From a distance, Fernando created an illusion for himself in which it was all a bad dream and that when it ended, he’d return to Spain and his brother would be there waiting for him. He would take him out of that insane asylum, they would go someplace safe and far away, and they would start fresh. A new life, far from their father, far from Publio. Far from everything. But then the twilight shadows would invade the forests and the frozen swamps and roads that surrounded his position. The cold grew worse, and the lieutenant stood up, rubbing his hands, exhaling the bluish smoke of the cigarette that burned down between his purple lips. And he remembered that the hell was all too real.
He took one last look at the distant horizon line; there among the shadows moved the silhouettes of Spanish soldiers who perhaps tomorrow, during the offensive they were preparing, would end up dead. Or perhaps it would be him, after so much searching, he who would find a last sky to glance up at as he died. He didn’t theorize about his death or the deaths of others. Nor about the pain that he could inflict or suffer. Nothing seemed real; his body simply went along for the ride, absent, like one more coat to protect him from the cold. Everything happened in a ghostly way, floating, filled with emptiness.
He heard the snow crunch behind him under the weight of someone approaching. It was Recasens.
“They brought something for you. It’s in the shelter,” he said, his tone curt, turning immediately from whence he had come. Recasens was a man of few words. His gestures were brusque, like his wide, veiny hands, like his Siberian woodcutter’s gait, sinking each step into the snow up to the knees. The frozen flakes fell on his cape and onto the machine gun he wore crossed on his back, with the bayonet fixed. Fernando followed him into the hole dug in the snow. They entered the shelter panting. Other soldiers were covered with the ponchos, wrapped up around the improvised fireplace. The smoke of the wet firewood irritated their eyes and stunk up the small cubicle, lit by the rising and falling flames that reflected the men’s silhouettes onto the stockade walls.
“There it is.” Recasens pointed to an envelope with the shovel he was using to fan the fire.
They all looked expectantly at the envelope. None of them had gotten mail or packages on the front during those months, and they all knew how difficult it was to cross the supply lines.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” asked Recasens, as if his name was written there too, in black pencil and in Spanish, beside the name Lieutenant Fernando Mola.
The lieutenant picked up the envelope and examined it with surprise. It wasn’t orders from military command. Those documents always came in code and were put directly into his hands, not sent through a liaison. Besides, it was obvious that the letter had been opened, censored, and resealed.
“It comes from Spain,” he said, his voice dreamy. Spain seemed like Atlantis: a place that didn’t really exist. His gaze became distressed. He searched for impossible privacy in some corner, taking cover beneath his forearm. The others, disappointed, granted him a moment of discretion, moving their eyes to the fire, the only thing that could muffle their curiosity over what was in the envelope.
Fernando bit his hand, stiffened by the cold. He was trying to hide it from the others, but he couldn’t contain his emotion. He read slowly.
“Bad news?” Recasens asked him when he saw the infinite void that opened up in the lieutenant’s eyes, overwhelmed and unable to react.
Fernando shook his head. He went over to the fire and slowly fed the paper to the flames.
“My father disinherited me, and my brother has been declared incompetent. He is locked up in the Pedralbes sanatorium. I have nothing, not even one peseta, no family to go back to,” he said laconically, as the fire turned the letter blue before turning it to ash. It was the first time that Fernando had spoken to anyone about anything having to do with his past.
Suddenly, there was a loud noise. The walls of the shelter trembled, and a thin layer of snow and fir needles fell onto them.
“The attack has started,” said Recasens in a funereal tone.
“Well, let’s go get them,” shouted Fernando, grabbing his automatic rifle and opening the shelter’s trap door. A glacial air immediately inundated the small space, putting out the weak fire.
