Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas

Three things had just happened: first my father had died; then my wife had left me; finally, I’d given up on my literary career. I’m lying.

Conversational aspect first person narrator

I mean that the fashion arose, in the best cases (the worst aren’t worth mentioning), from the natural need all writers have to invent their own tradition, from a certain urge to be provocative, from the problematic certainty that literature is one thing and life another and that it was therefore possible to be a good writer at the same time as being a terrible person (or a person who supports and foments terrible causes), from the conviction that we were being literarily unfair to certain Falangist writers, who, to use Andrés Trapiello’s phrase, had won the war but lost literature.

One sentence! Syntax makes him sound scattered or frantic

“The book’s called Our War, and it’s pretty good, though he tells a tremendous number of lies, as in all memoirs.

“I don’t write novels anymore,” I said. “Besides, it’s not a novel, it’s a true story.” “So was the article,” said Aguirre. “Did I tell you how much I liked it? I liked it because it was like a compressed tale, except with real characters and situations…Like a true tale.”

Difference Between fiction and truth

Pascual’s book was self-published; it contains several references to Sánchez Mazas, with whom Pascual spent the hours leading up to the execution. Following Aguirre’s suggestion, I likewise read Trapiello, and in one of his books discovered that he too told the story of Sánchez Mazas facing the firing squad, and in almost the exact same way I’d heard Ferlosio tell it, except for the fact that, like me in my article or my true tale, he didn’t mention the “forest friends” either. The exact similarity between Trapiello’s tale and mine surprised me. I thought Trapiello must have heard it from Ferlosio (or one of Sánchez Mazas’ other children, or his wife) and imagined that, having been told so often by Sánchez Mazas in his house, it must have acquired for the family an almost formulaic character, like those perfect comic stories where you can’t leave out a single word without spoiling the joke.

Collective memory through witnesses

“It’s odd,” I remarked. “Except for one detail, the story coincides point by point with what Ferlosio told me – as if, instead of telling it, they’d both recited it.” “Which detail is that?” “A minor one. In your telling (in Liliana’s, that is), when he sees Sánchez Mazas the militiaman shrugs and then he walks away. In mine (in Ferlosio’s, that is), before he leaves the militiaman looks him in the eye for a few seconds.” There was a silence. I thought the line had gone dead. “Hello?” “It’s funny,” Trapiello reflected. “Now that you mention it, that’s true. I don’t know where I got the shrug from, it must have struck me as more dramatic, or more like Pío Baroja.

Story morphs by the teller

Republican zone. Sánchez Mazas and Montes had been joyfully reunited

Story told by franco supporter

So as I listened to him tell it, sitting on a stool in front of a video player, in a Filmoteca cubicle, I couldn’t suppress a vague tremor, because I knew I was hearing one of the first versions, still rough and unpolished, of the same story Ferlosio was to tell me almost sixty years later, and I felt absolutely sure that what Sánchez Mazas had told his son (and what he’d told me) wasn’t what he remembered happening, but what he remembered having told before.

What is odd (or at least it strikes me as odd now) is that in all the time since Ferlosio’s tale first awoke my curiosity, it never occurred to me that any of the story’s protagonists could still be alive, as if the event had happened not a mere sixty years ago, but was as remote in time as the battle of Salamis.

Children Of the war feeling out of touch

For some reason I thought of my father again, and I felt guilty again. “Soon,” I surprised myself thinking, “when even I don’t remember him, he’ll be completely dead.”

Same as shadow of the wind- soul dies only when forgotten

country would be submerged in a savage orgy of blood. I don’t know who it was who said: no matter who wins a war, the poets always lose.

The first statement is stupid, not the second: it’s true that wars are made for money, which is power, but young men go off to the front and kill and get killed for words, which are poetry, and that’s why poets are always the ones who win wars; and for this reason Sánchez Mazas–who from his position of privilege at José Antonio’s side contrived a violent patriotic poetry of sacrifice and yokes and arrows and the usual cries that inflamed the imaginations of hundreds of youths and would eventually send them to slaughter – is more responsible for the victory of Francoist arms than all the inept military manoeuvres of that nineteenth-century general who was Francisco Franco.

I decided that, after almost ten years without writing a book, the moment to try again had arrived, and I also decided that the book I’d write would not be a novel, but simply a true tale, a tale cut from the cloth of reality, concocted out of true events and characters, a tale centered on Sánchez Mazas and the firing squad and the circumstances leading up to and following it.

true tale, I thought, but didn’t say. That’s what I’m going to write. It also occurred to me that Figueras was thinking if someone wrote about his father, his father wouldn’t be entirely dead.

uncle, to Maria Ferré and Angelats, if he was still alive. I told myself, even if Jaume Figueras’ tale couldn’t be considered trustworthy (or couldn’t be considered any more trustworthy than Ferlosio’s), for its veracity didn’t depend on a memory (his), but on the memory of a memory (his father’s), the accounts of his uncle, Maria Ferré and Angelats, if he was really still alive, were on the other hand firsthand reports and therefore, at least in principle, much less random than his.

