Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  That morning, extremely excited but exhausted, I told Conchi Miralles' story while we were having lunch at a self-service restaurant, explaining the error of perspective I'd committed when writing Soldiers of Salamis and assuring her that Miralles (or someone like Miralles) was exactly the part that was missing in order for the mechanism of the book to function. Conchi stopped eating, half closed her eyes and said, with resignation:

  'About time Lucas took a shit.'

  'Lucas? Who's Lucas?'

  'Nobody,' said Conchi. 'A friend. He took a shit after he died and he died of not shitting.'

  'Conchi, please, we're eating. Anyway, what's this Lucas got to do with Miralles?'

  'Sometimes you remind me of Brains, honey,' Conchi sighed. 'If I didn't know you were an intellectual, I'd say you were stupid. Didn't I tell you at the start what you had to do was write about a Communist?'

  'Conchi, I don't think you've really understood what '

  'Of course I understand!' she interrupted me. 'The amount of grief we would have saved if you'd listened to me in the first place! And, you know what I say?'

  'What?' I said, slightly uneasily.

  'We're going to come out with a fucking brilliant book!'

  We clinked glasses, and for a moment I was tempted to stretch out my foot to see if Conchi had any panties on; for a moment I thought I was in love with her. Prudent and happy, I said:

  'I haven't found Miralles yet.'

  'We'll find him,' said Conchi, with absolute conviction. ' Where did you say Bolaiño said he lived?'

  'In Dijon,' I said. 'Or somewhere around there.'

  'Well, that's where we'll have to start looking.'

  That evening I called Telefónica's international directory enquiries. The operator told me that in the city of Dijon and in the whole of Department 21, to which Dijon belonged, there was no one called Antoni or Antonio Miralles. I then asked if there were a Maria Miralles; the operator said there was not. I asked if there were any Miralles, and was surprised to hear her say there were five: one in the city of Dijon and four in villages of the Department: one in Longuic, another in Marsannay, another in Nolay and another in Genlis. I asked her to give me their names and telephone numbers. 'Impossible,' she said. 'I can only give out one name and one number per call. You'd have to call back another four times for us to give you all of them.'

  During the following days I phoned the Miralles who lived in Dijon (Laurent, he was called) and the other four, whose names were Laura, Danielle, Jean-Marie and Bienvenido. Two of them (Laurent and Danielle) were brother and sister, and all except Jean-Marie spoke correct (or broken) Castilian, since they came from Spanish families, but none of them were remotely related to Miralles, and none had ever heard of him.

  I didn't give up. Perhaps driven by the blind faith Conchi had instilled in me, I phoned Bolaiño. I brought him up to date with my investigation and asked him if he could think of any other trail I could follow up. Not a single one occurred to him.

  'You'll have to make it up,' he said.

  'Make what up?'

  'The interview with Miralles. It's the only way you can finish the novel.'

  It was at that moment I remembered the story from my first book that Bolaño had recalled in our first conversation, in which a man induces another to commit a crime so he can finish his novel, and I believed I understood two things. The first surprised me; the second did not. The first was that finishing the book mattered much less to me than being able to talk to Miralles; the second was that, contrary to what Bolaño had believed up till now (and contrary to what I'd believed when I wrote my first book), I wasn't a real writer, because if I were, talking to Miralles would have mattered much less than finishing the book. I decided not to remind Bolaño again that my book wasn't meant to be a novel, but a true tale, and that making up the interview with Miralles would amount to a betrayal of its nature, and sighed:

  'Yeah.'

  The answer was laconic, not affirmative; Bolaño didn't take it that way.

  'It's the only way,' he repeated, sure he had convinced me. 'Besides, it's the best way. Reality always ends up betraying us; it's best not to give her the chance and get in there first. The real Miralles would only disappoint you. Better to make him up; the invented one will surely be more real than the real one. You're not going to find him. Who knows where he might be: dead, in a home, in his daughter's house. Forget him.'

  'It's best we just forget about Miralles,' I told Conchi that night, having survived a terrifying trip to her house in Quart followed by a hurried tumble in the living room, under the devoted gaze of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the melancholic gaze of the copies of my two books that flanked her. 'Who knows where he might be: dead or in a home or in his daughter's house.'

  'Have you looked for his daughter?'

  'Yes. But I haven't found her.'

