Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  'Hey, you're not the Javier Cercas of The Motive and The Tenant, are you?'

  The Motive and The Tenant were the titles of the only two books I'd published, more than ten years before, without anyone except the odd friend from back then noticing. Bewildered or incredulous, I nodded.

  'I know them,' he said. 'I think I even bought them.'

  'Oh, so you were the one, were you?'

  He ignored the joke.

  'Hang on a second.'

  He disappeared down a hallway and came back a little while later.

  'Here they are,' he said, brandishing my books triumphantly.

  I flipped through the two copies, saw they were worn. Almost sadly, I remarked:

  'You read them.'

  'Of course,' Bolaño sort of smiled; he almost never smiled but he never quite seemed to be entirely serious either. 'I read everything, even bits of paper I find blowing down the street.'

  This time it was me who smiled.

  'I wrote them ages ago.'

  'You don't have to apologize,' he said. 'I liked them, or at least I remember liking them.'

  I thought he was mocking me; I raised my gaze from the books and looked him in the eye: he wasn't mocking. I heard myself ask:

  'Really?'

  Bolaño lit a cigarette and seemed to think it over for a moment.

  'I don't remember the first one too well,' he finally admitted. 'But I think there was a really good story about a son of a bitch who persuades some poor guy to commit a crime so he can finish his novel, right?' Without giving me time to agree, he added: 'As for The Tenant, I thought it was a delightful little novel.'

  Bolaño pronounced this judgement with such a mixture of ease and conviction that I suddenly knew those few bits of praise my books had received were products of courtesy or pity. I was speechless, and felt an enormous urge to hug that softly-spoken, curly-haired, scruffy, unshaven Chilean I'd only just met.

  'Well,' I said. 'Shall we start the interview?'

  We went to a bar by the port, between the market-place and the breakwater, and sat down by a large window from which we could make out, through the golden chilly morning air, the whole of Blanes bay, majestically criss-crossed by seagulls, with the dock in the foreground, its idle fishing boats, and in the background the Palomera promontory, marking the geographic border of the Costa Brava. Bolaño ordered tea and toast; I ordered coffee and water. We talked. Bolaño told me things were going well for him now, because his books were starting to bring in money, but for the last twenty years he'd been as poor as a church mouse. He'd quit school when he was practically still a kid; he'd had all kinds of odd jobs (though he'd never done any serious work other than writing); he'd been a revolutionary in Allende's Chile and in Pinochet's he'd been in prison; he'd lived in Mexico and France; he'd travelled all over the world. Years ago he'd undergone some very complicated surgery, and since then he lived the life of an ascetic in Blanes, with no other vice than writing, and seeing no one but his family. By chance, the day I interviewed Bolaño, General Pinochet had just returned to Chile to a hero's welcome from his supporters, after spending two years in England waiting to be extradited to Spain and tried for his crimes. We talked about Pinochet's return, about Pinochet's dictatorship, about Chile. Naturally, I asked him what it'd been like to live through Pinochet's coup and the fall of Allende. Naturally, he regarded me with an expression of utter boredom; then he said:

  'Like a Marx Brothers' movie, but with corpses. Unimaginable pandemonium.' He blew a little on his tea, took a sip and put the cup back down on the saucer. 'Look, I'll tell you the truth. For years I spat on Allende's name every chance I got, I thought it was all his fault, for not giving us weapons. Now I kick myself for having said that about Allende. Fuck, the bastard thought about us as if we were his kids, you know? He didn't want them to kill us. And if he'd let us have those guns we would have died like flies. So,' he finished, picking up his cup again, 'I think Allende was a hero.'

  'And what's a hero?'

  The question seemed to surprise him, as if he'd never asked himself, or as if he'd been asking himself forever; his cup in mid-air, he looked me fleetingly in the eye, then turned his gaze back out over the bay and thought for a moment; then he shrugged his shoulders.

  'I don't know,' he said. 'Someone who considers himself a hero and gets it right. Or someone who has courage and an instinct for virtue, and therefore never makes a mistake, or at least doesn't make a mistake the one time when it matters, and therefore can't not be a hero. Or someone, like Allende, who understands that a hero isn't the one who kills, but the one who doesn't kill or who lets himself get killed. I don't know. What's a hero to you?'

