Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  Three of Ballester’s men climbed up into the carriage. The old man dug, murmuring mindlessly to himself, oblivious to everything but the mule. He was too deranged to have a clue what was going on.

  Ballester’s men found the chest beneath the blankets.

  “Fifty rifles!” shouted one of them, joyful, throwing a handful of coins in Ballester’s direction. “We can buy fifty rifles with this lot!”

  “I stole it from those Bourbon scum!” I said, trying to turn their glee to my advantage. “I’m a patriot, utterly committed. The only thing I want is to topple Little Philip and his grandfather!”

  While they rejoiced in the ill-begotten fortune, I came up with a convoluted tale. I was a spy working for the Generalitat, I went around sabotaging the evil Bourbons, my allegiance was with Austria. Attacking me was a mistake, and a crime, too. My mission, secret, meant traveling to Barcelona with the cargo; ministers from the Generalitat were awaiting my arrival. I even asked if they would like to escort me, and said they’d be paid handsomely if they did a good job. Ballester punched me to the ground. “String him up,” he said.

  I whimpered and wept and begged for my life. I pushed the men off me and knelt down in front of Ballester. My family was dead, I told him, I was my blessed father’s only remaining son. A poor, peaceful, upstanding patriot.

  Begging mercy from your executioners seems the most pointless pursuit. But in that case, why do men always subject themselves to such humiliation? I’ll tell you why: because it works.

  “Sir,” I implored. “Have you forgotten who saved you from hanging in Beceite? The few hours of grace afforded you by my lenient words gave your men time to come back for you! And this is how you repay me! The one who saved your life, you sentence to death!”

  Ballester spat by my nose, which was down on the ground. “It’s all right, your chest has brightened up my day,” he said. “Get out of here. I won’t lower myself to dirty my hands with you.”

  I can still hear his rasping, stony voice and the words he said: “Fot el camp, gos.” (Away with you, dog.)

  They stripped me, though my clothes were worth nothing. It must have been a symbol to the Miquelets when releasing prisoners. They even took my undergarments, stained though they were with mud and shit from twenty days in the trenches. I instinctively covered up my genitals with my hands. Turning on my heel, I fled, my rear end bare and the men pursuing me with their laughter.

  “Hey!” Ballester shouted once there was a little distance between us. “Do you know how to write?” He had shifted to addressing me in the usted form, usually reserved for superiors.

  I stopped and turned, with my hands still in front of my crotch, and stammered an answer: “Yes, well, of course. In several languages.”

  He waved to me to come back. I obeyed, what else. He ordered his men to pull a plank from the carriage. He handed it to me, along with a piece of iron with a sharp point. “Write ‘I am a botiflero dog’ on it. In French and Spanish.”

  “May I ask,” I whispered haltingly, clearing my throat, “what the inscription’s for?”

  “Oh, I’ve changed my mind,” he said in the most amiable of voices. “Seeing as you know how to write, I’m going to string you up, and the whole world will know why. We’ll hang the plank around your neck.”

  The iron and the plank dropped from my hands. Down on my knees again, I implored him, I whimpered, I cried whole seas. He looked up at the sky, sighing as though reconsidering. I thought he might have softened again, but what he said was: “Know Latin, too? Put it in Latin as well.”

  I scratched out the letters on the plank, moaning and begging all the while. Ballester’s men found the whole thing hilarious.

  “On your feet, boy!” they said, their voices upbeat, once I had finished. They tied my hands behind my back and picked me up at the armpits. The tallest tree in the vicinity was a fig tree. Someone put the plank around my neck. The old lunatic began shouting from the hole he was still digging: “So many big men, all in one place, and none of you comes to help an old man!”

  One of the Miquelets tried to get the rope over one of the top branches but was so drunk that he stumbled and fell flat on his face. More laughter.

  “Don’t you know how deep a hole has to be to fit a mule in?” continued the old man. “And me, toiling in the sun, in this heat. What a life!”

  You only get one death, and mine had fallen into the hands of some drunk, bungling executioners. They finally managed to get the rope over the topmost branch. My head was introduced into the noose, and without any further ado, a couple of the brutes pulled down on the other end of the rope.

  “I know you’re all good lads! You pay well, and anyone who fetches up without any money, you escort them for free. But I’m poor, too, and old, and tired! And this mule is enormous!”

  I was lifted ten feet into the air. The yank on the noose caused my tongue to stick out. You never know how long your tongue is until you get hanged. The rope makes the blood in your head collect; you go bright red. My urine made an arc when I pissed myself. Some of the Miquelets fell down laughing.

  They were too drunk to remember the well-reputed untrustworthiness of fig trees. The branches have a tendency to break, and, when I had been raised a little higher, the one bearing me indeed snapped. There was a great noise as I fell to the ground: bones, wood, and bushy leaves all in a heap.

  Their guffaws were probably heard in Tortosa. Then, quite simply, they turned around and went off. That’s how Miquelets are.

  “Figa tova! Figa tova!” they called out mockingly as they rode away, taking my carriage and the chest, of course, with them.

  (Figa tova is untranslatable. Figa in Catalan means “fig,” and tova means “soft”; put together, they mean a whining know-it-all. Like Waltraud here, for instance.)

  “Ho, you layabout!” cried the old halfwit. “Instead of lying there, you could at least give me a hand.”

  Vidi

  1

  Very well, then, we can agree that my return home was rather less glorious than that of Ulysses. The only attire I was able to procure for myself was a pile of beggar’s rags. And thus it was that I returned to Barcelona after four long years away. Defeated by the war, baffled in my wretchedness. And the worst thing of all: with a fifth Point on my forearm that I had done nothing to deserve.

  But let us forget about the tragedy of Longlegs Zuvi for just a moment. I was returning to the city of my birth, to old Barcelona. To her noises, her smells, her alleyways. Her harbor, her excesses. The city felt like an invention of my memories, more distant than my mother. All I had retained in my head were a child’s recollections—do not forget, I left my home when I was but a child—and I was returning to Barcelona equipped with senses that were far from ordinary, which Bazoches had honed. Everything was new, after a fashion, for my perceptions and the passage of time meant I was experiencing the place as a foreigner would.

  At this point I ought to ramble off into a description of Barcelona in the early years of the century. Which would be a very dull thing. Since I have a map from the period, I shall simply attach it and leave it at that.

  The city walls are not shown on this plate. Very fitting, bearing in mind my mood at that moment, because the last thing I wanted was to go back to thinking as an engineer. Or about Bazoches, or Jeanne, or Vauban’s “You are not fit.” Or The Word.

  As you can see, the city was bisected by a broad avenue, Las Ramblas. The urban sprawl was much denser to its right, and on its left, vegetable gardens in abundance, something very useful to have in the case of a siege . . .

  I had left Barcelona a boy, and I was returning a man. A failure, but a man. I can assure you, this voice speaking to you now has never known a more frivolous port or a city, nor one that was home to more foreigners. Not even in America! They came, they settled, and their origins melted into the crowd. The day they decided to stay, they’d Catalanize their family names as a disguise, so nobody might know whether their birthplace had b
een in Italy, France, Castile, or somewhere more exotic still. As for the rest, and in contrast to the Castilian obsession with keeping the blood pure of Moors or Jews, the Catalans didn’t care a fig for their neighbors’ origins. If they had money to spend, if they were pleasant enough, and if they didn’t try and impose religious ideas, new arrivals were left to get on with it. This atmosphere, so passive and receptive, meant that the people would be transformed in less than a generation. So it was with my father.

  Thanks to his Catholic heritage, every other day in his calendar was a feast day. (The papacy had to have something going for it to have so many followers around the world.) Besides these, we should add the dozens of more or less improvised occasions, such as days of thanksgiving to commemorate the king being restored to health, or because Santa Eulalia had appeared to a drunkard in the street. But make no mistake, if the Catalans encouraged feast days, it was only because they understood that idleness is good business.

