So they did. But the very afternoon they arrived at the Figueras home, something happened to convince them that the big house on the edge of the Banyoles highway and right across from the train station was not a safe haven for deserters. While they were badgered with questions by the family as they sated their ravenous hunger along with Pere Figueras, before they had taken off their soldiers' uniforms, they heard the sound of motors stopping in front of Can Pigem. According to Joaquim Figueras, it was his mother who, guessing the danger they were in, urged them to go upstairs and hide under the enormous bed in the master bedroom. From there they heard a knock on the door, then unfamiliar voices conversing in the dining room that had been swiftly cleared, and then the noise of military boots climbing the stairs and walking around the second floor until they saw them come into the room; there were two pairs: one, which stayed in the doorway, was cracked and dusty; the other, old but recently shined, still martial, clicked a bit over the floor tiles until the Figueras brothers and Angelats, holding their breath under the bed, heard a soft, commanding voice ask that the room be prepared for him to spend the night. As soon as they were alone again, the three deserters almost wordlessly took the only decision possible and, instinctively persuaded that only speed could make up for the obligatory recklessness of the manoeuvre, they crawled out of their hiding place and, without looking up and trying to prevent the rigidity of their movements from betraying their hurry, went down the stairs, crossed the kitchen and yard and highway protected by the anonymity of their uniforms, which camouflaged them among all the other soldiers in the house or around the house waiting their turn to eat, or resting or arranging their things, calmly resigned to their stateless futures.
From that afternoon on the Figueras brothers and Angelats went into hiding. Undoubtedly it wasn't as hard for them as for Sánchez Mazas: they were young, they were armed, they knew the area and many people in the area; not only that but as soon as the Republican detachment left Can Pigem the next morning, the Figueras' mother began to provide them with food in abundance and lots of warm clothing and blankets. They spent the daylight hours in the woods, not far from Cornellá de Terri or from the Banyoles highway, always alert to the troop movements along it, and at night they slept in an abandoned barn near the Mas de la Casa Nova. It seems incredible they didn't bump into Sánchez Mazas until they'd been installed (the word is of course excessive) for three days in the vicinity of the Mas de la Casa Nova, since they'd arrived the same day as he had, but that's how it was. Sixty years later, Joaquim Figueras and Daniel Angelats both still remembered with absolute clarity the morning they saw him for the first time: the sound of breaking branches that alarmed them in the silence of the forest, and then the willowy, blind figure in the sheepskin jacket with the shattered spectacles in his hand, feeling his way up the rocky, tangled bank of the stream. They also remembered the moment they stopped him at gunpoint and the minutes of interminable reckoning and suspicion during which they, as much as Sánchez Mazas — whose attitude during this first conversation or interrogation drifted imperceptibly from frightened and dishonourable pleading to the almost paternalistic aplomb of one who knows himself to be beyond his interlocutor not only in years but especially in intellect and guile tried to find out the intentions of the other; and that, as soon as they did, Sánchez Mazas identified himself, offering them exorbitant rewards if they helped him cross the lines. Joaquim Figueras and Daniel Angelats also agree on another point: as soon as Sánchez Mazas said his name, Pere Figueras knew who he was. Although this might seem strange, it is not absolutely implausible: for quite a few years by then, Sánchez Mazas had been known all over Spain as a writer and politician and, although Pere Figueras had barely left his village except to defend the Republic with bullets, he could easily have seen his name and photograph in the newspapers and could have read articles he'd written. In any case, Pere, who had taken charge of the trio of soldiers without anyone telling him to, told him they couldn't take him to the other side, but said he could stay with them until the Nationalists arrived. Implicitly or explicitly, the pact was this: now they would protect him, with their weapons and their youth and their knowledge of the area and the people of the area, and later he would protect them with his indisputable authority as a hierarch. The offer was not up for discussion, and although Joaquim at first put up a bit of resistance to the idea of taking on, in those uncertain days, the responsibility of a half-blind man who, if they were captured by the Republicans, would earn them immediate execution, in the end he had no choice but to submit to his brother's will.
The life of the three deserters didn't change in any noticeable way after that moment, except for the fact that now there were four to feed from what the Figueras' mother sent, and four to sleep in the abandoned barn by Mas de la Casa Nova, for they decided that it was safer for Sánchez Mazas not to return to the hayloft by Mas Borrell. Curiously (or maybe not: maybe it's life's decisive moments that are most voraciously devoured by oblivion), neither Joaquim Figueras nor Daniel Angelats have a very clear memory of those days. Figueras, whose memory is sharp but expeditious and often gets lost in aimless meandering, remembers that meeting Sánchez Mazas relieved the boredom for a while, because he told them his wartime adventures, with a wealth of detail and in a tone that had at first impressed him with its solemnity but with time he'd come to consider a little pompous; he also remembered that, once they'd told their war stories — undoubtedly in a much more succinct, disorderly and direct manner — they were again overtaken by the tense, impatient boredom they'd suffered for the last few days. Or he and Daniel Angelats were at least. Because what Joaquim Figueras does remember very well is that, while he and Angelats went back to practising the most varied ways of killing time much as before, his brother Pere and Sánchez Mazas leaned up against the trunk of an oak tree at the edge of the woods conversing tirelessly. He could see them there stilclass="underline" listless and unshaven and well bundled up, with their knees higher and higher and their heads lower and lower as the day wore on, almost with their backs to each other, smoking cut tobacco or whittling away at something, turning to look at each other every now and then and, of course, not smiling at all, as if neither of the two were looking to the other for agreement or persuasion, but only the certainty that none of his words would be lost in the air. He never knew what they were talking about, or maybe he didn't want to know; he knew the subject was not politics or the war; once he suspected (without much basis) that it was literature. The truth is Joaquim Figueras, who'd never got along very well with Pere (whom he'd made fun of publicly more than once and whom he'd always secretly admired), realized with a secret pang of jealousy that Sánchez Mazas won, in a few hours, a friendship with his brother that he'd never had access to in his whole life. As for Angelats, whose memory is shakier than Figueras', his testimony does not contradict that of his old friend; at best, it complements it with various anecdotal details (Angelats, for example, remembers Sánchez Mazas writing with a minuscule pencil in his notebook with dark green covers, which perhaps proves that the diary was written during the events it relates) and one detail perhaps less so. As often happens with the memories of some old people which, because they are about to be left without them, remember much more clearly a childhood afternoon than what happened a few hours ago, in this concrete point Angelats' abounds in particulars. I don't know if time has given the scene a novelistic varnish; although I can't be sure, I tend to think not, because I know Angelats is a man without imagination; nor does any benefit occur to me that he might derive — a tired and ill man, with few years left to live — from inventing such a scene.