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2

At this point in his reminiscences, Adam felt the need to phone Sémiramis. When they had parted the night before, he had felt she was angry.

“No, I was just pensive,” she reassured him.

“I’m sorry. It was tactless of me.”

“To talk about Bilal, you mean? Don’t worry about it, it’s ancient history.”

This was clearly not entirely the case, since her words were followed by an awkward silence. In fact, she quickly admitted:

“No, actually, that’s not true. It’s a lie, Bilal will never be ancient history. I’ll never feel unmoved, indifferent when someone mentions his name. But that’s no reason not to talk about him. I don’t want you treating me with kid gloves, I don’t want you labelling me ‘fragile.’ The thing that would hurt me would be for a friend like you to feel he had to avoid subjects that might upset me. Even if you think I might suffer, I’m asking you not to treat me like a permanent convalescent. Promise?”

As if to demonstrate that it was duly noted, Adam said:

“There’s one thing that’s always nagged at me. Did you ever understand why Bilal took up arms? He was hardly passionate about politics, he loathed the war, and he had little respect for the various factions.”

From the other end of the line, there came a long sigh followed by another silence, and Adam could not help but wonder whether he had been wrong to take his friend’s assurances literally. However, after a moment she said:

“You’re right to ask me that question. But the answer isn’t a simple one …”

“Do you want to talk about it some other time?”

“No. Are you in your room? Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be right up.”

When she knocked at his door a few minutes later, her eyes were red and Adam felt guilty and ashamed.

“I’m sorry, Sémi! I didn’t mean to …”

With a wave, she silenced him then went and sat on a wicker chair. Without looking at him, she began:

“We loved each other very much, you know that.”

“Yes, of course I know.”

“Of all those who fell during the war, not one died for the same reasons as Bilal. It was literature that killed him. His heroes were Orwell, Hemingway, Malraux, the writers who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Those were his exemplars, his role models. They had taken up arms for a time so that their hearts could beat in sync with that of the century. Then, their duty done, they had gone home to write. Homage to Catalonia, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Man’s Hope—we had read them together. I’m sure that, on the barricades, shouldering his machinegun, Bilal was not thinking about the battles to come, but about the book he was going to write.

“I was terrified. From the very beginning. But that’s just one more part of the hero’s image. The wife, or the mother, or the girlfriend pleading with him not to go, while he listens only to his duty … I was a modern lover, I thought I was more sophisticated than other girls. I read the same books he did, I shared his dreams, and this meant I was entitled to say, ‘This isn’t nineteen-thirties Spain, where men were fighting for ideals. In our country, those taking up arms are just neighbourhood thugs. They strut around the place, they kidnap, they pillage, they traffic …’ Sometimes, he agreed with me, but sometimes he would say, ‘People are always contemptuous of their own era, just as they always idealize the past. It’s easy to imagine I would have been a Republican in Barcelona in 1937, or a member of the French Resistance in 1942, or a comrade of Che Guevara. But my life is happening here and now, and it is here and now that I have to choose: either I commit myself, or I stand on the sidelines.’

“He was afraid of missing out on his own era, and thereby losing the right to be a writer. He was afraid of not living intensely enough, passionately enough, and our love wasn’t enough for him.”

Sémiramis fell silent, and with her crumpled handkerchief, she dabbed her eyes and wiped the corners of her mouth. Adam allowed a few seconds to pass before saying:

“You’ve just answered another question that I always wondered about: he didn’t take up arms because the two of you had quarrelled.”

To his great surprise, this remark elicited a broad smile from Sémiramis.

“Our relationship was stormy, that’s certainly true. We broke up, we got back together, but neither of us would ever have given up on the other …

“It was never my fault … Yes, I know, it’s easy for me to say that when he’s not here to defend himself. But I think it’s something he would have readily admitted. He was always the one who started the fights, and he was the one who always made up again. Here, too, the problem stemmed from literature. From that inane myth that authors should have tempestuous relationships so they can write about their lovers. Quiet contentment blunts the edge of passion and dulls the imagination. Bullshit! A happy populace produces no history, a happy couple produces no literature. Complete rubbish. In the end, for us, there was no happy couple and no literature.”

