Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  The boldest among them peeked their heads over the tops of the “gentlemen,” at the trench’s most forward point, and made throat-slitting gestures or waved their fists. And said to us, in grimmest tones: “Ça va être votre fête!”

  On the night of September 10, I did not sleep. Could not. You didn’t need great powers of intuition to guess the final assault would begin at any moment. One of the things we’d done in anticipation was to pull back a number of the most exposed positions. It would be suicide to have groups of men so close to the Bourbon “gentlemen.” In the most devastated areas, we chose to create a retreat space for the men who would be receiving the first wave. So that night there was a kind of dead space between our lines and Jimmy’s.

  I’ve seen a large number of bombarded landscapes in my time, and the exceptional thing about this one was the outline of the ruins. Even the heaviest artillery usually only pierces rooftops and smashes ramparts, leaving sharp and pointed silhouettes. But when a barrage is so intense and has been carried out over such a long time, the edges take on an undulating bluntness, as though eroded over thousands of years. A very fine drizzle continued to fall over that labyrinth of ruins. The night was black, the moon hidden behind the weeping clouds. My feet slipped among smashed gun carriages, broken rifles, half-buried fajina baskets, their wicker mouths gawping ominously from the earth like the faces of drowned people. And thousands of our spiked bats, scattered everywhere. This was a place of such silence, sadness, and ghostliness that even my science was dispelled by its powers.

  And then, for no apparent reason, I was overcome by a desire to go back to our tent on the beach.

  Amelis was sleeping, unclothed. I awoke her. “Where’s Anfán?”

  She was subsumed in a drowsiness that was more hunger and exhaustion than sleep. She opened her eyes, those enormous black eyes. I remember being there, in the dark of night, in that meager tent on the beach. Her on the mattress, naked, covered in sweat, while I knelt down and embraced her, less out of love than an urge to protect. She was feverish. I’d woken her from a nightmare. Feeling my hand reaching around her back, she smiled, as though this were some long-awaited reunion. “Martí,” she whispered, “you’re here.”

  It was a subdued and queasy feeling of joy.

  “For the love of God, Amelis! Where’s Anfán?”

  If Nan and Anfán were killed, all would have been for absolutely nothing. They’d been part of my household for seven years now, seven. What truly joined us all together were not the transcendent acts but an accumulation of everyday things. There is nothing so significant as a million nothings all joined together.

  We were interrupted by an outbreak of shelling, the reverberations of which shook the tent so hard I thought it might take to the air. That could mean only one thing: the general assault being declared. I put my tricorn on my head and made to leave the tent. As I started to duck under the flap, Amelis said something, I don’t remember what precisely. Something about Beceite. A very faraway Beceite, that small town in Aragon where we’d met, among rapist Bourbons and murderous Miquelets. Her hunger was making her delirious. Running her finger along her cheek, she begged me in a distant voice: “Martí, it’s only mashed raspberry. Don’t go, please. It’s only raspberry.”

  She spread her arms wide to me. Duty called, but at the same time here was this woman who had never asked anyone for anything, saying, like a cat mewling the words, “Si us plau, si us plau.” I went to her.

  I embraced her carefully, she was so thin. Otherwise, no exaggeration, I’d have snapped her ribs. Her face was bathed in sweat. The most distressing thing was being able to do nothing to ease her pain. She asked me to get the broken music box. I found it and handed it to her. When she opened it, of course no sound came out. But, smiling, she said: “Do you hear? My father invented this box, he put music in a box. And this was the song he chose. Isn’t it lovely?”

  I’ve never liked the idea of lying to the sick. “We’ll get it fixed, you’ll see.”

  “Martí!” she cried, her fever going up a notch. “Say you can hear it!”

  No, I could not hear it. It was nothing but a broken box, one small scrap among countless objects consigned to oblivion by the enemy bombardment. I said nothing, just sighed. She knew; a high fever can sometimes bring about considerable lucidity. Those vast eyes of hers found mine.

  “Shall I tell you something, Martí? The fact that you can’t hear the music is what makes you you. This is your great strong point and, at the same time, the thing that limits you. If you wanted to hear our music, you’d hear it. But you can’t, because you don’t believe in it. You don’t even try.” She added: “You’ve heard this music a thousand times. Why not now? The box is only a box—one day it was bound to break.”

  I made her look me in the eye once more. “One thing, Amelis: You’re not to leave this beach. Whatever should come to pass, don’t go anywhere! If you find yourself walking on anything that isn’t sand, you’re to turn back.”

  “Jefe, I’ll look after her.”

  Anfán was behind me in the tent, with Nan beside him.

  “Where have you been?” I cried. Anfán groaned, impish and reluctant. “For once in your life, pay attention!” I shouted. “Tonight and tomorrow, no one must leave this beach. Not you, not Nan, not Amelis. And it’s your job to make sure that’s what happens! Understood?” Screaming at Anfán was a waste of time. I changed tack. “Did you know your mother?”

  “You know I didn’t.”

  I gestured to Amelis, who was asleep again, or, rather, unconscious, consumed by the fever, delirious. “If you had all the mothers in the world to choose between, is there another you could possibly rather have?”

  He looked down at Amelis. The only light was a nearly spent, guttering candle. I’d say, though, that a paltry flame such as that one is capable of feeling emotions.

  My Lord, how beautiful a beloved person can seem in her weakness. If it weren’t for her, the four of us never would have come together. Our life would have been quite different, and doubtless very much the poorer.

  Anfán took a deep breath, and for the first time, I heard the man in him speak: “As you wish, jefe. I’ll protect her. Whatever should pass, none of us will leave the beach. You have my word.”

  Chin up, Martí Zuviría, never mind! Never? No, not never.

  15

  And so, after more than a year under siege, September 11, 1714, finally came around. It began with a forbidding artillery barrage at half past four in the morning, immediately followed by ten thousand men charging at the breaches. Dozens of company banners, officers with their sabers held aloft, the sergeants hefting halberds to show the troops the way. I don’t believe there can have been more than five or six hundred haggard militiamen opposing them in the first line.

  I find it impossible to recount that September 11 in any kind of coherent order. I myself am unable to comprehend it: Fleeting images are all that remain from that longest of days, not so much a sequence of events as a heap of dismembered images. I left our tent on the beach and made my way back into the city. The church bells were frantically ringing out, all of them. Sheer chaos. What else could it have been, with the Virgin Mary elected commander in chief? Meanwhile, the Bourbons surging up and over ramparts that a child could have kicked aside.

  As the sky began growing light, I climbed up onto the terrace of Casa Montserrat, the mansion of a departed botiflero, and a vantage point over the area under attack between Saint Clara and Portal Nou. And I saw what, for an engineer, was the most exasperating sight of all: the stretch we’d defended for thirteen long months, overrun by that horde of mindless slaves. A blanket of white uniforms charging in formation across the breaches: En avant, en avant! Their numbers were so great that the few being picked off by snipers up on the ramparts didn’t make any difference. Was this my fate? Was this what I’d had my senses honed to do? To suffer all the more intensely the fall of Barcelona and the extinction of a people? So that on this, our las
t day of freedom, I’d hear even more acutely the howls of anguish, cry more tears, and my hands would flail and grasp all the more desperately at the sinking ship?

  One of the sights from that day: sections of the ramparts separated from one another by the gigantic breaches, towering up into the sky. Through the telescope, I see a particularly thin stretch of the rampart, either side of which, far below, thousands of enemies are streaming into the city. Just two soldiers are left up there, an old man and a youngster. The old man is loading rifles and handing them to the youngster to fire into the white flood of troops below. The old man isn’t quick enough with his reloading. The youngster, impotent and raging, ends up hurling the rifles themselves, the bayonets making primitive spears of them. Another fleeting image, which again comes back to me in the circular telescope sight, is of the second Bourbon wave now having taken this redoubt, and the duo having surrendered, each badly wounded. Up on the battlement, the soldiers force them to their knees before the abyss. Then each of them is kicked over the edge.

  A whirl of images. Children pulling the triggers of our “organ” contraptions, point-blank, mowing down whole ranks of grenadiers. Coronela soldiers flinging grenades until the enemy overruns them, and using the last ones to blow themselves up.

  A great stack of images, yes, but above and beyond any of them, prevailing in the tragedy, an appearance that enshrined that man in the memory of the righteous: Don Antonio de Villarroel Peláez. Don Antonio! What was he still doing in Barcelona? He was supposed to be miles away, out across the ocean, when he suddenly burst into a meeting between members of the high command. His booming voice.

  He was supposed to be in Vienna, safe, covered in praise, and forging a future for himself at Charles’s court. But he was here. These are the facts: He had waited until the last possible moment for the government to come to their senses and restore him. But that moment didn’t come, and as he walked down to the beach of his salvation, he halted, turned around, and simply returned to the ramparts. He knew very well he was signing his own death warrant. “I wish I could die shoulder to shoulder with these men, like any other soldier,” he’d said. Why are there such men as Don Antonio in the world? I don’t know the reason why. I only know that, when they appear, it is impossible not to love them.

  For a very brief moment, he and I were alone in his study. I didn’t know what to say or do. It still pains me that I failed to find the words to tell him what it meant to me that he’d come back. I suppose it doesn’t matter. Throughout the rest of the defense, Don Antonio never made a single mention of what he’d given up. Only in that moment, with no one to see or hear, did he let his gaze become abstracted and, smoothing down his uniform, say: “To hell with sailing away.”

  On that September 11, the head of the government, Rafael Casanova, also played his part, though without attaining the heights of Don Antonio’s greatness. Were I an indulgent person, I’d say that Casanova was more of a tragic character than a deplorable one, trapped between his own reasoning, the reasoning of the state, and the people’s willingness to go on fighting. But I don’t happen to be an indulgent person: If you want to be beloved by your country, you have to be prepared to sacrifice yourself for it. Don Antonio, not even a Catalan, come the final hour, understood this far more clearly than all the Casanovas in the world.

  Don Antonio ordered two concentric attacks. He’d lead one and Casanova would lead the other, carrying the Saint Eulalia flag at the head of the troops. Tradition states that that sacred banner should be brought out only if the city is in grave danger. Could there ever be a more grave danger? Don Antonio knew what it would do for the élan of the soldiers to see the Eulalia flying high among them.

  The problem was, protocol also demanded that any attack with the sacred ensign had to be led by the city’s highest-ranking political representative. The coward Casanova, in other words. I wasn’t at the meeting, no, but it most likely took some enraged officer to point a gun at him for Casanova to put on his colonel’s uniform. Soldiering and politics don’t, or at least shouldn’t, mix. But because Casanova was, at least in name, the leader of the Coronela, that meant he really had no choice but to put on that jacket with its golden braids, mount a tired old nag, and head up the attack. His demeanor, it struck me, was like that of an actor being made to play a role he disliked: resigned but at the same time wrapped up in the new part, brandishing his sword above his tricorn, simulating passions he didn’t at all feel.

  The troop left the Saint Jordi Hall. The roar from the people announced the fact. Desperate, filthy citizens tacked on to the party as it came past. People appeared at balconies and windows, blowing kisses to the violet saint. The same color, as it happened, as the jackets worn by the Sixth Battalion, which was made up of tailors, tavern owners, and tinkers, and which was in the vanguard in front of the banner.

  I also remember one of the Red Pelts, still dressed in those claret robes, who rode to one side of the banner. He went along shouting up at the women in the balconies to save their prayers and come and join the sacrifice. I remember the women, who were so weak they could barely stand, propping themselves up on the balcony railings and shouting: “Doneu-nos pa i hi anirem!” Give us bread, and we’ll come.

  It must have been seven in the evening when I saw them pass by on the way to the front, half army, half sword-brandishing mob. The Eulalia banner had returned to the origin of all banners: a nadir that joins men together in a single cause. Once a significant crowd had gathered, a phalanx of bayonets along its front edge, they set out to retake the bastions.

  I also say: There are moments when even the stoniest hearts melt. Above the throng, the large rectangular standard rippled in the wind, the Eulalia sewn on it seeming alive. That girl, so young and sad. The banner, drawing nearer to its own demise, fluttered, and it was as though she were looking out at you—and only you.

  Fleeting images, yes: I can see Costa, leaning his elbows on the stock of an empty cannon, observing the long column in tears.

  “For God’s sake!” I cried. “Stop crying and give them some cover.”

  He shook his head and, turning his palms up, said: “It’s over.”

  So, this jumble of trained soldiers and seething civilians, they attacked. Their objective was to scour the ramparts of enemies, from Portal Nou to Saint Clara. They would have had less of a job tearing the Rock of Gibraltar out of the ocean and bringing it back to exhibit at Saint María del Mar.

  Jimmy had already positioned thousands of soldiers and hundreds of sappers on and around the ramparts, in case some lunatic should come and try to retake them. The tragedy was that it wasn’t one lunatic but hundreds and hundreds of lunatics. They followed the banner of Saint Eulalia, crushed together like a herd of sheep, more concerned about protecting the standard than killing any enemies. It was a gruesome sight. Rifle fire strafed them from all sides. Dozens fell to the hail of bullets, but still the advance continued.

  They came to the ramparts; the walkway around them was perhaps ten feet wide. Like rams, the two vanguards clashed. Another image from that day: the violet uniforms of our Sixth Battalion merging in bayonet combat with the whites of the enemy. Against all expectation, they overran a long stretch of the Bourbon-controlled ramparts. The multitude surrounding the violet girl thinned out as they pushed ahead, shouting battle curses and forcing the enemy back.

  I was ordered to make my way to the center point of the Bourbon assault—thankfully, as it meant not having to witness the playing out of that mass suicide. Casanova, who claimed to have been injured in the leg, was evacuated from the fighting a little later. We saw him being carried past on a stretcher. I’m no surgeon, but to me, he seemed only lightly injured. He was more dejected than in physical danger, that much was certain, because when he came past us and people asked what was happening, he raised his head and said: “Go, sirs, and spur on the people, for the dangers are many.”

  What no one knew at that point was that while a tourniquet was applied to his leg, his
doctor was writing a certificate for him so he’d be able to flee the city. Enough about him.

  Images, images, a constant stream of them. Barricades at every entrance to every street that fed onto the rampart area, to impede the Bourbon advance into the city center. Against all established siege wisdom, and to Jimmy’s surprise, taking the ramparts didn’t mean the end of the assault; it was merely the prologue. In any other siege, the defenders would have entered discussions at that point. In Barcelona, people fought on, in street skirmishes and from their windows, converting buildings into ramparts. I became an engineer once more: The streets were so narrow that small barriers could be thrown up in a heartbeat. While these parapets were being piled up by civilians, soldiers stationed themselves behind and began firing on the approaching Bourbons.

  I ran into Ballester behind one of these barricades. He came as backup for the one I was helping erect. Ballester, yes, another image from that September 11, a day that would be his last. He was well aware of the fact, and know what? He seemed almost happy, loading and firing his rifle in unending succession. A kind of festive cheer had come over him, like that of someone who has sworn not to finish the night sober.

  Clouds of gunpowder made it impossible to see very far. But just then, Ballester did see something, dropping his ramrod and shoving me. “Your child! And the dwarf! They’re between the lines! Look, look!”

  Looking up, I could make out the two little monsters scurrying across the open ground between the Bourbon-controlled bastions and the mouth of the street we were on. Thousands of bullets flying, and a voice in my mind screaming: “What are you two doing here?” Only a few hours had passed since Anfán had made a sacred oath to me, and already it was broken. They were running, apparently without a destination, which was unusual; normally, they moved like a pair of hyenas, fixed on their goal as if they had compasses mounted to their noses. Then they went down. Amid flashes of gunfire and gunpowder vapor, I saw them fall. First Nan. Anfán stopped, began to go back for the dwarf, and then was hit himself, letting out a small cry, one more of surprise than of pain. The Bourbon volleys were coming so thick, such a lead hailstorm, that I was able to glance over the barricade for only a moment. Nan and Anfán had disappeared.