Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas

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...