Part Two. Soldiers Of Salamis

ON 27 APRIL 1939, the very day that Pere Figueras and his eight comrades from Cornellá de Terri were sent to prison in Gerona, Rafael Sánchez Mazas had just been named national advisor to the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS and Vice-President of its Leadership Council; a month had not yet passed since the definitive collapse of the Republic, and four more were yet to go by before Sánchez Mazas would become Minister Without Portfolio in the first post-war government. He had always been an unpleasant, arrogant, despotic man, but was neither petty nor vindictive, and so during that period the waiting room to his office teemed with relatives of prisoners eager to gain his intercession on behalf of old acquaintances or friends who the end of the war had left confined in the cells of the defeat. Nothing leads us to believe he did not do what he could for them. Thanks to his insistence, the Caudillo commuted the death sentence hanging over the head of the poet Miguel Hernández to life imprisonment, but not the one which, one November dawn in 1940, led a firing squad to end the life of Julian Zugazagoitia, a good friend of Sánchez Mazas and Minister in Negrín's government. Months before this pointless murder, just back from a trip to Rome as National Delegate of the Falange Exterior, his secretary, the journalist Carlos Sentís, brought him up to date on matters pending and read him the list of persons he'd granted an audience for that morning. Suddenly alert, Sánchez Mazas made him repeat a name; then he stood up, strode across his office, opened the door, stopped in the middle of the waiting room and, scouring the frightened faces crowding it, asked: apos;Which of you is Joaquin Figueras?'

Paralyzed by terror, a man with a bereft look and travelling clothes tried to answer, but only succeeded in breaking the solid silence following the question with an indecipherable burbling, while reaching a desperate hand, claw-like, into his jacket pocket. Standing in front of him, Sánchez Mazas wanted to know if he were related to the brothers Pedro and Joaquin Figueras. 'I'm their father,' he managed to articulate with a strong Catalan accent and frantic nodding that didn't abate even when Sánchez Mazas crushed him in a relieved embrace. After the effusive greetings, the two men chatted for a few minutes in the office. Joaquim Figueras recounted that his son Pere had spent the last month and a half in prison in Gerona, groundlessly accused, along with other young men of the village, of taking part in the burning of the Cornellá de Terri church at the beginning of the war and of having been involved in the murder of the Municipal Secretary. Sánchez Mazas didn't let him finish; he left his office through a side door and came back a few moments later.

'That's settled,' he proclaimed. 'When you get back to Cornellá you'll find your son at home.'

Figueras left the office in a euphoric state. On his way down the steps he noticed a piercing pain in his hand and realized he still had it thrust inside his jacket pocket, clutching, with all his strength, a piece of paper torn out of a notebook with green covers where Sánchez Mazas had recorded his debt of gratitude to Figueras' sons. And when he arrived in Cornellá days later and dry-eyed embraced his recently freed son, Joaquim Figueras knew he hadn't been wrong to undertake that hallucinatory trip across a devastated country to see a man he didn't know and whom he'd consider till the end of his days one of the most powerful men in Spain.

He was only partly mistaken. Although he'd always considered it an occupation unworthy of gentlemen, Sánchez Mazas had by then spent more than a decade in politics and would take another few years to leave it, but never in his whole life was he to accumulate so much real power in his hands as right then.

He'd been born in Madrid on 18 February, forty-five years earlier. His father, a military doctor originally from Coria, whose uncle had been royal physician to Alfonso XII, died a few months later, and his mother, Maria Rosario Mazas y Orbegozo, immediately sought the protection of her family in Bilbao. There, in a five-storey house beside the Deusto Bridge, on Henao Street, cajoled by an army of childless uncles, he spent his childhood and adolescence. The Mazas were a clan of hidalgos of liberal traditions and literary inclinations, related to Miguel de Unamuno and solidly anchored in the cream of Bilbao society, from which Sánchez Mazas drew inspiration to construct a few characters for his novels, and from whom he inherited an irrepressible propensity to lordly idleness and an obstinate literary vocation. The latter had once similarly tempted his mother, a clever, illustrious woman who poured all her untimely widow's energy into facilitating her son's career as a writer, a career she herself hadn't wanted or been able to pursue.

Sánchez Mazas didn't let her down. It's true he was a mediocre student, who wandered through various upper-class Catholic boarding schools with more shame than glory before ending up at the Central University of Madrid, and finally the Augustinian Maria Cristina Royal College for Advanced Studies at the monastery in El Escorial, where in 1916 he graduated in Law. It's equally true, however, that he began to show obvious signs of literary talent quite early. At the age of thirteen he wrote poems in the styles of Zorrilla and Marquina; at twenty he imitated Rubén Darío and Unamuno; by twenty-two he was a mature poet; at twenty-eight his poetic work was essentially complete. With typical aristocratic disdain, he barely bothered to publish them, and if we know his work in its entirety (or almost) it's largely owing to the vigilance of his mother, who transcribed his poems by hand in small notebooks bound in black oilcloth, recording beneath each one its place and date of composition. Moreover, Sánchez Mazas is a good poet; a good minor poet, I mean, which is about all a good poet can aspire to. His verses have only one chord — humble and ancient, monotonous and a bit sentimental — but Sánchez Mazas plays it masterfully, drawing from it a clean, natural, prosaic music that can only be sung by the bittersweet melancholy of time that flees and in its flight drags down order and the reliable hierarchies of an abolished world that, precisely because it is abolished, is also an invented, impossible world, almost always equivalent to the impossible, invented world of Paradise.

Although he published only one book of poems in his lifetime, it's possible that Sánchez Mazas always considered himself a poet, and perhaps that's what he essentially was; his contemporaries, however, knew him primarily as the author of chronicles, articles and novels, and especially as a politician, which is exactly what he never considered himself and perhaps what he never essentially was. In June of 1916, a year after publishing his first novel, Brief Memoirs of Tarín, and having recently graduated in law, Sánchez Mazas returned to Bilbao, then a headstrong, self-satisfied city, dominated by a buoyant bourgeoisie enjoying a period of economic splendour derived from Spain's neutrality during the First World War. That bonanza found its most conspicuous cultural expression in the magazine Hermes, which drew together a handful of Catholic writers, admirers of Eugenio d'Ors, Spanish nationalists, devotees of Roman culture and the values of western civilization, whom Ramón de Basterra baptized with the pompous title, 'Roman School of the Pyrenees'. Basterra was one of the more notorious members of that group of writers, the majority of whom would in time go on to swell the ranks of the Falangists; another was Sánchez Mazas. They would meet for discussions at the Lyon d'Or, a cafe located in the middle of Gran Via de López de Haro, where Sánchez Mazas dazzled, as a cultivated, circumspect and rather bombastic conversationalist. José Maria de Areilza, then a boy, whose father took him to the Lyon d'Or for hot chocolate, remembers him as 'a tall and very thin young man, with tortoiseshell spectacles, his eyes both ardent and weary, with a voice which sometimes became strident when emphasizing some point in an argument'. At that time Sánchez Mazas was already writing assiduously in the newspapers ABC, El Sol, and El Pueblo Vasco, and in 1921 Juan de la Cruz, editor of the latter, sent him as a correspondent to cover the war in Morocco, where he began a lasting friendship of drinking sessions and long nocturnal conversations — which would withstand the rancour of living through a war on opposite sides — with another correspondent from Bilbao called Indalecio Prieto.

Sánchez Mazas' stay in Morocco lasted barely a year, because in 1922 Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena sent him to Rome as ABC's correspondent. He was fascinated by Italy. His youthful passion for classical culture, for the Renaissance, and Imperial Rome were forever crystallized by contact with Rome itself. He lived there for seven years. There he married Liliana Ferlosio, an Italian recently emerged from adolescence whom he practically carried off from her home and with whom he would maintain for the rest of his life a chaotic relationship which produced five children. There he matured as a man and as a writer. There he gained a deserved reputation as a columnist by way of some very literary articles, sophisticated in style and confidently executed — sometimes dense with erudition and lyricism, sometimes vehement with political passion — that are perhaps the best of his work. There, too, he was converted to fascism. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to claim Sánchez Mazas as Spain's first fascist, and quite correct to say he was its most influential theoretician. Fervent reader of Maurras and intimate friend of Luigi Federzoni who incarnated in Italy a kind of enlightened, bourgeois fascism, and in the fullness of time would come to hold various ministerial posts in Mussolini's governments — monarchical and conservative by vocation, Sánchez Mazas thought he'd discovered in fascism the ideal instrument to cure his nostalgia for an imperial Catholicism and, especially, to forcibly mend the reliable hierarchies of the ancien regimé that the old democratic egalitarianism and the vigorous, new Bolshevik egalitarianism were threatening to annihilate all over Europe. Or to put it another way: perhaps for Sánchez Mazas fascism was simply a way of realizing his poetry, of making real the world it melancholically evoked the abolished, invented, impossible world of Paradise. Be that as it may, the fact is he greeted the March on Rome enthusiastically in a series of articles entitled Italy's Genteel Transition, and saw Benito Mussolini as the reincarnation of the Renaissance condottiere and his ascension to power as the proclamation that the time of heroes and poets had returned to Italy.

