Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  I was so riled by all this that I myself took the floor. “Don Antonio would never approve such a decision! Quite the reverse.”

  “Our commander in chief is at the government’s command, and my orders come from the government,” shouted the deputy. Like any Red Pelt, he was immediately incensed by any discussion about the Generalitat and Don Antonio’s competing influence. “It isn’t a military dictatorship!”

  “Don Antonio, a dictator?” I said, becoming animated. “I’ve never heard such bilge in all my days!”

  My tone forced Dalmau to intercede: “Lieutenant Colonel Zuviría! Act in a manner more befitting your rank—that’s an order!”

  But I couldn’t control the frenzy taking hold of me. “If Don Antonio loved the saber regiment so much, he’d be fighting for the Bourbons; they offered him far higher wages than Vienna now pays him! And if our lads get their hands on a few botiflero petticoats, where’s the harm in that? That’s how it is in war, and these cowardly, self-serving so-and-so’s abandoned their people to join the butchers. What should we do with them? Pin medals on their chests? Extol their honorable virtues? We could exchange them for patriots! Take this many botifleros and we’d stop the execution of hundreds, thousands, of Miquelets!”

  A number of the officers in the room wanted me arrested. When I put my hand to my sword hilt, Dalmau came and pushed me to the door. “Easy, Zuviría,” he said as he led me out. “You’ll achieve nothing, speaking to people like that.”

  I still had time to shout over his shoulder: “What is this war, anyway? Let clockmakers make clocks and politicians politic—soldiers should be left to do what they do, make war!”

  All there was for me to do then was sit at the foot of a tree with my head in my hands.

  The pendulum of war, indeed. Lose, win, lose again. Everything changed within minutes, incomprehensibly, and on the basis of decisions that seemed divorced from the military. How were we to stand any chance of winning with this kind of people leading the way? They cared more about their own kind, even if they were botifleros, than their own soldiers.

  Before I realized it, Ballester had come up and was standing next to me. “I’ve just come back from reconnaissance with my men,” he said. “Mataró is impossible to defend, and the garrison is a trifle. Should I report to someone with the details?”

  I didn’t answer but kept my head buried in my hands. Ballester hit me on the shoulder. “Are the battalions ready?” he asked. “There are three entry points. I don’t even think we’ll need them; they’ll surrender as soon as we come into view.”

  I could hardly look at him. “There isn’t going to be an attack,” I said. “Mataró isn’t going to be taken.”

  An eternity seemed to pass before he spoke again: “But why not? Why not?”

  It was one of the few times when I saw him become upset. I found this show of vulnerability unbearable; I felt responsible.

  “Ballester,” I stuttered, “I’m sorry. You’re right about the Red Pelts. I shouldn’t have made you come.” I got to my feet, avoiding eye contact. “You should take your men and leave. Or join up with Busquets. Do what you like.”

  He took me by the scruff of the neck and slammed me against the tree. “Who do you think you are? Who, damn it? You’ve as little right to eject me as you had to make me join up! Now tell me: Why no attack on Mataró?”

  I didn’t even try to resist. In my confusion, I was as sincere as I could possibly be: “I don’t know why.”

  Just then a couple of officers came by. “Ho! What’s happening here?”

  “What’s happening,” said Ballester, letting go of me and beginning to walk away, “is that there are some people who have no idea what’s truly happening.”

  3

  There is perhaps only one thing sadder than watching fortune slip between your fingers, and that is to be moving away from it out of your own free choosing. It had been decided: The expedition would move on, no attempt would be made to take Mataró, and so we went on, like a treasure seeker who, having orders to bring back gold, discards a diamond as big as a rock. The cavalry went first, with the infantry bringing up the rear. A late-summer Mediterranean downpour began to fall.

  The Miquelets under Busquets watched the army leave; despairing, grievous looks they gave us. Their silence was an accusation. I’d met them after a defeat—this was worse still. It was as though their souls had been extracted from their bodies. Even in victory, they’d suffered a defeat, and yet none could tell at whose hands.

  The only one to raise his voice was Busquets. As the rain came down, he rode alongside the ranks of blue-uniformed soldiers.

  “Why, why go?” he cried. “Victory’s right there!” He gestured in the direction of Matarós. “We only need to knock on the door, and the whole rotten building will come tumbling down!”

  I have stored up a great array of memories in my life, and the image of Busquets then is one of the most pathetic. His arm in a sling, his long blond hair wet with rain, his useless entreaties.

  Ballester and his nine Miquelets were in the column’s rearguard. They looked up at Busquets impassively, but I knew them, I knew that inside they were on fire. I spurred my horse over to where Ballester was. “If you want to leave,” I said, “do it now. It wouldn’t be good for the officers to catch wind of it. Legally, they could have you for desertion.”

  He turned his head and spat by the feet of my horse. “You’re the deserters,” he retorted.

  Busquets came over, bedraggled and weeping. “Ballester!” he said beggingly. “If we joined forces, maybe we could try it ourselves?”

  Ballester just shook his head. “They’ll have been warned by now,” he said. “And they’ll be getting reinforcements soon enough.” Then he flashed a rare smile. “Anyway, what would be the point of staying here with you? You’ll be dead before you ever pay me back.”

  “It’s for Saint Peter to decide how long we’re for this earth,” said Busquets. “And my bullet pouch is still only half empty.”

  “Or half full,” said Ballester.

  Busquets and his men made their way away from the column. I had no notion where they were headed. They didn’t even bid us farewell.

  And what about me, why did I carry on under the orders of that insect Deputy Berenguer? I don’t very well know. Don Antonio had ordered me to go with him, and I found it unthinkable to disobey Don Antonio. I believe I may also have been moved by the impulse, latent in every person, to drink a bitter cup to the very last dregs.

  It rained for the rest of that day.

  Things went from bad to worse after Mataró. When Pópuli learned of the expedition, having recovered from the fright, he threw all he could at us. Thousands of Spanish and French were sent from their posts across Catalonia to seek us out and crush us. Pópuli went so far as to take a handful of battalions away from the cordon to join the hunt; he knew very well how dangerous a mass uprising would be to him. Sad to say, but our enemies had more faith in the Catalan peasantry than our own leaders did.

  With such inferior numbers, the expedition soon became the fox trying to outrun the pack of hounds. We’d enter a town or village with trumpets blaring and the silver mace up front. Deputy Berenguer had given the order for us all to wear our finest attire, to make a stronger impression. To begin with, the order was obeyed. Then we ran out of changes of clothes. Soon enough we became unkempt, had no footwear, and our blue tunics were covered in mud and patches. In spite of everything, the marching band always had a full complement; its upbeat songs contrasted with our general aspect. Pu-rum pum pum! We’d come into a town square and the Crida would be read out, along with a little oration from Deputy Berenguer. And the following day, or the one after that, we’d have reports from our patrols that entire enemy regiments were approaching, and we’d have to take to our heels—Deputy Berenguer aloft, truly almost shitting himself.

  Well, all this was more or less to be expected. (The Bourbon attempts to pin us down, I mean, not Deputy Berenguer’s
flatulence.) Evading ambushes became our specialty; we traveled light and had a thousand eyes to inform us of the enemy’s positions. But the true disaster had already happened, and its name was Mataró.

  Word of the Crida from Barcelona spread, along with news of the fiasco at Mataró. People aren’t stupid. With precedents like that, how could they trust the deputy? When he harangued them, his argument was based around three things. One, that Archduke Charles was a pious man, deeply, deeply pious. (As if it mattered in the slightest that a king, in some far-off place called Vienna, loved God.) Two, that they should trust in Our Lord God, for He would come to devout Catalonia’s aid. (If everything was in God’s hands, and if God was on our side, why had He stood by and watched the country’s current plight?) Three, so as not to scandalize the upstanding Christians in the crowd, he would keep quiet about the enemy’s iniquitous outrages. (No, man, no! That you want to shout from the rooftops! Let even the deaf know that we share their pain!) I remember Dalmau, during Deputy Berenguer’s speeches in the town squares, looking to the heavens and showing his opposition with the occasional snort.

  One of the worst things was seeing how self-confirming Deputy Berenguer’s social prejudice was. All the zealous patriots had already joined groups of Miquelets like those of Busquets. Our presence was meant to encourage town councils to resist and govern in the name of the Generalitat, and to let the clergy know how treacherously their superiors had acted. But above all, we were hoping to win over the undecided majority: those who weren’t prepared to become outlaws but would happily oppose tyranny if it were done under the banner of a free and legitimate power. Deputy Berenguer’s speeches, full of as much hot air as his bowels, brought only excuses and tepid responses. Those who did join were the dregs of society—the dregs of the dregs. The usual layabouts, or folks so starved that they joined up simply for the meal. And thus Deputy Berenguer’s recruitment drive served to confirm his opinion about the lower classes. If any doubts remain as to what that man was like, here are a few more examples.

  One day we found ourselves faced with several Castilian battalions. They were occupying a town we wanted to take, and when they came out to engage us in battle, once the firing had begun, a group of patriots inside the town scaled the bell tower and began firing at them from behind. Our men waved their tricorns to salute the men’s efforts, and our standard-bearers waved the flags joyfully. There are few sensations as exhilarating as finding kinship with complete strangers. This put the Castilians on the back foot; you could feel them vacillate for a moment, and that was the moment to sound a charge and sweep them aside. Instead of that, what we heard were the trumpets sounding the retreat.

  Not believing what I was hearing, I pushed the soldiers nearest to me. “There must be some mistake,” I said. “Keep firing! Don’t stop!”

  Shitson himself had to come riding over and gave me the order to fall back. “Didn’t you hear the retreat being sounded?” he howled at me from up on his horse. “We’re leaving! We’ve had word from the scouts that a full regiment is on its way to hem us in.”

  “We’ve got them hemmed in!” I shouted, beside myself. “We could get to Portugal and back before that regiment arrives.”

