A Strange Country Page 2

  He was ten years old and the only surviving descendant of his clan.

  The funerals were remarkable. It was as if all of Extremadura had gathered in Yepes, their numbers swollen by travelers from the past who had managed to reach the village in time. It made for a strange crowd and, anyway, everything was strange that day—the mass, the procession, the burial, and the homily given by a priest cloaked in a wind-ravaged cassock. The wind had begun to blow when the coffins left the castillo, and stopped abruptly with the last word of the funeral oration. And then silence fell all around, until the bells tolled the angelus, and there was a feeling of departing an unknown land—this is what had quietly filled people’s hearts all day long, this inner crossing, this aimless wandering along unfamiliar paths, undisturbed by the priest’s Latin gibberish or the ridiculous sight of a procession of toothless old folk. Now they awoke as from a long meditation and watched Alejandro walking back up the steep slope to the fortress. Only one man was with him, and the village council was praised for its decision to entrust the child to his wise hands. Everyone knew he would take care of the castillo and treat the orphan well; they were glad that he would initiate him into certain higher things and, above all, they were relieved that they would not have to take charge of the matter themselves.

  Luis Álvarez must have been in his fifties and, whether from the stubbornness or the negligence of the gods, was altogether a little man, somewhat bent and very thin. But when he removed his shirt for the hardest tasks, it was to reveal taut and astonishingly vigorous muscles flexing beneath his skin. Similarly, he had an ordinary, unexpressive face, shining with deep blue eyes, and the contrast between the anonymity of his face and the splendor of his gaze summed up everything there was to know about the man. His position was that of steward: he supervised the upkeep of the domain, collected the rent from the tenant farmers, bought and sold wood and kept the ledgers. His soul, on the other hand, made him the guardian of the stars of the castillo. In the evening when they dined in the kitchen of the deserted fortress, Luis spoke with his pupil at length, for this man who was dedicated to serving the powerful and dealing with trivial commerce was in fact a great intellectual and a masterful poet. He had read everything, then reread it, and he wrote the sort of lyrical poetry that only a fervent soul can produce—a poetry of incantations to the sun and murmurs of stars, love, and crosses; of prayers in the night and silent quests. It was in his poetry, during the hours when he wrote it, that he perceived at the edge of his vision the same light Alejandro received from his dead, and he alone, more than anyone, would have been able to answer the boy’s questions about pilgrimage. However, he kept his peace.

  And so, for eight years, every day at noon, you could see him come down from the fortress in the company of the adolescent and sit at his table at the inn, wearing the same white shirt with an officer’s collar and the same light-colored suit, the same worn leather boots and the same wide-brimmed hat—straw in summer and felt when the first frosts arrived, in winter adding one of those long overcoats that shepherds on horseback are known to wear. They would serve him a glass of sherry, and he would stay for an hour while everyone stopped by, asking about his latest poem or the estimated price of cattle. When he was seated he seemed tall because he held himself straight, one leg over the other, one hand on his thigh, elbow propped on the table. He would take a sip intermittently, then wipe his lips with the white napkin folded next to his glass. He seemed enveloped in silence, although he spoke a great deal during these meetings that passed for banal conversation. His elegance was not intimidating; it was elevating, comforting. Next to him, Alejandro sat quietly, and learned the life of poor men.

  A lesser-ranked man can hold an entire country together. Blessed are the lands which know the comfort of such a being, without whom they are doomed to languish and die. In fact, everything can be read in two opposite ways; one has only to see grandeur in the place of wretchedness, or ignore the glory that shines through decline. Poverty had not made the place indigent: it evoked a calming fragrance of splendor and dreams, made all the more remarkable by deprivation; and as long as Luis Álvarez was managing the fortress, it was considered a place to be proud of, despite the knowledge that its land was no longer fertile and its walls were crumbling. And so, after the murder of the Yepes family, the steward naturally took over the tasks they had once performed. He presided over the first village council meeting after the tragedy, and later, when people looked back, it appeared to them as a moment of great dignity; in our collapsing world, such memories are almost more precious than life itself. He opened the meeting, then said a few words to honor the dead, and there can be little doubt that these words kept Alejandro from the madness of sorrow and made him a sane man—in particular the final words, which were addressed to him, although Luis refrained from looking in his direction: the living must tend to the dead. The child was sitting to the right of his steward, his gaze was feverish, but stiller than a stone. However, after he had heard these words, the feverishness of his eyes flickered out and he wiggled on his chair like any boy his age. Then the steward called the votes in the manner of the ancestors, naming the families and striking with his hammer at each decision. When everything had been examined and voted on, he adjourned the meeting and asked the priest to say the prayer for the dead. As the old priest was stumbling over his words, he continued for him, and at the end the entire council voiced the responses—nevertheless, one should not suppose that Luis Álvarez reigned over the land solely because he respected the organization of its rites: if the steward of the castillo had a natural authority, it was because he had created bonds with everyone, bonds that were rooted in a soil so spiritual that anyone who knew its poetry was born to govern the land. In the end, just after the last amen, the women began singing an old song from Extremadura. A song that no one knows anymore today, in a language that no one can translate anymore, but by God, was the music beautiful! It mattered little that no one understood it; it carried a message from stormy skies and a fertile land where the joy of the harvests mingled with the struggle to survive.

