Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  So they did. But the very afternoon they arrived at the Figueras home, something happened to convince them that the big house on the edge of the Banyoles highway and right across from the train station was not a safe haven for deserters. While they were badgered with questions by the family as they sated their ravenous hunger along with Pere Figueras, before they had taken off their soldiers' uniforms, they heard the sound of motors stopping in front of Can Pigem. According to Joaquim Figueras, it was his mother who, guessing the danger they were in, urged them to go upstairs and hide under the enormous bed in the master bedroom. From there they heard a knock on the door, then unfamiliar voices conversing in the dining room that had been swiftly cleared, and then the noise of military boots climbing the stairs and walking around the second floor until they saw them come into the room; there were two pairs: one, which stayed in the doorway, was cracked and dusty; the other, old but recently shined, still martial, clicked a bit over the floor tiles until the Figueras brothers and Angelats, holding their breath under the bed, heard a soft, commanding voice ask that the room be prepared for him to spend the night. As soon as they were alone again, the three deserters almost wordlessly took the only decision possible and, instinctively persuaded that only speed could make up for the obligatory recklessness of the manoeuvre, they crawled out of their hiding place and, without looking up and trying to prevent the rigidity of their movements from betraying their hurry, went down the stairs, crossed the kitchen and yard and highway protected by the anonymity of their uniforms, which camouflaged them among all the other soldiers in the house or around the house waiting their turn to eat, or resting or arranging their things, calmly resigned to their stateless futures.

  From that afternoon on the Figueras brothers and Angelats went into hiding. Undoubtedly it wasn't as hard for them as for Sánchez Mazas: they were young, they were armed, they knew the area and many people in the area; not only that but as soon as the Republican detachment left Can Pigem the next morning, the Figueras' mother began to provide them with food in abundance and lots of warm clothing and blankets. They spent the daylight hours in the woods, not far from Cornellá de Terri or from the Banyoles highway, always alert to the troop movements along it, and at night they slept in an abandoned barn near the Mas de la Casa Nova. It seems incredible they didn't bump into Sánchez Mazas until they'd been installed (the word is of course excessive) for three days in the vicinity of the Mas de la Casa Nova, since they'd arrived the same day as he had, but that's how it was. Sixty years later, Joaquim Figueras and Daniel Angelats both still remembered with absolute clarity the morning they saw him for the first time: the sound of breaking branches that alarmed them in the silence of the forest, and then the willowy, blind figure in the sheepskin jacket with the shattered spectacles in his hand, feeling his way up the rocky, tangled bank of the stream. They also remembered the moment they stopped him at gunpoint and the minutes of interminable reckoning and suspicion during which they, as much as Sánchez Mazas —whose attitude during this first conversation or interrogation drifted imperceptibly from frightened and dishonourable pleading to the almost paternalistic aplomb of one who knows himself to be beyond his interlocutor not only in years but especially in intellect and guile tried to find out the intentions of the other; and that, as soon as they did, Sánchez Mazas identified himself, offering them exorbitant rewards if they helped him cross the lines. Joaquim Figueras and Daniel Angelats also agree on another point: as soon as Sánchez Mazas said his name, Pere Figueras knew who he was. Although this might seem strange, it is not absolutely implausible: for quite a few years by then, Sánchez Mazas had been known all over Spain as a writer and politician and, although Pere Figueras had barely left his village except to defend the Republic with bullets, he could easily have seen his name and photograph in the newspapers and could have read articles he'd written. In any case, Pere, who had taken charge of the trio of soldiers without anyone telling him to, told him they couldn't take him to the other side, but said he could stay with them until the Nationalists arrived. Implicitly or explicitly, the pact was this: now they would protect him, with their weapons and their youth and their knowledge of the area and the people of the area, and later he would protect them with his indisputable authority as a hierarch. The offer was not up for discussion, and although Joaquim at first put up a bit of resistance to the idea of taking on, in those uncertain days, the responsibility of a half-blind man who, if they were captured by the Republicans, would earn them immediate execution, in the end he had no choice but to submit to his brother's will.

