Javier Cercas - Soldiers of Salamis

Once the African campaign was over, Leclerc's column, integrated into the organizational structure of the Allied Army, became motorized, turning into the 2nd Armoured Division and, after being sent to England for training in the handling of American tanks, on 1 August 1944, almost two months after D-Day, Miralles disembarked on Utah beach in Normandy, operating with Hislip's XV Army Corps. Leclerc's column left immediately for the front, and during the twenty-three days the French campaign lasted for Miralles, he didn't stop fighting for an instant, especially in the region of Sarthe and in the battles that preceded the definitive isolation of the Falaise pocket. Because at that time Leclerc's was a very special unit: not only was it the only French division to fight on French soil (full though it was of Africans and Spanish veterans of the Civil War, which the name of their tanks proclaimed: Guadalajara, Zaragoza, Belchite), but it was also a division made up exclusively of volunteers, so that it couldn't count on fresh relief troops like a normal division could and when a soldier fell, his post was left empty until another volunteer came to fill it. This explains how, although no sensible commander keeps a soldier in the front line of combat for more than four or five months at a time, because the tension of the front is unbearable, when Miralles and his comrades from the Civil War stepped on the beaches of Normandy, they'd been fighting non-stop for more than seven years.

But the war still hadn't ended for them. Leclerc's column was the first Allied contingent to enter Paris; Miralles did so by the Porte-de-Gentilly on the night of 24 August, barely an hour after the first French detachment under the command of Captain Dronne. Fifteen days had not yet passed when Leclerc's men, now integrated into de Lattre de Tassigny's Third French Army, entered combat again. The following weeks gave them not a moment's respite: they charged the Sigfried line, penetrated into Germany, and got as far as Austria. There Miralles' military adventure ended. There, on a windy winter morning he'd never forget, Miralles (or someone next to Miralles) stepped on a mine.

'He was blown to shreds,' said Bolaño, after pausing to finish his tea, which had gone cold in the cup. 'The war in Europe was just about to end and, after eight years of combat, Miralles had seen loads of people die around him, friends and comrades from Spain, Africa, France, everywhere. His turn had come. .' Bolaño thumped his fist down on the arm of the chair. 'His turn had come, but the bastard didn't die. They took him to the rearguard all blown to shit and put him back together again as best they could. Incredibly, he survived. And slightly over a year later, there's Miralles converted into a French citizen and with a pension for life.'

When the war ended and he had recovered from his injuries, Miralles went to live in Dijon, or some place around Dijon, Bolaiño didn't quite remember exactly. On more than one occasion he'd asked Miralles why he'd settled there, and sometimes he answered that he'd settled there just as he might have settled anywhere, and other times he said he'd settled there because during the war he'd promised himself that, if he managed to survive, he was going to spend the rest of his life drinking fine wine, 'and so far I've kept the faith', he'd add, patting his bare and happy buddha's belly. When he used to see Miralles, Bolaño thought that neither of those answers were true; now he thought maybe they both were. The fact is that Miralles married in Dijon (or around Dijon) and in Dijon (or around Dijon) he'd had a daughter. Her name was Maria. Bolaño met her at the campsite; at the beginning she'd come with her father every summer: he remembered an elegant, serious and strong-willed girl, 'thoroughly French', although she always spoke a Spanish dappled with guttural 'r's to her father. Bolaño also recalled that Miralles, who'd become a widower shortly after she was born, was totally soft on her: it was Maria who ran the house, Maria who gave orders which Miralles obeyed with the modest humility of a veteran used to obeying orders, and who, when the conversation went on too long at the camp bar and the wine started to make Miralles' mouth pasty and tangle up his sentences, took him by the arm and led him to the caravan, docile and stumbling, with the blurred gaze of a drinker and guilty smile of a proud father. Maria, however, only came for a short time, no more than two years (two of the four that Bolaño worked at the campsite), and then Miralles started to come to Estrella de Mar on his own. It was then that Bolaño really got to know him; that was also when Miralles started sleeping with Luz. Luz was a prostitute who worked the campsite for a few summers. Bolaño remembered her well: dark and chubby and quite young and good-looking, with a natural generosity and imperturbable common sense; perhaps she only occasionally worked as a hooker, Bolaño speculated.

'Miralles fell for Luz really hard,' he added. 'The poor bastard would get so sad and drink himself into a stupor when she wasn't around.'

Bolaño then remembered that one night of the last summer he spent with Miralles, while he was doing his first round, in the early hours of the morning, he heard some very soft music coming from the edge of the campsite, just beside the fence that separated it from a pinewood. More out of curiosity than to demand they turn off the music — it was playing so softly that it couldn't have disturbed anybody's sleep — he approached discreetly and saw a couple dancing in each other's arms beneath the awning of a caravan. He recognized the caravan as that of Miralles; the couple as Miralles and Luz; the music, as a very sad and very old paso doble (or that's what it seemed to Bolaño) that he'd often heard Miralles hum under his breath. Before they could sense his presence, Bolaño hid behind a caravan and spent several minutes watching them. They were dancing very close, very seriously, in silence, barefoot on the grass, wrapped in the unreal light of the moon and an old butane lantern, and Bolaño was struck most of all by the contrast between the solemnity of their movements and their attire — Miralles in his swimming trunks, as ever, old and potbellied, but marking the steps with the sure elegance of a dancehall regular, leading Luz, who perhaps because she was wearing a white blouse that reached her knees and allowed glimpses of her naked body, seemed to float like a phantom in the cool night air. Bolaiño said that at that moment, spying from behind a trailer on that old veteran of all the wars, with his body sewn up by scars and his soul bared to a sometime hooker who didn't know how to dance a paso doble, he felt a strange emotion, like a reflection of that emotion, perhaps a deceptive one, and as the couple turned, he thought he saw a sparkle in Miralles' eyes, as if just then he'd begun to cry or tried in vain to hold back his tears or maybe he'd been crying for a long time, and then Bolaño realized or imagined that his presence there was somehow obscene, that he was stealing that scene from someone and that he had to leave, and he also realized, vaguely, that his time at the campsite had come to an end, because he'd learned all he could learn there. So he lit a cigarette, looked one last time at Luz and Miralles dancing under the awning, turned and continued on his round.

'At the end of that summer I said see you next year to Miralles as usual,' Bolaño said after a long silence, as if he were talking to himself, or rather to someone who was listening to him but who wasn't me. On the other side of the Carlemany's windows it was already night; facing me was Bolafio's cloudy, absent expression and a table with several empty glasses and an ashtray overflowing with stubbed out cigarette butts. We'd asked for the bill. 'But I knew I wouldn't go back to the campsite the following year. And I didn't go back. I never saw Miralles again.'