The night shone as if in a storm, filled with red and blue gleams, one after the other and constantly followed by strong explosions and a rain of mud and shrapnel. Beneath the fire, the men advanced, dragging themselves across the snow, taking cover behind other charred, bleeding bodies. Some soldiers dragged a stretcher with a wounded man on it who swung his arms without hands, screaming like a madman. Others ran toward the rearguard, fleeing terrified, stumbling over the snow, and losing their weapons. Fernando and his men crouched in the crater of a mortar bomb, their faces tense and covered with blood and mud. They watched the horror unfold before their eyes as if it were normal, desensitized by cold and fear.
Near dawn everything stopped. Through the fog, the last Spanish soldiers of the Blue Division advanced through the cracked, smoking woods. An uncomfortable stillness had taken hold of the landscape, like the calm that precedes gale winds, only broken by the crackling of some burning huts and by the soft moans of the dying wounded. Fernando and his men advanced, making their way through the faces devastated by battle and exhaustion. After twenty minutes of a pathetic advance, they made out the smoking domes of an orthodox chapel between two hump-shaped hills.
A German officer came out to meet them. He was in the SS. He was wearing a thick coat with a leather collar and a hat with untied earflaps. On his belt stuck out the butt of a pistol on which he rested a gloved hand. He stopped in front of Fernando with a defiant look.
“We’ve taken a Russian officer of Spanish origin prisoner. We want you to interrogate him.”
* * *
Behind a barbed-wire fence, a row of men huddled together waiting beneath the blizzard. They were unarmed, many barefoot and without coats. They had been lined up for review, and their labored, steamy breathing mixed with the whirls of snowflakes that flew over their bowed heads. Fernando felt a strange unease.
The SS officer lifted an arm.
“This is your prisoner, Lieutenant. We believe he is a Spanish officer working for the NKVD, the Soviet military intelligence. We’ve tried to get the truth out of him, but he’s tough. He says he will only speak with an officer from the Blue Division.”
A soldier hit the prisoner on the hip with the butt of his rifle, forcing him out of the line.
“What’s your name?” Fernando asked him.
The prisoner touched his sore hip. His hands were covered with strips of blanket. The tips of his fingers were frozen and his nails blackened.
“I will only speak with your superiors,” he responded arrogantly.
Fernando arched his eyebrows. That guy had guts.
“Are you a military intelligence officer?” Fernando asked him, lighting a cigarette and putting it into the prisoner’s mouth.
The prisoner smiled with a twisted mouth.
“Have one of your superiors come over, Lieutenant. You are wasting your time with me. I won’t tell you anything.”
The prisoner’s confidence in and of itself was disconcerting to the lieutenant. His extremities shook with cold, and soon red blotches began to appear on his skin. It was the frozen Leningrad wind biting into his flesh. He clenched his chattering teeth, but his gaze didn’t flinch when Fernando approached him with a bayonet and stuck its sharp point beneath his right eyelid.
“You are a Russian prisoner. You work for military intelligence. I can rip out your entrails and then shove them back into your belly to start again as many times as I want. And nobody is going to stop me. So you may as well tell me who you are.”
At that moment, Corporal Recasens approached with his head bowed. When he looked up he stopped short. Not a single muscle in his face contracted, even though the sight of that prisoner gave him a stab of pain so intense that he feared he would faint, as if someone had rammed a b
ayonet into his ribs. His first feeling was consternation, followed by a sudden inner rage. He observed the prisoner from a distance. He had only seen him once in his entire life. He was changed, just as Recasens himself surely was. That damn war and that endless cold transformed everything. But it was him; there was no doubt about it.
It was in that moment when a cold, cruel resolve took seed in him, an instinct for revenge that would accompany him to the end of his days. He leaped onto the prisoner and punched him, sending him facedown onto the frozen ground. The prisoner wriggled along the snow, leaving thick drops of blood from his split lip behind him. The rest of the prisoners watched the scene with fear and impotence, as the soldiers held them at gunpoint.
Surprised by Recasens’s reaction, the lieutenant was slow to react. When he did he pushed him violently aside.
“Mind telling me what is going on with you? I didn’t give the order for anyone to hit this man.”
“As you wish, Lieutenant, but we need to talk. I know this man.”
