Thanks to his publishers, Mataix managed to provide his family with some food, a situation that was beginning to be quite privileged. Most of his colleagues were in far more precarious and dramatic situations. Some had joined the militia in a fit of passion and romanticism. “We’ll exterminate the Fascist rat in its putrid den,” they sang. More than one of them reproached him for not joining them. It was a time when large numbers of people turned the propaganda posters covering the city into their creed and conscience. “If you’re not prepared to fight for your freedom you don’t deserve it,” they told him. Mataix, who suspected they were right, was filled with remorse. Should he abandon Susana and his daughter Ariadna in the large house on the hill and set off to meet the massed ranks of the so-called Nacionales? “I don’t know what nation they’re talking about, but it’s not mine,” a friend told Mataix, who had gone to see him off at the station. “And it’s not yours either, even if you don’t have the courage to come out and defend it.” Mataix went home feeling ashamed of himself. When he got there, Susana threw her arms around him and burst into tears. She was shaking. “Don’t leave us,” she begged. “Ariadna and I are your country.”

As the war advanced, Mataix discovered that he couldn’t write. He would sit for hours in front of his typewriter, staring at the horizon beyond the large windows. In time, he began to go down to the city almost every day, to look for opportunities, he said, or to escape from himself. Most of his acquaintances were by then begging favors in the shady black market of servitude that spread in the shadow of the war. Rumor had it among starving men of letters that Mataix received a nonrefundable salary from Revells and Badens. “Envy is the gangrene of writers,” his old friend Martín had already warned him. “It rots us while we’re alive until oblivion hacks us down unceremoniously.” In a matter of months his acquaintances were no longer acquainted with him. When they saw him approaching in the distance, they would cross over to the opposite pavement, murmuring among themselves, laughing scornfully. Others passed him by, averting their eyes.

The initial months of the war had left Barcelona plunged in a strange somnolence of fear and internal skirmishes. The Fascist rebellion had failed in Barcelona in the first few days after the coup, and there were those who wanted to believe that the war was now a distant event, that in the end it would be seen as just one more piece of bravado from generals with little stature and even less shame. In a matter of weeks, they said, everything would return to the feverish abnormality that characterized the country’s public life.

* * *

Mataix no longer believed that. And he was scared. He knew that a civil war is never just one fight, but a tangle of large or small fights bound to one another. Its official memory is always established by chroniclers entrenched on the winning or the losing side, but it is never the story of those who are trapped between the two, those who seldom set the bonfire alight. Martín used to say that in Spain an opponent may be scorned, but anyone who does things his own way and refuses to swallow what he doesn’t agree with is hated. At the time, Mataix hadn’t believed him. But he was beginning to think that the only sin never forgiven in Spain was that of refusing to take sides, to join one flock or another. And where there are flocks of sheep, the hungry wolves always make an appearance. Sadly for him, Mataix had learned all this and was beginning to smell blood in the air. There would be time enough later on to hide the dead and invent stories. Now was the moment to pull out the knives and pay homage to cruelty. Wars soil everything, but they clean the memory.