Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  In the early days, what a terrifying man commander Villarroel seemed to me, a veritable tyrant on horseback. Cavalry was his great strength; he would take his squadrons out to the outskirts of Toledo, and “Off we go, lads!,” riding more often, and better, than the Macedonian royal guard. As an engineer, I managed to avoid most of the exercises, though not all. Hup-hup! Up and down, down and up, till your rump was square-shaped from the saddle. He was more like a sheepdog than a general. Whenever a rider strayed, there the general was, woof woof!, barking and bothering the dimwit who had gotten out of formation. And as the dimwit in question tended to be good old Zuvi, I did get some tremendous tellings-off.

  “I’ve got a contract as an engineer, not a dragoon!” I protested one day, wobbling about on my saddle.

  “And what do you expect me to say to that?” he shouted. “Accept it! God made you for a monk rather than for a soldier, just give thanks you haven’t been promoted any higher!”

  Don Antonio drank only one little glass of wine at lunchtime. He was satisfied with a dish of half-cooked pap and wasn’t interested in any women but his own wife. On the nights when he didn’t sleep in his marital bed, which were about three hundred and sixty-four nights a year, he preferred a wooden board to a mattress. How could good old Zuvi possibly get on with such a man?

  Engineers have never felt comfortable in the structures designed for military types. Those martial salutes, that respect for hierarchical superiors, I never took to any of this myself. I sneaked away from the pack whenever I could. Toledo was so dull that when I got drunk there, it was no longer to satisfy my vice but because I had nothing better to do. Once I was called to a meeting of the general’s staff officers, to which I reported late and jollier than usual. Don Antonio gave me one of his looks, silent and incredibly fierce.

  They were arguing about the situation as a whole, which was dark with storm clouds. While the Allies sat rotting in Toledo, Little Philip was gathering thousands of recruits for his army. As if that were not enough, the Beast had sent him French reinforcements under the command of the Duc de Vendôme. Villarroel shared his fears that Toledo was being transformed into a giant trap. He asked my opinion: Could the city survive a siege?

  The wine laughed for me. “Ha ha ha! What a silly question, Don Antonio—I mean, General. Heh heh heh, if the Bourbons besiege Toledo, there won’t be any siege. Supplies getting cut off, the people taking against us, the city walls becoming so rotten that even the stones have maggots in them. Hee hee hee, bearing in mind that they are likely to exceed our number by three to one, it would be best to quit now while we still can, ho ho ho . . . ”

  I was locked up in the cells for a week, on bread and water. And not because he disagreed with my opinion but because I had said exactly what he thought, but said it rudely. I thought my dungeon would be so deep that they’d have to send my food by catapult. No. The truth was, the incarceration was not too tough—apart from the diet, which purged me.

  During my brief incarceration, something of relevance also took place: Charles fled Toledo, and Castile, and made a discreet return to Barcelona. The fact that he had gone before the army tells you everything you need to know about his confidence in a military victory. He left before anybody else, to hell with us all. The road to Barcelona was riddled with Castilian irregulars ready to cut his balls off, which meant that he had to travel surrounded by an escort so strong that it weakened the army further. A heroic example!

  As for the Castilians, he had only complaints and recriminations: “I found many people in Madrid who asked me for things, and nobody to serve me.”

  What did he expect? Castile and Catalonia were at war; being king of the Catalans excluded him from reigning over the Castilians. He of all people should have known this. And he did, in fact.

  While he was in Castile, he drank milk only from goats that had been transported from Barcelona. His bread was baked from Catalan wheat, and even the sugar in his confectionary had been brought over from Catalonia. All his supplies were watched over by the regiment of the Royal Catalan Guard, an elite corps made up entirely of staunchly pro-Austrian Catalans, fanatics so fanatical that you could hear a “Carlossssss” when they broke wind. I scarcely exaggerate.

  When he crossed the border from Castile to Catalonia, he alit from the royal carriage, exclaiming, “I am back in my own kingdom at last.”

  He was loved by as few people in Castile as Philip was in Catalonia. If he had faced facts, he might have negotiated an end to the conflict. An end to the war. And if things had gone that way, I would have had at least one country in which to bury my bones. But no, His Majesty King Karl, our meringue-faced Charles, needed to rule over an empire and couldn’t settle for less. He did get his empire in the end! Though not as we expected, and through a stroke of chance and at the expense of his Mediterranean subjects. I will tell you of that anon. Let me first explain what happened on the final day of the Allied occupation of Toledo and the retreat, the painful retreat, to the land of the Catalans.

  Good old Zuvi got out of his cell. If you will allow me at this point to make a confession: The very mildness of the punishment made me reconsider the man who had imposed it upon me.

  What little experience I had with Don Antonio told me he was a good general, firm but fair. He had done the right thing, locking me up, absolutely the right thing. Vauban would have treated me just the same, as he should. Thanks to that incarceration, I became aware of how dulled I had become since leaving Bazoches. Perhaps Don Antonio was a kind of walking Bazoches.

  Once I was out of my dungeon, I reported to him. He noticed the change he had wrought in my spirit, and his behavior toward me softened a little.