Memory passed down through familg- research erll

hidalgos of liberal traditions and literary inclinations, related

not be an exaggeration to claim Sánchez Mazas as Spain’s first fascist, and quite correct to say he was its most influential theoretician.

monarchical and conservative by vocation, Sánchez Mazas thought he’d discovered in fascism the ideal instrument to cure his nostalgia for an imperial Catholicism and, especially, to forcibly mend the reliable hierarchies of the ancien régime that the old democratic egalitarianism and the vigorous, new Bolshevik egalitarianism were threatening to annihilate all over Europe. Or to put it another way: perhaps for Sánchez Mazas fascism was simply a way of realizing his poetry, of making real the world it melancholically evoked – the abolished, invented, impossible world of Paradise.

So in 1929, back in Madrid, Sánchez Mazas had already made the decision to dedicate himself entirely to ensuring that such a time would also return to Spain. Up to a point he succeeded. War is the time of heroes and poets par excellence, and in the thirties few people pledged as much intelligence, as much effort and as much talent as he did to making war break out in Spain.

José Antonio was very fond of quoting a phrase of Oswald Spengler’s: that at the eleventh hour it had always been a squad of soldiers that had saved civilization. At that time the young Falangists felt they were that squad of soldiers. They knew (or believed they knew) that their families slept an innocent sleep of bourgeois beatitude, not knowing that a wave of impunity and egalitarian barbarism was going to wake them suddenly with a tremendous clamour of catastrophe. They felt their duty was to preserve civilization by force and avoid the catastrophe.

The violence, in reality, had been around for a while and, despite the protests of victimization by some party leaders, opposed to it temperamentally and by education, the fact is that the Falange had been systematically feeding it, with the aim of making the Republic’s situation untenable; the use of force was at the very heart of the Falangist ideology, which, like all the other fascist movements, adopted Lenin’s revolutionary methods, for whom a minority of brave and committed men – the equivalent of Spengler’s squad of soldiers – was enough to take power through armed struggle.

By 1937, left leaderless by José Antonio’s death, domesticated as an ideology and annulled as an apparatus of power, the Falange, with its rhetoric and its rites and the rest of its external fascist manifestations, was already available to Franco to use as an instrument to bring his regime into line with Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy (from which he’d received and was receiving and still hoped to receive so much aid), but Franco could also use it, as José Antonio had foreseen and feared years before, “as a mere auxiliary shock element, like an assault guard of reaction, like a youthful militia destined to parade before the upraised bigheads in power”. Everything conspired in those years to dilute the original Falange, from the orthopaedic use Franco made of it, to the crucial fact that over the course of the war not only did those who shared its ideology to a fair degree join on a massive scale but also those who sought, within its ranks, to hide their Republican pasts. Things being as they were, the choice that sooner or later many “old shirts” had to face was clear: denounce the flagrant discrepancy between their political project and that governing the new state, or coexist as comfortably as they could with this contradiction and apply themselves to scraping up even the tiniest crumbs from the banquet of power.

Perhaps Sánchez Mazas was never more than a false Falangist, or else a Falangist who was only one because he felt obliged to be one – if all Falangists weren’t false and obligatory ones, deep down never entirely believing that their ideology was anything other than a desperate measure in confusing times, an instrument destined to succeed in changing something in order that nothing change; I mean, had it not been because, like many of his comrades, he felt a real threat looming over his loved ones’ sleep of bourgeois beatitude, Sánchez Mazas would never have stooped to getting involved in politics, nor would he have applied himself to forging the blazing rhetoric of the clash needed to inflame to victory the squad of soldiers charged with saving civilization. Sánchez Mazas identified civilization with the securities, privileges and hierarchies of his own people and the Falange with Spengler’s squad of soldiers; but he also felt pride in having formed part of that squad and, perhaps, the right to rest after having restored hierarchies, securities and privileges. That’s why it’s doubtful he would have wanted to forget anything, and certain that he regretted nothing.

Probably by then he no longer believed in anything. Probably in his heart, never in his life had he truly believed in anything, and least of all in what he’d defended or preached. He practised politics, but deep down always scorned them. He exalted time-honoured values – loyalty, courage – but practised treachery and cowardice, and contributed more than most to the brutalization the Falange’s rhetoric inflicted on these values; he also exalted old institutions – the monarchy, the family, religion, the fatherland – but didn’t lift a finger to bring a king to Spain, ignored his family, often living apart from them, would have exchanged all of Catholicism for a single canto of the Divine Comedy and as for the fatherland, well, no one knows what the fatherland is, or maybe it’s simply an excuse for venality or sloth. Those who had dealings with him in his later years recall that he often remembered the vicissitudes of the war and the firing squad at Collell.

also assumed that, although everything I’d found out about Sánchez Mazas over time was going to form the nucleus of my book, which would allow me to feel secure, a moment would arrive when I’d have to dispense with those training wheels, because – if what he writes is going to have real interest – a writer never writes about what he knows, but precisely about what he does not know.

“All good tales are true tales, at least for those who read them, which is all that counts. Anyway, what I don’t get is how you can be so sure that Miralles is the militiaman who saved Sánchez Mazas.”

In a sense, I thought, although it had been more than six years since he’d died, my father still wasn’t dead, because there was still someone remembering him.

Another instance of remembrance

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 miles 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, no...

Crux of novelp

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

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 García Segués 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 María Ferré, and also about my father and even Bolaño’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, unsu...