by Joan Sales
“They’re surrendering!” I hear the cry go up to my left.
I can see a tall thin man dressed in rags, covered in dust, with a two-week beard, standing on the parapet. A tramp, I think. What the hell’s a tramp doing on that parapet?
Something glints on the torn sleeve of his shirt; it’s an adjutant. He crosses his arms as if he wants to give us a hug.
“Stop firing! They’re surrendering!” I hear hoarse voices shouting. It’s my men.
It’s a pity a moment like this takes longer to tell than to live. We’re all brothers! Stop firing! Let’s stop killing each other! Let’s stop being such savages! This is a lovely moment . . . Perhaps we’re in Heaven? Perhaps we’re dead and that fatcha dressed in rags is our welcoming angel?
The tattered angel is winking at his men hidden out of sight in the trench. I watch him through my binoculars. And on the sly he’s signalling to them with his right hand, as if he were conducting an orchestra. What’s the symphony he wants them to play? No doubt something in our honour. The “Death of Åse”? I see through him as if I could read inside his head. Get your hand grenades ready and when they come to give us a hug . . .
It’s an old trick we’ve often played in similar circumstances. My men throw down their rifles in order to scramble up and embrace them, on a crazy high. I suddenly remember they are raw recruits unfamiliar with these ploys.
“It’s a trap!” – but they don’t hear. A noisy mêlée: they seem bewitched by the loving welcome they’ve been offered. For God’s sake, how can this desire to be brotherly run so deep? How can we let it get a hold and kill us by the dozen . . . ? “Idiots!” I bawl again, but my voice disappears in the fracas. As if it has a mind of its own, my hand goes into my back pocket and I find my pistol between my fingers, as if it had been born there. I take careful aim; the man on the parapet is waving his arms in my glinting sights. I press gently, voluptuously; the trigger makes a small, ridiculous noise. I remember it’s unloaded.
A dead soldier lay four steps away. I vaguely recall that his name was Esplugues and that he came from Arbeca. I pick up his rifle. Or maybe his name was Arbeca and he came from Esplugues; what’s it matter? Hardly urgent now. I feel a wonderful kick from the rifle and the tattered angel falls on his face like a marionette.
My men have got it at last; got it totally! They attack and massacre with their blades. They sink their machetes into every belly, even the bellies of those who kneel and beg for mercy. My shouts disappear into the air: “What are you doing, you animals? Let them be! No more killing!”
Now, at least, that they’re all dead, they can’t kill any more. Our mouths are covered in sores. Thirst is real torture! Picó manages to send us one of his mules with a wineskin of water. We drink as if we’ve got dropsy. It’s hot and muddy and we think it’s the best water we’ve ever drunk.
How quiet it seems once we’ve had our fill of water! We don’t dare look each other in the eye, as if from now on we’ll harbour a shameful secret. Can we ever look ourselves in the face again?
More days of battles and trenches. It turns out that, unlike us, the enemy had dug out three lines of trenches at different levels up the hill. It was so demoralising to take out one, only to find another a few hundred metres further on. Everything we’d done was to no avail; we had to attack again.
I remember a wood that burned at three corners after an aircraft dropped phosphorus bombs. We couldn’t get out: it was an island in flames surrounded by a swirling sea of machine-gun fire. We ate half-burnt bread. The acrid smell of that wood stuck to me; it often comes back to me, as do the sad, obscene songs the recruits sang.
We slept as best we could in a shallow pit we each made with our small hammer. What peaceful nights! Looking at the sky, listening to the odd stray bullet whistle by, and above the stars of Cygnus or the Northern Cross that Cruells had taught me to see and recognise. When I looked at the starry cross I thought of you, Ramon, and I thought of Trini and our son, and fell asleep saying the Lord’s Prayer. The four staves of that cross were such good company, twinkling in the depths of infinity! We’re in such a bad state, for God’s sake. We need company so badly!
21 SEPTEMBER
I have one real worry: I searched the pockets of their dead second lieutenant, as per our orders. I can tell you it’s the most unpleasant part of one’s duties. But it has to be done: you never know what you may find among the documents of an enemy officer. This fellow only had letters on him from a girl who spoke of getting married once the war was over. Four letters tucked into one envelope, the only one there was and without which I wouldn’t be in the quandary I’m in now. It said he was Antonio López Fernández.
Dear old Olegària never said her grandson was a second lieutenant, but perhaps he’d earned his flashes only recently. She had only very sporadic news from him through the International Red Cross . . .
I prefer to think it must be pure coincidence: so many people go by those names!
I’ve not told you the worst: the day after, when we went to put the dead in a grave, I found he’d been mutilated. They had ripped his trousers open with a knife . . . I’d like to identify the coward who did it and execute him in front of the company.
22 SEPTEMBER
I’m worried by that episode. War is such an unpleasant thing. If only one bore a grudge against those one kills! Or perhaps it is best as it is; we’ll all die one day, war or no war; the worst isn’t the fact that we kill each other but the hatred. Let’s kill each other, given that it is our duty, but without the hatred. It’s what Soleràs said once: let’s kill each other like good brothers.
I’m not sure what I should do: write to the girl? Her name and address are on the back of the envelope: Irene Natalia Royo Jalón. It’s strange, given that j and i are the same letter in Latin, so her initials would make up I.N.R.I. And what would I write? “Dear Miss, I’m pleased to inform you that I’ve just killed your fiancé . . .”? That’s ridiculous. Best forget it. And it would be so difficult to get a letter to her! Via the International Red Cross, obviously, or an embassy. “Miss, I’m very sad to bring you the news of your fiancé’s heroic death: standing on the parapet as we were advancing . . .”? I don’t have to say I did it. “We buried him with all honours, as such a brave enemy deserved . . . ”? What about the mutilation? Shut up! If only I could find the scoundrel . . . It could well be a soldier by the name of Pàmies who looks the part: he has such a stupid crooked expression on his face, the look of a dog that’s been beaten, a sly grin like that mummy in the monastery, but I can hardly execute a man simply because I don’t like his face!
I can’t execute him; it’s not customary to execute mummies. The quartermaster came to say it was time for grub: the men lined up in front of a big sooty black tin stew pot, in tatters, hair tousled, as black as the pot; not to mention the two-week stiff stubbly beards. Fortunately we couldn’t see our own faces and it was frightening to think how we must smell, though luckily we could no longer smell a thing. But at least our eyes shone, our eyes looked and saw and dreamed . . . of a life that’s on the boil and isn’t mutilated, awaiting us at the end of the war beyond all the wretchedness: our dreams stay firm in spite of everything. A double line! They obeyed my order, mechanically; they all gripped a tin plate, the plate that is never washed – it’s hard enough to find water to drink – and imprints its rancid taste on everything we put there. I reviewed my soldiers. I walked past each and every one, looked into their eyes, read their dreams: maybe a woman or a child, maybe a farmhouse with a barn, in the Vallès or on the plain of Urgell, or maybe a tiny flat in Gràcia or the Barceloneta, maybe a kiss that was never given and that might have turned the world upside down . . . Finally, I come to eyes without dreams, those belonging to the mummy: the crook’s eyes that believe in nothing. My mouth filled with saliva as it did then but this time the gob of spit silently hit that face and slid slowly between the bristles like a fat worm. Pàmies didn’t flinch. The other soldiers’ eyes were full of the
ir own dreams, of the pot sending a vertical stream of steam up to the sky, as when Abel was sacrificed and everywhere stank of wool: the eternal mutton that Supplies served up. Almighty God, why did you allow Cain’s seed to survive in this land?
I find it really difficult to believe that the dead lieutenant is old Olegària’s grandson. She’d not told me that he was courting; of course, he could have met that Irene in fascist territory, after he’d passed over to their side: that Irene comes from far away. You can draw little out of the four letters: that the girl’s quite “uncultured”, as Picó would say, and little besides. There’s a “yer ever luvvin’ ” that is absolutely genuine. Though that’s a very general complaint: didn’t Juliet our cousin once write “my deerest Lluís I adoor yer”?
FALGUERA DE LOS CABEZOS, SATURDAY, 9 OCTOBER
The area we’ve taken with many losses was a bare plain, grey as a basin of porridge, surrounded by equally bare mountains. Their peaks are geometrical, pyramids and truncated cones: at sunrise and sunset, the oblique light hit them and projected stark, angular shadows so it looked like the vulture trap in Olivel. It had a charm of its own: geometry is pure, mineral is clean; life is dirty. Xilte and La Pobla de Ladron were far behind us and we were roaming with the remnants of the battalion between what looked like craters on the moon. We were now an advanced contingent in enemy territory.
Once, we were totally isolated and had not eaten or drunk for two days. We set up in the shadow of a hill safe from gunfire; every approach was covered by artillery and machine gunners in trenches. Two from Supplies managed to slip away with a mule along a deep gully trail; when they came back, a grenade blew up a few feet from the animal and its belly opened up like a big flower. Three days later, its scent reached us on the breeze. Wasn’t its silence cynical? Why couldn’t we be a bunch of stony-faced statues?
Now we’re a long way from that plain. The enemy is surrendering the wide open countryside rather than fighting us for the saddle of the hill, as we thought they would. A long valley, two to seven kilometres across, lies between them and us: no man’s land. The four or five little villages are intact but deserted.