So in 1929, back in Madrid, Sánchez Mazas had already made the decision to dedicate himself entirely to ensuring that such a time would also return to Spain. Up to a point he succeeded. War is the time of heroes and poets par excellence, and in the thirties few people pledged as much intelligence, as much effort and as much talent as he did to making war break out in Spain. Upon his return to the country, Sánchez Mazas understood straightaway that to achieve his goal it was not only necessary to found a party cut from the same cloth as the one he'd watched triumph in Italy, but also to find a Renaissance condottiere, a figure who, when the time came, would symbolically catalyze all the forces liberated by the panic the decomposition of the monarchy and the inevitable triumph of the Republic would generate among the most traditional sectors of Spanish society. The first venture took a while yet to come off; but not the second, for José Antonio Primo de Rivera immediately came to embody the figure of providential caudillo Sánchez Mazas was looking for. The friendship that united them was solid and durable (so much so that one of the last letters José Antonio wrote from Alicante prison on the eve of his execution on 20 November 1936 was to Sánchez Mazas); perhaps this was because it was based on an equitable division of roles. José Antonio in fact possessed all that Sánchez Mazas lacked: youth, beauty, physical courage, money and lineage; the opposite was also true: armed with his Italian experience, his extensive reading and literary talent, Sánchez Mazas became José Antonio's most trusted advisor and, once the Falange was founded, its principal ideologue and propagandist and one of the fundamental forgers of its rhetoric and symbols. Sánchez Mazas proposed the party symbol of yoke and arrows, which had been the symbol of the Catholic Monarchs, coined the ritual slogan, 'Arise Spain!', composed the very famous Prayer for the Falangist Dead, and over the course of several December nights in 1935 participated, along with José Antonio and other writers of his circle — Jacinto Miquelarena, Agustin de Foxa, Pedro Mourlane Michelena, José Maria Alfaro y Dionisio Ridruejo — in the writing of the lyrics to the anthem Face to the Sun, on the ground floor of Or Kompon, a Basque bar located on Miguel Moya Street in Madrid.

But it would still take some time before Sánchez Mazas was to become the Falange's principal purveyor of rhetoric, as Ramiro Ledesma Ramos called him. When he arrived in Madrid in 1929, surrounded by an aura of prestige as a cosmopolitan writer with brand new ideas, no one in Spain was thinking seriously of founding a party in the fascist mould, not even Ledesma, who a couple of years later would found the JONS, the first Spanish fascist faction. Like life in general, however, literary life was becoming more radical by the minute, heated by the convulsions shaking Europe and the changes that could be glimpsed on the horizon of Spanish politics: in 1927 a young writer called Cesar Arconada, who had subscribed to the elitism of Ortega y Gasset and before long would be swelling the ranks of the Communist Party, summed up the feelings of many people of his age when he declared that 'a young man can be a Communist, a fascist, anything at all, anything as long as he doesn't cling to old liberal ideas'. That explained, in part, why so many writers of the moment, in Spain and all over Europe, changed in so few years from the playful, sporty aestheticism of the roaring twenties to the pure, hard political combat of the ferocious thirties.

Sánchez Mazas was no exception. In fact, the entirety of his pre-war literary activity consists of innumerable articles of hardened prose, where the moral and aesthetic definition of the Falangists — made up of deliberate ideological confusion, mystical exaltation of violence and militarism, and essentialist vulgarities proclaiming the eternal character of the fatherland and the Catholic religion — coexists with a central proposition which, as Andrés Trapiello points out, was basically limited to stocking up on quotes from Latin historians, German thinkers and French poets that would serve to justify the approaching fratricidal assault. Sánchez Mazas' political activity, on the other hand, was frenetic during these years. In February 1933, having taken part in various attempts to create a fascist party, along with the journalist Manuel Delgado Barreto, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Ilamiro Ledesma Ramos, Juan Aparicio and Ernesto Gimenez Caballero — with whom for years he carried on a not always buried struggle for the ideological leadership of Spanish fascism, which he eventually won — Sánchez Mazas founded the weekly El fascio, which amounted to the first encounter of the various national-syndicalist tendencies which would eventually come together in the Falange. The first and only issue of Elfascio appeared a month later and was immediately banned by the authorities, but on 29 October of that year the founding act of the Spanish Falange took place in the Madrid Drama Theatre, and Sánchez Mazas, who months later would be assigned party membership card number four (Ledesma had number one; José Antonio two; Ruiz de Alda three; Gimenez Caballero five), was named to its Executive Council. From that moment and until 18 July 1936 his influence in the party — a party that before the war never managed to attract more than a hundred members in the entire country, and that never reaped more than a few thousand votes in all the elections for which it stood, but that would be decisive for the future history of the country — was fundamental. During those obdurate years Sánchez Mazas gave speeches, spoke at meetings, designed strategies and programmes, wrote reports, made up slogans, advised his leader and, especially by way of F.E., the official weekly publication of the Falange — where he was in charge of a section called 'Watchwords and Standards of Style' —disseminated, in anonymous articles and others signed by him or by José Antonio himself, ideas and a way of life which, in time and as no one could have suspected — least of all Sánchez Mazas — would eventually become the way of life and ideas, adopted as a revolutionary shock ideology in the face of the urgencies of the war, later lowered to the status of ideological ornament by the chubby, blustering, effeminate, incompetent, astute and conservative soldier who usurped them, finally becoming the increasingly rotten and mean ingless paraphernalia with which a handful of boors struggled for forty gloomy years to justify their shitty regime.

However, during the time the war was incubating, the watchwords Sánchez Mazas disseminated still possessed a gleaming suggestion of modernity, that young patriots from good families and the violent ideals they cherished contributed to strengthening. At that time José Antonio was very fond of quoting a phrase of Oswald Spengler's; that at the eleventh hour it had always been a squad of soldiers that had saved civilization. At that time the young Falangists felt they were that squad of soldiers. They knew (or believed they knew) that their families slept an innocent sleep of bourgeois beatitude, not knowing that a wave of impunity and egalitarian barbarism was going to wake them suddenly with a tremendous clamour of catastrophe. They felt their duty was to preserve civilization by force and avoid the catastrophe. They knew (or believed they knew) that they were few, but this mere statistical circumstance did not daunt them. They felt they were heroes. Although he was no longer young and lacked the physical strength, courage and even the essential conviction to be one — but not a family whose innocent sleep of bourgeois beatitude he wished to preserve — Sánchez Mazas also felt it, and thus abandoned literature to give himself over to the cause with priestly devotion. That didn't keep him from frequenting the most exclusive salons of the capital with José Antonio, or from joining him in some of his notorious, seigneurial escapades, like the Charlemagne Dinner Parties, extravagantly sumptuous banquets held in the Hotel París to commemorate the Emperor; but especially to protest with their rigorous aristocratic exquisiteness against the democratic and republican vulgarity lying in wait on the other side of the hotel's walls. The most assiduous meetings of José Antonio and his constant entourage of poet soldiers took place downstairs at the Café Lyon, on Alcalá Street, in a place known as La Ballena Alegre, where they would argue heatedly, until the small hours, about politics and literature, and where they coexisted in an atmosphere of false cordiality with young left-wing writers with whom they shared anxieties and beer, conversations, jokes and polite insults.

The outbreak of war was to change this deceptive, affectionate hostility into real hostility, though the unstoppable deterioration of political life during the thirties had already announced the imminence of the change to whomever wanted to see it. Those who months, weeks or even days earlier had talked over a cup of coffee, on the way out of a theatre or at an exhibition of works by a mutual friend, now found themselves embroiled on opposite sides in street fights which disdained neither the crack of gunfire nor the shedding of blood. The violence, in reality, had been around for a while and, despite the protests of victimization by some party leaders, opposed to it temperamentally and by education, the fact is that the Falange had been systematically feeding it, with the aim of making the Republic's situation untenable; the use offeree was at the very heart of the Falangist ideology, which, like all the other fascist movements, adopted Lenin's revolutionary methods, for whom a minority of brave and committed men — the equivalent of Spengler's squad of soldiers was enough to take power through armed struggle. Like José Antonio, Sánchez Mazas was also one of those Falangists who was sometimes, in theory, reluctant to use violence (in practice he encouraged it: having read Georges Sorel, who considered it a moral imperative, his own writings are almost always an incitement) that's why in February 1934, in the Prayer for the Falangist Dead, composed at the request of José Antonio to put a stop to his men's desire for revenge after the murder of the student Matias Montero in a street brawl, he wrote: 'To a victory that's not clear, gentlemanly and generous, we prefer defeat, because while every blow our enemies deal is horrendous and cowardly, each of our actions must be the affirmation of a higher valour and morality.' Time proved these lovely words to be nothing but rhetoric. At a meeting held at the Parador de Gredos on 16 June 1935, the leadership of the Falange, convinced it would never reach power by way of elections and that its very existence as a political party was in danger — for the Republic rightly considered it a permanent threat to its survival — took the decision to embark on the conquest of power through armed insurrection. During the year following that meeting, the conspiratorial manoeuvrings of the Falange — replete as they were with innumerable suspicions, hesitations, provisos, and doubts that conveyed both their scant confidence in their own possibilities of triumph and their leader's prescient fears that the party and its revolutionary programme would be devoured by the predictable alliance of the army with the most conservative sectors of society who would support the coup — did not cease for an instant, until on 14 March 1936, after being decimated in the elections of February that year, the Falange was beheaded when the police closed its premises on Nicasio Gallego Street, arrested its entire Leadership Council and banned the party sine die.

After that Sánchez Mazas' trail vanishes. One can only attempt to reconstruct his adventures during the months before the conflict and during the three years it lasted by way of partial testimonies — fleeting allusions in memoirs and documents of the time, tales told by those who shared snippets of his adventures, memories of relatives and friends to whom he'd recounted his memories — and also through the veil of a legend shimmering with errors, contradictions and ambiguities which Sánchez Mazas' selective loquacity about this turbulent period of his life did nothing but nourish. So then, what follows is not what actually happened, but rather what seems probable might have happened; I'm not offering proven facts, but reasonable conjectures.

Here they are:

In March of 1936, when Sánchez Mazas is being held in the Modelo Prison in Madrid along with his Falange leadership comrades, his fourth child, Maximo, is born, and Victoria Kent, at that time General Director of Prisons, grants the inmate the three days' leave to visit his wife, which he's entitled to by law, on condition that he give his word of honour not to leave Madrid and to return to the prison at the end of the allotted time. Sánchez Mazas accepts the deal, but, according to another of his sons, Rafael, before he leaves the jail the governor summons him to his office and tells him, off the record, that he sees things getting very dark, half suggesting 'that he would be better off not coming back, and that he, for his part, wouldn't go too far out of his way to find and recapture him'. Since this justifies Sánchez Mazas' later dubious behaviour, the truth of this version could well be called into question; yet equally, one could imagine it not being false. The fact is that Sánchez Mazas, forgetting the protests of gentlemanly behaviour and heroism with which he illustrated so many pages of incendiary prose, breaks his word and flees to Portugal, but José Antonio — who had taken his deputy's words seriously and who judged that not only was his honour at stake, but that of the entire Falange — orders him from his prison cell in Alicante, where he'd been transferred along with his brother Miguel on the night of 5 June, to return to Madrid. Sánchez Mazas obeys, but before he can turn himself back over to the Modelo Prison the uprising breaks out.

The following days are confusing. Almost three years later, Eugenio Montes — whom Sánchez Mazas called 'my grandest and greatest comrade in the drive to put human words at the service of our Falange' — describes from Burgos his friend's situation in the days immediately after 18 July as 'an adventure of street corners and hideouts, with the red henchmen hot on his heels'. The phrase is as novelistic as it is elusive, but perhaps doesn't entirely betray the truth. Revolution triumphs in Madrid. People kill and die in back alleys and barracks. The legitimate government has lost control of the situation and the atmosphere is thick with a lethal mixture of fear and euphoria. Houses are searched; militiamen's control spreads through the streets. One night at the beginning of September, unable to stand the anxiety of secrecy and the constant imminence of danger any longer, or perhaps urged by his friends or acquaintances who'd been running the risk of giving cover to a fugitive of his importance for too long, Sánchez Mazas decides to leave his lair, flee Madrid and cross over into the Nationalist zone.

Predictably, he doesn't make it. The next day, as soon as he leaves the house, he gets stopped; the patrol demands he identify himself. With a strange mixture of panic and resignation, Sánchez Mazas realizes he is lost and, as if wanting to take his leave of reality in silence, for a second of indecision that seems interminable he looks around and sees that, though it's only nine o'clock, the shops on Montera Street have already opened and the urgent, everyday hustle and bustle of the crowd floods the pavements, while the harsh sun foretells another suffocating morning of this never-ending summer. At that moment the attention of the three armed militiamen is caught by a truck stuffed with members of the General Workers' Union bristling with weapons and war cries, heading for the front at Guadarrama with the bodywork painted with initials and names, among them that of Indalecio Prieto, who's just been named Minister of the Airforce and Navy in Largo Caballero's incendiary government. Then Sánchez Mazas thinks up a desperate idea and acts on it: he tells the militiamen that he cannot identify himself because he's undercover in Madrid carrying out a mission entrusted to him directly by the Minister of the Airforce and Navy, and demands they put him in contact with Prieto immediately. Caught between bewilderment and suspicion, the militiamen decide to take him to the headquarters of the State Security Office to check the authenticity of his implausible excuse; there, after a few anguished attempts, Sánchez Mazas manages to speak to Prieto by telephone. Concerned about the situation, Prieto advises him to seek refuge in the Chilean Embassy and affectionately wishes him good luck; then, in the name of their old friendship in Africa, orders his immediate release.

That same day Sánchez Mazas manages to get into the Chilean Embassy, where he will spend almost a year and a half. There is a photograph from this spell of confinement: Sánchez Mazas appears in the centre of a chorus of refugees, among whom is the Falangist writer Samuel Ros; there are eight of them, all a little ragged and unshaven, all expectant. Wearing an undershirt that was perhaps once white, with his Semitic profile, his spectacles and broad forehead, Sánchez Mazas is leaning elegantly on a desk on which there is nothing but an empty glass, a piece of bread, a sheaf of papers or notebooks and a hungry saucepan. He is reading; the rest listen to him. What he reads is an excerpt from Rosa Kriiger, a novel he wrote or began to write in those days to relieve the tedium of confinement and distract his companions, and which would only be published, unfinished, fifty years later, when its author had already been dead for a long time. It is, without doubt, his best novel and also a good novel, as well as being strange and rather atemporal, written in a Byzantine style by someone with the taste and sensibility of a Pre-Raphaelite painter, with a Europeanist vocation and a patriotic, conservative background, saturated with exquisite fantasies, exotic adventures, and a kind of melancholic sensuality across which, in a crystalline and exact prose, it recounts the battle waged in the mind of the protagonist between the two essential principles, which according to the author govern the universe the diabolical and the angelic and the final victory of the latter, incarnated in a donna angelicata called Rosa Kriiger. It's surprising that Sánchez Mazas managed to isolate himself from the obligatory and noisy promiscuity that reigned in the Embassy in order to write his book but not that the fruit of this isolation should so meticulously evade the dramatic circumstances surrounding its conception, for it would have been pointless to add to the tragedy of the war the tale of the tragedy of the war. Furthermore, the apparent contradiction, which has so preoccupied some of his readers, between Sánchez Mazas' bellicose Falangist ideas and his apolitical and aestheticizing literary task, is resolved if we admit that both are conflicting but coherent expressions of one nostalgia: for the abolished, impossible and invented world of Paradise, for the safe hierarchies of an ancien régime which the inevitable winds of history were sweeping away forever.

As time passes and the bloodletting and desperation of the war increases, the situation in the embassies harbouring refugees in Republican Madrid gets more and more precarious, and the fear of attacks intensifies, so that anyone who has a reasonable possibility of escape prefers to run the risk of the adventure in search of a safe refuge rather than prolong the anxious uncertainty of confinement and waiting. That's what Samuel Ros does, arriving in Chile in the middle of 1937, not to return to Nationalist Spain until the following year. Encouraged by Ros's success, at some point in the autumn of 1937 Sánchez Mazas attempts to escape. He has the help of a prostitute and a young Falangist sympathizer whose family has or had a transport company, and who are acquaintances of Sánchez Mazas. His plan is to get to Barcelona and, once there, engage the help of the fifth column to make contact with the escape networks that smuggled people across the French border. They put the plan into action and, for several days, Sánchez Mazas travels by secondary roads and cart tracks, camouflaged under a load of rotting vegetables, the 600 kilometres between him and Barcelona in the company of the prostitute and the young Falangist. Miraculously, they make it past all the control posts and arrive safe and sound at their destination, with no setbacks more serious than a blown-out tyre and getting the fright of their lives from a dog with an overly sensitive nose. The three travellers separate in Barcelona, and Sánchez Mazas is received, just as planned, by a lawyer who belongs to the JMB, one of the numerous, unconnected Falangist factions the fifth column have scattered throughout the city. After granting him a few days rest, the members of the JMB urge him to take command and, asserting his right as member number four of the Falange, assemble all the fifth columnist splinter groups and submit them to party discipline, obliging them to coordinate their activities. Perhaps because his only preoccupation up to that moment has been to get out of the red zone and cross over into Nationalist territory, or simply because he knows himself incapable of action, the offer surprises him, and he refuses outright on the grounds of his complete ignorance of the situation in the city and the groups operating within it; but the members of the JMB, who are as young and bold as they are inexperienced, and who greeted his arrival as a gift from providence, insist, and he has no choice but to accept.

Over the following days Sánchez Mazas meets with representatives of other fifth-column factions and one morning, on his way to the Iberia, a bar in the city centre where the owner is a sympathizer of the Nationalist cause, he is arrested by military intelligence agents. This is 29 November 1937; versions of what happens next differ. There are those who maintain that Father Isidoro Martin, who had been Sánchez Mazas' professor at the Maria Cristina Royal College at El Escorial, intercedes in vain on his behalf, to Manuel Azana, who had also been a student of his at that school. Julián de Zugazagoitia, whom at the end of the war Sánchez Mazas unsuccessfully tried to save from the firing squad, affirms that he proposed to President Negrín that they exchange him for the journalist Federico Angulo, and that Azana hinted at the expediency of swapping the writer for some compromising manuscripts of his own that were in seditious hands. Another version maintains that Sánchez Mazas didn't even make it as far as Barcelona, because after leaving the Chilean Embassy he sought refuge in the Polish one, which was attacked, and that was when Azorín intervened to spare him a death sentence. There are even those who claim Sánchez Mazas actually was swapped at some point during the war. These last two hypotheses are erroneous; almost certainly the first two are not. However it happened, the truth is that, after being arrested by the SIM, Sánchez Mazas was sent to the Uruguay, a ship anchored in the port of Barcelona and converted into a floating prison earlier in the war, and later taken to the Palace of Justice, where he was tried along with other fifth columnists. During the trial he was accused of being the Commander-in-Chief of the fifth column in Barcelona, which was false, and of incitement to rebellion, which was true. However, unlike most of the rest of the accused, Sánchez Mazas was not condemned to death. This is puzzling; perhaps only another intervention from afar by Indalecio Prieto can explain it.

Once the trial is over, Sánchez Mazas is returned to the Uruguay, and passes the following months in one of its cells. The living conditions are not good: food is scarce; the treatment brutal. News of the war is also scarce, but as it progresses, even the prisoners on the Uruguay understand that Franco's victory is near. On 24 January 1939, two days before Yagüe's troops enter Barcelona, he's awakened by an unusual sound, and before long notices the jailers' nervousness. For a moment he thinks they're going to release him; then he thinks they're going to shoot him. He spends the morning lurching between these two agonizing alternatives. At about three in the afternoon a SIM agent orders him out of his cell, off the boat and onto a bus parked on the dock, where another fourteen prisoners from the Uruguay and the Vallmajor checa are waiting, along with the sixteen SIM agents in charge of their custody. Among the prisoners are two women, Sabina González de Carranceja and Juana Aparicio Pérez del Pulgar; also among them is José Maria Poblador, an early leader of the JONS and important player in the putsch of July 1936, and Jesus Pascual Aguilar, one of the leaders of the Barcelona fifth column. What no one can know at this moment is that of all the male prisoners making up the convoy, by the end of the week only Sánchez Mazas, Pascual and Poblador will still be alive. Silently the bus crosses Barcelona, which has been changed by the terror of exodus and the wintry sky into a ghostly desolation of boarded-up windows and balconies, and wide ashen avenues with the disorderly air of an abandoned refugee camp, and traversed only, if at all, by furtive transients who gnash their teeth like wolves looking hungry and ready to flee as they pass craters in the pavement, protected from adversity and from the glacial wind only by threadbare overcoats. Upon leaving Barcelona by the road to exile, the spectacle turns apocalyptic: an avalanche of men and women, old people and children, soldiers and civilians together, carrying clothing, mattresses and household goods, advancing laboriously with the unmistakable trudge of the defeated or riding on carts or mules of despair, the road and ditches overflowing with people strewn intermittently with corpses of animals with their guts exposed or abandoned vehicles. The caravan crawls forward interminably. Sometimes it stops; sometimes, with a mixture of disbelief, hatred and immeasurable weariness, someone stares hard at the occupants of the bus, envying their comfort and shelter, ignorant of their firing squad fate; every now and then someone hurls an insult. Sometimes, as well, a Nationalist airplane flies over the road and spits out a few bursts of machine-gun fire or drops a bomb, provoking a panicked stampede among the refugees and a faint hope among the prisoners on the bus, who at some point even cherish the illusion — soon belied by the strict watch the SIM agents keep over them — that they could take advantage of the chaos of an attack to escape across the countryside.

The night is black by the time they make their way through Gerona and later Banyoles. Then they turn off on a dirt road that snakes its way through shadowy woods and eventually stop before a stretch of stone wall dotted with lights, like a colossal galleon capsized in the middle of the darkness, which is polluted by the jailers' barked orders. It is the Sanctuary of Santa Maria del Collell. Sánchez Mazas will spend five days there together with the other two thousand prisoners from what remains of Republican Spain, including several deserters from the reds and several members of the International Brigades. Before the war the monastery had been a boarding school where the brothers taught secondary students in classrooms with enormously high ceilings and gigantic windows overlooking earth-floored courtyards and gardens lined with cypresses, where there were long, low corridors and vertiginous staircases with wooden handrails; now the boarding school has been converted into a prison, the classrooms into cells, and in the patios, corridors and staircases the adolescent hubbub of the boarders no longer echoes, instead just the hopeless footsteps of the incarcerated. The prison governor is a man called Monroy, the same one who ruled the prison-ship Uruguay with an iron hand; however, at Collell the prison regime is less strict: it is not forbidden to speak to those who serve the food nor with those met in the coming and going from the lavatories; the food is still foul and scant, but sometimes a furtive cigarette appears in a cell, and is eagerly shared round. The cell Sánchez Mazas occupies is on the top floor of the old boarding school, and it's bright and spacious; along with him and several International Brigadistas who speak no intelligible language, it is occupied by the doctor Fernando de Marimón, the naval captain Gabriel Martín Morito, Father Guiu, Jesús Pascual and José Maria Poblador, who can hardly walk because his legs are covered in boils. On the second day the Brigadistas are released and their places taken by Nationalist prisoners captured at Teruel and Belchite; the cell fills up. Sometimes they let them go out and walk around the courtyard or in the gardens; they are not guarded by SIM agents or Carabineros (although the monastery swarms with both): they are guarded by soldiers as malnourished and ragged as themselves, who make jokes or hum popular songs between their teeth as they kick the garden stones in boredom or watch them indifferently. The hours of confinement and inactivity foster intrigue: given the nearness of the border, and especially from the moment a big shot like Sánchez Mazas joined the string of prisoners, many cherish the hope of being exchanged before long, a hypothesis that weakens as time goes on. The hours they share also give rise to the consolation of friendship. As if magically foreseeing that he'd be one of the survivors of the confinement, and the only one who, years later, will tell the horror of those final hours in a meticulous and Manichean book, Sánchez Mazas became especially friendly with Pascual, who only knew of him from reading his articles in F.E., and to whom Sánchez Mazas recounted his odyssey through the war: he tells him about the Modelo prison, about the birth of his son Maximo, about the uncertain days following the uprising, about In-dalecio Prieto and the Chilean Embassy, about Samuel Ros and Rosa Krüger, about his clandestine trip across enemy Spain in a delivery truck in the company of a rich kid and a prostitute, about Barcelona and the JMB and the fifth column and his trial and finally about the prison-ship Uruguay.

At dusk on the 29th, Sánchez Mazas, Pascual and his cellmates are taken to the roof of the monastery, a place they've never been before and where they are assembled with other prisoners, 500 in total, maybe more. Pascual knows some of them — Pedro Bosch Labnis, Viscount Bosch Labriis and airforce captain Emilio Leucona — but barely manages to exchange a few words with them before a Carabinero immediately orders silence and begins to read out a list of names. Because the hope of a prisoner swap comes to mind again, as soon as he hears the name of someone he knows Pascual desires heart and soul to be included in the list, but, without any precise reason for this shift in opinion, by the time the Carabinero pronounces his name — shortly after that of Sánchez Mazas and immediately following Bosch Labrús — he has already regretted formulating this wish. The twenty-five men who have been named, among whom are all of Sánchez Mazas and Pascual's cellmates except Fernando de Marimon, are taken to a cell on the first floor where there are only a few desks pushed against the crumbling walls and a blackboard with patriotic historical dates scribbled in chalk. The door closes behind them and an ominous silence falls, soon broken by someone declaring that they are about to be exchanged and who manages to distract the anguish of a few of them with the discussion of a conjecture that fades away after a while to make room for unanimous pessimism. Sitting at a desk at one end of the cell, before the evening meal Father Guiu hears the confession of some of the prisoners, and then prepares communion. No one sleeps that night: lit by a grey stoney light that comes in through the window, giving their faces a hint of their future cadaverous appearance (although as time passes the grey thickens and the darkness becomes real), the prisoners stay awake listening through the wall to noises in the corridor or seeking illusory comfort in memories or in a last conversation. Sánchez Mazas and Pascual are stretched out on the floor, leaning their backs against the cold wall, their legs covered by one insufficient blanket; neither of them will remember exactly what they talked about during that scant night, but both will recall the long silences punctuating their secret meeting, the whispers of their companions and the sound of their sleepless coughing, the rain falling, indifferent, assiduous, black and freezing on the paving stones in the courtyard and the cypresses in the garden; and it keeps falling until dawn of 30 January slowly changes the darkness of the windows for the sickly whitish, ghostly colour that stains the atmosphere in the cell like a premonition at the moment the jailer orders them out.

