Javier Cercas - Soldiers of Salamis

In my twilight years as an old libertine

and old courtly poet

I'd spend the evenings, in contest

with a devout Theatine Padre.

Increasingly gouty and ever more Catholic,

in the manner of an antiquated gentleman,

my impertinent and haughty genius

turning brittle and melancholic.

And finding to end the story

Masses and debts in my will,

they'll give me a charity funeral.

And fate in its final insult

would wreathe its immortal laurels on me

for a Moral Epistle to Fabius!*

I don't know if at the end of his days, fifty years after writing those words, Sánchez Mazas was an old libertine, but there's no doubt he was an old courtly poet. He was still Catholic, although only outwardly, and also an antiquated gentleman. He always had an impertinent, haughty, brittle and melancholic genius. He died one October night in 1966, of pulmonary emphysema; few people attended his funeral. He left little money and not much property. He was a writer who didn't fulfil his promise and for that reason and perhaps also because he was not worthy of it — did not write a Moral Epistle to Fabius. He was the best of the Falangist writers, leaving a handful of good poems and a handful of good prose pieces, which is much more than almost any writer can aspire to leave, but he left much less than his talent demanded, and his talent was always superior to his work. Andrés Trapiello says that, like so many Falangist writers, Sánchez Mazas won the war and lost the history of literature. The phrase is brilliant and, true in part — or at least it was, because for a while Sánchez Mazas paid for his brutal responsibility in a brutal war with oblivion but it is also true that, having won the war, perhaps Sánchez Mazas lost himself as a writer. He was a romantic after all, would he not have judged deep down all victory to be contaminated by unworthiness, and the first thing he noticed upon arriving in paradise albeit that illusory bourgeois paradise of leisure, chintz and slippers that, like a needy travesty of old privileges, hierarchies and securities, he constructed in his last years was that he could live there, but not write, because writing and plenitude are incompatible. Few people remember him today, and perhaps that's what he deserves. There's a street named after him in Bilbao.

* En mi ocaso de viejo libertino/ y de viejo poeta cortesano/ pasaria las tardes, mano a mano,/ con un beato padre teatino./ Cada vez mas gotoso y mas catolico,/ como es guisa de rancio caballero,/ mi genio impertinente y altanero/ tornarse vidrioso y melancolico./ Y como hallasen para fin de cuento/ misas y deudas en mi testamento,/ de limosna me harfan funerales./ Y la fortuna en su postrer agravio/ cifierame sus lauros inmortales/ jpor una Epistola moral a Fabio!

I FINISHED WRITING Soldiers of Salamis long before the leave of absence they'd given me from the newspaper ran out. Conchi and I had dinner together two or three times a week, but otherwise in all that time I hardly saw anyone, since I spent day and night shut up in my room in front of the computer. I wrote obsessively, with a drive and tenacity I didn't know I possessed; also without being too sure of my purpose. This entailed writing a sort of biography of Sánchez Mazas which, focusing on an apparently anecdotal but perhaps essential episode in his life — his botched execution at Collell would propose an interpretation of his character and, by extension, of the nature of Falangism; or more precisely, of the motives that induced the handful of cultivated and refined men who founded the Falange to pitch the country into a furious bloodbath. Naturally, I assumed that as the book progressed, this plan would change, because books always end up taking on a life of their own, and because a person doesn't write about what he wants to write about but what he's capable of writing about. I also assumed that, although everything I'd found out about Sánchez Mazas over time was going to form the nucleus of my book, which would allow me to feel secure, a moment would arrive when I'd have to dispense with those training wheels, because — if what he writes is going to have real interest — a writer never writes about what he knows, but precisely about what he does not know.

Neither of the two speculations were wrong, but by the middle of February, a month before my leave of absence was up, the book was finished. I read it euphorically; I reread it. At the second rereading my euphoria gave way to disappointment: the book wasn't bad, but insufficient, like a mechanism that was whole, yet incapable of performing the function for which it had been devised because it was missing a part. The worst of it was I didn't know what part it was. I revised the book thoroughly, I rewrote the beginning and the conclusion, I rewrote several episodes, I rearranged the order of others. The part, however, did not appear; the book remained hamstrung.

I gave up. The day I made the decision I went out for dinner with Conchi, who must have noticed I wasn't myself, because she asked me what was wrong. I didn't feel like talking about it (really, I didn't feel like talking at all, or even like going out for dinner), but I ended up explaining it to her.

'Shit!' said Conchi. 'Didn't I tell you not to write about a fascist? Those people fuck up everything they touch. What you have to do is forget all about that book and start another one. How about one on Garcia Lorca?'

I spent the next two weeks sitting in an armchair in front of the television without turning it on. As far as I remember, I didn't think about anything, not even about my father, not even my ex-wife. Conchi visited me daily; she cleaned up the house a little, made me something to eat and once I'd gone to bed, she left. I didn't cry too much, but I couldn't help it each night when, at about ten o'clock, Conchi switched on the television to see herself dressed up as a fortune-teller on the local channel and then discuss her performance.

It was also Conchi who convinced me that, although my leave hadn't run out and I wasn't completely recovered, I should go back to work at the paper. Perhaps because I'd spent less time away than last time, or because my expression and appearance invited more pity than sarcasm, coming back empty-handed was less humiliating on this occasion, and there were no ironic comments from the editorial staff and no one asked me anything, not even the publisher; in fact, not only didn't he make me bring him coffee from the bar on the corner (an activity for which I'd come prepared), but he didn't even punish me with any other menial task. On the contrary, as if guessing I needed a bit of fresh air, he suggested I leave the culture section and instead conduct an almost daily series of interviews with people of some prominence who, not having been born in the province, had made it their home. That was how I ended up spending several months interviewing businessmen, athletes, poets, politicians, diplomats, ambulance chasers and idlers.

One of my first interviewees was Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño, who was a writer and from Chile, had been living for ages in Blanes, a coastal town on the border between the provinces of Barcelona and Gerona. He was forty-seven years old, with a good number of books behind him and that unmistakable air of a hippy peddler that afflicted so many Latin-Americans of his generation exiled in Europe. When I went to see him he'd just won a considerable literary prize and was living with his wife and son in Carrer Ample, a street in the centre of Blanes where he'd bought a modernist apartment with the prize money. He opened the door to me there that morning, and we hadn't even exchanged the customary greetings when he sprang on me:

'Hey, you're not the Javier Cercas of The Motive and The Tenant, are you?'