The first time it happened I could forgive myself. Cutting across the hall from my office and glimpsing a man—pale, wearing metal-rimmed glasses, a thin man in a light-colored rolled-sleeve shirt and khaki pants, busy with files he was returning or extricating from a chin-high bank of beige metal cabinets lining the wall to my right, just inside the departmental office—nothing unforgivable about being confused a split second by the sight of someone I knew was dead, dead a good long while, dead and buried two thousand miles away in cold, high Wyoming, the dead man Roger Wilson’s office down and across from mine, fourth-floor Bartlett Hall, the dozen years I’d taught at U.W., so countless times I’d catch him hunched over his desk under a window opposite the door he always left slightly ajar, puttering in his share of the ubiquitous metal file cabinets that graced Bartlett and also preside here in this English department located in a building I find myself sometimes calling Bartlett, or rather find myself unable to recall this building’s name once Bartlett pops into my head, even after ten years of coming and going through this building’s glass vestibule and thick double doors, one with a push button and ramp for handicap access; nothing unusual or shameful about seeing dead Roger Wilson and silently calling out his name, surprised, hopeful, though I knew better than to believe I’d actually seen him, the flesh-and-bone body I realized now I was staring at could not belong to dead Roger Wilson who’d canceled his claim to a body long ago with a shotgun blast and become a lost soul, visible in this office only to me unless someone could enter my skull, pick their way through the mess of overflowing drawers, files, stacked newspapers, bags of trash, reach the place in my mind where Roger Wilson had suddenly appeared, sudden but rooted firm, solid as a tree planted two decades ago, you wouldn’t blame me, might forgive me as easily as I forgive myself for mixing up names, places, the living and dead because it could happen to anyone, happens frequently and usually passes without comment, it’s so ordinary and startling at the same time, people figure it’s not worth mentioning, who else would want to hear about such an inconsequential moment of slippage, let alone care whether you are mixed up an instant about the identity of a man you glimpse out of the corner of your eye, a split second of confusion leading nowhere except in a heartbeat back to the commonplace reality of a Tuesday, late in the afternoon, postseminar, post a dawn commute from New York City to the university in Massachusetts where I’ve landed and stuck since leaving the mountain West, when I step catty-corner across the hall and there’s old schoolmarm lean and severe, great white hunter and sorry-ass alcoholic, my buddy Roger wasting his good mind and precious time as usual futzing with files, documenting the shamefully low graduation rate of minority student-athletes or serving as liaison between physical sciences and humanities for an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural project of team teaching or organizing a new, socially relevant concentration perhaps one day a major, a department where now there is none, its absence or presence a ghost agitating the fertile, slightly hungover brain of my former colleague who’s risen from the grave to occupy a place here in Logan Hall, then just as quickly relinquishes it, fades and that’s Charley staring at me, Charley Morin puzzled because he’s caught me staring, an unconventionally long and thus suspect pause, our eyes locked and neither of us offering an explanation, an awkward silence I interrupt finally to clear the air, to sweep away the indecision that must have emptied my gaze of expression and caused Charley perhaps to feel vaguely responsible, perhaps challenged, minding his own business, then sensing the weight of eyes on his scrawny shoulders, he turns, meets an undecipherable look with a quizzical tilt of his head, his eyes invisible behind thick lenses whose steel rims catch fire as he straightens, shoot a silver tracer to the ceiling, the crimson afterimage slowly deforming in the air, and I recall the words pillars of light I heard first coming from the mouth of a physicist and vice president at the University of Wyoming who was attempting to explain to me during intermission of a lunch meeting something beautiful and eerie I reported observing one night camped out in the Snowies,
Suggested Reading
Dreaming Within the Text: Notebooks on Herman Melville
By Christopher Bollas“An author, like Melville, needs to dream within the text.”
The Daily
Diaries
The Art of Fiction No. 264
By Javier Cercas
At his paternal grandmother’s home in Ibahernando, ca. 1977. All images courtesy of Javier Cercas.
Javier Cercas rose to literary stardom in Spain with Soldiers of Salamis (2001, translation 2003), a novel about a forgotten incident in the Spanish Civil War. The book is narrated by a struggling novelist and cultural reporter also named Javier Cercas, a grandchild of the war who becomes obsessed with piecing together the story of how Rafael Sánchez Mazas, a Fascist poet and intellectual and one of the founders of the Falange Española, escaped certain death by firing squad and was then spared again by an unknown Republican militiaman. Mario Vargas Llosa praised the book as a return to a “committed literature,” a work that was no less “novelistic, fanciful, and creative” for being about real events; it was an immediate bestseller in Spain and, to date, has sold nearly two million copies worldwide. But the book’s most meaningful impact in Spain was political: it drew attention to the civil war’s legacy, a topic that had been widely avoided by the Spanish people and government for decades, following the pact of forgetting that the left and right made when Franco’s dictatorship fell. Today, Soldiers is credited with indirectly providing the foundation for Spain’s Law of Historical Memory, which has led to the renaming of Spanish streets and squares, the exhumation of the mass graves of victims of Francoist repression, and the restoration of citizenship for the descendants of those who were exiled under the dictatorship.
