Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  'They called them concentration camps,' Miralles used to say. 'But they were nothing but death-traps.'

  And so, a few weeks after arriving at Argeles, when the enlistment flags of the French Foreign Legion appeared in the camp, Miralles signed up without a second thought. That was how he ended up in the Maghreb, some part of the Maghreb, maybe Tunisia or Algeria, Bolaño didn't quite remember. The beginning of the World War caught him out there. France fell into the hands of the Germans in June of 1940, and the majority of the French authorities in the Maghreb took the side of the puppet government at Vichy. But Leclerc, General Jacques Phillippe Leclerc, was also in the Maghreb. Leclerc refused to accept orders from Vichy and began to recruit as many people as he could, with the reckless idea of getting them to cross half of Africa under his command and reach some French overseas possession that accepted the authority of De Gaulle, who like him, though from London, had rebelled against Petain in the name of Free France.

  'Fuck, Javier!' Reclining in an armchair in the bar of the Carlemany, Bolaño looked at me mockingly or incredulous through the thick lenses of his glasses and smoke of his Ducados. 'Miralles spent his whole life cursing Leclerc, and also himself for having listened to Leclerc. Neither he nor any of the other outcasts Leclerc took for suckers had the slightest idea of where they were heading. It was a journey of several thousand kilometres across the desert, pure hell, and in much worse conditions than Miralles had left behind in Argeles and with hardly any provisions. Paris-Dakar was a joke, a fucking little Sunday stroll in comparison! It'd take real balls to do a thing like that!'

  Nevertheless, there were Miralles and his bunch of deluded volunteers urgently recruited by Leclerc's ludicrous proselytism, who, after several months of suicidal countermarches through the desert, arrived in the province of Chad, in French Equatorial Africa, where they finally made contact with De Gaulle's people. A short time after getting to Chad, together with an English detachment from Cairo and in the company of five other men from the Foreign Legion under the command of Colonel D'Ornano, Commander-in-Chief of the French forces in Chad, Miralles took part in the attack on the Italian oasis of Murzuk, in south-western Libya. The six members of the French patrol were in theory volunteers; in reality Miralles would never have participated in that raid had it not been for the fact that, since no one in his company volunteered for it, they drew lots and Miralles ended up losing. Miralles' patrol was symbolic more than anything, because after the fall of France, it was the first time a French contingent took part in an act of war against the Axis powers.

  'Just imagine, Javier,' said Bolaño, looking slightly perplexed, as if holding back laughter, and as if he himself were discovering the story (or the meaning of the story) as he told it. 'All of Europe dominated by the Nazis, and there in the back of beyond, without anyone knowing it, these four fucking Moors, a fucking black guy and this bastard of a Spaniard who made up D'Ornano's patrol raising the flag of freedom for the first time in months. Fucking incredible! And there's Miralles, shafted and shit out of luck and probably with no idea what he's doing there. But there he was.'

  Colonel D'Ornano fell at Murzuk. His post in command of the forces in Chad was covered by Leclerc, who, spurred on by the success at Murzuk, immediately launched an attack against the oasis of Koufra the most important of the Libyan desert, and also in Italian hands — with a handful of volunteers from the Foreign Legion and a handful of natives, with very few weapons and very little transport, and on 1 March 1941, after another march of more than a thousand kilometres across the desert, Leclerc and his men took Koufra. And there, naturally, was Miralles. Back in Chad, Miralles enjoyed his first weeks of rest in years, and at some point various deceptive signs led him to imagine that, after the heroic achievements of Murzuk and Koufra, the war was going to keep well away from him and his comrades for some time. That was when Leclerc had his second brilliant idea in a very short time. Convinced, and rightly so, that the war was at stake in North Africa, where Montgomery's Eighth Army was fighting against the German Afrika-Korps, he decided to try to join the English troops, carrying out the reverse of the march — from the Maghreb to Chad — that they'd carried out months earlier. Other Allied units executed the same or a similar operation at the time, but Leclerc was entirely lacking any infrastructure, so Miralles and the 3,200 men he'd managed to gather by then had to cross the thousands of kilometres of merciless desert that separated them from Tripoli once again, by foot, and in even more precarious conditions than the first time, arriving finally in January 1943, just when Rommel's troops had been expelled from the city by Montgomery's Eighth Army. Leclerc's column spent the rest of the African campaign with that corps, so Miralles fought the Germans in the offensive against the Mareth line, and later the Italians in Gabes and Sfax.

