Two ideas among many others slip between the pages of Soldiers of Salamis, Javier Cercas's novel: "As a belief, and belief are not at issue, about nationalism can not be discussed: the independence movement yes. "And the other, the idea that is woven into this novel about the lineage of the hero:
" In the conduct of a hero is almost always a blind, irrational, instinctive, which is in its nanturaleza and what can not escape .
And the truth is that for many years since I touched a novel like this. The action is set towards the end of the English Civil War in the early months of 1939, amid a "stampede disorder." Franco's troops are heading to Catalonia and razing hundreds of thousands of Republicans to retreat into exile beyond the Pyrenees.
The tone of this whole "real story" is given from the beginning by the narrator's mood: a journalist, deserted by his wife, who begins to assume his failure as a writer and also just to survive the mourning of his father. This perspective or point of view, encouraged or discouraged by the illness of depression, it feels like the treble clef in the novel: the character diluted narrator in the personal defeat of those defeated by the war fighters.
not have to see the title directly to the battle of Salamis, an island located to the south near Athens, who won the Greeks against the Persians in 460 BC commanded by a brilliant strategist: Themistocles. In memory of Aeschylus, the Athenian fleet sank 200 ships of Xerxes, the son of Darius, leaving a sea dotted with "wrecks and dead men." The reference by Cercas, of course, is symbolic, since it calls for a sentence of novelist Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio that interviewers removed off the overwhelming with long disquisitions on the use of the planer or the defeat of the Persian ships in the battle of Salamis.
And here's the link to the primordial image of the novel. Ferlosio Sanchez's father (author of that famous novel by the 50, the Jarama) is none other than the central character of Soldiers of Salamis: Rafael Sánchez Mazas, writer, politician, founder and ideologist of the Falange and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who Cercas identified as instigators of the fratricidal war, the same that were inspired by a quote from Oswald Spengler, that has always been a platoon of soldiers at the last minute which has saved civilization.
When escaping from a prison in Madrid, Sánchez Mazas moves to Barcelona and there is apprehended by a bunch of Republican soldiers Military Intelligence Service, the remains of broken units, which leads him to a place known as the Collell, near Gerona, in the region of Banyoles. There someone organizes a firing squad and Sánchez Mazas bullets barely graze. In the confusion flees into the woods, pursued by the militia. One of them finally discovers him and pointing a gun in a ditch. He looks into my eyes and shouted to his companions: "For there is nobody here!" Turn around and leave.
That scene is hung throughout the novel. The Francoist Falange spend a lifetime wondering who will saved and why. Does get the post of minister without portfolio and account and account history. His words are so precise and silences that patterns so accurate that it seems, has fences, that "instead of telling the story is recited as an actor playing his role in a stage."
In a sort of Proustian digression, because we know that memory plays, Javier Cercas writes that "what Sánchez Mazas had told his son (and me what he told me) was not what I remembered what happened, but she remembered having had other times. " Painted by a patina of half truths and lies, the stories seem subsequent comply or not comply with the reality of the facts as if each one of their informants invented their own way.
Both the literature of memory as the novel of "the real and fictitious," the mixture of fact and fiction, the attempt to create "true fictions" from a "real story" is conceived in a context in itself dramatic the war, are enriched by the subtle perceptions of the author. Not because they escape the clichés on irregular and intermittent palpitations memory or on the promiscuity between "truth and illusion" (which were already at the time of Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca), but because they always have Javier Cercas in a very personal tone: "As often happens with the memory of some old people, because they are about to run if she remembered much more clearly an afternoon of your childhood that happened a few hours ago ..." Or
he says novelist Roberto Bolaño, who enters as a character at the end: "To write novels does not lack imagination. Only memory. The novels are written by combining memories. "
Javier Cercas, or narrator character in the novel convention, initiate an investigation, the investigative journey of classic Citizen Kane, Orson Wells film: is wondering here and there, after sixty years , who could have been that soldier who Sánchez Mazas was only seen once before among the troops of the camp, a soldier in the tedium of monitoring a well-known solo dance and sentimental pasodoble, Sighs of Spain.
And here comes the third part of the novel, the third act, another twist: an old Republican refugee who lives in France usually go in summer to a beach on the Costa Brava and there is surprised one night Roberto Bolaño. Marked by all the wounds of a thousand battles in which he participated, in Teruel, in Africa, in the French Resistance in Normandy, Antonio and Antonio Miralles, more than 80 years, is surprised one night while dancing a pasodoble, Sighs of Spain, with a prostitute.
fences, or the narrator, I wanted to know why he thought that morning in the woods after the shooting, when he recognized Sánchez Mazas and looked into his eyes. "To ask what he saw in his eyes. Why we saved, why not betrayed, why not kill him. "
Once found, almost like a prayer, he asks:" Were you, right? "
Miralles smiled warmly and said
" No. "
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