Victus: The Fall of Barcelona

1

Very well, then, we can agree that my return home was rather less glorious than that of Ulysses. The only attire I was able to procure for myself was a pile of beggar’s rags. And thus it was that I returned to Barcelona after four long years away. Defeated by the war, baffled in my wretchedness. And the worst thing of all: with a fifth Point on my forearm that I had done nothing to deserve.

But let us forget about the tragedy of Longlegs Zuvi for just a moment. I was returning to the city of my birth, to old Barcelona. To her noises, her smells, her alleyways. Her harbor, her excesses. The city felt like an invention of my memories, more distant than my mother. All I had retained in my head were a child’s recollections — do not forget, I left my home when I was but a child — and I was returning to Barcelona equipped with senses that were far from ordinary, which Bazoches had honed. Everything was new, after a fashion, for my perceptions and the passage of time meant I was experiencing the place as a foreigner would.

At this point I ought to ramble off into a description of Barcelona in the early years of the century. Which would be a very dull thing. Since I have a map from the period, I shall simply attach it and leave it at that.

The city walls are not shown on this plate. Very fitting, bearing in mind my mood at that moment, because the last thing I wanted was to go back to thinking as an engineer. Or about Bazoches, or Jeanne, or Vauban’s “You are not fit.” Or The Word.

As you can see, the city was bisected by a broad avenue, Las Ramblas. The urban sprawl was much denser to its right, and on its left, vegetable gardens in abundance, something very useful to have in the case of a siege. .

I had left Barcelona a boy, and I was returning a man. A failure, but a man. I can assure you, this voice speaking to you now has never known a more frivolous port or a city, nor one that was home to more foreigners. Not even in America! They came, they settled, and their origins melted into the crowd. The day they decided to stay, they’d Catalanize their family names as a disguise, so nobody might know whether their birthplace had been in Italy, France, Castile, or somewhere more exotic still. As for the rest, and in contrast to the Castilian obsession with keeping the blood pure of Moors or Jews, the Catalans didn’t care a fig for their neighbors’ origins. If they had money to spend, if they were pleasant enough, and if they didn’t try and impose religious ideas, new arrivals were left to get on with it. This atmosphere, so passive and receptive, meant that the people would be transformed in less than a generation. So it was with my father.

Thanks to his Catholic heritage, every other day in his calendar was a feast day. (The papacy had to have something going for it to have so many followers around the world.) Besides these, we should add the dozens of more or less improvised occasions, such as days of thanksgiving to commemorate the king being restored to health, or because Santa Eulalia had appeared to a drunkard in the street. But make no mistake, if the Catalans encouraged feast days, it was only because they understood that idleness is good business.

The festivities, which the calendar teemed with, cost colossal amounts. Barcelona’s festivals and carnivals were spoken of the world over. Those carnivals! The Castilian aristocrats, all so chaste, would return from their visits scandalized. Rich and poor out on the streets, men and women all together in a throng and dancing till the early hours. Just appalling. To a Castilian nobleman, clothing had to be one color only: the severest black. When I was in Madrid in 1710, I was surprised by the blackness of its patricians. It was the opposite in Barcelona. More than three hundred kinds of fabric were imported, and the more money you had, the more colors you would flaunt in your attire and at the dances.

There was a constant flow of merchandise being unloaded at the harbor. You could find a dozen varieties of ginger alone. When I was a little boy, my father once gave me a thrashing because I’d come back from market with the wrong kind of rice — no wonder I was confused about which he’d sent me for: There were as many as forty-three different varieties of rice, something to suit every purse.

In few places have I seen people smoke as much as I witnessed in Barcelona. In the city’s botigas, it was possible to find an even greater array of tobaccos than there was of rice. Healthy though smoking obviously was, the habit spread to such an extent that the bishop was obliged to pronounce an edict, an ecclesiastical proclamation, no less, forbidding priests from smoking — at least while performing their offices!

In Barcelona in the years before 1714, you always had the impression of a city governed by a tolerant, opulent, libertine kind of chaos. People worked themselves to death and, at the same time, died laughing and merrymaking. On the whole, the government of the Generalitat didn’t meddle when it came to popular excesses. Let me give you one example: the pedradas.

The line dividing popular revelry and mob violence has always been vanishingly thin. When my father was a young lad, the pedradas were the favored pastime of Barcelona’s universities. Essentially, these consisted of a contest between two teams, each made up of a good hundred participants. They’d find some expanse of open land to gather in, and with the two teams on opposite sides, when the signal was given, hunks of stone would begin to be hurled. Thousands of stones went back and forth, and if you could strike an opponent in the head with one of yours, so much the better for you! You will be wondering, perhaps, what sort of rules applied to such a noble pastime? The answer could not be simpler: There were no rules at all. The group who finally fled in terror was considered the loser; the one left on the field, the victor. Naturally, the battle would leave dozens injured, many with their heads split open for life, and even some dead.

The real crybabies among the clergy clamored against the brutishness of the pedradas. Could the competition not be made a little less rough by at least replacing the stones with oranges? At their insistence, the universities assumed a position entirely typical of the Catalans: agreeing without complying. At the start of the civic battles, oranges would be used, but only until these ran out, whereupon the combatants would proceed with stones. The Church was obliged to hold off on the sermonizing because the pedradas were an enormously popular entertainment; crowds came to watch, bets were laid and sides taken. And who among us is unfamiliar with students’ playful ways? Very often, when there was an attentive crowd, instead of attacking each other, the two groups, laughing, would unite to bombard the unsuspecting spectators!

Using the pedradas as their excuse, the students would sometimes designate the area around the university their “field of honor.” Then the two rival groups would form an alliance, feeling fraternal all of a sudden, leaving the building a wreck, outside and in. Lectures would be suspended until the furnishings were replaced, and — who would have thought such a thing, what a coincidence! — it seemed these pedradas always sprang up at the university around exam time. No wonder my father sent me to France; always having been head and shoulders above my peers, and always having been a scoundrel, I would have found my place (my father was sure) in the front line of the stone-throwers, on one side or the other, and would have ended up with my skull smashed in. In any case, during my boyhood, pedradas had already begun to tail off noticeably. But of one thing I am quite sure: If Christ was able to save the blessed prostitute from stoning, it was only because there were no Barcelonan university students around in Judea at the time.

While I’m on the subject of prostitutes, one of the defects of Barcelona in those days, which demonstrates the fathomless perfidy of the “Black Pelts” (as the bishops were commonly called, owing to the color of their cassocks), is that brothels were strictly forbidden. There was a particular watch kept over boardinghouses and inns, and “suspect” women were constantly kept under observation. As far as I can tell, this disproportionate harassment of the city’s pitiful tarts was a kind of concession granted to the Black Pelts on the part of the Red Pelts (the government, in the popular jargon, owing to the crimson color of the robe worn by Catalan magistrates). Since the rich and powerful were quick to ignore sermons against gambling and luxury, the government gave the Church the satisfaction of repressing, at least, those poor, defenseless prostitutes.

Which is not to say there were no whores at all. Of course there were! In cities with brothels, the tarts stay inside and never come out; in cities without any brothels, they spill all over the place and at all hours. With the ancient profession of procurer abolished, aspiring tarts came up with a thousand cunning schemes to allow them to carry out their work in secret.

Anyway, as I was saying, I had been wandering the streets, summoning the courage to return home, when I heard the sound of drums approaching. The crowd, all crushed together on the Ramblas, dropped to their knees.

The news of the fall of Tortosa had arrived in the city before me. On occasions such as that, the Barcelonans carried in procession their most sacred relic: the standard of Santa Eulalia. I hope you will allow me a few words at this point, because the Barcelonans’ precious flag most surely deserves them.

As a banner, it was nothing extraordinary. It was, however, quite different from modern ensigns. The whole large silk rectangle was taken up by the portrait of a young woman, her body violet-colored, with sadness in her eyes. Something about the image was irremediably pagan. The art that had captured the melancholy in her eyes was wonderful.

According to the dictates of tradition, the flag had to be passed on, by hand, from Catalan kings to their firstborn and successor. It was said that an army that flew this flag would never be defeated. (A lie, I say: Catalan history comprises ten sound defeats to every one victory.) In any case, what is certainly true is that the flag of Santa Eulalia provoked feelings of devotion that far outstripped merely military support. As it passed by, the Barcelonans knelt to cross themselves and ask for protection and blessings. If you will allow me to share a thought with you, I can tell you that this reverence had precious little to do with religion. For this ensign was much more than a saint: It was the representative of the city itself.

I did not kneel. Not through lack of piety but because that violet-colored young lady reminded me of the one in the dream that le Mystère had provoked in me. The flag progressed, flanked by drums beating out a dirge for the fall of Tortosa, and when it passed, those saintly eyes seemed to be asking me something.

Martí Zuviría did not talk to flags, of course, but the sensation of an encounter with a creature from another world, albeit as real as an old friend, was so vivid that I simply stood there, agog. And, well, I suppose you must now be asking the same question as my heavy, vile Waltraud: “So what did the violet girl ask you?” I’ll tell you, then: She didn’t use words; a damsel, when asking your protection, has no need of words.

Since all those around me were on their knees and I remained standing, it was not hard to spot me from a distance. Somebody called out my name — it was Peret. I believe I have already mentioned old Peret, that human relic who had taken care of me in the absence of a mother. He had recognized me, and when Saint Eulalia had gone by, he threw himself upon me. He was still a sentimental old graybeard, and when I asked him to stop crying, his response stunned me: “It’s you I’m crying for. Or did you not receive my most recent letters?”

No, I had not received them. My life had been so busy, and any letters had been lost in the limbo of the roads. Peret could not stop himself from blurting out the news: “Your blessed father is dead.”

To my disbelief, to my despair, he also told me that I was a changed man. I was not moderately wealthy but poor. I did not live in my house, as I believed, but nowhere at all. Because I was not the son of a Barcelona trader: I was an orphan. My father had died suddenly. Shortly before, he had married a Neapolitan widow whom he had doubtless met on one of his mercantile voyages. Once he was dead, she and her children had no qualms in setting themselves up in my house. Or, rather, her house, which was what it was now.

Over the course of the following days, my stupefaction gave way to indignation. I threatened the usurpers with legal action to hound them to the end of time. And that was more or less what did happen: Over the ensuing years, I spent everything I earned on the best lawyer in the city, one Rafael Casanova. Oh yes, a splendid fellow for arguing a case in a courtroom. Eighty years have passed, and still I am awaiting justice.

If cavalry charges moved at such a pace, this world would be sorely overpopulated.

2

Peret, who had been my father’s old servant, took me into his little den, close to the harbor. Once you were through the door, you had to go down three steps, and at that depth, the rats believed themselves to have the right to challenge us for possession of the territory. The place was something between a ground floor and a basement, and the only windows were slits at street level, small rectangular openings through which we could see the feet of passersby. We had two rooms: One served as a bedroom and the other a dining room, kitchen, toilet, and whatever else we might happen to need. The damp stains came halfway up the wall in grotesque shapes.

Peret took pity on me. Even in his own state of wretchedness, he gave me a little money, just enough for me to get drunk on the cheapest booze and in the most putrid of hovels. I was the unhappiest engineer in all the world.

Once you have acquired the rationality of Bazoches, from then on, that steers your thoughts exclusively, sleeping as well as waking. I very often wanted to free myself from the tyranny known as reality. Rather than having to listen all the way through as atrocious violinists stood on tables chanting bawdy songs. The caterwauling of soldiers of many nations. That laughter, which we could tell, without a word being spoken, whether it came from Germans, Englishmen, Portuguese, or Catalans. The yelling of the drunks, the smoke from the pipes and cigarettes that blackened the vaulted ceilings. I would have preferred never to see the light of the tavern’s five hundred candles dripping light into the dark. People laughing, drinking, dancing. The din of humans entertaining themselves, which, to my great regret, kept me at arm’s length from this same human condition.

Yes, it was pain, that class of pain. My final meeting with Vauban was torturing me. “The answer is comprised of just one word,” the marquis had said. One word, my whole youth ruined by this Word. But which word, which? Night after night I gave in to despair. At lonely corner tables, I downed whole tankards, one after another. The Word, which word? I thought back over them all, from amor right down to zapador. No, that was not it. I got myself so drunk that the spirals that rose up from the smokers, meandering toward the ceiling, made me feel as though I were doing circuits around an Attack Trench. Very often, drunk, I made my way toward those smokers and set upon them, head-butting their jumbled teeth. I received countless cudgelings, all of them heartily deserved. Thrown out of nameless squalid little hovels, I lay there in the dirty, narrow streets of Barcelona, this modern Babylon.

Drinking to flee the world, drinking to escape your very body. Let us drink, all of us, we insects in the trifling circumference of this universe of ours! Let us drink until our vomiting repeats, returning to us as faithfully as dogs! All in all, how was I to be rid of my Points? At my worst moments, I would bare my right arm and, gazing on those delicate geometrical shapes, I would weep. My misfortune was etched into my very skin.

What might Jeanne be doing? Anything but thinking of Martí Zuviría. I could hardly blame her. I should have said to her, “I love you more than engineering.” But I did not, and so lost them both.

One day I was wandering the streets, swigging from a bottle. I had stopped to buy a cabbage leaf filled with fried meat from a street vendor, and as I was haggling, I saw an unforgettable face. She was last in a line of women standing at a water fountain.

The public fountain is one of the great inventions of civilization. A place where women can exhibit themselves while they stand in line, and the young fellows can get to know them with the gallant excuse of carrying their water for them. And guess who was waiting her turn to fill a good-sized pitcher? Right, it was my old friend Amelis.

She threw me a quick look like a little cornered bird. Only fleeting, but strike me down if it didn’t suggest a certain interest in the well-groomed Martí Zuviría. Better not to mention the Beceite episode. I offered to carry her pitcher, and in truth, she did not turn me down. A bit of gallantry and a perfect excuse to make conversation. Or to pick up on what we’d been up to in the pine forest before she vanished into the night. We hadn’t taken ten steps when I noticed someone lifting the tails of my coat in search of my purse.

I might attribute my particular sensitivity to the acute perceptiveness instilled in me in Bazoches, but the truth was, I did not need to resort to that. A while earlier, I’d detected the presence of another pair of old acquaintances in the area: Nan and Anfán.

They had managed to make it to Barcelona after all. The boy, still with the same indescribably dirty mane; the dwarf with the funnel pulled down onto his head. The two of them were busy watching the passersby like miniature vultures. Noticing them, I handed Amelis the pitcher and grabbed them by the collar. It really felt as though no time had passed, as though we were back in a winding trench, with them running away from me around the bends.

“That’s it!” I said. “I’ve got you this time.”

They started to whine and bawl as though I were the aggressor and they the victims.

“Go on, let them go,” said Amelis. “They’re only kids.”

“Ha!” I laughed. “You have no idea what these two are capable of. I intend to hand them over to the first patrol I find.”

“You can’t do that,” my dark beauty said in their defense, “they will get twenty lashes, and with those tender bones, it will surely kill them.”

I shrugged. “It’s not I who make the laws, I merely carry them out.” The lawsuit against the Italians over my father’s apartment was very much in my mind as I said that. “And if an honorable man like myself is being given such a hard time, I don’t see why I ought to be indulgent toward incorrigible thieves.”

Anfán clung to my ankles, weeping and begging. When he saw that the girl was defending him, the weeping became louder. Since I am the greatest fraud of the century, I can recognize my own kind in an instant. And I must concede, the lad was wonderfully good at it. But he did not convince me.

“Off we go, trench pig!”

Amelis grabbed hold of my elbow. “You can’t treat these two little ones so!”

It is all very well for women to be compassionate creatures, but this one was starting to sound like Our Lady of the Poor and Defenseless.

“Please!”

I merely said, “I’m sorry, sweetie,” freed myself from her grip, and walked on, a pickpocket in each hand, dangling like a couple of trout. What I did not expect was that she would come and stand directly in front of me, blocking my path. She stood with her arms crossed.

“Let them go,” she said, then added bluntly: “Very well, what is it you want?”

Truly, this was unsettling. I understood what she was suggesting, but that did not make it any more comprehensible. I stared at her even harder.

Her features had something irremediably sad about them. But nobody can be that generous, so why did she volunteer? Well, it was all the same to me. She was too beautiful, and I was too much of a swine, for me possibly to refuse. I let them go.

“Next time I’ll see you hanged!” I shouted. “Your necks will be longer than a goose’s, understand?”

Before I had finished telling them off, they had already gone around three corners and were nowhere to be seen. I turned to her: “Where to?”

She took me to La Ribera, one of the most insalubrious and overpopulated neighborhoods in all Barcelona, which is saying something. Solid gray buildings, three, four, even five storeys high, and narrow little alleyways that stopped the sunlight from reaching ground level. It was unbelievably full of people and animals. Stray dogs, chickens living on balconies, milking goats tied to rings in the walls, meeeehhh. . Some of the people living there seemed quite content; they smoked and played dice in the doorways, using a barrel as a table. Others were like the living dead. I watched one man who looked like Saint Simeon the Stylite, the difference being that Simeon spent thirty years on top of a pillar and this man seemed to have been through at least double that, and living on a diet of sparrow shit. To make passersby pity him, he would open his shirt and show his ribs, which stood out like crab claws. He held a beggar’s hand out to me. “Per l’amor de Déu, per l’amor de Déu.”

Most of the buildings must already have been old when the Emperor Augustus was here. We went into one, I don’t know which, but it was even more squalid, possibly, than all the others. We climbed some stairs, up to a door on the third storey.

We walked in. I looked around us. A single shrunken room, a single window. The street was so narrow that if you stretched out your hand, you could almost touch the building opposite. At the back of the room, a straw mattress with no bed frame. Beside it, a little mountain of melted wax topped by a few candles. I imagined that at first the candles had been put on the floor, and that as they’d burned down, the same mass of melted wax had come to form the base for the ensuing ones. The rest of the furniture was comprised of a stool near the door and a basin of water, over which Amelis squatted down to wash. And that was it.

“This is where you live?” I asked as she undressed.

“I live nowhere.”

The presence at the back of the room of a little wooden box — made of what seemed to be fine wood — was all the more noticeable in the midst of that destitution; Intrigued by that solitary object, no larger than a shoe box, I walked toward it and, since Zuvi is an impertinent sort of cove, lifted the lid. The moment the box opened, a tune came out, jolly but also mechanical, filling the room. I jumped a little, like a scalded cat. I felt like one of those ignorant savages, as this was the first time I had seen a carillon à musique.

“What are you doing?” Amelis snapped in protest.

She had been busy taking off her clothes, and when she noticed my intrusion, she seized the music box. She stood there naked, protecting it with her body, keeping it away from me. I do not believe even she was aware of the beauty of that picture: a woman this lovely, protecting that musical repository.

She closed the lid, and the music died away.

“I’ve never seen such a thing,” I said.

She opened the lid again, and as that mechanical tune filled the air, she said: “Hurry. You have until it finishes.”

Well, then, best get to it. I had gone there to do her, and I did. She seemed much more offended that I should have laid hands on her music box than on her body. There was only one moment when she showed any sort of kindness toward me. It was when she said: “Wait.”

She picked up the tangle of my clothes that had fallen down and put them on the stool, in order that they should not get dirty on that filthy floor. We went straight back to it, and I soon had her shrieking like a witch on the bonfire.

When it comes to women, I have always followed the same strategy that Vauban used with cities: Assail them, but be not overly hasty. And you can take my word for it — with such spoils in my sights, it was difficult to ease off on the barrage. But then the little tune came to an end, and she pushed me from her body.

“I’ve done what I said, you’re satisfied, and the children got to keep their lives,” she said, staring up at the ceiling. “Out.”

There was nothing more to be said. I picked up my clothes and hat from the stool, dressed, and walked down the stairs without saying goodbye. Once I was out on the street, I passed the half-dead prophet again. He was still holding out his hand, with the same refrain: “Per l’amor de Déu, per l’amor de Déu.”

Everyone is in a decent mood after a good fuck, so I stopped to give him a couple of coins. I rummaged in my pockets. But just imagine — my purse had disappeared.

That whore!

I raced back up the stairs like a wild thing. How could I have allowed myself to be beguiled so grossly, so utterly predictably? Me! Who, just moments earlier, had been feeling odious and guilty for taking her to bed! I was more annoyed at the deception than at the loss. What would the Ducroix brothers have said? But when I entered the room, I stopped dead.

On top of the girl, on the straw mattress, there was an enormous brute of a man, and he was giving her a thrashing, right and left. And what a thrashing. He had her held between his legs; she was screaming, with no way to escape. It wasn’t that the man was especially broad at the shoulders, but his woodcutter’s arms looked like hammers. At this rate, he would kill her in no time. He wasn’t a customer, as I could tell by the fact that the music box was closed.

“Oi, look here!” I cried, as a reflex. “What’s this?”

The big fellow, whose back was to the door, turned and looked at me. An ogre, a one-eyed ogre. Until that moment I had thought the Cyclops lived on islands in the Aegean.

“What’s it look like?” he barked, looking at me with his one eye. “I’m giving her a rosewater bath, right? Are you going to stand there waiting your turn? Get out of here, blockhead!”

Was I going to be intimidated by this ruffian, this one-eyed lowlife, however oversize he may have been? Of course I was. I forgot all about my purse and ran down the stairs. “What a piece of work is a man,” I muttered to myself.

What happened next is harder to understand. I was on the last run of stairs when a little old woman appeared. She was carrying a pitcher much like the one I had offered to carry for Amelis.

“Allow me, my good woman, allow me,” I said, impeccably friendly. “I’ll take it up.”

I came into the room carrying the pitcher, which did indeed weigh a ton. Don’t ask me why I went back, because I do not know. I am no knight errant, and this girl was nothing but a thieving whore.

The one-eyed ogre was still going for it. Nor is it true that I am especially compassionate, but if you had heard the girl screaming! Although she was writhing between the sheets, trying to scratch out his one remaining eye, she was only a few punches from getting herself killed.

So there I was, me, her, and the ogre. And the pitcher filled with water in my hands. And — worth pointing out — the ogre had his back to me. Raising the pitcher high above my head, I hurled it with all my strength at the back of his neck.

The ogre toppled to one side, water and blood everywhere. His body subsided; there was a rushing noise like a landslide. He rolled over on the floor, coming to lie faceup. Amelis was soaked in blood and water, too, a pitiful sight, her lips cut and her hands shaking.

What came next was the sweetest conversation of my life.

Me: “Got anything heavy to hand?”

Her, hugging her knees and furious, as though she were still struggling with the Cyclops: “Do I look like a dockworker to you?”

Me (sarcastic): “Your little friend is waking up, and if I don’t do something, he’s going to rip us to shreds like a couple of heads of cabbage.”

Her, pointing at the four candles: “That, you idiot!”

Me (still more indignant): “It’s just a pile of wax! What am I supposed to do, make him swallow it so the poor baby gets a tummyache?”

Her, still with her arms around her knees, rolling her eyes like someone obliged to deal with an inveterate imbecile: “Noooo. . It’s not just wax — pick it up!”

The block of melted wax had a cannonball hidden inside it. God knows whether it was from the bombardment by the French fleet in 1691, the siege of 1697, the skirmishes that followed the landing of the Allies in 1705, or some other battle. Some person with a sense of humor had carried it up here and begun to use it for holding candles. The melted wax had wrapped itself around the ball like a solid shell, making it unrecognizable.

I picked up the iron projectile with both hands and approached the one-eyed ogre. His neck was twisted, his head in line with the wall.

Me: “Turn his neck! Don’t you see I can’t get a proper shot at this angle?”

“You can’t get what?”

“Turn his neck!”

Without leaving her mattress, Amelis grabbed the ogre by the hair and pulled. I stood astride the fallen body and raised the cannonball over my head. At exactly that moment, his one remaining eye opened.

“Wait!” cried Amelis.

Had she suddenly turned compassionate? She pointed at the bomb. “What if it explodes?”

Still half stunned, the ogre understood what was going on. He grabbed my ankle in one hand, his living eye wider than ever.

Well, his final sight of the world was to be a twenty-four-caliber projectile falling directly onto his face. That was too close. Whatever the strategists may tell you, the best tactic will always be a good heavy blow from behind.

I rubbed my hands to remove the wax. “Done. It was his head that did some good exploding, after all.”

From her bed, Amelis looked at the dead ogre, then at me, and said: “You aren’t planning on leaving me here with that, are you? If they find him, they’ll kill me!”

I save her life, and now she asks me to scrub the floor. Women!

“I didn’t come back to get friendly with your boyfriends,” I said. “My purse,” I added, holding out my hand for her to return what was mine.

She laughed and told me she had no purse. I could search as much as I wanted, she said, to prove her innocence, but I would not find it. On the whole, I do know when somebody is lying. And she was so sure of herself that I ruled out the possibility. What was more, in that barren room, there could be no little nooks or hiding places. If she was a thief, she was such a good one that she deserved my respect.

Sometimes you have to know when you’re beaten. I made as if to go. But when I was at the door, she said coldly: “Wait.”

She poured the water (which she’d been using to wash her cunt) out into the street. She wiped the blood off her face with a rag, got dressed, and the two of us left together. She went ahead of me without saying a word, surly as ever. And whom should we find but Nan and Anfán, sitting on the steps of the Pi church.

When they saw me, they started to run, but she gave a shepherd’s whistle and they stopped. We approached them, and Amelis rummaged through Anfán’s clothes till she had turned out my leather purse. She handed it over to me as if to say: “Now we’re even.”

They had planned the whole set piece. While gallant young men carried the heavy pitchers full of water, their arms raised, spellbound by the vision of this dark Helen of Troy, Nan and Anfán would relieve them of the contents of their pockets. If anything went awry, Amelis would intercede. Everyone surrendered to the entreaties of an eighteen-year-old angel as beautiful as she was: everyone except unscrupulous types like me. Those she’d take to the room in La Ribera. While they fucked, Nan would keep watch as Anfán crept into the room, silent as a lizard, to swipe the purse. You’ll recall that she placed my clothes on a stool beside the door, very easy to reach. I am sure that the loudest of her amorous wailing coincided with, and provided cover for, Anfán’s entrance. After, she could then maintain her blessed innocence, since the booty had gone and no trace of the crime could possibly be found. A fine trio.

The boy, the dwarf, and Amelis stayed in the half-basement in El Raval. They couldn’t be seen around La Ribera, at least until the death of the one-eyed ogre had been forgotten. As we learned subsequently, he was neither a procurer nor a criminal from the underworld but a depraved patrician who would occasionally carry Amelis’s pitcher and had gone mad with passion for her. Eventually, fed up with his pockets being picked, he’d come straight over to kill her.

They had nothing but the clothes on their backs, except for Amelis, who was carrying her one earthly possession in her arms: that strange box that played a tune, to which she was so attached. It was clear that she used her carillon à musique as a shield to protect herself against the sorrows of life. When she appeared, she had that sacred little box swaddled as though it were the baby Jesus Himself.

At first the whole thing was a real nuisance. Peret and I were already finding it a squeeze in that half-basement, and now we had to find room for another three bodies. Amelis and I shared the only bedroom. Peret and that other pair lay on straw mattresses in the room that served as kitchen and dining room. Peret could not abide them. He made my head throb with all his complaints, lamentations, and recriminations.

The dwarf, for example, had very queer ideas about domestic life. When he didn’t get his way, he’d express his frustration by shrieking like a speared boar, high-pitched and frantic enough to wake the dead. If he was ignored, he’d use his own head as a battering ram, butting doors and walls, racing around the house like a spinning top.

If the dwarf seemed eccentric, Anfán’s behavior was positively indescribable. The word “thief” is inadequate to describe that lad. He was compulsive, a larceny fanatic. Any time of the day or night, you might find his little fingers in your pockets. Thanks to what I had learned in the Spherical Room, I could see him coming a mile off, and shooed him as though swatting a fly, but poor Peret was robbed as many as five times a day. One morning he awoke early with a candle stuck in his nose and completely naked. Before breakfast, Anfán and Nan had already sold his clothes on the streets.

I tried to reason with the boy. “Don’t you understand that while you are here, what’s ours is yours?”

“No.”

At least he was honest.

Peret, entirely logically, wanted to beat them to death. As usual, Amelis protected them, shouting, hiding them behind her skirts. Peret’s opinion could not have been clearer: “Since you live with her, you have the right to treat her as your wife. Put her in her place and give her a good hiding every once in a while!”

Our half-basement was a nest of disagreement. On the other hand, I was in no hurry for Amelis to leave. She soon recovered from the beating she had received. She was infinitely more beautiful than the first day I saw her in the stable of a godforsaken little town. And in short, let me just say that, in bed, she was very obliging. We slept together, and this started to change into a routine that began, bit by bit, to develop beyond mere pleasure into a happy, daily amazement. Love? I do not know. Nobody ever asks whether he loves the air that he breathes, and yet he cannot live without it. It was a little like that. Her thoughts at the time were a mystery. Did she approve of her new condition, or did she go along with it in order to keep a roof over her head — or for the sake of that pair, with whom her relationship was more that of an older sister than a mother? All I can tell you is that one night, before making love, she did not open the carillon à musique. And from that night on, while we were still together, she never opened it again.

The thing was, Anfán’s thieving habits had to stop. Either the boy changed, or we would all be driven quite mad. I did not even consider beating them, as I was sure that technique would be no use. From what little I knew of his biography, the lad had experienced such treatment wherever he went. The results were plain to see.

The big changes started on the outside. Vauban had been such a stickler for cleanliness that he bathed every week. I am no admirer of such excesses, but Anfán and Nan had never been closer to water than a pair of desert rocks.

The worst was when we wanted to cut the hair of one of them and remove the funnel from the head of the other. The moment they saw the scissors and the clippers (could we have used anything less to yank off that funnel?), they fled and did not show their faces in the house for two days after.

Finally, we reached a compromise with Anfán. We had nothing against his braids, but we gave him to understand that those twisted shapes were made of pure filth. If he washed them, Amelis promised, she would weave his fair hair into natural braids, dozens of blond braids; we promised she would. Much more attractive, too.

Clean, decently dressed in a white shirt and a pair of pants without holes in them, with braids that glowed yellow instead of greasy rags, he even looked like a child and not the cabin boy from a pirate ship.

With the dwarf, we agreed to burn his circus clothes and that he should remove his funnel once a month. We had to swear that, while we washed his hair, he would be allowed to hold on to the funnel with both hands. I refuse to describe all the bugs and pus-covered gack we found in there that first time. Yeuch!

Amelis, Nan, and Anfán were a tight, inseparable trio. It was not quite clear who had adopted whom. However much I asked Anfán about his past, it was as though he had a crater in his memory. Whenever he was abandoned, or whenever his parents were killed, it must have been when he was very small, as he had no memory of them. It was better, perhaps, that he didn’t remember. He was aware of no other life than this one, as a piece of floating detritus, ever at the mercy of the tides of invasions that followed one another through that natural corridor of the Mediterranean called Catalonia. His very name, his barracks talk, a mixture of French, Catalan, and Spanish, said it all.

Boys will always be boys. Including that little beast Anfán. Deprived as he was of paternal love, he filled its absence by projecting it onto the dwarf. Deep down, Anfán gave Nan the very thing he himself was crying out for. I began to feel a soft spot for the boy when I understood that.

As far as I knew, not long after the siege of Tortosa came to an end, the pair had run into Amelis (the roads from Beceite and Tortosa met on the way to Barcelona). If a place has a roof, it’s possible to call it home; under that roof is the shared hearth, and in the absence of a fire, an embrace, simple and basic, will do. They were her home. The proof being, Nan and Anfán never got used to sleeping far away from Amelis. At any moment of the night, they might leave the straw where they lay and come in to us. That I might have been busy with her made no difference at all to them. They crowded in with us and slept like kittens. To begin with, I protested: “Can’t they at least stay outside till we’ve finished?”

Amelis answered quite simply: “What difference does it make?”

The three of them were shocked by my civilized rules. To them it was much more normal for all of us to sleep together in a tangle of elbows and knees, one person’s feet in another’s face, or someone’s cheeks on someone else’s belly. One false move, and the end of that damned funnel could stab you anywhere. And I mean anywhere!

Look, I know it is not really right to be making love and sleeping when you have a kid, a dwarf, and a funnel sharing your bed.

But honestly, what can I tell you?

3

Around that time we received the most unexpected of visits: four porters with three heavily armed escorts, who said that they had come from beyond the northern border and were delivering a letter and a trunk in my name.

The letter was from Don Bardonenche, who begged my forgiveness for not being able to deliver the trunk in person. The Vauban family had entrusted him with the mission of getting it to me. Unfortunately, once he had reached the border, the Allied army had blocked his passage, however strongly good Bardonenche had insisted that he was driven only by personal motives to visit beautiful Barcelona. “This world is going to the dogs,” wrote Bardonenche sadly, “as can be seen from the fact that nowadays, men don’t even trust their enemies.” My dear vile Waltraud is surprised by this, but I can assure you that in my day, at least among career soldiers, such courtesies were not in the least unusual.

Well, when we opened the trunk, our surprise provoked — in this order — stammering, shouting, and fainting, because it contained no more nor less than one thousand two hundred francs. The marquis had bequeathed the sum to me in his will. I won’t pretend I wasn’t moved: Even from beyond the grave, I remained in Vauban’s thoughts. Why had it taken so long? The distance between Paris and Barcelona is not inconsiderable even when there is no war on, and the conflict had increased the number of legal obstacles for such a large sum of money to reach me.

To celebrate my newfound fortune, I went on a binge so monumental that I suffered a hangover for two days. The problem was, that gang took advantage of my lying down a little to squander my treasure: They spent every last coin buying an apartment, a fifth-storey abode in the busy La Ribera neighborhood. Amelis needed a man’s signature, so Peret obliged. You will better understand my desire to throttle them when I tell you that the contents of the trunk were insufficient, which meant that, to complete the purchase, it was necessary to secure a loan. Naturally, they arranged to take it out in my name. As for the rest, how could a man trained to put up or knock down city ramparts ever love partition walls? I don’t know how I bore it when Amelis showed me our new nest.

