Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  'You can set your watch by them,' he said. 'Have you got kids?'

  'No.'

  'Don't you like kids?'

  'I like them,' I said, and thought of Conchi. 'But I don't have any.'

  'I like them too,' he said, waving his stick at them. 'Look at that little rascal, the one in the hat.'

  We sat in silence for a bit, watching the children. I didn't have to say anything, but philosophized inanely:

  'They always seem so happy.'

  'You haven't looked very closely,' Miralles corrected me. apos;They never seem it. But they are. Just like us. What happens is that none of us notice, not us and not them.'

  'What do you mean?'

  Miralles smiled for the first time.

  'We're alive, aren't we?' He stood up with the aid of his stick. 'Well then, it's time for lunch.'

  As we walked back to the home I said:

  'You were talking about Collell.'

  'Would you mind giving me another cigarette?'

  As if trying to bribe him, I gave him the whole pack. Putting it into his pocket he asked:

  'What was I saying?'

  'That it was pandemonium while you were there.'

  'Sure.' He picked up the thread easily. 'Imagine the scene. There we were, what was left of the battalion; a Basque captain was in charge, a fairly decent guy, I can't remember his name right now, the commander had been killed in a bombing raid on the way out of Barcelona. But there were civilians there too, Carabineros, SIM agents. All kinds. I don't think anyone knew what we were doing there; waiting for the order to cross the border, I suppose, which was the only thing we could do.'

  'Weren't you guarding the prisoners?'

  He grinned sceptically.

  'More or less.'

  'More or less?'

  'Yeah, of course we guarded them,' he gave in reluctantly. apos;What I mean is that the ones in charge of the prisoners were the Carabineros. But, sometimes, when the prisoners went out for a walk or something, they ordered us to stay with them. If you call that guarding, I guess we guarded them.'

  'And did you know who they were?'

  'We knew they were big shots. Bishops, officers, fifth-column Falangists. People like that.'

  We'd walked back up the gravel path; the old folks who minutes before had been sunning themselves had deserted their hammocks and were now chatting in groups at the entrance to the building and in the lounge where the television was still on.

  'It's still early: let them go in,' said Miralles, taking me by the arm and forcing me to sit down beside him, at the edge of the pond. 'You wanted to talk about Sánchez Mazas, didn't you?' I nodded. 'They used to say he was a good writer. What do you think?'

  'That he was a good minor writer.'

  'And what does that mean?'

  'That he was a good writer, but not a great writer.'

  'So a person can be a good writer at the same time as being a huge son of a bitch. What a world!'

  'Did you know Sánchez Mazas was at Collell?'

  'Of course! How could I not know? He was the biggest of the big shots! We all knew. We had all heard of Sánchez Mazas and knew enough about him — I mean that thanks to him and four or five others like him what happened had happened. I'm not sure, but I think when he arrived at Collell, we'd already been there a few days.'

  'Could be. Sánchez Mazas only arrived five days before they shot them. You told me before that you crossed the border on the 31st of January. The execution was the 30th.'

  I was about to ask him if he'd still been at Collell that day, and if he remembered what happened, when Miralles, who'd started picking the earth out of the cracks between the paving stones with the tip of his stick, began to speak.

  'The night before they'd told us to get our things together, because we'd be leaving the next day,' he explained. 'In the morning we saw a bunch of prisoners leave the Sanctuary escorted by some Carabineros.'

  'Did you know they were going to shoot them?'

  'No. We thought they were going to make them do some work or maybe swap them, there'd been a lot of talk of that. Although from the expressions on their faces it didn't really look like they were going to exchange them.'

  'Did you know Sánchez Mazas? Did you recognize him among the prisoners?'

  'No, I don't know . . . I don't think so.'

  'You didn't know him or you didn't see him?'

  'I didn't see him. Of course I knew him. How could I not have known him? We all knew him!'

  Miralles swore that someone like Sánchez Mazas couldn't have gone unnoticed in a place like that, so just like all the rest of his comrades, he'd seen him many times, when he went out to walk in the garden with the other prisoners; he still vaguely remembered his thick glasses, his prominent nose, the sheepskin jacket in which, a few days later, he'd triumphantly relate his incredible adventure for Franco's cameras . . . Miralles fell quiet, as if the effort of remembering had left him momentarily exhausted. A faint sound of cutlery came from inside the building; in a fleeting glance I saw the television had been turned off. Miralles and I were alone in the garden now.

  'And then?'

  Miralles stopped digging with his stick and inhaled the clear midday air.

  'Then nothing.' He exhaled slowly. 'The truth is I can't really remember, it was all so confused. I remember we heard shots and started running. Then someone shouted that the prisoners were trying to escape, so we started searching the woods to find them. I don't know how long the chase lasted, but once in a while you'd hear a shot, and they'd caught one of them. Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if more than one escaped.'

