Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas; Anne McLean

  Miralles stopped speaking, took out his handkerchief, dried his tears, blew his nose; he did it unabashed, as if it didn't embarrass him to cry in public, just like the ancient Homeric warriors, or a soldier of Salamis would have done. Then he gulped down the rest of his nescafe that had gone cold in the cup. We sat smoking in silence. The light on the balcony was fading; only an occasional car passed. I felt at ease, slightly inebriated, almost happy. I thought: He remembers for the same reason I remember my father and Ferlosio his and Miquel Aguirre his and Jaume Figueras his and Bolaiño his Latin American friends, all of them soldiers killed in wars already lost: he remembers because, although they died sixty years ago, they're still not dead, precisely because he remembers them. Or perhaps it's not him remembering them, but them clinging to him, so they won't die off entirely. But when Miralles dies, I thought, his friends will die off, too, because there won't be anyone to remember them, to keep them from dying.

  For a long time we chatted about other things, between nescafes, cigarettes and long silences, as if we hadn't just met that very morning. Then Miralles caught me sneaking a look at my watch.

  'I'm boring you,' he interrupted himself.

  'You're not boring me,' I answered. 'But my train leaves at eight-thirty.'

  'Do you have to get going?'

  'I think so.'

  Miralles stood up from his armchair and picked up his stick. He said:

  'I haven't been much help, have I? Do you think you'll be able to write your book?'

  'I don't know,' I answered, truthfully; but then I said: 'I hope so.' And added: 'If I do, I promise I'll talk about your friends.'

  As if he hadn't heard me, Miralles said:

  'I'll see you out.' He pointed to the carton of cigarettes on the table. 'And don't forget those.'

  We were about to leave the apartment when Miralles stopped.

  'Tell me something.' He spoke with his hand on the doorknob; the door was half open. 'Why did you want to find the soldier who saved Sánchez Mazas?'

  Without a moment's hesitation I answered:

  'To ask him what he thought that morning, in the forest, after the execution, when he recognized Sánchez Mazas and looked him in the eye. To ask him what he saw in those eyes. Why he spared him, why he didn't give him away, why he didn't kill him.'

  'Why would he kill him?'

  'Because in wars people kill people,' I said. 'Because thanks to Sánchez Mazas and four or five guys like him what happened had happened, and now that soldier was on his way to an exile with no way back. Because if anybody deserved to be shot it was Sánchez Mazas.'

  Miralles recognized his words, nodded with a hint of a smile and, opening the door the rest of the way, gave me a tap on the back of the legs with his stick and said:

  'Let's get going, we can't have you missing your train.'

  We took the elevator down to the ground floor; from reception we called a taxi.

  'Say goodbye to Sister Françoise for me,' I said, as we walked towards the exit.

  'You're not planning to come back?'

  'Not if you don't want me to.'

  'Who said I didn't want you to?'

  'In that case, I promise I'll come back.'

  Outside, the light was rusty: it was dusk. We waited for the taxi at the garden gate in front of a traffic light that changed for nobody, because traffic at the intersection of route des Daix and rue Combotte was scant and the pavement deserted. On my right was an apartment building, not very high, with big picture windows and balconies overlooking the garden of the Nimpheas Residential Home. I thought it was a good place to live. I thought anywhere was a good place to live. I thought about Líster's soldier, and I heard myself say:

  'What do you think he thought?'

  'The soldier?' I turned to him. Leaning all his weight on his stick, Miralles watched the traffic light, which was red. When it changed from red to green, Miralles fixed me with a blank stare. 'Nothing,' he said

  'Nothing?'

  'Nothing.'

  The taxi took a while. It was quarter to eight, and I still had to stop by the hotel to settle my bill and get my things.

  'If you come back, bring me something.'

  'Besides tobacco?'

  'Yes.'

  'Do you like music?'

  'I used to. I don't listen to it any more; each time I do it makes me feel bad. I suddenly start thinking about what's happened to me, and especially what hasn't happened to me.'

  'Bolaiño told me you danced a pretty mean paso doble.'

  'He said that?' he laughed. 'Fucking Chilean!'

  'One night he saw you dancing to "Sighing for Spain" with a friend of yours, beside your caravan.'

  'If you convince Sister Françoise, I can probably still dance it,' said Miralles, winking his scarred eye. 'It's a beautiful paso doble, don't you think? Look, here's your taxi.'

  The taxi stopped at the corner, beside us.

  'So,' said Miralles. 'I hope you come back soon.'

  'I'll be back.'

  'Can I ask you a favour?'

  'Anything.'

  Looking at the traffic light, he said:

  'It's been a long time since I hugged anyone.'

  I heard the sound of Miralles' stick falling to the ground, I felt his enormous arms squeezing me while mine could barely reach around him, I felt very small and very fragile, I smelled medicines and years of enclosure and boiled vegetables, and most of all old man, and knew that this was the unhappy smell of heroes.

  We let go and Miralles picked up his stick and pushed me towards the taxi. I got in, gave the driver the address of the Victor Hugo, asked him to wait a moment and rolled down the window.

  'There's one thing I didn't tell you,' I said to Miralles. apos;Sánchez Mazas knew the soldier who spared him. One time he saw him dancing a paso doble in the gardens of Collell. Alone. The paso doble was "Sighing for Spain".' Miralles stepped off the kerb and came over to the taxi, leaning his big hand on the rolled-down window. I was sure I knew what the answer was going to be, because I didn't think Miralles could deny me the truth. Almost pleading, I asked him: 'It was you, wasn't it?'

  After an instant's hesitation, Miralles smiled widely, affectionately, just showing his double row of worn-down teeth. His answer was:

  'No.'

  He took his hand off the window and ordered the taxi to start up. Then, abruptly, he said something that I didn't hear (maybe it was a name, but I'm not sure) because the taxi had started moving and though I stuck my head out the window and asked him what he'd said, it was already too late for him to hear me or answer me; I saw him raise his stick in a final farewell gesture and then, through the back window of the taxi, walk back to the home, slow, dispossessed, practically one-eyed, and happy, with his grey shirt, his threadbare trousers and felt slippers, getting smaller and smaller against the pale green of the façade, his proud head, tough profile, his large, swaying and dilapidated body, supporting his unsteady steps with his stick, and when he opened the garden gate I felt a sort of premature nostalgia, as if, instead of seeing Miralles, I were already remembering him, perhaps because at that moment I thought I wasn't going to see him again, that I was always going to remember him like this.

  I got my things from the hotel as fast as I could, paid the bill and arrived at the station just in time to catch the train. It was again a sleeper, very similar to the one I'd taken on the way here, maybe it was the same one. I settled into my compartment as I felt the train start off on its way. Then, down empty aisles carpeted in green, I made my way to the restaurant, a carriage with a double row of impeccably laid tables and springy seats of pumpkin-coloured leather. There was only one left. I sat down and, since I wasn't hungry, ordered a whisky. I savoured it, smoking, while on the other side of the window Dijon disintegrated in the twilight, soon converted into a series of crops barely visible in the growing darkness. Now the big window duplicated the restaurant car. It duplicated me: I looked fat and aged, a little sad. But I felt euphoric, immensely
happy. I thought as soon as I got to Gerona, I'd phone Conchi and Bolaño and tell them what Miralles was like and about the city that was called Dijon, but whose real name was Stockton. I planned one, two, three trips to Stockton. I'd go to Stockton and take an apartment in the building on route des Daix, across from the residential home, and spend the mornings and afternoons chatting with Miralles, smoking cigarettes on the hidden bench or in his apartment, and later perhaps not chatting, not saying anything, just passing the time, because by then we'd be such good friends we wouldn't need to talk to enjoy being together; and at night I'd sit on the balcony of my apartment, with a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of wine and I'd wait until I saw that on the other side of the route des Daix the light in Miralles' apartment had been switched off, and then I'd stay there for a little while longer, in the dark, smoking and drinking while he slept or lay awake across the street, very near, lying in his bed and perhaps remembering his dead friends. And I regretted not having let Conchi come with me to Dijon and for a moment imagined the pleasure of being there with her and Miralles, and with Bolaiño too, imagining that between the three of us we'd convince Bolaño to go to Dijon like someone going to Stockton, and Bolaiño would go to Stockton with his wife and his son, and the six of us would hire a car and go on outings to the surrounding villages; we'd form an odd, impossible family and then Miralles would finally stop being an orphan (and perhaps so would I) and Conchi would feel a terrible longing to have a child (and perhaps so would I). I also imagined that one day, not too late in the evening, Sister Françoise would call me at my house in Gerona, I'd call Conchi at her house in Quart and then Bolaño at his house in Blanes; and the three of us would leave the next day for Dijon although where we'd arrive would be Stockton, finally Stockton and we'd have to empty Miralles' apartment, throw out his clothes and sell or give away his furniture and keep a few things, very few because Miralles undoubtedly kept very few things, perhaps the odd photograph of him smiling happily between his wife and daughter or in a soldier's uniform among other young men in soldiers' uniforms, not much more, who knows, maybe an old vinyl record of scratchy old paso dobles that no one had listened to for ages. And there would be a funeral and a burial, and at the burial music, the cheerful music of a sorrowful paso doble playing on a scratched vinyl record; and then I'd take Sister Françoise by the hand and ask her to dance with me beside Miralles' grave, I'd insist that she dance to a music she didn't know how to dance to on Miralles' fresh grave, in secret, so no one would see us — so no one in Dijon or in France or in Spain or in all of Europe would know that a good-looking, clever nun (with whom Miralles always wanted to dance a paso doble and whose bum he never dared touch) and a provincial journalist were dancing in an anonymous cemetery of a melancholy city beside the grave of an old Catalan Communist, no one would know except a non-believing and maternal fortune-teller and a Chilean lost in Europe who would be smoking, his eyes clouded, standing back a little and very serious, watching us dance a paso doble beside Miralles' grave just as one night years before he'd seen Miralles and Luz dance to another paso doble under the awning of a trailer in the Estrella de Mar campsite, seeing it and wondering if maybe that paso doble and this one were in fact the same, wondering without expecting an answer, because he already knew that the only answer is that there is no answer, the only answer is a sort 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 that nun is and that journalist who is me dancing beside Miralles' grave as if their lives depended on that absurd dance or like someone asking for help for themselves and their family in a time of darkness. And there, sitting in the soft pumpkin-coloured seat in the restaurant car, rocked by the clattering of the train and the whirlwind of words spinning round unceasingly in my head, with the bustle of passengers dining around me and my almost empty glass of whisky in front of me, and in the window, beside me, the distant image of a sad man who couldn't be me but was me, there I suddenly saw my book, the book I'd been after for years, I saw it there in its entirety, finished, from the first line to the last, there I knew that, although nowhere in any city of any fucking country would there ever be a street named after Miralles, if I told his story, Miralles would still be alive in some way and if I talked about them, his friends would still be alive too, the Garcia Segues brothers — Joan and Lela — and Miquel Cardos and Gabi Baldrich and Pipo Canal and el Gordo Odena and Santi Brugada and Jordi Gudayol would still be alive even though for many years they'd been dead, dead, dead, dead, I'd talk about Miralles and about all of them, not leaving a single one out, and of course about the Figueras brothers and Angelats and Maria Ferré, and also about my father and even Bolafio's young Latin Americans, but above all about Sánchez Mazas and that squad of soldiers that at the eleventh hour has always saved civilization and in which he wasn't worthy to serve but Miralles was, about those inconceivable moments when all of civilization depends on a single man, and about that man and about how civilization repays that man. I saw my book, whole and real, my completed true tale, and knew that now I only had to write it, put it down on paper because it was in my head from start ('It was the summer of 1994, more than six years ago now, when I first heard about Rafael Sánchez Mazas facing the firing squad') to finish, an ending where an old journalist, unsuccessful and happy, smokes and drinks whisky in the restaurant car of a night train that travels across the French countryside among people who are having dinner and are happy and waiters in black bow-ties, while he thinks of a washed-up man who had courage and instinctive virtue and so never erred or didn't err in the one moment when it really mattered, he thinks of a man who was honest and brave and pure as pure and of the hypothetical book which will revive him when he's dead, and then the journalist watches his sad, aged reflection in the window licked by the night until slowly the reflection dissolves and in the window appears an endless and burning desert and a lone soldier, carrying the flag of a country not his own, of a country that is all countries and only exists because that soldier raises its abolished flag; young, ragged, dusty and anonymous, infinitely tiny in that blazing sea of infinite sand, walking onwards beneath the black sun of the window, not really knowing where he's going or who he's going with or why he's going, not really caring as long as it's onwards, onwards, onwards, ever onwards.

  Translator's Afterword

  Twentieth-century Spanish political history is extremely complex and the following is an attempt to give readers a brief outline of some of the background to parts of this novel.

  Spain was declared a Republic, for the second time, on 14 April 1931 when King Alfonso XIII abdicated after monarchist parties were defeated in key municipal elections. The country was extremely polarized with vast numbers belonging to ideologically committed trade unions and parties across the political spectrum. National elections were held in November 1933, resulting in a right-wing government which collapsed a little over two years later. The elections of February 1936 were contested by two broad coalitions: the Frente Nacional and the Frente Popular.