It was a common house with just a few pretensions: cheap painting on the ceiling, geometric patterns on the plastered walls, three bedrooms, and a kitchen. It smelled of new plaster. As usual, the fifth storey was the cheapest, since getting there required climbing numerous flights of stairs. At least the height meant there was sunlight in the bedrooms. We had one to ourselves, another for Nan and Anfán, and a third for that parasite Peret (his charge for helping with the swindle by pretending to be me with the creditors). The rear balcony looked out over the bastion of Saint Clara. The fortified pentagon stretched all the way out as far as the foot of the balcony. We could look down and see the bastion yard, the changing of the guard, the whole thing. In our room, Amelis showed me a skylight that opened immediately above the bed. Through the glass, there was a view of the sky, bluer than the Mediterranean itself.

As a matter of fact, the house became a real home the day Amelis installed her carillon à musique in our bedroom. Through the skylight, the rays of the sun poured down onto the white sheets, and she would often sit in the middle of the bed, naked, brushing her long black hair, her lips moving in time to that sad melody. The beauty of the sight was enough to turn you to stone. In such moments it was best not to interrupt her self-absorbed nakedness.

God, how the life we shared had changed! In the past, Amelis had made use of the music box in order to escape during the torments life had subjected her to. Now it served a different function: as though that music — so unusual, so artificial, and yet so sweet — were transporting her back to her most distant memories. No, it was more than that, the music box itself comprised the memories, the way a desert has no borders: The desert is itself the border.

And so, well, we were now the brand-new owners of a home. A problem arose from the fact that the trunk from Vauban had contained one thousand two hundred francs, while the apartment had cost one thousand, six hundred, and twelve. In other words, in less time than it takes to sleep off a hangover, we had exchanged our state from happily well-off paupers to that of happily poor property owners. And indebted ones, at that. We had to pay off the debt, and during wartime all business gets drawn into war, too.

It’s about time I recounted my little adventure in Castilian lands. How I was dragged into the 1710 campaign, how I came to witness the rise of Archduke Charles to the Madrid throne, and the fall that followed. Ah, yes, and also how I found — altogether unbelievably — a teacher who would replace Vauban, and that the last individual in the world I ever would have supposed capable of exercising any kind of preeminence in anything.

For this reason, if you will allow me, I will first permit myself a brief digression. My dear vile Waltraud is against it; she thinks I ought to get on. Well, pity for her.

In order to tear me away from the taverns, Amelis insisted that we leave the city, even if for a day, on the pretext of a chocolatada. For a reasonable price, it was possible to hire a carriage to take you six or seven miles outside Barcelona. There you would find green expanses, meadows, and beautiful views, and at the end of the day, the carts would return to collect the day-trippers and bring them home. Let me tell you a little about the chocolatadas.

A chocolatada did not necessarily mean simply going and eating chocolate. Depending on the kind of people taking part, the most peculiar products might be added to the melted chocolate, aphrodisiacs in particular. The priests had declared war on chocolate and were constantly sermonizing against its consumption, which was very much the fashion.

As chocolate is black, nobody could ever be sure what had been added to a mug. The cook could slip his hand in and add a few intoxicants, which, consumed to excess, could cause death. It was just a risk you took. In fact, it was more the danger than anything that excited people about it, because the great majority of chocolatadas contained no more than that, some innocent cocoa boiled up with sugar. But since everybody went along with the suspicion, if not the absolute conviction, that some love drugs had been poured in, whenever you put your hand on your daughter-in-law’s lovely behind, you could always blame the chocolate. (Yes, yes, everything was always the chocolate’s fault, of course!)

Fantasy or not, after a second mug people suddenly felt a passionate urge to dance. They would hold hands in a circle, laughing and singing. And without the slightest decorum! Men and women jumbled in together, with no distinction between generations, status, or kindred! There were always a couple of fiddles to brighten up the party, and shortly afterward, couples of dancers would start disappearing. You can guess what they had gone off to do.

I didn’t care a fig what they had done to the chocolate, I was suffering only for my Amelis. The carriages left us on a beautiful green hillock. No sooner had we alit than I started feeling unwell, since I knew that in the dissolute atmosphere of a chocolatada, any clown would try to take advantage of her. I remember the exact moment when my jealousy attack struck: I was helping her down from the wagon, my arm around her waist, and as I deposited her on the ground, I felt as though I had lost something. “Oh, Déu meu,. . ” I said to myself with something like sorrow. “So that’s what it is — I’m in love with her.”

There must have been thirty or forty of us sprawled on blankets. Presiding over the plain was an old ruined masía, a construction with no doors and half the roof caved in. The masías, traditional Catalan mountain houses, were miniature fortresses that took care — great care — of an area’s defenses. I wasn’t surprised that the former inhabitants of this one should have chosen such a setting: From there it was possible to control any approach, three hundred and sixty degrees around, and from a great distance. Bazoches was certainly not the first place to study the ancient art of defending.

After breakfast came the chocolate, and the revelry began. The fiddles started to play jouncing tunes. People gathered around in circles. Amelis took my hand for us to dance, too. I could not. At that moment something unusual happened: Anfán came up behind me and threw his arms around my neck. It had taken nearly a year for him to get that close. Laugh if you like, but I felt moved. He rested his boyish cheek against mine and whispered: “Can I rob them, jefe? They’re all drunk.”

“No, no, you can’t. They are drunk, but they’re also good people.”

That line of argument had no impact on him whatsoever.

“All that booty, and I could even buy Nan a new funnel.”

“Has Nan asked you for a funnel? No. What you want is to have some fun. Well, go and dance, then. You’ll see how much you enjoy that, and no risk of a whipping, either.” In the tone Vauban used to employ with me, I added, “You won’t understand why, but you have to make sure nobody takes Nan off into the bushes.” And I shouted: “Allez!”

When it comes to little boys and soldiers, it’s always better to charge them with a mission than a punishment.

And you will allow me to become a little emotional now, for I discovered, suddenly, that this was happiness. The green grass, the jolly fiddles. Circles of people laughing and dancing like zanies. Crooked little Peret holding hands with a widow, whispering filth in her ear. Nan and Anfán dancing, Nan as inexpressive as ever but happy on the inside; Anfán, following my instructions, driving off with a kick any woman who approached the dwarf. And Amelis laughing, dancing, her black hair loose in the wind. I don’t know how long it lasted. Just a short time, I’m sure; happiness is always fleeting. All at once Peret and the widow came rushing out of a clump of bushes, Peret holding his pants around his calves and the woman running with her hair all disheveled. They must have seen something when they were right in the middle of things.

“Ballester!” cried Peret, terrified. “Ballester’s coming!”

Ballester! My old friend who had become one of the most notorious and cruel Miquelets — though I have already explained to you that in Catalonia, the word “Miquelet” could mean many things.

The chocolatada, as I have said, took place on a high plateau. I climbed up on a rocky promontory and could see what would soon be upon us: a group of light cavalry, still some distance away. To judge by the dust raised by their hooves, there must have been a good dozen of them.

Panic transforms people into a herd. Everybody was shouting and running. The wealthiest, who had come on their own horses, fled at a gallop, leaving their lovers behind (and most unscrupulously, indeed — ah, love!). The rest didn’t really know what to do; animal instinct sent them inside the abandoned masía. Nan and Anfán were running, holding Amelis’s hands. They, too, went into the masía, and I was right behind them.

Inside, people were crushed together like cattle, because even though it was a spacious place, the partition walls had fallen in long ago. The women wept and hugged one another, the men tore their hair. I shouted for silence.

“Anyone planning to do anything,” I yelled, “or should we just wait here to be sacrificed like little lambs?”

A gallant in his best glad rags stepped forward. “What are you saying?” he said. “You with your baby face, and the man who’s coming for us is Ballester!”

“I was pretty sure it wasn’t Saint Peter on horseback!” I replied, and turned to address the whole crowd: “So are we going to do something, or aren’t we?”

“Listen to the big captain here!” The gallant was mocking me again. “These people bugger little boys like you for breakfast!”

There was a rotten old table. I climbed up on it. “Listen to me, all of you: If you do everything I tell you, there’s a chance we might get out of this alive.”

But again the gallant spoke up: “The men coming this way are professional killers, and they have an arsenal. All we’ve got here are women, children, and doddering old men. The house is in ruins, and you mean to defend it.” He pointed at the entrance. “There isn’t even a door!”

Something flashed through my head. If I’d had the time to think, believe me, my answer would have been rather different. But the situation was so urgent, and at the same time so desperate, that I could not do it. Which was why I sighed and, emphasizing each word, said: “We are the door.”

“They will slit our throats and rape the women!” the gallant insisted.

“That’s precisely why we mean to fight, you dolt!” I shouted. “When they see that they can get neither booty nor ransom, nor steal any horses, they will slit a few throats for their amusement and go riding on our women.” I pointed to Amelis. “That’s my woman, and I swear no one will touch her. They shall not!”

There are many different kinds of silence. The silence of desperation, the silence of reflection, the silence of peace: Every one is different, and that particular one reeked of doubt. Then somebody said, “They raped me once, a long time ago.”

It was a little old woman, the kind who still crackled with energy. She looked at the gallant while pointing a finger my way. “And on that day I would have liked to have a ‘little boy’ like this one around.” Then, looking at me, she said: “I’m just an old bag, but if you tell me to, I will stone anyone who sets foot through that door. What have I got to lose?”

Murmurs. That voice, humble but firm, was able to transform fear into anger. Peret came over to the table. He took hold of one of my ankles and said, petrified, “But Martí, lad, whatever do you think we poor wretches can possibly do?”

“First of all, pile up all the weapons we have, here on this table,” I replied.

I got down from the table, and the men who were carrying weapons brought them over. As usually happens, the most heavily armed are the most cowardly; the gallant took out two large pistols and a dagger. Altogether, we gathered six pistols and fifteen knives of varying sizes. The most pitiful of arsenals.

“Superb!” I cried, giving a sterling performance. “You see? With all this, we could defend Sagunto itself.”

As I’ve said, Catalan masías are designed like miniature fortresses, capable of repelling assaults from all four sides. Walls as thick as the ramparts of a city, windows as narrow as arrow-slits perpendicular to the ground, stone roofs that will not set fire: Even though it was falling into ruin, it remained a significant fortification.

I asked the women to pile up some good-sized stones. The roof had partly fallen in; using the rubble and the remains of the furniture, the men improvised a way up to the top. From there they could shoot, or at least throw stones, at anyone who approached. Others used the rubble to build a barricade — though a more symbolic barrier than an actual one — blocking the door. I told the children to go search in the corners. I squatted down beside Anfán. “Look underneath the floorboards; you’re sure to find something.”

And they did. Every masía has its own arsenal. In the floor of what must have been the main bedroom, Anfán and Nan found a dusty trapdoor. They opened it. Inside were four muskets. Rusty, two of them missing their stocks, but muskets all the same.

“What do you want us to do with this junk?” someone asked.

“Clean the barrels.”

“They’re here!” It was one of the lookouts; the only thing we weren’t short of was eyes.

For some time, the horsemen did not approach. They went round and round the masía, sniffing about, little more than that. I was running from one end to the other, asking the people stationed there: “What are they doing?”

“Nothing. Just loitering and looking.”

To the defenders, the time spent waiting for an attack is immeasurably worse than the attack itself; we needed to stop ourselves from imagining its horrors, at all costs. I decided to go outside. Amelis tried to hold me back.

“Who do you think should go and speak for us, then?” I said. “That gallant? Peret? You can be sure that Nan and Anfán won’t be leaving your side.”

“They’re bandits! They won’t be reasoned with.”

She was weeping tears of rage, furious with me, as though I had just confessed to her that I had a lover. She pummeled my chest with both fists. “They’ll kill you! They’ll kill you!” She turned and walked away.

You see? It is easier to reason with bandits than with women. And as for you, woman, don’t give me that look — just write down what I say.

We moved the fragile barricade from the doorway, and I stepped outside.

One of the bandits on horseback approached and then stopped about twenty feet away, scrutinizing me. I’d come up with no better idea than simply looking indifferent. I greeted him with a forced smile, touching the tip of my tricorn hat with my fingertips. He rode off. Then his boss appeared, escorted by four horsemen on either side. Ballester.

He had changed since we’d met in Beceite and at the inn. He’d aged; he seemed more used to that life of assault and flight. I could see that his eyes were sunken, as though their sockets were twice as deep as most people’s. He was not especially ugly, since ferocity can have its appeals. But with those sunken eyes, his eyebrows solid and dark like rope, and a thick, incredibly black beard, he had the look of a man who cared little for age or such things. He sported a pair of pistols either side of his upper torso; in a sticky situation, he could cross his arms and draw them in a flash.

I will always remember that look on Ballester’s face. His eyes had their own eloquence. And it was contradictory. They said, I’m going to kill you, and at the same time, they said, Let’s talk. Those who could not see the second fled.

What I said was: “Good afternoon.”

“It is, a very good afternoon,” he replied. His hands were on the pommel of his saddle, and he was looking up at the sky like a country philosopher. “A very good afternoon indeed.”

“What can we do for you?” I asked.

He took offense. He rode his horse forward and circled me a few times, an act that was obviously most intimidating. I could almost hear people’s hearts pounding inside the masía. I raised my voice. “It’s rude addressing a person who is not mounted from on a horse, even for a gentleman.”

Ballester addressed his men: “A gentleman! Did you hear that? I’m a proper gentleman now!”

His fellow outlaws burst out laughing. Ballester made a gesture of mocking condescension and dismounted.

He did not smell bad — a fact I found strange, because as the son of a seafaring trader who lived with his back to the inland places, I had been schooled in the belief that Miquelets were no better than the dregs and overspillings of the brimstone of hell. Ballester gave off a smell of clean ashes, of thyme, and of rosemary. As did his men.

A year had passed since we had met, but he stated rather than asked: “We know each other.”

“I do believe we’ve met,” I said coolly. “We engaged in a commercial transaction. I came away with nothing, and you with everything.”

He ignored my words, gesturing at the masía. “Why have you shut yourselves inside there?”

“Your reputation precedes you.”

“Oh, dear — and what reputation would that be?”

Since we had decided to defend ourselves, I stood my ground. “They say Esteve Ballester is a murderous brute, a criminal. That he uses the excuse of fighting for the Catalan fatherland to attack poor defenseless travelers. He robs and kidnaps. If the ransom does not arrive in time, he burns his victim’s feet. And that’s when he’s in a good mood.”

He chose to ignore the provocation. “Really?” he said. “And you believe everything people say?”

“I myself happen to know that some people, he strips naked, hangs, and leaves for dead.”

He gave a guffaw. “To the best of my knowledge, I have never taken anything of yours.” He paused, then said, his voice graver: “And as for you, botiflero, you dare to call me a thief?”

If I wanted to bargain with him, it was not good to have him talk down to me like this. Ballester and I were halfway between his men and the masía. I took off my hat. It was the sign for all the firearms to be poked out of the door, the windows and the roof, including the barrels of the rusty muskets, which the women had polished up with rags and spit.

“Señor, I have twenty rifles pointing directly at your head,” I lied. “Our riders have galloped off to notify the guard. They’ll be along any moment. You know we are poor citizens; there’s no booty to be had here. If this has to be resolved with firearms, there will be no one but you to blame for it.”

I had shouted these words so that everyone could hear. It was a simple calculation: If the prospect of raiding the house didn’t seem profitable, they would leave. And even if they believed only half of my lies, that was enough to give them good cause for doubt. Unfortunately, the proximity of violence changed Ballester. So it is with all men, but in him it was as though something inside snapped. His deep eyes sank deeper. The blue vein across his right temple swelled and throbbed. Years later, I would discover the small things in him that signaled murderous intent: When he was ready to kill, you could smell that sweating of his, incredibly intense.

His voice hissed horribly, the blue vein as thick as a worm: “If your people kill me, mine will kill you, too, you fool.”

“Indeed,” I replied, also whispering. “All in all, it’s a draw.”

Then we heard something: the cries of a terrified child.

One of the horsemen approached with Anfán under his arm. The boy was struggling. When he saw me, he reached out his hands toward me, his fingers splayed open, and began to squeal even more desperately.

Ballester must have seen something change in my expression, because he gave a bit of a grimace, though not a smile, and said: “So it seems that draw of yours has just gone to hell.”

We all have dreams in our childhood in which we are swallowed up in a deep tentacle-filled pit. But to Anfán, this was now reality. He was thirty feet away, and those thirty feet were as insuperable as a whole world.

The boy had been with me for a year. I had clothed and fed him. He slept with me and my woman. I had scolded and corrected him more times than I could count, and he was a little better now than when I had first met him. Just a little, but now, for the first time, I saw tears in his eyes that were not false.

I felt a red curtain drop down over my eyes, descending. I didn’t recognize my own voice as I said: “You are going to release him! Now! Or I swear by my blessed mother that I will kill you. You and that animal who’s holding him.” And I added, so quiet as to be almost imperceptible, “I swear it.”

For a single, endless moment, Ballester stared into my eyes. Anfán was squirming around, and I was about to lose my mind completely. Perhaps Ballester understood: You can’t negotiate with a madman. With a flick of his head — as though the business were nothing to do with him — he gestured for the rider to put Anfán down.

The lad started running, so quickly that he fell and got up and fell again. Even though he was petrified, running with his straw-colored braids in the wind, when he was a safe distance from the horseman, he stopped, stuck out his tongue, and gave him a bras d’honneur. Then he was whimpering and running again, and he didn’t stop till his arms were clinging tightly around my waist.

Ballester moved away from me. It was an odd moment, because it clearly meant something that, though the barrels of a thousand guns were pointing at him, nobody had fired yet. He walked up and down in front of the barricaded doorway, rage in his eyes.

“You people have such a quiet, happy life,” he began. “You think the world is nothing more than chocolatadas and fucking. Fools! The sky is going to fall on our heads when you least expect it.”

To demonstrate his prophet’s disdain, he risked slapping away the barrel of one of the rifles pointed at him. I didn’t react. I made a gesture to the people in the masía, downplaying Ballester’s audacity; better that he give his little speech and then leave. After everything that had happened, it was obvious that at this point, all he wanted was not to look bad in front of his men, with a bit of braggart talk.

“You people all believe the Generalitat’s lies merely because they’re published in official documents. How many poor people do you know to whom I owe anything? I have paid for hundreds of masses, for the upkeep of orphanages. . The only people who need fear me are the botifleros and the Red Pelts.” He was referring to the ministers of the Generalitat, because of their red velvet clothing and hats.

I’ve told you this already? Oh, damn it all.

From inside the masía came an anonymous voice: “You raped my son-in-law’s cousin, ill-born swine! They ought to tear you limb from limb up on the fifth gallows!”

“Slander!” replied Ballester, turning toward the voice. “People have been carrying out attacks and claiming to be acting in my name. Or does anyone really believe that Ballester needs to use payment or force in order for a woman to join him in bed?”

The lively old lady poked her head out through the doorway. She had half-climbed onto the heap of rubble with a rock in her hand, threatening to hurl it at him. “You or any other Miquelets. . what difference does it make? You think you’re so big and strong just because you sleep around a campfire and dine on the venison you’ve hunted. You fight for your own benefit, attacking peaceful people, and now you want to persuade us you’re some kind of mountain saint because every once in a while you happen to kill a drunk Bourbon? Get hanged!”

Ballester waved a finger at her threateningly, but his voice was more restrained. “Mestressa, do not be mistaken. I have killed more Frenchmen and Castilians in this war than any of the king’s regiments.”

At this point I intervened, Anfán in my arms, his legs around my hips like a little monkey, and clinging so tightly to my neck that he was almost choking me. “If you’re so passionate about defending the country, why not join King Charles’s army?”

“Because both armies are the same, even if they’re wearing different uniforms; flames burn all the same, blue or red.”

I thought he was leaving, but he turned back toward us. He whispered in my ear: “I can swear, too. Now listen to me: If I see you again, I’m going to send you flying. Understand?”

Anfán leaned in toward Ballester’s face, puffed up his cheeks, pressed his lips together, and let rip with a huge raspberry blown in his ear. I think it was the first and last time I ever saw Ballester laugh healthily.

“And tell your little braided monkey here that if he doesn’t learn some manners, I shall come back and take him.” He opened his eyes wide, staring at Anfán without blinking, made his lips into an O, and went “Boo!”

Anfán clung even harder to my neck, squealing with fear, his back to Ballester, kicking against my hips. Ballester mounted his horse amid laughter from his men, and before leaving, he announced as he turned his mount, raising his hat in greeting: “Ladies! Gentlemen! You have had a good day today.” And he offered a polite gesture to the old woman who had accused him: “Iaia, t’estimo.” Grandmother, my regards.

He spurred on his horse, and away they went.

Anfán spotted something on the ground. Ballester had dropped his riding whip. Anfán climbed down my body as if it were a tree and handed me the trophy.

I shall carry the happiness on that boy’s face with me till the day I die, his satisfaction at offering me Ballester’s whip. It was not a gift; it was something that cannot be expressed fully in words. He had been born a thief, and the fact he was now sharing his booty said it all.

I snatched the whip away. “You! I told you to stay by Amelis’s skirts and not to move!”

The day wasn’t over. Though you may find this hard to believe, the real heroism of the day was yet to come. After dinner, I confronted Anfán.

“After you found those muskets, I told you to stay with Amelis,” I said, glaring at him across the table. “And you disobeyed me.”

He responded like a wild beast with rational faculties. His innate instincts and his sense of justice joined forces to proclaim in a single voice: “But the bandits were thieves!” He stood up on his chair, defensive and indignant at the same time. “Why can’t I steal from thieves?” he added, his eyes wide. “They were thieves!”

Peret shouted: “Stupid boy! When are you going to learn that’s the worst insult you can make against anybody? If it weren’t for Martí, the Miquelets would be roasting you alive right now. Stupid boy!”

Something snapped when Nan, who was sitting on his chair, swinging his legs and looking down at the floor, repeated Peret’s words: “Stupid boy.”

“Time for you to be punished,” I announced.

I went to my room, returning with Ballester’s riding whip. I sat down and said, “Come over here.”

It is a very particular expression, the expression on the face of a human being who discovers that he has been betrayed. After a year under the same roof, after so long sleeping in the same bed, I was going to use violence on him. The boy approached, feigning indifference. By the time he had taken those four steps, his expression had changed to that of someone who never wanted to see me again.

I placed the whip in his hand and held out my open palm. “Hit me.”

At first he didn’t understand.

“Hit me!” I said again.

He did, gently.

“Harder!”

He turned away to consult the others, bewildered, but I put a finger on his chin and forced him to look at me.

The whip cracked against my hand.

“Is that the best you can do? Harder!”

He hit me harder, drawing blood. When he saw it, he took a step back in alarm.

“We’re not done yet. Again.”

I offered him my bleeding palm one more time. He hit me. The whip had gone deeper into the wound, and this time I couldn’t help a grimace of pain.

“That’s enough,” Amelis pleaded.

“Quiet!” I shouted, and looking straight at Anfán, I said firmly: “Keep going, or get out of here and never come back!”

He raised the whip. I showed my wounded hand, the open groove streaming with blood. “The whip. Use it!”

He burst out crying. He had never cried like this before. In the hands of the Miquelets, he had been afraid, but with this torrent of tears, he was purging himself of all the ills of the world, all the bile that our age had corrupted him with. Amelis put her arms around him.

“Do you understand?” I whispered in his ear. “Now do you understand?”

Anfán learned that night that his pain was ours, and ours his. His learning that lesson meant I learned another: that four human beings can be not merely the sum of a few individuals but an entity conjoined by fondness for one another. That night our full bed seemed to me quite changed. I no longer saw that elbow, that funnel, that mane of hair belonging to another, a nuisance that fell in our eyes as we slept. They were a whole now, like the Spherical Room had been, beyond just the objects that inhabited it. I looked at them, I tell you, with the alertness of Bazoches, undisturbed by feelings, which are nothing more than clouds obscuring the landscape of reason. And yet I never cease to be amazed how methodical observation can turn into tenderness. I heard Anfán’s gentle snoring, watched Nan’s grimaces as he dreamed, Amelis’s closed eyelids, and said to myself that the bed, that tiny rectangle, was surely the most valuable star in our whole universe.

4

So there it was, the strange home that, in mid-1710, I was forced to leave for a long time. And why did I leave? I should say a little about the military situation in those days.

Despite the frivolity of the Barcelonans, whose lives carried on as though the war were being fought on the banks of the Rhine alone, the truth was that it was coming closer and closer. One might say that by 1710 it was already all around us. The only territory controlled by Charles was the little triangle that was Catalonia, with Barcelona at its center. In 1710 almost all of Spain was in the hands of Little Philip, the Two Crowns’ strategy was fiendishly systematic, and our Allies, meanwhile, operated by means of momentary thrusts, followed by long stretches of indolence.

The military situation was going from bad to worse, so the Allied leaders decided that something had to be done. And each time war ground to a halt in the Spanish theater, the Allies made the same choice: to send a new general to Spain to get things moving again. At that time, the latest import was the Englishman James Stanhope. If only we’d had a different Jimmy on our side, James Berwick rather than the boy Stanhope. As bigheaded as he was impulsive, Stanhope was the embodiment of the attitude “I’ll sort this out in a trice!” How is it possible that a man who thinks he knows it all should learn absolutely nothing? General In-a-Trice! That’s how history should have remembered him!

He arrived in Barcelona well briefed by his government. England had had enough of the war, and his mission would be to put an end to it once and for all. And this was the final effort London was prepared to make to bring about a victorious conclusion. New military contingents arrived with Stanhope, too: Dutch and Austrian infantry, along with the powerful English cavalry corps, with Stanhope himself at its head. These reinforcements, combined with the Allied troops that had remained in Catalonia, were bound to be enough for a great offensive, avenging Almansa and crowning Charles in Madrid as the king of all Spain. And all in a trice!

The offensive raised uncommon expectations among those of us in Barcelona. History books tend to forget the huge numbers of people who travel with an army on campaign. And since the number of civilians following an army convoy often exceeds the number of actual soldiers, it is, you will agree, a rather sizable thing to forget. On the one hand, there are the people providing services, from barbers to cobblers, indispensable functions for such a great contingent of humanity. But there was also the fact that the 1710 offensive was to be the decisive attack. Hundreds, thousands, of pro-Austrian Spaniards in exile in Catalonia joined the military columns, and they did so with the enthusiasm of people who finally see an opportunity to return home, galloping to victory. Matters didn’t end there, because in addition to the merchants and expatriates, there came a whole trail of opportunists. After all, Catalonia was the land that had been most faithful to Charles’s cause. It would make sense that, upon ascending the throne in Madrid, he would recompense his compatriots with perks and positions. And can you guess who was to be found among the worst of that pack of hustlers? Yes indeed, good old Zuvi. I told Amelis that this was an opportunity unlike any other, that with luck, I might be able to land myself a tidy sum we could use to pay off our debts.

And yet money wasn’t the true reason I added my name to the convoy of army followers. I never told Amelis that, of course. She never would have understood that I was risking my skin for a Word.

The trunk from Vauban had been a message from beyond the grave. It was as though the marquis were saying: “Is this the life your teacher prepared you for?” I told myself I could not accept the marquis’s fortune, not without making one final attempt to learn a word — The Word.

“Summarize the optimum defense”: That was what Vauban had asked of me. Half of Europe’s armies were attacking the heart of the Spanish empire. If they wanted to crown Charles, they would need to take the capital, Madrid. Spain and France would do their utmost to oppose this. The greatest leaders would clash on the bare wastelands of Castile; the whole struggle would hinge on Madrid’s defense. It promised to be a spectacle both tragic and grand, a clash of cosmic proportions. And within this theater, perhaps I might find a teacher to continue the marquis’s work. With his help, maybe The Word would be revealed to me. The recriminations I heard from Amelis made me happy, because there could be only one possible reason for her opposing my departure: love. But I had a debt to another love, and it was every bit as great.

I owed it to Vauban.

I needed to figure out some way to follow the army, so I came to an arrangement with a merchant who was planning to follow the troops with a two-horse covered wagon laden with barrels of stomach-churning liquor. He was calculating that when the army crossed the dry, uninhabited parts of Castile, where it would be impossible to procure any wine, the price of alcohol would soar.

We came to a mutually beneficial agreement. I needed transportation, and his wagon was covered with a bit of sackcloth that would serve as a roof over our heads at night. The merchant was accompanied by his son, a troubled lad whose wits were barely sharper than a dog’s. At night the merchant and his lad would sleep in the front section of the wagon, right behind the driver’s seat. Another passenger and I would be at the back, defending the rear.

This other passenger said his name was Zúñiga, Diego de Zúñiga. Eight decades have passed, and I still remember him as an altogether remarkable man. What set Zúñiga apart? Well, strange though it may sound, it was the fact that there was nothing about him that stood out, absolutely nothing at all. He wasn’t very talkative or very withdrawn; he wasn’t miserly or profligate; neither tall nor short; neither merry nor sad. Every man has his own distinctive manner, a certain way of clicking his fingers, an unusual laugh or a particular way of tilting his head when he spits. Zúñiga did not spit, his laughter was always buried away within the laughter of others, and he tended to keep his fingers hidden. A ghost would have seemed much more tangible beside him. He was one of those fellows you tend to forget the moment they have left your field of vision. As a matter of fact, as I try to reconstruct Zúñiga’s face now, I find it hard to gain purchase on it in my memory.

According to what he told me, he was the son of a moderately affluent family brought low by the war. Since his father was one of the few Castilians to have taken Charles’s part, the Bourbons and their supporters had expropriated the family’s possessions. By then an old man, he hadn’t survived the shock of it all. Zúñiga was a native of Madrid.

The two of us got on well, if only because we had a lot in common. For a start, our families were of a similar social standing, neither rich nor very poor, and life had brought us down several rungs on the ladder. We were the same sort of age, added to which was the similarity between our family names. We slept curled up next to each other. From the first day, it seemed quite natural that we should share our bread and wine. A shame he was not a more garrulous sort.

Shortly before arriving at Lérida, we caught up with the giant serpent that was the Allied army, a motley troop of Englishmen, Dutchmen, Portuguese, and even a regiment of Catalans (a gang of diehard loons, I must say), led by a high command every bit as diverse. We approached the main column by a little path that met it at right angles, and we had to wait hours for all the troops to pass, with their baggage, artillery, gun carriages, and provisions. Then came our kind: thousands of people who followed the army like seagulls the stern of a fishing boat.

Knowing that we were in for a long journey, and that there were gaps in my Spanish, I had brought with me the thickest book I could find. I would read it before turning in for the night, by the light of the fire, or even in the wagon. Between one jolt and the next, I’d be taken by fits of laughter, because it was a most brilliant piece of work and a delight to the spirit. What follows is a seemingly insignificant episode, but for some reason, one that has remained in my memory.

We had stopped at some spot or other. It was one of those plains that stretch out beyond Balaguer, a foretaste of Spain’s vast empty stretches, and to kill time, I began to read that book. Soon I was laughing. On every page, there were five things to make me chuckle. These outpourings attracted the attention of Zúñiga.

“May I ask what you’re reading?” He looked at words on the binding and said, with a mixture of distaste and disappointment, “Oh, that.”

Unable to understand his qualms, I exclaimed, ever so amused: “It has been some time since I’ve laughed so heartily!”

“Irony may be divine, but sarcasm is of the devil,” said Zúñiga. “And you will agree with me that this is a book abounding in sarcasm.”

“If a writer is able to make me laugh,” retorted cynical Zuvi, “I don’t much care how he does it.”

“The worst part is,” he went on, “that the writer reduces heroic feats to their basest, most wretched parts. And if we want to win this war, we need to extol the epic, not mock it.”

“I can’t see how you can dislike such an engaging, humorous story. I’ve just been reading a chapter in which the protagonist frees a chain of prisoners. His reasoning is very enlightened: Man is born free; it is therefore intolerable that any man should be chained up by other men, and as a result, any noble soul has an obligation to oppose such a thing. Once they have been freed, of course, the villains express their thanks by stoning him.” I burst out laughing. “Sad, amusing, superb!”

Zúñiga didn’t laugh, not even a little. “Rather than refuting my argument, you strengthen it. Because the reason for being a man of letters is to convey lofty thoughts, and to do so in a style that elevates the language. What you have there is something quite different: pages filled with cudgelings and frivolity. Is that what the writers’ art should be devoted to?”

“Literature can, and indeed should, teach us lessons that, in its majesty, only it is capable of imparting. If someone says, ‘There is clarity in madness!’ well, wise words, but also no more than baseless opinion. But when this idea is presented to us plotted out within a dramatic framework, I have no choice but to agree.” I shook the thick volume with both hands. “Yes, that’s the great truth within this story: that reason is to be found in the irrational.”

The day after this literary debate, it was Stanhope and his cavalry ponies that took the role of protagonists in our current tale. We found ourselves on the outskirts of a little town called Almenar. Day was nearly done, and we were readying ourselves to spend the night on the outskirts of the village when word began to spread that the Allied army had met the forces of the Two Crowns. I suggested to Zúñiga that we go on ahead a bit to see what was happening. We left the civilian caravan behind. We came across the sick wagon in the rearguard, and when we asked them what news, they gestured eastward. “They say Stanhope’s surprised the Bourbons.”

I told Zúñiga I thought we ought to climb a little nearby hill, to watch what was happening.

It was a good walk. To tell the truth, we went because we had nothing else to do. And with the sun already setting, at this time of day, the climb would not be so wearying. It was an ocher-colored hillock, dappled with clumps of rosemary. The smell was wonderful.

Our summit was modest in height, but the views from it were good. A rectangular plane stretched out at our feet, flanked by mountains to the left and a river to the right. On one of the shorter sides of the rectangle was In-a-Trice Stanhope with his horsemen. A single regiment, in battle formation, occupied a space of some two hundred feet. In-a-Trice had arrived in Spain with four thousand strapping lads, selected for their fearsomeness. When not drinking or riding, they were pissing away their “bir” (a drink they spell “beer”), so the Catalans ended up calling them pixabirs, which is to say, “piss-beers.” And on the opposite end of the rectangle was the Bourbon army. Their infantry had been hurriedly arranged in a line, and their bayonets were fixed. God, what a great spectacle it is, to see thousands of men in formation and poised for battle. And yet, schooled as I was in the arts of Bazoches, I could sense something more than flesh and uniform. Amid that whole human mass, arranged as it was by battalion, I could make out their souls, like the little flames of thousands of candles trembling before the breath of an approaching hurricane.

