The legend, proclaimed to the four winds by the most diverse sources, has it that one day in July 1940, during a full Council of Ministers, Franco, fed up with Sánchez Mazas not showing up for those meetings, pointed at the writer's empty seat, and said: 'Please get that chair out of here.' Two weeks later, Sánchez Mazas was sacked, which (still according to legend) didn't seem to bother him too much. The causes of the dismissal were not clear. Some allege that Sánchez Mazas, whose position as Minister Without Portfolio lacked real content, was supremely bored by ministerial councils, because he was incapable of taking interest in bureaucratic and administrative affairs, which are what absorb the majority of a politician's time. Others maintain that it was Franco who was supremely bored by the erudite disquisitions on the most eccentric subjects (the causes of the defeat of the Persian fleet in the battle of Salamis, say; or the correct use of the jack plane) that Sánchez Mazas inflicted on him, and therefore decided to do without that inefficient, outlandish and untimely man of letters who played a virtually ornamental role in the government. There are even those who, whether out of innocence or bias, attribute Sánchez Mazas' idleness to disenchantment as a Falangist loyal to the authentic ideals of the party. All agree that he offered his resignation on several occasions, and that it was never accepted until his repeated absences from ministerial meetings, always justified by exotic excuses, made it a fait accompli. No matter which way you look at it, the legend is flattering to Sánchez Mazas, since it contributed to creating his image as an upright man, reluctant for the trappings of power. It is, most likely, false.
The journalist Carlos Sentís, who was his personal secretary during that period, maintains that the writer stopped attending the ministerial councils simply because he stopped being summoned to them. According to Sentís, certain inconvenient or extemporaneous declarations concerning the Gibraltar problem, along with the ill will the then all-powerful Serrano Sufier bore him, provoked his fall from grace. This version of events is reliable, to my mind, not only because Sentís was the person closest to Sánchez Mazas in the single year he lasted in the ministry, but also because it seems reasonable that Serrano Súñer would see in the tactlessness of Sánchez Mazas — who had conspired against him more than once to gain Franco's favour, just as he had in years gone by against Gimenez Caballero to gain that of José Antonio — a perfect excuse to free himself of someone who, in his position as most senior 'old shirt', could represent a threat to his authority and erode his ascendancy over the orthodox Falangists and the Caudillo himself. Sentís claims that, as a result of his dismissal, Sánchez Mazas was confined for months in his house in the suburb of Viso a cottage on Serrano Street he'd bought years before with his friend the Communist José Bergamin and which still belongs to the family and deprived of his ministerial salary. His economic situation was getting ever more desperate, and in December, when they lifted the house arrest without any explanation, he decided to travel to Italy to ask for help from his wife's family. On his way he stayed at Sentís' house in Barcelona. Sentís doesn't retain an exact memory of those days, nor of Sánchez Mazas' state of mind, but he does recall that on Christmas day, just after the family celebrations, the writer received a providential telephone call from a relative, telling him that his aunt Julia Sánchez had just died and left him in her will a vast fortune including a mansion and several estates in Coria, in the province of Cáceres.
'You used to be a writer and a politician, Rafael,' Agustin de Foxa said to him around this time. 'Now you're just a millionaire.' Foxa was a writer and a politician and a millionaire, and one of the few friends Sánchez Mazas didn't end up losing over time. He was also a clever man, and as so often happens with clever men, he was often right. It's true that, after receiving his aunt's inheritance, Sánchez Mazas held various political posts from member of the Leadership Council of the Falange through to Deputy Member of Parliament, by way of President of the Patrons' Association of the Prado Museum but it's also true they were always secondary or decorative and barely took up his time and that from the middle of the forties he began to give them up as if shedding an annoying burden, and little by little, as time went by, he disappeared from public life. This does not mean, however, that Sánchez Mazas in the forties and fifties was a kind of silent opponent to Franco's government; he undoubtedly scorned the intellectual shoddiness and the mediocrity the regime had imposed on Spanish life, but he didn't feel uncomfortable in it, nor did he hesitate to proffer in public the most embarrassing dithyrambs to the tyrant and even, if it came to that, to his wife — though in private he flayed them for their stupidity and bad taste and nor, of course, did he lament having contributed with all his might to inciting a war which razed a legitimate republic and failed to replace it with the terrible regime of poets and renaissance condottieri he'd dreamt of, but rather with a simple government of rogues, rustics and sanctimonious goody-goodies. 'I neither regret nor forget,' he famously wrote, by hand, in the full page frontispiece of Foundation, Brotherhood and Destiny, a book where he reprinted some of his bellicose articles of Falangist doctrine that in the thirties he'd published in Arriba and F.E. The phrase is from the spring of 1957; the date compels reflection. Madrid was then still in the grip of the backlash after the first great internal crisis of Francoism, stemming from an alliance, unexpected but in fact inevitable, between two groups Sánchez Mazas knew very well, because he lived with them on a daily basis. On one side, the young left-wing intelligentsia, an important part of which had arisen from the disillusioned ranks of the Falange itself and was made up of rebellious scions of notorious families of the regime, among them two of Sánchez Mazas' sons: Miguel, the first-born, one of the ring-leaders of the student rebellion of 1956—who in February of that year was j ailed and shortly afterwards left to a long exile — and Rafael, Sánchez Mazas' favourite, who had just published Eljarama, the novel in which the aesthetics and intellectual restlessness of those dissident youths came together; on the other side, a few 'old shirts' —among whom, in the front line, was Dionisio Ridruejo, an old friend of Sánchez Mazas, who had been arrested along with his son Miguel, and other student leaders from the anti-Franco outcry of the previous year, and in that same year, 1957, founded the social-democratic Social Party of Democratic Action — old Falangists from the early days who had perhaps not forgotten their political past, but who doubtless did regret it and were even undertaking, with more or less determination or courage, to combat the regime they had helped to bring about. I neither regret nor forget. Since emphatic loyalty so often denounces the traitor, there are some who suspect that if Sánchez Mazas wrote such a thing at such a time, it was precisely because, like some of his José Antonian comrades, he did regret — or at least partially regretted, and was trying to forget — or at least he was trying to partially forget. The conjecture is attractive, but false; in every case, apart from the secret disdain with which he contemplated the regime, not a single particular of his biography endorses it. 'If there's one thing I hate the Communists for, Your Excellency,' Foxa once said to Franco, 'it's for obliging me to join the Falange.' Sánchez Mazas would never have said such a thing — too irreverent, too ironic — and much less in the presence of the General, but it undoubtedly goes for him too. Perhaps Sánchez Mazas was never more than a false Falangist, or else a Falangist who was only one because he felt obliged to be one — if all Falangists weren't false and obligatory ones, deep down never entirely believing that their ideology was anything other than a desperate measure in confusing times, an instrument destined to succeed in changing something in order that nothing change; I mean, had it not been because, like many of his comrades, he felt a real threat looming over his loved ones' sleep of bourgeois beatitude, Sánchez Mazas would never have stooped to getting involved in politics, nor would he have applied himself to forging the blazing rhetoric of the clash needed to inflame to victory the squad of soldiers charged with saving civilization. Sánchez Mazas identified civilization with the securities, privileges and hierarchies of his own people and the Falange with Spengler's squad of soldiers; but he also felt pride in having formed part of that squad and, perhaps, the right to rest after having restored hierarchies, securities and privileges. That's why it's doubtful he would have wanted to forget anything, and certain that he regretted nothing.