Then he sees him. He's standing beside the ditch, tall and burly and silhouetted against the dark green of the pines and the dark blue of the clouds, panting a little, his large hands grasping the slanted rifle and the field uniform with all its buckles, threadbare from exposure. Prey to the aberrant resignation of one who knows his time has come, through his thick glasses blurred by the rain, Sánchez Mazas looks at the soldier who is going to kill him or hand him over — a young man, his hair plastered to his skull by the rain, his eyes maybe grey, his cheeks gaunt and cheekbones prominent and remembers him or thinks he remembers him from among the ragged soldiers who guarded them in the monastery. He recognizes him or thinks he recognizes him, but takes no comfort from the idea that it's going to be him and not a SIM agent who redeems him from the endless agony of fear, and it humiliates him like an injury added to all the injuries of these years on the run not to have died with his cellmates or not to have known how to die in an open field in broad daylight and fighting with a courage he lacked, instead of dying now and there, muddy and alone and shaking with dread and shame in an undignified hole in the ground. So, his mind raving and confused, Rafael Sánchez Mazas exquisite poet, fascist ideologue, Franco's future minister — awaits the shot that will finish him off. But the shot doesn't come, and Sánchez Mazas, as if he were already dead and from death remembering this scene from a dream, watches guilelessly as the soldier slowly advances towards the edge of the ditch in the unceasing rain and the threatening sound of soldiers and Carabineros, just steps away, the rifle pointing at him unostentatiously, the gesture more inquisitive than tense, like a novice hunter about to identify his first prey, and just as the soldier gets to the edge of the ditch the vegetal noise of the rain is pierced by a nearby shout:
'Is anyone there?'
The soldier is looking at him; Sánchez Mazas is looking at the soldier, but his weak eyes don't understand what they see: beneath the sodden hair and wide forehead and eyebrows covered in raindrops the soldier's look doesn't express compassion or hatred, or even disdain, but a kind of secret or unfathomable joy, something verging on cruelty, something that resists reason, but nor is it instinct, something that remains there with the same blind stubbornness with which blood persists in its course and the earth in its immovable orbit and all beings in their obstinate condition of being, something that eludes words the way the water in the stream eludes stone, because words are only made for saying to each other, for saying the sayable, when the sayable is everything except what rules us or makes us live or matters or what we are or what this anonymous defeated soldier is, who now looks at this man whose body almost blends in with the earth and the brown water in the ditch, and who calls out loudly without taking his eyes off him:
'There's nobody over here!'
Then he turns and walks away.
For nine days and nights of the brutal winter of 1939 Rafael Sánchez Mazas wandered through the region of Banyoles trying to cross the lines of the Republican army in retreat and pass over into the Nationalist zone. Many times he thought he wasn't going to make it; alone, no other resources than his will to survive, unable to get his bearings in unfamiliar territory of wild, dense woods, weakened to the point of exhaustion from walking, by the cold, hunger and three uninterrupted years of captivity, many times he had to stop to gather his strength in order not to let himself just give up. The first three days were terrible. He slept during the day and walked at night, avoiding the exposure of the roads and villages, begging for food and shelter at farms, and though he prudently dared not reveal his true identity at any of them, but rather introduced himself as a lost Republican soldier, and though almost everyone he asked gave him something to eat, let him rest awhile and gave him directions without asking questions, fear kept anyone from offering him protection. At dawn on the fourth day, after more than three hours wandering through dark forests, Sánchez Mazas made out a farm in the distance. Less by rational decision than out of utter fatigue, he collapsed onto a bed of pine needles and remained there, his eyes closed, barely sensing the sound of his own breathing and the smell of the dew-soaked earth. He had eaten nothing since the morning before, he was exhausted and felt ill, because not a single muscle in his body didn't ache. Until then the miracle of having survived the firing squad and the hope of encountering the Nationalists had given him a perseverance and a fortitude he'd thought lost; now he realized that his energy was running out and that, unless another miracle occurred or someone helped him, his adventure would very soon be at an end. After a while, when he felt a little restored and the sun shining through the foliage had instilled in him a scrap of optimism, he gathered all his strength, stood up and started walking towards the farm.