  We stared at each other for a second — two — three. Then, without another word, I got up, went to the phone, dialled Telefonica's international directory enquiries. I told the operator (I think I recognized her voice; I think she recognized mine) that I was looking for a person who lived in an old people's home in Dijon and I asked her how many old people's homes there were in Dijon. 'Oh,' she said after a pause, 'loads.' 'How many's loads?' 'Thirty odd. Maybe forty.' 'Forty old people's homes!' I looked at Conchi who, sitting on the floor, and barely covered by her T-shirt, held back her laughter. 'Is there no one but old people in that city?' 'The computer doesn't specify whether they're old people's homes,' the operator clarified. 'It just says residential home.' 'And how many are there in the Department?' After another pause she replied: 'More than twice as many.' Slightly sarcastically she added: 'I can only give you one number per call. Should I start alphabetically?' I thought this was the end of my search; making sure Miralles didn't live at any of these eighty some residential homes could take me months and I could end up broke — not to mention that I didn't have the slightest reason to believe he did live in any of them, and even less that he was the soldier of Líster's I was looking for. I looked at Conchi, who looked back at me drumming her fingers impatiently on her bare knees; I looked at my books beside the Virgin of Guadalupe and — I don't know why — I thought of Daniel Angelats. Then, as if getting even with someone, I said: 'Yes. Alphabetically please.'

  That was how a telephonic pilgrimage began, a pilgrimage that would last for a month of daily long-distance calls, first to the residential homes of the city of Dijon and then to those of the entire Department. The procedure was always the same. I called international directory inquiries, asked for the next name and number on the list (Abrioux, Bagatelle, Cellerier, Chambertin, Chanzy, Eperon, Fontainemont, Kellerman, Lyautey were the first lot), I called the home, asked the switchboard operator for Monsieur Miralles, they answered that there was no Monsieur Miralles there, I phoned international directory inquiries again, asked for another telephone number, and so on until I got tired of it; and the next day (or the one after, because sometimes I couldn't find the time or the will to go back into my obsessive roulette) took up the trail again. Conchi helped me, luckily: I now think that, if not for her, I would have abandoned the search early on. We called in our spare time, almost always secretly, me from the editorial offices, her from the television studio. Then, every night, we'd compare notes on the day, exchange the names of ruled out residential homes, and during those conversations I realized that for Conchi, the monotony of daily telephone calls in search of a man who we didn't even know was alive was an unexpected and exciting adventure; and as for me, at first infected by Conchi's investigative drive and straightforward conviction, I bent to the task enthusiastically, but after I'd surveyed the first thirty homes I began to suspect that I was doing it more out of inertia or stubbornness (or so as not to let Conchi down) than because I still held some hope of finding Miralles.

  But one night the miracle happened. I'd finished writing a short article and we were putting the paper to bed when I started my round of calls by dialling
the number of the Nimphéas Residential Home in Fontaine-Lès-Dijon, and, when I asked for Miralles, instead of the usual negative, the switchboard operator answered me with silence. I thought she'd hung up and I was about to do the same, routinely, when a masculine voice stopped me in my tracks.

  Allô?

  I repeated the question that I'd just asked the operator and that we'd spent more than ten days asking in an absurd tour of all the residential homes in Department 21.

  'Miralles here,' said the man in Spanish: the surprise kept me from noticing that my rudimentary French had given me away. 'Who am I speaking to?'

  'Antoni Miralles?' I managed to mumble.

  'Antoni or Antonio, whatever,' he said. 'But call me Miralles; everybody calls me Miralles. Who am I speaking to?'

  It strikes me as incredible now but, no doubt because deep down I never really thought I'd end up talking to Miralles, I hadn't thought through how I'd introduce myself to him.

  'You don't know me, but I've been trying to track you down for ages,' I improvised, aware of a pulse in my throat and a tremor in my voice. To disguise them, I quickly told him my name and where I was calling from. Fortunately I added: 'I'm a friend of Roberto Bolaiño's.'

  'Roberto Bolaiño?'

  'Yes, from the Estrella de Mar campsite,' I explained. 'In Castelldefells. Many years ago you and he —'

  'Of course!' I was grateful, rather than relieved, for the interruption. 'The caretaker! I'd almost forgotten him!'

  While Miralles talked about his summers at Estrella de Mar and his friendship with Bolaño, I wondered how I would ask him for an interview; finally I resolved not to beat about the bush and to state the matter directly. Miralles didn't stop talking about Bolaño.

  'So, what's become of him?'

  'He's a writer,' I answered. 'He writes novels.'