I remember Zúñiga speaking the thought that was then running through his head: “Dear Lord, how is this going to end?”

In my day, the theorists of cavalry were engaged in a debate that ran curiously in parallel to that between us engineers. They, too, were divided between Vaubanians and Coehoornians, as it were, their Coehoorn being Marlborough. Yes, yes, the very same, Jimmy’s cousin: Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre, mironton, mironton, mirontaine.

Up until that point, a cavalry had always followed the most prudent tactics. The riders would approach the enemy infantry, stop at the distance of a pistol’s range, and fire. Persistent gunfire could cause the infantry to lose its nerve and run. Then, and only then, would the cavalry draw their sabers to pursue the soldiers as they scattered in all directions.

These formations, which were sly and always had the chance of getting away entirely unscathed, were changed by Marlborough. Essentially, what he proposed was to go back three hundred years in the art of military cavalry, saying: Wasn’t the horse itself a hugely powerful weapon? Marlborough took the cavalry back to the Middle Ages: the horse seen not as transportation but as a means of crushing whatever was in its path.

The English cavalry was the first to take on this new tactic. When they came to within three hundred feet of the enemy line, they did not stop: They shifted up from a trot into a charge. They trampled anything that was in their way — problem solved! And — in a trice!

Let’s see whether you can guess, my foul little German, which of the two theories In-a-Trice Stanhope subscribed to? Bravo, you guessed! How very clever you are!

The sun was already sinking below the horizon, an orange semicircle surrounded by a violet halo. The great mystery is why the Spaniards did nothing. By the time Zúñiga and I reached the hill, the two sides had already been engaged for quite some time. The Spaniards had had hours to change formation or even withdraw from the field. But they did nothing, they did nothing of anything, at all. They just waited, melting under a summer sun. Perhaps the valley was too narrow for them to maneuver; perhaps they did not know of the tactics used by the English cavalry and thought that the riders would do no more than harass them a little with pistol and rifle. Or perhaps it was just the usual: The Spaniards were led by a pack of incompetents.

We could see the Allies on a bit of headland setting up a battery of six cannons. They began to fire at once, clearly meaning to support the charge of the cavalry. Stanhope had split his forces into two lines. When the order was given, the front line would charge, sabers in the air and howling hoarsely like wolves.

Believe me when I tell you there are few things in life more terrifying than a cavalry charge at twilight. Thousands and thousands of hooves, rumbling heavily against the ground in a multitudinous animal rush; the shaking was so great that, even where we were standing, stones and clods of earth were dislodged and went tumbling down the hillside.

By that time the Bourbon army had been severely diminished. At the start of the year, the French troops had returned to their country as reinforcements for the front at the Rhine, and the Spanish recruits left a great deal to be desired. In any case, you didn’t have to be a general or know the weaknesses of the Army of the Two Crowns; you only had to look at that mass of red coats on horseback headed toward the fragile line of little white soldiers, and it was obvious how the affair was going to end.

The Spanish lines quivered like strings of sausages, however much the officers ranted and raved, demanding order. They hesitated. Poor lads. Recruited not four days earlier, they were about to experience a charge from the elite of the English army. I did a quick calculation: four thousand horses, about three hundred kilos per head, plus an average of sixty for each rider, came to a total of over a million four hundred thousand kilos, racing forward at twenty miles per hour against some poor petrified boys. A moment before the impact, I looked away.

In some places, surprisingly, the upthrust bayonets did offer resistance. In others, the formation toppled like an old fence. Even the noise made you think of thousands of timbers splitting. And yes, despite the decisive violence of that clash, I learned one lesson on the field of Almenar, one I often repeated: that most retreats, curious though this may be, begin in the rearguard.

From that moment, the battle was reduced to no more than a human hunt. To a cavalry soldier, there is something magnetic about a back turned to flee. Instinct urges him to go in pursuit and split open the skull with a saber. As for the man being pursued, there are no words to describe the torment of his flight. If the saber doesn’t get him, the horses’ hooves will.

I have already described the battlefield as a rectangular valley, mountains to the left and a river to the right. To reach the river, it was necessary to climb down a rift in the land, which appeared all of a sudden and went down a considerable way. In their flight, hundreds were pushed into it by their own companions. They bounced down the rocks of the slopes, while the survivors tried to swim across the river. The others scattered eastward.

In the rush, the Bourbons abandoned their artillery and their whole baggage convoy. I called out to Zúñiga, pointing toward the farthest horizon: “Look! Way over there, in that raised copse, don’t you see it? It’s Little Philip himself, running away with his escort of palatine mercenaries!”

Stanhope’s piss-beers were busy riding down the Bourbons. And these had abandoned all their baggage, including the opulent wagons with all the riches that Little Philip had brought with him. I have told you this before: The early bird catches the worm, and in the midst of so much confusion, it wouldn’t be hard to get hold of a generous slice. A wagon transporting the royal crockery, fifty pairs of fine shoes, whatever we could lay our hands on. Besides, it was getting dark, which would help to hide us. The groans of the dying began to rise into the air like the croaking of frogs by a pond at dusk. Dozens of looters were there already, hopping between the fallen bodies. I could see that the men were rummaging through the corpses for jewels or coins, while the women tended to take possession of boots and clothing.

“We’re better splitting up,” I said to Zúñiga. “If one of us finds something, we’ll let the other know by whistling three times.”

We each went our own way, but before long, I gave up. It was almost completely dark. I stopped at the steep bank that went down toward the river. Perhaps, I thought, some important carriage might have toppled over the edge. If I were a Bourbon bearing the royal crucifixes, or the king’s gold chamber pot, I would choose to hurl it all in the water sooner than let the enemy take it.

The slope was very steep, and I climbed down gingerly. I found nothing of any interest, just a few dead bodies scattered across the riverbank. On both banks, there were vegetable patches, destroyed by the passage of the armies. The moon was there to light the way back to our wagon now, and when I happened to see Zúñiga, he was coming out of a little stone hut, a small workers’ store.

“Oh, Diego, there you are,” I greeted him.

He looked very startled to see me. He’d gone into the house to snoop around a little, he told me; no joy. If it hadn’t been for my sense of smell, I would have turned back, and that would have been it. But in Bazoches, they had trained my eyes, my ears, and also my nose: every one of my senses. The moment Zúñiga pulled that rickety old door closed, something happened. That same door, when it moved, pushed a blanket of air from the inside toward my nose. A smell. A very distinctive smell — mixed with other more common smells, like dry grain or old esparto grass. But in the middle of it all, that smell. My nose recalled it, but my memory could not.

“I’ll just have a quick look,” I said.

“I’m telling you, there’s nothing there,” said Zúñiga, barring my way. “Let’s go.”

I brushed him off and went ahead, entering the house. That smell, that smell, unpleasant and yet, at the same time, irresistible. What was it to me, what did it remind me of? It was very dark; the only light was that of the moon, spooling down like threads of silver. The tools were covered in rust, forgotten; rotting ears of corn were piled up. At the back, a shapeless mass covered by a bit of old sackcloth. There. Each of us has a particular smell. And our fear intensifies that smell. I felt a sudden spark: At last I knew to whom it belonged, that smell of greasy pores, of some thick, oleaginous matter.

I pulled back the cloth. And there he was, hidden like a scorpion under a rock: Joris Prosperus van Verboom. And just as one ought to do with a scorpion, before it reacted, I gave its head a good stamp. “Caught you,” I said. I turned his heavy body over and began laying in to him with short punches.

“Martí! Leave him, you’re going to kill him!”

“Oh, he and I are old acquaintances,” I said, catching my breath.

And I gave him a little more. Verboom was shouting out things in French, in Spanish, and in one of those Dutch languages, too.

Zúñiga grabbed me in his arms. “You’ve told me a thousand times that normal people don’t have anything to do with this dynastic war. And now there’s this poor wretch, and you’re about to kill him!”

“Poor wretch?” I interrupted my beating and looked at Zúñiga, panting. “Did you say poor wretch? This is Prosperus van Verboom!”

Zúñiga saved Verboom’s life. When he learned that this was a big fish we’d caught, he begged me not to kill him, saying we ought to take him prisoner and claim a reward. And I was stupid enough to agree.

Verboom had been unseated from his horse by a cannon shot. Slightly wounded, during the defeat, he had dragged himself over to that happenstance refuge. The truth was, they did congratulate us and reward us handsomely for his capture. So much that even In-a-Trice Stanhope wanted to meet us.

My heart gave such a leap that I felt it halfway up my throat. Could this be a sign of le Mystère? Before becoming cavalry, maybe Stanhope had served as an engineer. Was he perhaps to be my new teacher? Let me give you the most synthetic answer I can: no. I found him the least likely creature one might ask for moral shelter. All great horsemen look small when they are not in the saddle. Stanhope looked it and he was, short in stature as he was short of brains, as well as conceited and silver-tongued. We had been dragged over to his campaign tent for one reason and one reason only: extolling his own person by appearing to praise us. By the time we left, it had been made quite clear to everybody present that if the Allies had been victorious in battle, if they had captured such distinguished characters as Verboom, it was not down to the combined forces, nor to that little king, Charles, but entirely and exclusively to the presence in Spain of a genius by the name of James Stanhope.

Following our audience, Zúñiga asked me about Verboom: “What has he done to make you hate him so much?”

I was not sure how to answer. Such a long time had passed since our argument in Bazoches. I thought about Jeanne and felt a stab in my breast. But I wanted to believe that my ill will toward the Dutch sausage-maker was led by something more than personal revenge.

Verboom was a bad man. Read those words again, and you will agree they are the worst that can be proclaimed about a human being. It is as if to say: “The world would be much better off without you.” In a just world, there would have been no place for Verboom, and finding him in an imperfect world, one should drive him out of it for fear he might make it worse. I did not do that, and soon repented bitterly, as always happens when we choose profit over justice.

And what do you think? Is this a note too moralistic on which to end the chapter? Right — you like it. Well, in that case, there’s no doubt about it at all: Strike it out. I’m sure it’s better without.

5

Almenar was a decisive victory. Nobody doubted that the Two Crowns would seek to join further battles. But the number of casualties, which was not too great, did not reflect the turmoil in their ranks.

Without the French contingent, Little Philip could count on only the Spanish recruits, who, as you have seen, had proved themselves greener than grass. The next encounter took place in Zaragoza, a city on the banks of the River Ebro. And this one went even worse for Little Philip than Almenar. By the time the day ended, eighty flags had been captured, six hundred Bourbons taken prisoner, and the infantry suffered twelve thousand casualties.

After the victory at Zaragoza, the Allies paused to decide what to do next. They were in a place called Calatayud, and the council of war that met there was made up of nine generals from a variety of nationalities. The Portuguese, naturally, were keen to keep going and join up with Portugal; Lisbon and Barcelona would be united through the two armies physically joining. Other generals wanted to take control of the north. If they could take Navarre, they argued, they could seal the border with France, and Philip would be cut off from reinforcements from his grandfather. Charles was having doubts. But now In-a-Trice Stanhope intervened. Navarre, to the north? Portugal, to the west? What the devil were they talking about? He had arrived with the express mandate to place Charles on the throne as Carlos III of Spain and return home. And that was precisely what he intended to do. Apparently, he thumped the table at this point: Either the army marches to Madrid, or he and his piss-beers go straight back home. So, Madrid it was!

The pro-Austrian army was never such a precise military machine as in the lead-up to Zaragoza. As for the troops, nobody had seen such a ragtag army since the days of Hannibal. After spending whole months with them on marches and roads, I can tell you I came to know them very well.

The English officers were true gentlemen, while to a man, the rank and file were louts, the worst in Europe. In the Portuguese forces, it was the other way around: The soldiers were a delight, always shy and obedient, but under orders from officers who acted like slave traders. Among the Dutch, there were two categories of soldier: the drinkers, and then the bad drinkers.

The attitudes of the different national groups toward one another could be defined as “let them have a drink, but don’t let go of the bottle.” The English looked down on the Portuguese with infinite contempt. They took them for worse than the Spanish, which is saying something. As for the Portuguese, as you can imagine, they had different ideas. If the English were so rich and such know-it-alls, they asked themselves, why did the final victory never follow?

Well, it looked like it was finally coming now, because that autumn, in 1710, the Allied army was making its juggernaut advance on the heart of Castile. Now, you might be wondering how the capital defended itself against the Allied army. The answer is very simple: It didn’t.

On September 19, two English dragoons reached the outskirts of Madrid. They were astonished to learn that between them and the city, there was no opposition in place, not so much as a single scraggy battalion of conscripts. I was just as astonished as that pair of dragoons. So there wasn’t going to be a fight? No, there would be no such thing. Not a single shot fired! Had we ridden across half the peninsula for this? When the city was in sight, Zúñiga explained to me that Madrid was not a fortified city. It was just surrounded by a ring of masonry whose only purpose was to drive traffic toward the customs posts that charged a levy on products entering the city. Good work, Zuvi!

While Charles was preparing his triumphal entrance into Madrid, Zúñiga and I got in ahead of the troops. My first impression of Madrid was that it was a bare, charmless city, all its streets empty. I was wrong. We did not know yet that Little Philip, when he had withdrawn from the capital, had been followed by up to thirty thousand courtiers and supporters. He hadn’t left them much choice: Any nobleman or adviser who didn’t follow him in his flight would have been considered a traitor to the blessed Bourbon cause.

The best lodgings we were able to find were in the attic above a tavern. The ceiling sloped down so steeply that to move about where it was lowest, we needed to crawl on our hands and knees. And the furniture was no more than a couple of straw mattresses, two washbasins, and a window. Well, we couldn’t complain. We had entered Madrid before the mass of the army. To celebrate his return to his home city, Zúñiga took me to one of the most popular taverns, and as we were putting away a few jars, the innkeeper heard us talking.

“But really, gentlemen,” he said, “it is possible you don’t know? The Allies are about to enter Madrid.” He glanced left and right as though afraid we were being overheard. “Ten days ago, all French subjects received the order to leave the city. Where were you? How could you not have known? There’s not much love lost between the Allies and the French!”

Zúñiga and I exchanged a glance. The innkeeper, it seemed, had mistaken my Catalan accent, taking me for a Frenchman. Diego shrugged as if to say, Well, why disabuse him?

“Oh, damn,” I replied, “I was sure my accent would go unnoticed.”

“Oh no, not at all!” said the innkeeper. “And you might find yourself in a real pickle.”

“The real pickle,” I interrupted him, “is that I cannot leave Madrid. Actually, I’ve only just been sent here. You do understand, don’t you?”

I let him come to his own conclusions. People like you to think them cleverer than they actually are. Finally his eyes lit up: What I have here, he must have thought, is a spy for King Philip.

It was only then that I added: “Hush! The city will be filled with Austrians in a flash. And our arrival was so hurried that we have not resolved the matter of our lodgings.”

And so, thanks to the patriotism of this innkeeper, we got ourselves a free bed and a roof over our heads in the attic. Once we had settled in, we caught up with the latest news on the situation. According to what we were told, Little Philip had decided to add to his arsenal a weapon unknown in modern warfare: the cunt.

The innkeeper explained it to us in the most confidential of tones: “When it became clear that Madrid was sure to fall, the government brought in all the sickly whores from Castile, Andalucia, even Extremadura. Bodies in thrall to the most invisible and contagious of ailments. Thus, they hope to inflict thousands of casualties upon the Allies. However much you may want to, be sure not to come anywhere near the tarts!”

Madrid is not the most beautiful capital one might hope to visit. Its streets spread out in an arbitrary fashion, a horror for any engineer. The uneven ground robs buildings of their perspectives, and their facades are of an ugliness that frankly defies belief. Public decoration is at a minimum. Madrid has no ancient relics, though this is a failing that one can excuse given that it is a new city. It was not until the court was established here (which happened only a century before the arrival of Longlegs Zuvi) that this little one-horse town began to assume the grand position of capital. What one cannot excuse, however, is that, being a new city, it was extended with no advance planning, streets improvised on sloping ground, narrow, dark, and winding. I’m telling you, when it was being built, Madrid’s engineers must have been off erecting fortresses in the Caribbean. The streets are absolutely filthy, and the road paving, where there is any, is poorly kept, broken up, and sticking out. According to the Madrileños themselves, the worst torture the Inquisition could conceive of would be to put the offender in a carriage and send him rolling over this city’s cobblestones.

But I am giving a one-sidedly glum impression of Madrid. My senses, sharpened in Bazoches, got even more excited when confronted with something new, and given that this novelty was an entire city, my eyes and ears were experiencing a feast. Yes, my studies in Bazoches had made my visit to Madrid an exploration. To a good student of le Mystère, everything shines, and everything is lit by close observation. Natives and foreigners united to praise the Madrid skies. The air was always fresh; its light in winter was sweet and beautiful, while in summer, unlike in the Mediterranean Barcelona, its sun never hurt your eyes. Your typical Madrileño was a lover of all chilled drinks, which obliged him to load up a thousand beasts of burden stocked with snow. In Barcelona, the trade in ice was a lucrative one; in Madrid, it made millionaires. There is no more pleasant way to waste one’s time than strolling along the banks of the city’s river, the Manzanares, with a little sweetened ice in your hand, admiring the beauties. On the whole, the marriageable young women will sit there like flowers, chaperoned by relatives, under a parasol, showing off the latest fashionable attire. The young gallants who walk past slow their pace and offer compliments, which are met with a little wave, or a snub, or a wave that is also a sort of snub.

Madrid’s main square is a constant bustling revel. It is the last staging post on the road to the capital of the empire, which is why people gather to hear and comment on the latest news. The same square is the site of autos-da-fé, bullfights, and executions. A happy triple confluence, as spectators can marvel at the penitent, before the bullfights then take over, and the spectacle is rounded off with all the fun of a beheading. The audience members are still chatting about the condemned man’s last words when messengers arrive from the far reaches of the empire to recount the slaughter carried out by the Mapuche Indians in some colony or other, or an attack on a Caribbean port.

Spaniards are not too greatly enamored of their dominions. So very far away, after all, and they get so little real benefit from them, that the good news is received with the same indifference as the bad. I found this mild nature extremely appealing. To a Barcelonan, Madrid seems like the most peace-loving of places. We Catalonians live in a state of war, war that is dormant but also constant, everyone against everyone else. Poor against rich, those from the wealthy coastline suspicious of the mountain barbarians from the interior, Miquelets against foreigners and the Guard against the bandits. On the sea were the Berber pirates, whose particular business was kidnapping travelers and demanding ransom. And to complete the picture, hordes of stone-lobbers otherwise known as students. All this, not to mention the dynastic wars, which are the only ones historians consider worth recounting.

For many, varied reasons, it was different in Madrid. The presence of the court restrained any violent challenge to established power; the city was far from the path of any invaders, and by nature, the Madrileños are not much inclined to rebellion. Like every court, Madrid was a honeycomb that attracted a huge mobile population. People who — like any opportunists — were interested not in fighting but in huddling together. Perhaps the strangest thing was that in Madrid, popular aggression issued solely from one particular class: the emboscados, or Stealthy Ones, young noblemen who wore cloaks covering their faces and bodies and spent their days looking for any excuse to duel.

As if life were not dangerous enough, all Madrid needed was these lunatics, a strange mixture of a knight-errant and a night jackal. The merest slight would be cause enough for them to demand a duel — to the death, no excuses. The nighttime belonged to them, which was why, when the sun set, Madrid was transformed into a much duller city than Barcelona. I very quickly learned that the best thing to do was to appear poor and pitiful, since, for an emboscado, there was no value in killing just anybody. And since good old Zuvi was always less dignified than a shaggy Indian, I managed to avoid their attentions without too much trouble.

Now for the best part of all. If you ask me where this little soldier stood to attention the most times, he would surely answer you two places: Cook’s Tahiti, and Madrid in that autumn of 1710. Definitive proof that there’s something wrong with the world lies in the fact that whores charge money to screw. And you can just shut up and write, sanctimonious old cow. However, when the rumor spread that they were all Bourbon agents, the poor Madrid tarts had no choice but to lower their prices, then lower them again. And when they were right down near ground level, lower them again. It was obvious that it was all a lie dreamed up to torment the Allies. And yet the occupying forces swallowed it completely. Considering Little Philip capable of the lowest acts, they shut themselves up in their quarters in search of consolation, replacing the whores with the bottle. A soldier’s mind can be unpredictable.

Anyway, I was saying that, for Longlegs Zuvi, at least, those were incredibly happy days. The army had entered Madrid, but Charles was on the outskirts, attending to his little bits of business and preparing his great triumphal entrance. In the meantime, I was spending my days screwing low-cost beauties.

To begin with — I hold my hands up — I made a real novice’s mistake.

On the first day, as I walked through the southern part of the city, I stopped to look at one of those horrible windowless facades. A friendly Madrileño who appeared to be at a loose end came over to me. “What are you looking at with such interest? Are you planning to set up a house of mischief?”

“Not to set them up or manage them,” I replied, ever the innocent. “I would be satisfied with enjoying them myself. Do you know whether visiting a ‘house of mischief’ is very expensive?”

“Lord, no,” the good fellow replied, “why should it be? Here in Madrid, we are all very welcoming. Go in, go in, ask the owner anything you like.”

The door was indeed ajar, showing no sign of fear or caution as regarded passersby. I climbed a narrow flight of stairs. On the second storey, there was a fine woman darning clothes. And what a discreet first floor it was! Not so much as a window, doubtless to hide the office carried out there.

“Hello!” I greeted her. “How many girls are there in the house?”

The woman gave me a strange look. Perhaps she’d taken me for a constable, and I wanted to reassure her. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m only a customer.”

At that moment, a man came in. I repeated my question, and although the fellow looked confused, the woman gave him to understand that I was a rather illustrious visitor.

“Well, I’ve got my wife here,” he replied, somewhat disconcerted, “whom you’ve already met, my three daughters, and my blessed mother. But might I ask who you are? And why are you interested in the women?”

“You employ your own daughters? Is that normal in Madrid?” I said, a little scandalized. “Well, your customs are no business of mine. Mind showing me them? And how much do you want for me to enjoy them for a while? Nothing unusual, just a quick bit of rough-and-tumble. You must understand, I’ve come from a long way away, and I have my needs.”

The man turned livid and wanted to throw me out.

“Oi, look, I’ll pay my way!” I protested. “Your outrage is a bargaining ploy, I’m guessing, eh, but do name your price first. Take Catalan money? I haven’t had time to visit the money changer.”

To my surprise, he furnished himself with an ax — and raised it above his head!

“Look, you will never meet a tougher negotiator than the son of a Catalan trader, so you can calm down,” I said. “All I want is to go to bed with your daughters, all three at once, if that will get me a discount.”

When I saw him charging toward me, ax ready to swing, I told myself that the best thing would be to race back down the stairs.

“Your loss,” I shouted as I fled. “And you should know, sir, you have just put a considerable dent in this city’s once great reputation for hospitality!”

When I told this story to Zúñiga, he roared with laughter. “Houses of mischief” were not brothels but the name by which people in Madrid referred to a particular kind of legal ploy. According to the city’s laws, the king had the right to charge taxes on the second storey of every building. In order to avoid paying, people would build their houses in such a deceptive way that the first floor had no external windows and looked like an extension of the tiled roof. Houses of mischief! For the love of God, what did they expect me to think? And who would even think of imposing such a foolish tax? Truly, playing host to a court would never be good business.

All the same, putting aside such minor misunderstandings, which can happen to any visitor, it didn’t take me long to get used to the sweetnesses of the city. I would spend the day flitting from flower to flower, and when I returned to my attic, the patriotic innkeeper would be waiting for me: “You always come home so exhausted! I wouldn’t trade my job for that of a spy, no sir, I wouldn’t. You have such deep bags under your eyes, my friend. I can see that the comings and goings of an agent to the king must consume both body and soul.”

At this point, my dear vile Waltraud gets annoyed, protests, and starts to squirm, calling me a bad husband, depraved, and a libertine. Of course, this is the female view and could never be a man’s. Whatever can you be thinking, my little wood louse, do you really believe Amelis was waiting for me, quietly spinning like a Penelope? In spite of everything, we loved each other, which is something that your blond pigeon brain will never understand.

On September 28, Charles finally made his entrance into Madrid. The plan was that the king should attend mass at the Atocha sanctuary and subsequently make his triumphal entrance into Madrid. Some triumph! Ha! And ha again! Here, write down a good deal of mocking things, write laughter and jeers, a thousandfold!

Charles came in on a white horse, wearing an extremely elegant black suit. You should have seen the look on his face. Because out on the streets, there was nobody to be seen, absolutely nobody, apart from good old Zuvi and a one-legged man who hadn’t had time to hide.

He wasn’t their king. The Madrileños hated Charles just as much as the Catalans hated Little Philip. The previous day, an order had gone around that the people should wash the route clean of the usual city filth, and deck the balconies with garlands. Naturally, they did no such thing. The streets were as thick with dung as ever, if not more so. He found the balconies empty and shut. The bells seemed to be tolling rather than chiming. When he was still only on Alcalá Street, he turned back without reaching the palace and supposedly uttered the words: “Madrid is a desert!”

I cannot confirm this, because by that point in the procession, I had already gone off with some dire prostitute or another, so you will understand that Charles’s tantrums were of no interest to me. But right behind Charles, on another white horse, rode In-a-Trice Stanhope, and his face spoke volumes, even more eloquently than that of the king.

They’re all the same, these foreign generals, they never get it. They didn’t want to acknowledge that Castile and Catalonia were at war in just the same way as France and England; that Spain was a name that hid a reality more powerful than politics, trade, and even, if I may say so, common sense. A pitched battle between two opposing ways of understanding the world, life, everything. I tell you, I was watching the look on Stanhope’s face very closely; at last the man had understood what a fine mess he’d gotten himself into. Never had a commander failed so roundly after having completed his mission so perfectly. He had conquered Madrid, but doing so as an invader had lost Castile; he had crowned Charles, but Charles was an interloper on the throne and, as such, apt to change.

The English might come to accept a French dynasty reigning in London, or the French an English dynasty in Paris. The Madrileños would never put up with Charles as their king, never, and not because he was Austrian but because he was king of the Catalans. And Stanhope thought a couple of cavalry charges would fix the whole business. Don’t make me laugh! Yes indeed, my dear vile Waltraud: As you people would say, schöne Schweinerei, a fine old mess.

For the whole war, the Bourbons had been strategically superior. The Allies had conquered Madrid with a madcap kind of medieval cavalcade. The Bourbons always behaved according to the most methodical rules, like a slow, detailed snare. The Allies were in Madrid, but the French and Spanish were firmly anchored in Tortosa, in Lérida and Gerona. I’ll sort this out in a trice! I would laugh if it weren’t for the fact that the Allies’ tragedy would end up becoming ours, too.

Over the next few days, Charles attempted to appeal to the Madrileños, a thousand persuasions and flatteries. Free bullfights, gifts, and perks for the city. Nothing doing. He paid for three days of illuminations to which nobody showed up; until that time, I had never known how depressing a fireworks display without spectators could be. A people’s dignity cannot be bought, as monarchs are always forgetting.

He even went so far as to hand out money, in the manner of the Caesars. Several horsemen rode around the city with bags filled with coins that they would toss up into the air. The Madrileños did bend down to pick them up, naturally, because it’s one thing not being pro-Austrian and quite another being a fool. They did so, but did not forgo their most caustic sense of humor. Charles had proclaimed himself Carlos III of Spain. They would kiss the coins and proclaim sarcastically: “Long live Carlos the Third, while the money keeps coming!”

So as you can see, the conquest and occupation of Madrid was not as epic as the phrase suggests. And since Vauban’s question had been about the optimum defense, this was hardly the optimum setting for finding myself a teacher, nor for learning The Word. Meanwhile, the clamor against Charles was starting to grow. Not that people were plotting an uprising. It wasn’t that. The vast majority of Madrileños have one thing in common with the vast majority of Barcelonans: As long as their life continued unaltered, they were as little inclined to fight for Philip V as they were to fight against Carlos III. The Allied soldiers stayed shut away in barracks and had little contact with the people, so there was not too much provocation. And the Civil Guard was made up of Catalans, whose reputation for heavy-handedness struck dread into people. In any case, one might say that they had reached a state of perfect balance. When they caught a miscreant, they would give him a thrashing, force him to cry “Long live Carlos III!” and take him to a dungeon. And when they caught an innocent passerby, just the same: If they didn’t like the look of him, they’d give him a thrashing, force him to cry “Long live Carlos III!” and he would be taken in, too.

It was the stealthy emboscado Bourbons and the fanatical priests who were having the most trouble. As far as I could make out, they were squandering their labors. On the one hand, they had no need to bribe the people of Madrid for their loyalty, for they had it already. And on the other, however much they might be induced, the Madrileños were prudent enough, or responsible enough, not to be so crazy as to rise up against an army. (Furthermore, why would they want to mutiny as long as there were bags of money raining down?) As for the Spanish priests, they are the very worst of all Catholics. Their interests are always allied with the interests of human stupidity, each of which they foment with every sermon, and neither a sense of the ridiculous nor the power of reason is enough to stop them.

One day I was sitting in some tavern when a beggar came in. Instead of asking for alms, he began to hand out leaflets. He left a couple on each table, including mine. Having nothing better to do, I read it. By the third line, I was unable to contain my laughter.

Some sly agent of Philip’s must have employed the beggar to hand out those scraps of paper, which gave a clear picture of the Bourbon mentality. The pamphlet did not attack the English, the Portuguese, or the Austrians. Not at all. Their entire rhetorical charge was aimed against the “rebels,” which is to say the Catalans. According to their author, the blame for the enemy having occupied Madrid did not lie with the Allied forces or in Bourbon incompetence but with the Catalans and their plotting. Even I ended up convinced that in their free time, the Catalans had invented crab lice, bunions, and piles. That the Catalans also suffered from these evils was no excuse, just as the Jews were damned, however much of a Jew Christ Himself may have been.

I don’t remember precisely the points made in the pamphlet, and perhaps it’s better that way. All I have retained are the main charges against us. When the war ended, we would rape all the women in Castile and murder their husbands or send them off to the galleys. According to this pamphlet, the Catalans were behind a plot to take power and monopolize the trade with America (from which Catalonia had always been strictly excluded, being from a separate kingdom). Taxes on the Castilians would be not merely extortionate but would make slaves of them, with all the money ending up in Barcelona’s coffers for the rebels to enjoy. Natives of Catalonia would supplant the whole of the army’s high command, and all Castile’s judges and jurists. To be certain of maintaining a hold over Madrid, a fortress would be erected, which would keep its inhabitants enchained until the end of time.

I laughed and laughed. I should not have. What I was reading on that piece of paper, that little scrap, was the worst that humanity is capable of. And not because of its malice toward the enemy, not that. It contained something far more terrible, as time would tell.

What was so diabolical was that only a few years later, this little scrap of paper would be transformed into a reality, but applied to Catalonia, and on a biblical scale. The Bourbons, projecting their own fears, punished imaginary offenses so thoroughly that no stone was left unturned. The mass murder began long before the war ended. After September 11, 1714, the legal framework of Catalan order was pulled down and Castile’s installed in its place. For decades Catalonia would be considered a land under military occupation. All of its rulers came from Castile. The once rich country was ruined by taxes, and the majority of its population reduced to penury. Finally, to keep Barcelona under control, they erected the Ciudadela, the most perfidious Vaubanian fortress ever conceived. Can you guess who its author was? Nail on the head, first time: your man Joris van Verboom, the Antwerp butcher. Such was his reward for his part in the siege of Barcelona. Have I already told you how I killed him?

But who would have imagined all that in 1710, with the Allied army in Madrid and Charles boasting — however nominal it may have been — the title of king of all Spain. Evil is at times impossible to see, and I sensed no animosity at all. People were pleasant, even obsequious; the war remained something being played out at a dynastic level, far from the day-to-day wretchedness of Spain’s various peoples. I tore the pamphlet into pieces. What at first had made me laugh, on more careful reading made me furious. I had seen the outrages of the Spanish forces at Beceite, Catalan forests full of nooses and hanged men. Now I could see the source of their soldiers’ and officers’ murderous bile.

I returned to my lodging in a stormy mood. I would have liked to break someone’s skull, but whose? Whose? The blame didn’t fall on any person in particular, but on something like an invisible mist. Evil is like a black cloud; it forms high above, out of our reach and beyond our understanding, and when it pours down upon us the cloud itself is unseen, and we merely suffer its torments.

I didn’t want to share a table with anyone that evening. I went up to my attic room furious, with a hunk of bread and some cheese. Zúñiga wasn’t there. Just as well. As I say, this wasn’t a day to be shared with anyone, friends even less than enemies. I sat down on my straw mattress. The cheese was dry. Since I had no knife, I started to rummage around in Zúñiga’s effects for one. Next to his straw mattress was his round leather bag. On a different day, I would have been more restrained with other people’s belongings, but I needed a knife, and besides, we were friends. I turned the bag upside down, tipping its contents onto the floor.

There was nothing solid inside, only sheets of paper. Hundreds of pamphlets, quarto sheets identical to the one I’d been given to read moments earlier in that tavern. I had a bunch of them in my hands when Zúñiga came in.

I had previously been friends with a man, a man called Diego Zúñiga, and through that door some other man came in, a stranger about whom I knew nothing, apart from his mission: to give his life for Philip V, the most loathsome man of the century. His watery nature now made sense, that way he had of looking without being seen, his discreet, almost insubstantial profile. Earlier images of Zúñiga flashed though my mind. In Almenar, I had caught him coming out of the little workers’ house where Verboom was hidden. He must have hidden the man there himself. Yes, until that moment it had never occurred to me: Some people are born spies.

I flung the handful of leaflets in his face and shouted: “This trash is yours!”

He didn’t bat an eyelid. This was Zúñiga, invisible Zúñiga, and he never let his passions betray him. He simply went about picking up the bits of paper, acting as though I weren’t there. I kept on at him.

“You ask me why I have served my king? Is that what you wish to know?” he replied at last. “Why I have risked my life, spent years and years hiding out among the enemy? Two words, I suppose: fidelity and sacrifice.”

“A king’s privilege is that we will uphold him, not hate for him,” I said. “Only a barbarian could wish to confront peoples and nations as though they were armies.”

He smiled. “When your government ministers violated their oath of fidelity to King Philip, who was it that set up the Catalan people on a collision course with their king? And what did you think would happen next? That Castile would look upon such a slight to their sovereign unmoved — a sovereign who, if we’re being quite accurate, is yours, too? That, after you had brought war to Spain and betrayed us, we’d just stand there, arms crossed, doing nothing? We have an empire to preserve, Martí, and in Barcelona, all they want is to bleed it dry. Castile has supported itself for three hundred years, while you people concerned yourselves with other matters, hidden beneath the skirts of your liberties and constitutions.”

“Oh empire, empire. . What have you gained by conquering a world? The American Indians hate you; your European neighbors don’t envy you, just hold you in contempt, and maintaining that myriad of possessions overseas has ruined Castile’s exchequer. And you think you have the right to demand that other kingdoms take part in your excesses, and do so for the glory of Castile! I took you for an intelligent man, Diego.”

“I also hold myself as such,” he responded coolly. “Which is why I regret having been unable to comprehend the Catalan soul. Can you explain the reason for this unreasonableness? Why do you wish to destroy a mighty union that would make us powerful and well respected? Why do you so detest a common scheme that should have unified the peninsula centuries ago?”

“Because what you people call unity is in truth oppression! Tell me: Would you move the court to Barcelona? Would you allow Castile to be ruled by Catalan kings? Your ministers to be chosen from among Catalan government ministers alone? Would you like the idea of your villages and towns occupied by Catalan troops, having to bear them, take them into your homes, offer them up your wives?” I waved some pamphlets under his nose. “According to what I’ve read here, I imagine not!”

“Natural law dictates that big will consume small, the weak yield to the strong. Despite everything, that is not Castile’s position. You could be a privileged part of a whole, and instead you choose to be less than nothing. It’s incomprehensible.”

“Maybe what’s incomprehensible is measuring honor in terms of a hunger for war. That road has led you to nothing but defeat and bankruptcy. Every prosperous nation flows with money and sweat, not weapons and gunpowder. But you people insist on stubbornness, obtuse heroism. Every ship that is filled with cannons instead of barrels is one more ship lost to trade; every regiment trained and armed, an industry wasted. At least that is what my own fellow citizens feel.”

To Zúñiga’s credit, he knew how to listen, I’ll give him that.

“I understand now,” he said. “Greatness doesn’t move you, only riches. Not glory but wealth. You detest the Spartans for the same reason you love the Sybarites.” He took a step toward me. “But tell me, Martí, what’s the point of a life bereft of epic desires, shorn of exploits to pass down to the next generation? Your scheme for life is no different from that of an earthworm. No light and no dreams, always under the earth, never rising above your times. Better to lose your life in battle than waste it in some tawdry backwater.” He concluded with this pronouncement: “Mediocrity of spirit, that’s what’s wrong with you.”

“And what’s wrong with you,” I replied, “is that you are drunk on books of chivalry. The bad ones!”

The little laugh he let out was as powerful as it was contemptuous. He had hidden from me his role as a spy, even used me as camouflage. Who would have suspected such a thing from the companion of a harmless libertine like Longlegs Zuvi? I grabbed him by the neck and pushed him up against the wall.

“Someone scribbles this shit, off in some unseen corner, and then, before you know it, the forests are full of hanged men,” I said. “I’ve seen it! A pile of falsehoods like this gets written down, and the next day, people who have nothing to do with writing have their throats slit and their bodies thrown off cliffs. Just tell me you don’t believe the travesties written in these pamphlets. Tell me!”

I looked him in the eye and, in that same moment, understood something terrifying. I cursed my blindness, for his smile told me that he, my good friend Diego Zúñiga, had written or dictated those words.

“Castile has conquered a whole world,” he said. “And now four bloodsuckers show up from Barcelona, shielding themselves behind Archduke Charles, and want to take everything our forefathers died for. Never. And believe you me, Martí: A lot of people are going to pay. The king’s power may not extend as far as Vienna or London, but you can be sure every last corner of Spain is within his reach.”

I let him go. Good old Zuvi never liked things to be too definitive, but my voice has rarely been firmer than when I said: “Diego, you and I are no longer friends.”

That really was not my best day in Madrid. I spent the night going from tavern to tavern, not to find new whores but to drink. Very well, I’ll tell you the truth: What I really wanted was to bash someone’s face in. I’m no great brawler, but I would never deny the value of a good fight. When everything is going wrong, the best thing a man can do is throw a few punches, if possible in the face of someone who deserves them. And if not, well, then the next fellow who happens to be passing. Man against man. It hardly matters who gives and who receives: Venting your anger is ample.

I felt guilty, too, very guilty. I had accompanied the army in the hope that something bad, a war, would do me good, bring me a teacher, but how was I to find Maganons in Madrid? In my drunken madness, I started rolling up people’s right sleeves in search of Points. Unfortunately, the tavern patrons gave me a wide berth. With my Barcelona accent and my cursing of Philip V, they took me for an agent playing drunk in order to flush out Bourbons. Even the most foolish believed I was a pro-Austrian provocateur. I could find nobody to comfort me, nor to confront me. I can still see myself there, slumped against the penultimate bar, drunk, alone, and shouting: “How can it be that in the whole of Madrid, I cannot find one single friend, nor one single enemy?”

It was already the early hours of the morning when I found my way to a dive full of rowdy drinkers. If I couldn’t get a beating there, I never would. I was so far gone, I could barely stand. The place was packed, not a single seat free. I saw five men sitting squashed around a table. The one in charge was in his fifties, a big fellow, authoritative-looking. At any other time I would have recognized him at once, but wine is no friend to memory, may the Ducroix brothers forgive me.

I grabbed the smallest of the five by the neck and yanked him from his seat. I sat down on it, put my feet up on the table, and said to that man in his fifties: “Mind if I join you?”

He didn’t rise to the provocation. Instead of throwing the first punch, he nodded to his men to ignore me. They were arguing about military matters, and one of them made reference to something defensive.

“What you have just said, señor,” I interrupted him, “is utter nonsense. Sticking stakes in glacis only gives your attackers steps to use. Well, idiots speak idiocies, I suppose that’s no surprise.”

The man in his fifties must have had considerable authority, because even after that, he managed to rein in the man I’d offended. Looking at me, he said: “Before you find yourself trading blows with Rodrigo, who, by the way, will demolish you, it would be interesting to hear you back up your insults with argument.”

“You should know, señor, that it was not I who spoke,” I said, defending myself, “but the great Vauban, who speaks through me.”

“Oh, damn,” said the big man sarcastically. “So you’re in the habit of breakfasting with French marquises of a morning?”

“I was,” I replied, to his disbelief, and qualified it: “Sometimes.”

Now that the argument was between him and me, I could take him in more fully and, despite the wine, did at last recognize him. “Wait a moment, I know you! Since I saw you, it’s been going round and round in my head; I was confused by your lack of uniform, but I’ve remembered at last.” I waved a finger toward his nose. “Tortosa! Yes, that’s right, Tortosa! You’re General Rumpkicker! You sent me flying back down the glacis!” I got to my feet and challenged him, circling my fists in front of his face. “Come on, then, seeing as you’re so brave. See if you dare to give me a kick now that you’re not in your general’s uniform!”

The old man looked at me as an old dog looks at a bluebottle.

“Shall we shut him up once and for all, Don Antonio?” his men intervened.

“Just try it!” I laughed. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Madrid has been occupied by the Allies. I just have to step outside and whistle. The Guard will be delighted to arrest our friend the general, especially bearing in mind what happened at Tortosa, added to the fact that the Guard is made up of Catalans.”

The whole group gave a laugh so unanimous that everyone else in the place stopped and looked over. What was funny? I didn’t understand it at all. Quite unnerved, I dropped my fists and scratched the back of my neck.

“I’d be very happy to take you down a peg or two,” said this general. “But first, sit beside me and tell me what you made of that siege.”

I did. Maybe it was a way of letting off steam, as useful as coming to blows. I spent a long hour drinking and discoursing on the flaws and defects of the Tortosa siege. That Attack Trench, an incomplete joke. Our rushed, shallow digging. Inadequate materials, inadequately applied. An Attack Trench en règle is a more sophisticated construction than a pyramid! And that one was no better than an absurd collection of galleries going nowhere, walls braced with green pine instead of proper uprights. The earth that should have been compacted kept spilling down. And what did it lead to? All those unnecessary deaths. Thousands of lads murdered, but it was politics that killed them, not the enemy, cojones. The trench only had to make it as far as the city walls. The English commander, a sensible man, would have surrendered. But, oh no, that pig Orléans wanted glory in a hurry. What did a few thousand deaths matter to him? I say again, cojones!

I was incredibly drunk. Once I had vented all this, I looked at the general. The wine was coming out of my ears. “And as if that wasn’t enough, you gave me a kick on my behind!”

I wanted to use my hand to pick up my glass. But my eyes could no longer calculate distances, and my fingers passed through it as though it were a ghost-thing. I was seeing triple: Three generals sat before me now.

My disquisitions on Tortosa were of some interest to him, because he grabbed me by the lapels and, shaking me hard, asked: “Where did you learn all this? And why did you mention the French engineer?”

The alcohol had defeated me. I looked at him. I opened my lips, very slowly, to tell him something about Bazoches. I gave up, couldn’t, didn’t want to. And what was more, why should I have? My mouth all furred up, I moved closer to the general’s ear and moaned sadly: “Tell me something, I beg you. Do you know The Word?”

He looked at me with a frown, his mouth open. “Word? What damn word?”

He went on asking me questions. But in my condition, I was beyond any authority. I said: “It’s a load of shit, all of it.”

My head sagged as though I were a rag doll. My forehead was dropping onto the table like a neck under the executioner’s ax.

Some hours later, I was awakened. I’d been left on my own, and the place was closing. My right cheek was glued to the table, stuck there with dried wine. I left reeling. A patrol that was going past saw me having trouble.

“Hey, lads,” they said to each other in Catalan, “let’s have a bit of a laugh with that drunken sot.” They surrounded me and pressed me to shout the much repeated “Long live Carlos III!”

“Long live Madrileño stew!” I shouted.

“Huh? Show a bit more respect for your king!”

“Respect? Kings are all the same! Self-centered child-snatchers! And now that I think of it, how have you managed to get yourself lost in Madrid? Go home and stop fucking with good drinkers.”

I think it was the most comprehensive thrashing I have ever received. I was so flattened that when they were done, there was little difference between good old Zuvi and a Ceuta rug. Once they were done, they also stole my boots.

At first light, I was rescued by the patriotic innkeeper. He was walking past on his way to open up the tavern. He saw me stretched out in the road and carried me, one of my arms over his shoulder.

“But for God’s sake, man, I did warn you!” he scolded me. “Whatever made you get mixed up with those Catalans?”

6

I was so shattered that even two days later, I still couldn’t get up from my straw mattress. My only joy was to see that Zúñiga had left the attic. Many years later, we would meet again, and he would spend decades pursuing me across three continents. He never stopped hating me. But that’s another story.

I got to my feet, all my bones aching, and dressed. In an inside pocket, I found a passport that must have been put there on the general’s behalf by his men:

Please go to Toledo and report at once to General Don Antonio de Villarroel.

As soon as I had read it, I understood a number of things. No wonder they laughed at me when I threatened to turn them in to the Guard! Despite Little Philip’s threats and coercion, some Castilians had taken advantage of the 1710 occupation to switch sides. This General Villarroel was evidently one of them. Those men around him must have been his staff officers. Most likely, they were in the tavern to celebrate Charles having allowed them into the pro-Austrian army with full pay and rank.

And so I headed for Toledo. To be honest, I wasn’t sure why my legs were taking me there. To be interviewed by that general? The same one who, back in Tortosa, had sent me rolling down the glacis with a kick in the behind? Anyone could see that the fellow had the nature of a resentful mule, that he was clearly one of those military types who swallows hammers and shits out nails. What business could good old Zuvi have with someone like him? Well, shall I tell you something? I did go to Toledo, and I went more directly than the flight of an Indian’s arrow.

I found Villarroel in the Toledo citadel, in an extremely somber-looking study. He got right down to business. He was indeed serving as a general in the pro-Austrian army, and he wanted to have an expert in siege warfare among his staff officers. He was no fool: He’d picked up on my comments about Vauban and knew at once that this kid was much more than a hopeless drunk. We started to haggle over the terms of my recruitment, though the money was the least of my interests.

Call it intuition, call it le Mystère, call it what you like. As we negotiated, I took advantage of the opportunity to examine that man’s inner recesses, bringing all my Bazoches faculties to bear.

There was something about him, though I could not have told you what exactly that something was. “If you need a teacher, you will find him, whether he is a Points Bearer or not.” Still, would he be the man to continue the teachings of Vauban? Not an engineer but a military man, and a Castilian to boot, while I was a Catalan? “Well, and why not?” I said to myself. “Did the Marquis de Vauban not take me in despite the French hatred for the Catalans?”

I resolved the conflict between my head and my heart by means of a compromise: I would give the general a chance. If he showed himself worthy of Vauban, I would follow him. If he let me down, I would desert him at the earliest possible opportunity.

As usual, my dear, extremely vile Waltraud stops the narrative with an ignorant inquiry. First she asks whether my plan to desert at the earliest opportunity wasn’t dangerous. I answer yes, it was, but much less than it might seem. In my day, such a large proportion of men deserted, and from every army, that one might rather ask the opposite question: Why were there any men who didn’t? Some clever-clogs soldiers used it as a way to make a living, the fraudulent practice of enlisting in those armies that paid best and then deserting. The result was such a bloodletting that recently formed armies would sometimes reach the front reduced to half their number. That’s as far as the troops were concerned. As for the generals, my fat Waltraud is surprised that Villarroel had begun the war on one side only to switch halfway through. Well, we should make it clear there was nothing unusual about that. Times change. Nowadays the French army is made up of Frenchmen, and the English army of Englishmen. It wasn’t like that in my day. A career soldier was a qualified professional not much different from, say, a medical specialist. A French doctor could be employed by an English king, and no Frenchman in his right mind would criticize him for treating a foreigner. And so any sovereign might hire soldiers of any origin, and what gave a soldier his distinction was meeting the terms of the contract, not whose contract it was. In 1710 Villarroel rescinded the contract that bound him to Little Philip, leaving him perfectly free to serve any other sovereign who might make him a good offer. Is that clear now, my blond walrus? Let’s go on, then.

In the early days, what a terrifying man commander Villarroel seemed to me, a veritable tyrant on horseback. Cavalry was his great strength; he would take his squadrons out to the outskirts of Toledo, and “Off we go, lads!” riding more often, and better, than the Macedonian royal guard. As an engineer, I managed to avoid most of the exercises, though not all. Hup-hup! Up and down, down and up, till your rump was square-shaped from the saddle. He was more like a sheepdog than a general. Whenever a rider strayed, there the general was, woof woof!, barking and bothering the dimwit who had gotten out of formation. And as the dimwit in question tended to be good old Zuvi, I did get some tremendous tellings-off.

“I’ve got a contract as an engineer, not a dragoon!” I protested one day, wobbling about on my saddle.

“And what do you expect me to say to that?” he shouted. “Accept it! God made you for a monk rather than for a soldier, just give thanks you haven’t been promoted any higher!”

Don Antonio drank only one little glass of wine at lunchtime. He was satisfied with a dish of half-cooked pap and wasn’t interested in any women but his own wife. On the nights when he didn’t sleep in his marital bed, which were about three hundred and sixty-four nights a year, he preferred a wooden board to a mattress. How could good old Zuvi possibly get on with such a man?

Engineers have never felt comfortable in the structures designed for military types. Those martial salutes, that respect for hierarchical superiors, I never took to any of this myself. I sneaked away from the pack whenever I could. Toledo was so dull that when I got drunk there, it was no longer to satisfy my vice but because I had nothing better to do. Once I was called to a meeting of the general’s staff officers, to which I reported late and jollier than usual. Don Antonio gave me one of his looks, silent and incredibly fierce.

They were arguing about the situation as a whole, which was dark with storm clouds. While the Allies sat rotting in Toledo, Little Philip was gathering thousands of recruits for his army. As if that were not enough, the Beast had sent him French reinforcements under the command of the Duc de Vendôme. Villarroel shared his fears that Toledo was being transformed into a giant trap. He asked my opinion: Could the city survive a siege?

The wine laughed for me. “Ha ha ha! What a silly question, Don Antonio — I mean, General. Heh heh heh, if the Bourbons besiege Toledo, there won’t be any siege. Supplies getting cut off, the people taking against us, the city walls becoming so rotten that even the stones have maggots in them. Hee hee hee, bearing in mind that they are likely to exceed our number by three to one, it would be best to quit now while we still can, ho ho ho. . ”

I was locked up in the cells for a week, on bread and water. And not because he disagreed with my opinion but because I had said exactly what he thought, but said it rudely. I thought my dungeon would be so deep that they’d have to send my food by catapult. No. The truth was, the incarceration was not too tough — apart from the diet, which purged me.

During my brief incarceration, something of relevance also took place: Charles fled Toledo, and Castile, and made a discreet return to Barcelona. The fact that he had gone before the army tells you everything you need to know about his confidence in a military victory. He left before anybody else, to hell with us all. The road to Barcelona was riddled with Castilian irregulars ready to cut his balls off, which meant that he had to travel surrounded by an escort so strong that it weakened the army further. A heroic example!

As for the Castilians, he had only complaints and recriminations: “I found many people in Madrid who asked me for things, and nobody to serve me.”

What did he expect? Castile and Catalonia were at war; being king of the Catalans excluded him from reigning over the Castilians. He of all people should have known this. And he did, in fact.

While he was in Castile, he drank milk only from goats that had been transported from Barcelona. His bread was baked from Catalan wheat, and even the sugar in his confectionary had been brought over from Catalonia. All his supplies were watched over by the regiment of the Royal Catalan Guard, an elite corps made up entirely of staunchly pro-Austrian Catalans, fanatics so fanatical that you could hear a “Carlossssss” when they broke wind. I scarcely exaggerate.

When he crossed the border from Castile to Catalonia, he alit from the royal carriage, exclaiming, “I am back in my own kingdom at last.”

He was loved by as few people in Castile as Philip was in Catalonia. If he had faced facts, he might have negotiated an end to the conflict. An end to the war. And if things had gone that way, I would have had at least one country in which to bury my bones. But no, His Majesty King Karl, our meringue-faced Charles, needed to rule over an empire and couldn’t settle for less. He did get his empire in the end! Though not as we expected, and through a stroke of chance and at the expense of his Mediterranean subjects. I will tell you of that anon. Let me first explain what happened on the final day of the Allied occupation of Toledo and the retreat, the painful retreat, to the land of the Catalans.

Good old Zuvi got out of his cell. If you will allow me at this point to make a confession: The very mildness of the punishment made me reconsider the man who had imposed it upon me.

What little experience I had with Don Antonio told me he was a good general, firm but fair. He had done the right thing, locking me up, absolutely the right thing. Vauban would have treated me just the same, as he should. Thanks to that incarceration, I became aware of how dulled I had become since leaving Bazoches. Perhaps Don Antonio was a kind of walking Bazoches.

Once I was out of my dungeon, I reported to him. He noticed the change he had wrought in my spirit, and his behavior toward me softened a little.

The thing is, with Villarroel, you always ended up paying for your failings, one way or another. And the last one, the last sin of youth that I committed while under his command, very nearly cost me my life.

I wanted to celebrate my newfound liberty with whores, and the binge lasted so long that I awoke late, worse for the wear, and not in the barracks.

“The archduke’s army! They’re finally off!” cried the whore who woke me. “They left at night so they could slip away unnoticed. Long live King Philip!”

The whole fucking army was returning home, and me rubbing the sleep from my eyes! Even though, at Bazoches, I’d been taught to remain alert even in my sleep, the notification hadn’t reached me because I’d spent the night outside the barracks. I got dressed so quickly that at first I tried to put my shirt on over my legs.

The Allies were not exactly beloved in Toledo, and as soon as I was outside, I could see that the atmosphere was warming up. As the news spread and neighbors began to wake, their bitterness awoke, too. You could already see small groups shouting: “Long live King Philip! Viva!” and brandishing improvised weapons above their heads. God, anything could happen now.

I hastened toward the citadel. I thought there might be some reserve battalion left behind that I might join. What I found was a little band of drunkards, so drunk that even the most imperious orders hadn’t been able to get them out of their bunks. There was a bit of everything: some Englishmen, Portuguese, Dutch. . Alcohol makes no distinction between origins.

“What are you still doing here? They’ve all left for Barcelona!” I cried. “The Toledo mob is going to kill us!”

It was useless — they didn’t respond at all. I felt as though I were at the bottom of a monstrous Atlantic whirlpool, with the only ship that could save me, the Allied army, receding farther and farther into the distance. No sooner had I left the citadel than I began to hear shouting and gunshots. People were looking for the last stragglers, and there were plenty of them. At the end of the road, I saw an Englishman on his knees, being kicked and stabbed by a yelling crowd of men and women. It was as though people had lost their reason.

Toledo is a relatively small place. I ran through the streets, heading east. So as not to arouse suspicion by my haste, I gave the occasional enthusiastic cry: “Long live King Philip! We’re free at last! Viva, viva!”

And you — why are you making that face? What would you have liked me to have shouted? “Long live King Charles! I’m a fucking Catalan rebel, and I eat truffles and Castilian babies for dinner!”? Use your brain, my little cannonball-head.

The last street led to a few kitchen gardens beyond which scraggly vegetation stretched toward the horizon. I stopped a moment to look behind me. Over there, up at the top, the citadel was wreathed in smoke. A few desperate rifles appeared through the small windows, but it was obvious there was nothing to be done. Poor bastards. Before being quartered alive, they would do better to turn their final bullets on themselves.

Good old Zuvi has always had luck on his side, because as chance would have it, there was a priest arriving in the city. He was riding a decent-sized horse, Amazon-style, with both legs on the same side because of his cassock. I knocked him to the ground, climbed onto his saddle like a monkey onto a coconut palm, and tore off at a gallop, so fast it felt like the horse had eight legs. Toledo! You’re welcome to her.

7

The Allies had Don Antonio’s light cavalry as their rearguard. His horsemen acted as a protective screen for the rest of the army, who moved more slowly, as they fled Toledo for Barcelona. I met them at a crossroads from where they were scanning the horizon. Don Antonio, their leader, was sitting at the foot of a solitary tree, eating, surrounded by his staff officers.

By the time I reached them, the priest’s horse was a wreck. I was sweating horrors and distress, and I didn’t climb down from the horse’s back so much as dropped onto the thin yellow grass. And there I stayed, lying there gasping like a dying fish.

“Here’s the little engineer,” said Don Antonio by way of greeting, entirely indifferent. “We thought you’d disappeared, you know.”

My hair was on end after the shock. Someone poured the contents of a jug of water over Don Antonio’s hands, and he gave them a cursory wash and said: “Right, off we go.”

“I’ve only just arrived!” I protested. “Even the shadow of my soul is weighing me down!”

He shrugged. “Very well, stay if you’d rather.”

“What about all the stragglers?” I protested again. “Back in Toledo, there are dozens of soldiers getting massacred. Why are we abandoning them?”

“Because they’re layabouts.”

At once he was back on his splendid white horse. One of Don Antonio’s officers spoke for him: “With Vendôme upon us, you really think the whole fucking army is going to sit and wait for a handful of drunkards? They had their chance. Things like this are useful for purging the troop of its undesirables.”

Yes, this from Don Antonio de Villarroel Peláez. And to think I believed he might replace the mastery of a Vauban!

Criticisms aside, if you ever want to know whether a general is one of the good ones, don’t even think about blood-soaked victories — tell him to lead a retreat; if you want to make it even more difficult, a retreat in winter. It’s much easier to defeat than to defend; it’s easier to attack than to retreat in an orderly fashion. A retreat never brings laurels or decorations.

An army in flight can come dangerously close to panic, threatening to disintegrate. We find ourselves in enemy territory, which is the main reason for keeping our ranks closed. As I’ve said, the Castilian countryfolk did not exactly love the Allied troops. If a soldier left formation, worn out, if he fell asleep under a tree, thwack! he would end up with his gullet sliced through with a sickle. Our flanks were surrounded by gangs of irregular killers, and behind us we had the Duc de Vendôme, the old marshal whom France’s Beast had sent to Spain to help his idiotic grandson. The whole Allied army was a single body, pressed together as tightly as a frightened herd, meeehhhh. .

And the cold! That winter, 1710, was the coldest of the century. Just picture this: One day I stopped my horse at the foot of a solitary tree, looking at a branch that had frozen in the frost. The weak sun was reflected in it with the rich colors of a rainbow. Then I heard plop, plop, plop hitting the ground very nearby. They were birds, dozens of them, falling from the branch, frozen.

The Allied army was transformed into the largest gathering of chilblains ever. My fingers were constantly purple; my lips were a maze of cracks. Since I had fled Toledo in whatever clothes I happened to be wearing, I needed to find some way to get something warmer: gloves, hat, blanket. Comradeship among soldiers? Ha! Débrouillez-vous, more like! I stole it all. And a scarf — old, but long enough to go three times around my neck and even covering my nose like an emboscado.

What followed was an interminable march across an endless landscape. Not just level but absolutely, perfectly flat. Not just dry, arid. In spite of the winter cold, neither the mist nor the rain managed to dampen it. God, how hard the Castilian soil is; there’s not an invader’s boot that can soften it up. We crossed distances that went on forever; towns would emerge like atolls on an ocean horizon. What is Castile? Get a big expanse of wasteland, plant a tyrannical regime upon it, and there you have Castile.

Vendôme was a great soldier. The Bourbon army was pursuing us relentlessly, with no hesitation, no letup, always in search of the perfect moment to destroy the Allied army, but also in no hurry. If you ask me, the only thing that spared us any unpleasant surprises, including getting ourselves completely surrounded, was Don Antonio’s cavalry.

Villarroel made no exceptions. I might have been nominally an engineer, but I had to ride, patrol, and fight like anyone else. I tried to make claims for my special expertise.

“We’re short of men” was his reply.

“Not least because we abandoned them in Toledo after they’d had one drink too many!” was mine.

“It’s only that lack of men that prevents me flogging you.” He handed me the reins. “Get on your horse.”

It was during that terrifying retreat that good old Zuvi became an expert horseman. Not through any love of horses but out of the strongest imperative that exists: You learn or you get killed.

But I’m not being fair to Don Antonio. You might not believe me, but that apocalyptic retreat from a hostile Madrid to Barcelona — the Retreat, as we veterans would come to call it — taught me to respect him, then to admire him, and eventually to love him.

He censured my manners, never my opinions. I was no more than a mouthy lad, and he was a proper general forged in cauldrons of iron and gunpowder. Who was I to argue with him? At the time, I couldn’t see the vast tolerance he extended to me. In his eyes, I was exempt by virtue of my youth and my office. No other general would have been so indulgent.

His motto was the same thing I’d been taught at Bazoches: Know what you need to do, and be where you need to be. He worried about his troops. Actually, that was the only thing that guided him. Vauban saved lives by means of numbers; Villarroel, by example. If you will allow me to simplify a little, I would say that to me, Vauban was theory and Villarroel was practice. Even during mobile wars, there are many things for an engineer to do: Find the best place for a ford when the bridges are inaccessible, build pontoons or provisional defenses. It was only then that I was able, as it were, to make use of my studies. And with this I earned the great general’s respect.

I suggested that we leave a small provision of dragoons to our rear, in some one-horse town that had a few battlements standing. When Vendôme approached, he would be forced to stop the whole army, to consider whether to attack the place, besiege it, or surround it. Our dragoons would mount their horses and race out under cover of night. Yes, the following day, the Bourbons would discover that the place was empty, but by then the Allied army would have gained a day’s marching on them.

The next trick from the Bazoches list was really rather cruel. We gathered all the inhabitants from down in Villabajo and sent them up to Villarriba — these were two settlements located on the north-south axis separating us from the army we had in pursuit. Simultaneously, another Allied squadron would force the inhabitants from Villarriba to head down to Villabajo. It often happened that the two populations would meet — amazed — on their way, bringing their goats, wagons, and chattel with them. The ill feeling between these unfortunate people illustrated the scale of our disgrace. The fact was, the Bourbon scouts wouldn’t spare the horses to notify Vendôme: “Marshal, the inhabitants of Villabajo have been moved up to Villarriba!”

From which Vendôme would deduce that the Allies were divesting themselves of mouths to feed as they converted the place into a center of resistance. Then another group of scouts would come to him saying the exact opposite: “Marshal, the inhabitants of Villarriba have been moved down to Villabajo!”

What was going on? Things became clear only when the Bourbons, having taken many precautions, entered the town square of each of the two villages and found, hanging on the door of the town hall, a polite note, written in perfect French, from good old Zuvi.

À bas Villabajo

Le maraud!

À bas Villarriba

Le gros Verrat!

À bas Vendôme,

Ce sale bonhomme!

Which might be loosely translated as:

Neither Villabajo nor Villarriba. Oh, Vendôme, but what a fool you are.

Well, it obviously sounded better in French, because it rhymed.

The Retreat of 1710 can be summarized as one long, unending logistical nightmare. Geographers can say what they like, but having experienced the Retreat, I can tell you that in my opinion, Barcelona will always be farther away from Toledo than the Land of Saturn.

Stanhope and his Englishmen insisted on marching parallel to the bulk of the army. Maintaining communication between the two bodies of men complicated everything. An army advancing or retreating lays waste to a huge area around it for its own maintenance. With the Castilian land being so poor and the winter so harrowing, it is understandable that the two columns needed to be moving very far apart from each other. “Close together when in combat, far apart when on the move,” so says the military maxim. But not quite that far apart, caray!

On December 8, Stanhope — that conceited ass Stanhope — allowed himself to be surrounded in a small town by the name of Brihuega. He didn’t know how near or far behind the enemy was. Unbelievable though it sounds, he stopped in Brihuega for three whole days so that his army could rest and he could have himself a nice little cup of hot tea. Before he knew what was happening, Vendôme was upon him. He dug himself in at Brihuega. He sent the bulk of the army as many as six desperate messages, begging them to come to the rescue of the English.

How could he have allowed himself to get trapped so easily? The explanation is simple. Stanhope didn’t have Don Antonio’s eyes. His heavy cavalry did not move easily in that war of feints and dodges. And Stanhope was a great Coehoornian brute, capable of heavy frontal batterings and nothing else.

After some conference between the senior command, Don Antonio came out of the tent to tell us how things were going. When we asked his opinion, he shook his head. “There aren’t enough of the English to survive a mass assault. Vendôme knows that, and he’ll throw everything he’s got at the attack. They’ll never make it.”

But the Allied army went to their aid. The trumpets sounded, and the whole army turned tail and headed for Brihuega at a forced march. The political and military consequences of losing the entire English contingent would be equally serious. After so many protracted maneuvers, after making such efforts to put some distance between us, we turned around and headed of our own free will into the battle we had striven so hard to avoid. Well, Lord In-a-Trice, thank you very much!

Oh, but let us be a little more indulgent; perhaps it was not such a senseless maneuver after all. The Allied army was hastening to the rescue; if In-a-Trice could hold out a little, we would be able to catch the Bourbons between the devil and the deep blue sea. While we were driving our mounts to their limit, Vendôme surrounded Brihuega and demanded the surrender of the English forces. Stanhope responded with a most peculiar note: “Inform the Duc de Vendôme that my Englishmen and I shall defend ourselves to the bitter end.”

Somebody ought to have explained to In-a-Trice that heroic proclamations only become a source of perpetual ridicule for anyone who fails to live up to them. By the third attack, he was having doubts. Why die in some godforsaken Castilian village in the middle of nowhere if he could spend that night dining on pheasant with his opponent general, Vendôme? When we approached the outskirts of Brihuega, the sound of cannon fire had already stopped. It wasn’t hard to guess what had happened: The English, the entire English force, had surrendered.

Four thousand veterans taken with all their weapons and all their equipment! And General Stanhope at their head, the same man who had arrived in Spain so very generously supplied with arrogance and with horses. I’ll sort this out in a trice! And now his four thousand Englishmen were marching toward captivity, heads lowered and with a bayonet escort.

Well, we planted ourselves on the outskirts of Brihuega, gasping for breath. And who should be waiting for us, rubbing his hands in glee? Only Vendôme and the entire Army of the Two Crowns, in perfect battle formation.

The Bourbons exceeded us in number by two to one. Our men and horses were exhausted after a day and a night’s marching to rescue Stanhope. And with the enemy so close, we had no way to retreat. Never has a battle been so unlooked for and yet so unavoidable.

An engineer will never be a soldier. Our mentality differs in one fundamental point: Why are human beings so keen on killing each other out in the open when we’ve invented such marvels of self-preservation as trenches and bastions? In case it comes in useful to you one day, let me cite Martí Zuviría’s Brief Instruction Manual for Surviving a Pitched Battle. Thus it goes:

CHAPTER ONE: Devise some good excuse to separate yourself from your fighting formation.

CHAPTER TWO: Drop to the ground facedown, feigning death, with your head behind the biggest rock you can find, and don’t move till your ears inform you the shooting is over.

CHAPTER THREE: Instruction Manual concludes.

I can assure you, it has been of great use to me, as evidenced by the fact that at the age of ninety-eight, here I am, with half my face missing and three holes in my ass but still dictating my memoirs to my dear vile Waltraud. The only defect of this guide is that in certain circumstances, such as in Brihuega, it is not possible to put it into practice. And do you know why? Because of all the generals in the world, I had to be serving the only one who used his rank not to hide behind but to make himself more exposed.

Villarroel had been born in a uniform, and for a fellow like that, dying in battle was one more perk of the job. That particular battle had been lost before it was even begun; anyone could see that. My own war vehicle was a horse who had been worn out by the cold, the deprivation, and his exertions. His ribs were so prominently visible, his flanks looked like a bellows. My horse stood beside that of Don Antonio, who, without looking at me, gave me a telling-off: “Sit up straight, Captain Zuviría! Any soldier who happens to glance to one side should see his officers proud and ready for the attack. And you look like a limp head of lettuce.”

I did not answer. He gave me a sharp blow to the kidneys with his riding crop and added: “An officer is the spirit and the mirror of the troops. If an officer has doubts, the men will collapse.”

I straightened up a little, not much. I, too, spoke without looking at him. It was as though we were in a horseback confessional.

“I’m not an officer, sir, you know that as well as I do,” I said sadly. “Merda.”

That Catalan word, merda, made him smile. “You might not know it, but I was born in Barcelona.”

I looked at him, astonished. Villarroel, the epitome of Castilian virtues: severe, inflexible, and just. That piece of news simply astonished me.

“My father was also a soldier, and he was posted there,” he explained. “Which was why my mother gave birth to me in Barcelona. Beautiful city.”

While Villarroel made a happy speech about the beauties of Barcelona as seen through the eyes of a Castilian, the fighting stretched all the way down the line. From where we sat, we could just hear the din of the gunfire, see the injured men pouring back toward the rearguard, hear the yells of the sergeants trying to maintain order in the ranks.

“Don Antonio,” I groaned, “this is madness. There’s no way we can possibly win this battle, you know that already.”

In reply, he stuck his riding whip under my chin, raised it, and exclaimed: “You will address me as ‘General’! My staff officers are allowed the familiarity because they are men who have shown their valor under my command. That is not true of you.”

At that moment, a messenger on horseback, sweating despite the cold, approached us. “General! The enemy is breaking through on the left flank! Marshal Starhemberg requests that you return to the front.”

Villarroel put the crop away, drew his sword, and cried: “It was about time, damn it!”

Half the Allied cavalry followed him. I did, too, in spite of myself.

And so, a day of suffering. When the Bourbons broke our line, there was Don Antonio’s cavalry, ready to close up the breach. I spent the whole battle riding side by side with that man.

“I’m your faithful squire, Don Antonio!” I shouted, for want of anything better to say.

“In that case, tell me,” he retorted, laughing, “why is it that when the enemy is to our right, you ride to my left, and when we have them on our left, you switch sides and position yourself to my right? You wouldn’t happen to be using my body as a moving fajina, would you?”

Have you ever had a nightmare that lasted five whole hours? That’s what Brihuega was like. From noon until sunset, the Bourbons tried to break through the Allied lines. Our officers tightened up the battalions, rebuilt the walls of bayonets. The regiments were sturdy but badly depleted, nervous exhaustion visible on their faces. By around three in the afternoon the infantry were so desperate that they began to form squares.

My dear vile Waltraud, who knows nothing about anything, asks me to explain. How easy that is! Basically, we were giving up.

When an infantry battalion is cornered, it literally forms a human square, with the soldiers pointing the bayonets outward and the officers, the drummers, and the wounded in the center. It is an agonizing method of resistance, especially against a cavalry. A troop who resorts to that is admitting that they are abandoning any kind of attack. (Do you understand me finally, my little blond she-bear?) And back they come, the Bourbons, and again, and again. When a breach is opened, there goes Don Antonio and his cavalry, closing up the gaps with a charge of scrawny old nags, again and again.

If you ever find yourselves compelled to take part in a cavalry charge, do the following: The most important thing is to avoid the violence of the impact. At the last moment, dip your head down behind your horse’s neck to hide a sharp tug on the reins that will stop the animal. In the confusion, nobody will notice what was holding back the momentum. Throw all the strength in your body into your calves, squeezing them to the horse’s flanks as though they were forceps. Position yourself between the first and second line of attacking riders. If the enemy flees, spur on your mount and go for it, yelling as though you’ve broken through the line alone (thereby allowing yourself much vaunting about the battle afterward). If they stand their ground, swing your sword above your head, cursing your fellow riders who are getting between you and your adversaries. But do not advance! In the case of a retreat, turn tail and flee shamelessly. The front line of idiots you allowed to go ahead of you will protect your back.

The battle of Brihuega was decided by exhaustion. Or, rather, not decided. The Bourbons had thrown all their wood on the fire without breaking the cohesiveness of the Allied army. Some regiments suffered up to a dozen consecutive assaults. And when they faltered, there was Don Antonio charging over with riders to drive the enemy away.

In the last countercharge the momentum took us out beyond the Allied infantry. When we stopped, we were surrounded by the bodies of the enemy dead, a real carpet of white uniforms. I gave a childish howl: “What a sight, Don Antonio! Look at this slaughter!” I leaped off my horse and stared around me. There were so many dead bodies, I had to take great strides so as not to tread on them. “You were right after all! We haven’t lost! And Vendôme thought he had us. Ha!”

Then the general dismounted, came over, and with fury in his eyes, gave me a resounding slap. And left.

I was dazed, but more by the offense than by the pain. I couldn’t understand it. Villarroel had spent the whole day scolding me for my lack of military spirit and enthusiasm, and when I showed a bit of fire, he struck me. No, I still hadn’t understood that war, his occupation, increased Don Antonio’s pain and his contradictions. With one hand on the offended cheek, I protested, “What have I said now?”

One of his adjutants explained for him: “You imbecile, not twelve months ago these were the lads under Don Antonio’s command.”

8

Don Antonio called for me at the first chance the army got to pause for breath after Brihuega. It was late, the retreat had already been sounded, and the night was so cold that just to cross the short distance to his tent, I had to wear my whole arsenal of warm clothes.

The staff officers were delighted; the official report of the battle praised my great general to the skies. But I had never seen him in a good mood. And as for his relationship with me, the most recent episode we had shared had been a slap in the middle of the battle.

His campaign tent was more Spartan than Leonidas’s. His mattress was thinner than a plank of wood. The rest of the furniture amounted to a folding seat, a small table, and a couple of candles shivering at the icy air that sneaked through the thousand cracks in the canvas.

He wasn’t looking good. He wasn’t sitting on his chair but on the camp bed, drinking straight from a bottle. I’d rarely seen him drink. Well, all warriors are familiar with the melancholy that arises after a battle. He looked at me with eyes hooded by red, drooping lids. Outside, the Castilian wind howled like a monster calling out to you from your nightmares.

“I struck you,” he said, skipping past any formalities. “I was wrong to do that.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond.

“My apologizing has nothing to do with your foolishness,” he went on, “only with your uniform, however provisional it may be. You don’t strike an officer. It’s ugly, degrading to the rank.”

“Yes, Don Antonio.”

“General, damn it! Address my person by the rank I hold.”

He looked up, and I saw he was half-drunk. “Yes, General.”

“As for the rest, I have signed up a man who is mean and selfish. All armies have blisters popping out all over their ass, and you are the fattest, most pus-filled in the entire Allied coalition.”

That is an “apology” as understood by Don Antonio de Villarroel: He summons me to ask for forgiveness and ends up calling me a purulent blister. He pointed at me with the mouth of the bottle and added: “I ought to hang you.”

“You’re right, Don Antonio.”

“But as an engineer, you do have a certain competence. I’ve seen you carry out maneuvers that might lack grace, though they are amusing.” He sighed deeply. “It’s my fault; engineers are no use on horseback. No. Your skill is hiding away between chunks of stone.”

“Yes, Don Antonio. I mean, no, Don Antonio. Whatever you say.”

He looked at me a moment, his eyes glassy with wine. He patted the mattress a couple of times. “Sit here!”

I obeyed, and he put an arm around my shoulders. He smelled of sour wine. And then, to my surprise, he showed an affection toward me that I had known nothing of. “You needn’t worry, son. You’re a coward, I know that, but few men are born brave. Bravery is something you learn, just like a child learning to speak. Do you understand?”

“I’m not sure, Don Antonio.”

He squeezed me a little tighter, jostling me like a wisp of straw. He waved a fist under my nose. “The good Lord has placed a barrier between each man and his destiny. Our mission in this life is to get past it, to go beyond it, to have the courage to learn what there is on the other side.” He stopped, pensive. “Whatever that may be.”

“But Don Antonio,” I replied, shriveling up, “that does sound rather dangerous.”

I shouldn’t have said that. He stared at me with his drunken pop eyes and, with his booming Castilian voice, let out some words that I can remember down to the last drop of saliva: “So what the fuck did that French engineer teach you, then?”

“How to fortify, storm, and defend fortresses, Don Antonio.”

“And what else?”

I hesitated. “What else, Don Antonio?”

He shook me. “Yes, yes! What else?”

I must have been brought low by the carnage, by being far from home. By that night, one more night camped out in the cold. The wind howling like a pack of wild hounds. The post-battle melancholy had struck me, too.

“Don Antonio,” I confessed, “I’ve lied to you. I’m not an engineer. The French marquis never approved the fifth Point that was to make me an engineer.”

He didn’t hear me, or if he did, he didn’t care. “Damn battle,” he whispered. “Damn it. . The world is a thousand souls lighter. And what for? Nothing has changed.”

The wine had gone to his head much more than I had realized. He curled up his knees like an old man, arms folded, and lay down on the camp bed. I stayed where I was for a few minutes, watching the great man sleeping after his victory. In Bazoches, I had been taught to look at objects that hung from invisible threads, to decode them and understand them in their vast humility. How could my eyes not be drawn to the human enormity of Don Antonio?

I felt a rush of pity toward him. That night, as the man snored, sleeping like a fetus, I would have given my life to protect his rest. His whole life was service, discipline, a just measure of rigor. I saw each of the pores on his mature cheeks, everything I knew about him, and told myself that this cavalry general had chosen his own path to le Mystère. Then I understood his most deeply hidden secret, perhaps better than he understood it himself: that ever since he had started, he had sought to die in a heroic cavalry charge, so beautiful in its despair.

It wasn’t a simple, senseless death wish. For somebody so self-denying, so possessed by the spirit of chivalry, to fall before his men did not signify the end of an existence but the perfecting of one. At Brihuega, he had spent the entire battle right at the front of every single Allied charge and countercharge. But death had eluded him, stubbornly, mockingly. As for me, I found myself at the opposite end of the moral arc. And yes, thanks to the senses I had developed at Bazoches, I understood, or at least respected, his code of intransigent rectitude. For this very reason, what a tragic irony in his life! In 1705 he had begun the war on the Bourbon side and, in 1710, had moved over to the pro-Austrian side. A path on which the view of the enemy had changed places and faded away, stripped of any meaning. To protect today’s friends, he would kill yesterday’s. Sad, sad, sad. It might be that le Mystère was keeping him for that apex of all dramas that was Barcelona on September 11, 1714. Like it was keeping me.

It was the coldest night of the whole Retreat. A pitiless wind whipped at the thin canvas of the tent. I took off his boots and covered his body with the only blanket there was in the tent. I went out, stole a couple more blankets, and came back to wrap him more warmly. He was snoring. Before I left, I kissed his cheek. Just as well he was sleeping deeply. If he had realized, he would have struck me on the head for being a pansy. Then I went and got myself drunk on what was left in the bottle.

Don Antonio. My battle-running general, my good Don Antonio de Villarroel Peláez, the most anonymous hero of our century. Things ended badly, very badly. Not many great men came out well from that war of ours. That leech In-a-Trice Stanhope was certainly one of the lucky ones.

Owing to his high rank, the Bourbons treated him with kid gloves, and four days later, he returned to London like a greenhorn coming home from an outing. Without glory, but without dishonor, either. Instead of hanging him, the English exalted him, perhaps as a way of disguising the failure of their continental strategy. He married the daughter of the governor of Madras and thrived in politics. Some men are born covered in a patina of moral oil: Misfortune slips off them like water. But those same men stain everything they touch. A decade later, his government was foolish enough to give him the reins to the faltering English economy. I’ll wager anything you like that, as he took on the post, he exclaimed, “I’ll sort this out in a trice!”

As we already know, England’s finances ended up the same way as their expeditionary forces: destroyed in a trice. It took him only two years to devastate trade with America and the savings of a million shareholders, and to bring half the country’s industries, banks, businesses, and warehouses to the point of bankruptcy in what has come to be known as the South Sea Bubble. From my own exile in England, I recall some delightful heads, such as Swift or Newton, a wise astronomer who looked like a libertine priest. Newton always had one eye on the heavens and another on his purse. During the crisis, he lost thousands of pounds in shares, and measured though he surely was, even he wanted to strangle Stanhope. I can still see him now, shouting, “It’s infinitely easier to predict the motion of a heavenly body than the lunacies of these secretaries of finance!”

As for Marshal Vendôme, our enemy at Brihuega, in those last days of 1710, Little Philip named him governor-general of Catalonia. A premature title, you will agree, since at that point, most of Catalonia remained in the hands of the Generalitat. The truth was, he never got the chance to enjoy the post. In 1712, as he was travelling through one of our towns to the south, Vinaroz, he stopped — to everyone’s horror — to have dinner. To make him happy, they served him the local delicacy, fried prawns.

“How good these prawns are!” Vendôme crowed.

The people of Vinaroz were scared to death, naturally, so they just kept serving him trays and more trays of prawns. The glutton wolfed down sixty-four prawns. No one dared to tell him that they were served in their shell but that you eat them without. Vendôme was such an exalted aristocrat that it never would have occurred to him that a servant would bring him in a shell something that was eaten peeled, and that his noble little fingers were being smeared with grease from the sea.

That very night he died of indigestion.

In the days that followed Brihuega, we became intoxicated by a false sense of security. Since we’d left Toledo, the cry that had united the army had been “Return to Barcelona or die!” After the failure of the great Bourbon attempt to annihilate us, everybody let go a little.

We were already on Aragon land, barren like the Castilian but at least an Allied kingdom. Don Antonio was in command of a motley troop made up of a few hundred Dutch, Portuguese, Palatines, Hessians, a real ragtag bunch. (Italian mercenaries, too! They were everywhere!) Most were ill or bore wounds from Brihuega, and we carried them in wagons that were full up and groaning heavily. So as not to be a burden on the march of the army, we took a parallel route.

Although I didn’t like the idea at all, I went with Don Antonio. From the very first, I knew that looking after this little troop of invalids, riding apart from the main army, was a bad idea. I was anxious as I rode alongside my great general, asking myself what good old Zuvi was doing there. The answer, as you can imagine, is that I had grown to feel a loyalty for this man very similar to that which had bonded me to Vauban. The marquis taught me what I needed to do; Don Antonio went further, filling the work with moral meaning. That same day he would be practicing what he preached.

Being so far away from the army, we were easy prey. Nine out of ten of these wounded men couldn’t lift a rifle. If we were attacked by a decent-sized force, we would be condemned to disaster. I had a bad feeling about it all. I was constantly turning in my saddle, scanning the horizon, or racing up and down the short column of wagons chivvying the drivers. What we hoped was that the Bourbons would not pay any attention to these little crumbs of the army and we would be able to get ourselves lost on minor roads. We couldn’t.

The Castilian warriors attacked us on both flanks at once. The diminished mounted escort charged — led by Don Antonio — then charged again, and a third time. The Bourbons avoided them like wolves escaping a shepherd, but they were soon back in pursuit of the defenseless flock, and there were more of them each time. Those in the wagons who were in a fit state had armed themselves and fired from where they were on the flatbed of the carts. Don Antonio gave the order to take refuge in the nearest settlement, a small place called Illueca that we could make out on the horizon.

I was desperate. “Don Antonio! Please don’t do it! You know as well as I do what that order will mean. Please!”

He didn’t answer. We entered Illueca like a mouse into a trap. Don Antonio’s logic was absolutely impeccable: The Bourbons exceeded us in number; if those of us on horseback fled, the injured in the wagons would be annihilated in the excitement of the fighting.

As an engineer, I knew that Illueca was impossible to defend. We had neither the provisions nor the arms to defend it. And we knew, furthermore, that there was nobody to come to our rescue. But once we had dug ourselves in, when all the smoke had cleared and the siege begun, Don Antonio could agree to a reasonable settlement with someone in the Two Crowns’ command. At least they would have respect for the lives of the wounded. That was what duty and sacrifice meant to Don Antonio: to lose the warrior’s most sacred possession, freedom, if in doing so, he could save the lives of his men.

But I could not forget two details that were crucial to my own interests: that good old Zuvi was neither ill nor wounded, and that the prospect of captivity was unbearable to me. I tried, exasperated, to reason with Don Antonio. As the gates to the town were closed and some improvised defenses set up, I asked him to reconsider: “Let’s flee while there is still time, leaving the command in the hands of some lame officer who can negotiate the terms of the surrender.” I had plenty of tactical reasons for this: he was a general, the finest commander under Karlangas. Was it worth the army losing his talent for some hundred invalids?

Nothing doing. He would never abandon men under his command, never. I had escaped a razed Toledo, the cold Retreat, the battle of Brihuega. And now, because of a stupid question of honor, I was going to fall into the hands of an intransigent enemy. His example was an admirable one; more than that, it was heroic. But Longlegs Zuvi wasn’t yet ready to grasp The Word, as evidenced by the fact that I exploded in frustration.

“You’re more stubborn than a deaf mule! You hear me? A fucking mule in a general’s sash! That’s what you are.”

Anyone else would have had me hanged on the spot. But he didn’t do it. Why?

He was fond of me, there was no other explanation. He and his adjutants just left me alone there, stamping on my tricorn hat in utter fury. After a while I was called into his presence. I had calmed down a little and I could recognize my insubordination. I went to meet him like a lamb to the slaughter.

He was in the castle. I had to climb a spiral staircase to get to the top of a solitary turret, whipped by the four winds. From there you could keep an eye on the whole landscape all the way to the horizon.

Although I wish I could, I know I never shall forget that sight. Our good general standing alone, wrapped in a long, ragged, rat-colored cloak. He looked like a human échauguette, impassive at the gusts of wind that shook those heights. He was using his spyglass to watch the Bourbons’ movements. The warriors of Castile had already called for the French regular troops. Seen from where we stood, they looked like little white roaches. Soon they would have Illueca surrounded. Soon our sacrifice would come to a head.

“What am I to do with you?” he said, still looking through his spyglass.

Resigned, I allowed my gaze to follow the direction of the spyglass and just answered: “I suppose it doesn’t much matter, Don Antonio.” I sighed. “We are going to fall into their hands.”

“Do you have a family?”

“I think so.”

He lowered the spyglass. “You think so?” he boomed. “Either you have a family or you don’t!”

“I do.” I hadn’t the slightest idea what he wanted.

“I need a messenger to tell the king what has happened,” he said. “I have served under the Bourbon flag. It might be thought that I took advantage of the situation to commit treason.”

“But anyone thinking that, Don Antonio, would be an idi—” I shut up, suddenly understanding that this was just an excuse he had dreamed up to spare me from captivity. “Forgive me, Don Antonio.”

“General! Address me according to my rank.”

“Yes, General.”

He went back to his spyglass and said: “Take saddlebags filled with plentiful provisions. And my horse. It’s in the best condition. I don’t want it to end up with some French fop.”

I wanted to thank him, dizzy with delight, but he prevented me with a shout: “Now get out of my sight before I change my mind!”

I withdrew. All the same, when I reached the staircase, something made me turn. I couldn’t go just like that.

“Don Antonio, I want you to know that I have been thinking a lot about what you said that night. I don’t have the courage to take on that invisible border which God has put in front of us. And you, what’s more, you seek it out with tireless tenacity.”

He looked me up and down. He noticed how moved I was. “What are you talking about? When did we have that conversation?”

“A few nights ago, Don Antonio. In your tent.”

He didn’t remember.

“For me, you’re a teacher who has come to replace the person I have most admired in this world,” I went on. “From the first day you have made me a gift of your example. And today you have given me freedom.”

Don Antonio didn’t expect me to fall to my knees, nor that, my shoulder leaning against an old battlement, I would confess: “For the second time in my life, I have failed in a decisive test. In the first, I didn’t have the heart to understand what was being asked of me. In this second, I haven’t the courage to take it on.”

I couldn’t hold back my tears. I cried so much that my hands, covering my face, were wet as sponges. I cried so much, hugging that cold Aragon battlement, that for a moment I forgot what we were doing there.

Villarroel looked through his spyglass once again and immediately said, in a gentle reprimand, “They’ve nearly completed the siege. Stand up.”

I got up on my long legs, and as I was leaving, ashamed, he was the one who stopped me for a moment. On that cold, windy day, in that distant place, Don Antonio’s eyes took on the brilliance of Vauban’s.

“Zuviría,” he said, “don’t be mistaken. You will be able to run away today. But for good or for ill, this doesn’t end here. Neither the war nor the tribulations of your soul. Now go.”

I fled at a speed that was meteoric, if not very heroic. Villarroel’s horse was every bit as reluctant to be taken prisoner as good old Zuvi. What was more, my body was lighter than his master’s, and within moments we had become accomplices in our flight. And just in time! Once we were out of Illueca, we came across the enemy troops as they closed the siege and had to drop behind some bushes to hide. I lay down on the animal’s body and covered its mouth with my hand. It was very docile.

As chance would have it, the Spanish irregular forces were beginning to be relieved by French soldiers and officers. And knowing how much Don Antonio liked the Frog-eaters — and now he would have to negotiate the surrender with them! But it was for the best. The French would be satisfied with taking the garrison prisoner without any executions. While the Bourbons kept their eyes trained on the city walls, I — behind them — took advantage of the moment to head off in the opposite direction.

Free, in flight, on horseback. And yet the joy of the survivor remained outside me. Because of what I had left behind and what was yet to come. I crossed places where rejoicing and happiness had no reason to be. Poor old Zuvi on an animal’s sore back, his clothes filthy, his tricorn and scarf in tatters. Across every hill, natural cones of earth as low as Moghul tombs. I was whipped by a constant wind that cut my lips. In those few moments when the wind fell silent, it felt as though rider and mount would be turned to stone then and there. And always, at any time when there was some light, that enormous sky covering my head and out toward infinity. Blue, a limpid, huge blue, vaster than the whole Spanish empire. I couldn’t stop thinking about Don Antonio.

My hopes of finding The Word in the lands of Castile had died there. How would I find it in a country that tolerated only empty spaces? Indeed: I had found a teacher capable of taking Vauban’s place, and what was more, a man of Castilian origin. But that same land had taken him captive, had trapped him inside, perhaps forever. I owed him my liberty, perhaps my life. I could have shared in his luck, and I didn’t, while he made the teacher’s supreme sacrifice: to give his life for his student’s. Thanks to Don Antonio, I could return to Anfán and Amelis. Wretched but free. I cried like a baby, big, slow tears that slipped down my cheeks.

Illueca, for anyone interested in historical trivia, is the resting place of a pope, Pope Luna, a dramatic type who, in the fourteenth century, challenged Rome. After Don Antonio capitulated, the French soldiery demolished the man’s tomb in the hope of finding great treasures. They found nothing in the casket but bones, and the Frog-eaters took this badly. They dismantled the mummified body, played football with the skull, and ended up hurling it out of a window.

9

As to what happened between my return from the Allied offensive in 1710, to settle back in Barcelona, and the vile summer of 1713, it’s not worth the telling.

We owed a great deal of money from the purchase of the house in La Ribera. Amelis and I argued about the debts, we argued about her poor skill in cooking (great lovers do not tend to be good cooks), about a thousand silly things. When the subject of the debt came up in conversation, and its generous twenty percent interest, it was like the rolling of thunder that precedes a storm. Peret, Nan, and Anfán would vanish down the stairs. Then I would scold her for having bought the fifth-storey apartment in La Ribera. She would laugh at my scruples. Amelis didn’t know how to read, she didn’t know how to add, she knew just one thing: You survive in this world only if you can learn to walk on broken glass. Any of you husbands reading this, however good-natured, will be asking yourselves an extremely reasonable question: Why didn’t I just give her a good hiding? Look, it all came down to two things: If I wouldn’t use violence when in service and against people I didn’t know, how could I with her? And the second reason: I loved her.

It wasn’t hard to find out that she had gone back to selling herself. I had been schooled in Bazoches, after all. When things were particularly tight, bags filled with money would appear. She thought she could keep it a secret from me because she was very skillful at measuring out the flow of the money. Besides, she didn’t spend much time renting out her body. I noticed that when she disappeared, her violet-colored Sunday dress was also missing from the closet. I had no doubt whatsoever: She was the luxury whore of some Red Pelt who paid her well for her attentions. I kept quiet.

That’s enough for today. Pass me the cat and the bottle. And go.

For lack of anything else to occupy my time, I took on the role of home teacher to Nan and Anfán. To my surprise, the dwarf turned out to be very good with numbers, although sitting still was not his forte; after a while he would start squirming as though the chair were covered in nails. At this point, I ought to mention something that makes me sad. My lessons had one unpredictable effect, and a deplorable one. The brotherhood between Nan and Anfán began to break down. I can remember one particularly pitiful day.

I had given Nan a big spinning top that had numbers all over its surface. Anfán came into the little room I sometimes used as workroom and saw Nan with the top in front of him spinning. They argued. The dwarf clasped hold of the top, unwilling to give it up. Anfán was offended and cried: “You and those numbers! Have you lost count of how many crusts of bread I brought you when we were sleeping in those tarts’ hovels? Have you forgotten that already? Nan merdós!”

That he should aim such a strong insult at Nan was so unusual, so unthinkable, that I didn’t even respond. The dwarf did. He chased after the boy, crying with remorse and kicking him out of sheer helplessness. To try and console him, Nan gave him the big spinning top. Anfán tried its weight, hesitated, and ended up throwing it out the window. A bit farther and he would have killed a knife sharpener who was outside on the street.

Anfán understood somehow that a comfortable life, modern education, all that, was destroying the fundamental bond that held them together. They were reconciled, but it wasn’t like before.

Between us, Amelis and I had given them a roof, clothes, food, and even affection. With the best will in the world, we’d tried hard to make sure they had something like a family. So they were no longer exposed to shrapnel or to the rigors of the elements, but you got the sense that all the pain from before, rather than being driven away, had filtered beneath their skin. During the siege of Tortosa, I had never seen them sad. On the contrary. They mocked death every bit as mercilessly as they mocked me. And they always came out on top. Nowadays, Anfán was no longer stealing, no longer interrupting us in bed to throw his arms around our necks, purring. Now, during his long afternoon tea, he would just sit on the rear balcony, his legs hanging through the bars, on his own, with the low, languid appearance of a savage who has been ripped out of the jungle. Eating a hunk of fried bread soaked in oil, he would watch the people on the street and beyond, in the Saint Clara bastion, and farther beyond still, in the outside world. We were tormented by the same question: Wouldn’t it have been better if they had never left the Tortosa trenches?

In order to temper the hours we spent in lessons, I increased the frequency of our walks. The truth was it made scarcely any difference whether I taught them at home or on foot, and Anfán was a little creature who needed fresh air. Something happened during one of those walks that demonstrates how an excess of civilization transforms upright people into simpletons.

As I was saying, I had taken Nan and Anfán out for a walk, this time into the outskirts of the city. Anfán was exceptionally interested in my military adventures. I was always reticent when it came to recounting that collection of carnage, mud, and bayonets, but my resistance only intensified the boy’s interest. We were already outside the city walls, on a small path flanked by scattered houses and kitchen gardens, when he asked me about the generals I had known.

“If you’re talking to a French general, you have to stand up really straight. Like this,” I said, standing to attention, arms parallel to my body and my chin up, “as though you’ve swallowed a broom. And whatever nonsense they say, you have to click your heels — like this! — and reply with a shout: ‘Mes devoirs, mon général!’ Then they order you to attack a given position. You reply, even louder: ‘À vos ordres, mon général!’ and in the middle of the commotion, you race off in any direction other than the one they sent you in.”

“And is that the same with Spanish generals?”

“Oh no, with the Spanish ones, it’s completely different!” I exclaimed. “With them, you have to cry ‘A su servicio, mi general!’ and run off in exactly the opposite direction than the one they’ve told you to go in.”

They must have been growing up, because they took this as a joke, while I was being entirely serious.

“Well,” I said, acknowledging the truth, “I did serve under the command of two great men whom I would have obeyed blindly, whatever madness they ordered me to do. Not because they were great generals but because they were great teachers.”

“And of those two great men,” asked the dwarf, “which was the greater?”

To Anfán, the greater was the one who had taught me to survive, because if you’re dead, you can’t learn any more secrets. To the dwarf, who had great lucidity in that little frame of his, the greater was the one who had taught me secrets, “because if you don’t know the secrets of life, you can’t survive,” he said.

We walked on, and Anfán climbed a fence that was surrounding a small cottage and a kitchen garden. All he wanted was to examine the cedar that rose up at one end of the fence. I had been talking to them about the qualities of different kinds of wood, and the fact that cedar is one of the most valued by various kinds of artisan. Anfán wanted to see what it felt like and climbed up the trunk like a monkey.

“The same tree is used to make both fiddles and rifle butts,” I said. “Strange, isn’t it? At this moment, inside there, you can find both a fiddle and a rifle. If it were up to you, which of the two would—”

I was interrupted by a yell from the gardener’s cottage, and it sounded furious with Anfán: “Oi, you! You bunch of petty thieves! Scram, or you’ll see what’s what!”

“I haven’t stolen anything!” said Anfán, defending himself with uncommon vehemence because just this once it happened to be true.

But the young man — who was brandishing a stick — came over the fence accompanied by a little dog, which hurled itself at the dwarf. I let the four of them battle it out for a bit. Then I stepped in. “All right, all right, that’s enough now.”

I talked to the young man courteously. I admired his fruit trees and how well kept the garden was. His attitude changed. His father appeared. We chatted, and he ended up giving us a string of garlic and a few ripe tomatoes.

“You see how being honorable can do you good?” I said to Anfán as we walked home, arms full.

“Good?” he protested, rubbing his face, which was still red from the blows he had received. “I don’t see any good in it at all! The one time I’m not stealing, and I get attacked by a great beanpole like that. So much for being honorable!”

“Then you’re quite wrong,” I replied. “What’s the first thing you do after you’ve stolen something?”

“What do you think? Race off like a cannonball!”

“Exactly. Meanwhile, today you were attacked by a fellow five years older than you, armed with a stick and a dog, and instead of running away, you defended yourself.”

My rhetorical flourish must have had some impact on him, because he was listening closely.

“Honesty lubricates the muscles of your soul,” I went on. “It protects us in the face of injustice and strengthens our will to fight. You were the weaker party, and you were unarmed. But you were right, and you knew it. That was why you stood your ground.

“On the other hand, righteous souls are complemented by calm speech. Look at this garlic and these tomatoes I’m carrying. Free and obtained in simple good faith, which is hard to find nowadays. And why? I didn’t steal them; I didn’t even have to lie. When I was admiring this good man’s vegetable garden, I was telling him a great truth: that his noble work transforms the world, and that puts food on his table. And he, to repay me for this precise flattery, wanted to share his food with some total strangers. Why settle for an exchange of bad things when you can exchange good ones? He’s given us much more than we would have been able to get ourselves by stealing!”

A good speech, don’t you think? As a teacher, I was never much of a Rousseau, but not bad for an amateur.

As we approached the city gates, I saw a strange group of people. Five men, four of them armed with rifles over their shoulders. And the fifth was him — it was him! The Antwerp butcher!

Joris Prosperus van Verboom. Under escort, happily walking about outside the city, making his way around the foot of the city walls. I knew he was a prisoner of the government (I’d captured him myself, remember?), but I hadn’t realized he was here in Barcelona. I left Nan and Anfán, made straight for him, got my hands around his neck, and tried to strangle him. The guard intervened and parted us.

“Hey there, just take it easy,” said the captain understandingly. “I can tell you don’t like the big fish of the Bourbons, but we’ve all got to be civilized about it. We have to treat our enemies nobly until it’s time for them to be exchanged.”

“Exchanged?” I screamed. “What are you talking about? This scum can’t be exchanged! And now you’ve been stupid enough to let him go for a walk! He mustn’t be allowed out of the city again till the war is over! Leave him to me.”

Most men get to their deathbeds without ever understanding that war is not a matter of brute force. That the outcome of a conflict is settled in a higher sphere made up of ink and volumes and calculations. Verboom was a Points Bearer. No doubt he’d suggested the walk in order to examine our defenses, our precious bastions. It was quite clear that Verboom would be calculating information that would be worth a score of regiments. I at least had to rebel against the idiocy of the government and its good manners.

There he was, not even in chains, measuring out the distances between the walls, their thickness and height and the depth of the moat. The best place for a huge, threatening Attack Trench. Verboom was the spy who took the fewest risks in all of history — they couldn’t arrest him because he was arrested already; he was living as his enemies’ guest, and they were blithely showing him whatever he wanted to see. We were right at the foot of the Saint Clara bastion. Only a few dozen meters away was my home, the home I shared with the kids, with Amelis.

I hurled myself against the Antwerp butcher one more time. This time I was restrained less subtly. I was so furious that I smashed in two or three noses. Eventually, they knocked me down with their rifle butts, to the laughter of Verboom, who spoke in French so that the guards should not understand him: “L’homme avisé est toujours sur ses gardes même quand il se trouve emprisonné.” A watchful man is on his guard even when he is a prisoner.

It was a line from Livy, I think, often cited in Bazoches, I’m sure, in which the word “asleep” had been changed to “a prisoner.” My own side was beating me, and he had the luxury of standing there laughing. Always the same, going around in spirals like a Venetian dream: Whenever I confronted the Dutch sausage-maker, there would be a screen of authority figures stepping between us who were entirely incapable of understanding why it was necessary to eradicate him from the world.

I spent the night in a dingy cell, partly underground, surrounded by whores, drunks, thieves, and other riffraff. Verboom spent two years as a captive in Barcelona. And there wasn’t one day or one night when he didn’t sleep in a bed that was fluffier than that of most Barcelonans, and when he didn’t eat better than we did, too. The Red Pelts suckled him with our blood, kept him in silk and cotton. Just as I was saying: We brought the serpent’s egg into our home and lulled it gently until the viper was born.