  Once the African campaign was over, Leclerc's column, integrated into the organizational structure of the Allied Army, became motorized, turning into the 2nd Armoured Division and, after being sent to England for training in the handling of American tanks, on 1 August 1944, almost two months after D-Day, Miralles disembarked on Utah beach in Normandy, operating with Hislip's XV Army Corps. Leclerc's column left immediately for the front, and during the twenty-three days the French campaign lasted for Miralles, he didn't stop fighting for an instant, especially in the region of Sarthe and in the battles that preceded the definitive isolation of the Falaise pocket. Because at that time Leclerc's was a very special unit: not only was it the only French division to fight on French soil (full though it was of Africans and Spanish veterans of the Civil War, which the name of their tanks proclaimed: Guadalajara, Zaragoza, Belchite), but it was also a division made up exclusively of volunteers, so that it couldn't count on fresh relief troops like a normal division could and when a soldier fell, his post was left empty until another volunteer came to fill it. This explains how, although no sensible commander keeps a soldier in the front line of combat for more than four or five months at a time, because the tension of the front is unbearable, when Miralles and his comrades from the Civil War stepped on the beaches of Normandy, they'd been fighting non-stop for more than seven years.

  But the war still hadn't ended for them. Leclerc's column was the first Allied contingent to enter Paris; Miralles did so by the Porte-de-Gentilly on the night of 24 August, barely an hour after the first French detachment under the command of Captain Dronne. Fifteen days had not yet passed when Leclerc's men, now integrated into de Lattre de Tassigny's Third French Army, entered combat again. The following weeks gave them not a moment's respite: they charged the Sigfried line, penetrated into Germany, and got as far as Austria. There Miralles' military adventure ended. There, on a windy winter morning he'd never forget, Miralles (or someone next to Miralles) stepped on a mine.

  'He was blown to shreds,' said Bolaño, after pausing to finish his tea, which had gone cold in the cup. 'The war in Europe was just about to end and, after eight years of combat, Miralles had seen loads of people die around him, friends and comrades from Spain, Africa, France, everywhere. His turn had come . . .' Bolaño thumped his fist down on the arm of the chair. 'His turn had come, but the bastard didn't die. They took him to the rearguard all blown to shit and put him back together again as best they could. Incredibly, he survived. And slightly over a year later, there's Miralles converted into a French citizen and with a pension for life.'

  When the war ended and he had recovered from his injuries, Miralles went to live in Dijon, or some place around Dijon, Bolaiño didn't quite remember exactly. On more than one occasion he'd asked Miralles why he'd settled there, and sometimes he answered that he'd settled there just as he might have settled anywhere, and other times he said he'd settled there because during the war he'd promised himself that, if he managed to survive, he was going to spend the rest of his life drinking fine wine, 'and so far I've kept the faith', he'd add, patting his bare and happy buddha's belly. When he used to see Miralles, Bolaño thought that neither of those answers were true; now he thought maybe they
both were. The fact is that Miralles married in Dijon (or around Dijon) and in Dijon (or around Dijon) he'd had a daughter. Her name was Maria. Bolaño met her at the campsite; at the beginning she'd come with her father every summer: he remembered an elegant, serious and strong-willed girl, 'thoroughly French', although she always spoke a Spanish dappled with guttural 'r's to her father. Bolaño also recalled that Miralles, who'd become a widower shortly after she was born, was totally soft on her: it was Maria who ran the house, Maria who gave orders which Miralles obeyed with the modest humility of a veteran used to obeying orders, and who, when the conversation went on too long at the camp bar and the wine started to make Miralles' mouth pasty and tangle up his sentences, took him by the arm and led him to the caravan, docile and stumbling, with the blurred gaze of a drinker and guilty smile of a proud father. Maria, however, only came for a short time, no more than two years (two of the four that Bolaño worked at the campsite), and then Miralles started to come to Estrella de Mar on his own. It was then that Bolaño really got to know him; that was also when Miralles started sleeping with Luz. Luz was a prostitute who worked the campsite for a few summers. Bolaño remembered her well: dark and chubby and quite young and good-looking, with a natural generosity and imperturbable common sense; perhaps she only occasionally worked as a hooker, Bolaño speculated.

  'Miralles fell for Luz really hard,' he added. 'The poor bastard would get so sad and drink himself into a stupor when she wasn't around.'

  Bolaño then remembered that one night of the last summer he spent with Miralles, while he was doing his first round, in the early hours of the morning, he heard some very soft music coming from the edge of the campsite, just beside the fence that separated it from a pinewood. More out of curiosity than to demand they turn off the music — it was playing so softly that it couldn't have disturbed anybody's sleep — he approached discreetly and saw a couple dancing in each other's arms beneath the awning of a caravan. He recognized the caravan as that of Miralles; the couple as Miralles and Luz; the music, as a very sad and very old paso doble (or that's what it seemed to Bolaño) that he'd often heard Miralles hum under his breath. Before they could sense his presence, Bolaño hid behind a caravan and spent several minutes watching them. They were dancing very close, very seriously, in silence, barefoot on the grass, wrapped in the unreal light of the moon and an old butane lantern, and Bolaño was struck most of all by the contrast between the solemnity of their movements and their attire — Miralles in his swimming trunks, as ever, old and potbellied, but marking the steps with the sure elegance of a dancehall regular, leading Luz, who perhaps because she was wearing a white blouse that reached her knees and allowed glimpses of her naked body, seemed to float like a phantom in the cool night air. Bolaiño said that at that moment, spying from behind a trailer on that old veteran of all the wars, with his body sewn up by scars and his soul bared to a sometime hooker who didn't know how to dance a paso doble, he felt a strange emotion, like a reflection of that emotion, perhaps a deceptive one, and as the couple turned, he thought he saw a sparkle in Miralles' eyes, as if just then he'd begun to cry or tried in vain to hold back his tears or maybe he'd been crying for a long time, and then Bolaño realized or imagined that his presence there was somehow obscene, that he was stealing that scene from someone and that he had to leave, and he also realized, vaguely, that his time at the campsite had come to an end, because he'd learned all he could learn there. So he lit a cigarette, looked one last time at Luz and Miralles dancing under the awning, turned and continued on his round.

  'At the end of that summer I said see you next year to Miralles as usual,' Bolaño said after a long silence, as if he were talking to himself, or rather to someone who was listening to him but who wasn't me. On the other side of the Carlemany's windows it was already night; facing me was Bolafio's cloudy, absent expression and a table with several empty glasses and an ashtray overflowing with stubbed out cigarette butts. We'd asked for the bill. 'But I knew I wouldn't go back to the campsite the following year. And I didn't go back. I never saw Miralles again.'

  I insisted on accompanying Bolaño to the station and, while he was buying a pack of Ducados for the trip, I asked him whether in all these years he'd ever heard anything more about Miralles.

  'Nothing,' he answered. 'I lost track of him, like so many people. Who knows where he is now. Maybe he still goes to the campsite; but I don't think so. He'd be over eighty, and I doubt very much if he'd be up to it. Maybe he still lives in Dijon. Or maybe he's dead, really I guess that's the most likely, no? Why do you ask?'

  'No reason,' I said.

  But it wasn't true. That afternoon, as I listened with growing interest to the exaggerated tale of Miralles, I thought that I'd soon be reading it in one of Bolaiño's exaggerated books; but when I got home, after seeing my friend off and walking through the city lit by street lamps and shop windows, and perhaps carried away by the exaltation of the gin and tonics, I had already begun to hope that Bolaño wasn't ever going to write that story: I was going to write it. I kept going over the idea in my mind all evening. While I was making dinner, while I was eating, while I washed the dishes after dinner, while I drank a glass of milk watching the television but without seeing it, I imagined a beginning and an ending, organized episodes, invented characters, mentally wrote and rewrote many sentences. Lying in bed, wide awake in the dark (only the numbers on the digital alarm clock gave off a red glow in the thick darkness of the bedroom), my head was seething, and at some moment, inevitably, because age and failure impart prudence, I tried to rein in my enthusiasm by remembering my latest disaster. That was when I thought of it. I thought of Sánchez Mazas and the firing squad and that Miralles had been one of Líster's soldiers all through the war, that he'd been with him in Madrid, in Aragón, at the Ebro, in the retreat through Catalonia. Why not at Collell?, I thought. And at that moment, with the deceptive but overwhelming clarity of insomnia, like someone who finds, by unbelievable chance, having already given up the search (because a person never finds what he's searching for, but what reality delivers), the missing part to complete the mechanism that was otherwise whole yet incapable of performing the function for which it had been devised, I heard myself murmur, in the pitch-black silence of the bedroom: 'It's him.'