  The life of the three deserters didn't change in any noticeable way after that moment, except for the fact that now there were four to feed from what the Figueras' mother sent, and four to sleep in the abandoned barn by Mas de la Casa Nova, for they decided that it was safer for Sánchez Mazas not to return to the hayloft by Mas Borrell. Curiously (or maybe not: maybe it's life's decisive moments that are most voraciously devoured by oblivion), neither Joaquim Figueras nor Daniel Angelats have a very clear memory of those days. Figueras, whose memory is sharp but expeditious and often gets lost in aimless meandering, remembers that meeting Sánchez Mazas relieved the boredom for a while, because he told them his wartime adventures, with a wealth of detail and in a tone that had at first impressed him with its solemnity but with time he'd come to consider a little pompous; he also remembered that, once they'd told their war stories — undoubtedly in a much more succinct, disorderly and direct manner — they were again overtaken by the tense, impatient boredom they'd suffered for the last few days. Or he and Daniel Angelats were at least. Because what Joaquim Figueras does remember very well is that, while he and Angelats went back to practising the most varied ways of killing time much as before, his brother Pere and Sánchez Mazas leaned up against the trunk of an oak tree at the edge of the woods conversing tirelessly. He could see them there still: listless and unshaven and well bundled up, with their knees higher and higher and their heads lower and lower as the day wore on, almost with their backs to each other, smoking cut tobacco or whittling away at something, turning to look at each other every now and then and, of course, not smiling at all, as if neither of the two were looking to the other for agreement or persuasion, but only the certainty that none of his words would be lost in the air. He never knew what they were talking about, or maybe he didn't want to know; he knew the subject was not politics or the war; once he suspected (without much basis) that it was literature. The truth is Joaquim Figueras, who'd never got along very well with Pere (whom he'd made fun of publicly more than once and whom he'd always secretly admired), realized with a secret pang of jealousy that Sánchez Mazas won, in a few hours, a friendship with his brother that he'd never had access to in his whole life. As for Angelats, whose memory is shakier than Figueras', his testimony does not contradict that of his old friend; at best, it complements it with various anecdotal details (Angelats, for example, remembers Sánchez Mazas writing with a minuscule pencil in his notebook with dark green covers, which perhaps proves that the diary was written during the events it relates) and one detail perhaps less so. As often happens with the memories of some old people which, because they are about to be left without them, remember much more clearly a childhood afternoon than what happened a few hours ago, in this concrete point Angelats' abounds in particulars. I don't know if time has given the scene a novelistic varnish; although I can't be sure, I tend to think not, because I know Angelats is a man without imagination; nor does any benefit occur to me that he might derive — a tired and ill man, with few years left to live — from inventing such a scene.

  This is the scene:

  At some point during the second night the four of them spent together in the barn, Angelats was awakened by a noise. Startled, he sat up and saw Joaquim Figueras sleeping placidly beside him among the straw and blankets; Pere and Sánchez Mazas weren't there. He was about to get up (or wake Joaquim, who was less of a coward or at least more decisive than he was) when he heard voices an
d realised that was what had woken him; they were barely whispering but their words carried to him clearly in the perfect silence of the barn, on the other side of which, almost level with the floor and beside the half-closed door, Angelats saw the glow of two cigarettes burning in the darkness. He told himself that Pere and Sánchez Mazas had left the straw bed where the four of them slept to smoke safely; he then wondered what time it was and, imagining Pere and Sánchez Mazas had been awake and talking for a long while, lay back down and tried to fall asleep again. He couldn't. Sleepless, he clung on to the thread of conversation between the two insomniacs: at first uninterestedly, just to while away the time, for he understood the words he was hearing but not their meaning nor their intention; then things changed. Angelats heard the voice of Sánchez Mazas, deep and deliberate, slightly hoarse, telling of the days in Collell, the hours, the minutes, the frightful seconds that preceded and followed the shooting; Angelats knew of the episode because Sánchez Mazas had told them of it the first morning they were together, but now, perhaps because the impenetrable darkness of the barn and the careful choice of words conferred on the events an additional reality, he heard as if for the first time or as if, more than hearing it, he was reliving it, expectant and with his heart contracted, perhaps a little incredulous, because also for the first time — Sánchez Mazas had avoided mentioning him in the first telling — he saw the militiaman standing beside the ditch, in the rain, tall and burly and soaked through, looking at Sánchez Mazas with his grey, perhaps greenish, eyes