  Shitson had it in for me in particular because we were the same rank. I tried to make him feel less envious by saying it meant nothing, Don Antonio had promoted me only so my orders to do with engineering would be obeyed. It was pointless. All that happened was, as well as considering me a pen pusher, he also decided I was an imposter. He was obsessed with being promoted to colonel. That would happen only if a new regiment was formed, or if an existing colonel was killed, and that made any other lieutenant colonel a rival. Leaning out of his saddle, he prodded my nose with a finger. “You’ll never make a soldier, Zuviría. Your problem is you fail to see the bigger picture.”

  The bigger picture! Let me tell you about the “bigger picture” of that day.

  After we left, the Bourbons didn’t take the trouble to capture the snipers in the bell tower: They simply set fire to the church, and the men burned alive. The tactics they used against us were proof of the straightforwardness of the Bourbon approach. Any town that had taken us in would have its houses burned down, and one in ten inhabitants would be shot. Straightforward indeed.

  Not long after that, the expedition forces divided into two. It was Dalmau’s suggestion, it being his view that there was no way for us to tackle such great numbers head-on; the best thing was to split the column. The main unit would stay under the deputy’s command. A secondary but well-stocked column would be under Dalmau, and a number of other, smaller units would go farther afield and try to raise troops.

  Not a bad plan. If we split up, it would make it harder for the Bourbon patrols to track us, and in the first place, they’d be delayed trying to work out how many units we’d split into. They’d have to divide their forces, too. The large-scale war had become one of smaller encounters, so it was advantageous to try and reduce the numbers. Also, Pópuli’s terror tactics had other impacts. Once people knew their towns would go up in flames the day after we left, they became less willing to open their doors to us. By splintering, we’d move into a great many more towns, and not even the commanders of the Army of the Two Crowns would be brazen enough to burn down every single town and city in Catalonia.

  That day I found out about the sheer sickening perversity that underlies all war. The deputy, emerging at one point from his musings, looked up and, with eyes full of hope, said: “Well, if that were to happen, at least the peasantry, stripped of menfolk and places to live, would join our side.”

  The other men there seemed not to notice. Dalmau because he was concentrating on the maps on which he was explaining his plan, and Shitson because he was Shitson. But the words made a strong impression on me.

  Politics are bad; war is evil. There’s only one thing worse than these two: a hybrid known as war policy. I’d been educated in a world where engineers were the hinges separating politics and war. A world based on the idea that politics merely shadow the armed forces: following behind, defining the outer edges. Coming into the new century, however, the noxious fumes of war took over the whole corpus. And here were the consequences: the overall thrust of our elevated mission being to protect citizens’ lives and homes. Turning the moral principle on its head, for Berenguer, the enemy burning and killing was no bad thing as people’s helplessness and feelings of revenge would play into our hands.

  It goes without saying that Dalmau was extremely fed up with the deputy, his senile speeches, his constant gas from the other end, and this was another reason behind his proposal. Dalmau wanted to see what he could achieve on his own. I implored him to let me be in his column, but he refused.

  “When we get back, Don Antonio will want an account of things,” he argued. “And without me around, the only reliable witness is you. Or do you think we should leave it to Shitson?”

  The following weeks and months are a whirlwind of images in my memory, always the same, always changing. The Army of the Two Crowns hounding us. Us fleeing, attacking, counterattacking. March, countermarch, nights out in the open. Rain. Sun. Mud. Always on guard. Towns for us, towns against us, towns being put to the torch. The landscape there became a kind of cement in which past and present merged, as one’s senses were dulled by the sheer monotony of repeated cruel acts. We’d retrace our steps and find yesterday’s supportive town had become today’s ashy ruins. Mud. Sun. More rain. Sleet and hail, we’d make our way into ravines and hidden paths, later emerging in a forest. To our right, seven trees, each bearing three hanged men. Hadn’t we been there the day before? No, the day before it had been three trees, each bearing seven men. Change of direction; the scouts as our antennae, the column shuffling along like a thousand-legged insect. We were being defeated by a paradox: There was no way for us to recruit new troops because we were constantly fleeing, and we were constantly fleeing because of our inability to raise recruits.

  Nor would I wish to sugge
st that it was the same everywhere, with each and every inhabitant prepared to make sacrifices for the constitution and Catalan liberties. Far from it! Many were the instances of betrayal, debility, and self-serving behavior. War also allows man’s most atavistic instincts to flourish.

  I found myself at the vanguard of our unit one day, riding with the cavalry, when we came under fire from a hillside strewn with boulders. We could hear our assailants calling out encouragement to one another, and they were talking in Catalan. I thought it must have been one of these lamentably regular cases of mistaken identity you get in war. “It’s local militia,” I said to myself, “they’ve mistaken us for French or Castilian troops.” I gave the order to the other riders not to return fire, and moved forward, waving my hat to greet them. But the firing only intensified. As I moved closer on my horse, I could make out one of their men loading his rifle up on the top of a boulder.

  “What the . . . What are you doing?” I cried. “We’re with the Army of the Generalitat!”

  To which the man said nothing. His elbow moved frantically as he thrust the ramrod up and down, and then I could see it in his eyes: He was just praying that my confusion would last long enough for him to have an easy shot at me.