  I jumped out of bed, and barefoot, in three strides, I was in the dining room; I picked up the telephone and dialled Bolaiño's number. I was waiting for someone to answer when I saw the clock on the wall said three-thirty. I hesitated for a moment; then I hung up.

  I think towards dawn I managed to get to sleep. Before nine I phoned Bolaiño again. His wife answered; Bolaiño was still in bed. I didn't manage to speak to him until twelve, from the office. Almost straight out I asked him if he intended to write about Miralles; he said no. Then I asked him if he'd ever heard Miralles mention the Sanctuary of Collell; Bolaño made me repeat the name.

  'No,' he said at last. 'Not that I recall.'

  'What about Rafael Sánchez Mazas?'

  'The writer?'

  'Yeah,' I said. 'Ferlosio's father. Do you know him?'

  'I've read a couple of things of his, pretty good, I'd have to say. But why would Miralles mention him? We never talked about literature. And, anyway, what's this interrogation all about?'

  I was about to avoid his question when I realized in time that only through Bolaiño could I get to Miralles. Briefly, I explained.

  'Fuck, Javier!' Bolaiño exclaimed. 'You've got a hell of a novel there. I knew you were writing something.'

  'I'm not writing.' Contradicting myself, I added, 'And it's not a novel. It's a story with real events and characters. A true tale.'

  'Same difference,' replied Bolaiño. 'All good tales are true tales, at least for those who read them, which is all that counts. Anyway, what I don't get is how you can be so sure that Miralles is the militiaman who saved Sánchez Mazas.'

  'Who said I was? I'm not even sure he was at Collell. All I'm saying is that Miralles could have been there and, the
refore, could have been the militiaman.'

  'Could have been,' murmured Bolaño sceptically. 'But most probably wasn't. In any event —'

  'In any event, it's a case of finding him and settling the matter,' I cut him off, guessing the way his sentence was going to end ('. . . if it's not him, you pretend it was him'). 'That's why I called you. The question is: have you any idea how to locate Miralles?'

  Exhaling loudly, Bolaño reminded me that he hadn't seen Miralles for twenty years, and that he wasn't friends with anyone from back then, anyone who could he stopped short and, offering no explanation, asked me to hang on a moment. I hung on. The moment got so long that I thought Bolaño must have forgotten I was waiting on the phone.

  'You're in luck, you bastard,' I heard eventually. Then he read out a telephone number to me. 'That's Estrella de Mar. I'd completely forgotten I had it, but I've still got all my diaries from back then. Call and ask about Miralles.'

  'What was his first name?'

  'Antoni, I think. Or Antonio. I don't know. Everybody called him Miralles. Call and ask for him: in my day we kept a register with the names and addresses of all the people who stayed at the campsite. I'm sure they still do . . . That's if Estrella de Mar still exists, of course.'

  I hung up. I picked the phone back up. I dialled the number Bolaño had given me. Estrella de Mar still existed, and had already opened its gates for the summer season. I asked the female voice that answered if a person called Antoni or Antonio Miralles was staying at the campsite; after a few seconds, during which I heard the distant typing of speedy fingers, she told me no. I explained the situation: I urgently needed the details of this person, who had been a regular client of Estrella de Mar twenty years earlier. The voice hardened: she assured me that it was not their custom to give out details of their clients and, while I heard the nervous typing start up again, she informed me that two years earlier they had computerized the campsite register, keeping only data relating to the last eight years. I insisted: I said that perhaps Miralles had been coming to the campsite till then. 'I assure you he hasn't,' said the girl. 'How?' said I. 'Because he's not in our archive. I've just checked. There are two Miralles, but neither of them is called Antonio. Or Antoni.' 'Are either of them called Maria?' 'No.'