  'Two escaped.'

  'Like I said, it doesn't surprise me. It had started to rain and the forest was pretty dense. Or at least that's how I remember it. Anyway, when we got tired of looking (or when someone gave the order) we went back to the Sanctuary, got the rest of our things together and that same morning we left.'

  'In other words, according to you, there was no firing squad.'

  'Don't put words in my mouth, young man. I'm just telling you how things were, or at least how I experienced them. The interpretation is your job, that's why you're a journalist, isn't it? Besides, you have to admit, if anybody deserved to be shot back then, Sánchez Mazas did; if they'd gotten rid of him in time, we might have been spared the war, don't you think?'

  'I don't think anyone deserves to be shot.'

  Miralles turned unhurriedly and looked at me steadily with his unmatched eyes, as if looking in mine for an answer to his ironic bewilderment; then an affectionate smile, that for a moment I feared would lead to a roar of laughter, softened the sudden toughness of his features.

  'Don't tell me you're a pacifist!' he said, and put a hand on my collar bone. 'You might have told me that from the start! And while we're at it,' leaning on me, he stood up and pointed with his stick towards the home, 'let's see how you manage with Sister Françoise.'

  I ignored Miralles' taunt and because I thought my time was running out, hastily asked:

  'I'd like to ask you one last question.'

  'Just one?' He spoke up to address the nun: 'Sister, the journalist wants to ask me one last question.'

  'That's fine with me,' said Sister Françoise. 'But if the answer goes on too long, you're going to miss your lunch, Miralles.' Smiling at me, she added: 'Why don't you come back this afternoon?'

  'Yes, young man,' Miralles agreed jovially. 'Come back this afternoon and we'll go on talking.'

  We decided I'd come back about five, after his siesta and rehabilitation exercises. Along with Sister Françoise I accompanied Miralles to the dining room. 'Don't forget the tobacco,' Miralles whispered in my ear, in farewell. Then he went into the dining room, and as he sat down at a table between two white-haired old ladies who'd already started to eat, ostentatiously shot me a conspiratorial wink.

  'What did you give him?' asked Sister Françoise as we walked towards the exit.

  Since I thought she was referring to the pack of forb
idden cigarettes that bulged in Miralles' shirt pocket, I blushed.

  'Give him?'

  'He seems very happy.'

  'Ah,' I smiled with relief. 'We were talking about the war.'

  'What war?'

  'The war in Spain.'

  'I didn't know Miralles had fought in that war.'

  I was about to tell her that Miralles hadn't fought in one war, but many, but I couldn't, because I suddenly saw Miralles walking across the Libyan desert towards the Murzuk oasis —young, ragged, dusty and anonymous, carrying the tricolour flag of a country not his own, of a country that is all countries and also the country of liberty and which only exists because he and four Moors and a black guy are raising that flag as they keep walking onwards, onwards, ever onwards.

  'Does anyone come to see him?' I asked Sister Françoise.

  'No. At first his son-in-law used to come, his daughter's widower. But then he stopped coming; I think they fell out. Miralles can be a slightly prickly character after all — I can tell you one thing though: he has a heart of gold.'

  Listening to her talk about the embolism that paralysed Miralles' whole left side a few months ago, I thought how Sister Françoise spoke like the director of an orphanage trying to place an unruly pupil with a potential client; I also thought how Miralles was perhaps not an unruly pupil, but he certainly was an orphan, and then I wondered whose memory he'd cling to when he was dead so as not to die completely.

  'We thought that was the end,' Sister Françoise went on. 'But he's recovered very well; he's got the constitution of an ox. He hasn't taken well to giving up smoking or eating without salt, but he'll get used to it.' When we got to the desk, she smiled and held out her hand. 'Well then, we'll see you this afternoon, won't we?'

  Before leaving the residential home I looked at my watch: it had just gone twelve. I had five empty hours before me. I walked awhile along the route des Daix looking for a bar with a terrace where I could get something to drink, but, since I didn't find one anywhere — the neighbourhood was a network of wide suburban avenues with little semi-detached houses —as soon as I saw a taxi I stopped it and asked him to take me to the city centre. He dropped me off in a semi-circular plaza that opened onto the Palace of the Dukes of Burgundy. In front of its façade, sitting at a table on a terrace, I drank two glasses of beer. From where I was sitting I could see a sign with the name of the plaza: Place de la Liberation. Inevitably I thought of Miralles entering Paris through the Porte-de-Gentilly the night of 24 August 1944, with the first Allied troops, on board his tank which would have been called Guadalajara or Zaragoza or Belchite. Beside me, on the terrace, a very young couple were marvelling at the laughter and expressions of their pink baby, while busy, indifferent people walked by. I thought: Not a single one of these people knows of the existence of that practically one-eyed, dying old man who smokes cigarettes on the sly and at this very minute is eating without salt a few kilometres from here, but there's not a single one of them who's not indebted to him. I thought: No one will remember him when he's dead. I saw Miralles again, walking with the flag of the Free French across the infinite, burning sands of Libya, walking towards the Murzuk oasis while people were walking across this French plaza and across all the plazas in Europe going about their business, not knowing that their fate and the fate of the civilization they'd abdicated responsibility for depended on Miralles continuing to walk onwards, ever onwards. Then I remembered Sánchez Mazas and José Antonio and it occurred to me that perhaps they weren't so wrong and that at the eleventh hour it always has been a squad of soldiers that has saved civilization. I thought: What José Antonio and Sánchez Mazas could never imagine was that neither they nor anyone like them could ever form part of that eleventh-hour squad; on the contrary it would be formed by four Moors, a black guy, and a Catalan lathe operator who happened to be there by chance or bad luck, and who would have died laughing if anyone had told him he was saving us all in that time of darkness, and perhaps precisely for that reason — because he didn't imagine civilization at that moment depended on him — he was saving it and saving us, not knowing his final reward would be an unknown room in a residential home for the poor, in a sad city of a country that wasn't even his country, and where no one except maybe a smiling skinny nun, who didn't know he'd fought in the war, would miss him.

  I ate lunch in the Café Central, in Place Grangier, very near to where I'd had breakfast that morning and, after drinking a coffee and a whisky at a Café on rue de la Poste and buying a carton of cigarettes, returned to the Résidence des Nimphéas. It wasn't yet five when Miralles invited me up to his room and I noticed, not without surprise, that it wasn't the sordid institutional room I'd expected, but a neat, orderly and bright little apartment: one glance showed me a kitchen, a washroom, a bedroom and a little lounge with almost bare walls, two big armchairs, a table and big window onto a balcony open to the afternoon sun. I handed Miralles the carton of cigarettes in greeting.

  'Don't be an idiot,' he said, tearing off the cellophane wrapper and taking out two packets. 'Where do you expect me to hide this?' He gave me back the rest of the carton. apos;Would you like a nescafé? Decaffeinated, of course. They've forbidden me the real stuff.'

  I didn't feel like one, but I accepted. As he made the coffee, Miralles asked me how I liked the apartment; I told him I liked it very much. He told me about the services (medical, recreational, cultural, cleaning) the home offered, and the rehabilitation exercises he had to do daily. When he'd finished making the coffee, I picked up the cups to take them into the lounge, but he motioned to me to stop; opening a low cupboard, he leaned half-way in with the agility of a contortionist and triumphantly brought out a hipflask.

  'If you don't add a bit of this,' he remarked while pouring a shot in each cup, 'this stuff tastes like shit.'

  Miralles put the flask back in its place,| and then, each with our cup, we sat in the armchairs in the little lounge. I took a sip of nescafe; what Miralles had added was cognac.

  'Now then,' said Miralles, amused, almost flattered, sitting back in his chair and stirring his nescafe. 'Shall we carry on with the interrogation? I assure you I've told you everything I know.'

  I suddenly felt ashamed to keep asking him things, and felt like telling him that, even if I didn't have any questions to ask him, I'd be there anyway, chatting and drinking nescafe with him; for a moment I thought that I already knew everything I needed to know from Miralles, and, I don't know why, I remembered Bolaiño and the night when he'd come across Miralles dancing a paso doble with Luz under the awning of his caravan and understood that his time at the campsite was up. In a flash I thought of Bolaño and my book, of Soldiers of Salamis, of Conchi and of the many months I'd spent searching for the man who'd saved Sánchez Mazas' life and for the meaning of a look and a shout in the woods, searching for a man who'd danced a paso doble in the garden of an improvised prison, sixty years earlier, just as Miralles and Luz had danced to another paso doble (or maybe the same one) in a working-class campsite in Castelldefells, under the awning of his improvised home. I didn't ask him anything, and said, as if it were a revelation:

  'Sánchez Mazas survived the firing squad.' Miralles nodded, patiently, enjoying his nescafe with cognac. 'He survived thanks to a particular man, I added. One of Líster's soldiers.'

  I told him the story. When I'd finished, Miralles set his empty cup on the table and, leaning over a bit, and without getting out of the chair, he opened the balcony window and looked outside.

  'Sounds like fiction, that story,' he said, in a neutral tone of voice, as he took a cigarette out of the half-empty pack from the morning.

  I remembered Miquel Aguirre and said:

  'Possibly. But all wars are full of stories that sound like fiction, aren't they?'

  'Only for those who don't live through them.' He exhaled a plume of smoke and spat something out, perhaps a shred of tobacco. 'Only for those who tell them. For those who go to war to tell it, not to fight it. What was the name of tha
t American novelist who entered Paris . . . ?'

  'Hemingway.'

  'Hemingway, that's it. What a clown!'

  Miralles went quiet, distracted, as he watched the columns of smoke waving slowly in the still light on the balcony, through which the intermittent traffic noise reached us.

  'And this story about Líster's soldier,' he started, turning back to me: the right half of his face had again taken on its stone-like appearance; on the left was an ambiguous expression of indifference and disappointment, almost annoyance. apos;Who told you that?'

  I explained. Miralles nodded, his mouth a circumflex, almost mocking. It was obvious the jovial spirit he'd welcomed me with that afternoon had disappeared. I didn't know what to say, but I knew I had to say something; but Miralles got in there first:

  'Tell me something. You don't really care about Sánchez Mazas and his famous firing squad, right?'

  'I don't know what you mean,' I said, quite honestly.

  He looked into my eyes with curiosity.

  'Got to hand it to you fucking writers!' he laughed. 'So what you were looking for was a hero. And I'm that hero, is that it? Can you believe it! But hadn't we decided you were a pacifist? Well, you know something? There aren't any heroes in peacetime, except maybe that little Indian guy who always went around half naked . . . And he wasn't even a hero, or only once they'd killed him. Heroes are only heroes when they die or get killed. The real heroes are born out of war and die in war. There are no living heroes, young man. They're all dead. Dead, dead, dead.' His voice cracked; after a pause, as he swallowed hard, he stubbed out his cigarette. 'Do you want another of these concoctions?'

  He went to the kitchen with the empty cups. From the little lounge I heard him blow his nose; when he came back his eyes were shining, but he seemed to have calmed down. I suppose I must have tried to apologize for something, because I remember that, after handing me the nescafé and leaning back again in his armchair, Miralles interrupted me impatiently, almost irritated.

  'Don't apologize, young man. You haven't done anything wrong. Besides, at your age you should know by now that a man doesn't apologize: he does what he does and says what he says, and then puts up with it. I'm going to tell you something you don't know, something about the war.' He took a sip of nescafé; so did I (Miralles had gone overboard with the cognac). 'When I left for the front in '36, these other boys went with me. They were from Terrassa, like me; very young almost children — just like me; I knew some of them to see them or to speak to, but most of them I didn't. There were the García Segués brothers (Joan and Lela), Miquel Cardos, Cagi Baldrich, Pipo Canal, el Gordo Odena, Santi Brugada and Jordi Gudayol. We fought the war together, both wars, ours and the other one, though they were both the same one. None of them survived. They all died. The last one was Lela Garcia Segues. At first I got along better with his brother Joan, who was the same age as me, but in time Lela became my best friend, the best I've ever had: we were such good friends we didn't even have to talk when we were together. He died in the summer of '43, in a town near Tripoli, crushed by an English tank. You know what? Since the war ended, not a single day has gone by when I haven't thought about them. They were so young . . . They all died. All of them dead. Dead. Dead. All of them. None of them tasted the good things in life: none of them ever had a woman all to himself, none of them knew the wonder of having a child and of their child, at three or four years of age, climbing into his bed between him and his wife, on a Sunday morning, in a room full of sunshine . . .' At some point Miralles had started to cry: his face and his voice hadn't changed, but inconsolable tears streamed down the smooth channel of his scar, rolling more slowly down his unshaven cheeks. 'Sometimes I dream of them and then I feel guilty. I see them all: intact and greeting me with jokes, just as young as they were then, because time doesn't pass for them, they're just as young, and they ask me why I'm not with them — as if I'd betrayed them, because my true place was there; or as if I were taking the place of one of them; or as if in reality I had died sixty years ago in some ditch in Spain or Africa or France and I were dreaming a future life with a wife and children, a life that would end here, in this room in a home, chatting away to you.' Miralles kept talking, more quickly, without drying the tears that ran down his neck and soaked into his flannel shirt. 'Nobody remembers them, you know? Nobody. Nobody even remembers why they died, why they didn't have a wife and children and a sunny room; nobody remembers, least of all, those they fought for. There's no lousy street in any lousy town in any fucking country named after any of them, nor will there ever be. Understand? You understand, don't you? Oh, but I remember, I do remember, I remember them all, Lela and Joan and Gabi and Odena and Pipo and Brugada and Gudayol, I don't know why I do but I do, not a single day goes by that I don't think of them.'