Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Keep quiet and follow me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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