  It was Luis Álvarez, in the end, who shaped Alejandro’s vocation for war. On the eve of his sixteenth year, they were sitting by the fire, and the adolescent was drinking his first wine. Since Juan’s death, there had been no visitors to the fortress, but the cellar held a collection of bottles that would last for centuries. Alejandro was finishing his second glass of petrus when Luis recited the poem he had composed that morning.

  “I find some of them in my heart,” he said. “But this one came from another world.”

  To the earth and the sky

  Live for your dead

  And stand vulnerable

  Before mankind

  That in the final hour

  Your noblesse will oblige us

  “What determines noblesse?” asked Alejandro, after a moment’s silence.

  “Courage,” replied Luis.

  “And what makes courage?” asked Alejandro again.

  “Confronting one’s fear. For most of us, it is the fear of dying.”

  “I’m not afraid of dying,” said Alejandro. “I’m afraid of being responsible for men and failing them because the devil in me will have triumphed over the guardian.”

  “Then you must go wherever you can wage that battle.”

  Two years later, Alejandro left for the military academy. He had neither money nor savoir-faire, which is why he was a mere lieutenant at the beginning of the war; nor did he have a talent for career intrigue. All he wanted was to learn. After the academy, he set about joining units whose leaders had their men’s respect—and so he learned, and the day the war broke out, he considered himself ready.

  Naturally, he was mistaken.

  He learned his lesson from circumstance, then from a simple soldier, during one of the first battles. Alejandro had already noticed this man from the ranks who’d proved to be very efficient at carrying out
orders. Something told him that the soldier was from a poor background, but nothing in Jesús Rocamora’s behavior invited familiarity or condescension: he was an aristocrat of the sort who are not born in castles, but where noblesse oblige is written in the heart. He was handsome, too, with an open face and sharply-drawn features, shining blue eyes, and lips crafted by a lacemaker’s needle. Like Alejandro, he was not tall, but he had a fine bearing, black hair, broad shoulders, and hands that were not like any fisherman’s. In addition, he liked to embellish his speech with expressions that would make a hussar blush, then return to the absolute gravity that is the custodian of noble causes.

  On the fifth day of the war, Alejandro’s troops were caught in a pincer movement; the lieutenant from Yepes was witnessing the moment when his men no longer understood him and, in panic, began to do everything back to front. And then, thanks to one of history’s false miracles, Jesús Rocamora was suddenly at his side, begging for an order, gazing at him like a dog at its master.

  “We’ve got to wheel the artillery round on the north flank,” cried Alejandro, for whom the appearance of a man ready to listen was a godsend.

  Then he looked at him and suddenly realized that Jesús should have been with the third unit, six kilometers from there.

  “And retreat through the southern pass?” shouted Jesús in turn.

  Alejandro had given those precise instructions earlier, and several times over, but no one had wanted or known how to follow them. Jesús Rocamora, however, saw to it that followed they were. Better still, he did not leave his lieutenant for a second—no sooner had he set things in motion than he came back, the way a dog returns to his master, to wait for the next order, which he already knew. After two hours of this, they found themselves on the summit of an ineffable ridge, where an angel’s fart would suffice to either precipitate them into the abyss or show them the pathway down the mountain. Alejandro shouted to Jesús: Go, go, stop asking for orders! Jesús looked at him blankly and Alejandro said again, Go, away with you! So the other man cleared off like a nasty cur and showered his men with orders, no longer even taking the time to return to his superior.

  They survived. Then they talked. Every evening they would speak and their acquaintance grew in a brotherly mood that precluded any sense of hierarchy. Then at dawn, lieutenant and soldier would put on their insignia and fight side by side with respect for their ranks. When Alejandro ventured to admit that he would have liked a more enviable status for Jesús, the soldier said: Fishing is the only hell I will ever know on this planet.

  It was also Jesús who taught Alejandro his greatest lesson about war, and turned him from a mere tactician into a strategist.

  “It’ll be a long war,” he told his lieutenant, the evening they were bivouacking on the shady little plateau.

  “So you don’t think we’ll end up surrendering fairly soon?” asked Alejandro.

  “We are the lords of these lands, we won’t lose them as soon as all that. But winning is another matter. It will take time for our leaders to comprehend that while the forms of war may have changed, the essence has remained the same. Once the fronts are stable—vast fronts, sir, the likes of which we’ve never seen—and the generals see that no one will carry the day any time soon, it will become obvious that everything has been staked upon tactics—outdated tactics at that—but that war is still just what it has always been.”

  “A duel,” said Alejandro.

  “A duel to the death,” said Jesús. “Tactics can be adapted, but in the end the winner will be whoever is the best strategist.”

  “And what makes for the best strategist?” asked Alejandro.

