Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  That’s the first thing I thought I understood during those days: that at the end of his life Manuel Mena was a stranger in his own village. The second thing I thought I understood is that, since war is an accelerated accumulator of experience, thanks to his time at war Manuel Mena had amassed in his nineteen years of life as much seniority as a normal man in fifty, and that perhaps on his last visits to the village, when he returned from the front on leave, his gaze was at once that of an old man and that of a youngster, that of a stranger and that of a local, and that gaze of his then must not have been very different from mine now. I will add that I have no doubt that only Manuel Mena or my obsession for Manuel Mena those days explains many of the answers I gave Ernest Folch before the cameras. At a certain moment, for example, Folch asked me what it had meant to me that when I was four my parents had transplanted me from Extremadura to Catalonia, and I’m sure I was thinking of Manuel Mena when I answered that it most likely meant that since I was a child I’d felt dislocated, a guy who doesn’t fit in Catalonia or in Extremadura, and that I had always lived in both worlds with a feeling of strangeness, feeling like an outsider in both places, as if each time I returned from Catalonia to Extremadura or from Extremadura to Catalonia it was like returning from another world or rather as if I was returning to a world that was no longer mine, and never could be. At another point Folch asked me if I felt Extremeño or Catalan, a question I’d been asked hundreds of times since childhood, and I’m sure I was also thinking of Manuel Mena when I heard myself answer as I had never answered before in my life; what I answered was that for my whole life I had been ashamed of coming from Ibahernando and that, although I left Ibahernando as a little boy and had only occasionally returned to Ibahernando and in Ibahernando I had always been an outsider and a native or a foreigner in my own village and I had always fitted into Ibahernando as badly as I fit in anywhere else, the truth is a person is from the place he had his first kiss and where he saw his first western, and that I felt neither Extremeño nor Catalan: I felt I was from Ibahernando.

  * * *

  —

  The first two people I’d arranged to meet to talk about Manuel Mena during that visit were my cousin Alejandro Cercas and a friend of his named Manolo Amarilla. Alejandro was one of my aunt Francisca Alonso and my uncle Juan’s six children: the former had been a classmate of Manuel Mena’s at Don Marcelino’s local school; the latter, first cousin to my father as well as my mother, and perhaps due to this double kinship had kept up a very close relationship with both of them. Alejandro and I had not inherited it, in part because there is a thirteen-year age difference between us and in part because we lead very different lives. As with the majority of inhabitants of Ibahernando in the fifties and sixties, Alejandro had moved away from the village with his family; however, he had not moved to Catalonia, like me, but to Madrid, where since he was very young, in the last years of Francoism and the early years of democracy, he had distinguished himself as a socialist leader and held responsible positions in the party and in the Congress of Deputies, until in 1999 he was elected Spanish Representative to the European Parliament. He had held the post for several legislatures and, after having lived for more than a decade in Brussels, had just retired and moved back to live between Ibahernando and Cáceres, in the university of which he taught classes on the problems of European integration. In recent times we’d seen each other with some frequency, almost always in Brussels or in Ibahernando, and I had discovered without surprise that, although he’d moved to Madrid as a teenager, his relationship with the village remained intense and passionate, and that he knew many details about its history.

  I remember the first time I asked him about Manuel Mena. It must have been shortly after I started collecting information about him, although I don’t remember where, or even if it was in person or by telephone. However, I remember his reaction very well. “Whoa!” he exclaimed. “Are you sure you want to write about that?” “Who said I was going to write about Manuel Mena?” I rushed to answer. “Nobody,” he said, and added with irony I might not have caught at the time, “It’s just that I thought you writers only asked about things you’re going to write about.” Once the misunderstanding was cleared up, I wanted to know why writing about Manuel Mena seemed like such a bad idea. “I don’t think it’s a bad idea,” he answered. “Maybe it’s a really good one. I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s really complicated.” “Why do you say that?” I asked. “What do you mean why?” he answered, switching in a second from irony to passion. “The war was horrible, Javi. Horrible. And in the villages even worse. You’re left-wing, like me, and our family was on the right. If you dig into the story of Manuel Mena, you might find out things you don’t like.” “About him?” I asked. “About him or about whoever,” he answered. “Then what do you do? Would you tell it?” “Of course,” I said. “If I had to tell it, I’d tell it.” “And your mother?” he asked. I didn’t say anything. Alejandro took advantage of my silence to explain: “Look, Javi. I never wanted to know anything about my family; about my father’s family especially, which is yours too, as you know, the ones who ruled the village. They seemed horrible to me. Now that I’m older, I think I understand them better, but—” “That’s what I would need to try to do if I told the story of Manuel Mena,” I interrupted. “What?” Alejandro asked. “To know,” I said. “Not to judge,” I added. “Understand,” I clarified. And finally I concluded: “That’s what we writers do.”

  That same day Alejandro confessed to me that his worst memory of his childhood was the silent wake of hatred, resentment, and violence the war had left behind; he also assured me that he had gone into politics to finish with that and so that nothing like it would ever happen again. Then he summed up what he’d heard about Manuel Mena (mostly from his father and his mother, who had known him), and from that day on we almost never saw each other or spoke without one way or another ending up at the war and Manuel Mena. Manolo Amarillo must have appeared very early in those conversations, because Alejandro always associated his friend with Manuel Mena, so he almost never talked about Manuel Mena without talking about Manolo Amarilla and without urging me to meet him. His name was very familiar. From Alejandro I learned that Amarilla had been born and raised in Ibahernando, that he was a long-time socialist activist like my cousin, that he had been a teacher at the school in Las Hurdes and in Cáceres, and that his wife, even though I didn’t know her or didn’t remember her, was my aunt, because she was the daughter of Andrés Mena, one of Manuel Mena’s brothers. So it’s not odd that after accepting the idea of filming the television programme in Ibahernando I called Alejandro and asked him if Manolo Amarilla would be in town and whether I could take advantage of my trip to see him. “Manolo’s not going through the best moment of his life,” Alejandro warned me. “He’s just lost his wife. But I’m sure he’d love to see you and for us to have a chat. It’ll distract him.” It was only then that he told me that Manolo Amarilla kept a few mementos of Manuel Mena in his house, which he’d inherited from his father-in-law. “Among them,” he specified, “a handwritten piece of text.” I froze. “Why have you never told me this before?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I didn’t know it was that important. Didn’t you tell me you weren’t going to write about Manuel Mena?” Instead of replying to the question, I posed another: “And are you sure the text was written by him?” “Completely,” he said. “I would say they’re some notes for a speech to the Ibahernando Falangists. Or something like that.” Alejandro talked about the text or what he remembered of the text. “Did you know that not a single paper written by Manuel Mena remains?” I asked again when he had finished. “Not a single letter. Not a single keepsake. Nothing. They destroyed everything when he died. Everything except for one photograph.” “Didn’t I tell you?” Alejandro said. “You have to meet Manolo Amarilla.” He gave me his friend’s telephone number, I called him, we spoke a few times, and, when I’d agreed on the exact dat
e with the television crew, I arranged to meet him and Alejandro in Ibahernando.

  10

  It took more than a month for Manuel Mena to completely recover from his first war wound. According to a report written in the Trujillo military hospital by Major Juan Moret of the medical corps, after suffering the impact of a Republican bullet in one arm on January 8, 1938, a few miles from Teruel, our man was attended to successively in the Zaragoza and Logroño hospitals before arriving at the Trujillo hospital, where he remained from January 18 until February 10, 1938, when he was discharged. I don’t know what Manuel Mena’s life was like during that parenthesis from the war, or what his state of mind was, although I’m sure that he received visits in the hospital from relatives and friends who would have come from Ibahernando to see how the hero’s health was doing and spend some time with him; I’m also sure that, once his convalescence was over, he enjoyed some days on leave in the village, and that at some point he found out, perhaps with more melancholy than satisfaction, that Teruel had finally fallen into Francoist hands on February 22, a month and a half after he went into combat for the first time with the Ifni Riflemen to try to take it. Several trustworthy witnesses, among them Javier Cercas’s mother, remember that the first few times Manuel Mena returned from the front on leave he did so accompanied by a North African orderly who followed him or tried to follow him everywhere—including on the walks he took with girlfriends at dusk along the Trujillo road—and that, in that village where nobody had seen an Arab for the last seven centuries, he caused almost as much dread as an extraterrestrial would have caused. This apprehension explains an incident that happened the first night the North African orderly spent in Ibahernando. Manuel Mena’s family didn’t really know how to treat him and, before they all went to bed, Manuel Mena’s mother cautiously took her son aside and asked whether she should make up a bed for his companion in the hayloft or in the stable, beside the animals.

  “How could you even think that, Mother?” Manuel Mena said, scandalised, according to what Blanca Mena remembers. “This man is just like me and will sleep where I sleep and eat where I eat.”

  José Cercas, father of Javier Cercas, also had a precise childhood reminiscence of Manuel Mena’s furloughs during the war. According to him, Manuel Mena never spent a few days’ rest in Ibahernando without coming to his house for lunch at least once, with him, with his two siblings, his mother, and his father, Paco Cercas, who was then the leader of the Falange in the village. José Cercas didn’t remember them talking about the war during those meals, but he did remember that after lunch, Manuel Mena and his father would shut themselves up in his father’s study and spend the afternoon talking and smoking while he and his sister Concha tried to catch snippets of their conversation through the closed door. Nobody remembers, however, Manuel Mena renewing during these fleeting stays in the village his disciple-friendship with Don Eladio Viñuela; it would have been an illusory memory, because by then Manuel Mena’s mentor had been long since recruited by Franco’s army and was working as a military medic in the village of Vitigudino, in the province of Salamanca. As for the rest, I don’t know exactly how much time Manuel Mena spent in Ibahernando that winter once the wound in his arm had healed; but, however long he stayed, there is no doubt that by the beginning of March he was already back with his comrades of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen, which by then found itself in the rearguard in the vicinity of a village in the province of Teruel called Azaila, and that incorporated into the 13th Division, in turn incorporated into Yagüe’s Moroccan Corps, they were preparing to take part in the great offensive against Aragon and Catalonia that Franco and his generals had designed for that spring.

  The 13th Division did not set off until the 22nd, several weeks after Manuel Mena rejoined it. General Barrón’s unit had been camped for some days in the village of Quinto, on the right bank of the Ebro, when he received the order to create a bridgehead to the other side of the river so the whole Corps of the Army could cross it. It was a manoeuvre as complicated as it was risky, especially at the beginning, because on the left bank awaited, solidly entrenched, the 26th Republican Division, Durruti’s former column, and the divisionary leadership entrusted it to the 4th Bandera of the Legion, under the command of Major Iniesta Cano, and the First Tabor of the Ifni Riflemen, under the command of Major Villarroya.

  The operation began at nine o’clock at night. If it hadn’t been for the almost total darkness at that hour, Manuel Mena could have seen from the right bank how the bridge-builders laid out the pontoons and how the legionnaires rushed across them in silence, under a steady rain that wet their weapons and soaked their clothes. An hour and a quarter later the 4th Bandera had crossed the river without incident; after a few minutes’ wait, during which all they could hear was the rain and the turmoil of the black, churning, fast-flowing waters of the Ebro, the First Tabor of the Ifni Riflemen began to do the same. The crossing concluded just after eleven, and on the left bank Manuel Mena’s unit crouched in the dank silence of a reed bed while trying to regroup and reorganise themselves. Then they embarked on the advance with difficulty, splashing blindly through marshes criss-crossed with irrigation ditches, towards a place called Casa de Aznares (although on some maps it appeared as Casa de los Catalanes), until after a while, not far from where they were, a shot rang out. Then another. And another. And soon they were in the middle of a skirmish mixed with shouts, insults, and curses. Then they realised that the legionaries of the 4th Bandera had run into Líster’s soldiers, but they received orders to stop and wait while the rifle shots blended in the darkness with mortar detonations and the rattle of machine guns. Although the clash intensified, they continued to wait, without joining it. After a while the silence gradually returned and they were ordered to try to sleep. They could not do so for more than a couple of hours, because before dawn Major Villarroya summoned his officers to inform them of the situation and to tell them that, since the 4th Bandera was effectively in front of them, blocked by the Republicans, they should make their way towards the right flank and try to overrun the enemy’s positions there. At first light they launched the attack. The initial charges by the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen were rebuffed, but after a while several Francoist planes appeared, which, after dropping a few bombs on their own positions, corrected their aim and began to bombard the Republican positions. When the planes left they were replaced by artillery fire from the other side of the river. Finally, two other Francoist units advanced south to surprise the enemy from behind, who before being surrounded abandoned their positions to the 4th Bandera.

  The creation of that bridgehead on the left bank of the Ebro cost the lives of two hundred and sixty-five Francoists and two hundred and eighteen Republicans, but from that moment on and until they reached the gates of the city of Lérida, already in Catalonia, the 13th Division’s advance was little more than a walkover. At the end of that first day of the offensive the Moroccan Army Corps had gone six miles deep into Republican territory while the opposing front crumbled, and on the following days its progression was meteoric: crossing the Monegros Desert with the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen always in the vanguard—and with the 150th Division on their left and the 5th Navarra Division on their right—the 13th Division occupied Bujaraloz on March 25, Candasnos on the 26th, and Fraga and the banks of the River Cinca by the 27th; the following day the 5th Navarra Division took Mequinenza, and on the 29th Serós, Aytona, and Soses, where they linked up with the 13th Division, which on the 30th took Alcarrás. There everything got complicated. There, the Francoist vanguard began to be fired upon by enemy artillery, which slowed their progress, and when they arrived at a place called Partida de Butsenit, two and a half miles from Lérida, with the city and Gardeny Castle already in sight in the rusty light of dusk, they were attacked by Republican infantry and tanks, which forced their men to get down off the trucks, spread out, and create a front line all the way along the road to Collastret, towards Montagut and Serra Gross
a.

  The next day the Battle of Lérida began. Three days earlier its inhabitants had begun a massive exodus after being bombed by four squadrons of German Heinkel He 51s from the Sariñena aerodrome, and at that point the city was practically deserted; just the wreckage of demoralised Republican troops was left there, having been retreating in disorder for months, joined at the last moment at great speed by the 46th Division led by Valentín Gonzalez, El Campesino. He knew very well that, of the three key points to conquer Lérida, the fundamental one was Gardeny—the other two were Les Collades and Serra Grossa—a Templar castle at the end of a plateau that crowns the hill of the same name, which overlooks the city. Its strategic location explains why at the beginning of the war the Republicans had constructed on the slope, the peak, and the plateau of the hill a terraced system of dugouts, fortifications, barbed-wire fences, machine-gun nests, and evacuation routes that El Campesino now hastened to reinforce and arm with machine guns, mortars, tanks, and men, trusting in the hope of containing the Francoists there.

  He did not manage it. During the night of the 30th the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen camped on the Partida de Butsenit, and on the morning of the 31st began to advance in combat formation on Lérida following a path that zigzagged, between dry elevated strips of land, to the left of the road. They were at the head of the Second Regiment of the 2nd Brigade, with the First Regiment on their left and the 5th Navarra Division on their right, between the road and the bank of the Segre, and all day they managed to progress barely a half-mile to a mile, harassed unceasingly by Republican artillery firing from the other side of the river, and by the men of the 46th Division, who were putting up a fierce resistance. That night they slept out in the open, with the Republicans very near, and on April 1 they took the Creu del Batlle, a farmstead a hundred yards or so from Gardeny that a few hours earlier had harboured El Campesino’s headquarters. There, in the course of a nighttime meeting of officers including Manuel Mena, the command of the 13th Division decided that the next day, while the two Regiments of the 1st Brigade were attacking Les Collades, the 2nd Brigade would attack Gardeny: the Second Regiment would do so frontally, from the steepest and best-protected place, and the First Regiment would try to surround it from Camí de Gardeny, a more accessible zone to the north of the castle; they also decided that the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen would fight in the vanguard of the Second Regiment, ahead of its other two battalions—the 262nd and the Victory Battalion.