Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas

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...

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