The Siege

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Hsssss. Boom. Hsssss. Boom. Two Spanish shells cleave the air above the observation deck, exploding somewhere near the barracks—where, by now, Lieutenant Bertoldi should have burned all the official documents and useless paperwork. Simon Desfosseux, who ducked when he heard the shells pass overhead, straightens up and looks over for the last time at the enemy fort of Puntales. With the naked eye—it is barely half a mile away—he can make out the stubborn Spanish flag, riddled by shrapnel, that has fluttered there every single day. The garrison is composed of a battalion of Volunteers, experienced artillerymen and a handful of Englishmen manning the upper gun battery. The full name of the stronghold is San Lorenzo de Puntal and, some days ago, during the celebrations for its patron saint, Desfosseux and Maurizio Bertoldi were astonished to see through the spyglass these defenders—who had remained stoic throughout the ceremony, impassive despite being under constant fire from the Cabezuela—cheering and applauding as they hoisted the flag.

  Far to his right lies Cádiz. The captain contemplates the white city against the crimson sunset: this landscape which he knows better than he does his own home, his own country, having studied it for so long through his lens and on the lines of a map. Simon Desfosseux dearly hopes he will never have to see it again. Like thousands of other men, he has squandered his life on this bay during the thirty months and twenty days of the siege: mired in tedium and impotence, gradually sinking as if in the filthy mud of some swamp. With no glory, though the word means little to him. No success, no satisfaction and no profit.

  Hssss. Boom. Again. And again. The battery of 8-pound guns continues firing at Puntales, and the Spanish fort returns their fire. More enemy shells whistle above the observation deck; the captain ducks again and decides to leave. It is better not to tempt fate, he thinks as he goes down the ladders. It would not be particularly comical to be hit by a cannonball at the last moment. So he mentally bids goodbye to this vista having fired 5,574 artillery shots of various calibers on the city from Cabezuela: that is the figure that appears in his operations ledger, now consigned to gather dust among the military archives. Of this number, only 534 bombs actually reached Cádiz, mostly inert ones filled with sand and lead. All the others fell short and landed in the bay. Nor will the damage he has inflicted on the city win Desfosseux the Légion d’Honneur: half a dozen houses demolished, fifteen or twenty dead and perhaps a hundred wounded. The brusqueness of Marshal Soult and his general staff when Desfosseux was summoned to give a final tally of operations left little room for doubt. No one, he fears, will ever offer him a promotion again.

  La Cabezuela is in chaos, as are all the retreating troops. Broken equipment lies everywhere, limbers and gun carriages from the battering train are burning on pyres, onto which is thrown anything that might prove useful to the enemy. Sappers using hatchets, picks and shovels are demolishing everything they can while another squad, under the command of an Officer of Engineers, are laying trails of tar and gunpowder to torch the barracks, or setting powder charges and fuses. The rest of the soldiers, artillerymen and marines, given the ill-disciplined nature of the moment, are roaming about aimlessly, impetuous and insolent; they steal everything they can, loading the carts with equipment and everything they have looted from nearby houses and villages in the past few hours, paying little heed to the marauders raping and killing. The voluminous baggage belonging to the generals, with their beloved Spanish ladies installed in wagons requisitioned from Chiclana and El Puerto, set out for Seville some hours ago under a heavy escort of dragoons; the road to Jerez is heaving with carriages, cavalrymen and a confusion of troops and civilians—the families of French officials, those Spaniards loyal to Bonaparte and collaborators fearful of being left to the tender mercies of their compatriots. No one wants to draw up the rear, to risk falling into the hands of the guerrilleros, who already prowl like vicious vermin, ever more daring, fueled by pillage and blood. Only yesterday, twenty-eight sick and wounded Frenchmen, left without an escort between Conil and Vejer, were captured by locals, surrounded by straw bales soaked in oil and burned alive.

  As he reaches the foot of the ladder, Simon Desfosseux sees four sappers setting charges around the supports of the observation deck. It is hot and they are sweating profusely in their blue frockcoats with black lapels. Standing a little further off, the Officer of Engineers—a fat lieutenant mopping his neck and brow with a filthy kerchief—watches them as they lay trails of tar and gunpowder.

  “Anyone left up there?” he asks Desfosseux as he passes.

  “No one,” says the captain. “She’s all yours.”

  The officer gives an unconcerned shrug, his eyes watery and expressionless. He did not even bother to salute when he registered Desfosseux’s rank. He barks an order. The captain walks away without looking back; he hears the hiss of the fuse being lit and then the crackle of the flames as they rise along the piles and the ladder. When he reaches the redoubt, he finds Mauricio Bertoldi staring back at the tower.

  “There go two years of our lives,” the lieutenant remarks.

  Only now does Desfosseux turn to look. The observation deck is a flaming torch, with a billowing plume of black smoke rising into the air. The citizens of Cádiz are in for a fine light-show tonight, he thinks. Flames and fireworks sweeping from one end of the bay to the other: a farewell celebration, with gunpowder provided by the Emperor.

  “How are things here?” he asks.

  His adjutant makes a vague gesture, as if the concept of things going well or badly has little to do with what is happening.

  “The twenty-five four-pounders we’re leaving behind have all been spiked,” he says. “Labiche will toss them into the bay as soon as he can … Everything else has been burned or cut to pieces.”

  “What about my baggage?”

  “Packed and shipped, as is mine. The carts set off under escort a little while ago.”

  “Good. Not that we would have much to lose, you and I.”

  The two officers look at each other. Two sad, complicit smiles. They have been living cheek by jowl for so long now they have no need of words. They leave as impoverished as they arrived—unlike their superior officers, those greedy generals who are carrying off chalices looted from churches and the silver cutlery from the elegant houses where they were billeted.

  “What orders should I give the officer manning the eight-pounders?”

  “He is to keep firing until everyone has left; we wouldn’t want the manolos landing too early … At midnight he is to spike the cannons and get out of here.”

  Bertoldi gives a skeptical laugh. “I hope he stands his ground and doesn’t take to his heels long before then.”

  “I hope so too.”

  A huge explosion, two miles northeast along the coast. A black cloud mushrooms over the Castillo de Santa Catalina.

  “They’re obviously in a hurry too,” says Bertoldi.

  Desfosseux peers into the redoubt where the howitzers are stored. The sappers have clearly been here already: the wooden gun limbers have been broken up with hatchets, and the metal carriages dismantled. The thick brass barrels lie on the ground like corpses after a bloody battle.

  “As you feared, Captain, we could only take away three field guns. We simply didn’t have the transport or the manpower … We had to leave everything else.”

  “How many has Labiche thrown into the bay?”

  “Just one. But we don’t have the resources to dump the rest of them. The sappers will come by later, put a hefty powder charge in each and plug up the barrel. We should be able to crack them at least.”

  Desfosseux hops down into the redoubt, between the fascines and the broken blanks, and walks over to the broken field guns. It is somehow moving seeing them like this. Poor Fanfan is here, lying amid the shattered remnants of its gun carriage. With its polished brass, almost nine feet long and one foot in diameter, it looks like a strange dead sea creature stranded on land.

  “They’re only guns, sir. We’ll cast more of them.”
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  “For what? Another Cádiz?”

  Struck by a curious wave of melancholy, Simon Desfosseux bends and runs his fingertips over the pitted metal: the foundry stamps, the recent marks of hammer blows to the trunnions. The brass is still intact; not a single crack.

  “Good lads,” he whispers. “Faithful to the end.”

  He gets up, feeling like a traitorous leader abandoning his men. The 8-pounders are still firing from the battery below. A Spanish grenade fired from Puntales explodes thirty feet away, forcing him to duck while Bertoldi, with cat-like reflexes, leaps down from the parapet and lands on top of him. Rocks and debris rain down all around. Almost immediately, there are screams from where the bomb fell. Some poor bastards have just been hit, Desfosseux realizes as he and his lieutenant get to their feet, brushing the dirt from their uniforms. Rotten luck, he thinks, taking a hit at this stage given that the military ambulances must be in Jerez by now. The cloud of smoke and dust has not yet cleared when a lieutenant from the engineering corps appears, with several men lugging heavy boxes of equipment and explosives.

  “The bastards seem to be enjoying this.”

  Leaving Fanfan and his brothers to the mercy of the sappers, the captain and his assistant leave the redoubt and cross the footbridge to the barracks, where everything now has begun to burn. The heat from the blaze is unbearable—the leaping flames create a haze, the air rippling in the distance where disorganized lines of cavalrymen, artillerymen and infantrymen, pushing handcarts and carrying packs, merge into a sea of blue, brown and gray that moves slowly along the road to El Puerto. Twelve thousand men in full retreat.

  “We’ve got a little way to go,” says Bertoldi, “to get to France.”

  “I fear we have further still. They say we are at war with Russia.”

  “Shit.”

  For the last time, Simon Desfosseux looks back at the unattainable city in the distance, flaring red as the sun sets over the bay. Pray God, he thinks, that strange policeman has finally found what he was looking for.

  A GENTLE NIGHT breeze from the east. The air is balmy and almost still. Nor is there any sound, except for the whispered voices of two men standing in the half light of a lantern amid the ruins of the Castillo de Guardiamarinas, next to the gap in the wall that leads to the Calle del Silencio.

  “You cannot ask so much of me,” says Hipólito Barrull.

  Next to him Rogelio Tizón falls silent for a moment.

  “I am not asking anything of you,” he says finally. “Except for your version of events. Your opinion. You are the only person clear-sighted enough to give me what I need: a rational view that might clarify matters. A scientific paradigm to order what I already know.”

  “There is not much there to order, in my opinion. It is not always possible … There are answers that are simply beyond us. Things it would take us centuries to understand.”

  “A soap merchant,” mutters the comisario under his breath. He is disappointed. And still confused. “An ordinary, accursed soap merchant.”

  He feels the professor’s eyes on him. The flash from the lighthouse reflected in the lenses of his spectacles.

