Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas

Author:Javier Cercas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

In my twilight years as an old libertine

and old courtly poet

I'd spend the evenings, in contest

with a devout Theatine Padre.

Increasingly gouty and ever more Catholic,

in the manner of an antiquated gentleman,

my impertinent and haughty genius

turning brittle and melancholic.

And finding to end the story

Masses and debts in my will,

they'll give me a charity funeral.

And fate in its final insult

would wreathe its immortal laurels on me

for a Moral Epistle to Fabius!*

I don't know if at the end of his days, fifty years after writing those words, Sánchez Mazas was an old libertine, but there's no doubt he was an old courtly poet. He was still Catholic, although only outwardly, and also an antiquated gentleman. He always had an impertinent, haughty, brittle and melancholic genius. He died one October night in 1966, of pulmonary emphysema; few people attended his funeral. He left little money and not much property. He was a writer who didn't fulfil his promise and for that reason and perhaps also because he was not worthy of it — did not write a Moral Epistle to Fabius. He was the best of the Falangist writers, leaving a handful of good poems and a handful of good prose pieces, which is much more than almost any writer can aspire to leave, but he left much less than his talent demanded, and his talent was always superior to his work. Andrés Trapiello says that, like so many Falangist writers, Sánchez Mazas won the war and lost the history of literature. The phrase is brilliant and, true in part — or at least it was, because for a while Sánchez Mazas paid for his brutal responsibility in a brutal war with oblivion but it is also true that, having won the war, perhaps Sánchez Mazas lost himself as a writer. He was a romantic after all, would he not have judged deep down all victory to be contaminated by unworthiness, and the first thing he noticed upon arriving in paradise albeit that illusory bourgeois paradise of leisure, chintz and slippers that, like a needy travesty of old privileges, hierarchies and securities, he constructed in his last years was that he could live there, but not write, because writing and plenitude are incompatible. Few people remember him today, and perhaps that's what he deserves. There's a street named after him in Bilbao.

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