Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  That double discovery was a revelation, and for several weeks a suspicion worried me: perhaps I had been wrong to refuse to write about Manuel Mena. Of course, I still thought more or less what I’d always thought about his story, but I wondered if the fact that it was a shameful story for me was reason enough not to tell it and to continue to keep it hidden; at the same time I told myself I still had time to tell it, but that, if I really wanted to tell it, I should get down to work immediately, because I was sure that there would be barely a trace of documentary evidence of Manuel Mena in archives and libraries and that, seventy-odd years after his death, he would be little more than the shreds of a legend in the eroded memories of a diminishing handful of elderly people. Anyway, I also understood that if my mother understood Antonioni so well, or Antonioni’s film, it was not only because the aphasic slowness of Big Brother had prepared her for it, but that, even though she still inhabited a world with God (a world that had already been extinguished and that Manuel Mena had thought he was fighting to defend), as a girl she had been perplexed to learn and had suffered as an outrage the fact that precarious and volatile human memory spurned her uncle, unlike its treatment of Achilles. Because the truth is that oblivion had begun its demolition job immediately after Manuel Mena’s death. In her own house a dense and incomprehensible silence, or one that my mother as a girl judged incomprehensible, fell over him. Nobody investigated the circumstances or precise causes of his death and everyone made do with the hazy version of it given by his orderly (a man who accompanied his body to the village and stayed for a few days in his mother’s house), nobody was interested in speaking with his fellow officers or the commanders who had fought at his side, nobody wanted to investigate the vicissitudes of his war, which fronts he’d fought on or the unit he’d belonged to, nobody bothered to visit Bot, that distant Catalan village where he’d died and which I’d always thought was called Bos or Boj or Boh, because, since Spanish has no words that end in t, that’s how my mother always pronounced it. A few months after Manuel Mena’s death, in short, his name was already almost never mentioned in the family, or mentioned only when there was no way not to mention it, and, a few years after his death, his mother and his sisters destroyed all his papers, mementos, and belongings.

  All except for one photograph (or at least that’s what I always thought): a military portrait of Manuel Mena. After his funeral, the family made seven enlarged copies; one of them presided over his mother’s dining room until her death; the other six were distributed among his six siblings. That relic vaguely unsettled the summers of my cold immigrant childhood, when we returned in the holidays to the warmth of the village. Happy to leave behind for a few months the inclemency and confusion of exile and recover my cosy status as the progeny of one of the patrician families of Ibahernando, I settled into my maternal grandparents’ house and saw the portrait of the dead man hanging on the unprivileged wall of a dressing room where trunks full of clothing and shelves full of books accumulated; and it unsettled my adolescence and youth even more, when my grandparents died and the uninhabited house was closed up all year and opened only when my parents and my sisters returned in the summers and I tried to get used to the cold of the outdoors and the confusion of the uprooting and tried to emancipate myself from the false warmth of the village by visiting it as little as possible, keeping myself as far apart from that house and that family and that ominous portrait that watched over the room full of trunks alone in the winter, afflicted by a vague shame or guilt the roots of which I preferred not to investigate, the shame of my theoretical hereditary condition of village patrician, the shame of my family’s political origins and actions during the war and Franco’s regime (unknown to me or almost unknown), the diffuse, parallel, and complementary shame of being tied by an unbreakable bond to that lost and needy little one-horse town that wouldn’t quite disappear. But most of all Manuel Mena’s portrait has unsettled me in maturity, when I haven’t stopped feeling ashamed of my origins and my inheritance but have in part resigned myself to them, have in part accepted being who I am and having the bonds I have and coming from where I come from, have grown accustomed for better or worse to the rootlessness and to being out in the open and to feeling unsettled, and have understood that my patrician condition was illusory and have often returned to the village with my wife and son and my parents (never or almost never with friends, never or almost never with people outside the family) and have stayed in that house that’s crumbling away where Manuel Mena’s portrait has been collecting dust in silence for more than seventy years, converted into the perfect, mournful and violent symbol of all the errors and responsibilities and guilt and shame and misery and death and defeats and fright and filth and tears and sacrifice and passion and dishonour of my ancestors.

