Part Three. Rendezvous In Stockton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Motive and The Tenant were the titles of the only two books I'd published, more than ten years before, without anyone except the odd friend from back then noticing. Bewildered or incredulous, I nodded.

'I know them,' he said. 'I think I even bought them.'

'Oh, so you were the one, were you?'

He ignored the joke.

'Hang on a second.'

He disappeared down a hallway and came back a little while later.

'Here they are,' he said, brandishing my books triumphantly.

I flipped through the two copies, saw they were worn. Almost sadly, I remarked:

'You read them.'

'Of course,' Bolaño sort of smiled; he almost never smiled but he never quite seemed to be entirely serious either. 'I read everything, even bits of paper I find blowing down the street.'

This time it was me who smiled.

'I wrote them ages ago.'

'You don't have to apologize,' he said. 'I liked them, or at least I remember liking them.'

I thought he was mocking me; I raised my gaze from the books and looked him in the eye: he wasn't mocking. I heard myself ask:

'Really?'

Bolaño lit a cigarette and seemed to think it over for a moment.

'I don't remember the first one too well,' he finally admitted. 'But I think there was a really good story about a son of a bitch who persuades some poor guy to commit a crime so he can finish his novel, right?' Without giving me time to agree, he added: 'As for The Tenant, I thought it was a delightful little novel.'

Bolaño pronounced this judgement with such a mixture of ease and conviction that I suddenly knew those few bits of praise my books had received were products of courtesy or pity. I was speechless, and felt an enormous urge to hug that softly-spoken, curly-haired, scruffy, unshaven Chilean I'd only just met.

'Well,' I said. 'Shall we start the interview?'

We went to a bar by the port, between the market-place and the breakwater, and sat down by a large window from which we could make out, through the golden chilly morning air, the whole of Blanes bay, majestically criss-crossed by seagulls, with the dock in the foreground, its idle fishing boats, and in the background the Palomera promontory, marking the geographic border of the Costa Brava. Bolaño ordered tea and toast; I ordered coffee and water. We talked. Bolaño told me things were going well for him now, because his books were starting to bring in money, but for the last twenty years he'd been as poor as a church mouse. He'd quit school when he was practically still a kid; he'd had all kinds of odd jobs (though he'd never done any serious work other than writing); he'd been a revolutionary in Allende's Chile and in Pinochet's he'd been in prison; he'd lived in Mexico and France; he'd travelled all over the world. Years ago he'd undergone some very complicated surgery, and since then he lived the life of an ascetic in Blanes, with no other vice than writing, and seeing no one but his family. By chance, the day I interviewed Bolaño, General Pinochet had just returned to Chile to a hero's welcome from his supporters, after spending two years in England waiting to be extradited to Spain and tried for his crimes. We talked about Pinochet's return, about Pinochet's dictatorship, about Chile. Naturally, I asked him what it'd been like to live through Pinochet's coup and the fall of Allende. Naturally, he regarded me with an expression of utter boredom; then he said:

'Like a Marx Brothers' movie, but with corpses. Unimaginable pandemonium.' He blew a little on his tea, took a sip and put the cup back down on the saucer. 'Look, I'll tell you the truth. For years I spat on Allende's name every chance I got, I thought it was all his fault, for not giving us weapons. Now I kick myself for having said that about Allende. Fuck, the bastard thought about us as if we were his kids, you know? He didn't want them to kill us. And if he'd let us have those guns we would have died like flies. So,' he finished, picking up his cup again, 'I think Allende was a hero.'

'And what's a hero?'

The question seemed to surprise him, as if he'd never asked himself, or as if he'd been asking himself forever; his cup in mid-air, he looked me fleetingly in the eye, then turned his gaze back out over the bay and thought for a moment; then he shrugged his shoulders.

'I don't know,' he said. 'Someone who considers himself a hero and gets it right. Or someone who has courage and an instinct for virtue, and therefore never makes a mistake, or at least doesn't make a mistake the one time when it matters, and therefore can't not be a hero. Or someone, like Allende, who understands that a hero isn't the one who kills, but the one who doesn't kill or who lets himself get killed. I don't know. What's a hero to you?'

By then it had been almost a month since I'd thought about Soldiers of Salamis, yet at that moment I couldn't help but remember Sánchez Mazas, who never killed anyone and at some point, before reality showed him he lacked courage and an instinct for virtue, perhaps considered himself a hero. I said:

'I don't know. John Le Carré says one must think like a hero to behave like a decent human being.'

'Yeah, but a decent human being isn't the same as a hero,' Bolaño shot back. 'There're lots of decent people: they're the ones who know enough to say no in time; heroes, on the other hand, are few and far between. Actually, I think there's almost always something blind, irrational, instinctive in a hero's behaviour, something that's in their nature and inescapable. Also, you can be a decent person for a whole lifetime, but you can't be awe-inspiring without a break, and that's why a hero is only a hero exceptionally, once, or at most, during a spell of insanity or inspiration. There's Allende, speaking on Radio Magallanes, lying on the floor in a corner of La Moneda, with a machine gun in one hand and microphone in the other, talking as if he were drunk or as if he were already dead, not really knowing what he's saying and saying the purest, most noble words I've ever heard. . I just remembered another story. It happened in Madrid a while back, I read it in the paper. A young guy was walking down a street in the city centre and suddenly saw a house enveloped in flames. Without a word to anyone he rushed into the house and came out with a woman in his arms. He went back in and this time brought a man out. Then he went in again and brought out another woman. By this time the fire had reached such proportions that not even the firemen would dare enter the house, it was suicide; but the guy must've known there was someone still inside, because he went back in. And, of course, he never came out.' Bolaño halted, pushed his glasses up with his index finger so the frame brushed his eyebrows. 'Brutal, isn't it? Still, I'm not sure that guy was acting out of compassion, or some sort of benevolence; I think he acted out of a kind of instinct, a blind instinct that overcame him, took him over, acted for him. More than likely the guy was a decent person, I'm not saying he wasn't; but he iulght not have been. Fuck, Javier, he didn't need to be: the bastard was a hero.'

Bolaño and I spent the rest of the morning talking about his books, the authors he liked — who were many — and the ones he despised — more still. Bolaño talked about them with a strange, icy passion, which fascinated me at first and then made me feel uncomfortable. I cut the interview short. When we were about to say goodbye, on the seaside promenade, he invited me to come and have lunch at his house, with his wife and son. I lied: I said I couldn't, because they were expecting me back at the paper. Then he invited me to come and see him some time. I lied again: I said I would very soon.

A week later, when the interview was published, Bolaño phoned me at the newspaper office. He said he'd liked it a lot. He asked:

'Are you sure I said all that about heroes?'

'Word for word,' I answered, suddenly suspicious, thinking the initial praise was just a preamble to the reproaches, and that Bolaño was one of those loquacious interviewees who attribute all their verbal indiscretions to journalists' spite, negligence or frivolity. 'I've got it on tape.'

'No shit! Well, it sounded pretty good!' he reassured me. apos;But I called you about something else. I'm going to be in Gerona tomorrow, I have to renew my residency permit a fucking nuisance, but it won't take me very long. Do you want to meet for lunch?'

I hadn't expected the call or the suggestion and, perhaps because it seemed easier to accept than make up an excuse, I accepted, and the next day, when I arrived at the Bistrot, Bolaño was already sitting at a table with a Diet Coke in hand.

'It's been at least twenty years since I've been here,' remarked Bolaño, who on the phone the previous day had told me that, when he used to live in the city, his place was near the Bistrot. 'This has changed a fuck of a lot.'

After having ordered (steak and salad for him; steamed mussels and rabbit for me), Bolaño repeated his praise for my interview, he talked about Capote and Mailer, then asked me suddenly if I was writing anything. Since nothing annoys a writer who doesn't write as much as being asked what he's writing, I answered, slightly irritated:

'No.' And because I figured for Bolaño, like for everyone, writing for a newspaper wasn't really writing, I added: 'I don't write novels any more.' I thought of Conchi and said: 'I've discovered I have no imagination.'

'To write novels you don't need an imagination,' Bolaño said. 'Just a memory. Novels are written by combining recollections.'

'Then I've run out of memories.' Trying to be witty I explained: 'I'm a journalist now: a man of action.'

'Well, that's a shame,' said Bolaño, 'a man of action is a frustrated writer. If Don Quixote had written one single book of chivalry he never would have been Don Quixote, and if I hadn't learned how to write I'd be firing away with the FARC right now. Besides, a real writer never stops being a writer. Even if they don't write.'

'What makes you think I'm a real writer?'

'You wrote two real books.'

'Juvenilia.'

'The newspaper doesn't count?'

'It counts. But I don't write for pleasure there: just to make a living. Besides, a journalist isn't the same thing as a writer.'

'You're right there,' he conceded. 'A good journalist is always a good writer, but a good writer is almost never a good journalist.'

I laughed.

'Dazzling, but false,' I said.

While we ate, Bolaño told me about when he'd lived in Gerona; he described minutely an interminable February night in one of the city's hospitals, the Josép Trueta. That morning they'd diagnosed him with pancreatitis and when the doctor finally appeared in his room, he asked him, knowing what the answer would be, if he was going to die; the doctor stroked his arm and told him no in the voice they always reserve for lies. Before falling asleep that night, Bolaño felt profoundly sad, not because he knew he was going to die, but for all the books he'd planned to write and would now never write, for all his dead friends, all the young Latin Americans of his generation — soldiers killed in wars already lost — he'd always dreamt of resuscitating in his novels and who'd now stay dead forever, just like him, as if he'd never existed; then he fell asleep and during the night dreamt he was in a ring fighting a sumo wrestler, a gigantic and smiling Oriental against whom he could do nothing and against whom, nevertheless, he kept fighting all night long until he woke up and knew, before anyone told him, with a superhuman joy he'd never felt since, that he wasn't going to die.

'But sometimes I think I still haven't woken up,' Bolaño said wiping his mouth with his serviette. 'Sometimes I think I'm still in that bed in the Trueta, fighting that sumo wrestler, and everything that's happened over these years (my son and my wife and the novels I've written and my dead friends I've talked about) is what I've dreamed, and at some moment I'll wake up and I'll be on the canvas in the ring, murdered by a big fat Oriental guy who smiles just like death.'

After lunch Bolaño asked me to go for a walk with him around the city. I went with him: we walked through the old part of the city, down the Rambla, across the Plaza de Catalunya, through the market-place. At dusk we went to have a drink in the bar of the Hotel Carlemany, quite near the station, while Bolaño waited for his train. It was there, between cups of tea and gin and tonics, that he told me the story of Miralles. I don't remember why or how he got to it; I remember he talked with an unwavering enthusiasm, with a sort of jubilant seriousness, putting all his military and historical erudition at the service of the tale, which was overwhelming but not always precisely accurate, because later when I consulted several books on the military operations of the Civil War and the Second World War, I discovered that some of the dates and names and circumstances had been modified by his imagination or his memory. Yet for the most part, the tale not only seems true, but is also, in most of its details, verifiable.

