Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  Porky murmured in agreement. “Greatest, greatest, greatest.”

  “Wonderful,” I said to myself. The prior had said nothing to me about any selection process. Or there being only one place. How could anyone be expected to choose me over these two bookworms?

  After the Marquis de Vauban’s description, I was expecting someone battle-hardened, Herculean, covered in scars. The man who came in, though, was a short, distinguished, and irritable-looking nobleman. He wore a sumptuous wig, the hair wavy and with a central parting. In spite of his advanced age, as shown in his jowly, angular cheeks, his whole being emanated an impatient energy. On his left cheek, there was a violet patch, the result of a bullet that had grazed him at the siege of Ath.

  We each stood to attention in a line. The marquis cast his eye over us, saying nothing. He stopped in front of each of us and regarded us for scarcely one or two seconds. And with what eyes! Ah, yes, that Bazoches glance, unlike any other. When Vauban looked at you, it was as though to say: I know you, imperfections and all, better than you know yourself. And that was true, in a certain sense. But this was only the man’s harder side.

  Vauban also had a paternal streak. Though severity might have seemed the most visible facet of his character, no one could fail to see that its aim was both benign and constructive. He was the sort of man whose rectitude is beyond question.

  Finally, he deigned to speak. He began with the good part: The royal engineers were the crème de la crème, a select few. So few, in fact, that the kings of Spain and of Asia were prepared to pay any price for their services. This was sounding better . . . French francs, English pounds, Portuguese cruzados. I’d earn, plus get to see the world!

  Then the exposition took a turn. Vauban turned serious and said to us: “Be aware, gentlemen, that an engineer risks his life more often in a single siege than an infantry officer will in an entire campaign. Still interested?”

  The pair of nitwits at my side assented in unison with an emphatic “Oui, monsieur!” I barely knew which way to look. The military? Rifles? Cannons? I mean, what on earth were they talking about? When I thought of an engineer, I thought bridges, canals. Though Porky and Stretch had mentioned sieges and battles, presumably the men at the helm were always well placed—particularly if their role was to draw up blueprints—in the rearguard, with a wench on either knee.

  Look, I had bargained on coming away from Bazoches with some kind of qualification, even in ditch planning. Anything, just something I could use to justify myself to my father. And here was this old loon talking nonsense, endless nonsense, on and on.

  For it went from bad to worse. Much worse. Before I realized it, he was already on to “The Mystery.”

  I’ve been trying to understand the twinkling lights of le Mystère (write it down like that, Waltraud) for the better part of a hundred years, and still I consider myself a novice. So why don’t you, my readers, tell me what a lad of fourteen was supposed to think hearing about it for the first time, in that small side room in the castle at Bazoches?

  Almost every other word was Mystère, and Vauban’s tone was so reverential that in the end I thought it must be some cryptic moniker for God Himself. But then again, why bring God into it? By the way Vauban was speaking, God could be no more than a featherbrained stepson to this Mystère.

  I quickly gave up any hope of being accepted at Bazoches. As I say, I hadn’t the faintest notion where it was all headed. Porky and Stretch seemed enthused. They had a good idea what was in store, were as prepared as possible—given their standing and their schooling—and their lives’ only objective seemed to be devoting themselves to the rare cause being invoked by the marquis.

  Very abruptly, Vauban fell quiet and left the room. Porky and Stretch looked at each other in bafflement. A minute later, someone else came out in Vauban’s place. It was her. The redheaded beauty from the courtyard. She proceeded to introduce herself . . . as the marquis’s daughter.

  The possibility, or anything like it, had not occurred to me. What a fool I was—no serving girl could possibly move with such aplomb. This time she was far more elegantly attired, with a long skirt that covered her feet. She made no sign of recognizing me. She was serious as death and nearly as frightening. She came and stood before us.

  “My father wishes to form an idea of your aptitudes. Knowing that his presence can be intimidating to young cadets, he has asked me to carry out the test.” Opening a folder, she took out a print. “The test consists of a single question. I will show you designs, one by one, and you must describe them to me. Please be concise in your answer.”

