True fiction. (The Last Word).

When I lived in Berkeley, almost twenty years ago, I heard of a Dominican priest in neighboring Oakland. He was a Spaniard who had fought for the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. I was told he never spoke of it publicly for one simple reason: Americans cannot understand the Spanish Civil War.

It was a puzzling remark. What was there not to understand? I knew Picasso's Guernica. As an undergraduate at Oberlin, I had read Peter Stansky and William Abrahams's Journey to the Frontier. It is still on my shelf. The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was the first engagement of arms of the great moral forces aligning after World War I that would culminate in the defeat of Nazi fascism in World War II. The good priest's comment lurked in my mind, however. Understand it or no, I realized that I knew little about the Spanish Civil War and asked a professor of Spanish history what I should read. He spoke of the historical studies with the sort of qualifiers that give one pause. And then he remarked, "If you want to try to understand the Spanish Civil War, read The Cypresses Believe in God." It was, he said, the great Spanish novel of the Spanish Civil War. The author was Jose Maria Gironella.

Gironella taught me about his Civil War. He brings us the life of a Spanish family in a provincial capital in the five years leading us to its outbreak. After almost a year of reading Cypresses, I understood the Dominican's reticence. I had become reticent myself. There was indeed much not to understand.

In his preface to the American edition of 1955, Gironella writes that he is defending the complexity of Spain. The many political movements that proliferate and crosscut in the period before the war are here. The American edition identifies them in a three-page list at the back. Yet they are here not simply as movements; they are, in Gironella's Spain, movements in the hearts of men. Gironella is a storyteller, and his is a saga of men and women in a land that is erupting. One feels the tremors and one fears they are but tokens of something dark to come. Civil war is the culmination of something tragic.

In Cypresses, our hearts move with the anarchists because we come to know anarchists; that they are anarchists makes sense. Our hearts move with the Falangists because we come to know them; that they are Falangists makes sense. Gironella warns his American reader: "When the narrative deals with a priest, a policeman, a Socialist, a bootblack, it is essential to remember that it is dealing with a Spanish priest, a Spanish policeman, a Spanish Socialist, a Spanish bootblack, not with generic types." Gironella's men and women are not figures in a political cartoon or even of a grand political mural; they are men and women of flesh and blood and moral weight. They act in the manifold ways of man. Gironella assures his American audience that they act in the manifold ways of Spanish man. Precisely because of the former, I came to some appreciation of the latter.

I knew nothing of Gironella when I began Cypresses. I knew nothing about him when I had finished it, a thousand pages later. I could not tell what side he was on, but I now knew there were very many sides indeed. A colleague recently spent a year in Spain, learning Spanish and reading Gironella. He came back knowing nothing of Gironella, not even whether he was still alive. It turns out, he could have passed the old man on the street.

Gironella died on January 3 at the age of eighty-five. An obituary in the London Times (January 17) fills in a few details. He was a Catalan, a Catholic, a former seminarian who fled the Republican zone in the Civil War and fought, in the words of the Times, "on the side of the rebels, led by Franco." In the last years of his life, the Times reports, "Gironella had largely slipped from public attention and, although he continued to write until the end, his death prompted newspaper reports written in shocked tones at the discovery that one of Spain's most famous and successful writers could die in relative penury and obscurity." Although Gironella was among us, he lived quietly.

I take some comfort, I am not sure why, in knowing that Gironella was with us quietly for so many years. I wish I had known; I would have liked to write him. I would have thanked him for such an arrestingly good story and for teaching me about his country and its history. I hope he was truthful, for more than any other work, The Cypresses Believe in God has given shape, color, and substance to what little understanding of the Spanish Civil War I have.

John F. Boyle is professor of theology at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota.