Javier Cercas - Soldiers of Salamis

That happened on the Thursday night; the next day the Nationalists arrived. Since Tuesday the last military convoys had been passing continually and they had heard explosion after explosion as the Republicans — blowing up bridges, cutting communications — tried to protect their retreat; and so Sánchez Mazas and his three companions spent the whole of Friday morning impatiently keeping watch over the highway from their observatory in the field, until just after noon they spotted the first Nationalist scouts. The group erupted with joy. However, before going to meet their liberators, Sánchez Mazas convinced them to accompany him to Mas Borrell to thank Maria Ferré and her family, and when they arrived at Mas Borrell they found Maria Ferré's father and her mother, but not Maria Ferré. She clearly remembers at noon on that day, from a spot not far from where Sánchez Mazas and his companions were, she had also seen the first Nationalist troops go by and after a while a neighbour had come to tell her on behalf of her parents that she should go back home, because there were soldiers in her house. Slightly worried, Maria started walking alongside her neighbour, but she calmed down when her neighbour told her that the lads from Can Pigem were amongst the soldiers. Although she'd not exchanged more than four words with Pere or Joaquim, she'd known them all her life, and as soon as she saw the younger Figueras in the farmyard, chatting with Angelats, she recognized him immediately. In the kitchen were Pere and Sánchez Mazas with her parents; euphoric, Sánchez Mazas embraced her, lifted her up in the air, kissed her. Then he told the Ferrés what had happened during the days they'd had no news of him, and showering Angelats and the Figueras brothers with words of praise and gratitude, he said:

'Now we're friends.' Neither Maria nor Joaquim Figueras remember, but Angelats does: it was at this moment when, according to him, Sánchez Mazas pronounced, for the first time, the words he would repeat many times in the years to come and that until the ends of their lives would resonate in the memories of the lads who helped him survive, the words that had the adventurous ring of a secret password: 'The forest friends'. And, again according to Angelats, he added with a touch of solemnity: 'One day I'll tell the whole story in a book; it'll be called Soldiers of Salamis!

Before leaving, he reiterated his eternal gratitude to the Ferrés for having harboured him, and begged them not to hesitate to get in touch with him if there was ever anything they thought he might be able to help them with, and by way of a safe-conduct, in case they had any problems with the new authorities, he wrote down plainly on a piece of paper what they'd done for him. Then they left, and from the back door Maria and her parents watched them go off down the dirt track in the direction of Cornellá, Sánchez Mazas in the lead — tall and proud like a captain in charge of the negligible, elated, shabby remains of his victorious troops — Joaquim and Angelats escorting him, and Pere a little further back and almost downcast, as if he wasn't entirely sharing the joy of the others but would battle with all his strength so as not to be excluded from it. Over the following years, Maria would write to Sánchez Mazas many times and he would always answer in his own handwriting. Sánchez Mazas' letters no longer exist, because Maria, on the advice of her mother, who for some reason feared they might compromise her, eventually destroyed them. As for her own letters, the secretary of the Banyoles Town Hall wrote them for her, and in them she asked for relatives, friends or acquaintances to be released from prison, which they almost invariably were; so over the years she was endowed with a saint's halo, or made into a fairy godmother to the desperate people of the region, whose families came in search of protection for the indiscriminate victims of a post-war period that in those days no one could have imagined would last so long. Other than her family, no one else knew that the source of those favours wasn't a secret lover of Maria's, or a supernatural power she'd always had but hadn't thought appropriate to use until now, but rather a fugitive beggar she'd offered a little hot food one day at dawn and whom, after that mid-morning in February when he disappeared down the dirt track in the company of the Figueras brothers and Angelats, she never saw again in her entire life.

