Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  As soon as we crossed into Catalonia, we began to see people hanged from the branches of trees. The convoy’s slow advance was now constantly presided over by these oscillating bodies. On the larger trees, there were sometimes five, six, seven cadavers swinging from the branches, some higher, some lower, feet stirred by the wind. Most were men of all ages, but I did see a woman hanged from one solitary oak. They had not even bothered to tie her hands behind her. Beneath her on the ground were a little girl and a dog; its snout thrust in the air, the animal let out heartrending yowls, snorting through its nostrils like a bellows. The dog knew the woman was dead, but most harrowing of all, the child did not.

  Official historians limit themselves to official history. They omit to mention that in 1708 the war had reached Catalonia, and thousands of Catalan irregulars joined in the fight. “Volunteers” would be one name for them, “militia,” or “mountain fusiliers,” but we called them Miquelets. These require a little explanation; otherwise, what was going on will make no sense.

  “Miquelet” itself is simply a transcription of the original Catalan word Miquelet. The origin is possibly Michaelmas (Sant Miquel), when harvesting would traditionally commence. Anyone who didn’t find work at harvest would look for alternatives, such as enlisting in the French or Spanish armies. If, for instance, the French were raising war against southern Protestants, the paymasters would hurry to Catalonia to recruit Miquelets. Miquelets were vehemently opposed to putting on army uniforms and footwear, and they even armed themselves. The French and Spanish high command considered them undisciplined hillmen, savages almost, unpredictable and unorthodox—none of which stopped them from appreciating their virtues as warriors. As light infantry, they were peerless. Excellent in forest combat, and as snipers, they always took on perilous roles in the vanguard, ravaging enemy lands. “Les Miquelets ont fait des merveilles” was the view of French officialdom. Which was why they were quick to enroll as many as possible: They cost half that of a professional unit and were twice as effective.

  The problem was that some of them took a liking to the life of pillaging and slaughtering in the name of others. Whenever demobilized, they’d roam the hills and tracks as bandits, waiting for the next call-up. Catalan civilians came to abhor them—at least in the cities, Miquelets were thought of as outlaws.

  1708 was the first time a Bourbon army had set foot in Catalonia. As was to be expected, the Miquelets took exception to the invaders. Until that point, they hadn’t cared a radish for the war, but all that changed when their own lands were advanced upon. Though nominally under the command of the Allied armies, they acted of their own accord. In any case, the fact that they wore no uniforms meant the Bourbons didn’t recognize them as combatants bound by the usual treaties, which made hostilities unprecedentedly ferocious.

  A captured Miquelet would usually be hanged. For their part, the Miquelets were no less cruel. Any soldiers they took prisoner would have their feet scorched and, before execution, be made to hop around like dancing bears. Sometimes the Miquelets would send them up onto the edge of a cliff or gully, where the enemy could see them. A horn would be sounded to draw the attention of the Bourbon soldiers. The prisoners, in single file, would have their ankles tied together with a long rope. Then the first one would be pushed over the edge. Then the second and the third, until the weight of the fallen, combined, would pull the others over. I was witness to one of these savage reprisals. Ten or twelve soldiers, hands tied behind their backs, ankles connected by the same rope. The more who fell, the harder it would be for those at the top to hold the weight. My God, their shrieks and cries. What a sight, these lines of white uniforms falling, vanishing without a trace. Nothing, I can assure you, could possibly lay a man’s heart any lower.

  Here’s a representative account of the Miquelets, to show what kind of people they were. A case that, unfortunate that I was, I had to experience in the flesh.

  Eighty or so Miquelets had at that time made an incursion into an area on the Catalan frontier called Beceite. Typical Miquelet behavior: They’d take out a small Bourbon detachment, then spend a few days in the liberated settlement, living more comfortably than up in the hills. But the fates were against them on this occasion, as the unit I was traveling in to Tortosa was passing very near to Beceite. We came across a couple of fear-stricken Spanish soldiers, who had managed to get away, and they told us what had happened at Beceite.

  The Spanish caught the Miquelets with their breeches around their ankles that day. They were out in the town square celebrating their small victory, half drunk, when two cavalry squadrons rode in. The Miquelets fled in disarray, and thirty of their number were killed and one taken prisoner.

  When it was all done, our unit took over the town, and I can assure you this was no pretty sight. In one corner, like a pile of discarded horseshoes, lay the soldiers who had died when the Miquelets first attacked; strewn across the square, the thirty Miquelets ridden down and bayoneted by the cavalry. Day was already well advanced, and it was decided that we would stay the night in Beceite, so “hospitality,” as the officers put it, was “arranged.”

  Doors were kicked down and the civilians rounded up in the square. The skirmish was over, but the screaming and wailing had barely begun. Once all the townspeople were there, the officers, in order of rank, began picking out the prettiest girls and taking them back to their houses, where they would exercise what they termed their right to “hospitality.” In other words, raping these women, whether they were virgins or had husbands, all in plain view of their families.

  Back in the square, the mayor was down on his knees, and one of the captains had a sword at his neck. The town had always been loyal to Philip V, protested the mayor.

  “He’s lying,” said the driver of my carriage.

  “How do you know?” I said.

  In answer, he pointed at the bell tower, which was empty. “Any town without a bell supports the archduke,” he explained. “They were all handed over and melted down to make cannons.” He winked at me. “Well, these are Catalans, so no doubt they made a little money out of it. But the end result’s the same.”

  Overhearing us, a corporal came over. “You speak Catalan?” he said. “Because we need a translator.”

  I got down from the carriage and let him lead me to the sole prisoner. He was the group’s leader, a man by the name of Ballester. Before they hanged him, they wanted to extract whatever information they could. His eyebrow was split and had bled profusely. But his broad face had a beauty out of keeping with the situation, and seemed to scorn any pain he might have been in. The ropes binding his wrists were soaked dark red. He had been captured moments earlier, and the blood he’d shed was already dry, as though, the thought struck me, he had been born with old veins.

  And he was astonishingly young. Leading a squad of irregulars, and yet he couldn’t have been any older than sixteen or seventeen—a boy, like me. He must have had quite the temperament, to be respected as a leader. His features melded nobility and sadness—not so strange, given the situation. But something also said to me that, even in better times, he’d be the distant kind. As for Ballester’s gaze? It put me in mind of waves crashing against rocks; sooner or later, they’d overwhelm you. We came from such opposed worlds that I felt uncomfortable having to address him. I told him what his captors wanted. His attitude to me was that of a man listening to rabbits chew grass. He tilted his head and spat blood, and all he said in answer was: “I’m going to die, and that’s all.”

  He didn’t lament death, as though, more than an inevitable risk in the militia, it might mean martyrdom. Human instinct leads us to sympathize with the captive rather than the captor, and though Ballester’s fate mattered nothing to me, I found myself saying, “Don’t be a fool. If you promise them information, they’ll keep you alive. Tell them something they’ll need to wait to check the veracity of. Meantime, anything could happen. Who knows? Maybe peace will break out.”

  He raised his hands, bold youth, and
looked me in the eye. The words seemed to scrape out from between his teeth. “If it weren’t for these binds, I’d rip out your tongue, shitty botiflero.”

  Botiflero is the worst insult one can ever give a Catalan. It means anyone who supports Philip V, Castile, and the Bourbon dynasty. A traitor, a colluder, that is. The -iflero part of the word relates to a Catalan (and Spanish) word for fat—anyone, that is, all puffed up in his finery. I imagine it comes from the fact that the vast majority of supporters of the Austrian king, Charles, were from the lower classes, and those few Catalans behind Little Philip tended to be aristocracy and clergy.