  She turned to me first, showing me a picture. I still have a replica of the original. (You, you brutish blondie, insert it here, after this page, nowhere else! Get it? Here!)

  If she’d shown me a poem in Aramaic, I would have had a better idea what it meant. I shrugged and said the first thing that came into my head. “A star. A star that looks like a flower, with spines instead of petals.”

  Porky and Stretch, who had already managed a sidelong glance at the drawing, broke down laughing. Not her. She remained impassive, moved two paces along, and showed the illustration to Porky, who answered: “A fortress with eight bastions and eight ravelins.”

  When it came to Stretch, he merely said: “Neuf-Brisach.”

  “Of course!” exclaimed Porky. “How could I fail to see it? Vauban’s crowning work!”

  Stretch, confident he’d won, couldn’t help but assume the victorious expression of someone the gods have smiled upon. He even commiserated with Porky, laying the crass amiability on thick. The image in the print was that of the fortress at Neuf-Brisach, wherever that was.

  Vauban’s daughter asked us to wait while she went and passed on our answers to her father. When it was the three of us again, I said: “The next time we lay eyes on one another, you would be better off minding your manners.”

  They were taken aback by my aggrieved tone.

  “Ah, yes. You’re that beggar,” Stretch said, finally working out who I was. He was the cleverer of the two. “And might I ask what you’re doing here?”

  My intention was merely to needle them a little before I left, what with the mud and the fact that I never have been able to stand conceited little snots like them. But my insults were sufficiently choice as to make their faces drain of vim—and they piled right in to me!

  There were two of them, but two’s not so many, and I kicked them in the shins and poked them in the eyes. Porky came up behind me and started strangling me, and we fell to the floor. I bit him on the arm and aimed a few defensive kicks at Stretch, who was raising a chair over his head, ready to crack mine open. I don’t know what would have happened if Vauban and his daughter hadn’t come in and interrupted us.

  “Gentlemen!” she exclaimed, scandalized. “This is Bazoches castle, not a common tavern!”

  We got to our feet and stood up straight, our clothes crumpled, Stretch with a bashed-in eye and Porky nursing his arm where I’d bitten it. The marquis’s glare was indescribably severe. And I’m not being rhetorical when I say the silence was such that you could have heard the woodworms eating the chairs.

  “You have brought violence into my home,” declared the marquis. “Get out.”

  There was nothing more to be said. The daughter addressed the other two boys. “You and you, come with me.” As she was leading them from the room, she turned her head and said to me: “You, wait here.”

  I was alone with the marquis, who kept his probing eyes upon me. We could hear the protests of Porky and Stretch on the far side of the door. Then, these having diminished, the girl came back into the room.

  I thought Vauban’s daughter was going to throw me out as well but was staggering our departure; after our punching, biting, and scratching spectacle, it was only logical to separate us to avoid a repeat.

  But what the marquis said next, though unyielding in tone, did not fit with a goodbye: “Our first conversation takes place after an act of violence under
my roof. Does that seem to you to augur well?”

  Better not to answer. He paced around a little. Coming back over to me, he stopped and prodded me on the chest with two fingers. “I am now going to ask you a question,” he said, “and I want you to answer honestly. What happened with the Carmelites?”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s complicated. The Carmelites are, how can I say it, they’re real disciplinarians.”

  I could see Vauban wasn’t one to beat about the bush. I had no way of knowing what it said in the prior’s letter, so I simply decided to present the facts without twisting them too much.

  “One day I got in a carriage to return to the college. I was in such a hurry, I failed to notice that, though indeed a carriage, it was meant for a funeral. The Carmelites took it very badly.”

  “For a funeral?”

  “The family was unhappy at the change of route,” I said, avoiding as best I could the most disagreeable parts.

  I heard lively laughter start up behind me, growing louder; it was the daughter, sitting behind me. The most unexpected thing to me was that the marquis joined in the joke. His stony face suddenly crumpled, and there he was, guffawing. Father and daughter, laughing, exchanged looks.

  “Now I understand why the prior sent you to me,” said the marquis, explaining: “I studied with them as a youngster, too, and committed a nearly identical error. They must never have forgotten it!” Still laughing, he turned back to his daughter. “Have I never told you about it, Jeanne, my dear? I took a seat next to the driver and said: ‘To the Carmelite college!’ ”

  She was beset by laughter, louder and louder, as the marquis continued his tale: “And the driver said: ‘Young man, do not be in such a hurry to arrive at the place where this vehicle is destined.’ So I understood that it was going to the cemetery. My face must have been quite the picture!”

  They broke down laughing. The marquis pulled out an enormous white handkerchief to dry his eyes. When he spoke again, laughter punctuated his words. “Dear Lord God . . . And they got angry at a peccadillo like that?” More laughter. “When one finds oneself in a bit of a spot, lying under a carriage like a boob, that’s all there is to it . . .” Laughter, ho, ho, ho. “But honestly . . . I mean . . .” Hee, hee, hee from Vauban, ho, ho, ho from Jeanne, “The Carmelites have many virtues, but a sense of humor has never been one!”

  The private man seemed altogether different from his public persona. At that point I did not know that, for Vauban, the idea of “private” included only Jeanne, the youngest of his two daughters, in whom he had complete trust. As he looked at me, the marquis’s face turned stony again. “There’s still time for you,” he said. “Should you choose to remain in Bazoches, your life will undergo radical changes.”

  Who’d have thought it? When Jeanne passed on our test answers, she must have told her beloved father that good old Zuvi, not Stretch, had hit the mark. She’d seen something in Martí Zuviría . . .

  “The Carmelites’ letter also makes reference to certain little defects of character: pride, disobedience, a dislike of authority. Want to know what I think? I think the prior has relieved himself of a difficult student.”

  Almost a hundred years have passed and still, still I see Jeanne Vauban in that moment, seated beside me, head askance, chewing strands of red hair. In her eyes, a look that suggested everything—or nothing. If it had been just the two of us, I believe I would have pounced on her there and then.

  Vauban again prodded my chest. “Think you’re here merely to become a simple ‘engineer’? Wrong. Bazoches is the fount of certain secrets known to very few. Know this: By the time we finish with you, you will no longer be any old commoner. True: You’ll touch the gates of glory with fingers of lead. But the rewards will be few. And for you to become an engineer, Bazoches will take everything you’ve got out of you before we put it all back in. You’ll feel as though you’ve swallowed your vomit a thousand times. And only then will you be worthy of le Mystère.” He paused to take breath into his old lungs and then asked: “Do you feel you’re up to such a task?”

  Part of me was saying, Get out of here. Go whistling out and don’t stop till you hit the Pyrenees. Drop le Mystère, leave the Great Marquis-Engineer-Leanwit to cook in his own sauce, don’t get caught up in affairs not your own . . .

  Then again, I thought, why not? Though it wasn’t what I’d been expecting, I didn’t have much of an option. As I hesitated, my gaze turned away a little, toward Vauban’s daughter. My giddy goodness, that redhead.

  I stood up tall to give my answer: “Ready and willing, Monsieur!”

  He nodded lightly. But his blessing contained something slightly troubling, in that he turned to his daughter and said: “What are you waiting for?”

  When it comes down to it, the most important decisions in our lives are not made by us, they happen to us. Was it le Mystère’s invisible aroma that did it? Possibly. Or it could have been my cock talking. Also quite possible.

  3

  What led the great Vauban to adopt me as a student? Even now, I cannot answer with any certainty.

  His only male child had died at two months old, meaning that Vauban had to make do with two daughters. Was there some form of never exercised paternity that he needed to feel? Don’t believe for a moment I was that important. And, as I was later to learn, to a man with Vauban’s ideas about the world, he cared little whether his offspring were boys or girls. He sired a good many bastards with local peasant women. This was common knowledge, he never made any effort to hide it, and in his will went so far as to leave each a good stipend. But in life he never paid them the slightest bit of mind.

  In March 1705, he was precisely two years shy of death. He knew the end was not far off. A privileged few had gone before me, and I would be the final student. The only way I can put it is sometimes, a few times, I felt like the piece of parchment upon which the castaway writes his last message before inserting it into the bottle.

  Naturally, I did not see Vauban each and every day. He was often away traveling, in Paris or elsewhere. Let’s say he concerned himself with my progress as he did the majority of his fortification works: in the capacity of supervisor general.

  They allocated me a room in a tower at the top of a winding staircase. It was small but light, neat and tidy, and smelled of lavender. The next day I breakfasted in a corner of the kitchens, which were larger than my whole house in Barcelona. I ate alone, the servants all busy with other tasks. I expected I’d see Jeanne afterward—or at least I hoped to. Instead of her, a venerable old man appeared, beaming and delicate-looking.

  “So, you’re the new pupil?”

  He introduced himself as Armand Ducroix. “Have you managed to get your bearings at Bazoches?” he asked before answering his own question. “No, of course not, if he only arrived yesterday. All in good time, hmm, yes.”

  I was yet to learn that this was Armand’s habitual way of speaking. He thought out loud, as if he believed it the most normal thing in the world that his thoughts should flow freely, without hiding in silences and conventions.

  “Good lad,” he went on, “spirited-looking, built like a greyhound. Yes, he could go far, who knows? But let’s not fool ourselves. All is in the hands of le Mystère. That sharp nose indicates liveliness of spirit, hmm, yes, and those shoulders look made to bear great burdens. Now to see about fortifying his muscles and his spirit.”

  He took me to the library. Seeing the rows and rows of shelves overflowing with books, I was astonished.

  “Wow!” I exclaimed. “But if each one has fifty books and more? Can any one person possibly have read so much?”

  Laughing, Armand pulled up a chair. “Dear cadet,” he said. “You will have to read far more before you become a Maganon.”

  “A Maganon?”

  “That was what the ancient Greeks called their military engineers.”

  As Armand bowed his head to write, I was afforded a view of his cranium, bare and magnificent, in all its glory. A curio
usly spherical head. With most bald people, their cranium is freckled or has blue or pinkish veins on it, or ridges adorning it, like on a nut. Not Armand. His skin, a healthy pinkish color, was tight as a drum. What hair he still had formed a white halo around the base of his skull, like a crown of laurels that then joined in a beard tapering down to a goatee. Everything about him was slight, concentrated, and compact. The apparent fragility of his bones in reality hid the vivaciousness of a squirrel. His thinness was not a reflection of old age consuming him but a rare vital tension. I never once saw him in bad humor, and he never needed an excuse to laugh. Yet with all that, this bonhomie never obscured his gray eyes, his wolf eyes, constantly watching you. Even out of the back of his head.

  He had sat down to write a note. Finishing it, he bade me come closer. “This will be your program of study,” he announced. “Read it back to me, if you would.”

  I no longer have this note—nor do I need it. I remember it down to the last letter:

  6: 30–7: Wash. Chapel. Breakfast.

  7–8: Drafting.

  8– 9: Mathematics. Geometry. Lemon juice.

  9–10: Spherical Room.

  10–12: Metrics of Fortifications. Topography.

  12–12:30: Lunch. Lemon juice.

  12:30–14: Fieldwork.

  14–15: Obey and Command. Tactics and Strategy.

  15–16: History. Physics.

  16–17: Surveying. Ballistics. Lemon juice.

  17–19: Mineralogy. Fieldwork.

  19:00: Dinner.

  19:30–21: Architecture.

  21–23: Fieldwork. Chapel.

  This was my study schedule, although in reality I was never required to pray, and I never set foot in chapel.

  “Sundays you’ll have for yourself,” Armand said with that perpetual smile of his. “Are you in agreement with the general plan?”

  Was I really in a position to refuse?