  By then it had been almost a month since I'd thought about Soldiers of Salamis, yet at that moment I couldn't help but remember Sánchez Mazas, who never killed anyone and at some point, before reality showed him he lacked courage and an instinct for virtue, perhaps considered himself a hero. I said:

  'I don't know. John Le Carré says one must think like a hero to behave like a decent human being.'

  'Yeah, but a decent human being isn't the same as a hero,' Bolaño shot back. 'There're lots of decent people: they're the ones who know enough to say no in time; heroes, on the other hand, are few and far between. Actually, I think there's almost always something blind, irrational, instinctive in a hero's behaviour, something that's in their nature and inescapable. Also, you can be a decent person for a whole lifetime, but you can't be awe-inspiring without a break, and that's why a hero is only a hero exceptionally, once, or at most, during a spell of insanity or inspiration. There's Allende, speaking on Radio Magallanes, lying on the floor in a corner of La Moneda, with a machine gun in one hand and microphone in the other, talking as if he were drunk or as if he were already dead, not really knowing what he's saying and saying the purest, most noble words I've ever heard . . . I just remembered another story. It happened in Madrid a while back, I read it in the paper. A young guy was walking down a street in the city centre and suddenly saw a house enveloped in flames. Without a word to anyone he rushed into the house and came out with a woman in his arms. He went back in and this time brought a man out. Then he went in again and brought out another woman. By this time the fire had reached such proportions that not even the firemen would dare enter the house, it was suicide; but the guy must've known there was someone still inside, because he went back in. And, of course, he never came out.' Bolaño halted, pushed his glasses up with his index finger so the frame brushed his eyebrows. 'Brutal, isn't it? Still, I'm not sure that guy was acting out of compassion, or some sort of benevolence; I think he acted out of a kind of instinct, a blind instinct that overcame him, took him over, acted for him. More than likely the guy was a decent person, I'm not saying he wasn't; but he iulght not have been. Fuck, Javier, he didn't need to be: the bastard was a hero.'

  Bolaño and I spent the rest of the morning talking about his books, the authors he liked — who were many — and the ones he despised — more still. Bolaño talked about them with a strange, icy passion, which fascinated me at first and then made me feel uncomfortable. I cut the interview short. When we were about to say goodbye, on the seaside promenade, he invited me to come and have lunch at his house, with his wife and son. I lied: I said I couldn't, because they were expecting me back at the paper. Then he invited me to come and see him some time. I lied again: I said I would very soon.

  A week later, when the interview was published, Bolaño phoned me at the newspaper office. He said he'd liked it a lot. He asked:

  'Are you sure I said all that about heroes?'

  'Word for word,' I answered, suddenly suspicious, thinking the initial praise was just a preamble to the reproaches, and that Bolaño was one of those loquacious interviewees who attribute all their verbal indiscretions to journalists' spite, negligence or frivolity. 'I've got it on tape.'

  'No shit! Well, it sounded pretty good!' he reassured me. apos;But I called you about something else. I'm going to be i
n Gerona tomorrow, I have to renew my residency permit a fucking nuisance, but it won't take me very long. Do you want to meet for lunch?'

  I hadn't expected the call or the suggestion and, perhaps because it seemed easier to accept than make up an excuse, I accepted, and the next day, when I arrived at the Bistrot, Bolaño was already sitting at a table with a Diet Coke in hand.

  'It's been at least twenty years since I've been here,' remarked Bolaño, who on the phone the previous day had told me that, when he used to live in the city, his place was near the Bistrot. 'This has changed a fuck of a lot.'

  After having ordered (steak and salad for him; steamed mussels and rabbit for me), Bolaño repeated his praise for my interview, he talked about Capote and Mailer, then asked me suddenly if I was writing anything. Since nothing annoys a writer who doesn't write as much as being asked what he's writing, I answered, slightly irritated:

  'No.' And because I figured for Bolaño, like for everyone, writing for a newspaper wasn't really writing, I added: 'I don't write novels any more.' I thought of Conchi and said: 'I've discovered I have no imagination.'

  'To write novels you don't need an imagination,' Bolaño said. 'Just a memory. Novels are written by combining recollections.'

  'Then I've run out of memories.' Trying to be witty I explained: 'I'm a journalist now: a man of action.'

  'Well, that's a shame,' said Bolaño, 'a man of action is a frustrated writer. If Don Quixote had written one single book of chivalry he never would have been Don Quixote, and if I hadn't learned how to write I'd be firing away with the FARC right now. Besides, a real writer never stops being a writer. Even if they don't write.'

  'What makes you think I'm a real writer?'

  'You wrote two real books.'

  'Juvenilia.'

  'The newspaper doesn't count?'

  'It counts. But I don't write for pleasure there: just to make a living. Besides, a journalist isn't the same thing as a writer.'

  'You're right there,' he conceded. 'A good journalist is always a good writer, but a good writer is almost never a good journalist.'

  I laughed.

  'Dazzling, but false,' I said.

  While we ate, Bolaño told me about when he'd lived in Gerona; he described minutely an interminable February night in one of the city's hospitals, the Josép Trueta. That morning they'd diagnosed him with pancreatitis and when the doctor finally appeared in his room, he asked him, knowing what the answer would be, if he was going to die; the doctor stroked his arm and told him no in the voice they always reserve for lies. Before falling asleep that night, Bolaño felt profoundly sad, not because he knew he was going to die, but for all the books he'd planned to write and would now never write, for all his dead friends, all the young Latin Americans of his generation — soldiers killed in wars already lost — he'd always dreamt of resuscitating in his novels and who'd now stay dead forever, just like him, as if he'd never existed; then he fell asleep and during the night dreamt he was in a ring fighting a sumo wrestler, a gigantic and smiling Oriental against whom he could do nothing and against whom, nevertheless, he kept fighting all night long until he woke up and knew, before anyone told him, with a superhuman joy he'd never felt since, that he wasn't going to die.

  'But sometimes I think I still haven't woken up,' Bolaño said wiping his mouth with his serviette. 'Sometimes I think I'm still in that bed in the Trueta, fighting that sumo wrestler, and everything that's happened over these years (my son and my wife and the novels I've written and my dead friends I've talked about) is what I've dreamed, and at some moment I'll wake up and I'll be on the canvas in the ring, murdered by a big fat Oriental guy who smiles just like death.'

  After lunch Bolaño asked me to go for a walk with him around the city. I went with him: we walked through the old part of the city, down the Rambla, across the Plaza de Catalunya, through the market-place. At dusk we went to have a drink in the bar of the Hotel Carlemany, quite near the station, while Bolaño waited for his train. It was there, between cups of tea and gin and tonics, that he told me the story of Miralles. I don't remember why or how he got to it; I remember he talked with an unwavering enthusiasm, with a sort of jubilant seriousness, putting all his military and historical erudition at the service of the tale, which was overwhelming but not always precisely accurate, because later when I consulted several books on the military operations of the Civil War and the Second World War, I discovered that some of the dates and names and circumstances had been modified by his imagination or his memory. Yet for the most part, the tale not only seems true, but is also, in most of its details, verifiable.

  Once the few facts and dates Bolaño had altered have been corrected, the story goes like this:

  Bolaño met Miralles in the summer of 1978, in the Estrella de Mar campsite, in Castelldefells. The Estrella de Mar was a caravan site where a floating population, comprised basically of members of the European proletariat, would show up each summer: French, English, Dutch, Germans, the odd Spaniard. Bolaño remembered that, at least during the time he spent there, those people were very happy; he also remembered that he, too, was happy. He worked at the campsite for four summers, from 1978 to 1981, sometimes on weekends in the winters too; he worked as rubbish collector, night watchman, everything.

  'It was my doctorate,' Bolaño assured me. 'I got to know such a range of human fauna. Actually, never in my life have I learned so many things, so quickly, as I did there.'

