We were only ten or fifteen feet under the ground, but it was hot as an oven. We could feel the artillery exchanges going on as they reverberated the ground. A fine shower of loose earth was falling from the poorly braced ceiling. I felt sure it was going to cave in.
Zuvi, good old Zuvi, wasn’t born to crawl along on his belly. The air became more and more stifling, and I felt invisible pincers gripping my throat. Under the ground, my Bazoches senses were worthless or as good as; the darkness was a leveler, reducing all men to moles. Those guttering lamps in our hands seemed less to light the way than make apparent just how dark it was. And given that my sight could usually take in as much as that of four men at once, to lose it was all the more crippling.
Somehow managing to turn and look behind me, I saw that lunatic Ballester in fits of laughter, though he was keeping his voice down. He pointed around us; it had finally dawned on him why, in the early stages of the siege, I’d insisted on the looting of furniture from houses across the city. The braces for this long, winding tunnel were made from the beams and planks we ourselves had removed. Window frames made the perfect tunnel supports, girding the roof and the sides. Table legs buttressed the walls.
I pushed on, bringing us through into a corridor that seemed to go on forever. Then we came to a fork. I chose the right branch.
I halted somewhere along the way and set one of the plugs against the tunnel wall. Putting my ear against the ceramic part of the large plate and hunching myself over it, I gestured for Ballester to be quiet. His men piled up behind him, their curiosity overcoming any battle seasoning.
It’s hard to believe the number of sounds that can travel through earth. They were redoubled by the ceramic, which acted like a microscope for acoustics. I introduced the first of the canes through the hole in the center of the plate. The earth was soft, and the cane, or sounding line, passed easily into it, traveling farther and farther into the wall. Once it was all the way in, I screwed the next one onto its bottom and resumed pushing. Then another sounding line, then another. Finally, I could tell, combining my senses of hearing and touch, that the lines in series had come out into a space; the resistance of compacted earth wasn’t there anymore. Then I had to feed a thinnish piece of cable down the center of the line, thereby clearing the earth out of it. And when that was done, withdrawing the cable, I could look along the interior of the line, which functioned like a periscope.
The only thing I could tell was that it was an enemy gallery—flickering lights, movements, shadows. I could hear as much as see them. But they were there, all right.
Dark bodies came across my field of vision. I could hear their picks, and the sound of baskets full of earth being dragged along. Their presence became more and more sharply defined, details such as someone clearing his throat.
“What on earth are you doing?” whispered Ballester.
The movements I was making must have struck him as strange. I’d put my eye up to the end of the line for the briefest moment, then pull my head back, and again go to the line—back and forth, like a chicken pecking for seeds. I gestured for him to be quiet.
Too late. Perhaps they heard Ballester, or perhaps they saw my line poking through into their gallery; whatever it was, within moments they had sent a line of their own in our direction, and it emerged into our gallery between Ballester and me. A tubular worm poking through into the space, a metal circle no wider than a thumb and forefinger. And yet what a terrifying thing, for it meant that we’d been discovered.
That little tube of metal—apparently inoffensive—signified death. The men at the far end were killers, and they had sniffed us out. French sappers, veterans of a thousand skirmishes, possibly trained by Vauban himself. And what adeptness they showed: The moment they’d heard or perhaps only sensed us, one sank a sounding line into the wall and located us at the first attempt. I was paralyzed with fear.
Ballester understood what was happening and responded in typical fashion: He inserted his pistol into the opening at the end of the enemy line and pulled the trigger. We heard cries. Ballester’s bullet had doubtless hit the enemy sapper in the eye. Perhaps now my chicken-head movements will make sense. Indignation among the dead man’s colleagues, shouts, insults. I decided to skip the niceties: “Back, back!” I cried. “Get out, before they smoke us out!”
I by no means ordered the retreat for the sake of it. On top of my habitual cowardice, there was what I’d been taught at Bazoches.
When a brigade of miners locates the opponent’s gallery, it will proceed to drill a small trou, that is, a hole. Into this hole, a bolus of pine needles will be introduced—the size of a cannonball, smeared with pitch and on fire—and stuffed all the way through. Innocuous it might seem, but far from it. In such narrow spaces, smoke becomes a lethal weapon. In under a minute, all breathable air will have been consumed; the men will pass out and die from suffocation. And if the lack of air doesn’t kill them, the enemy will, breaking into the gallery as soon as the smoke has cleared and knifing the fallen bodies.
The French miners had far more expertise than the Miquelets in such matters; they’d be sure to drill a smoke hole far more quickly than we would. And as it says in the manual of good old Zuvi, if you cannot win a race, best to run in the opposite direction. And be quick about it!
We shuffled out of there like centipedes, reaching the ladder just in time. As soon as we were back above earth, the mine shaft began to vomit black smoke, like an underground chimney.
All I said to Ballester was: “How did you know it’s standard procedure to shoot your pistol along an enemy sounding line like that?”
“I didn’t.”
Feeling ever bleaker, I went and sat in the corner of the abandoned house, head in hands. The Miquelets, not understanding my despondency, tried to console me. I let out a bitter laugh. “You’ll soon get it,” I said.
Los Cucs soon showed up, and their captain asked me how it had gone.
“What?” he cried. “You’ve given away the whereabouts of one of our galleries? And they smoked you out?” He looked despairing. “Do you know what it took for us to make that tunnel? All that work, ruined in half an hour! How am I supposed to lead my men down into a gallery that the enemy has detected? We’ll have to block it up and start a whole new one! What kind of imbeciles has the government sent me?”
The final days down in the mine comprised unutterable horrors. Worst of all were the reproachful glances I got from the leader of Los Cucs (his name is still a blank!) when we went back down the shaft.
Above, ramparts that might succumb at any moment; below, a hidden deposit of gunpowder, tons of it, that might blow before we found it. One day when we were about to go underground again, I told Ballester’s men to wait: There were voices rising up out of the mine, distorted by how far underground they were, but clearly not belonging to Los Cucs. The Miquelets pointed their guns down into the shaft.
Everyone was silent. I placed my ear to the entrance of the shaft. Whispers in French and Catalan. The Bourbons had plenty of botifleros in their service, so it would make sense to use some of them in the mines.
The Miquelets’ fingers were on their triggers, guns encircling the shaft entrance. Then a head appeared, and it had fair and very knotty hair. He looked up at me and said in a happy voice: “Hello, jefe! What are you doing here?”
Behind Anfán came Nan, and behind them several Cucs. I was speechless. Their leader explained. “The boy and the dwarf save us all kinds of work. They’re so small and agile, we can send them into the tiniest shafts and have them listen for enemies. You know them? Why are you looking at me like that?”
This sparked the final fight between Amelis and me. Dashing to the beach with long Zuvi strides, I found her in line at the camp mess.
The only free food provided by the government was a bland fish soup. The line was strictly regimented—the Red Pelts had posted a guard to see that no one got too much—a couple of ladlefuls was the maximum. Amelis ignored me totally. She was s
o exhausted that her eyes were violet-red, and all her attention was focused on the back of the person in front of her. I grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out of the line. Then she came to life, thrashing around desperately, trying to get clear of me. Her scrawny body felt light as a feather.
Amelis’s place in the line was taken immediately by the unscrupulous woman behind her. When Amelis saw she’d lost her place, her legs gave way. She fell to her knees on the sand and wept, her skirts spread out around her like the petals of an open flower.
“Anfán!” I cried. “How could you have let him enlist?”
“Déu meu, Déu meu,” she sobbed.
“He’s joined up!” I went on. “He’ll be killed down in those mines!”
She looked up at me, her face wet with tears. “Want to know how long I’ve been in line? Since midday yesterday!”
“We took him away from war, from being a trench rat!” I replied. “And all for him to end up dead from an explosion or from a bullet in the head. The French sappers aren’t playing games down there!”
She threw her metal bowl in my face. “I was here all yesterday, all last night, and all this morning. And you come and yank me out of the line! What are we supposed to eat? Tell me that!”
It was pointless trying to reason with her—it was the hunger speaking, not Amelis. She barely had the energy to argue. She hung her head like a small dying animal.
Half of the soup rations was apportioned to the wounded and sick in the hospital. It was becoming more watered down daily, and they were using fresh water from the last irrigation canal still coming into the city. The Bourbons had dammed all but one, and that they’d been polluting by placing dead bodies upstream. But the poor gulped it down like nectar—anything to avoid the husk torta.
While we’d been arguing, the crowds of people had ebbed away. The woman who had taken Amelis’s place in line was the last to be given soup. The people behind her were all protesting. There was uproar, but only in a minor way: The people were so depleted that a couple of blows from the guards dispersed them. Amelis’s sobbing gave way to a torrent of tears.
I’d have to take it up with Anfán himself. I ought to point out how much time had passed since I’d encountered him at Tortosa: That was in 1708, and it was now 1714. I roughly estimated that he’d been born at the turn of the century, and that the eight-year-old was now fourteen. He wasn’t a child any longer.
When Anfán appeared out of the mineshaft, I begged the leader of the Cucs to discharge him. I could hardly blame him for his response, which was one of surprise: “We’re so short on troops, why would we turn away anyone of military age?”
Fourteen was the age when a Catalan could legally bear arms. After the years he’d spent under our roof, when we’d taken good care of him and taught him manners, Anfán had turned into quite an impressive young man. I kick myself for not having noticed sooner. If you stare at the grass day after day, you’ll miss the fact it’s growing. After all, parents always see their children as the babies they once were.
A frontal assault would have been pointless, so I came at him another way, with conversation and affection. We had a long discussion about the mining operation. Anfán filled me in at length: Los Cucs had been saving time by creating diminutive tunnels on either side of the main mines and sending Nan and Anfán down them. Whenever they found one of the Bourbon galleries, they’d drill through to it, starting overhead and angling the fist-width cavity downward, and then roll two or three grenades in with the fuses lit, before crawling quickly back the way they’d come.
The story made me smile but also shudder. In mine warfare, the combatants, though faceless, soon got to know their opponents by the techniques they used. I felt sure that the Bourbons would have put a price on the heads of these two rats by now.
“So you don’t care about Nan, is that right?” I asked, smiling coldly. “At this very moment, there must be dozens of enemy miners thinking of ways to kill the both of you.”
Anfán threw his arms wide, ready to take me on. “Dozens? I thought it would be thousands. Casanova’s son is fourteen, and he was made drummer of a regiment.”
I couldn’t contain myself: “And Casanova went and saw him off in person! He pulled some strings so they’d be sent away from the city! They’re now garrisoning a place called Cardona!”
And I wasn’t lying, either. The Red Pelts loved demonstrating their Homeric virtues: Sending troops out into other parts of Catalonia was like saying to Jimmy that the people of Barcelona had more than enough courage, constancy, and resolve to overcome anything he cared to throw at them. (You can imagine what Don Antonio thought about our own leaders giving men leave.) The fact was, at Cardona, one of the few places the Generalitat still controlled, no fighting was taking place. The Bourbons knew as well as we did that if Barcelona fell, the rest of Catalonia would subside with it, and therefore they dedicated no resources to the outgrowths of “rebellion” elsewhere.
I grabbed Anfán by the arms. “Am I the jefe? Say it. Am I or not?”
Truly, he had grown older. He answered me gravely. “Yes, jefe, you absolutely are. All right, I won’t go back down the mine.” He made the sign of the cross. “I swear.”
I didn’t believe a word of it.
The next day, a small troop of Cucs, just four men, finally identified the whereabouts of the primary enemy mine, or Royal Mine, a gallery containing a hundred barrels of gunpowder covered in soaked hide. Los Cucs managed to slit the guards’ throats and, having set a charge to collapse the ceiling, ghosted the barrels away. Mine found, mine destroyed.
This was the last thing to cheer about. Church bells throughout the city chimed the victory. The Cucs heroes’ names were Francisco Diago, one of our Aragonese; Josep Mateu, a native of Barcelona; and the man who had led them, the leader of the Cucs—what was his name? What a shame not to be able to remember such a sublime warrior! . . . And the fourth of the crew, naturally, was Anfán. Having crawled along one of the small antechambers, he had been the one to hit upon the Royal Mine. How would you have reacted? Would you have told him off or applauded? I chose to do neither.
For the thousandth time, dear vile Waltraud makes me stop. Am I not allowed even a brief moment to enjoy the memory of that rare victory?
What’s that you say? How strange that I remember the names of the lower-ranking Cucs but not that of the leader? That it’s suspicious for a memory as prodigious as mine not to have retained that hero’s name, the man who won the city a stay of execution? That maybe I’m pretending and not saying his name because I didn’t like the man?
All right, all right!
You are quite right. I set myself to be sincere, fully, and I will be.
The Cucs hero was Francesc Molina, and he was the son of a couple who had married in Barcelona but moved back to their native country. They identified so strongly with the city that their son, as did so many other foreigners, had come to fight there, even engaging in mine warfare for the sake of the Catalan capital. He’d fought tooth and nail, day after day, night after night, and finally managed to locate that lethal mound of explosives.
What’s that? Where were the Molinas from?
I see, I see, you want me humiliated fully and utterly.
I give in.
The Molinas were from Naples.
14
I, Martí Zuviría, engineer (let’s save ourselves the long-winded titles) consent to the following things:
That national extractions are quite random and have no bearing on the character of peoples.
That the vast majority of the Italians I have met are good God-loving creatures, upstanding, trustworthy, decent, and that no one has the right to blame defects or personal slights on whole communities.
And, so that it is set down in writing, I hereby retract any insidious claims there might be in this book with regard to Neapolitans, Italians, and foreigners in general, French, Germans, Castilians, Moors, Jews, Maoris, Oglaga, Dutch, Chinese, Persian.
The other option, correcting the sullied pages, would be a recourse that my parlous finances would not allow.
Happy now? Make you feel good, imposing your will on this shredded bag of bones, as good as on his deathbed? Lo and behold, we end like this: I, the author, begging the forgiveness of the one scribbling down my words.
Yes, all right, you’re right: Let’s move on. Finish the tale. There’s one last tear to cry.
On September 3, 1714, all our seas parted. And the thing that provoked it was neither cannibal hunger, nor an enemy victory, nor an exhausted population giving in. The cause, paradoxically, was a magnanimous gesture by Jimmy.
A messenger came from the enemy encampment that day. Jimmy warned us to surrender or suffer an attack with unimaginable consequences. The text itself was brief and intimidating, with no room for mercy: Give in, or we’d all have our throats cut, right down to the unborn children. But there’s one thing I ought to be clear about, to do with the rules that govern a siege.
The ultimate aim of an Attack Trench is to force the besieged city to sue for peace, or, as the French say, battre la chamade. In such circumstances, with the trench reaching as far as the city moat, and the ramparts on the verge of collapse, terms are sought to try and safeguard the remaining vestiges. Life, honor, and if possible, a little property. Otherwise the attacking army has every right to enter the city and pillage and rape as much as it pleases. A chamade avoids this extreme. War etiquette—which, in my day, was adhered to by all, barring Pópuli, that animal, and his pro-Philip generals—requires that any besieged position that sues for peace will at least keep intact the lives of its remaining population and the honor of its garrison.
It was an unusual thing for Jimmy to do, because it was never the besieging army but the besieged who would carry out a battre la chamade. The straits we were in justified Jimmy’s decision. But by being the one to send the messenger, and not the other way around, he was opening the door to negotiations. And at that, a negotiation that promised more than the bare minimum. Bravery and constancy always bring some reward: The battle in August had made Jimmy fear that his troops might be massacred. Victory might cost him half the army, and neither Little Philip nor the Beast would be overly pleased at losing their most distinguished officers. Further, if it did come to that, the Bourbon rank and file would be enraged and uncontainable in their desire to take revenge by sacking the city. They would lay waste to Barcelona. And Jimmy didn’t like the idea of the same philosophers he’d been raised among calling him a savage.
Victus Page 56