Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  That same day Sánchez Mazas manages to get into the Chilean Embassy, where he will spend almost a year and a half. There is a photograph from this spell of confinement: Sánchez Mazas appears in the centre of a chorus of refugees, among whom is the Falangist writer Samuel Ros; there are eight of them, all a little ragged and unshaven, all expectant. Wearing an undershirt that was perhaps once white, with his Semitic profile, his spectacles and broad forehead, Sánchez Mazas is leaning elegantly on a desk on which there is nothing but an empty glass, a piece of bread, a sheaf of papers or notebooks and a hungry saucepan. He is reading; the rest listen to him. What he reads is an excerpt from Rosa Kriiger, a novel he wrote or began to write in those days to relieve the tedium of confinement and distract his companions, and which would only be published, unfinished, fifty years later, when its author had already been dead for a long time. It is, without doubt, his best novel and also a good novel, as well as being strange and rather atemporal, written in a Byzantine style by someone with the taste and sensibility of a Pre-Raphaelite painter, with a Europeanist vocation and a patriotic, conservative background, saturated with exquisite fantasies, exotic adventures, and a kind of melancholic sensuality across which, in a crystalline and exact prose, it recounts the battle waged in the mind of the protagonist between the two essential principles, which according to the author govern the universe the diabolical and the angelic and the final victory of the latter, incarnated in a donna angelicata called Rosa Kriiger. It's surprising that Sánchez Mazas managed to isolate himself from the obligatory and noisy promiscuity that reigned in the Embassy in order to write his book but not that the fruit of this isolation should so meticulously evade the dramatic circumstances surrounding its conception, for it would have been pointless to add to the tragedy of the war the tale of the tragedy of the war. Furthermore, the apparent contradiction, which has so preoccupied some of his readers, between Sánchez Mazas' bellicose Falangist ideas and his apolitical and aestheticizing literary task, is resolved if we admit that both are conflicting but coherent expressions of one nostalgia: for the abolished, impossible and invented world of Paradise, for the safe hierarchies of an ancien régime which the inevitable winds of history were sweeping away forever.

  As time passes and the bloodletting and desperation of the war increases, the situation in the embassies harbouring refugees in Republican Madrid gets more and more precarious, and the fear of attacks intensifies, so that anyone who has a reasonable possibility of escape prefers to run the risk of the adventure in search of a safe refuge rather than prolong the anxious uncertainty of confinement and waiting. That's what Samuel Ros does, arriving in Chile in the middle of 1937, not to return to Nationalist Spain until the following year. Encouraged by Ros's success, at some point in the autumn of 1937 Sánchez Mazas attempts to escape. He has the help of a prostitute and a young Falangist sympathizer whose family has or had a transport company, and who are acquaintances of Sánchez Mazas. His plan is to get to Barcelona and, once there, engage the help of the fifth column to make contact with the escape networks that smuggled people across the French border. They put the plan into action and, for several days, Sánchez Mazas travels by secondary roads and cart tracks, camouflaged under a load of rotting vegetables, the 600 kilometres between him and Barcelona in the company of the prostitute and the young Falangist. Miraculously, they make it past all the control posts and arrive safe and sound at their destination, with no setbacks more serious than a blown-out tyre and getting the fright of their lives from a dog with an overly sensitive nose. The three travellers separate in Barcelona, and Sánchez Mazas is received, just as planned, by a lawyer who belongs to the JMB, one of the numerous, unconnected Falangist factions the fifth column have scattered throughout the city. After granting him a few days rest, the members of the JMB urge him to take command and, asserting his right as member number four of the Falange, assemble all the fifth columnist splinter groups and submit them to party discipline, obliging them to coordinate their activities. Perhaps because his only preoccupation up to that moment has been to get out of the red zone and cross over into Nationalist territory, or simply because he knows himself incapable of action, the offer surprises him, and he refuses outright on the grounds of his complete ignorance of the situation in the city and the groups operating within it; but the members of the JMB, who are as young and bold as they are inexperienced, and who greeted his arrival as a gift from providence, insist, and he has no choice but to accept.