  Anyway, what does it matter where the word comes from? The point is that Ballester had insulted me, and I responded accordingly. “I try to help you, and you insult me!” I shouted. “I’d like to know what my place as an upstanding engineer has to do with the lowly kind of warfare you are engaged in.”

  A few more insults went back and forth. The only thing to note being how clear was the irremediable distance separating us. For me, war was what I’d been taught at Bazoches: a technical exercise free of ill will, tempered by the nobility of the opposing spirits. War, in this account, could (and ought to) be undertaken without emotions, which can only cloud the rational landscape of engineering; battle was a rational sphere, closer to chess than flying bits of lead. If a soldier had ever said to Vauban that he hated the enemy, no question, Vauban would have answered: “And what has he ever done to you?” Whereas for individuals like Ballester, war was a matter of life and death. Or not—it was more, much more than that—according to what he believed, this war was being conducted according to principles far higher than the brief transition that is life. From my point of view, of course, this was deluded: A military engineer was as far removed from mysticism as a clockmaker.

  Yes, I had seen hundreds of people hanged, their feet swaying in the pines. I’d seen the Játiva hecatomb, and the dog and the girl at the woman’s feet. But my education was made of stuff too solid to be rocked by a few sad sights. I stopped arguing with Ballester; it wasn’t worth the trouble. He seemed to me the perfect mix of bandit and fanatic.

  “Very well,” I said, “don’t tell them anything. You’re the first person I’ve ever met who’d prefer a shorter to a longer life.”

  The Spanish captain who had sent for a translator was becoming annoyed, not being able to understand the insults. Curtly, he demanded to know what had been said.

  “The Miquelets in this area are under orders of General Jones, the English commander in Tortosa,” I lied. “Their mission is to take this godforsaken place and then await orders. A courier will be arriving tomorrow, first thing. To speak to this nincompoop, specifically.”

  As I’d thought, rather than stringing him up there and then, they decided to use him as bait.

  “You’ve got another night to live,” I said to him. “Put your house in order.”

  I had made it all up. No courier would be arriving the next morning, but I was in no danger. The Miquelets had decided against it, was all anyone would think, or they’d worked out it was a trap. Why did I do it? I don’t know; perhaps Jimmy’s royal generosity—not at all the same thing as generosity—had rubbed off on me. Or because of being a student of Vauban, whose punishment of vanquished foes was always benevolent. I do not believe it was purely out of goodness, as my next piece of conduct demonstrated very well the so-and-so I was becoming: I went after one of our Mediterranean beauties, a young girl, my and Ballester’s age, who sparkled even from afar, even with a dirty rag for a head wrap. I saw her passing in front of a squat building, an open-door stable now holding twenty or thirty military horses. She was inside, feeding them hay. When she saw me, she looked away.

  Look, I have lain down beside women from a great many latitudes, some of them of the strangest tints and hues. And in the eternal debate over which are most beautiful, I hold with the French. It must be one of the few commonplaces that are actually true. Still, it is a general truth; individually, when a Mediterranean woman is beautiful, she is without peer. And this young girl was bewitching. Her curly locks escaped from under the edges of the head wrap and fell down about her shoulders. The darkest black hair.

  A passing sergeant warned me off: “Don’t go near that one, she’s sick with something. She’ll even ward off horse rustlers.”

  It must be a question of character: If you say to certain people “Don’t go,” the very first thing they’ll do is go. I entered the large stable, stopping a few feet from her with my elbow propped on the back of a horse. Chewing a piece of straw, I looked directly at her. She didn’t stop working, piling straw in the mangers, pretending not to notice me.

  “Come over here,” I ordered.

  From closer up, I could observe her in more detail. Sure enough, she was very young. Her nose had a pronounced, graceful curve to it. Slowly, I lifted a finger to her cheek. She turned her face away, but I had her cornered. I brushed her cheek with my fingertip, coming away with one of the ugly black grains. Well, perhaps she was contagious, but not to a student from Bazoches, who notices even the tiniest details. I pressed on the eruption, then put my finger in my mouth and sucked.

  Raspberry jam. How clever! Not only had her pretend illness gotten her a job; it acted as a brilliant shield against the possibility of being raped. She knew she’d been found out, and the uncovered areas of her pale skin flushed an irate red.

  Don’t for a second think I’m going to launch into some discourse about military abuses. I’ve had dealings with too many soldiers, from all across the world, not to see their side. The common soldier is born a pauper and will die one. And things become available to an armed man that he’d never have the benefit of without a rifle at his shoulder. Spoils, and victims, become defenseless objects; it is then up to the morality of the would-be pillager to protect them. I agree that violating defenseless women is not a nice thing. My point is merely that to condemn the pillagers is easy—as easy as pillaging is difficult to defend.

  No, I did not violate her. Perhaps because, if you have been educated in Bazoches, you come to treat women à la Vauban, and not à la Coehoorn. But my case is an exception to what was happening all across occupied Catalonia: At that very moment hundreds, thousands, of soldiers were stepping inside barns such as that one, sword in one hand, woman under the other arm.

  The country was too small to provide lodgings for so many soldiers. A number of years later, I met a man who had been the mayor of a town of no more than eight hundred souls, called Banyoles. Practically every single virgin had been deflowered, and seventy-three of them fell pregnant. When he went to the governing authorities to protest, they reacted in the typical Bourbon fashion: by throwing the mayor in jail. Not even the Dutch in the sixteenth century suffered such ignominy at the hands of the duke of Alba’s troops.

  I asked her a few questions. Her name was Amelis. She did not hail from Beceite, the town where we were. So what was she doing there? She told me that she lived as a camp follower, taking whatever jobs she could find. I was about to push her harder, to try and elicit more information, when I heard shots outside.

  It wasn’t uniform volleys, like the kind you’d expect from regular troops, but, rather, a scattering of shots, punctuated by inhuman wailing. If there is one thing I have always had in spades, it is the prudence usually associated with beetles; rather than running out of the stable, I went farther in, to the back, keeping Amelis close to me as hostage. We got inside a mound of straw, me with my hand fast over her mouth, and I myself kept very, very quiet. Whatever was happening, I’d be sure to find out later on, without trying to be a hero. Indeed, it didn’t take long before I found out what, and who, it was. A soldier burst in, terrified, trying to get away from something—he wasn’t given time to hide: A number of Miquelets followed immediately behind. They ended his life as if he were a dog, beating his head in, and then went out in search of more. During the execution, I moved my hand from Amelis’s mouth to cover her eyes. She was kind and pruden
t enough not to scream.

  This was the execution I mentioned before, the one I witnessed in the flesh. The unpredictable, what in military terms was irrational, was never clearer than in assaults like the one on Beceite. They themselves had been given a hiding; they’d fled leaving thirty dead and their little caudillo, Ballester, in enemy hands. Who could have expected a counterattack within half an hour, leaderless and against superior forces? But their regard for Ballester, and the chance to rescue him, quite simply, drew them back.

  The Miquelets revealed a principle that is often ignored but that I have always had much respect for: lunacy. In war, it always lends the element of surprise. And they won the day! The Spanish officials were spread around in different houses throughout the town, each with his breeches down. The rank and file were not on guard and had no one to give them orders. Extremely cautiously, I peeked out of a window. At the end of the street, in the town square, I saw Ballester himself. Free once more, surrounded by his men, he was about to slit the throat of the captain who, moments before, had had him interrogated. The captain, kneeling; Ballester behind him. He lifted the captain’s chin with one hand and, with the other, drew a knife across the man’s gullet.

  I barely need say how nervous that pretty little scene made me. In Ballester’s eyes, I was an accursed botiflero. I preferred not to think what he’d do if he caught me. The way the captain had been killed, I was sure, would be rather agreeable compared to what they would line up for me; bleeding cleanly to death was sweet in comparison with the inventive torture methods the Miquelets could surely come up with.