Once the few facts and dates Bolaño had altered have been corrected, the story goes like this:

Bolaño met Miralles in the summer of 1978, in the Estrella de Mar campsite, in Castelldefells. The Estrella de Mar was a caravan site where a floating population, comprised basically of members of the European proletariat, would show up each summer: French, English, Dutch, Germans, the odd Spaniard. Bolaño remembered that, at least during the time he spent there, those people were very happy; he also remembered that he, too, was happy. He worked at the campsite for four summers, from 1978 to 1981, sometimes on weekends in the winters too; he worked as rubbish collector, night watchman, everything.

'It was my doctorate,' Bolaño assured me. 'I got to know such a range of human fauna. Actually, never in my life have I learned so many things, so quickly, as I did there.'

Miralles arrived every year at the beginning of August. Bolaño remembered him driving up with his caravan, with his exuberant greetings, his huge smile, his cap pulled down over his brow and his enormous buddha's belly, registering at the office and setting up immediately at his assigned site. From that moment on Miralles never wore more than swimming trunks and a pair of flip-flops for the rest of the month and, since he walked around undressed all day, he attracted attention from the start because his body was a real compendium of scars. In fact, his whole left side, from his ankle all the way up to his eye, out of which he could still see, was one entire scar. Miralles was Catalan, from Barcelona or near Barcelona — Sabadell maybe, or Terrassa: in any case Bolaño remembered having heard him speak Catalan but he'd been living in France for years and, according to Bolaño, he'd become completely French: he wielded a sharp sense of irony, ate and drank well and loved good wine. In the evenings he'd get together with his old campsite friends from every summer in the bar and Bolaño, as night watchman, would often join these sessions that went on far into the night; he saw Miralles get drunk on many occasions, but he never saw him turn aggressive or rowdy or sentimental. At the end of such nights he simply needed someone to take him back to his caravan, because he couldn't get there by himself. Bolaño helped him many times, and also sat up late with him in the bar, drinking on their own long after Miralles had outlasted all his mates, and it was during these interminable solitary nights (he never saw him talk about it in front of others) that he listened to him unfurl his war record — unfurl it without boasting, without pride, with the learned irony of an adoptive Frenchman, as if it didn't belong to him but to some other person, someone he barely knew but whom he vaguely respected. That's why Bolaño remembered his tale with absolute precision.

Miralles was recruited in the autumn of 1936, a few months after the beginning of the war in Spain and after he had just turned eighteen; at the beginning of 1937, after some hasty military training, he was placed in the First Mixed Brigade of the Army of the Republic, which was under the command of Enrique Líster. Líster, who'd been commander of the Antifascist Workers' Militias and of the Fifth Regiment, was already a living legend. The Fifth Regiment had just been disbanded, and the majority of Miralles' battalion comrades had fought in its ranks and had been decisive, a few months earlier in November, in stopping Franco's troops at the gates of Madrid. Before the war Miralles worked as an apprentice lathe operator; he knew nothing about politics: his parents were very poor and never discussed such things; nor did his friends. Nevertheless, as soon as he arrived at the front, he became a Communist: the fact that his comrades and commanders and Líster were Communists undoubtedly influenced his decision too; perhaps even more so did his immediate certainty that the Communists were the only ones who were really ready to stand firm and win the war.

'I guess he was a bit wild,' Bolaño remembered Miralles saying one night, talking about Líster, under whose orders he'd spent the entire war. 'But he loved his men and he was very brave, very Spanish. A guy with real guts.'

'A thoroughbred Spanish brute,' Bolaño quoted, without telling Miralles he was quoting Cesar Vallejo, about whom he was writing a quirky novel at the time.

Miralles laughed.

'Exactly,' he agreed. 'Afterwards I read a lot about him, against him really. Most of it false, from what I know. I suppose he was wrong about a lot of things, but he got a lot of things right too, don't you think?'

In the early days of the war Miralles had been in sympathy with the anarchists, not so much for their chaotic ideas or for their urge to revolution, but more because they were the first to take to the streets and fight against fascism. Nevertheless, as the struggle advanced and the anarchists spread chaos in the rearguard, that sympathy disappeared: like all Communists — and undoubtedly this also helped push him towards them Miralles understood that the first thing was to win the war, then there would be time for revolution. So, in the summer of 1937 when the 11th Division, to which he belonged, liquidated the Aragonese anarchist collectives on Líster's orders, Miralles considered the operation brutal, but not unjustified. Later he fought in Belchite, in Teruel, at the Ebro and, when the front collapsed, Miralles retreated with the army towards Catalonia and at the beginning of 1939 crossed the French border together with the other 450,000 Spaniards who did so in the final days of the war. On the other side was the Argelès concentration camp, which was really just a bare, immense beach surrounded by a double ring of barbed wire; there were no huts, and no protection from the savage February cold, and no sanitation, just a quagmire, where in subhuman conditions, with women and old folks and children sleeping on the sand dappled with snow and frost, and men wandering around, dumbfounded by the burden of desperation and the rancour of defeat, 80,000 Spanish fugitives waited for the hell to end.

'They called them concentration camps,' Miralles used to say. 'But they were nothing but death-traps.'

And so, a few weeks after arriving at Argeles, when the enlistment flags of the French Foreign Legion appeared in the camp, Miralles signed up without a second thought. That was how he ended up in the Maghreb, some part of the Maghreb, maybe Tunisia or Algeria, Bolaño didn't quite remember. The beginning of the World War caught him out there. France fell into the hands of the Germans in June of 1940, and the majority of the French authorities in the Maghreb took the side of the puppet government at Vichy. But Leclerc, General Jacques Phillippe Leclerc, was also in the Maghreb. Leclerc refused to accept orders from Vichy and began to recruit as many people as he could, with the reckless idea of getting them to cross half of Africa under his command and reach some French overseas possession that accepted the authority of De Gaulle, who like him, though from London, had rebelled against Petain in the name of Free France.

'Fuck, Javier!' Reclining in an armchair in the bar of the Carlemany, Bolaño looked at me mockingly or incredulous through the thick lenses of his glasses and smoke of his Ducados. 'Miralles spent his whole life cursing Leclerc, and also himself for having listened to Leclerc. Neither he nor any of the other outcasts Leclerc took for suckers had the slightest idea of where they were heading. It was a journey of several thousand kilometres across the desert, pure hell, and in much worse conditions than Miralles had left behind in Argeles and with hardly any provisions. Paris-Dakar was a joke, a fucking little Sunday stroll in comparison! It'd take real balls to do a thing like that!'

Nevertheless, there were Miralles and his bunch of deluded volunteers urgently recruited by Leclerc's ludicrous proselytism, who, after several months of suicidal countermarches through the desert, arrived in the province of Chad, in French Equatorial Africa, where they finally made contact with De Gaulle's people. A short time after getting to Chad, together with an English detachment from Cairo and in the company of five other men from the Foreign Legion under the command of Colonel D'Ornano, Commander-in-Chief of the French forces in Chad, Miralles took part in the attack on the Italian oasis of Murzuk, in south-western Libya. The six members of the French patrol were in theory volunteers; in reality Miralles would never have participated in that raid had it not been for the fact that, since no one in his company volunteered for it, they drew lots and Miralles ended up losing. Miralles' patrol was symbolic more than anything, because after the fall of France, it was the first time a French contingent took part in an act of war against the Axis powers.

'Just imagine, Javier,' said Bolaño, looking slightly perplexed, as if holding back laughter, and as if he himself were discovering the story (or the meaning of the story) as he told it. 'All of Europe dominated by the Nazis, and there in the back of beyond, without anyone knowing it, these four fucking Moors, a fucking black guy and this bastard of a Spaniard who made up D'Ornano's patrol raising the flag of freedom for the first time in months. Fucking incredible! And there's Miralles, shafted and shit out of luck and probably with no idea what he's doing there. But there he was.'

Colonel D'Ornano fell at Murzuk. His post in command of the forces in Chad was covered by Leclerc, who, spurred on by the success at Murzuk, immediately launched an attack against the oasis of Koufra the most important of the Libyan desert, and also in Italian hands — with a handful of volunteers from the Foreign Legion and a handful of natives, with very few weapons and very little transport, and on 1 March 1941, after another march of more than a thousand kilometres across the desert, Leclerc and his men took Koufra. And there, naturally, was Miralles. Back in Chad, Miralles enjoyed his first weeks of rest in years, and at some point various deceptive signs led him to imagine that, after the heroic achievements of Murzuk and Koufra, the war was going to keep well away from him and his comrades for some time. That was when Leclerc had his second brilliant idea in a very short time. Convinced, and rightly so, that the war was at stake in North Africa, where Montgomery's Eighth Army was fighting against the German Afrika-Korps, he decided to try to join the English troops, carrying out the reverse of the march — from the Maghreb to Chad — that they'd carried out months earlier. Other Allied units executed the same or a similar operation at the time, but Leclerc was entirely lacking any infrastructure, so Miralles and the 3,200 men he'd managed to gather by then had to cross the thousands of kilometres of merciless desert that separated them from Tripoli once again, by foot, and in even more precarious conditions than the first time, arriving finally in January 1943, just when Rommel's troops had been expelled from the city by Montgomery's Eighth Army. Leclerc's column spent the rest of the African campaign with that corps, so Miralles fought the Germans in the offensive against the Mareth line, and later the Italians in Gabes and Sfax.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I insisted on accompanying Bolaño to the station and, while he was buying a pack of Ducados for the trip, I asked him whether in all these years he'd ever heard anything more about Miralles.

'Nothing,' he answered. 'I lost track of him, like so many people. Who knows where he is now. Maybe he still goes to the campsite; but I don't think so. He'd be over eighty, and I doubt very much if he'd be up to it. Maybe he still lives in Dijon. Or maybe he's dead, really I guess that's the most likely, no? Why do you ask?'

'No reason,' I said.

But it wasn't true. That afternoon, as I listened with growing interest to the exaggerated tale of Miralles, I thought that I'd soon be reading it in one of Bolaiño's exaggerated books; but when I got home, after seeing my friend off and walking through the city lit by street lamps and shop windows, and perhaps carried away by the exaltation of the gin and tonics, I had already begun to hope that Bolaño wasn't ever going to write that story: I was going to write it. I kept going over the idea in my mind all evening. While I was making dinner, while I was eating, while I washed the dishes after dinner, while I drank a glass of milk watching the television but without seeing it, I imagined a beginning and an ending, organized episodes, invented characters, mentally wrote and rewrote many sentences. Lying in bed, wide awake in the dark (only the numbers on the digital alarm clock gave off a red glow in the thick darkness of the bedroom), my head was seething, and at some moment, inevitably, because age and failure impart prudence, I tried to rein in my enthusiasm by remembering my latest disaster. That was when I thought of it. I thought of Sánchez Mazas and the firing squad and that Miralles had been one of Líster's soldiers all through the war, that he'd been with him in Madrid, in Aragón, at the Ebro, in the retreat through Catalonia. Why not at Collell? I thought. And at that moment, with the deceptive but overwhelming clarity of insomnia, like someone who finds, by unbelievable chance, having already given up the search (because a person never finds what he's searching for, but what reality delivers), the missing part to complete the mechanism that was otherwise whole yet incapable of performing the function for which it had been devised, I heard myself murmur, in the pitch-black silence of the bedroom: 'It's him.'

