Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  I tugged Ballester’s sleeve. “Did they get them?” I asked, sobbing. “Did you see it, are you sure?”

  Ballester looked me in the eye; his silence said it all. Then a wailing sound reached our ears. Above the sound of the gunfire, the diminishing sound of a death rattle, and the words: “Father, Father, Father.” With his dying breath, Anfán had become a child once more. He’d fallen down into a rut, out of my field of vision. When Ballester spoke, it only exacerbated the torture; in a small, meek voice, he said: “He’s calling for you.”

  It was all over. The end of the world was no longer only nigh: Your son calling you “Father” for the first time, and it also being the very instant before he passes away. That nameless tension that keeps us all alive then slackened in me. I inhabited an empty body for a time. I don’t know how long I was there, down on my knees, feeling that pain. The next thing I remember is Ballester’s face in front of mine: “You have to come with me,” he said.

  All around, the uproar of battle continued, but the bloodbath seemed far away from me, signifying nothing. An obscene, incongruous apathy gripped me. I even burst out laughing. I mocked Ballester as he dragged me away, I mocked everything.

  We made for the rearguard. Peret came into view. His very demeanor spoke, and I didn’t want to listen. My state was akin to that of a fever dream, when all we see and all we know is turned upside down. I said or perhaps thought: “I told that woman not to leave the beach.” Peret spoke, seemingly in unison with a group of people gathered around him like an assembly of ghosts: “We are at the beach, Martí.” I looked down at my feet and fell to my knees, which indeed sank into dirty sand. Out of nowhere, a question formed in my mind, one that I should have come up with a long while before: What did Anfán want to say to me? What could have forced him to come in search of me, though it had been emphatically forbidden? Lying in front of me, the body of Amelis.

  “A stray bullet,” said an old voice, perhaps Peret’s.

  I didn’t try to deny it; we’d seen too many dead bodies. The greenish hue under her fingernails was a clear sign. Even Ballester bit his fist, gasping. We suffered so much that September 11, the pain had to form a line.

  I rubbed my cheek against hers, which had begun to turn chill. Yes: Death is a cold nowhere. And no, a cold cadaver does not come back to life. Yet just then she did: She suddenly sat up, like a tail thrashing.

  Everyone in the gathering took a step back. I saw Amelis’s eyes, which had burst open, and our whole universe, everything, was collected in that look. She grabbed my chest, tried to speak. I knew she was dead, that she had come back to say something to me, only to sink forevermore. And so she did: Though it was only a moment, she came back.

  As I remember it, there was a lull in the battle. All the noise was suspended in anticipation of Amelis’s words. This, of course, was not what happened. I thought all possible cruelties had occurred. But we still had one coming: the four most terrible words any father could hope to hear.

  “Martí,” she said imploringly, “tingues cura d’Anfán.” Take care of Anfán.

  And she was gone, a loosening of her soul more than her muscles.

  How to face the impossibility of her request, the fact it had come too late? Or that her wish made a connection between me and the world, one of unbearable pain? Amelis couldn’t have known that Anfán was dead, that he had died specifically in an attempt to save her, in trying to bring me to help. Even Ballester was moved. His cheeks contracted beneath his beard, and he turned his head away so that I wouldn’t see.

  Fleeting images: The next finds me at the Fossar de les Moreres, the mass burial ditch. The battle continued to rage, but the only thing concerning me was the bundle I was carrying: Amelis’s body covered in a shawl. Ballester was at my side. One of the gravediggers asked me the customary question: “One of ours?” The government had made a decree by which no Bourbon bodies were to be buried. I didn’t even bother to answer. Ballester shook his fist at the digger, who fled.

  I went down to the ditch. It was a great crater in which bodies were deposited. Wisely, the Red Pelts had ordered it to be built five storeys deep. But at this point in the siege, the pile of bodies was almost up to ground level. I buried Amelis to the sound of cannons thundering. While I knelt down to deposit her body as delicately as I could, Ballester kept an eye out.

  A stray bullet. After having made it through a life full of danger, rapes, and destitution, Amelis had been taken by something as ridiculous as a stray bullet. I couldn’t prevent the thought: That stray bullet was me.

  I fell to my knees and, sobbing uncontrollably, said: “I killed them. Amelis. Anfán. The dwarf. All of them.”

  Squinting, Ballester asked: “Mind telling me what you’re going on about?”

  I spoke through gurgles, my face bathed in tears. “I designed the Bourbon trench. While I was over there, on the other side of the cordon. I thought it would be the lesser evil for the city, but I was only fooling myself.”

  I wished, truly I did, that he would take out a knife and slit my throat, as he should have done in Beceite. The seven intervening years—I saw very clearly now—had all been a dream. But instead of putting an end to me, he reacted with irate skepticism.

  “What are you saying?” he shouted. “Who cares about your damned calculations, all those tables and compasses? Get your head out of your books and let’s go and fight!”

  “I did my best,” I said. “And not for the sake of the city, nor for my family, but for engineering. Any Maganon would have dreamed of such a trench. Faced with a recalcitrant city, and provided all the means to create the perfect trench. For all the tricks I included, all I really wanted was to better my teachers, beat Vauban’s cousin himself. I let myself be tempted, then hid that fact from myself. There was only one way to erase such a stain, which was coming back to the stronghold I’d condemned, letting the work of my hand lead to my own demise.”

  Ballester tried to wrestle me to my feet, to urge me back to the front, but I held him off.

  “Want to know the worst of it?” I looked for my judgment in Ballester’s eyes. Or, rather, that he would execute that judgment. To that end, I concluded: “If I had truly loved my family more than I loved engineering, if I had loved love and not vanity, I’d never have designed any trench. Neither a good one nor a bad one. An honest man serves not the devil—for good or for ill.”

  “But your work hindered the devil,” he said in my defense. “Obstructing the trench, you won us a few more days in this city.”

  “And for what? Look around you. If I do survive, it will always be hanging over me that I was the architect of its demise.” Ballester shook his head, but I refused to listen. “Where is truth, the authentic truth? In our deeds or in the feelings that guide them? I know I didn’t design this trench based on love or patriotism but out of vanity. Now the death of my family bears my signature.”

  I cried so hard, I thought my eyes would drop from my head. Ballester knelt down beside me and, crushing my cheeks in his hands, gave me a hateful look. The world was sinking, and Ballester, I now understand, knew these would be the last words spoken between us.

  “Know your problem?” he said. “That you only fight for the living. Between them, the French, the Spanish, and the Red Pelts killed my father, my mother, and my brothers. So many of my people are dead, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I won’t be able to avenge them all. Don’t fight for the living, and don’t fight for the dead, either. People in the future might speak ill of acts we’ve committed—because we got things wrong or because we failed. Fine. I’d rather be looked down on for the things I did do than the things I never did.”

  I was still on my knees, shaken, weeping. He stood up. Ballester standing at his full height made me feel like a child. He added: “Do you truly think the world revolves around your damned trench? Know what I say to that? I hope it was the greatest work of your life. Because if not, what would have been the point in having taken on that bunch of braggart
s dressed in white?”

  Ballester then did the most loving thing one man can do for another: He lifted me to my feet.

  “Let’s go, let’s go!” he entreated me. And we returned to the fray. I followed him, I think, because at that moment I hadn’t the slightest desire to outlive Amelis and Anfán. Or my trench.

  A number of units from the Coronela, during their retreat, had taken up positions on the absurd unfinished cutting, the ditch inside the ramparts that had been intended to contain the Bourbon assault. Dozens of the militiamen, covered in mud after all the rain, had taken shelter in it and were leaning out and firing at floor height. The wave of Bourbon soldiers was crashing down on them—they’d end up trapped if they stayed down there. Ballester and I leaped down into the six-foot cutting and began shoving and urging them to get out. “Out of the cutting!” we cried. “Fall back!” Ballester and his men forced them up and out.

  I went along shouting, pointing the way to the first line of streets behind us. “To the buildings! Occupy them and shoot from the windows!”

  We carried on, forcing them out of the cutting. Before we knew it, the Bourbons were upon us. Dozens, hundreds, of white uniforms jumped down, brandishing their bayonets. They had come from the captured ramparts; it was at least a regiment. Down in the ditch and around it, Barcelonans and Frenchmen gored one another. I now tried to scrabble out myself, but as I was doing so, someone grabbed me by the neck and threw me to the ground. I remember, as I sank into the mud, thinking disparagingly: Why not just knife me in the back? The answer was that the person who had yanked me back down was no other than my good friend Don Antoine Bardonenche.

  He’d been tasked with clearing the cutting; the Frenchmen around us wreaking havoc with their bayonets were his escort. It had turned out to be a devastating day even for him. His pristine white uniform was dirty for once, and his face smeared. There were blood spatters all over his chest.

  He pointed his sword at my nose and said: “Mon ami, mon ennemi. Rendez-vous.”

  “Ah, non!” I replied in the offended tone of someone asked to pay a debt he does not owe. “Ça jamais!”

  That’s right: Longlegs Zuvi, the rat, refusing the very thing that had been in motion since the siege began. I didn’t even have Peret’s sword about my person, so, very nobly, I threw a handful of mud in Bardonenche’s eyes, turned, and ran. While his and Ballester’s men continued laying into one another with bayonets, Bardonenche wiped the mud from his eyes and raced after me. I tripped over a rut, landing face-to-face with a dead soldier. I grabbed the man’s rifle and, gasping, turned the bayonet on myself like a spear. Halting, Bardonenche sighed. “Don’t,” he said.

  Pity for Bardonenche—pity for me—pity for all of us. His expression was more than merely downcast: It was commiseration itself. I, of course, felt like a rat cornered by a tiger. Imagine a zero the size of the moon: That was how likely I was to overcome Bardonenche, Europe’s finest swordsman.

  I still think Martí Zuviría should, by rights, have died that September 11, in that waterlogged cutting. But just then Ballester leaped like a panther from the edge of the ditch, and he and Bardonenche set to tussling in the mud. I wasn’t stupid enough to let such a chance go begging, and flexing my long legs, I launched myself out of the cutting.

  White uniforms were everywhere; the entire cutting was being overrun by hundreds of Frenchmen. The men accompanying Bardonenche tried to protect their captain, and the Miquelets theirs. Ballester’s men fired and thrust their blades in a frenzy, but the cascade of Bourbons intensified. The clamor of the battle was appalling: Across the city, more than forty thousand rifles were exchanging fire, so disorderly and at such a pace that it sounded like a constant drumroll. We had to fall back immediately.

  For the second time, I addressed Ballester by his first name. “Esteve!” I howled, on all fours at the edge of the cutting. “Get out, for the love of God, get up here now! You don’t know who you’re dealing with! Surti!”

  Ballester had bargained on a French captain being more skilled in martial arts than he was, but by turning it into a brawl in the confines of the cutting, he’d hoped to level the field. Bardonenche’s long arms kept hitting up against the walls, preventing him from using his skills. They punched, bit, and scratched each other like wild animals.

  Still, not even Ballester could withstand a swordsman like Bardonenche for long. The latter eventually managed to force some space between them and, with a lightning-fast thrust, ran Ballester through at stomach height. The blade entered up to the hilt. Ballester, with half the sword projecting from his lower back, turned his head, looked up, saw me, and said something that I’ll take to my grave: “Go! You’re more important than we are!”

  His last words. Next came a deafening guttural cry that could be heard over and above the din of the battle. His fingers sank into the ground like grappling hooks, and he looked Bardonenche in the eye. Bardonenche threw back his head, but—and this was his error—didn’t move away. His most sensible option would have been to let his saber go and kick Ballester’s body clear. In Bardonenche’s world, I suppose, it was bad form to drop your weapon in such a fashion. Honor was the death of him.

  Bardonenche cried out, his chin high, as Ballester, summoning what little strength remained in him, sank his teeth into the Frenchman’s neck. They both toppled into the mud. They writhed together, and Ballester’s hands came upon something Bardonenche was carrying. A small leather pouch containing used bullets: the pouch of Busquets, the old Miquelet from Mataró. Ballester took it and forced it into his enemy’s mouth, ramming it down his throat with bloodied fingers. Bardonenche, his body in spasms, struggled to get clear.

  The rest of the Miquelets had fallen, and several Frenchmen came to their captain’s aid, bayoneting Ballester’s body. In the melee, and with the two bodies intertwined, they also managed to finish off Bardonenche by stabbing him a few times. By the end, the pair were a single mangled lump enveloped in thick mud. Two men with such different trajectories, so perfectly unalike one from the other, and in their demise, unified by death—as though their destiny had been to end up in each other’s arms.

  I turned and I ran as never before. Corre, Zuvi! Run! Only when there was no breath left in me did I finally come to a halt. Wheezing, with no thought for where I was, I dropped to the ground. I couldn’t believe they were all dead. Amelis, Anfán, Nan. Ballester. And still the battle was raging. More images: brave men, the kind I never thought I’d see give in, fleeing home; and cowards, who had never shown their faces anywhere near the ramparts, taking on the enemy armed with hatchets. I’d need a whole page to list the nobles who, back in June 1713, had voted against resisting, and come September 11, 1714, died defending their city.

  Questions abound. So many pointless sacrifices—why? Was it worth filling the world with so many tragic, extraordinary tales, all those brilliant, meteoric ends? We know what happened afterward. All officers put in chains, hauled to Castile, and Don Antonio first among them. The Saint Eulalia flag captured and transported to the Atocha shrine in Madrid. The entire country under a military regime for decades. And Barcelona in the hands of that mercenary murderer, the Antwerp butcher, Verboom.

  My thoughts turn to another of the Miquelet captains, Josep Moragues. He was tied to the back of a cart and dragged the length and breadth of the city before being decapitated and his arms and legs cut off. They placed his head in a cage and had no qualms about hanging it from one of the city gates. There his bare skull stayed, as mockery of and a warning to the rebels, for twelve long years—twelve, as all the while his widow’s protests went unheard.

  Could there be any greater ignominy than that of Moragues? Yes, perhaps that of a man named Manuel Desvalls. And not because his body was subjected to torments but because he didn’t die from his treatment. Desvalls had commanded troops outside Barcelona. When the victors exiled him, he couldn’t have had any idea what the rest of his days would hold. Remarkably, he lived to a hundred. Can you imagine? A la
rger proportion of his life spent outside his home than in it, his return never allowed. A hundred years—a century. And I’m headed the same way.

  Or should I talk about the women, our women, all the women who sustained us and who spat when we said they couldn’t fight on the bastions? Or perhaps Castellví, Francesc Castellví, our starry-eyed captain of the Valencian company? When he was exiled, he chose the path of the writer or, more specifically, his own dead end. He stubbornly dedicated his life to chronicling our war, corresponding for decades with participants from either side, men from dozens of countries. He wrote a book five thousand pages long and more, an impartial testimony of all the great deeds. And do you know what happened? No publisher would touch it. He died without a single page making it into the public domain.

  But above all, my thoughts turn to Don Antonio, Don Antonio de Villarroel Peláez, renouncing glory and honor, family and even life itself, and all for an allegiance that made no sense—to a group of nameless men. He, a son of Castile, embodying what was good about that harsh land, sacrificing himself for Barcelona, no less. And his reward? Infinite pain, eternal oblivion.

  In my delirium, another of my tragedies occurred to me: With Anfán dead, I had a son remaining, one I’d never meet, and who would never learn that his father had fought and died defending the freedoms of a people he’d also never know about. But no, I thought, my pain wasn’t unusual: When we lost and all of us perished, all our children would be educated by the victors.