Coughing, the prisoner got to his knees, and with a hand on his thigh he got up shakily. His eyes were like embers, and his bruised lip trembled with cold and rage.
Fernando looked at Recasens as if he were drunk. They stepped a few paces away.
“What are you saying?”
Recasens didn’t take his eyes off of the prisoner.
“That man killed a woman in front of me. Two years ago, in an abandoned quarry in Badajoz. He identified himself as an officer of the national intelligence service. He’s no red; he’s a fraud and a killer. They forced me to make a declaration against some poor bastard they’d accused of the murder. They said if I didn’t, they’d send me here. I lied to save myself, and my declaration sent an innocent man to his death. And they sent me to this crappy war anyway.” Recasens raised a hand and pointed with his index finger at the prisoner. “And all because of that son of a bitch. He was the killer.”
The blizzard’s gusts sent those words crashing into the lieutenant’s face. He remembered his brother’s disgrace, his mother’s death, his fate. And then, inside, he felt a heartrending animal pain.
“That man you accused … what was his name?”
Recasens shook his head. He remembered the name perfectly. Every night he saw the same image. The image of a man hanged because of him.
“Alcalá … His name was Marcelo Alcalá.”
The SS officer came over, impatient.
“What’s going on, Lieutenant?”
Fernando looked at the prisoner with a gaze as sharp as a knife blade.
“I need to interrogate the detainee carefully.”
He gestured to Recasens. The corporal grabbed the prisoner by the hair and dragged him to a building in ruins where they were interrogating other prisoners. From inside they heard excruciating screams of suffering. The German soldiers vented their anger on several prisoners, stripping them and jabbing them into the frozen ground with pickaxes and bayonets. It was a scene out of Goya, a lusty orgy of blood and pain. Fernando’s eyes widened. His look was a lost one, as if he had no memory of who he was or who he had been.
“Take off his clothes,” he ordered Recasens. The corporal obeyed, tearing the prisoner’s tattered rags off brutally.
Fernando pulled out his Luger, pulled back the slide, and cocked it, ramming the mouth of the cannon into the prisoner’s temple.
“Did you know a woman named Isabel Mola? Answer!”
The prisoner blinked, disconcerted at hearing that name. He opened his eyes very wide, and his face went pale.
“You … are Fernando Mola?”
Fernando clenched his pistol harder, beside himself.
“Is it true what Recasens says? You killed my mother?”
At that moment shouting was heard from the other side of the door. Suddenly, it opened widely, and the head of the Blue Division, General Esteban Infantes himself, appeared, supported by his general staff.
“What is going on here?” he bellowed, looking alternately at Fernando and the prisoner. Fernando stood at attention, although his whole body shook with rage.
“I’m interrogating a Russian prisoner, my general.”
The prisoner breathed a sigh of relief.
“Pleased to see you again, General. I see that my message arrived on time. The Soviets are about to launch the last offensive. They are going to come with their T-34s and with planes. I think you should order a massive retreat.”
The general nodded. It was obvious that he knew this man. He looked at Fernando brusquely.
“You are an idiot, Lieutenant. You were about to kill one of our men infiltrated into the Russian lines.” He ordered them to give the prisoner a coat and take him out of there.
Fernando couldn’t believe what was going on.
“That man, my general, is suspected of having committed a crime in Spain … he killed my mother.”
The prisoner didn’t even flinch. “My general, I would leave a small contention squad to gain some time as we retreat. It’s likely that the men in it won’t survive, but the Fatherland will remember them as heroes. In my opinion, Lieutenant Mola is perfect for that position, and that corporal there, Recasens, should remain loyally at his superior’s side till the end,” he said. He looked at Fernando sadly. He approached him and took his Luger with a curt gesture while looking him in the eyes. “I think I’ll keep your pistol as a souvenir.” Then he headed toward the door.
“You can’t do this!” Fernando shouted at the general. “That man is a murderer.”
The prisoner stopped. He turned slowly, contemplating the horror of the other prisoners in their death throes, impaled and crucified on the ground.
“I’m a murderer, it’s true. But look around you, Fernando. Tell me who of us isn’t.”
* * *
Two hours later, the snow grew worse. Almost a dozen men had hastily dug holes in the ground to take shelter in as the ground trembled beneath the weight of the columns of Russian tanks that appeared on the horizon.
Fernando closed his eyes. Beside him, Recasens prayed the Our Father. Fernando fixed the finder of his automatic rifle toward the front.
“Open fire!” he ordered when the tanks were already upon them. And while one by one his men died, crushed by the caterpillar tracks of the unstoppable tanks, he kept shooting and crying, sure of his imminent death.
20
Barcelona, February 2, 1981
It hadn’t been easy, but in the end Gabriel had given up. He barely had any mobility, and his life had deteriorated so rapidly that it was impossible for him to keep doing even the simplest things without help. At first he had adopted an offended attitude, as if he were denying the evidence that he had become an old man, an unbearable burden for others, even for himself. In other times, times so distant that it seemed they’d never existed, he wouldn’t have allowed his weakness to reach this denigrating state. He would have shot himself so he could be buried beside his wife in San Lorenzo. That, he said, would have had an aesthetic grace to it, almost the icing on the cake: resting eternally beside his wife who had committed suicide, after so many years of hating each other in silence. Because if Gabriel was sure of one thing, it was that the dead hated with greater intensity than the living. And he could feel, every time he went up to her grave, his wife’s hatred of him.
Gabriel ended up accepting that he had finally become some piece of furniture that could be moved from place to place and parked in a corner without a second thought. He couldn’t shake that feeling of abandonment, even though his daughter made sure to visit him often.
Maybe that was the reason he had decided to take the step he was about to take.
He stroked the package he carried under his arm, aware that as he went through the revolving door that opened before him nothing would ever be the same again. Still, he took a deep breath and went into the lobby of the nursing home with a determined step.
Behind a tall counter, a young man wearing metal-framed glasses was on the telephone
. Gabriel stood waiting, flipping through some pamphlets that explained how to apply for a trip to Lanzarote with the Imserso, at special senior discounts. The piped-in music was classical. He saw a couple of old men passing with walkers and some nurses in white coats and caps. It was all clean, enfeebled, tranquil. An ascetic place where passions had no place.
“How can I help you?” the young man asked him when he hung up the phone. There was something effeminate about him; maybe it was his excessively sweet perfume or his voice or the way he moved his hands.
“I wanted to see Fernando Mola.”
The young man looked surprised.
“Excuse me, who?”
Gabriel repeated the name. The young man got nervous and looked over his shoulder, as if he feared someone had heard.
“I’m afraid that there is no one living here by that name.”
“I don’t know what name the jerk goes by these days. Maybe he’s changed it. But judging by your face, you know who I’m talking about. My name is Gabriel Bengoechea. Tell him I’m here to see him.”
The young man hesitated. He wiped the palm of his hand on the leg of his pants, as if it were sweaty.
“This is not how we usually do things,” he stuttered. “Visits have to be authorized by a supervisor. The man you are referring to doesn’t usually see visitors at this time of the day. He’s doing his water therapy.”
“Well, he’ll just have to do it later.”
The young man left the counter and headed down the corridor. He came back a few minutes later, his face white as plaster. “There was a slight problem, but it’s been taken care of. Come with me, please.”
Gabriel didn’t ask what kind of problem there was, but obviously someone had given him a good talking-to.
They went through a corridor with large exterior windows. On either side there were old people sunbathing, sitting on wicker chairs. They looked like statues stored in the basement of a museum. They barely looked up as the men passed. They crossed a series of whitewashed arches before reaching a shady area where the temperature was cooler. Along the ceiling ran pipes, and flowing water could be heard. The young man said that they were below the pool area. A few yards later he stopped. He pulled out a key and opened a door.
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