Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  That happened on the Thursday night; the next day the Nationalists arrived. Since Tuesday the last military convoys had been passing continually and they had heard explosion after explosion as the Republicans — blowing up bridges, cutting communications — tried to protect their retreat; and so Sánchez Mazas and his three companions spent the whole of Friday morning impatiently keeping watch over the highway from their observatory in the field, until just after noon they spotted the first Nationalist scouts. The group erupted with joy. However, before going to meet their liberators, Sánchez Mazas convinced them to accompany him to Mas Borrell to thank Maria Ferré and her family, and when they arrived at Mas Borrell they found Maria Ferré's father and her mother, but not Maria Ferré. She clearly remembers at noon on that day, from a spot not far from where Sánchez Mazas and his companions were, she had also seen the first Nationalist troops go by and after a while a neighbour had come to tell her on behalf of her parents that she should go back home, because there were soldiers in her house. Slightly worried, Maria started walking alongside her neighbour, but she calmed down when her neighbour told her that the lads from Can Pigem were amongst the soldiers. Although she'd not exchanged more than four words with Pere or Joaquim, she'd known them all her life, and as soon as she saw the younger Figueras in the farmyard, chatting with Angelats, she recognized him immediately. In the kitchen were Pere and Sánchez Mazas with her parents; euphoric, Sánchez Mazas embraced her, lifted her up in the air, kissed her. Then he told the Ferrés what had happened during the days they'd had no news of him, and showering Angelats and the Figueras brothers with words of praise and gratitude, he said:

  'Now we're friends.' Neither Maria nor Joaquim Figueras remember, but Angelats does: it was at this moment when, according to him, Sánchez Mazas pronounced, for the first time, the words he would repeat many times in the years to come and that until the ends of their lives would resonate in the memories of the lads who helped him survive, the words that had the adventurous ring of a secret password: 'The forest friends'. And, again according to Angelats, he added with a touch of solemnity: 'One day I'll tell the whole story in a book; it'll be called Soldiers of Salamis!

  Before leaving, he reiterated his eternal gratitude to the Ferrés for having harboured him, and begged them not to hesitate to get in touch with him if there was ever anything they thought he might be able to help them with, and by way of a safe-conduct, in case they had any problems with the new authorities, he wrote down plainly on a piece of paper what they'd done for him. Then they left, and from the back door Maria and her parents watched them go off down the dirt track in the direction of Cornellá, Sánchez Mazas in the lead — tall and proud like a captain in charge of the negligible, elated, shabby remains of his victorious troops — Joaquim and Angelats escorting him, and Pere a little further back and almost downcast, as if he wasn't entirely sharing the joy of the others but would battle with all his strength so as not to be excluded from it. Over the following years, Maria would write to Sánchez Mazas many times and he would always answer in his own handwriting. Sánchez Mazas' letters no longer exist, because Maria, on the advice of her mother, who for some reason feared they might compromise her, eventually destroyed them. As for her own letters, the secretary of the Banyoles Town Hall wrote them for her, and in them she asked for relatives, friends or acquaintances to be released from prison, which they almost invariably were; so over the years she was endowed with a saint's halo, or made into a fairy godmother to the desperate people of the region, whose families came in search of protection for the indiscriminate victims of a post-war period that in those days no one could have imagined would last so long. Other than her family, no one else knew that the source of those favours wasn't a secret lover of Maria's, or a supernatural power she'd always had but hadn't thought appropriate to use until now, but rather a fugitive beggar she'd offered a little hot food one day at dawn and whom, after that mid-morning in February when he disappeared down the dirt track in the company of the Figueras brothers and Angelats, she never saw again in her entire life.

  Sánchez Mazas spent some time at Can Pigem waiting for transportation to take him back to Barcelona. They were very happy days. Although in some parts of Spain the war continued its course, for him and for his companions it was over, and the terrible memory of those months of uncertainty, captivity and the proximity of death reinforced his euphoria, as did the anticipation of his imminent reunion with his family and friends and with the new country he'd decisively contributed to forging. Eager to ingratiate itself with the new authorities — and the new authorities being eager to ingratiate themselves with the people — that militantly Republican region celebrated the entrance of the Nationalists in style, with feasts and fairs never lacking the presence of Sánchez Mazas and his three companions, still dressed in their Popular Army uniforms and carrying their long-barrelled nine-millimetre pistols, but especially protected by the intimidating presence of the hierarch, who a little ironically but unfailingly introduced them as his personal guard. This period of cheerful impunity ended for them the morning that a lieutenant of a column of regulars burst into Can Pigem, announcing that a car leaving immediately for Barcelona had a free seat for Sánchez Mazas. Without even time to take his leave of the Figueras or Angelats families, Sánchez Mazas managed to hand Pere the notebook with the green covers where, as well as the diary of his days in the forest, he'd put down in writing the bond of gratitude that would always unite them, and Joaquim Figueras and Daniel Angelats remember very well that the last words they heard him say, reaching out a hand to wave goodbye from the window of the car that was already on its way down the Gerona highway, were:

  'We'll meet again!'

  But Sánchez Mazas was mistaken: he never saw Pere or Joaquim Figueras again, nor Daniel Angelats. However, and although Sánchez Mazas never came to find out, Daniel Angelats and Joaquim Figueras did see him again.

  It happened several months later, in Zaragoza. Sánchez Mazas was then a completely different man from the one they'd known. Driven by the momentum of the liberation, in those days he was tirelessly active: he'd visited Barcelona, Burgos, Salamanca, Bilbao, Rome, San Sebastián; everywhere he was the object of lavish hospitality, celebrating his liberty and incorporation into Nationalist Spain as if it were a triumph of incalculable value to its future; everywhere he wrote articles, gave interviews, lectures, speeches and radio broadcasts where he'd make veiled allusions to episodes during his long period in custody and where, with a cohesive faith, he placed himself at the service of the new regime. Nevertheless, from the day after he left Can Pigem and began visiting the office of Dionisio Ridruejo (Chief of Press and Propaganda for the rebels) where he regularly met with his intellectual Falangist comrades, both new and old, Sánchez Mazas could have sensed, in and among the triumphalist atmosphere of superficial fraternity, the suspicions and mistrust among the victors that Franco's guile and three years of conspiratorial secret meetings in the rearguard had caused. He could have sensed it, but he didn't — or didn't want to. This is easily explained: having recently recovered his liberty, Sánchez Mazas thought everything had turned out perfectly, because he couldn't imagine that the reality of Franco's Spain differed one iota from his desires; that was not the case for some of his old Falangist comrades. Ever since the proclamation on 19 April 1937 of the Decree of Unification, a veritable coup d'etat in reverse (as Ridruejo would call it years later), by which all political forces that had joined the Uprising came to be integrated in one single party under the command of the Generalisimo, the old guard of the Falange began to suspect the fascist revolution they'd dreamt of was never going to happen. In fact the expeditious cocktail of its doctrine which blended, in a brilliant, demagogic and impossible amalgam, both the preservation of certain traditional values with the urgency for profound change in the social and economic structures of the country, and the terror the middle classes felt of the proletarian revolution with a vitalist Nietzschean irrationalism, which, faced with inherent
bourgeois prudence, advocated the romance of living dangerously would eventually be diluted into sanctimonious, predictable, conservative slop. By 1937, beheaded by José Antonio's death, domesticated as an ideology and annulled as an apparatus of power, the Falange, with its rhetoric and its rites and the rest of its external fascist manifestations, was already available to Franco to use as an instrument to bring his regime into line with Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy (from which he'd received and was receiving and still hoped to receive so much aid), but Franco could also use it, as José Antonio had foreseen and feared years before, 'as a mere auxiliary shock element, like an assault guard of reaction, like a youthful militia destined to parade before the upraised bigheads in power'. Everything conspired in those years to dilute the original Falange, from the orthopaedic use Franco made of it, to the crucial fact that over the course of the war not only did those who shared its ideology to a fair degree join on a massive scale but also those who sought, within its ranks, to hide their Republican pasts. Things being as they were, the choice that sooner or later many 'old shirts' had to face was clear: denounce the flagrant discrepancy between their political project and that governing the new state, or coexist as comfortably as they could with this contradiction and apply themselves to scraping up even the tiniest crumbs from the banquet of power. Of course, between these two extremes the intermediate positions were almost infinite; but the truth of the matter is that, in spite of so much invented honesty professed after the fact, except for Ridruejo a man who erred many times, but who was almost always unsullied and brave and pure as pure almost no one opted openly for the first.

  Naturally, Sánchez Mazas did not. Not right after the war finished, or ever. But on 9 April 1939, eighteen days before Pere Figueras and his eight comrades from Cornellá de Terri were imprisoned in Gerona and the same day that Ramon Serrano Suner — at the time Minister of the Interior, Franco's brother-in-law and the Falangists' principal sentinel in government — organized and presided over an act of homage to Sánchez Mazas in Zaragoza, he still had no serious reason to imagine that the country he had aspired to create was not the same as the one the new regime aspired to create; much less did he suspect that Joaquim Figueras and Daniel Angelats were also in Zaragoza. As a matter of fact, they had spent barely a month in the city, where they'd been sent to fulfil their military service, when they heard on the radio that Sánchez Mazas had been staying in the Grand Hotel since the previous day and that night he was going to give a speech to the top brass of the Aragónese Falange. In part out of curiosity, but mostly driven by hope that Sánchez Mazas' influence could do something to relieve the rigours of their privates' barracks regime, Figueras and Angelats showed up at the Grand Hotel and told a porter they were friends of Sánchez Mazas and would like to see him. Figueras still remembers that placid, corpulent porter very well, with his blue frock coat with tassels and fancy gold fastenings gleaming under the foyer's crystal chandeliers, amid the constant coming and going of uniformed hierarchs, and especially his expression halfway between sarcasm and disbelief as he looked over their miserable uniforms and irredeemably rustic appearance. Finally, the porter told them that Sánchez Mazas was in his room, resting, and that he wasn't authorized to disturb him or to let them through.

  'But you lads can wait for him here,' he spoke down to them with a twinge of cruelty, pointing at some chairs. 'When he comes down, break through the cordon the Falangists will form and greet him: if he recognizes you, great, but if he doesn't recognize you . . .' smiling grimly, he ran his index finger across his throat.

  'We'll wait,' Figueras proudly parried, dragging Angelats over to a chair.

  They waited for almost two hours, but as the time passed they felt more and more intimidated by the porter's warning, the unheard-of sumptuousness of the hotel, the asphyxiating fascist paraphernalia with which it was decorated, and by the time the foyer finally filled up with military greetings and blue shirts and red berets, Figueras and Angelats had given up on their original intention and decided to go straight back to the barracks without approaching Sánchez Mazas. They hadn't yet left the foyer when a Falangist guard of honour formed between the stairway and the revolving door and blocked their way and, a little later, allowed them a brief glimpse for the last time in their lives, gliding along with the projected martial manner of a condottiere among a sea of red berets and a forest of raised arms, of the unmistakable Jewish profile of that man, his prestige now enhanced by the prosopopeia of power — who three months before, diminished by rags and unseeing eyes, by exhaustion, privations and fear, had implored their help in a remote and empty field — and who could now never repay that wartime favour to two of his forest friends.

  The Zaragoza function, during which he delivered his 'Saturday of Glory' speech in which, undoubtedly because he already sensed the danger of defections, he exasperatedly called his Falangist comrades to discipline and blind obedience to the Caudillo — was just one more of Sánchez Mazas' numerous public contributions during those months. Since Ledesma Ramos, José Antonio and Ruiz de Alda had been shot at the beginning of the war, Sánchez Mazas was the most senior living member of the Falange; this, added to his brotherly friendship with José Antonio and the crucial role he'd had in the early Falange, gave him an enormous influence over his colleagues in the party, and persuaded Franco to treat him with the greatest consideration, to win his loyalty and to smooth over the bitterness that had arisen in his relationship with some of the less accommodating Falangists. The culmination of this simple yet extremely effective strategy of recruitment, similar in every respect to a bribe of perks and praises — a method, it's worth noting, the Caudillo wielded like a virtuoso and to which a good part of his interminable monopoly of power can be attributed — took place in August 1939, when, in putting together the first post-war government, Sánchez Mazas, who since May had occupied the position of National Delegate of the Falange Exterior, was named Minister Without Portfolio. This was not, of course, an exclusive occupation, or he didn't take it very seriously; in any case, he knew how to fulfil it without any prejudice to his recaptured vocation as a writer: during that time he published frequently in newspapers and journals, attended literary gatherings and gave public readings, and in February 1940 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, along with his friend Eugenio Montes, as 'spokesman for the poetry and revolutionary language of the Falange', according to the daily newspaper ABC. Sánchez Mazas was a vain man, but not stupid, so his vanity did not overrule his pride: aware that his election to the Academy obeyed political rather than literary motives, he never actually delivered his acceptance speech for admission into the institution. Other factors must have had a hand in this gesture that everyone has chosen to interpret, not without reason, as an elegant sign of the writer's disdain for mundane glories. Although it too has always been seen as such, it is a riskier proposition attributing the same significance to one of the episodes that contributed most to endowing Sánchez Mazas' figure with the aristocratic aureole of unconcern and indolence that surrounded him till his death.

  The legend, proclaimed to the four winds by the most diverse sources, has it that one day in July 1940, during a full Council of Ministers, Franco, fed up with Sánchez Mazas not showing up for those meetings, pointed at the writer's empty seat, and said: 'Please get that chair out of here.' Two weeks later, Sánchez Mazas was sacked, which (still according to legend) didn't seem to bother him too much. The causes of the dismissal were not clear. Some allege that Sánchez Mazas, whose position as Minister Without Portfolio lacked real content, was supremely bored by ministerial councils, because he was incapable of taking interest in bureaucratic and administrative affairs, which are what absorb the majority of a politician's time. Others maintain that it was Franco who was supremely bored by the erudite disquisitions on the most eccentric subjects (the causes of the defeat of the Persian fleet in the battle of Salamis, say; or the correct use of the jack plane) that Sánchez Mazas inflicted on him,
and therefore decided to do without that inefficient, outlandish and untimely man of letters who played a virtually ornamental role in the government. There are even those who, whether out of innocence or bias, attribute Sánchez Mazas' idleness to disenchantment as a Falangist loyal to the authentic ideals of the party. All agree that he offered his resignation on several occasions, and that it was never accepted until his repeated absences from ministerial meetings, always justified by exotic excuses, made it a fait accompli. No matter which way you look at it, the legend is flattering to Sánchez Mazas, since it contributed to creating his image as an upright man, reluctant for the trappings of power. It is, most likely, false.

  The journalist Carlos Sentís, who was his personal secretary during that period, maintains that the writer stopped attending the ministerial councils simply because he stopped being summoned to them. According to Sentís, certain inconvenient or extemporaneous declarations concerning the Gibraltar problem, along with the ill will the then all-powerful Serrano Sufier bore him, provoked his fall from grace. This version of events is reliable, to my mind, not only because Sentís was the person closest to Sánchez Mazas in the single year he lasted in the ministry, but also because it seems reasonable that Serrano Súñer would see in the tactlessness of Sánchez Mazas — who had conspired against him more than once to gain Franco's favour, just as he had in years gone by against Gimenez Caballero to gain that of José Antonio — a perfect excuse to free himself of someone who, in his position as most senior 'old shirt', could represent a threat to his authority and erode his ascendancy over the orthodox Falangists and the Caudillo himself. Sentís claims that, as a result of his dismissal, Sánchez Mazas was confined for months in his house in the suburb of Viso a cottage on Serrano Street he'd bought years before with his friend the Communist José Bergamin and which still belongs to the family and deprived of his ministerial salary. His economic situation was getting ever more desperate, and in December, when they lifted the house arrest without any explanation, he decided to travel to Italy to ask for help from his wife's family. On his way he stayed at Sentís' house in Barcelona. Sentís doesn't retain an exact memory of those days, nor of Sánchez Mazas' state of mind, but he does recall that on Christmas day, just after the family celebrations, the writer received a providential telephone call from a relative, telling him that his aunt Julia Sánchez had just died and left him in her will a vast fortune including a mansion and several estates in Coria, in the province of Cáceres.