fortress.
“Meditate as often as you can.”
Although he was from Madrid, Ybáñez had told him that he used to spend his childhood summers at his mother’s family home, on the slope of a mountain overlooking Granada.
“Through meditation I learned the power of ideas,” he said. “What else can you do when you see the sun rising over eternal snows and suddenly the Alhambra is there before you? Someday it will be destroyed, because that is the fate of works of human genius, but the idea behind it will never die. It will be born again elsewhere, in another form of beauty and power, because we receive the idea of it from the dead speaking to us from the sanctuary of their graves.”
Pensively gazing into his glass, he added:
“That is why I conceive of the art of war as a meditation in the company of my dead.”
Then he fell silent. After a moment, he said one last thing.
“Because ideas alone are not enough, one must also have a mandate. That is the question that no one ever asks me: who do we get it from and to what kingdom does it consign us?”
“We get it from our ancestors,” said Alejandro.
“You are thinking about mandates and forgetting the kingdom,” replied Miguel. “And yet tomorrow our kingdom will be covered with camps where people will be burned.”
I have tried to describe Alejandro de Yepes through the three major figures of his youth, who shared the same aspirations in life. Why are some born to take responsibility for others, so that their lives become nothing but a succession of battles through which they learn to accept their burden? From that moment on, these battles, this burden, make them into guides whom their troops or brothers will follow to the gates of hell. However, this responsibility for other souls does not stop at the threshold to the cemetery, because the dead belong to the people entrusted to these singular men, and the terrible weight of the kingdom of the dead, the burning obligation to respond to the call, is what we refer to as the life of the dead: a silent, incandescent life, more intense and magnificent than any other, and a few individuals among the living have agreed to be its messengers.
Sons! To the earth and the sky!
Sons! Live for your dead!
Brothers! Stand vulnerable before us!
Brothers! Your noblesse will oblige us.
Book of Battles
BATTLE
How did this war differ from the previous ones?
There was the fact that the Western world no longer knew its dead: either because it had grown old and was approaching an end it did not want to see, or because it had reached the limits of its dream and had to construct another one. In any case, it lacked the whispering of the dead, without which none can live honorably—who can call an existence decent if it has not received a mandate?
As for me, right from the start it seemed as if the battle would have to be resolved by radically rewriting the dream of history. Never had murder come closer to triumphing over poetry.
MURDER
The life of Alejandro de Yepes had begun with the murder of his family and continued with that of his protector, and he sensed, correctly, that he would endure other crimes. What he did not know, however, was that long before he came into the world, the source of his own story lay in a distant murder whose protagonists were strangers to him.
Given the fact that it had been committed neither for gain nor for power, but because the murderer had an obscure premonition that his victim had been sent by the devil, this murder occupied an unusual spot in the sequence of major murders, a spot that yielded up the hope of something beneficial.
Can one ever escape from the fatality of murder? Hope and horror—this shall all be told below. There is only fiction, there are only stories. It doesn’t matter to me whether I know them in advance.
DARKER THAN NIGHT
Now two hours have gone by and Alejandro de Yepes, from the tower of his castillo, is watching the snow fall in the night. He has just been woken, and he’s not sure he understands what’s happening.
“How long has the snow been falling?” he asked.
“For two hours,” Jesús replied. “In two hours, six feet of snow have fallen.”
“Six feet,” said Alejandro. “And you say these men arrived without leaving footprints?”
“Our watchmen are positioned so close together that even an ant could not get through. And besides, what sort