'Look in here,' he said, handing it to me. 'Beside each name is a file number; if you want to consult one, let me know.'
I sat down at a table and looked through the index, which ran from 1924 to 1949, for a Figueras who'd been held in prison in 1939 or 1940. Since it's quite a common surname in the region, there were several, but none of them were the Pere (or Pedro) Figueras Bahi I was looking for: no one of that name had been in Gerona prison in 1939 or 1940, not even in 1941 or 1942, which was when, according to Jaume Figueras' tale, his father had been in jail. I looked up from the binder: the employee was still typing at his computer; the room was still deserted. Beyond the windows which were flooded with light was a confusion of decrepit houses which, I thought, wouldn't have looked much different sixty years and a few months before, when, in the final days of the war, a few kilometres away three anonymous lads and an illustrious man in his forties, hid and awaited the end of the nightmare. As if struck by a sudden realization, I thought: 'It's all a lie.' I reasoned that, if the first fact I attempted to confirm independently — Pere Figueras' time in prison — turned out to be false, nothing prevented me from supposing the rest of the tale to be equally untrue. I told myself that there had undoubtedly been three lads who helped Sánchez Mazas survive in the forest after the firing squad — a certainty supported by various circumstances, among them the coincidences between the notes in Sánchez Mazas' notebook and the tale he'd told his son — but certain clues lent credence to the suspicion that it wasn't the Figueras brothers and Angelats. First of all, in Sánchez Mazas' notebook their names had been written in ink and in a different handwriting from the rest of the text, which was in pencil; undoubtedly, then, a hand other than that of Sánchez Mazas had added them. Furthermore, the missing page of the final declaration where, as far as I could tell from studying the notebook, the Figueras brothers and Angelats should be mentioned, because he'd surely have expressed his gratitude for their help, could well have been torn out precisely because it didn't mention them, so that someone would come to the very conclusion that I had reached. And as far as Pere Figueras' false prison sentence goes, it would undoubtedly have been invented by Pere himself, or his son, or by who knows who; in any case, added to the proud refusal to evade captivity by appealing to the favours of a high Francoist dignitary like Sánchez Mazas, and the letter in which he denounced some unscrupulous person who tried to get money out of Sánchez Mazas by pretending to be him, the story amounted to ideal cement for building one of those legends of paternal heroism which — without anyone ever happening to identify their origins — so prosper at the death of a father in the kind of families inclined to their own mythogenesis. More disappointed than perplexed, I wondered who then were the real forest friends and who had fabricated that fraud and why; more perplexed than disappointed, I said to myself that maybe, as some had suspected from the beginning, Sánchez Mazas hadn't even been in Collell, and perhaps the whole story of the execution and the circumstances surrounding it were nothing but an immense swindle minutely plotted by Sánchez Mazas' imagination — with the voluntary or involuntary collaboration of relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers — to cleanse his reputation as a coward, to hide some dishonourable episode in his strange wartime adventure and, most of all so that some credulous investigative reporter, avid for novelties, would reconstruct it sixty years later, redeeming him forever before history.
I put the ring binder back in its place on the shelf, and got ready to leave the library, feeling embarrassed and conned, when, as I passed the computer, the clerk asked me if I'd found what I was looking for. I confessed that I hadn't.
'Oh, but don't give up so quickly.' He stood up and, not giving me time to explain anything, went to the shelf and got the binder down again. 'What's the person's name?'
'Pere or Pedro Figueras Bahi. But don't worry: he probably wasn't ever in any prison.'
'Then he won't be here,' he said, but insisted: 'Have you an idea of when he might have been in prison?'
'In '39,' I yielded. 'At the latest '40 or '41.'
The clerk quickly found the page.
'No one of that name,' he confirmed. 'But the prison officer could have made an error in writing it down.' He smoothed his moustache and muttered: 'Let's see. .'
He flipped ahead and back through the pages of the register several times, running down the lists of names with his index finger, which finally stopped.
'Piqueras Bahi, Pedro,' he read. 'That must be him. Wait a moment, please.'
He went out through a side door and returned a short while later, smiling and carrying a document case with faded covers.
'There's your man,' he said.
The document case did in fact contain Pere Figueras' dossier. Extremely excited, my self-esteem suddenly restored, and telling myself that if Pere Figueras' prison stay wasn't an invention then nor was the rest of the story, I examined the dossier. It stated that Pere Figueras was a native of Sant Andreu del Terri, a municipality assimilated over time into Cornellá de Terri. That he was a farmer and single. That he was twenty-five years old. That his background was unknown. That he'd been incarcerated in the prison of the Military Government, without any charge being laid against him, on 27 April 1939, and that he'd left it not even two months later on 19 June. It also stated that he'd been released by the General Auditor in accordance with an order included in the dossier of a certain Vicente Vila Rubirola. I looked up Rubirola in the index, found him, and asked the clerk for his dossier, which he brought me. A member of the Catalan Republican Left, Rubirola had been in prison after the revolution of 1934 and had been sent back there at the end of the war, the very same day as Pere Figueras and his eight comrades from Cornellá de Terri; all of them were freed on 19 June, the same day as Figueras, in accordance with an order from the Auditor General, which didn't specify any reason justifying this decision; Vila Rubirola, however, had been sent back to jail in June of the same year and having been tried and found guilty, hadn't finally left it again for another twenty years.
I thanked the archive clerk and, as soon as I got to the newspaper office I phoned Aguirre. Many of the names of those imprisoned with Figueras were familiar to him — the majority notorious activists of left-wing parties — and especially Vila Rubirola, who in the early days of the war had participated in the assassination, in Barcelona, of the Secretary-General of the Municipality of Cornellá de Terri. According to Aguirre, the fact that Pere Figueras and his eight comrades were incarcerated without explanation was perfectly normal at the time, when everyone who'd had any kind of military or political link to the Republic had their past submitted to rigorous albeit arbitrary scrutiny, and meanwhile they stayed in prison; nor did he find it strange that Pere Figueras was released after a short time, as this happened often with those the new regime didn't consider a danger.
'What does strike me as odd is that someone as well known as Vila Rubirola, and a few of the others who went into prison with Figueras, should have been released with him,' observed Aguirre. 'And what I really just can't understand is all of them getting out the same day without any explanation, and all so that Vila Rubirola — and I wouldn't be surprised if one or two others — were sent straight back in. I don't get it.' Aguirre fell silent. 'Unless. .'
'Unless what?'
'Unless someone interceded,' Aguirre concluded, avoiding the name we both had in mind. 'Someone with real power. A hierarch.'
That very evening, having dinner with Conchi in a Greek restaurant, I solemnly announced, because I felt the need to announce it solemnly, that after ten years of not writing a book, the moment had come to try again.