If cavalry charges moved at such a pace, this world would be sorely overpopulated.
2
Peret, who had been my father’s old servant, took me into his little den, close to the harbor. Once you were through the door, you had to go down three steps, and at that depth, the rats believed themselves to have the right to challenge us for possession of the territory. The place was something between a ground floor and a basement, and the only windows were slits at street level, small rectangular openings through which we could see the feet of passersby. We had two rooms: One served as a bedroom and the other a dining room, kitchen, toilet, and whatever else we might happen to need. The damp stains came halfway up the wall in grotesque shapes.
Peret took pity on me. Even in his own state of wretchedness, he gave me a little money, just enough for me to get drunk on the cheapest booze and in the most putrid of hovels. I was the unhappiest engineer in all the world.
Once you have acquired the rationality of Bazoches, from then on, that steers your thoughts exclusively, sleeping as well as waking. I very often wanted to free myself from the tyranny known as reality. Rather than having to listen all the way through as atrocious violinists stood on tables chanting bawdy songs. The caterwauling of soldiers of many nations. That laughter, which we could tell, without a word being spoken, whether it came from Germans, Englishmen, Portuguese, or Catalans. The yelling of the drunks, the smoke from the pipes and cigarettes that blackened the vaulted ceilings. I would have preferred never to see the light of the tavern’s five hundred candles dripping light into the dark. People laughing, drinking, dancing. The din of humans entertaining themselves, which, to my great regret, kept me at arm’s length from this same human condition.
Yes, it was pain, that class of pain. My final meeting with Vauban was torturing me. “The answer is comprised of just one word,” the marquis had said. One word, my whole youth ruined by this Word. But which word, which? Night after night I gave in to despair. At lonely corner tables, I downed whole tankards, one after another. The Word, which word? I thought back over them all, from amor right down to zapador. No, that was not it. I got myself so drunk that the spirals that rose up from the smokers, meandering toward the ceiling, made me feel as though I were doing circuits around an Attack Trench. Very often, drunk, I made my way toward those smokers and set upon them, head-butting their jumbled teeth. I received countless cudgelings, all of them heartily deserved. Thrown out of nameless squalid little hovels, I lay there in the dirty, narrow streets of Barcelona, this modern Babylon.
Drinking to flee the world, drinking to escape your very body. Let us drink, all of us, we insects in the trifling circumference of this universe of ours! Let us drink until our vomiting repeats, returning to us as faithfully as dogs! All in all, how was I to be rid of my Points? At my worst moments, I would bare my right arm and, gazing on those delicate geometrical shapes, I would weep. My misfortune was etched into my very skin.
What might Jeanne be doing? Anything but thinking of Martí Zuviría. I could hardly blame her. I should have said to her, “I love you more than engineering.” But I did not, and so lost them both.
One day I was wandering the streets, swigging from a bottle. I had stopped to buy a cabbage leaf filled with fried meat from a street vendor, and as I was haggling, I saw an unforgettable face. She was last in a line of women standing at a water fountain.
The public fountain is one of the great inventions of civilization. A place where women can exhibit themselves while they stand in line, and the young fellows can get to know them with the gallant excuse of carrying their water for them. And guess who was waiting her turn to fill a good-sized pitcher? Right, it was my old friend Amelis.
She threw me a quick look like a little cornered bird. Only fleeting, but strike me down if it didn’t suggest a certain interest in the well-groomed Martí Zuviría. Better not to mention the Beceite episode. I offered to carry her pitcher, and in truth, she did not turn me down. A bit of gallantry and a perfect excuse to make conversation. Or to pick up on what we’d been up to in the pine forest before she vanished into the night. We hadn’t taken ten steps when I noticed someone lifting the tails of my coat in search of my purse.
I might attribute my particular sensitivity to the acute perceptiveness instilled in me in Bazoches, but the truth was, I did not need to resort to that. A while earlier, I’d detected the presence of another pair of old acquaintances in the area: Nan and Anfán.
They had managed to make it to Barcelona after all. The boy, still with the same indescribably dirty mane; the dwarf with the funnel pulled down onto his head. The two of them were busy watching the passersby like miniature vultures. Noticing them, I handed Amelis the pitcher and grabbed them by the collar. It really felt as though no time had passed, as though we were back in a winding trench, with them running away from me around the bends.
“That’s it!” I said. “I’ve got you this time.”
They started to whine and bawl as though I were the aggressor and they the victims.
“Go on, let them go,” said Amelis. “They’re only kids.”
“Ha!” I laughed. “You have no idea what these two are capable of. I intend to hand them over to the first patrol I find.”
“You can’t do that,” my dark beauty said in their defense, “they will get twenty lashes, and with those tender bones, it will surely kill them.”