Maria Ferré would never forget the radiant February dawn she first set eyes on Rafael Sánchez Mazas. Her parents were out in the field and she was getting ready to feed the cows when a man appeared in the yard — tall, famished and spectral, with his twisted spectacles and many days' growth of beard, in his sheepskin jacket and trousers full of holes, and covered in mud and weeds — and asked her for a piece of bread. Maria wasn't scared. She'd just turned twenty-six and she was a dark blonde, illiterate, hard-working girl for whom the war was nothing more than a confusing background noise to the letters her brother sent home from the front, and a meaningless whirl wind that two years earlier had taken the life of a boy from Palol de Revardit she'd once dreamed of marrying. During this time her family hadn't been hungry or frightened, because the farm lands they cultivated and the cows, pigs and hens sheltering in the stables were enough, more than enough, to feed them, and because, although Mas Borrell, their house, was located halfway between Palol de Revardit and Cornellá de Terri, the abuses of the days of revolution didn't reach them and the disorder of the retreat brought them only the odd lost, disarmed soldier who, more frightened than threatening, asked for something to eat or stole a hen. It's possible that at first Sánchez Mazas was to Maria Ferré just another of the many deserters who roamed the area during those days, and that's why she wasn't scared, but she always maintained that as soon as she saw his pitiful figure outlined against the ground of the path that ran past the yard, she recognized beneath the ravages of three days' exposure to the elements the unmistakable bearing of a gentleman. Whether that's true or not, Maria gave the man the same kind treatment she'd given countless other fugitives.
'I don't have any bread,' she told him. 'But I could heat something up for you.'
Undone by gratitude, Sánchez Mazas followed her into the kitchen and, while Maria heated up the previous night's saucepan — where, in a rich, brown broth, floated lentils and big chunks of bacon, sausage and chorizo along with potatoes and vegetables — he sat down on a bench, enjoying the nearness of the fire and the joyful promise of hot food, took off his soaking shoes and socks, and suddenly noticed a terrible ache in his feet and an infinite tiredness in his bony shoulders. Maria handed him a clean rag and some clogs, and out of the corner of her eye watched him dry his neck, his face, his hair, as well as his feet and ankles, while watching the flames dance amid the logs with staring, slightly glazed eyes, and when she handed him the food she saw him devour it with a hunger of many days, in silence and scarcely forgoing the manners of a man raised among linen tablecloths and silver cutlery, which, more out of his courteous instincts than his recently acquired habit of fear, made him set the spoon and pewter plate down by the fire and stand up when Maria's parents burst into the half-light of the kitchen and stood, looking at him, with a bovine mixture of passivity and suspicion. Perhaps mistakenly thinking their guest didn't understand Catalan, Maria told her father in Catalan what had happened; he asked Sánchez Mazas to finish his meal and, without taking his eyes off him, put his farming tools down beside a stone bench, washed his hands in a basin and came over to the fire. As he sensed the father approach, Sánchez Mazas scraped the plate clean. His hunger calmed, he'd reached a decision: he realized that, if he didn't reveal his true identity, he wouldn't have the slightest chanc
e of being offered shelter there either, and he also realized that the hypothetical risk of denunciation was preferable to the real risk of starving or freezing to death.
'My name is Rafael Sánchez Mazas and I am the most senior living leader of the Falange in Spain,' he finally said to the man who listened without looking at him.
Sixty years later, when neither her parents nor Sánchez Mazas were alive to do so, Maria still recalled those words exactly, perhaps because that was the first time she'd heard of the Falange, just as she recalled that Sánchez Mazas went on to relate his implausible adventure at Collell, told them about his wanderings of the last few days and, addressing the man, added:
'You know as well as I do that the Nationalists will be here any time now. It's a question of days, if not hours. But if the reds catch me I'm a dead man. Believe me, I'm very grateful for your hospitality, and I wouldn't want to take advantage of your good faith, but if you could give me what your daughter just gave me to eat once a day and a sheltered spot to spend the night, I shall be eternally grateful. Think it over. If you do me this favour you'll be well rewarded.'
