The Siege
Page 67
She sits down on the low chair, holding the bag in her lap, rearranging the folds of her skirt and her damp mantilla. The feverish eyes watched her approach, following her in silence. They are not green now, but seem darker because the pupils are dilated—drugs, probably, to ease the pain. For a moment, the woman turns away, uncomfortable, looking along the body to the hollow in the sheet below the right hip where one leg has been amputated, a hand’s-breadth from the groin. For several seconds she stares, fascinated, at this empty space. When finally she looks up again, she notices he has not taken his eyes off her.
“I had so many words prepared,” she says eventually. “But none of them will serve me.”
No answer, only the dark, intense stare, the feverish glow. Lolita leans over the mattress and as she does a raindrop trickles from her hair across her face.
“I owe you so much, Captain Lobo.”
Still the man says nothing, and she studies his face again: pain has drawn his skin taut against his cheekbones and his lips, cracked by fever, are covered in scabs and sores. Including the vicious scar. Those lips once kissed mine, she thinks, distraught. This mouth once barked orders during the battle I witnessed from the far side of the bay—tiny sparks of cannonfire against the darkness.
“We shall take care of you.”
She is conscious of the plural the moment she utters it, and she can tell Pépé Lobo has noticed too. She feels grief surge within her, a desperate, deep-seated sadness. And so the word hovers in the air, an unwelcome intruder between the woman and the man, who is still staring at her. Then she sees the corsair’s tormented lips contract. The hint of a smile, she thinks—or perhaps something he is about to say, some word that does not come.
“This is a terrible place. I will try to have you moved from here.”
She glances around uneasily. The stench—even he smells, she thinks, unable to stop herself—is nauseating. It seems to cling to her clothing and her skin. She cannot abide it, so she takes her fan from her bag and fans herself. After a moment, she realizes this is the fan with the dragon tree painted on it, the tree they had planned to visit together but never did—the symbol of what could never be, and never was.
“You will live, Captain. You will come through this. There is a lot of … Well. There is money waiting for you. You and your men have earned it.”
The feverish eyes, which have been staring at the fan, blink suddenly. It is as if, for the corsair, the words live and come through are not related.
“Me and my men,” he whispers. Finally, he speaks, his voice low and hoarse. His dark, dilated pupils stare into space. “Now there’s a pretty joke …”
Lolita leans toward him, confused. Close up, he smells of defeat, of stale sweat and suffering.
“Don’t talk like that. So sadly.”
Pépé Lobo shakes his head. Lolita looks at his hands as they lie on the sheet, the pale skin and the long dirty fingernails, the blue swollen veins beneath the surface.
“The surgeon says you are recovering well. You will always have someone to look after you and enough to live on. You will have what you always wanted, a plot of land and a house far from the sea … I give you my word.”
“Your word,” he echoes, almost wistfully.
His butchered mouth finally curls into a smile, she notices. Or rather a pensive, almost indifferent expression.
“I am dead,” he says suddenly.
“Don’t say such foolish nonsense.”
He is no longer looking at her. He turned away some moments ago.
“I was killed in the cove at Rota.”
Perhaps he is right, thinks Lolita. A corpse capable of speech would smile exactly as Pépé Lobo is smiling at this moment.
“I am buried on the beach there, with twenty-three of my men.”
Lolita turns this way and that, trying to stem the pain that wells in her breast. Moved by her own pity. Suddenly, without wanting to, she finds herself on her feet, covering her head with her mantilla.
“I will see you soon, Captain.”
She knows this is not true. She knows it even as, step by step, quickening her pace, she walks back along the ward between the rows of men lying on the ground. She knows it as she steps outside and can finally take a deep breath of cool, damp air. She does not stop, but keeps walking until she comes to the shoreline and stands, staring at the blurred line of the white-gray city in the distance, as rain splashes her face with cold tears.
For José Manuel Sánchez Ron
amicus usque ad ara
A friend to the end
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Siege is a novel, not a work of history. This makes it possible to take small liberties, adapting a date, a name, a character or an actual event to the needs of the narrative. That aside, I am grateful for the invaluable help of numerous people and institutions, in particular Óscar Lobato, José Manuel Sánchez Ron, José Manuel Guerrero Acosta and Francisco José González, the librarian of the Observatorio de la Armada. The director of the Museo Municipal de Cádiz, the municipal council of San Fernando, and Luisa Martín-Merás of the Museo Naval de Madrid put at my disposal maps and documents which proved extraordinarily useful, and my friends at the Cádiz bookshops Falla and Quorum kept me up to date on everything that has been published in recent years about Cádiz during the French siege and the Constitution of 1812. Juan López Eady, sea captain and hydrographic surveyor, guided me at appropriate moments. Thanks to the expert advice of Esperanza Salas, chief librarian at Unicaja, I was able to discover in the newspapers of 1810–12 some crucial information about ships, fleets and port-related incidents. My old friend, the antiquarian bookseller Luis Bardón, tracked down a number of key works of the period for me. The Cádiz historian Alberto Ramos Santana and his wife, Marieta Cantos, were kind enough to read the book in manuscript, and Iñigo Pastor cast a careful professional eye over Lolita Palma’s finances. It is only fair to mention, among others, the specialist work of María Nélida García Fernández, Manuel Bustos Rodríguez, María Jesús Arazola Corvera, María del Carmen Cózar Navarro, Manuel Guillermo Supervielle and Juan Miguel Teijeiro, all of whom were of great help in acquainting me with the mind-set, the mores and the customs of the commercial class of Cádiz at the turn of the nineteenth century. I would also like to thank the city of Cádiz and its inhabitants for their kind hospitality, their assistance and their unfailing warmth.
AP-R
La Navata, December 2009
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are times when being armed with diligence, persistence and even a copy of the 1836 Diccionario Técnico Marítimo are not enough when a translator is faced with a world that is as truly unfamiliar as the high seas during the Napoleonic wars. I would like to offer my heartfelt thanks to historical novelist and maritime historian David Cordingly for his generous help and advice in translating the seafaring passages of the novel; his encyclopedic knowledge of historical vessels, armaments and sailing terms proved invaluable in bringing the novel to life.
FRANK WYNNE
ALSO BY ARTURO PÉREZ-REVERTE
The Fencing Master
The Flanders Panel
The Club Dumas
The Seville Communion
The Nautical Chart
The Queen of the South
The Painter of Battles
THE ALATRISTE SERIES
Captain Alatriste
Purity of Blood
The Sun Over Breda
The King’s Gold
The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet
Pirates of the Levant
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ARTURO PÉREZ-REVERTE’s bestselling books, including The Club Dumas, The Flanders Panel, The Seville Communion, and the Captain Alatriste series, have been translated into thirty-four languages in fifty countries and have sold millions of copies. Pérez-Reverte was born in 1951 in Cartagena, Spain, and now lives in Madrid, where he was recently elected to the Spanish Royal Academy. A retired war journalist, h
e covered conflicts in Angola, Bosnia, Croatia, El Salvador, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Romania, the Persian Gulf, and Sudan, among others. He now writes fiction full-time.