Javier Cercas - Soldiers of Salamis

This confession resolved the misunderstanding. Because although the three soldiers' adventure had only just begun, their motives were identical to those of Sánchez Mazas. Two of them were the Figueras brothers, Pere and Joaquim; the other was called Daniel Angelats. Pere was the oldest of the three, and the most capable and most intelligent. Although in adolescence he'd been unable to convince his father — a devious but very respected businessman in Cornellá de Terri — to pay for him to study law in Barcelona and he'd had to stay in the village helping the family in their small garlic business, since he was a child his indiscriminately eager reading (first in the school library and later in the Ateneo Popular) had refined his understanding and given him an uncommon range of knowledge. The collective enthusiasm awakened by the proclamation of the Republic attracted his attention towards politics, but it wasn't until after the events of October 1934 that he became a member of the Catalan Republican Left, and the uprising of the summer of 1936 caught him finishing his military service in an infantry barracks in Pedralbes, where on 19 July, earlier than usual, they were woken up with an untimely ration of cognac at breakfast and the announcement that they were going to march through Barcelona that morning in honour of the Popular Olympiad; nevertheless, before noon he'd already gone over, with weapons and equipment, along with other soldiers of his detachment, to a column of anarchist workers who urged them to join their ranks on an avenue in the city centre. During the entire afternoon and night of that dreadful Monday he fought in the streets to put down the rebellion, and in the revolutionary delirium of the days that followed, exasperated by the timidity of the government of the Generalitat, he joined the libertarian onrush of the Durruti column and went off to recapture Zaragoza. But, since neither the intoxication of victory over the rebels nor the idealistic vehemence of much of his reading had completely overridden his Catalan peasant's common sense, he soon sensed his error; once convinced by events that it was impossible to win a war with an army of enthusiastic amateurs, at the first opportunity he joined the regular army of the Republic. Under its discipline he fought at Madrid's University City and in the Maestrazgo, but at the beginning of May 1938 a stray bullet cleanly pierced his thigh and afforded him some months of convalescence, first in improvised field hospitals and finally in the military hospital in Gerona. There, amid the end of the world disorder reigning in the city during the days of retreat, his mother came for him. Although he'd just turned twenty-five, Pere Figueras was by then an old man, tired and disillusioned, in a bit of a daze, but he didn't even have a limp any more, so he was able to follow his mother back home. To his surprise, waiting for him in Can Pigem, together with his sisters, were his brother Joaquim and Daniel Angelats, who that very morning had taken advantage of the terror and confusion spread by a bomb that landed on the Grober factory in Gerona, near where they'd stopped to refuel, in order to evade the vigilance of the political commissar of their company and escape through the old part of the city towards Cornellá de Terri. Joaquim and Angelats had met two years earlier when, barely nineteen years old, they were recruited and, after three months' military instruction in the Sanctuary of Collell, sent as members of the Garibaldi Brigade to the Aragón front. Their inexperience saved them from much unpleasantness: that and the impression they gave of being adolescents too young for combat got them sent immediately back to the rearguard — first to Binéfar and later to Barcelona and finally to Vilanova i la Geltrú, where they joined a coastal artillery battalion made up mostly of wounded and disabled soldiers, where for months they played at war; but when the Republic felt its fate was at stake on the beaches of the Ebro, even they were sent as a last hope to contain, with their old, inefficient cannon, the Nationalist onslaught. The front collapsed and the rout began; all along the Mediterranean coast the shredded remains of the Republican army were retreating in disarray towards the border, unceasingly harassed by gunfire from the German planes and by the constant encircling manoeuvres of Yagüe, Solchaga and Gambara, who hemmed into inescapable pockets (or with no escape but the sea) hundreds of prisoners terrified by the shrieks of the Moroccan regulars. Bereft of political convictions, starving, defeated and sick of war, unwilling to face the agony of exile, persuaded by Francoist propaganda that, unless their hands were stained with blood, they had nothing to fear from the victors except the restoration of the order the Republic had shattered, Figueras and Angelats had no other ambition by this point than to save their skins, evade the limitless fury of the Moors and take advantage of their commanders' slightest distraction to take the road home and wait there for the arrival of the Nationalists.

