The uprising of 1640 was followed by a war between Catalonia and Castile, with France caught in the middle. A long, cruel war in which neither party gave any quarter. It concluded with an indeterminate pact that left everything more or less as it had been, Catalonia governing itself according to its own constitutions and liberties, Castile plumbing the depths of decadence.
The ensuing peace was a long intermission, more than anything. Catalonia and Castile exchanged openly hostile glances. Mistrust on the part of Castile had converted into undisguised rancor. Indeed, see what the writer Quevedo had to say on the subject:
Catalonia is the grotesque abortion of politics. Its people are a pox on their kings, and all suffer because of them. A nation arming itself with criminals unworthy of ever being pardoned.
Here he limited himself to expressing a repute we fully justified. Elsewhere, he was more to the point, elucidating the adequate treatment for this treacherous breed:
As long as there remains in Catalonia even the one Catalan, and stones in the field, we shall have an enemy, and we shall have war.
How kind! “Grotesque abortion . . . a pox on their kings.” A worthier inquiry surely would have been to ask why no one loved us.
Castile’s high point came with the conquest of the Americas. Thereafter, it fell into a dull and lethargic stupor. An outcome written in its roots. The Castilian character par excellence is the hidalgo, that is, the nobleman, a medieval creation who still lives on. Proud to the point of madness, going out of his way for the sake of honor, capable of fighting to the death over a slight, but incapable of any constructive initiative. That which for him is a heroic gesture, in the eyes of a Catalan is nothing but the most laughably pigheaded error. He can’t see beyond the present moment; like dragonflies, he aspires to brilliance, but his wings flutter erratically, carrying him low and to no place in particular. His hands are good only for bearing arms; otherwise, it would mean getting them dirty. He does not understand, much less tolerate, other ways of life: Industriousness is repellent to him. In order to prosper, that same aloof conception of dignity paradoxically impels him to plunder defenseless continents, or to carry out the miserable role of courtier.
Spanish nobility . . . Spanish nobility . . . I shit on their nobility! What did we have to do with that scum? Work, to the true Castilian, was dishonorable; for a Catalan, the dishonor was not to work. I can still hear my father, holding out the palms of his big hands for me to see: “Never trust any man with smooth hands.”
Their grubby empire sank into history’s dirtiest, lowest slime. Millions of the natives were enslaved, their backs broken in mines across the Americas, but Castile, apart from cracking the whip, was unable to construct a free, or at least sound, economy. Any initiative it came up with was cut short by a monarchy with shades of the Asiatic—as well as being autocratic, also backward and especially corrupt.
In 1700, finally, after the Loon had died, the magnitude of the disagreement between Catalonia and Castile became evident. For the Catalans, a French king was a political aberration, the end of all their freedoms, of their very essence as a nation. France’s autocratic regime, which would sooner or later come to apply to Spain, would cancel all indigenous powers. When Castile chose Little Philip, there was no way back from the conflict. In reaction, Catalonia opted for Archduke Charles of Austria to sit on the Spanish throne. (Or a maharaja from Kashmir, if he had come and presented his credentials—anything but a French Bourbon.)
That will do. Now you might understand better the situation in the peninsula of that year. For the Catalans, Spain was merely the name for a free confederation of nations; the Castilians, on the other hand, saw in the word “Spain” an imperial extension of Castile. Or, put another way: For the Castilians, Spain was the chicken coop and Castile its rooster; for the Catalans, Spain was a designation merely for the stick used to beat the chickens. Therein lies the tragedy. In fact, when a Catalan and a Castilian used the word “Spain,” they were referring to two opposed ideas—which is what leads to such confusion for the foreigner. See what I am driving at? In reality, there is no such thing; Spain is not so much a place as a failure to meet.
But before I finish, allow me to say just a few words about my nation, Catalonia. Because in the picture painted so far, I might seem to be a Vaubanian enamored of just one side of the Pyrenees, and that simply isn’t the case.
Even as a child, I realized what a piece of flotsam Catalonia was, floating along on the currents of history when, by rights, it should have sunk hundreds of years before. The problem was that no one wanted to notice its congenital weakness and, even less, try to remedy it. When our concelleres, the Catalan government ministers, held a parade, it was pitiful. A group of silly-looking rag dolls who thought themselves very important—for they never had to doff hats to the king—and their garments and caps were made of red velvet. To the people, they were the “Red Pelts.” We were too enamored of the pantomime.
And here you have our worst defect. We never knew what we wanted, beyond having a good time, the last redoubt of the poor and insignificant. Neither one nor the other—neither France nor Spain—but incapable of building our own political edifice. Neither resigned to our fate nor disposed to changing it. Trapped between the slowly shutting jaws of France and Spain, we resigned ourselves to riding out the storm. Which left us adrift, directionless. Our ruling classes, in particular, were the height of chronic indecision, endlessly caught between servility and resistance. As Seneca said: If a sailor does not know to what port he is steering, no wind will be favorable to him. And when I think about our history, what comes to mind is the most nail-biting question: Which excuse is more melancholy, that which harks after “What we might have been” or that which says “We never should have tried”? We suffered both of those harrowings. The Catalans’ problem was that they never knew what they wanted, and at the same time, they wanted it intensely.
In 1705 a small group of upstanding Catalans conspired to seek the aid of the Allies in light of an incipient uprising against the Bourbons. The Treaty of Genoa between Catalonia and England was struck. The idea was for an Allied army to disembark in Barcelona. England committed to meeting the cost of operations. For their part, the Catalans would raise a Catalan army of volunteers to support the standard troops. This would open the way to Madrid, where they would place the Austrian ape Charles on the throne and give him the title Carlos III of Spain.
As good lawyers, they demanded every guarantee. The contract went so far as to detail what kind of feed the Allies should give to the beasts of burden. Very Catalan, yes. Oh, and if, by some twist of fate, as explicated in the contract, “any adverse and unforeseen events occur when weapons are drawn (God forbid),” the English crown promised that the Catalonian principality would remain “with all the security, guarantee and protection of the Crown of England, without their Persons, Goods, Laws and Privileges suffering the least alteration or detriment.”
And now, excuse me if I explode.
Who did these little lords think they were to speak in the name of the country without even asking the opinion of the Generalitat? Agreed, at that time Barcelona was in the hands of the Bourbon military. Even so, what authority did they have to involve us in a world war as nonchalantly as going out for a stroll in the countryside? Did it occur to no one that we weren’t bartering over a bag of green beans or a kilo of salt but, rather, the blood and the future of the entire country, all in exchange for a scrap of paper? Things did not simply go badly for us—they went as badly as could possibly be imagined. We lost the war. In 1713 our last forces were grouped together upon the walls of Barcelona. The foreign troops had boarded their ships, leaving us with our rumps naked in the wind. You can guess what England did next. They did not have the decency to lie to us. When someone brought out the famous little scrap of paper, those windbags simply spat, saying: “It is not in the interest of England to preserve Catalan liberties.”
Fabulous! And hard to believe as it may seem, when
the Catalan ambassador knelt at the feet of Her Gracious Majesty, begging for aid to Barcelona—which, reduced though it then was to rubble, was still holding out against the Bourbon onslaught—what did she say? That we ought to be thankful for their constant concern, that was what!
In Utrecht in 1713, just as the siege of Barcelona was beginning, all the implicated powers negotiated a general peace. So that the English diplomats would not make an issue of the Catalonian question, France and Spain made them a gift of Newfoundland. This was what, in the eyes of the English, our thousands of years of liberty were worth, as well as the worth of that scrap of paper—the right to fish twenty tons a year of cod.
In the last year of the war, tragic 1714, the defenders of Barcelona had been reduced to fighting for their lives, their homes, their city. For the Catalan liberties, which were perfectly tangible, a regime that was opposed to the horror now raining down. They fought under the orders of Villarroel, Don Antonio de Villarroel. Wait a couple of chapters and you will see my view of this man, how he lifted me out of abjection like a boot out of mud. And if you were to ask me the cruelest of questions—to whom do I owe more, Vauban or Villarroel?—my answer would be: I should rather die than answer.
Of the five hundred or so of us who initiated the charge that day, September 11, 1714, I do not believe more than twenty or thirty survived. Villarroel was shot from his horse. The horse fell on top of him, kicking around in pain, and as the grapeshot flew, it was no easy task dragging him out from underneath. One of his legs had been crushed, and the bone above his knee was protruding from his trouser leg. Even so, he pushed away the men helping him, shouting as if possessed: “Don’t stop the charge! Don’t stop! No falling back, not as long as I still draw breath!”
When we pushed on, a charge of grapeshot flew from a cannon and took off half my face. I fell to the floor among mounds of dead and wounded. Lifting five trembling fingers to my left cheek, I found it wasn’t there; in its place, a cavity had been blown as far as the other side of my mouth, a wettish bloody hole with splintered bits of bone sticking out, and my left jaw was broken. I’d lost half my face. Blinded by my own blood, I became not the most reliable witness to those last few hours of Catalan freedom.
In the intervening seventy years, twenty or so different masks have covered my face. The first was somewhat cobbled together, skin-colored, covering my whole face, and with slanted eyes, as in the visor of a helmet. In America I had a craftsman make me a far better one. It cost me an arm and a leg, but it was money well spent. It came down over just my cheek, my left eye, and half of my mouth. The right side of my face was exposed to the sun, and this is what people have always been able to see; given that it was intact, no reason to hide it. It adjusted at the back with clever bands and invisible catches. My sharp nose could stick out all it liked—I was lucky not to have had that blown off, too. Women began casting admiring glances my way once more, and I felt almost human again.
Many other masks were to follow, a great many, some exquisitely designed. Some I sold, others I lost in tropical climes or in wagers, some were seized from me, others stolen, and many were broken by thumps and kicks and fallings-down from horses. The sixth one I owned was shattered by a stray bullet. I owe my life to that mask, which was made of a robust ivory.
Why am I telling the story of my masks? Why is it important? You, woman, you tell me to be quiet only when it seems a good time to you—not when it is good for the book.
11
I have just given an outline of the Catalan view of their final war, which saw an end to them as a nation. But at that time, April 1707, Longlegs Zuvi, nothing but a young lad who couldn’t have cared a pepper for politics and history, was headed into the thick of that French border war on the side he would later come to loathe. And all for the sake of a Word.
When we joined the main body of the Franco-Spanish army in Almansa, we could see for ourselves how bad things were. The two sides, the Allies and the Two Crowns, had spent the previous fifteen days seeking each other out and then withdrawing in a succession of marches and countermarches, indecisive skirmishes and sieges at minor fortresses.
The Allied army was led by the earl of Galway who, despite his title, was French: His name was Henri Massue de Ruvigny, and he was a veteran who had lost an arm the previous year, campaigning in Portugal. This is why, as historians love to repeat, Almansa was seen as a battle between an English force commanded by a Frenchman, and a French force led by an Englishman—General Berwick. The truth of the matter was more complicated.
Berwick must have been the most eminent bastard in all of Europe. The illegitimate son of the ousted James II, England’s last Catholic king, Berwick had grown up in France and always served the Beast. (Remember the letter he sent to Vauban in 1705 about the fall of Nice?) As the pompous name “The Army of the Two Crowns” indicated, it was made up of French and Spanish, that much is true, but also Irish (Berwick’s personal guard), Walloon mercenaries, Neapolitans (you always find a few of them about the place), and even a Swiss battalion. As for the Allies, aside from the English, Portuguese, and Dutch, there was a small corps of diehard Catalans and another of French Huguenots —to this day, I struggle to understand how a bunch of Huguenots pitched up in those desolate latitudes, a nook off to the west of Albacete.
Morale in the Two Crowns’ camp wasn’t precisely what you could call high. Everything had been withdrawn in the recent days. It was said that Galway had begun sarcastically referring to Berwick as his “innkeeper,” since the latter was continually taking up lodgings where he had slept the previous night. Berwick stopped at Almansa only because he’d run out of provisions.
This delay at least allowed Berwick to group together the reinforcements pouring in from far and wide. Some of these, such as the part of Bardonenche’s Couronne regiment in which I traveled, were top-notch. But the vast majority were press-ganged Spaniards—recruits, worth less than nothing.
A sorry sight they were. The day we arrived, they were being given some last-minute training. A regiment, however, is like an oak tree: some twenty years are needed for it to take shape. During the maneuvers, you saw the French advancing in straight lines, while the Spanish twisted about like vines. I didn’t want to think what they would be like under enemy fire. They had been given the gray and white uniforms of Bourbon France. Another strike on the part of the Beast: French companies had been given the contracts to provision all Spanish forces—by decree. In other words, your country gifts its throne to a French prince and, on top, has to pay him rent. Quite a racket. (At least the Catalans squeezed the English down to the very last coin.) The majority of the recruits were very young. Poor boys. They were having their heads introduced into the lion’s mouth because the textile companies in Lyon could claim their pay for the uniforms only when the bodies wearing them were dead. The encampment was an endless sea of tents—no doubt the canvases were from France as well, all bought at a pretty price dictated by the Beast.
Berwick was lodging at the mayor’s house, where the recently arrived officers were going to present themselves to him. Bardonenche wanted me to go with him. He was sitting at a table upon which a large map had been unrolled. Around him were a dozen or so high-ranking officers at a council of war. I found it strange that at a simple council, they would be wearing their armor. It must have been very uncomfortable debating and cogitating with those iron breastplates, shoulder and arm pieces on. Perhaps it was to accentuate their authority, or so everyone would understand the gravity of the situation. Berwick looked up as we came in.
The first, most noticeable thing about Berwick was his youthful mien—not very military. My God, I thought, how can a babe like that command the respect of a whole army? He was thirty-six, and his skin was still baby-soft. He had a perfect oval face. The nose, solid, thin, divided it in two; the lips, though wide, were also wildly sensuous, and the corners rose amiably upward. His fine arcing eyebrows had been heavily plucked. Rarely have I looked upon such black eyes. The right on
e was squinting somewhat, a feature I attributed to the overwhelming pressure he must have been under.
But James Fitz-James Berwick (Jimmy to his friends) was one of the most frequently depicted people this century (he was by no means immune to vanity). So instead of one plate I’ll give you two. You be the judges.
Ho! You like him, horrendous Waltraud? Don’t fool yourself. He would have barely glanced at you, for you are as ugly as a keg on legs, you are—well, other things besides.
Word in camp was that Berwick was backing off due to his English roots—he had a treacherous streak, so they said. Codswallop. But in Madrid they had taken the idea so seriously that crazy Philip V had sent the duke of Orléans to take over command! His opposite number in the Allied army, Galway, was a gruff general, fifty-nine years of age, and his right-hand man, the Portuguese Das Minas, a hoary old sixty-three. They felt certain they’d be having little bastard Berwick for breakfast. Even less flatteringly, Berwick’s own army was of the same opinion. I have already said a little as to the quality of the new recruits. Few generals have found themselves on the eve of battle with an outlook so dire.
I turned my Bazoches gaze on Berwick; I couldn’t help it. He was making a superhuman effort to try to master his own fate. The dilemma was clear: Brave a battle and his army would most likely be demolished, or shun it, and the duke of Orléans, who was soon to arrive, would wrest command from him. In terms of his personal interests, both outcomes were equally fatal.
Berwick came over to the recently entered officers, greeting them one by one. Bardonenche he knew personally and stopped at him. They were chatting away like old friends, when at a certain moment he noticed me. Pointing to me, acutely interested, he said: “And this handsome, stern-looking youth?”
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