  Over the following days Sánchez Mazas meets with representatives of other fifth-column factions and one morning, on his way to the Iberia, a bar in the city centre where the owner is a sympathizer of the Nationalist cause, he is arrested by military intelligence agents. This is 29 November 1937; versions of what happens next differ. There are those who maintain that Father Isidoro Martin, who had been Sánchez Mazas' professor at the Maria Cristina Royal College at El Escorial, intercedes in vain on his behalf, to Manuel Azana, who had also been a student of his at that school. Julián de Zugazagoitia, whom at the end of the war Sánchez Mazas unsuccessfully tried to save from the firing squad, affirms that he proposed to President Negrín that they exchange him for the journalist Federico Angulo, and that Azana hinted at the expediency of swapping the writer for some compromising manuscripts of his own that were in seditious hands. Another version maintains that Sánchez Mazas didn't even make it as far as Barcelona, because after leaving the Chilean Embassy he sought refuge in the Polish one, which was attacked, and that was when Azorín intervened to spare him a death sentence. There are even those who claim Sánchez Mazas actually was swapped at some point during the war. These last two hypotheses are erroneous; almost certainly the first two are not. However it happened, the truth is that, after being arrested by the SIM, Sánchez Mazas was sent to the Uruguay, a ship anchored in the port of Barcelona and converted into a floating prison earlier in the war, and later taken to the Palace of Justice, where he was tried along with other fifth columnists. During the trial he was accused of being the Commander-in-Chief of the fifth column in Barcelona, which was false, and of incitement to rebellion, which was true. However, unlike most of the rest of the accused, Sánchez Mazas was not condemned to death. This is puzzling; perhaps only another intervention from afar by Indalecio Prieto can explain it.

  Once the trial is over, Sánchez Mazas is returned to the Uruguay, and passes the following months in one of its cells. The living conditions are not good: food is scarce; the treatment brutal. News of the war is also scarce, but as it progresses, even the prisoners on the Uruguay understand that Franco's victory is near. On 24 January 1939, two days before Yagüe's troops enter Barcelona, he's awakened by an unusual sound, and before long notices the jailers' nervousness. For a moment he thinks they're going to release him; then he thinks they're going to shoot him. He spends the morning lurching between these two agonizing alternatives. At about three in the afternoon a SIM agent orders him out of his cell, off the boat and onto a bus parked on the dock, where another fourteen prisoners from the Uruguay and the Vallmajor checa are waiting, along with the sixteen SIM agents in charge of their custody. Among the prisoners are two women, Sabina González de Carranceja and Juana Aparicio Pérez del Pulgar; also among them is José Maria Poblador, an early leader of the JONS and important player in the putsch of July 1936, and Jesus Pascual Aguilar, one of the leaders of the Barcelona fifth column. What no one can know at this moment is that of all the male prisoners making up the convoy, by the end of the week only Sánchez Mazas, Pascual and Poblador will still be alive. Silently the bus crosses Barcelona, which has been changed by the terror of exodus and the wintry sky into a ghostly desolation of boarded-up windows and balconies, and wide ashen avenues with the disorderly air of an abandoned refugee camp, and traversed only, if at all, by furtive transients who gnash their teeth like wolves looking hungry and ready to flee as they pass craters in the pavement, protected from adversity and from the glacial wind only by threadbare overcoats. Upon leaving Barcel
ona by the road to exile, the spectacle turns apocalyptic: an avalanche of men and women, old people and children, soldiers and civilians together, carrying clothing, mattresses and household goods, advancing laboriously with the unmistakable trudge of the defeated or riding on carts or mules of despair, the road and ditches overflowing with people strewn intermittently with corpses of animals with their guts exposed or abandoned vehicles. The caravan crawls forward interminably. Sometimes it stops; sometimes, with a mixture of disbelief, hatred and immeasurable weariness, someone stares hard at the occupants of the bus, envying their comfort and shelter, ignorant of their firing squad fate; every now and then someone hurls an insult. Sometimes, as well, a Nationalist airplane flies over the road and spits out a few bursts of machine-gun fire or drops a bomb, provoking a panicked stampede among the refugees and a faint hope among the prisoners on the bus, who at some point even cherish the illusion — soon belied by the strict watch the SIM agents keep over them — that they could take advantage of the chaos of an attack to escape across the countryside.

