First Defeat (1939) by Alberto Méndez

The fiction in this week’s New Yorker, a short story about an officer’s surrender during the Spanish Civil War, has a couple of techniques worth noting.

The (sadly, late) Alberto Méndez tells the story in a first-person plural voice that suggests either a committee trying to reconstruct action, or a team of researchers presenting a paper.

What’s nice is, the point-of-view goes a long way toward developing one of Mendez’s themes, which is the difficulty of knowing what is in someone’s head as they take certain actions.

The narrators rarely use quoted dialogue unless it’s attributable to some other source. The few times they do, they admit they’re speculating. And it’s this admission that hooked me into the story.

These speculations about our hero’s thoughts are simply our way of explaining
the events we know to have occurred. We know that Alegría studied law, first in
Madrid, and then in Salamanca. We know from his relatives that he received a
country gentleman’s education in Huérmeces, in the provinces of Burgos, where he
was born, in 1912, to an aristocratic family of old Castilian stock, and reared
in a rambling house with two stone archways and a coat of arms that
distinguished its inhabitants from the local parvenus who owed their fortunes to
famines in the south, where livestock, vines, corn, and olives had succumbed to
anthrax, phylloxera, weevils, oidium, and other curses.

The voice, which is brimming with limitations like these, makes the story feel like actual history. But it also suggests a pair of questions that serve as subtext for the story. What was Alegría really thinking when he surrendered? And, why do these narrators care enough to track down records and witnesses long after the fact?