Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  The only thing was to hide and await nightfall. Then make myself scarce. The two of us lay there for a long while, on the floor, under that mound of straw. I lay close to Amelis’s back, the two of us like spoons. My cheek against hers, my hand over her mouth once more: a forced, absurd intimacy. Her neck smelled lovely, and the straw made me think of Jeanne. This is what human beings are like: people being shot down in the street outside, me possibly next in line, and even so, I couldn’t avoid seeing, in Amelis’s outline, with all her clothes on, Jeanne naked.

  Night finally fell. We were still lying down, and I whispered in the ear of my dark-haired beauty. “If I let you go now, you’ll give me away, and they’ll be straight after me. I’m going to keep you with me for a little while. All I want is to get out of here alive. Behave yourself and I’ll let you go once we’re clear of this place. Understand?”

  She nodded, and I took my hand away from her mouth. Just to be safe, before I let her go, I spoke the most amorous words imaginable: “And if you cry out, I’ll strangle you.”

  Outside the stable door lay the street, where I would inevitably run into one of those deadly Miquelets. Behind the stable, on the other hand, there was a wood not far off. Slip out of a back window, was my thought. The problem was how; the window was too narrow for us both to get through it at the same time. If she went first, she’d run off screaming the moment her feet touched the ground. If I went first, she’d turn on her heel and escape. She was a sharp girl and could see my problem without my having to explain it.

  “Get out of here,” she hissed, more disgusted than hostile. “Why would I bother getting them to kill you? I won’t say anything to anyone.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe that.”

  I picked her up at her hips, lifting her onto the cramped window ledge, and then got up next to her, side by side. It was a thick adobe wall, made far thicker than usual, perhaps to keep the stable cool. That meant the window was reached by a long tube, a few feet in length. We were bound to get stuck with our arms in front, our heads outside, our bellies wedged together and our four feet dangling in the air behind us.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve studied how to deal with situations like this.”

  “Oh, really?” she replied. “Quite the student you’ve turned out to be.”

  “Anatomical theory states that, if a man’s shoulders can fit through the width of a trench or a mine, the rest of the body can also get through. And if the cavity is too narrow, all you have to do is dislocate one shoulder. Once through, simply pop the shoulder back into place.”

  Her large eyes grew even wider. “You’re going to dislocate your shoulder?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “I’ll do yours. I’ll put it back in afterward. It won’t be hard—both my hands are free, and I know how it’s done.”

  At this point she began buffeting me about the head with her fists. “You’ve had your grubby hands on me for hours, and now you’re saying you want to break my back! I’m not going to let you touch me anymore, not even my shoulder!”

  I put my hand over her mouth. “Quiet!”

  I have no idea how we did eventually manage it. I believe I may have pulled off the wooden frame, widening the space somewhat, and we then slid out like boneless lizards. We fell to the floor outside, I lifted her up, and into the woods we went.

  Beceite was surrounded by mountainous terrain, a delightful natural labyrinth for the Miquelet parties to shelter in. The Army of the Two Crowns was off to the southeast, and that was the way I headed.

  It was a pinewood forest, not especially dense, and a full moon bathed everything in an amber light. There is no such thing as war for crickets, and the freshness of the night was a relief after the heat of the summer day. Had that group of senseless throat slitters not been so close by, it might have been a most pleasurable nighttime stroll. Once we were far enough away to make noise, I said: “Quite the friends you’ve got! That soldier who came into the stable—they beat him to death just to save on bullets!”

  Though she was at my side, she made it clear she wanted to get away from me as soon as possible. “I don’t have any friends,” she said. “And even if I did, who are you to criticize? What does war have to do with the poor?”

  “It’s possible to be poor and not a savage,” I said.

  “At least they don’t go around raping their enemies’ women!”

  “Neither do I!” I said, defending myself. “And, so you know, I’m an engineer. We professionals, engineers or soldiers, we serve the person who has contracted our services, whichever king it happens to be, and for the duration of the contract, and that’s all. Birth does not tie us to any particular sovereign, and therein lies our privilege. I might serve France today, Sweden or Prussia tomorrow, and no one could call me disloyal or a deserter, just as no one would be surprised to see a spider crossing the river by jumping from rock to rock.”

  “To the Miquelets, you are a Bourbon,” she said. “And if the Bourbons go around hanging their parents and children, is it so surprising they want to kill you?”

  “I am paid to carry out engineering works. To be honest with you, I couldn’t care less either way, Bourbon or pro-Austrian, one side or the other.”

  Suddenly, she stopped. She looked around, smiling, and said: “Do you not hear that?”

  The abrupt change of subject surprised me, but I answered: “You’re quite right, it’s very annoying having to walk in a pine forest. I supposed it would be pointless to ask you to stop stepping on pinecones; they crunch so loudly, you can hear them a mile off.”

  “No, engineer,” she said, cutting me off, straining to hear. “I mean the music.”

  Music? There were, of course, only the sounds of the forest at night. Had she lost her mind? The summer moon lent her pale complexion an unreal tone. I thought for a moment that she might have been referring to the two of us; we’d gotten off on the wrong foot, but the forest at night was making everything sweeter. Or perhaps not: I reached an arm around her waist, but she got away from me immediately.

  As she went, she left me with an almost sad sigh. “No, you do not hear it,” she said. “Farewell, then, great engineer.”

  She had disappeared, but the scent of her lingered in the forest air for a moment. And know something else? I wasn’t certain whether she had taken me for a ride or there was something more.

  I walked all night to try and put as much distance as I could between me and that Miquelet warren. At first light, I positioned myself on top of one of the large boulders you see throughout that region. From up there, lying on my front, I could see the path without being seen. I had a decent amount of time to think things through. In such moments, the infinite superiority of love over any horror becomes clear, because my mind turned again and again to that girl: Amelis, averting the images of death, Amelis.

  After Jeanne, no beauty had moved me as much. And you’ll agree when I say that Amelis was at a disadvantage, seeing as Jeanne always had recourse to upper-class cosmetics, whereas when I met Amelis, she was wearing a laughable head wrap and had disguised herself with a pretend disease. Where could she have gone? Her parting words could have meant anything, even that she was a spy, possibly for both sides. . . . She would end up hanged, that was for sure.

  At midmorning I made out a dust cloud on the horizon. This was the first time in my life, and the last, I believe, that I was happy to see a detachment of Bourbon cavalry. At least they wouldn’t treat me as the Miquelets might have done! I signaled to them with my hat from the top of the boulder and came down to ground level.

  At their head was a captain in a dust-covered uniform, the white of it altogether gray now. Without dismounting, he asked me: “Spanish or French?”

  “Alive is what I am, and it’s a miracle!” I cried, scurrying over to them. “Get me away from here, damn it!”

  12

  The army set to attack Tortosa was led by the duke of Orléans, nephew to the Beast himself. Orléans had twenty
-five thousand men under his command, and a lavishly stocked artillery train.

  Thus, after so many twists and turns, I was going to take part in a proper siege. I won’t deny that my spirits picked up. Perhaps I would manage to overcome my Bazoches disaster, restore myself, become an engineer. I’d spent two years, the most interesting years of my short life thus far, deep in the task of becoming a Maganon, absorbing both the science and the necessary morals. Twenty-four months, if you think about it, is a considerable portion of the life of a sixteen-year-old. So whenever I was feeling doubtful, I would roll up my right sleeve. I meditated on my five Points, contemplating them in many different lights, in the glowing dawn, or by that of a full moon, when midday embraced us or in the soft violet twilight. My God, I found my tattoos full of beauty, those five sacred Points. I couldn’t give up. Tortosa meant the chance to discover a Word that would bathe me in light.

  The Bourbon army had pitched tents outside Tortosa on June 12, and I arrived the next day. I joined the engineers’ brigade as an aide-de-camp. I could make myself additionally useful with my French and Catalan, and there was a chance that I might be used to liaise between the French and Spanish contingents.

  Family ties are even more important in France’s army than in Europe’s other armies, and the engineers’ brigade had been given to the duke of Orléans’s cousin to command. He was an innocuous man, phlegmatic rather than lackadaisical, of slender build and cheerful, a daydreamer. He had effeminate tastes, which reflected in the way he carried himself, and indeed his pretty looks, though they were no indication of his carnal preferences. He spent his days inside his splendid field tent, in which Darius of Persia would have been quite at home; its fabric was decorated with large cashmere depictions, and the roof was in the shape of an onion bulb, like orthodox church domes. Spacious and sumptuous—an entire orchestra could have fit inside—it featured nocturnal carousings with throngs of people, the only thing restraining them being his cousin’s warnings. This pleasure seeking of his was regularly excessive; one of the things he liked most was to recruit, en masse, whores from the towns through which the army passed, along with a few elderly nuns. The Spanish priests complained to Orléans, who, wanting to avoid a scandal, promptly tried reining his cousin in. Wigs and perfume were his great weakness; he loved to stand before a mirror trying on dozens of different hairstyles. As for perfumes, he had them sent in especially. Always overpoweringly strong. His arrival would be preceded by a great wave of Asiatic smells.

  His mind was on Versailles, and he put up with this southern sojourn with an air of ironic resignation. He hoped to go back to Paris saying he’d served dans l’armée royale. As for his relationship with the engineers, let us say it was the same as that of a pet fish with its elements: That it inhabits a pond does not mean it understands water. The gravity of the man was such that I have entirely forgotten his name. Let’s call him Monsieur Forgotten.

  Something good about Monsieur Forgotten, I admit, was that one could be sincere and speak the truth with him, by no means the usual way with French aristocracy. Granted, the impulse behind his tolerance of me was not all that lofty. Why did he put up with me when I criticized and made suggestions and even accusations? Because I was a nobody, less than a nobody. To him I was a fly of the kind constantly buzzing around us in the relentless summer heat, and he treated me as such.

  For what it is, or was, worth, the siege we were engaged in seemed an out-and-out disaster to me from day one. I am the first to recognize that war always has been, and will be, the art of negotiating shortages and imperfections. No campaign or siege has ever been conducted in optimum conditions. Quite the reverse: Something will always be missing. The man-at-arms, or the siege engineer, must have the gumption to improvise, to make the most of the situation (and trust that the enemy is on a level, or worse, footing). Vauban knew it, and that was why my technical instructions by the Ducroix brothers were always tempered by that one maxim: Débrouillez-vous! Deal with it!

  Even allowing for the usual mishaps and limitations associated with war, Tortosa was a complete negation of all I’d learned at Bazoches. It had some value pedagogically: as an example to an engineer of what not to do. Ineptitude, in a siege situation, is paid for in blood.

  An example. The first day, the very first day, of my studies in siege warfare, the Ducroix brothers etched in my memory the Thirty General Maxims of de Vauban, which pertained to any attack on a stronghold. Would you like to know what the very first one was? Well, then I’ll tell you.

  Être toujours bien informé de la force des garnisons avant de déterminer les attaques: You must always be well informed as to the powers of the garrison before beginning your attack.

  The calculations of Tortosa’s defenses proved useless: Orléans had found out that there were some fifteen hundred soldiers, among them English, Dutch, and Portuguese, set to stand against us on the ramparts. Among them, survivors from Allied troops at Almansa. But we noticed, once the attack had commenced, that their forces had multiplied: The civilians were lending enthusiastic support, so enthusiastic that the regular troops themselves were nonplussed. A further fifteen hundred men, the civilian militia, joined in, and everyone else was helping, too: women tending to wounds, children bringing pitchers of water to the bastions. I was dumbfounded. Why didn’t they hole up at home and wait for the storm to pass? Why would these simple peasants, to whom dynastic affairs were neither here nor there, risk taking part in a battle, as well as the reprisals in the case of defeat? Fool that I was, I was yet to realize that this was going to be the war at the end of the world—the end of the Catalan world, at least.

