Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  All the foregoing is no more than conjecture. The only thing certain is that Manuel Mena spent the eve of the Civil War in Cáceres, preparing to enrol in the university the following year, and that the first thing he did when he returned to Ibahernando was to visit Don Eladio Viñuela. They saw each other at the doctor’s house or, more often, at his school; that’s what the students who were then attending it remembered. They remembered that Manuel Mena brought them his notes from his courses in Cáceres, thorough, impeccable notes written out especially for them with the aim of improving the teaching of the academy. They remembered Manuel Mena often helped Don Eladio in the classes, that Don Eladio was fond of teaching out in the countryside, in the fresh air, and that ominous spring he did so often, assisted by Manuel Mena. They remembered that sometimes, during those studious outings, Don Eladio and Manuel Mena would divide up the students, and that, once the lesson was finished, the pupils would make their own way back to the village while the teacher and his disciple would stay on their own out in the country. And they also remembered that other times Don Eladio would set them exercises and that, during the time it took to complete them, he and Manuel Mena would walk some distance away, talking. What did they talk about during those peripatetic conversations? Years later those who’d watched them would wonder, having observed them strolling with heads bent and hands behind their backs or buried in the pockets of their trousers, while the golden evenings fell in silence against the uninterrupted horizon, over the stone fences, and the empty holm-oak woods. Did Manuel Mena unburden himself of his doubts to Don Eladio? Did he tell him his anxieties, his perplexities, his fears and ambitions of a rural adolescent transplanted to the provincial capital? Did they discuss books? Or were they informing each other of what was happening in Cáceres and in Ibahernando, commenting on the dismal way reality was going? It is tempting to imagine Manuel Mena trying to persuade Don Eladio of the newest revolutionary merits recently learned from José Antonio, and Don Eladio countering Manuel Mena’s fresh-faced, ardent rhetoric and the utopian spell of the Falangist ideology and its shiny new suggestion of youth and modernity with the old rationalist scepticism and the old and peaceful arguments of the old liberal ideology, which Manuel Mena would consider out of date. It’s tempting to imagine or fantasise it like that. But I am not a literato and I cannot fantasise, I can only confine myself to facts, and the fact is we don’t know whether it was like that, and it’s almost certain that we’ll never know. Because the past is an unfathomable pit in the blackness of which we can barely manage to glimpse hints of truth, and what we know of Manuel Mena and his story is infinitely less than what we don’t know.

  5

  David Trueba filmed more than two hours of conversation in the front hall of the Shearer’s house, but the film he put together lasted barely forty minutes. It is titled Memories and is divided into five chapters, each of which announces the subject it will deal with in a heading. Most of the film is a single low-angle shot of the Shearer, in which we only see, covered by a white shirt, his torso and farm worker’s shoulders, still strong despite being over ninety years old, and his head, almost completely bald, his powerful, senatorial skull, with a spot on his temple and a grazed cheek; his silhouette against a backdrop of ceramic tiles with very brightly coloured floral motifs.

  He remains seated throughout the entire film. The images do not show the physical presence of his daughter Carmen, or that of his son-in-law, but her voice is often heard clarifying my questions, or reinforcing or qualifying or annotating his replies. At first the Shearer is apprehensive, uneasy and suspicious; bit by bit, however, he seems to relax, although he never gives the impression of being totally relaxed; he sometimes smiles, on one occasion he even laughs (and his face turns youthful then and his eyes narrow into furrows); most of the time his expression is one of resigned and slightly absent seriousness, but each time one of the many silences that punctuate the interview opens up his eyes sink into a sadness so solid, so heavy, and so deep that it seems impossible one man alone might be able to bear it. I experienced this feeling as I conducted the interview, but while watching the film the feeling was even stronger. The Shearer always has his crutch in his hand, as if he felt orphaned or defenceless without it; sometimes he leans it against the back of a nearby chair; most of the time he rests his hand or his arm or his armpit on the top of it, moving it from one side to the other, impatiently or nervously. During a very short sequence he wears a wool cap that I didn’t remember.

