Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  “Ah, yes,” said Bardonenche. “Martí Zuviría, the most promising engineering cadet in all France, Your Excellence.”

  I had studied at the Dijon academy? he asked.

  “No, sir,” I answered. “I did my training under one engineer alone.”

  He wanted to know the name. I didn’t want to bring up Bazoches. “Someone,” I said with diplomatic sarcasm, “to whom you once sent a missive regarding the happy conquest of Nice . . . ”

  His gaze grew sharp, and he said: “I was sorry not to have been able to make the funeral. As you can see, I have been somewhat busy of late.” Those around him burst out laughing. “Have I said something amusing?” barked the Englishman, turning on them.

  His mood swings were dramatic and, as I would later discover, also predictable. It was his way of catching his subordinates off guard, a way of reminding them who was top dog. He waved a hand as though offended, and everyone withdrew. “Not you,” he ordered me. “I want you to tell me about the final moments in the great Vauban’s life.”

  Ah! A little one-to-one chat, what about that! I had seen it coming the moment he called me a “handsome, stern-looking youth.” Converse about Vauban! If it had really been that, Bardonenche should have stayed, the aristocrat, the old friend, and someone who had been present in the marquis’s dying days. He had asked me to accompany him to his private chamber. How was I supposed to say no? Sometimes the predictable is unavoidable.

  He led me up some stairs. We entered his room and he said, “Help me with my armor.”

  The words were friendly, the tone, authoritative. He turned away from me, crossed his arms, and I undid his cuirass at the neck. I couldn’t help but let the armor fall to the floor with a clatter. More than asking, he ordered me: “Call me Jimmy.”

  The brusqueness of the demand infuriated me. I gave him a fierce look. Outside of the field of battle, he was not accustomed to being disobeyed, and my hostility must have disarmed him, because he gave a surprisingly submissive wave of the hand, now saying, “D’accord?”

  I was thinking about how to get myself out of the situation when something happened. Once he was free of the steel that held and tormented him, he staggered. His knees buckled. He scratched the wall with his nails as he fell. He began drooling like a slug and convulsing.

  The convulsions were so violent that I thought to go for help. “Your Excellence, what is it?”

  Still kneeling, he turned his head slowly. Something in his eyes was different. He was the private Berwick now, free of the need to be ostentatious. An organism pushed to inhuman limits, a creature lacking all affection.

  That power brings with it an enormous public aspect is no secret. And Jimmy was obliged to push his army beyond all bounds. The slightest false move, even blinking at the wrong moment, could be taken as a sign of weakness. An out-of-place gesture and his authority would evaporate. A wrong decision and he’d lose an army. On the night preceding Almansa, he was less than a rag.

  I felt for him. I know I may have been wrong to. I got my hands under his armpits and heaved him to his feet. He pushed me away, furious. “I’m fine!” he shouted.

  “No, no, you aren’t,” I said. “Vauban spoke to me of the illness of those with power, and ways of treating them.”

  He gave me a hateful glance.

  “Tea with thyme in it,” I said. “And turn your back on the world.”

  I found out for myself that day that the things I had learned at Bazoches would make me feel love for people more often than was desirable; my sight, my sense of touch, all my senses were too sharp not to see the man suffering underneath that triumphant uniform. That this man was so powerful, and at the same time so defenseless, and that he had to hide his inadequacies from the world, moved me to the point where I couldn’t help but take him in my arms. Jimmy, poor Jimmy, he never knew that my love for him was due not to his power but—oh, paradox!—his weaknesses, which made even him human, that demon who would one day annihilate us.

  He did not let me accompany him the following day, which meant my experience of the battle of Almansa was from inside the town walls. I hardly lamented the fact; Zuvi wasn’t exactly spoiling for a fight. Plus, I had learned about sieges, not battles in open country. I watched the encounter from a window, which is one way of putting it, for the fog, smoke, and clouds of dust combined to form a curtain so opaque that all was reduced to the din of artillery and gunfire.