under the double arch of his brows, his gaunt cheeks and prominent cheekbones, 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. He was very young, Angelats heard Sánchez Mazas say. Your age or perhaps younger, although he had an adult expression and features. For a moment, while he looked at me, I thought I knew who he was; now I'm sure. There was a silence, as if Sánchez Mazas was waiting for Pere's question, which didn't come; Angelats made out at the end of the barn the glow of two cigarettes, one grew momentarily more intense and lit up Pere's face with a weak reddish radiance. He wasn't a Carabinero or a SIM agent, obviously, Sánchez Mazas went on. Had he been, I'd not be here now. No: he was a simple soldier. Like you. Or like your brother. One of the ones who guarded us when we went out walking in the garden. I noticed him straightaway and I think he noticed me too, or at least that's what I think now, because in reality we never exchanged a single word. But I noticed him, as did all my companions, he was always sitting on a bench humming something, popular songs and things like that, and one afternoon he stood up from the bench and began to sing 'Sighing for Spain'. Have you ever heard it? Of course, said Pere. It's Liliana's favourite paso doble, said Sánchez Mazas. I always think it's so sad, but her feet start up if she hears four notes of it. We've danced to it so many times . . . Angelats saw the ash of Sánchez Mazas' cigarette redden and then go out abruptly, and then he heard him raise his hoarse and almost ironic voice in a whisper and recognized in the silence of the night the melody and lyrics of the paso doble, which made him feel so much like weeping because they suddenly struck him as the saddest lyrics and music in the world, as well as a desolate mirror of his wasted youth and the pitiful future awaiting him: 'God desired, in his power, / to blend four little sunbeams / and make of them a woman, / and when His will was done / in a Spanish garden I was born / like a flower on her rose-bush. / Glorious land of my love, / blessed land of perfume and passion, / Spain, in each flower at your feet / a heart is sighing. / Oh, I'm dying of sorrow, / for I'm going away, Spain, from you, / for away from my rose-bush I'm torn.' Sánchez Mazas stopped his soft singing. Do you know all of it? asked Pere. All of what? asked Sánchez Mazas. The song, answered Pere. More or less, answered Sánchez Mazas. There was another silence. So, said Pere. And what happened with the soldier? Nothing, said Sánchez Mazas. Instead of sitting on the bench, humming quietly like usual, that afternoon he started singing 'Sighing for Spain' out loud, smiling and, as if he were letting himself be swept away by an invisible force, he stood up and started to dance through the garden with his eyes closed, embracing his rifle as if it were a woman, in the same way, just as gently, and I and my companions and the rest of the soldiers who were guarding us and even the Carabineros stopped and stared, sadly or dumbfounded or mocking, but all in silence while he dragged his big military boots over the gravel riddled with cigarette butts and bits of food, just as if they were leather shoes on a pristine dance floor and then, before he'd finished dancing to the song, someone said his name and cursed him affectionately and the spell was broken, a lot of men started laughing or smiling; we laughed, prisoners and guards, everyone . . . I think it was the first time I had laughed in a long, long time. Sánchez Mazas fell quiet. Angelats heard Joaquim roll over beside him, and wondered if he might be listening too, but the rough, regular breathing soon made him discard the notion. That was it? asked Pere. That was it, answered Sánchez Mazas. Are you sure it was him? asked Pere. Yes, answered Sánchez Mazas. I think so. What was his name? asked Pere. You said someone said his name. I don't know, answered Sánchez Mazas. Perhaps I didn't hear. Or I heard it and I forgot it straightaway. But it was him. I wonder why he didn't give me away, why he let me escape. I've asked myself over and over again. They grew quiet again, and Angelats felt that this time the silence was denser and longer, and thought the conversation had finished. He was looking at me for a moment from the edge of the ditch, Sánchez Mazas continued. He looked at me strangely, no one has ever looked at me like that, as if he'd known me for a long time but at that moment was unable to recognize me and was making an effort to do so, or like an entomologist who doesn't know whether he has a unique and unknown specimen before him, or like someone trying in vain to decipher an elusive secret from the shape of a cloud. But no: in reality the way he looked at me was . . . joyful. Joyful? asked Pere. Yes, said Sánchez Mazas. Joyful. I don't understand, said Pere. Me neither, said Sánchez Mazas. Well, he added after another pause, I don't know. I think I'm talking nonsense. It must be very late, said Pere. We'd better try to get some sleep. Yes, said Sánchez Mazas. Angelats heard them get up, lie down in the straw side by side, next to Joaquim, and also heard them (or maybe just imagined them) trying in vain to get to sleep, tossing and turning in the blankets, unable to get free of the song that had become tangled up in their memories, and the image of that soldier dancing with his rifle in his arms among the cypress trees and prisoners, in the garden at Collell.