  Miralles arrived every year at the beginning of August. Bolaño remembered him driving up with his caravan, with his exuberant greetings, his huge smile, his cap pulled down over his brow and his enormous buddha's belly, registering at the office and setting up immediately at his assigned site. From that moment on Miralles never wore more than swimming trunks and a pair of flip-flops for the rest of the month and, since he walked around undressed all day, he attracted attention from the start because his body was a real compendium of scars. In fact, his whole left side, from his ankle all the way up to his eye, out of which he could still see, was one entire scar. Miralles was Catalan, from Barcelona or near Barcelona — Sabadell maybe, or Terrassa: in any case Bolaño remembered having heard him speak Catalan but he'd been living in France for years and, according to Bolaño, he'd become completely French: he wielded a sharp sense of irony, ate and drank well and loved good wine. In the evenings he'd get together with his old campsite friends from every summer in the bar and Bolaño, as night watchman, would often join these sessions that went on far into the night; he saw Miralles get drunk on many occasions, but he never saw him turn aggressive or rowdy or sentimental. At the end of such nights he simply needed someone to take him back to his caravan, because he couldn't get there by himself. Bolaño helped him many times, and also sat up late with him in the bar, drinking on their own long after Miralles had outlasted all his mates, and it was during these interminable solitary nights (he never saw him talk about it in front of others) that he listened to him unfurl his war record — unfurl it without boasting, without pride, with the learned irony of an adoptive Frenchman, as if it didn't belong to him but to some other person, someone he barely knew but whom he vaguely respected. That's why Bolaño remembered his tale with absolute precision.

  Miralles was recruited in the autumn of 1936, a few months after the beginning of the war in Spain and after he had just turned eighteen; at the beginning of 1937, after some hasty military training, he was placed in the First Mixed Brigade of the Army of the Republic, which was under the command of Enrique Líster. Líster, who'd been commander of the Antifascist Workers' Militias and of the Fifth Regiment, was already a living legend. The Fifth Regiment had just been disbanded, and the majority of Miralles' battalion comrades had fought in its ranks and had been decisive, a few months earlier in November, in stopping Franco's troops at the gates of Madrid. Before the war Miralles worked as an apprentice lathe operator; he knew nothing about politics: his parents were very poor and never discussed such things; nor did his friends. Nevertheless,
as soon as he arrived at the front, he became a Communist: the fact that his comrades and commanders and Líster were Communists undoubtedly influenced his decision too; perhaps even more so did his immediate certainty that the Communists were the only ones who were really ready to stand firm and win the war.

  'I guess he was a bit wild,' Bolaño remembered Miralles saying one night, talking about Líster, under whose orders he'd spent the entire war. 'But he loved his men and he was very brave, very Spanish. A guy with real guts.'

  'A thoroughbred Spanish brute,' Bolaño quoted, without telling Miralles he was quoting Cesar Vallejo, about whom he was writing a quirky novel at the time.

  Miralles laughed.

  'Exactly,' he agreed. 'Afterwards I read a lot about him, against him really. Most of it false, from what I know. I suppose he was wrong about a lot of things, but he got a lot of things right too, don't you think?'

  In the early days of the war Miralles had been in sympathy with the anarchists, not so much for their chaotic ideas or for their urge to revolution, but more because they were the first to take to the streets and fight against fascism. Nevertheless, as the struggle advanced and the anarchists spread chaos in the rearguard, that sympathy disappeared: like all Communists — and undoubtedly this also helped push him towards them Miralles understood that the first thing was to win the war, then there would be time for revolution. So, in the summer of 1937 when the 11th Division, to which he belonged, liquidated the Aragonese anarchist collectives on Líster's orders, Miralles considered the operation brutal, but not unjustified. Later he fought in Belchite, in Teruel, at the Ebro and, when the front collapsed, Miralles retreated with the army towards Catalonia and at the beginning of 1939 crossed the French border together with the other 450,000 Spaniards who did so in the final days of the war. On the other side was the Argelès concentration camp, which was really just a bare, immense beach surrounded by a double ring of barbed wire; there were no huts, and no protection from the savage February cold, and no sanitation, just a quagmire, where in subhuman conditions, with women and old folks and children sleeping on the sand dappled with snow and frost, and men wandering around, dumbfounded by the burden of desperation and the rancour of defeat, 80,000 Spanish fugitives waited for the hell to end.