  Now I have it in front of me, in my office in Barcelona. I don’t remember when I brought it back from Ibahernando; in any case, it was years after my mother recovered from her accident and I made a resolution about Manuel Mena’s story. The resolution was that I would not write it. The resolution was that I would write other stories, but as I wrote them I would gather information about Manuel Mena, even if it was just between one book and the next or in my spare time, before all traces of his brief life vanished completely and disappeared from the precarious and worn-out memories of those who had known him or from the volatile order of archives and libraries. In this way Manuel Mena’s story or what was left of Manuel Mena’s story would not be lost and I could tell it if I one day got the urge to tell it or felt able to tell it, or I could give it to another writer so they could tell it, supposing some other writer might want to tell it, or I could simply not tell it, turn it forever into a void, a hole, into one of the thousands and thousands of stories that will never be told, perhaps into one of those projects that some writers are always expecting to write and never write because they don’t want to take on the burden or because they fear they’ll never be equal to the task and prefer to leave them in the state of mere possibility, converted into their radiant, never-written masterpiece, radiant and masterly precisely because it will never be written.

  That was the decision I made: not to write Manuel Mena’s story, to continue not writing Manuel Mena’s story. As for his portrait, since I brought it to my office I haven’t stopped gazing at it. It is a studio portrait, taken in Zaragoza: the city’s name appears in the bottom right corner, in white, almost illegible letters; time has deposited stains and scrapes on the paper, has cracked its edges. I don’t know the exact date it was taken, but there is a clue on Manuel Mena’s uniform that lets me fix an approximate date. On the left-hand side of his jacket our man displays, sure enough, a Suffering for the Nation Medal—the equivalent of an American Purple Heart—and above it a ribbon with two stripes; both decorations mean that, at the moment the photograph was taken, Manuel Mena had been wounded in combat twice by enemy fire, which could not have happened before the spring of 1938, when he had gone into combat only once with the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen, but also no later than the middle of the summer, when the Battle of the Ebro broke out and he barely returned to the rearguard again. The portrait must have been taken, therefore, between the spring and early summer of 1938, during Manuel Mena’s second or third stay in Zaragoza or in the vicinity of Zaragoza. At that time he was about to turn or had just turned nineteen, and in a few months he would die. In the photograph, Manuel Mena wears the dress uniform of the Ifni Riflemen, with his tilted white-and-black peaked cap and his immaculate white jacket with gold buttons and black chevrons, on each of which shines a second lieutenant’s star. The third star is on his cap; immediately above it, on the white background, is the insignia of the infantry: a sword and an arquebus crossed over a bugle. The insignia is repeated on the lapels of the jacket. Under the right lapel, blurrier, part of it almost invisible, the insignia of the Ifni Rifle Company can be distinguished, an Arabic crescent moon on which can be read or intuited, in capital letters, the word IFNI, and in the semici
rcle of which fits a five-pointed star with two crossed guns. Under the left lapel, the Suffering for the Nation Medal and the ribbon with two stripes stand out against the white cloth of the military jacket. The top two buttons of the jacket are left undone, as is the right breast pocket; this deliberate carelessness allows a better view of the white shirt and black tie, both similarly spotless. It is striking how thin he is; in fact, his body seems unable to fill out his uniform: it is the body of a child in the clothing of an adult. The position of his right arm is also striking, with his forearm crossed in front of his abdomen and his hand clutching the inside of his left elbow, in a gesture that does not seem natural but dictated by the photographer (we might also imagine the photographer suggesting the jaunty angle of the peaked cap, which casts a shadow over Manuel Mena’s right eyebrow). But what is most striking is the face. It is, unmistakeably, a childish face, or at most adolescent, with his newborn complexion, without a single wrinkle or any trace of whiskers, his tenuous brows and his virgin, half-open lips, between which peek out teeth as white as his jacket. He has a straight and slender nose, his neck is also slender, and his ears stick quite far out from his head. As for his eyes, the black-and-white photography has robbed them of their colour; my mother remembers them as green; they do look light. They are not looking at the camera, in any case, but to his right, and they don’t seem to be looking at anyone in particular. I have been looking at them for a long time, but I have not managed to see in them any pride or vanity or thoughtlessness or fear or joy or ambition or hope or discouragement or horror or cruelty or compassion or delight or sadness, not even the hidden imminence of death. I have spent a long time looking at them and I am unable to see anything in them. Sometimes I think those eyes are a mirror and the nothing I see in them is me. Sometimes I think the nothing is the war.