  The night is black by the time they make their way through Gerona and later Banyoles. Then they turn off on a dirt road that snakes its way through shadowy woods and eventually stop before a stretch of stone wall dotted with lights, like a colossal galleon capsized in the middle of the darkness, which is polluted by the jailers' barked orders. It is the Sanctuary of Santa Maria del Collell. Sánchez Mazas will spend five days there together with the other two thousand prisoners from what remains of Republican Spain, including several deserters from the reds and several members of the International Brigades. Before the war the monastery had been a boarding school where the brothers taught secondary students in classrooms with enormously high ceilings and gigantic windows overlooking earth-floored courtyards and gardens lined with cypresses, where there were long, low corridors and vertiginous staircases with wooden handrails; now the boarding school has been converted into a prison, the classrooms into cells, and in the patios, corridors and staircases the adolescent hubbub of the boarders no longer echoes, instead just the hopeless footsteps of the incarcerated. The prison governor is a man called Monroy, the same one who ruled the prison-ship Uruguay with an iron hand; however, at Collell the prison regime is less strict: it is not forbidden to speak to those who serve the food nor with those met in the coming and going from the lavatories; the food is still foul and scant, but sometimes a furtive cigarette appears in a cell, and is eagerly shared round. The cell Sánchez Mazas occupies is on the top floor of the old boarding school, and it's bright and spacious; along with him and several International Brigadistas who speak no intelligible language, it is occupied by the doctor Fernando de Marimón, the naval captain Gabriel Martín Morito, Father Guiu, Jesús Pascual and José Maria Poblador, who can hardly walk because his legs are covered in boils. On the second day the Brigadistas are released and their places taken by Nationalist prisoners captured at Teruel and Belchite; the cell fills up. Sometimes they let them go out and walk around the courtyard or in the gardens; they are not guarded by SIM agents or Carabineros (although the monastery swarms with both): they are guarded by soldiers as malnourished and ragged as themselves, who make jokes or hum popular songs between their teeth as they kick the garden stones in boredom or watch them indifferently. The hours of confinement and inactivity foster intrigue: given the nearness of the border, and especially from the moment a big shot like Sánchez Mazas joined the string of prisoners, many cherish the hope of being exchanged before long, a hypothesis that weakens as time goes on. The hours they share also give rise to the consolation of friendship. As if magically foreseeing that he'd be one of the survivors of the confinement, and the only one who, years later, will tell the horror of those final hours in a meticulous and Manichean book, Sánchez Mazas became especially friendly with Pascual, who only knew of him from reading his articles in F.E., and to whom Sánchez Mazas recounted his odyssey through the war: he tells him about the Modelo prison, about the birth of his son Maximo, about the uncertain days following the uprising, about In-dalecio Prieto and the Chilean Embassy, about Samuel Ros and Rosa Krüger, about his clandestine trip across enemy Spain in a delivery truck in the company of a rich kid and a prostitute, about Barcelona and the JMB and the fifth column and his trial and finally about the prison-ship Uruguay.

  At dusk on the 29th, Sánchez Mazas, Pascual and his cellmates are taken to the roof of the monastery, a place they've never been before and where they are assembled with other prisoners, 500 in total, maybe more. Pascual knows some of them — Pedro Bosch Labnis, Viscount Bosch Labriis and airforce captain Emilio Leucona — but barely manages to exchange a few words with them before a Carabinero immediately orders silence and begins to read out a list of names. Because the hope of a prisoner swap comes to mind again, as soon as he hears the name of someone he knows Pascual desires heart and soul to be included in the list, but, without any precise reason for this shift in opinion, by the time the Carabinero pronounces his name — shortly after that of Sánchez Mazas and immediately following Bosch Labrús — he has already regretted formulating this wish. The twenty-five men who have been named, among whom are all of Sánchez Mazas and Pascual's cellmates except Fernando de Marimon, are taken to a cell on the first floor where there are only a few desks pushed against the crumbling walls and a blackboard with patriotic historical dates scribbled in chalk. The door closes behind them and an ominous silence falls, soon broken by someone declaring that they are about to be exchanged and who manages to distract the anguish of a few of them with the discussion of a conjecture that fades away after a while to make room for unanimous pessimism. Sitting at a desk at one end of the cell, before the evening meal Father Guiu hears the confession of some of the prisoners, and then prepares communion. No one sleeps that night: lit by a grey stoney light that comes in through the window, giving their faces a hint of their future cadaverous appearance (although as time passes the grey thickens and the darkness becomes real), the prisoners stay awake listening through the wall to noises in the corridor or seeking illusory comfort in memories or in a last conversation. Sánchez Mazas and Pascual are stretched out on the floor, leaning their backs against the cold wall, their legs covered by one insufficient blanket; neither of them will remember exactly what they talked about during that scant night, but both will recall the long silences punctuating their secret meeting, the whispers of their companions and the sound of their sleepless coughing, the rain falling, indifferent, assiduous, black and freezing on the paving stones in the courtyard and the cypresses in the garden; and it keeps falling until dawn of 30 January slowly changes the darkness of the windows for the sickly whitish, ghostly colour that stains the atmosphere in the cell like a premonition at the moment the jailer orders them out.

  No one has slept, everyone seems to have been awaiting that moment and, as if drawn by the urgency of resolving the uncertainty, they obey with somnambulant diligence and gather in the courtyard with another similar-sized group of prisoners, to bring the number to fifty. They wait a few minutes, docile, silent and soaked, under a fine rain and a sky thick with clouds, and finally a young man appears in whose indistinct features Sánchez Mazas recognizes the indistinct features of the warden of the Uruguay. He tells them they are going to be put to work at an aviation camp under construction in Banyoles and orders them to form into ten lines, five deep; while obeying, unthinkingly taking the first place on the right in the second line, Sánchez Mazas feels his heart bolt: in the grip of panic, he realizes the aviation camp can only be an excuse — senseless to build one with the Nationalist troops launching a definitive offensive a few kilometres away. He begins to walk at the head of the group, unhinged and shaking, unable to think clearly, absurdly searching the blank faces of the armed soldiers lining the road for a sign or a glimmer of hope, trying in vain to convince himself that at the end of that journey what awaited him was something other than death. Beside him, or behind him, someone is trying to justify or explain something he doesn't hear or d
oesn't understand, because every step he takes absorbs all his attention, as if it might be his last; beside him or behind him, the sickly legs of José Maria Poblador say, Enough, and the prisoner collapses in a puddle and is helped up and dragged back to the monastery by two soldiers. A hundred and fifty metres on from this, the group turns left, leaves the road and goes up into the forest along a path of chalky soil that opens out into a clearing: a wide expanse surrounded by pine trees. From out of the woods booms a military voice ordering them to halt and face left. Terror seizes the group, which stops in its tracks; almost all its members automatically turn to the left, but dread confuses the instinct of others who, like Captain Gabriel Martín Morito, turn to the right. For an instant, which feels eternal, Sánchez Mazas thinks he's going to die. He thinks the bullets that are going to kill him will come from behind his back, which is where the commanding voice had come from, and that, before he dies from bullets hitting him, they'll have to hit the four men lined up behind him. He thinks he's not going to die, that he's going to escape. He thinks that he can't escape to the back because the shots will come from there; nor to his left, because he'd run back out to the road and the soldiers; nor ahead, because he'd have to jump over a wall of eight utterly terrified men. But (he thinks) he can escape towards the right, where no more than six or seven metres away a dense thicket of pines and undergrowth holds a promise of hiding. To the right, he thinks. And he thinks: Now or never. At that moment several machine guns stationed behind the group, exactly where the commander's voice had come from, begin to sweep the clearing; trying to protect themselves, the prisoners instinctively seek the ground. By then Sánchez Mazas has reached the thicket, he runs between pines that scratch his face with the pitiless clatter of the machine guns still ringing in his ears, finally trips providentially and is flung, rolling over mud and wet leaves, into the ravine at the edge of the plateau, landing in a swampy ditch at the mouth of a stream. Because he rightly imagines that his pursuers imagine him trying to get as far away from them as possible, he decides to shelter there, relatively close to the clearing — cringing, panting, soaking wet and with his heart pounding in his throat, covering himself as best he can with leaves and mud and pine boughs, hearing his unfortunate companions receiving coups de grâce — and then the barking of the dogs and the shouts of the Carabineros urging the soldiers to find the fugitive or fugitives (because Sánchez Mazas doesn't yet know that, infected by his irrational impulse to abscond, Pascual has also managed to escape the massacre). For a length of time he has no idea whether to measure in minutes or hours, while he scratches ceaselessly at the ground to cover himself in mud till his fingernails are bleeding and hopes that the incessant rain will prevent the dogs from finding his trail, Sánchez Mazas keeps hearing shouts and barks and shots, until at some moment he senses something shift behind him and urgently turns around, cringing like a cornered rat.