Javier Cercas - Soldiers of Salamis

Naturally, Sánchez Mazas did not. Not right after the war finished, or ever. But on 9 April 1939, eighteen days before Pere Figueras and his eight comrades from Cornellá de Terri were imprisoned in Gerona and the same day that Ramon Serrano Suner — at the time Minister of the Interior, Franco's brother-in-law and the Falangists' principal sentinel in government — organized and presided over an act of homage to Sánchez Mazas in Zaragoza, he still had no serious reason to imagine that the country he had aspired to create was not the same as the one the new regime aspired to create; much less did he suspect that Joaquim Figueras and Daniel Angelats were also in Zaragoza. As a matter of fact, they had spent barely a month in the city, where they'd been sent to fulfil their military service, when they heard on the radio that Sánchez Mazas had been staying in the Grand Hotel since the previous day and that night he was going to give a speech to the top brass of the Aragónese Falange. In part out of curiosity, but mostly driven by hope that Sánchez Mazas' influence could do something to relieve the rigours of their privates' barracks regime, Figueras and Angelats showed up at the Grand Hotel and told a porter they were friends of Sánchez Mazas and would like to see him. Figueras still remembers that placid, corpulent porter very well, with his blue frock coat with tassels and fancy gold fastenings gleaming under the foyer's crystal chandeliers, amid the constant coming and going of uniformed hierarchs, and especially his expression halfway between sarcasm and disbelief as he looked over their miserable uniforms and irredeemably rustic appearance. Finally, the porter told them that Sánchez Mazas was in his room, resting, and that he wasn't authorized to disturb him or to let them through.

'But you lads can wait for him here,' he spoke down to them with a twinge of cruelty, pointing at some chairs. 'When he comes down, break through the cordon the Falangists will form and greet him: if he recognizes you, great, but if he doesn't recognize you. .' smiling grimly, he ran his index finger across his throat.

'We'll wait,' Figueras proudly parried, dragging Angelats over to a chair.

They waited for almost two hours, but as the time passed they felt more and more intimidated by the porter's warning, the unheard-of sumptuousness of the hotel, the asphyxiating fascist paraphernalia with which it was decorated, and by the time the foyer finally filled up with military greetings and blue shirts and red berets, Figueras and Angelats had given up on their original intention and decided to go straight back to the barracks without approaching Sánchez Mazas. They hadn't yet left the foyer when a Falangist guard of honour formed between the stairway and the revolving door and blocked their way and, a little later, allowed them a brief glimpse for the last time in their lives, gliding along with the projected martial manner of a condottiere among a sea of red berets and a forest of raised arms, of the unmistakable Jewish profile of that man, his prestige now enhanced by the prosopopeia of power — who three months before, diminished by rags and unseeing eyes, by exhaustion, privations and fear, had implored their help in a remote and empty field — and who could now never repay that wartime favour to two of his forest friends.

The Zaragoza function, during which he delivered his 'Saturday of Glory' speech in which, undoubtedly because he already sensed the danger of defections, he exasperatedly called his Falangist comrades to discipline and blind obedience to the Caudillo — was just one more of Sánchez Mazas' numerous public contributions during those months. Since Ledesma Ramos, José Antonio and Ruiz de Alda had been shot at the beginning of the war, Sánchez Mazas was the most senior living member of the Falange; this, added to his brotherly friendship with José Antonio and the crucial role he'd had in the early Falange, gave him an enormous influence over his colleagues in the party, and persuaded Franco to treat him with the greatest consideration, to win his loyalty and to smooth over the bitterness that had arisen in his relationship with some of the less accommodating Falangists. The culmination of this simple yet extremely effective strategy of recruitment, similar in every respect to a bribe of perks and praises — a method, it's worth noting, the Caudillo wielded like a virtuoso and to which a good part of his interminable monopoly of power can be attributed — took place in August 1939, when, in putting together the first post-war government, Sánchez Mazas, who since May had occupied the position of National Delegate of the Falange Exterior, was named Minister Without Portfolio. This was not, of course, an exclusive occupation, or he didn't take it very seriously; in any case, he knew how to fulfil it without any prejudice to his recaptured vocation as a writer: during that time he published frequently in newspapers and journals, attended literary gatherings and gave public readings, and in February 1940 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, along with his friend Eugenio Montes, as 'spokesman for the poetry and revolutionary language of the Falange', according to the daily newspaper ABC. Sánchez Mazas was a vain man, but not stupid, so his vanity did not overrule his pride: aware that his election to the Academy obeyed political rather than literary motives, he never actually delivered his acceptance speech for admission into the institution. Other factors must have had a hand in this gesture that everyone has chosen to interpret, not without reason, as an elegant sign of the writer's disdain for mundane glories. Although it too has always been seen as such, it is a riskier proposition attributing the same significance to one of the episodes that contributed most to endowing Sánchez Mazas' figure with the aristocratic aureole of unconcern and indolence that surrounded him till his death.

