Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  Eladio nodded sadly, with resignation.

  “You’re right, Javi,” he conceded. “It’s what I always tell Pilar: when we die, that’ll be it for the village.”

  We said farewell to Eladio and went back to the Shearer’s house; we knocked on his door again; again, nobody answered. The street was still empty, although the old man with the crutch was still watching us from afar, sitting on the steps of the house. We decided to kill time by having a coffee in the bar and, as we walked down the calle de Las Cruces and crossed the Pozo Castro, we talked about Eladio and about my mother’s house; David said, if he were me, he’d keep it.

  “And if I were Stephen King, so would I,” I answered.

  “Bullshit,” he replied. “If you were Stephen King you could keep the whole village.”

  Aside from the owner, in the bar there were only two customers, playing dominoes. I knew all of them vaguely; we said hello and the five of us talked for a moment. Over coffee I explained to David that for many years the place had been the village cinema and dancehall, and I’d first kissed a girl and seen my first film here.

  “And what film was it?” he asked.

  “The Sons of Katie Elder,” I answered.

  “See how right Eladio was?” I looked at him without understanding. He explained: “A guy is from wherever he gets his first kiss and sees his first western.” He paid for the coffees and added: “This isn’t your parents’ village, kid: this is your fucking village.”

  The door to the Shearer’s house was ajar. I pushed it without knocking, saying good afternoon, and a slim, smiling woman in her fifties, with fair hair and a lilting voice, immediately appeared. It was the Shearer’s daughter Carmen, and I recognised her straightaway, because during my childhood I’d seen her helping my aunt Sacri with the household chores every summer. Back then she was cheerful and affectionate; she still was: she gave me a big kiss on each cheek, asked after my mother and my sisters, apologised for not having been home at the agreed time, and said her father had gone out for a walk after lunch as he did every afternoon, and it was very strange that he wasn’t back yet. We all looked out the door.

  “Look at him,” Carmen said, pointing up the street. “There he is.”

  It was the old man we’d seen from the start, sitting on the steps of a house and leaning on a crutch. I realised the distance had deceived me and that he hadn’t been watching us with curiosity but with concern. Carmen confirmed my impression.

  “He’s been uneasy about the interview all week,” she told us, walking up the street towards her father. “He says he doesn’t know what he has to say.”

  We followed her. The Shearer stood up, helping himself with his crutch, and, leaning on it, waited until we reached him. When we did I shook his hand firmly (a rough and hard, but indecisive hand), introduced myself, introduced David. He was a bald, compact, and burly man, with dark, nervous eyes and rounded features, as if sculpted by his ninety-four years of age; he was wearing a very clean white shirt and polyester trousers. I had never seen him before, or I didn’t remember him, which seemed strange. He was uncomfortable or scared, or both at the same time. As we walked back towards his house I tried to reassure him, and when we arrived we sat in the front hall, me on his left and across from him David, who took a small, high-definition Sony camera out of his pocket; to the right of the Shearer sat Carmen and her husband, a quiet and discreet man, somewhat older than her. Carmen must have offered us something to drink, though I don’t remember. What I do remember is that before getting to the point I asked the Shearer:

  “Do you mind if we film you?”

  4

  It’s not true that the future modifies the past, but it is true that it modifies the meaning and the perception of the past. That’s why the memory many elderly people in Ibahernando have of the Second Republic is a memory poisoned by confrontation, division, and violence. It is a false memory, a memory distorted or contaminated retrospectively by the memory of the Civil War that swept the Second Republic away. The violence, the division, and the confrontation existed, but they existed most of all at the end of the Second Republic. To begin with, it was all different.

  On April 13, 1931, the day after municipal elections that had turned into a plebiscite, which the monarchy lost unreservedly in the big cities and which precipitated the immediate exile of Alfonso XIII and the immediate proclamation of the Republic, the king’s last prime minister declared that Spain had gone to bed monarchist and woken up republican. I don’t know if that was what happened all over the country; it is undoubtedly what happened in Ibahernando. In fact, on April 12 it wasn’t even necessary to hold elections in the village, because electoral law at the time held that elections not be held in municipalities which did not have several candidates standing, and in Ibahernando only one candidate had put himself forward: the monarchist candidate. However, two months later there were more elections, this time national ones, and Alejandro Lerroux’s Radical Republican Party won a convincing victory in the village that time, obtaining four hundred and forty of the five hundred votes cast. So it is probable that in April of that year the majority of the inhabitants of Ibahernando were monarchists by inertia and in June the majority were by inertia republicans. The fact is that, as in the rest of the country, that fickle majority received the Republic with hope. It was a fitting sentiment. Back then the village had not entirely assumed any fantasy of basic inequality among its inhabitants nor had it entirely entered into that fiction, and most of the locals must have intuited that although some of them were agricultural labourers with land and some of them were labourers without land, their interests were not essentially different, that they were not serfs and patricians but that they were all serfs subjugated by the remote and absentee tyranny of the aristocratic landowners in Madrid, and that they all had a common adversary against whom the new Republic could defend them, whose promise of a prosperous and emancipated future was not only seductive but plausible.

