Soldiers of Salamis

by Javier Cercas

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.