No one has slept, everyone seems to have been awaiting that moment and, as if drawn by the urgency of resolving the uncertainty, they obey with somnambulant diligence and gather in the courtyard with another similar-sized group of prisoners, to bring the number to fifty. They wait a few minutes, docile, silent and soaked, under a fine rain and a sky thick with clouds, and finally a young man appears in whose indistinct features Sánchez Mazas recognizes the indistinct features of the warden of the Uruguay. He tells them they are going to be put to work at an aviation camp under construction in Banyoles and orders them to form into ten lines, five deep; while obeying, unthinkingly taking the first place on the right in the second line, Sánchez Mazas feels his heart bolt: in the grip of panic, he realizes the aviation camp can only be an excuse — senseless to build one with the Nationalist troops launching a definitive offensive a few kilometres away. He begins to walk at the head of the group, unhinged and shaking, unable to think clearly, absurdly searching the blank faces of the armed soldiers lining the road for a sign or a glimmer of hope, trying in vain to convince himself that at the end of that journey what awaited him was something other than death. Beside him, or behind him, someone is trying to justify or explain something he doesn't hear or doesn't understand, because every step he takes absorbs all his attention, as if it might be his last; beside him or behind him, the sickly legs of José Maria Poblador say, Enough, and the prisoner collapses in a puddle and is helped up and dragged back to the monastery by two soldiers. A hundred and fifty metres on from this, the group turns left, leaves the road and goes up into the forest along a path of chalky soil that opens out into a clearing: a wide expanse surrounded by pine trees. From out of the woods booms a military voice ordering them to halt and face left. Terror seizes the group, which stops in its tracks; almost all its members automatically turn to the left, but dread confuses the instinct of others who, like Captain Gabriel Martín Morito, turn to the right. For an instant, which feels eternal, Sánchez Mazas thinks he's going to die. He thinks the bullets that are going to kill him will come from behind his back, which is where the commanding voice had come from, and that, before he dies from bullets hitting him, they'll have to hit the four men lined up behind him. He thinks he's not going to die, that he's going to escape. He thinks that he can't escape to the back because the shots will come from there; nor to his left, because he'd run back out to the road and the soldiers; nor ahead, because he'd have to jump over a wall of eight utterly terrified men. But (he thinks) he can escape towards the right, where no more than six or seven metres away a dense thicket of pines and undergrowth holds a promise of hiding. To the right, he thinks. And he thinks: Now or never. At that moment several machine guns stationed behind the group, exactly where the commander's voice had come from, begin to sweep the clearing; trying to protect themselves, the prisoners instinctively seek the ground. By then Sánchez Mazas has reached the thicket, he runs between pines that scratch his face with the pitiless clatter of the machine guns still ringing in his ears, finally trips providentially and is flung, rolling over mud and wet leaves, into the ravine at the edge of the plateau, landing in a swampy ditch at the mouth of a stream. Because he rightly imagines that his pursuers imagine him trying to get as far away from them as possible, he decides to shelter there, relatively close to the clearing — cringing, panting, soaking wet and with his heart pounding in his throat, covering himself as best he can with leaves and mud and pine boughs, hearing his unfortunate companions receiving coups de grâce — and then the barking of the dogs and the shouts of the Carabineros urging the soldiers to find the fugitive or fugitives (because Sánchez Mazas doesn't yet know that, infected by his irrational impulse to abscond, Pascual has also managed to escape the massacre). For a length of time he has no idea whether to measure in minutes or hours, while he scratches ceaselessly at the ground to cover himself in mud till his fingernails are bleeding and hopes that the incessant rain will prevent the dogs from finding his trail, Sánchez Mazas keeps hearing shouts and barks and shots, until at some moment he senses something shift behind him and urgently turns around, cringing like a cornered rat.

Then he sees him. He's standing beside the ditch, tall and burly and silhouetted against the dark green of the pines and the dark blue of the clouds, panting a little, his large hands grasping the slanted rifle and the field uniform with all its buckles, threadbare from exposure. Prey to the aberrant resignation of one who knows his time has come, through his thick glasses blurred by the rain, Sánchez Mazas looks at the soldier who is going to kill him or hand him over — a young man, his hair plastered to his skull by the rain, his eyes maybe grey, his cheeks gaunt and cheekbones prominent and remembers him or thinks he remembers him from among the ragged soldiers who guarded them in the monastery. He recognizes him or thinks he recognizes him, but takes no comfort from the idea that it's going to be him and not a SIM agent who redeems him from the endless agony of fear, and it humiliates him like an injury added to all the injuries of these years on the run not to have died with his cellmates or not to have known how to die in an open field in broad daylight and fighting with a courage he lacked, instead of dying now and there, muddy and alone and shaking with dread and shame in an undignified hole in the ground. So, his mind raving and confused, Rafael Sánchez Mazas exquisite poet, fascist ideologue, Franco's future minister — awaits the shot that will finish him off. But the shot doesn't come, and Sánchez Mazas, as if he were already dead and from death remembering this scene from a dream, watches guilelessly as the soldier slowly advances towards the edge of the ditch in the unceasing rain and the threatening sound of soldiers and Carabineros, just steps away, the rifle pointing at him unostentatiously, the gesture more inquisitive than tense, like a novice hunter about to identify his first prey, and just as the soldier gets to the edge of the ditch the vegetal noise of the rain is pierced by a nearby shout:

'Is anyone there?'

The soldier is looking at him; Sánchez Mazas is looking at the soldier, but his weak eyes don't understand what they see: beneath the sodden hair and wide forehead and eyebrows covered in raindrops the soldier's look doesn't express compassion or hatred, or even disdain, but a kind of secret or unfathomable joy, something verging on cruelty, something that resists reason, but nor is it instinct, something that remains there with the same blind stubbornness with which blood persists in its course and the earth in its immovable orbit and all beings in their obstinate condition of being, something that eludes words the way the water in the stream eludes stone, because words are only made for saying to each other, for saying the sayable, when the sayable is everything except what rules us or makes us live or matters or what we are or what this anonymous defeated soldier is, who now looks at this man whose body almost blends in with the earth and the brown water in the ditch, and who calls out loudly without taking his eyes off him:

'There's nobody over here!'

Then he turns and walks away.

For nine days and nights of the brutal winter of 1939 Rafael Sánchez Mazas wandered through the region of Banyoles trying to cross the lines of the Republican army in retreat and pass over into the Nationalist zone. Many times he thought he wasn't going to make it; alone, no other resources than his will to survive, unable to get his bearings in unfamiliar territory of wild, dense woods, weakened to the point of exhaustion from walking, by the cold, hunger and three uninterrupted years of captivity, many times he had to stop to gather his strength in order not to let himself just give up. The first three days were terrible. He slept during the day and walked at night, avoiding the exposure of the roads and villages, begging for food and shelter at farms, and though he prudently dared not reveal his true identity at any of them, but rather introduced himself as a lost Republican soldier, and though almost everyone he asked gave him something to eat, let him rest awhile and gave him directions without asking questions, fear kept anyone from offering him protection. At dawn on the fourth day, after more than three hours wandering through dark forests, Sánchez Mazas made out a farm in the distance. Less by rational decision than out of utter fatigue, he collapsed onto a bed of pine needles and remained there, his eyes closed, barely sensing the sound of his own breathing and the smell of the dew-soaked earth. He had eaten nothing since the morning before, he was exhausted and felt ill, because not a single muscle in his body didn't ache. Until then the miracle of having survived the firing squad and the hope of encountering the Nationalists had given him a perseverance and a fortitude he'd thought lost; now he realized that his energy was running out and that, unless another miracle occurred or someone helped him, his adventure would very soon be at an end. After a while, when he felt a little restored and the sun shining through the foliage had instilled in him a scrap of optimism, he gathered all his strength, stood up and started walking towards the farm.

Maria Ferré would never forget the radiant February dawn she first set eyes on Rafael Sánchez Mazas. Her parents were out in the field and she was getting ready to feed the cows when a man appeared in the yard — tall, famished and spectral, with his twisted spectacles and many days' growth of beard, in his sheepskin jacket and trousers full of holes, and covered in mud and weeds — and asked her for a piece of bread. Maria wasn't scared. She'd just turned twenty-six and she was a dark blonde, illiterate, hard-working girl for whom the war was nothing more than a confusing background noise to the letters her brother sent home from the front, and a meaningless whirl wind that two years earlier had taken the life of a boy from Palol de Revardit she'd once dreamed of marrying. During this time her family hadn't been hungry or frightened, because the farm lands they cultivated and the cows, pigs and hens sheltering in the stables were enough, more than enough, to feed them, and because, although Mas Borrell, their house, was located halfway between Palol de Revardit and Cornellá de Terri, the abuses of the days of revolution didn't reach them and the disorder of the retreat brought them only the odd lost, disarmed soldier who, more frightened than threatening, asked for something to eat or stole a hen. It's possible that at first Sánchez Mazas was to Maria Ferré just another of the many deserters who roamed the area during those days, and that's why she wasn't scared, but she always maintained that as soon as she saw his pitiful figure outlined against the ground of the path that ran past the yard, she recognized beneath the ravages of three days' exposure to the elements the unmistakable bearing of a gentleman. Whether that's true or not, Maria gave the man the same kind treatment she'd given countless other fugitives.

'I don't have any bread,' she told him. 'But I could heat something up for you.'

Undone by gratitude, Sánchez Mazas followed her into the kitchen and, while Maria heated up the previous night's saucepan — where, in a rich, brown broth, floated lentils and big chunks of bacon, sausage and chorizo along with potatoes and vegetables — he sat down on a bench, enjoying the nearness of the fire and the joyful promise of hot food, took off his soaking shoes and socks, and suddenly noticed a terrible ache in his feet and an infinite tiredness in his bony shoulders. Maria handed him a clean rag and some clogs, and out of the corner of her eye watched him dry his neck, his face, his hair, as well as his feet and ankles, while watching the flames dance amid the logs with staring, slightly glazed eyes, and when she handed him the food she saw him devour it with a hunger of many days, in silence and scarcely forgoing the manners of a man raised among linen tablecloths and silver cutlery, which, more out of his courteous instincts than his recently acquired habit of fear, made him set the spoon and pewter plate down by the fire and stand up when Maria's parents burst into the half-light of the kitchen and stood, looking at him, with a bovine mixture of passivity and suspicion. Perhaps mistakenly thinking their guest didn't understand Catalan, Maria told her father in Catalan what had happened; he asked Sánchez Mazas to finish his meal and, without taking his eyes off him, put his farming tools down beside a stone bench, washed his hands in a basin and came over to the fire. As he sensed the father approach, Sánchez Mazas scraped the plate clean. His hunger calmed, he'd reached a decision: he realized that, if he didn't reveal his true identity, he wouldn't have the slightest chance of being offered shelter there either, and he also realized that the hypothetical risk of denunciation was preferable to the real risk of starving or freezing to death.

'My name is Rafael Sánchez Mazas and I am the most senior living leader of the Falange in Spain,' he finally said to the man who listened without looking at him.

Sixty years later, when neither her parents nor Sánchez Mazas were alive to do so, Maria still recalled those words exactly, perhaps because that was the first time she'd heard of the Falange, just as she recalled that Sánchez Mazas went on to relate his implausible adventure at Collell, told them about his wanderings of the last few days and, addressing the man, added:

'You know as well as I do that the Nationalists will be here any time now. It's a question of days, if not hours. But if the reds catch me I'm a dead man. Believe me, I'm very grateful for your hospitality, and I wouldn't want to take advantage of your good faith, but if you could give me what your daughter just gave me to eat once a day and a sheltered spot to spend the night, I shall be eternally grateful. Think it over. If you do me this favour you'll be well rewarded.'

Maria Ferré's father didn't need to think it over. He assured him that he could not have him in the house because it would be too risky, but he proposed a better alternative: Sánchez Mazas would spend the day in the woods, in a safe field nearby beside the Mas de la Casa Nova — a farm abandoned by its owners since the beginning of the war — and at night he would sleep warmly in a hayloft, a couple of hundred metres from the house, where they would make sure he didn't lack food. Sánchez Mazas was delighted with the plan, he took the blanket and package of food Maria prepared for him, took his leave of her and her mother, and followed her father along the dirt track that passed in front of the door to the house and then went along through sown fields the top of which through the clear air of the sunny morning — overlooked the road to Banyoles and the valley full of farms and further off the jagged, distant profile of the Pyrenees. After a while, once Maria's father had pointed out in the distance the hayloft where he should spend the night, they crossed an open, uncultivated field and stopped at the edge of the woods, just where the track thinned out into a narrow path; the man then told him that at the end of the path was the Mas de la Casa Nova and insisted he not return until night had fallen. Sánchez Mazas didn't have time even to reiterate his gratitude, because the man turned and started walking back towards Mas Borrell. Following his instructions, Sánchez Mazas entered a forest of ash trees, holly and enormously tall oaks which barely let the sun through and got thicker and more impenetrable as the path went down the slope of a hillside, and he'd been walking for long enough for a little voice to start injecting him with the venom of mistrust when he came out into a clearing in the middle of which stood the Mas de la Casa Nova. It was a two-storey stone farmhouse, with an artesian well and a big wooden door; once he was sure it had been uninhabited for a long time Sánchez Mazas considered forcing one of the entrances and holing up inside, but after a moment of reflection he decided to follow Maria Ferré's father's instructions and look for the field he'd recommended. He found it quite nearby, as soon as he crossed a steep, rocky, dry streambed lined with elms, and he lay down there, in the tall grass, under the clear, perfectly blue sky and the dazzling sun that warmed the cold, still morning air, and although every bone in his body ached with exhaustion and an endless fatigue weighed down his eyelids, for the first time in a long time he felt safe and almost happy, reconciled with reality, and as he noticed the pleasant weight of sunlight on his eyes and skin and the irrevocable slipping of his consciousness towards the waters of sleep, like an anomalous offshoot of that unforeseen plenitude, some lines appeared on his lips that he didn't even remember having read:

Do not move

Let the wind speak

That is paradise

Hours later, anxiety awakened him. The sun shone in the middle of the sky and although he still had a twinge of pain in his muscles, sleep had restored part of his energy and strength that he'd burnt-up over the last few days in the desperation to cling to life; but as soon as he got free of Maria Ferré's blanket and heard in the silence of the field a distant noise of many running motors he realized the cause of his uneasiness. He went to the far edge of the field and from there, needlessly hidden, he watched from afar the procession of a large column of trucks and Republican soldiers swarming along the Banyoles road. Although in the immediate future he'd experience the threatening proximity of enemy troops many more times, only that morning did he consider it a danger, and feel he must return to his improvised bed, collect the blanket and package of food, and duck into the edge of the forest to hide. There, in a shelter made of stone and branches, which he planned that very afternoon but didn't start building until the following dawn, he spent most of the next three days. At first the construction of the shelter kept him busy, but then time went by as he lay on the ground sometimes sleeping, recouping the energy that he could see he might need at any moment, searching through his memory for every forgotten instant of his wartime adventure and especially imagining how he would tell it once he was liberated by his own people — a liberation that the logic of events brought ever nearer, yet his impatience made him feel was ever further away. He didn't talk to anyone except Maria Ferré or her father, with whom he'd chat for a while in the hayloft when they came in the dark to bring him food, and on the only night when her father allowed him to come inside and have dinner with them he also talked to two Republican deserters the family knew, and who, as they ate a little and warmed up by the fire before continuing their journey to Banyoles, told him the Nationalist troops had entered Gerona that morning.

The following day passed as usual; on the next everything changed. As he had every morning, Sánchez Mazas got up with the sun, picked up the package of food they'd brought him from Mas Borrell and started walking towards Mas de la Casa Nova; as he was crossing the streambed, he tripped and fell. He didn't hurt himself, but he broke his glasses. The event, which under normal circumstances would have inconvenienced him, now drove him to despair: he was extremely short-sighted and, without the help of corrective lenses, reality was nothing but an unintelligible handful of smudges. Sitting on the ground, with his broken spectacles in his hands, he cursed his clumsiness; he was on the point of weeping with rage. Pulling himself together, he crawled up the bank of the stream on all fours, and feeling his way, guided by the routine of the last few days, searched out the shelter by the field.

That was when he heard the order to halt. Stopping dead and instinctively putting his hands up, he made out at a distance of fifteen metres, barely distinguishable against the confusing green of the woods, three cloudy figures starting to advance towards him with an expectant, watchful attitude. When they were closer Sánchez Mazas realized they were Republican soldiers, they were very young, and they were pointing two long-barrelled nine-millimetre pistols at him; they were as nervous and startled as he was, and their shabby fugitive air and the undisciplined disparity of their uniforms made him assume they were deserters, but he didn't have time to figure out a way of confirming his suspicion because the one who spoke for them submitted him to an interrogation which lasted for almost half an hour of tension, guesswork and insinuations, until Sánchez Mazas resolved that this fortuitous encounter, just after breaking his glasses, could only be a favourable play of fate and decided to put all his money on it and admit that he'd spent six days wandering in the woods waiting for the arrival of the Nationalists.

