'Bloody brilliant!' shouted Conchi, who was hoping to add a third book to the two escorting her Virgin of Guadalupe in the living room; with a piece of pita bread dipped in tzatziki on its way to her mouth, she added: 'I hope it's not a novel.'
'No,' I said, very confidently. 'It's a true tale.'
'What's that?'
I explained; I think she understood.
'It'll be like a novel,' I summed up. 'Except, instead of being all lies, it's all true.'
'I'm glad it's not going to be a novel.'
'Why's that?'
'No reason,' she answered. 'It's just that — well, honey, I don't think imagination is really your strong suit.'
'You're a real sweetheart, Conchi.'
'Don't take it like that, darling. What I meant to say was. .' Since she didn't know how to say what she meant to say, she picked up another piece of pita bread and said, 'Anyhow, what's the book about?'
'The battle of Salamis.'
'The what?' she screeched.
Several pairs of eyes turned to look at us, for the second time. I knew the story line of my book wasn't going to appeal to Conchi, but, since I didn't want her to kick up a fuss and call everyone's attention to us, I tried to explain it briefly.
'What are you like?' was her comment, accompanied by a look of disgust. 'How can you want to write about a fascist with the number of really good lefty writers there must be around! Garcia Lorca, for example. He was a red, wasn't he? Ooh,' she said not waiting for a reply, reaching under the table: alarmed, I lifted the table cloth up a bit and looked, 'God, my pussy's so itchy.'
'Conchi!' I scolded her in whisper, sitting up quickly and forcing a smile while glancing around at the neighbouring tables, 'I'd appreciate it, when you go out with me, if you'd at least wear panties.'
'What an old fart you are!' she said with her most affectionate smile, but without bringing the submerged hand out into the open; I felt her toes creeping up my calf. 'Don't you think it's sexy? Anyway, when do we start?'
'I've told you a million times I don't like doing it in public toilets.'
'I didn't mean that, dummy. I mean when do we start on the book?'
'Oh that,' I said as one flush went up my leg and another down my face. 'Soon,' I stammered. 'Very soon. As soon as I finish the research.'
But it would actually take me a while yet to reconstruct the story I wanted to tell and to get to know, if not each and every one of its hidden aspects, at least what I judged its essential ones. In fact, for many months I spent all my free time at the newspaper studying the life and work of Sánchez Mazas. I reread his books, I read a lot of the articles he published in the press, many articles by his friends and enemies, his contemporaries, and also everything I came across about the Falange, fascism, the Civil War, and the equivocal, changeable nature of the Franco regime. I scoured libraries, newspaper archives, public records. I travelled to Madrid several times, and constantly to Barcelona, to talk to scholars, professors, friends and acquaintances (or friends of friends and acquaintances of acquaintances) of Sánchez Mazas. I spent an entire morning at the Sanctuary of Collell, which, as I was told by Mossen Juan Prats — the priest with the shiny bald patch and devout smile who showed me the garden with its cypress and palm trees and immense empty halls, low corridors, stairways with wooden handrails and deserted classrooms where Sánchez Mazas and his cellmates had wandered like premonitions of shades — had, once the war was over, gone back to being used as a boarding school for boys until, a year and a half before my visit, it was reduced to its present lonely status of a conference centre for pious associations and occasional lodging for sightseers. It was Father Prats himself, only just born when the events in question occurred in Collell, but not unaware of them, who told me the real or apocryphal story according to which, when Franco's regulars took the Sanctuary, they left not a single prison guard alive. Father Prats also gave me precise directions to get to the spot where the execution took place. Following them, I left the monastery by the access road, arrived at a stone cross commemorating the massacre, turned left down a path which snaked through pines and came out in the clearing. I stayed there for a while, walking beneath the cold sun and immaculate, windy October sky, not doing anything other than sounding out the leafy silence of the forest and trying in vain to imagine the light of another less crystal clear morning, that inconceivable January morning, sixty years ago in the same place, when fifty men suddenly faced death and two of them managed to evade its grasp. As if a revelation by osmosis might await me, I stayed there a while. . I didn't feel anything. So I left. I went to Cornellá de Terri, because the same day I was having lunch with Jaume Figueras, who that afternoon took me to see Can Borrell, the Ferré's old house, Can Pigem, the Figueras' old house, and the Mas de la Casa Nova, which had been Sánchez Mazas', Angelats' and the Figueras brothers' temporary hiding place. Can Borrell was a farm located in the township of Palol de Rebardit; Can Pigem was in Cornellá de Terri; the Mas de la Casa Nova was between the two villages and in the middle of the woods. Can Borrell was uninhabited, but not in ruins, so was Can Pigem; the Mas de la Casa Nova was uninhabited and in ruins. Sixty years before they'd surely been three quite different houses, but time had virtually equalled them, and their common air of abandonment, of stone skeletons among whose fleshless ribcages the winds groaned in the autumn evening, held not a single suggestion that anyone had ever once lived in them.
It was also thanks to Jaume Figueras, who finally kept his word and acted as diligent intermediary, that I got to speak to his uncle Joaquim, Maria Ferré and Daniel Angelats. All three were over eighty: Maria Ferré was eighty-eight; Figueras and Angelats, eighty-two. All three still had good memories, or at least they still remembered their encounter with Sánchez Mazas and the circumstances surrounding it, as if it had been a determining moment in their lives and they'd often recalled it. Their three versions differed, but weren't contradictory, and at more than one point they were complementary, so from their testimonies, and filling in the gaps they left by means of logic and a little imagination, it wasn't difficult to reconstruct the puzzle of Sánchez Mazas' adventure. Perhaps because no one has time any more to listen to people of a certain age, much less when they start remembering incidents from their youth, all three were anxious to talk, and more than once I had to channel the disorderly flow of their recollections. I can imagine they might have embellished some secondary factors, some lateral details; not that they lied, because among other reasons, if they had, the lie wouldn't have fitted into the puzzle and would have given them away. In all other respects, the three of them were so different that to my eyes the only thing that linked them was their condition as survivors, that deceptive added prestige the protagonists of the bland, routine inglorious present, often concede to the protagonists of the past, which because we only know it through the filter of memory, is always extraordinary, tumultuous, heroic: Figueras was tall and well-built, with an almost youthful air checked shirt, sailor's cap, well-worn jeans a travelled man, possessing an enormous vitality and a conversational manner erupting with gestures, exclamations and hearty laughs; Maria Ferré who, according to what Jaume Figueras told me later, had coquettishly visited the hairdresser's before receiving me in her house in Cornellá de Terri a house that at times had been the village bar and general store, and still at the entrance, almost like relics, stood a marble counter and a set of scales — was slight and sweet, digressive, with eyes that at one moment were mischievous and the next would brim with tears at her inability to dodge the tricks nostalgia set for her in the course of her tale, young eyes, with the colour and fluidity of a summer stream. As for Angelats, my interview with him was crucial. Crucial for me, I mean — or, more precisely, for this book.