  That intuition was spot on, and the first years of the new regime seemed to confirm it. It’s possible that when the Second Republic was established most of Ibahernando became republican by inertia or intuition or contagion with the fever for change that inflamed a large part of the country; if that was the case, soon that heteronomous impulse turned into an autonomous one, so that the inaugural fever affected the whole village or almost all of it: the new republican and socialist ideas took a strong hold among labourers with land and labourers without land, a village hall (Casa del Pueblo) was built, parties and labour unions were created or financed linked to the Socialist Party and union, such as the Agrarian Socialist Union. This effervescence did not have a single political sign, because Ibahernando was not a divided community, but nor was it idyllic or empty of conflicts and opposing interests: even though the interests of the community were the same, they weren’t identical or monolithic; the proof is that some agricultural labourers first founded a right-wing union called The Future and later another called the Society of Farmers. But, as well as political and syndicalist, the effervescence was also social and religious. At the beginning of the century a group of Protestants led by the son of a pastor of German origin had settled in the village, and in 1914 founded a church. It was the visible beginning of a profound change. As in the rest of Spain, in Ibahernando the Catholic Church had been hunkered down in a stupefying and monopolistic despotism for centuries, much less interested in the well-being of its faithful than in the preservation of its power and privileges, and the recently arrived Protestants defied that pitiless negligence by looking after the poorest and neediest, teaching them to read and write, even helping them economically. They didn’t take part in politics, at least not openly, but the result of this active compassion was that by the time the monarchy fell the Protestants had become acclimatised to Ibahernando and that, along with the unheard-of republican secularism, the members of its congregation became even more dynamic and their prese
nce ever more conspicuous.

  Nothing of what happened in that time better symbolised the modernising turn of the Republic, however, than the arrival of a new doctor in town. He was named Don Eladio Viñuela. He’d been born in a village near Ávila and studied medicine in Salamanca. Thanks to his first-class qualifications, at the beginning of 1928, having just finished his degree, he received a grant from the Board of Further Study to continue his internship in Berlin, and three years later was still enjoying that prerogative earned through his hard work when his father fell ill and his mother asked him to come home as quickly as he could to shore up the threatened family finances by accepting a job offer that a group of notables of Ibahernando had made through his brother Gumersindo. That happened in 1931, a few weeks after the proclamation of the Second Republic, and that’s how that brilliant young man exchanged from one day to the next his promising scientific future for a sombre present as a village doctor, and the metropolitan splendour of the capital of Europe for the shabby closed-mindedness of that godforsaken place. The reasons the prominent families of Ibahernando offered the job to Don Eladio are not entirely clear; here I’ll set out the most often repeated (and most plausible) hypothesis. Don Eladio’s predecessor was Don Juan Bernardo and he was a doctor of such fervent monarchist convictions that he had baptised most of his children with names of members of the royal family and had presided for years over the local committee of the Patriotic Union, the conservative party created in the 1920s to support the monarchist dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, which had more than one hundred members in the village. Don Juan Bernardo was an enterprising and ambitious man. Years earlier, with the support of two of the men who had brought him to Ibahernando by contracting his services, he had founded a business in town to produce electricity and flour; at least one of his two associates was as ambitious and enterprising as he was: Juan José Martínez, maternal great-grandfather of Javier Cercas, a man who had risen from nothing and who, though far from being the biggest landowner in the village, had become one of its most powerful. The commercial alliance between Juan José Martínez and Don Juan Bernardo broke down after a time, and the men became enemies. Everything indicates that antagonism was the reason that the conservative doctor was removed from his position and Don Eladio Viñuela was sought to replace him; everything also indicates that Don Juan Bernardo did not take his dismissal well and that he interpreted it as a reprisal from his former associate. It is also possible that he interpreted it as an obvious sign that the strong families of Ibahernando considered him an ungovernable person and were determined to frustrate his ambitions. Conjectures apart, the fact is that from that moment on, Don Juan Bernardo forswore his former monarchism, converted to passionate republicanism, and began to claim to be a doctor who championed the poor and oppressed, and who, although the war turned him into a devoted Francoist after having underhandedly swerved to the right in the months before the conflict—when the political and social situation became embittered and the same frightened and violent prewar atmosphere of confusion was prevalent in the village as it was all over the country—for the majority of the Republican period was the ideological leader of the local leftists.

  But there was still a while to go before all this would happen. In May 1931, when Don Eladio Viñuela replaced Don Juan Bernardo, the foundational optimism of the Second Republic dominated Ibahernando. Don Eladio was a cultured, secular, cosmopolitan, and liberal-minded man; he did not drink, he was not interested in the countryside, hunting, high society, or the ins and outs and intrigues of local politics, and for the fifteen years he lived in the village nobody ever knew him to practise any vices other than playing a card game every day after lunch and devoting several hours after dinner to reading: he professed a contradictory loyalty to Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset and the Revista de Occidente, his library was full of scientific publications in German and over the years he learned English in order to read George Bernard Shaw in the original. When he arrived in the village he was twenty-four years old. His mother, Doña Rosa, came with him, and the two of them moved into a house adjacent to that of Blanca Mena, mother of Javier Cercas, who in her old age remembered him as a tall, elegant, olive-skinned man with glasses, with a wise man’s simplicity and a good-looking man’s grace. It is not strange that his arrival in the village should have unleashed an expectant stir among the young women of marriageable age, who began to dispute the privilege of his company and lavish him with their attentions. Don Eladio did not take long to choose; his decision seemed like a declaration of principles: to the surprise of all, the fortunate one was not a rich heiress or what was considered a rich heiress in the village, but a poor, protestant, educated girl named Marina Díaz, whom Don Eladio married in a Lutheran ceremony after a long engagement and with whom he went to live near the village square.

  By then the doctor had organised his own personal rebellion against the village’s inveterate backwardness. As well as bringing a radio and projecting or getting the first films projected to general amazement, from the community clinic he set up in his home he instilled elemental but unknown rules of hygiene, such as regular hand washing, encouraged moderate and healthy eating habits, and introduced new ways of living, starting with taking children to the beaches of Portugal in the summers so the water and sea air would protect them for the rest of the year against illness; in the same way he battled ceaselessly against the afflictions that ravaged the village, such as malaria, tuberculosis, and high infant mortality. Don Eladio worked for the families that had hired him and assured his livelihood, but also for all those who required his services, so his silent revolution reached the furthest corner of the village, which earned him unanimous respect and admiration and encircled his name with the perpetual aura of a benefactor.

  The novelties that Don Eladio introduced to Ibahernando were not only to do with health and technology; there were also educational ones. On the advice or at the instigation of his fiancée, who was studying for a degree in philosophy and letters, in the autumn of 1933 Don Eladio founded a secondary school. At first the only teachers were the two of them; Don Eladio taught the science classes and Doña Marina taught arts, including French. However, the faculty of two soon began to attract more students, first from the village and later from the neighbouring villages—from Ruanes, from Santa Ana, from Santa Cruz—and after a short time they felt obliged to increase the staff, which was soon joined by Doña Julia, Doña Marina’s sister, and Don Severiano, a gentle and intelligent man who had been banished to the village for political reasons. The new school’s success was predictable. Accustomed to the gruff, rustic, hopeless squalor of Don Marcelino’s school, Don Eladio’s students noticed a huge difference: first because they no longer had classes in the gloomy, freezing, pokey little room in the back of the church, but in a house on calle de Las Cruzes with three bright, clean, and airy classrooms, as well as a big yard where the students could go outside and play during recess; second—and especially—because Don Eladio and Doña Marina both had pedagogical vocations, a love of learning, and the ability to create a favourable atmosphere for study, not to mention that their knowledge was far greater than that of Don Marcelino. All this explains why, unlike Don Marcelino’s unlucky students, Don Eladio and Doña Marina’s students finished their studies in the village prepared to pass the official baccalaureate exams without difficulty, and that the school run by the young doctor and his wife produced the first university graduates in the history of the village.

  Manuel Mena could have been one of them; in fact, only the outbreak of the war prevented him. Manuel Mena studied at Don Eladio’s academy for barely two years, but that was enough to change him completely: he did not lose his cheerful and extroverted nature, but at the end of that time the unruly, arbitrary boy who was a bit of a know-it-all with no interest in education, victim of his badly managed pride and rough-hewn intelligence, turned into an industrious, reflective, and responsible adolescent, with a precociously
clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life and with such passion for knowledge and reading that, according to what his classmates remember, he began to get up at daybreak to read and study. Nobody remembers, however, what he liked to read; his library, if he managed to accumulate one, was lost or dispersed; in July 1936, when the war turned the country upside down, he had enrolled in law school, but that signifies nothing or hardly anything. Only one thing is sure: his intellectual curiosity could have been sated by Don Eladio’s library, and it does not seem adventurous to suppose that the doctor would have started him off with his favourite books and that Manuel Mena should have benefited from them. Because Don Eladio was not just a decisive teacher for him—this is also a certain fact—but perhaps the only one he had in his very short life. He was more than that: he was a maître à penser, who he visited at home, with whom he had conversations without time limits, who he helped with his classes and accompanied on his strolls in the countryside. He could even have been more than that: a vaguely paternal figure, a vague successor to a lost father, or perhaps, given that only twelve years separated them, the kind of older friend who guides rebellious adolescents when they feel an urgency to emancipate themselves from their childish past and immediate surroundings, the man able to fascinate with the radiant prestige of his modernity and culture, to show him that life existed beyond the village without prospects in which he’d been born, and to inculcate the desire to learn and to travel, the subversive ambition to grow to be himself. He might have been more: he might have been, apart from a teacher of knowledge, a teacher of life.

  * * *

  —

  In the autumn of 1933, while Don Eladio was opening the doors of his school and Manuel Mena was beginning his providential relationship with that providential doctor, the Second Republic was falling into a crisis that two and a half years later would lead to a war, or rather a military coup, the failure of which would lead to a war that would eventually sweep it away.