The stranger says that he’s ready to endure every necessary hardship alongside Paracelsus, but before he takes the final step he needs some proof. Paracelsus, troubled, doesn’t ask what proof he demands, but when he wants to see this proof. Immediately, the stranger answers. “They had begun their discourse in Latin; they now were speaking German,” writes Borges. “You are famed,” says the stranger, “for being able to burn a rose to ashes and make it emerge again, by the magic of your art. Let me witness that prodigy. I ask that of you, and in return I will offer up my entire life.”
From this point on, the conversation turns philosophical. Paracelsus asks if he believes anyone is capable of destroying a rose. No one is incapable, says the aspiring disciple. Paracelsus argues that nothing that exists can be destroyed. Everything is mortal, answers the stranger. “If you cast this rose into the embers,” says Paracelsus, “you would believe that it has been consumed, and that its ashes are real. I tell you that the rose is eternal, and that only its appearances may change. At a word from me, you would see it again.” The stranger is puzzled by this response. He insists that Paracelsus burn the rose and make it rise from the ashes, whether with alembics or with the Word. Paracelsus resists: he talks about semblances that sooner or later lead to disenchantment, he talks about faith and credulity, he talks about the search. The stranger takes the rose and throws it on the fire. It burns to ashes. The stranger, says Borges “for one infinite moment awaited the words and the miracle.” But Paracelsus doesn’t do anything, he just sits there sadly and is reminded of the physicians and pharmacists of Basilea who believe he’s a fraud. The stranger thinks he understands and tries not to humiliate him any further. He ceases his demands, takes back his gold coins, and politely leaves. Despite the love and admiration he feels for Paracelsus, vilified by all, he understands that under the mask there is nothing. And he asks himself: who am I to judge and expose Paracelsus? A little while later they bid each other farewell. Paracelsus accompanies the stranger to the door, telling him he’ll always be welcome in his house. The stranger promises to return. They both know they’ll never see each other again. Alone now, and before he puts out the lamp, Paracelsus scoops up the ashes and utters a single word in a low voice. And in his hands the rose springs back to life.
JAVIER CERCAS'S NEW NOVEL
It’s called Soldiers of Salamis (Tusquets, 2001) and the narrator is someone by the name of Javier Cercas, who clearly isn’t the Javier Cercas I know and with whom I often have long conversations on the most unusual subjects. The man I know is married, has a child, his father is still living. Meanwhile, the narrator of Soldiers of Salamis introduces himself like this, at the very start of the noveclass="underline" “Three things had just happened: first my father had died; then my wife had left me; finally, I’d given up my literary career.” These three statements are false, or rather, in this combination of possibilities that we call reality, they’re false, although in some other configuration of reality, or of nightmare logic, they’re probably true. The hypothetical Cercas is preparing a piece on the writer Sánchez Mazas, an entirely real character who was one of the founding fathers of Spanish fascism.
Everything we’re told about Sánchez Mazas in the novel cleaves strictly (although with Cercas nothing is strict) to historical fact: Sánchez Mazas’s early years, his books, his friends, his political activities, his misfortunes. Then comes the Civil War and the writer is imprisoned in the Republican zone. The incident that sparks the novel comes at the end of the war and today it may strike us as an unusual story (or not), but in those days it was a common and brutal practice: Sánchez Mazas and a group of nationalist prisoners are taken to a small Catalan town and shot. They’re all killed, except for Sánchez Mazas, who escapes and is pursued without much enthusiasm. At some point, one of the soldiers who’s giving chase finds him hidden in the bushes. The leader of the group asks whether the soldier sees anything. The Republican soldier looks at Sánchez Mazas, looks him in the eye, and says there’s no one here. Then he turns around and goes.
The second part of the novel tells the story of Sánchez Mazas (whose only positive quality, in my view, is that he fathered Sánchez Ferlosio, one of the best Spanish prose writers of the twentieth-century) and the endless intellectual disillusionment of the Spanish Falangists, which never translated into productive discontent.
The third part centers on the unknown Republican soldier who saved Sánchez Mazas’s life, and here there appears a new character, someone by the name of Bolaño, who is a writer and Chilean and lives in Blanes, but who isn’t me, in the same way that the narrator Cercas isn’t Cercas, although both characters are possible and even probable. Through this Bolaño the reader learns the story of Miralles, a soldier, who, as he retreated, passed the place where the Falangists were killed and Sánchez Mira was nearly killed, and who later crossed the border into France and spent a while in a concentration camp on the outskirts of Argèles, and who, to escape the camp, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, and who, after the fall of France in 1940, followed General Leclerc on his great march from the Maghreb to Chad, and who took part in several battles against the Italians and the Afrika Korps, and who then, assigned to the French 2nd Armored Division, fought in the battle of Normandy and entered Paris and then fought near Strasbourg until a mine, in German territory, put an end to his war, if not his life. The search for this Miralles, whom Bolaño got to know over the course of three summers at a campground near Barcelona, becomes the key to the novel. Of course, Cercas doesn’t know (nor does his friend) whether Miralles is alive or not. All he knows is that he lived in Dijon, that he had acquired French citizenship, and that now he must be past eighty or dead. The third part of the novel is the search for Miralles. If he really is the soldier who chose not to kill Sánchez Mazas, Cercas has just one question for him: Why not?
With this novel, published to critical acclaim and appearing in French and Italian translations a few days before it even landed in Spanish bookstores, Javier Cercas joins the small group at the leading edge of Spanish fiction. His novel flirts with hybridization, with the “relato real,” or “true fiction” (which Cercas himself invented), with historical fiction, and with hyper-objective fiction, though whenever he feels so inclined he has no qualms about betraying these generic categories to slip toward poetry, toward the epic without the slightest blush: in any direction, so long as it’s forward.
BRAQUE: ILLUSTRATED NOTEBOOKS
Braque was seventy years old in 1952, when Illustrated Notebooks was published by Gallimard, a book scarcely one hundred pages long that is now being issued in Spanish by the publishing house El Acantilado. The least that can be said of it is that it’s a precious book, in the literal sense of the word, composed of notes, reflections, and aphorisms that the painter tossed off between 1917 and 1952 — obviously they are anything but his principal occupation, which is precisely what makes them so interesting, what gives the book the aura of a secret project, never exclusionary but always exacting.