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.

The life of the three deserters didn't change in any noticeable way after that moment, except for the fact that now there were four to feed from what the Figueras' mother sent, and four to sleep in the abandoned barn by Mas de la Casa Nova, for they decided that it was safer for Sánchez Mazas not to return to the hayloft by Mas Borrell. Curiously (or maybe not: maybe it's life's decisive moments that are most voraciously devoured by oblivion), neither Joaquim Figueras nor Daniel Angelats have a very clear memory of those days. Figueras, whose memory is sharp but expeditious and often gets lost in aimless meandering, remembers that meeting Sánchez Mazas relieved the boredom for a while, because he told them his wartime adventures, with a wealth of detail and in a tone that had at first impressed him with its solemnity but with time he'd come to consider a little pompous; he also remembered that, once they'd told their war stories — undoubtedly in a much more succinct, disorderly and direct manner — they were again overtaken by the tense, impatient boredom they'd suffered for the last few days. Or he and Daniel Angelats were at least. Because what Joaquim Figueras does remember very well is that, while he and Angelats went back to practising the most varied ways of killing time much as before, his brother Pere and Sánchez Mazas leaned up against the trunk of an oak tree at the edge of the woods conversing tirelessly. He could see them there still: listless and unshaven and well bundled up, with their knees higher and higher and their heads lower and lower as the day wore on, almost with their backs to each other, smoking cut tobacco or whittling away at something, turning to look at each other every now and then and, of course, not smiling at all, as if neither of the two were looking to the other for agreement or persuasion, but only the certainty that none of his words would be lost in the air. He never knew what they were talking about, or maybe he didn't want to know; he knew the subject was not politics or the war; once he suspected (without much basis) that it was literature. The truth is Joaquim Figueras, who'd never got along very well with Pere (whom he'd made fun of publicly more than once and whom he'd always secretly admired), realized with a secret pang of jealousy that Sánchez Mazas won, in a few hours, a friendship with his brother that he'd never had access to in his whole life. As for Angelats, whose memory is shakier than Figueras', his testimony does not contradict that of his old friend; at best, it complements it with various anecdotal details (Angelats, for example, remembers Sánchez Mazas writing with a minuscule pencil in his notebook with dark green covers, which perhaps proves that the diary was written during the events it relates) and one detail perhaps less so. As often happens with the memories of some old people which, because they are about to be left without them, remember much more clearly a childhood afternoon than what happened a few hours ago, in this concrete point Angelats' abounds in particulars. I don't know if time has given the scene a novelistic varnish; although I can't be sure, I tend to think not, because I know Angelats is a man without imagination; nor does any benefit occur to me that he might derive — a tired and ill man, with few years left to live — from inventing such a scene.

This is the scene:

At some point during the second night the four of them spent together in the barn, Angelats was awakened by a noise. Startled, he sat up and saw Joaquim Figueras sleeping placidly beside him among the straw and blankets; Pere and Sánchez Mazas weren't there. He was about to get up (or wake Joaquim, who was less of a coward or at least more decisive than he was) when he heard voices and realised that was what had woken him; they were barely whispering but their words carried to him clearly in the perfect silence of the barn, on the other side of which, almost level with the floor and beside the half-closed door, Angelats saw the glow of two cigarettes burning in the darkness. He told himself that Pere and Sánchez Mazas had left the straw bed where the four of them slept to smoke safely; he then wondered what time it was and, imagining Pere and Sánchez Mazas had been awake and talking for a long while, lay back down and tried to fall asleep again. He couldn't. Sleepless, he clung on to the thread of conversation between the two insomniacs: at first uninterestedly, just to while away the time, for he understood the words he was hearing but not their meaning nor their intention; then things changed. Angelats heard the voice of Sánchez Mazas, deep and deliberate, slightly hoarse, telling of the days in Collell, the hours, the minutes, the frightful seconds that preceded and followed the shooting; Angelats knew of the episode because Sánchez Mazas had told them of it the first morning they were together, but now, perhaps because the impenetrable darkness of the barn and the careful choice of words conferred on the events an additional reality, he heard as if for the first time or as if, more than hearing it, he was reliving it, expectant and with his heart contracted, perhaps a little incredulous, because also for the first time — Sánchez Mazas had avoided mentioning him in the first telling — he saw the militiaman standing beside the ditch, in the rain, tall and burly and soaked through, looking at Sánchez Mazas with his grey, perhaps greenish, eyes under the double arch of his brows, his gaunt cheeks and prominent cheekbones, silhouetted against the dark green of the pines and the dark blue of the clouds, panting a little, his large hands grasping the slanted rifle and the field uniform with all its buckles, threadbare from exposure. He was very young, Angelats heard Sánchez Mazas say. Your age or perhaps younger, although he had an adult expression and features. For a moment, while he looked at me, I thought I knew who he was; now I'm sure. There was a silence, as if Sánchez Mazas was waiting for Pere's question, which didn't come; Angelats made out at the end of the barn the glow of two cigarettes, one grew momentarily more intense and lit up Pere's face with a weak reddish radiance. He wasn't a Carabinero or a SIM agent, obviously, Sánchez Mazas went on. Had he been, I'd not be here now. No: he was a simple soldier. Like you. Or like your brother. One of the ones who guarded us when we went out walking in the garden. I noticed him straightaway and I think he noticed me too, or at least that's what I think now, because in reality we never exchanged a single word. But I noticed him, as did all my companions, he was always sitting on a bench humming something, popular songs and things like that, and one afternoon he stood up from the bench and began to sing 'Sighing for Spain'. Have you ever heard it? Of course, said Pere. It's Liliana's favourite paso doble, said Sánchez Mazas. I always think it's so sad, but her feet start up if she hears four notes of it. We've danced to it so many times. . Angelats saw the ash of Sánchez Mazas' cigarette redden and then go out abruptly, and then he heard him raise his hoarse and almost ironic voice in a whisper and recognized in the silence of the night the melody and lyrics of the paso doble, which made him feel so much like weeping because they suddenly struck him as the saddest lyrics and music in the world, as well as a desolate mirror of his wasted youth and the pitiful future awaiting him: 'God desired, in his power, / to blend four little sunbeams / and make of them a woman, / and when His will was done / in a Spanish garden I was born / like a flower on her rose-bush. / Glorious land of my love, / blessed land of perfume and passion, / Spain, in each flower at your feet / a heart is sighing. / Oh, I'm dying of sorrow, / for I'm going away, Spain, from you, / for away from my rose-bush I'm torn.' Sánchez Mazas stopped his soft singing. Do you know all of it? asked Pere. All of what? asked Sánchez Mazas. The song, answered Pere. More or less, answered Sánchez Mazas. There was another silence. So, said Pere. And what happened with the soldier? Nothing, said Sánchez Mazas. Instead of sitting on the bench, humming quietly like usual, that afternoon he started singing 'Sighing for Spain' out loud, smiling and, as if he were letting himself be swept away by an invisible force, he stood up and started to dance through the garden with his eyes closed, embracing his rifle as if it were a woman, in the same way, just as gently, and I and my companions and the rest of the soldiers who were guarding us and even the Carabineros stopped and stared, sadly or dumbfounded or mocking, but all in silence while he dragged his big military boots over the gravel riddled with cigarette butts and bits of food, just as if they were leather shoes on a pristine dance floor and then, before he'd finished dancing to the song, someone said his name and cursed him affectionately and the spell was broken, a lot of men started laughing or smiling; we laughed, prisoners and guards, everyone. . I think it was the first time I had laughed in a long, long time. Sánchez Mazas fell quiet. Angelats heard Joaquim roll over beside him, and wondered if he might be listening too, but the rough, regular breathing soon made him discard the notion. That was it? asked Pere. That was it, answered Sánchez Mazas. Are you sure it was him? asked Pere. Yes, answered Sánchez Mazas. I think so. What was his name? asked Pere. You said someone said his name. I don't know, answered Sánchez Mazas. Perhaps I didn't hear. Or I heard it and I forgot it straightaway. But it was him. I wonder why he didn't give me away, why he let me escape. I've asked myself over and over again. They grew quiet again, and Angelats felt that this time the silence was denser and longer, and thought the conversation had finished. He was looking at me for a moment from the edge of the ditch, Sánchez Mazas continued. He looked at me strangely, no one has ever looked at me like that, as if he'd known me for a long time but at that moment was unable to recognize me and was making an effort to do so, or like an entomologist who doesn't know whether he has a unique and unknown specimen before him, or like someone trying in vain to decipher an elusive secret from the shape of a cloud. But no: in reality the way he looked at me was. . joyful. Joyful? asked Pere. Yes, said Sánchez Mazas. Joyful. I don't understand, said Pere. Me neither, said Sánchez Mazas. Well, he added after another pause, I don't know. I think I'm talking nonsense. It must be very late, said Pere. We'd better try to get some sleep. Yes, said Sánchez Mazas. Angelats heard them get up, lie down in the straw side by side, next to Joaquim, and also heard them (or maybe just imagined them) trying in vain to get to sleep, tossing and turning in the blankets, unable to get free of the song that had become tangled up in their memories, and the image of that soldier dancing with his rifle in his arms among the cypress trees and prisoners, in the garden at Collell.

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.

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.

'You used to be a writer and a politician, Rafael,' Agustin de Foxa said to him around this time. 'Now you're just a millionaire.' Foxa was a writer and a politician and a millionaire, and one of the few friends Sánchez Mazas didn't end up losing over time. He was also a clever man, and as so often happens with clever men, he was often right. It's true that, after receiving his aunt's inheritance, Sánchez Mazas held various political posts from member of the Leadership Council of the Falange through to Deputy Member of Parliament, by way of President of the Patrons' Association of the Prado Museum but it's also true they were always secondary or decorative and barely took up his time and that from the middle of the forties he began to give them up as if shedding an annoying burden, and little by little, as time went by, he disappeared from public life. This does not mean, however, that Sánchez Mazas in the forties and fifties was a kind of silent opponent to Franco's government; he undoubtedly scorned the intellectual shoddiness and the mediocrity the regime had imposed on Spanish life, but he didn't feel uncomfortable in it, nor did he hesitate to proffer in public the most embarrassing dithyrambs to the tyrant and even, if it came to that, to his wife — though in private he flayed them for their stupidity and bad taste and nor, of course, did he lament having contributed with all his might to inciting a war which razed a legitimate republic and failed to replace it with the terrible regime of poets and renaissance condottieri he'd dreamt of, but rather with a simple government of rogues, rustics and sanctimonious goody-goodies. 'I neither regret nor forget,' he famously wrote, by hand, in the full page frontispiece of Foundation, Brotherhood and Destiny, a book where he reprinted some of his bellicose articles of Falangist doctrine that in the thirties he'd published in Arriba and F.E. The phrase is from the spring of 1957; the date compels reflection. Madrid was then still in the grip of the backlash after the first great internal crisis of Francoism, stemming from an alliance, unexpected but in fact inevitable, between two groups Sánchez Mazas knew very well, because he lived with them on a daily basis. On one side, the young left-wing intelligentsia, an important part of which had arisen from the disillusioned ranks of the Falange itself and was made up of rebellious scions of notorious families of the regime, among them two of Sánchez Mazas' sons: Miguel, the first-born, one of the ring-leaders of the student rebellion of 1956—who in February of that year was j ailed and shortly afterwards left to a long exile — and Rafael, Sánchez Mazas' favourite, who had just published Eljarama, the novel in which the aesthetics and intellectual restlessness of those dissident youths came together; on the other side, a few 'old shirts' —among whom, in the front line, was Dionisio Ridruejo, an old friend of Sánchez Mazas, who had been arrested along with his son Miguel, and other student leaders from the anti-Franco outcry of the previous year, and in that same year, 1957, founded the social-democratic Social Party of Democratic Action — old Falangists from the early days who had perhaps not forgotten their political past, but who doubtless did regret it and were even undertaking, with more or less determination or courage, to combat the regime they had helped to bring about. I neither regret nor forget. Since emphatic loyalty so often denounces the traitor, there are some who suspect that if Sánchez Mazas wrote such a thing at such a time, it was precisely because, like some of his José Antonian comrades, he did regret — or at least partially regretted, and was trying to forget — or at least he was trying to partially forget. The conjecture is attractive, but false; in every case, apart from the secret disdain with which he contemplated the regime, not a single particular of his biography endorses it. 'If there's one thing I hate the Communists for, Your Excellency,' Foxa once said to Franco, 'it's for obliging me to join the Falange.' Sánchez Mazas would never have said such a thing — too irreverent, too ironic — and much less in the presence of the General, but it undoubtedly goes for him too. Perhaps Sánchez Mazas was never more than a false Falangist, or else a Falangist who was only one because he felt obliged to be one — if all Falangists weren't false and obligatory ones, deep down never entirely believing that their ideology was anything other than a desperate measure in confusing times, an instrument destined to succeed in changing something in order that nothing change; I mean, had it not been because, like many of his comrades, he felt a real threat looming over his loved ones' sleep of bourgeois beatitude, Sánchez Mazas would never have stooped to getting involved in politics, nor would he have applied himself to forging the blazing rhetoric of the clash needed to inflame to victory the squad of soldiers charged with saving civilization. Sánchez Mazas identified civilization with the securities, privileges and hierarchies of his own people and the Falange with Spengler's squad of soldiers; but he also felt pride in having formed part of that squad and, perhaps, the right to rest after having restored hierarchies, securities and privileges. That's why it's doubtful he would have wanted to forget anything, and certain that he regretted nothing.

So, strictly speaking, it cannot be claimed that Sánchez Mazas was a politician during the post-war period; it would seem more contentious to maintain, as does clever Foxá, that nor was he a writer. Because it's true that in these years, as the political activity decreased, the literary increased: in the two decades following the war, novels, short stories, essays and theatre adaptations came out under his name, as well as innumerable articles appearing in Arriba, La Tarde, and ABC. Some of these articles are exceptional, finely crafted verbal jewels, and certain books he published then, like The New Life of Pedrito de Andía (1951) and The Waters of Arbeloa and OtherMatters (1956), figure among the best of his oeuvre. And yet it is also true that, although between the mid-forties and the mid-fifties he occupied a pre-eminent place in Spanish literature, he never bothered about having a literary career (an effort, like that of a political career, he always thought beneath the dignity of a gentleman), and as time went on he practised, with increasing skill, the subtle art of concealment, to the point where, for five years starting in 1955, he signed his ABC articles with three enigmatic asterisks. As to the rest, his social life was confined to assiduously keeping up with the few friends who, like Ignacio Agusti or Mariano Gomez Santos, had managed to survive the excesses of his character and, from the beginning of the fifties, the very occasional visit to the literary circle that Cesar González-Ruano brought together at the Café Comercial at the Glorieta de Bilbao in Madrid. González-Ruano, who knew him well, at that time saw Sánchez Mazas 'as a great amateur, like a senior gentleman of letters, like a great, unmatched Senor who hadn't ever needed to make a profession of his vocations, but rather wrote verse and prose exercises during his vacations'.

In other words, Foxa was probably right after all: from the end of the war until his death, perhaps Sánchez Mazas was not essentially anything except a millionaire. A millionaire without many millions, languid and a bit decadent, given over to slightly extravagant passions clocks, botany, magic, astrology and the no less extravagant passion for literature. He divided his time between the mansion in Coria, where he spent long spells of vie en chateau, the Hotel Velasquez in Madrid, and the cottage in the suburb Viso, surrounded by cats, Italian flagstones, travel books, Spanish paintings and French engravings, with a big drawing room dominated by a fireplace, and a garden full of rose-bushes. He'd get up about midday and, after lunch, write until supper time; nights, which often stretched till dawn, he spent reading. He left the house very rarely; he smoked a lot. Probably by then he no longer believed in anything. Probably in his heart, never in his life had he truly believed in anything, and least of all, in what he'd defended or preached. He practised politics, but deep down always scorned them. He exalted time-honoured values — loyalty, courage — but practised treachery and cowardice, and contributed more than most to the brutalization the Falange's rhetoric inflicted on these values; he also exalted old institutions — the monarchy, the family, religion, the fatherland — but didn't lift a finger to bring a king to Spain, ignored his family, often living apart from them, would have exchanged all of Catholicism for a single canto of the Divine Comedy and as for the fatherland, well, no one knows what the fatherland is, or maybe it's simply an excuse for venality or sloth. Those who had dealings with him in his later years recall that he often remembered the vicissitudes of the war and the firing squad at Collell. 'It's incredible how much one learned in those few seconds of the execution,' he told a journalist in 1959, to whom, nevertheless, he did not reveal the learning he'd gained from the imminence of death. Perhaps he was no more than a survivor, and that's why at the end of his life he liked to imagine himself as a failed, autumnal gentleman, like someone who, having been capable of great things, had done almost nothing. 'I have but only in the most mediocre way measured up to the hope placed in me and help given me,' he confessed around this time to González-Ruano, and years before a character in The New Life of Pedro de Andia seems to speak for Sánchez Mazas when he proclaims from his deathbed: 'I've never been able to finish anything in this life.' In fact, it was in this way, melancholic, defeated and futureless, that he liked to portray himself from very early on. In July 1913, in Bilbao, barely nineteen years of age, Sánchez Mazas wrote, with the title 'Under an Ancient Sun', three sonnets, the last of which goes like this:

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!