  'He wrote them back then, too. But no one wanted to publish them.'

  'It's different now,' I said. 'He's a successful writer.'

  'Really? I'm glad: I always thought he was talented, as well as an out-and-out liar. But I suppose you have to be an out-and-out liar to be a good novelist, don't you?' I heard a brief, dry, distant sound, like a laugh. 'Well, how can I help you?'

  'I'm investigating an episode of the Civil War. The execution by firing squad of some Nationalist prisoners at the Sanctuary of Santa Maria del Collell, near Banyoles. It was at the end of the war.' In vain I waited for Miralles' reaction. Impulsively I added: 'You were there, weren't you?'

  During the interminable seconds that followed I could hear Miralles' gravelly breathing. Silently, exultantly, I realized I had struck home. When he began to speak again, Miralles' voice sounded darker and slower: completely different.

  'Bolaiño told you that?'

  'I figured it out. Bolaño told me your story. He told me you spent the whole war with Líster, even retreating with him across Catalonia. Some of Líster's soldiers were at Collell just then, the same time as the execution. So you could easily have been one of them. You were, weren't you?'

  Miralles was silent again; I heard his gravelly breathing again, and then a click: I thought he must have lit up a cigarette; a distant conversation in French fleetingly crossed the line. As the silence lengthened, I told myself I'd made a mistake, been too abrupt, but before I could try to rectify it, I finally heard:

  'You said you were a writer, didn't you?'

  'No,' I said. 'I'm a journalist.'

  'Journalist.' Another silence. 'And you're planning to write about this? You really think any of your newspaper's readers are going to be interested in a story that happened sixty years ago?'

  'I'm not going to write about it for the paper. I'm writing a book. Look, perhaps I've put it badly. I just want to talk to you for a while, so you can give me your version, so I can tell what really happened, or your version of what happened. It's not a question of settling scores, it's about trying to understand —'

  'Understand?' he interrupted me. 'Don't make me laugh! You're the one who doesn't understand. A war is a war. And that's all there is to understand. I know all too well, I spent three years shooting off bullets for Spain, you know? And do you think anyone's ever thanked me for it?'

  'Precisely because of that —'

  'Shut up and listen, young man,' he cut me off. 'Answer me, do you think anyone's ever thanked me? I'll tell you the answer: nobody. No one has ever thanked me for giving up my youth, fighting for their fucking country. Nobody. Not a single word. Not a gesture. Not a letter. Nothing. And now you come along, sixty years later, with your shitty little newspaper, or your book, or whatever, to ask me if I took part in an execution by firing squad. Why don't you just accuse me of murder straight out?'

  'Of all the stories in History,' I thought as Miralles spoke, 'the saddest is Spain's, because it ends badly.' Then I thought: apos;Does it end badly?' I thought: 'And damn the Transition!' I said:

  'I'm sorry you've misunderstood me, Seiior Miralles —'

  'Miralles, for Christ's sake, Miralles!' roared Miralles. 'No one in my fucking life has ever called me Señor Miralles. My name is Miralles, just Miralles. Got it?'

  'Yes, Señor Miralles. I mean Miralles. But there is a misunderstanding here. If you'll let me speak I'll explain.' Miralles didn't say anything; I proceeded. 'A few weeks ago Bolaiño told me your story. I had just finished writing a book about Rafael Sánchez Mazas. Have you heard of him?'

  Miralles took his time answering, though clearly not because of any doubt.

  'Of course. You're talking about the Falangist, aren't you? José Antonio's mate.'

  'Exactly. who escaped the firing squad at Collell. My book is about him, about the execution, about the people who helped him survive afterwards. And about one of Líster's soldiers who spared his life.'

  'And what do I have to do with all of this?'

  'The other fugitive from the firing squad left a testimony of the event, a book called / Was Murdered by the Reds!

  'What a title!'

  'Yes, but the book's good, because it tells in detail what happened at Collell. What I don't have is any Republican version of what happened there, and without one my book's hamstrung. When Bolaiño told me your story I thought perhaps you were at Collell too at the time of the execution and could give me your version of events. That's all I want: to chat with you for a while and for you to tell me your version. Nothing more. I promise I won't publish a single line without consulting you beforehand.'

  Once again I heard Miralles' breathing, mixed in with the confused conversation in French that crossed the line again. When Miralles began to speak again his voice was as it had been at the beginning of our conversation, and I realized my explanation had managed to placate him.

  'How did you get my phone number?'