Cercas is ambivalent about the “memory industry” that he helped foment, preferring to dwell in what he calls the blind spots of history, where the lines between heroism and betrayal, and authenticity and imposture, are less easily adjudicated. The first in a cycle of four novels that complicate Spain’s historical narrative, Soldiers of Salamis was followed by the nonfiction novel The Anatomy of a Moment (2009, 2011), a riveting portrait of the three members of Spanish Parliament who, during the attempted military coup of 1981 in which three hundred and fifty members of the Cortes were held hostage at gunpoint by a rebel faction of the Civil Guard, remained in their seats when asked to surrender; The Impostor (2014, 2017), about Enric Marco, a man from Barcelona who, for decades, falsely claimed he was a survivor of Flossenbürg concentration camp, and became a spokesperson for Spanish victims of Nazism; and Lord of All the Dead (2017, 2019), about Manuel Mena, Cercas’s own great-uncle, who died at nineteen serving in Franco’s army. More recently, he’s taken a foray into detective fiction, writing a series of novels called Terra Alta. Soon after we met, he finished a new book—“the most ambitious and craziest I’ve ever written,” he said—for which he spoke with cardinals and prefects in the Vatican and traveled with the Pope to Mongolia.
In his melding of reportage and archival research with novelistic techniques, Cercas is often compared to the French author Emmanuel Carrère. But where Carrère’s nonfiction narratives merge reporting on contemporary events with high-wire autobiography, Cercas’s books often feature invented narrators, whose creative blocks and marital crises serve to bolster the suspense of their moral examinations of the past. A private man, Cercas avoids literary society, but in recent years he has waged a public battle in his columns for El País against the independence movement of his Catalonian neighbors. He was born in 1962 in Ibahernando, a small village in Extremadura, but he moved to Girona, Catalonia, as a young child. He now lives between Barcelona, where he earned his Ph.D. in Spanish philology, and Verges, a small town in the north of Catalonia, with his wife, the Catalan former actor Mercè Mas.
We spoke this past spring, over the course of three days at his apartment in Barcelona. The living room was sparsely decorated but for a still life of a bowl of fruits painted by a childhood friend and a trove of literary awards haphazardly stashed in a corner. Cercas, who taught literature at the University of Girona for thirteen years, peppers his speech with bons mots and quotes from his favorite writers, and rushes excitedly to offer multiple answers to any question. More than once, he seemed thrilled to have been cornered, and, after venturing a couple of tentative responses, returned the following day with a better answer, having polished it overnight.
INTERVIEWER
Soldiers of Salamis and The Impostor both begin with their narrators in creative crisis. Have you experienced similar moments of block, or doom?
JAVIER CERCAS
I suppose I’d say that, in a way, I’m always in crisis.
INTERVIEWER
That feels like a joke answer, to evade a real one.
CERCAS
I’m being serious. You’re always insecure, always thinking the book you’ve just written will be your last …
But I’ve had two major crises, at least. The most serious was undoubtedly while writing The Anatomy of a Moment. That’s the one I write about in The Impostor.
INTERVIEWER
I remember bumping into you one day around that time, here in Barcelona. You seemed tied up in knots.
CERCAS
It was a brutal time. I don’t want to say too much about it, but suffice it to say I had to go on meds.
INTERVIEWER
Because of the book?
CERCAS
I had a young child, a dying father, and a hundred drafts. In order to figure it out, I had to change genres, change everything. Anatomy began as fiction—I’d intended to write a contemporary take on The Three Musketeers, using the events of the attempted coup of 1981—but it was completely without tension. The problem, of course, was that I was already dealing with a fiction. The coup is like Kennedy’s assassination—everyone has their own personal theory about what happened that day. If you don’t, you’re not a Spaniard.
INTERVIEWER
Damn right.
CERCAS
We’ve all watched that footage a thousand times. For a while, even I believed the theory that the king was implicated in the coup—that it was staged by the intelligence service so that the king could put a stop to it, become the savior of democracy, and consolidate the monarchy. It’s a theory that the far right started floating during the trial, that the far left now upholds, and that, in a literary sense, sounds very appealing, as many conspiracy theories do. And by then it had practically cemented itself as truth in certain books. Well, after I decided that Anatomy had to be a nonfiction novel and started reporting, I spent a week speaking to the secretary-general of the intelligence service at the time of the coup, Lieutenant Colonel Javier Calderón, every afternoon, and to his subordinate, Captain Diego Camacho, every morning, until I realized that the truth was precisely the opposite. What I discovered was that Calderón had actually been one of the few high-ranking officers who’d remained loyal to democracy, and that Camacho, who’d been Calderón’s favorite disciple for some time, had taken revenge for professional reasons and accused him of staging the coup. That doesn’t mean there weren’t members of the secret service who did support the coup, or who went along with it—it was simply the small truth on which the bigger lie was built. Still, many people prefer to stick with tidy, convenient lies, fictions created by unscrupulous journalists on deadline and by authors who’ve written books upon books upon books feeding an industry. All this was fueled by the public imagination and by the coup’s participants themselves—men who seemed to have come straight out of a poem by García Lorca, with mustaches and tricorn hats.
From the Archive, Issue 249
Interview
Season 4 Trailer
The Paris Review Podcast returns with a new season, featuring the best interviews, fiction, essays, and poetry from America’s most legendary literary quarterly, brought to life in sound. Join us for intimate conversations with Sharon Olds and Olga Tokarczuk; fiction by Rivers Solomon, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and Zach Williams; poems by Terrance Hayes and Maggie Millner; nonfiction by Robert Glück, Jean Garnett, and Sean Thor Conroe; and performances by George Takei, Lena Waithe, and many others. Catch up on earlier seasons, and listen to the trailer for Season 4 now.
Subscribe for free: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music