Javier Cercas's 'Les Soldats de Salamine' Blends Spanish History with Fiction

Javier Cercas, a novelist largely unknown in France, has published a remarkable narrative that weaves Spanish history into a superb fiction. The author-narrator investigates an event from 1939, before Franco's capture of Barcelona, centered on the identity of Rafael Sánchez Mazas, a Falangist writer who escaped execution. The narrator, a journalist, writes an article about Sánchez Mazas that triggers a flood of reader mail, leading him to the story of poet Antonio Machado and his brother Manuel, who crossed the French border at Collioure in 1939 to flee Francoist militias. Machado recounts Sánchez Mazas's execution: arrested in Barcelona, he fled into the forest, pursued by militiamen. One found him, looked him in the eyes, then shouted to his companions, 'Over here, there's nobody!' and left. From these clues, the author seeks to understand how the writer survived. He gathers documents, meets protagonists and witnesses, and studies Sánchez Mazas's notebooks to unravel the secret of the Collel execution. The mystery revolves around the militiaman's gaze and how the writer escaped death. The author attempts to resolve the tale of the 'Battle of Salamina' by discovering Sánchez Mazas's project: a text titled 'Les Soldats de Salamine' that was never written. The journalist then writes his own book, reconstructing the situations and mental state of the writer up to the final seconds of the failed execution.