Sánchez Mazas spent some time at Can Pigem waiting for transportation to take him back to Barcelona. They were very happy days. Although in some parts of Spain the war continued its course, for him and for his companions it was over, and the terrible memory of those months of uncertainty, captivity and the proximity of death reinforced his euphoria, as did the anticipation of his imminent reunion with his family and friends and with the new country he'd decisively contributed to forging. Eager to ingratiate itself with the new authorities — and the new authorities being eager to ingratiate themselves with the people — that militantly Republican region celebrated the entrance of the Nationalists in style, with feasts and fairs never lacking the presence of Sánchez Mazas and his three companions, still dressed in their Popular Army uniforms and carrying their long-barrelled nine-millimetre pistols, but especially protected by the intimidating presence of the hierarch, who a little ironically but unfailingly introduced them as his personal guard. This period of cheerful impunity ended for them the morning that a lieutenant of a column of regulars burst into Can Pigem, announcing that a car leaving immediately for Barcelona had a free seat for Sánchez Mazas. Without even time to take his leave of the Figueras or Angelats families, Sánchez Mazas managed to hand Pere the notebook with the green covers where, as well as the diary of his days in the forest, he'd put down in writing the bond of gratitude that would always unite them, and Joaquim Figueras and Daniel Angelats remember very well that the last words they heard him say, reaching out a hand to wave goodbye from the window of the car that was already on its way down the Gerona highway, were:

'We'll meet again!'

But Sánchez Mazas was mistaken: he never saw Pere or Joaquim Figueras again, nor Daniel Angelats. However, and although Sánchez Mazas never came to find out, Daniel Angelats and Joaquim Figueras did see him again.

It happened several months later, in Zaragoza. Sánchez Mazas was then a completely different man from the one they'd known. Driven by the momentum of the liberation, in those days he was tirelessly active: he'd visited Barcelona, Burgos, Salamanca, Bilbao, Rome, San Sebastián; everywhere he was the object of lavish hospitality, celebrating his liberty and incorporation into Nationalist Spain as if it were a triumph of incalculable value to its future; everywhere he wrote articles, gave interviews, lectures, speeches and radio broadcasts where he'd make veiled allusions to episodes during his long period in custody and where, with a cohesive faith, he placed himself at the service of the new regime. Nevertheless, from the day after he left Can Pigem and began visiting the office of Dionisio Ridruejo (Chief of Press and Propaganda for the rebels) where he regularly met with his intellectual Falangist comrades, both new and old, Sánchez Mazas could have sensed, in and among the triumphalist atmosphere of superficial fraternity, the suspicions and mistrust among the victors that Franco's guile and three years of conspiratorial secret meetings in the rearguard had caused. He could have sensed it, but he didn't — or didn't want to. This is easily explained: having recently recovered his liberty, Sánchez Mazas thought everything had turned out perfectly, because he couldn't imagine that the reality of Franco's Spain differed one iota from his desires; that was not the case for some of his old Falangist comrades. Ever since the proclamation on 19 April 1937 of the Decree of Unification, a veritable coup d'etat in reverse (as Ridruejo would call it years later), by which all political forces that had joined the Uprising came to be integrated in one single party under the command of the Generalisimo, the old guard of the Falange began to suspect the fascist revolution they'd dreamt of was never going to happen. In fact the expeditious cocktail of its doctrine which blended, in a brilliant, demagogic and impossible amalgam, both the preservation of certain traditional values with the urgency for profound change in the social and economic structures of the country, and the terror the middle classes felt of the proletarian revolution with a vitalist Nietzschean irrationalism, which, faced with inherent bourgeois prudence, advocated the romance of living dangerously would eventually be diluted into sanctimonious, predictable, conservative slop. By 1937, beheaded by José Antonio's death, domesticated as an ideology and annulled as an apparatus of power, the Falange, with its rhetoric and its rites and the rest of its external fascist manifestations, was already available to Franco to use as an instrument to bring his regime into line with Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy (from which he'd received and was receiving and still hoped to receive so much aid), but Franco could also use it, as José Antonio had foreseen and feared years before, 'as a mere auxiliary shock element, like an assault guard of reaction, like a youthful militia destined to parade before the upraised bigheads in power'. Everything conspired in those years to dilute the original Falange, from the orthopaedic use Franco made of it, to the crucial fact that over the course of the war not only did those who shared its ideology to a fair degree join on a massive scale but also those who sought, within its ranks, to hide their Republican pasts. Things being as they were, the choice that sooner or later many 'old shirts' had to face was clear: denounce the flagrant discrepancy between their political project and that governing the new state, or coexist as comfortably as they could with this contradiction and apply themselves to scraping up even the tiniest crumbs from the banquet of power. Of course, between these two extremes the intermediate positions were almost infinite; but the truth of the matter is that, in spite of so much invented honesty professed after the fact, except for Ridruejo a man who erred many times, but who was almost always unsullied and brave and pure as pure almost no one opted openly for the first.