Pedro Figueras Bahí
Joaqufn Figueras Bahí
Daniel Angelats Dilmé
And further down:
Casa Pigem de Cornelià
(across from the station)
Further down are the signatures, in ink — not pencil, like the rest of the writing in the book — of the two Figueras brothers, and on the following page is written:
Palol de Rebardit
Casa Borrell
Ferré Family
On another page, also in pencil and in the same handwriting as the diary, except much clearer, is the longest text in the notebook. It says:
1, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, founding member of the Spanish Falange, national adviser, ex-president of the Leadership Council and at present the senior Falangist in Spain and highest ranking in red territory, hereby declare:
1. that on the 30th of January 1939 I faced a firing squad at the Collell prison camp with 48 other unhappy prisoners and escaped miraculously after the first two rounds, breaking away into the forest —
2. that after three days' march through the forest, walking at night and asking for charity at the farms, I arrived in the area of Palol de Rebardit, where I fell into an irrigation ditch and lost my spectacles, leaving me half blind. .
There's a page missing here, which has been torn out. But the text goes on:
. . proximity of front line kept me hidden in their house until the Nationalist troops arrived.
4. that despite the generous objection of the inhabitants of the Borrell farm I wish by means of this document to confirm my promise to repay them with a substantial monetary reward, proposing the proprietor [here there is a blank space] for an honorary distinction if the military command is in agreement and to swear my immense and eternal gratitude to him and his family, all of which will be very little in comparison to what he has done for me.
Signed in the Casanova de un Pla farm near Cornellá de Terriat 1. .
That was the contents of the notebook. I reread it several times, trying to give those dispersed notes a coherent meaning, and link them to the facts I knew. To begin with, I discarded the suspicion, which insidiously crossed my mind as I read, that the notebook was a fraud, a falsification contrived by the Figueras family to deceive me, or to deceive someone: at the time I thought it didn't make much sense that a modest rural family would concoct so sophisticated a scheme. So sophisticated and, most of all, so absurd. Because, when Sánchez Mazas was alive, when it could have been a shield for defeated people against the reprisals of the victors, the document could easily have been authenticated and, once he was dead, it lost its value. Nevertheless, I thought that it would be a good idea to make sure the handwriting in the notebook (or one of the handwritings in the notebook, because there were several) and that of Sánchez Mazas were the same. If that were the case (and nothing led me to believe it wasn't), Sánchez Mazas was the author of the little diary, which had undoubtedly been written during the days he spent wandering in the forest, or at most very shortly afterwards. To judge by the last text in the notebook, Sánchez Mazas knew the date of the execution had been 30 January 1939; in any case the numeration preceding each entry of the diary corresponded to the days of the month of February of the same year (the Nationalists had indeed taken Gerona on 4 February). From the text of the diary I deduced that, before availing himself of the protection of the Figueras brothers and Angelats, Sánchez Mazas had found a more or less secure refuge in a house in the area, and this house could be none other than the Borrell house or farm, whose inhabitants he thanked and promised a 'substantial monetary reward' and 'an honorary distinction' in the long final declaration, and I also deduced that this house or farm must be in Palol de Rebardit — a municipality bordering on Cornellá de Terri — and that its inhabitants could only be the Ferré family, one of whom was sure to be Maria Ferré, who, as Jaume Figueras had told me at the sudden end of our interview in the Núria, was still alive. All of the above seemed obvious, just as, once fitted together, the place for each piece of a jigsaw puzzle seems obvious. As far as the final declaration went, drawn up in the Mas de la Casa Nova, the place in the forest where the four fugitives had stayed hidden — and undoubtedly when they knew themselves to be safe — it also seemed obvious that it was a way of formalizing Sánchez Mazas' debt to those who'd saved his life, like a safe-conduct enabling them to cross the uncertainties of the immediate post-war period, without having to undergo each and every one of the outrages reserved for the majority of those who, like the Figueras brothers and Angelats, had swelled the ranks of the Republican army. I found it strange, however, that one of the pages torn out of the notebook should be precisely the one containing the declaration in which, it could be inferred, Sánchez Mazas expressed his gratitude to the Figueras brothers and Angelats. I wondered who had torn out that page. And why. I wondered who had torn out the first pages of the notebook, and why. Since every question leads to another, I also wondered — in fact I'd already been wondering this for quite a while — what really happened during those days that Sánchez Mazas wandered aimlessly through the forest in no man's land. What did he think about, what did he feel, what did he tell the Ferrés, the Figueras brothers, Angelats? What did they remember him having told them? And what had they thought and felt? I was yearning to talk to Jaume Figueras' uncle, to Maria Ferré and Angelats, if he were still alive. I told myself, even if Jaume Figueras' tale couldn't be considered trustworthy (or couldn't be considered any more trustworthy than Ferlosio's), for its veracity didn't depend on a memory (his), but on the memory of a memory (his father's) — the accounts of his uncle, Maria Ferré and Angelats (if he was still alive) were on the other hand firsthand reports and therefore, at least at first, much less random than his. I wondered if those tales would fit the reality of events or whether, perhaps inevitably, they'd be varnished with that gloss of half-truth and fibs that always augment an episode now distant and perhaps legendary to its protagonists, so that what they might tell me had happened wouldn't be what really happened or even what they remembered happening, but what they remembered telling before.
Overwhelmed with questions, sure that I'd be lucky if I didn't have to wait more than a month before talking to Figueras' uncle as if walking over sand dunes and needing to step on terra firma 1 called Miquel Aguirre. It was a Monday and it was very late, but Aguirre was still awake and, after telling him about my interview with Jaume Figueras, about the latter's uncle and about Sánchez Mazas' notebook, I asked him if it were possible to obtain documentary proof that Pere Figueras, Jaume's father, had indeed been in prison after the end of the war.
'Couldn't be easier,' he answered. 'In the City Archives there's a register of all the names of every single person who's been imprisoned since before the war. If Pere Figueras was in jail, his name will be there. For sure.'
'Couldn't they have sent him to another prison?'
'Impossible. Everyone detained in the Banyoles area was sent to Gerona prison.'
The next day, before going to work at the newspaper, I presented myself at the City Archives, which were located in a renovated convent, in the old part of the city. Following the signs, I went up a stone stairway and entered the library, a spacious, sunny room, with big windows, gleaming wooden tables bristling with lamps, the silence of which was broken only by the typing of an employee almost completely hidden behind a computer. I told the clerk — a man with unruly hair and a grey moustache — what I was looking for; he stood up, went to a shelf and got down a ring binder.