  At the beginning of the interview we talk about his trade, which consisted of shearing the animals of Ibahernando and the surrounding villages. Then we talked about my family, my great-grandmother Carolina and her children, among them my grandfather Juan, and also the wife and daughters of my grandfather Juan, among them my mother; according to him, they were always his neighbours, he knew them all well, has fond memories of them all, which do not seem feigned. He also speaks of other people from the village; one of them is my grandfather Paco, my father’s father, who he remembers with admiration because he worked very hard, he says, to send all three of his sons to university. At a certain moment, after a quick cut, a chapter titled “The Photograph” begins. It is the third, and its first image shows the Shearer putting on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses; then I am heard to ask them:

  “Have you seen this photograph?”

  Although the images don’t show this, I have just handed Carmen a copy of an old photograph of the boys who attended Don Marcelino’s school; Manuel Mena appears in the photograph and almost beside him, according to my cousin José Antonio Cercas, is the Shearer. Carmen replies in her singsong voice:

  “Oh, no, I haven’t. Never.”

  As Carmen hands the photograph to the Shearer, I can be heard insisting:

  “Let’s see if your father has seen it.”

  The Shearer takes the photograph and looks at it closely.

  “No,” Carmen repeats, convinced. “My father has never seen that photo.”

  After a few seconds of silence, during which the Shearer does not take his eyes off the image, concentrating hard on it, my nose, a lock of my hair, and my index finger break into the left edge of the shot, pointing at the photograph.

  “Do you recognise anybody there?”

  “I don’t know,” answers the Shearer; he immediately apologises, as if that were an exam and he fears that his performance was not up to the expected level: “People change so much…”

  After a silence, trying to help, I explain:

  “It’s a photo of Don Marcelino’s students.” I add: “And I think you are one of those boys.”

  Then the Shearer raises his eyes from the photograph and looks to his left, which is where I am, although the image doesn’t show me.

  “No, that’s impossible,” he corrects me, visibly relieved. And he explains: “I didn’t go to Don Marcelino’s school. I went to Don Miguel’s, a teacher who came from Santa Cruz; when Don Marcelino came to the village I was already working. That’s what used to happen to us boys: as soon as we were twelve or thirteen, they’d take us out to the pastures to look after cows or lambs.”

  The Shearer goes on talking in the image; off-screen, I am doing my best to digest my disappointment, or that’s how I remember that moment. After a few seconds, after another cut, a new chapter begins, this one titled “Manuel Mena.” It begins with the image of the Shearer’s face very close to my face, which has burst into the frame, and with the sound of my voice asking a question:

  “Do you know this one?”

  The camera tilts to bring the Shearer’s hands into the foreground of the image. They are the hands of a countryman, coarse and worn, and just the fingertips hold the photograph of Don Marcelino’s students while I point with a tense index finger to a boy dressed in a striped jacket and white shirt with a lock of unruly hair on his forehead, standing to the right of the teacher, and I ask again:

  “D
o you remember Manuel Mena?”

  The Shearer looks to his left and in his filmed gaze I notice the same thing I noticed that day in his real gaze: that his daughter Antonia, with whom I had arranged that interview by telephone, had put him in the picture about its precise purpose.

  “How could I not remember him?” he answers.

  “And isn’t this kid him?” I insist, without taking my index finger off the photograph.

  The Shearer looks again; a little upset, he nods several times before saying:

  “Yes. That’s him.”

