Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  'You used to be a writer and a politician, Rafael,' Agustin de Foxa said to him around this time. 'Now you're just a millionaire.' Foxa was a writer and a politician and a millionaire, and one of the few friends Sánchez Mazas didn't end up losing over time. He was also a clever man, and as so often happens with clever men, he was often right. It's true that, after receiving his aunt's inheritance, Sánchez Mazas held various political posts from member of the Leadership Council of the Falange through to Deputy Member of Parliament, by way of President of the Patrons' Association of the Prado Museum but it's also true they were always secondary or decorative and barely took up his time and that from the middle of the forties he began to give them up as if shedding an annoying burden, and little by little, as time went by, he disappeared from public life. This does not mean, however, that Sánchez Mazas in the forties and fifties was a kind of silent opponent to Franco's government; he undoubtedly scorned the intellectual shoddiness and the mediocrity the regime had imposed on Spanish life, but he didn't feel uncomfortable in it, nor did he hesitate to proffer in public the most embarrassing dithyrambs to the tyrant and even, if it came to that, to his wife —though in private he flayed them for their stupidity and bad taste and nor, of course, did he lament having contributed with all his might to inciting a war which razed a legitimate republic and failed to replace it with the terrible regime of poets and renaissance condottieri he'd dreamt of, but rather with a simple government of rogues, rustics and sanctimonious goody-goodies. 'I neither regret nor forget,' he famously wrote, by hand, in the full page frontispiece of Foundation, Brotherhood and Destiny, a book where he reprinted some of his bellicose articles of Falangist doctrine that in the thirties he'd published in Arriba and F.E. The phrase is from the spring of 1957; the date compels reflection. Madrid was then still in the grip of the backlash after the first great internal crisis of Francoism, stemming from an alliance, unexpected but in fact inevitable, between two groups Sánchez Mazas knew very well, because he lived with them on a daily basis. On one side, the young left-wing intelligentsia, an important part of which had arisen from the disillusioned ranks of the Falange itself and was made up of rebellious scions of notorious families of the regime, among them two of Sánchez Mazas' sons: Miguel, the first-born, one of the ring-leaders of the student rebellion of 1956—who in February of that year was j ailed and shortly afterwards left to a long exile — and Rafael, Sánchez Mazas' favourite, who had just published Eljarama, the novel in which the aesthetics and intellectual restlessness of those dissident youths came together; on the other side, a few 'old shirts' —among whom, in the front line, was Dionisio Ridruejo, an old friend of Sánchez Mazas, who had been arrested along with his son Miguel, and other student leaders from the anti-Franco outcry of the previous year, and in that same year, 1957, founded the social-democratic Social Party of Democratic Action — old Falangists from the early days who had perhaps not forgotten their political past, but who doubtless did regret it and were even undertaking, with more or less determination or courage, to combat the regime they had helped to bring about. I neither regret nor forget. Since emphatic loyalty so often denounces the traitor, there are some who suspect that if Sánchez Mazas wrote such a thing at such a time, it was precisely because, like some of his José Antonian comrades, he did regret — or at least partially regretted, and was trying to forget — or at least he was trying to partially forget. The conjecture is attractive, but false; in every case, apart from the secret disdain with which he contemplated the regime, not a single particular of his biography endorses it. 'If there's one thing I hate the Communists for, Your Excellency,' Foxa once said to Franco, 'it's for obliging me to join the Falange.' Sánchez Mazas would never have said such a thing — too irreverent, too ironic — and much less in the presence of the General, but it undoubtedly goes for him too. Perhaps Sánchez Mazas was never more than a false Falangist, or else a Falangist who was only one because he felt obliged to be one — if all Falangists weren't false and obligatory ones, deep down never entirely believing that their ideology was anything other than a desperate measure in confusing times, an instrument destined to succeed in changing something in order that nothing change; I mean, had it not been because, like many of his comrades, he felt a real threat looming over his loved ones' sleep of bourgeois beatitude, Sánchez Mazas would never have stooped to getting involved in politics, nor would he have applied himself to forging the blazing rhetoric of the clash needed to inflame to victory the squad of soldiers charged with saving civilization. Sánchez Mazas identified civilization with the securities, privileges and hierarchies of his own people and the Falange with Spengler's squad of soldiers; but he also felt pride in having formed part of that squad and, perhaps, the right to rest after having restored hierarchies, securities and privileges. That's why it's doubtful he would have wanted to forget anything, and certain that he regretted nothing.

  So, strictly speaking, it cannot be claimed that Sánchez Mazas was a politician during the post-war period; it would seem more contentious to maintain, as does clever Foxá, that nor was he a writer. Because it's true that in these years, as the political activity decreased, the literary increased: in the two decades following the war, novels, short stories, essays and theatre adaptations came out under his name, as well as innumerable articles appearing in Arriba, La Tarde, and ABC. Some of these articles are exceptional, finely crafted verbal jewels, and certain books he published then, like The New Life of Pedrito de Andía (1951) and The Waters of Arbeloa and OtherMatters (1956), figure among the best of his oeuvre. And yet it is also true that, although between the mid-forties and the mid-fifties he occupied a pre-eminent place in Spanish literature, he never bothered about having a literary career (an effort, like that of a political career, he always thought beneath the dignity of a gentleman), and as time went on he practised, with increasing skill, the subtle art of concealment, to the point where, for five years starting in 1955, he signed his ABC articles with three enigmatic asterisks. As to the rest, his social life was confined to assiduously keeping up with the few friends who, like Ignacio Agusti or Mariano Gomez Santos, had managed to survive the excesses of his character and, from the beginning of the fifties, the very occasional visit to the literary circle that Cesar González-Ruano brought together at the Café Comercial at the Glorieta de Bilbao in Madrid. González-Ruano, who knew him well, at that time saw Sánchez Mazas 'as a great amateur, like a senior gentleman of letters, like a great, unmatched Senor who hadn't ever needed to make a profession of his vocations, but rather wrote verse and prose exercises during his vacations'.

  In other words, Foxa was probably right after all: from the end of the war until his death, perhaps Sánchez Mazas was not essentially anything except a millionaire. A millionaire without many millions, languid and a bit decadent, given over to slightly extravagant passions clocks, botany, magic, astrology and the no less extravagant passion for literature. He divided his time between the mansion in Coria, where he spent long spells of vie en chateau, the Hotel Velasquez in Madrid, and the cottage in the suburb Viso, surrounded by cats, Italian flagstones, travel books, Spanish paintings and French engravings, with a big drawing room dominated by a fireplace, and a garden full of rose-bushes. He'd get up about midday and, after lunch, write until supper time; nights, which often stretched till dawn, he spent reading. He left the house very rarely; he smoked a lot. Probably by then he no longer believed in anything. Probably in his heart, never in his life had he truly believed in anything, and least of all, in what he'd defended or preached. He practised politics, but deep down always scorned them. He exalted time-honoured values — loyalty, courage — but practised treachery and cowardice, and contributed more than most to the brutalization the Falange's rhetoric inflicted on these values; he also exalted old institutions — the monarchy, the family, religion, the fatherland — but didn't lift a finger to bring a king to Spain, ignored his family, often living apart from them, would have exchanged all of Catholicism for a single canto of the
Divine Comedy and as for the fatherland, well, no one knows what the fatherland is, or maybe it's simply an excuse for venality or sloth. Those who had dealings with him in his later years recall that he often remembered the vicissitudes of the war and the firing squad at Collell. 'It's incredible how much one learned in those few seconds of the execution,' he told a journalist in 1959, to whom, nevertheless, he did not reveal the learning he'd gained from the imminence of death. Perhaps he was no more than a survivor, and that's why at the end of his life he liked to imagine himself as a failed, autumnal gentleman, like someone who, having been capable of great things, had done almost nothing. 'I have but only in the most mediocre way measured up to the hope placed in me and help given me,' he confessed around this time to González-Ruano, and years before a character in The New Life of Pedro de Andia seems to speak for Sánchez Mazas when he proclaims from his deathbed: 'I've never been able to finish anything in this life.' In fact, it was in this way, melancholic, defeated and futureless, that he liked to portray himself from very early on. In July 1913, in Bilbao, barely nineteen years of age, Sánchez Mazas wrote, with the title 'Under an Ancient Sun', three sonnets, the last of which goes like this:

  In my twilight years as an old libertine

  and old courtly poet

  I'd spend the evenings, in contest

  with a devout Theatine Padre.

  Increasingly gouty and ever more Catholic,

  in the manner of an antiquated gentleman,

  my impertinent and haughty genius

  turning brittle and melancholic.

  And finding to end the story

  Masses and debts in my will,

  they'll give me a charity funeral.

  And fate in its final insult

  would wreathe its immortal laurels on me

  for a Moral Epistle to Fabius!*

  I don't know if at the end of his days, fifty years after writing those words, Sánchez Mazas was an old libertine, but there's no doubt he was an old courtly poet. He was still Catholic, although only outwardly, and also an antiquated gentleman. He always had an impertinent, haughty, brittle and melancholic genius. He died one October night in 1966, of pulmonary emphysema; few people attended his funeral. He left little money and not much property. He was a writer who didn't fulfil his promise and for that reason and perhaps also because he was not worthy of it — did not write a Moral Epistle to Fabius. He was the best of the Falangist writers, leaving a handful of good poems and a handful of good prose pieces, which is much more than almost any writer can aspire to leave, but he left much less than his talent demanded, and his talent was always superior to his work. Andrés Trapiello says that, like so many Falangist writers, Sánchez Mazas won the war and lost the history of literature. The phrase is brilliant and, true in part — or at least it was, because for a while Sánchez Mazas paid for his brutal responsibility in a brutal war with oblivion but it is also true that, having won the war, perhaps Sánchez Mazas lost himself as a writer. He was a romantic after all, would he not have judged deep down all victory to be contaminated by unworthiness, and the first thing he noticed upon arriving in paradise albeit that illusory bourgeois paradise of leisure, chintz and slippers that, like a needy travesty of old privileges, hierarchies and securities, he constructed in his last years was that he could live there, but not write, because writing and plenitude are incompatible. Few people remember him today, and perhaps that's what he deserves. There's a street named after him in Bilbao.