I jumped out of bed, and barefoot, in three strides, I was in the dining room; I picked up the telephone and dialled Bolaiño's number. I was waiting for someone to answer when I saw the clock on the wall said three-thirty. I hesitated for a moment; then I hung up.

I think towards dawn I managed to get to sleep. Before nine I phoned Bolaiño again. His wife answered; Bolaiño was still in bed. I didn't manage to speak to him until twelve, from the office. Almost straight out I asked him if he intended to write about Miralles; he said no. Then I asked him if he'd ever heard Miralles mention the Sanctuary of Collell; Bolaño made me repeat the name.

'No,' he said at last. 'Not that I recall.'

'What about Rafael Sánchez Mazas?'

'The writer?'

'Yeah,' I said. 'Ferlosio's father. Do you know him?'

'I've read a couple of things of his, pretty good, I'd have to say. But why would Miralles mention him? We never talked about literature. And, anyway, what's this interrogation all about?'

I was about to avoid his question when I realized in time that only through Bolaiño could I get to Miralles. Briefly, I explained.

'Fuck, Javier!' Bolaiño exclaimed. 'You've got a hell of a novel there. I knew you were writing something.'

'I'm not writing.' Contradicting myself, I added, 'And it's not a novel. It's a story with real events and characters. A true tale.'

'Same difference,' replied Bolaiño. 'All good tales are true tales, at least for those who read them, which is all that counts. Anyway, what I don't get is how you can be so sure that Miralles is the militiaman who saved Sánchez Mazas.'

'Who said I was? I'm not even sure he was at Collell. All I'm saying is that Miralles could have been there and, therefore, could have been the militiaman.'

'Could have been,' murmured Bolaño sceptically. 'But most probably wasn't. In any event —'

'In any event, it's a case of finding him and settling the matter,' I cut him off, guessing the way his sentence was going to end ('. . if it's not him, you pretend it was him'). 'That's why I called you. The question is: have you any idea how to locate Miralles?'

Exhaling loudly, Bolaño reminded me that he hadn't seen Miralles for twenty years, and that he wasn't friends with anyone from back then, anyone who could he stopped short and, offering no explanation, asked me to hang on a moment. I hung on. The moment got so long that I thought Bolaño must have forgotten I was waiting on the phone.

'You're in luck, you bastard,' I heard eventually. Then he read out a telephone number to me. 'That's Estrella de Mar. I'd completely forgotten I had it, but I've still got all my diaries from back then. Call and ask about Miralles.'

'What was his first name?'

'Antoni, I think. Or Antonio. I don't know. Everybody called him Miralles. Call and ask for him: in my day we kept a register with the names and addresses of all the people who stayed at the campsite. I'm sure they still do. . That's if Estrella de Mar still exists, of course.'

I hung up. I picked the phone back up. I dialled the number Bolaño had given me. Estrella de Mar still existed, and had already opened its gates for the summer season. I asked the female voice that answered if a person called Antoni or Antonio Miralles was staying at the campsite; after a few seconds, during which I heard the distant typing of speedy fingers, she told me no. I explained the situation: I urgently needed the details of this person, who had been a regular client of Estrella de Mar twenty years earlier. The voice hardened: she assured me that it was not their custom to give out details of their clients and, while I heard the nervous typing start up again, she informed me that two years earlier they had computerized the campsite register, keeping only data relating to the last eight years. I insisted: I said that perhaps Miralles had been coming to the campsite till then. 'I assure you he hasn't,' said the girl. 'How?' said I. 'Because he's not in our archive. I've just checked. There are two Miralles, but neither of them is called Antonio. Or Antoni.' 'Are either of them called Maria?' 'No.'

That morning, extremely excited but exhausted, I told Conchi Miralles' story while we were having lunch at a self-service restaurant, explaining the error of perspective I'd committed when writing Soldiers of Salamis and assuring her that Miralles (or someone like Miralles) was exactly the part that was missing in order for the mechanism of the book to function. Conchi stopped eating, half closed her eyes and said, with resignation:

'About time Lucas took a shit.'

'Lucas? Who's Lucas?'

'Nobody,' said Conchi. 'A friend. He took a shit after he died and he died of not shitting.'

'Conchi, please, we're eating. Anyway, what's this Lucas got to do with Miralles?'

'Sometimes you remind me of Brains, honey,' Conchi sighed. 'If I didn't know you were an intellectual, I'd say you were stupid. Didn't I tell you at the start what you had to do was write about a Communist?'

'Conchi, I don't think you've really understood what '

'Of course I understand!' she interrupted me. 'The amount of grief we would have saved if you'd listened to me in the first place! And, you know what I say?'

'What?' I said, slightly uneasily.

'We're going to come out with a fucking brilliant book!'

We clinked glasses, and for a moment I was tempted to stretch out my foot to see if Conchi had any panties on; for a moment I thought I was in love with her. Prudent and happy, I said:

'I haven't found Miralles yet.'

'We'll find him,' said Conchi, with absolute conviction. ' Where did you say Bolaiño said he lived?'

'In Dijon,' I said. 'Or somewhere around there.'

'Well, that's where we'll have to start looking.'

That evening I called Telefónica's international directory enquiries. The operator told me that in the city of Dijon and in the whole of Department 21, to which Dijon belonged, there was no one called Antoni or Antonio Miralles. I then asked if there were a Maria Miralles; the operator said there was not. I asked if there were any Miralles, and was surprised to hear her say there were five: one in the city of Dijon and four in villages of the Department: one in Longuic, another in Marsannay, another in Nolay and another in Genlis. I asked her to give me their names and telephone numbers. 'Impossible,' she said. 'I can only give out one name and one number per call. You'd have to call back another four times for us to give you all of them.'

During the following days I phoned the Miralles who lived in Dijon (Laurent, he was called) and the other four, whose names were Laura, Danielle, Jean-Marie and Bienvenido. Two of them (Laurent and Danielle) were brother and sister, and all except Jean-Marie spoke correct (or broken) Castilian, since they came from Spanish families, but none of them were remotely related to Miralles, and none had ever heard of him.

I didn't give up. Perhaps driven by the blind faith Conchi had instilled in me, I phoned Bolaiño. I brought him up to date with my investigation and asked him if he could think of any other trail I could follow up. Not a single one occurred to him.

'You'll have to make it up,' he said.

'Make what up?'

'The interview with Miralles. It's the only way you can finish the novel.'

It was at that moment I remembered the story from my first book that Bolaño had recalled in our first conversation, in which a man induces another to commit a crime so he can finish his novel, and I believed I understood two things. The first surprised me; the second did not. The first was that finishing the book mattered much less to me than being able to talk to Miralles; the second was that, contrary to what Bolaño had believed up till now (and contrary to what I'd believed when I wrote my first book), I wasn't a real writer, because if I were, talking to Miralles would have mattered much less than finishing the book. I decided not to remind Bolaño again that my book wasn't meant to be a novel, but a true tale, and that making up the interview with Miralles would amount to a betrayal of its nature, and sighed:

'Yeah.'

The answer was laconic, not affirmative; Bolaño didn't take it that way.

'It's the only way,' he repeated, sure he had convinced me. 'Besides, it's the best way. Reality always ends up betraying us; it's best not to give her the chance and get in there first. The real Miralles would only disappoint you. Better to make him up; the invented one will surely be more real than the real one. You're not going to find him. Who knows where he might be: dead, in a home, in his daughter's house. Forget him.'

'It's best we just forget about Miralles,' I told Conchi that night, having survived a terrifying trip to her house in Quart followed by a hurried tumble in the living room, under the devoted gaze of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the melancholic gaze of the copies of my two books that flanked her. 'Who knows where he might be: dead or in a home or in his daughter's house.'

'Have you looked for his daughter?'

'Yes. But I haven't found her.'

We stared at each other for a second — two — three. Then, without another word, I got up, went to the phone, dialled Telefonica's international directory enquiries. I told the operator (I think I recognized her voice; I think she recognized mine) that I was looking for a person who lived in an old people's home in Dijon and I asked her how many old people's homes there were in Dijon. 'Oh,' she said after a pause, 'loads.' 'How many's loads?' 'Thirty odd. Maybe forty.' 'Forty old people's homes!' I looked at Conchi who, sitting on the floor, and barely covered by her T-shirt, held back her laughter. 'Is there no one but old people in that city?' 'The computer doesn't specify whether they're old people's homes,' the operator clarified. 'It just says residential home.' 'And how many are there in the Department?' After another pause she replied: 'More than twice as many.' Slightly sarcastically she added: 'I can only give you one number per call. Should I start alphabetically?' I thought this was the end of my search; making sure Miralles didn't live at any of these eighty some residential homes could take me months and I could end up broke — not to mention that I didn't have the slightest reason to believe he did live in any of them, and even less that he was the soldier of Líster's I was looking for. I looked at Conchi, who looked back at me drumming her fingers impatiently on her bare knees; I looked at my books beside the Virgin of Guadalupe and — I don't know why — I thought of Daniel Angelats. Then, as if getting even with someone, I said: 'Yes. Alphabetically please.'

That was how a telephonic pilgrimage began, a pilgrimage that would last for a month of daily long-distance calls, first to the residential homes of the city of Dijon and then to those of the entire Department. The procedure was always the same. I called international directory inquiries, asked for the next name and number on the list (Abrioux, Bagatelle, Cellerier, Chambertin, Chanzy, Eperon, Fontainemont, Kellerman, Lyautey were the first lot), I called the home, asked the switchboard operator for Monsieur Miralles, they answered that there was no Monsieur Miralles there, I phoned international directory inquiries again, asked for another telephone number, and so on until I got tired of it; and the next day (or the one after, because sometimes I couldn't find the time or the will to go back into my obsessive roulette) took up the trail again. Conchi helped me, luckily: I now think that, if not for her, I would have abandoned the search early on. We called in our spare time, almost always secretly, me from the editorial offices, her from the television studio. Then, every night, we'd compare notes on the day, exchange the names of ruled out residential homes, and during those conversations I realized that for Conchi, the monotony of daily telephone calls in search of a man who we didn't even know was alive was an unexpected and exciting adventure; and as for me, at first infected by Conchi's investigative drive and straightforward conviction, I bent to the task enthusiastically, but after I'd surveyed the first thirty homes I began to suspect that I was doing it more out of inertia or stubbornness (or so as not to let Conchi down) than because I still held some hope of finding Miralles.

But one night the miracle happened. I'd finished writing a short article and we were putting the paper to bed when I started my round of calls by dialling the number of the Nimphéas Residential Home in Fontaine-Lès-Dijon, and, when I asked for Miralles, instead of the usual negative, the switchboard operator answered me with silence. I thought she'd hung up and I was about to do the same, routinely, when a masculine voice stopped me in my tracks.

I repeated the question that I'd just asked the operator and that we'd spent more than ten days asking in an absurd tour of all the residential homes in Department 21.

'Miralles here,' said the man in Spanish: the surprise kept me from noticing that my rudimentary French had given me away. 'Who am I speaking to?'

'Antoni Miralles?' I managed to mumble.

'Antoni or Antonio, whatever,' he said. 'But call me Miralles; everybody calls me Miralles. Who am I speaking to?'

It strikes me as incredible now but, no doubt because deep down I never really thought I'd end up talking to Miralles, I hadn't thought through how I'd introduce myself to him.

'You don't know me, but I've been trying to track you down for ages,' I improvised, aware of a pulse in my throat and a tremor in my voice. To disguise them, I quickly told him my name and where I was calling from. Fortunately I added: 'I'm a friend of Roberto Bolaiño's.'

'Roberto Bolaiño?'

'Yes, from the Estrella de Mar campsite,' I explained. 'In Castelldefells. Many years ago you and he —'

'Of course!' I was grateful, rather than relieved, for the interruption. 'The caretaker! I'd almost forgotten him!'

While Miralles talked about his summers at Estrella de Mar and his friendship with Bolaño, I wondered how I would ask him for an interview; finally I resolved not to beat about the bush and to state the matter directly. Miralles didn't stop talking about Bolaño.

'So, what's become of him?'

'He's a writer,' I answered. 'He writes novels.'

'He wrote them back then, too. But no one wanted to publish them.'

'It's different now,' I said. 'He's a successful writer.'

'Really? I'm glad: I always thought he was talented, as well as an out-and-out liar. But I suppose you have to be an out-and-out liar to be a good novelist, don't you?' I heard a brief, dry, distant sound, like a laugh. 'Well, how can I help you?'

'I'm investigating an episode of the Civil War. The execution by firing squad of some Nationalist prisoners at the Sanctuary of Santa Maria del Collell, near Banyoles. It was at the end of the war.' In vain I waited for Miralles' reaction. Impulsively I added: 'You were there, weren't you?'

During the interminable seconds that followed I could hear Miralles' gravelly breathing. Silently, exultantly, I realized I had struck home. When he began to speak again, Miralles' voice sounded darker and slower: completely different.

'Bolaiño told you that?'

'I figured it out. Bolaño told me your story. He told me you spent the whole war with Líster, even retreating with him across Catalonia. Some of Líster's soldiers were at Collell just then, the same time as the execution. So you could easily have been one of them. You were, weren't you?'

Miralles was silent again; I heard his gravelly breathing again, and then a click: I thought he must have lit up a cigarette; a distant conversation in French fleetingly crossed the line. As the silence lengthened, I told myself I'd made a mistake, been too abrupt, but before I could try to rectify it, I finally heard:

'You said you were a writer, didn't you?'

'No,' I said. 'I'm a journalist.'

'Journalist.' Another silence. 'And you're planning to write about this? You really think any of your newspaper's readers are going to be interested in a story that happened sixty years ago?'

'I'm not going to write about it for the paper. I'm writing a book. Look, perhaps I've put it badly. I just want to talk to you for a while, so you can give me your version, so I can tell what really happened, or your version of what happened. It's not a question of settling scores, it's about trying to understand —'

'Understand?' he interrupted me. 'Don't make me laugh! You're the one who doesn't understand. A war is a war. And that's all there is to understand. I know all too well, I spent three years shooting off bullets for Spain, you know? And do you think anyone's ever thanked me for it?'

'Precisely because of that —'

'Shut up and listen, young man,' he cut me off. 'Answer me, do you think anyone's ever thanked me? I'll tell you the answer: nobody. No one has ever thanked me for giving up my youth, fighting for their fucking country. Nobody. Not a single word. Not a gesture. Not a letter. Nothing. And now you come along, sixty years later, with your shitty little newspaper, or your book, or whatever, to ask me if I took part in an execution by firing squad. Why don't you just accuse me of murder straight out?'

'Of all the stories in History,' I thought as Miralles spoke, 'the saddest is Spain's, because it ends badly.' Then I thought: apos;Does it end badly?' I thought: 'And damn the Transition!' I said:

'I'm sorry you've misunderstood me, Seiior Miralles —'

'Miralles, for Christ's sake, Miralles!' roared Miralles. 'No one in my fucking life has ever called me Señor Miralles. My name is Miralles, just Miralles. Got it?'

'Yes, Señor Miralles. I mean Miralles. But there is a misunderstanding here. If you'll let me speak I'll explain.' Miralles didn't say anything; I proceeded. 'A few weeks ago Bolaiño told me your story. I had just finished writing a book about Rafael Sánchez Mazas. Have you heard of him?'

Miralles took his time answering, though clearly not because of any doubt.

'Of course. You're talking about the Falangist, aren't you? José Antonio's mate.'

'Exactly. who escaped the firing squad at Collell. My book is about him, about the execution, about the people who helped him survive afterwards. And about one of Líster's soldiers who spared his life.'

'And what do I have to do with all of this?'

'The other fugitive from the firing squad left a testimony of the event, a book called / Was Murdered by the Reds!

'What a title!'

'Yes, but the book's good, because it tells in detail what happened at Collell. What I don't have is any Republican version of what happened there, and without one my book's hamstrung. When Bolaiño told me your story I thought perhaps you were at Collell too at the time of the execution and could give me your version of events. That's all I want: to chat with you for a while and for you to tell me your version. Nothing more. I promise I won't publish a single line without consulting you beforehand.'

Once again I heard Miralles' breathing, mixed in with the confused conversation in French that crossed the line again. When Miralles began to speak again his voice was as it had been at the beginning of our conversation, and I realized my explanation had managed to placate him.

'How did you get my phone number?'

I told him. Miralles laughed out loud.

'Look, Cercas,' he then began. 'Or do I have to call you Señor Cercas?'

'Call me Javier.'

'Okay, Javier. Do you know how old I am? Eighty-two. I'm an old man and I'm tired. I had a wife and I don't have her any more. I had a daughter and I don't have her any more. I'm still recovering from an embolism. I haven't got much time left, and the only thing I want is to be left alone. Listen, those stories don't interest anyone any more, not even those of us who lived through them; there was a time when they did, but not any more. Someone decided they had to be forgotten and, you know what I say? They were probably right. Besides, half of them are unintentional lies and the rest intentional ones. You're young; believe me I'm grateful for your call, but it would be best if you listened to me, if you forgot about this nonsense and devoted your time to something else.'

I tried to insist, but it was futile. Before hanging up, Miralles asked me to give his regards to Bolaño. 'Tell him I'll see him in Stockton,' he said. 'Where?' I asked. 'In Stockton,' he repeated. 'Tell him: he'll understand.'

Conchi exploded with joy when I phoned to tell her we'd found Miralles; then she exploded with rage when I told her I wasn't going to see him.

'After all this?' she screeched.

'He doesn't want to, Conchi. You have to understand.'

'And what's it matter to you that he doesn't want to?'

We argued. She tried to convince me. I tried to convince her.

'Look, do me a favour,' she finally said. 'Phone Bolaño. You never listen to me but he'll convince you. If you don't call him, I will.'

Partly because I was already planning to, and partly to prevent Conchi from calling him, I phoned Bolaño. I told him about the conversation I'd had with Miralles and the old man's blank refusal of my proposal to go and see him. Bolaiño said nothing. Then I remembered the message Miralles had given me for him; I told him.

'Damn the old guy,' muttered Bolaiño, his voice self-absorbed and sardonic. 'He still remembers.'

'What's it mean?'

'The Stockton thing?'

'What else?'

After a long pause Bolaiño answered my question with another question:

'Have you seen Fat City?' I said I had. 'Miralles really liked movies.' Bolaiño went on. 'He'd watch them on the TV he had set up under the awning of his trailer; sometimes he'd go into Castelldefells and in one afternoon he'd watch three movies in a row, everything that was playing, he didn't care what was on. I usually took advantage of my few days off to go to Barcelona, but one time I ran into him on the seafront in Castelldefells, we went to have an horchata together and then he suggested I come to the pictures with him; since I didn't have anything better to do, I went with him. It might seem incredible that in a holiday resort town they'd be showing a John Huston film, but these things happened back then. Do you know what Fat City means? Something like "city of opportunities", or "fantastic city" or, even better, "some city!" Well, some sarcasm! Because Stockton, the city in the movie, is an atrocious city, where there aren't any opportunities for anybody no opportunities except for failure, that is. For the most absolute and total failure, really. It's strange: almost all boxing movies are about the rise and fall of the protagonist, about how they attain success and then they fail and are forgotten; not here. In Fat City neither of the protagonists an old boxer and a young boxer even glimpse the possibility of success, nor do any of those around them; like that old washed-up Mexican boxer, I don't know if you remember the one, he pisses blood before going into the ring, and enters and leaves the stadium alone, almost in darkness. Anyway, so that night, after the movie, we went to a bar, and ordered beer sitting at the bar and we were there talking and drinking until very late, facing a big mirror which reflected us and the bar, just like the two Stockton boxers at the end of Fat City, I think it was probably both the coincidence and the beer that made Miralles say at some point that we were going to end up the same, defeated and alone and punch-drunk in a dead-end city, pissing blood before going into the ring to fight to the death against our own shadows in an empty stadium. Miralles didn't say that, obviously, the words are mine, but he said something very similar. That night we laughed a lot and when we got back to the campsite it was practically daybreak, everyone was sleeping and the bar was closed, and we kept talking and laughing in that loose way that people laugh at funerals — or places like that, you know and when we had said goodnight and I was going to my tent, stumbling along in the dark, Miralles called me and I turned and saw him: fat and lit by the pale light from a lamp-post, standing straight with his fist raised, and before his repressed laughter burst out again, I heard him whisper in the slumbering darkness of the campsite: quot;Bolaiño, see you in Stockton!" And from that day on, every time we said goodbye, whether it was until the next day or the next summer, Miralles always added: "See you in Stockton!"

We were left in silence. I suppose Bolaiño was waiting for some sort of comment from me; I couldn't say anything, because I was crying.

'Anyway,' said Bolaiño. 'What do you think you'll do now?'

'Fan-fucking-tastic!' shouted Conchi when I told her the news. 'I knew Bolaiño would convince you! When do we leave?'

'We're not both going,' I said, thinking Conchi's presence might make the interview with Miralles easier to get. 'I'm going on my own.'

'Don't be silly! Tomorrow morning we'll get in the car and we'll be in Dijon in a jiffy.'

'I've already made up my mind,' I insisted emphatically, thinking that a trip to Dijon in Conchi's Volkswagen was riskier than Leclerc's column's march from the Maghreb to Chad. 'I'm going by train.'