  Against all expectations, Jimmy crushed the Allied army. He came back covered in dirt, worn out, dents all over his cuirass. And yet the demonic part of him was visible in the return, the part that kept him going. For battle had cured all his ills: Victory is the most marvelous elixir. He seemed a different man; more than merely cured, Jimmy was drunk on vitality, exultant, bursting with life.

  Seeing me, he said, “You’re still here. Good.”

  And so began an amity that, to put it one way, was far from straightforward. James Fitz-James, duke of Fitz-James, duke of Berwick, of Liria and Jérica, peer and marshal of the French realm, thanks to the victory at Almansa, knight of the Golden Fleece, et cetera, et cetera. Anything you like. Even so, never ceasing to be a bastard; son of James II of England, yes, but a bastard all the same.

  Life pushed him into a race he could never win. However many armies he destroyed, fortresses stormed, services rendered, he would always be what he was: misbegotten, a social neuter. Any aristocrat of good blood who had notched up half the accomplishments of his short life would have been held up as more than Olympian. Not him. Son of an outcast king and illegitimate to boot. Hence his constant quest for legitimacy and royalty.

  The strangest thing about him was that he was also absolutely clear-sighted. He knew he would never be given the one thing he sought. He garnered honors and praise, duchies, infinite wealth, all the claptrap awarded by kings, ceremonies with priests in attendance, and the singing of infantile hymns. In private, he scorned such affairs. I know he did. Certain of his supporters have said he made the most of his time on earth, emphasizing the ten children he had with his second wife. Ha! Don’t make me laugh. Where do they imagine a person like Jimmy would find time to lie down with his little wife (who, by the way, was uglier than a Barbary ape), even if we’re talking about only ten occasions? In 1708 alone, he took part in three different campaigns in the service of that dreadful monster of a king, Louis XIV—in Spain, France, and Germany. Do they want to try and convince me that he went a-wooing to her whenever he could? That he’d trot off to her abode, say, “Sweetie, here I am,” have a roll around with her, and then back to the action? I can assure them the only possibility is that he tasked someone else with such matters. On top of the fact that I was with him.

  Fine, all right. I said I had set myself to be sincere, and that is what I shall be. I’m too old to care.

  We fucked the whole night through. And the next day, we did not leave the room. Why would we? Where could be better than there? Plus, he could allow himself it. There were continual knocks at the door: “Your Excellence, the mayor of Almansa entreats an audience!” or “Your Excellence, urgent dispatch from Madrid!” or “Colonel so-and-so asks about lodgings for the prisoners.” At first the door knocker startled me, but when I jumped out of bed, sending the chamber pot flying, all Jimmy did was laugh. The world was at his feet, why should he bother to answer? He had earned the right not to let a door knocker importune him. That’s what power is, precisely that: The world seeks an audience with you, and you laugh at it from behind the door.

  Now what? Why are you making that face?

  I could have skipped this, but you asked for a love scene.

  You didn’t like it?

  I can see you did not.

  For a good amount of time, I was very close to being happy. I felt sure le Mystère had delivered me into the arms of a teacher who might be a replacement for Vauban. Jimmy was perfectly suited to the role. He was sufficiently distinguished as a Maganon that, a full two years before, he had dared disagree with Vaub
an in his letter from Nice—and on the subject of a siege, no less. Further, Jimmy included in his criticism of the marquis the statement that it was all very well pontificating from the rearguard, passing judgment on those fighting up front. And this was precisely the thing I needed, the siege experience, the reality of combat, and of life, that would enable me to discover The Word.

  Everything was fine to begin with, though little of note took place. Jimmy and the rest of the army had to recover from battle. I understood that. Then winter arrived, and naturally enough, the campaign was put on hold; since time immemorial, armies have never fought in winter.

  Jimmy was one of the great personalities of his age. Daring but at the same time sound in judgment, an incongruous mix flowed in him: He was both an utter egoist and extremely generous and indulgent toward others. He was one of the few truly great figures of our century, this tortured and tortuous century, full of sagas epic and inane. But by the spring of 1708, we had been together for almost a year, and I was still to see any action. Some say the great Battle of Almansa was exceptional. For every one battle in open country, there were ten sieges of strongholds, large or small, and the issue for me was that I was missing out on them all. Attacking or defending, what did it matter to me? If I finally got to take part in a siege selon les règles, not merely as a theoretical exercise, I might be able to unveil The Word, that Word that had the kernel of knowledge trapped inside it. Validate my fifth Point. I wouldn’t let it go.

  “Oh, don’t worry yourself over that,” Jimmy would say. “You’re rendering far worthier services: making war pleasurable for me.”

  At that point, our mutual understanding withered, all the ties that could bind me to him as a man and, especially, as a Maganon. I had erred: People in high office demand everything from those around them, and Jimmy was the most egoistic marshal of all. He used soldiers, engineers, and lovers alike.

  He tried to keep me from leaving, began avoiding me. When it comes to powerful men, the best thing is to give them a wide berth: If they grow tall, you will be in their shade, and if they fall, you’ll find yourself crushed underneath. With Jimmy, I was kept quiet by an unfathomable force that also kept us apart: le Mystère. You do not say no to a marshal of France, not to his face, so I limited myself to trying to leave without him noticing.

  When spring came, the Franco-Spanish army split into two. One part was to remain under Jimmy’s command, while the other would be led by the duke of Orléans. I asked to be reassigned to the latter’s section. Among aristocracy, the envy of others is much to be desired, so you can imagine Orléans’ satisfaction when I offered him my services. Vauban’s name could move mountains, and Orléans didn’t hesitate to accept me in. Indeed, no doubt rivalry between leaders had an impact, a considerable one: Stealing Berwick’s little apricot would supply Orléans with endless opportunities to lord it over him.

  The day before we were set to leave, I received orders to present myself at Jimmy’s field tent. My having “deserted,” gone over to his rival in the Bourbon high command, was doubtless an affront. I knew it and made my way there very reluctantly.

  He was sitting, writing something, when I came in. The tent was rectangular and very long. His desk was at the far end, and it was as though he were a spider waiting in its web. He bade his servants leave and, once they had gone, thrust his quill into the inkstand like a knife, saying: “You haven’t even said goodbye.”

  I could take refuge in hierarchy for once. I held my nerve, looking straight ahead of me. I spoke in a formal, distant way: “The marshal has sent no order for me to bid him farewell.”

  “Enough of the silliness!” he barked. “We’re alone now. And stand at ease. You’re like a pole in the ground.” He handed me some papers. “Read. You’ll be grateful to me all your days.” As though he were doing me a considerable favor, he added: “You’re coming with me. It’s decided.”

  It was my appointment as a royal engineer. Or at least a personal petition to the Beast, signed by Jimmy.

  This is how powerful people behave. Everything, as far as they’re concerned, is agreed without discussion, and on they go. What I might have to say, my interests, desires, needs, mattered not a jot. But I had been educated at Bazoches, and that was a rampart that not even the duke of Berwick could clear. I interjected: “You can’t appoint me engineer.”

  He wasn’t sure how to overcome this resistance, whether to employ threats or seduction, but was too clever to go fully either way. “It will be the king of France doing so,” he said evasively.

  “Not even he has the correct authority.” I bared my forearm, showing my five Points. “The king may make what decrees he pleases, but not on my tattoos. You know full well.”

  “You want us to disagree. Tell me why.”

  I said nothing. I could have hurt him by saying his only authority over me was carnal, or that his spitefulness was the product of wounded vanity. That was how Jimmy was: He thought he had the right to receive love without giving any back. No, I didn’t say a word. What would be the point? It was a good thing I kept quiet: He took my silence harder than any accusation I could have come up with. He realized he was up against a force that was not me but which I was merely representing. He pondered how he might subdue it but was sufficiently intelligent to know it was beyond his powers. He sighed, then barked: “I at least have the right to ask why you don’t want to come with me. I’m more than a marshal to you. Which is why I want you at my side.”

  I interjected for the second time, brusquely rebuffing him. “Of course a marshal is what you are.” I looked him in the eye. “Always and wherever. Much as you might want to be, you can’t be anything else.”

  I left without being ordered to. He wouldn’t have been able to stop me.

  Jimmy, along with half the army, was to go north, and Orléans east, to lay siege to a city named Játiva. Alas, I wasn’t allowed to join Orléans’s troops. As a farewell of his own, Jimmy left me a poisoned gift: a bureaucratic tangle between his secretaries and those of Orléans that would delay my transfer. He did it simply to aggravate me, as it meant I had to stay in Almansa waiting for my new passport to be sorted out. Very nice. The siege of Játiva promised to be quite the spectacle, and there I was, stuck in that godforsaken Albacete pigsty, a place that—among the wounded, monks, reinforcements, and mounds of provisions that were to be sent out to the new battle lines—would have the smell of death about it for a thousand years to come. They say that, on both sides combined, ten thousand poor souls died at Almansa. Ten thousand, when, at a well-directed siege, the marquis had shown a way of losing no more than ten! The slaughter had been such that the inhabitants of the town had to use the wells as graves. They threw the naked bodies in like sacks. Naked, I say, because the people were so miserable that they stripped the belongings of the fallen, right down to their dirty undergarments.

  The Word. My mistake had been not learning The Word. What had been the marquis’s question? “Summarize the optimum defense.” The days went by with me stuck in a dust-ridden field tent, and my anxiety grew. More than wanting to, I needed to experience the things I had been taught at Bazoches.

  By the time my passport came, Játiva had already fallen into Bourbon hands, but the siege of Tortosa was about to get underway. I shrugged it off: The Word might be found in any siege, I thought. Tortosa was also an extremely interesting prospect. One day a supply convoy set out, and I was allowed to go along.

  During the march, an incident occurred that would shatter my musings, which until then had been purely to do with siege warfare. The convoy had to stand aside to allow a crowd coming the opposite way to pass, made up of women, children, and the elderly, all of them dressed in rags and wretched-looking. These individuals were all tinted the same: Their clothes, their faces, their feet as they shuffled by, all took on the same grayish, subdued hue. A flock whose tribulation was plain to see, who, in spite of their numbers, went by in silence. Only the youngest ones were bold enough to shed tears. None even held
out a hand for alms. They were being escorted by a few men on horseback who cracked the occasional whip to make them keep up the pace. An old woman fell down directly in front of me, and my natural impulse was to lean over to help her. One of the riders spurred his horse over to us. “Stand away from the rebels.”

  “Rebels?” I said in surprise. “Since when have old women been rebels?”

  The man came and stood his beast between the old woman and me. A horse’s hooves can be very intimidating, and I took a couple of backward steps.

  “Fancy changing direction? We’ve got plenty of room for more!” bellowed the man, deadly serious.

  It isn’t exactly prudent to argue with a man who’s armed and on horseback when you yourself are neither of those things. Even so, I made clear what I thought of this villainous bully. He looked at me with his beady rat eyes.

  The driver of my carriage, an older man I’d chatted with a little in the jib, came up behind me, tugged on my arm, and hissed: “Don’t be an imbecile.”

  “But what can these children and grayheads have done that’s so bad?” I cried. “And where are they being taken?”

  “What do you want to be?” he said in my ear. “A good engineer or a Good Samaritan?” To try to calm things down, he turned a smile at the man on the horse, saying: “Hi, friend! How did it go in Játiva?”

  “No such place as Játiva now,” said the brute, spurring his horse away.

  So the people were from Játiva, deported to Castile, an express wish of Little Philip’s. After the city was conquered, thousands were enslaved, including from the nearby settlements. Even Játiva’s name was eliminated, the place rechristened Colonia de San Felipe. Had I not seen this sorry column with my own eyes, I would have refused to believe it.

  I spoke very little in the ensuing days. I had been educated to believe in a certain basic idea, that a king fights to defend or win territories—never to destroy them. Such an absurdity could make sense only in the mind of a madman. What use could there be in taking control of a place that has been flattened? Játiva, the city of a thousand wells, wiped from the face of the earth because a king had pointed his finger at a map.