  In the eyes of an engineer, Tortosa was an unusual city indeed. It had long been a strategically important spot, a military boundary, which meant there were a great many different fortification styles superimposed, from the Arabic rampart all the way to the very modern bastions. It sat on either side of the River Ebro, not far from where it met the sea—hence its strategic importance. In fact, the city was on the west bank, and a bastion stood protecting the east side. As a whole, it was thoroughly fortified. The Austrians had had their best engineers working on the defenses, preparing for a siege they rightly judged inevitable after Almansa. Most of the walls were modern, coming down at a sharp angle. Churches stood at the ends of certain parts of the cities, and then engineers had no qualms about turning these into makeshift bastions.

  It made sense that Orléans would come up against such well-prepared defenses. Whoever controlled Tortosa would have the most important river route in Catalonia, and with it all routes south.

  We struck the trench on July 20. As I explained in the opening chapters, “striking the trench” was the founding act for attacking any stronghold. Once your point of attack has been chosen, there’s no going back. Total defeat for the besieged, or disgrace for the attacking army.

  I heard only on the nineteenth that the order had been given. “And the geological report?” I asked the Forgotten.

  “Report? What report might that be, dear aide?”

  Troops had been posted in the area where the trench was to begin, but no engineer had reconnoitered it. Really, the whole engineers’ brigade was full of dimwits, and most of them hardly knew what I meant. At first I thought they must be joking.

  “We are going to strike the trench without doing a geological survey?” I asked.

  “My, you’re meticulous!”

  The grand event would happen, I was informed, the next day at eight in the evening. I put my hands to my head and straightaway went to entreat Monsieur Forgotten to hold off. “Sir, I have been told we are to strike the trench tomorrow.”

  As ever, he was sitting in his tent, trying on a yellow wig in the mirror. He answered without looking at me. “Your information is correct. Which will give us the whole night ahead to dig under cover of darkness.”

  “It’s not advisable, sir.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s June, sir. It’s still light at eight in the eveni
ng.”

  “You, sir, are a pessimist, not to mention a panicmonger.”

  What Monsieur Forgotten did not mention was that he was oblivious, not to mention a wanton killer! I’ll explain why.

  Striking a trench is always a highly delicate operation. Thousands of soldiers are gathered together, converted into peons, and made to line up at certain predetermined points under the cover of dark: rows of stakes joined together by a trail of lime on the ground. (I’ve participated in setting up the stakes at times, scrabbling along on your knees and in fear of your life.) The closer to the stronghold the trench can begin, the fewer days will be needed for digging. Counter to this, the closer to the ramparts it begins, the more likely it will be noticed. At this point the troops still cannot take refuge beneath ground—it was quite usual for the trench to begin within range of the defenders’ cannons—since the digging has only just begun.

  Each of the men would have a pick or shovel, and thousands of the fajina wicker baskets would already have been lined up. The signal would be given and, as quietly as possible, digging begun all along the line. Each man would work behind the fajina, which the first shovelfuls would fill up, creating the first parapet in a matter of minutes, however precarious the situation.

  Only a very disciplined troop, or one working at a very safe distance, would be able to move about undetected and at absolutely no risk. Predictably enough, the enemy sentries saw us, heard us, or, I’d say, possibly smelled us, given Monsieur Forgotten’s pungent patchouli. And what was bound to happen, happened.

  Twilight in the west of Catalonia has an intensity and forcefulness all its own; the throes of the day come erupting into the sky in oceanic blues and reddish ambers. As cannon fire commenced, a strip of maroon lit up the horizon.

  There were fifty or so Allied cannons at Tortosa, of all calibers, and they began to pound our positions immediately: 2,200 excavators turned to 2,100, and in no time at all, 2,000. A chronicle I read subsequently referred to that night of horrors with the following lovely phrase: “The cannonade that night was a delight to hear.” Those historians might save “delight” for describing royal weddings, I say!