While I was being beaten and arrested, Nan and Anfán made their way calmly back to our home in La Ribera. My absence was not in the least bit strange, as I might have gone off to the tavern for a while, or anywhere. But at dinner, Amelis asked after me.

“The captain gave him a beating, and he’s in jail,” replied Anfán, eating his soup without a pause. “He gave us a speech about honesty, and the effect of speaking well, and the uselessness of violence when there is no just cause for it. Then he saw an unarmed gentleman who was a prisoner and went off and started punching him. When they dragged him away, he was screeching like an animal, cursing the virgin, the government, and the idiot King Karl. I’m sure they’ll hang him.”

Ah, the candor of a child.

Another subject that occupied me during those days was the liberation of Don Antonio. Rescuing him from the claws of the Bourbons had become an obsession for me. You might say that securing his freedom was the only thing that remained of my engineer’s spirit. Since I hadn’t been able to get to The Word, at least Vauban’s successor could be freed. That was my poor consolation. There were prisoner exchanges happening all the time, but there was little that a starveling like Martí Zuviría could do. I tried to take advantage of my tavern friendship with a Dutch agent who worked on exchange deals. He was always coming and going, crossing the lines, and anyone unaware of what he did never would have guessed that he was involved in such high-powered intrigues.

Prisoner exchanges were a kind of cross between a game of chess and a secret auction. A colonel was worth three captains; three colonels could get you a general; and you could round up by offering amounts in hard cash. Meanwhile, both sides had an interest in recovering their most valuable technicians (like the swine Verboom, whom I wouldn’t have given back until I’d ripped out his tongue and his eyes — it still makes me crazy to think of how foolish we were). The process of negotiation was a torturous one, because nobody wanted to acknowledge the real value of their best-loved pieces, nor reveal what they’d be prepared to pay for them.

In the middle of 1712, Don Antonio de Villarroel had been a prisoner for a year and a half. It was an outrage that a soldier of his caliber should be in enemy hands for so long. I bought the Dutchman all the drinks I could, to try to exert my influence, and to coax some information out of him. But the man was an artist in the ways of “mini-diplomacy,” as he called it. Whenever the subject of Don Antonio arose, he would give a little laugh. The only stories I could get out of him were contradictory ones.

“The problem with Villarroel,” he sometimes said, “is that he’s too good a general. There’s a rumor that they’ve been tempting him with the offer of a good position in Philip’s army. But Villarroel is resisting them. They say he has unhappy memories of the Bourbons and wants nothing more to do with them. To tell the truth, I don’t really understand. After all, he’s served the Two Crowns in the past. He could go back to the Bourbon side unblemished, since his enlisting in King Carlos’s army was entirely legal. As for the Bourbons themselves, they aren’t stupid: They don’t want to release him if it will restore his talents to the enemy.”

Other times, however, he would smack his lips and offer a quite different version. “Your poor general has an enemy back home. The government is not choosing to prioritize his exchange, so he will rot in captivity.”

When I started to get worked up, the Dutchman would shrug. “Tell me,” he would say. “On this subject, King Carlos is very much led by his counselors. These things don’t get decided without the blessing of the Generalitat. And the government isn’t interested. They say Villarroel ‘isn’t one of us.’ ”

To what could they be referring? Well, no man is ever free of his past. In Barcelona, the fall of Tortosa had stung, and very badly, and they remembered that it was Don Antonio who had led the final assault that took the city by storm for the Bourbon forces. Besides, he wasn’t Catalan.

I was in such a bad mood in those days that my domestic relationship with Amelis was getting worse. We couldn’t have a meal in the same room without an argument breaking out. Or worse still, there would be a long, tense silence that hurt everybody. It moved me to see Anfán and Nan suffer. They looked at us with the expectant gaze of someone who doesn’t want a fight but cannot say so.

Until one night Amelis said to me, “You can stop growling, complaining, and sniffing the air as though everything smelled rotten. Your little general is free.”

I was flabbergasted. “How do you know?” I asked.

“What difference does it make?”

“Is it anything to do with his exchange?”

She replied with the cruelest, most mocking tone of voice she could, emphasizing every word: “Yes, ’course it is! Your fucking Mystère asked me for it.”

I couldn’t coax any more out of her.

However it had come about, at the end of 1712, Don Antonio was at last exchanged. The bad part was that Verboom got his freedom, too. The negotiations happened in secret, and I assumed that the Antwerp butcher had been included in the contingent that was exchanged. He left fatter than when he’d arrived, and his head filled with data. I don’t like to brag of my skills as a prophet, but facts are facts: The first thing he did when he got back to Madrid was to write a thorough account of the city’s defenses. As for Don Antonio, he naturally took the road in the opposite direction: from Madrid to Barcelona. He was offered a post as a cavalry general, which he finally accepted.

He was a man who had always worn tragedy engraved on his brow. I believe he took on the new charge for the simple reason that there was nothing else he could do. He was a career soldier; the army was his life. Why had he spurned the last, generous offer he had received from Philip V? Pride, perhaps. Don Antonio was a very Spanish man. You know how it is, that lofty idea of pride, so very Castilian, constantly at the crossroads between utter heroism and the most sublime stupidity.

10

Meanwhile, there were things happening far beyond our horizons that would overturn the war entirely, bring fate into our lives, and place me — contrary to all my predictions — face-to-face with The Word itself.

In 1711 a scrawny young lad by the name of Pepito died. A devastating attack of smallpox, and straight off to the grave with him. His death caused the war to take a dramatic turn and condemned all Catalans to perpetual slavery. You’ll be wondering how it’s possible that such a banal event, a simple death from smallpox, could have had such decisive effects. Well, due to the fact that this particular sickly lad, this Pepito, was Joseph I, the young emperor of Austria and brother to King Charles. With Pepito dead, the Austrian throne came into Charles’s hands; he still had aspirations to reign over all Spain and was now the emperor of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. As you will recall, the war had started because England was against the dynastic union between France and the Spanish empire. London would never countenance the creation of such a strong continental power; hence their support for Charles as an alternative to Little Philip. But the solution they had imagined created a new problem, with Charles uniting Spain and Austria under a single scepter, thereby threatening to create a kingdom that was every bit as powerful as anything they’d feared. In other words, the situation that had triggered the conflict in the first place was simply shifting position.

Pepito’s death sealed our condemnation. On that very day, England’s diplomats began to look for a negotiated solution to the situation. And — just look how things turn out — this time they really did find their solution in a trice: Charles was to renounce the Spanish throne and remain in Vienna forever; Little Philip, in turn, should renounce his claims to the French succession (in the event of the Beast’s death) and stay in Madrid forever. War over. Move along, please, nothing to see here.

France dragged its heels, but it was exhausted; Charles objected, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Without military support from England, and especially without her financial backing, he wouldn’t be in a position to keep fighting for long, not as much as three months. So everybody accepted the English proposal, more or less. From then on, it was only a matter of haggling and pinning down the minor details.

And the Catalans? Surely you’re joking! Neither Charles nor the English deigned to inform the authorities in Barcelona. As you can imagine, even the Red Pelts would have expressed some outrage! And so our Miquelets went on dying in the mountains, our citizens went on paying exorbitant taxes to support a war they could never conclude, and all the while our own king was digging our grave. Diplomatic negotiations move slowly, all the more so when you’ve got a world war involved, and between 1711 and 1713, the Catalans kept on fighting, like dumb pawns, for a king who had already sold them out to their executioner.

I can’t help a brief digression here. The chroniclers have written that Pepito died from smallpox, a story I’ve always thought sounded rather fishy. There’s no such thing as a single victim of smallpox; either you’ve got an epidemic or there’s no smallpox. Imagine the coincidence that it should be Pepito, of all the people in Vienna, who was the only person to contract the illness.

Relations between the two brothers had been sour for some time. Out of fraternal solidarity, Pepito had been spending vast sums on a distant war, and he was as fed up with the conflict as all the other chanceries in Europe. According to what I heard from an old Viennese courtier, the final letters that Pepito sent Charles took this tone: “My dear brother Karl, enough of this endless war! So the Catalans love you and the Castilians hate you? Well, how would this be for a solution — how about Philip as king of the Castilians and you as king of the Catalans?”

The fact that this option was not merely a comment between brothers but an official policy was demonstrated by the fact that all the Austrian newspapers published the proposal as a definitive solution. Charles didn’t think the idea was the least bit funny, and he sent the next letter to his brother via an agent who put arsenic under his fingernails. Smallpox! What do you think, my dear vile Waltraud? Did he kill him like Cain killed Abel? Well, shut up, then, your opinion isn’t worth a damn anyway.

Where were we? Oh yes, Charles being named the new emperor of Austria. He packed his bags and raced over to Vienna for the coronation ceremony. He left his little queen — now also the empress of Austria — back in Barcelona as a pledge of eternal fidelity to the Catalans.

I say it again: An excess of civilization transforms upright people into simpletons. Because it was quite clear that Charles was never coming back and that the queen — who, to tell the truth, had been left as a political token — would use the first opportunity she got to follow him. She spent a year in Barcelona, yawning her way through the opera. And then, when the time looked right, a very goodbye to you! What still gives me shivers, and riles me no end, is the reason that the old tart gave for leaving. In her own words, she needed to go, owing to “the great matter of the hoped-for succession.” In other words, that great matter was urging her to open her legs to her Charles, which was much more important than the destiny of an entire nation.

Now, would you like to guess what the Red Pelts did when Charles’s little queen announced her noble reasons for leaving us in the lurch?

They let her go without a word of complaint! Those very men, the Red Pelts, the gents of the noble ruling class! The only card that a nation without a king might be able to play; the final guarantee that an entire country would not be disemboweled alive. And they waved it goodbye with full honors! The entire government went off to the docks, and the only thing they cared about was getting a place near the queen so as to be seen during the farewell.

Let me tell you what they should have done! They should have sent a sealed letter to Vienna swearing that we were going to put Her Majesty in the room with all the rats, and that she wouldn’t change her petticoat until Charles had worked European diplomacy to achieve every political, diplomatic, and military guarantee that Catalonia would remain free and safe. But that was not how it happened; the Red Pelts were too civilized for that. The world was going to slit our throats, and they were busy fretting about powdering their wigs!

With his hands free now, Charles signed the ominous Treaty of Evacuation with the Bourbons. According to its terms, the Allies were to withdraw all the troops they still had on the peninsula, that is, in Catalonia, which was the only territory under their control. From then on, things happened fast. When the queen fled to Vienna, the post of viceroy of Catalonia was filled by an Austrian soldier, Marshal Starhemberg.

It was on Starhemberg’s shoulders that the burden fell of carrying out the most heinous and monumental mass execution in recent times. Early in 1713, the drama was ready to come to a head, all the cogs in the machine set for the sky to fall in. All that was needed was for the lever to be activated. And Starhemberg was that lever.

The Beast and the Allies had formalized their agreement behind the scenes. The messenger arrived in Barcelona: Starhemberg should order and direct the evacuation of all Allied troops from Catalonia. Dutch, Germans, and Portuguese boarded the English fleet anchored at Barcelona. Didn’t this mean handing over this most faithful of countries to slaughter and butchery? Of course it did. And so what? It is not in the interest of England to preserve the Catalan liberties. Nor their lives.

Just imagine the astonishment of the Barcelonans when the news was made public. At first no one wanted to believe it. A wave of fatalism silenced every soul. On streets and in taverns, the inevitable was being discussed, and drunks sang the most gruesome ditties:

The Portuguese have signed the deal!

The Dutch will soon comply.

The English up and left us here. .

It’s time for us to die.

The walls of Barcelona were covered in posters, some of them of the very blackest humor:

The Comedy of Evacuation

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Spain, as the friar’s ass; our freedoms, as a toilet brush; slavery in a number two role; and all the Allies playing the part of shit.

The positions, titles, and boons that Charles had signed lost all their value overnight. There was one clown who would go around ringing a bell, throwing confetti over passersby, shouting: Es venen senyories a preus d’escombaries! Titles for sale, at the price of wastepaper!

The thing is, sarcastic humor has always helped people keep control of their fear. One day I ran into Nan and Anfán very close to our home, in the popular Plaza del Born, where they were acting as street performers. The dwarf was performing in the nude — if you don’t count the funnel on his head — like a deformed Adam. He had bent his left leg back as though he were one-legged. He had tied a ham bone to his knee, extending the apparently mutilated leg. From the front, he looked like a creature with a pig’s leg and trotter. He was using a penknife to scratch the bare bone in search of the last little bits of flesh. He was feigning terrible pain, and as he swallowed the minuscule pieces of ham, he seemed to be weighing the pleasure he got from tasting it against the torture he was inflicting on himself. Meanwhile, Anfán walked among the spectators, holding out an open bag, asking for contributions, and singing a little rhyme that was very popular in those days: Entre Carlos tres i Felip cinc, m’han deixat ab lo que tinc! Between Charles number three and Phil number five, they’ve left us with barely enough to survive!

Ah, laughter, that great outlet for fear, which buries it but does not drive it away. Because the third phase is terror.

Terror arrived in the city like the plague, brought in by travelers. Everyone fleeing from the interior of Catalonia converged at Barcelona. And whenever they came in through the city gates, the Barcelonans would pounce on them, questioning them about what was happening inland. They always gave the same answer: “All the horizons are on fire.”

And it was true. If a place did not surrender at once, it was blasted by cannon fire and attacked by the cavalry. The Bourbon columns that had followed the Allies in our retreat were not content with riding into the towns and cities. They demanded that the mayors come out to meet them and offer their submission.

Terror can play out in opposing reactions. Submission to the threat, most commonly. But sometimes, just occasionally, it incites a mood as uncommon as it is dangerous: collective rage.

The last columns of Allied soldiers retreating toward the coast were no longer being begged to stay; the civilians threw stones at them. The height of indignation came when proof emerged that there was treachery in addition to desertion — not only were they going, but as they beat their retreat, the Allies had handed the keys to cities and strongholds to the Bourbon commanders!

In the closing days of June 1713, Barcelona was seething with indignation. People are not stupid; they know full well whom to blame for their misfortunes. Hundreds of furious people gathered outside the residence of Viceroy Starhemberg and stuck chicken talons and feathers to the door. They were wrong in one respect: Starhemberg was no chicken, nothing of the kind, just as executioners are neither cowardly nor brave; they are simply despicable.

The Red Pelts came to ask him for an explanation as to why the Allies were retreating, why they were abandoning defenseless cities to such a cruel enemy, and finally, what Charles meant to do to prevent the execution of an entire population who had been faithful to him ever since the war started.

Starhemberg’s answer should go down in the history of cynicism: “My finest feelings and affection are with you, Excellencies.”

And he left. That same afternoon he climbed into his coach, leaving through the back door, on the pretext that he was off on a hunting party. He never came back. The truth was that he had gone to join the Allied troops who were about to embark at the mouth of the Besòs River, to the north of the city. The English fleet was there to prevent trouble in case of altercations in the port of Barcelona. Our loyal allies!

They say that Starhemberg did not even resign his post as viceroy. It’s hard to imagine any greater ignominy. Even men condemned to death are allowed to receive extreme unction.

And while our allies were departing, leaving us on the palisades, and the Bourbon columns made their implacable approach toward Barcelona, what did the Red Pelts decide to do? Nothing. Even as Starhemberg was packing his bags, up till the very last moment, they were still sending him dispatches for signature. According to their twistedly legalistic logic, that Austrian vulture was still viceroy. The machinery of state really ought to keep up appearances. The fact that Starhemberg was in league with the enemy, that he was handing over our homes and our freedom, well, heavens, that hardly seemed important!

Among the Allied regiments boarding ships were a few Catalans, though not many, who in their day had been enlisted in Charles’s imperial army. They weren’t Miquelets, halfway between hell and the law, merely men who wanted to make careers in a regular army. They knew exactly what was going on. They weren’t at the heart of government, they didn’t have daily dealings with the executive and their elevated politics, and yet they understood what was up and to whom they owed their fidelity. Right up until the final day, there were men who abandoned the ranks of the Allied forces, even some who leaped overboard from ships to head for Barcelona. Starhemberg exceeded mere rigor, ending up in cruelty: He gave orders that deserters should be executed, when the truth was that throughout the whole war, he had been quite unenthusiastic in his pursuit of deserters. And so our most generous young lads were left hanging from trees, dotting the path of retreat, and all the while the Red Pelts were bowing down before these boys’ murderer.

Toward the end of 1713, the Red Pelts decided to call the Catalan parliament. They were so disconcerted at the situation that the session could be summarized in one single point: How to face the Bourbon advance, submit or fight?

I should clarify that our parliament was divided into three groups, or branches: One was made up of the nobility; the second represented the common people; and the third, inevitably, consisted of the cockroaches from the Vatican.

As for you, woman, you are not to interrupt me or correct me when I pick on the priests! I’m perfectly aware of what I’m saying, and I’m going to speak my mind.

I am not saying that all priests are bad people. It’s not that. During the siege, you could see certain priests who were thinner than cypresses, fragile as glass, still and impassive as they faced enemy fire. With no earthly possessions but their cassock, they had bullets buzzing past their ears and they remained imperturbable on their knees, administering the sacrament to the dying on the front line. Their bishops, however, were like the Red Pelts, but black. You need only to look at the behavior of the cardinal and bishop of Barcelona himself, the wretched Benet Sala.

On the first day of discussion, the secretary to the parliament asked the ecclesiastical branch their view. As theirs was the smallest group of the three, it seemed logical that this should be cleared up before the others. Their answers were evasive. Not a yes, not a no. They just contended theological abstractions, according to which war is itself a bad thing, and when it breaks out between Christians, the good Lord weeps blood.

A fine bunch of Philistines! To the best of my knowledge, the Vatican has blessed dozens of wars, and they have never been too bothered that people have died in them. What was more, up till now, for thirteen long years of world war, it had never for a moment occurred to them to think that war was a very unpleasant thing. And then came the knife in the back.

Benet Sala had a good pretext for leaving Barcelona. Around that time, he had been called to Rome. And in one of those ruses so very typical of the Vatican, he had coordinated with Starhemberg to set sail the same time as the Allied forces.

Suddenly, the Barcelonans found themselves abandoned by the army who had been protecting their bodies and, simultaneously, by the shepherd who was meant to be caring for their souls. Naturally, Benet’s aim was to demoralize the very Christian people to whom he owed spiritual service, so that they would waver, surrender, and go into the slaughterhouse as docile as lambs. When I die, I hope to be able to have a few words with Benet Sala. Because I have no doubt we will both roast in the cauldron of Pere Botero, that devil of legend, but I can swear that Sala will also be drowned in it, strangled by yours truly in the soup.

Meanwhile, in the city, emotions were running higher and higher. What happened next is hard to explain.

Religious expression has always been a good outlet for feelings of powerlessness. The streets were filled with processions praying for the city’s salvation. They were an absolute nuisance, making trouble under our window day and night. While they were no more than murmuring crowds at first, their excitement grew with the city’s. The procession that caused the greatest impact was the one made up of the dozen young women who went off on pilgrimage to the holy mountain of Montserrat in a quest for divine intervention. (Montserrat is a very curious mountain to the northwest of Barcelona. It looks like a blunt-edged handsaw, at the summit of which is kept a strange virgin with black skin.)

Call me an unbeliever, but processions made up of pretty young women with tight-fitting bodices do seem rather better attended than the ones with people in hoods flagellating themselves. That vision, at a certain moment, prompted a thought in the minds of the people: “Well, actually, now that we think about it, why do we have to put up with girls this delightful going off to be sacrifices?” And in that way, religious processions were transformed into proclamations of rejection of the surrendering of the city. Eventually, the cries for the city’s saint, Saint Eulalia, were transformed into a clamor against Philip V.

And good old Zuvi? What was he up to while all these civic convulsions were going on?

What I was interested in, in those days, was reviving the legal case concerning my inheritance. I had plenty of free time and often stopped by the lawyers’ offices. The only thing that occurred to me that might speed up the case was talking to Casanova himself — he was the lord and master of that office. Nothing doing. Casanova was never to be seen there, and his employees just dizzied me with dispiriting circumlocution. That Señor Casanova had a senior political position now and couldn’t offer me his support, that the courts were overflowing with all this unrest, that this, that that, and the other. Other times the door wouldn’t open the whole day, so chaotic was everything. When that happened, I’d be in a filthy mood. When I was arguing with some pettifogging junior, I could always rail at him and get some of it off my chest, even if it did no actual good. But what can you do with a closed door? If they gave me a good brigade of sappers, I could storm a twenty-bastion fortress in twenty days. But the house of a lawyer? There was no point in even trying.

“Hey, Martí, want to see something fun?” Peret said one day.

The debates in parliament had started, and Peret had invited me to attend.

“You’re planning to go in?” I said scornfully. “There’s a triple guard on the door; the Plaza de Sant Jaume is full of hotheads. Can’t you hear?”

Through our windows, we could hear the howling of the indignant people as they gathered there.

“Just follow me and keep quiet. And put your Sunday clothes on.”

I had nothing better to do, so I followed him. It took us some time to get there, because Sant Jaume was indeed overflowing with a noisy mob. They weren’t revolutionaries, exactly; they weren’t crowding up against the doors and the guard. Their eyes were on the balcony. The people didn’t want to topple the government, they wanted to be led. Their cry was: “The Crida! Publish it! Publish the Crida!”

By the Crida, they were referring to the legal call to arms. Only the Crida had the sacrosanct power to call up Catalan adults in defense of the country, and anyone who rose up without its support found himself reduced to a Miquelet — that is, an outlaw, however patriotic his intentions may have been. That was why it was so important that it be published according to legal procedure. And the raison d’être of the Red Pelts was, naturally, to prevent it.

Peret walked me around the building to the door on Calle de Sant Honorat, which was much narrower and more discreet. There he muttered a few words in the ear of the two soldiers who were standing guard, and they let us in. I was surprised by the soldiers’ attitude, at once complicit and suspicious.

“A certain gentleman has offered me some money in exchange for my support for the cause he is defending,” Peret explained as we climbed the stairs.

The parliament was split into two opposing camps: those in favor of releasing the Crida, gathering an exclusively Catalan army and resisting, and those who would prefer us to submit ourselves to the approaching army of the Bourbons. As I have said, the Red Pelts had no interest in protecting the constitutions, and without a legal Crida, there could be no call to arms. So I followed Peret, and before I knew it, we were in the Chamber of Sant Jordi itself.

Imagine a large rectangular hall, high-ceilinged, with stone walls. Three of the walls were covered by grand chairs upholstered in velvet — red, naturally — in strictly kept rows. On the main table, there was nothing but a book of oaths and a small bell, all on top of a big crimson cloth. In theory, the bell was to begin and end different people’s turns to speak. I say “in theory” because when debates became more heated, the speakers didn’t care a fig for that bell.

On paper, the whole of the Catalan territory had the right to send representatives, which was impossible, when you bear in mind that three quarters of that territory was already occupied by the enemy. Things had moved into a new phase that day. With the voting rights divided out and all sewn up, both groups were concentrating on finding other ways of exerting pressure. Yes, you’ve guessed it: hiring mercenary throats to yell out their slogans and disturb the opposing speakers. Peret was a suitable candidate, because his age meant he could pass as an old patrician and because he would have sold his mother’s grave for a dish of fried squid. And the Chamber of Sant Jordi was every bit as stormy as the country itself. Not everyone who was supposed to be there was there, and not everyone who was there was supposed to be. Many members were unable to attend (they had good excuses: they were rowing in galleys or hanging from trees); others had simply abandoned their obligations.

If I remember right, this great day was July 4 or 5, and it was hot as hell. The spokesman for the pro-submission band was one Nicolau de Sant Joan. Before he started speaking, he was already being applauded. He urged people to be quiet. Solemnity was one thing, at least, he wasn’t short of.

“When strength is lacking, the natural thing is to consider the moral impossibility of resistance against power. Christian law and the law of nature both teach us, and persuade us, not to expose to the ultimate rigors of war our temples, those people of vulnerable age, those people whose lives are devoted to God. The fury of military license is no respecter of churches; nor does it have consideration for those of tender years; nor does it leave intact the sanctuary of virginity.”

At this point he was interrupted by a loud laugh. “Nor do we! Bring us a virgin, and we’ll show you how it’s done!”

It was Peret, of course. His impertinence, so inappropriate at that moment, confused Sant Joan. The Red Pelts were none too happy. “Rascals! Rebels! Silence!”

Sant Joan resumed his speech. “Our country finds itself between Castile and France; the ports to the sea, shut off by the French navy. As for the English, who have handed us over, we should feel apprehension and legitimate misgivings. So I ask you: Where does the king, our lord, have an army naval force superior to those two powers to bring us assistance? And even if they did arrive, what sums of money could he allocate to our aid, considering the war under way on the Rhine?”

“What we need are fewer rich people lining their pockets, and more cojones, you dunderhead!” shouted Peret. There were plenty of people behind him: “Boooo, boooo!”

“Enough! Rascals, rascals! Out of the hall! Out!”

Those words came from the Red Pelts’ claque, who were stamping their feet and waving their arms around. To the Red Pelts, common people were little better than riffraff who served only to get in the way between their office and the wise decisions they made. But they forgot that not everyone of their class thought the same way. And among them, sticking out like a beacon anchored in a desert, was one Ferrer. Emmanuel Ferrer.

Ferrer was a member of the minor nobility, but very popular because of the way he had distinguished himself in the administration of the city. This human rat addressing you now may have as much the makings of a hero about him as a horseshoe, but that doesn’t mean he can’t recognize those qualities, in all their magnitude, when they appear over the horizon. Ferrer lived a comfortable, peaceful life; he was wealthy and he was happy. He had nothing to gain from voting for resistance, and everything to lose. As soon as he spoke, he would have committed himself openly to one side, and when the Bourbons arrived, they would come after him with all their despotic bile.

When his turn came, Ferrer stood up and said: “I have a question: Is Catalonia any different now from what she used to be? Do our laws and privileges not give us the ability to oppose the Castilians who want unjustly to oppress us? What reason does the Bourbon have for oppressing us so severely, wanting to make our open and free people into a nation that is subjugated and enslaved? So who could possibly agree to Castilian vanity and violence being enthroned over the Catalans, that we should serve in the same ignominy they force upon the Indians?”

“You’re all crazy, irresponsible!” replied those on the side of the Red Pelts. “You’re going to bring our whole nation to ruin!”

I should like to be impartial. I would never say that the noblemen who voted to submit were all corrupt. By no means. There were more than reasonable justifications for not offering resistance. We had been abandoned; we were being attacked by the entire might of the Two Crowns, the French and Spanish empires combined. Voting for a negotiated solution, however little we might expect from such a thing at this point, did not necessarily imply serving Little Philip.

Ferrer invoked the name of the king of Portugal, a kingdom that was fearful of following the Catalans down the same route and who surely would help us; if we resisted, Emperor Charles wouldn’t be able to wash his hands of us without his international prestige being tarnished. England had signed a long-standing agreement; the Catalan ambassadors were traveling around all the courts of Europe arguing the case for a people who wanted nothing more than that most basic of rights: survival.

He was interrupted several times. Ferrer remained deaf to the voices of friends and enemies alike. He went over Catalonia’s history, of the pernicious dynastic alliance with Castile, and continued: “For all these reasons, let us at once take up arms and raise our flags, let us enlist soldiers without a moment’s delay. May the Fidelísimos Brazos Generales, our three honorable branches, use all the authority that God has placed in their hands; may they immediately draw up manifests to make our justice and our proceeding absolutely clear to all of Europe, and let our enemies discover to their cost that the spirit and honor of the Catalan nation has not declined a jot.”

Deep down, though, not even Ferrer was very hopeful. It was such a desperate play that it could almost have been mistaken for a noble suicide.

“May our nation meet her end with glory,” he went on, “for a glorious end is worth more than accepting demands and violence the likes of which even the Moors were never guilty of.”

My dear vile Waltraud interrupts me here, raising her great head like a cow who can’t find her pasture and asking, again and again, what my own opinions were at that time. They were not of the least significance, but very well, I shall summarize them.

My point of view sought to be as dispassionate as possible, and this was it: Both sides were right. To submit would mean losing the liberties that had ruled us for a thousand years, being transformed into one more province of Castile and its empire, sharing its people’s yoke, suffering merciless repression. Resisting, as the Red Pelts kept proclaiming, meant ruin and massacre. We were faced with a choice between two options, each as bad as the other.

There was a vote. Submission won. By a sizable majority. Ferrer gave a leap, went over to the secretary with the small bell, and insisted that his name be noted, that there be a specific record of his vote against. It was like signing his own death warrant. When the Bourbons arrived, that would be evidence enough to hang him. And yet other nobles got to their feet and went to follow Ferrer’s example!

I was amazed. Why would people do such a thing?

We ought to examine the other side of the coin, too. Just as admirable or even more so, strange though it may seem. Because there were noblemen like Francesc Alemany, Baldiri Batlle, Lluís Roger, or Antoni València, whose consciences led them to vote for submission, and so they did. Later, things would take a turn. And they fought. They followed the will of the majority, setting aside their personal opinions in favor of the general good. Waltraud asks me why I have tears in my eyes. I can tell you: because these men, who never chose resistance, fought unfaltering for a long year of siege. They acted in support of other people’s ideas, even those people who were opposed to them. And at dawn on September 11, 1714, they sacrificed their lives. All of them. I can see València now, attacking a wall of bayonets, saber in hand, swallowed up by a sea of white uniforms.

To give you some idea of the significance of the resolution, I’d say that the noblemen’s branch of the parliament was similar to that of the English lords. More important than the number of votes, it had an intangible moral weight, and it was very common that the people’s branch simply ratified their decisions.

“It serves you right that your side lost,” I said to Peret as we headed home. “Aren’t you ashamed of having sold your opinion?”

“No, lad, not at all,” he replied. “The Red Pelts paid me to join the claque in favor of submission, but they were foolish enough to pay up in advance.”

“In any case, they’re currently at two — zero,” I snorted as we made our way across a packed Plaza de Sant Jaume. “Priest and nobility, in favor of submitting. Tomorrow the people’s branch will follow the ruling from the nobles. It’s over.”

I have never been so wrong. We were still in the square when a spokesman came out onto the balcony and did indeed inform the crowd that the noble branch had voted for submission. It was as though a frozen downpour had fallen. No one objected. Of those thousand throats, not one rose up in an angry shout. But instead of going home, they continued to camp out where they were, there in the Plaza Sant Jaume!

In my opinion, that was the real turning point. Not an act of rebellion but a deaf noncompliance. The people down there were so disconcerted by what they had heard, just as the nobles up on the balcony were disconcerted by that mass stillness and silence. What could they do? They couldn’t expel all those people. Nobody would dare, nor did they have enough troops to try. Besides, an act of violence like that could lead to just the kinds of disturbance that the Red Pelts were trying so hard to avoid.

That whole night nobody moved from the packed square. The following day, the people’s branch of the parliament assembled. The atmosphere out on the street, and Ferrer’s speech, had so fired them up that their vote went in favor of resistance, and by an overwhelming majority. This time the Plaza Sant Jaume did react, with an explosion of joy: “Publish the Crida! Publish it!”

There was so much shouting, and it was so passionate, that they were no longer merely expressing a desire. It was a threat and an order; fail to comply and anything could happen. And more of the noblemen changed their votes! But it didn’t end there. The most intransigent of the Red Pelts placed a thousand legal obstacles in the way. They alleged that the branch of aristocrats had expressed the change in their intentions out in the corridor, not in a session that had been convened legally, and as such, it was not a binding decision. Their strategy, as it’s not hard to deduce, consisted in drawing out proceedings for so long that the people outside grew tired and went home. They did not succeed. Two days and nights had gone by and the Plaza de Sant Jaume was as full as ever, or fuller. Generosity always has this bitter side to it; those most willing to give everything are those with the least to gain by a victory and the most to lose from a defeat. Over the course of those two days, the debates ran aground.

On July 9, Peret wanted to go back to the Chamber of Sant Jordi.

“Again?” I exclaimed. “I can’t believe the pro-submission party has been so foolish as to pay out again to people who betrayed them at the last minute.”

“No, lad, no — you see, I gave such a convincing performance the other day that now those on the side of resistance have offered me a bit of money to yell even louder.”

“But the pro-submission party knows you; they’ll stop you from getting in!”

“No, they won’t, because I’ve informed the submitters about the offer from the resisters, and they promised me twice as much if we join the claque in favor of peace. I shall vote for submission. Long live peace! Want to come?”

When we went in, we found the Chamber of Sant Jordi a madhouse. The blessed altar of Catalan parliamentarianism transformed into a grocer’s store! As they were sitting in rows in front of one another, the yielders and the resisters were protesting, waving their hands before them like the tentacles of an octopus. Those in favor of fighting were shouting from their seats: “The constitutions and our freedom! Let’s draw up the Crida!”

“Peace and good sense!” came the reply from the other side.

Ha! As a spectator, I was getting irritated at the Red Pelts and their oafish sycophants. Hadn’t the vote gone for resistance despite all their schemings? Well then, if that was the freely expressed will of the people, the Crida would have to be drawn up. (As far as I was concerned, this would mean dashing out of the city as fast as I could go. No one needed to tell me, of all people, what a siege of such a big stronghold would mean!)

“Seny!” yelled those who favored submission. “Have you lost it? Seny!”

I should explain this seny business, the seny they were invoking. Isn’t that so, my dear vile Waltraud?

The Catalans are the world experts in useless spiritual inventions. You might describe seny as an attitude of calm, reasonableness, peacefulness. In theory, when faced with a serious problem, a man who is assenyat should react with a restraint altogether opposed to the chivalrous passion of the Castilians. The problem was, there was an army bearing down on us, and it was led by Castilian hidalgos. To their warrior mentality, seny was incomprehensible, a despicable trait of Jews and hucksters who sought to resolve their differences with words because they lacked the bravery to do it with swords.

As I said, the Chamber of Sant Jordi was overtaken by a cacophony of roaring. The Red Pelts had kept two coups de théâtre for that final day. They took the first one out of the grave.

An old nobleman, nearly blind, tottered into the chamber, one hand on a stick and the other leaning on the arm of his great-grandson. Did I say old? Ancient! He must have gotten up from bed at least four times a night to pass water; and just think, I get up three times myself.

His name was Carles de Fivaller. As with those old senators from the Roman republic, his moral potency came not so much from any position as from his experience and the respect he had earned over a long life of public service. Fivaller had an honorary seat in the chamber. Being such a wreck, he had not been present in any of the debates. But the Red Pelts had gone to fetch him out of bed, which he never left, to come in and advocate on behalf of seny.

There was something much more than a crooked old man entering the chamber. With Fivaller came Catalan parliamentarianism itself. Rather than taking his seat, Fivaller stopped in the exact center of the Chamber of Sant Jordi. Everybody knew his words would have a tremendous impact. Both sides stopped, reverent.

“My sons. The ruins of my age prevent me from being of use to my country,” said Fivaller, looking around in the way the blind do, at everyone and no one, his chin up. “Which is why I beg, I implore, this august chamber to grant one final wish, which I hope will be granted me.”

He had to stop to get his voice back. There was such silence that even the shameless Zuvi avoided swallowing so as not to make a sound.

Fivaller brought a trembling hand to his face to wipe away a tear and finally said: “Now that my hands can no longer bear the weight of a rifle, I ask you, please, in this fight we are forced into, to use my body to take the place of a fajina in the battle.”

Oh, the cry that went up then! Unexpected joys are the noisiest kind of all. Even some of the Red Pelts were moved, giving in. Perhaps Fivaller wasn’t quite so senile after all. Or so blind or so deaf. As he had crossed the Plaza de Sant Jaume, the square filled to bursting, he must have understood what was going on.

A subversive hand opened the balcony doors. Seeing them open, the people downstairs thought the matter had been decided: “The Crida! Announce the Crida once and for all!”

But the most inveterate Red Pelts still had one cartridge left. Together with their friends the Black Pelts, they had drawn up a list of theological-legalistic arguments. You can guess which way these were arguing.

Their Vatican eminences enjoyed considerable respect. They were perfectly capable of turning the tables. The nobles had already changed their minds once. Nothing prevented them from coming back. And a little sermon from the priests might be enough to make many delegates on the people’s branch have a bit of a think.

In order to have the greatest impact, they decided that the text should be read by their most talented rhetorician, a marble Demosthenes. He was admired by those of his profession, the men at law, and he had only lately decided to enter politics. Well, this great man was none other than Rafael Casanova, the lawyer who was dealing with my house, and who now walked into the chamber wearing the long red gown of the Catalan magistracy.

“You!” I cried the moment I clapped eyes on him. I leaped up, and with three strides I was beside him. “Damn it, Casanova! I’m absolutely fed up! Do you hear? I put my father’s inheritance in your hands! And I want the inheritance from my father! I have a right to it! Defend the damn thing once and for all!”

Since most of those present were educated people, when they heard “the inheritance from my father,” they interpreted this as a reference to “the inheritance of our forefathers,” a frequent theme of these debates. Those who were not yet on their feet were spurred on by my attack.

“The lad is right! Enough is enough! A hundred generations of Catalan heroes are looking down upon us from heaven. It’s time we drew up the Crida!”

Despite the high passion, the two sides had been jeering from their seats. But now, following my example, dozens of people piled in around Casanova, either to rebuke him with me or to shield him from me. Casanova, losing his balance, tried to straighten his red velvet cap, but I got away from Peret, and from everybody who was getting in my way, and I went back to jostling him.

“But this is violence!” protested Casanova, like Caesar receiving the first stab wound.

“Violence my foot!” I cried, indignant. “We pay you to defend our interests, and all you do is fob us off!”

“He’s right! Enough of this delay! The lad is right!” shouted all those opposed to submission. “We should be ashamed that we need a kid to show us the way. The enemy is approaching at a forced march, and we’re wasting our time on useless debates!”

At this point, Emmanuel Ferrer took the initiative. And it was a shrewd, brilliant initiative, as he was the first person to notice that the decision was hanging by a thread, a thread that was within reach of only the boldest. He walked away from the commotion and over to the bespectacled secretary with the little bell, who had remained in his place, with a haggard expression, and ordered him, pointing a finger, imperiously: “Write!”

The man needed to choose between chaos and a firm guiding spirit. For a moment the secretary thought about it. Then he dipped his pen in the inkwell.

Ferrer dictated a few hurried lines. Before the ink had dried, Ferrer stamped it with the government seal, grabbed the piece of paper from the secretary, and raised it in the air, proclaiming: “The Crida! I have it!”

Debate over. Ferrer was lifted into the air and carried out into the street. Outside, he was given an ovation from the crowd, frenzied and ecstatic. I could see this all perfectly, because rather than following them out into the Plaza Sant Jaume, I stepped out onto the balcony.

I saw Ferrer carried aloft on someone’s shoulders, showing the paper with the Crida to the crowd, who swirled around him like a wheel on its axis. I simply couldn’t understand it: They were weeping for joy because now they could go to a desperate war.

All those people carried off Ferrer — or, rather, the Crida—plunging into the city streets. The square was left deserted, covered in debris after the prolonged encampment.

The mentality of your average Catalan shelters one single moral principle, which is as flawed as it is endearing: They are always certain of having right on their side. They aren’t the only people to feel this way. What is extraordinary about the case of the Catalans, however, is what they deduce from this: Given that they are in the right, the world will end up realizing this. Naturally, things aren’t like that. The movement of a train of artillery depends not on truths but on interests, and they are not up for debate: They impose themselves on you, they crush you.

I remember that there were just two sentences. The first of them, to my mind, being the most exquisite, limpid, and beautiful yet written in the Catalan language.

Having on this sixth day of the present month advised this city council to resolve to defend the Liberties, Privileges and Prerogatives of the Catalan people, which our ancestors gloriously achieved at the cost of their own blood, we shall on the ninth day of the present month make order of the public proclamation for our defence

Marshal Starhemberg was surprised to hear the call to arms when he was right on the beach, just about to set sail. From the mouth of the Besòs River, he could see Barcelona’s western walls. He asked the reason for such a ruckus of shouts, drums, and trumpets. “A reckless enterprise,” he said, apparently, “but brave.”

He struck the ground twice with his walking stick and boarded his ship.

He ought to have formulated his words the other way around: a brave enterprise but reckless. And how! Or, rather, he should have said what he was really thinking: “You’re staying here, poor bastards.”

11

The historians tell us that at the start of the Third Punic War, the city of Carthage went through a military fever. All alone, with no friends and hurtling toward a certain end, the entire might of the Roman Empire was hurled upon them. And yet its citizens threw themselves into laboring for their defense with frantic ardor.

Something similar happened in Barcelona in 1713. A warrior passion overtook the whole city. The foundries beat out a frenzied rhythm. The workshops were turning out rifles, bayonets, projectiles of every size. Most surprising of all: The Barcelonans faced up to their dangers with a happiness that was quite in opposition to their circumstances. Children ran about the battalions, and — in an inversion of the natural order of things — women threw compliments to the soldiers.

There was a reason for this new mood. Barcelona’s popular classes had always felt that dynastic war between Austrians and Bourbons was something basically apart from them. But now war was approaching their walls and threatening to destroy the regimen of freedoms they had maintained for as long as they had been Catalans.

I’d add one more thing besides: By attacking the Barcelona of people like Amelis, Philip V was committing the most unforgivable mistake a tyrant can make: attacking the houses of people who have no houses. They will defend home tooth and nail, for that is the final redoubt of those who have nothing else. My Amelis had spent her life as a wanderer, her sex as her only refuge, and now that she finally had a home, this lunatic despot was threatening to cut her future short. And not just my Amelis; Barcelona was the refuge for the dispossessed from all over. The place where they had at last found four walls and a wage. How many of the heroes born in our siege were foreigners! And now that all the doubts about whether the fight was just and necessary had been dispelled, Barcelonans of all kinds were throwing themselves into this war, their war, with the kind of revelry that doesn’t happen even during carnivals. Just this once, rich and poor, men and women, were united in common cause. The happy were fighting for their happiness, while the unfortunate joined this common cause hoping that, in the struggle, their afflictions would disappear.

We should be impartial: Enthusiasm makes it impossible to see anyone but enthusiasts, and not everybody shared that uncommon euphoria. The indifferent, the fearful, the uncertain, the reluctant, even the occasional pro-Bourbon would keep quiet or hide themselves away, in the hope that times would change. But all the same, what a sense of unity! Fear is contagious — but hope is, too. Because a man like Zuvi, whose senses were so alert, couldn’t but be moved when his Bazoches eyes fell on the smiles of the poor, the wretched, the hungry who — at last — had found a cause to give their whole lives meaning.

Nobody could be more aware than a Bazoches student of how miraculous such a transformation is. Those of us in the business of war, who end up wedded to violence, have always been a tiny minority. In normal conditions, you don’t see anyone bearing a rifle. Actually, human beings are such cowardly creatures that for the most part, they aren’t prepared to risk their lives, even if it’s in order to save them.

One of the days of greatest jubilation was when the reluctant rich abandoned the city. The wealthiest, as one might imagine, didn’t want anything to do with that madness. They’d rather get to the Bourbon lines and throw themselves on Little Philip’s mercy. He wouldn’t deny them. The rich are always welcome.

They gathered in a convoy, like a herd finding safety in numbers. What exactly were they afraid of? The government of Red Pelts had always protected them. They were abandoning their civic obligations; it was public knowledge that they were thinking about heading to the town of Mataró, a well-known refuge for botifleros. And after they were gone, the Red Pelts did not expropriate their homes — inexplicably — but posted guards outside to prevent them from being looted.

On the day of their flight, their opulent carriages gathered on Calle Comerç. Since the convoy had been preannounced, the people were congregating along the roads that led out of the city, jeering and bombarding the vehicles with rotten vegetables. Those crowding onto the balconies scoffed at them and mocked them. But that was all. No acts of violence, nothing more than sarcasm and blackening potatoes launched at the wigs of the poor coachmen. Had the situation been reversed, the Bourbons would not have hesitated to resort to summary executions.

I happened to meet the convoy in its slow progress. The city’s children were using their whole repertoire of taunts on it, which could be tremendous. But the whole thing was a social act in which the festive prevailed over the punitive, and there was three times as much laughter as there was insult.

I was filled with sorrow. Those people fleeing were going to be spared an imminent terrible siege, and I and mine should have been in those carriages, those life rafts amid the shipwreck. All of a sudden I noticed the last carriage stopping beside me.

“Martí!” I heard my name being called. “Well, if it isn’t you, Zuviría’s son!”

It was Joaquim Nadal, the richest investor in my father’s company. When he saw me, he ordered his coachmen to stop his carriage. He opened the door and leaned halfway out and said: “What are you still doing here? Come on, get in! You can see my carriage is the last. What luck I spotted you, lad!”

When he saw that I was hesitating, he looked at me, confused. Carrots and turnips bounced off the roof of the vehicle. “Botifleros, botifleros!” cried the crowd. “Foteu el camp! Bugger off!”

Nadal insisted: “Come on, kid! What’s up with you? This is your last chance. Come with me, or you’re staying here at the mercy of this rabble.”

I excused myself and said politely: “But this isn’t rabble, Señor Nadal. They are the same people they always were; they’re our neighbors.”

He stared at me as though I were a lunatic. “I see,” he said thoughtfully, as vegetables continued to rain down, and after a moment he said again, “I see.” He closed the door and told the coachmen to drive on.

That night, at home, Peret spent dinner praising the new battalions and their banners, which had been blessed in church. Some of the units were in blue uniforms, while others wore the most beautiful garnet. There were even some as yellow as lemons. When he started talking wonders about the works that had been carried out on the city walls, I could no longer contain myself. I interrupted him so sharply that he did indeed shut up.

“Has the entire city lost its mind?” I protested to him and Amelis. “Dreamers like you haven’t the slightest idea of what’s happening on the other side of the Pyrenees. None at all!” I banged the table. “How many Catalans are there in the world? Half a million, give or take a few. There are more people living in Paris alone. The French are born with a bayonet under their arm; they are the most aggressive people in the world. And they’re heading this way, the army of the Spanish empire reinforced by battalions from France. And we have been abandoned by all our allies — all of them! Oh, well, that’s just splendid!” I exclaimed, applauding my own sarcasm. “So, now tell me: If the city arms itself and closes the door, can you imagine for one moment what the consequences of such lunacy would be? Spain can devastate the city by land and France by sea, but I’m not going to let them destroy my house.”

An uncomfortable silence fell. I didn’t expect Amelis to be the one to speak. Quietly, in a voice that for her was unusually subdued, she asked: “And if the city were to give itself up, would everything be all right then?”

I rubbed the back of my neck and answered: “I don’t know. No one can know. That’s why we’re going to go. The five of us. You, me, Nan, Anfán, and Peret. We’ll come back when things have calmed down. It’s decided.”

I expected an argument, shouting, but they offered neither dissent nor agreement. Amelis shut herself up in the bedroom. Peret wandered over toward the fireplace, rekindled the fire, and started to roast peppers. Their docile behavior made me feel empty inside, as though I were throwing punches at the air. I followed Amelis and closed the bedroom door behind me.

“Anfán’s only a boy,” I said. “Nan is such a troubled little fellow. Peret has only ever left the city to go out on chocolatadas. But you know as well as I do what the advance of the Bourbon army really means. You’ve seen the woods filled with hanged men, the outrages perpetrated in the occupied towns. If I enlist, you know what difference there’ll be between your destiny and mine?” Before she could answer, I announced, “I’ll just be killed.”

If she had only resisted or replied. Whenever that particular sadness of hers took her over, I was rendered speechless. It was as though she were crying on the inside and I could not dry her tears.

She walked over to the music box and opened it. She looked up at the sky through our glass skylight and said: “Very well, you’re in charge. We’ll go. But tell me, Martí—where? The whole country’s at war. Are we going to set sail for Naples? And once we get there, what then? There’s war in Italy, too. Are we going to Turkey? Farther still?”

“No,” I replied, “there’s no need. We just have to get to Mataró. It’s not two days’ walk from here.”

“With the botifleros?”

There was no recrimination in her tone, but that didn’t stop me from feeling insulted. “With people who want nothing to do with any of this!” I replied.

“And how do you know they won’t attack Mataró? The pro-Austrians, the Bourbons, the Miquelets. And if, somehow or other, pro-Austrians do win the war, how will we come back to Barcelona then? Every finger will point at us and call us traitors.” Her gaze still fixed on the skylight, Amelis went on: “I told you I used to live by following armies on the march. I lied. It’s the armies who have always followed me. I lost my virginity to a French soldier when I was thirteen. I bled for eight days. On the ninth, there was a Spanish captain. The ones who came afterward, I don’t remember too well, I don’t want to. A lot of Miquelets. At least they would give me something to eat after doing it. After that, I just wandered.” She looked around her. “I’ve never had a home.”

For the first time since I’d come into the room, she looked at me, very sad. “Let’s go, then, Martí. But just tell me: Where? Where?”

I couldn’t bear that she agreed with me: Whenever she did, it disarmed me. As for me, the question I was asking myself was a different one. What right did a king have to change my life? Anyway, what did I really care about in this insignificant life, this paltry crumb of le Mystère?

The thing I most loved in the world was the sight of Amelis getting out of bed every morning, naked, squatting down over the washbasin to clean herself. Her black hair fell as far as her nipples. She always parted her knees wide. And she used a lot of water, perhaps because the place between her legs was the refuge for a thick black bush. From bed I would watch her, and we’d exchange a smile. Despite all my woes and all my impudence, nobody had the right to interrupt that sequence of everyday actions that allowed me to recognize happiness. Nobody.

A sigh. I raised four fingers till the tips touched the glass of the skylight. What would Ten Points have said? “Once you have grazed this sky with your fingers, you will never want to pull your hands back again.” There are moments when life positions us in just the right place where morality and necessity converge. Why would anyone decide to tackle a fight that would be desperate and fatal? For eternal glory? For the perpetual comfort of the human race? No, my friend, not that. Le Mystère has already told me.

People allow themselves to be killed at Thermopylae for an apartment with a skylight.

Having served under Don Antonio, I didn’t find it hard to secure an audience with him. Because, unbelievable though it may sound, the Red Pelts had chosen him as commander in chief of our forces. An unexpected decision. There were two other candidates from older families who were, thank God, rejected. They were Catalans, they had no shortage of military experience, and naturally, their titles in the nobility surpassed Don Antonio’s — he was, as we know, a Castilian national, born to our sworn enemies. Why, then, did they choose Villarroel? Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps, out-and-out defeatists that they were, the Red Pelts were not all that optimistic and wanted to avoid one of their own being responsible for the disgrace of the inevitable disaster. Or perhaps the reason was simply that he was the best of the best, and having the option to choose such a competent general, even they could not deny him the position.

In truth, I approached his office with a mixture of contradictory feelings. My dear vile Waltraud asks me how it’s possible that I had never paid him a visit, given that he had been free for a year. The answer is very simple: because my joy at his return was combined with my shame at having abandoned him right before his capture.

He offered me a seat and was polite to me, too polite. In Don Antonio, this was not a good sign. Why? Well, because he was never, not ever, agreeable to those under his command.

“I am most grateful for your offer,” he said at last. “But I am going to turn it down.”

I stopped, frozen. Had we not shared the 1710 Retreat? Had I not proved my worth as an engineer? Within Barcelona’s walls, there were few qualified engineers. Did he not think me competent, as he had three years earlier, and then out in the open?

“Of course I do. Despite your youth, as an engineer, you have mastered techniques that are unprecedented and always effective.”

“But?”

He thought for a moment before answering in that booming voice of his: “I’m turning you down because you don’t have what you need to have.”

I wanted to throw some punches, to take it out on the walls. Naturally, I asked what he was referring to.

“Our last conversation, in Illueca,” he said. “I offered you the chance to leave, and you left.”

“That’s right, Don Antonio,” I replied, offended. “But it was you, as I recall, who offered me the chance to run away.”

“Indeed. And so you fled with no dishonor. But that’s just it. If you had stayed, your captivity would have been glorious.”

I saw red. “Oh, for the love of God, Don Antonio! What use would it have been if they’d captured me? I still think it was a mistake for you to allow yourself to be taken prisoner, thereby depriving the army of your skills as a commander.”

He smiled. “Come now, Zuviría, be honest with yourself. Your flight wasn’t motivated by rationality but selfishness. You weren’t driven by your love for life but your fear of death.”

“They were just a little band of cripples!” I protested. “And do you want to know something sad, Don Antonio? When I got back to Barcelona I went for help. Well, nobody wanted to listen to me, no one in the army even remembered the wagons that you and I had been escorting. The worst thing of all is that they might have been right: Four wagons of invalids were not going to win the war.”

“You see,” he interrupted me. “You served under my command, but you understood nothing, nothing at all.”

I was so hurt that I didn’t say a word. I got up and walked toward the door.

Looking back now, from so many years later, I think Don Antonio had set up the whole scene. Because when I already had my hand on the doorknob, he said: “One word. If you’d said just one word in Illueca, I would consider you an engineer.”

I stopped. One word. Perhaps on some binge, drunk on cheap booze, I had confessed my tragedy to Don Antonio. One word! In any case, that phrase set my insides on fire. I turned — furious — and banged my fists down on his oak table.

“Everyone in this city has gone mad!” I cried. “Everyone! Every person from the council down to the last beggar is supporting a defense that is idiotic! I’ve fought against the opinions of my family, of my friends, of my neighbors. And now that they’ve finally persuaded me to take part in this preposterous defense, here you are — you of all people — refusing to enlist me. No! You have no right to do this! This is my city, it’s my home, and you are going to let me into your fucking army whether you like it or not!”

He allowed me to vent for a while, and when I was out of breath from all those words, he said: “That’s already an improvement. At least it’s some progress.” After a pause, he added: “I told you in Illueca, son. The war is not yet over, and nor are your tribulations.”

That night, at home, we had a goodbye dinner to bid farewell to peace. At least to the fake peace the city had been living through over the past few years. When we reached dessert, I called for a minute of everyone’s attention.

“After some tough negotiating with Don Antonio, he has bestowed the rank of lieutenant colonel upon me. Did you hear that? You’re talking to a lieutenant colonel, so from now on, I’ll expect you to address me with appropriate respect! The youngest lieutenant colonel in the army! And that’s not all. My pay will increase by ten percent, because in addition, he has hired me as his own private aide-de-camp.” I couldn’t help a smile of triumph. “What do you think?”

“A lieutenant colonel!” cried Amelis. Though she then asked: “So what’s one of those?”

“You see, my love,” I explained between puffs on the cigar I was smoking, “in an army, the rank immediately below a general is a colonel, who leads a regiment. A lieutenant colonel is an officer pending the assignment of his own regiment. Do you understand?”

“So you don’t have your own regiment yet?”

“Well, no,” I confessed. “But what does that matter?”

Anfán was sitting beside me. He tugged on my sleeve and asked: “Jefe, how many soldiers do you command?”

“None in particular,” I replied. “I will be taking charge of higher matters. The reality is that I will be working as an engineer. But Don Antonio, valuing me so highly, believed I ought to have a rank fitting with my authority, to carry more weight among the soldiery.”

“Well, I think it’s a pretty shitty rank if you aren’t commanding any soldiers, jefe,” Anfán concluded.

“I’ll be earning twenty-six pesos a month!” I announced very proudly. “That’s without counting the extra ten percent as aide-de-camp.”

At this point Peret intervened: “So tell us, Martí, this aide-de-camp thing, what exactly does it mean?”

“I’ve told you, it means I’ll be completely available to Don Antonio for any crisis or anything that happens to come up. He values me very highly!”

“So you mean you’ll be Villarroel’s errand boy.” He burst out laughing. “You’ve allowed yourself to be duped. Your working day is going to be twice as long, if not more.”

“In exchange for which you’ve only got another ten percent,” Amelis pointed out. “Some negotiator you are!”

They had succeeded in casting gloom over my mood. “You’re right, maybe I’m not the best businessman in the world!” Like anyone who finds himself at a loss for an argument, I resorted to patriotism. “But when the enemy is approaching, we shouldn’t lower ourselves to pecuniary baseness.”

“What color will your uniform be?” asked Amelis.

“None. I won’t have one. In practice, as I said, I’ll be working as an engineer. And the engineer corps are not required to be in uniform.”

“Not required to be in uniform!” exclaimed Peret, laughing. “Have you ever heard of a general who is — as you put it—not required to wear a uniform? You haven’t even gotten them to pay for one of those for you!”

They were ruining my party, the lot of them. This wasn’t the triumphal march I had been expecting.

Peret asked: “And your name will be signed up to the lists of which regiment?”

“Signed up?”

“Yes, man, on the payroll of which regiment?”

I gave a dismissive wave of the hand holding my cigar and said: “Oh, I don’t need to be troubling myself with those little details. Don Antonio is the most honest man in the city. It’s inconceivable that he would not make sure I appear on somebody’s payroll.”

“Very well,” Peret insisted, “but in which regiment?”

“I don’t know!” I gave up, cornered and deep down rather annoyed at myself for not being able to give a different answer. “When I was in France, I learned to build, defend, and attack bastions. Nobody taught me what kind of bureaucratic paperwork is required by rearguard secretaries!”

“Fantastic!” They all roared with laughter, including the dwarf. “They aren’t buying you a uniform, and you’ll be spending your days racing this way and that. You’re a lieutenant colonel, which is a provisional rank; you have no provisional regiment, and you don’t know which one you might have.”

“Very well!” I said, defending myself. “I think I remember Villarroel saying something about an imperial regiment. He has already sent letters to Vienna asking for confirmation of his own position and, while he was at it, doubtless asking for me to be enlisted in one of Charles’s units. We can take that for granted. Do you think the emperor isn’t going to listen to the request of his only general in Spain?”

This time the laughter was so thunderous that the neighbors banged on the walls in complaint.

“But how very stupid you are, Martí! That’s not how things work. If they sign you up to an Austrian regiment, it’ll be months before you get your rank recognized. And now you’re being paid out of Vienna, not Barcelona. Until the imperial funds arrive, you won’t get a salary. The French fleet is blockading the port, so it’s quite possible you’ll get nothing.”

They had spoiled my dinner. Worst of all, they were right.

“Fine!” I said, addressing Peret. “Maybe I’m not going to get rich, but you’ve enlisted as a private, and the salary for privates is nothing to write home about.”

“And who says it’s the Generalitat who’s going to be paying me?” he replied, laughing at my bewildered expression. “Martí, you know what the Barcelona rich are like. You think people like that are going to be prepared to join battalions, climb bastions, or stand guard night and day, to risk getting shot at or bombarded? Of course they aren’t. It’s one thing being in favor of constitutions and liberties, it’s quite another gambling their own skin for them. And so I showed up at the home of some of the particularly reluctant ones.”

“A commercial visit,” said Amelis, understanding at once.

“Precisely,” said Peret. “The government wants complete units, but they don’t give a damn about the identity of the people who make them up. So I have offered myself to fill the place of the biggest shirkers. In exchange for a small gratuity, naturally.”

“You’ve taken the place of a rich person who doesn’t want to fight!” I cried, outraged.

“Only after a strict auction,” said Peret.

They spent the rest of the night mocking good old Zuvi and his poor commercial sense. By the end of it, I was so dejected I couldn’t even finish my cigar. Of all the sieges I’ve taken part in over the last seventy years, the one government by whom I wasn’t paid a cent was that of my own country. Still. . I didn’t know it at the time, but that was actually our last night together and happy. Why does it cost so much to see how happy you are, when you are?

I can remember Peret laughing at my naïveté; I remember his wish to fight, at his age, and I think how fortunate we human beings are that our destinies are hidden from us. My friend Peret was killed after it was all over.

By the end of the siege, the only healthy Barcelonans were the cannibals. You could recognize them because their skin was an unnatural pinkish color, their pupils shone repulsively like the eyes on a fresh fish, and their lips were frozen in a perpetual smile. The rest of the city’s inhabitants were a beggarly mass, dusty bodies, as though they had been shut away in some dark attic. For weeks, months, after the siege, the Barcelonans who traveled outside the city could be recognized by their deathly complexion and their crestfallen gait. One day Peret went out to get some food. Perhaps simply because he was Barcelonan, some spiteful soldier shot him. But it’s more likely that they cried halt at some roadblock. He didn’t hear their voices and they fired.

What is a fortress? Bring together a handful of people ready to fight, an enclosed space, and a standard, and there you have a fortress. In the summer of 1713, the military situation was as I am about to describe it to you, and I will begin with the good part.

As we know, the Red Pelts had named Don Antonio commander in chief of the army. A huge task was expected of Don Antonio, if not an impossible one: to organize, drill, and lead an army that did not exist, with the mission to defend a city that was indefensible.

Besides the staff officers, the most outstanding thing we had was our artillery. This was under the command of Costa, Francesc Costa. Quite a fellow. The best artilleryman of the century. To give you an idea of his skill, I shall set down just one piece of information: When the Bourbons entered, Costa was the only senior officer they did not detain. (Well, Costa and good old Zuvi, to be precise.) Jimmy, being of a rationality that was as superb as it was entirely without scruples, knew what he was dealing with and offered him various perks and an extremely well-remunerated position, four doubloons a day, if he joined the French army. Costa did not hesitate for a second. He said yes, that he would be very honored to make a career in the army of Louis XIV. That same night he disappeared.

Costa’s best artillerymen were from Mallorca. When it came to Costa’s lightning flight after September 11, I would bet anything that it was his Mallorcans who had met him to set sail for the Balearics.

Costa was a small, quiet fellow. He didn’t walk; rather, he slid along, head down and hidden between his shoulders, eyebrows raised as though he was always astonished or apologizing. He never spoke unless spoken to. It was most wearing having to deal with him; the fact is, people who are so shy unnerve any interlocutor. His favorite words were “yes” and “no,” and while concision is highly desirable among technicians, Costa’s excess of reserve was out of all bounds. Let us forgive him. Let us admire him. If anyone could understand him, it would be me. We had parallels that connected us: On paper, command of the artillery fell to General Basset, just as that of the engineers fell to Santa Cruz the elder. In practice, I led on the engineering, and Costa on the cannons. These functions above our rank wove a complicity between us. To people like Costa, reality was no more than the angle and distance at which a bomb fell.

His shyness was innate, and he concealed it by chewing on parsley all day long. By the end of the siege, everybody was chewing on weeds so as to deceive their hunger, no choice in the matter, but for Costa it was a natural impulse. As for the possibility of making conversation with him, as I said, you had to drag every word out of him. I remember the first time we met. I asked him how many artillery pieces we had at our disposal.

“Ninety-two.”

I had expected some complaint or request. But nothing. “Have you set out the pieces according to Don Antonio’s orders?”

“Yes, with a few adjustments.”

“Do you think we’ll have enough?” I asked, still faced with this parsimony of his.

“It depends.”

I waited for some further comment. None came. “And what does it depend on, in your opinion?”

He looked at me wide-eyed, as though only my judgment mattered and not his. “On the ones the enemy’s got.”

“To the best of our knowledge at the moment, bearing in mind that our spies have been giving us reports that don’t all match up,” I said, “their convoy is made up of a hundred and fifteen. We can assume that there will be reinforcements coming in future.”

“Well, then,” he said.

“Well, then?”

“Yes.”

His terseness was irritating me; he must have noticed, and he added, raising his eyebrows higher still and chewing his parsley: “My Mallorcans will keep them at bay as long as they do not outnumber us by a ratio of more than five to three. Beyond that, I cannot give any assurances.” He took more sprigs of parsley from his pocket and began to chew on them like a bored rabbit.

As to the general situation, the good part ends here, and there wasn’t much to it. And so begins the bad bit.

A fortress without troops to defend it is as useless as a garrison in a stronghold without walls. Even you, my dear vile Waltraud, can understand that. Well, we had neither one nor the other. Neither an army nor walls.

The first time I went over the rolls of the army, my soul plummeted into my feet. Villarroel wanted a precise calculation of the resources and forces at his disposal. One day he came through the door while I was discussing matters with Costa. He interrupted us as brusquely as usual. He wanted to know why he hadn’t seen the list of all the units.

“I’m sorry, Don Antonio,” I said, “I haven’t been able to calculate the totals because of a mistake.” I couldn’t help laughing while I showed him some papers. “Some idiot in the government has sent us this. I ask them for the army rolls, and they send us the plans for a proposed new market.”

As Villarroel was reading the papers, I laughed again. “They must have muddled the documents,” I added. “What you’ve got there must be the layout for positions for sellers, suppliers, and traders. As you know, they’re saying that, after the war, they want to restructure the market in Plaza del Born. I’ll go myself to the Generalitat in person today and demand the correct rolls.”

But Villarroel was looking at me with those frowning eyes, saying nothing.

“That can’t be.” I swallowed. “Tell me you’re joking.”

Until that day, I had thought we would be making war like any other European kingdom (albeit with no king). The government would hire professional forces wherever they could be found, or would bring them in from elsewhere by making them a reasonable offer. The local militia would be there for support and supplies. What else could you expect from civilians who were barely more skilled than old Peret?

The only professional troops the city had were remnants of the Allied army, the odd individual who, for one reason or another, had decided not to go when his fellows were evacuated. The best little group were the hundred Germans. They were together in a unit of their own, led by eleven officers of the same origin. And such compact ranks! I had to bring them countless messages, which they obeyed with a watchmaker’s precision. Professional soldiers will always have a bit of the adventurer about them. I say this because Waltraud, who has less imagination than an ant, couldn’t understand what some of her compatriots were doing in Barcelona between 1713 and 1714. In those days, it was hardly the most pleasant place in the world to be, though an adventurer isn’t looking for what’s safe but what’s exciting. Many of them had reasons for not returning home, and the Generalitat paid reasonably well; others, in short, had good reasons for staying.

You must understand, my dear vile Waltraud, that in this world, there is such a thing as mutual attraction between male and female genitals, also known as love. Barcelona was full of beautiful women, either single or married to seamen who were practically never home, and. . Well, need I go on? As for the other enlisted foreigners, there were so few, they’re not even worth counting. Yes, we did have a bit of everything, from Hungarians to Irishmen (even Neapolitans, who were still everywhere). I met one who was from the Papal States.

But as I say, the bulk of our army was made up of simple civilians. I had left my city when I was very young, and was only vaguely aware of what was considered the traditional way of defending it. It was based on the Coronela, the local militia. Each trade was assigned its own unit as well as one of the city gates. This was all very well by the military standards of the thirteenth century, but this was five hundred years later, and we were living in Vauban’s technical age.

To give you an idea of my distress, I shall describe to you the entire roster of the Fifth Battalion.

First company: attorneys-at-law. (And they didn’t even know how to take care of my case! How could we expect them to fire a rifle or man a bastion?)

Second company: blacksmiths and tinkers.

Third company: market gardeners.

Fourth company: potters, upholsterers, and makers of pots and pans. (At least these latter are easier to understand: When the hunger sets in, there will be empty pots and pans aplenty.)

Fifth company: belt-makers.

Sixth company: butchers. (Another group who’ll be out of work before long.)

Seventh company: cobblers.

Eighth company: silk weavers and dyers.

Ninth company: students of theology, medicine, and philosophy. (A fine graduation awaits them.)

And with this, we had to face dragoons and grenadiers trained through experience in a thousand battles: with companies of coopers, innkeepers, and velvet-makers; booksellers, glovers, rope-makers, grooms, tailors, stevedores, legal clerks. As I recall, the Sixth Battalion had an entire company made up of people who resold things. Yes, you read that right, they weren’t people who sold things; they resold them. What could they have been thinking when they signed them up? Reselling to the quartermaster the bullets that had been used by the enemy?

The total came to fewer than six thousand armed men. Fewer than six thousand against forty thousand. Some of those forty thousand were tied up trying to hold back our Miquelets from the interior, but even if there were only thirty thousand, the math didn’t lie: As far as troops were concerned, for each defender of Barcelona, there were five Bourbons. To complicate matters still further, our problems began before the siege had even been formalized.