Los Cabezos is a cool, leafy mountain range covered in pine trees, dotted with springs and brooks. The shepherd’s hut where I’ve established myself is next to a brook and I wash in a pool deep enough for the water to come up to my collarbone. The foliage of elms and poplars has a thousand hues, yellowy green to reddish purple, and the stream carves out luxuriant meadows here and there. Cows and goats come to graze from the villages behind us, where life has returned to normal soon after a new front was established. I don’t think they are at all worried that the front protecting them now fights under a different flag. Didn’t dear old Olegària often say “We’re all tarred with the same brush”?
The land is more pastoral than arable; there are no plantations, and the sound of tinkling bells is so pleasant after weeks of only hearing the rat-a-tat of machine guns and explosions of mortars. The goatherds sell us goat’s milk that otherwise they’d throw away since people around here won’t drink it. The goats belong to a mountain breed, they have long silky wool and graceful horns.
Every day at sunset the woodpecker’s powerful, insistent cry echoes down the wooded ravines. With a bit of imagination it sounds like a neigh and that explains why the locals call it “horse”. It is the bird’s farewell to the dying day; then you hear only the cries of mountain and barn owls and the cackling night jay.
However, the woodpecker’s farewell isn’t gloomy but energetic, confident, cheerful. One evening I was by myself among the pines; I’d stretched out on a bed of pine to smoke and dream. I was so quiet the woodpecker didn’t notice me as its beak busily hit a tree trunk and its taps echoed round the countryside. The rays of the sun filtering through foliage glinted on its feathers now and then: a deep red, green and yellow flash of lightning spotted black and white. It must be a male, brightly coloured and as big as a turtle dove. Clinging to the trunk with its claws, it was working at something important because I drew near and it wasn’t distracted. When it finally was, rather than flying off, the woodpecker went to the other side of the tree and poked its head out to keep an eye on me. I walked round too, and it repeated its manoeuvre, as if playing hide and seek. Its head kept poking into sight and I found its beady, suspicious little eyes very funny. I tried to catch it but it took flight and screeched, as if to warn the whole forest.
From the top of Cabezo Mayor you could on very calm days make out a bluish line on the misty horizon, far to the northeast. Sometimes I would sit on a high rock and spend hours trying to encompass the stillness of that perpetual snow. My heart kept telling me it was our country’s advance guard. I’ve been away for almost eighteen months, eighteen months without seeing Trini and my boy. I’ve not missed them till now. Why the change? I feel strangely heavy in my chest – no, not in my chest, in my stomach. As if I’d eaten meat that had gone off, that upsets your insides until you vomit.
The nurse comes to see me occasionally, always with his telescope. We look at Venus, that shines like a trembling tear until long after sunset: it’s now enjoying its “maximum length”, Cruells explained. His is an extending navy telescope from the nineteenth century – maybe I’ve already described it to you? – of the kind with sections that slot back into each other; once it’s collapsed back it’s barely ten centimetres long and when extended it’s more than a metre. On evenings like these, Venus seems like a thin, fragile strip of new moon. Our observatory is that high rock, where the tops of the trees don’t obstruct our view of the sky.
One evening, when we were sitting on that famous rock and amusing ourselves looking through his telescope at the craters and seas on the waxing moon, he suddenly asked if I was feeling unwell.
“I’m just about right. Why do you ask?”
“You look yellowish, as if something hadn’t gone down too well.”
I gave him a look of surprise: “I’ve had that feeling for some time. Something’s weighing on me inside. It’s probably stuff and nonsense, but my stomach really hurts. Where do you puke up stuff and nonsense? Can you give me confession?”
He shook his head gravely.
“I’ve not been ordained.”
“That’s irrelevant. I need you to listen. Who can I talk to, if not you? I don’t know whether I believe or not and perhaps it doesn’t really matter – it comes and goes with the moon. However, I do feel this heaviness in my stomach. I am sure of that.”
I told him about the second lieutenant and didn’t miss out the detail of his mutilation: “I won’t regain my peace of mind until I’ve executed the scoundrel who —”
“How would that solve anything?” he said, shaking his head. “He’s dead now, forget it. You did your duty, as he did his; pray for his soul and don’t give it another thought, I beg you. War is war.”
“And what if he was old Olegària’s grandson?”
“Unlikely. It would be too much of a coincidence. Old Olegària’s grandson wasn’t well enough educated to be a second lieutenant. He’s probably illiterate.”