So on Saturday evening I said goodbye to Conchi at the station ('Give Señor Miralles my regards', she said. 'He's called Miralles, Conchi,' I corrected her. 'Just Miralles'), and boarded a train to Dijon like someone boarding a train to Stockton. It was a sleeper, a night train, and I remember being in the restaurant car, with its springy leather seats and windows licked by the speed of the night, until very late, drinking and smoking and thinking about Miralles; at five in the morning, dishevelled, thirsty and sleepy, I stepped down into Dijon's underground and after walking along the deserted platforms illuminated by globes of weak light, I took a taxi that dropped me off at the Victor Hugo, a little family-run hotel on the rue des Fleurs, not far from the city centre. I went up to my room, took a long drink of water from the tap, had a shower and lay down on the bed. In vain I tried to sleep. I thought about Miralles, whom I'd soon see, and about Sánchez Mazas, whom I'd never see; I thought about their one hypothetical encounter, sixty years earlier, almost a thousand kilometres from there, in the rain one violent morning in the forest; I thought I'd soon know if Miralles were the soldier of Líster's who spared Sánchez Mazas, and also what he'd thought as he looked him in the eye, and why he spared him, and that then perhaps I'd finally understand an essential secret. I thought all this and, while I thought, I started to hear the first sounds of the morning (footsteps in the hallway, the trill of a bird, a car's revving motor) and sense the dawn pushing against the window's shutters.

I got up, opened the window and the shutters: the uncertain light of the morning sun shone on a garden with orange trees and a quiet street lined by houses with sloping tiled roofs; only the birds' chirping broke the village-like silence. I got dressed and had breakfast in the hotel dining room; then, since I thought it was too early to go to the Nimpheas Residential Home, I decided to go for a walk. I'd never been to Dijon before, and not four hours earlier, as the taxi had crossed the streets which were lined with buildings like corpses of prehistoric animals, I had looked sleepily at its stately façades and bright blinking advertisements, and it had struck me as one of those imposing medieval cities that become ghostly at night and only then show their true face, the rotted skeleton of their former might; now, on the other hand, as soon as I got out onto the rue des Fleurs and, turning down rue des Roses and rue Desvoges, arrived at Place D'Arcy which at that hour teemed with cars circling the Arc de Triomphe — it struck me as one of those sad provincial French cities where Simenon's sad husbands commit their sad crimes, a cheerless city with no future, just like Stockton. Although it was cool and the sun barely shone, I sat on the terrace of a bar, in Place Grangier, and had a Coca-Cola. To the right of the terrace, in a cobbled street, a little market was set up on the pavement, beyond which rose Notre Dame church. I paid for my Coke, and wandered through the market stalls looking at this and that, crossed the street and went into the church. At first I thought it was empty, but as I heard my footsteps echoing from the domed Gothic ceiling, I caught sight of a woman who'd just lit a candle at one of the side altars; now she was writing something in a bound notebook that was lying open on a lectern. When I approached the altar she stopped writing and turned to leave; our paths crossed in the middle of the nave, and I saw she was tall, young, pale, distinguished. Arriving at the altar, I couldn't help reading the last sentence written in the notebook: 'Please God, help me and my family in this time of darkness.'

I left the church, stopped a taxi and gave him the address of the Nimpheas Residential Home in Fontaine-Les-Dijon. Twenty minutes later, we stopped on the corner of route des Daix and rue des Combottes, in front of a rectangular building with a pale green façade, which bristled with tiny balconies overlooking a garden with a pond and gravel paths. At the reception desk I asked for Miralles, and a girl with the unmistakable air and attire of a nun looked at me with a touch of curiosity or surprise and asked me if I were a relative. I told her I wasn't.

'A friend, then?'

'More or less,' I said.

'Room twenty-two,' and pointing down a corridor she added: 'but I saw him go that way a little while ago; he's probably in the television room, or in the garden.'

The corridor led into a big living room with enormous windows that opened onto a garden with a fountain and lawn chairs, where several old men were lying in the midday sun, tartan blankets covering their legs. In the living room were two old people — a woman and a man — sitting in imitation leather armchairs and watching TV; neither of them turned when I entered the room. I couldn't help but look at the man: a scar began at his temple, crossed his cheek, his jaw, went down his neck and disappeared under the fleece of his grey flannel shirt. I knew he was Miralles straightaway. Paralyzed, I hastily sought the words with which to approach him; but I didn't find them. As if sleepwalking, with my heart pounding in my throat, I sat down in the armchair next to his; Miralles did not turn, but an imperceptible movement of his shoulders revealed he'd noticed my presence. I decided to wait, I made myself comfortable in the chair, looked at the TV: on the screen the sun shone brilliantly, and a presenter with perfect hair and a hospitable air belied by the condescending rictus on his lips, gave instructions to the contestants.

'I expected you sooner,' murmured Miralles after a while, almost sighing, not taking his eyes off the screen. 'You're a bit late.'

I looked at his stony profile, his sparse grey hair, his beard growing like a minuscule forest of whitish bushes around the wild firebreak of the scar, the stubborn chin, the autumnal prominence of his belly tugging at the buttons of his shirt, and the strong hands speckled with spots, resting on a white cane.

'Late?'

'It's almost lunch time.'

I didn't say anything. I looked at the screen, now crammed with an array of domestic appliances; except for the prerecorded and insistent voice of the presenter and the sounds of domestic chores coming from the corridor, the room was completely silent. Three or four armchairs away from Miralles, the woman was still sitting, motionless, with her cheek resting on a brittle hand, which was furrowed with blue veins; for a moment I thought she was asleep.

'Tell me, Javier,' Miralles spoke, as if we'd been talking for a long while and had stopped for a rest, 'do you like TV?'

'Yes,' I answered, and, transfixed by the cluster of whitish hairs sticking out of his nostrils, answered, 'But I don't watch it much.'

'I don't like it at all. But I watch it a lot: game shows, reports, films, spectaculars, news, everything. You know? I've lived here for five years, and it's like being shut out of the world. The newspapers bore me and I stopped listening to the radio a long time ago, so it's thanks to TV that I find out what's going on out there. This programme, for example,' scarcely lifting the tip of his stick to point at the television. apos;I've never seen anything so stupid in my life: the people have to guess how much each of these things cost, and if they get it right, they keep it. But look how happy they are, look how they laugh.' Miralles went quiet, undoubtedly for me to appreciate for myself the pertinence of his observation. apos;People today are much happier than they were in my day, anyone who's lived long enough knows that. That's why, every time I hear some old man fuming about the future, I know he's doing it to console himself because he's not going to be able to live through it, and every time I hear one of those intellectuals fume against TV I know I'm dealing with a cretin.'

Sitting up a little he turned his big, age-shrunken gladiator's body towards me and examined me with a pair of green eyes, which were strangely unmatched: the right, inexpressive and half-closed by the scar; the left wide open and inquisitive, almost ironic. I then realized that my initial impression of Miralles' face as petrified was only true for the side devastated by the scar; the other was vital, vehemently so. For a moment I thought it was like two people living together in the same body. Slightly intimidated by how close he was, I wondered whether the veterans of Salamis would also have had this derelict look of run-over old truck drivers.

'Do you smoke?' Miralles asked

I went to get my cigarettes out of my jacket pocket, but Miralles didn't let me finish.

'Not here.' Leaning on the arms of the chair and the walking stick, and unceremoniously rejecting my help ('Let go, let go, I'll ask you to lend me a hand when I need it'), he stood up laboriously and ordered: 'Come on, we're going for a walk.'

We were about to go out into the garden when a nun appeared from the corridor; she was about forty, dark-haired, smiling, tall and thin, wearing a white blouse and grey skirt.

'Sister Dominique told me you had a visitor, Miralles,' she said, holding out a pale, big-boned hand to me. 'I'm Sister Fran£oise.'

I shook her hand. Visibly uncomfortable, as if caught red-handed, holding the door half open Miralles introduced us: he said to me that Sister Françoise was the director of the home; he told her my name.

'He works for a newspaper,' he added. 'He's come to interview me.'

'Really?' The nun widened her smile. 'What about?'

'Nothing important,' said Miralles, beckonong me out into the garden with his expression. I obeyed. 'A murder. One that happened sixty years ago.'

'Oh good,' Sister Franchise laughed. 'It's about time you started confessing your crimes.'

'Go to hell, Sister,' Miralles said in farewell. 'You see,' he grumbled later on, as we walked beside a pond carpeted with water lilies and past a group of old men lying in hammocks, 'a whole lifetime spent railing against priests and nuns and here I am, surrounded by nuns who won't even let me smoke. Are you a believer?'

Now we were going down a gravel path bordered by boxwood hedges. I thought about the pale, distinguished-looking woman I'd seen that morning in the church of Notre Dame, lighting a candle and writing a supplication, but before I had time to answer the question, he answered it himself:

'What nonsense! There's nobody who believes any more, except for nuns. I'm not a believer either, you know. I lack imagination. When I die, what I'd like is for someone to dance on my grave, it'd be more cheerful, don't you think? Of course, Sister Françoise wouldn't be too pleased, so I suppose they'll say a mass and that'll be that. But that doesn't bother me, either. Did you like Sister Françoise?'

Since I didn't know whether or not Miralles liked her, I answered that I hadn't yet formed an opinion of her.

'I didn't ask you for your opinion,' answered Miralles. 'I asked if you liked her or not. If you can keep a secret, I'll tell you the truth: I like her a lot. She's good-looking, smart and nice. And young. What else can you ask for in a woman? If she wasn't a nun I'd have pinched her bum years ago. But, being a nun. . to hell with it!'

We passed the front of the entrance to an underground parking lot, left the path and clambered down a small embankment — Miralles with surprising agility, clinging to his stick; me behind him, fearing he would fall at any moment — on the other side of which stretched a patch of lawn with a wooden bench overlooking the intermittent traffic of the rue des Combottes and facing a row of semi-detached houses lined up on the other side. We sat down on the bench.

'Okay,' said Miralles, leaning his stick on the edge of the bench, 'let's have that cigarette.'

I gave it to him, I lit it for him, then I lit one for myself. Miralles smoked with obvious enjoyment, inhaling the smoke deeply.

'Is smoking forbidden in the home?' I asked.

'Nah, it's just that hardly anybody smokes. The doctor made me give it up when I had the embolism. As if one thing had anything to do with the other. But sometimes I sneak into the kitchen, nick a cigarette off the cook and smoke it in my room, or out here. How do you like the view?'

I didn't want to subject him to an interrogation right away, and besides, I felt like listening to him talk about things, so we chatted away about his life in the home, Estrella de Mar, Bolaiño. I could see that his mind was sharp and his memory intact and, as I vaguely listened to him, it occurred to me that Miralles was the same age my father would have been if he were still alive; this struck me as strange, stranger still that I'd thought of my father precisely at that moment and in that place. In a sense, I thought, although it had been more than six years since he'd died, my father still wasn't dead, because there was still someone remembering him. Or maybe it wasn't me remembering my father, but he who clung to my memory, so as not to die completely.