The only scenario in which the running of a military dictatorship is permissible, indeed necessary, is in a city under siege. It isn’t a matter of politics but common sense. Because the worst position for a military stronghold is trying to face an attack while under a split command. And that was precisely what happened to us.

Villarroel was supposed to be the commander in chief of all the pro-Austrian troops remaining in Spain. But as I have already explained, the problem was that the vast majority of the soldiers belonged to the Barcelonan militia, under the control of the council. Furthermore, Don Antonio always bore the burden of having been named commander in chief by the Catalan government, who considered him a general there to do their bidding. Villarroel insisted that his position be ratified by Vienna, which finally happened in November 1713. But this only made matters worse, because according to the terms of the Treatise of Evacuation between the Two Crowns and the Allies, imperial troops were not allowed to remain in Spain. The Red Pelts considered him a foreign subordinate; to the enemy, he was a rebellious Castilian.

The Red Pelts always guarded their prerogatives very jealously, and Don Antonio had to ask their permission if he even wanted to transfer the company of the Impedits, made up of former soldiers who had lost limbs. Going to war with people missing an arm or half a leg might seem a little absurd, but I can assure you, they were tremendously useful fellows. They had experience and extremely high morale. I remember one of them, with one leg that went down only as far as the calf of the other, raising his crutch as Don Antonio walked past, exclaiming: “General! I shall not retreat, I give you my word!”

During a siege, garrison work is a terrible drain on troops. Even if a system of rotation is used on the bastions, tiredness, bombardments, and sickness lead to a trickle of losses that we couldn’t allow to happen. The Impedits would be useful covering bastions and stretches of walls that were not under the most severe threat, allowing those being relieved a bit of rest.

There were disgraceful scenes. Don Antonio in a council of war with the Red Pelts, screaming his head off — flushed with rage — demanding, protesting, that they allow him a hundred men? Even fifty? Pitiful. A commander in chief being denied the right to move a handful of cripples. All we needed at that point was for Villarroel’s aide-de-camp to be one Martí Zuviría, a fellow universally known for his diplomacy. More than once — and more than twice — I nearly smashed in some councilor’s spectacles. It was infuriating. More than infuriating, because in certain situations, stupidity can come to resemble pure treason.

Let us recall that when it all began, in that ominous summer of 1713, the enemy was approaching Barcelona at a forced march. The Allies’ garrisons were handing the keys to our cities to the killer. Deceived, disconcerted, with no authority giving them orders and all taken completely by surprise, it had never occurred to the Miquelets scattered around the countryside that such a stab in the back was possible. They came down from the mountains and, from one day to the next, found friendly sites occupied by Bourbon troops. There was nothing they could do but remain on the horizon watching the fires, the looting, the executions. The final uproar.

In those circumstances, some drastic decisions were essential: extending the Crida right across the country, proclaiming the legitimacy of Barcelona’s government, and bringing together disparate fighters under a single banner. They had to prevent more towns and cities from falling into Bourbon hands. And for this, it was inescapable, desperately urgent, to show some symbol that would unite those who were longing for a voice to lead them. Villarroel ordered a military delegate to leave the city immediately with the silver mace and the banner of Saint Eulalia and travel across the country proclaiming that the struggle was not over.

“Take the sacred banner of Saint Eulalia beyond the Barcelona walls?” The Red Pelts were not sure. “That is most unusual. This will require a debate first.”

They weren’t joking! Solemnly, they gathered in council. Was it fair and fitting within the law and tradition that the sacred banner should be taken outside Barcelona’s walls? What honorable escort would accompany it? As for the few noblemen who were still in the city, were their titles sufficiently worthy for them to carry the pole and its braids? The debate stretched on; it was resumed the following day and then the next, and the next, without arriving at a definitive legal conclusion. Villarroel was absolutely incensed. By the time they had decided, the enemy would have taken control of all of Catalonia, with the exception of Barcelona and a few isolated sites like Cardona, those places where the most determined native commanders had refused to comply with the imperial orders.

Let us now examine the fortifications of Barcelona, which so often used to make me turn away, unwilling to judge them so as not to relive my past as a student in Bazoches.

The first order Villarroel gave me, his first commission, was to produce a report on the general condition of the defenses. I obeyed. I walked around the whole site. I cried. And when I say that, I am not, to my shame, speaking rhetorically.

As well as being an engineer, I happened also to be a Barcelonan. And when you examine the walls of your own city, knowing with certainty that they are going to be attacked by armed men ready to burn down your house, kill your children, and rape your wife, you see things somewhat differently. According to le Mystère, I ought not to feel emotion. A Maganon without a cool head is not a Maganon or anything at all. To justify my dismay, however, I should tell you that what I found was a complete and utter disaster.

Comparisons can be useful. Look at the next illustration. Put it in the place where it’s supposed to go, or you can forget that you and I ever met, you fat old magpie.

If by any chance, destiny had seen good old Zuvi commissioned to fortify Barcelona, this would have been the optimal result.

As you can see, the city walls and the inner bastions are protected by a series of staggered half-moons or ravelins, perfectly arranged and three meters deep. Each one would have to be taken in separate attacks, without this ever affecting the main line of defense. By the time Jimmy managed to reach our final redoubt, the number of his dead would form such a tall mountain that the top ones could be buried on the moon. In fact, and following Vauban to the letter, the very existence of such fortifications would discourage any assault. Jimmy was a sly fox and would have graciously declined the honor of leading a siege of such complexity. And if not Jimmy, who else could vanquish us?

Now compare the previous plate with the sad reality, on the following page.

Devastating. Incongruous. Dislocated jaws, a heap of shapeless lumps. Or, as Vauban would have defined it technically, more circumspectly, a “composite fortress”; that is, an ancient site that has been patched up to meet the demands of modern warfare.

The old city walls had been supplemented with a few pentagonal bastions. There was no small number of them, and each had its own name, its own story; in themselves, they were real characters who were dear to the Barcelonans. But all those bastions had been built in different periods, with no overall plan and as though merely patched up. A few stretches of the wall were so long that the gunfire from one bastion could not serve as backup for the next, being too far apart. As for the dry moat that had to stretch around the outside of the fortifications, the less said about that, the better. It was so full of waste and debris, and so shallow, that you could see the ears of the pigs that grazed in it. A bankrupt government would find it hard to allow for whole squads of cleaners. The sieges at the end and beginning of the century had damned whole stretches of the perimeter. Amazing as it may sound, nobody had bothered to repair the holes. That is the position we found ourselves in. And now we had the barbarians ad portas. A devastating military machine, ignited by a hatred toward the “rebels” and trained through their experience in a long decade of campaigns. In under two weeks, they would be pitching camp outside Barcelona.

One might want to formulate this entirely legitimate question: If war came to the peninsula in 1705, and between that date and 1713 there were eight long years to fortify the city, how was it possible that the Catalans, who had their own government, never took care of the defenses of their city? This is one of my private torments, an argument that fills my nightmares and the distress of my wakeful hours. What could have happened? You should never have recourse to an “if. . ”; that “what if. .?” can kill. Because the answer, curiously, is neither political nor military. It doesn’t even have anything to do with matters of engineering.

Vauban was indeed the greatest military engineer of all time. But he was also French. In his study, using only ink and paper, he could create fascinating systems of defense, optimal and perfect, overwhelming in their geometric beauty. There was one problem with Vauban’s system of fortification and one only: It cost a lot of money.

Human imagination can develop at no cost, right up until the point at which it comes into contact with contractors. Tons of material, thousands of stonecutters, carpenters, and laborers, dozens of local specialists — or, more frequently, foreign ones, charging astronomical fees. Suppliers cheat, swindle, and defraud the government’s finances. The work drags on, the budget increases by a factor of three or four. And once the work has begun, how can it be suspended? A site that has been half-fortified is more useless than a half-built cathedral. You can praise God in a potato patch, but you cannot defend the city until the very last échauguette has been erected, humbly proud, on the point of the bastions. Even the most slow-witted of vegetable sellers understands that a wall needs to be closed up. Progress on a wall is in plain view of everybody, which puts considerable pressure on those in charge. They resign themselves to corruption. Opportunist agents in league with the technicians, the former supplying inadequate shipments and the latter signing for the receipt in exchange for an illegal “commission.” Money, always money. Themistocles was already saying as much: War is not a matter of weaponry but of money — whoever is the last person holding a coin. (All right, maybe it wasn’t Themistocles, it might have been Pericles, I don’t remember, but really, what difference does it make? Put any name you like to that quote. Anyone but Voltaire!)

There was another significant reason for this utter defenselessness. In 1705 there was every indication that the war would be over in a matter of months. After their troops had landed at Barcelona, the Allies would advance on Madrid, they’d depose Little Philip, and Charles would become the king of all Spain. Castile would learn, at last, that it was not the cock of the walk, and the Catalans would make Spain a confederate kingdom, modern and prosperous, with an English parliament, a Dutch fleet, and a bourgeoisie competent to hold the reins of the finances. But it didn’t happen like that. The war dragged on. Charles, from his base in Barcelona, asked for more and more loans from the Catalan authorities to defray the costs of his multinational army. Wars are won in attack, not in defense, and the government gave in. The ultimate result of this was the drama of 1713 and 1714.

I did my calculations that very night. An unusual calm reigned at home. Nan and Anfán were playing together, strangely pacific, next to the fireplace, in which we were roasting peppers and green tomatoes. Next to them, in a rocking chair, Peret was reading by the light of the fire. He had never learned to read in his head, and he was muttering aloud like a monk. They were lines of verse by Romaguera, and they were shockingly bad, and they seemed worse given our situation. Perhaps that is why I remember them.

She envies you, the butterfly,

For being happy so,

For her love’s destined soon to die

While yours can live and grow. .

Amelis was more affectionate than usual. She wanted to set aside the calculation tables, the paper and inkwell, and take me to bed. I brushed her away with a burning feeling under my skin. They hadn’t realized what was awaiting us; they didn’t want to, as though ignoring the future might make it disappear.

According to my most optimistic calculations, the city would be able to resist exactly eight days of actual siege conditions. Not a day longer. And after that, blackness.

12

The weeks immediately preceding the arrival of the Bourbon army were very useful ones. The Coronela companies paraded up and down the Ramblas — more than anything, to raise the people’s morale — and did shooting practice. The conscripts took it all as a terrifically fun exercise, revelry that was hardly military at all. They got hold of two large dolls of semi-human shape, filled with straw, behind which they erected a three-meter-high wooden barricade. They called one of them Lluís and the other Filipet, Bourbon scum. Every day a hundred rifles would shoot at them ten times. Without that much success, if I’m honest. To the question of how accurate they were, all I need to tell you is that the surrounding windows were boarded up.

It is impossible in such a short space of time to transform companies of tinsmiths and tanners into professional units. That was not the aim. The bonds that hold men together are much more important than the quality of their marksmanship. And that camaraderie, in turn, has to be knitted together with confidence in the officers. In this regard, Don Antonio was unique. Nowadays an insurgent France is scattering an endless supply of revolutionary generals right across the world; from one day to the next, they have gone from wearing a tavern apron to a marshal’s sash. But in my day, the senior officers were quite different. In my ninety-eight years, I have encountered dozens of colonels and generals who knew nothing of their regiments but the color of their coats.

Don Antonio was a real soldier, a man of battle and trench. His love for the army came from his family. In fact, Don Antonio having been born in Barcelona was an accident, as I’ve told you, since around that time, his father was posted in the city. I’m telling you: a man with a destiny. Because to the Red Pelts, he never stopped being Castilian and, as such, an intruder, while the Bourbons did not even recognize his status as Catalan. Years later, Jimmy showed me a copy of the list of the main players to be arrested once the city had fallen. (He did it to persuade me that he’d had nothing to do with the repression, as they had been detained after he left Barcelona. He was lying. If he didn’t give the order, neither did he prevent it, well aware of what would happen.) By Don Antonio’s name, they had not written “Castilian” but, very significantly, “not Catalan.”

The thing was, Villarroel quickly realized that this army was not like other armies. The Coronela was a collection of armed civilians, and the usual conventions could not be applied to them. He would get much further with encouragement than with strict discipline.

I’ve never seen a commander in chief who spent so much time among his troops. He would show up all of a sudden and unannounced at some post or other on the walls, then another, then another. He was in the habit of calling the soldiers “my boys,” which they loved. On one occasion when most of the armed citizens surrounding him were his own age or older, he corrected himself in the middle of his sentence: “My boys — I mean, sorry, I meant to say, my brothers. . ”

The soldiers burst out laughing. And the old codgers among them were allowed to pat him affectionately on the back! In any other army, that would have cost you fifty lashes.

This would have been all well and good were it not for the fact that, since I was so young, in public he would call me fillet. That is, “son.” It must have been the only Catalan word he ever learned, the stubborn old thing. What’s more, he pronounced it wrong, which I think he did on purpose, because instead of fillet, he would pronounce it fiyé, emphasizing his Castilian accent, which the soldiers found hilarious.

Decades later, I served under that Prussian, Frederick. And — my God — the difference between Barcelona’s conscripts and the regiments of Prussia! To Frederick, a soldier was less than a dog. Much less! I can assure you — and this is no exaggeration — that any German soldier would have jumped for joy to be treated like a dog. Just one detail: When the Prussian regiments were on the move, in order to prevent desertions, the soldiers were forbidden from getting more than six meters away from the formation; this was surrounded by horsemen armed with carbines, with orders to shoot to kill. Can you imagine the Prussian tyrant addressing a soldier as “my brother”? Please! That was the difference, the big difference, between our army and any other. Don Antonio was a real military man, but he was able to see the nub of the truth: that the Coronela was made up of free men defending their freedom, and you cannot lead men like that by watering down the principles that drive them.

Right, enough of this sentimental rot.

More often than I would have liked, Don Antonio called me to attend meetings of his staff officers. My main concern was the engineering works, so my presence at these meetings felt like a waste of time. The Bourbons were approaching, and I have described to you already the state in which our defenses found themselves. Normally, I didn’t say much. But one day the discussion turned to the troops and how few of them there were. Somebody — I do not recall who — suggested incorporating groups of Miquelets into the official soldiery. The government of Red Pelts was prepared, reluctantly, to grant permission. Ballester’s name was the first to crop up in this argument. My notional superior as head of the engineers was one Santa Cruz, a man well connected among the Red Pelts whom Don Antonio had no choice except to tolerate, but whom he ignored. Santa Cruz was radically opposed to raising Ballester up to the honorable state of a soldier. Don Antonio asked my opinion.

“No, I don’t believe Ballester is a mere bandit,” I said with certainty. “A fanatic, yes, and bloodthirsty. But deep down, he is a man of great nobility. It may be that he has kidnapped the odd Red Pelt — excuse me, the odd wealthy gentleman from the government — however, he is ruled not by a desire for profit but by hatred of the Bourbons, be they French or Spanish.”

“General. .,” Santa Cruz interrupted me, “seeing as we already have discipline problems among the Coronela men, what would happen when they have these people of such dissolute morals as their examples? And we all know how lenient I am when it comes to using those words, ‘dissolute morals.’ ”

“With Ballester or without him,” I argued, “discipline will never be the Coronela’s forte. And if Ballester agrees to join us, it will always be in his natural role as part of the light cavalry. We could use him as a link to the Miquelets on the outside, to reconnoiter the terrain or cause trouble for the enemy’s foragers. We will hardly see him, since he will be as little use to us posted on a bastion as a Coronela battalion on horseback.”

Don Antonio was staring into the void, saying nothing, lost in his ruminations. At that moment, I realized just how much good old Zuvi wanted Ballester brought in. My old arguments with him no longer meant anything; I could judge Ballester as he was, a shrewd, capable leader, whether in a uniform or not. And we were desperately short of men with experience.

It was an age before Villarroel pronounced his verdict. Finally, he passed judgment: “We’re so short on troops that we have nothing to lose by offering him the chance to join up to serve in the armed forces, and now with honor. If he turns down the offer, well, then it’s between him and his conscience.”

“Very well said, Don Antonio!” I cried.

His eyes drilled into me. It was very hard to bear that look of disapproval, severer than any words he could have spoken. Don Antonio needed to attend to some dispatches, and the rest of us officers turned to leave. I remember Santa Cruz shaking his head, disapproving.

“Zuviría.” Don Antonio stopped me when I had already reached the threshold. “One more thing: You are to take charge of making Ballester this offer yourself.”

I thought I was going to have a fit. “Me? But Don Antonio, that’s just not possible! I have a mountain of work to do, reinforcing the walls and bastions.”

“Well, I believe it is indeed possible,” he interrupted me. “Because I am your superior, and that is what I have ordered you to do, and because it has become clear that you are a great supporter of Ballester’s. Doubtless he will be more sensitive to your requests than anyone else’s.”

Sensitive to my requests? What I naturally could not tell him was that Ballester had laid siege to me in a masía, and that before that he had robbed me, he had stripped me naked and hanged me from a fig tree.

“Come on, fiyé, what’s that face for?” Villarroel said consolingly. “You think I’m going to risk losing an aide-de-camp when the enemy is just six days’ march away? I’ll make sure you are supplied with an adequate escort.”

The “escort” consisted of two gentlemen, one of them very thin on horseback and the other smaller and sitting on a mule. The one on the horse apparently knew more or less where the Bourbons’ advance guard had gotten to, and the one on the mule knew all the habitual hiding places used by Ballester and his villains. They were every bit as terrified as I was. The quartermaster’s store loaned me the uniform of an infantry lieutenant colonel. To make me more respected, according to Don Antonio. I doubted that very much. Ballester was perfectly happy slitting the gullets of officers, and he absolutely didn’t care which side they were on. What was more, the coat was so tight on me that I couldn’t do up the front. Still, this was hardly a time to start seeking out a good tailor.

We rode out of Barcelona, passing through a number of towns, finding nothing visibly changed. The countryfolk were on our side and gave us news about the advance of Philip’s army, then under the command of one duke of Pópuli. Pópuli! Another name to consign to the bonfires of history. And when I tell you why, I’m certain you will agree with me.

They had seen only a handful of Bourbon patrols on horseback, only fleetingly, no sign of the columns of infantry or convoys of artillery. They were moving at that slow pace because they wanted to secure all the towns as they went. The Crida notwithstanding, the Bourbons didn’t think the Barcelonans so crazy as to close their city walls to such an impressive army.

As for Ballester, finding him was easier than we had anticipated. He didn’t bother to hide. With the evacuation of the Allied troops, especially outside Barcelona’s walls, any last trace of authority had disappeared.

We found him in an opulent country mansion, a residence that had been abandoned by a notable botiflero. Through the windows, we could hear the sounds of a frenzied party. Men singing and shouting, wild laughter from the women, and the crash of bottles smashing against the floor or the walls.

“Are you really planning to go into that den?” asked my escorts.

“There’s no need for you to come with me. If all goes well, we’ll see each other again soon. And if not. . ” I gave a resigned sigh. “In that case, inform Barcelona.”

No sooner had I walked through the door than I found myself in a very spacious hall. Everything was turned upside down. And there, like a gang of drunken monks, were Ballester’s men. The drunkest of them was a great hulk of a man. Around his neck, he was wearing a curtain as though it were a cloak, and he had a chicken spitted on his sword. I can see it now, that chicken with its beak half-open, its eyes closed.

I counted five women and ten men. One of the men was in women’s clothing and was dancing with the body of a dead Bourbon soldier. The dead man’s head swung like a pendulum, falling backward or leaning forward onto the cross-dresser’s shoulder, and the man hugged him, lavishing caresses on his cheeks. Another fellow was suspended from the big chandelier on the ceiling, making howling noises. He must have been the joker of the group. His audience laughed, simultaneously reprimanding him and egging him on. Everyone but Ballester.

He was sitting in a corner, on a sofa that had been disemboweled by bayonets. On either side of him, a couple of tarts from the town had their arms around his neck, one of them laughing like a madwoman, the other, who was drunk, with her head resting on his chest. Ballester was the first to see me.

At that moment, the lamp gave in to the weight of the man who was swinging from it. Man and lamp fell together in a thundering of broken glass. The great roars of laughter stopped dead: The monkey man had landed right at my feet.

The hulk approached me with sword and chicken raised. He wanted to babble some kind of threat, but he was so drunk that he tripped on what was left of the lamp and he, too, fell flat on his face.

Ballester made a clicking sound with his lips, sarcastically. “What bad luck you seem to be having with me!” he said, not deigning to stand up. “You come here to rescue your little botiflero friends, and look who you find.”

“I have found,” I replied, “exactly the person I was looking for.”

One of his men approached me, dagger drawn, to eliminate me without further ado. I held up the tube in which I was carrying the rolled-up documents, with the seal of the Generalitat on the outside. “This,” I announced, “is an official commission and in the interests of all those present. Would you like me to read it? I’m sure you would, because if you slit my throat, I don’t imagine anyone here can read.”

At least they hesitated long enough for me to add: “The government has decided to confer the rank of captain of a volunteer regiment to Señor Esteve Ballester. With uniform and remuneration as befits this position. In addition, Captain Ballester shall have the right to enlist whichsoever men he chooses, who will be admitted into service as honorable soldiers of the emperor and on a wage from the Generalitat.”

For a few moments there was silence.

“Now!” one of the less drunk ones shouted at last. “Now they show up to lick our asses! Now that the Red Pelts find themselves with theirs suddenly on the line!”

I chose not to reply. Not least because he was right. They surrounded me — everyone but Ballester — screaming right up close to my face. One of them was telling me the story of a farm that was repossessed because of the high taxes; another showed me his back, striped with lash marks from the Red Pelts.

If you want to talk to mutineers, you need to be above them. And I’m not referring to a position of morality. I circled around a table, climbed upon it, and holding up the tube, said: “It may be that this was signed by the Red Pelts. But this”—grabbing hold of the front of my uniform—“is a principle that is higher than all of them. It was sewn by a woman in La Ribera for her husband, an officer in the Fourth Battalion. The man is a carpenter. Who was it that whipped you? The carpenters of Barcelona or agents of the government?”

“Go to hell, you and the fatherland!” they jeered, surrounding the table. “What did you do for us when we needed help? You sent us to the guards! Persecuted us! Put us to the rack!”

“Shameful wretches!” I yelled, and even I was impressed at my own audacity. “What kind of child, seeing his mother threatened, instead of defending her, reproaches her for a slap she gave him years earlier?” I shook my head as though a profound sadness had taken hold of me, but I made a joke. “It’s like they say: When a child falls down a well, his mother throws herself down after him. When it’s the mother who falls down, the child goes off to tell the neighbors.”

Incredible as it may sound, there were a few bursts of laughter. I didn’t wait for them to die out, and resumed my reproachful tone. “Well then, the bad news is that our neighbors are called Castile and France, and they are the ones who are trying to drown us in the darkness of that well.”

“And they’ve sent you here to tell us that? We are the ones with the least to lose when the French and Castilians dine on the constitutions with a side helping of turnips. Go to hell!”

“You can go to hell yourself!” I roared, beside myself. “Even you know it’s not really like that. If Barcelona falls, we all fall with her. What would happen if the Bourbons razed everything to the ground? Even if you’ve run away from your homes, I’m sure you have relatives and friends somewhere. Don’t you care about them? No more random ballots: The new mayors will be handpicked by Little Philip, and they will be confirmed botifleros. All young men will be forced to serve under his banner, including in that ghastly place they call America, for decades to come. Our judgments will depend on their judges, who may be no better than ours but are certainly farther away, and they hate us. And if the rates of taxes seem exorbitant to you now, wait till they’re set at the court in Madrid by our enemies, without the branches of our parliament having any sacred right to veto them.” I had gotten myself so worked up that I paused only to catch my breath. “Are you all blind? You should be the first to see that it’s the Red Pelts with the least to lose in the event of catastrophe. They’ll always rise back up to the top, whoever’s in charge. And if you truly are so indifferent to all this, tell me, why are you dancing with Bourbon corpses?”

They settled a bit. I was completely overtaken by my passion. How peculiar: Up until that moment, I hadn’t realized how closely my ideas tallied with my speech. I had gone there to persuade them, and in reality, I was the one being most persuaded.

Someone asked: “What kind of man is your commander?”

That was very typical of the Miquelets’ mentality; they cared less about the cause they were defending than the man who would lead them.

“You can work that out for yourself,” I replied with a bitter smile. “He was the one who ordered me into this den, and whom I did not hesitate a second in obeying.”

Up to that point, Ballester had not spoken a word. He got up off his broken sofa and said: “And what I believe is that if we go into Barcelona, we will never come out again. Tell these men if that isn’t so. Tell them!”

“No, I can’t tell them that,” I replied, weighing my words carefully. “That may well be the way things go. They will kill us all. All I can assure you,” I added, moderating my voice, “is that if that happens, I will not survive any longer than you will.”

Ballester gestured with his thumb toward a door at the back of the room. “Get in there.”

It was a rear patio enclosed by high walls. So I might feel more at ease, I was sharing the place with a couple of dead bodies in white uniforms. I tipped out their bags, which were full of letters between officers: They had been messengers for the Bourbons. I imagined what had happened. They’d been riding between units carrying messages when they saw this delightful-looking mansion on the way and came in for a little rest. Ballester was passing by and had the same idea. Bad luck.

Through the door, I could clearly hear the Miquelets’ arguments, which all happened at the top of their voices. Some wanted to accept the offer from the government; most were in favor of slitting my throat. Best not to listen to them.

It was strange the way my thoughts were going in those days. All the means I had acquired at Bazoches were still active. The siege had not even begun, and yet it was already shaping and guiding my mind. Martí Zuviría, Prince of the Cowards, was eclipsed when Engineer Zuviría was awakened. I remember that my only thought was: If they kill me, I have to make sure these letters get to Barcelona one way or another.

The door opened. I went back into the great hall. All the eyes of the men and women were on me. It would be best to take the initiative myself.

“It may be that you do not want to take part in the defense of Barcelona,” I said, holding out the letters to Ballester. “But I presume you are not against it, either. Please take these letters out to the man who brought me here.”

During a pause that went on forever, Ballester stared straight into my eyes without taking the papers I was holding out toward him. His men were even more expectant than I was, since I had at least prepared my share of resignation. Despite all my time at Bazoches, it took me a whole year to understand the full significance of that look of Ballester’s.

“Take them yourself,” he answered tersely, without the slightest trace of sympathy despite what he was saying. He went over to the table, picked up the tube holding his commission as captain of the volunteers, looked at it, and said sadly: “These lads are getting soft. Softer than the branch of a fig tree.”

Men and women all gave a roar of jubilation. As though the last person to make up his mind had been their leader and the final decision had depended on him. Today I’m sure that’s not how it was, that Ballester had been the first to favor that fateful option. That he had kept his opinions to himself so as not to interfere in the others’ judgment, not to seem too mild or force them into an act of suicide.

They were going into death and doing it gladly. Within a moment they had vanished, getting on their horses, the women clinging to their sides. The sounds of hooves and neighing seemed to disappear into the distance in a moment. Ballester moved more slowly; a leader does not run. We were left alone. He was very self-absorbed, far away from me, from everything. I noticed that he had the same expression from that day in Beceite, with his hands tied, awaiting death. We left the mansion. As we mounted up, his horse and mine were alongside but facing in opposite directions, the two riders face-to-face.

“One other thing,” I said. “If you agree to subordinate yourself to the imperial army, from this moment you have a duty to rank and to discipline. I am a lieutenant colonel and the aide-de-camp to our commander in chief, and you must obey any orders you are given. Without exception.”

He gave a little smile, which always looked ghoulish in that face with such a thick beard and such black bushy eyebrows. “I said to you in that masía that if we met again, I would send you flying.”

He closed his hand into a fist and brought it with all his strength into the middle of my chest. I hadn’t yet put my feet into the stirrups, so I was flung from the saddle and landed on my back. It was just as well that I fell on some tall rosemary bushes that cushioned my landing. All the same, it was quite a punch.

When I looked up, Ballester and his men had already gone. Out of the undergrowth came the skinny gentleman and the tiny one, who helped me to my feet.

“Holy Mother of God!” they exclaimed, while my hands tried to alleviate the pain in my kidneys. “You’re alive. And Ballester on his way to Barcelona. What did you have to give him?”

“Something those people have always been denied,” I replied. “The truth.” They looked at me, hoping for more details, and I added: “I gave them my word that we were all going to be killed.”

And so we come to July 25, 1713. The enemy will be arriving any day now. The work of building and repairing the city walls was not finished, very far from it. After talking to Don Antonio, we decided to stop it all, apart from the work on the palisade.

When there is time to anticipate a siege in advance, the garrison will surround the fortified enclosure with a screen of sharpened stakes pointing out toward the besieger, immediately outside the moat, the first line of defense of the walls and bastions.

There is another interruption from that bag of lard by the name of Waltraud. She tells me that from what she’s learned so far, a palisade would seem to be a useless measure. Artillery fire would certainly destroy a few simple wood contraptions sticking out in front of the walls. So why waste time sticking in more and more and more rows of stakes?

A palisade makes it harder for an infantry to advance, and it intimidates the enemy. A forest of thousands and thousands of pointed stakes constitutes a quite considerable obstacle. At least if you look at it from the point of view of someone who has to cross it while being shot at from all sides. Officers need a lot of authority if they are to drive their men against a sharpened barrier.

All right, so the artillery bombardments will smash most of the stakes into splinters. But even that is not as decisive as it might appear. The stakes are two or three meters long. They are sunk very deep into the ground, at an acute angle, and with a buttress at their base. So that only a meter or a meter and a half is sticking out. The grapeshot and the bombs will indeed destroy them, but even if only a few inches are left, that is enough to injure feet and calves. The same explosions help to break and sharpen the points. A thick forest of solid spikes is no small matter to contend with. When the attackers advance en masse, it breaks up their formation, injures hundreds, and slows down the assault. And then they have the moat awaiting them, and the walls. Sometimes the simplest defenses are the most effective.

What I will not deny is the great transformation to the landscape that a palisade implies. The city, our ancient, frivolous Barcelona, suddenly seems to be surrounded by a halo of prickles, hostile and grim. The perimeter of a fortress can be vast, and I have seen enclosures circled by eighty thousand stakes. This static wood, worked by hands that wish to cause somebody else pain, is an announcement of death. When it is soaked by the rain, it is even more dismal than when it is covered in snow. When it is somewhere as sunny as Barcelona, its intention to cause harm is laid bare.

In our stores, we had sixteen thousand stakes. According to my calculations, we needed a minimum of forty thousand. We didn’t have them. Well, what was I to do? Go sit in a corner and cry? Débrouillez-vous! I focused on covering the most exposed areas.

At least we were not short of enthusiastic help. The government could not pay for all the work that needed to be done, but thanks to the prevailing civic fervor, we were joined by six thousand volunteers. I spent long hours with them, out on-site, where the work was being undertaken. I showed people how they ought to be digging in more deeply, anchoring the foot of the stake well for when the sticking-out part is blasted into the air by the effect of the artillery fire; I made sure they were leaning out at an angle of forty-five degrees; that the end was well sharpened, all of that. We were short of the stakes, tools, workers, and above all, time we needed to transform Barcelona into a hedgehog-city.

I was spending that July 25 supervising the works on the palisade when Ballester and his men came past. They were leading their horses behind them, and they were happy and flushed with wine. A lot of the whorehouses that were best supplied with the strongest liquor were outside the walls, waiting for travelers before they entered or left the city. They were doubtless returning from just such a brothel. It wasn’t hard to understand. There was an end-of-the-world mood in those establishments. When the Bourbons showed up, the party would stop.

It was four days since they’d arrived, and they had become famous for how profligate they were in taverns and brothels. And for their fistfights with the guards. Each time I heard news of them, I shook my head, disappointed. Perhaps recruiting them hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

When I saw them, I addressed their leader. “Ah, Captain Ballester,” I said, not thinking, prompted by the urgency of the situation. “Leave off what you’re doing and help us with these stakes. We need all the hands we can get.”

I should have seen his answer coming. They all burst out laughing, saying they had come to fight, not to work. This was bad, as their refusal to comply forced me into a confrontation.

I had told Ballester quite clearly that if he was joining an organized defense, he consequently had a duty toward discipline. If I allowed him to ignore me once, and in front of everybody, I would never have his respect again. I was in my shirtsleeves because of the heat. It was not the ideal attire for intimidating a gang of killers. Yes, this was bad. To make matters worse, when they recognized Ballester, the workers who were closest put down their tools and waited expectantly, holding in a gasp of fear. All the same, Longlegs Zuvi walked up to the Miquelets and said: “That’s an order. Here everyone works.” And pointed a finger all the way down their line. “Everyone.”

“Really?” Ballester answered. “Because I don’t see any Red Pelts here sticking in stakes.”

“We’re not out in the field now. Here we fight differently.” I took a few steps back and took one of the workers by the arm, a very young girl. I tugged her over and showed her open palms to Ballester. “Look at the blood flowing on her hands. These scratches are decorations every bit as worthy as any you can earn from some heroic deed in war.”

Ballester moved his face close to mine and, with barely contained hatred, whispered: “If what you wanted was manual laborers, why the hell did you ask us to come?”

“When are you going to understand,” I replied in the same tone, “that all of this is not for me but for the common good?”

“What I am beginning to understand,” said Ballester, “is that war is a good excuse for the Red Pelts to subjugate us even more than they used to.”

I was going to answer when we heard a terrific noise: All the bells in Barcelona were ringing the warning bell. Dozens of wild belfries, announcing the bad news. We looked up. The sentries on the walls had been warning us for some time. So absorbed were we in our squabble that we hadn’t even heard them. From the top of the bastion, they were shouting: “They’re coming! They’re coming!”

When news that is so long awaited is finally confirmed, it becomes somehow unreal. They were here. Although for weeks we had thought of nothing else, the fact stunned me. Ballester, the palisade, everything was suddenly meaningless faced with the danger that was so imminent.

“What are you waiting for?” shouted the sentries. “Get to the nearest entrance. Get inside or they’ll close the gates!”

They were a couple of very young lads, poorly armed, one of them wearing a pince-nez. On that day, this particular sector was being guarded by the philosophy students. They looked more fragile than the paper in their books. The one in the spectacles pointed toward the horizon.

“Run! There’s a whole army heading this way!”