* * *
After that Sánchez Mazas' trail vanishes. One can only attempt to reconstruct his adventures during the months before the conflict and during the three years it lasted by way of partial testimonies — fleeting allusions in memoirs and documents of the time, tales told by those who shared snippets of his adventures, memories of relatives and friends to whom he'd recounted his memories — and also through the veil of a legend shimmering with errors, contradictions and ambiguities which Sánchez Mazas' selective loquacity about this turbulent period of his life did nothing but nourish. So then, what follows is not what actually happened, but rather what seems probable might have happened; I'm not offering proven facts, but reasonable conjectures.
Here they are:
In March of 1936, when Sánchez Mazas is being held in the Modelo Prison in Madrid along with his Falange leadership comrades, his fourth child, Maximo, is born, and Victoria Kent, at that time General Director of Prisons, grants the inmate the three days' leave to visit his wife, which he's entitled to by law, on condition that he give his word of honour not to leave Madrid and to return to the prison at the end of the allotted time. Sánchez Mazas accepts the deal, but, according to another of his sons, Rafael, before he leaves the jail the governor summons him to his office and tells him, off the record, that he sees things getting very dark, half suggesting 'that he would be better off not coming back, and that he, for his part, wouldn't go too far out of his way to find and recapture him'. Since this justifies Sánchez Mazas' later dubious behaviour, the truth of this version could well be called into question; yet equally, one could imagine it not being false. The fact is that Sánchez Mazas, forgetting the protests of gentlemanly behaviour and heroism with which he illustrated so many pages of incendiary prose, breaks his word and flees to Portugal, but José Antonio — who had taken his deputy's words seriously and who judged that not only was his honour at stake, but that of the entire Falange — orders him from his prison cell in Alicante, where he'd been transferred along with his brother Miguel on the night of 5 June, to return to Madrid. Sánchez Mazas obeys, but before he can turn himself back over to the Modelo Prison the uprising breaks out.
The following days are confusing. Almost three years later, Eugenio Montes — whom Sánchez Mazas called 'my grandest and greatest comrade in the drive to put human words at the service of our Falange' — describes from Burgos his friend's situation in the days immediately after 18 July as 'an adventure of street corners and hideouts, with the red henchmen hot on his heels'. The phrase is as novelistic as it is elusive, but perhaps doesn't entirely betray the truth. Revolution triumphs in Madrid. People kill and die in back alleys and barracks. The legitimate government has lost control of the situation and the atmosphere is thick with a lethal mixture of fear and euphoria. Houses are searched; militiamen's control spreads through the streets. One night at the beginning of September, unable to stand the anxiety of secrecy and the constant imminence of danger any longer, or perhaps urged by his friends or acquaintances who'd been running the risk of giving cover to a fugitive of his importance for too long, Sánchez Mazas decides to leave his lair, flee Madrid and cross over into the Nationalist zone.
Predictably, he doesn't make it. The next day, as soon as he leaves the house, he gets stopped; the patrol demands he identify himself. With a strange mixture of panic and resignation, Sánchez Mazas realizes he is lost and, as if wanting to take his leave of reality in silence, for a second of indecision that seems interminable he looks around and sees that, though it's only nine o'clock, the shops on Montera Street have already opened and the urgent, everyday hustle and bustle of the crowd floods the pavements, while the harsh sun foretells another suffocating morning of this never-ending summer. At that moment the attention of the three armed militiamen is caught by a truck stuffed with members of the General Workers' Union bristling with weapons and war cries, heading for the front at Guadarrama with the bodywork painted with initials and names, among them that of Indalecio Prieto, who's just been named Minister of the Airforce and Navy in Largo Caballero's incendiary government. Then Sánchez Mazas thinks up a desperate idea and acts on it: he tells the militiamen that he cannot identify himself because he's undercover in Madrid carrying out a mission entrusted to him directly by the Minister of the Airforce and Navy, and demands they put him in contact with Prieto immediately. Caught between bewilderment and suspicion, the militiamen decide to take him to the headquarters of the State Security Office to check the authenticity of his implausible excuse; there, after a few anguished attempts, Sánchez Mazas manages to speak to Prieto by telephone. Concerned about the situation, Prieto advises him to seek refuge in the Chilean Embassy and affectionately wishes him good luck; then, in the name of their old friendship in Africa, orders his immediate release.
That same day Sánchez Mazas manages to get into the Chilean Embassy, where he will spend almost a year and a half. There is a photograph from this spell of confinement: Sánchez Mazas appears in the centre of a chorus of refugees, among whom is the Falangist writer Samuel Ros; there are eight of them, all a little ragged and unshaven, all expectant. Wearing an undershirt that was perhaps once white, with his Semitic profile, his spectacles and broad forehead, Sánchez Mazas is leaning elegantly on a desk on which there is nothing but an empty glass, a piece of bread, a sheaf of papers or notebooks and a hungry saucepan. He is reading; the rest listen to him. What he reads is an excerpt from Rosa Kriiger, a novel he wrote or began to write in those days to relieve the tedium of confinement and distract his companions, and which would only be published, unfinished, fifty years later, when its author had already been dead for a long time. It is, without doubt, his best novel and also a good novel, as well as being strange and rather atemporal, written in a Byzantine style by someone with the taste and sensibility of a Pre-Raphaelite painter, with a Europeanist vocation and a patriotic, conservative background, saturated with exquisite fantasies, exotic adventures, and a kind of melancholic sensuality across which, in a crystalline and exact prose, it recounts the battle waged in the mind of the protagonist between the two essential principles, which according to the author govern the universe the diabolical and the angelic and the final victory of the latter, incarnated in a donna angelicata called Rosa Kriiger. It's surprising that Sánchez Mazas managed to isolate himself from the obligatory and noisy promiscuity that reigned in the Embassy in order to write his book but not that the fruit of this isolation should so meticulously evade the dramatic circumstances surrounding its conception, for it would have been pointless to add to the tragedy of the war the tale of the tragedy of the war. Furthermore, the apparent contradiction, which has so preoccupied some of his readers, between Sánchez Mazas' bellicose Falangist ideas and his apolitical and aestheticizing literary task, is resolved if we admit that both are conflicting but coherent expressions of one nostalgia: for the abolished, impossible and invented world of Paradise, for the safe hierarchies of an ancien régime which the inevitable winds of history were sweeping away forever.