“And what do you think le Mystère is?” asked Armand.
They fired at me again. I hastened my digging. If I could make a sufficiently deep hole, at least I would have some protection from the bullets. Once the earth was fairly well broken up, I grabbed the shovel.
“Other way, cadet!” shouted Armand. “Shovelfuls are cast in the direction of the enemy. That way you’ll have a mound of earth to conceal you more quickly.”
I said nothing for a moment as I took in the instructions. Another shot. I began digging even more frenetically. It isn’t until you try making a hole to fit an entire body in that you realize what a task it is. Roots as thick as arms appeared.
“Roots!” I cried in desperation. “How do I cut them?”
Everything I said struck the brothers as hilarious.
“Well, of course there are roots! So it goes with this strange French soil of ours: The roots grow beneath the ground, not over it,” said a laughing Armand, thrusting the ramrod down the rifle’s barrel.
“No scissors?” shouted Zeno, getting in on the joke. “No? Shame! Well, now you know what your job is before bedtime: Sharpen your spade, precisely for this hallowed task.”
I continued to dig, down on my knees now so as to make a less visible target of myself. More shots. One so close that soil erupted over my helmet. I finally managed to open up a cavity into which I could just about fit. I was gasping and exhausted.
Armand came over. “Cadet: Change out of those clothes, wash your face and your armpits, and to the study room.”
I was defeated. And that first day, after Fieldwork, I still had to carry on paying attention in class.
“Obey and Command” had to do with a classical precept of Quintus Ennius, Appian, or some such Roman or Greek: “Before you can command, you must learn to obey.” The subject came to be an addendum to Practical Fieldwork, the idea being that the blisters on your hands would help instruct you about what you might reasonably expect from men.
History classes. For the Ducroix brothers, “Universal” History was the history of France; France and who else? Ah, yes, don’t forget France. Then there was a trifling corner, somewhere beyond the king’s borders, an unimportant wayside known as “the world.” This far-off land merited a tenth of the lessons, and then only when the Parthians were laying siege to Palmyra, or when Cato said to the Roman senate that in order to ensure a good crop of prickly pears, Carthage would have to be sown with salt. To begin with, I made my skepticism clear, but one day, when Zeno claimed that Arquimedex (they pronounced and wrote it like this, with an X at the end) had Gallic origins, I did not stop him. In general, the French are more open-spirited than people think. True, you shouldn’t ever attempt to convince them that perhaps, only perhaps, and according to the opinion of some cartographers who know a little about the subject, Paris is not at the geographical center of Planet Earth. They will not argue with you but simply think you are a poor lost soul.
Being the good Frenchmen that they were, they started with the siege of Alesia. Caesar surrounded Alesia with a twenty-mile-long palisade and then another around that, twice as long, to stop reinforcements from getting in. What did I care about Alesia, Caesar, and Vercingetorix? Hard as I tried, at that point in the never-ending day, my eyelids began to droop, and my arms became deadweights. I rejoiced when supper was announced! Before going to the dining hall, I asked them: “Were you really shooting at me?”
“Well,” said Zeno, “we try to create a situation with the haze of smoke, and the havoc, of an actual war. We don’t necessarily aim at the body.”
“But you could have killed me! At a hundred feet, a rifle is hardly accurate.”
Shrugging, they continued their conversation. Those Ducroix! What a pair.
Usually, I ate on my own in the kitchens. By the time I came to sit, the servants had been abed a good while. In my corner were fruit and a small cooking pot; I served myself. My fingers were trembling from wielding those hulking picks and spades. The edges of the helmet had chafed my temples, as though I’d been wearing a crown of thorns. At around midnight, when I was just biting into an apple, Armand appeared. “Cadet, outside.”
“You’re joking,” I snapped. “But I’m more dead than alive!”
“I believe I remember you yourself agreeing to the study plan,” said Armand. “Do you think your enemy cares a jot as to your physical and mental state?” He examined my head. “I suggest that you put some wadding around your head before putting the helmet back on. That’s what wadding was invented for. Go on, then, allez!”
And back to the field we went.
Once I was in the hole, I had to dig following the line of lime. I don’t think I could have covered even ten feet in an hour. The pick, the spade, the helmet. Those round wicker baskets, which I had to call fajinas or be punished. Fajina, fajina, more fajinas. And the brothers’ rifle. Each time a fajina appeared, full of earth and forming a parapet beside the trench, Armand would take aim. And those were the conditions I had to work in! I learned very quickly to hide my hands, holding the fajina by the base and from behind, so as not to give the shooter a target.
Next day, more of the same. Drawing, studying, fieldwork, studying, fieldwork, retreat practice. And back to the beginning again. I did not have it in me to try and importune Jeanne, I was that shattered. I fell leadlike into bed every night and woke only when the castle bells rang out—very sonorous they were, and positioned (by design, no doubt)—directly above my room. And this was merely the beginning.
As tutors, I have to say, the Ducroix brothers were the best; their methods, the most demanding. Pay attention! Spherical Room. Be constantly attentive, whether in there or in any other place! Geometry. Ballistics. Mineralogy. Fieldwork. Allez!
One day, a fortnight in, I came close to insurrection. It rained the whole day through; plainly, that was no obstacle to the unaltered continuation of field drills. The pick sank into the trench wall, but the earth, compacted by the rain, didn’t budge. My body was covered in a thick sludge, a ballast of viscid mud I had to haul around, becoming heavier and heavier. The rain came down ever harder, torrential cascades pouring over the edges of my helmet. There was a foot of water covering the ground, and my shoes were full up. To top things off, the drill lasted half an hour longer than usual. I remember looking skyward, up at those filthy weeping clouds. The skies of France, ah, yes, that gray so sweet and cruel. A shot hitting the cylinder of one of the fajinas brought me back to reality.
By the end, I was so destroyed that I could not lift myself out of my hole, which had been growing deeper, wider, and more than anything, longer. Armand did not deign to help me out. I managed to get my arms and head out, complete with that cumbersome helmet, the thick drops of rain bouncing off it.
“And you want me to be constantly attentive?” I protested. “But dear God! Do you not see, if I die, there is little chance of my paying any attention to anything!”
Armand knelt down on the edge of the trench, his nose right up close to my iron visor. The delicate man I thought I’d met that first day had quite disappeared. Even the rain seemed to fall on him in a respectful manner, running down the bald sphere of his head and, when it reached his cheek, draining neatly off through his goatee.
“As long as you are alive, you must pay attention. And as long as you pay attention, you’ll stay alive. Now, out of the trench.”
“I cannot.” I held out my hand to him. “Help me, I cannot.”
“Not true. You can. Do it.”
“I cannot!”
He shrugged and got to his feet, shouldering the rifle. “Given that you insist on this laziness, I hereby suspend my academic powers. I can give orders to a thinking mind, never to a stomach or a back. And given that your belly prefers fasting over dinner, and your back the mud rather than a decent bed, well, I wish you a very good night, my dear cadet.”
Lightning and thunder. Off he went, while I fell asleep where I was, snoozing in the rainy mire. I was so broken, I didn�
�t have the energy to take off my helmet.
Next morning, I was awakened by a kick, and thus another day began, just the same as if I had enjoyed a refreshing sleep.
Drawing. What’s that ink stain? Slap. Pay attention, always pay attention, ma petite taupe, my little blind mole! Physics, mathematics, this, that, the other. Languages, a hateful subject, according to the Ducroix brothers, but essential, given that certain unfortunates hailing from England, Spain, Austria, and in general, the backwaters of the world, bizarre as it may have seemed, had yet to learn French. As ever in Bazoches, the titles of the disciplines had shades within them, because aside from English and German, they were also teaching me the language of engineers.
Among the Maganons there was a gestural code they could use to communicate secretly among themselves in public. They spoke using signs, and it was a language so elaborate that there was nothing, neither technical nor worldly, that it couldn’t be used to express. I was introduced to this unwillingly, not to say discontentedly, but later learned how useful it could be.
In the deafening clamor of battle, to be able to communicate with one’s hands is a very helpful thing. “Pull back,” “Ammunition!,” “Get down, there’s a sniper to your left.” These, the Ducroix brothers told me, from small beginnings had become ever more sophisticated, developing into a great Maganon secret.
Now, gentle reader, picture an engineer about his work. His superior officer (an engineer) introduces him to the fortress commander. In public, the chief of engineers proclaims to the recent arrival: “General so-and-so, to whom not even Corbulo in his sieges of Armenian strongholds could have held a candle!” But at the same time, by moving his fingers and hands around, he is saying: “This man, here to my right, is nothing but a know-it-all. Pay him no mind. Any silly order he gives, agree to but be sure to disobey; come and ask me, and I’ll tell you what really must be done.”
I had to learn this sign language at a rate of twenty signs a day. This to begin with. Then it went up to thirty, forty, and even fifty. What was that? Still can’t make yourself understood in the arsenal? How are we going to make sure the artillery has what they need when munitions are running low? Slap! Wake up! Out to the field! Spherical Room.
I do not believe anything could be so enervating to a man as that systematic and uninterrupted combination of physical and mental exertion. And even if I shut my eyes, I had to be just as attentive at all hours. Take that! Back in the Spherical Room, open your eyes! Cadet Zuviría, when will you learn the simple thing that is to use your eyes! To the field! Allez! Allez! And so on, day after day after day.
5
The first month in Bazoches was like a nightmare I awoke into every day—I have no other way to describe it. You might ask: How did I bear it? My answer is, the best way to make the unbearable bearable is a combination of equal parts love, equal parts terror.
The terror, I barely need say, was provided by my father. That was his function; I never had the sensation of being treated as a son. As a child, I felt only aversion for him. When he was called away on business, farther into the interior of the Mediterranean, I couldn’t have been happier. I later came to learn the underlying reasons for his embittered character, and this softened my memories of him.
Peret (more on him later) said he had never seen a man so in love as my father had been with my mother. Hard for me to believe, for I knew the man in two moods only: irate and very irate. Always that dour face, taciturn, bearded, off elsewhere in his thoughts, especially if it was the two of us dining together in the meager candlelight. Such a miser he was, he even scrimped on wax.
When I arrived into the world, his life plummeted. Not because of me but because my mother died giving birth to me. He never forgot her. Bitterness was a ballast weighing him down inside—a visible tumor, constantly there. He took refuge in his work, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to carry on.
The port of Barcelona was a very active one and had trade links with the whole of the western Mediterranean. My father, a minor stockholder in a maritime company of twenty or thirty members, a widower and therefore with fewer familial responsibilities than the other associates, often sailed to finalize contracts and strengthen ties with their counterparts—in the Balearic Islands, and in Italy and its surrounding islands. In a business like his, in which client and stockist saw so little of each other in person, it was vital that ties of friendship and business be constantly maintained and renewed. (Everybody knows what Italians are like, forever prattling with their kisses, smiles, embraces, and feeble promises of eternal friendship.)
Let us simply say that, in legal terms, he put himself in a position of care toward me without ever having the slightest involvement with me as a human being. At least that was my experience. He beat me often, though for that I never blamed him; I deserved all those clouts, and many more besides. Curious, but a child will never complain so much about the beatings given as the embraces withheld. He embraced me only when it was my birthday—though I knew full well it wasn’t me he was drawing close to him but, rather, my mother. On that day he would become bestially drunk, would weep and squeeze me tight—like a bear mumbling her name—hers, never mine.
I shall say that, to his credit, in this world of illiterates, he spent everything he could on my education, though even the best schools in Barcelona were all a calamity. For professors, we had curmudgeonly priests who, in their own words, treated us pupils as “sinning, rot-destined sacks of flesh.”
My father spent half his time at the port or away on voyages, so he contracted the services of Peret to take care of me. The logical thing would have been for my father to find a buxom nurse for me and, since he was master, have his way with her every now and then. But it ended up being Peret, simply because no one cost less.
Even the Italians have sayings about the stinginess of the Catalans. But if my father were the measure of our nation’s stinginess, I can assure you, they didn’t know the half. I got a beating one day for throwing out a candle that had less than half a thumb’s length of wax remaining. Ah, and there was the time he learned of a ship that, because of issues with the cargo, had weighed anchor with six tenths of the hold empty—bluer than a duck egg he turned that day.
Peret was a scraggedy old wretch. Before I was born, he had worked as a stevedore at the port for my father and his associates. All he earned, he spent on drink. When he became too old to carry bulky things, they kicked him out of the shipping company for a layabout and a drunk. He had a long, wrinkled neck and a bald head, like a vulture’s. After leaving the company, he circulated the alleyways and lanes of Barcelona’s Ramblas, peddling knickknacks, his back so bent he gave the impression of being a mushroom forager. In return for a bare room and a miserable wage, my father brought him in to take charge of me and the household.
Poor Peret. I do not believe there can have been a human being more ill treated by a child. He’d go to bed and I’d fill up his shoes with dung; this he’d find out when he put them on the next morning. He had to wait to go out in the street before realizing I’d painted his enormous hooked nose red. If he ever threatened to hit me, I’d threaten to tell my father about him pilfering from the domestic allowance.
In spite of all, Peret was the only substitute for my mother whom I ever knew. It was impossible for me not to feel fond of the man who combed my hair, dressed me, and showed me affection—far more than my father ever did. I remember that Peret cried a lot—that being his only defense against my abuses and extortions.
When I turned twelve, my father considered what to do with me. The normal thing would have been to send me to one of the Carmelite colleges in Barcelona, but they persuaded him to send me to their headquarters in France, a far more adequate place. He agreed, as it truly was a good school for the son of a businessman; also, it would put me out of sight. I did not blame him. The mutual distance was a relief to us both. At twelve, I looked seventeen, and at some point soon it was going to come to blows between us.
I have
already related what passed with the Carmelites in France. Given that for two years now, our only contact had been through letters, when I got to Bazoches I wrote to tell him the news and to let him know my new address. (The expulsion I kept to myself—it would only lead to further questions—I told him it had been a decision made with my future interests in mind, and so on.)
His reply arrived soon after.
What’s all this about castles and a marquis? What makes you want to be an engineer all of a sudden? The bridges over the sea are boats, and we have these in the company. You were supposed to be learning numbers. If I find you are playing tricks on me, young man, I’ll tear you limb from limb.
Next came the friendliest part of the letter:
Precocious boy that you are, you’re doubtless beginning to have feelings for girls now. Beware. Father a bastard, you’ll get not a single peso from the grandfather. Are we clear, cap de lluç?
Cap de lluç is impossible to translate; literally, it means head of hake, but in Catalan is more along the lines of hopeless idiot.
The good part was the surprising mildness of his tone. Being the man he was, if he had been truly angry, he would have ordered me to return immediately to Barcelona, where the belt and a blessed beating would await. As it was, he enclosed the money to cover my studies for several months to come. In my letter, I’d said that Bazoches was twice as expensive as the Carmelites, in theory to sound him out, but to my surprise, he let me have the money with no complaint.
Well, he hit the nail on the head in suspecting me of tricking him. On the first day, I had asked the Ducroix brothers what payment was expected for my schooling. It was the only time I ever saw them take offense.
“Cadet! What, think the marquis needs funding by you? It is he who shall remunerate you during your stay. Thereby, you will be seen as very knavish indeed should you ever choose to criticize this house once you have left its walls.”
Victus Page 4
