Javier Cercas - Soldiers of Salamis

SOLDIERS OF SALAMIS

ON 27 APRIL 1939, the very day that Pere Figueras and his eight comrades from Cornell de Terri were sent to prison in Gerona, Rafael Snchez Mazas had just been named national advisor to the Falange Espaola Tradicionalista y de las JONS and Vice-President of its Leadership Council; a month had not yet passed since the definitive collapse of the Republic, and four more were yet to go by before Snchez Mazas would become Minister Without Portfolio in the first post-war government. He had always been an unpleasant, arrogant, despotic man, but was neither petty nor vindictive, and so during that period the waiting room to his office teemed with relatives of prisoners eager to gain his intercession on behalf of old acquaintances or friends who the end of the war had left confined in the cells of the defeat. Nothing leads us to believe he did not do what he could for them. Thanks to his insistence, the Caudillo commuted the death sentence hanging over the head of the poet Miguel Hernndez to life imprisonment, but not the one which, one November dawn in 1940, led a firing squad to end the life of Julian Zugazagoitia, a good friend of Snchez Mazas and Minister in Negrn's government. Months before this pointless murder, just back from a trip to Rome as National Delegate of the Falange Exterior, his secretary, the journalist Carlos Sents, brought him up to date on matters pending and read him the list of persons he'd granted an audience for that morning. Suddenly alert, Snchez Mazas made him repeat a name; then he stood up, strode across his office, opened the door, stopped in the middle of the waiting room and, scouring the frightened faces crowding it, asked: apos;Which of you is Joaquin Figueras?'

Paralyzed by terror, a man with a bereft look and travelling clothes tried to answer, but only succeeded in breaking the solid silence following the question with an indecipherable burbling, while reaching a desperate hand, claw-like, into his jacket pocket. Standing in front of him, Snchez Mazas wanted to know if he were related to the brothers Pedro and Joaquin Figueras. 'I'm their father,' he managed to articulate with a strong Catalan accent and frantic nodding that didn't abate even when Snchez Mazas crushed him in a relieved embrace. After the effusive greetings, the two men chatted for a few minutes in the office. Joaquim Figueras recounted that his son Pere had spent the last month and a half in prison in Gerona, groundlessly accused, along with other young men of the village, of taking part in the burning of the Cornell de Terri church at the beginning of the war and of having been involved in the murder of the Municipal Secretary. Snchez Mazas didn't let him finish; he left his office through a side door and came back a few moments later.

'That's settled,' he proclaimed. 'When you get back to Cornell you'll find your son at home.'

Figueras left the office in a euphoric state. On his way down the steps he noticed a piercing pain in his hand and realized he still had it thrust inside his jacket pocket, clutching, with all his strength, a piece of paper torn out of a notebook with green covers where Snchez Mazas had recorded his debt of gratitude to Figueras' sons. And when he arrived in Cornell days later and dry-eyed embraced his recently freed son, Joaquim Figueras knew he hadn't been wrong to undertake that hallucinatory trip across a devastated country to see a man he didn't know and whom he'd consider till the end of his days one of the most powerful men in Spain.

He was only partly mistaken. Although he'd always considered it an occupation unworthy of gentlemen, Snchez Mazas had by then spent more than a decade in politics and would take another few years to leave it, but never in his whole life was he to accumulate so much real power in his hands as right then.

He'd been born in Madrid on 18 February, forty-five years earlier. His father, a military doctor originally from Coria, whose uncle had been royal physician to Alfonso XII, died a few months later, and his mother, Maria Rosario Mazas y Orbegozo, immediately sought the protection of her family in Bilbao. There, in a five-storey house beside the Deusto Bridge, on Henao Street, cajoled by an army of childless uncles, he spent his childhood and adolescence. The Mazas were a clan of hidalgos of liberal traditions and literary inclinations, related to Miguel de Unamuno and solidly anchored in the cream of Bilbao society, from which Snchez Mazas drew inspiration to construct a few characters for his novels, and from whom he inherited an irrepressible propensity to lordly idleness and an obstinate literary vocation. The latter had once similarly tempted his mother, a clever, illustrious woman who poured all her untimely widow's energy into facilitating her son's career as a writer, a career she herself hadn't wanted or been able to pursue.

Snchez Mazas didn't let her down. It's true he was a mediocre student, who wandered through various upper-class Catholic boarding schools with more shame than glory before ending up at the Central University of Madrid, and finally the Augustinian Maria Cristina Royal College for Advanced Studies at the monastery in El Escorial, where in 1916 he graduated in Law. It's equally true, however, that he began to show obvious signs of literary talent quite early. At the age of thirteen he wrote poems in the styles of Zorrilla and Marquina; at twenty he imitated Rubn Daro and Unamuno; by twenty-two he was a mature poet; at twenty-eight his poetic work was essentially complete. With typical aristocratic disdain, he barely bothered to publish them, and if we know his work in its entirety (or almost) it's largely owing to the vigilance of his mother, who transcribed his poems by hand in small notebooks bound in black oilcloth, recording beneath each one its place and date of composition. Moreover, Snchez Mazas is a good poet; a good minor poet, I mean, which is about all a good poet can aspire to. His verses have only one chord humble and ancient, monotonous and a bit sentimental but Snchez Mazas plays it masterfully, drawing from it a clean, natural, prosaic music that can only be sung by the bittersweet melancholy of time that flees and in its flight drags down order and the reliable hierarchies of an abolished world that, precisely because it is abolished, is also an invented, impossible world, almost always equivalent to the impossible, invented world of Paradise.

Although he published only one book of poems in his lifetime, it's possible that Snchez Mazas always considered himself a poet, and perhaps that's what he essentially was; his contemporaries, however, knew him primarily as the author of chronicles, articles and novels, and especially as a politician, which is exactly what he never considered himself and perhaps what he never essentially was. In June of 1916, a year after publishing his first novel, Brief Memoirs of Tarn, and having recently graduated in law, Snchez Mazas returned to Bilbao, then a headstrong, self-satisfied city, dominated by a buoyant bourgeoisie enjoying a period of economic splendour derived from Spain's neutrality during the First World War. That bonanza found its most conspicuous cultural expression in the magazine Hermes, which drew together a handful of Catholic writers, admirers of Eugenio d'Ors, Spanish nationalists, devotees of Roman culture and the values of western civilization, whom Ramn de Basterra baptized with the pompous title, 'Roman School of the Pyrenees'. Basterra was one of the more notorious members of that group of writers, the majority of whom would in time go on to swell the ranks of the Falangists; another was Snchez Mazas. They would meet for discussions at the Lyon d'Or, a cafe located in the middle of Gran Via de Lpez de Haro, where Snchez Mazas dazzled, as a cultivated, circumspect and rather bombastic conversationalist. Jos Maria de Areilza, then a boy, whose father took him to the Lyon d'Or for hot chocolate, remembers him as 'a tall and very thin young man, with tortoiseshell spectacles, his eyes both ardent and weary, with a voice which sometimes became strident when emphasizing some point in an argument'. At that time Snchez Mazas was already writing assiduously in the newspapers