fifteenth birthday, I went down to the lake. It was a misty dawn, and someone had gone over the landscape with ink; the water was black while the mist created incredible images. That landscape . . . that landscape went straight to the heart. I had a vision of the lake—dried up—and of a great battle, and of the face of a child instantly erased by the face of an old man. Finally, everything disappeared, the mist rose to the sky, and I fell to my knees in tears, because I knew I was going to betray my father and go away. I wept for a long time, until my body was drier than the lake I had seen in my vision, then I stood up and looked one last time at the dark water. In that moment, I felt I had just been entrusted with a burden, but also that this cross to bear would free me from my shame. With the priest, I learned to read and write, and two years later I enlisted.”
Surrounded since childhood by the kindness of his elders and the affection of his peers, Alejandro had never known the brotherly friendship of men who have lived through the same conflagration. At the age of eighteen he had seen the army as a place to fulfill his desire for courage, and he experienced solidarity with his fellow soldiers of the sort that comes with the imminence of combat. But he had never yet met anyone whose heart was in tune with his own. When he went back to Yepes during the last year of the war to set up his headquarters in the castillo, he walked up the main street through the village, happy to see people coming up to shake his hand, the old folk embracing him. Outside the fortress, the priest came to meet him with the mayor at his side, leaning on a cane. They were dressed in black, as awkward and gloomy as scarecrows, but their faces lit up, for once, with their pride in the fact that their young lord was one of the great generals of the day. Alejandro felt his heart racing with gratitude and cheer, to be acknowledged and celebrated in this way. Next to him, Major Rocamora was smiling, and the people of Yepes appreciated both his open gaze and his devotion to their general—if, on top of it, Alejandro had known that they rejoiced in his friendship with Jesús because it meant a lord was indebted to a fisherman, his emotion, no doubt, would have increased tenfold.
There they stood, the young general and his young major, at the top of the tower in the castillo, now that the war had been raging for six years, bringing with it all the plagues that every war always brings. They stood expectant at the top of the great tower, like the world holding its breath on the eve of battle, on the summit where the roll of a single pebble will determine victory or surrender.
“It’s going to snow,” said Jesús.
Alejandro had seen only two Novembers with snow: the one when his family was murdered, twenty years earlier, and the one when Miguel Ybáñez had come to see him in Yepes, three years earlier, in the days when the conflict was spreading farther than anyone would have predicted. After their conversation about the long war, Miguel Ybáñez had asked Alejandro to take him to the cemetery. The two men stood by the graves in silence, and after a moment, Alejandro saw the sparkling that was always there. Thick snowflakes began to fall and before long the cemetery was covered in a light powder that glistened in the late afternoon light. When they went away again, Ybáñez seemed lost in luminous, grave thoughts. The next morning, just before his departure, in a dawn of cruel frost, he told Alejandro he was appointing him major general and entrusting him with the leadership of the first army.
Three months later, the general from Yepes learned of the generalissimo’s death, and he knew his life would be repeatedly marked by the murder of those who were dearest to him. For Alejandro, the death of Miguel Ybáñez was a personal tragedy, but it was also tragic for the soldier in him: the staff needed men of Ybáñez’s fiber, and Alejandro had never met anyone else like him. His thoughts echoed with the words the general had uttered as he passed through the gate to the