  2

  Manuel Mena was born on April 25, 1919. Back then Ibahernando was a remote, isolated, and miserable village in Extremadura, a remote, isolated, and miserable region of Spain, over towards the border with Portugal. The name of the place is a contraction of Viva Hernando; Hernando was a Christian knight who in the thirteenth century contributed to conquering the Moors of the city of Trujillo and incorporating it into the possessions of the King of Castile, who presented his vassal with the adjoining lands as payment for services rendered to the crown. Manuel Mena was born there. His whole family was born there, including his niece, Blanca Mena, including Blanca Mena’s son, Javier Cercas. Some maintain that the family arrived in the region with Hernando’s Christians, dragged by the medieval impetus of the Castilian conquest. Maybe so. But it could also be that they arrived earlier, because before the impetuous Christians settled in Ibahernando the pithy Iberians and the reasonable Romans and the barbarous Visigoths and the very civilised Arabs had settled there. The fact might surprise people, because it’s not a gentle land but a bleak plateau of freezing winters and torrid summers, extensive uncultivated land out of the dry surface of which jut craggy stretches like the shells of gigantic buried crustaceans. Whatever the case, if the family did settle in the village with Hernando and his Christians, the impetus or desperation that brought them that far must have soon extinguished, because not a single one of its members carried on with the Castilian monarchs in the invasion of the rest of the Iberian peninsula, or with the conquistadors in search of the gold and women of the Americas, and all remained in the vicinity, as still as holm oaks, putting down roots so powerful that in spite of the mid-twentieth-century diaspora, which practically emptied the village, few have been able to pull them up entirely.

  Manuel Mena could not even try to. At the moment of his arrival on earth, Ibahernando was further from the twentieth century than it was from the Middle Ages; to put it a better way: it’s possible that it hadn’t entirely emerged from the Middle Ages. Back then, after the expulsion of the Muslims by the Christians, the village formed part of the crown land of Trujillo, which was accountable directly to the king, but all its lands were in the hands of noblemen with the power of life and death over their serfs, whom they kept in a state of semi-slavery. Eight centuries later, at the beginning of the twentieth, things had barely changed. The country had not heard of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment or the liberal revolutions (or had only half-heard of them), the region did not know the meaning of industry or what the bourgeoisie was, and, although in the middle of the nineteenth century Trujillo was no longer crown land and Ibahernando had emancipated itself from the auspices of the distinguished city and established itself as a humble independent municipality, most of its territory continued to be in the hands of aristocrats with bombastic names who lived in Madrid and who nobody had ever seen around those parts—the Marquis of Santa Marta, the Count of La Oliva, the Marquis of Campo Real, the Marchioness of San Juan de Piedras Albas—while the inhabitants of the village starved to death trying to produce wheat, barley, and rye from those thankless, stony fields, and grazing with great difficulty flocks of scraggy sheep, swine, and cattle, which they sold for low prices in the nearby markets.