  “Why not a soap merchant? That has little to do with anything. This is about sensitivities.”

  “Well then, tell me what you think.”

  Barrull looks away. He clearly feels uncomfortable here, a feeling that quickly superseded his initial curiosity. Since he came up from the basement of the Castillo, his manner has been different—evasive.

  “I spoke to him for scarcely half an hour.”

  Tizón says nothing; he simply waits. After a moment he sees Barrull look around him at the shadows of the old, abandoned building.

  “He is a man obsessed with precision,” the professor says finally. “I suspect the fact that his job involves a keen understanding of chemistry has much to do with it … He has, in a sense, his own system of weights and measures. Truth be told, he is very much a child of our times, a fully fledged son of the Enlightenment. A quantifying spirit, so to speak. Geometrical.”

  “Then he is not mad?”

  “That word is a double-edged sword, Comisario. A dangerous ragbag of ideas.”

  “Then give me a better word. Define him for me.”

  “Would that I could,” says the professor. “I understand only the smallest part of the matter. When I say obsessed with precision, I mean careful about details. All the more so if one is blessed with a mathematical mind, which is clearly the case here. This man is endowed with both characteristics. Though he had no formal scientific education, he is a natural mathematician, capable of intuiting constants and understanding the laws that govern a host of different types of data: air, smell, wind, angles … You know what I am talking about.”

  “Why did he kill?”

  “Perhaps arrogance had something to do with it … rebelliousness, too. And resentment.”

  “Curious that you should mention resentment. This man had a daughter … she died two years ago during the yellow fever epidemic. She was sixteen.”

  Barrull looks at him curiously, warily.

  Tizón shakes his head, looking to one side then the other, his eyes filled with shadows. “… Like my own daughter.”

  He coldly recalls the long interrogation in the cell of the Guardiamarinas—Cadalso’s astonishment when he was ordered to bring the man here rather than the dungeons on the Calle del Mirador; the superficial patching of the wound made by the bullet lodged in the man’s right hip; the questioning, and the howls of pain at first; the reaction of Hipólito Barrull when he first brought him down into the ruined basement—his initial horror and consternation. For ten years you have told me you are my friend, Professor. Now prove it. You have half an hour to plumb the soul of this man before he faces his demons, and mine.

  “Go on, please. Tell me what you think.”

  Barrull takes a little time to answer, and while he does Tizón thinks of the conversation he overheard earlier while leaning against a basement wall smoking a cigar. In the lamplight the comisario had observed the professor, perched on a rickety chair and talking to the prisoner who lay sprawled on an old straw mattress on the floor, his wrists and ankles shackled, a makeshift bandage wrapped about his hip. The sound of low voices, almost whispers, as the lamp’s oily glow shimmered on the soap merchant’s greasy skin and glittered in his eyes, the pupils dilated by a drop of laudanum—just one—poured into a glass of water. I need him lucid and not in too much pain, Tizón had explained. Capable of reasoning. Just for a while, so the two of you can talk. After that, I don’t care whether or not he suffers.

  “It is clear that this man is rebelling against our prosaic vision of the world,” Barrull finally speaks. “To him, making soap is not simply a job, it requires great accuracy: it entails combining the various elements with absolute precision. It calls on his sense of touch, of smell. And the resulting product serves to luster other flesh, other skin—that of young women, mostly … the girls who come into his shop every day to ask for this or that.”

  “That son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t oversimplify, Comisario.”

  “Are you suggesting that he is an artist as well as a scientist?”

  “That is probably how he sees himself. Perhaps that notion saves him from having to think of himself merely as someone who combines substances. Deep down, he may be sensitive. And it is that sensitivity that leads him to kill.”

  Sensitivity. The word draws a bitter laugh from Tizón.

  “The whip of braided wire … he had it with him. We found it in the grotto.”

  “I assume he got the idea from the penitent brotherhood,” Barrull says.

  “He is not even a true member. In the Santa Cueva, they accept only men of noble birth … This man merely assists at ceremonies. He is a sort of acolyte, a servant.”

  Tizón looks up at the heavens. Above the crumbling walls of the shadowy Castillo, the stars are shining, as cold as his own thoughts. Never has he felt more lucid,
he thinks; never has he been as clear-sighted about the present and the future.

  “How could he anticipate the bombs?”

  “He trained himself. He sensed that Cádiz is a special place, shaped by the sea and the wind, and the urban landscape that challenges or channels them. To him, the city is not merely a collection of buildings inhabited by people, it is an agglomeration of air, silences, sounds, temperature, light, smells …”

  “So we were on the right track?”

  “Absolutely. You proved it yourself. Just like this man, you created a singular map composed of just such elements. A secret, parallel city.”

  There is a long silence, one that the policeman is loathe to break. Eventually, Barrull shifts slightly, anxious.

  “Damn it,” he says. “This is complicated, Comisario … I can scarcely imagine it. I only spoke with the man for half an hour. I am not at all sure that getting myself mixed up in this—”