'But you haven't come here to talk about these things,' Miralles interrupted himself, at some point, a while after we'd thrown away our cigarette butts. 'You've come to talk about Collell'

I didn't know where to start, so I just said:

'Then it's true you were at Collell?'

'Of course I was at Collell. Don't play the fool; if I hadn't been there, you wouldn't be here. Of course I was there — a week, maybe two, no more. It was at the end of January '39,1 remember because the 31st of that month I crossed the border, I'll never forget that date. What I don't know is why we were there for so long. We were the remains of the V Corps of the Army of the Ebro, the majority of us veterans of the whole war, and we'd been firing away without a break since the summer until the front disintegrated and we had to make for the border like bats out of hell, with the Moors and the fascists hot on our heels. And all of a sudden, a few steps from France, they made us stop. Sure, we were grateful, because we'd taken a hell of a beating; but we didn't understand what those days of truce were in aid of. There were rumours; there were some who said Líster was preparing the defence of Gerona, or a counterattack who knows where. Bullshit! We didn't have any weapons or ammunition or supplies or anything, really, we weren't even an army, just a bunch of wrecks who'd been hungry for months, scattered through the woods. But yeah, as I said, at least we got a rest. You know Collell?'

'A little.'

'It's not far from Gerona, near Banyoles. Some of them stayed there, others in the nearby villages; others were sent to Collell.'

'What for?'

'I don't know. Really, I don't think anyone knew. Don't you see? It was unimaginable pandemonium, every man for himself. Everybody gave orders, but nobody obeyed them. People deserted as soon as they got the chance.'

'And why didn't you desert?'

'Desert?' Miralles looked at me as if his brain weren't prepared to process the question. 'Well, I don't know. It didn't occur to me, I guess. At times like that it's not so easy to think, you know? Besides, where was I going to go? My parents had died and my brother was at the front too. . Look,' he lifted his stick, as if something unexpected had come along to get him out of a fix, 'here they are.'

In front of us, on the other side of the grille that separated the garden of the residential home from the rue des Combottes, a group of small children were walking past, shepherded by two teachers. I regretted having interrupted Miralles, because the question (or his inability to answer it; or perhaps it was just the children passing by) seemed to have disconnected him from his memories.

'You can set your watch by them,' he said. 'Have you got kids?'

'No.'

'Don't you like kids?'

'I like them,' I said, and thought of Conchi. 'But I don't have any.'

'I like them too,' he said, waving his stick at them. 'Look at that little rascal, the one in the hat.'

We sat in silence for a bit, watching the children. I didn't have to say anything, but philosophized inanely:

'They always seem so happy.'

'You haven't looked very closely,' Miralles corrected me. apos;They never seem it. But they are. Just like us. What happens is that none of us notice, not us and not them.'

'What do you mean?'

Miralles smiled for the first time.

'We're alive, aren't we?' He stood up with the aid of his stick. 'Well then, it's time for lunch.'

As we walked back to the home I said:

'You were talking about Collell.'

'Would you mind giving me another cigarette?'

As if trying to bribe him, I gave him the whole pack. Putting it into his pocket he asked:

'What was I saying?'

'That it was pandemonium while you were there.'

'Sure.' He picked up the thread easily. 'Imagine the scene. There we were, what was left of the battalion; a Basque captain was in charge, a fairly decent guy, I can't remember his name right now, the commander had been killed in a bombing raid on the way out of Barcelona. But there were civilians there too, Carabineros, SIM agents. All kinds. I don't think anyone knew what we were doing there; waiting for the order to cross the border, I suppose, which was the only thing we could do.'

'Weren't you guarding the prisoners?'

He grinned sceptically.

'More or less.'

'More or less?'

'Yeah, of course we guarded them,' he gave in reluctantly. apos;What I mean is that the ones in charge of the prisoners were the Carabineros. But, sometimes, when the prisoners went out for a walk or something, they ordered us to stay with them. If you call that guarding, I guess we guarded them.'

'And did you know who they were?'

'We knew they were big shots. Bishops, officers, fifth-column Falangists. People like that.'

We'd walked back up the gravel path; the old folks who minutes before had been sunning themselves had deserted their hammocks and were now chatting in groups at the entrance to the building and in the lounge where the television was still on.

'It's still early: let them go in,' said Miralles, taking me by the arm and forcing me to sit down beside him, at the edge of the pond. 'You wanted to talk about Sánchez Mazas, didn't you?' I nodded. 'They used to say he was a good writer. What do you think?'

'That he was a good minor writer.'

'And what does that mean?'

'That he was a good writer, but not a great writer.'

'So a person can be a good writer at the same time as being a huge son of a bitch. What a world!'

'Did you know Sánchez Mazas was at Collell?'

'Of course! How could I not know? He was the biggest of the big shots! We all knew. We had all heard of Sánchez Mazas and knew enough about him — I mean that thanks to him and four or five others like him what happened had happened. I'm not sure, but I think when he arrived at Collell, we'd already been there a few days.'

'Could be. Sánchez Mazas only arrived five days before they shot them. You told me before that you crossed the border on the 31st of January. The execution was the 30th.'

I was about to ask him if he'd still been at Collell that day, and if he remembered what happened, when Miralles, who'd started picking the earth out of the cracks between the paving stones with the tip of his stick, began to speak.

'The night before they'd told us to get our things together, because we'd be leaving the next day,' he explained. 'In the morning we saw a bunch of prisoners leave the Sanctuary escorted by some Carabineros.'

'Did you know they were going to shoot them?'

'No. We thought they were going to make them do some work or maybe swap them, there'd been a lot of talk of that. Although from the expressions on their faces it didn't really look like they were going to exchange them.'

'Did you know Sánchez Mazas? Did you recognize him among the prisoners?'

'No, I don't know. . I don't think so.'

'You didn't know him or you didn't see him?'

'I didn't see him. Of course I knew him. How could I not have known him? We all knew him!'

Miralles swore that someone like Sánchez Mazas couldn't have gone unnoticed in a place like that, so just like all the rest of his comrades, he'd seen him many times, when he went out to walk in the garden with the other prisoners; he still vaguely remembered his thick glasses, his prominent nose, the sheepskin jacket in which, a few days later, he'd triumphantly relate his incredible adventure for Franco's cameras. . Miralles fell quiet, as if the effort of remembering had left him momentarily exhausted. A faint sound of cutlery came from inside the building; in a fleeting glance I saw the television had been turned off. Miralles and I were alone in the garden now.

'And then?'

Miralles stopped digging with his stick and inhaled the clear midday air.

'Then nothing.' He exhaled slowly. 'The truth is I can't really remember, it was all so confused. I remember we heard shots and started running. Then someone shouted that the prisoners were trying to escape, so we started searching the woods to find them. I don't know how long the chase lasted, but once in a while you'd hear a shot, and they'd caught one of them. Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if more than one escaped.'

'Two escaped.'

'Like I said, it doesn't surprise me. It had started to rain and the forest was pretty dense. Or at least that's how I remember it. Anyway, when we got tired of looking (or when someone gave the order) we went back to the Sanctuary, got the rest of our things together and that same morning we left.'

'In other words, according to you, there was no firing squad.'

'Don't put words in my mouth, young man. I'm just telling you how things were, or at least how I experienced them. The interpretation is your job, that's why you're a journalist, isn't it? Besides, you have to admit, if anybody deserved to be shot back then, Sánchez Mazas did; if they'd gotten rid of him in time, we might have been spared the war, don't you think?'

'I don't think anyone deserves to be shot.'

Miralles turned unhurriedly and looked at me steadily with his unmatched eyes, as if looking in mine for an answer to his ironic bewilderment; then an affectionate smile, that for a moment I feared would lead to a roar of laughter, softened the sudden toughness of his features.

'Don't tell me you're a pacifist!' he said, and put a hand on my collar bone. 'You might have told me that from the start! And while we're at it,' leaning on me, he stood up and pointed with his stick towards the home, 'let's see how you manage with Sister Françoise.'

I ignored Miralles' taunt and because I thought my time was running out, hastily asked:

'I'd like to ask you one last question.'

'Just one?' He spoke up to address the nun: 'Sister, the journalist wants to ask me one last question.'

'That's fine with me,' said Sister Françoise. 'But if the answer goes on too long, you're going to miss your lunch, Miralles.' Smiling at me, she added: 'Why don't you come back this afternoon?'

'Yes, young man,' Miralles agreed jovially. 'Come back this afternoon and we'll go on talking.'

We decided I'd come back about five, after his siesta and rehabilitation exercises. Along with Sister Françoise I accompanied Miralles to the dining room. 'Don't forget the tobacco,' Miralles whispered in my ear, in farewell. Then he went into the dining room, and as he sat down at a table between two white-haired old ladies who'd already started to eat, ostentatiously shot me a conspiratorial wink.

'What did you give him?' asked Sister Françoise as we walked towards the exit.

Since I thought she was referring to the pack of forbidden cigarettes that bulged in Miralles' shirt pocket, I blushed.

'Give him?'

'He seems very happy.'

'Ah,' I smiled with relief. 'We were talking about the war.'

'What war?'

'The war in Spain.'

'I didn't know Miralles had fought in that war.'

I was about to tell her that Miralles hadn't fought in one war, but many, but I couldn't, because I suddenly saw Miralles walking across the Libyan desert towards the Murzuk oasis — young, ragged, dusty and anonymous, carrying the tricolour flag of a country not his own, of a country that is all countries and also the country of liberty and which only exists because he and four Moors and a black guy are raising that flag as they keep walking onwards, onwards, ever onwards.

'Does anyone come to see him?' I asked Sister Françoise.

'No. At first his son-in-law used to come, his daughter's widower. But then he stopped coming; I think they fell out. Miralles can be a slightly prickly character after all — I can tell you one thing though: he has a heart of gold.'

Listening to her talk about the embolism that paralysed Miralles' whole left side a few months ago, I thought how Sister Françoise spoke like the director of an orphanage trying to place an unruly pupil with a potential client; I also thought how Miralles was perhaps not an unruly pupil, but he certainly was an orphan, and then I wondered whose memory he'd cling to when he was dead so as not to die completely.

'We thought that was the end,' Sister Françoise went on. 'But he's recovered very well; he's got the constitution of an ox. He hasn't taken well to giving up smoking or eating without salt, but he'll get used to it.' When we got to the desk, she smiled and held out her hand. 'Well then, we'll see you this afternoon, won't we?'