  But the fact that the conditions of medieval servitude had barely changed since antiquity for the inhabitants of Ibahernando doesn’t mean that they hadn’t changed at all or weren’t starting to change, at least in part or for some. Still, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a renowned geographical dictionary written by a renowned Spanish liberal contained a disconsolate portrait of the village; according to him, Ibahernando was an inclement corner reached by neither the highway nor the postal service and where one thousand two hundred and five souls were crammed into a hundred and eighty-nine lamentable houses, with a primary school, a parish church, a public fountain, and a municipal government so poor it could not attend to even the most basic and urgent needs of its residents. Only a few years on from that description, at the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth, the Spanish liberal’s portrait would still have been an accurate etching of that dark part of Spain, but perhaps it might have been a little different. By that time, just before the birth of Manuel Mena, some enterprising agricultural labourers were inspired to rent the lands of the absent aristocrats. The arrangement supposed a fragile and unequal alliance between aristocrats and labourers or, to be specific, between some aristocrats and some labourers; it also supposed a small mutation that had various entwined consequences. The first is that the enterprising labourers began to prosper, first thanks to the profits from their exploitation of the rented lands and later thanks to the profits from the exploitation of the small farms they began to acquire thanks to the profits from the exploitation of the rented lands. The second consequence is that those labourers with land turned into foremen or delegates of the interests of the aristocrats and began to relegate their own interests and to confuse them with those of the aristocrats, some even began to want to look at themselves from a distance in the unreachable mirror of patrician customs and ways of life and to think that, at least in the village, they could become patricians. The third consequence is that the labourers with land began to give work to the landless labourers and the landless labourers began to depend on the labourers with land and to consider them rich or as the patricians of the village. The fourth and final consequence—the most important—is that the village began to incubate a fantasy of basic inequality according to which, while the landless labourers had not stopped being poor or being serfs, the labourers with land had turned into rich patricians, or were on their way to doing so.

  It was pure fiction. The reality was that the landless labourers were still poor although less and less so, and that, although there were more and more of them, the labourers with land were not rich: it was simply that some of them were no longer poor, or they were at least beginning to emerge from centuries of poverty; the reality is that no matter that all of them believed what they believed, the labourers with land were not patricians and were still serfs, but the landless labourers could turn into or were already turning into serfs of serfs. In short
: until then the interests of the villagers had been essentially identical, because they were all serfs and they all knew they were; from then on, however, the artificial mirage began to take over that in the village there were serfs and patricians, and the interests of its inhabitants began to diverge, artificially.

  * * *

  —

  Manuel Mena had been born into a family that was part of this ascendant minority of illusory patricians and real serfs that began to prosper at the beginning of the twentieth century in Ibahernando. It wasn’t the richest of those families, or the poorest. Manuel Mena’s father was named Alejandro and, like almost everybody in the village, he earned his living working in the fields: he ran the only farm the family possessed, a few acres of unirrigated land known as Valdelaguna, where he grew grain crops and raised sheep and cattle; Manuel Mena’s mother’s name was Carolina and she ran a tobacco shop. They had seven children. They could not allow themselves even the tiniest luxury, but they did not go hungry. A few years after Manuel Mena’s birth, his father died, and his three older brothers—Juan, Antonio, and Andrés—took over running Valdelaguna. Almost nothing is known about this initial stage of his life; most of what happened in it has been lost with the memories of those who knew him, and what remains is barely an imprecise legend out of which we can only rescue for real history a general image of his character and two concrete anecdotes. The image is clear, unanimous, and confirmed; it is also two-sided: on the one hand, the cordial image of a restless, cheerful, extroverted, quick-witted, and gleefully irresponsible boy who got along well with his mother and his brothers and sisters and knew how to make friends; on the other, the sharp image of a spoiled youngest son of a big family, with a limitless selfishness, pride verging on arrogance, and an unrestrained propensity to explosions of bad temper. As for the two anecdotes, they are both still recalled with improbable exactitude by two almost hundred-year-old women whom Javier Cercas has known since he was a boy without ever knowing they had gone to school with Manuel Mena, and whom he began to frequent when he found out they had. One was his aunt Francisca Alonso, widow of a cousin of his parents; the other, Doña María Arias, was the village teacher for decades.