  I told him. Miralles laughed out loud.

  'Look, Cercas,' he then began. 'Or do I have to call you Señor Cercas?'

  'Call me Javier.'

  'Okay, Javier. Do you know how old I am? Eighty-two. I'm an old man and I'm tired. I had a wife and I don't have her any more. I had a daughter and I don't have her any more. I'm still recovering from an embolism. I haven't got much time left, and the only thing I want is to be left alone. Listen, those stories don't interest anyone any more, not even those of us who lived through them; there was a time when they did, but not any more. Someone decided they had to be forgotten and, you know what I say? They were probably right. Besides, half of them are unintentional lies and the rest intentional ones. You're young; believe me I'm grateful for your call, but it would be best if you listened to me, if you forgot about this nonsense and devoted your time to something else.'

  I tried to insist, but it was futile. Before hanging up, Miralles asked me to give his regards to Bolaño. 'Tell him I'll see him in Stockton,' he said. 'Where?' I asked. 'In Stockton,' he repeated. 'Tell him: he'll understand.'

  Conchi exploded with joy when I phoned to tell her we'd found Miralles; then she exploded with rage when I told her I wasn't going to see
him.

  'After all this?' she screeched.

  'He doesn't want to, Conchi. You have to understand.'

  'And what's it matter to you that he doesn't want to?'

  We argued. She tried to convince me. I tried to convince her.

  'Look, do me a favour,' she finally said. 'Phone Bolaño. You never listen to me but he'll convince you. If you don't call him, I will.'

  Partly because I was already planning to, and partly to prevent Conchi from calling him, I phoned Bolaño. I told him about the conversation I'd had with Miralles and the old man's blank refusal of my proposal to go and see him. Bolaiño said nothing. Then I remembered the message Miralles had given me for him; I told him.

  'Damn the old guy,' muttered Bolaiño, his voice self-absorbed and sardonic. 'He still remembers.'

  'What's it mean?'

  'The Stockton thing?'

  'What else?'

  After a long pause Bolaiño answered my question with another question:

  'Have you seen Fat City?' I said I had. 'Miralles really liked movies.' Bolaiño went on. 'He'd watch them on the TV he had set up under the awning of his trailer; sometimes he'd go into Castelldefells and in one afternoon he'd watch three movies in a row, everything that was playing, he didn't care what was on. I usually took advantage of my few days off to go to Barcelona, but one time I ran into him on the seafront in Castelldefells, we went to have an horchata together and then he suggested I come to the pictures with him; since I didn't have anything better to do, I went with him. It might seem incredible that in a holiday resort town they'd be showing a John Huston film, but these things happened back then. Do you know what Fat City means? Something like "city of opportunities", or "fantastic city" or, even better, "some city!" Well, some sarcasm! Because Stockton, the city in the movie, is an atrocious city, where there aren't any opportunities for anybody no opportunities except for failure, that is. For the most absolute and total failure, really. It's strange: almost all boxing movies are about the rise and fall of the protagonist, about how they attain success and then they fail and are forgotten; not here. In Fat City neither of the protagonists an old boxer and a young boxer even glimpse the possibility of success, nor do any of those around them; like that old washed-up Mexican boxer, I don't know if you remember the one, he pisses blood before going into the ring, and enters and leaves the stadium alone, almost in darkness. Anyway, so that night, after the movie, we went to a bar, and ordered beer sitting at the bar and we were there talking and drinking until very late, facing a big mirror which reflected us and the bar, just like the two Stockton boxers at the end of Fat City, I think it was probably both the coincidence and the beer that made Miralles say at some point that we were going to end up the same, defeated and alone and punch-drunk in a dead-end city, pissing blood before going into the ring to fight to the death against our own shadows in an empty stadium. Miralles didn't say that, obviously, the words are mine, but he said something very similar. That night we laughed a lot and when we got back to the campsite it was practically daybreak, everyone was sleeping and the bar was closed, and we kept talking and laughing in that loose way that people laugh at funerals — or places like that, you know and when we had said goodnight and I was going to my tent, stumbling along in the dark, Miralles called me and I turned and saw him: fat and lit by the pale light from a lamp-post, standing straight with his fist raised, and before his repressed laughter burst out again, I heard him whisper in the slumbering darkness of the campsite: quot;Bolaiño, see you in Stockton!" And from that day on, every time we said goodbye, whether it was until the next day or the next summer, Miralles always added: "See you in Stockton!"