Before leaving the residential home I looked at my watch: it had just gone twelve. I had five empty hours before me. I walked awhile along the route des Daix looking for a bar with a terrace where I could get something to drink, but, since I didn't find one anywhere — the neighbourhood was a network of wide suburban avenues with little semi-detached houses — as soon as I saw a taxi I stopped it and asked him to take me to the city centre. He dropped me off in a semi-circular plaza that opened onto the Palace of the Dukes of Burgundy. In front of its façade, sitting at a table on a terrace, I drank two glasses of beer. From where I was sitting I could see a sign with the name of the plaza: Place de la Liberation. Inevitably I thought of Miralles entering Paris through the Porte-de-Gentilly the night of 24 August 1944, with the first Allied troops, on board his tank which would have been called Guadalajara or Zaragoza or Belchite. Beside me, on the terrace, a very young couple were marvelling at the laughter and expressions of their pink baby, while busy, indifferent people walked by. I thought: Not a single one of these people knows of the existence of that practically one-eyed, dying old man who smokes cigarettes on the sly and at this very minute is eating without salt a few kilometres from here, but there's not a single one of them who's not indebted to him. I thought: No one will remember him when he's dead. I saw Miralles again, walking with the flag of the Free French across the infinite, burning sands of Libya, walking towards the Murzuk oasis while people were walking across this French plaza and across all the plazas in Europe going about their business, not knowing that their fate and the fate of the civilization they'd abdicated responsibility for depended on Miralles continuing to walk onwards, ever onwards. Then I remembered Sánchez Mazas and José Antonio and it occurred to me that perhaps they weren't so wrong and that at the eleventh hour it always has been a squad of soldiers that has saved civilization. I thought: What José Antonio and Sánchez Mazas could never imagine was that neither they nor anyone like them could ever form part of that eleventh-hour squad; on the contrary it would be formed by four Moors, a black guy, and a Catalan lathe operator who happened to be there by chance or bad luck, and who would have died laughing if anyone had told him he was saving us all in that time of darkness, and perhaps precisely for that reason — because he didn't imagine civilization at that moment depended on him — he was saving it and saving us, not knowing his final reward would be an unknown room in a residential home for the poor, in a sad city of a country that wasn't even his country, and where no one except maybe a smiling skinny nun, who didn't know he'd fought in the war, would miss him.

I ate lunch in the Café Central, in Place Grangier, very near to where I'd had breakfast that morning and, after drinking a coffee and a whisky at a Café on rue de la Poste and buying a carton of cigarettes, returned to the Résidence des Nimphéas. It wasn't yet five when Miralles invited me up to his room and I noticed, not without surprise, that it wasn't the sordid institutional room I'd expected, but a neat, orderly and bright little apartment: one glance showed me a kitchen, a washroom, a bedroom and a little lounge with almost bare walls, two big armchairs, a table and big window onto a balcony open to the afternoon sun. I handed Miralles the carton of cigarettes in greeting.

'Don't be an idiot,' he said, tearing off the cellophane wrapper and taking out two packets. 'Where do you expect me to hide this?' He gave me back the rest of the carton. apos;Would you like a nescafé? Decaffeinated, of course. They've forbidden me the real stuff.'

I didn't feel like one, but I accepted. As he made the coffee, Miralles asked me how I liked the apartment; I told him I liked it very much. He told me about the services (medical, recreational, cultural, cleaning) the home offered, and the rehabilitation exercises he had to do daily. When he'd finished making the coffee, I picked up the cups to take them into the lounge, but he motioned to me to stop; opening a low cupboard, he leaned half-way in with the agility of a contortionist and triumphantly brought out a hipflask.

'If you don't add a bit of this,' he remarked while pouring a shot in each cup, 'this stuff tastes like shit.'

Miralles put the flask back in its place,| and then, each with our cup, we sat in the armchairs in the little lounge. I took a sip of nescafe; what Miralles had added was cognac.

'Now then,' said Miralles, amused, almost flattered, sitting back in his chair and stirring his nescafe. 'Shall we carry on with the interrogation? I assure you I've told you everything I know.'

I suddenly felt ashamed to keep asking him things, and felt like telling him that, even if I didn't have any questions to ask him, I'd be there anyway, chatting and drinking nescafe with him; for a moment I thought that I already knew everything I needed to know from Miralles, and, I don't know why, I remembered Bolaiño and the night when he'd come across Miralles dancing a paso doble with Luz under the awning of his caravan and understood that his time at the campsite was up. In a flash I thought of Bolaño and my book, of Soldiers of Salamis, of Conchi and of the many months I'd spent searching for the man who'd saved Sánchez Mazas' life and for the meaning of a look and a shout in the woods, searching for a man who'd danced a paso doble in the garden of an improvised prison, sixty years earlier, just as Miralles and Luz had danced to another paso doble (or maybe the same one) in a working-class campsite in Castelldefells, under the awning of his improvised home. I didn't ask him anything, and said, as if it were a revelation:

'Sánchez Mazas survived the firing squad.' Miralles nodded, patiently, enjoying his nescafe with cognac. 'He survived thanks to a particular man, I added. One of Líster's soldiers.'

I told him the story. When I'd finished, Miralles set his empty cup on the table and, leaning over a bit, and without getting out of the chair, he opened the balcony window and looked outside.

'Sounds like fiction, that story,' he said, in a neutral tone of voice, as he took a cigarette out of the half-empty pack from the morning.

I remembered Miquel Aguirre and said:

'Possibly. But all wars are full of stories that sound like fiction, aren't they?'

'Only for those who don't live through them.' He exhaled a plume of smoke and spat something out, perhaps a shred of tobacco. 'Only for those who tell them. For those who go to war to tell it, not to fight it. What was the name of that American novelist who entered Paris. .?'

'Hemingway.'

'Hemingway, that's it. What a clown!'

Miralles went quiet, distracted, as he watched the columns of smoke waving slowly in the still light on the balcony, through which the intermittent traffic noise reached us.

'And this story about Líster's soldier,' he started, turning back to me: the right half of his face had again taken on its stone-like appearance; on the left was an ambiguous expression of indifference and disappointment, almost annoyance. apos;Who told you that?'

I explained. Miralles nodded, his mouth a circumflex, almost mocking. It was obvious the jovial spirit he'd welcomed me with that afternoon had disappeared. I didn't know what to say, but I knew I had to say something; but Miralles got in there first:

'Tell me something. You don't really care about Sánchez Mazas and his famous firing squad, right?'

'I don't know what you mean,' I said, quite honestly.

He looked into my eyes with curiosity.

'Got to hand it to you fucking writers!' he laughed. 'So what you were looking for was a hero. And I'm that hero, is that it? Can you believe it! But hadn't we decided you were a pacifist? Well, you know something? There aren't any heroes in peacetime, except maybe that little Indian guy who always went around half naked. . And he wasn't even a hero, or only once they'd killed him. Heroes are only heroes when they die or get killed. The real heroes are born out of war and die in war. There are no living heroes, young man. They're all dead. Dead, dead, dead.' His voice cracked; after a pause, as he swallowed hard, he stubbed out his cigarette. 'Do you want another of these concoctions?'

He went to the kitchen with the empty cups. From the little lounge I heard him blow his nose; when he came back his eyes were shining, but he seemed to have calmed down. I suppose I must have tried to apologize for something, because I remember that, after handing me the nescafé and leaning back again in his armchair, Miralles interrupted me impatiently, almost irritated.

'Don't apologize, young man. You haven't done anything wrong. Besides, at your age you should know by now that a man doesn't apologize: he does what he does and says what he says, and then puts up with it. I'm going to tell you something you don't know, something about the war.' He took a sip of nescafé; so did I (Miralles had gone overboard with the cognac). 'When I left for the front in '36, these other boys went with me. They were from Terrassa, like me; very young almost children — just like me; I knew some of them to see them or to speak to, but most of them I didn't. There were the García Segués brothers (Joan and Lela), Miquel Cardos, Cagi Baldrich, Pipo Canal, el Gordo Odena, Santi Brugada and Jordi Gudayol. We fought the war together, both wars, ours and the other one, though they were both the same one. None of them survived. They all died. The last one was Lela Garcia Segues. At first I got along better with his brother Joan, who was the same age as me, but in time Lela became my best friend, the best I've ever had: we were such good friends we didn't even have to talk when we were together. He died in the summer of '43, in a town near Tripoli, crushed by an English tank. You know what? Since the war ended, not a single day has gone by when I haven't thought about them. They were so young. . They all died. All of them dead. Dead. Dead. All of them. None of them tasted the good things in life: none of them ever had a woman all to himself, none of them knew the wonder of having a child and of their child, at three or four years of age, climbing into his bed between him and his wife, on a Sunday morning, in a room full of sunshine. .' At some point Miralles had started to cry: his face and his voice hadn't changed, but inconsolable tears streamed down the smooth channel of his scar, rolling more slowly down his unshaven cheeks. 'Sometimes I dream of them and then I feel guilty. I see them all: intact and greeting me with jokes, just as young as they were then, because time doesn't pass for them, they're just as young, and they ask me why I'm not with them — as if I'd betrayed them, because my true place was there; or as if I were taking the place of one of them; or as if in reality I had died sixty years ago in some ditch in Spain or Africa or France and I were dreaming a future life with a wife and children, a life that would end here, in this room in a home, chatting away to you.' Miralles kept talking, more quickly, without drying the tears that ran down his neck and soaked into his flannel shirt. 'Nobody remembers them, you know? Nobody. Nobody even remembers why they died, why they didn't have a wife and children and a sunny room; nobody remembers, least of all, those they fought for. There's no lousy street in any lousy town in any fucking country named after any of them, nor will there ever be. Understand? You understand, don't you? Oh, but I remember, I do remember, I remember them all, Lela and Joan and Gabi and Odena and Pipo and Brugada and Gudayol, I don't know why I do but I do, not a single day goes by that I don't think of them.'

Miralles stopped speaking, took out his handkerchief, dried his tears, blew his nose; he did it unabashed, as if it didn't embarrass him to cry in public, just like the ancient Homeric warriors, or a soldier of Salamis would have done. Then he gulped down the rest of his nescafe that had gone cold in the cup. We sat smoking in silence. The light on the balcony was fading; only an occasional car passed. I felt at ease, slightly inebriated, almost happy. I thought: He remembers for the same reason I remember my father and Ferlosio his and Miquel Aguirre his and Jaume Figueras his and Bolaiño his Latin American friends, all of them soldiers killed in wars already lost: he remembers because, although they died sixty years ago, they're still not dead, precisely because he remembers them. Or perhaps it's not him remembering them, but them clinging to him, so they won't die off entirely. But when Miralles dies, I thought, his friends will die off, too, because there won't be anyone to remember them, to keep them from dying.

For a long time we chatted about other things, between nescafes, cigarettes and long silences, as if we hadn't just met that very morning. Then Miralles caught me sneaking a look at my watch.

'I'm boring you,' he interrupted himself.

'You're not boring me,' I answered. 'But my train leaves at eight-thirty.'

'Do you have to get going?'

'I think so.'

Miralles stood up from his armchair and picked up his stick. He said:

'I haven't been much help, have I? Do you think you'll be able to write your book?'

'I don't know,' I answered, truthfully; but then I said: 'I hope so.' And added: 'If I do, I promise I'll talk about your friends.'

As if he hadn't heard me, Miralles said:

'I'll see you out.' He pointed to the carton of cigarettes on the table. 'And don't forget those.'