Maria Ferré's father didn't need to think it over. He assured him that he could not have him in the house because it would be too risky, but he proposed a better alternative: Sánchez Mazas would spend the day in the woods, in a safe field nearby beside the Mas de la Casa Nova — a farm abandoned by its owners since the beginning of the war — and at night he would sleep warmly in a hayloft, a couple of hundred metres from the house, where they would make sure he didn't lack food. Sánchez Mazas was delighted with the plan, he took the blanket and package of food Maria prepared for him, took his leave of her and her mother, and followed her father along the dirt track that passed in front of the door to the house and then went along through sown fields the top of which through the clear air of the sunny morning — overlooked the road to Banyoles and the valley full of farms and further off the jagged, distant profile of the Pyrenees. After a while, once Maria's father had pointed out in the distance the hayloft where he should spend the night, they crossed an open, uncultivated field and stopped at the edge of the woods, just where the track thinned out into a narrow path; the man then told him that at the end of the path was the Mas de la Casa Nova and insisted he not return until night had fallen. Sánchez Mazas didn't have time even to reiterate his gratitude, because the man turned and started walking back towards Mas Borrell. Following his instructions, Sánchez Mazas entered a forest of ash trees, holly and enormously tall oaks which barely let the sun through and got thicker and more impenetrable as the path went down the slope of a hillside, and he'd been walking for long enough for a little voice to start injecting him with the venom of mistrust when he came out into a clearing in the middle of which stood the Mas de la Casa Nova. It was a two-storey stone farmhouse, with an artesian well and a big wooden door; once he was sure it had been uninhabited for a long time Sánchez Mazas considered forcing one of the entrances and holing up inside, but after a moment of reflection he decided to follow Maria Ferré's father's instructions and look for the field he'd recommended. He found it quite nearby, as soon as he crossed a steep, rocky, dry streambed lined with elms, and he lay down there, in the tall grass, under the clear, perfectly blue sky and the dazzling sun that warmed the cold, still morning air, and although every bone in his body ached with exhaustion and an endless fatigue weighed down his eyelids, for the first time in a long time he felt safe and almost happy, reconciled with reality, and as he noticed the pleasant weight of sunlight on his eyes and skin and the irrevocable slipping of his consciousness towards the waters of sleep, like an anomalous offshoot of that unforeseen plenitude, some lines appeared on his lips that he didn't even remember having read:
Do not move
Let the wind speak
That is paradise
Hours later, anxiety awakened him. The sun shone in the middle of the sky and although he still had a twinge of pain in his muscles, sleep had restored part of his energy and strength that he'd burnt-up over the last few days in the desperation to cling to life; but as soon as he got free of Maria Ferré's blanket and heard in the silence of the field a distant noise of many running motors he realized the cause of his uneasiness. He went to the far edge of the field and from there, needlessly hidden, he watched from afar the procession of a large column of trucks and Republican soldiers swarming along the Banyoles road. Although in the immediate future he'd experience the threatening proximity of enemy troops many more times, only that morning did he consider it a danger, and feel he must return to his improvised bed, collect the blanket and package of food, and duck into the edge of the forest to hide. There, in a shelter made of stone and branches, which he planned that very afternoon but didn't start building until the following dawn, he spent most of the next three days. At first the construction of the shelter kept him busy, but then time went by as he lay on the ground sometimes sleeping, recouping the energy that he could see he might need at any moment, searching through his memory for every forgotten instant of his wartime adventure and especially imagining how he would tell it once he was liberated by his own people — a liberation that the logic of events brought ever nearer, yet his impatience made him feel was ever further away. He didn't talk to anyone except Maria Ferré or her father, with whom he'd chat for a while in the hayloft when they came in the dark to bring him food, and on the only night when her father allowed him to come inside and have dinner with them he also talked to two Republican deserters the family knew, and who, as they ate a little and warmed up by the fire before continuing their journey to Banyoles, told him the Nationalist troops had entered Gerona that morning.
The following day passed as usual; on the next everything changed. As he had every morning, Sánchez Mazas got up with the sun, picked up the package of food they'd brought him from Mas Borrell and started walking towards Mas de la Casa Nova; as he was crossing the streambed, he tripped and fell. He didn't hurt himself, but he broke his glasses. The event, which under normal circumstances would have inconvenienced him, now drove him to despair: he was extremely short-sighted and, without the help of corrective lenses, reality was nothing but an unintelligible handful of smudges. Sitting on the ground, with his broken spectacles in his hands, he cursed his clumsiness; he was on the point of weeping with rage. Pulling himself together, he crawled up the bank of the stream on all fours, and feeling his way, guided by the routine of the last few days, searched out the shelter by the field.
That was when he heard the order to halt. Stopping dead and instinctively putting his hands up, he made out at a distance of fifteen metres, barely distinguishable against the confusing green of the woods, three cloudy figures starting to advance towards him with an expectant, watchful attitude. When they were closer Sánchez Mazas realized they were Republican soldiers, they were very young, and they were pointing two long-barrelled nine-millimetre pistols at him; they were as nervous and startled as he was, and their shabby fugitive air and the undisciplined disparity of their uniforms made him assume they were deserters, but he didn't have time to figure out a way of confirming his suspicion because the one who spoke for them submitted him to an interrogation which lasted for almost half an hour of tension, guesswork and insinuations, until Sánchez Mazas resolved that this fortuitous encounter, just after breaking his glasses, could only be a favourable play of fate and decided to put all his money on it and admit that he'd spent six days wandering in the woods waiting for the arrival of the Nationalists.
This confession resolved the misunderstanding. Because although the three soldiers' adventure had only just begun, their motives were identical to those of Sánchez Mazas. Two of them were the Figueras brothers, Pere and Joaquim; the other was called Daniel Angelats. Pere was the oldest of the three, and the most capable and most intelligent. Although in adolescence he'd been unable to convince his father — a devious but very respected businessman in Cornellá de Terri — to pay for him to study law in Barcelona and he'd had to stay in the villa
ge helping the family in their small garlic business, since he was a child his indiscriminately eager reading (first in the school library and later in the Ateneo Popular) had refined his understanding and given him an uncommon range of knowledge. The collective enthusiasm awakened by the proclamation of the Republic attracted his attention towards politics, but it wasn't until after the events of October 1934 that he became a member of the Catalan Republican Left, and the uprising of the summer of 1936 caught him finishing his military service in an infantry barracks in Pedralbes, where on 19 July, earlier than usual, they were woken up with an untimely ration of cognac at breakfast and the announcement that they were going to march through Barcelona that morning in honour of the Popular Olympiad; nevertheless, before noon he'd already gone over, with weapons and equipment, along with other soldiers of his detachment, to a column of anarchist workers who urged them to join their ranks on an avenue in the city centre. During the entire afternoon and night of that dreadful Monday he fought in the streets to put down the rebellion, and in the revolutionary delirium of the days that followed, exasperated by the timidity of the government of the Generalitat, he joined the libertarian onrush of the Durruti column and went off to recapture Zaragoza. But, since neither the intoxication of victory over the rebels nor the idealistic vehemence of much of his reading had completely overridden his Catalan peasant's common sense, he soon sensed his error; once convinced by events that it was impossible to win a war with an army of enthusiastic amateurs, at the first opportunity he joined the regular army of the Republic. Under its discipline he fought at Madrid's University City and in the Maestrazgo, but at the beginning of May 1938 a stray bullet cleanly pierced his thigh and afforded him some months of convalescence, first in improvised field hospitals and finally in the military hospital in Gerona. There, amid the end of the world disorder reigning in the city during the days of retreat, his mother came for him. Although he'd just turned twenty-five, Pere Figueras was by then an old man, tired and disillusioned, in a bit of a daze, but he didn't even have a limp any more, so he was able to follow his mother back home. To his surprise, waiting for him in Can Pigem, together with his sisters, were his brother Joaquim and Daniel Angelats, who that very morning had taken advantage of the terror and confusion spread by a bomb that landed on the Grober factory in Gerona, near where they'd stopped to refuel, in order to evade the vigilance of the political commissar of their company and escape through the old part of the city towards Cornellá de Terri. Joaquim and Angelats had met two years earlier when, barely nineteen years old, they were recruited and, after three months' military instruction in the Sanctuary of Collell, sent as members of the Garibaldi Brigade to the Aragón front. Their inexperience saved them from much unpleasantness: that and the impression they gave of being adolescents too young for combat got them sent immediately back to the rearguard —first to Binéfar and later to Barcelona and finally to Vilanova i la Geltrú, where they joined a coastal artillery battalion made up mostly of wounded and disabled soldiers, where for months they played at war; but when the Republic felt its fate was at stake on the beaches of the Ebro, even they were sent as a last hope to contain, with their old, inefficient cannon, the Nationalist onslaught. The front collapsed and the rout began; all along the Mediterranean coast the shredded remains of the Republican army were retreating in disarray towards the border, unceasingly harassed by gunfire from the German planes and by the constant encircling manoeuvres of Yagüe, Solchaga and Gambara, who hemmed into inescapable pockets (or with no escape but the sea) hundreds of prisoners terrified by the shrieks of the Moroccan regulars. Bereft of political convictions, starving, defeated and sick of war, unwilling to face the agony of exile, persuaded by Francoist propaganda that, unless their hands were stained with blood, they had nothing to fear from the victors except the restoration of the order the Republic had shattered, Figueras and Angelats had no other ambition by this point than to save their skins, evade the limitless fury of the Moors and take advantage of their commanders' slightest distraction to take the road home and wait there for the arrival of the Nationalists.
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