“That may very well be, but this is much, much worse than the poor dead, mutilated second lieutenant. In the end it’s the usual story: the obscene and the macabre. The mutilation may be a ritual that comes down to us from pre-historical times, perpetuated over the centuries; Melo gives examples in his history of the war of the Segadors: some of Goya’s etchings from the war against France show such cases. How can these rituals pass from one war to another if they are sometimes centuries apart and the culprits haven’t a clue about history? It’s not passed down by tradition; it is born instinctively. What instincts do we have? What are they, for God’s sake? You are right: better not think about it. And in the end, the adjutant got what was coming to him! What the fuck was he doing, standing up on the parapet? Couldn’t he see it would all end badly? No, other things are tying my stomach in knots. It’s not the dead adjutant. I’m an adjutant too. I’ll be dead one of these da
ys. He’d have killed me if I’d not killed him: we are quits. Requiescat in pace. To hell with him.”
Cruells’ lips were moving imperceptibly.
“Don’t pray now; don’t be a fool. You’ll have time enough for that. Now listen to me.”
And I rolled off all my dealings with the carlana, not sparing him a single detail.
“You see how far I’ve sunk. I can tell you now, the forgery doesn’t worry me at all; I keep thinking about poor, resigned Trini . . . And I left her all alone to cope by herself. I’ve carried on my life as if she didn’t exist. My life or whose? It’s true that she and I have advanced ideas, that the idea of not being married by the Church or by civil law was something that came from both of us, possibly more from her side, as she’s from an anarchist family; advanced ideas . . . If I told you . . . Is that any reason to abandon a young woman and disappear into thin air? Is that what advanced ideas are all about? I told the carlana that I’d be prepared to leave Trini for her . . .”
“To leave Trini? I don’t imagine you’d ever have done that.”
“At that particular moment . . . Afterwards, obviously, I’d have pulled my hair out but then I didn’t know what I was doing or saying. Clearly, you’ve never been there and find it hard to understand. If you don’t up the ante, they don’t take any notice. They don’t want half-baked passions: it’s sublime and crazy or . . . They have an extraordinary refined sensitivity when it comes to perceiving emotions, if you don’t go full out, might as well not bother! They are astonishing, Cruells, much superior to us! If you suggest staking all, life and death, well-being and peace, they’ll follow you to the ends of the earth; they are astonishing, Cruells! Why should we think it so strange we like women if they are a thousand times superior to us?”
“You speak as if this little affair weren’t the first.”
“The first? Please, Cruells, you’re forgetting I wasn’t a seminarist. The first! Bah, if we had to drag out my past affairs . . . it would be never-ending! On the other hand, it’s been a long time and I’d probably not remember some by now. They belong to the pre-war period and a lot of water has passed under the bridge! I have duly repented: please, let’s not rake up stuff I’ve put behind me. Only one very occasionally comes back to mind and the fact is I got myself into such a tangle . . . my God, what a tangle that was. Naturally, Trini never suspected anything. Perhaps the worst of it is when you get into a mess and can’t find a way out, can’t seek relief from the only person in the world who can help you get rid of that burden, namely your own wife. You’re so isolated . . . Then I’d never thought of confessing, as I am now to you. I went through a very bad period, I can tell you. She was a divorcée with a couple of children and had to maintain herself because her husband had vanished. She’d had the bright idea of marrying a South American, who as his name suggests disappeared without trace when she found she was pregnant for a second time. She performed bit parts in a music hall on carrer Nou de La Rambla to keep herself and her children, and lived in a boarding house on carrer del Carme. She was dark-skinned and stunning, waist-length black hair and eyes straight out of A Thousand and One Nights, but she was so stupid . . . so stupid, for God’s sake! She devoured cheap novelettes and listened to melodramas on the radio; she soaked them up like the Bible and quoted whole sentences at you in conversation; how could one ever resist such wisdom? I remember she once said to me word for word: ‘Love is male; but passion is female’, and she always quoted this stuff in Spanish because she saw herself as a passionate soul and perhaps was. The drawback was that she acted like that with all and sundry. If I were to tell you the sordid situations I got into that I managed to tolerate because I didn’t have the strength to break with that fool! I was hooked, unable to give her up like a coke addict; it lasted for months. I felt tarnished, destroyed, as if I’d fallen to the bottom of a pit and would never have the strength to drag myself out – where’d I ever find a helping hand? The only person who could have helped at the time was Trini and I couldn’t say a word to her! They were months I spent in hell. I felt as if I’d lost contact with Trini and everyone, as if they’d shut themselves off from me. Sensual women repel me, they always have, and that woman was no exception; how could I explain the enigma that you can be so hooked on a woman and yet think she’s dreadful? Yet, she was still a thousand times better than I am; a thousand times more generous, more accepting. But why are we talking about her now? That seems like a dream now. I can’t think how that hapless woman could have dominated me as she did for four or five months of my life . . .”