So they did. But the very afternoon they arrived at the Figueras home, something happened to convince them that the big house on the edge of the Banyoles highway and right across from the train station was not a safe haven for deserters. While they were badgered with questions by the family as they sated their ravenous hunger along with Pere Figueras, before they had taken off their soldiers' uniforms, they heard the sound of motors stopping in front of Can Pigem. According to Joaquim Figueras, it was his mother who, guessing the danger they were in, urged them to go upstairs and hide under the enormous bed in the master bedroom. From there they heard a knock on the door, then unfamiliar voices conversing in the dining room that had been swiftly cleared, and then the noise of military boots climbing the stairs and walking around the second floor until they saw them come into the room; there were two pairs: one, which stayed in the doorway, was cracked and dusty; the other, old but recently shined, still martial, clicked a bit over the floor tiles until the Figueras brothers and Angelats, holding their breath under the bed, heard a soft, commanding voice ask that the room be prepared for him to spend the night. As soon as they were alone again, the three deserters almost wordlessly took the only decision possible and, instinctively persuaded that only speed could make up for the obligatory recklessness of the manoeuvre, they crawled out of their hiding place and, without looking up and trying to prevent the rigidity of their movements from betraying their hurry, went down the stairs, crossed the kitchen and yard and highway protected by the anonymity of their uniforms, which camouflaged them among all the other soldiers in the house or around the house waiting their turn to eat, or resting or arranging their things, calmly resigned to their stateless futures.

From that afternoon on the Figueras brothers and Angelats went into hiding. Undoubtedly it wasn't as hard for them as for Sánchez Mazas: they were young, they were armed, they knew the area and many people in the area; not only that but as soon as the Republican detachment left Can Pigem the next morning, the Figueras' mother began to provide them with food in abundance and lots of warm clothing and blankets. They spent the daylight hours in the woods, not far from Cornellá de Terri or from the Banyoles highway, always alert to the troop movements along it, and at night they slept in an abandoned barn near the Mas de la Casa Nova. It seems incredible they didn't bump into Sánchez Mazas until they'd been installed (the word is of course excessive) for three days in the vicinity of the Mas de la Casa Nova, since they'd arrived the same day as he had, but that's how it was. Sixty years later, Joaquim Figueras and Daniel Angelats both still remembered with absolute clarity the morning they saw him for the first time: the sound of breaking branches that alarmed them in the silence of the forest, and then the willowy, blind figure in the sheepskin jacket with the shattered spectacles in his hand, feeling his way up the rocky, tangled bank of the stream. They also remembered the moment they stopped him at gunpoint and the minutes of interminable reckoning and suspicion during which they, as much as Sánchez Mazas — whose attitude during this first conversation or interrogation drifted imperceptibly from frightened and dishonourable pleading to the almost paternalistic aplomb of one who knows himself to be beyond his interlocutor not only in years but especially in intellect and guile tried to find out the intentions of the other; and that, as soon as they did, Sánchez Mazas identified himself, offering them exorbitant rewards if they helped him cross the lines. Joaquim Figueras and Daniel Angelats also agree on another point: as soon as Sánchez Mazas said his name, Pere Figueras knew who he was. Although this might seem strange, it is not absolutely implausible: for quite a few years by then, Sánchez Mazas had been known all over Spain as a writer and politician and, although Pere Figueras had barely left his village except to defend the Republic with bullets, he could easily have seen his name and photograph in the newspapers and could have read articles he'd written. In any case, Pere, who had taken charge of the trio of soldiers without anyone telling him to, told him they couldn't take him to the other side, but said he could stay with them until the Nationalists arrived. Implicitly or explicitly, the pact was this: now they would protect him, with their weapons and their youth and their knowledge of the area and the people of the area, and later he would protect them with his indisputable authority as a hierarch. The offer was not up for discussion, and although Joaquim at first put up a bit of resistance to the idea of taking on, in those uncertain days, the responsibility of a half-blind man who, if they were captured by the Republicans, would earn them immediate execution, in the end he had no choice but to submit to his brother's will.