  From that moment on the direction of the conversation changes. For several minutes I try to get the Shearer to talk to me about Manuel Mena, about his relationship to Manuel Mena, but the attempt drifts into a struggle throughout which he responds to my questions in monosyllables or very succinct sentences, or simply does not respond or responds by dodging the question, uncomfortably, and moving his crutch from one side to the other. The Shearer tells us that Manuel Mena and he were more or less the same age, were neighbours and as children they had been friends, playing together in the street, the calle de Las Cruces, and in my great-grandmother Carolina’s yard. I ask him if they still saw each other when they were no longer children, when they became adolescents, and he says yes, although less. I ask him if he remembers that Manuel Mena went off to war and died at the front and he says yes, of course, and that he also remembers that he was nineteen when he died and a second lieutenant in the Regulars, and that when he came home on leave he came back with his orderly, a North African who never left his side. I ask him if they saw each other when Manuel Mena came home from the front on leave, and he says yes, that they could hardly not have seen each other since they still lived next door to one another. I ask him if they talked about the war during those encounters and about Manuel Mena’s life at the front and he says no. Then I ask him if he remembers the day of his funeral, which is a day all the old folks in the village remember, and he says yes, perfectly, that he saw the whole thing from the door of his house, but when I try to get him to tell me details of the event he begins to talk about a different funeral, another well-attended funeral that happened before or after or almost at the same time as Manuel Mena’s, the funeral of a doctor named Don Félix, and, when I ask again about Manuel Mena or about Manuel Mena’s funeral, he dodges the question again and goes back to talking about my great-grandmother Carolina and my grandfather Juan and my family. That strange back-and-forth goes on for several minutes, until I stop asking questions, undoubtedly convinced that the Shearer is refusing to budge and it’s futile to carry on my interrogation from this angle.

  Then, after another cut, begins the best chapter of the film, which is also the last one. It is titled “Murder in Ibahernando” and opens with the Shearer’s face of unshaken sadness and my voice asking a question in a strange tone, a touch too high.

  “So, your father was killed at the beginning of the war?”

  It is clear (or at least it is for me) that in the film I have just reformulated as a question something the Shearer has just told us off-camera; it is also clear that I have tried to react as if the words of my interlocutor did not take me by surprise, although I don’t know if I’ve posed the question to give myself time to take them in, to keep the Shearer from changing the subject, to ensure the camera records the news I’ve just heard, or for all three reasons at once. Whatever the case, the conversation changes again, and over the following minutes the Shearer sinks into ever more intense and longer silences, during which his sadness turns deeper and his expression even tenser, his eyes fixed on the invisible floor, his lips sealed. The Shearer’s answer to my question consists of saying yes in a very faint, almost inaudible voice.

  “He cut hair,” Carmen interjects, exchanging her natural cheerfulness for genuine sorrow. “He was a barber.”

  At that moment, for the first and only time in the film, we hear the voice of David Trueba.

  “Oh, really?” he says. “So you both worked in the same field.”

  He means the Shearer and his father. I don’t know if David has interjected because he feels that we’ve arrived at the crucial moment of the interview and that I need help, but the fact is that his comment seems to inject confidence into the Shearer, as if my friend’s previous silence had intimidated him (or perhaps what intimidated him was the camera). Looking me in the eye, the Shearer tells us:

  “Here, at the beginning of the war, they killed a few people. A schoolteacher who was named Don Miguel.”

  “Your teacher?” I asked. “The one who came from Santa Cruz?”

  “No,” explained the Shearer. “Another one. A good man. They killed a girl too. Sara was her name. Sara García. She had a boyfriend in the Red zone. They say that’s why they killed her.” The Shearer falls silent again; his gaze fixes on the floor again. There are five of us in that vestibule, but the camera doesn’t pick up the slightest noise. Finally the Shearer adds: “That night they killed a handful.”

  Then, without me or anybody else having asked, the Shearer describes the event that changed his life for ever. He does so with a lost look in his eye, with few words, which more than words seem like objects, and with a coolness that chills the blood. His mother had died years before, he tells us, and he and his father and brother were having dinner as on any other night in the dining room of their house. “Right there,” he clarifies, pointing vaguely to his right. He doesn’t remember what they were eating. He doesn’t remember what they were talking about, if they were even talking about anything. The only thing he remembers is that at a certain point someone knocked on the door and his father asked him to answer it. The war had just broken out, but he didn’t remember noticing concern in his father’s voice; he doesn’t remember feeling concerned himself either. He obeyed, left the table, opened the door. On the threshold, silhouetted against the hot breath of the recently fallen August night, were some men. He didn’t remember how many there were or what they looked like. He didn’t know any of them. The men asked if his father was home, he said yes, and several of them went in and took him. That was it. He didn’t remember if his father left the house voluntarily or if he put up any resistance and the strangers had to take him out by force. He didn’t remember if his father could get dressed or if he left in the clothes he was wearing. He didn’t remember if his father was scared or not. He didn’t remember if he said anything to him before leaving, or if he looked at him one last time. He only remembered what he’d just told us: the rest had been erased from his memory, or never registered. He was eighteen, a year older than Manuel Mena, and he never saw his father alive again.

  When the Shearer finishes speaking, a stony, imposing silence ensues, which only Carmen dares to break.

  “That’s the first time I’ve heard my father talk about this,” she says in a voice without perplexity, without even sorrow, a vacant voice. “I knew about it from my mother, but I’ve never heard him tell it.”

  Now I am slow to react, I suppose because I don’t know how to react and maybe because I am saying to myself what I’m saying to myself again as I see the images: that it’s not just the first time the Shearer is telling that story to his daughter, but probably the first time he’s ever told it, at least the way he’s just told it.

  “Do you know why he was killed?” I manage to ask.

  The Shearer is also slow to respond. He gives the impression of being disconcerted, although it’s hard to guess why; perhaps because he doesn’t fully understand how he has been able to tell what he has just told; perhaps because he feels strangely that it isn’t him who has told it, but someone else.

  “No,” he finally answers, and for a second his eyes shine and he seems about to burst into tears. But it is just a second; when he speaks again he does so with his habitual dry sadness. “Back then people got killed over any little thing,” he continues. “Over arguments. Out of envy. Because someone exchanged four wo
rds with someone. For anything. That’s how the war was. People say now that it was politics, but it wasn’t politics. Not only. Someone said they had to go after someone and they did. That was it. It was just like I told you: no more, no less. That’s why so many people left the village when the war started.”

  From this moment for several minutes the Shearer gives the impression of talking almost spontaneously, free of restrictions or of inordinate restrictions, in the end even with some enthusiasm. He tells us that one day, shortly after his father was killed, he and his brother found out where his corpse was, went and buried him secretly, without any funeral or ceremony or anyone’s help. He tells us that later he was called up and he had to fight the war in the army of those who had killed his father. He tells us that he fought the war in Ávila and somewhere in Asturias. He tells us that when he came back to the village he found his brother living with a woman—a generous woman who had taken him in—and that he went to live with his girlfriend and future wife, or that she came to live with him. “She got a lot of criticism for that,” he says with a kind of fury. “You know what villages are like; and back then, I don’t need to tell you…But she didn’t care: she moved in with me because she wouldn’t have me living on my own.” And then he tells us that, even though he and his wife were very young, they fought a lot, that he learned his trade, that she raised their three children, that he felt proud of his work and having provided for his family. “Ask about me in town,” he dares me. “You’ll see what they say.” After that sentence, the Shearer sinks into an exhausted silence, which Carmen rushes to fill talking about her mother and her father’s work. He listens to her distractedly, moving the crutch and with his gaze fixed once again on the floor. It seems clear that he has decided the interview is over and I’m not going to get any more information out of him, at least for this afternoon, at least about Manuel Mena and the war. Strangely, I don’t seem to notice, or maybe I haven’t resigned myself to accepting his decision; in any case, the only thing I can dredge up to put to him is a fact formulated as conjecture and in a rather solemn tone. The phrase is: