Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  A very noble stance—I couldn’t have agreed more. If an aristocrat’s honor proved lucrative to others, who was I to complain? While in Bazoches I’d receive money from Vauban and from my father, double what those Carmelite dolts were getting before. I could make a little corner for myself, as the Catalan saying goes. (Though, given my circumstances, there wouldn’t be much for me to spend it on!)

  I’m feeling sorry for myself, and I would not want to be thought a complainer. Because Bazoches was a veritable Noah’s Ark, but one that was filled with guides to thinking instead of animals. And I was sufficiently clever to realize this.

  Beneath the Burgundy sun, I grew into a good-looking, muscular youth. My efforts were tempered by the strains of pick and shovel (and lemon juice, gah!). After a few months in my pit, I was handling the sapper’s instruments like kitchen utensils. And most important: I was absorbing rare know-how.

  There might have been one or two hundred people in all the world with a better knowledge than mine of the subjects pertaining to Bazoches. The Ducroix brothers, to their great credit, made my education involving for me, and soon it was me pestering them to tell me everything, everything. Tiredness converted to hunger; the more exhausted I was, the more keen to get on with the next lesson. Once I’d gotten my head around the rudiments of engineering, I began to seek alternatives and improvements myself. More than that: Love has the underappreciated merit of also spurring a desire to learn.

  For Jeanne was the other thing motivating me, keeping me alive and awake. With regard to the educational value of desire, I here present an example:

  I was walking in a small wood one day alongside Armand. In Bazoches, the cultivation of “attention” was by no means limited to sight. Sometimes, on walks in the countryside, I was made to list all the sounds I could hear. Until a person concentrates, the sheer amount of detail our ears offer us goes totally unnoticed. The air, the murmurs of hidden water sources, the noise of invisible insects, the ringing out of the tools of some faraway labor . . .

  Armand slapped my nape. “And the bird? You’ve missed that. Are you deaf?”

  “But I’ve counted six different birdsongs!”

  “What about the seventh?”

  “Where?”

  “Behind on your left, a hundred and fifty feet or so away.”

  At times, I must say, his demands upset me. “How am I supposed to hear a tiny sound like that, coming from behind me, and at such a distance?”

  “By focusing on it. This is why you were given ears.” Armand then turned his hearing in the direction of this invisible bird—“a hundred and fifty feet or so away”—and when I say “turned,” I mean physically moving his ears, as would a dog!

  “Learn to use your muscles” was his answer to my look of surprise. “That they are atrophied does not mean their use may never be recuperated. Let’s go.”

  He obliged me to do it. We spent a good while standing silently in those woods. I tried moving my ears under Armand’s watchful gaze. No easy thing—don’t believe me, try it for yourselves! What did move were my cheeks or my crinkled-up forehead. Nothing, only ridiculous expressions. I gave up.

  I sat down at the foot of a tree with my hands on my head. There was a mushroom a foot to my right. It was the only time I came truly close to giving up. That which two months of hard disciplinary exercises had not managed, this infantile one nearly had.

  What was I doing there, in that corner of France, taking orders from a couple of old lunatics? Breaking my back in some pointless trench, my brain chock-full of drawings, angles, geometry—and for what? To be duped out in the middle of some wood, pouring my all into the sublime, halfwit art of waggling my ears.

  “I’ll never be an engineer, never,” I said to myself—thinking out loud, like the Ducroix brothers.

  “Martí, lad,” Armand said, “you’ve made decent progress.”

  He knelt down beside me. It was unusual for him to use my name and not the typical scathing “cadet” or “blind mole.” The Ducroix brothers knew when they’d gone too far, and then, only then, would they show me a little affection.

  “Not true,” I protested like a child. “I see nothing and hear less. How am I ever going to build fortresses or defend them?”

  “I said you’ve made decent progress,” he said. And putting on a sudden barracks tone, he gave me an order: “Cadet, on your feet!”

  I had sufficient respect for the Ducroix brothers to jump up, desolate though I felt.

  “What is behind you, immediately behind the tree you were sitting beneath?”

  I described the vegetation, including every single branch: those snapped and hanging down, and those that stood straight up, including the number and colors of leaves on each. I didn’t think this any great thing.

  “Very good,” said Armand. “Five hundred feet straight behind you, what else is there?”

  I answered immediately. “A woman. Strolling, carrying flowers. She has a bunch with red and yellow buds in one hand—forty-three flowers, I think. At the speed she was going, I believe by now she’ll have picked forty-five.” Sighing, I whispered: “She has red hair.”

  A natural thoroughfare in the woods led to the clearing we found ourselves in. A few hundred feet beyond this, the trees opened out onto a green field in which, half a minute earlier, I had seen Jeanne walking.

  “Do you see?” said Armand. “When we want to, we can pay attention. Your problem is that, had it been a lame old woman with a hunchback and no teeth, you wouldn’t have noticed her. But, and I’m sure you’ll agree, each is just as visible. And for carrying messages between enemy lines, the enemy will always choose the hunchbacks over the redheads. Precisely because no one notices them.”

  The Ducroix brothers had realized my feelings toward Jeanne from day one, of course. Armand sighed and clapped me on the cheek twice, though I didn’t know if this was meant as consolation or recrimination.

  “If you want to become an engineer,” he said, “you have to be constantly paying attention, and for that, what you need to fall in love with is reality, the world around you.”

  That night I went down to Jeanne’s room. I knocked twice, lightly. She did not open the door. I went back the following night. I knocked three times. She did not open. Another night: I knocked three times and then, leaving an interval, a fourth. She did not open. I didn’t go back the next night. But the following night, I gave five little knocks.

  Now is when I describe how Jeanne and I fell into each other’s arms. How I seduced her, or she seduced me, or how I believed I’d seduced her when in truth it was the other way around, or vice versa, or how it all happened at once. You know, love, all that. The thing is, I’ve never felt comfortable with love poetry, and I have no notion of how to tell it prettily.

  All right, listen: Between the practice field and the castle, there stood a hayloft. Picture Zuvi and Jeanne up in the top, on a bed of dry straw, nude and one mounting the other, and vice versa.

  So there you have it.

  The Vauban family rarely gathered at Bazoches all together. When they did, curiously, those were the days when I was afforded most time with the marquis. And, using the excuse that he was giving me some practical guidance, he was able to free himself from his dull relations, of whom the only one he could bear was his cousin Dupuy-Vauban. Sometimes they allowed me to accompany them on long walks through the countryside.

  Dupuy-Vauban, whom I will henceforth call “Dupuy” so as not to confuse my imbecile of a transcriber, was one of the five greatest engineers of the century. If anything can explain the fact he has, unjustly, not gone down in history, it’s his close kinship with the marquis, who inevitably eclipsed him. He was an exceptional, loyal, modest, and unassuming man, virtues of no use in gaining earthly glory. At the end of his military career he had sixteen wounds upon his body.

  I always liked seeing him. Dupuy was to me an example and an inspiration, as well as a link between Martí the student and the great marquis. Though far the yo
unger of the two, the marquis treated Dupuy as an equal. I felt like a child in their company—a child growing up amongst geniuses. Just as newborns understand nothing of their parents’ speech, to begin with the idiom of engineering was gibberish to me. But as my studies progressed, I began to join in the discussions. One of my most satisfying moments at Bazoches was afforded me by Dupuy, during one of these country walks. Halting, he said to the marquis: “My God, Sébastien! I do hope you inserted the clause into this young snip’s study contract!”

  “The clause?” I said. “What clause?”

  “The one prohibiting him from taking part in any siege in which Dupuy is on the other side!”

  They both laughed. As did I. How could I ever possibly take aim at men such as these?

  On one occasion, Dupuy was unable to attend one of the family reunions; he was taking part in a siege, in Germany. Vauban must have thought I was sufficiently advanced to accompany him, for the two of us strolled out together, alone.

  “Well then?” he said to me. “Do you find your studies to be coming along adequately, cadet Zuviría?”

  “Fabulously well, monsieur,” I replied—and meant it. “The Ducroix brothers are exceptional teachers. I have learned more in these few months than my whole life.”

  “I can sense a ‘but’ . . .” prompted Vauban.

  “I’m not complaining,” I replied, again sincerely. “Only, I don’t see how Latin, German, and English apply. And even Physics and Surveying strike me as having hardly anything to do with engineering. Monsieur! I spend hours with a bandage across my eyes trying to guess, just by the texture, the kind of sand or stones they place in my hands. Though I have almost grown eyes in my fingers, I fail to see the use to my learning as a whole . . . ”

  “The whole is you,” he interrupted. “Let us walk.”

  In Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban’s view, all of military history can be summarized as an eternal dispute between attacker and defender. The invention of the cudgel was followed by that of the breastplate; that of the sword, the shield; the lance, armor. The more powerful the projectiles, the more stalwart became the means for defending against them.

  If there’s one thing men have sought to protect more avidly than their bodies, it is their homes. If we look carefully, the great battles have all been attempts to keep combat at a distance from the hearth. Cain mashed Abel’s head with a lump of stone, this is true, but what the Bible omits to mention is that the following day Cain attacked his brother’s home, stole his pigs, violated his wife, and put his children into bondage.

  Fire versus caves. Ladders versus wooden stockades. Siege towers versus ramparts made of stone. However, one day this unsteady equilibrium was thrown out of kilter.

  A moment came when defense turned into a form of attack. Fortification techniques had outstripped those available to the attacker. However large the rocks hurled by catapults, onagers, and trebuchets, any city—if its engineers had the resources to erect sufficiently stout ramparts—would be invulnerable. That city existed, and its name was Constantinople: the last, splendorous stronghold of the Eastern Roman Empire. Over centuries, each emperor would pass on to his successor a widening of the ramparts.

  From the point of view of a military engineer such as Vauban, classical Constantinople was ancient civilization’s crowning achievement. Its megalithic stone ramparts stood three hundred feet high, and towers and storehouses studded the inside edges.

  Decadent Byzantium was invaded on many occasions, but those Herculean ramparts were never breached. All peoples, from East and from West, attempted it, and all were unsuccessful. Over the centuries it resisted twenty-five sieges! Germans, Huns, Avars, Russians—even the Catalans tried in medieval times, lest we forget. But in 1453 something happened that changed the course of engineering, war, history, and, therefore, all humanity.

  In Turkey, or thereabouts, there lived a sheikh who got it in his mind to take Constantinople. Vauban had a portrait of the man on a wall at Bazoches. He said this was so as never to forget that one must always respect one’s enemy, little as he may merit it, and, should he indeed merit it, one must go so far as to admire him. In the portrait, the Suleiman in question wore a turban on his head and was smelling a flower. He had a cruel, spine-crumbling gaze.

  The story goes that, when he was still a young man, he fell in love with a Greek woman who was being held prisoner. He kept her with him inside his tent for three full days and nights. The soldiers began to mutter among themselves, calling him henpecked, a milksop, that sort of thing. Once he had spent a while enjoying the girl, the sheikh found out about the rumors. He dragged the poor Byzantine girl out of the tent and—pam!—slit her throat with his scimitar. Then, with the army in formation before him, he bellowed the words: “Who out of you will follow this sword of mine, so powerful it severs even the bonds of love?”

  The sheikh’s onslaughts initially comprised the usual: thousands of Janissaries roasted, scalded with boiling pitch, and to a greater or lesser degree, taken to pieces at the foot of the ramparts.

  But then a small group of Hungarian and, mainly, Italian engineers (those Italians, always making trouble!) offered their services to the Moorish king. And this sheikh charged them with designing the largest cannon ever known.

  Gunpowder was in use by that time, although in battle merely as fireworks, which would frighten the less battle-hardened and aid the morale of one’s own side, but little else. But this Turk was very—very—serious about cannons. The result was the Great Bombard, a thirty-foot-long cannon. Once it was assembled, a team of three hundred bullocks was needed to pull it to Constantinople. They covered no more than a mile and a half of ground a day, it was so heavy. But they got there in the end.

  The Great Bombard fired half-ton balls of stone. As hard as the Byzantines tried to fill the breaches, what could they do against this? One discharge would be followed by another and another. And though it was hard to be accurate with the Bombard, it was impossible to miss ramparts that high and vertical.

  Everybody knows the rest. The Turks poured through the breaches, the Byzantine emperor died fighting on the front line. Throughout Europe, engineers shuddered—for, from that moment on, what use were ramparts? Fortifying a city was a very costly affair, and kings were not prepared to spend fortunes on useless works. The big question was: Now how to protect our cities? (And in private: Now how to conserve our wages as royal engineers?)

  Formulas were devised, proposals made, the majority of them unreliable, confused, doubtful. And the only mind ever to succeed in solving all aspects of the problem was the man strolling at my side: Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban.

  Given that pyroballistics had become the principal threat to city ramparts, in order to protect against them, everything had to be reinvented. Vauban glanced at me inquisitively. “Well? What would you do in such a case, Cadet Zuviría?”

  What a question. I had not the faintest idea. “I’m afraid I don’t know, monsieur,” I mused aloud. “How to avoid a bombardment by artillery? Only two formulas occur to me: attacking the cannons or hiding from them. Attacking would seem like suicide. If cannons can destroy the strongest ramparts, what would they do to human flesh? As for fleeing, that would save the garrison but condemn the city. And there is no way to hide ramparts.”

  Vauban clicked his fingers. “The last one you said. You were on the right track.”

  I had to stop myself from laughing. “But monsieur, how to hide the entire walled perimeter of a city?”

  “By burying it.”

  6

  In the Middle Ages, city ramparts were tall and vertical. The thicker the ramparts and the taller the battlements, the stronger the defenses. And to make them even stronger, there you had your turrets all the way around.

  The might of medieval ramparts was there for all to see, and to this day, they are so associated in people’s minds with the idea of what a fortress is that if we ask a child to draw a picture of a rampart, he’ll do one in the old style, eve
n though he has never seen one like that, rather than a modern one, the kind he spends every day playing at the foot of.

  Vauban turned traditional fortress-making principles on their head by introducing more of a slope to his ramparts, at times to an incline of sixty degrees; the angle meant that cannonballs would bounce off rather than punch through. Given that cannonballs tended to skew off in all directions, they were extremely inaccurate.

  Moreover, the height of medieval ramparts had become a disadvantage, so that the Vaubanian system built them behind a very deep concealing moat. In certain of Vauban’s projects, the fortifications stood even lower than the town buildings. This produced a curious effect: An army approaching the city would barely be able to make out the defenses, but the civil buildings behind would be in plain sight.

  I include a print to give a better idea. (This one, you German flabber face. Here! Not before, not after. Here!)

  The medieval turrets, at intervals along the walled enclosures, came to be replaced by bastions. A bastion was a sort of smaller fort embedded in the walls, normally five-sided. See, in this next image, the spear point construction sticking out from the ramparts?

  This is a basic bastion, in fact a rather unassuming one in terms of its size. The bastions in the larger fortresses would be gigantic, immense bulks garrisoned by up to a thousand men, with dozens of cannon and underground ammunition stores inside. In the fortifications built by the modern Maganons, thus, the ramparts were protected by bastions, and these in turn provided one another with covering fire.

  Let us imagine that an invader decides to try to take the stronghold. The bastion has been expressly designed with five sides. The attackers will have no choice but to scale one of the outwardly projecting bastion walls. Whichever they choose, the adjacent bastions will cover their fellow defenders with sustained fire. As the attackers advance, arrows and cannonballs will rain down from the ramparts and the bastions, as well as thousands of liters of burning pitch.