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Javier Cercas

Soldiers of Salamis

For Raul Cercas and Mercè Mas

Author's note

This book is the fruit of extensive reading and long conversations. Many of the people to whom I am indebted appear in the text with their full names; among those who do not, I want to mention Josep Clara, Jordi Gracia, Eliane and Jean-Marie Lavaud, José-Carlos Mainer, Josep Maria Nadal, Carlos Trías, and especially Mónica Carbajosa, whose doctoral thesis, The Prose of '27: Rafael Sánchez Mazas has been immensely useful. To all of them: thank you.

Part One. Forest Friends

IT WAS THE SUMMER of 1994, more than six years ago now, when I first heard about Rafael Sánchez Mazas facing the firing squad. Three things had just happened: first my father had died; then my wife had left me; finally, I'd given up my literary career. I'm lying. The truth is, of those three things, the first two are factual, even exact; but not the third. In reality, my career as a writer had never actually got started, so it would have been difficult to give it up. It'd be more accurate to say I gave it up having barely begun. I'd published my first novel in 1989; like the collection of stories that appeared two years earlier, the book was received with glaring indifference, but a combination of vanity and an enthusiastic review written by a friend from those days contrived to convince me I could one day become a novelist and, to do so, should quit my job as a journalist and devote myself entirely to writing. The results of this change in lifestyle were five years of economic, physical and metaphysical anguish, three unfinished novels and a dreadful depression that knocked me back into an armchair in front of the television for two whole months. Fed up with paying the bills, including the one for my father's funeral, and watching me stare at the blank television screen and weep, my wife moved out as soon as I started to recover, and I was left with no choice but to forget my literary ambitions and ask for my old job back at the newspaper.

I'd just turned forty, but luckily — or because I'm not a good writer but nor am I a bad journalist, or, more likely, because there was no one at the paper willing to do my job for a salary as meagre as mine — they agreed.

They assigned me to the culture section, which is where they put people they don't know what to do with. At first, with the undeclared aim of punishing my disloyalty — given that, for some journalists, a colleague who leaves journalism to write a novel is nothing less than a traitorthey made me do everything but get the boss's coffee from the bar on the corner, and very few colleagues refrained from indulging in sarcasm and irony at my expense. Time must have blunted the memory of my infidelity: soon I was editing the odd piece, writing articles, doing interviews. That was how, in July 1994, I ended up interviewing Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, who was giving a series of lectures at the university at the time. I knew Ferlosio was extremely reluctant to speak to journalists, but thanks to a friend (or rather a friend of that friend who'd organized Ferlosio's stay in the city), I managed to get him to agree to talk to me for a while. Calling that an interview would be going a bit far; if it was an interview, it was the weirdest one I've ever done. To begin with, Ferlosio showed up on the terrace of the Bistrot surrounded by a swarm of friends, disciples, admirers and hangers-on; this, added to an obvious lack of attention to his clothes and a physical appearance that inextricably blended the manner of a Castilian aristocrat ashamed of being one with that of an old Mongol warrior — massive head, unruly hair streaked with grey, hard, emaciated, difficult face, large nose and cheeks shadowed with incipient beard — might have suggested, to an uninformed observer, a religious guru surrounded by acolytes. Moreover, Ferlosio roundly refused to answer a single one of the questions I put to him, claiming he'd given the best answers he was capable of in his books. This doesn't mean he didn't want to talk to me; quite the contrary: as if seeking to refute his reputation for unsociability (or perhaps it's just unfounded), he was extremely cordial, and the afternoon flew by as we chatted. The problem was that if I asked him, say, about his division of literary personae into those of fate and those of character, he would contrive to answer me with a discourse on, say, the causes of the rout of the Persian fleet in the battle of Salamis; whereas when I tried to extract his opinion on, say, the pomp and ceremony of the celebrations of the five hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Americas, he would answer me by describing, with a wealth of gesticulation and detail, say, the correct use of a jack plane. It was an exhausting tug-of-war, and it wasn't until the last beer of the evening that Ferlosio told the story of his father facing the firing squad, the story that's kept me in suspense for the last two years. I don't remember who mentioned the name Rafael Sánchez Mazas or how it came up (maybe it was one of Ferlosio's friends, maybe Ferlosio himself), but I do remember Ferlosio telling us: