothing but nourish. So then, what follows is not what actually happened, but rather what seems probable might have happened; I'm not offering proven facts, but reasonable conjectures.
Here they are:
In March of 1936, when Sánchez Mazas is being held in the Modelo Prison in Madrid along with his Falange leadership comrades, his fourth child, Maximo, is born, and Victoria Kent, at that time General Director of Prisons, grants the inmate the three days' leave to visit his wife, which he's entitled to by law, on condition that he give his word of honour not to leave Madrid and to return to the prison at the end of the allotted time. Sánchez Mazas accepts the deal, but, according to another of his sons, Rafael, before he leaves the jail the governor summons him to his office and tells him, off the record, that he sees things getting very dark, half suggesting 'that he would be better off not coming back, and that he, for his part, wouldn't go too far out of his way to find and recapture him'. Since this justifies Sánchez Mazas' later dubious behaviour, the truth of this version could well be called into question; yet equally, one could imagine it not being false. The fact is that Sánchez Mazas, forgetting the protests of gentlemanly behaviour and heroism with which he illustrated so many pages of incendiary prose, breaks his word and flees to Portugal, but José Antonio — who had taken his deputy's words seriously and who judged that not only was his honour at stake, but that of the entire Falange —orders him from his prison cell in Alicante, where he'd been transferred along with his brother Miguel on the night of 5 June, to return to Madrid. Sánchez Mazas obeys, but before he can turn himself back over to the Modelo Prison the uprising breaks out.
The following days are confusing. Almost three years later, Eugenio Montes—whom Sánchez Mazas called 'my grandest and greatest comrade in the drive to put human words at the service of our Falange' — describes from Burgos his friend's situation in the days immediately after 18 July as 'an adventure of street corners and hideouts, with the red henchmen hot on his heels'. The phrase is as novelistic as it is elusive, but perhaps doesn't entirely betray the truth. Revolution triumphs in Madrid. People kill and die in back alleys and barracks. The legitimate government has lost control of the situation and the atmosphere is thick with a lethal mixture of fear and euphoria. Houses are searched; militiamen's control spreads through the streets. One night at the beginning of September, unable to stand the anxiety of secrecy and the constant imminence of danger any longer, or perhaps urged by his friends or acquaintances who'd been running the risk of giving cover to a fugitive of his importance for too long, Sánchez Mazas decides to leave his lair, flee Madrid and cross over into the Nationalist zone.
Predictably, he doesn't make it. The next day, as soon as he leaves the house, he gets stopped; the patrol demands he identify himself. W
ith a strange mixture of panic and resignation, Sánchez Mazas realizes he is lost and, as if wanting to take his leave of reality in silence, for a second of indecision that seems interminable he looks around and sees that, though it's only nine o'clock, the shops on Montera Street have already opened and the urgent, everyday hustle and bustle of the crowd floods the pavements, while the harsh sun foretells another suffocating morning of this never-ending summer. At that moment the attention of the three armed militiamen is caught by a truck stuffed with members of the General Workers' Union bristling with weapons and war cries, heading for the front at Guadarrama with the bodywork painted with initials and names, among them that of Indalecio Prieto, who's just been named Minister of the Airforce and Navy in Largo Caballero's incendiary government. Then Sánchez Mazas thinks up a desperate idea and acts on it: he tells the militiamen that he cannot identify himself because he's undercover in Madrid carrying out a mission entrusted to him directly by the Minister of the Airforce and Navy, and demands they put him in contact with Prieto immediately. Caught between bewilderment and suspicion, the militiamen decide to take him to the headquarters of the State Security Office to check the authenticity of his implausible excuse; there, after a few anguished attempts, Sánchez Mazas manages to speak to Prieto by telephone. Concerned about the situation, Prieto advises him to seek refuge in the Chilean Embassy and affectionately wishes him good luck; then, in the name of their old friendship in Africa, orders his immediate release.