  “Ideas always triumph over weapons,” said Jesús. “Who would entrust an engineer with the keys to paradise? It is the divine part in us that determines our fate. The best strategist is the one who looks death in the eye and reads there that he must not be afraid of losing. And with every war this changes.”

  “The real lords are the fishermen,” said Alejandro with a smile.

  And then Jesús told him the story of his moment of revelation.

  “I’m the son of a fisherman, but from the moment I set eyes on the lake, at an age when I couldn’t even walk or talk yet, I knew I wouldn’t become one. After that, I forgot what I knew. When I was a boy, I followed in my father’s footsteps. I knew how to set the nets and bring them in, how to mend them, and all the things you need to know for the job. My first fourteen years were spent between ropes and walking, and I didn’t want to remember that first sight of the lake. But on the morning of my fifteenth birthday, I went down to the lake. It was a misty dawn, and someone had gone over the landscape with ink; the water was black while the mist created incredible images. That landscape . . . that landscape went straight to the heart. I had a vision of the lake—dried up—and of a great battle, and of the face of a child instantly erased by the face of an old man. Finally, everything disappeared, the mist rose to the sky, and I fell to my knees in tears, because I knew I was going to betray my father and go away. I wept for a long time, until my body was drier than the lake I had seen in my vision, then I stood up and looked one last time at the dark water. In that moment, I felt I had just been entrusted with a burden, but also that this cross to bear would free me from my shame. With the priest, I learned to read and write, and two years later I enlisted.”

  Surrounded since childhood by the kindness of his elders and the affection of his peers, Alejandro had never known the brotherly friendship of men who have lived through the same conflagration. At the age of eighteen he had seen the army as a place to fulfill his desire for courage, and he experienced solidarity with his fellow soldiers of the sort that comes with the imminence of combat. But he had never yet met anyone whose heart was in tune with his own. When he went back to Yepes during the last year of the war to set up his headquarters in the castillo, he walked up the main street through the village, happy to see people coming up to shake his hand, the old folk embracing him. Outside the fortress, the priest came to meet him with the mayor at his side, leaning on a cane. They were dressed in black, as awkward and gloomy as scarecrows, but their faces lit up, for once, with their pride in the fact that their young lord was one of the great generals of the day. Alejandro felt his heart racing with gratitude and cheer, to be acknowledged and celebrated in this way. Next to him, Major Rocamora was smiling, and the people of Yepes appreciated both his open gaze and his devotion to their general—if, on top of it, Alejandro had known that they rejoiced in his friendship with Jesús because it meant a lord was indebted to a fisherman, his emotion, no doubt, would have increased tenfold.

  There they stood, the young general and his young major, at the top of the tower in the castillo, now that the war had been raging for six years, bringing with it all the plagues that every war always brings. They stood expectant at the top of the great tower, like the world holding its breath on the eve of battle, on the summit where the roll of a single pebble will determine victory or surrender.

  “It’s going to snow,” said Jesús.

  Alejandro had seen only two Novembers with snow: the one when his family was murdered, twenty years earlier, and the one when Miguel Ybáñez had come to see him in Yepes, three years earlier, in the days when the conflict was spreading farther than anyone would have predicted. After their conversation about the long war, Miguel Ybáñez had asked Alejandro to take him to the cemetery. The two men stood by the graves in silence, and after a moment, Alejandro saw the sparkling that was always there. Thick snowflakes began to fall and before long the cemetery was covered in a light powder that glistened in the late afternoon light. When they went away again, Ybáñez seemed lost in luminous, grave thoughts. The next morning, just before his departure, in a dawn of cruel frost, he told Alejandro he was appointing him major general and entrusting him with the leadership of the first army.

  Three months later, the general from Yepes learned of the generalissimo�
�s death, and he knew his life would be repeatedly marked by the murder of those who were dearest to him. For Alejandro, the death of Miguel Ybáñez was a personal tragedy, but it was also tragic for the soldier in him: the staff needed men of Ybáñez’s fiber, and Alejandro had never met anyone else like him. His thoughts echoed with the words the general had uttered as he passed through the gate to the fortress.

  “Meditate as often as you can.”

  Although he was from Madrid, Ybáñez had told him that he used to spend his childhood summers at his mother’s family home, on the slope of a mountain overlooking Granada.

  “Through meditation I learned the power of ideas,” he said. “What else can you do when you see the sun rising over eternal snows and suddenly the Alhambra is there before you? Someday it will be destroyed, because that is the fate of works of human genius, but the idea behind it will never die. It will be born again elsewhere, in another form of beauty and power, because we receive the idea of it from the dead speaking to us from the sanctuary of their graves.”

  Pensively gazing into his glass, he added:

  “That is why I conceive of the art of war as a meditation in the company of my dead.”

  Then he fell silent. After a moment, he said one last thing.

  “Because ideas alone are not enough, one must also have a mandate. That is the question that no one ever asks me: who do we get it from and to what kingdom does it consign us?”

  “We get it from our ancestors,” said Alejandro.

  “You are thinking about mandates and forgetting the kingdom,” replied Miguel. “And yet tomorrow our kingdom will be covered with camps where people will be burned.”