  * En mi ocaso de viejo libertino/ y de viejo poeta cortesano/ pasaria las tardes, mano a mano,/ con un beato padre teatino./ Cada vez mas gotoso y mas catolico,/ como es guisa de rancio caballero,/ mi genio impertinente y altanero/ tornarse vidrioso y melancolico./ Y como hallasen para fin de cuento/ misas y deudas en mi testamento,/ de limosna me harfan funerales./ Y la fortuna en su postrer agravio/ cifierame sus lauros inmortales/ jpor una Epistola moral a Fabio!

  Part Three

  RENDEZVOUS IN STOCKTON

  I FINISHED WRITING Soldiers of Salamis long before the leave of absence they'd given me from the newspaper ran out. Conchi and I had dinner together two or three times a week, but otherwise in all that time I hardly saw anyone, since I spent day and night shut up in my room in front of the computer. I wrote obsessively, with a drive and tenacity I didn't know I possessed; also without being too sure of my purpose. This entailed writing a sort of biography of Sánchez Mazas which, focusing on an apparently anecdotal but perhaps essential episode in his life — his botched execution at Collell would propose an interpretation of his character and, by extension, of the nature of Falangism; or more precisely, of the motives that induced the handful of cultivated and refined men who founded the Falange to pitch the country into a furious bloodbath. Naturally, I assumed that as the book progressed, this plan would change, because books always end up taking on a life of their own, and because a person doesn't write about what he wants to write about but what he's capable of writing about. I also assumed that, although everything I'd found out about Sánchez Mazas over time was going to form the nucleus of my book, which would allow me to feel secure, a moment would arrive when I'd have to dispense with those training wheels, because — if what he writes is going to have real interest — a writer never writes about what he knows, but precisely about what he does not know.

  Neither of the two speculations were wrong, but by the middle of February, a month before my leave of absence was up, the book was finished. I read it euphorically; I reread it. At the second rereading my euphoria gave way to disappointment: the book wasn't bad, but insufficient, like a mechanism that was whole, yet incapable of performing the function for which it had been devised because it was missing a part. The worst of it was I didn't know what part it was. I revised the book thoroughly, I rewrote the beginning and the conclusion, I rewrote several episodes, I rearranged the order of others. The part, however, did not appear; the book remained hamstrung.

  I gave up. The day I made the decision I went out for dinner with Conchi, who must have noticed I wasn't myself, because she asked me what was wrong. I didn't feel like talking about it (really, I didn't feel like talking at all, or even like going out for dinner), but I ended up explaining it to her.

  'Shit!' said Conchi. 'Didn't I tell you not to write about a fascist? Those people fuck up everything they touch. What you have to do is forget all about that book and start another one. How about one on Garcia Lorca?'

  I spent the next two weeks sitting in an armchair in front of the television without turning it on. As far as I remember, I didn't think about anything, not even about my father, not even my ex-wife. Conchi visited me daily; she cleaned up the house a little, made me something to eat and once I'd gone to bed, she left. I didn't cry too much, but I couldn't help it each night when, at about ten o'clock, Conchi switched on the television to see herself dressed up as a fortune-teller on the local channel and then discuss her performance.

  It was also Conchi who convinced me that, although my leave hadn't run out and I wasn't completely recovered, I should go back to work at the paper. Perhaps because I'd spent less time away than last time, or because my expression and appearance invited more pity than sarcasm, coming back empty-handed was less humiliating on this occasion, and there were no ironic comments from the editorial staff and no one asked me anything, not even the publisher; in fact, not only didn't he make me bring him coffee from the bar on the corner (an activity for which I'd come prepared), but he didn't even punish me with any other menial task. On the contrary, as if guessing I needed a bit of fresh air, he suggested I leave the culture section and instead conduct an almost daily series of interviews with people of some prominence who, not having been born in the province, had made it their home. That was how I ended up spending several months interviewing businessmen, athletes, poets, politicians, diplomats, ambulance chasers and idlers.

  One of my first interviewees was Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño, who was a writer and from Chile, had been living for ages in Blanes, a coast
al town on the border between the provinces of Barcelona and Gerona. He was forty-seven years old, with a good number of books behind him and that unmistakable air of a hippy peddler that afflicted so many Latin-Americans of his generation exiled in Europe. When I went to see him he'd just won a considerable literary prize and was living with his wife and son in Carrer Ample, a street in the centre of Blanes where he'd bought a modernist apartment with the prize money. He opened the door to me there that morning, and we hadn't even exchanged the customary greetings when he sprang on me: