go look for a place for us to stay: meantime I’ll go see the martyrs struggling, that’s what I wish to do first of all, he went in all haste to the place of executions and he saw the fortunate martyrs, one suspended by his feet over a bonfire, another stretched on four pieces of wood and subjected to slow torture, a third lacerated with iron nails, a fourth whose hands had been cut off, and the last raised into the air and choked by logs fastened to his neck, as he viewed these different tortures the executioner was carrying out pitilessly, Boniface felt his courage and his love for Jesus Christ grow and he cried out how great is the God of holy martyrs! then he ran and threw himself at their feet and kissed their chains, courage, he said to them, martyrs of Jesus Christ and the judge Simplician, who saw Boniface, had him approach his court and asked him who he was, I am a Christian, he replied, and Boniface is my name then the angry judge had him strung up and ordered his body to be flayed, until his bare bones could be seen then he had sharpened reeds pushed under his fingernails, the holy martyr, his eyes lifted to heaven, bore his sufferings with joy, then the fierce judge ordered molten led to be poured into his mouth, but the saint said thanks be to you, Lord Jesus, Son of the living God, after which Simplician called for a cauldron filled with boiling pitch and Boniface was thrown into it head-first, the saint still didn’t suffer, then the judge ordered his head to be cut off: immediately there came a terrible earthquake and many infidels, who had been able to appreciate Boniface’s courage, converted, his comrades bought his body and they embalmed it and wrapped it in costly linens and then, having put it on a litter, they returned to Rome where an angel of the Lord appeared to Aglaida and revealed to her what had happened to Boniface, she went over to the holy body and had a tomb worthy of it built in its honor — as for Aglaida, she renounced the world and its pomp, after having distributed all her worldly goods to the poor and the monasteries she freed her slaves and spent the rest of her life in fasting and prayer, before being buried next to Saint Boniface tortured and beheaded, during the homily I thought about Maks Luburić the Croatian butcher, about those whom he had decapitated, flayed, impaled, burned because they were infidels, how many times had he heard the Mass of Saint Boniface martyr patron saint of Carcaixent, under the name Vicente Pérez was he still thinking about Jasenovac or Ante Pavelić great collector of human eyes when his assassin smashed his skull with a log before stabbing him twenty times with a kitchen knife, one warm April night, in the heady perfume of the flowering orange tree, I down my gin to the health of Boniface the little martyr from Tarsus in Cilicia, Tarsus city of Saint Paul and of the Armenians massacred in turn by the infidel Turks under the eyes of Doughty-Wylie the consul fallen in the Dardanelles, my head is spinning, my head is spinning I feel suddenly nauseous I cling to the window jamb, I need some air, the bartender is looking at me, the gin didn’t do me any good I’ll go splash some water on my face, I stagger in the train’s movements over to the nearby john, I close the door behind me sprinkle myself with water as if for a baptism I sit down in the comfort of the brushed steel alcohol was a mistake I haven’t eaten anything all day, what the hell am I doing here in the train toilets I’m beat I’ll go back and sit down try to sleep a little but first I’ll light a cigarette, too bad for the anti-cancer laws, soon Florence, soon Florence and then Rome, what slowness despite the speed, the dryness of the tobacco relaxes me, the tiny toilet is immediately filled with smoke, like the square in Carcaixent after the mascletà, as we left the Mass of the martyr Boniface a band was playing local tunes on short wind instruments that sounded shrill and piercing, a horrible sound that bored into our eardrums as mercilessly as the firecrackers, the faithful followed the fanfare while out on the square they were setting off fireworks that exploded in a fountain over the night sky, it was like Naples on New Year’s Eve, Naples or Palermo, a tie in pyrotechnical excess, along with Barcelona in the summer on Saint John’s Day, a trinity of cities in love with noise, Carcaixent put all its good will into it, the festival was in full swing, after three or four more drinks and a quick dinner Stéphanie wanted to go to bed, I let her go back alone to the hotel I had business to attend to at 25 Avinguda Blasco-Ibáñez the author of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Mare Nostrum, what an address, with his advanced age I was pretty sure the man I was looking for would be home, maybe even asleep, if he could find sleep, a little outside of the center of town I spotted a telephone booth, I dialed his number, after four rings a man’s voice replied si? I hung up immediately, according to my map the avenue was a scant hundred meters to the south, Ljubo Runjas isn’t expecting me, what’s more his name is Barnabas Köditz now, he has lived in Spain since 1947, in Madrid at first and then, when Ante Pavelić died ten years later, he settled in Carcaixent, for years he informed Yugoslav intelligence about the activities of Luburić the butcher and other Ustashis protected by Franco, he gave them everything, in exchange for his own immunity — from whom could he be hiding, Ljubo Runjas the sergeant from Jasenovac, at twenty years of age he was a man of base deeds, murdering women and children, by poison by gas by club or knife, he had the hot blood of youth, Ljubo, born in 1922 he will die in his bed, unlike his mentor Maks Luburić whom he betrayed, he helped his assassin flee to France and I suspect him too of having planted one or two knife wounds in his friend’s body, out of pleasure, prudently he then left Carcaixent for Valencia, before returning and settling there over twenty years after the fact, for reasons I know nothing of, sentimental ones maybe, maybe financial ones, he’s still there at almost eighty years of age when I head for Avenue Blasco-Ibáñez the duel-loving writer, the whole village is at the festival the streets are deserted, dark, the avenue is lined with buildings on one side on the other a few villas looking out onto the orchards by the banks of the Júcar, the night is very dark, no moon, not one star, the stars must not have shone often in Jasenovac on the Sava which the inmates crossed in a ferry to go to Gradina where most of the executions took place, they say that Ljubo Runjas killed almost a hundred people with his own hands in a field in one evening, with a knife, impossible to believe that the condemned ones stayed quietly in their field, he must have had to run after them like chickens, women children old men, Ljubo Runjas had invented a method so as not to have cramps in his fingers he attached the weapon with a piece of leather directly to his palm like a glove, his hand just had a few jobs to do, just direct the blade, the whole movement was in the arm like a tennis player, forehand stroke, backhand, how many humans did he sacrifice in three years in Jasenovac, many more than the animals in his father’s slaughterhouse, more than all the lambs of Bosnia on the day of Kurban Bajram, even the Nazis were horrified by the Ustashi methods, the Nazis who sought to protect their soldiers from proximity to the victims, who used technology for massacres ever since Himmler himself, by a ditch near Riga, had been splattered by Jewish blood: in Jasenovac there were no rules no technology no order in death, it came according to the murderers’ own sweet whims, firearms, knives, clubs especially, one by one the inmates went through the double door, behind which they got a big hammer blow on the back of the head, next, next, the executioners relieved each other every thirty or forty victims, an amateur business, amateur or at most an eighteenth-century technique — I ring the bell at number 25, the villa is white, with a covered porch, a tiny garden where a short palm tree holds court, no lights, I try again, it’s 10:30, a festival day, the porch lights up, the intercom crackles, the same