We were about to leave the apartment when Miralles stopped.

'Tell me something.' He spoke with his hand on the doorknob; the door was half open. 'Why did you want to find the soldier who saved Sánchez Mazas?'

Without a moment's hesitation I answered:

'To ask him what he thought that morning, in the forest, after the execution, when he recognized Sánchez Mazas and looked him in the eye. To ask him what he saw in those eyes. Why he spared him, why he didn't give him away, why he didn't kill him.'

'Why would he kill him?'

'Because in wars people kill people,' I said. 'Because thanks to Sánchez Mazas and four or five guys like him what happened had happened, and now that soldier was on his way to an exile with no way back. Because if anybody deserved to be shot it was Sánchez Mazas.'

Miralles recognized his words, nodded with a hint of a smile and, opening the door the rest of the way, gave me a tap on the back of the legs with his stick and said:

'Let's get going, we can't have you missing your train.'

We took the elevator down to the ground floor; from reception we called a taxi.

'Say goodbye to Sister Françoise for me,' I said, as we walked towards the exit.

'You're not planning to come back?'

'Not if you don't want me to.'

'Who said I didn't want you to?'

'In that case, I promise I'll come back.'

Outside, the light was rusty: it was dusk. We waited for the taxi at the garden gate in front of a traffic light that changed for nobody, because traffic at the intersection of route des Daix and rue Combotte was scant and the pavement deserted. On my right was an apartment building, not very high, with big picture windows and balconies overlooking the garden of the Nimpheas Residential Home. I thought it was a good place to live. I thought anywhere was a good place to live. I thought about Líster's soldier, and I heard myself say:

'What do you think he thought?'

'The soldier?' I turned to him. Leaning all his weight on his stick, Miralles watched the traffic light, which was red. When it changed from red to green, Miralles fixed me with a blank stare. 'Nothing,' he said

'Nothing?'

'Nothing.'

The taxi took a while. It was quarter to eight, and I still had to stop by the hotel to settle my bill and get my things.

'If you come back, bring me something.'

'Besides tobacco?'

'Yes.'

'Do you like music?'

'I used to. I don't listen to it any more; each time I do it makes me feel bad. I suddenly start thinking about what's happened to me, and especially what hasn't happened to me.'

'Bolaiño told me you danced a pretty mean paso doble.'

'He said that?' he laughed. 'Fucking Chilean!'

'One night he saw you dancing to "Sighing for Spain" with a friend of yours, beside your caravan.'

'If you convince Sister Françoise, I can probably still dance it,' said Miralles, winking his scarred eye. 'It's a beautiful paso doble, don't you think? Look, here's your taxi.'

The taxi stopped at the corner, beside us.

'So,' said Miralles. 'I hope you come back soon.'

'I'll be back.'

'Can I ask you a favour?'

'Anything.'

Looking at the traffic light, he said:

'It's been a long time since I hugged anyone.'

I heard the sound of Miralles' stick falling to the ground, I felt his enormous arms squeezing me while mine could barely reach around him, I felt very small and very fragile, I smelled medicines and years of enclosure and boiled vegetables, and most of all old man, and knew that this was the unhappy smell of heroes.

We let go and Miralles picked up his stick and pushed me towards the taxi. I got in, gave the driver the address of the Victor Hugo, asked him to wait a moment and rolled down the window.

'There's one thing I didn't tell you,' I said to Miralles. apos;Sánchez Mazas knew the soldier who spared him. One time he saw him dancing a paso doble in the gardens of Collell. Alone. The paso doble was "Sighing for Spain".' Miralles stepped off the kerb and came over to the taxi, leaning his big hand on the rolled-down window. I was sure I knew what the answer was going to be, because I didn't think Miralles could deny me the truth. Almost pleading, I asked him: 'It was you, wasn't it?'

After an instant's hesitation, Miralles smiled widely, affectionately, just showing his double row of worn-down teeth. His answer was:

'No.'

He took his hand off the window and ordered the taxi to start up. Then, abruptly, he said something that I didn't hear (maybe it was a name, but I'm not sure) because the taxi had started moving and though I stuck my head out the window and asked him what he'd said, it was already too late for him to hear me or answer me; I saw him raise his stick in a final farewell gesture and then, through the back window of the taxi, walk back to the home, slow, dispossessed, practically one-eyed, and happy, with his grey shirt, his threadbare trousers and felt slippers, getting smaller and smaller against the pale green of the façade, his proud head, tough profile, his large, swaying and dilapidated body, supporting his unsteady steps with his stick, and when he opened the garden gate I felt a sort of premature nostalgia, as if, instead of seeing Miralles, I were already remembering him, perhaps because at that moment I thought I wasn't going to see him again, that I was always going to remember him like this.

I got my things from the hotel as fast as I could, paid the bill and arrived at the station just in time to catch the train. It was again a sleeper, very similar to the one I'd taken on the way here, maybe it was the same one. I settled into my compartment as I felt the train start off on its way. Then, down empty aisles carpeted in green, I made my way to the restaurant, a carriage with a double row of impeccably laid tables and springy seats of pumpkin-coloured leather. There was only one left. I sat down and, since I wasn't hungry, ordered a whisky. I savoured it, smoking, while on the other side of the window Dijon disintegrated in the twilight, soon converted into a series of crops barely visible in the growing darkness. Now the big window duplicated the restaurant car. It duplicated me: I looked fat and aged, a little sad. But I felt euphoric, immensely happy. I thought as soon as I got to Gerona, I'd phone Conchi and Bolaño and tell them what Miralles was like and about the city that was called Dijon, but whose real name was Stockton. I planned one, two, three trips to Stockton. I'd go to Stockton and take an apartment in the building on route des Daix, across from the residential home, and spend the mornings and afternoons chatting with Miralles, smoking cigarettes on the hidden bench or in his apartment, and later perhaps not chatting, not saying anything, just passing the time, because by then we'd be such good friends we wouldn't need to talk to enjoy being together; and at night I'd sit on the balcony of my apartment, with a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of wine and I'd wait until I saw that on the other side of the route des Daix the light in Miralles' apartment had been switched off, and then I'd stay there for a little while longer, in the dark, smoking and drinking while he slept or lay awake across the street, very near, lying in his bed and perhaps remembering his dead friends. And I regretted not having let Conchi come with me to Dijon and for a moment imagined the pleasure of being there with her and Miralles, and with Bolaiño too, imagining that between the three of us we'd convince Bolaño to go to Dijon like someone going to Stockton, and Bolaiño would go to Stockton with his wife and his son, and the six of us would hire a car and go on outings to the surrounding villages; we'd form an odd, impossible family and then Miralles would finally stop being an orphan (and perhaps so would I) and Conchi would feel a terrible longing to have a child (and perhaps so would I). I also imagined that one day, not too late in the evening, Sister Françoise would call me at my house in Gerona, I'd call Conchi at her house in Quart and then Bolaño at his house in Blanes; and the three of us would leave the next day for Dijon although where we'd arrive would be Stockton, finally Stockton and we'd have to empty Miralles' apartment, throw out his clothes and sell or give away his furniture and keep a few things, very few because Miralles undoubtedly kept very few things, perhaps the odd photograph of him smiling happily between his wife and daughter or in a soldier's uniform among other young men in soldiers' uniforms, not much more, who knows, maybe an old vinyl record of scratchy old paso dobles that no one had listened to for ages. And there would be a funeral and a burial, and at the burial music, the cheerful music of a sorrowful paso doble playing on a scratched vinyl record; and then I'd take Sister Françoise by the hand and ask her to dance with me beside Miralles' grave, I'd insist that she dance to a music she didn't know how to dance to on Miralles' fresh grave, in secret, so no one would see us — so no one in Dijon or in France or in Spain or in all of Europe would know that a good-looking, clever nun (with whom Miralles always wanted to dance a paso doble and whose bum he never dared touch) and a provincial journalist were dancing in an anonymous cemetery of a melancholy city beside the grave of an old Catalan Communist, no one would know except a non-believing and maternal fortune-teller and a Chilean lost in Europe who would be smoking, his eyes clouded, standing back a little and very serious, watching us dance a paso doble beside Miralles' grave just as one night years before he'd seen Miralles and Luz dance to another paso doble under the awning of a trailer in the Estrella de Mar campsite, seeing it and wondering if maybe that paso doble and this one were in fact the same, wondering without expecting an answer, because he already knew that the only answer is that there is no answer, the only answer is a sort 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 that nun is and that journalist who is me dancing beside Miralles' grave as if their lives depended on that absurd dance or like someone asking for help for themselves and their family in a time of darkness. And there, sitting in the soft pumpkin-coloured seat in the restaurant car, rocked by the clattering of the train and the whirlwind of words spinning round unceasingly in my head, with the bustle of passengers dining around me and my almost empty glass of whisky in front of me, and in the window, beside me, the distant image of a sad man who couldn't be me but was me, there I suddenly saw my book, the book I'd been after for years, I saw it there in its entirety, finished, from the first line to the last, there I knew that, although nowhere in any city of any fucking country would there ever be a street named after Miralles, if I told his story, Miralles would still be alive in some way and if I talked about them, his friends would still be alive too, the Garcia Segues brothers — Joan and Lela — and Miquel Cardos and Gabi Baldrich and Pipo Canal and el Gordo Odena and Santi Brugada and Jordi Gudayol would still be alive even though for many years they'd been dead, dead, dead, dead, I'd talk about Miralles and about all of them, not leaving a single one out, and of course about the Figueras brothers and Angelats and Maria Ferré, and also about my father and even Bolafio's young Latin Americans, but above all about Sánchez Mazas and that squad of soldiers that at the eleventh hour has always saved civilization and in which he wasn't worthy to serve but Miralles was, about those inconceivable moments when all of civilization depends on a single man, and about that man and about how civilization repays that man. I saw my book, whole and real, my completed true tale, and knew that now I only had to write it, put it down on paper because it was in my head from start ('It was the summer of 1994, more than six years ago now, when I first heard about Rafael Sánchez Mazas facing the firing squad') to finish, an ending where an old journalist, unsuccessful and happy, smokes and drinks whisky in the restaurant car of a night train that travels across the French countryside among people who are having dinner and are happy and waiters in black bow-ties, while he thinks of a washed-up man who had courage and instinctive virtue and so never erred or didn't err in the one moment when it really mattered, he thinks of a man who was honest and brave and pure as pure and of the hypothetical book which will revive him when he's dead, and then the journalist watches his sad, aged reflection in the window licked by the night until slowly the reflection dissolves and in the window appears an endless and burning desert and a lone soldier, carrying the flag of a country not his own, of a country that is all countries and only exists because that soldier raises its abolished flag; young, ragged, dusty and anonymous, infinitely tiny in that blazing sea of infinite sand, walking onwards beneath the black sun of the window, not really knowing where he's going or who he's going with or why he's going, not really caring as long as it's onwards, onwards, onwards, ever onwards.