Lord of All the Dead by Javier Cercas

Author:Javier Cercas [Cercas, Javier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

9

At the beginning of 2015, exactly a year after I’d learned of the Shearer’s death from my mother, and two or three since I’d started collecting information about Manuel Mena, a film producer called to say she was preparing a television series about Catalans born in other parts of Spain and to propose that one of the segments should be about me. As usual when I’m asked to appear on television I remembered for an instant what a friend of Umberto Eco’s told him on one occasion (“Umberto, every time I don’t see you on television you seem more intelligent”), so I said no; the next instant, however, I remembered my mother and Manuel Mena and the Shearer and I said yes. With one condition: that we would film in Ibahernando and with my mother.

The producer accepted, and for three days at the end of June 2015 we were filming in Ibahernando. By that time I knew Manuel Mena’s story quite well, I’d spoken to lots of people who knew him or knew things about him, I’d explored archives and libraries, I’d travelled to the places where Manuel Mena had fought during the war—around Teruel, Lérida, the Bielsa Valley, and the sites of the Battle of the Ebro, near the municipality of Terra Alta—and I had been in contact with professional historians, with amateur historians, with local experts, with historical associations and aficionados of local history, with the locals themselves. In spite of all that, I still couldn’t see Manuel Mena; I mean Manuel Mena was still for me what he’d always been: a blurry, distant, schematic figure, without humanity or moral complexity, as rigid, cold, and abstract as a statue. Apart from that, at the beginning of my investigations I’d had a few shocks. I remember, for example, my first exchange of e-mails with Francisco Cabrera, a retired Civil Guard officer who possessed in his house in Gandesa, the capital of Terra Alta, an archive of documents collected over twenty years of almost exclusive dedication to the history of the Battle of the Ebro, and who had published several stout studies on the subject. I got his e-mail address from a friend and collaborator of his whom I’d met by chance in a Barcelona library, and I succinctly told him what I was looking for. Cabrera responded immediately, as if he’d been waiting for my question or as if his only job was to respond to questions like mine. “I regret to disagree with what you’ve so far been able to discover about your great-uncle,” he wrote. “According to my database, he died on January 8, 1938, in the Battle of Teruel, and not September 21, 1938, in the Battle of the Ebro. I hope you won’t be angry with me because my documents do not confirm what you thought you knew until now about the death of your ancestor.” After that, beneath his reply, he added a page from a history of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.