  The thing is, with Villarroel, you always ended up paying for your failings, one way or another. And the last one, the last sin of youth that I committed while under his command, very nearly cost me my life.

  I wanted to celebrate my newfound liberty with whores, and the binge lasted so long that I awoke late, worse for the wear, and not in the barracks.

  “The archduke’s army! They’re finally off!” cried the whore who woke me. “They left at night so they could slip away unnoticed. Long live King Philip!”

  The whole fucking army was returning home, and me rubbing the sleep from my eyes! Even though, at Bazoches, I’d been taught to remain alert even in my sleep, the notification hadn’t reached me because I’d spent the night outside the barracks. I got dressed so quickly that at first I tried to put my shirt on over my legs.

  The Allies were not exactly beloved in Toledo, and as soon as I was outside, I could see that the atmosphere was warming up. As the news spread and neighbors began to wake, their bitterness awoke, too. You could already see small groups shouting: “Long live King Philip! Viva!” and brandishing improvised weapons above their heads. God, anything could happen now.

  I hastened toward the citadel. I thought there might be some reserve battalion left behind that I might join. What I found was a little band of drunkards, so drunk that even the most imperious orders hadn’t been able to get them out of their bunks. There was a bit of everything: some Englishmen, Portuguese, Dutch . . . Alcohol makes no distinction between origins.

  “What are you still doing here? They’ve all left for Barcelona!” I cried. “The Toledo mob is going to kill us!”

  It was useless—they didn’t respond at all. I felt as though I were at the bottom of a monstrous Atlantic whirlpool, with the only ship that could save me, the Allied army, receding farther and farther into the distance. No sooner had I left the citadel than I began to hear shouting and gunshots. People were looking for the last stragglers, and there were plenty of them. At the end of the road, I saw an Englishman on his knees, being kicked and stabbed by a yelling crowd of men and women. It was as though people had lost their reason.

  Toledo is a relatively small place. I ran through the streets, heading east. So as not to arouse suspicion by my haste, I gave the occasional enthusiastic cry: “Long live King Phili
p! We’re free at last! Viva, viva!”

  And you—why are you making that face? What would you have liked me to have shouted? “Long live King Charles! I’m a fucking Catalan rebel, and I eat truffles and Castilian babies for dinner!”? Use your brain, my little cannonball-head.

  The last street led to a few kitchen gardens beyond which scraggly vegetation stretched toward the horizon. I stopped a moment to look behind me. Over there, up at the top, the citadel was wreathed in smoke. A few desperate rifles appeared through the small windows, but it was obvious there was nothing to be done. Poor bastards. Before being quartered alive, they would do better to turn their final bullets on themselves.

  Good old Zuvi has always had luck on his side, because as chance would have it, there was a priest arriving in the city. He was riding a decent-sized horse, Amazon-style, with both legs on the same side because of his cassock. I knocked him to the ground, climbed onto his saddle like a monkey onto a coconut palm, and tore off at a gallop, so fast it felt like the horse had eight legs. Toledo! You’re welcome to her.

  7

  The Allies had Don Antonio’s light cavalry as their rearguard. His horsemen acted as a protective screen for the rest of the army, who moved more slowly, as they fled Toledo for Barcelona. I met them at a crossroads from where they were scanning the horizon. Don Antonio, their leader, was sitting at the foot of a solitary tree, eating, surrounded by his staff officers.

  By the time I reached them, the priest’s horse was a wreck. I was sweating horrors and distress, and I didn’t climb down from the horse’s back so much as dropped onto the thin yellow grass. And there I stayed, lying there gasping like a dying fish.

  “Here’s the little engineer,” said Don Antonio by way of greeting, entirely indifferent. “We thought you’d disappeared, you know.”

  My hair was on end after the shock. Someone poured the contents of a jug of water over Don Antonio’s hands, and he gave them a cursory wash and said: “Right, off we go.”

  “I’ve only just arrived!” I protested. “Even the shadow of my soul is weighing me down!”

  He shrugged. “Very well, stay if you’d rather.”

  “What about all the stragglers?” I protested again. “Back in Toledo, there are dozens of soldiers getting massacred. Why are we abandoning them?”

  “Because they’re layabouts.”

  At once he was back on his splendid white horse. One of Don Antonio’s officers spoke for him: “With Vendôme upon us, you really think the whole fucking army is going to sit and wait for a handful of drunkards? They had their chance. Things like this are useful for purging the troop of its undesirables.”

  Yes, this from Don Antonio de Villarroel Peláez. And to think I believed he might replace the mastery of a Vauban!

  Criticisms aside, if you ever want to know whether a general is one of the good ones, don’t even think about blood-soaked victories—tell him to lead a retreat; if you want to make it even more difficult, a retreat in winter. It’s much easier to defeat than to defend; it’s easier to attack than to retreat in an orderly fashion. A retreat never brings laurels or decorations.

  An army in flight can come dangerously close to panic, threatening to disintegrate. We find ourselves in enemy territory, which is the main reason for keeping our ranks closed. As I’ve said, the Castilian countryfolk did not exactly love the Allied troops. If a soldier left formation, worn out, if he fell asleep under a tree, thwack!, he would end up with his gullet sliced through with a sickle. Our flanks were surrounded by gangs of irregular killers, and behind us we had the Duc de Vendôme, the old marshal whom France’s Beast had sent to Spain to help his idiotic grandson. The whole Allied army was a single body, pressed together as tightly as a frightened herd, meeehhhh . . .

  And the cold! That winter, 1710, was the coldest of the century. Just picture this: One day I stopped my horse at the foot of a solitary tree, looking at a branch that had frozen in the frost. The weak sun was reflected in it with the rich colors of a rainbow. Then I heard plop, plop, plop hitting the ground very nearby. They were birds, dozens of them, falling from the branch, frozen.

  The Allied army was transformed into the largest gathering of chilblains ever. My fingers were constantly purple; my lips were a maze of cracks. Since I had fled Toledo in whatever clothes I happened to be wearing, I needed to find some way to get something warmer: gloves, hat, blanket. Comradeship among soldiers? Ha! Débrouillez-vous, more like! I stole it all. And a scarf—old, but long enough to go three times around my neck and even covering my nose like an emboscado.

  What followed was an interminable march across an endless landscape. Not just level but absolutely, perfectly flat. Not just dry, arid. In spite of the winter cold, neither the mist nor the rain managed to dampen it. God, how hard the Castilian soil is; there’s not an invader’s boot that can soften it up. We crossed distances that went on forever; towns would emerge like atolls on an ocean horizon. What is Castile? Get a big expanse of wasteland, plant a tyrannical regime upon it, and there you have Castile.

  Vendôme was a great soldier. The Bourbon army was pursuing us relentlessly, with no hesitation, no letup, always in search of the perfect moment to destroy the Allied army, but also in no hurry. If you ask me, the only thing that spared us any unpleasant surprises, including getting ourselves completely surrounded, was Don Antonio’s cavalry.

  Villarroel made no exceptions. I might have been nominally an engineer, but I had to ride, patrol, and fight like anyone else. I tried to make claims for my special expertise.

  “We’re short of men” was his reply.

  “Not least because we abandoned them in Toledo after they’d had one drink too many!” was mine.

  “It’s only that lack of men that prevents me flogging you.” He handed me the reins. “Get on your horse.”

  It was during that terrifying retreat that good old Zuvi became an expert horseman. Not through any love of horses but out of the strongest imperative that exists: You learn or you get killed.

  But I’m not being fair to Don Antonio. You might not believe me, but that apocalyptic retreat from a hostile Madrid to Barcelona—the Retreat, as we veterans would come to call it—taught me to respect him, then to admire him, and eventually to love him.

  He censured my manners, never my opinions. I was no more than a mouthy lad, and he was a proper general forged in cauldrons of iron and gunpowder. Who was I to argue with him? At the time, I couldn’t see the vast tolerance he extended to me. In his eyes, I was exempt by virtue of my youth and my office. No other general would have been so indulgent.

  His motto was the same thing I’d been taught at Bazoches: Know what you need to do, and be where you need to be. He worried about his troops. Actually, that was the only thing that guided him. Vauban saved lives by means of numbers; Villarroel, by example. If you will allow me to simplify a little, I would say that to me, Vauban was theory and Villarroel was practice. Even during mobile wars, there are many things for an engineer to do: Find the best place for a ford when the bridges are inaccessible, build pontoons or provisional defenses. It was only then that I was able, as it were, to make use of my studies. And with this I earned the great general’s respect.

  I suggested that we leave a small provision of dragoons to our rear, in some one-horse town that had a few battlements standing. When Vendôme approached, he would be forced to stop the whole army, to consider whether to attack the place, besiege it, or surround it. Our dragoons would mount their horses and race out under cover of night. Yes, the following day, the Bourbons would discover that the place was empty, but by then the Allied army would have gained a day’s marching on them.

  The next trick from the Bazoches list was really rather cruel. We gathered all the inhabitants from down in Villabajo and sent them up to Villarriba—these were two settlements located on the north-south axis separating us from the army we had in pursuit. Simultaneously, another Allied squadron would force the inhabitants from Villarriba to head down to Villab
ajo. It often happened that the two populations would meet—amazed—on their way, bringing their goats, wagons, and chattel with them. The ill feeling between these unfortunate people illustrated the scale of our disgrace. The fact was, the Bourbon scouts wouldn’t spare the horses to notify Vendôme: “Marshal, the inhabitants of Villabajo have been moved up to Villarriba!”

  From which Vendôme would deduce that the Allies were divesting themselves of mouths to feed as they converted the place into a center of resistance. Then another group of scouts would come to him saying the exact opposite: “Marshal, the inhabitants of Villarriba have been moved down to Villabajo!”

  What was going on? Things became clear only when the Bourbons, having taken many precautions, entered the town square of each of the two villages and found, hanging on the door of the town hall, a polite note, written in perfect French, from good old Zuvi.