The legend, proclaimed to the four winds by the most diverse sources, has it that one day in July 1940, during a full Council of Ministers, Franco, fed up with Sánchez Mazas not showing up for those meetings, pointed at the writer's empty seat, and said: 'Please get that chair out of here.' Two weeks later, Sánchez Mazas was sacked, which (still according to legend) didn't seem to bother him too much. The causes of the dismissal were not clear. Some allege that Sánchez Mazas, whose position as Minister Without Portfolio lacked real content, was supremely bored by ministerial councils, because he was incapable of taking interest in bureaucratic and administrative affairs, which are what absorb the majority of a politician's time. Others maintain that it was Franco who was supremely bored by the erudite disquisitions on the most eccentric subjects (the causes of the defeat of the Persian fleet in the battle of Salamis, say; or the correct use of the jack plane) that Sánchez Mazas inflicted on him, and therefore decided to do without that inefficient, outlandish and untimely man of letters who played a virtually ornamental role in the government. There are even those who, whether out of innocence or bias, attribute Sánchez Mazas' idleness to disenchantment as a Falangist loyal to the authentic ideals of the party. All agree that he offered his resignation on several occasions, and that it was never accepted until his repeated absences from ministerial meetings, always justified by exotic excuses, made it a fait accompli. No matter which way you look at it, the legend is flattering to Sánchez Mazas, since it contributed to creating his image as an upright man, reluctant for the trappings of power. It is, most likely, false.

The journalist Carlos Sentís, who was his personal secretary during that period, maintains that the writer stopped attending the ministerial councils simply because he stopped being summoned to them. According to Sentís, certain inconvenient or extemporaneous declarations concerning the Gibraltar problem, along with the ill will the then all-powerful Serrano Sufier bore him, provoked his fall from grace. This version of events is reliable, to my mind, not only because Sentís was the person closest to Sánchez Mazas in the single year he lasted in the ministry, but also because it seems reasonable that Serrano Súñer would see in the tactlessness of Sánchez Mazas — who had conspired against him more than once to gain Franco's favour, just as he had in years gone by against Gimenez Caballero to gain that of José Antonio — a perfect excuse to free himself of someone who, in his position as most senior 'old shirt', could represent a threat to his authority and erode his ascendancy over the orthodox Falangists and the Caudillo himself. Sentís claims that, as a result of his dismissal, Sánchez Mazas was confined for months in his house in the suburb of Viso a cottage on Serrano Street he'd bought years before with his friend the Communist José Bergamin and which still belongs to the family and deprived of his ministerial salary. His economic situation was getting ever more desperate, and in December, when they lifted the house arrest without any explanation, he decided to travel to Italy to ask for help from his wife's family. On his way he stayed at Sentís' house in Barcelona. Sentís doesn't retain an exact memory of those days, nor of Sánchez Mazas' state of mind, but he does recall that on Christmas day, just after the family celebrations, the writer received a providential telephone call from a relative, telling him that his aunt Julia Sánchez had just died and left him in her will a vast fortune including a mansion and several estates in Coria, in the province of Cáceres.