Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  “You can’t know how moving it is for me to be here,” my mother said, taking Cortés by the hands. “I never imagined that one day I was going to be in the place where my uncle Manolo died.” Unfailingly, she added: “Thank you so much.”

  The last phrase erased the smile from the face of Cortés, whose mouth opened below his moustache to protest and he looked at me with astonishment while, stifling a giggle, my wife took my mother’s arm and led her out of the dining room. I begged for comprehension with my gaze, and he shook his head from one side to the other, defeated, and followed behind my wife and my mother.

  Preceded by Cortés, we went up to the second floor. There, emerging from the shadows with the lantern, Josepa Miró joined us, and for a long time the five of us wandered around the darkness of the house. I have some precise, partial, and disjointed memories of that stroll. I remember an inexhaustible series of rooms and halls sleeping in a silent semi-darkness of polished doors and grandfather clocks stopped at arbitrary hours and stately wardrobes full of papers, old books, and embossed leather folders. I remember a decadent luxury of thick velvet curtains and green satin sofas and canopies of fuchsia silk and noble coats of arms and secret or seemingly secret rooms and kitchens and pantries full of rubble. I remember bedrooms with brass bedsteads with canopies and baldachins and hardwood cradles and bedside tables and skeletal bedsprings and empty umbrella stands and orphaned coat racks. I remember a chapel decorated with frescos representing the four evangelists, and I remember Josepa Miró and Cortés pointing out the scratched faces of the evangelists and explaining that they had been the victims of the anticlerical fury of the libertarians who seized the house at the outbreak of the war. I remember a chapel and benches and kneelers and church organs and saints mounted on pedestals or hiding in vaulted niches and marble and wooden crucifixes and tons of religious images. I remember tapestries that showed sumptuous hunting scenes (a pack of hounds pursuing a stag, a dog with a freshly caught rabbit in its jaws), and I also remember huge dusty mirrors and grand pianos and framed photographs and charcoal portraits and oil paintings of men and women who were surely dead and forgotten. I remember all of that and I remember my mother and my wife walking beside me, behind Cortés and Josepa Miró, who showed us the way with Josepa’s lantern amid the ruinous splendour of that abandoned mansion, and I remember the silhouettes and the voices and the laughter of the increasingly numerous visitors or intruders whose paths we crossed, and who none of us greeted, not even Cortés and Josepa, as if they didn’t know them or didn’t recognise them or didn’t even see them, as if they were ghosts and we were explorers lost in a sea of ghosts. But I especially remember myself feeling euphoric, almost levitating with stealthy joy at the certainty that at last I was going to tell the story I had spent half my life not telling, I was going to tell it so I could tell my mother the truth about Manuel Mena, the truth I could not or dared not tell her any other way, not just the truth of the memory and the legend and the fantasy, which was what she had created or contributed to creating and which I’d been hearing since I was a boy, but also the historical truth, the bitter truth of facts, I was going to tell that double truth because it contained a more complete truth than either of the other two on its own and because only I could tell it, nobody else could tell it, I was going to tell Manuel Mena’s story so it would exist entirely, since only the stories someone writes exist, I thought, thinking of my uncle Alejandro, that’s why I was going to tell it, so that Manuel Mena, who could not live for ever in the volatile memory of men like the heroic Achilles of The Iliad, should live at least in one forgotten book like the repentant and melancholy Achilles of The Odyssey survives in a forgotten corner of The Odyssey, I would tell Manuel Mena’s story so that his wretched story of a triple war loser (of a secret loser, of a loser disguised as a winner) would not be entirely lost, I was going to tell his story, I thought, to show that within it there was shame but also pride, dishonour but also integrity, misery but also courage, filth but also nobility, fright but also joy, and because in that story there was what there was in my family, and maybe in all families—defeats and passion and tears and guilt and sacrifice—I understood that Manuel Mena’s story was my inheritance or the mournful and violent and wounding and onerous part of my inheritance, and that I could not keep refusing it, that it was impossible to refuse it, because in any case I had to take it on, because Manuel Mena’s story formed part of my history and therefore it was better to understand than not to understand it, to accept than not to accept it, to discuss it at length than to leave it rotting inside me the way that mournful and violent stories rot inside someone who has to tell them and leaves them untold, to write the book about Manuel Mena my way, I finally thought, what I had always thought it was, taking charge of Manuel Mena’s story and my family’s story, but I also thought, thinking of Hannah Arendt, that this was the only way to take responsibility for both, the only way also to alleviate and emancipate myself from both, the only way to use the writer’s destiny my mother had written for me or had confined me to so that not even my mother would write me, to write myself on my own.

  I thought all this as I wandered almost blindly with my mother holding on to my arm and my wife making sure we didn’t stumble, the three of us following the light shining from Josepa Miró’s lantern through the gloom of Ca Paladella, and at a certain moment I said to myself that, since I was going to tell Manuel Mena’s story and take responsibility for the bad part of my family legacy, there was no reason for me not to take responsibility also for the good or not so bad, that if I was going to take on that mournful and violent and wounding and onerous piece of my inheritance there was no reason for me not to take on my whole inheritance and that I was authorised to tell my mother the truth once and for all: that I was not Stephen King or Bill Gates, and that when she died I would get rid of the house in Ibahernando. Standing at the door of a room Cortés and Josepa Miró had just entered, I announced to my mother that I had something important to tell her. She stood still and silent.

  “It’s about the house in Ibahernando,” I prepared her, trying to prepare myself.

  From the threshold of the room my wife beckoned us in, but my mother ignored her gestures and gave me a complicit squeeze on my forearm.

  “Oh, then I know what it is,” she said, and, without giving me time to ask, added: “You’re not going to sell the house in Ibahernando. And that, when I die, you’ll keep it.”

  Perplexed, I looked for her face in the darkness but didn’t find it; I didn’t start to laugh either. I just thought of Odysseus and of Ithaca and, almost grateful, I lied:

  “You’ve read my mind, Blanquita.”

  We heard Cortés calling us, and followed my wife into a relatively large room that had perhaps once been an office, or looked like it had, with a curtain behind which was an alcove in which all I remember is a double bed without a mattress and a ceramic washbasin. There, Cortés explained—or as Cortés’s mother had just explained to him—they had set up the operating theatre of Ca Paladella, the room where seventy-seven years earlier Manuel Mena was about to be urgently operated on. While Cortés was repeating his mother’s explanations about the place, I could not help wondering what would have happened if Manuel Mena had not died in Ca Paladella, if that night in September 1938 that campaign operating theatre had been free and Dr. Cerrada could have operated on him and saved him. I heard noise outside, in the hallway and the adjoining rooms, only now it didn’t seem like an isolated murmur of steps or voices but the swarming buzz of a crowd or a forest of ghosts. Then I was assaulted by a thought. He didn’t die, I thought. He’s not dead. A cold chill ran up my back. I tried to get this thought out of my mind, but I could not, as if it wasn’t my own. He’s not dead, I thought again. He’s here. And I thought: He’s here, they’re all here, none of the dead who died in this mansion died. Nobody has gone. Nobody goes. Cortés was still talking, but I wasn’t hearing him anymore, and bit by bit the euphoria and
stealthy joy in which I’d felt myself lifted turned into something else, or maybe it was me who felt he was turning into someone else, a sort of happy and mediocre and old Odysseus to whom that expedition through the shadows of that big empty house in search of the lord of all the dead had just revealed the most elemental and most hidden, most recondite, and most visible secret, which is that we don’t die, that Manuel Mena had not died, that’s what I thought all of a sudden, or rather what I knew, that my wife and my son and my nephew Néstor would not die, and I would not die either, with a shiver of vertigo I thought that nobody dies, I thought that we are made of matter and that matter is not destroyed or created, it just transforms, and that we do not disappear, we transform into our descendants just as our ancestors transformed into us, I thought that our ancestors live on in us as we will live on in our descendants, it’s not that they live metaphorically in our volatile memories, I thought, they live physically in our flesh and our blood and our bones, we inherit their molecules and with their molecules we inherit everything they were, whether we like it or not, despise it or not, accept it or not, whether we take it on or not, we are our ancestors as we will be our descendants, I thought, and at that moment I was overwhelmed by a certainty I’d never felt, now I think I could have felt it at any other moment, or better yet that I should have felt it or at least intuited it, but the fact is that when I felt it for the first time, I was in that former operating theatre in that abandoned mansion of that village lost in the middle of Terra Alta, beside my mother and my wife and Cortés and Josepa Miró, I felt that I was at the summit of time, on the infinitesimal and so fleeting and extraordinary and daily peak of history, in the eternal present, with the incalculable legion of my ancestors beneath me, integrated in me, with all their flesh and their blood and their bones turned into my bones and my blood and my flesh, with all their past life turned into my present life, taking them all on, converted into all of them or rather being them all, I understood that writing about Manuel Mena was also writing about myself, that his biography was my biography, that his mistakes and his responsibilities and his guilt and his shame and his misery and his death and his defeats and his fear and his filth and his tears and his sacrifice and his passion and his dishonour were mine because I was him as I was my mother and my father and my grandfather Paco and my great-grandmother Carolina, in the same way that all those ancestors who gathered in my present just like a crowd or innumerable legion of dead people or a forest of ghosts, just like all the bloods that flowed into my blood coming from the unfathomable well of our infinite ignorance of the past, I understood that telling, that accepting Manuel Mena’s story was to tell and accept the story of all of them, that Manuel Mena would live on in me as all my ancestors lived in me, I thought that too, and in the end, drunk on lucidity or on euphoria or on stealthy joy, I told myself that this was the final and best reason to tell Manuel Mena’s story, the definitive reason, if Manuel Mena’s story had to be told it was most of all, I said to myself, to reveal the secret I had just discovered in the realm of the shades, in the profound darkness of that forgotten ruined palace where his legend began and where, I saw it then as if written in a radiant never-written masterpiece, I was going to finish my novel, that transparent secret according to which, although it might be true that history is written by the victors and people weave legends and writers fantasise, not even death is certain. This does not end, I thought. It never ends.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Some of the people to whom I am indebted appear in the pages of this book with their first and last names, but there are many more who do not appear; at the risk of forgetting some, I shall mention the following: José Luis and Ramón Acín, Leandro Aguilera, Josep Mª Álvarez, Francisco Ayala Vicente, Messe Cabús, Julián Casanova, Enrique Cerrillo, Julián Chaves Palacios, Luciano Fernández, Pol Galitó, Antonio Gascón Ricao, Roque Gistau, Jordi Gracia, José Hinojosa, Anna Martí Centelles, Jorge Mayoral, Enrique Moradiellos, Sergi Pàmies, José Miguel Pesqué, José Antonio Redondo Rodríguez, Joan Sagués, Margarita Salas, Manolo Tobías, David Tormo, and the children of Don Eladio Viñuela and Doña Marina Díaz: Marina, José Antonio, Julio, José María, and José Luis. To all of them, thank you. I also want to thank my old friend Robert Soteras, who accompanied me halfway around Spain following the trail of Manuel Mena and the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JAVIER CERCAS is a novelist, short story writer, and columnist for El País. His books include Soldiers of Salamis, which was awarded many prizes, including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and sold more than a million copies worldwide), The Tenant and The Motive (the latter now a film directed by Manuel Martín Cuenca), The Speed of Light (short-listed for the 2008 IMPAC Award), The Anatomy of a Moment (winner of Spain’s National Narrative Prize), Outlaws (short-listed for the 2016 Dublin International Literary Award), and, most recently, The Impostor (winner of the European Book Prize). In 2015 he was the Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, and a book based on the lectures he gave there is published under the title The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  ANNE McLEAN has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, stories, memoirs, and other writings by many authors, including Héctor Abad, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has twice won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, with Javier Cercas for Soldiers of Salamis and with Evelio Rosero for The Armies. She shared the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with Juan Gabriel Vásquez for his novel The Sound of Things Falling, and in 2016 and 2004 won the Premio Valle Inclán for her translations of Outlaws and Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas. In 2012 Spain awarded her a Cruz de Oficial of the Order of Civil Merit.

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