Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  “Mamá,” I said, pointing to her, “this lady was working in this house when Manuel Mena died.”

  And who knows, I was about to add, perhaps she holds the last image of a living Manuel Mena. My mother’s fatigued face was transfigured, and the two old ladies kissed each other on each cheek and began to chat as if they’d known each other for ever, my mother about Manuel Mena and Cortés’s mother about her work as a nurse’s auxiliary in Ca Paladella during the war; in spite of the fact that Cortés’s mother was speaking in Catalan (and my mother’s deafness), they seemed to understand each other perfectly. Cortés interrupted them: he asked his mother where the room for officers was; in reply his mother turned and, escorted by her son, was off like a shot into the darkness, with obvious risk to her balance. We followed her to a room on the same floor.

  “It was here,” she said. “The officers were here.”

  The Miró sisters’ lantern barely chased away the shadows of a dining room that seemed stuck in the 1960s. Two shutters blocked the light from coming in through the only window. It smelled of dust and confinement.

  “This is the room where your uncle died,” Cortés explained to my mother. “It’s been abandoned for many years. And, of course, you have to imagine that none of what you see here was here then.”

  My mother didn’t say a word and turned to me with a lost look. To be sure she had understood, I repeated that this was the place where Manuel Mena had died and, with the help of Cortés and Cortés’s mother, I tried to reconstruct for her some of the hypothetical details of her uncle’s stay in that house. My mother listened to us and nodded while looking around the room: at the table covered in a velvet tablecloth with a brass soup tureen and a china plate, the carved wooden sideboards that occupied the ends of the dining room, the chairs and upholstered armchairs, the radio and record player of the time; the beam of the paraffin lantern seemed to focus on her face, damp with perspiration, suffering and waxy, projecting a spectral shadow on the wall. I thought she was dizzy and asked if she wanted to sit down; she said yes. I sat her down on a chair, dried her face with a handkerchief, sat down next to her. Meanwhile, Josepa Miró struggled with the shutters over the windows until she finally managed to open them; filtering through a broken blind, the scant light that entered the room lit up thousands of particles of dust floating in the cloistered air. I felt like I had already lived this instant, although I did not know when or where, and I realised that some strangers had come into the room and were observing us in intrigued or expectant silence and whispering to each other. I wondered again if they were friends or relatives of the Miró sisters, or if they were intruders. Meanwhile, Cortés and the Miró sisters offered to show us the rest of the house; I told them my mother would rather rest and the three of them left, followed by the other visitors. Her curiosity piqued, my wife joined them.

  “Well, then, Mamá,” I said, once they closed the door. “Now you see: here is as far as Manuel Mena got.”

  My mother nodded; alone with me, she didn’t seem dizzy or faint, but nor did she seem to have recovered or to be in complete control of herself. Now she was scrutinising the opposite side of the room through the shadows, where the strips of light that pierced the broken blind and the half-open shutters lit up a patch of dirty, checkerboard floor with a damp patch on the wall. After a couple of seconds she pointed in front of her with a barely perceptible tip of her head and murmured:

  “It’s as if I can see him lying there…”

  She kept contemplating the empty space in silence, and her withdrawn countenance reminded me of her perpetual countenance during her two years of depression, when an excess of lucidity revealed to her that she had spent a quarter of a century living in Gerona as if she lived in Ibahernando, that she had wasted her life waiting to go home, that this futile wait had been a misunderstanding and that this misunderstanding was going to kill her. “Well,” I said to myself, trying to get that memory out of my head and remembering Lieutenant Drogo and The Tartar Steppe. “Here is where the legend of Manuel Mena began, and here is where it ends. Case closed, Inspector Gadget.” Case closed? For a moment I too saw Manuel Mena there, on the other side of the room, slumped and in agony on a rickety military bed, his uniform soaked in blood and the pallor of death invading his adolescent features. Then I turned back to my mother, who was still staring at the empty space, and I thought she was going to burst into tears, that she would cry again almost eighty years after Manuel Mena’s body returned to Ibahernando from Bot and she used up all her tears crying for him, and it occurred to me that if I saw my mother weep for the first time in my life, there and then, the war would have finally ended, seventy-six years after it ended. But there were no tears, my mother did not cry: surrounded by two dark and wrinkled circles, her eyes were still dry. “This does not end,” I said to myself. “This never ends.” I looked again where she was looking and again thought of The Tartar Steppe, and of the end of The Tartar Steppe, again I imagined Manuel Mena lying and waiting for death as Lieutenant Drogo waited for death at the end of The Tartar Steppe. I imagined him like that and asked myself what I would have said to him if I had been at his side at that moment, if I had been in the place of his orderly. I answered myself that I would have tried to comfort him, that I would have done whatever I could to help him die well. I thought that I would have told him it was true that he was going to die, but that, as Lieutenant Drogo had understood on his deathbed, that was the real battle, the one he’d always been unknowingly waiting for. I thought I would have told him that it was true he was going to die, but that, unlike Lieutenant Drogo, he would not die alone and anonymous in the semi-darkness of an inn, far from the combat and glory, without having been able to test his mettle on the field of battle. I thought I would have told him that it was true he was going to die, but that he should die in peace, because his death was not an absurd death. That he wasn’t dying fighting for interests that were neither his nor his family’s, that he wasn’t dying for a mistaken cause. That his final lucidity was a false lucidity and his disenchantment an unsubstantiated disenchantment. That his death had meaning. That he was dying for his mother and his siblings and nieces and nephews and for everything decent and honourable. That his death was an honourable death. That he had been equal to the task and had measured up and not been found wanting. That he was dying in combat as Achilles had in The Iliad. That his death was a kalos thanatos and he was dying for values greater than himself and that his was a perfect death that crowned a perfect life. That I wasn’t going to forget him. That nobody was going to forget him. That he would live for ever in the volatile memory of men, as heroes live on. That his suffering was justified. That he was the Achilles of The Iliad, not the Achilles of The Odyssey. That in the realm of the dead he would not think it preferable to know old age as a slave of a penniless labourer than never to know it as lord of all the dead. That he would never be like the Achilles of The Odyssey, that nobody had deceived him, that he wasn’t killed by a misunderstanding. That his was a beautiful death, a perfect death, the best of deaths. That he was going to die for his country.

  “What are you thinking, Javi?” my mother asked.

  Without looking at her I answered:

  “Nothing.”

  My mother reached for my hand, held it, and pulled it into her lap. I noticed the feel of her fingers twisted by arthritis, with her wedding ring still on her finger, I noticed the wilted softness of her skin and her familiar scent amid the rancid, closed-up, damp smell of that room. I wondered how many more years her life would last and what I would do with mine when she died.

  “Don’t think anymore about it, Javi,” she said. “Uncle Manolo felt obliged to do what he did. That was all. The rest just happened.” After a pause she added, in a different tone of voice: “You can’t know how much I wish you could have known him: he was so nice, always laughing, always joking…That’s how he was. And that’s why he felt obliged. No more, no l
ess, no more or less.”

  I wondered if she was right and if it’s all that simple. I let a couple of seconds pass. Then I said:

  “I have to tell you something, Mamá.”

  “What’s that?”

  I thought: Uncle Manolo didn’t die for his country, Mamá. He didn’t die to defend you and your grandmother Carolina and your family. He died for nothing, because they deceived him and made him believe he was defending his interests when he was actually defending other people’s interests and that he was risking his life for his own people when he was just risking it for others. That he died because of a gang of sons of bitches who poisoned the minds of children and sent them to slaughter. In the last days or weeks or months of his life he suspected it or began to see it, when it was already too late, and that’s why he didn’t want to go back to the war and lost the cheerfulness you’ll always remember and turned in on himself and became solitary and sank into melancholy. That he wanted to be Achilles, the Achilles of The Iliad, and in his way he was, or at least he was for you, but in reality he’s the Achilles of The Odyssey and he is in the realm of the dead cursing having to be the lord of all the dead in death and not a slave of a penniless labourer in life. That his death was absurd. Again I said:

  “Nothing.”

  It was only then that I thought again of my book on Manuel Mena, of the book I’d spent my whole life postponing or the one I’d always refused to write, and now it occurred to me that I thought of it because I suddenly understood that a book was the only place where I could tell my mother the truth about Manuel Mena, or where I’d know how to or where I’d dare to tell her. Should I tell her? Should I tell that story? Should I put down in writing the story of the symbol of all the mistakes 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 forebears? Should I take on the family past that most embarrassed me and discuss it at length in a book? In recent years, while I scratched up information about Manuel Mena here and there, I had come to understand some things. I had understood, for example—I thought, thinking of David Trueba—that I was no better than Manuel Mena: it was true that he had taken up arms for an unjust cause, a cause that had provoked a war and a dictatorship, death and destruction, but it was also true that Manuel Mena had been able to risk his life for values that, at least at a certain moment, were for him more valuable than life, even though they were not or even though for us they were not; in other words: there was no doubt that Manuel Mena had been politically mistaken, but there was also no doubt that I had no right whatsoever to consider myself morally superior to him. I had also understood that Manuel Mena’s story was the story of an apparent victor and an actual loser; Manuel Mena had lost the war three times: the first, because he had lost everything in the war, including his life; the second, because he had lost everything fighting for a cause that was not his but that of others, because in the war he had not defended his own interests but the interests of others; third, because he had lost everything for a bad cause: if he had lost everything for a good cause, his death would have had meaning, it would make sense now to pay him homage, his sacrifice would deserve to be remembered and honoured. But no: the cause for which Manuel Mena died was a hateful, irredeemable, dead cause, I thought, thinking of David Trueba and Danilo Kiš or of the end of the Danilo Kiš story David Trueba had told me: “History is written by the victors. Legends are woven by the people. Writers fantasise. Only death is certain.” This is what had happened to Manuel Mena, I thought: that, even though the victors had written the history of the war, nobody had written his, everybody had preferred to tell legends or fantasise, as if they were all literati or as if they had guessed that in practice Manuel Mena was one of those who lost the war. Was that another good reason for me to tell his story? In that time I had also understood that it would be impossible for another writer to tell it, no matter how often I’d toyed with that idea, and that, if I didn’t tell it, nobody would tell it. Should I tell it? I asked myself again. Or should I leave it untold, forever turned into a void, a hollow, into one of the millions and millions of stories that never get told, into a radiant never-written masterpiece—masterly and radiant precisely because nobody was going to write it—refusing to take it on, keeping it forever hidden like the best-kept secret?

  My mother sighed without letting go of my hand; she still had her gaze fixed on the far side of the dining room, on the exact point where she’d decided that seventy-seven years earlier Manuel Mena had lain dying. I heard, very near, the sound of footsteps and laughter, and I thought of the intruders who had snuck into Ca Paladella; also, for some reason, I thought of ghosts. Then I remembered the Danilo Kiš story again and, maybe because I was sitting beside my mother, breathing in her scent with her hand in mine, it occurred to me that it was impossible that the Countess Esterházy had deceived her son on the day of his execution only so he would have a kalos thanatos, a perfect death that would crown a perfect life, and by doing so be worthy of his name and his patrician lineage: if she had deceived him—if she had appeared on the balcony dressed in white when her son was on his way to the scaffold amid the braying of the crowd—it had been so he could leave life without fear and without anguish, to help him die well with the deceiving security that before the execution the imperial reprieve would arrive. I thought this and I thought that, in the same way, it was novelistic ingenuousness to think that my mother had spent her life telling me about Manuel Mena because for her there was no higher destiny than that of Manuel Mena, because she wanted to write my destiny with Manuel Mena’s destiny, because she wanted me to be equal to the task and measure up and be worthy of my name and my false patrician lineage. No, I thought again: the most likely thing is that my mother had spent her life telling me about Manuel Mena because with Manuel Mena or with Manuel Mena’s death she had understood to the point of running out of tears that it was a thousand times better to be Odysseus than to be Achilles, to live a long and mediocre and happy life of fidelity to Penelope, to Ithaca and to oneself, even if at the end of that life another does not await, than to live a brief and heroic life and a glorious death, that it is a thousand times better to be a penniless labourer’s slave in life than to be the lord of all the dead in the realm of shades, and because she needed or because it was urgent to her that I understood that. And I also thought that it was also ingenuous on my part (as well as presumptuous) to believe that the Countess Esterházy had written her son, and perhaps Manuel Mena’s mother hers, and that whereas my mother had not managed to write me, I suddenly realised my puerile arrogance of believing that by becoming a writer I had prevented my mother from writing me, rebelled against my mother, avoided the destiny in which, knowingly or unknowingly, she had wanted to confine me; the truth, I thought, was precisely the opposite: that there had been no rebellion, that my mother had imposed her will, that I had not been the heroic and ephemeral and radiant Achilles but the long-lived and mediocre and loyal Odysseus, that by being Odysseus I had been exactly what my mother had wanted me to be and by becoming a writer I had done exactly what my mother had wanted me to do, that I had not written myself but had been written by my mother, I understood that my mother had wanted me to be a writer so I wouldn’t be Manuel Mena and so that I could tell his story.

  “What are you thinking, Javi?” my mother asked again.

  This time I told her the truth.

  “That maybe I should write a book about Manuel Mena,” I said.

  My mother sighed, and at that moment I thought there are a thousand ways to tell a story, but only one good one, and I saw, or thought I saw, with midday clarity, without a shadow of a cloud, the way to tell the story of Manuel Mena. I thought that to tell Manuel Mena’s story I should tell my own story; or, to put it another way, I thought that in order to write a book about Manuel Mena I should split myself in two: I should tell one story on one side, the story of Manuel Mena, and tell it exactl
y as a historian would tell it, with a historian’s coolness and distance and scrupulous veracity, confining myself strictly to the facts and disdaining legend and fantasy and the writer’s freedom, as if I were not who I am but another person; and, on the other side, I should write not a story but the story of a story—that is, the story of how and why I came to tell the story of Manuel Mena in spite of the fact that I didn’t want to tell it or take it on or bring it up, in spite of the fact that my whole life I have believed I became a writer precisely not to write the story of Manuel Mena. My mother said:

  “What I don’t understand is how it is that you have not yet written that book.”

  I turned to look at her; she looked back at me with a neutral expression.

  “You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

  “And if you don’t like what you read?”

  She answered my question with another question:

  “Don’t tell me now you write your books so I’ll like them?” A glimmer of irony shone in her eyes: “Talk about locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.”

  We fell silent again. I kept hearing voices, footsteps, the odd bang, but they weren’t coming from our floor but the floor above, or that’s what it sounded like. In the midst of the shadowy silence of that abandoned palace we must have looked like two characters from the Antonioni film, or perhaps two outlandish contestants on an outlandish version of Big Brother. I heard footsteps approaching the room and thought about ghosts again. The door opened. It was my wife.

  “You have to come upstairs and see the house,” she said. “It’s spectacular.”

  Cortés appeared beside her with an enthusiastic smile. My mother stood up and took two headlong steps towards him, and he had to catch her so she wouldn’t stumble. I could tell what was going to happen, but I didn’t do anything to prevent it.