She caught her breath, then added:

“Our relationship was like that frenzied dance where the dancers violently pivot away from each other, spin back, and just as violently collide before pivoting away again. But at no point do they let go of each other’s hands.”

Another pause, a smile from a bygone age. Then she continued her story:

“He showed me the gun he had just bought, he was as proud as a little kid, he held it out so that I could take it, maybe thinking I’d be overwhelmed. I was instantly disgusted by the cold metal and the smell of gun grease and threw it onto the sofa where it bounced and almost fell on the floor; he caught it just in time and gave me an angry, contemptuous look. ‘I thought you were going to start writing,’ I said defiantly. He said, ‘First I have to fight, then I can write.’ I never saw him again. We never spoke to each other. He died four days later. Without having written anything, and without having really fought. The first mortar shell from the other district landed a few feet from him. He was sitting with his back to a wall, daydreaming, apparently. I’m pretty sure that he never even fired his gun.”

“At least his hands were clean. He didn’t kill anyone.”

“No, no one. Apart from himself and me, he didn’t kill anyone.”

Sémi was visibly distressed by her memories, Adam wrote as soon as his friend had left the room. But, thinking about it, I don’t regret bringing up this chapter of her past—of our mutual past, I should say, even if, for me and for the rest of our friends, the trauma was much less devastating. It was important that I gave her the opportunity to tell me, straightforwardly, that she had done everything she could to stop Bilal from courting death.

Of course, I realize that that will not take away her grief, or the inevitable feeling of guilt we all feel at the death of a loved one. But I think that making him a sort of martyr to literature, rather than the victim of a grubby skirmish, she ennobled his death, made it a little less absurd.

I was intrigued by what she said about Bilal’s fascination with the Spanish Civil War. It’s true that he and I often talked about it. But no more than we talked about Vietnam, Chile, or the Long March. I didn’t realize that he was so obsessed with it, nor that he dreamed of being another Hemingway. When he and I discussed the Spanish Civil War during our walks together, we more often talked about García Lorca, who was one of its first victims, though he never took up arms.

That said, the last conversation between Sémi and her beloved was not unlike a lot of the discussions our group was having at that time, all of which revolved around the same subject: Was the fighting in our country merely a clash between tribes or clans—not to say between gangs of thugs—or was there some greater merit to these clashes, some moral dimension? In other words, was it worth getting involved, at the risk of losing one’s life?

At that point in our lives, we all believed that the Spanish Civil War, despite the atrocities committed, was the archetypal conflict with a genuine cause, an ethical dimension, and hence one worthy of dying for. Now, as a historian approaching fifty, I have some doubts about this. At the time, I had none, and nor did my friends. The only other struggle that, to our eyes, had been worthy of dying for was the anti-Nazi resistance—whether that be French, Italian, Soviet, or German. At the tops of our lungs we sang “Bella ciao” and Aragon’s “L’Affiche rouge,” we all wanted to be Stauffenberg or, better yet, Missak Manouchian, the Armenian carpenter from Jounieh who had gone on to lead a faction of the French Resistance.

Our misfortune, our tragedy, was that we felt the battles we could fight in our time, in our country, lacked the same purity, the same nobility.

Not that I think we would all have been prepared to lay down our lives for a good cause, even at the age of eighteen. But it was an issue that was never far from our thoughts, or our discussions. Were we going to spend our whole lives, or at the very least our youth, without the opportunity to throw ourselves headlong into a struggle worthy of the name? And was there a just cause, one championed by men who were pure of heart, or at least trustworthy? Personally, I doubted it.

I feel certain that Bilal had the same doubts I did. Even if there came a day when, out of sheer impatience, he decided to silence them. He was mistaken, but I respect his decision, and whenever I think of him, I will never cease to say, “He was a pure soul.”