  The festivities, which the calendar teemed with, cost colossal amounts. Barcelona’s festivals and carnivals were spoken of the world over. Those carnivals! The Castilian aristocrats, all so chaste, would return from their visits scandalized. Rich and poor out on the streets, men and women all together in a throng and dancing till the early hours. Just appalling. To a Castilian nobleman, clothing had to be one color only: the severest black. When I was in Madrid in 1710, I was surprised by the blackness of its patricians. It was the opposite in Barcelona. More than three hundred kinds of fabric were imported, and the more money you had, the more colors you would flaunt in your attire and at the dances.

  There was a constant flow of merchandise being unloaded at the harbor. You could find a dozen varieties of ginger alone. When I was a little boy, my father once gave me a thrashing because I’d come back from market with the wrong kind of rice—no wonder I was confused about which he’d sent me for: There were as many as forty-three different varieties of rice, something to suit every purse.

  In few places have I seen people smoke as much as I witnessed in Barcelona. In the city’s botigas, it was possible to find an even greater array of tobaccos than there was of rice. Healthy though smoking obviously was, the habit spread to such an extent that the bishop was obliged to pronounce an edict, an ecclesiastical proclamation, no less, forbidding priests from smoking—at least while performing their offices!

  In Barcelona in the years before 1714, you always had the impression of a city governed by a tolerant, opulent, libertine kind of chaos. People worked themselves to death and, at the same time, died laughing and merrymaking. On the whole, the government of the Generalitat didn’t meddle when it came to popular excesses. Let me give you one example: the pedradas.

  The line dividing popular revelry and mob violence has always been vanishingly thin. When my father was a young lad, the pedradas were the favored pastime of Barcelona’s universities. Essentially, these consisted of a contest between two teams, each made up of a good hundred participants. They’d find some expanse of open land to gather in, and with the two teams on opposite sides, when the signal was given, hunks of stone would begin to be hurled. Thousands of stones went back and forth, and if you could strike an opponent in the head with one of yours, so much the better for you! You will be wondering, perhaps, what sort of rules applied to such a noble pastime? The answer could not be simpler: There were no rules at all. The group who finally fled in terror was considered the loser; the one left on the field, the victor. Naturally, the battle would leave dozens injured, many with their heads split open for life, and even some dead.

  The real crybabies among the clergy clamored against the brutishness of the pedradas. Could the competition not be made a little less rough by at least replacing the stones with oranges? At their insistence, the universities assumed a position entirely typical of the Catalans: agreeing without complying. At the start of the civic battles, oranges would be used, but only until these ran out, whereupon the combatants would proceed with stones. The Church was obliged to hold off on the sermonizing because the pedradas were an enormously popular entertainment; crowds came to watch, bets were laid and sides taken. And who among us is unfamiliar with students’ playful ways? Very often, when there was an attentive crowd, instead of attacking each other, the two groups, laughing, would unite to bombard the unsuspecting spectators!

  Using the pedradas as their excuse, the students would sometimes designate the area around the university their “field of honor.” Then the two rival groups would form an alliance, feeling fraternal all of a sudden, leaving the building a wreck, outside and in. Lectures would be suspended until the furnishings were replaced, and—who would have thought such a thing, what a coincidence!—it seemed these pedradas always sprang up at the university around exam time. No wonder my father sent me to France; always having been head and shoulders above my peers, and always having been a scoundrel, I would have found my place (my father was sure) in the front line of the stone-throwers, on one side or the other, and would have ended up with my skull smashed in. In any case, during my boyhood, pedradas had already begun to tail off noticeably. But of one thing I am quite sure: If Christ was able to save the blessed prostitute from stoning, it was only because there were no Barcelonan university students around in Judea at the time.

  While I’m on the subject of prostitutes, one of the defects of Barcelona in those days, which demonstrates the fathomless perfidy of the “Black Pelts” (as the bishops were commonly called, owing to the color of their cassocks), is that brothels were strictly forbidden. There was a particular watch kept over boardinghouses and inns, and “suspect” women were constantly kept under observation. As far as I can tell, this disproportionate harassment of the city’s pitiful tarts was a kind of concession granted to the Black Pelts on the part of the Red Pelts (the government, in the popular jargon, owing to the crimson color of the robe worn by Catalan magistrates). Since the rich and powerful were quick to ignore sermons against gambling and luxury, the government gave the Church the satisfaction of repressing, at least, those poor, defenseless prostitutes.

  Which is not to say there were no whores at all. Of course there were! In cities with brothels, the tarts stay inside and never come out; in cities without any brothels, they spill all over the place and at all hours. With the ancient profession of procurer abolished, aspiring tarts came up with a thousand cunning schemes to allow them to carry out their work in secret.

  Anyway, as I was saying, I had been wandering the streets, summoning the courage to return home, when I heard the sound of drums approaching. The crowd, all crushed together on the Ramblas, dropped to their knees.

  The news of the fall of Tortosa had arrived in the city before me. On occasions such as that, the Barcelonans carried in procession their most sacred relic: the standard of Santa Eulalia. I hope you will allow me a few words at this point, because the Barcelonans’ precious flag most surely deserves them.

  As a banner, it was nothing extraordinary. It was, however, quite different from modern ensigns. The whole large silk rectangle was taken up by the portrait of a young woman, her body violet-colored, with sadness in her eyes. Something about the image was irremediably pagan. The art that had captured the melancholy in her eyes was wonderful.

  According to the dictates of tradition, the flag had to be passed on, by hand, from Catalan kings to their firstborn and successor. It was said that an army that flew this flag would never be defeated. (A lie, I say: Catalan history comprises ten sound defeats to every one victory.) In any case, what is certainly true is that the flag of Santa Eulalia provoked feelings of devotion that far outstripped merely military support. As it passed by, the Barcelonans knelt to cross themselves and ask for protection and blessings. If you will allow me to share a thought with you, I can tell you that this reverence had precious little to do with religion. For this ensign was much more than a saint: It was the representative of the city itself.

  I did not kneel. Not through lack of piety but because that violet-colored
young lady reminded me of the one in the dream that le Mystère had provoked in me. The flag progressed, flanked by drums beating out a dirge for the fall of Tortosa, and when it passed, those saintly eyes seemed to be asking me something.

  Martí Zuviría did not talk to flags, of course, but the sensation of an encounter with a creature from another world, albeit as real as an old friend, was so vivid that I simply stood there, agog. And, well, I suppose you must now be asking the same question as my heavy, vile Waltraud: “So what did the violet girl ask you?” I’ll tell you, then: She didn’t use words; a damsel, when asking your protection, has no need of words.

  Since all those around me were on their knees and I remained standing, it was not hard to spot me from a distance. Somebody called out my name—it was Peret. I believe I have already mentioned old Peret, that human relic who had taken care of me in the absence of a mother. He had recognized me, and when Saint Eulalia had gone by, he threw himself upon me. He was still a sentimental old graybeard, and when I asked him to stop crying, his response stunned me: “It’s you I’m crying for. Or did you not receive my most recent letters?”

  No, I had not received them. My life had been so busy, and any letters had been lost in the limbo of the roads. Peret could not stop himself from blurting out the news: “Your blessed father is dead.”

  To my disbelief, to my despair, he also told me that I was a changed man. I was not moderately wealthy but poor. I did not live in my house, as I believed, but nowhere at all. Because I was not the son of a Barcelona trader: I was an orphan. My father had died suddenly. Shortly before, he had married a Neapolitan widow whom he had doubtless met on one of his mercantile voyages. Once he was dead, she and her children had no qualms in setting themselves up in my house. Or, rather, her house, which was what it was now.

  Over the course of the following days, my stupefaction gave way to indignation. I threatened the usurpers with legal action to hound them to the end of time. And that was more or less what did happen: Over the ensuing years, I spent everything I earned on the best lawyer in the city, one Rafael Casanova. Oh yes, a splendid fellow for arguing a case in a courtroom. Eighty years have passed, and still I am awaiting justice.