Victus: The Fall of Barcelona

1

If man is the only being with a geometrical, rational mind, why is it that the poor and defenseless take up arms against the powerful and well equipped? Why do the few oppose the many, and the small resist the great? I know the reason why. One word.

We, the engineers of my age, had not one office but two. The first, which was sacred, consisted of building fortresses; the second, sacrilegious, their destruction. And now that I have become like Tiberius, allow me to reveal the word — that one Word. For, my friends, my enemies, insects all, in the trifling circumference of this universe of ours, I was the traitor. My actions led to the storming of my father’s house. I surrendered the city that had been given to me to defend, a city that stood in defiance of two imperial allies. My city. The traitor who delivered it over was me.

What you have just read is a first draft. Writing it, I must have been in a melancholy mood or drunk. When I read it back, I wanted to tear up the paragraph in question, affected and simpering as it was. More the kind of thing one might expect from a cock-sucker like Voltaire.

But as you can see, the Austrian elephant to whom I dictate these memoirs is uncompliant, will not tear it up. She likes it, for some reason, such epic words, so sublime a tone, and so on. Merda. Or, as they’d put it: Scheisse. But who’s going to argue with a Teutonic woman — and, to boot, one with a quill in her hand? Her cheeks are rosier and more swollen than the apple that deceived Adam, her rear end is fat as a regimental drum, and, evidently, she does not understand Catalan.

The clot taking down my words is an Austrian called Waltraud something-or-other; these Viennese names all sound like chewed-up stones. At least she knows French and Spanish. Well, I have set myself to be sincere, and shall be. Poor Waltraud. As well as transcribing these lines, she has the task of sewing me back together from time to time, taking needle and thread to the nineteen wounds that furrow the terrain of my sorry, battered body; wounds from the bullets, grapeshot, and bayonets of fifteen different nations: the broadsword of a Turk, the cudgel of a Maori, arrows and javelins of the natives of New Spain, the New Beyond, and the New Even Further Beyond. Dear, vile Waltraud dabs the suppurating seventy-year-old wounds on my half face, which reopen like flowers with every season’s change. And to round it all off, she has to darn the holes in my behind. Oh — oh, the pain! Some days I cannot tell which of them I’m shitting from. And all this for a miserable pension of eight kreuzers a month, for the emperor’s purse can stretch no further. It pays for her, and for this drafty garret, but it’s all the same to me. Chin up, never mind! — as I always say.

Always, the hardest part is always the beginning. What was in the beginning? Information I am not privy to. . Nearly a hundred years have passed. Do you realize, gentle reader, the sheer enormity of these words? I have been about the sun so many times, I struggle to recall my mother’s name. There’s another enormity for you. You’ll surely think me a blatherer and a muckabout.

I’ll skip the childhood sob stories. Forced to elect the moment when it all began, I would opt for the very day: March 5, 1705.

First, an exile. Picture, if you will, a lad of fourteen. A chill day breaks over the road to Bazoches castle, in French Burgundy. All his worldly effects fit in a knapsack on a stick over his shoulder. He has long legs and is slender about the chest. A sharp nose. And hair straighter, blacker, and more brilliant than the wings of a Burgundian crow.

Well, this lad was me. Martí Zuviría, “good old Zuvi” to some, or even “Longlegs Zuvi.” The castle’s three spiraling towers, with their black slate roofs, came into view. Fields of barley lined the path, and it was raining so hard you could almost see frogs taking to the air. It hadn’t been four days since my expulsion from the Carmelite college in Lyon. For bad behavior, of course. My last hope was that I might be admitted at Bazoches as a pupil of a certain Marquis de Vauban.

The previous year, my father had sent me to France, concerned as he was about the political stability in Spain. (Well-founded concerns, as you’ll agree should you read on.) It was by no means an elite school, not by a long shot, but rather a Carmelite venture aimed at the children of families neither rich nor poor, commoners with pretensions but not the means to rub shoulders with aristocracy. My father was what is known in Barcelona as a Ciutadà Honrat — an Honored Citizen. Strange, these titles we give ourselves. To be an Honored Citizen, one must have attained a certain level of wealth — my father was at that level, but barely. He never stopped lamenting the fact. When he was drunk, it was not uncommon to see him tug his hair and exclaim: “Of all the Honored Citizens, I am the very least!” (And he was such a somber man, he never saw how funny the joke was.)

The Carmelite college had a certain renown, at least. I shall not bore you with a full list of my excesses at that place, but proceed directly to the last and definitive.

At fourteen, I was already quite the little man. One night I and the other older students went drinking and scandalizing through the taverns of Lyon. We didn’t even remember to return to our dormitories to sleep. It was the first time in my life I had been on such a spree, and the wine had made me barbarously euphoric. The sun was already coming up when it occurred to one of my companions that we ought to return to our lodgings; it was one thing to go back late, quite another not to go back at all. I spied a carriage and leaped up beside the driver.

“Driver! To the Carmelite residence!”

The man said something, I did not understand what, and, my wine-addled brain combining with my juvenile energies, I pushed him into the road.“Won’t drive us? Very well, we will drive ourselves!” I took the reins. “Forward, boys!”

My ten or dozen roistering companions surged onto the carriage like pirates boarding a ship, and I cracked the whip. The horses reared up and set out along the road. I was having a whale of a time, oblivious to the cries at my back, which had suddenly turned to alarm.

“Martí, hold up!”

I turned to look: My friends, not having had sufficient time to seat themselves, were falling from the vehicle left and right. The carriage hurtled along, and they toppled from it like ten pins. “So drunk they can’t even sit in a carriage?” I said to myself. But there was more: We were being chased, I saw, by a furious mob. “What have I done to them?”

The two questions converged in a single answer. My friends weren’t able to get up on the carriage properly because it was not, indeed, a carriage, but a casket on wheels. Like all funeral carriages. I’d mistaken it for any ordinary conveyance. As for our pursuers, they were the dead person’s family, the cortege. And from the way they were howling, they didn’t seem overly pleased. All I could think to do was flee — in any case, there was little else I might do, for the horses had turned hellcats, and I had no idea how to rein them in. I pulled uselessly, succeeding only in making them gallop harder. I sobered up somewhat when I saw, as we took a corner, sparks flying from the wheel edges. We entered a square at breakneck speed. One of the most famous glass shops in Lyon, in all of France, was situated in this square. With the morning light, the frontage, which was all glass, must have appeared to the horses like the entrance to a passageway.

Quite a pretty dustup. The horses, the carriage, the coffin, the dead person, and I were hurled, as one, across the interior of the shop. The shattering of the windowpane was a sound unlike any other. Twenty thousand glasses, lamps, bottles, mirrors, goblets, and vases exploding at once as well. What I still do not understand is how I came out of it alive and, more or less, in one piece.

Getting up on all fours, I peered around at what was now a glass hecatomb. The mob appeared at the mouth of the square. The carriage had come undone at the back, and the coffin was on the floor, with the lid open. And it was empty. “Where might the dead person have gone to?” I asked myself. Anyway, it was hardly the moment to try and find out. I was still stunned by the impact and found myself crawling into the coffin and shutting the lid after me.

My head throbbed horribly. All night drinking, one tavern after another — we’d come to blows at one point with a group of young Dominican monks, even more devout than we Carmelites — then this headlong rush and the bump on the head. “To hell with it all,” I said. If I stayed quiet, maybe things would sort themselves out. I laid my cheek against the velvet coffin lining and let oblivion settle over me.

I do not know how long I was in there, but had I stayed a little longer, it would have been forever. A movement awoke me; my closed bed was lurching around. It took me a good few moments to remember. .

“Hoi! Open this!” I began shouting. “You whoresons, open up!”

My coffin was swaying on account of its being lowered into the ground. They must have heard my cries, for it began to ascend once more (very slowly, or so it seemed to me). Several hands opened the top and out I shot like a scalded cat. What anguish!

“You almost buried me alive!” I cried, justifiably indignant.

It wasn’t difficult to surmise what had happened. The family, finding the coffin, had simply placed it back on the carriage and set out again on the road to the cemetery; it hadn’t occurred to them to check whether it was their kin or good old Zuvi inside. That was a little too close for comfort.

But the next day I had to deal with the consequences. Eight of my fellow classmates were in the hospital with broken bones, and several ladies who had fainted at the funeral were yet to recover. The glass shop owner was threatening to take me to court. What was more, when rounding up the damage to his business, he had found the cadaver of one of his fellow burghers hanging from a chandelier, which was where it had ended up after the crash. I had gone too far this time. The prior gave me two options: return home with a note explaining my disgraceful conduct, or be sent to the castle at Bazoches. Home? If I went back to my father in Barcelona, having been expelled, I would not come away alive. I opted for Bazoches. From what I was able to find out, a certain Marquis de Vauban was offering to take on students.

2

But enough of the nonsense of children. I was saying: That March 5, I was approaching the castle at Bazoches, on foot and with a knapsack at my back.

The edifice was stately rather than military, attractive rather than pompous. Three round towers soared up out of the ramparts, topped by pointed cowls of black tile. Bazoches castle was beautiful in its antiquated sobriety. In that plain landscape, the eye couldn’t help but be drawn to it, magnetized, even, to the point that I didn’t hear the coach approaching and nearly running me over.

The road was so narrow, I barely had time to jump clear as the coach wheels splashed mud all over me. This to the great amusement of the two jokers who poked their heads out of the coach windows, a couple of boys my age. The coach carried on toward the castle, their laughter at my misfortune ringing out.

And misfortune it truly was, given that I had planned to present myself in my very best attire. The tricorn hat and the morning suit I wore were the only ones I owned. How could I show myself to a venerable marquis when covered head to toe in mud?

I barely need tell how low I felt arriving at Bazoches. The gates were still open from the arrival of the coach, and a footman came out and began rebuking me. “How many times do I have to tell you people, alms day, Monday? Get out of here!”

I could hardly blame him. What else was he to think but that I was a beggar come at the wrong time?

“I am here as an engineering candidate — I have a sealed accreditation to prove it!” I said, fumbling with the knapsack.

The man did not even want to listen. This must have been a common occurrence for him, because straightaway he brought out a cudgel. “Away, knave!”

Do you believe in angels, oh German buffalo of mine? I do not, but in Bazoches I met three. And the first appeared just then — just as that footman’s stick was about to crack my ribs.

By the look of the girl, she was a servant, but by her air of authority, I imagined she must have boasted some office. And for all they say that angels have no gender, I can assure you this one was female. My goodness, that she was.

I struggle for words to describe that creature’s charm. Given that I am not a poet, I’ll be brief and simply say that, as a woman, she was everything you are not, my dear vile Waltraud. Don’t be like that — I only mean you are broader in the beam than a honeybee, and she was no more than a handspan and a half across. You seem as weighed down as a mule with a heavy load; her movements were those of a certain kind of select woman, noble or not, who could flatten empires underfoot. Your hair always looks fresh-dipped in a barrel of grease; hers was fine, shoulder-length, and watermelon-red. I have never seen your breasts, nor do I ever want to, but I would wager they hang off you like eggplants; hers, you could fit perfectly inside a cup. I do not say she was perfection. Her lower jaw, which was firm and angular, bestowed perhaps a little too much personality for a woman. Well, and since I have begun in this direction, I might as well go all the way; you, you had your chin stolen from you at some point, consummately rounding off your cretinous mien.

What else? Ah, yes, small ears, eyebrows thin as brushstrokes and the color of russet, and as with most redheads, freckles splashed across her cheeks. She had precisely six hundred and forty-three freckles. (Later I’ll speak about the academic regime in Bazoches and how it was that I came to count those freckles.) If you had freckles, it would make you look like a leprous witch, whereas she resembled a creature out of myth. And now I come to think of it, one of the few heroes of this age I haven’t actually met is your henpecked husband, who puts up with a monstrosity like you every night. Why the tears? Have I said anything that is not truth? Come, take up the quill again.

The maidservant listened carefully to what I had to say. I must have been convincing, because she asked to see my accreditation. She could read, confirmation that she occupied a high position in the servant hierarchy. I told her what had befallen me, which put her in a position to help or have me thrown out. And she helped me. She went off somewhere. I waited for a little while (though it seemed forever). She came back with arms full of clothes.

“Take this morning suit,” she said, “and hurry. They’re starting already.”

I ran off in the direction indicated, and didn’t stop until I reached a perfectly square room with a low ceiling. For furniture, there were only a couple of chairs, and a door was set in the wall facing. And, next to that, the two lugs responsible for my muddy state. They were on foot, waiting to be admitted.

The first was thickset and had a squashed nose, the nostrils facing more forward than down, not unlike a pig’s. The other was tall and scrawny, with legs like a flamingo. His rich boy attire did nothing to hide his ungainliness; instead of having grown gradually, he seemed to have been suddenly yanked from above with tongs. Porky and Stretch, I christened them in my mind.

The fact that they greeted me indifferently, casually, as if this were the first time we’d laid eyes on one another, is not so strange as it seems. Word to the wise, my dear orangutan: People tend to be poor at looking and worse at seeing. The first time Porky and Stretch saw me, it had been fleeting, and now they didn’t recognize me. Wearing this wonderful morning suit, I looked completely different. When Stretch spoke, his competitiveness was plain to see.

“Another cadet? Good luck to you, but just so you know, I’ve been studying the principles of engineering for, oh, years. Only one student is going to be admitted, and it’s going to be me.” He emphasized the word me.

“My dear friend,” said Porky, interceding. “You forget that I have been awaiting this chance just as long as you.”

Stretch sighed. “I cannot believe Vauban himself is about to walk through this door,” he said. “A man responsible for the building or remodeling of three hundred strongholds. Three hundred!”

“That’s right,” said Porky. “To say nothing of the one hundred and fifty acts of war he’s been involved in, great and small.”

“The fairest and greatest of which,” insisted Stretch, “was taking fifty-three different cities. Harder to penetrate than Troy, each and every one!”

Porky murmured in agreement. “Greatest, greatest, greatest.”

“Wonderful,” I said to myself. The prior had said nothing to me about any selection process. Or there being only one place. How could anyone be expected to choose me over these two bookworms?

After the Marquis de Vauban’s description, I was expecting someone battle-hardened, Herculean, covered in scars. The man who came in, though, was a short, distinguished, and irritable-looking nobleman. He wore a sumptuous wig, the hair wavy and with a central parting. In spite of his advanced age, as shown in his jowly, angular cheeks, his whole being emanated an impatient energy. On his left cheek, there was a violet patch, the result of a bullet that had grazed him at the siege of Ath.

We each stood to attention in a line. The marquis cast his eye over us, saying nothing. He stopped in front of each of us and regarded us for scarcely one or two seconds. And with what eyes! Ah, yes, that Bazoches glance, unlike any other. When Vauban looked at you, it was as though to say: I know you, imperfections and all, better than you know yourself. And that was true, in a certain sense. But this was only the man’s harder side.

Vauban also had a paternal streak. Though severity might have seemed the most visible facet of his character, no one could fail to see that its aim was both benign and constructive. He was the sort of man whose rectitude is beyond question.

Finally, he deigned to speak. He began with the good part: The royal engineers were the crème de la crème, a select few. So few, in fact, that the kings of Spain and of Asia were prepared to pay any price for their services. This was sounding better. . French francs, English pounds, Portuguese cruzados. I’d earn, plus get to see the world!

Then the exposition took a turn. Vauban turned serious and said to us: “Be aware, gentlemen, that an engineer risks his life more often in a single siege than an infantry officer will in an entire campaign. Still interested?”

The pair of nitwits at my side assented in unison with an emphatic “Oui, monsieur!” I barely knew which way to look. The military? Rifles? Cannons? I mean, what on earth were they talking about? When I thought of an engineer, I thought bridges, canals. Though Porky and Stretch had mentioned sieges and battles, presumably the men at the helm were always well placed — particularly if their role was to draw up blueprints — in the rearguard, with a wench on either knee.

Look, I had bargained on coming away from Bazoches with some kind of qualification, even in ditch planning. Anything, just something I could use to justify myself to my father. And here was this old loon talking nonsense, endless nonsense, on and on.

For it went from bad to worse. Much worse. Before I realized it, he was already on to “The Mystery.”

I’ve been trying to understand the twinkling lights of le Mystère (write it down like that, Waltraud) for the better part of a hundred years, and still I consider myself a novice. So why don’t you, my readers, tell me what a lad of fourteen was supposed to think hearing about it for the first time, in that small side room in the castle at Bazoches?

Almost every other word was Mystère, and Vauban’s tone was so reverential that in the end I thought it must be some cryptic moniker for God Himself. But then again, why bring God into it? By the way Vauban was speaking, God could be no more than a featherbrained stepson to this Mystère.

I quickly gave up any hope of being accepted at Bazoches. As I say, I hadn’t the faintest notion where it was all headed. Porky and Stretch seemed enthused. They had a good idea what was in store, were as prepared as possible — given their standing and their schooling — and their lives’ only objective seemed to be devoting themselves to the rare cause being invoked by the marquis.

Very abruptly, Vauban fell quiet and left the room. Porky and Stretch looked at each other in bafflement. A minute later, someone else came out in Vauban’s place. It was her. The redheaded beauty from the courtyard. She proceeded to introduce herself. . as the marquis’s daughter.

The possibility, or anything like it, had not occurred to me. What a fool I was — no serving girl could possibly move with such aplomb. This time she was far more elegantly attired, with a long skirt that covered her feet. She made no sign of recognizing me. She was serious as death and nearly as frightening. She came and stood before us.

“My father wishes to form an idea of your aptitudes. Knowing that his presence can be intimidating to young cadets, he has asked me to carry out the test.” Opening a folder, she took out a print. “The test consists of a single question. I will show you designs, one by one, and you must describe them to me. Please be concise in your answer.”

She turned to me first, showing me a picture. I still have a replica of the original. (You, you brutish blondie, insert it here, after this page, nowhere else! Get it? Here!)

If she’d shown me a poem in Aramaic, I would have had a better idea what it meant. I shrugged and said the first thing that came into my head. “A star. A star that looks like a flower, with spines instead of petals.”

Porky and Stretch, who had already managed a sidelong glance at the drawing, broke down laughing. Not her. She remained impassive, moved two paces along, and showed the illustration to Porky, who answered: “A fortress with eight bastions and eight ravelins.”

When it came to Stretch, he merely said: “Neuf-Brisach.”

“Of course!” exclaimed Porky. “How could I fail to see it? Vauban’s crowning work!”

Stretch, confident he’d won, couldn’t help but assume the victorious expression of someone the gods have smiled upon. He even commiserated with Porky, laying the crass amiability on thick. The image in the print was that of the fortress at Neuf-Brisach, wherever that was.

Vauban’s daughter asked us to wait while she went and passed on our answers to her father. When it was the three of us again, I said: “The next time we lay eyes on one another, you would be better off minding your manners.”

They were taken aback by my aggrieved tone.

“Ah, yes. You’re that beggar,” Stretch said, finally working out who I was. He was the cleverer of the two. “And might I ask what you’re doing here?”

My intention was merely to needle them a little before I left, what with the mud and the fact that I never have been able to stand conceited little snots like them. But my insults were sufficiently choice as to make their faces drain of vim — and they piled right in to me!

There were two of them, but two’s not so many, and I kicked them in the shins and poked them in the eyes. Porky came up behind me and started strangling me, and we fell to the floor. I bit him on the arm and aimed a few defensive kicks at Stretch, who was raising a chair over his head, ready to crack mine open. I don’t know what would have happened if Vauban and his daughter hadn’t come in and interrupted us.

“Gentlemen!” she exclaimed, scandalized. “This is Bazoches castle, not a common tavern!”

We got to our feet and stood up straight, our clothes crumpled, Stretch with a bashed-in eye and Porky nursing his arm where I’d bitten it. The marquis’s glare was indescribably severe. And I’m not being rhetorical when I say the silence was such that you could have heard the woodworms eating the chairs.

“You have brought violence into my home,” declared the marquis. “Get out.”

There was nothing more to be said. The daughter addressed the other two boys. “You and you, come with me.” As she was leading them from the room, she turned her head and said to me: “You, wait here.”

I was alone with the marquis, who kept his probing eyes upon me. We could hear the protests of Porky and Stretch on the far side of the door. Then, these having diminished, the girl came back into the room.

I thought Vauban’s daughter was going to throw me out as well but was staggering our departure; after our punching, biting, and scratching spectacle, it was only logical to separate us to avoid a repeat.

But what the marquis said next, though unyielding in tone, did not fit with a goodbye: “Our first conversation takes place after an act of violence under my roof. Does that seem to you to augur well?”

Better not to answer. He paced around a little. Coming back over to me, he stopped and prodded me on the chest with two fingers. “I am now going to ask you a question,” he said, “and I want you to answer honestly. What happened with the Carmelites?”

“Well,” I said, “it’s complicated. The Carmelites are, how can I say it, they’re real disciplinarians.”

I could see Vauban wasn’t one to beat about the bush. I had no way of knowing what it said in the prior’s letter, so I simply decided to present the facts without twisting them too much.

“One day I got in a carriage to return to the college. I was in such a hurry, I failed to notice that, though indeed a carriage, it was meant for a funeral. The Carmelites took it very badly.”

“For a funeral?”

“The family was unhappy at the change of route,” I said, avoiding as best I could the most disagreeable parts.

I heard lively laughter start up behind me, growing louder; it was the daughter, sitting behind me. The most unexpected thing to me was that the marquis joined in the joke. His stony face suddenly crumpled, and there he was, guffawing. Father and daughter, laughing, exchanged looks.

“Now I understand why the prior sent you to me,” said the marquis, explaining: “I studied with them as a youngster, too, and committed a nearly identical error. They must never have forgotten it!” Still laughing, he turned back to his daughter. “Have I never told you about it, Jeanne, my dear? I took a seat next to the driver and said: ‘To the Carmelite college!’ ”

She was beset by laughter, louder and louder, as the marquis continued his tale: “And the driver said: ‘Young man, do not be in such a hurry to arrive at the place where this vehicle is destined.’ So I understood that it was going to the cemetery. My face must have been quite the picture!”

They broke down laughing. The marquis pulled out an enormous white handkerchief to dry his eyes. When he spoke again, laughter punctuated his words. “Dear Lord God. . And they got angry at a peccadillo like that?” More laughter. “When one finds oneself in a bit of a spot, lying under a carriage like a boob, that’s all there is to it. .” Laughter, ho, ho, ho. “But honestly. . I mean. .” Hee, hee, hee from Vauban, ho, ho, ho from Jeanne, “The Carmelites have many virtues, but a sense of humor has never been one!”

The private man seemed altogether different from his public persona. At that point I did not know that, for Vauban, the idea of “private” included only Jeanne, the youngest of his two daughters, in whom he had complete trust. As he looked at me, the marquis’s face turned stony again. “There’s still time for you,” he said. “Should you choose to remain in Bazoches, your life will undergo radical changes.”

Who’d have thought it? When Jeanne passed on our test answers, she must have told her beloved father that good old Zuvi, not Stretch, had hit the mark. She’d seen something in Martí Zuviría. .

“The Carmelites’ letter also makes reference to certain little defects of character: pride, disobedience, a dislike of authority. Want to know what I think? I think the prior has relieved himself of a difficult student.”

Almost a hundred years have passed and still, still I see Jeanne Vauban in that moment, seated beside me, head askance, chewing strands of red hair. In her eyes, a look that suggested everything — or nothing. If it had been just the two of us, I believe I would have pounced on her there and then.

Vauban again prodded my chest. “Think you’re here merely to become a simple ‘engineer’? Wrong. Bazoches is the fount of certain secrets known to very few. Know this: By the time we finish with you, you will no longer be any old commoner. True: You’ll touch the gates of glory with fingers of lead. But the rewards will be few. And for you to become an engineer, Bazoches will take everything you’ve got out of you before we put it all back in. You’ll feel as though you’ve swallowed your vomit a thousand times. And only then will you be worthy of le Mystère.” He paused to take breath into his old lungs and then asked: “Do you feel you’re up to such a task?”

Part of me was saying, Get out of here. Go whistling out and don’t stop till you hit the Pyrenees. Drop le Mystère, leave the Great Marquis-Engineer-Leanwit to cook in his own sauce, don’t get caught up in affairs not your own. .

Then again, I thought, why not? Though it wasn’t what I’d been expecting, I didn’t have much of an option. As I hesitated, my gaze turned away a little, toward Vauban’s daughter. My giddy goodness, that redhead.

I stood up tall to give my answer: “Ready and willing, Monsieur!”

He nodded lightly. But his blessing contained something slightly troubling, in that he turned to his daughter and said: “What are you waiting for?”

When it comes down to it, the most important decisions in our lives are not made by us, they happen to us. Was it le Mystère’s invisible aroma that did it? Possibly. Or it could have been my cock talking. Also quite possible.

3

What led the great Vauban to adopt me as a student? Even now, I cannot answer with any certainty.

His only male child had died at two months old, meaning that Vauban had to make do with two daughters. Was there some form of never exercised paternity that he needed to feel? Don’t believe for a moment I was that important. And, as I was later to learn, to a man with Vauban’s ideas about the world, he cared little whether his offspring were boys or girls. He sired a good many bastards with local peasant women. This was common knowledge, he never made any effort to hide it, and in his will went so far as to leave each a good stipend. But in life he never paid them the slightest bit of mind.

In March 1705, he was precisely two years shy of death. He knew the end was not far off. A privileged few had gone before me, and I would be the final student. The only way I can put it is sometimes, a few times, I felt like the piece of parchment upon which the castaway writes his last message before inserting it into the bottle.

Naturally, I did not see Vauban each and every day. He was often away traveling, in Paris or elsewhere. Let’s say he concerned himself with my progress as he did the majority of his fortification works: in the capacity of supervisor general.

They allocated me a room in a tower at the top of a winding staircase. It was small but light, neat and tidy, and smelled of lavender. The next day I breakfasted in a corner of the kitchens, which were larger than my whole house in Barcelona. I ate alone, the servants all busy with other tasks. I expected I’d see Jeanne afterward — or at least I hoped to. Instead of her, a venerable old man appeared, beaming and delicate-looking.

“So, you’re the new pupil?”

He introduced himself as Armand Ducroix. “Have you managed to get your bearings at Bazoches?” he asked before answering his own question. “No, of course not, if he only arrived yesterday. All in good time, hmm, yes.”

I was yet to learn that this was Armand’s habitual way of speaking. He thought out loud, as if he believed it the most normal thing in the world that his thoughts should flow freely, without hiding in silences and conventions.

“Good lad,” he went on, “spirited-looking, built like a greyhound. Yes, he could go far, who knows? But let’s not fool ourselves. All is in the hands of le Mystère. That sharp nose indicates liveliness of spirit, hmm, yes, and those shoulders look made to bear great burdens. Now to see about fortifying his muscles and his spirit.”

He took me to the library. Seeing the rows and rows of shelves overflowing with books, I was astonished.

“Wow!” I exclaimed. “But if each one has fifty books and more? Can any one person possibly have read so much?”

Laughing, Armand pulled up a chair. “Dear cadet,” he said. “You will have to read far more before you become a Maganon.”

“A Maganon?”

“That was what the ancient Greeks called their military engineers.”

As Armand bowed his head to write, I was afforded a view of his cranium, bare and magnificent, in all its glory. A curiously spherical head. With most bald people, their cranium is freckled or has blue or pinkish veins on it, or ridges adorning it, like on a nut. Not Armand. His skin, a healthy pinkish color, was tight as a drum. What hair he still had formed a white halo around the base of his skull, like a crown of laurels that then joined in a beard tapering down to a goatee. Everything about him was slight, concentrated, and compact. The apparent fragility of his bones in reality hid the vivaciousness of a squirrel. His thinness was not a reflection of old age consuming him but a rare vital tension. I never once saw him in bad humor, and he never needed an excuse to laugh. Yet with all that, this bonhomie never obscured his gray eyes, his wolf eyes, constantly watching you. Even out of the back of his head.

He had sat down to write a note. Finishing it, he bade me come closer. “This will be your program of study,” he announced. “Read it back to me, if you would.”

I no longer have this note — nor do I need it. I remember it down to the last letter:

6: 30–7: Wash. Chapel. Breakfast.

7–8: Drafting.

8– 9: Mathematics. Geometry. Lemon juice.

9–10: Spherical Room.

10–12: Metrics of Fortifications. Topography.

12–12:30: Lunch. Lemon juice.

12:30–14: Fieldwork.

14–15: Obey and Command. Tactics and Strategy.

15–16: History. Physics.

16–17: Surveying. Ballistics. Lemon juice.

17–19: Mineralogy. Fieldwork.

19:00: Dinner.

19:30–21: Architecture.

21–23: Fieldwork. Chapel.

This was my study schedule, although in reality I was never required to pray, and I never set foot in chapel.

“Sundays you’ll have for yourself,” Armand said with that perpetual smile of his. “Are you in agreement with the general plan?”

Was I really in a position to refuse?

“Perfect, then,” he said, pleased. “We’ll make a start. Go next door, if you would, and bring me La nouvelle fortification by Nicolaus Goldmann. And De Secretis Secretorum by Walter de Milemete.”

The library continued in an adjoining room. I could not believe that anyone could be so eccentric as to store such quantities of printed paper. I entered through a doorless recess — and there was Armand once more! At the top of a stairwell, organizing books, with his splendid bald pate and white goatee. The same black breeches, the same white shirt. He looked over at me. Those same gray wolf eyes, and that same kind but shrewd smile. “Can I help you with anything, young man?”

“You. . you yourself know very well,” I said, dumbfounded. “I’m looking for La nouvelle fortification by Nicolaus Goldmann and De Secretis Secretorum by Walter de Milemete.”

Descending the stairs, he handed me the books.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“Using the index. This library is governed by a principle known as ‘order.’ ”

I was utterly baffled. I retraced my steps, coming back through into the larger room, the books under my arm. And I found Armand sitting at his desk!

The mystery was solved only when my librarian came in and joined us. They were identical twins, as difficult to tell apart as crabs. Even the wrinkles on their cheeks were the same. They began to laugh. Later on I found that confusing the servants at Bazoches was a pastime they greatly enjoyed. They found the range of jokes permitted by that particular corporeal fusion endlessly amusing.

“But you’re so alike!” I exclaimed, a little disturbed.

“I can assure you that it won’t be long before you can tell us apart.”

At that moment the only difference I could see was that one was called Armand and the other Zeno — or vice versa, so impossible did I find it to distinguish them. The first made me sit at a table. He placed Goldmann and Milemete in front of me and, now deeply serious, gave me an order: “Read. And if you understand any of it, let me know.”

A strange directive. They left me to read uninterrupted for a while. I did so with the best will. Milemete was my chosen starting point; the title seemed promising. Secrets upon secrets — I was hoping for dragons, founts of eternal life, carnivorous ox-eating plants, that sort of thing. Not in the slightest; it was dry as could be. The only thing that appealed were the prints of some kind of Roman amphora that had four legs and vomited fire. As for Goldmann, again, the pictures were the most interesting thing. They looked to my eye like the illegible scrawls of a person so hopelessly bored that he had resorted to filling page after page with maniacal geometric shapes. After a little while, the twins said: “Et alors?”

I looked up. Better to be honest.”Not a word,” I admitted.

“Perfect. Herein lies today’s lesson,” said Armand. “Now, at least, you know that you know nothing at all.”

The next day the Ducroix brothers continued to indulge me. They limited themselves to assessing my knowledge so they could establish where to begin. I was not very focused — my thoughts were all of Jeanne.

“Something bothering you?” asked Zeno.

“Absolutely not,” I said, waking from my daydream. “Merely, I have so recently arrived and do not yet know my position in Bazoches.”

“But how can that be?” said Armand. “Are you yet to be introduced to the inhabitants of the castle?”

He himself brought me before each of the servants. I must say, both Zeno and Armand were courtesy personified. With them, there was nothing of the usual distance affected by nobles toward common folk. The latter knew perfectly well their station, of course, but the twins comported themselves with a cordialness that occluded any difference.

To their right, they had me, and to their left, Vauban. They had been with him for decades; they knew all his engineering secrets and shared in his philosophy. They helped in the early stages of his fortification projects, and helped bridge Vauban’s military and worldly affairs. Truly, I was lucky to arrive at Bazoches in the autumn of great de Vauban’s life. At any other time, the Ducroix twins would have been too busy to lavish such attention on me.

“Now for the marquis’s daughter.”

Hearing these words, I had to adjust my breeches so no one would notice my upstanding member. I was, however, disappointed, as I was henceforth brought before an altogether different creature: Charlotte, Jeanne’s sister and Vauban’s eldest. She had a little peach face, red cheeks, a mouth shorter than a tortoise’s tail, and a nose oddly positioned, a set square that commenced somewhere above her eyebrows. She had a laugh like a parrot, clo, clo, clo, and jowls that shook like the bag of a bagpipe.

And if you, gentle reader, think me a clown for describing her in such terms, how wrong you are. The fact is, I found it distressing to make her acquaintance: How could nature be that cruel? Sisters they were, but all virtue had fallen to Jeanne. Intelligence, great beauty, wit, while Charlotte had always been a simple soul, not a bad bone in her body.

“I believe you have met Jeanne already,” said Armand. “She is in town at the moment, occupied by some charitable affair.”

Wonderful.

“Her husband is hardly ever in Bazoches himself,” remarked Zeno. “When you make his acquaintance, please behave kindly and. . with a certain delicacy. He is an unusual character.”

“What Zeno means to say,” clarified Armand, “is that his mind is not all there.”

At the end of the day, I retired to my lovely lavender-smelling quarters. What, I, to bed? Not on your life.

During the Ducroix brothers’ tour of the castle’s living quarters, I had learned which was Jeanne’s room. I waited for everyone to be abed before approaching. In any case, I would not have been able to sleep. I let a little time pass before leaving my room, barefoot and carrying an oil lamp. I came to Jeanne’s door and knocked softly. Nothing happened. I was vacillating — knock again or withdraw — when finally she came to the door.

Perhaps it is owing to my tender years, but I had never suffered an impression such as that. And I say “suffered,” for love, I say, is quite capable of provoking physical pain. My lungs shrank; my mind, usually agile, became suddenly muddy. The lamp flames were less atremble than I.

My first sight of her had been in the attire of a common country girl; next, she had been made up like a queen; now, in a nightgown and with her red locks tumbling loose. And we were alone in the dark. The faint light from the two flames, mine and hers, revealed the outlines of what was beneath her gown. I had been rehearsing two or three phrases but merely stood, slack-jawed.

“Well?” she said.

“I wanted to. . to thank you,” I said, eventually reacting. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”

“Do you deem it appropriate to be calling at a woman’s door at this hour?”

“Why did you choose me? Of the three, I was least well prepared — it was plain to see.”

“I like to wear comfortable clothing when we are not receiving visitors. Those two walked straight past me, didn’t even notice a servant; they saw nothing.” Something in her aspect altered. “You asked for help.” Regretting having spoken with such frankness, she sought to change the subject. She glanced up and down the passageway to see if anyone was coming. “How old are you?”

I was a few months short of fifteen. “Eighteen.”

“So young?” she said, surprised.

As a youth, I always looked five years older than my true age, and when I became a man, twenty less. My theory being that le Mystère was in a hurry to make me grow, because it had designs on me to die before my time, in 1714. This was followed by certain unforeseen cosmic occurrences; a number of decades passed with le Mystère neglecting to add years to me, and here you have me, gentle reader, here you have me.

“I care not a jot for engineering,” I said. “Since the moment I laid eyes on you, I have thought of nothing else.”

She laughed — she hadn’t expected this. “If you knew what was in store for you, you’d change your priorities.”

I did not take her meaning.

“The previous cadet lasted three weeks,” she explained. “That was not so bad; the previous one went home after day five.”

“When I came to Bazoches, I did not know what I was looking for,” I said. “Now I do.”

She wasn’t having any of it. My feelings were sincere, but my ways of presenting them straight out of a cheap theater.

“To bed with you,” she said. “Believe me, come tomorrow you’ll be happy of some rest.”

And she shut the door in my face.

4

Jeanne couldn’t have been more right, as I very soon found.

We began with Drawing, the Ducroix view being that ink and line awoke the senses. Next came Physics and Geometry. That was when I learned what a privilege it is to have a tutor dedicated entirely to you. And I had two! I’m no pedagogue; I would not know how to go about evaluating their methods, so all I can say is that they applied to me a unique combination of indulgence, discipline, and acuity of spirit.

Next, a break and the lemon juice. “Drink.”

It was an order. Until I grew accustomed to it, they had to watch that I did not empty the glass into some nearby plant pot. Because “lemon juice” wasn’t truly accurate; Vauban, altogether the polymath, had invented a brew composed of root extracts, beeswax, various juices, and goodness knows what else, so congealed and sickly sweet that it was hard to stomach. In his view, it awakened the brain and fortified the muscles. Well, it didn’t quite kill me.

Possibly the most curious discipline at Bazoches was the one they called the Spherical Room. The name was closer to the reality than that of the juice, because it really was a room without any corners, egg-shaped, a gigantic globe with matte, pure whitewashed walls. Even the floor was concave, so when the door shut behind you, you were confined in this immaculate sphere. The Spherical Room was at the top of the castle. There was a skylight in the center of the roof, which let sunlight in to flood the space.

“You have five minutes exactly,” said the Ducroix twins the first time they pushed me inside.

I felt taken aback the first time. And not because I expected something malign; I simply did not know what to expect. Ever since I’d come to Bazoches, I’d had the sense of a world of marvels surrounding me: strange books, wise twins, beautiful women. And now this spherical, light-filled room, and me inside it, alone, bemused by the majestic silence.

There were objects up ahead. Dozens and dozens of white threads hanging from the ceiling, invisible at the point where they merged with the far walls. And from the threads, hanging at different heights, the most diverse array of objects: a horseshoe, a theater mask, a simple nail. A wig! A goose feather hard to see against the white walls. A gold clock revolving at the end of the small chain.

Five minutes later, they opened the door.

“Speak,” said Armand. “What did you see?”

“Things hanging,” was my flustered response.

Zeno was behind me. He dealt me a slap to the neck. I turned defiantly and exclaimed: “You hit me!”

“The objective is not the blow itself but to wake you up,” Zeno said by way of justification.

“Cadet Zuviría!” called out Armand. “You are blind. Any engineer who does not know how to use his eyes properly is no engineer. If you had been paying attention, you would have given a worthier answer than this vague ‘things hanging.’ Useless. What things? How many? In what order, height, and depth?”

They made me enter once more — more accurately, they flung me back in. I committed what I could upon my retinas and to memory. When I came out, I had to describe the objects in detail and according to position. I began with the things that had been at the front and detailed the following ones using these as reference. They listened attentively and did not interrupt at any point.

“Pathetic,” was Armand’s view. “There were twenty-two objects, and you have described only fifteen, and those poorly. There was a horseshoe, yes. But how many holes did it have? Which side was it hanging on? How high up?”

I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

“Do you not understand?” said Zeno, cutting me off. “When you are attacking a bastion or defending one, and you have only a few seconds to form a picture of the situation, how are you going to take responsibility for the lives of those under you?”

“Paying attention is essential,” said Armand. “Always, at all hours and in all places. Otherwise you’ll fail to see things, and if that happens, you’ll be no use in this role. From now on, you’ll remain constantly attentive, both awake and asleep. Clear?”

“I think so.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Sure you’ve understood?”

“Yes,” I cried, more out of frustration than belief.

Before I’d finished saying “yes,” Zeno instantly said: “Describe the buckles on my shoes.”

Instinctively, I looked down.

Zeno lifted my chin with a finger. “Answer.”

I could not.

“Since you have been with us, I have been wearing the same footwear. And in all that time, you have failed to notice they have no buckles.”

In Bazoches, I realized how blind people are. Most men, when they look around, do so in a hurry, alighting briefly on single objects, guided by the base instincts — this I like, this I do not — like children. The Ducroix brothers divided the human race into two: moles and Maganons. Ninety-nine out of a hundred were blind as moles. A good Maganon would notice more things in one day than a mole would in a year. (You yourself, you blubbery mole, how many fingers do I have? Do you see? All this time together, and you have failed to notice that the tip of one of my pinkie fingers is missing. Shrapnel, Gibraltar. I say, it served well: The siege scuppered them, and I enjoyed making life difficult for a Bourbon.)

That day they put up twenty-two objects; others, thirty, forty, even fifty. Sometimes just one, which was mere mockery, for I then had to recount its every detail. My personal best was describing one hundred and ninety-eight objects hanging from a panoply of white threads. And I had to remember everything about each and every object: the number of holes in the flute, pearls on the necklace, and teeth on the saw. Have you, gentle reader, ever tried such a thing? Do so, do, and you’ll discover in small details the vast complexity of our world.

These would all have been no more than quaint and stimulating drills, part and parcel with the brothers’ eccentricity, had it not been for the discipline known as “Fieldwork.” I imagined this was going to be some form of bracing exercise in the open air. Wasn’t it just!

We went to a field a mile or so away from the castle, a rectangular field that looked as though it hadn’t been tilled in many years. The Ducroix brothers began to hold forth on the lovely views. This was very much the way they went about things; their academic activities never drew them away from their principal motivation in life: to take pleasure in the sight of a bird in flight or a beautiful sunset.

“Well, Cadet Zuviría,” said Armand, finally turning to face me. “Let us suppose — and a wild supposition it remains — that you have become a member of the engineering corps. And let us then suppose that a ditch needs making. What would you do?”

“I suppose order the sappers to begin digging,” I answered, caught somewhat off balance.

“Very good!” said Zeno, applauding sarcastically.

Four servants from the castle approached. They were carrying stakes, ropes, and small bags containing lime, and these they deposited at our feet. Also some voluminous round wicker baskets, which, I would later learn, were known as fajinas. As well as these, an iron helmet that looked two hundred years old, a leather cuirass of a sort, and a rifle. They also left a pile of sticks, clubs, and a thousand digging implements. There are more kinds of shovels in the world than butterflies, was one of the things I learned that day.

“What are you waiting for?” said Armand.

“What’s the rifle for?” I asked, a little worried.

“Oh, don’t you worry about the rifle,” said Zeno, picking it up, walking a little way away, and loading it.

The first lessons I’d received had been on the metrics of fortifications. I took a stake and inserted it deep into the earth. I then took a rope, tied one end to the base of the stake, unspooled it to a length of sixty or seventy feet, tying the other end to another stake. I then sprinkled lime over the rope; the powder that fell either side marked a straight line for the excavation. Then I heard the report: A bullet had just flown by, whizzing past my helmet like a bumblebee.

I let out a shrill cry. “Eeeh!” I could not believe it; Zeno had shot at me! He stood a hundred feet away, reloading the rifle.

“The other way around,” said Armand. “First you smear the lime onto the rope. Then unroll it. If the rope is covered in a good amount of lime, laying it out will leave a clear line. That way you save having to move around the field a second time, and give your enemy less time to shoot at you.

“Zeno can reload and fire every two minutes,” he continued. “Lucky for you. A young rifleman, if he’s at all handy, will be able to do it in less than half that time. If I were you, I’d hurry up and start digging.”

I grabbed a pick by the handle — it weighed more than a dead man — and attacked the strip of lime for all I was worth.

“If you please!” said Armand. “Adjust your chin strap and the cuirass.”

“But why was your brother shooting at me?” I cried.

“Because it was his turn. Now it’s mine.” And he went to take the loaded rifle from Zeno.

The helmet they had given me was more like something from the fifteenth century than our own, with a visor and long earflaps, also made of iron, all extremely heavy. I was still struggling to adjust the cuirass when I heard another report. I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Promise you’ll only shoot with caps!”

They both laughed.

“Truce!” I said, raising my hands in the air. “I stop digging, you stop firing, and you can give me some coaching in that Mystère you keep mentioning.”

“And what do you think le Mystère is?” asked Armand.

They fired at me again. I hastened my digging. If I could make a sufficiently deep hole, at least I would have some protection from the bullets. Once the earth was fairly well broken up, I grabbed the shovel.

“Other way, cadet!” shouted Armand. “Shovelfuls are cast in the direction of the enemy. That way you’ll have a mound of earth to conceal you more quickly.”

I said nothing for a moment as I took in the instructions. Another shot. I began digging even more frenetically. It isn’t until you try making a hole to fit an entire body in that you realize what a task it is. Roots as thick as arms appeared.

“Roots!” I cried in desperation. “How do I cut them?”

Everything I said struck the brothers as hilarious.

“Well, of course there are roots! So it goes with this strange French soil of ours: The roots grow beneath the ground, not over it,” said a laughing Armand, thrusting the ramrod down the rifle’s barrel.

“No scissors?” shouted Zeno, getting in on the joke. “No? Shame! Well, now you know what your job is before bedtime: Sharpen your spade, precisely for this hallowed task.”

I continued to dig, down on my knees now so as to make a less visible target of myself. More shots. One so close that soil erupted over my helmet. I finally managed to open up a cavity into which I could just about fit. I was gasping and exhausted.

Armand came over. “Cadet: Change out of those clothes, wash your face and your armpits, and to the study room.”

I was defeated. And that first day, after Fieldwork, I still had to carry on paying attention in class.

“Obey and Command” had to do with a classical precept of Quintus Ennius, Appian, or some such Roman or Greek: “Before you can command, you must learn to obey.” The subject came to be an addendum to Practical Fieldwork, the idea being that the blisters on your hands would help instruct you about what you might reasonably expect from men.

History classes. For the Ducroix brothers, “Universal” History was the history of France; France and who else? Ah, yes, don’t forget France. Then there was a trifling corner, somewhere beyond the king’s borders, an unimportant wayside known as “the world.” This far-off land merited a tenth of the lessons, and then only when the Parthians were laying siege to Palmyra, or when Cato said to the Roman senate that in order to ensure a good crop of prickly pears, Carthage would have to be sown with salt. To begin with, I made my skepticism clear, but one day, when Zeno claimed that Arquimedex (they pronounced and wrote it like this, with an X at the end) had Gallic origins, I did not stop him. In general, the French are more open-spirited than people think. True, you shouldn’t ever attempt to convince them that perhaps, only perhaps, and according to the opinion of some cartographers who know a little about the subject, Paris is not at the geographical center of Planet Earth. They will not argue with you but simply think you are a poor lost soul.

Being the good Frenchmen that they were, they started with the siege of Alesia. Caesar surrounded Alesia with a twenty-mile-long palisade and then another around that, twice as long, to stop reinforcements from getting in. What did I care about Alesia, Caesar, and Vercingetorix? Hard as I tried, at that point in the never-ending day, my eyelids began to droop, and my arms became deadweights. I rejoiced when supper was announced! Before going to the dining hall, I asked them: “Were you really shooting at me?”

“Well,” said Zeno, “we try to create a situation with the haze of smoke, and the havoc, of an actual war. We don’t necessarily aim at the body.”

“But you could have killed me! At a hundred feet, a rifle is hardly accurate.”

Shrugging, they continued their conversation. Those Ducroix! What a pair.

Usually, I ate on my own in the kitchens. By the time I came to sit, the servants had been abed a good while. In my corner were fruit and a small cooking pot; I served myself. My fingers were trembling from wielding those hulking picks and spades. The edges of the helmet had chafed my temples, as though I’d been wearing a crown of thorns. At around midnight, when I was just biting into an apple, Armand appeared. “Cadet, outside.”

“You’re joking,” I snapped. “But I’m more dead than alive!”

“I believe I remember you yourself agreeing to the study plan,” said Armand. “Do you think your enemy cares a jot as to your physical and mental state?” He examined my head. “I suggest that you put some wadding around your head before putting the helmet back on. That’s what wadding was invented for. Go on, then, allez!”

And back to the field we went.

Once I was in the hole, I had to dig following the line of lime. I don’t think I could have covered even ten feet in an hour. The pick, the spade, the helmet. Those round wicker baskets, which I had to call fajinas or be punished. Fajina, fajina, more fajinas. And the brothers’ rifle. Each time a fajina appeared, full of earth and forming a parapet beside the trench, Armand would take aim. And those were the conditions I had to work in! I learned very quickly to hide my hands, holding the fajina by the base and from behind, so as not to give the shooter a target.

Next day, more of the same. Drawing, studying, fieldwork, studying, fieldwork, retreat practice. And back to the beginning again. I did not have it in me to try and importune Jeanne, I was that shattered. I fell leadlike into bed every night and woke only when the castle bells rang out — very sonorous they were, and positioned (by design, no doubt) — directly above my room. And this was merely the beginning.

As tutors, I have to say, the Ducroix brothers were the best; their methods, the most demanding. Pay attention! Spherical Room. Be constantly attentive, whether in there or in any other place! Geometry. Ballistics. Mineralogy. Fieldwork. Allez!

One day, a fortnight in, I came close to insurrection. It rained the whole day through; plainly, that was no obstacle to the unaltered continuation of field drills. The pick sank into the trench wall, but the earth, compacted by the rain, didn’t budge. My body was covered in a thick sludge, a ballast of viscid mud I had to haul around, becoming heavier and heavier. The rain came down ever harder, torrential cascades pouring over the edges of my helmet. There was a foot of water covering the ground, and my shoes were full up. To top things off, the drill lasted half an hour longer than usual. I remember looking skyward, up at those filthy weeping clouds. The skies of France, ah, yes, that gray so sweet and cruel. A shot hitting the cylinder of one of the fajinas brought me back to reality.

By the end, I was so destroyed that I could not lift myself out of my hole, which had been growing deeper, wider, and more than anything, longer. Armand did not deign to help me out. I managed to get my arms and head out, complete with that cumbersome helmet, the thick drops of rain bouncing off it.

“And you want me to be constantly attentive?” I protested. “But dear God! Do you not see, if I die, there is little chance of my paying any attention to anything!”

Armand knelt down on the edge of the trench, his nose right up close to my iron visor. The delicate man I thought I’d met that first day had quite disappeared. Even the rain seemed to fall on him in a respectful manner, running down the bald sphere of his head and, when it reached his cheek, draining neatly off through his goatee.

“As long as you are alive, you must pay attention. And as long as you pay attention, you’ll stay alive. Now, out of the trench.”

“I cannot.” I held out my hand to him. “Help me, I cannot.”

“Not true. You can. Do it.”

“I cannot!”

He shrugged and got to his feet, shouldering the rifle. “Given that you insist on this laziness, I hereby suspend my academic powers. I can give orders to a thinking mind, never to a stomach or a back. And given that your belly prefers fasting over dinner, and your back the mud rather than a decent bed, well, I wish you a very good night, my dear cadet.”

Lightning and thunder. Off he went, while I fell asleep where I was, snoozing in the rainy mire. I was so broken, I didn’t have the energy to take off my helmet.

Next morning, I was awakened by a kick, and thus another day began, just the same as if I had enjoyed a refreshing sleep.

Drawing. What’s that ink stain? Slap. Pay attention, always pay attention, ma petite taupe, my little blind mole! Physics, mathematics, this, that, the other. Languages, a hateful subject, according to the Ducroix brothers, but essential, given that certain unfortunates hailing from England, Spain, Austria, and in general, the backwaters of the world, bizarre as it may have seemed, had yet to learn French. As ever in Bazoches, the titles of the disciplines had shades within them, because aside from English and German, they were also teaching me the language of engineers.

Among the Maganons there was a gestural code they could use to communicate secretly among themselves in public. They spoke using signs, and it was a language so elaborate that there was nothing, neither technical nor worldly, that it couldn’t be used to express. I was introduced to this unwillingly, not to say discontentedly, but later learned how useful it could be.

In the deafening clamor of battle, to be able to communicate with one’s hands is a very helpful thing. “Pull back,” “Ammunition!” “Get down, there’s a sniper to your left.” These, the Ducroix brothers told me, from small beginnings had become ever more sophisticated, developing into a great Maganon secret.

Now, gentle reader, picture an engineer about his work. His superior officer (an engineer) introduces him to the fortress commander. In public, the chief of engineers proclaims to the recent arrival: “General so-and-so, to whom not even Corbulo in his sieges of Armenian strongholds could have held a candle!” But at the same time, by moving his fingers and hands around, he is saying: “This man, here to my right, is nothing but a know-it-all. Pay him no mind. Any silly order he gives, agree to but be sure to disobey; come and ask me, and I’ll tell you what really must be done.”

I had to learn this sign language at a rate of twenty signs a day. This to begin with. Then it went up to thirty, forty, and even fifty. What was that? Still can’t make yourself understood in the arsenal? How are we going to make sure the artillery has what they need when munitions are running low? Slap! Wake up! Out to the field! Spherical Room.

I do not believe anything could be so enervating to a man as that systematic and uninterrupted combination of physical and mental exertion. And even if I shut my eyes, I had to be just as attentive at all hours. Take that! Back in the Spherical Room, open your eyes! Cadet Zuviría, when will you learn the simple thing that is to use your eyes! To the field! Allez! Allez! And so on, day after day after day.

5

The first month in Bazoches was like a nightmare I awoke into every day — I have no other way to describe it. You might ask: How did I bear it? My answer is, the best way to make the unbearable bearable is a combination of equal parts love, equal parts terror.

The terror, I barely need say, was provided by my father. That was his function; I never had the sensation of being treated as a son. As a child, I felt only aversion for him. When he was called away on business, farther into the interior of the Mediterranean, I couldn’t have been happier. I later came to learn the underlying reasons for his embittered character, and this softened my memories of him.

Peret (more on him later) said he had never seen a man so in love as my father had been with my mother. Hard for me to believe, for I knew the man in two moods only: irate and very irate. Always that dour face, taciturn, bearded, off elsewhere in his thoughts, especially if it was the two of us dining together in the meager candlelight. Such a miser he was, he even scrimped on wax.

When I arrived into the world, his life plummeted. Not because of me but because my mother died giving birth to me. He never forgot her. Bitterness was a ballast weighing him down inside — a visible tumor, constantly there. He took refuge in his work, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to carry on.

The port of Barcelona was a very active one and had trade links with the whole of the western Mediterranean. My father, a minor stockholder in a maritime company of twenty or thirty members, a widower and therefore with fewer familial responsibilities than the other associates, often sailed to finalize contracts and strengthen ties with their counterparts — in the Balearic Islands, and in Italy and its surrounding islands. In a business like his, in which client and stockist saw so little of each other in person, it was vital that ties of friendship and business be constantly maintained and renewed. (Everybody knows what Italians are like, forever prattling with their kisses, smiles, embraces, and feeble promises of eternal friendship.)

Let us simply say that, in legal terms, he put himself in a position of care toward me without ever having the slightest involvement with me as a human being. At least that was my experience. He beat me often, though for that I never blamed him; I deserved all those clouts, and many more besides. Curious, but a child will never complain so much about the beatings given as the embraces withheld. He embraced me only when it was my birthday — though I knew full well it wasn’t me he was drawing close to him but, rather, my mother. On that day he would become bestially drunk, would weep and squeeze me tight — like a bear mumbling her name — hers, never mine.

I shall say that, to his credit, in this world of illiterates, he spent everything he could on my education, though even the best schools in Barcelona were all a calamity. For professors, we had curmudgeonly priests who, in their own words, treated us pupils as “sinning, rot-destined sacks of flesh.”

My father spent half his time at the port or away on voyages, so he contracted the services of Peret to take care of me. The logical thing would have been for my father to find a buxom nurse for me and, since he was master, have his way with her every now and then. But it ended up being Peret, simply because no one cost less.

Even the Italians have sayings about the stinginess of the Catalans. But if my father were the measure of our nation’s stinginess, I can assure you, they didn’t know the half. I got a beating one day for throwing out a candle that had less than half a thumb’s length of wax remaining. Ah, and there was the time he learned of a ship that, because of issues with the cargo, had weighed anchor with six tenths of the hold empty — bluer than a duck egg he turned that day.

Peret was a scraggedy old wretch. Before I was born, he had worked as a stevedore at the port for my father and his associates. All he earned, he spent on drink. When he became too old to carry bulky things, they kicked him out of the shipping company for a layabout and a drunk. He had a long, wrinkled neck and a bald head, like a vulture’s. After leaving the company, he circulated the alleyways and lanes of Barcelona’s Ramblas, peddling knickknacks, his back so bent he gave the impression of being a mushroom forager. In return for a bare room and a miserable wage, my father brought him in to take charge of me and the household.

Poor Peret. I do not believe there can have been a human being more ill treated by a child. He’d go to bed and I’d fill up his shoes with dung; this he’d find out when he put them on the next morning. He had to wait to go out in the street before realizing I’d painted his enormous hooked nose red. If he ever threatened to hit me, I’d threaten to tell my father about him pilfering from the domestic allowance.

In spite of all, Peret was the only substitute for my mother whom I ever knew. It was impossible for me not to feel fond of the man who combed my hair, dressed me, and showed me affection — far more than my father ever did. I remember that Peret cried a lot — that being his only defense against my abuses and extortions.

When I turned twelve, my father considered what to do with me. The normal thing would have been to send me to one of the Carmelite colleges in Barcelona, but they persuaded him to send me to their headquarters in France, a far more adequate place. He agreed, as it truly was a good school for the son of a businessman; also, it would put me out of sight. I did not blame him. The mutual distance was a relief to us both. At twelve, I looked seventeen, and at some point soon it was going to come to blows between us.

I have already related what passed with the Carmelites in France. Given that for two years now, our only contact had been through letters, when I got to Bazoches I wrote to tell him the news and to let him know my new address. (The expulsion I kept to myself — it would only lead to further questions — I told him it had been a decision made with my future interests in mind, and so on.)

His reply arrived soon after.

What’s all this about castles and a marquis? What makes you want to be an engineer all of a sudden? The bridges over the sea are boats, and we have these in the company. You were supposed to be learning numbers. If I find you are playing tricks on me, young man, I’ll tear you limb from limb.

Next came the friendliest part of the letter:

Precocious boy that you are, you’re doubtless beginning to have feelings for girls now. Beware. Father a bastard, you’ll get not a single peso from the grandfather. Are we clear, cap de lluç?

Cap de lluç is impossible to translate; literally, it means head of hake, but in Catalan is more along the lines of hopeless idiot.

The good part was the surprising mildness of his tone. Being the man he was, if he had been truly angry, he would have ordered me to return immediately to Barcelona, where the belt and a blessed beating would await. As it was, he enclosed the money to cover my studies for several months to come. In my letter, I’d said that Bazoches was twice as expensive as the Carmelites, in theory to sound him out, but to my surprise, he let me have the money with no complaint.

Well, he hit the nail on the head in suspecting me of tricking him. On the first day, I had asked the Ducroix brothers what payment was expected for my schooling. It was the only time I ever saw them take offense.

“Cadet! What, think the marquis needs funding by you? It is he who shall remunerate you during your stay. Thereby, you will be seen as very knavish indeed should you ever choose to criticize this house once you have left its walls.”

A very noble stance — I couldn’t have agreed more. If an aristocrat’s honor proved lucrative to others, who was I to complain? While in Bazoches I’d receive money from Vauban and from my father, double what those Carmelite dolts were getting before. I could make a little corner for myself, as the Catalan saying goes. (Though, given my circumstances, there wouldn’t be much for me to spend it on!)

I’m feeling sorry for myself, and I would not want to be thought a complainer. Because Bazoches was a veritable Noah’s Ark, but one that was filled with guides to thinking instead of animals. And I was sufficiently clever to realize this.

Beneath the Burgundy sun, I grew into a good-looking, muscular youth. My efforts were tempered by the strains of pick and shovel (and lemon juice, gah!). After a few months in my pit, I was handling the sapper’s instruments like kitchen utensils. And most important: I was absorbing rare know-how.

There might have been one or two hundred people in all the world with a better knowledge than mine of the subjects pertaining to Bazoches. The Ducroix brothers, to their great credit, made my education involving for me, and soon it was me pestering them to tell me everything, everything. Tiredness converted to hunger; the more exhausted I was, the more keen to get on with the next lesson. Once I’d gotten my head around the rudiments of engineering, I began to seek alternatives and improvements myself. More than that: Love has the underappreciated merit of also spurring a desire to learn.

For Jeanne was the other thing motivating me, keeping me alive and awake. With regard to the educational value of desire, I here present an example:

I was walking in a small wood one day alongside Armand. In Bazoches, the cultivation of “attention” was by no means limited to sight. Sometimes, on walks in the countryside, I was made to list all the sounds I could hear. Until a person concentrates, the sheer amount of detail our ears offer us goes totally unnoticed. The air, the murmurs of hidden water sources, the noise of invisible insects, the ringing out of the tools of some faraway labor. .

Armand slapped my nape. “And the bird? You’ve missed that. Are you deaf?”

“But I’ve counted six different birdsongs!”

“What about the seventh?”

“Where?”

“Behind on your left, a hundred and fifty feet or so away.”

At times, I must say, his demands upset me. “How am I supposed to hear a tiny sound like that, coming from behind me, and at such a distance?”

“By focusing on it. This is why you were given ears.” Armand then turned his hearing in the direction of this invisible bird—“a hundred and fifty feet or so away”—and when I say “turned,” I mean physically moving his ears, as would a dog!

“Learn to use your muscles” was his answer to my look of surprise. “That they are atrophied does not mean their use may never be recuperated. Let’s go.”

He obliged me to do it. We spent a good while standing silently in those woods. I tried moving my ears under Armand’s watchful gaze. No easy thing — don’t believe me, try it for yourselves! What did move were my cheeks or my crinkled-up forehead. Nothing, only ridiculous expressions. I gave up.

I sat down at the foot of a tree with my hands on my head. There was a mushroom a foot to my right. It was the only time I came truly close to giving up. That which two months of hard disciplinary exercises had not managed, this infantile one nearly had.

What was I doing there, in that corner of France, taking orders from a couple of old lunatics? Breaking my back in some pointless trench, my brain chock-full of drawings, angles, geometry — and for what? To be duped out in the middle of some wood, pouring my all into the sublime, halfwit art of waggling my ears.

“I’ll never be an engineer, never,” I said to myself — thinking out loud, like the Ducroix brothers.

“Martí, lad,” Armand said, “you’ve made decent progress.”

He knelt down beside me. It was unusual for him to use my name and not the typical scathing “cadet” or “blind mole.” The Ducroix brothers knew when they’d gone too far, and then, only then, would they show me a little affection.

“Not true,” I protested like a child. “I see nothing and hear less. How am I ever going to build fortresses or defend them?”

“I said you’ve made decent progress,” he said. And putting on a sudden barracks tone, he gave me an order: “Cadet, on your feet!”

I had sufficient respect for the Ducroix brothers to jump up, desolate though I felt.

“What is behind you, immediately behind the tree you were sitting beneath?”

I described the vegetation, including every single branch: those snapped and hanging down, and those that stood straight up, including the number and colors of leaves on each. I didn’t think this any great thing.

“Very good,” said Armand. “Five hundred feet straight behind you, what else is there?”

I answered immediately. “A woman. Strolling, carrying flowers. She has a bunch with red and yellow buds in one hand — forty-three flowers, I think. At the speed she was going, I believe by now she’ll have picked forty-five.” Sighing, I whispered: “She has red hair.”

A natural thoroughfare in the woods led to the clearing we found ourselves in. A few hundred feet beyond this, the trees opened out onto a green field in which, half a minute earlier, I had seen Jeanne walking.

“Do you see?” said Armand. “When we want to, we can pay attention. Your problem is that, had it been a lame old woman with a hunchback and no teeth, you wouldn’t have noticed her. But, and I’m sure you’ll agree, each is just as visible. And for carrying messages between enemy lines, the enemy will always choose the hunchbacks over the redheads. Precisely because no one notices them.”

The Ducroix brothers had realized my feelings toward Jeanne from day one, of course. Armand sighed and clapped me on the cheek twice, though I didn’t know if this was meant as consolation or recrimination.

“If you want to become an engineer,” he said, “you have to be constantly paying attention, and for that, what you need to fall in love with is reality, the world around you.”

That night I went down to Jeanne’s room. I knocked twice, lightly. She did not open the door. I went back the following night. I knocked three times. She did not open. Another night: I knocked three times and then, leaving an interval, a fourth. She did not open. I didn’t go back the next night. But the following night, I gave five little knocks.

Now is when I describe how Jeanne and I fell into each other’s arms. How I seduced her, or she seduced me, or how I believed I’d seduced her when in truth it was the other way around, or vice versa, or how it all happened at once. You know, love, all that. The thing is, I’ve never felt comfortable with love poetry, and I have no notion of how to tell it prettily.

All right, listen: Between the practice field and the castle, there stood a hayloft. Picture Zuvi and Jeanne up in the top, on a bed of dry straw, nude and one mounting the other, and vice versa.

So there you have it.

The Vauban family rarely gathered at Bazoches all together. When they did, curiously, those were the days when I was afforded most time with the marquis. And, using the excuse that he was giving me some practical guidance, he was able to free himself from his dull relations, of whom the only one he could bear was his cousin Dupuy-Vauban. Sometimes they allowed me to accompany them on long walks through the countryside.

Dupuy-Vauban, whom I will henceforth call “Dupuy” so as not to confuse my imbecile of a transcriber, was one of the five greatest engineers of the century. If anything can explain the fact he has, unjustly, not gone down in history, it’s his close kinship with the marquis, who inevitably eclipsed him. He was an exceptional, loyal, modest, and unassuming man, virtues of no use in gaining earthly glory. At the end of his military career he had sixteen wounds upon his body.

I always liked seeing him. Dupuy was to me an example and an inspiration, as well as a link between Martí the student and the great marquis. Though far the younger of the two, the marquis treated Dupuy as an equal. I felt like a child in their company — a child growing up amongst geniuses. Just as newborns understand nothing of their parents’ speech, to begin with the idiom of engineering was gibberish to me. But as my studies progressed, I began to join in the discussions. One of my most satisfying moments at Bazoches was afforded me by Dupuy, during one of these country walks. Halting, he said to the marquis: “My God, Sébastien! I do hope you inserted the clause into this young snip’s study contract!”

“The clause?” I said. “What clause?”

“The one prohibiting him from taking part in any siege in which Dupuy is on the other side!”

They both laughed. As did I. How could I ever possibly take aim at men such as these?

On one occasion, Dupuy was unable to attend one of the family reunions; he was taking part in a siege, in Germany. Vauban must have thought I was sufficiently advanced to accompany him, for the two of us strolled out together, alone.

“Well then?” he said to me. “Do you find your studies to be coming along adequately, cadet Zuviría?”

“Fabulously well, monsieur,” I replied — and meant it. “The Ducroix brothers are exceptional teachers. I have learned more in these few months than my whole life.”

“I can sense a ‘but’. .” prompted Vauban.

“I’m not complaining,” I replied, again sincerely. “Only, I don’t see how Latin, German, and English apply. And even Physics and Surveying strike me as having hardly anything to do with engineering. Monsieur! I spend hours with a bandage across my eyes trying to guess, just by the texture, the kind of sand or stones they place in my hands. Though I have almost grown eyes in my fingers, I fail to see the use to my learning as a whole. . ”

“The whole is you,” he interrupted. “Let us walk.”

In Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban’s view, all of military history can be summarized as an eternal dispute between attacker and defender. The invention of the cudgel was followed by that of the breastplate; that of the sword, the shield; the lance, armor. The more powerful the projectiles, the more stalwart became the means for defending against them.

If there’s one thing men have sought to protect more avidly than their bodies, it is their homes. If we look carefully, the great battles have all been attempts to keep combat at a distance from the hearth. Cain mashed Abel’s head with a lump of stone, this is true, but what the Bible omits to mention is that the following day Cain attacked his brother’s home, stole his pigs, violated his wife, and put his children into bondage.

Fire versus caves. Ladders versus wooden stockades. Siege towers versus ramparts made of stone. However, one day this unsteady equilibrium was thrown out of kilter.

A moment came when defense turned into a form of attack. Fortification techniques had outstripped those available to the attacker. However large the rocks hurled by catapults, onagers, and trebuchets, any city — if its engineers had the resources to erect sufficiently stout ramparts — would be invulnerable. That city existed, and its name was Constantinople: the last, splendorous stronghold of the Eastern Roman Empire. Over centuries, each emperor would pass on to his successor a widening of the ramparts.

From the point of view of a military engineer such as Vauban, classical Constantinople was ancient civilization’s crowning achievement. Its megalithic stone ramparts stood three hundred feet high, and towers and storehouses studded the inside edges.

Decadent Byzantium was invaded on many occasions, but those Herculean ramparts were never breached. All peoples, from East and from West, attempted it, and all were unsuccessful. Over the centuries it resisted twenty-five sieges! Germans, Huns, Avars, Russians — even the Catalans tried in medieval times, lest we forget. But in 1453 something happened that changed the course of engineering, war, history, and, therefore, all humanity.

In Turkey, or thereabouts, there lived a sheikh who got it in his mind to take Constantinople. Vauban had a portrait of the man on a wall at Bazoches. He said this was so as never to forget that one must always respect one’s enemy, little as he may merit it, and, should he indeed merit it, one must go so far as to admire him. In the portrait, the Suleiman in question wore a turban on his head and was smelling a flower. He had a cruel, spine-crumbling gaze.

The story goes that, when he was still a young man, he fell in love with a Greek woman who was being held prisoner. He kept her with him inside his tent for three full days and nights. The soldiers began to mutter among themselves, calling him henpecked, a milksop, that sort of thing. Once he had spent a while enjoying the girl, the sheikh found out about the rumors. He dragged the poor Byzantine girl out of the tent and — pam! — slit her throat with his scimitar. Then, with the army in formation before him, he bellowed the words: “Who out of you will follow this sword of mine, so powerful it severs even the bonds of love?”

The sheikh’s onslaughts initially comprised the usual: thousands of Janissaries roasted, scalded with boiling pitch, and to a greater or lesser degree, taken to pieces at the foot of the ramparts.

But then a small group of Hungarian and, mainly, Italian engineers (those Italians, always making trouble!) offered their services to the Moorish king. And this sheikh charged them with designing the largest cannon ever known.

Gunpowder was in use by that time, although in battle merely as fireworks, which would frighten the less battle-hardened and aid the morale of one’s own side, but little else. But this Turk was very — very — serious about cannons. The result was the Great Bombard, a thirty-foot-long cannon. Once it was assembled, a team of three hundred bullocks was needed to pull it to Constantinople. They covered no more than a mile and a half of ground a day, it was so heavy. But they got there in the end.

The Great Bombard fired half-ton balls of stone. As hard as the Byzantines tried to fill the breaches, what could they do against this? One discharge would be followed by another and another. And though it was hard to be accurate with the Bombard, it was impossible to miss ramparts that high and vertical.

Everybody knows the rest. The Turks poured through the breaches, the Byzantine emperor died fighting on the front line. Throughout Europe, engineers shuddered — for, from that moment on, what use were ramparts? Fortifying a city was a very costly affair, and kings were not prepared to spend fortunes on useless works. The big question was: Now how to protect our cities? (And in private: Now how to conserve our wages as royal engineers?)

Formulas were devised, proposals made, the majority of them unreliable, confused, doubtful. And the only mind ever to succeed in solving all aspects of the problem was the man strolling at my side: Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban.

Given that pyroballistics had become the principal threat to city ramparts, in order to protect against them, everything had to be reinvented. Vauban glanced at me inquisitively. “Well? What would you do in such a case, Cadet Zuviría?”

What a question. I had not the faintest idea. “I’m afraid I don’t know, monsieur,” I mused aloud. “How to avoid a bombardment by artillery? Only two formulas occur to me: attacking the cannons or hiding from them. Attacking would seem like suicide. If cannons can destroy the strongest ramparts, what would they do to human flesh? As for fleeing, that would save the garrison but condemn the city. And there is no way to hide ramparts.”

Vauban clicked his fingers. “The last one you said. You were on the right track.”

I had to stop myself from laughing. “But monsieur, how to hide the entire walled perimeter of a city?”

“By burying it.”

6

In the Middle Ages, city ramparts were tall and vertical. The thicker the ramparts and the taller the battlements, the stronger the defenses. And to make them even stronger, there you had your turrets all the way around.

The might of medieval ramparts was there for all to see, and to this day, they are so associated in people’s minds with the idea of what a fortress is that if we ask a child to draw a picture of a rampart, he’ll do one in the old style, even though he has never seen one like that, rather than a modern one, the kind he spends every day playing at the foot of.

Vauban turned traditional fortress-making principles on their head by introducing more of a slope to his ramparts, at times to an incline of sixty degrees; the angle meant that cannonballs would bounce off rather than punch through. Given that cannonballs tended to skew off in all directions, they were extremely inaccurate.

Moreover, the height of medieval ramparts had become a disadvantage, so that the Vaubanian system built them behind a very deep concealing moat. In certain of Vauban’s projects, the fortifications stood even lower than the town buildings. This produced a curious effect: An army approaching the city would barely be able to make out the defenses, but the civil buildings behind would be in plain sight.

I include a print to give a better idea. (This one, you German flabber face. Here! Not before, not after. Here!)

The medieval turrets, at intervals along the walled enclosures, came to be replaced by bastions. A bastion was a sort of smaller fort embedded in the walls, normally five-sided. See, in this next image, the spear point construction sticking out from the ramparts?

This is a basic bastion, in fact a rather unassuming one in terms of its size. The bastions in the larger fortresses would be gigantic, immense bulks garrisoned by up to a thousand men, with dozens of cannon and underground ammunition stores inside. In the fortifications built by the modern Maganons, thus, the ramparts were protected by bastions, and these in turn provided one another with covering fire.

Let us imagine that an invader decides to try to take the stronghold. The bastion has been expressly designed with five sides. The attackers will have no choice but to scale one of the outwardly projecting bastion walls. Whichever they choose, the adjacent bastions will cover their fellow defenders with sustained fire. As the attackers advance, arrows and cannonballs will rain down from the ramparts and the bastions, as well as thousands of liters of burning pitch.

If, rather than the bastions, they attack one of the rampart’s central portions, they’ll have an even worse time of it. The poor fools who go down into the moat will never get out. They’ll be fired on from three sides: from the rampart, and from the covering bastions to the left and right.

Cross fire. Two words that, on paper, are just an engineer’s design concept. But when ink becomes stone, these two words become the light of a very hell.

Cross fire! Hundreds, thousands, of uniforms descending into and rising out of an everlasting ditch, fired at, bombarded, exterminated by an invisible army. The ditch may have been flooded or, as in most cases, packed with sharpened stakes over five feet in length. Those who impaled themselves would have to be clambered over by the rest until, finally, any advance would become impossible. If the attack were by a small troop, not a man would be left alive; if it comprised thousands, the ditch would fill up with writhing bodies.

This callous marvel to which Vauban gave his name could be multiplied infinitely. For still more protection, a “moon” or “half-moon” fortification could be set before one of the flat sections. Before they could attack the rampart’s first line, the invader would have to expend thousands of projectiles to demolish the half-moon. And in the unlikely case that it was taken, the defenders would draw back to the next rampart, raising the drawbridges after them.

And the game would begin again, the fallback still viable. The attackers would have succeeded in taking only an outcrop — at a cost of hundreds of dead. What resources could they call on to resume the attack? Moons, half-moons, ravelins, pincers. . an endless variety of defensive architecture that does not bear describing to the uninitiated. In any case, anyone who wants to can look up the technical details of a fully equipped armature.

Undeniably, the fortified architecture of our time has a certain charm. Ours is the art of making the useful beautiful. Geometric lines, clear-cut and clean. Formally ascetic, they conceal nothing. They are what they are: defenses. And all the beings in this trifling universe of ours seek security in a hostile world. In peacetime, civilians may stroll beneath them, happy and safe, secure in the feelings offered by these bastions with their angular defiles, these colossi crouching like immutable sentinels. It is not that the Vaubanian fortification tends toward beauty but, rather, that beauty approaches its forms, yielding to them. Because when we contemplate them, that doubtful principle appears before our eyes, that unfounded faith: that there is order in the world, an order of goodness.

And in the following print, if this careless windbag puts it in the right place, allow me a poetic detail.

See the little sentry box at the top of the bastion, which looks like a figurehead? In French, this is called the échauguette. It is a sentry nest, safe from the elements. Beyond the purely functional, military engineers are not unaware of the aesthetic value of their work. And the échauguette is something like the cherry on the cake. The sole detail into which the designer could allow some vain expressiveness. Sometimes it would be delicately conical roofs with black or red slate tiles; at others, ramparts decorated with intricate stone carvings. I was passionate about a great many of them; their artistic value was far from negligible. I knew a Hungarian engineer who drew wonderfully well and whose hobby was sketching these échauguettes. And he was quite good at it.

What, when the enemy nears, is the first defensive measure to be taken? You blow up the échauguette with gunpowder, to deprive the enemy artillery of a reference point.

This always caused me a unique, inexpressible, ambivalent kind of pain. A city prepares to defend the homes contained within it, and what’s the first act? The sacrificing of the most exposed point of beauty.

A city before a siege is like an anthill that has been stepped on. Annibal ad portas! The churchbells ring out in warning. Farmers from the neighboring countryside come to take shelter, with family and livestock in tow. The garrison has soon taken up position. Munitions are distributed, the covers taken off the cannons, gunpowder deposits safeguarded.

But even in the midst of this uproarious tumult — when the duty officer shouts out for people to stand clear, that the échauguette is about to blow — every time, and I mean every time, the same happens: Everybody stops. Misty-eyed looks in the direction of the échauguette—the silence such that you could hear a match being lit. And then, boom! An instantaneous shift from the state of peace to the state of war. This boom is to a siege as Genesis is to the Bible. We Point Bearers (and, with heavy Miss Waltraud’s assistance, I’ll come directly to the meaning of the Points) had to be a cut above — we couldn’t be like other people. I hated the blowing of the échauguettes, but at the same time experienced the joy, the pleasure of the pain, to come.

Bazoches’s great error was to believe that the task of the warring Maganons could be dignified — elevated, even, to the saintly status of civilian art. Vauban’s belief was that by making war more technical, lives would be saved. Now, with the time that has passed, a great many massacres later, this altogether puerile notion seems sordid. But the marquis believed in it. Truly he did. I can’t blame him.

Coming to the end of our stroll, on which he related the history of Byzantium, he asked me a question. We had passed through green secluded meadows, wet with rain, on the outskirts of Bazoches. Crows squawked above our heads. Vauban stopped. “And you,” he said, “in this never-ending war, which side are you on? Are you for cannon or for bastion?”

“Monsieur, I do not know,” I replied, surprised. After hesitating for a moment, I added: “I suppose I am for whoever’s cause is just.”

He took hold of my right hand and turned it over as if about to tell my fortune, and then rolled up my sleeve. “Tell the Ducroix brothers they are to give you your first Point.”

I have summarized a good amount of Vauban’s teachings, but please do not think they were limited to one single walk in the country. In reality, there were many meetings, with him stopping in from time to time when I was in lessons or me being called to his study when he had a free moment or felt like enlarging on something or other. In any case, most of my learning was left to the Ducroix brothers to instill. They composed the text; Vauban applied the finishing touches.

Let us go back a little. These Points bear explaining. (At least my German mammoth seems to think so; chatterbox cockatoo that she is, she interrupts and demands that I go back to the mention of the first Point.)

The twins announced my first Point once I had made substantial progress. I stretched out my right arm on a table, palm up, and they applied the tattoo using irons — these seemed part scalpel, part torture instrument. They placed the first Point on my wrist, just where hand and forearm meet. “Point” is one way of putting it. The first was precisely that, a simple circle of indelible ink, dark violet in color, the application of which hurt like anything. The next, an inch higher up my forearm, was more sophisticated, like a plus sign but with the points joined by lines, like a weathervane. The third was a pentagon. Each Point was more elaborate than the last. From the fifth onward, the outline of a bastioned fortress began to take shape. If an engineer reaches perfection, the idea is to have ten Points, covering the whole of the forearm up to the crook of the elbow.

To get in ahead of the curious reader: No person on earth has ten Points. That is, no person is a Ten Points, to my knowledge. Which is not to say there is no person deserving—merely that the circle of Maganons was so small, so specialized and select, that anyone who might confer the ranking had been dead for decades. Well, I’m still going, a Nine Points. So what? I’m old enough to take on pupils by now. As if that were not enough, the Paris revolutionaries of today, the ones my insufferable Waltraud so admires, are even changing the traditional ways of waging war. On which I would say a few words.

At the beginning of my century, armies were made up of career soldiers (or mercenaries, whatever you prefer). Given that no such king had endless wealth, armies had relatively few men. This was why bastioned fortresses were so important, for they blocked invasion routes. If, instead of attacking them, an army chose to go around, putting the fortress at their rear, their lines of communication might be severed, and they would be caught in another kind of cross fire: between the enemy army and the garrison at the fortress, which would come out to attack from behind.

Nowadays Robespierre and his Paris popinjays have invented the levée en masse—murder en masse, more like. Armies currently stand ten or a hundred times larger than they were in my day. They can leave a number of regiments blockading a fortress, and send the others off ahead; they need not bother taking the fortress. This was why, in my day, there were twenty sieges to every pitched battle, and the majority of the latter were in order to force the lifting of a siege — or to prevent another. Now battles have become little more than tossing rank after rank against rifle and cannon, like feeding firewood into the flames. He with the biggest woodpile wins. The science of modern warfare brought us to this. Viva progress!

As for the mystery of the Points, in the world of Bazoches, these were a way of recognizing progress.

At a time when a polite greeting took the form of a light nod of the head, it was the engineers who were the first to go back to the Roman handshake. On clasping hands, they would turn the wrist very slightly, inconspicuously. Each would see the other’s Points and, in this way, work out where the other was positioned in an already decided hierarchy, saving much long-windedness, dispute, and misunderstanding. And believe me when I say how important this was when laying siege to or defending a stronghold. No matter the rankings doled out by the army, a Three Points was always subordinate to a Four Points, and so on. Career officers would perceive something amiss, but in general the Point Bearers were so practical and inscrutable, and military men such dullards, that the latter never cottoned on. Or it did not matter to them.

The Point Bearers’ hierarchy formed a core universal brotherhood. What a wonder, how galvanizing to the spirit, to stumble upon a complete stranger in Berlin or Paris, in the vast dales of Hungary or up in the Andean peaks scourged by blizzards, and suddenly, all this way from home, feel, with a simple turn of the wrist, as though by some magic, all that distance melt: two men joined by a mutual recognition. No thing in this world can replace that unique glance of complicity.

Do you know of what I speak, my dear vile Waltraud? No, of course you do not. But it isn’t complicated. Behind you sits my cat, enthralled by the fire. See the way he glances at me? That’s it.

And yet I did not fully comprehend the value of my tattoos. The Ducroix brothers gave me my second Point for counting chickpeas. Don’t laugh. I was fed up with the Spherical Room. To the back teeth! So much that I had not even realized the progress I’d made.

You have succeeded in becoming truly alert when, even as you are distracted, you remain alert. Do you take my meaning? Of course not. Nor, at one time, did I. It has to be internalized. At a certain point, you’ll think your mind wanders, but the alertness mechanisms are still on, keeping close track of things.

For lunch one day, I was given a plate of chickpeas. The Ducroix brothers were eating with me that day, and they noticed the second my mind began to wander. (They were right: I was thinking how the down on Jeanne’s cunt was exactly the same color as these chickpeas.)

Armand whacked me on the forehead with a ladle. “Cadet Zuviría! How many chickpeas on the plate? Answer immediately!”

I quickly ate a spoonful before answering: “There were ninety-one. Now, eighty-one.”

They were delighted. And I hadn’t made it up. I myself was not aware that I knew the answer — until they put the question to me. The mouthful I ate was to vex them, and to demonstrate that I was now being observant continuously, not just from time to time in isolated moments.

Each time I exited the Spherical Room, the question was always the same: “Cadet Zuviría, what was in the room?”

As much detail as I went into about the objects I’d seen hanging up, their distances from the floor, the gaps between them, the verdict would almost always be: “Pass, but not perfect.”

Eventually, one day, at the conclusion of my list, I paused and then added: “And myself as well.”

They had told me a thousand times that the observer forms a part of what is being observed. To my chagrin, it had taken me months to grasp that I also was one of the things in the room. Maybe this will seem a simple lesson in humility or even a not tremendously witty play on words. However, it was anything but.

As the enemy prepared to attack my bastion, I had to see everything, enumerate everything. Our rifles, theirs; the condition of our defenses, the number of cannons, the lengths and width of their parallels; and my fear. Nothing in the world distorts reality like a dose of terror. If I was unconscious of my fear, the fear would look instead of me. Or, as the Ducroix brothers would say: “Fear will cloud your sight, then it will be doing the looking instead of your own eyes.” The world is a killer; men die storming or defending ramparts. But in fact, the whole thing is no more than a minuscule white sphere, lost in some corner of the universe, indifferent to our troubles and pains. Herein, le Mystère.

I became a Three Points upon completing my long trench.

“Congratulations, Cadet Zuviría. You have earned your third Point,” Armand informed me. “Permit us, however, to qualify the value of the task you’ve completed. Having reached the edge of the field, you continued to dig the trench and place out the fajinas. This was well done, even though it meant the destruction of the bordering hedge. We gave no instructions for you to stop, and an engineer must always be obedient and resolute. Even so, didn’t you notice that the next field had been sowed for corn?”

“I did.”

“Correct. Someone digging a trench in private property, outside his own land, would never be punished — on a war footing, all land is in contention. But when the line of your trench met with the donkey pushing the plow, and the goodly man behind it — who, by the way, protested very vehemently at the incursion — did it not occur to you that the exercise was by now exceeding its teaching objectives?”

“No.”

“Correct. Orders are there to be obeyed, not questioned. Nonetheless, when this noble worker insulted you, did you really think it was the right thing to hit him with your shovel and throw him in the trench?”

“I did. The blow merely knocked the man out. To argue with him, I reasoned, would be to waste time. I also did it to keep him safe from the flying bullets. An engineer’s work is to protect the king’s subjects.” I sighed. “I dared do nothing for the donkey; I could, of course, have knocked it over as well with a strong blow to the head, but that would have been to put myself in the line of fire. I also could not have been sure it would fit inside the trench, it being very bulky and the trench narrow. My assessment was that the life of an engineer is worth more than that of a donkey, and so I left it to its fate.”

Armand and Zeno looked at each other doubtfully. I added: “The donkey appeared indifferent on the matter.”

The fourth Point was given to me after a session in the hayloft, one of the best moments in my long career — well, making hay while the sun shines, as they say.

One Sunday afternoon Jeanne and I were in the hayloft after making love, unclothed, and the rain was falling steadily, languidly, without. Jeanne, eyes closed, was dozing. Here was beauty. Her roseate skin, her red locks, reclining on a mattress of straw. . a vision in the sweet gray half-light of Burgundy. From out of my mound of clothes, I took a folder.

“I have written you some poems,” I said, and placed before her a sheaf of papers.

She opened her eyes, and her face lit up. Be a woman noble and high-ranking, or be she stinking peasantry, like my dear vile Waltraud, it is all one; someone says he has written a poem for her, she’s automatically over the moon.

She took up the sheets of paper. “And this?” she asked in amusement and surprise.

“A book of poems. Though there is only one that is worth anything, which is the one I completed yesterday and which won me my fourth Point.”

“Poems? But these are drawings.”

“And?” I said, offended. “The Ducroix brother school me in design, not versifying. But they are poems.” I drew closer to her. “They’re fortress designs. Are they to your liking?”

She didn’t dare make a show of her incomprehension, which was nonetheless plain to see. I laid the sheets out on the straw and went on. “My last blueprint is the best. Can you guess which it is? If you look closely, you’ll see it’s different from the others.”

Her eyes skipped between them.

“Give it a proper look!” I said. “You’re Vauban’s daughter. If you can’t understand it, who will?”

She looked at one of the sheets for a few moments. Then put it aside. Another and another. The rain continued to fall. As she was deciding between the drawings, my mind turned to the rain. It struck me that in wet countries, the rain could be used as a weapon against the besieging army. .

“This one,” she said finally. “Yes, this is the one.” She’d gotten it right. Her face resembled that of a child who had just learned to read. “This one is different from the others. They look like identical drawings but are not. It has something extra.” She looked at me. “What makes it different?”

“In this one,” I said, prodding the sheet of paper, “I created a fortress with the thought of you asleep in the middle of the city. And I defended you.”

Of the extensive Vauban family, the one who paid the fewest visits to the castle was Jeanne’s husband. It is my understanding that theirs was something of an arranged marriage, and the truth is, I did not find his presence unsettling.

It wasn’t out of any particular grievance that he kept far from Bazoches. He had simply turned his back on his wife, whom he paid no mind, but not in a hostile or abusive manner. Protocol stated that they had to sit side by side when eating at the great table. He paid considerably more attention to the saltcellar than to his wife (one of his numerous obsessions was a constant fear of running out of salt). When he passed by me, I could almost see the thoughts spilling from his head like sawdust.

Unless his family was supervising him, the man never washed. When he stayed in Paris for extended periods, not under their control, his nails would grow longer than a wolf’s. And his very fine clothing was always in tatters. The moment he arrived in Bazoches, he would have to be hurried out of sight and washed and clothed, for if the marquis saw him in that state, he was quite capable of expelling him. But, this much is true, he was extremely happy, perhaps the happiest man I have ever laid eyes upon. His particular mania was the philosopher’s stone. He was constantly on the verge of discovering the final piece in the puzzle. And is any man so happy as he who finds himself on the verge of a scientific revolution? Whichever track he was on would inevitably come to naught, and he’d be depressed for several days. But come the third day, he was back to his carefree, lively, and joyous self again, for he had uncovered another secret formula in some dusty tome.

As is so often the way, the cuckold became very friendly with his partner’s lover (unfortunately, but what to do?). I do not think he ever knew about Jeanne and me, and if he did know, he cared not a pepper. Much as I tried to avoid him, it was inevitable that sooner or later, he would collar me in some corner of Bazoches.

“My dear Zuviría!” I heard him exclaim one day before he approached and embraced me.

On this occasion he had been at the castle a whole week, an extraordinarily extended stay, bearing in mind the suddenness of his comings and goings. This was due to an old woman, a spirit medium in the town of Bazoches, to whom he was paying daily visits.

“I believe I have finally alighted on the definitive path that will lead us to the philosopher’s stone,” he went on. “The path was not in this but in the next world! Thanks to that old witch, I am able to converse with superior souls who give me guidance. Yesterday I set off alongside none other than Michel de Nostradame and Charlemagne.”

His liking for my company made a certain sense. His family had made up their minds about him already and sent him away whenever they could, while the servants were not at his level. With me, on the other hand, he could hammer on all he liked; as a student, I was somewhere between the two social extremes. For my part, it would have been highly indecorous of me to send a member of the Vauban family off to fry asparagus. So I had to bear his happy tirades, his mental raspberries, on the subject of the philosopher’s stone. Looked at with a little leniency, nor was it the heaviest load to bear. My obligations were limited to opening my eyes wide, every now and then letting out a “Can that be?” a “How interesting!” or even a “The world will shake with delight!” when my thoughts were: Enough now, fruitcake, I want to go and lie down with your wife.

The true philosopher’s stone was Bazoches. Ah, yes, Bazoches, pleasant Bazoches. The best days of my life; the most tender and full of hope. Joyous. And bear in mind that it is a life of ninety-eight years of which I speak, ninety-eight times around the sun. Though, during that time, something somewhat ominous also occurred.

Jeanne and I didn’t spend all our time together in secret dalliances. We were on occasion visited by an infantry captain, Don Antoine Bardonenche. I do not remember what the relation was between him and the marquis, but he was free to come and go at Bazoches as he pleased. A young man, supreme with the sword, he was stocky, with a jaw like an anvil and a very candid manner. His ideal was that of the knights errant, though in place of the tragic aspect, Bardonenche had an uproarious laugh. With his perfect manly deportment, he was one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen. Charlotte, Jeanne’s older sister, was hopelessly in love with him. Sometimes on a Sunday, the four of us, Jeanne and I, Bardonenche and Charlotte, would go for picnics in the meadows surrounding the castle. The two of them would engage in pretend swordfights, armed with sticks, laughing and tumbling innocently around for hours on end. I turned my Bazoches eyes on Bardonenche, to examine him, to ascertain what was hidden beneath that soldier skin of his, at once so boyishly voluptuous. Nothing — there was nothing. All his life was taken up in passion for weaponry and serving Louis XIV of France, whom the laypeople called the Sun King and his enemies called the Beast of Europe or, simply, the Beast.

One day when the marquis was abroad and — what news! — the Ducroix brothers were as well, we two couples made a carnival of the castle. We were still children, in spite of my studies, in spite of Jeanne’s marriage, in spite of the infantry captain’s uniform worn by Bardonenche. We played blind hen. When the blindfold was put on me, I followed the others without any difficulty. Thanks to my training in the Spherical Room, it was so easy to find them that I hardly needed eyes. I could smell their laughter, hear their smells. But, pretending I couldn’t, I let them get away for a little while. Suddenly, my hands were pushing on a hidden door behind a drape. I didn’t know why the door might be hidden like that, but with the blindfold on, it felt like less of an aberration to go ahead and enter.

Behind this door was a thin passageway. My hands felt along some wall brackets. Certain curious figures stood on these. I took off the blindfold; before me were reproductions, to scale, of the fortifications of every one of the cities and citadels of Europe.

Dear Lord, I knew what this place was. In Versailles the Beast had a store of designs, in miniature, of all the fortresses on the continent, toutes en relief. Should a day come when his generals needed to storm them, they had a replica so that the engineers could plan the best line of attack. Vauban, unbeknownst to the Beast, had built a similar room. Naturally, the marquis wasn’t going to show such a secret to a simple engineering cadet like me. Though my loyalty to him impelled me not to, something made me stay.

I looked at the model nearest to hand, a star shape with twelve bastions. It was beautifully made. Out of plaster, small pieces of wood, and porcelain, reproductions of fortresses from all corners of Europe had been constructed. The scales were exact, as were the angles of inclination for each of the bastion walls, the depth of the ditches. . Rivers, coasts, and marshes were indicated by a lighter or darker blue, depending on how deep they were and their distance from the ramparts. Elevations and gulleys in the land were depicted in brown, lighter or darker depending on the height. Numerical tables in the margins provided complementary information for the technical experts.

I closed my eyes, as though still playing blind hen. The reproductions were of such excellent quality that they could be identified by touch. Ath. Namur. Dunkirk. Lille. Perpignan. Most of them had been erected or rebuilt by Vauban. Besançon. Tournay. And Bourtange, Copertino, too, enemy strongholds spied on by minions of the Beast. Each fortress was star-shaped, and my fingers ran across their outlines, one after another, as if a Milky Way were contained in that magical room. I heard voices. Without, Jeanne and Bardonenche were calling for me. One last maquette, I thought, one more before I go back to them.

Eyes shut, then, I ran my fingers over one last series of medieval ramparts and ancient bastions. Everything suggested a venerable place thousands of years in the making. Interesting. More details: It was a port — no ramparts on the sea side. I pulled up. A shudder. I gulped. I knew those outlines.

For the first time in Bazoches, I was touched by a baleful presentiment. For every single thing at Bazoches was dictated by its usefulness, and if these designs were there, it was because one day, perhaps, they could be used to plan an assault. Opening my eyes, I looked upon this last maquette. It was Barcelona.

7

Have you ever hated a person the moment you laid eyes on him? Throughout the course of my life, I have had dealings with enough scoundrels, knaves, and lowlifes that if the devil were to gather them all in one maleficent reunion, they would fill the whole of the Mediterranean Ocean. But only one has merited my constant hate: Joris Prosperus van Verboom. See, here, a copy of his official portrait. Lovely-looking lad, wouldn’t you say?

When I met him, Verboom must have been a little shy of forty. His coarse demeanor and doggy cheeks put one in mind of a heartless butcher. I do not exaggerate. He had a bigoted sneer on his face, his features packed together as though he had not had his belly purged in years. Whereas the marquis’s severe aspect conformed to ideas of order and justice — strict but ultimately just — that of Verboom spoke of his utter hostility to inferiors.

Considering what happened later on, the world would have been a far better place had this man accepted living like what he truly was: a sausage-maker from Antwerp, with no need ever to really leave home. But leave he did, because what defined Verboom above all was that he was both sycophantic and ambitious — it fitted his demeanor perfectly. This was why so many powerful people clamored after him, and he was offered a great many cushy jobs; kings know that the vultures fly high, but never at the height of the eagles.

He’d never learned how to laugh. A trait that was very useful in his dealings with subordinates, because he intimidated them, but catastrophic when it came to women. To see him act the gallant was a pitiful sight, not to say grotesque. His disharmony with the feminine, with the whole sphere of the world not governed by simple obey-and-command, made him timid as a doe. To qualify: He would happily act the clown provided only his love object, and not his rival, were there to see. For there was Verboom, in the middle of the parade ground at Bazoches, trying to seduce my Jeanne with that ugly butcher’s mug of his.

I was on my way back from being out in the fields, looking a wreck, arms full of shovels and picks, when I saw them. The Bazoches observation techniques can be turned upon many facets of life, not just the engineering-based. I was a Four Points by then and needed only a look, a half-look, to surmise what this individual was after. Or, better put, whom.

Years earlier Verboom, the Antwerp butcher, had served under Vauban at a couple of sieges. This justified what was ostensibly a courtesy visit. Good excuse to strut about in his royal engineer uniform — ha! He was after bigger game. Jeanne was beautiful and rich, Vauban’s daughter, and married to a man who was close to being locked up in the attic of some merciful institution. As I approached, that sausage seller was asking after Vauban. When Jeanne said he was not at Bazoches, he said: “A shame — I changed my route in order to come and pay my respects.”

Spurious liar! All of France knew that Vauban was in Paris at that moment, conferencing with the ministers of the monstrous Sun King. Verboom had come to Bazoches precisely because the marquis was not at home — all the more leeway to woo Jeanne.

I came and stood right up close to the pair, staring at Verboom with all the brazenness of a madman. He was surprised at such impertinence from a mud-spattered youngster, but being there on a visit, and in front of a lady, he preferred to pay the lout no mind. Jeanne straightaway realized what this might have led to.

“Martí, go and get cleaned up,” she said. And then asked Verboom if he would like a light meal.

I carried on looking at him unblinkingly. And then said: “Don’t give him a thing — he will never be satisfied.”

In my defense, it was almost the Ducroix brothers speaking through me. Excepting Jeanne and brief talks with the servants, I spent my days with them alone and had caught their habit of thinking aloud. As the Ducroix brothers never tired of saying: “Children do not speak because they know how to think; they know how to think because they speak.” A person trained in keeping a constant grip on reality has no fear of speaking frankly. But high society, I forgot, is governed by falsity and censure.

Verboom’s face became inflamed, and by this I mean a physical phenomenon both real and remarkable. Ire affects some people in such a way that their facial muscles dilate outrageously. The thick meaty layers of Verboom’s face blew up like red bubbles. I should have been afraid. Instead, I had to make efforts to hold myself back.

Jeanne could see we were teetering on the edge of a disaster. “Martí!”

I had the pick and shovel over my right shoulder, and with my dirty sleeves falling back over my elbow, it meant my bare forearm was exposed. Verboom counted the four Points, and his incredulity made his fury double. He grabbed my wrist in one of his thick hands, brought it closer to his face, and said: “There must be some mistake.”

The pick and shovel fell to the floor, wood and iron reverberating as they struck against the stone. I, in turn, whipped around and with my left hand pushed back his right cuff. Verboom had only three Points. I clucked mockingly. “In your case, surely not.”

“How dare you lay hands on me, dungheap gardener!” he cried. “Let go!”

“More than happy to. When you let go of me.”

Pride meant he could not desist. He wanted to humble me, not let me go. He had a boulderlike strength, that of men born to inhabit naturally thickset frames. My muscles were worked, catlike, not an ounce of fat. In the most absurd manner, we found ourselves locked in a body press reminiscent of Turkish wrestling. Or perhaps not so absurd, for in truth men come to blows far more often over women than over questions of money, glory, or anything else.

It must be the time when I’ve come physically closest to the Antwerp butcher. Our noses were as good as touching. That close up, his coarse features clearly delineated his avaricious gluttony. The deep, dilated pores, and his dense sweat, like the muck a snail leaves in its wake.

Engaging in a fight with a man like Verboom is like scaling a mountain: You think the summit will never be reached, the ascent is endless. About to give in, you push on. Until, suddenly, there you are, setting foot on the peak.

Before caving in, Verboom let out a muffled cry. He knelt down on one knee and scanned my face in horror. I was about to lay my sapper boots across that pig’s head of his when a horde of his menservants pulled me away from him. Verboom was slack-jawed, humiliated. Jeanne tried to patch the thing up as best she could. She presented her excuses, swearing that I was nothing to her but an overly protective guardian. And a little unhinged, she had to add, because even being held back by four men, I continued to shout and struggle.

“Martí! Beg pardon of Sir Joris van Verboom. Now!”

Jeanne’s demand prompted the servants to loose their hold on me a little, and I took the chance to launch myself at him again. There was somewhat less swagger to Verboom on this occasion. He turned to run but, unfortunately, slipped and fell flat on the road. I grabbed him by an ankle and dragged him along as the servants tried to hold me back by the legs. Before they carried me away from there, I was able to sink my teeth into his left buttock. You should have heard him shriek.

Youthful impetuousness is, in part, formed by the inability to see the consequences of one’s actions. But if you are a student kept according to the grace of the lord of Bazoches, under his guardianship and in his pay, when you shred the pantaloons of a houseguest with your teeth, well, my boy, it makes sense that the master of the house will want to have words.

As if this were not enough, my brawl with Verboom had been badly timed. Vauban’s meetings with Louis XIV’s ministers had made it clear to him that he had been ostracized. It was purely a matter of form that they had invited him; every one of his suggestions — as to matters of both war and peace — had been rejected out of hand. He returned to Bazoches in a dog of a mood, and the first piece of news he heard was that his reputation as a host had been dented.

Darkly, the Ducroix brothers said to me: “Martí, the marquis wants to see you.”

Jeanne had gone before me. In his absence, the marquis left her to see to the running of the castle, and she was responsible for whatever went on. When I went in, they were in the midst of trading insults. I caught Jeanne saying: “But you yourself have stated a thousand times the low opinion you have of Verboom.”

“We’re not talking about him!” shouted the marquis. “He had crossed my threshold, he should have been provided for! And instead of that, we attack him, we take bites out of him!” Seeing me, he exclaimed, “Ah, here’s the brute!”

He marched over to me. For a moment I thought he was going to give me a slap. “What excuse can that deranged mind of yours offer?” he rebuked. “Answer! What led you to abuse a guest in my home?”

“He was a base man,” I answered.

The truth is sufficiently powerful that it can shock the most eminent of men. The marquis lowered his voice, though not by much.

“And have you not been taught that certain buffers exist between goodness and evil, namely manners? You left the pantaloons of a royal engineer in tatters!”

I wanted to say something, but he cut me off, becoming extremely vexed again.”Silence! I never want to lay eyes on you again! Jamais!” he roared. “You will go to your quarters and stay there until tomorrow, when the diligence carriage arrives. You will then travel on it to your home or to wherever you please. In any case, very far from Bazoches. Now, out of my sight!”

Up in my room, I head-butted the wall. Home! Without a qualification, with no credentials. My father would kill me. Worse, at this point I knew how lucky I’d been. Life had gifted me something no amount of money could buy: being the student, the sole student, of the greatest genius of siege warfare ever to walk the earth. At the same time, I realized how far I was from having completed my studies; I had not received even half of what Bazoches had to offer. And the hardest thing to bear was the thought of being separated from Jeanne.

I had behaved like an idiot, a downright idiot. When it came to it, my mistake had been that of a poor student. If I had been attentive — if, as the Ducroix brothers had taught me, passion had not blinded me — I would have seen that Jeanne could never fall for a man like Verboom. But no, the Zuviría in me had gone and ruined everything.

The point being that, from that day on, I held Verboom in enmity until the end of his days. Later on, the Antwerp butcher would see me shackled, tortured, exiled, and worse things. But never did he cause me such harm as on that first occasion. My enmity for him was boundless, flawless, pure as crystal. A mutual enmity, it goes without saying, and one that lasted until that swine of all swines got the end he deserved. Lamentably, that episode lies outside my present account, for when it comes to that man’s demise, I relish the tale. He suffered greatly; after that, arriving in hell must have seemed like a Turkish bath for him.

Well, be a good girl and I’ll tell you later, my dear vile Waltraud — in one gap or another between chapters. But if your horror provokes you to vomit, at least turn your fat head away from me before you do it! I have heard an old saying from your hometown Vienna, which runs more or less: “Next to a good friend, the best thing one can have in this life is a good enemy!” Pah! If enemies they truly are, there is no such thing as a good one; there are only living enemies and dead, and while they live, they are a constant trouble.

Sponge cake — I shall have sponge cake. Bring it to me.

Thankfully, the angels never sleep. While I was shut in my room, the twins showed Vauban the plans for a project to fortify Arras. They handed him the prints and made comments while the marquis examined them carefully, leaning close to the paper, as his sight was failing. He used a sort of magnifying lens with no handle, a large piece of concave glass girded with iron and held up on three small wheels. It moved around on the paper in search of small errors. In such moments he resembled a simple jeweler.

Arras was a project very close to the maréchal’s heart. For one reason or another, he’d had to defer it constantly, but nonetheless ordered the Ducroix brothers to make plans for the most complete, most powerful, and best-equipped fortress imaginable. When Vauban was studying plans, he never spoke. There could be ten, fifteen, even twenty experts around him, and they could be making continuous remarks as to his marvelous projects. But as I say, Vauban was very sparing in his comments. Only his breathing would be heard, for, as with many men who breathe heavily when deep in thought, he turned his nose up at the general chatter.

At any event, those who knew him could guess his opinion by the sounds escaping from him. Silence was a bad sign, very bad. On the other hand, when an idea excited him, he let out the strangest guttural noises; to those not of his circle, these seemed to indicate annoyance, though it was quite the reverse.

As the Ducroix brothers continued to hand plans to him, the guttural grunts and groans grew even louder. At one point, his lens stopped over a bastion. “Et ça?” he asked, not looking up. “What are these three rises on each of the corners supposed to mean?”

“Turrets, monsieur,” they said. “Fortified turrets.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The mortar is the bastion’s prime enemy,” said Zeno. “The idea is to combat the enemy artillery by using the same weapons: Destroy their mortars using mortars of our own. With the advantage that the mortars inside the bastion will have a solid stone casing protecting them. The enemy must install theirs in exposed positions, making themselves vulnerable to cannonade. Meanwhile, those inside the stronghold, given their iron carapace, will go unharmed.”

Vauban’s guttural sounds grew louder.

“As you can see, the turrets have only a small opening near the top, in the shape of a half-moon. But the base will have a pinion on which it can turn, a platform allowing one hundred and eighty degrees’ turning range; with three mortars up there, any object outside will be covered.”

Not a man given to praise, on this occasion, through clenched teeth, Vauban had to acknowledge the Ducroix brothers’ good work. Armand then peered close to the final plan, turned stiff, and screeched at his brother: “Mais tu es idiot! What is this you’ve brought to the marquis’s table?”

Vauban did not know what was meant until Zeno humbly excused himself. “A thousand apologies, Marquis. I’ve committed a blunder: These prints are no more than exercise pieces by that execrable engineering cadet, Martí Zuviría.”

They moved swiftly on as though nothing had happened, leaving Vauban nonplussed but also angry, for he was sufficiently clever to realize that all this had been a ruse to make him change his mind about me.

That same night, Jeanne tackled him during dessert. She sent the servants out, and even her sister, Charlotte, so that it was just the two of them at far ends of the long table.

“I know what it is you seek!” cried Vauban, pointing a fork in her direction. “And the answer is no! I am a marshal of the realm, I have had the unhappy task of deciding the fate of the lives of many thousands of men. And now, when I send an uncouth youngster back to his home, I find everyone around conspiring against me. Not even on campaigns among generals have I found such opposition!”

“I would never oppose what my father decides on such a trivial issue,” said Jeanne. “There was something else I wanted to raise with you.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re bluffing, the lot of you! I’ll have you know I’d be within my rights sending him to a galley ship, should that be pleasing to me. How can I be expected to waste my time on an individual who sees fit to bite my guests on their behinds?” He finally stopped pointing the fork. “I never should have admitted him!”

“And I say,” Jeanne went on, unruffled, “that there is another issue I wish to raise with you.” Getting up from her seat, in all her gracefulness, she went over and sat upon the marquis’s knee. “Papa,” she continued, putting her arms about his neck, “it’s a good idea.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Me marrying Prosperus van Verboom.”

“What the—. . ”

Jeanne put a finger to his lips and, with her best smile, said: “He seeks my hand, and you know it. It is hardly the first time he’s happened by Bazoches. Shall I present his case to you?” She sighed. “My marriage is a farce. We weren’t unhappy to begin with, but now he’s lost his mind. This affliction will at least allow me to request an annulment of matrimony. With your contacts at the Vatican, it will be given within a year. Oh, Papa! Think of the opportunity. Verboom is one of the most gifted engineers around. Marry him and I will become a lady at court! I’ll be the luckiest woman in the world!”

Placing his hands on her hips, Vauban lifted his daughter from him. Then he leaped from his chair as though a demon had poked him with a trident. He began pacing up and down the dining hall, one hand on his back, the other gesticulating wildly. “Verboom’s soul is blacker than a dog’s! Hear me? The disease of power, money, and vainglory consumes him. Of course he desires the hand of a Vauban daughter! The day after I die, he’ll make off with my name, our home, our fortune, all my credit and glory. And my own daughter! That reprobate, that unprincipled mercenary, giving his life in service of all the devils!”

Jeanne showed her indignation, her chin held high, her eyes squinted and choleric. “In service of devils, you say?”

“Aye, I do!”

“A reprobate mercenary, a traitor to any decent cause. . ”

“Exactly! You have understood exactly.”

“A man who uses women like sacks of dung and, when he’s emptied them, throws them away at any bend in the road.”

Vauban applauded sourly. “Very good. I think you take my meaning.”

“A creature with a soul blacker than a dog’s, if dogs had souls.”

“Bravo!” exclaimed the marquis, clapping twice more, sarcastically, wearily.

Jeanne took a breath and, in a neutral tone, declared: “He holds you in the utmost esteem.”

“That carbuncle’s esteem matters nothing to me! I have only ever shown him a gentleman’s customary courtesy. Never have I had a shred of confidence in him, for he does not merit it and never shall have it.”

Jeanne cut short the marquis’s words like a scythe. “I mean Martí.”

The marquis, the marshal, the man, said nothing more. He straightaway saw the trap he, of his own accord, had fallen into.

“He adores you, and I can assure you, his reverence has nothing to do with the titles you hold but, rather, the things you have built.” She drew closer to her father, her chin held still higher, and with great calm added: “And you are going to do away with him for a bite on the behind to a black-souled reprobate.”

She turned on her heel and left the dining room.

Though the Ducroix twins would later reveal all of this to me, at the time it happened, I was sobbing, cursing, and pounding on the walls of my room, so I could have had no notion of what was going on three floors below. I did not sleep at all that night.

Logically, then, it was with spirits sagging that I came downstairs the next morning. I had packed my bags, not much of a job, for I owned next to nothing. Indeed, the coach stood waiting out on the parade ground. Though I forget which, either Armand or Zeno said to me: “Before you go, the marquis wishes to speak with you.”

Vauban ignored me when I came into his study. He had a book before him and was murmuring as though he had never progressed beyond reading out loud. The light of day came from the far side of him, through windows that covered almost the entire length of the wall. Not an elaborate tactic but effective: The light would dazzle the visitor, making him feel immediately inferior in the face of this august, luminous presence.

He looked up and, in a peevish voice, said: “Sit!”

I obeyed, naturally.

“Well? What plans have you made for the future?”

“Your Excellence, I am yet to make any,” was all I could think to say.

“Ah, but,” he said tartly, which surprised me, “did you ever even have any?”

His tone and my agonizing situation impelled me to blurt out: “I did, Your Excellence, yes! In recent times I have hoped to become an engineer, with all my heart. Though I suppose monsieur wasn’t aware.”

“Impertinent child!” he bellowed. “Or are the words you have just spoken not the very definition of impertinence? Answer!”

I broke down crying. I was only fifteen years old! There before me was Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, marquis of Vauban, marshal of the realm, and goodness knows what else. A living myth, the man who had stormed sixty-eight fortresses, the great fortifier. All these things. And I was nothing but a boy, somewhere along the road toward becoming a man.

“You’re crying!” said Vauban.

I got to my feet.

“Since you have been kind enough to receive me, Your Excellence, in spite of my subordination, may I make one final appeal?”

He said nothing. I took his silence as a license to continue.

“Allow me to bid farewell to Jeanne.”

He took an eternity to answer. I had no notion what to do, pinned to the floor like some scarecrow.

“You and I are going to agree on something,” he said at last. “Given that you would be returning home in disgrace, I have an alternate proposal: that you continue your engineering studies in the Royal Academy at Dijon. On my recommendation, naturally. In exchange, I ask only that you never come anywhere near Bazoches or my home again, much less my daughter. You will give the place a berth of thirty miles. Your studies, until they are completed, and all your academic costs will be paid by me. You will want for nothing. Accept.”

“May I see Jeanne? It will only take a few minutes.”

He got up from the table like a fury. “And you never even bothered to hide the fact you are Catalan, and from the south! I know your kind very well, I worked along that frontier for over a decade, fortifying places against the zealous, rebellious natives. As a matter of fact, I believe I’m more than entitled to ask you a vital question: In your heart, which king do you owe allegiance to? The king of Spain or the king of France?”

“Monsieur,” I said, “until two days ago, I served only the kingdom of engineering.”

“If you would seek to flatter me, know that I am as immune to obsequiousness as I am to wine. We moderate men never get indigestion.”

I did not know what reply to make, if indeed the marquis was expecting one. This was all beside the point. It would cost me nothing to persist: “Does it seem so unusual and dangerous to you, sir, that I bid her farewell?”

“Bid me farewell,” he insisted, a rare intrigue showing on his face, “and as well as a place at Dijon, and your maintenance, you will receive the sum of one thousand francs — to spend as you see fit.”

My eyes brimmed once more with tears, but before my composure fled me entirely, I managed to say: “Je l’aime.”

Something inside the marquis gave way. He had provoked me, I realize, in order to find out if I was different from Verboom. That Antwerp butcher had always been an ambitious reptile, and to him, marriage was a means to an end. The person before him now was renouncing everything for the sake of a farewell.

If all was lost, I wanted to see Jeanne one last time. Even if I had to push the marquis himself aside to get to her. But then he softened and, in a voice both calm and resigned, said: “Sit back down, you fool.”

He dandled a small bronze figure in his hands for a few seconds. He turned it over in his fingers. It was a twenty-four-point star, a small-scale version of the fortifications he’d built at Neuf-Brisach.

He looked out the window over the Bazoches courtyard, the fields beyond. Without turning to face me, he said: “However, nothing changes the fact that you bit Verboom.”

“Yes, sir.”

“On the buttocks.”

“The left buttock.”

“I have received word from him: Your canines went sufficiently deep that he is still not fit to ride a horse.”

“I am very sorry.”

“You are a liar.”

“I mean, monsieur, for the trouble I caused you and all of Bazoches.”

Another long pause before he spoke again. “Tell me: Do you take me for a dolt?”

“No!” I cried, jumping to my feet. “Sir, no!”

“Often,” he continued, as though not hearing me, “I have seen you come to dinner with your back covered in straw. The same straw that happens to also be stuck to the back of Jeanne’s dress.”

I thought he was about to come down hard on me, but instead, what followed was a sigh.

“Marriage. . yes. . that citadel which all without wish to enter, and all within wish to get out from.” He looked me in the eye. “But you ought to know, Cadet Zuviría, that of all the fortresses created by man, matrimony is the most impregnable. Do you take my meaning?”

“Can I see her?”

“What you shall do is go to the classroom and apply yourself to a double lesson of strategy. As shown by recent events, tactics are a considerable weak point: If you attack from behind, take note, you ought always to go for the windpipe, not the rump.”

8

Clearly, the Ducroix brothers were extraordinary teachers, and Vauban was one of a kind. In the early hours of the day following my reprieve, he took me by the elbow, and the two of us went for a walk in the castle grounds.

He walked with a cane, but it did nothing to alter his haughtiness. Every now and then he stopped before an apple tree, picked an apple with his free hand, and took two or three bites before throwing it to one side. (Nothing wrong with that — the trees were his property.) More often than that, he stopped in order to cough, spit, and then dry his mouth on one of the large white gold-trimmed handkerchiefs he kept in his tunic pockets.

“Up until now, you have been learning about fortifying cities,” he said. “And you have not done badly, according to the Ducroix brothers. From now on, you will apply yourself to becoming an expert in the art of laying siege to them.”

“But monsieur,” I said, smiling, “if I’ve learned anything, it’s that, because of your very own fortification methods, well-designed defenses are altogether impossible to break through.”

Stopping, he looked at me and smiled indulgently.

I have had the good fortune — undeserved — of meeting a good number of the geniuses of my age — such as in the arts, Mozart (poor boy, I twice destroyed him at billiards), in terms of moral rectitude, Washington (drier than salt cod), and above all, Rousseau. Not Voltaire! Not that upstart, that despicable pipsqueak. Even Franklin and Danton ought to be considered universal geniuses. But, looked at properly, each of these distinguished himself for contributing a single idea to the human race, only one. Vauban had the immense merit of making two. First, he designed the perfect system for immuring cities. Following that, exceeding or, even, in a sense, nullifying his own work, a method for storming them.

I had my folder under my arm and Vauban drummed his fingers impatiently. “A design of yours. Come, let’s be seeing it!”

I held the plan up before him, and he considered it for a few moments. . “Ggnnnnn. . Yes, fourteen. . fifteen days. Fifteen, at the most.”

“Pardon?”

He looked up at me. “It would withstand a siege of fifteen days. Not one more.”

“But Your Excellence,” I protested, laughing a little, “that’s impossible.”

Holding his forefinger in front of my nose, he said: “Never use that word in my presence.” Then he asked me, me, the person who had designed the project, how I would take over that fabulous amalgamation of bastions, moons, half-moons, and superimposed buttresses.

I shook my head. “I really don’t know, monsieur,” I said. “The only thing I can think of would be to concentrate a portentous amount of artillery, fifty wide-bore pieces, at a single point, and carry out a bombardment for months. But what king could afford the luxury of so much artillery? And that’s without taking into account the logistical nightmare of transport and maintenance, or the astronomical costs for that amount of gunpowder and ammunition, and so forth.”

That it was just the two of us permitted an act of intimacy he carried out only when he was on his own or with Jeanne: He took off his wig. I already knew from Jeanne that he’d lost his hair very early in his youth, but I was so accustomed to those artificial curls that I found it difficult to contain my surprise at seeing a man before me balder than a toad.

“Logistics? Astronomical costs?” He sighed and then added, “All you need are picks and shovels. And decent men.”

And so it proved: Vauban’s siege method was based on something as simple and straightforward as pick and shovel.

Once the surrounding fence had been established, the engineers would decide on the point of attack. The works would begin at a prudent distance, out of range of the defenders’ weapons. This act was called, altogether appropriately, “opening the trench,” and it marked the beginning of the construction of the Attack Trench.

Like jigsaw pieces beginning to slot into place, the many backbreaking sessions with the Ducroix brothers began to make sense. Because Vauban’s method consisted of nothing more than a sapping job, perfectly coordinated. See here, in all its splendor, his siege méthode.

The aim was to make an immense excavation, the so-called Attack Trench, that would lead to the bastions. To keep the sappers from being fired on by the enemy, the trench had to be deep enough to hide them. And to avoid enfilade fire, it had to run parallel to the ramparts. The initial trenches were therefore named “parallels.” Three parallels, connected by linking culverts in zigzag, would be enough to reach the ramparts. The work would assume a very distinctive appearance. To take on a perfectly designed fortress, the perfect trench.

Never have such immortal works been so ephemeral. A large trench could be titanic in size and, once finished, would simply disappear, swallowed up by not being used. In a number of months, rain, mud, and disuse would see it buried in the mud, forgotten. Racine himself was once sent as a reporter to one of Vauban’s sieges. “There are more corners in one of our great Attack Trenches,” he wrote admiringly, “than in all of Paris.” And at the very instant the city conceded defeat, the life of the trench was at an end.

Logically enough, an Attack Trench required impeccable command of each of the sciences imparted to me in Bazoches. All in all, it would mean thousands of men working together in a coordinated way. The trench had to be wide enough for an entire army to be able to move around inside, and that meant the removal of millions of square feet of earth, with pinpoint accuracy and orderliness. The floor and walls were lined with pieces of wood to prevent landslides and flooding. A siege meant the felling of an entire forest! Munitions stores were located in the second line of trenches. Large enclosed spaces would be dug out in certain places with the sole aim of creating refuges for the cannons and mortars whose task it was to punish the point of attack and the defenders’ cannons. And when the moment came, the third parallel would become the launch point for the assault.

Imagine a trench advancing not along the exact route laid out for it but going off on a tangent of a few degrees. What would happen in such a case? Nothing serious, if we forget about the sappers not digging in parallel to the ramparts, who would be exposed; that is, from the fortress, the vanguard sappers could be seen, and they would find themselves riddled by enemy fire.

Not the ideal situation, wouldn’t you say? I’ve been on one side or the other dozens of times, and if there is a competent officer in the bastion, the most minor error in the progress of the works won’t go unpunished. Usually, a sniper will spill the brains of the poor dupe digging away in the open. But as I say, an attentive, observant officer, efficient and highly intelligent (like yours truly), would leave it a day before doing anything, holding fire as the badly dug trench advanced so ill-advisedly, leaving more and more of the men exposed in the open furrow.

The vanguard sappers might have noticed the parallel trench going off track, no longer parallel but perpendicular. And from the nearest bastion, one of the entire trench lines, and all these muddy little ants carrying wicker baskets of earth, comes into full sight. But the engineer on duty, putting his feet up in his rearguard cabin, ignores the warning, refuses to concede he’s done anything wrong. Blueprints are blueprints, and after all, though the French have recently chopped off their king’s head, the society in which we live is still governed by class. Am I wrong?

Except for those educated by a good Maganon, engineers were spoiled, arrogant brats from some important family, severely indisposed to listening to their inferiors. Well, bear in mind that I received my education from the best of the best, and therefore, I naturally consider the vast majority of military engineers for what they are: a band of savages so inept they couldn’t find their own rump if they used both hands.

Up on our bastion, looking through the telescope and seeing the peons working with pick and shovel on a trench that has strayed off track, the moment has come to act. Rifle fire? Well, of course not. While the enemy worsens his error, you transfer three wide-bore cannons into position on the bastion wall.

Into one of these, pack a five-kilo ball; into the other two, grapeshot. And adjust the range. First land one fifteen feet to the left of the furrow, then another the same distance to the right. Everything’s ready — though the sappers have no idea. First because they’re keeping their heads down behind the brushwood breastwork; second because, in the midst of the general harassment, the rifle fire from both sides, the continual exchange of rockets and grenades, the cries of the wounded and the screen of smoke cloaking no-man’s-land, it would never occur to the poor idiots that the two explosions have anything to do with them. And so, when a lot of people are gathered there, on the perpendicular that never should have been, you give the order for all three cannons to fire at once.

Ten sappers explode into ten thousand pieces. The trench is furrowed, and the impact is so powerful that their remains won’t embed into the far wall but will be blasted back the length and breadth of the trench. The shreds of bone, meat, and viscera will likely spread out over an area of more than five hundred feet.

Much is gained from this. Imagine now the morale of the survivors when the nincompoop engineer sitting in his little cabin says, “Dear Lord, what poor luck,” before ordering them to get back to it — all of a sudden they’re three days behind schedule. Desertions may follow, some might even rebel; in any case, the siege is delayed. And when you are the defender, you have one objective: to play for time.

Meanwhile, the unfortunate sappers have to go back to their work, advancing on all fours. And the lovely spectacle accompanying them is that of walls coated with pieces of their friends, fragments of cranium, ribs, and femurs split like pieces of cane. Human intestines, by the way, have a tendency to stick to the wooden uprights in a trench like boiled noodles to a wall. .

You, stop your whinging and write! Did you not say you liked the epic tone, all that rot? Well, here’s epic for you.

But the example I have just given is hardly worthy of Vauban’s genius. If his method were rigorously followed, the defenders would never be presented with such opportunities. He never made a single mistake. Under his command, the parallels advanced implacably, at great speed, as though an army of termites were doing the work. Within a week, two at a stretch, he could be within sixty feet of any rampart. And at that distance, with the trench so close, the besieger had the upper hand.

They could then tunnel under the bastion and, once underneath, pack the tunnel with an enormous explosive charge. Boom! The bastion would come down with the defenders inside; the rubble would plug the hole beneath and create a mound for the attacking force to scale. The defenders could always come back with countermines, but with the enemy a mere sixty feet away, who could be sure they had not opened two, three, or even four different underground galleries? In any case, the other option, and the commonest conclusion to a siege, was a grenadier attack.

Grenadiers! My God, the very word brings shivers. The French had the best grenadiers of all; they were, very simply, killing machines.

For the French grenadiers, sixty feet was nothing. They were select men, chosen for being the strongest and, more than anything, the tallest men in the realm. In certain armies, instead of the normal tricorn hat, they wore their traditional brimless cap. Their uniform was spotless white. Trench warfare converts soldiers into an army of ragdolls, but they never let the slightest speck onto that Bourbon white.

And now consider the effect of this: Each side has become a band of scarecrows, faces black with smoke and soot, all military neatness gone. And you, at the top of the bastion, your hands covered in sores from all the carrying and firing, fed up with pissing down the cannon chamber to cool it, half-starved to death because all you’ve been brought to eat is rancid cabbage soup, your eyes red from tiredness and the gunpowder, half deaf from the explosions, you suddenly see a hundred giants dressed in brilliant white emerging shoulder to shoulder, with astonishing aplomb, from the enemy trench. It’s conceivable that, for all your officer’s bawling, you, rather than pulling the trigger, will let your jaw drop. For half a minute, at least — the half a minute it takes the grenadiers to line up at the edge of the trench.

One or two, or five or six, or even twenty or thirty, will naturally go down under the concentrated, desperate fire turned on them by the soldiers in the bastion. But these, these stay as still as statues and react only to the voice of their capitaine. He gives the orders:

One: Attention! And they stand up even taller, for all that the bullets whistle by. Zip, zip!

Two: Grenade! They put their hands to the grenades in their pouches — a kind of iron and bronze ball, incredibly heavy in relation to its size, and with a short fuse.

Three: Au feu! They light the fuse and hold the grenade behind their head, ready to throw.

A terrifying sight — particularly when viewed from the summit of a half-destroyed bastion. All those flickering sparks, suspended in the air, apparently so harmless. . One may be tempted to stand watching, like the rabbit with the serpent, to see what happens. But if you find yourself at such a point, believe me: Forget Honor, forget King and Country, all such nonsense, and run, run for all you’re worth!

Fourth and final order: Lancez! A hundred or more black balls curving through the air toward you, landing directly upon the defenders’ heads.

Next, a pretty carnival of screams and flying human limbs. Then a bayonet charge, sweeping aside the wounded and any crying out for mercy. Or do you imagine those who have been providing the others with targets to practice on will feel all at once forgiving? Just because the others raise their little hands? No. They will bayonet their livers, they will split them head to behind and move onto the next. As the first to enter a now defenseless city, one that had the chance to surrender and obstinately refused, they are well within their rights to ransack houses, churches, and storerooms, slit civilians’ throats, and amuse themselves with the womenfolk.

The problem any defensive perimeter faces is that a chain of fortifications is only as strong as its weakest link. An assailant force need not take the rampart’s whole perimeter, just a toehold on a single bastion, just one. Control one bastion, and the city will be yours for the taking. The city has fallen. This is why, once the attack reaches the third parallel, the defenders usually concede. A trumpet will sound, asking to discuss the terms of the surrender. With a rampart destroyed and the enemy trench a few paces away, any sensible garrison opts to negotiate an honorable way out. I have seen surrenders that were majestic in the way they were enacted.

A trumpet from the besieged calls for a truce. The firing dies down. The tumult of war becomes expectant silence. A few minutes later, the garrison commander steps forward in his best regalia, sword in belt, at the center of the breach — which the cannons have made look altogether like a stage in a theater. He is not at risk; to shoot him now would be too dishonorable. The two armies look at him: the besieger in the trenches and those remaining on the fortifications. Should he be a man with a talent for declamations, he will stand proud and tall before proclaiming with a dignified wave of the hand, “Monsieur l’ennemi! Parlons.”

And they agree terms.

It is not a military manual I’m writing here, so I won’t go into the technical aspects (which I had coming out of my ears in Bazoches), measures, countermeasures, appeals, stratagems, and all manner of imponderables that might arise during a siege. But in a nutshell, these were the rules of the game.

Vauban was not the only one to set out a general method for besieging. When he was young, his great rival was Menno van Coehoorn, a Dutchman with a face more elongated than a cucumber.

Vauban and Coehoorn settled their disputes many years before Longlegs Zuvi was even born. In fact, it was already history when I came to Bazoches, with both men nearing the ends of their lives. But two distinct schools of thought came to be named after them, two entirely opposed ways of conceiving a military siege.

The system Coehoorn devised, it might be said, was the obverse of Vauban’s. For Vauban, storming a fortified place was a rational undertaking, informed by almost all the disciplines with which humankind has shaped the world. For Coehoorn, it was a stunning act of extreme violence.

Coehoorn is said to have compared the siege to removing a molar — painful but quickly over, the quicker, the better. According to the Dutchman, the besieger ought to concentrate on the weakest, or least well defended, point in the fortifications. Once this had been identified, hurl everything at it and break through it in one savage onslaught. At night, if possible, using the element of surprise, exploiting any weakness the besieged side has failed to take into account. Nothing else mattered.

Theorists across Europe divided into two camps, and impassioned arguments ensued: the supporters of the attack à la Vauban and those who preferred it à la Coehoorn. Needless to say, I was on Vauban’s side; unavoidably, intellectually, we become our teachers’ children. And my view has always been that, at root, there isn’t much to take from the Coehoorn school. The idea that what the enemy needs is a good cosh to the head — any thug could come up with that. Hard-line Coehoornians would come back with the argument that war is simple, radically simple. In reply, I would say this is to negate two thousand years of developments in the science of war. A humanist edifice was constructed upon Vauban’s foundations; Coehoorn merely encouraged rashness.

The Coehoornians had another, more scientific argument, which therefore held more weight. They claimed, with reason but unreasonably, that Vauban’s method always drew things out. “Agreed,” they would say, “a city besieged according to Vauban’s model will inevitably fall within ten, twenty, or thirty days. But in that time a great many things could happen: Epidemics might break out within the besieger’s enclosed camp; reinforcements might arrive; the adversary might lay siege to one of our cities, turning it into an exchange of kingdoms, or any other diplomatic imponderable obliging us to suspend the siege.”

Coehoorn’s detractors, in turn, pointed to the risks involved in such a premature thrust. If successful, it would indeed see an end to the siege before it had formally become that. But if it failed? You ended up with a carpet of dead bodies, the city intact, and the defenders’ morale sky-high.

Clearly, the debate turned on certain irreconcilable principles, endless fodder for the dispute. Vaubanians and Coehoornians, two schools that would never see eye to eye. Once a Maganon was a Coehoornian, he would always be one, and vice versa. The debate never ended. The problem being that these rational theories were also at cross-purposes with individuals’ self-interest.

Your young and ambitious general, for instance, would tend to be a Coehoornian. What did it matter to him to sacrifice five hundred, a thousand, or two thousand lives in a reckless attack? Coehoornians sought glory, and after all, they wouldn’t be the ones having to cross those labyrinths of stone, those unforgiving ditches and steep scarpment walls. By contrast, and though they were little educated in the matter, footsoldiers were outright Vaubanians. Out of self-interest! The thing is that Vauban was no military man. He never was. The engineer in him always governed the soldier. At the first siege he was in charge of, he addressed not his generals but the rank and file: “Sweat for me, and I will save you having to bleed.” Sweat instead of blood. That was the heart of it.

Coehoorn accused Vauban of being spineless; Vauban branded Coehoorn a brute. In private, after the Dutchman’s reference to pulling teeth, Vauban referred to him as “the Dentist.” And their rivalry went beyond the merely intellectual: Vauban once even laid siege to a fortress commanded by Coehoorn! In 1692, this was, at Namur.

What brought particular renown to the duel was that the Beast was there watching. Louis XIV was there, and as king, he was the attacking army’s general in chief. He witnessed the spectacle with his royal buttocks comfortably seated on a litter, an awning over him, and refreshments at hand, since he had delegated command to Vauban. If things went badly, it would be the fault of the subordinate. (Kings, all of them, are callous self-serving swine. Always have been, always will be!)

Well, in spite of the fact that Coehoorn had a heavily manned and battle-hardened garrison to count on, the city fell in precisely twenty-two days. Not a day longer. Driving home the victory was that Vauban had twenty times fewer dead. Vauban once managed to take a city with only twenty-seven dead or wounded! The rank and file adored him. At Namur’s surrender, the Beast couldn’t help but grimace owlishly when the troops who usually would have been cannon fodder — still alive, thanks to Vauban — cheered far more loudly for Vauban than their own king. Soldiers may be simple, but they are not stupid.

Namurcum captum. Could there ever have been a more total victory or a more humiliating defeat? As a matter of fact, there could. Vauban showed mercy to Coehoorn in the only way a righteous person could: showing such indulgence as to raise up the generous giver and belittle the receiver. The keys to the city were handed to him by Coehoorn himself, whose cucumber face looked longer and waxier than ever. Vauban abstained from unnecessary humiliations; the garrison was allowed to leave Namur honorably. The Frenchman showed extreme courtesy in renaming the citadel where his enemy had made his last stand as Fort Coehoorn. A monument to gentlemanliness. Looked at another way, it could be seen as a way of commemorating his great rival’s defeat, wouldn’t you say?

A small detail: Have you not noticed? Note that Vauban did not rename this interior bastion Fort Louis XIV. And this although his king had been there at the brow of a hill, watching over the whole siege.

They were great friends — Vauban and Coehoorn, I mean. They shared the same principles, though from opposed angles. Their rivalry had the intractability of intellectual competition about it. An insane rivalry, considering the blood spilled. But given that each, with divergent technical notions, sincerely believed that his principles would lead to less blood being spilled, a moral judgment is difficult to make.

Above and beyond banners, kings, and countries, the devotion to le Mystère brought them together in secret brotherhood, one that rose above all conflicts and hierarchies. The departure of the garrison made this clear. The usual protocols of a city in surrender were taken to ludicrous extremes; at Namur’s gate, two lines of French soldiers were there to present arms.

The Dutchman with the cucumberish face was at the head of the formation. After him came his men, flags flying. When they passed each other, Vauban and Coehoorn saluted, sabers to nose, dividing their faces symmetrically. Two days earlier they would have used them to spill the other’s guts.

“À la prochaine!” ventured Coehoorn. (Until next time.)

“On verra,” Vauban calmly replied. (Perhaps.)

Magnificent. And the joust didn’t end there. Being impartial, I cannot hide the fact that the warning from the man with the cucumber face turned out to be prophetic. As with all eternal contests, the scales were to tip again.

Years later, an army under Coehoorn’s command attacked the selfsame Namur! He attacked according to his own méthode; that is, in brute fashion. And was victorious. Unfortunately for him, on this occasion it was not Vauban leading the defense, leaving the final verdict on the titanic duel undecided to the end of time.

The undeniable fact is that those heading up siege forces were not always rational Vaubanians. They were very often callous and unscrupulous Coehoornians. One of them, an ambitious youth, once had the gall to send the marquis the most offensive of letters.

His name was James Fitz-James Stuart, duke of Berwick. Please remember the name. It features later in our tale. And heavily! If it hadn’t been for him, the tragedy of Barcelona, my tragedy, never would have taken place.

In the year 1705, I had yet to hear of Berwick, who, that year, as general in chief of the French forces, had led the attack on the fortress of Nice. From what I have been able to gather, he and Vauban were at odds over an attack on Nice, which the marquis considered a waste of time, money, and above all, good men. Berwick was a most ambitious Coehoornian, and while the siege was under way, Vauban wrote tireless letters urging him to call it off.

Berwick must have taken this badly, because a snide and presumptuous letter came to Bazoches one day from the front.

As you see, sir, Nice is taken. On the angle you considered impossible to attack, and in very few days. This, I hope, will lead you to conclude that those on the ground, directing operations, ought to be believed ahead of those so bold as to dispense opinions from two hundred leagues hence.

A reproach that was shot through with a victor’s disdain. The marquis flew into a rage. “Who does he think he is? Writing to me, me, in such a tone! A fatherless little bigmouth whose greatest merit has been to bathe his hands in the blood of others.”

No one could go near the marquis for two days; his mood was such that he did not even come down to eat.

An irresolvable paradox lay at the heart of Vauban. Because if I have referred before now, with disgust, to those who disavow the art of war, it must be understood in Vaubanian terms. What is war? Guts spilling, pillaging, destruction? The paradox is that, according to the Bazoches way of looking, the art of war, at its most developed, prevented war. A discipline whose goal was to undo itself!

Unlike the Beast he served, Vauban found expansionist desire odious. For the miserliness of it, for being a concept ridiculously detached from the homeland, if you like. For Vauban, France wasn’t a good country; it was perfection. So why seek more? All his energy went into conserving what had been inherited geographically. Into fortifying the borders to such a degree that any attack would be aborted before it had begun. He came up with the pré carré, the “square field,” which is what the frog eaters call their damned estate: France as a perfectly defined monolith, eternal, compact, and peaceable. Genius builder though Vauban was, he was ruled by the moneyed and, if I may say so, shortsighted mentality of a conformist. Vauban perfected Vegetius’s saying: Si vis pacem para castrum (If you want peace, erect fortresses). If deterrence is at its optimum, who would attack whom? So, an end to all conflict.

Vauban ended badly. In many ways, he was a staunch conservative in a country governed by the modern mania for universal power; in others, an overly audacious reformer. In his writings, he proposed freedom of creed and thought, and in that another tyranny, one that sought to flatten the individual: giving everything to your autocrat. He wanted to recoin hereditary aristocracy as meritocracy. And he hoped to do that in the context of the most absolute monarchy since Darius of Persia! The Beast’s ministers thought Vauban harmless enough. His guiding principle was not revolution but reason: He calculated that out of every twenty-four French people, only one was cultivating the land; as a consequence, the other twenty-three were living off his efforts.

They cast him out like an old loon, and if they didn’t bother to pursue him, it was because he was too old, hoary, an anachronism. His ingrained idea of loyalty stopped him from ever rising up against his king. Quite the reverse. For all he hated Louis’s way of doing things, his misguided conduct and his pretensions, he would have died a thousand deaths for him. His guile in other fields was of no use to him when it came to seeing politics for what it really was. His logic was geometrical and, therefore, overly simplistic. He never came close to understanding that in human relations, endless vectors are at play, juxtaposed, unforeseeable, hidden, and almost always malign.

The end to war! How ironic. Plato already said it: Only those fallen in combat have seen the end of war.

9

If life were divided into stages, mine was about to come to the end of its most profitable and lovely. And in the most abrupt and distressing manner. Although it wouldn’t be quite right to say it all came crashing down at once. The day Jeanne’s husband miraculously recovered from his mental illness was the beginning of the end.

When a person succumbs to madness, those around him react with a mix of incredulity and indignation, as though the ailment suffered is a personal affront to them. In a way, we associate the lunatic with the figure of the deserter. As with battalions, we press close together when facing life’s difficulties, and have no time for anyone who drops out voluntarily. Curiously, when someone who has lost his mind then regains it, this disbelief is even greater. Someone cured of that kind of affliction is as strange to us as a deserter rejoining the ranks.

I had heard he was getting better. But Paris was far from Bazoches, and my studies were all-consuming. When he came to visit, I couldn’t believe it. He did not look disheveled, his gait was steady, and his gaze, which once would have been lost for hours in pursuit of invisible bumblebees, was quite normal.

He was as friendly to me as ever. “Zuviría, my good friend!” he exclaimed when he saw me, clapping his hands on my shoulders. “It’s been a while, and how you’ve changed! You’ve grown a whole foot, when you were already having to duck under doorways. And what character in your face!” he added with an affectionate chuck. “You’ve grown innerly even more than without.”

“Permit me to be pleased,” I said in turn. “For I am not the only one showing some remarkable changes.”

His eyes turned misty, as though penitent at the thought of his recent past. “You are quite right, mon ami.”

I could not help but ask as to the medicine or treatment that had brought about his extraordinary recovery.

“Treatment? None whatsoever. Simply, I was off in my corner one day, singeing my fingernails like Paracelsus, when I asked myself a question that was so simple, it had never occurred to me before.” He drew a little closer, as though fearing to be overheard, and with wide eyes said: “If I am a hugely wealthy man, married to a hugely wealthy woman, what the devil am I wasting my time trying to convert salt into gold for?”

I noticed a distance in Jeanne. I didn’t make much of it until the following Sunday, when, as ever, we met in the hayloft. We would arrive there separately, and normally, she would be undressed, waiting for me, lying down on the first stack of hay. This time she had her attire all on, and she was standing up.

Even my Waltraud, who is denser than a sack of potatoes, would have surmised what Jeanne had to say, so I’ll save the telling of it. It pains me to this day.

“The fact that your husband is not out of his mind,” I said, “does not mean our feelings have changed.”

“My feelings for you, no; my duty to him, yes.”

One thing of which I am sure is that great lovers, true lovers, never go in for the kind of little scenes you see in the theater. And do you know why? Well, playwrights can say whatever they please, but love is the most rational thing in the world.

There was a lot I could have said, but I knew in advance the answer. She was a wealthy woman, now happily married (or less unhappily, at least), and the daughter to a marquis. She wouldn’t give it all up for a lad with no credentials, some provincial cadet. Changing the subject, she said: “The Ducroix brothers say your Points only need polishing, and you’ll be ready to become a great engineer. In fact, they’re thrilled with you.”

I said nothing; I looked at her. She was not ignorant of my despondency, my mute recrimination, my wordless hurt.

“Tell me something, Martí,” she said then. “Between being a royal engineer and staying by my side forevermore, which would you choose if you had to?”

I opened my mouth two, three times, but nothing came out. I had entered Bazoches out of desire for a woman and would be leaving in love with engineering.

This marked the beginning of the end. Things falling apart, the great debacle of my life, March 1707. “Matrimony, that citadel which all without wish to enter, and all within wish to get out from,” Vauban had said. Even stiff old Zeno and Armand Ducroix gave me a couple of slaps on the back. I didn’t need to tell them what had happened, of course not. They said one day: “No feat of engineering can keep this pain at bay. Take deep breaths, and that’s all.”

I believe they gave me my fifth Point as a way of lifting my spirits. And because something else was going on, something I didn’t know about and which was far more significant for me, for Bazoches, and for half the world: Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban was dying.

His lungs were giving out. The final phase of an illness that had crept up on him in Paris. The Ducroix brothers kept it from me for as long as possible. When they decided to say something, Armand did so in inimitably stoic fashion: “Cadet, the Marquis of Bazoches is dying.”

He would not be coming back to Bazoches — a fact that seemed to have more finality than the death itself. I froze. To me, Vauban had become a figure standing outside of human contingencies. It was like being told fire can no longer be lit, or that the moon would henceforth rise and fall in a matter of seconds.

Zeno was already with the marquis, assisting him with the final act. Armand and I climbed into a carriage and set out for Paris. It was a strange journey. I had never been to Paris, the head of that war-loving religion named France. I tried to stay attentive, and at the same time, I couldn’t get Jeanne from my thoughts. Yes, it was as though a cosmic conjunction had forecast these two ruptures in such a short space of time. I was also bothered by uncertainty, something that, out of fellow feeling, I didn’t dare put to Armand. He answered my question without my having to formulate it: “The marquis will hold on until he has said goodbye to each and every one of his close relations.”

One of the inconvenient things about being a patrician of the first order is that all manner of people will flock to your deathbed. Custom demands that, even in great agony, almost anyone has the right to come and bother you, What’s-his-name, Thingamaijig, first and second secretary to the commander at the Hellespont, cousin of your alcoholic father-in-law’s other son-in-law. That the person going through those agonies should have to put up with a chattering multitude has always struck me as unnecessary and cruel. But can I truly criticize? After all, I myself went and took up position in that troop of undesirables. In my case, because of something very pressing.

For Vauban was going to validate — or not — my fifth Point. According to Armand, the marquis had expressed an interest in examining me personally. A great honor, even greater considering the circumstances. Perfection among Maganons is based on a rule of ten — so what it meant, the authority that came with reaching five Points, isn’t hard to see.

Vauban’s Paris home was a small palace but not ostentatious. In the antechamber to his room, there must have been fifty or sixty individuals awaiting an audience. Protocol demanded that he be seen according to a strict hierarchy, and since the least grand personage was the owner of five cannon factories, night had fallen by the time it came to me.

“If I were the marquis,” I said with a sad sigh, “I would hurry up and die and not have to put up with all these bootlickers. Merde!”

“Keep quiet and follow me.”

And Armand made his way through the people. Getting to the door, predictably enough, a servant, primped and preened to the extreme, detained us. “Eh, you! Wait your turn.”

“Sir!” said Armand indignantly. “I am the marquis’s personal secretary, and my place is at his bedside. Or do you fail to recognize me?”

“Ah, yes, a thousand pardons,” the man said. He did not know about Zeno’s twin brother. “But were you not inside? Excuse my error, I must not have seen you leave.”

We crossed the threshold. Armand grumbled, “Moles. . The world’s full of them. . They’re all moles. .”

The great Vauban was reclining in a magnificent four-poster bed. His upper half was sunken in a voluminous cushion. He was dying, and no mistake. But even at this final hour, his presence was awesome. His broken breathing was like that of a lion. His family was there. Jeanne was by his side.

Protocol demanded that I approach the foot of the bed and greet the great man with a bow of the head. I could not. To him I owed the two most rewarding years of my life, the shaping of my character and my destiny. I sprang toward his hand and raised it to my cheek, sobbing like an infant. To the Vauban family’s credit, no one held me back or reprimanded me. Furthermore, when I raised my head, the marquis regarded me, and if a father’s look can say to a son, “You are my creation,” that was indeed the most paternal look I had ever been given.

“You have entered this room as a cadet,” the marquis said. “My wish is for you to leave it a royal engineer.”

He bade his daughters and secretaries leave us, Armand and Zeno to stand at the door. I would have liked to see the face of the servant who tried to stop us from coming in: the personal secretary appearing before him again, now double.

“For obvious reasons,” rasped the marquis, “the exam will have to be brief. I am going to ask you one question only.” He gazed up at the ceiling for a few moments, mouth open, deep in thought. Finally, without taking his eyes from the ceiling, he said, “Summarize the following: What elements comprise the optimum defense of a besieged stronghold?”

I could not have imagined a simpler question. It was a formality, then. Before he died, Vauban wanted to send his final engineer out into the world, that was it. For all that he might try to hide it, I knew he was extremely proud of this student of his — unruly, quick to answer back, but at the same time, well suited to the office. I began to sketch out the vertical columns supporting a decent fortress with bastions. The glacis, the covered path, the correct distance between bastions to avoid creating blind spots in the areas that took the brunt of the onslaught. I even permitted myself an analysis of the gullet, that is, the bastion entrance, which, to my mind, tended to be built too narrow. But then something unexpected happened. Vauban interrupted me. He still had the strength to raise his voice. “Get to the point, please!”

I was also startled to hear: “No, no, that’s not it.”

I was on the wrong track? I became nervous. I went into detail on the width of rampart walls, the steepness of their inclines. On making the best of the terrain in erecting defenses. On the moat and the many ways of sealing breached walls. The chagrin on his face said no, this was not what he wanted to hear. He put his hand to his brow, an unmistakable sign of displeasure in the marquis. I spoke about garrisons, about the adequate number of men in relation to the size of the fortification, the necessary weaponry, ammunition, and provisions. I quoted Hero of Constantinople’s sage advice to a general defending a stronghold, at which moment a pained look came over the marquis. He half shut his eyes, pursed his lips. He looked up at the ceiling, as if requesting a postponement, then said: “No, no, and no! Get to the point, time is running low.” And sighed. “A word. The answer is comprised of just one word.”

People who are close to death have no time for being vague, and Vauban was treating me like some dolt. My spirit trembled. Everything I’d learned I now doubted. I went on a little more — perhaps Vauban wanted to hear about the compassionate element of a defense, so I made reference to each and every measure that might be taken to keep civilians safe during a siege. No. Wrong again. I stopped there. I had no notion of what he wanted to hear. I stopped speaking.

Forefinger raised, he uttered something I’ll take to my grave. “One word. All you need to do is say one word.”

I stepped closer to his bed and leaned over it, resting my fists on the mattress. “But monsieur,” I said in a tone gentler and more respectful than for anything else I have ever said, “I have just recounted all that Bazoches has taught me.”

It was as though Vauban were surrendering. He lifted a hand to his eyes. “No, you haven’t done it. You haven’t understood. Enough.” He took a heaving breath, not looking at me. “I cannot give you my blessing, my conscience will not allow it. Believe me, I am sorry. You are going to have to find a better teacher than I. I have failed you.” And he issued his judgment: “You are not fit.”

I thought it was me death had come for, not him. He made a tired gesture with his hand, which then fell back onto the bed.

“I have an audience now, one I cannot put off. Go.”

I left the room white as plaster. The Ducroix brothers immediately understood what was happening and drew me apart, keeping me from the assembled carrion. I could hardly speak. I rolled up my sleeve in despair. “The fifth Point!” I said, looking at my forearm. “I have it etched into me, but it isn’t mine. Who will validate it now? Who?”

As they brought me away, I whimpered like a small dog that had just received an unmerited beating. “But what word did the marquis want?” I said, sobbing. “What was the word?”

I had gone to Paris to take the test, the most important test of my life. I would leave having learned a bitter, useless lesson: When can you tell all is lost? When even those who hold you dear say nothing. For the Ducroix brothers let out afflicted sighs, and the only solace they could offer was to remove me from the sight of others, taking me to the room that was farthest from everything in that death-visited house.

Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban died on March 5, 1707. Of the rites and the funeral, all I am left with is an indistinct vertigo: “You are not fit.”

I was the last creation to come out of Bazoches and, if I may be so bold, the best wrought. A machine made perfect over the course of two years of rigor and discipline. Toward the end of my training, I felt I could do anything; Constantinople had been besieged twenty-five times, and I felt confident I could defend it from twenty-five armies at once. Or to storm it myself, if serving another master. Fifteen days would be all I’d ask, time to make three parallels. And now I was nothing — a nothing that condemned me to life in limbo. “One word, just one.” But which? By that judgment, I had been turned into a monster, a stillborn unicorn.

One of the endless numbers who attended the final farewell was Don Antoine Bardonenche, the infantry captain whose company Jeanne, her sister, and I had occasionally enjoyed, playing blind hen on the banks of streams or along the castle passageways at Bazoches. I was sitting on a bench with my hands forlornly folded in my lap, my mind empty except for the pain, when Bardonenche came over, svelte and sporting his white livery.

“You, my good friend, are melancholy,” he said, jovial as ever in spite of being in the midst of a funeral. “They tell me you are seeking gainful employment.”

I had not the energy to reply. Bardonenche continued: “Since engineering is your subject, you ought to put the knowledge you’ve acquired into practice. What would you say to joining a brigade of engineers as an adjutant? That way you’d gain practical experience. After a time be ratified as a member of the royal corps, I’m sure.”

With the marquis’s death, Bazoches had become something quite different. Jeanne would be taking the reins. There was no way I could stay. I gave an absentminded nod. Bardonenche cheerfully punched his left fist into his right palm. “Rejoignez l’armée du roi!”

Jeanne had been the anvil and Vauban the hammer. And I, a piece of brass crushed between the two. Nothing mattered. If a vacancy had opened in Anatolia, making fences for Turkish sheep, I would have said yes. As for Jeanne, my final conversation with her served only to further demolish my soul.

“You were the one who let me in to Bazoches,” I reminded her. “You lied to your father. You said I knew his work best, which wasn’t true. Maybe it was a mistake; maybe we should never have met. We’d all be far happier now.”

“But Martí,” she said, “I told him no lies. I related to him exactly the three candidates’ answers, yours included. ‘A stone flower’ was how you described his best fortress. To which my father said, ‘This one will be my student, it could be that this one has the heart of an engineer.’ ”

Vauban was buried at Bazoches. The heart, separate from the body, in an urn. A lover of order, he did not want to oppose the conventions of his time. But for any who knew how to look, it was all there: his body to the priests, his heart for le Mystère. For those believers among you, know that, of all the human beings who have ever lived, Vauban is the only one I would dare say with certainty made it to heaven. I’d wager anything — anything you like — that on seeing him approach, they opened the gates, opened them wide, not a word. Either that or Saint Peter would run the risk of him coming back with a regiment of sappers. Heaven — I’d bet he’d have taken it in seven days. Well, let us not be impious, even if only so as not to offend the One those gulls believe made this dung heap of a world; eight, let’s say.

10

Of the journey from France to the depths of Spain, all I can recall is my feet, so downcast was I the whole way. Nothing mattered to me anymore. My body was a limp piece of hide, untouched even by the abominable jolting of the carriages. Le Mystère had abandoned me. The day before Vauban died I had felt full with it; the next, it had evaporated. As many pages as I might dictate, I would never be able to explain the simultaneous horror and apathy this emptiness came with.

I am a human desert, I know it. Every day of my life, a grain of sand is added to the dunes. So much time has passed, so very much, that in my contemplation of the boy Martí Zuviría, it is as though I see another person. I am not indulgent with him, I swear it. But I am able to feel a certain amount of compassion for him. His future, his love, his hopes, those who guided and taught him. . It had all vanished, suddenly and at once. Who would have emerged unscathed from such a thing? And all for a word, The Word.

I am ninety-eight years old now, so in 1707 I would have been. . Help me out, oh, sweet swine. . Yes, sixteen. Bardonenche’s regiment crossed the border of Navarra as a column many miles long, on foot, and once in Spain made a hard southerly march for three days. I was allowed to ride in one of the many carriages that brought up the tail of the convoy, and not on foot, like the rugged infantry. We were to join the main body of the army, at which point I would be incorporated into the engineering staff.

If you ever had to partake in those endless marches, day after day, you would understand how fortunate I was in this. The soldiers advanced two abreast, and from sunup to sundown, with the carriages bringing up the rear. The marching pace of the French army was one of the swiftest in all of Europe, a pace taken every second: left, right, left, right. . En route, mauvaise troupe! A week after crossing the border, men began to fall by the wayside, exhausted. The sweeper carriages gathered them up. To pay for this, come the end of the day, they had to see to the tasks around camp. Since these were just as punishing and far more humiliating, only those who genuinely could not go on would allow themselves to drop.

Bardonenche went on a splendid horse, riding up and down, checking the formation of the line. I have already made mention of his pleasant nature. He frequently came alongside my carriage, which was toward the back, and directed a few spirited words at me beside the driver. Navarra was damp, and even when we came down into northern Castile, it was predominantly lush. But the moment we set foot on the southern steppes, it became dry and dusty, and the heat suffocating, though it was still only springtime.

Bardonenche was the most formidable swordsman. In fact, aside from his mania for swordplay, all there was in him was nonsense. As to sword philosophy, he declared: “What the devil is there to say? Strike before you are struck.” And he was profoundly disdainful when it came to any weapon propelled by gunpowder, sparks, and flint. “Bullets fly any which way, the tip of my sword at one target only: the enemy’s heart.”

In some of my lessons at Bazoches, I had noticed likenesses between swordplay and engineering. Certain Maganons aspired to the perfect fortress. I asked Bardonenche if he had ever thought about the existence of the perfect sword, the perfect deathblow, or the perfect swordsman.

He looked at me as though I were some prattler who had just asked about the mystery of the Holy Trinity. “All my fights have been perfect,” was his indignant response. “As proved by the fact that I’m here to talk about my nineteen duels, which is more than can be said for my opponents.”

At any event, I had the consolation that we were on the same side, so I’d never have to face the ire of his blade.

We knew we were drawing closer to the Spanish-French army by the detritus that began to line the route. Difficult to credit the amount of dross left in the wake of a large troop. Unusable pots and pans, pieces of timber, broken carriage axles, pouches riddled with holes, dead mules, tattered apparel, frayed rope, horseshoes. The sun beat down on all manner of things.

We crossed La Mancha, turning west. We stopped for a couple of days in Albacete, a cold and unlovely place, and again set off. We camped for a night in one village, a thousand miles from anywhere, a hundred thousand fleas to every soul inhabiting it. I got drunk on a wine so contaminated that the bottom of the bottle had become a cemetery for insects. I swallowed them down and all. The following morning, when I was sleeping it off, Bardonenche came and woke me.

Before we set out, there was a local he wanted to speak with, and I was to act as translator. Where precisely was the Franco-Spanish Army of the Two Crowns? I asked, rubbing my eyes and not in the slightest bit interested.

“About to have quite a battle,” he said. “Marshal Berwick is in pursuit of the Allies, and the Allies are in pursuit of Berwick.” He pointed west. In the distance was a hill presided over by an old castle, and a settlement at the foot.

“What is the place called?” I asked, removing sleep from my eyes.

“Almansa.”

Thus Martí Zuviría, brazen Martí Zuviría, became involved in the greatest imbroglio of the age, the War of Spanish Succession. The largest war the world has ever known. Dozens of countries were drawn into it; it lasted a quarter of a century and had several continents as its theater. I’m no historian — I wouldn’t pontificate as to its causes — but it was certainly so vast, and its influence on my life so decisive, that I must at least sketch a general outline. To save your suffering, I’ll be brief.

In the year 1700, Spain’s Emperor Carlos II died. The man had been an aberration of nature, a slathering burden who, had he not been king, would have spent his days locked up in some monastery. His Castilian subjects called him “the Bewitched.” I’m not so pious, so what say we leave it at “the Loon”? He died childless — how was he supposed to go about begetting them? His mind was so far gone, he probably didn’t know that the radish between his legs had uses other than for pissing.

All monarchs are, by definition, loony — or end up that way. The only question is whether their subjects prefer the rule of someone with very limited mental functions or that of a nasty whoreson. When I was young, I erred on the side of the former, for at least they content themselves with eating pheasant and leave the people in peace. The Loon, for example, was heartily lamented in Castile but wildly popular in Catalonia. Why? Because he did nothing. His atrophied brain was a reflection of Castile and its congealed empire. The Catalans loved it. The less a monarch governs, and the farther away he stays, the better.

It was clear, long before he died, that this human offal of a king wouldn’t be leaving behind any heirs. Naturally, all Europe’s ears pricked up — all the carrion. A number of years afterward, I met a nobleman who had served in the Spanish embassy in Madrid at that time. He told me the court was so infested with spies, they even “looked into” the king’s undergarments! Tests proved conclusive: Carlos never ejaculated. And as the laws of nature state, where there is no semen, nor will there be any progeny.

For the French, it was a golden opportunity. If they could place one of their own on the Spanish throne after the Loon died, two historical objectives would be dealt with at a stroke: creating an alliance with their eternal enemy south of the Pyrenees; and indirectly, the main prize, bringing under its own aegis the decayed Spanish empire, stretching across Italy, the Americas, and a thousand far-flung places across the globe. That monster Louis XIV must have been rubbing his hands together with glee.

But as the saying goes, one thing leads to another. The Loon was part of the Austrian dynasty, the Hapsburgs, and they were there, too, circling the dying king with the same intentions as the French vultures.

By the time Carlos the Loon gave up the ghost with an unhappy gurgle, things were already well and truly a mess. The Beast put forward his grandson, Philip of Anjou, and Austria’s Emperor Leopold proposed his son, Archduke Charles, as the future Carlos III of Spain.

Anjou made the English and the Dutch extremely uneasy. If Spain and France joined together (for Little Philip obviously would be nothing more than a puppet controlled by the Beast), the balance of power would tilt. The Spanish empire was something akin to a dying man covered in pustules, and France the local braggart. The Beast had turned France into an autocratic tyranny with a huge stockpile of armaments, unprecedented in the modern world; it did not bother to hide its goal of world domination. Which led England, Holland, and of course, the German empire to declare war on France. The fact that Portugal and the House of Savoy also formed an alliance showed the Beast’s menace — the only reason China didn’t send regiments to get involved was because it was a long way to travel, and hiring a boat rather expensive.

As I said, the greatest imbroglio of the century, and all because of some unsoiled undergarments. How did it not occur to anyone to send a stud into the queen’s room one night and let them go at it, then decree that the child was the Loon’s? What that would have saved us, caray!

So, as I said, all the armies of Europe joined the fray. On the borders of Germany, the French and Dutch were going at it hammer and tongs. And in Spain, what truly caused the dispute?

Before I continue, a necessary but brief digression to explain the Spanish Affair, which has a complicated aspect for foreigners like you, my dear vile Waltraud. That aspect simply being: There was no such thing as Spain.

If Caesar described Gaul as divisible into three parts, he might have said of the Hispania existing after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire that it was divided into three strips, each stretching north to south.

One of these vertical strips is Portugal, occupying the Atlantic portion, as any map will show you. The widest strip is Castile, in the center. And then there is one more strip of land, invisible on the maps of today, along the Mediterranean coast. This, more or less, is the Catalan crown. (Or was; nowadays we are nothing).

Though all these kingdoms were Christian, each had distinct dynasties, languages, and cultures. Histories of their own. The mutual suspicion was such that they were constantly at war. No strange thing. Catalonia and Castile had opposed mentalities. Apart from Saints’ Days, they had nothing in common. Castile was rain-fed; Catalonia, on the Mediterranean coast. Castile, aristocratic and rural; Catalonia, middle-class and shipowning. The Castilian landscape had produced oppressive signories — there is an anecdote from medieval times that I can half remember, possibly apocryphal, but which explains the thing well.

There is a little princess from Castile, and she marries a little prince from Catalonia. She goes to live in Barcelona, and on the second day, a servant talks back to her. The girl asked for a glass of water, or where they kept the chamber pot, something, and the servant told her to go and look for herself. Naturally, the Castilian princess appeals to her husband: The foulmouth must have a flogging. The prince shrugs: “My lady, I am sorry,” he says, “I cannot comply.” She, going wild, inquires why. “Here, unlike in Castile,” says the husband with a heavy heart, “the people are free.”

In the year 1450, more or less, the two kingdoms were joined by a royal intermarriage. Anyone could have seen that, as a marriage, it would end badly, very badly. I compare the union of the two crowns to a marriage that is going badly because the discrepancies that lay in the years to come were very much like those between two individuals who marry wanting different things. The Catalans wanted a union between equals; Castile, as time passed, gradually forgot this founding principle.

All was well in the first couple of centuries because the two kingdoms continued as they always had been, each with its back to the other. Catalonia, governed by the Generalitat (the Catalan government), paying tribute to the common crown more symbolically than anything. Then the Hispanic monarchy, which had been itinerant in the Middle Ages, settled in Madrid. The seat of power shifted to Castile.

According to one of our oldest constitutions, the Catalans were obliged to fight for the king only “in the case of an attack on, and in defense of, Catalonia.” In other words, Madrid was not allowed to recruit cannon fodder for its wars in Flanders, the plains of Patagonia, or any one of the fetid corners of Florida. As for taxation, the amount paid by Catalans had to be approved by its own court. Accustomed as they were to their despotic ways, the monarchs now based in Madrid found it intolerable, scandalous, that the peninsula’s most prosperous area should not give up anything when there was a war on — against half the world.

Ludicrous! The crowns had joined together in the fifteenth century, not the kingdoms; the same king for all, never the same government, and never under the yoke of Castile. That had been the agreement. In Castile, this independence was always seen as a nuisance, and later a betrayal. Remember what I said about a marriage going wrong? One side had forgotten its promises, the other was feeling increasingly stifled.

In the year 1640, the Catalans had had enough, and the entire country rose up in rebellion. Mobs of angry peasants entered Barcelona. The Spanish viceroy was apprehended when he tried to flee. They didn’t treat him well, it’s fair to say. The largest piece left of him would have fit inside a vase.

The uprising of 1640 was followed by a war between Catalonia and Castile, with France caught in the middle. A long, cruel war in which neither party gave any quarter. It concluded with an indeterminate pact that left everything more or less as it had been, Catalonia governing itself according to its own constitutions and liberties, Castile plumbing the depths of decadence.

The ensuing peace was a long intermission, more than anything. Catalonia and Castile exchanged openly hostile glances. Mistrust on the part of Castile had converted into undisguised rancor. Indeed, see what the writer Quevedo had to say on the subject:

Catalonia is the grotesque abortion of politics. Its people are a pox on their kings, and all suffer because of them. A nation arming itself with criminals unworthy of ever being pardoned.

Here he limited himself to expressing a repute we fully justified. Elsewhere, he was more to the point, elucidating the adequate treatment for this treacherous breed:

As long as there remains in Catalonia even the one Catalan, and stones in the field, we shall have an enemy, and we shall have war.

How kind! “Grotesque abortion. . a pox on their kings.” A worthier inquiry surely would have been to ask why no one loved us.

Castile’s high point came with the conquest of the Americas. Thereafter, it fell into a dull and lethargic stupor. An outcome written in its roots. The Castilian character par excellence is the hidalgo, that is, the nobleman, a medieval creation who still lives on. Proud to the point of madness, going out of his way for the sake of honor, capable of fighting to the death over a slight, but incapable of any constructive initiative. That which for him is a heroic gesture, in the eyes of a Catalan is nothing but the most laughably pigheaded error. He can’t see beyond the present moment; like dragonflies, he aspires to brilliance, but his wings flutter erratically, carrying him low and to no place in particular. His hands are good only for bearing arms; otherwise, it would mean getting them dirty. He does not understand, much less tolerate, other ways of life: Industriousness is repellent to him. In order to prosper, that same aloof conception of dignity paradoxically impels him to plunder defenseless continents, or to carry out the miserable role of courtier.

Spanish nobility. . Spanish nobility. . I shit on their nobility! What did we have to do with that scum? Work, to the true Castilian, was dishonorable; for a Catalan, the dishonor was not to work. I can still hear my father, holding out the palms of his big hands for me to see: “Never trust any man with smooth hands.”

Their grubby empire sank into history’s dirtiest, lowest slime. Millions of the natives were enslaved, their backs broken in mines across the Americas, but Castile, apart from cracking the whip, was unable to construct a free, or at least sound, economy. Any initiative it came up with was cut short by a monarchy with shades of the Asiatic — as well as being autocratic, also backward and especially corrupt.

In 1700, finally, after the Loon had died, the magnitude of the disagreement between Catalonia and Castile became evident. For the Catalans, a French king was a political aberration, the end of all their freedoms, of their very essence as a nation. France’s autocratic regime, which would sooner or later come to apply to Spain, would cancel all indigenous powers. When Castile chose Little Philip, there was no way back from the conflict. In reaction, Catalonia opted for Archduke Charles of Austria to sit on the Spanish throne. (Or a maharaja from Kashmir, if he had come and presented his credentials — anything but a French Bourbon.)

That will do. Now you might understand better the situation in the peninsula of that year. For the Catalans, Spain was merely the name for a free confederation of nations; the Castilians, on the other hand, saw in the word “Spain” an imperial extension of Castile. Or, put another way: For the Castilians, Spain was the chicken coop and Castile its rooster; for the Catalans, Spain was a designation merely for the stick used to beat the chickens. Therein lies the tragedy. In fact, when a Catalan and a Castilian used the word “Spain,” they were referring to two opposed ideas — which is what leads to such confusion for the foreigner. See what I am driving at? In reality, there is no such thing; Spain is not so much a place as a failure to meet.

But before I finish, allow me to say just a few words about my nation, Catalonia. Because in the picture painted so far, I might seem to be a Vaubanian enamored of just one side of the Pyrenees, and that simply isn’t the case.

Even as a child, I realized what a piece of flotsam Catalonia was, floating along on the currents of history when, by rights, it should have sunk hundreds of years before. The problem was that no one wanted to notice its congenital weakness and, even less, try to remedy it. When our concelleres, the Catalan government ministers, held a parade, it was pitiful. A group of silly-looking rag dolls who thought themselves very important — for they never had to doff hats to the king — and their garments and caps were made of red velvet. To the people, they were the “Red Pelts.” We were too enamored of the pantomime.

And here you have our worst defect. We never knew what we wanted, beyond having a good time, the last redoubt of the poor and insignificant. Neither one nor the other — neither France nor Spain — but incapable of building our own political edifice. Neither resigned to our fate nor disposed to changing it. Trapped between the slowly shutting jaws of France and Spain, we resigned ourselves to riding out the storm. Which left us adrift, directionless. Our ruling classes, in particular, were the height of chronic indecision, endlessly caught between servility and resistance. As Seneca said: If a sailor does not know to what port he is steering, no wind will be favorable to him. And when I think about our history, what comes to mind is the most nail-biting question: Which excuse is more melancholy, that which harks after “What we might have been” or that which says “We never should have tried”? We suffered both of those harrowings. The Catalans’ problem was that they never knew what they wanted, and at the same time, they wanted it intensely.

In 1705 a small group of upstanding Catalans conspired to seek the aid of the Allies in light of an incipient uprising against the Bourbons. The Treaty of Genoa between Catalonia and England was struck. The idea was for an Allied army to disembark in Barcelona. England committed to meeting the cost of operations. For their part, the Catalans would raise a Catalan army of volunteers to support the standard troops. This would open the way to Madrid, where they would place the Austrian ape Charles on the throne and give him the title Carlos III of Spain.

As good lawyers, they demanded every guarantee. The contract went so far as to detail what kind of feed the Allies should give to the beasts of burden. Very Catalan, yes. Oh, and if, by some twist of fate, as explicated in the contract, “any adverse and unforeseen events occur when weapons are drawn (God forbid),” the English crown promised that the Catalonian principality would remain “with all the security, guarantee and protection of the Crown of England, without their Persons, Goods, Laws and Privileges suffering the least alteration or detriment.”

And now, excuse me if I explode.

Who did these little lords think they were to speak in the name of the country without even asking the opinion of the Generalitat? Agreed, at that time Barcelona was in the hands of the Bourbon military. Even so, what authority did they have to involve us in a world war as nonchalantly as going out for a stroll in the countryside? Did it occur to no one that we weren’t bartering over a bag of green beans or a kilo of salt but, rather, the blood and the future of the entire country, all in exchange for a scrap of paper? Things did not simply go badly for us — they went as badly as could possibly be imagined. We lost the war. In 1713 our last forces were grouped together upon the walls of Barcelona. The foreign troops had boarded their ships, leaving us with our rumps naked in the wind. You can guess what England did next. They did not have the decency to lie to us. When someone brought out the famous little scrap of paper, those windbags simply spat, saying: “It is not in the interest of England to preserve Catalan liberties.”

Fabulous! And hard to believe as it may seem, when the Catalan ambassador knelt at the feet of Her Gracious Majesty, begging for aid to Barcelona — which, reduced though it then was to rubble, was still holding out against the Bourbon onslaught — what did she say? That we ought to be thankful for their constant concern, that was what!

In Utrecht in 1713, just as the siege of Barcelona was beginning, all the implicated powers negotiated a general peace. So that the English diplomats would not make an issue of the Catalonian question, France and Spain made them a gift of Newfoundland. This was what, in the eyes of the English, our thousands of years of liberty were worth, as well as the worth of that scrap of paper — the right to fish twenty tons a year of cod.

In the last year of the war, tragic 1714, the defenders of Barcelona had been reduced to fighting for their lives, their homes, their city. For the Catalan liberties, which were perfectly tangible, a regime that was opposed to the horror now raining down. They fought under the orders of Villarroel, Don Antonio de Villarroel. Wait a couple of chapters and you will see my view of this man, how he lifted me out of abjection like a boot out of mud. And if you were to ask me the cruelest of questions — to whom do I owe more, Vauban or Villarroel? — my answer would be: I should rather die than answer.

Of the five hundred or so of us who initiated the charge that day, September 11, 1714, I do not believe more than twenty or thirty survived. Villarroel was shot from his horse. The horse fell on top of him, kicking around in pain, and as the grapeshot flew, it was no easy task dragging him out from underneath. One of his legs had been crushed, and the bone above his knee was protruding from his trouser leg. Even so, he pushed away the men helping him, shouting as if possessed: “Don’t stop the charge! Don’t stop! No falling back, not as long as I still draw breath!”

When we pushed on, a charge of grapeshot flew from a cannon and took off half my face. I fell to the floor among mounds of dead and wounded. Lifting five trembling fingers to my left cheek, I found it wasn’t there; in its place, a cavity had been blown as far as the other side of my mouth, a wettish bloody hole with splintered bits of bone sticking out, and my left jaw was broken. I’d lost half my face. Blinded by my own blood, I became not the most reliable witness to those last few hours of Catalan freedom.

In the intervening seventy years, twenty or so different masks have covered my face. The first was somewhat cobbled together, skin-colored, covering my whole face, and with slanted eyes, as in the visor of a helmet. In America I had a craftsman make me a far better one. It cost me an arm and a leg, but it was money well spent. It came down over just my cheek, my left eye, and half of my mouth. The right side of my face was exposed to the sun, and this is what people have always been able to see; given that it was intact, no reason to hide it. It adjusted at the back with clever bands and invisible catches. My sharp nose could stick out all it liked — I was lucky not to have had that blown off, too. Women began casting admiring glances my way once more, and I felt almost human again.

Many other masks were to follow, a great many, some exquisitely designed. Some I sold, others I lost in tropical climes or in wagers, some were seized from me, others stolen, and many were broken by thumps and kicks and fallings-down from horses. The sixth one I owned was shattered by a stray bullet. I owe my life to that mask, which was made of a robust ivory.

Why am I telling the story of my masks? Why is it important? You, woman, you tell me to be quiet only when it seems a good time to you — not when it is good for the book.

11

I have just given an outline of the Catalan view of their final war, which saw an end to them as a nation. But at that time, April 1707, Longlegs Zuvi, nothing but a young lad who couldn’t have cared a pepper for politics and history, was headed into the thick of that French border war on the side he would later come to loathe. And all for the sake of a Word.

When we joined the main body of the Franco-Spanish army in Almansa, we could see for ourselves how bad things were. The two sides, the Allies and the Two Crowns, had spent the previous fifteen days seeking each other out and then withdrawing in a succession of marches and countermarches, indecisive skirmishes and sieges at minor fortresses.

The Allied army was led by the earl of Galway who, despite his title, was French: His name was Henri Massue de Ruvigny, and he was a veteran who had lost an arm the previous year, campaigning in Portugal. This is why, as historians love to repeat, Almansa was seen as a battle between an English force commanded by a Frenchman, and a French force led by an Englishman — General Berwick. The truth of the matter was more complicated.

Berwick must have been the most eminent bastard in all of Europe. The illegitimate son of the ousted James II, England’s last Catholic king, Berwick had grown up in France and always served the Beast. (Remember the letter he sent to Vauban in 1705 about the fall of Nice?) As the pompous name “The Army of the Two Crowns” indicated, it was made up of French and Spanish, that much is true, but also Irish (Berwick’s personal guard), Walloon mercenaries, Neapolitans (you always find a few of them about the place), and even a Swiss battalion. As for the Allies, aside from the English, Portuguese, and Dutch, there was a small corps of diehard Catalans and another of French Huguenots — to this day, I struggle to understand how a bunch of Huguenots pitched up in those desolate latitudes, a nook off to the west of Albacete.

Morale in the Two Crowns’ camp wasn’t precisely what you could call high. Everything had been withdrawn in the recent days. It was said that Galway had begun sarcastically referring to Berwick as his “innkeeper,” since the latter was continually taking up lodgings where he had slept the previous night. Berwick stopped at Almansa only because he’d run out of provisions.

This delay at least allowed Berwick to group together the reinforcements pouring in from far and wide. Some of these, such as the part of Bardonenche’s Couronne regiment in which I traveled, were top-notch. But the vast majority were press-ganged Spaniards — recruits, worth less than nothing.

A sorry sight they were. The day we arrived, they were being given some last-minute training. A regiment, however, is like an oak tree: some twenty years are needed for it to take shape. During the maneuvers, you saw the French advancing in straight lines, while the Spanish twisted about like vines. I didn’t want to think what they would be like under enemy fire. They had been given the gray and white uniforms of Bourbon France. Another strike on the part of the Beast: French companies had been given the contracts to provision all Spanish forces — by decree. In other words, your country gifts its throne to a French prince and, on top, has to pay him rent. Quite a racket. (At least the Catalans squeezed the English down to the very last coin.) The majority of the recruits were very young. Poor boys. They were having their heads introduced into the lion’s mouth because the textile companies in Lyon could claim their pay for the uniforms only when the bodies wearing them were dead. The encampment was an endless sea of tents — no doubt the canvases were from France as well, all bought at a pretty price dictated by the Beast.

Berwick was lodging at the mayor’s house, where the recently arrived officers were going to present themselves to him. Bardonenche wanted me to go with him. He was sitting at a table upon which a large map had been unrolled. Around him were a dozen or so high-ranking officers at a council of war. I found it strange that at a simple council, they would be wearing their armor. It must have been very uncomfortable debating and cogitating with those iron breastplates, shoulder and arm pieces on. Perhaps it was to accentuate their authority, or so everyone would understand the gravity of the situation. Berwick looked up as we came in.

The first, most noticeable thing about Berwick was his youthful mien — not very military. My God, I thought, how can a babe like that command the respect of a whole army? He was thirty-six, and his skin was still baby-soft. He had a perfect oval face. The nose, solid, thin, divided it in two; the lips, though wide, were also wildly sensuous, and the corners rose amiably upward. His fine arcing eyebrows had been heavily plucked. Rarely have I looked upon such black eyes. The right one was squinting somewhat, a feature I attributed to the overwhelming pressure he must have been under.

But James Fitz-James Berwick (Jimmy to his friends) was one of the most frequently depicted people this century (he was by no means immune to vanity). So instead of one plate I’ll give you two. You be the judges.

Ho! You like him, horrendous Waltraud? Don’t fool yourself. He would have barely glanced at you, for you are as ugly as a keg on legs, you are — well, other things besides.

Word in camp was that Berwick was backing off due to his English roots — he had a treacherous streak, so they said. Codswallop. But in Madrid they had taken the idea so seriously that crazy Philip V had sent the duke of Orléans to take over command! His opposite number in the Allied army, Galway, was a gruff general, fifty-nine years of age, and his right-hand man, the Portuguese Das Minas, a hoary old sixty-three. They felt certain they’d be having little bastard Berwick for breakfast. Even less flatteringly, Berwick’s own army was of the same opinion. I have already said a little as to the quality of the new recruits. Few generals have found themselves on the eve of battle with an outlook so dire.

I turned my Bazoches gaze on Berwick; I couldn’t help it. He was making a superhuman effort to try to master his own fate. The dilemma was clear: Brave a battle and his army would most likely be demolished, or shun it, and the duke of Orléans, who was soon to arrive, would wrest command from him. In terms of his personal interests, both outcomes were equally fatal.

Berwick came over to the recently entered officers, greeting them one by one. Bardonenche he knew personally and stopped at him. They were chatting away like old friends, when at a certain moment he noticed me. Pointing to me, acutely interested, he said: “And this handsome, stern-looking youth?”

“Ah, yes,” said Bardonenche. “Martí Zuviría, the most promising engineering cadet in all France, Your Excellence.”

I had studied at the Dijon academy? he asked.

“No, sir,” I answered. “I did my training under one engineer alone.”

He wanted to know the name. I didn’t want to bring up Bazoches. “Someone,” I said with diplomatic sarcasm, “to whom you once sent a missive regarding the happy conquest of Nice. . ”

His gaze grew sharp, and he said: “I was sorry not to have been able to make the funeral. As you can see, I have been somewhat busy of late.” Those around him burst out laughing. “Have I said something amusing?” barked the Englishman, turning on them.

His mood swings were dramatic and, as I would later discover, also predictable. It was his way of catching his subordinates off guard, a way of reminding them who was top dog. He waved a hand as though offended, and everyone withdrew. “Not you,” he ordered me. “I want you to tell me about the final moments in the great Vauban’s life.”

Ah! A little one-to-one chat, what about that! I had seen it coming the moment he called me a “handsome, stern-looking youth.” Converse about Vauban! If it had really been that, Bardonenche should have stayed, the aristocrat, the old friend, and someone who had been present in the marquis’s dying days. He had asked me to accompany him to his private chamber. How was I supposed to say no? Sometimes the predictable is unavoidable.

He led me up some stairs. We entered his room and he said, “Help me with my armor.”

The words were friendly, the tone, authoritative. He turned away from me, crossed his arms, and I undid his cuirass at the neck. I couldn’t help but let the armor fall to the floor with a clatter. More than asking, he ordered me: “Call me Jimmy.”

The brusqueness of the demand infuriated me. I gave him a fierce look. Outside of the field of battle, he was not accustomed to being disobeyed, and my hostility must have disarmed him, because he gave a surprisingly submissive wave of the hand, now saying, “D’accord?”

I was thinking about how to get myself out of the situation when something happened. Once he was free of the steel that held and tormented him, he staggered. His knees buckled. He scratched the wall with his nails as he fell. He began drooling like a slug and convulsing.

The convulsions were so violent that I thought to go for help. “Your Excellence, what is it?”

Still kneeling, he turned his head slowly. Something in his eyes was different. He was the private Berwick now, free of the need to be ostentatious. An organism pushed to inhuman limits, a creature lacking all affection.

That power brings with it an enormous public aspect is no secret. And Jimmy was obliged to push his army beyond all bounds. The slightest false move, even blinking at the wrong moment, could be taken as a sign of weakness. An out-of-place gesture and his authority would evaporate. A wrong decision and he’d lose an army. On the night preceding Almansa, he was less than a rag.

I felt for him. I know I may have been wrong to. I got my hands under his armpits and heaved him to his feet. He pushed me away, furious. “I’m fine!” he shouted.

“No, no, you aren’t,” I said. “Vauban spoke to me of the illness of those with power, and ways of treating them.”

He gave me a hateful glance.

“Tea with thyme in it,” I said. “And turn your back on the world.”

I found out for myself that day that the things I had learned at Bazoches would make me feel love for people more often than was desirable; my sight, my sense of touch, all my senses were too sharp not to see the man suffering underneath that triumphant uniform. That this man was so powerful, and at the same time so defenseless, and that he had to hide his inadequacies from the world, moved me to the point where I couldn’t help but take him in my arms. Jimmy, poor Jimmy, he never knew that my love for him was due not to his power but — oh, paradox! — his weaknesses, which made even him human, that demon who would one day annihilate us.

He did not let me accompany him the following day, which meant my experience of the battle of Almansa was from inside the town walls. I hardly lamented the fact; Zuvi wasn’t exactly spoiling for a fight. Plus, I had learned about sieges, not battles in open country. I watched the encounter from a window, which is one way of putting it, for the fog, smoke, and clouds of dust combined to form a curtain so opaque that all was reduced to the din of artillery and gunfire.

Against all expectations, Jimmy crushed the Allied army. He came back covered in dirt, worn out, dents all over his cuirass. And yet the demonic part of him was visible in the return, the part that kept him going. For battle had cured all his ills: Victory is the most marvelous elixir. He seemed a different man; more than merely cured, Jimmy was drunk on vitality, exultant, bursting with life.

Seeing me, he said, “You’re still here. Good.”

And so began an amity that, to put it one way, was far from straightforward. James Fitz-James, duke of Fitz-James, duke of Berwick, of Liria and Jérica, peer and marshal of the French realm, thanks to the victory at Almansa, knight of the Golden Fleece, et cetera, et cetera. Anything you like. Even so, never ceasing to be a bastard; son of James II of England, yes, but a bastard all the same.

Life pushed him into a race he could never win. However many armies he destroyed, fortresses stormed, services rendered, he would always be what he was: misbegotten, a social neuter. Any aristocrat of good blood who had notched up half the accomplishments of his short life would have been held up as more than Olympian. Not him. Son of an outcast king and illegitimate to boot. Hence his constant quest for legitimacy and royalty.

The strangest thing about him was that he was also absolutely clear-sighted. He knew he would never be given the one thing he sought. He garnered honors and praise, duchies, infinite wealth, all the claptrap awarded by kings, ceremonies with priests in attendance, and the singing of infantile hymns. In private, he scorned such affairs. I know he did. Certain of his supporters have said he made the most of his time on earth, emphasizing the ten children he had with his second wife. Ha! Don’t make me laugh. Where do they imagine a person like Jimmy would find time to lie down with his little wife (who, by the way, was uglier than a Barbary ape), even if we’re talking about only ten occasions? In 1708 alone, he took part in three different campaigns in the service of that dreadful monster of a king, Louis XIV — in Spain, France, and Germany. Do they want to try and convince me that he went a-wooing to her whenever he could? That he’d trot off to her abode, say, “Sweetie, here I am,” have a roll around with her, and then back to the action? I can assure them the only possibility is that he tasked someone else with such matters. On top of the fact that I was with him.

Fine, all right. I said I had set myself to be sincere, and that is what I shall be. I’m too old to care.

We fucked the whole night through. And the next day, we did not leave the room. Why would we? Where could be better than there? Plus, he could allow himself it. There were continual knocks at the door: “Your Excellence, the mayor of Almansa entreats an audience!” or “Your Excellence, urgent dispatch from Madrid!” or “Colonel so-and-so asks about lodgings for the prisoners.” At first the door knocker startled me, but when I jumped out of bed, sending the chamber pot flying, all Jimmy did was laugh. The world was at his feet, why should he bother to answer? He had earned the right not to let a door knocker importune him. That’s what power is, precisely that: The world seeks an audience with you, and you laugh at it from behind the door.

Now what? Why are you making that face?

I could have skipped this, but you asked for a love scene.

You didn’t like it?

I can see you did not.

For a good amount of time, I was very close to being happy. I felt sure le Mystère had delivered me into the arms of a teacher who might be a replacement for Vauban. Jimmy was perfectly suited to the role. He was sufficiently distinguished as a Maganon that, a full two years before, he had dared disagree with Vauban in his letter from Nice — and on the subject of a siege, no less. Further, Jimmy included in his criticism of the marquis the statement that it was all very well pontificating from the rearguard, passing judgment on those fighting up front. And this was precisely the thing I needed, the siege experience, the reality of combat, and of life, that would enable me to discover The Word.

Everything was fine to begin with, though little of note took place. Jimmy and the rest of the army had to recover from battle. I understood that. Then winter arrived, and naturally enough, the campaign was put on hold; since time immemorial, armies have never fought in winter.

Jimmy was one of the great personalities of his age. Daring but at the same time sound in judgment, an incongruous mix flowed in him: He was both an utter egoist and extremely generous and indulgent toward others. He was one of the few truly great figures of our century, this tortured and tortuous century, full of sagas epic and inane. But by the spring of 1708, we had been together for almost a year, and I was still to see any action. Some say the great Battle of Almansa was exceptional. For every one battle in open country, there were ten sieges of strongholds, large or small, and the issue for me was that I was missing out on them all. Attacking or defending, what did it matter to me? If I finally got to take part in a siege selon les règles, not merely as a theoretical exercise, I might be able to unveil The Word, that Word that had the kernel of knowledge trapped inside it. Validate my fifth Point. I wouldn’t let it go.

“Oh, don’t worry yourself over that,” Jimmy would say. “You’re rendering far worthier services: making war pleasurable for me.”

At that point, our mutual understanding withered, all the ties that could bind me to him as a man and, especially, as a Maganon. I had erred: People in high office demand everything from those around them, and Jimmy was the most egoistic marshal of all. He used soldiers, engineers, and lovers alike.

He tried to keep me from leaving, began avoiding me. When it comes to powerful men, the best thing is to give them a wide berth: If they grow tall, you will be in their shade, and if they fall, you’ll find yourself crushed underneath. With Jimmy, I was kept quiet by an unfathomable force that also kept us apart: le Mystère. You do not say no to a marshal of France, not to his face, so I limited myself to trying to leave without him noticing.

When spring came, the Franco-Spanish army split into two. One part was to remain under Jimmy’s command, while the other would be led by the duke of Orléans. I asked to be reassigned to the latter’s section. Among aristocracy, the envy of others is much to be desired, so you can imagine Orléans’ satisfaction when I offered him my services. Vauban’s name could move mountains, and Orléans didn’t hesitate to accept me in. Indeed, no doubt rivalry between leaders had an impact, a considerable one: Stealing Berwick’s little apricot would supply Orléans with endless opportunities to lord it over him.

The day before we were set to leave, I received orders to present myself at Jimmy’s field tent. My having “deserted,” gone over to his rival in the Bourbon high command, was doubtless an affront. I knew it and made my way there very reluctantly.

He was sitting, writing something, when I came in. The tent was rectangular and very long. His desk was at the far end, and it was as though he were a spider waiting in its web. He bade his servants leave and, once they had gone, thrust his quill into the inkstand like a knife, saying: “You haven’t even said goodbye.”

I could take refuge in hierarchy for once. I held my nerve, looking straight ahead of me. I spoke in a formal, distant way: “The marshal has sent no order for me to bid him farewell.”

“Enough of the silliness!” he barked. “We’re alone now. And stand at ease. You’re like a pole in the ground.” He handed me some papers. “Read. You’ll be grateful to me all your days.” As though he were doing me a considerable favor, he added: “You’re coming with me. It’s decided.”

It was my appointment as a royal engineer. Or at least a personal petition to the Beast, signed by Jimmy.

This is how powerful people behave. Everything, as far as they’re concerned, is agreed without discussion, and on they go. What I might have to say, my interests, desires, needs, mattered not a jot. But I had been educated at Bazoches, and that was a rampart that not even the duke of Berwick could clear. I interjected: “You can’t appoint me engineer.”

He wasn’t sure how to overcome this resistance, whether to employ threats or seduction, but was too clever to go fully either way. “It will be the king of France doing so,” he said evasively.

“Not even he has the correct authority.” I bared my forearm, showing my five Points. “The king may make what decrees he pleases, but not on my tattoos. You know full well.”

“You want us to disagree. Tell me why.”

I said nothing. I could have hurt him by saying his only authority over me was carnal, or that his spitefulness was the product of wounded vanity. That was how Jimmy was: He thought he had the right to receive love without giving any back. No, I didn’t say a word. What would be the point? It was a good thing I kept quiet: He took my silence harder than any accusation I could have come up with. He realized he was up against a force that was not me but which I was merely representing. He pondered how he might subdue it but was sufficiently intelligent to know it was beyond his powers. He sighed, then barked: “I at least have the right to ask why you don’t want to come with me. I’m more than a marshal to you. Which is why I want you at my side.”

I interjected for the second time, brusquely rebuffing him. “Of course a marshal is what you are.” I looked him in the eye. “Always and wherever. Much as you might want to be, you can’t be anything else.”

I left without being ordered to. He wouldn’t have been able to stop me.

Jimmy, along with half the army, was to go north, and Orléans east, to lay siege to a city named Játiva. Alas, I wasn’t allowed to join Orléans’s troops. As a farewell of his own, Jimmy left me a poisoned gift: a bureaucratic tangle between his secretaries and those of Orléans that would delay my transfer. He did it simply to aggravate me, as it meant I had to stay in Almansa waiting for my new passport to be sorted out. Very nice. The siege of Játiva promised to be quite the spectacle, and there I was, stuck in that godforsaken Albacete pigsty, a place that — among the wounded, monks, reinforcements, and mounds of provisions that were to be sent out to the new battle lines — would have the smell of death about it for a thousand years to come. They say that, on both sides combined, ten thousand poor souls died at Almansa. Ten thousand, when, at a well-directed siege, the marquis had shown a way of losing no more than ten! The slaughter had been such that the inhabitants of the town had to use the wells as graves. They threw the naked bodies in like sacks. Naked, I say, because the people were so miserable that they stripped the belongings of the fallen, right down to their dirty undergarments.

The Word. My mistake had been not learning The Word. What had been the marquis’s question? “Summarize the optimum defense.” The days went by with me stuck in a dust-ridden field tent, and my anxiety grew. More than wanting to, I needed to experience the things I had been taught at Bazoches.

By the time my passport came, Játiva had already fallen into Bourbon hands, but the siege of Tortosa was about to get underway. I shrugged it off: The Word might be found in any siege, I thought. Tortosa was also an extremely interesting prospect. One day a supply convoy set out, and I was allowed to go along.

During the march, an incident occurred that would shatter my musings, which until then had been purely to do with siege warfare. The convoy had to stand aside to allow a crowd coming the opposite way to pass, made up of women, children, and the elderly, all of them dressed in rags and wretched-looking. These individuals were all tinted the same: Their clothes, their faces, their feet as they shuffled by, all took on the same grayish, subdued hue. A flock whose tribulation was plain to see, who, in spite of their numbers, went by in silence. Only the youngest ones were bold enough to shed tears. None even held out a hand for alms. They were being escorted by a few men on horseback who cracked the occasional whip to make them keep up the pace. An old woman fell down directly in front of me, and my natural impulse was to lean over to help her. One of the riders spurred his horse over to us. “Stand away from the rebels.”

“Rebels?” I said in surprise. “Since when have old women been rebels?”

The man came and stood his beast between the old woman and me. A horse’s hooves can be very intimidating, and I took a couple of backward steps.

“Fancy changing direction? We’ve got plenty of room for more!” bellowed the man, deadly serious.

It isn’t exactly prudent to argue with a man who’s armed and on horseback when you yourself are neither of those things. Even so, I made clear what I thought of this villainous bully. He looked at me with his beady rat eyes.

The driver of my carriage, an older man I’d chatted with a little in the jib, came up behind me, tugged on my arm, and hissed: “Don’t be an imbecile.”

“But what can these children and grayheads have done that’s so bad?” I cried. “And where are they being taken?”

“What do you want to be?” he said in my ear. “A good engineer or a Good Samaritan?” To try to calm things down, he turned a smile at the man on the horse, saying: “Hi, friend! How did it go in Játiva?”

“No such place as Játiva now,” said the brute, spurring his horse away.

So the people were from Játiva, deported to Castile, an express wish of Little Philip’s. After the city was conquered, thousands were enslaved, including from the nearby settlements. Even Játiva’s name was eliminated, the place rechristened Colonia de San Felipe. Had I not seen this sorry column with my own eyes, I would have refused to believe it.

I spoke very little in the ensuing days. I had been educated to believe in a certain basic idea, that a king fights to defend or win territories — never to destroy them. Such an absurdity could make sense only in the mind of a madman. What use could there be in taking control of a place that has been flattened? Játiva, the city of a thousand wells, wiped from the face of the earth because a king had pointed his finger at a map.

As soon as we crossed into Catalonia, we began to see people hanged from the branches of trees. The convoy’s slow advance was now constantly presided over by these oscillating bodies. On the larger trees, there were sometimes five, six, seven cadavers swinging from the branches, some higher, some lower, feet stirred by the wind. Most were men of all ages, but I did see a woman hanged from one solitary oak. They had not even bothered to tie her hands behind her. Beneath her on the ground were a little girl and a dog; its snout thrust in the air, the animal let out heartrending yowls, snorting through its nostrils like a bellows. The dog knew the woman was dead, but most harrowing of all, the child did not.

Official historians limit themselves to official history. They omit to mention that in 1708 the war had reached Catalonia, and thousands of Catalan irregulars joined in the fight. “Volunteers” would be one name for them, “militia,” or “mountain fusiliers,” but we called them Miquelets. These require a little explanation; otherwise, what was going on will make no sense.

“Miquelet” itself is simply a transcription of the original Catalan word Miquelet. The origin is possibly Michaelmas (Sant Miquel), when harvesting would traditionally commence. Anyone who didn’t find work at harvest would look for alternatives, such as enlisting in the French or Spanish armies. If, for instance, the French were raising war against southern Protestants, the paymasters would hurry to Catalonia to recruit Miquelets. Miquelets were vehemently opposed to putting on army uniforms and footwear, and they even armed themselves. The French and Spanish high command considered them undisciplined hillmen, savages almost, unpredictable and unorthodox — none of which stopped them from appreciating their virtues as warriors. As light infantry, they were peerless. Excellent in forest combat, and as snipers, they always took on perilous roles in the vanguard, ravaging enemy lands. “Les Miquelets ont fait des merveilles” was the view of French officialdom. Which was why they were quick to enroll as many as possible: They cost half that of a professional unit and were twice as effective.

The problem was that some of them took a liking to the life of pillaging and slaughtering in the name of others. Whenever demobilized, they’d roam the hills and tracks as bandits, waiting for the next call-up. Catalan civilians came to abhor them — at least in the cities, Miquelets were thought of as outlaws.

1708 was the first time a Bourbon army had set foot in Catalonia. As was to be expected, the Miquelets took exception to the invaders. Until that point, they hadn’t cared a radish for the war, but all that changed when their own lands were advanced upon. Though nominally under the command of the Allied armies, they acted of their own accord. In any case, the fact that they wore no uniforms meant the Bourbons didn’t recognize them as combatants bound by the usual treaties, which made hostilities unprecedentedly ferocious.

A captured Miquelet would usually be hanged. For their part, the Miquelets were no less cruel. Any soldiers they took prisoner would have their feet scorched and, before execution, be made to hop around like dancing bears. Sometimes the Miquelets would send them up onto the edge of a cliff or gully, where the enemy could see them. A horn would be sounded to draw the attention of the Bourbon soldiers. The prisoners, in single file, would have their ankles tied together with a long rope. Then the first one would be pushed over the edge. Then the second and the third, until the weight of the fallen, combined, would pull the others over. I was witness to one of these savage reprisals. Ten or twelve soldiers, hands tied behind their backs, ankles connected by the same rope. The more who fell, the harder it would be for those at the top to hold the weight. My God, their shrieks and cries. What a sight, these lines of white uniforms falling, vanishing without a trace. Nothing, I can assure you, could possibly lay a man’s heart any lower.

Here’s a representative account of the Miquelets, to show what kind of people they were. A case that, unfortunate that I was, I had to experience in the flesh.

Eighty or so Miquelets had at that time made an incursion into an area on the Catalan frontier called Beceite. Typical Miquelet behavior: They’d take out a small Bourbon detachment, then spend a few days in the liberated settlement, living more comfortably than up in the hills. But the fates were against them on this occasion, as the unit I was traveling in to Tortosa was passing very near to Beceite. We came across a couple of fear-stricken Spanish soldiers, who had managed to get away, and they told us what had happened at Beceite.

The Spanish caught the Miquelets with their breeches around their ankles that day. They were out in the town square celebrating their small victory, half drunk, when two cavalry squadrons rode in. The Miquelets fled in disarray, and thirty of their number were killed and one taken prisoner.

When it was all done, our unit took over the town, and I can assure you this was no pretty sight. In one corner, like a pile of discarded horseshoes, lay the soldiers who had died when the Miquelets first attacked; strewn across the square, the thirty Miquelets ridden down and bayoneted by the cavalry. Day was already well advanced, and it was decided that we would stay the night in Beceite, so “hospitality,” as the officers put it, was “arranged.”

Doors were kicked down and the civilians rounded up in the square. The skirmish was over, but the screaming and wailing had barely begun. Once all the townspeople were there, the officers, in order of rank, began picking out the prettiest girls and taking them back to their houses, where they would exercise what they termed their right to “hospitality.” In other words, raping these women, whether they were virgins or had husbands, all in plain view of their families.

Back in the square, the mayor was down on his knees, and one of the captains had a sword at his neck. The town had always been loyal to Philip V, protested the mayor.

“He’s lying,” said the driver of my carriage.

“How do you know?” I said.

In answer, he pointed at the bell tower, which was empty. “Any town without a bell supports the archduke,” he explained. “They were all handed over and melted down to make cannons.” He winked at me. “Well, these are Catalans, so no doubt they made a little money out of it. But the end result’s the same.”

Overhearing us, a corporal came over. “You speak Catalan?” he said. “Because we need a translator.”

I got down from the carriage and let him lead me to the sole prisoner. He was the group’s leader, a man by the name of Ballester. Before they hanged him, they wanted to extract whatever information they could. His eyebrow was split and had bled profusely. But his broad face had a beauty out of keeping with the situation, and seemed to scorn any pain he might have been in. The ropes binding his wrists were soaked dark red. He had been captured moments earlier, and the blood he’d shed was already dry, as though, the thought struck me, he had been born with old veins.

And he was astonishingly young. Leading a squad of irregulars, and yet he couldn’t have been any older than sixteen or seventeen — a boy, like me. He must have had quite the temperament, to be respected as a leader. His features melded nobility and sadness — not so strange, given the situation. But something also said to me that, even in better times, he’d be the distant kind. As for Ballester’s gaze? It put me in mind of waves crashing against rocks; sooner or later, they’d overwhelm you. We came from such opposed worlds that I felt uncomfortable having to address him. I told him what his captors wanted. His attitude to me was that of a man listening to rabbits chew grass. He tilted his head and spat blood, and all he said in answer was: “I’m going to die, and that’s all.”

He didn’t lament death, as though, more than an inevitable risk in the militia, it might mean martyrdom. Human instinct leads us to sympathize with the captive rather than the captor, and though Ballester’s fate mattered nothing to me, I found myself saying, “Don’t be a fool. If you promise them information, they’ll keep you alive. Tell them something they’ll need to wait to check the veracity of. Meantime, anything could happen. Who knows? Maybe peace will break out.”

He raised his hands, bold youth, and looked me in the eye. The words seemed to scrape out from between his teeth. “If it weren’t for these binds, I’d rip out your tongue, shitty botiflero.”

Botiflero is the worst insult one can ever give a Catalan. It means anyone who supports Philip V, Castile, and the Bourbon dynasty. A traitor, a colluder, that is. The — iflero part of the word relates to a Catalan (and Spanish) word for fat—anyone, that is, all puffed up in his finery. I imagine it comes from the fact that the vast majority of supporters of the Austrian king, Charles, were from the lower classes, and those few Catalans behind Little Philip tended to be aristocracy and clergy.

Anyway, what does it matter where the word comes from? The point is that Ballester had insulted me, and I responded accordingly. “I try to help you, and you insult me!” I shouted. “I’d like to know what my place as an upstanding engineer has to do with the lowly kind of warfare you are engaged in.”

A few more insults went back and forth. The only thing to note being how clear was the irremediable distance separating us. For me, war was what I’d been taught at Bazoches: a technical exercise free of ill will, tempered by the nobility of the opposing spirits. War, in this account, could (and ought to) be undertaken without emotions, which can only cloud the rational landscape of engineering; battle was a rational sphere, closer to chess than flying bits of lead. If a soldier had ever said to Vauban that he hated the enemy, no question, Vauban would have answered: “And what has he ever done to you?” Whereas for individuals like Ballester, war was a matter of life and death. Or not — it was more, much more than that — according to what he believed, this war was being conducted according to principles far higher than the brief transition that is life. From my point of view, of course, this was deluded: A military engineer was as far removed from mysticism as a clockmaker.

Yes, I had seen hundreds of people hanged, their feet swaying in the pines. I’d seen the Játiva hecatomb, and the dog and the girl at the woman’s feet. But my education was made of stuff too solid to be rocked by a few sad sights. I stopped arguing with Ballester; it wasn’t worth the trouble. He seemed to me the perfect mix of bandit and fanatic.

“Very well,” I said, “don’t tell them anything. You’re the first person I’ve ever met who’d prefer a shorter to a longer life.”

The Spanish captain who had sent for a translator was becoming annoyed, not being able to understand the insults. Curtly, he demanded to know what had been said.

“The Miquelets in this area are under orders of General Jones, the English commander in Tortosa,” I lied. “Their mission is to take this godforsaken place and then await orders. A courier will be arriving tomorrow, first thing. To speak to this nincompoop, specifically.”

As I’d thought, rather than stringing him up there and then, they decided to use him as bait.

“You’ve got another night to live,” I said to him. “Put your house in order.”

I had made it all up. No courier would be arriving the next morning, but I was in no danger. The Miquelets had decided against it, was all anyone would think, or they’d worked out it was a trap. Why did I do it? I don’t know; perhaps Jimmy’s royal generosity — not at all the same thing as generosity — had rubbed off on me. Or because of being a student of Vauban, whose punishment of vanquished foes was always benevolent. I do not believe it was purely out of goodness, as my next piece of conduct demonstrated very well the so-and-so I was becoming: I went after one of our Mediterranean beauties, a young girl, my and Ballester’s age, who sparkled even from afar, even with a dirty rag for a head wrap. I saw her passing in front of a squat building, an open-door stable now holding twenty or thirty military horses. She was inside, feeding them hay. When she saw me, she looked away.

Look, I have lain down beside women from a great many latitudes, some of them of the strangest tints and hues. And in the eternal debate over which are most beautiful, I hold with the French. It must be one of the few commonplaces that are actually true. Still, it is a general truth; individually, when a Mediterranean woman is beautiful, she is without peer. And this young girl was bewitching. Her curly locks escaped from under the edges of the head wrap and fell down about her shoulders. The darkest black hair.

A passing sergeant warned me off: “Don’t go near that one, she’s sick with something. She’ll even ward off horse rustlers.”

It must be a question of character: If you say to certain people “Don’t go,” the very first thing they’ll do is go. I entered the large stable, stopping a few feet from her with my elbow propped on the back of a horse. Chewing a piece of straw, I looked directly at her. She didn’t stop working, piling straw in the mangers, pretending not to notice me.

“Come over here,” I ordered.

From closer up, I could observe her in more detail. Sure enough, she was very young. Her nose had a pronounced, graceful curve to it. Slowly, I lifted a finger to her cheek. She turned her face away, but I had her cornered. I brushed her cheek with my fingertip, coming away with one of the ugly black grains. Well, perhaps she was contagious, but not to a student from Bazoches, who notices even the tiniest details. I pressed on the eruption, then put my finger in my mouth and sucked.

Raspberry jam. How clever! Not only had her pretend illness gotten her a job; it acted as a brilliant shield against the possibility of being raped. She knew she’d been found out, and the uncovered areas of her pale skin flushed an irate red.

Don’t for a second think I’m going to launch into some discourse about military abuses. I’ve had dealings with too many soldiers, from all across the world, not to see their side. The common soldier is born a pauper and will die one. And things become available to an armed man that he’d never have the benefit of without a rifle at his shoulder. Spoils, and victims, become defenseless objects; it is then up to the morality of the would-be pillager to protect them. I agree that violating defenseless women is not a nice thing. My point is merely that to condemn the pillagers is easy — as easy as pillaging is difficult to defend.

No, I did not violate her. Perhaps because, if you have been educated in Bazoches, you come to treat women à la Vauban, and not à la Coehoorn. But my case is an exception to what was happening all across occupied Catalonia: At that very moment hundreds, thousands, of soldiers were stepping inside barns such as that one, sword in one hand, woman under the other arm.

The country was too small to provide lodgings for so many soldiers. A number of years later, I met a man who had been the mayor of a town of no more than eight hundred souls, called Banyoles. Practically every single virgin had been deflowered, and seventy-three of them fell pregnant. When he went to the governing authorities to protest, they reacted in the typical Bourbon fashion: by throwing the mayor in jail. Not even the Dutch in the sixteenth century suffered such ignominy at the hands of the duke of Alba’s troops.

I asked her a few questions. Her name was Amelis. She did not hail from Beceite, the town where we were. So what was she doing there? She told me that she lived as a camp follower, taking whatever jobs she could find. I was about to push her harder, to try and elicit more information, when I heard shots outside.

It wasn’t uniform volleys, like the kind you’d expect from regular troops, but, rather, a scattering of shots, punctuated by inhuman wailing. If there is one thing I have always had in spades, it is the prudence usually associated with beetles; rather than running out of the stable, I went farther in, to the back, keeping Amelis close to me as hostage. We got inside a mound of straw, me with my hand fast over her mouth, and I myself kept very, very quiet. Whatever was happening, I’d be sure to find out later on, without trying to be a hero. Indeed, it didn’t take long before I found out what, and who, it was. A soldier burst in, terrified, trying to get away from something — he wasn’t given time to hide: A number of Miquelets followed immediately behind. They ended his life as if he were a dog, beating his head in, and then went out in search of more. During the execution, I moved my hand from Amelis’s mouth to cover her eyes. She was kind and prudent enough not to scream.

This was the execution I mentioned before, the one I witnessed in the flesh. The unpredictable, what in military terms was irrational, was never clearer than in assaults like the one on Beceite. They themselves had been given a hiding; they’d fled leaving thirty dead and their little caudillo, Ballester, in enemy hands. Who could have expected a counterattack within half an hour, leaderless and against superior forces? But their regard for Ballester, and the chance to rescue him, quite simply, drew them back.

The Miquelets revealed a principle that is often ignored but that I have always had much respect for: lunacy. In war, it always lends the element of surprise. And they won the day! The Spanish officials were spread around in different houses throughout the town, each with his breeches down. The rank and file were not on guard and had no one to give them orders. Extremely cautiously, I peeked out of a window. At the end of the street, in the town square, I saw Ballester himself. Free once more, surrounded by his men, he was about to slit the throat of the captain who, moments before, had had him interrogated. The captain, kneeling; Ballester behind him. He lifted the captain’s chin with one hand and, with the other, drew a knife across the man’s gullet.

I barely need say how nervous that pretty little scene made me. In Ballester’s eyes, I was an accursed botiflero. I preferred not to think what he’d do if he caught me. The way the captain had been killed, I was sure, would be rather agreeable compared to what they would line up for me; bleeding cleanly to death was sweet in comparison with the inventive torture methods the Miquelets could surely come up with.

The only thing was to hide and await nightfall. Then make myself scarce. The two of us lay there for a long while, on the floor, under that mound of straw. I lay close to Amelis’s back, the two of us like spoons. My cheek against hers, my hand over her mouth once more: a forced, absurd intimacy. Her neck smelled lovely, and the straw made me think of Jeanne. This is what human beings are like: people being shot down in the street outside, me possibly next in line, and even so, I couldn’t avoid seeing, in Amelis’s outline, with all her clothes on, Jeanne naked.

Night finally fell. We were still lying down, and I whispered in the ear of my dark-haired beauty. “If I let you go now, you’ll give me away, and they’ll be straight after me. I’m going to keep you with me for a little while. All I want is to get out of here alive. Behave yourself and I’ll let you go once we’re clear of this place. Understand?”

She nodded, and I took my hand away from her mouth. Just to be safe, before I let her go, I spoke the most amorous words imaginable: “And if you cry out, I’ll strangle you.”

Outside the stable door lay the street, where I would inevitably run into one of those deadly Miquelets. Behind the stable, on the other hand, there was a wood not far off. Slip out of a back window, was my thought. The problem was how; the window was too narrow for us both to get through it at the same time. If she went first, she’d run off screaming the moment her feet touched the ground. If I went first, she’d turn on her heel and escape. She was a sharp girl and could see my problem without my having to explain it.

“Get out of here,” she hissed, more disgusted than hostile. “Why would I bother getting them to kill you? I won’t say anything to anyone.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that.”

I picked her up at her hips, lifting her onto the cramped window ledge, and then got up next to her, side by side. It was a thick adobe wall, made far thicker than usual, perhaps to keep the stable cool. That meant the window was reached by a long tube, a few feet in length. We were bound to get stuck with our arms in front, our heads outside, our bellies wedged together and our four feet dangling in the air behind us.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve studied how to deal with situations like this.”

“Oh, really?” she replied. “Quite the student you’ve turned out to be.”

“Anatomical theory states that, if a man’s shoulders can fit through the width of a trench or a mine, the rest of the body can also get through. And if the cavity is too narrow, all you have to do is dislocate one shoulder. Once through, simply pop the shoulder back into place.”

Her large eyes grew even wider. “You’re going to dislocate your shoulder?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “I’ll do yours. I’ll put it back in afterward. It won’t be hard — both my hands are free, and I know how it’s done.”

At this point she began buffeting me about the head with her fists. “You’ve had your grubby hands on me for hours, and now you’re saying you want to break my back! I’m not going to let you touch me anymore, not even my shoulder!”

I put my hand over her mouth. “Quiet!”

I have no idea how we did eventually manage it. I believe I may have pulled off the wooden frame, widening the space somewhat, and we then slid out like boneless lizards. We fell to the floor outside, I lifted her up, and into the woods we went.

Beceite was surrounded by mountainous terrain, a delightful natural labyrinth for the Miquelet parties to shelter in. The Army of the Two Crowns was off to the southeast, and that was the way I headed.

It was a pinewood forest, not especially dense, and a full moon bathed everything in an amber light. There is no such thing as war for crickets, and the freshness of the night was a relief after the heat of the summer day. Had that group of senseless throat slitters not been so close by, it might have been a most pleasurable nighttime stroll. Once we were far enough away to make noise, I said: “Quite the friends you’ve got! That soldier who came into the stable — they beat him to death just to save on bullets!”

Though she was at my side, she made it clear she wanted to get away from me as soon as possible. “I don’t have any friends,” she said. “And even if I did, who are you to criticize? What does war have to do with the poor?”

“It’s possible to be poor and not a savage,” I said.

“At least they don’t go around raping their enemies’ women!”

“Neither do I!” I said, defending myself. “And, so you know, I’m an engineer. We professionals, engineers or soldiers, we serve the person who has contracted our services, whichever king it happens to be, and for the duration of the contract, and that’s all. Birth does not tie us to any particular sovereign, and therein lies our privilege. I might serve France today, Sweden or Prussia tomorrow, and no one could call me disloyal or a deserter, just as no one would be surprised to see a spider crossing the river by jumping from rock to rock.”

“To the Miquelets, you are a Bourbon,” she said. “And if the Bourbons go around hanging their parents and children, is it so surprising they want to kill you?”

“I am paid to carry out engineering works. To be honest with you, I couldn’t care less either way, Bourbon or pro-Austrian, one side or the other.”

Suddenly, she stopped. She looked around, smiling, and said: “Do you not hear that?”

The abrupt change of subject surprised me, but I answered: “You’re quite right, it’s very annoying having to walk in a pine forest. I supposed it would be pointless to ask you to stop stepping on pinecones; they crunch so loudly, you can hear them a mile off.”

“No, engineer,” she said, cutting me off, straining to hear. “I mean the music.”

Music? There were, of course, only the sounds of the forest at night. Had she lost her mind? The summer moon lent her pale complexion an unreal tone. I thought for a moment that she might have been referring to the two of us; we’d gotten off on the wrong foot, but the forest at night was making everything sweeter. Or perhaps not: I reached an arm around her waist, but she got away from me immediately.

As she went, she left me with an almost sad sigh. “No, you do not hear it,” she said. “Farewell, then, great engineer.”

She had disappeared, but the scent of her lingered in the forest air for a moment. And know something else? I wasn’t certain whether she had taken me for a ride or there was something more.

I walked all night to try and put as much distance as I could between me and that Miquelet warren. At first light, I positioned myself on top of one of the large boulders you see throughout that region. From up there, lying on my front, I could see the path without being seen. I had a decent amount of time to think things through. In such moments, the infinite superiority of love over any horror becomes clear, because my mind turned again and again to that girl: Amelis, averting the images of death, Amelis.

After Jeanne, no beauty had moved me as much. And you’ll agree when I say that Amelis was at a disadvantage, seeing as Jeanne always had recourse to upper-class cosmetics, whereas when I met Amelis, she was wearing a laughable head wrap and had disguised herself with a pretend disease. Where could she have gone? Her parting words could have meant anything, even that she was a spy, possibly for both sides. . She would end up hanged, that was for sure.

At midmorning I made out a dust cloud on the horizon. This was the first time in my life, and the last, I believe, that I was happy to see a detachment of Bourbon cavalry. At least they wouldn’t treat me as the Miquelets might have done! I signaled to them with my hat from the top of the boulder and came down to ground level.

At their head was a captain in a dust-covered uniform, the white of it altogether gray now. Without dismounting, he asked me: “Spanish or French?”

“Alive is what I am, and it’s a miracle!” I cried, scurrying over to them. “Get me away from here, damn it!”

12

The army set to attack Tortosa was led by the duke of Orléans, nephew to the Beast himself. Orléans had twenty-five thousand men under his command, and a lavishly stocked artillery train.

Thus, after so many twists and turns, I was going to take part in a proper siege. I won’t deny that my spirits picked up. Perhaps I would manage to overcome my Bazoches disaster, restore myself, become an engineer. I’d spent two years, the most interesting years of my short life thus far, deep in the task of becoming a Maganon, absorbing both the science and the necessary morals. Twenty-four months, if you think about it, is a considerable portion of the life of a sixteen-year-old. So whenever I was feeling doubtful, I would roll up my right sleeve. I meditated on my five Points, contemplating them in many different lights, in the glowing dawn, or by that of a full moon, when midday embraced us or in the soft violet twilight. My God, I found my tattoos full of beauty, those five sacred Points. I couldn’t give up. Tortosa meant the chance to discover a Word that would bathe me in light.

The Bourbon army had pitched tents outside Tortosa on June 12, and I arrived the next day. I joined the engineers’ brigade as an aide-de-camp. I could make myself additionally useful with my French and Catalan, and there was a chance that I might be used to liaise between the French and Spanish contingents.

Family ties are even more important in France’s army than in Europe’s other armies, and the engineers’ brigade had been given to the duke of Orléans’s cousin to command. He was an innocuous man, phlegmatic rather than lackadaisical, of slender build and cheerful, a daydreamer. He had effeminate tastes, which reflected in the way he carried himself, and indeed his pretty looks, though they were no indication of his carnal preferences. He spent his days inside his splendid field tent, in which Darius of Persia would have been quite at home; its fabric was decorated with large cashmere depictions, and the roof was in the shape of an onion bulb, like orthodox church domes. Spacious and sumptuous — an entire orchestra could have fit inside — it featured nocturnal carousings with throngs of people, the only thing restraining them being his cousin’s warnings. This pleasure seeking of his was regularly excessive; one of the things he liked most was to recruit, en masse, whores from the towns through which the army passed, along with a few elderly nuns. The Spanish priests complained to Orléans, who, wanting to avoid a scandal, promptly tried reining his cousin in. Wigs and perfume were his great weakness; he loved to stand before a mirror trying on dozens of different hairstyles. As for perfumes, he had them sent in especially. Always overpoweringly strong. His arrival would be preceded by a great wave of Asiatic smells.

His mind was on Versailles, and he put up with this southern sojourn with an air of ironic resignation. He hoped to go back to Paris saying he’d served dans l’armée royale. As for his relationship with the engineers, let us say it was the same as that of a pet fish with its elements: That it inhabits a pond does not mean it understands water. The gravity of the man was such that I have entirely forgotten his name. Let’s call him Monsieur Forgotten.

Something good about Monsieur Forgotten, I admit, was that one could be sincere and speak the truth with him, by no means the usual way with French aristocracy. Granted, the impulse behind his tolerance of me was not all that lofty. Why did he put up with me when I criticized and made suggestions and even accusations? Because I was a nobody, less than a nobody. To him I was a fly of the kind constantly buzzing around us in the relentless summer heat, and he treated me as such.

For what it is, or was, worth, the siege we were engaged in seemed an out-and-out disaster to me from day one. I am the first to recognize that war always has been, and will be, the art of negotiating shortages and imperfections. No campaign or siege has ever been conducted in optimum conditions. Quite the reverse: Something will always be missing. The man-at-arms, or the siege engineer, must have the gumption to improvise, to make the most of the situation (and trust that the enemy is on a level, or worse, footing). Vauban knew it, and that was why my technical instructions by the Ducroix brothers were always tempered by that one maxim: Débrouillez-vous! Deal with it!

Even allowing for the usual mishaps and limitations associated with war, Tortosa was a complete negation of all I’d learned at Bazoches. It had some value pedagogically: as an example to an engineer of what not to do. Ineptitude, in a siege situation, is paid for in blood.

An example. The first day, the very first day, of my studies in siege warfare, the Ducroix brothers etched in my memory the Thirty General Maxims of de Vauban, which pertained to any attack on a stronghold. Would you like to know what the very first one was? Well, then I’ll tell you.

Être toujours bien informé de la force des garnisons avant de déterminer les attaques: You must always be well informed as to the powers of the garrison before beginning your attack.

The calculations of Tortosa’s defenses proved useless: Orléans had found out that there were some fifteen hundred soldiers, among them English, Dutch, and Portuguese, set to stand against us on the ramparts. Among them, survivors from Allied troops at Almansa. But we noticed, once the attack had commenced, that their forces had multiplied: The civilians were lending enthusiastic support, so enthusiastic that the regular troops themselves were nonplussed. A further fifteen hundred men, the civilian militia, joined in, and everyone else was helping, too: women tending to wounds, children bringing pitchers of water to the bastions. I was dumbfounded. Why didn’t they hole up at home and wait for the storm to pass? Why would these simple peasants, to whom dynastic affairs were neither here nor there, risk taking part in a battle, as well as the reprisals in the case of defeat? Fool that I was, I was yet to realize that this was going to be the war at the end of the world — the end of the Catalan world, at least.

In the eyes of an engineer, Tortosa was an unusual city indeed. It had long been a strategically important spot, a military boundary, which meant there were a great many different fortification styles superimposed, from the Arabic rampart all the way to the very modern bastions. It sat on either side of the River Ebro, not far from where it met the sea — hence its strategic importance. In fact, the city was on the west bank, and a bastion stood protecting the east side. As a whole, it was thoroughly fortified. The Austrians had had their best engineers working on the defenses, preparing for a siege they rightly judged inevitable after Almansa. Most of the walls were modern, coming down at a sharp angle. Churches stood at the ends of certain parts of the cities, and then engineers had no qualms about turning these into makeshift bastions.

It made sense that Orléans would come up against such well-prepared defenses. Whoever controlled Tortosa would have the most important river route in Catalonia, and with it all routes south.

We struck the trench on July 20. As I explained in the opening chapters, “striking the trench” was the founding act for attacking any stronghold. Once your point of attack has been chosen, there’s no going back. Total defeat for the besieged, or disgrace for the attacking army.

I heard only on the nineteenth that the order had been given. “And the geological report?” I asked the Forgotten.

“Report? What report might that be, dear aide?”

Troops had been posted in the area where the trench was to begin, but no engineer had reconnoitered it. Really, the whole engineers’ brigade was full of dimwits, and most of them hardly knew what I meant. At first I thought they must be joking.

“We are going to strike the trench without doing a geological survey?” I asked.

“My, you’re meticulous!”

The grand event would happen, I was informed, the next day at eight in the evening. I put my hands to my head and straightaway went to entreat Monsieur Forgotten to hold off. “Sir, I have been told we are to strike the trench tomorrow.”

As ever, he was sitting in his tent, trying on a yellow wig in the mirror. He answered without looking at me. “Your information is correct. Which will give us the whole night ahead to dig under cover of darkness.”

“It’s not advisable, sir.”

“Oh?”

“It’s June, sir. It’s still light at eight in the evening.”

“You, sir, are a pessimist, not to mention a panicmonger.”

What Monsieur Forgotten did not mention was that he was oblivious, not to mention a wanton killer! I’ll explain why.

Striking a trench is always a highly delicate operation. Thousands of soldiers are gathered together, converted into peons, and made to line up at certain predetermined points under the cover of dark: rows of stakes joined together by a trail of lime on the ground. (I’ve participated in setting up the stakes at times, scrabbling along on your knees and in fear of your life.) The closer to the stronghold the trench can begin, the fewer days will be needed for digging. Counter to this, the closer to the ramparts it begins, the more likely it will be noticed. At this point the troops still cannot take refuge beneath ground — it was quite usual for the trench to begin within range of the defenders’ cannons — since the digging has only just begun.

Each of the men would have a pick or shovel, and thousands of the fajina wicker baskets would already have been lined up. The signal would be given and, as quietly as possible, digging begun all along the line. Each man would work behind the fajina, which the first shovelfuls would fill up, creating the first parapet in a matter of minutes, however precarious the situation.

Only a very disciplined troop, or one working at a very safe distance, would be able to move about undetected and at absolutely no risk. Predictably enough, the enemy sentries saw us, heard us, or, I’d say, possibly smelled us, given Monsieur Forgotten’s pungent patchouli. And what was bound to happen, happened.

Twilight in the west of Catalonia has an intensity and forcefulness all its own; the throes of the day come erupting into the sky in oceanic blues and reddish ambers. As cannon fire commenced, a strip of maroon lit up the horizon.

There were fifty or so Allied cannons at Tortosa, of all calibers, and they began to pound our positions immediately: 2,200 excavators turned to 2,100, and in no time at all, 2,000. A chronicle I read subsequently referred to that night of horrors with the following lovely phrase: “The cannonade that night was a delight to hear.” Those historians might save “delight” for describing royal weddings, I say!

It couldn’t have gone any worse. Everything that Vauban foretold, all the possible things that can go wrong in a siege, came about. Another example: As a rule, commanders in the artillery tend to love blowing things up. At the first chance, with a childlike joy, they will commence firing. As happened in Tortosa. The first parallel had not even been dug, and our chief of artillery was already there, ordering fifteen cannons and six mortars be installed — at positions we had not even touched with pick or shovel. The problem being that the first parallel is at such a distance, nearly a mile from the ramparts, that cannonfire won’t land anywhere near. If the guns are accurate enough to land any shots on a rampart or bastion, that is. A great many hundredweights of gunpowder and ammunition for nothing. I objected; Monsieur Forgotten didn’t even hear. What did it matter to him? The artillery chief was one of his revelers par excellence, and in any case, neither of them would have to cough up for the powder.

The trench a little way advanced, we ran into some monumental rocks under the surface. It was almost as though some had been placed there by the enemy expressly to obstruct the trench. For the largest ones, we had to resort to explosives. But the blasting would also take out a large section of the trench, including the fajina parapets protecting us from enemy fire, which would then have to be reformed. And to think my superiors had laughed off a geological survey!

It was also in Tortosa that I had confirmation of another of Vauban’s teachings, one he’d told me about in person: Sappers are heavy drinkers; they become drunk before going and getting themselves killed. The front end of the trench moves forward by dint of the work of a small crew — eight or, at most, ten men. However grandiose the overall works, that is the most that can fit into the confines of a trench. The enemy knows this very well and concentrates fire on just that point.

Sappers suffer a disproportionately high number of casualties and deaths. However well they are paid, and though the crews are relieved every three or four hours, the tension will end up destroying their nerves. In order to bear it, they drink, and drink, then they drink some more.

For a young engineer such as myself, Tortosa brought home the gap between lessons and reality. Take the Mantelletta, for instance. If you look at any images of a siege, beside a sapper there will always be a barrow, a contraption with two wheels and a panel of wood. The sapper farthest forward uses this as a shield. Fine, well, you can forget about that — I can assure you the nitwit who drew those pictures has never been present at a siege in all his life. I can remember only one siege where a Mantelletta was used, and that was because some recently graduated dunderhead forced the sappers to take it. Sapper crews hated the Mantelletta — why? Because they enrage the enemy, who sees the head of the dragon and proceeds to rain down upon it all the fire they can.

But of all the gaps between theory and practice, perhaps the most surprising was something no one had referred to during my studies: the raft of people voluntarily inserting themselves into the battle situation.

In Vauban’s world, the spheres of civic and martial life were at once overlapping and separate. But the last thing I expected was, as the Attack Trench became a complex web of passageways and surface-level crypts, that it would also be invaded by civilians. Milling around as though the parallels were city boulevards, and the lines of communication streets and alleyways.

Naturally, as the trenches drew closer to the ramparts, and the enemy fire grew fiercer, you would see fewer and fewer non-troops. But even where the vanguard was most exposed, dozens of people who had no clear place there would be swarming around. Priests above all. Everyone with something to sell; the whores offering a quickie up against some outjutting trench corner, lying there with their legs akimbo, cunt in the air, lifting their skirt whenever anyone came by; peddlers offering morsels to eat, a break from the usual insipid gruel. The range of professions that descended into the trenches was nigh on infinite. Shoemakers, professional gamblers, barbers, people to delouse your clothing, cobblers, gypsies, prostitutes of all varieties, anything and everything. Bear in mind that Vauban never would have tolerated such a sorry spectacle — but Vauban had the kind of clout you don’t see very often. And Orléans was a Coehoornian who had little time for the idea of a siege being comprised of different facets. I think he initiated that trench only to give his cousin Monsieur Forgotten a chance to take the credit back at Versailles.

It was quite a lesson to me, seeing the way man exploits and usurps undergroun realms. And there in the trench at Tortosa, I met two creatures who caused me profound dismay, the closest thing imaginable to creatures from the underworld.

The child can have been no older than six or seven years. Even an animal would clothe itself in a more dignified way. Barefoot, and with tattered pantaloons that went down only as far as his knees, and a vest that might have been white once but was covered in gray from ash and adventures. And his hair, mother of God, his hair: So much grime and muck had accumulated in it that his sandy locks had turned into rough, ratty clumps. And then, dependent on this child, another being out of fable: a dwarf clothed in the attire of a traveling fairground. His face was squashed together, as though he were suffering some form of mental constipation, not uncommon among his kind. But his compulsive grimacing suggested he was unhinged in some way. Most extraordinary of all was the funnel crowning the dwarf’s head — a large round piece of metal, its pointed spout pointing proudly up. You couldn’t be sure whether the funnel suited the dwarf or vice versa. Both child and dwarf were the same height.

I will always remember the first words I said to the lad. I took him by the scruff of the neck and asked: “You? Where’s your father?”

Father? He looked at me as though I’d said something in Chinese. His Catalan was mixed together with a little Castilian Spanish and much French. As for the dwarf, his chosen form of communication was the grunt. The child was called Anfán, the dwarf Nan; their life stories were contained in these names. Anfán was no more than a spoken transcription of the French word for “child,” enfant. I assumed therefore that his life until then had been spent in French military encampments, where the men simply called this wayward little creature enfant. And “Nan” is simply Catalan for “dwarf.” Doubtless Anfán was an orphan with nowhere else to go. Catalonia had been in an almost perpetual state of war for decades. His parents having died of natural causes — or at the hands of some murderer — Anfán, like so many, fell by the wayside. As for the dwarf, his name represented a summary of his life as much as the mystery of it. How had he got there, and where from? No one would ever know. Neither his language, nor his mind, both deficient, would ever be able to express it. One thing was certain: The child loved the dwarf unreservedly, fiercely, absolutely. As he scurried around the trenches, Anfán was always sure to protect the dwarf and provide him with shelter, and on one occasion, when they lost each other, the boy rushed around in sheer desperation. He looked for Nan night and day, and when they were reunited, an outbreak of joyful weeping was heard all around.

I came across them one night, sleeping totally unprotected in their little den: a hole in the ground alongside the first parallel, full of a great number of empty munitions boxes as large as coffins. Seeing some shadows, I entered. And there they were. For a bed, some old rush matting hidden at the back of the rat hole, in among all the detritus. They slept hugging each other, far from the din of fighting without.

Anfán, mewling sweetly, held a protective arm across the dwarf’s chest. I got ready to give them the fright of their life — but something stopped me at the last moment: Anfán’s unshod feet. I held one of them lightly in my hand. I examined it with the same attention I had applied in the Spherical Room. The scars all over the soles spoke of the harshness of the life he’d led. I was overcome by emotion, something an engineer should always guard against. I did not want to grow attached to this sorry pair, but neither did I feel it in me to trouble them.

There is something sacrosanct in the breathing of sleeping children, as though a sign by nature to say that anyone who harmed them would never be forgiven. I laid a sheet of munition wadding over them, that was all, and left.

We were yet to get as far as the third parallel. The majority of the civilian interlopers didn’t go any farther than the first. Even the greediest trader didn’t usually go as far as the second, at which point the enemy projectiles fell more accurately; light weapons were in range, too.

One day I found myself at the vanguard, making some calculations on a tablet, looking through my periscope. Ay, yes, the periscope. That Z-shaped lens-tube, so very useful for observing the ramparts from the trenches, the same reason it would always be targeted by enemy fire. The best way of concealing it was in a gap in the ground between two fajinas. Alas, there was some Allied whoreson, a Dutchman or a Portuguese, up on the ramparts with a telescope; he had it trained on the trench’s cautious advance and must have had a gift for spotting periscopes. Telescope versus periscope: This was trench warfare. Half my life I have spent fighting on the side of the periscope, half on that of the telescope. An enemy officer ordered a twenty-bore cannon to see if it could hit me.

Boom! The cannonball landed right between two large wicker baskets that were above me — orange light exploded all around me. I was saved by the fact that I was crouched down at that moment, leaning right forward and making notes on the distances. A nearby crew of sappers came and dug me out of the avalanche of mud, uprights, and rubble.

I was not the slightest bit just or thankful in the way I pushed my saviors off me — shouting and shoving them away. The periscope, a very expensive piece of equipment, was broken. This made me even more vexed. Finally, an old sapper managed to bring me back to my senses. He gave short shrift to my fit of pique. “Calm yourself, lad. You survived somehow. Now get yourself to the rear, get a strong drink inside you, and they’ll soon sew you back together.”

He was quite right, not that it stopped me from going away in a foul mood. In that humor, with my face darker than coal, I made my way to the rear. Which was when I saw that pair, Anfán and Nan, up to their tricks again.

You find a multitude of lateral openings in the overall circuit of an Attack Trench: spaces for storing ammunition and building materials, recesses begun in error and abandoned, drainage ditches, false branches to confuse the enemy watchmen, areas for men to fall back into and depositories, branches leading to the artillery platforms. In one of these I saw Anfán on his knees, facing a soldier who was in the process of unbuckling his belt.

What was it about the prospect of this act that so enraged me? All I know is that I howled at the man like a monkey. “Pig! I’m going to send you to the galleys!”

The soldier was startled — finding himself reprimanded by some frenzied stranger, eyes staring out from a soot- and red-mud-covered face. Then I noticed the dwarf was in there, too, behind the soldier. Hearing me, he shot out, followed by the boy. And they didn’t go away empty-handed.

“Imbecile!” I said to the soldier. “They’ve stolen your purse. The least you deserve!”

He ran out after Anfán and Nan — not, of course, that he was ever going to catch them.

Once the second parallel was under way, the mortars and cannons on either side bombarded one another twenty-four hours a day. The besieged sought to impede the forward progress of our trenches and destroy our artillery, we to destroy theirs and to create breaches in the ramparts. The firing from the city rained down on the fajina parapet like hail. Near misses would come flying at those of us behind.

For some unknown reason, summer in the south of Catalonia can be even more suffocating than down in Andalusia. Add to this the dozens of dead bodies situated foolhardily above the trench, which no one dared bury even at night, and you can imagine the clouds of pernicious insects that abounded. What a wonderful invention sign language is! We engineers had another way of communicating. Why? Well, because if you opened your mouth to speak any word longer than oui, twenty flies would be in there before you knew it.

As for Nan and Anfán, I chased after them day and night, in vain. They were impossible to catch. They scuttled like lizards on six feet and always knew the best fork in the trenches to vanish down.

I decided to try and make a pact with them. I came across them one day in a trench that was particularly long and straight, they at one end and I at the other. Before they ran away, I let them know it wasn’t my intention to trap them. I left a folded piece of paper on the floor. I shouted out that it was a pass so they could come into my tent — if they came, I’d reward them with chocolates. Then I withdrew so they could come and take the piece of paper.

It did not work. Perhaps they didn’t trust me, but most likely, their natural tendencies simply took over. They were trench rats, born to pilfering and dashing off.

A few days later, I finally got my hands on them. I was lucky enough to run into them on a sharp corner, and they didn’t have time to escape. The dwarf managed to evade me, but I got a good hold on Anfán. I lifted him up under my arm as he kicked and screamed.

“Quiet!” I said. “I’m going to make certain you’re never seen around here again.”

But he somehow wriggled free and dashed away, Longlegs Zuvi following after. I lunged and got him by the ankle. The two of us rolled around on the floor of the second parallel.

Thus, when an enormous man appeared nearby, the two of us were tangled up, tearing at each other like schoolboys. Anfán thrashed around, but I was getting the better of him and didn’t pay much mind to the man.

“You!” he growled. “Does no one in this army salute a general?” He pointed to the band on his belt indicating his rank. He must have been around fifty years old, with thick, substantial cheeks. From where I was, like a worm on the ground, he blotted out the sun. I got to my feet. If I had known then how important this man was going to be in my life, I can assure you I wouldn’t have given such a wishy-washy answer.

“Apologies, General, I didn’t see you. Now, if you’ll allow, I’m trying to bring a bit of order to this trench.”

I had been in contact almost exclusively with French personnel, and I must admit I had taken on many of their prejudices, and the way they looked down on their Spanish allies. They considered them an army of poorly organized, poorly directed beggars. And they were right. This general wasn’t happy about being brushed aside. Obviously, faced with a French general, I would have shown an altogether different attitude, and he knew it.

I made to head off with Anfán by the neck, but the general stopped me, putting his hand on my chest. He’d encountered me tangled up with this whimpering boy, the boy resisting and trying to get away. What could he think? Our eyes met, and then I knew. He got me by my shirt and slammed me against the trench wall. Keeping a hold on me, he brought his face right up to mine. “I know your kind very well! Like abusing trench orphans, isn’t that it?”

“Me?” I said as his large hands pinned me back. “I must be the only person in the entire army trying to stop such abuses!”

To make things worse, Anfán began weeping like a widow. He was so convincing that even I, in another moment, would have been moved. He spoke his mix of Catalan, French, and a little Castilian, but you didn’t need to know languages to understand what he was saying: that I was an underground letch, that I’d made him suck my pito, the whole thing. Kneeling now, in a memorable final flourish, he lifted his eyes to the heavens, two tears running down his mud-smeared face, and begged the Almighty to free him from this life of sorrow. Even his sandy locks seemed pitiful. At six years of age, not even the rascal Martí Zuviría was quite so accomplished! I of course protested, but the Spanish general grabbed me by the neck with bull-like strength.

“That’s enough out of you, you swine! How can such a vile specimen as you even exist? Abusing children is like sacrilege!” he cried, and with a swipe of the hand, he delivered his judgment. “What is there left to say? I’ve heard enough.”

He was a hefty, well-built man, and in the confines of the trench, his figure blocked out his entourage of Spanish assistants. Within seconds, they all piled on top of me, and I was under arrest.

“Before this day is out,” he growled, wagging a finger in front of my nose, “you’ll be swinging from a tree.”

He meant it; there was no point in my protesting or appealing. My only chance was if the French generalship interceded, but it was clear that this Spanish general had little sympathy with the French. Anfán was very pleased about the turn of events. As three men dragged me away, he followed after, skipping and jumping around me and my captors. His hands by his nose, wiggling his fingers, he mocked me: “What fun!” he said, then went on in Catalan so my captors wouldn’t understand. “Don’t you want me to clear off? Well, for once I’m going to listen to you. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, you getting hanged, stupid old mule!”

Then, by some miracle, someone shouted out: “General! General! Look! Up there!”

Sure enough, something came into sight up above Tortosa: Through the hazy gunsmoke, we saw flares going up. Obviously something other than the usual shooting and grapeshot. Little flashing red and yellow puffs of smoke, against the blue of the summer sky, and the pure white of the clouds, forming a beautiful five-colored painting. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite in the right frame of mind to appreciate it.

“Red and yellow flares, red and yellow!” called out the general’s assistant, in high excitement. “The Allies are using the red and the yellow!”

“Let’s go, let’s go!” ordered the general. “Follow me!”

And he led the way to headquarters. He had one of these Castilian voices custom-built for telling others what to do, so forceful that they brook no reply. When someone like this general said “Follow me,” it meant “Follow me,” and everything else ceased to matter. The men who had a hold on me immediately let go and simply trotted after their leader.

A red and yellow signal, in Allied code, meant a petition to friendly outside forces for urgent help. So here was a dilemma for Orléans! The flares signified that the garrison in Tortosa was on its last legs, yes, but also that an auxiliary Austrian army was close enough to see the signals in the sky. Which gave Orléans two choices: Lift the siege and head out to take on the external army, or (à la Coehoorn) throw everything he had at Tortosa despite the trenches not yet being complete. In either case, the mountains of earth that had been moved would all be for nothing.

This was what the high command had to reckon with. For me personally, the flares were a godsend, and I let out a sigh of relief like a buffalo. My long legs folded, slack from the fright, and I knelt down. I saw Anfán. It was just the two of us again.

“I’m going to break every single bone in your body!” I roared.

What do you think my dear, vile Waltraud? Did I catch him? Yes or no?

Of course not. A rat scurrying up into the nooks and crannies of a cathedral wall would have been easier to catch.

13

The assault was now down to the infantry, not the engineers. We fell back from the trenches as thousands of Bourbon soldiers took up their attack positions.

I did not see the assault, but I did hear it. I was by one of the entrances to the first parallel, in the rearguard. First came a bombardment at twilight, the attack beginning at exactly the same time we’d begun digging the trench: eight in the evening. Then we heard rifles being fired, and the sounds of the infantry charging up a forty-five-degree incline. The resistance was so fierce that civilians resorted to hurling statues of saints from the ramparts. It was four hours before the Spanish took hold of a single bastion. There was no cease-fire until two in the morning.

Predictably enough, Orléans had opted for a direct attack, cost what it may. And the vast majority of the wounded crying out were doing so in Spanish, not French. I didn’t think so at the time, but in hindsight, it’s enough to make you spit. What was the point of this war? A French monarch wanting to get his hands on the Spanish throne, with the Spanish army at his service. Any serious encounter, and it was Spanish soldiers who would be sent as cannon fodder into the charnel house. It was hardly as though the Spanish were dying against their will. Not even the Turks would have been obtuse enough to involve themselves in such a shambles as this.

At the Allies’ request, there was a truce. Orléans suspected they were playing for time, but he was so intent on taking Tortosa that he put up with it. He lost nothing by it. The auxiliary army was still a long way away, and Orléans had control of a bastion. Well, during this truce, something truly chilling happened.

We heard cries, women screaming. It was still dark when, from inside the walls, a lamentation went up, a clamor that put one in mind of passages from the Old Testament. We later learned that the inhabitants of Tortosa, hearing that the foreign officers had opted to surrender, were in despair.

I couldn’t understand it. In dynastic conflicts, the people hid; they never took part in the combat themselves. I remember saying to myself for the first time: “Zuvi, you have been away from your home too long. What on earth is going on here?”

Luckily, I didn’t have very much time to consider it. I was approached by a French official, a liaison officer with the Spanish command. He told me I was to go to the bastion we had taken, to tell the troops there they were about to be relieved. Fine, I supposed — falling back from such an exposed position would surely be taken as good news. What seemed strange was for a youngster like me to be sent, to speak with a general, no less.

Seeing my shambolic appearance, the liaison officer said: “Get washed, put a decent tunic on over that. And shine your boots.”

“But Captain,” I said artlessly, “shouldn’t someone with a far higher rank be going on such a mission?”

“Oh!” he said, patting me on the back. “Take it as a great honor, my boy.”

A great honor! What this “great honor” consisted of, I’ll now tell you.

It wasn’t until dawn that I was sent to the bastion, when the sun was already up, warming the living and causing the dead to rot. The path to the bastion was lined with bulging bodies. As I went up the mound made by the rubble of the bastion, my boots raised clouds of flies covering the bodies, like plump, winged chestnuts.

There were hundreds of soldiers up on the bastion, rifles loaded and bayonets drawn, sheltering in the ruins and looking out over the deathly quiet city. The general to whom I was to take my message was also sheltering among the bastion stones. He was the same man who had tried to have me hanged, though, thank heavens, he didn’t recognize me just then!

“Mon général!” I said in French. “I find you at last.” I gave him the order to fall back.

He didn’t understand a word of my French. He looked at one of his men and said in the sternest of Castilian voices: “What does this Frog want?”

I repeated what I’d said, this time in Castilian, and with the kind of reverence and smile one reserves for the victors. “An order from the high command, mon général: You have carried out your task, gloriously and honorably, and now please allow yourself to be withdrawn. French battalions will take your place until hostilities are complete.”

His disdain turned into fury. Turning his head and squinting, he said: “Allow ourselves to be what?”

“Leave him to us, my general!” said a nearby soldier, brandishing his bayonet.

I kept up my diplomatic smile, while saying to myself that I never would understand these military types.

What could they be thinking? They’d suffered terrible losses. I had come to them with the good news of being allowed to leave that dreadful spot. And how did they respond? By threatening to spill my guts with the sharp end of a bayonet.

The general launched himself at me. His puffy cheeks flushed dark red. Grabbing me by the collar of my shirt, he thrust me the way I’d come, back down the glacis covered in dead bodies, and said: “Look at them! Look! Do you think they died so that some Frenchie can come and take all the credit? Do you really think I’m going to let some cousin of Orléans come and have the keys to the city placed in his hands?”

I resisted him, aided by the knowledge that I’d done nothing wrong. For all that he was a general, I shouted: “Do you think this mess has anything to do with me? Let me go, imbecile, I’m just a messenger!”

That stopped him in his tracks. He hesitated for a moment — how does one deal with a soldier who would speak to a general in this way? — before exclaiming: “Tell that to the person who sent you!”

What happened next, all the historians must somehow have missed, for it has never seen mention in any of the accounts of the siege.

He gave me such a kick up the behind that it was a miracle I didn’t go into orbit. I flew down the slope, bouncing over the rubble like a ball, dislodging stones of all sizes, as well as cadavers, which, in the moment I bumped into them, seemed to come to life for a moment.

I returned to camp with my tunic ripped and my rear end on fire from the kick. I was ready to burst with umbrage. I ran into the liaison officer.

“Ah!” he said cautiously. “How did it go?”

Now I understood why I’d been sent! No one was brave enough to go and tell the general he was being relieved, so to avoid a scene, they’d sent the most insignificant creature in the army.

“How did it go?” I said, infuriated. “Where did you get that Spanish general?”

“Mm, yes. .,” the Frenchman said apologetically. “General Antonio de Villarroel does have quite the temper.”

Yes, dear readers, that’s right: This was my first encounter with Don Antonio. It was he who, years later, would go on to drag good old Zuvi out of the most pernicious existence to the highest heights; the same man who, though of Castilian origin, in 1713 would lead the defense of the Catalan capital, Barcelona, and make the ultimate sacrifice for us.

Dear vile Waltraud, weighing heavier on me than an anchor, constantly interrupts. She’s finding it hard to understand how, if Villarroel was serving a Bourbon king in the summer of 1708, we’ll find him fighting on the Austrian side in 1713.

Let’s see, my most horrendous Waltraud: I already know you to be dimmer than a glowworm’s fetus, but even so, has it not occurred to you that, in order to be understood, this book must be read in order, all the chapters, and to the very end?

What a tonic a kick up the backside can be! I should really have thanked that mad general.

What on earth was I doing there? Since failing Vauban’s test, I had been floundering in inertia. Fine, well, now I had a siege under my belt, and what else? Had I discovered The Word? I had not.

That kick up the backside was going to send me straight home. I would go and apologize to my father, on my knees if I had to. I’d come clean. And he would forgive me — bad-tempered as he was, I was still his only son. I said to myself that however bad a father might be, he could never trump a siege. To hell with warfare, and generals ready to kick you about, and all the Monsieur Forgottens in this world!

I hurried back to my tent. I was ready to cut my losses, grab the few things I really needed, and head to Barcelona.

The whole army was waiting for the terms of the surrender to be agreed, so I wouldn’t find a better moment to make myself scarce.

Given the engineers’ elite specialism, their tents were surrounded by a makeshift stake fence that separated them from the common troops. Monsieur Forgotten’s tent, with its bulbous roof, was in the middle of our precinct. Around that, individual officers’ tents, and next, the lower engineers, where aides-de-camp like me slept. There were usually three pairs of soldiers on guard, but that morning, with the conclusion of the siege imminent, there was just one soldier, a youth. He was walking up and down, rifle at his shoulder, and greeted me as I came past. Ignoring him, I went into my tent.

Someone had been through my things, I was surprised to find. All my money, everything I’d saved from Bazoches, plus my wages since I’d joined the French army, all gone! Understandably enough, I shot out of there in a rage, angry even at the fact that anyone had entered the tent, which was bad enough in itself.

“Soldier!” I shouted at the unfortunate sentry. “Are you blind? I’ve been robbed!”

“Sir, I’m very sorry,” he said. “It must have been that pair.”

“Pair? What pair?”

“A dwarf wearing a funnel for a hat and a boy with dirty pigtails.”

I let out a howl. “So if you saw them, what came over you that you let them enter? Didn’t you think they looked suspicious?”

“They showed me a pass, sir, I had to let them through!” said the soldier, excusing himself. “I can’t read, but an officer who was passing by helped me. It was fine, according to him. The pass had their names on it, and it was signed by you.”

I kicked a fencepost with my sapper boots. Childhood! That time of the soul’s innocence! My good friend Rousseau ought to have met this miniature monster Anfán before writing his essays on pedagogy!

They’d employed a brilliant strategy, waiting until the last day of the siege to use my pass, when all eyes were on Tortosa and camp was practically empty. This prompted a thought in me. I ceased my attack on the post and asked the sentry: “Was it long ago they were here?”

“Not at all. They just left. I think I saw them a few minutes ago.” He pointed toward the outskirts of camp. “They went that way.”

I trotted in the direction indicated. I traversed the camp, coming to the last tents. Beyond these stretched parched fields, only one or two bushes here and there. I spotted the pair. Nearly half a mile away, cutting across the fields at a run, and weighed down with more booty than ants in the Yucatán.

There were thousands of nooks and crannies in the trenches for them to hide in, but in open country, they didn’t have a chance against Longlegs Zuvi. I ran after them, accelerating, eating up the distance.

Seeing me coming, they also picked up the pace, though each was weighed down with a sack larger than his own body. They reached the top of a rise and disappeared down the other side.

It was a couple of minutes before I reached that point, and once there, I couldn’t see them anymore. Damn it, where had they gotten to? I paused for a moment to catch my breath.

I scanned around, thinking maybe they’d hidden in some hole in the ground. But no, there weren’t any. “Come on, Zuvi,” I said to myself, “think! Wasn’t it the lord of Bazoches himself who taught you to use your eyes?”

A couple of hundred feet to my right: a small construction, abandoned. One of these stone huts where peasants keep tools and suchlike. There was nowhere else they could be.

I circled the place before going in, checking for any escape route. No, the windows were too small even for them. Only then did I approach the door and shout: “Come on, out with you! I know you’re in there!”

To my surprise, the door opened immediately. It wasn’t either of them, though, but a French soldier.

He was the paradigm of soldiery at its most depraved. His belt was loose, and his uniform was so dirty that its whiteness was a mere memory. He peered out of drunken, sleepy eyes. Leaning lazily against the doorframe, picking at his teeth with a knife, he asked what I wanted. What was going on there? I pushed him to one side and took a step forward into the hut. Once my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, I was dumbstruck.

The dwarf was in there, tied to a beam, his mouth gagged with straw and a rag tied around him. Anfán was seated on an old chair, bound tight at his ankles and wrists. Gagged, too, and with a black hood that came down over half his body. The French soldier had an accomplice, and he was kneeling down finishing tying Anfán’s binds. Even the flies had fled that place. Nan looked at me in utter terror. They’d stumbled into an atrocious situation, one of these small hells you’ll always find in or near a war, just as cobwebs always inhabit corners.

My first thought was to recover my belongings and get out of there. This perverted pair of maniacs disgusted me, of course. But we were in a time of widespread indiscriminate killing. The sooner I could get away, the better.

There was a small detail, though, something otherwise quite minor, that made me more upset than I ordinarily might have been. Want to know what this trivial thing was? A bead, a bead of sweat, running down the cheek of one of those swine. This little drop betrayed foul desires, a soul gone rancid. His mouth hung half open, and he was staring intently at Anfán, who was desperately trying to free himself on the chair. Like all scavengers, he had large gaps between his teeth, which made him all the more repulsive. Sometimes it’s trivial details that spur us into action. It had been a bad day, and someone was going to have to pay for it.

There was a thick, rusty chain hanging from the ceiling. I picked a large stone up off the floor and, stowing this under one arm, reached up and took down the chain with my free hand. I took a step toward the soldier at the door. “Mind holding this stone for a moment?”

“All right,” he said, putting away his knife and holding out his hands. “But what do you want me to hold it for?”

The answer was very simple: so he would have his hands full as I brought the chain down across his head, knocking him to the floor. The other man was too much of a coward to take me on. Seeing me coming toward him with the chain, he curled up in a ball, protecting his head with his hands. I’d scared him witless, and I left it at that. Dropping the chain, fed up with Tortosa, with war, with the world, I untied the boy and the dwarf, gathered my belongings, and left the hut.

Anfán and the dwarf followed me out. “Monsieur, monsieur!”

Any hostility I’d felt toward them had faded. I’d recovered my money and my effects, and if you have saved a person’s life, you do not then give him a hiding. Which isn’t to say I cared what happened to them, not in the slightest. Without breaking stride, I said scornfully back to them, “Go and get back in the trench. Turns out you might have been right: With what’s going on at the moment, it might be the safest place for you.”

They swarmed around me like butterflies.

“Get out of here!” I said again. “You ought to be hanged, you little thieves. Luckily for you, I myself am in too much of a hurry to get back to Barcelona.”

But the mention of Barcelona only made them more excited.

“Monsieur!” cried Anfán. “We’ve wanted to go to Barcelona for so long! We’ve been saving up to do exactly that.”

Saving up! What my father would have said of this pair’s ideas about work! I was about to give them a farewell thrashing when I heard the snorting of animals.

A cavalry squadron in the near distance. The rearguard of the besieging army was protected by these mounted patrols. They would escort foragers, ward off Miquelet attacks, as well as rounding up deserters. I could have spoken with them but was too much the fugitive by this point. My first impulse was to dash into a small forest that stood nearby and looked dense enough to make it difficult for horses to enter.

“No, monsieur!” said Anfán. “You won’t make it in time. Follow us!” They turned in to an abandoned vineyard, Anfán gesturing for me to follow. “Run! Quick!”

The vines were a little above knee height. In such open country, cavalry would trap us easily. They were insane, these two. But do you know what? I followed them anyway.

The patrol came after us. We made a desperate dash, me weighed down with the two sacks, sweating. I cursed myself. But when the horses reached the edge of the vineyard, they pulled up as though obstructed by some invisible force. The riders didn’t attempt to spur them on.

Anfán laughed, very pleased with himself indeed. “Horses hate vineyards — they break their legs on the vines.”

The riders fired a few shots our way, with no great intent. By the time they went around this vineyard, which was extensive, we’d be well into the forest. They decided against following us.

“Saved your life, monsieur. You owe us one,” said Anfán when we finally stopped to rest among the trees.

I laughed. “Surely it’s I who saved the two of you — from something awful — and you who owe me.”

“Let’s make a deal!” said the child. “We get you a vehicle, and you take us to Barcelona.”

“Vehicle? What vehicle?” I said, intrigued. I’d escaped so unplanned, I hadn’t even thought about the next leg of the journey.

“Follow us!” They led me along a small hidden path, the woods and undergrowth becoming ever thicker around us.

“Here,” said Anfán after a short time, bringing me through an opening between some trees.

There, nestled against a wall of vegetation, stood a two-horse carriage. The driver was still in his seat. Dead.

There were thousands of Miquelets in this area, harassing the siege army’s rearguard; the driver must have made a harebrained attempt to flee from some small skirmish. There was a bullet wound in his back, the dried blood blackening his white uniform. His last effort must have been to try hiding away from the road, and this was where he’d ended up.

In the seat, with his chin on his chest, the dead driver looked as though he were sleeping. Taking hold of him by the shoulder, I pushed him somewhat unceremoniously to the ground. The horses, sensing a living human, brightened up, seemed pleased. Consequently, they were very obedient during the tricky maneuver of turning them around and going back to the road.

“We’re going to Barcelona?” asked a gleeful Anfán.

He had such hungry eyes, this child — hungrier-seeming than his stomach itself. I examined the horses. One had a bullet in its right haunch; the other’s mane had been singed. Fine, I thought: They needed only to be able to cover the distance to Barcelona, a hundred or so miles. I climbed onto the bay of the carriage, which was full of sacks. Opening one, I found biscuits in it. I lobbed a couple to Nan and Anfán, who gobbled them down, even though the biscuits were the size of discuses, if not bigger. But there was an assortment of things. When I went to open another sack, cylindrical and six feet tall, it fell over, loosing its contents all over the floor of the bay.

Bullets, lead bullets. A torrent of little round bullets that went everywhere. Nan and Anfán, beside themselves with excitement, got down and began gathering them up. What a small thing a bullet is, a tiny globe, apparently so inoffensive. And yet, properly directed, it will kill soldiers and generals, kings and paupers alike. Not that any of this entered Anfán’s thoughts. He and the dwarf began playing marbles with them. He was still a child — an accomplished survivor, perhaps, but a child first and foremost. Standing watching them in the carriage bay, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of nostalgia.

It was the first natural silence I’d heard in twenty days, the time I’d been in the trenches. Twenty days and nights, putting up with the thundering cannons and the insidious sound of the sappers’ picks. And now nothing but forest around me, the trill of birds, and the air clear of artillery smoke and resounding trumpets. Plus a child, and a dwarf with a funnel on his head, playing marbles with the instruments of death. Yes, infancy will always be our time of subversion.

While they amused themselves, I investigated the rest of the cargo. There were two blankets covering something in one of the corners. Lifting them off, I discovered a hefty trunk. It had three locks, which took my breath away: I knew what those three locks signified.

I’d shared a tent during the siege with, among others, one of the army paymasters. One of those asses who reckon themselves important because they rub shoulders with the top brass. He wasn’t high up enough to sleep in the officers’ tent, but he turned up his nose at sharing with the rank and file. So we were saddled with him. He talked constantly. I’d get back to my camp bed, exhausted from the trenches, and he’d be at it straightaway — blah blah blah. It didn’t matter if I had been on a day or a night shift, he’d be there waiting — Prattler Paymaster, as we began calling him. His problem was that he worked only one day a week, so he’d spend the rest of his time gossiping and going on at anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot.

Well, one day this nuisance paymaster was showing off a key he had, which was for the chest that held the army’s wages. The money chests, he told me, had three locks, and the keys were held by different people — one by the paymaster, one by the field marshal, and one by the supervisor general. Prattler Paymaster crowed about having met the supervisor general. But you tell me, what other kind of chest on an army vehicle would have three locks?

I didn’t have the three keys, but, having studied at Bazoches, I did not need them. I found a mallet and chisel there in the carriage and, employing my acute sense of precision, hammered off the locks. When I opened the top, there inside were dozens of small cylindrical sacks, packed tightly together in two rows. Each with a wax seal bearing the Bourbon fleur-de-lis. I broke one open, and coins came tumbling out. There must have been wages for an entire regiment there, at least. Mother of God.

Have you ever had an abandoned treasure trove fall into your hands? The sensation is very much akin to that of love at first sight: Your heart beats harder, your hands tremble, and a happy nervousness takes hold of you. And you are overtaken by a terrible desire to flee with it.

I slammed the top shut, startled by the discovery. Nan and Anfán were still playing marbles.

“Here, boys!” I said, a Judas smile on my face. “Go back to the driver’s body and check his pockets, will you?”

A brazen lie to give me a chance to get clear of them. By the time they’d realized what was happening, I’d already set off, cracking the reins on the horse’s backs. Nan and Anfán ran uselessly after the carriage.

“Monsieur, monsieur!” shouted Anfán. “Don’t leave us here, please. Take us to Barcelona!”

Turning in the seat, I saw his little head, his matted locks blown by the wind, his pained expression. .

But now, much to my regret, I have to halt my tale, because Waltraud the dunce interrupts, sniveling, whinging, calling me a heartless so-and-so. Why the sudden sentimentality? Can’t you see what these two were like? Anfán was a born thief — how could I possibly have him and this chest along on the same journey?

All right, all right. I’ll confess something to you, if it’ll make you feel any better.

I pulled on the reins and stopped the carriage. The truth is, I felt a pang of compunction. After all, I’d secured myself transport, plus booty, thanks to this pair. Seeing me stop, and with their hopes renewed, they ran harder to catch up. When they got within twenty or so feet, I threw a few coins in their direction.

“All yours! Bread and wine’s on me!”

And I cracked the reins again.

Deep down, you see, I’ve always been a good person.

Departing Tortosa as swiftly as the wounded horses allowed, I was struck by the perilousness of my situation. There were patrols everywhere, from both armies, and constant skirmishes. But in reality, the two armies were the least of my problems. The south of Catalonia had been ravished by war, and there were bands of looters, bandits, and deserters of six or seven nationalities, to add to my beloved Miquelets, who were the worst of all. I was on my own with just a pistol, and for company an altogether appealing chest full of coins. I have rarely been so pleased to see the sun go down. To my right was a narrow path leading through the middle of a field of overgrown wheat. Possibly a place to hide for the night. The lack of recent harvests had left the wheat to grow implausibly high. At the end of the field was an irrigation canal. I couldn’t have hoped for anything better: The tall ears of wheat would screen me, and here was water for the horses and me. I took their torturous harnesses off.

I had yet to finish setting up camp when he appeared.

He came into the clearing from the same path I’d taken. He wore an ample black cape. With this garment and his tricorn hat pulled down over his eyebrows, he appeared to float out of the wheat. In alarm, I reached for my pistol, which I had left in the carriage. What was this figure doing here, so far from anywhere, civilization as well as the war? I pointed the pistol at him. “Do you come armed? Identify yourself.”

He continued moving toward me and simply said: “Pau.”

I didn’t know if this was his name or a declaration. (Pau means “peace” in Catalan but is also our word for “Paul.”) Keeping my guard up, I came back at him, matching him for ambiguity, raising him on the sarcasm: “Fallen off your horse?”

The man flashed a quick smile. He held his cape open, showing himself unarmed. His shirt had wide sleeves that fell back when he held up his arms. What I then saw, my dear vile Waltraud, I have never seen again: ten Points, one after the other, tattooed on his right forearm. The tenth, just beneath his elbow, stood out.

The indelible ink marked skin far older than the man’s expression; he had a venerability but also seemed in excellent physical and mental shape. Ten Points! The ideal engineer, a perfect Maganon. My suspicion gave way to astonishment and admiration. Still smiling that inexpressive smile, he came and stood before me.

“And you?” he said, his voice neutral.

“At your service,” I said, lifting my right sleeve and showing my five Points.

He drew a little closer. “Where have you come from?”

“Tortosa.”

“And where are you bound?”

“Barcelona.”

“Why?”

“That’s where my father lives?”

“Are you certain about that?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing’s certain.”

It seemed more like an interrogation than a dialogue, but a Point Bearer never questions his superiors, who, in turn, must know all a subordinate has to tell. Nothing must be kept from them. I couldn’t take my eyes off his forearm and the tenth Point. He stepped to one side and surveyed my little camp: the carriage, the irrigation canal, the high wheat surrounding us like living walls.

He was every inch the Ten Points. He seemed to listen, rather than look: the objects around, the insects, the general environment, even the transparent air, spoke to him, only too happy to confess all. Then he made a gesture: He raised a hand as though telling an orchestra to stop playing. He looked at my carriage for a few moments. “What’s inside your vehicle?”

“Nothing,” I lied.

“Exactly.”

Though I was a product of Bazoches, even so, I shuddered.

It was a warm night. He took off his cape and rolled up his sleeves. My eye settled on his forearm again.

The world of engineering, its practical spirit in direct opposition to the symbolic, here gave one small concession. For the glorious tenth Point was smaller than the preceding ones. That is, when an engineer reached perfection, his prize was a point that strongly resembled the first: a simple circle.

He asked me, “Who is your teacher?”

“It was Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban. He’s dead now.”

“A good engineer, yes, a very good engineer,” he whispered respectfully. “He lives on in you. Remember him.”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “I didn’t earn this fifth Point. I failed to find a certain Word.”

“Well, you’ll have to carry on looking.”

“I’ve given up on it all,” I said. “Even if I were to persevere, who could ratify my fifth Point? Vauban is dead, I know no other teacher, and anyway, I wouldn’t want anyone else to take me under his wing. So, enough.”

He smiled faintly. “Everyone says the same thing. Until one day they graze the sky with their fingers. And from then on, they would rather die than give up on that glory.”

In spite of my respect for him, I couldn’t but smile incredulously. Noticing this, his tone changed, becoming imperious enough to subdue kings. He raised his voice. “If a teacher is what you need, you will find one, whether or not he has the Points. There’s no getting away from your search for this Word, and when you find it, you will know you are worthy of your fifth Point.”

I wanted to say something but failed to find the right way to express myself — with the proper respect. In any case, he was the one directing this conversation.

“Lay out your mat,” he said.

I obeyed.

“Lie down. Shut your eyes. Sleep.”

I was asleep before he finished speaking.

It would be very interesting to include here my dream that night. Unfortunately, when I awoke, I couldn’t remember it. I was left with nothing but a fleeting trace. The blurry image of a young woman, naked, with violet-colored skin and a very dark pubis, somewhere in a blazing landscape. I spent weeks trying to fully recall the dream. She had the most sorrowful eyes. Suddenly, legions of white beetles attacked her, swarming all around her and running up her ankles. She called out for my help. But everything melted away before the meaning of the dream became complete. Trying to decipher it, I turned the dream over in my mind hundreds of times.

Unfortunately, I was too much of an insomniac in those days. The dream slipped through my hands like a fish. Very frustrating.

The following day, I climbed back up in the carriage and set out again for Barcelona. I didn’t bother to check if the chest was where I’d left it. A Ten Points would never bother with such trifles.

Now, eight decades on, eighty times around the sun later, I believe I know who this twilight man was. A moment — I must breathe.

He was no man. He was le Mystère itself, traversing this earth with the indifference of a beekeeper seeing a few upset beehives. He came across a curious bee and lingered over it for a few moments.

He must have been at a loose end.

14

All morning long I drove along a route flanked by pine-covered mountains. And at midday came across the thing I’d been looking for, my want and deliverance.

An inn stood on the floodplain that opened out to my right. Its main building was a shoddy adobe construction, a long rectangle with a thatched roof. There was an old man in front of it, digging a grave for a dead mule lying there. Stopping the carriage, I got down and approached him.

I passed myself off as a modest businessman looking to join a civilian convoy. He was almost completely deaf.

“You’re looking for protection?” he yelled, holding a hand up to his head like an ear trumpet. “Okay, well, the boys are inside. They escort carriages. The more travelers who club together, the cheaper it ends up. And they’ve got a gift for negotiating at checkpoints with soldiers, whichever army they’re from!”

“Can I get myself something to drink?” I said, handing him a couple of coins. “I’m parched.”

“Go in and help yourself — though with this heat, the wine will be warm,” he replied, pointing to the main building. “Wait, though: If you help me bury this mule, I’ll give you all the wine you want, free. People come along,” he complained, referring to his customers, “and as soon as their mounts have a rest, they’re so worn out, they drop dead! What am I supposed to do with them? Why don’t you tell me that, eh, eh?”

Yes, that was exactly what I needed to do at that moment, bury dead mules. I didn’t bother to excuse myself but headed straight into the adobe building.

The table inside looked like the Last Supper. Drinking and talking at the tops of their voices, twelve gruff, very drunk men, half sitting with their backs to me, and those on the other side obscured by the way the light fell. At first I didn’t pay them any mind, nor they me.

I went over to a bar made of some rough planks set over a line of casks. There was a pitcher hanging from a post on one side. I took a couple of swigs — it was a rancid-tasting herb wine — and then heard a voice behind me.

“Come and join us, friend! You’ll find our liquor far preferable to that vinegar.”

It was worth getting off on the right foot with them, so I went and sat at the center of one of the benches. Only then did I get a proper look at their faces.

Scars. Earrings. Beards rough enough to sand rocks with. Heavy bags under their eyes, and eyes that scanned you for where best to stick a knife — in your windpipe or just under your chin? And this was an escort organized by decent citizens? The most harmless out of them all must have been saved from the scaffold five times, at least. And sitting straight across from me, my old friend: Ballester.

I went whiter than blanched asparagus. The look Ballester gave me was thick with hate. He said just four words.

“El botifler de Beceit.”

Waltraud has forgotten who Ballester is. He was in the last chapter! That fanatic young Miquelet briefly captured by the Bourbons, an utter animal who’d be only too happy cutting off my two ears and using them as a handkerchief.

Ballester’s words brought the revels to a halt. The twelve primitive apostles turned to look at me in unison. I was speechless. Under normal conditions, my Bazoches senses would have picked up on Ballester’s presence before I entered the inn. But I’d given up on engineering, and I’d been so eager to find an escort, it had made a common mole of me. I was as ashamed as I was frightened.

Ballester pulled out an enormous and very sharp dagger — likely the one he’d slit the captain’s throat with in Beceite. I wanted to flee but didn’t make it halfway to the door. I was pushed to the floor by four sets of hands, and Ballester came round and stood behind me. As he brought the point of the dagger to my jugular, I cried out: “Wait! I’ve got something you want!”

If ever you find yourself in such a situation, do as I say and skip trying to be clever. Go straight for the words that will be most appealing.

“A chest full of money!” I cried, half suffocated by the terror and the blade at my throat. “Right outside!”

All thirteen of us exited the inn, me with my chin up high due to the knife prodding it in that direction. The old man was still digging the mule’s grave. Tears began to run down my face.

“Make it easy on yourself,” said Ballester. “Spit it out, and I’ll let you choose the way I kill you.”

“My carriage!” I said, pointing to it. “You’ll find something of interest in there. I swear to Christ!”

Three of Ballester’s men climbed up into the carriage. The old man dug, murmuring mindlessly to himself, oblivious to everything but the mule. He was too deranged to have a clue what was going on.

Ballester’s men found the chest beneath the blankets.

“Fifty rifles!” shouted one of them, joyful, throwing a handful of coins in Ballester’s direction. “We can buy fifty rifles with this lot!”

“I stole it from those Bourbon scum!” I said, trying to turn their glee to my advantage. “I’m a patriot, utterly committed. The only thing I want is to topple Little Philip and his grandfather!”

While they rejoiced in the ill-begotten fortune, I came up with a convoluted tale. I was a spy working for the Generalitat, I went around sabotaging the evil Bourbons, my allegiance was with Austria. Attacking me was a mistake, and a crime, too. My mission, secret, meant traveling to Barcelona with the cargo; ministers from the Generalitat were awaiting my arrival. I even asked if they would like to escort me, and said they’d be paid handsomely if they did a good job. Ballester punched me to the ground. “String him up,” he said.

I whimpered and wept and begged for my life. I pushed the men off me and knelt down in front of Ballester. My family was dead, I told him, I was my blessed father’s only remaining son. A poor, peaceful, upstanding patriot.

Begging mercy from your executioners seems the most pointless pursuit. But in that case, why do men always subject themselves to such humiliation? I’ll tell you why: because it works.

“Sir,” I implored. “Have you forgotten who saved you from hanging in Beceite? The few hours of grace afforded you by my lenient words gave your men time to come back for you! And this is how you repay me! The one who saved your life, you sentence to death!”

Ballester spat by my nose, which was down on the ground. “It’s all right, your chest has brightened up my day,” he said. “Get out of here. I won’t lower myself to dirty my hands with you.”

I can still hear his rasping, stony voice and the words he said: “Fot el camp, gos.” (Away with you, dog.)

They stripped me, though my clothes were worth nothing. It must have been a symbol to the Miquelets when releasing prisoners. They even took my undergarments, stained though they were with mud and shit from twenty days in the trenches. I instinctively covered up my genitals with my hands. Turning on my heel, I fled, my rear end bare and the men pursuing me with their laughter.

“Hey!” Ballester shouted once there was a little distance between us. “Do you know how to write?” He had shifted to addressing me in the usted form, usually reserved for superiors.

I stopped and turned, with my hands still in front of my crotch, and stammered an answer: “Yes, well, of course. In several languages.”

He waved to me to come back. I obeyed, what else. He ordered his men to pull a plank from the carriage. He handed it to me, along with a piece of iron with a sharp point. “Write ‘I am a botiflero dog’ on it. In French and Spanish.”

“May I ask,” I whispered haltingly, clearing my throat, “what the inscription’s for?”

“Oh, I’ve changed my mind,” he said in the most amiable of voices. “Seeing as you know how to write, I’m going to string you up, and the whole world will know why. We’ll hang the plank around your neck.”

The iron and the plank dropped from my hands. Down on my knees again, I implored him, I whimpered, I cried whole seas. He looked up at the sky, sighing as though reconsidering. I thought he might have softened again, but what he said was: “Know Latin, too? Put it in Latin as well.”

I scratched out the letters on the plank, moaning and begging all the while. Ballester’s men found the whole thing hilarious.

“On your feet, boy!” they said, their voices upbeat, once I had finished. They tied my hands behind my back and picked me up at the armpits. The tallest tree in the vicinity was a fig tree. Someone put the plank around my neck. The old lunatic began shouting from the hole he was still digging: “So many big men, all in one place, and none of you comes to help an old man!”

One of the Miquelets tried to get the rope over one of the top branches but was so drunk that he stumbled and fell flat on his face. More laughter.

“Don’t you know how deep a hole has to be to fit a mule in?” continued the old man. “And me, toiling in the sun, in this heat. What a life!”

You only get one death, and mine had fallen into the hands of some drunk, bungling executioners. They finally managed to get the rope over the topmost branch. My head was introduced into the noose, and without any further ado, a couple of the brutes pulled down on the other end of the rope.

“I know you’re all good lads! You pay well, and anyone who fetches up without any money, you escort them for free. But I’m poor, too, and old, and tired! And this mule is enormous!”

I was lifted ten feet into the air. The yank on the noose caused my tongue to stick out. You never know how long your tongue is until you get hanged. The rope makes the blood in your head collect; you go bright red. My urine made an arc when I pissed myself. Some of the Miquelets fell down laughing.

They were too drunk to remember the well-reputed untrustworthiness of fig trees. The branches have a tendency to break, and, when I had been raised a little higher, the one bearing me indeed snapped. There was a great noise as I fell to the ground: bones, wood, and bushy leaves all in a heap.

Their guffaws were probably heard in Tortosa. Then, quite simply, they turned around and went off. That’s how Miquelets are.

“Figa tova! Figa tova!” they called out mockingly as they rode away, taking my carriage and the chest, of course, with them.

(Figa tova is untranslatable. Figa in Catalan means “fig,” and tova means “soft”; put together, they mean a whining know-it-all. Like Waltraud here, for instance.)

“Ho, you layabout!” cried the old halfwit. “Instead of lying there, you could at least give me a hand.”