I shrugged. “It’s not I who make the laws, I merely carry them out.” The lawsuit against the Italians over my father’s apartment was very much in my mind as I said that. “And if an honorable man like myself is being given such a hard time, I don’t see why I ought to be indulgent toward incorrigible thieves.”
Anfán clung to my ankles, weeping and begging. When he saw that the girl was defending him, the weeping became louder. Since I am the greatest fraud of the century, I can recognize my own kind in an instant. And I must concede, the lad was wonderfully good at it. But he did not convince me.
“Off we go, trench pig!”
Amelis grabbed hold of my elbow. “You can’t treat these two little ones so!”
It is all very well for women to be compassionate creatures, but this one was starting to sound like Our Lady of the Poor and Defenseless.
“Please!”
I merely said, “I’m sorry, sweetie,” freed myself from her grip, and walked on, a pickpocket in each hand, dangling like a couple of trout. What I did not expect was that she would come and stand directly in front of me, blocking my path. She stood with her arms crossed.
“Let them go,” she said, then added bluntly: “Very well, what is it you want?”
Truly, this was unsettling. I understood what she was suggesting, but that did not make it any more comprehensible. I stared at her even harder.
Her features had something irremediably sad about them. But nobody can be that generous, so why did she volunteer? Well, it was all the same to me. She was too beautiful, and I was too much of a swine, for me possibly to refuse. I let them go.
“Next time I’ll see you hanged!” I shouted. “Your necks will be longer than a goose’s, understand?”
Before I had finished telling them off, they had already gone around three corners and were nowhere to be seen. I turned to her: “Where to?”
She took me to La Ribera, one of the most insalubrious and overpopulated neighborhoods in all Barcelona, which is saying something. Solid gray buildings, three, four, even five storeys high, and narrow little alleyways that stopped the sunlight from reaching ground level. It was unbelievably full of people and animals. Stray dogs, chickens living on balconies, milking goats tied to rings in the walls, meeeehhh . . . Some of the people living there seemed quite content; they smoked and played dice in the doorways, using a barrel as a table. Others were like the living dead. I watched one man who looked like Saint Simeon the Stylite, the difference being that Simeon spent thirty years on top of a pillar and this man seemed to have been through at least double that, and living on a
diet of sparrow shit. To make passersby pity him, he would open his shirt and show his ribs, which stood out like crab claws. He held a beggar’s hand out to me. “Per l’amor de Déu, per l’amor de Déu.”
Most of the buildings must already have been old when the Emperor Augustus was here. We went into one, I don’t know which, but it was even more squalid, possibly, than all the others. We climbed some stairs, up to a door on the third storey.
We walked in. I looked around us. A single shrunken room, a single window. The street was so narrow that if you stretched out your hand, you could almost touch the building opposite. At the back of the room, a straw mattress with no bed frame. Beside it, a little mountain of melted wax topped by a few candles. I imagined that at first the candles had been put on the floor, and that as they’d burned down, the same mass of melted wax had come to form the base for the ensuing ones. The rest of the furniture was comprised of a stool near the door and a basin of water, over which Amelis squatted down to wash. And that was it.
“This is where you live?” I asked as she undressed.
“I live nowhere.”
The presence at the back of the room of a little wooden box—made of what seemed to be fine wood—was all the more noticeable in the midst of that destitution; Intrigued by that solitary object, no larger than a shoe box, I walked toward it and, since Zuvi is an impertinent sort of cove, lifted the lid. The moment the box opened, a tune came out, jolly but also mechanical, filling the room. I jumped a little, like a scalded cat. I felt like one of those ignorant savages, as this was the first time I had seen a carillon à musique.
“What are you doing?” Amelis snapped in protest.
She had been busy taking off her clothes, and when she noticed my intrusion, she seized the music box. She stood there naked, protecting it with her body, keeping it away from me. I do not believe even she was aware of the beauty of that picture: a woman this lovely, protecting that musical repository.
She closed the lid, and the music died away.
“I’ve never seen such a thing,” I said.
She opened the lid again, and as that mechanical tune filled the air, she said: “Hurry. You have until it finishes.”
Well, then, best get to it. I had gone there to do her, and I did. She seemed much more offended that I should have laid hands on her music box than on her body. There was only one moment when she showed any sort of kindness toward me. It was when she said: “Wait.”
She picked up the tangle of my clothes that had fallen down and put them on the stool, in order that they should not get dirty on that filthy floor. We went straight back to it, and I soon had her shrieking like a witch on the bonfire.
When it comes to women, I have always followed the same strategy that Vauban used with cities: Assail them, but be not overly hasty. And you can take my word for it—with such spoils in my sights, it was difficult to ease off on the barrage. But then the little tune came to an end, and she pushed me from her body.
“I’ve done what I said, you’re satisfied, and the children got to keep their lives,” she said, staring up at the ceiling. “Out.”
There was nothing more to be said. I picked up my clothes and hat from the stool, dressed, and walked down the stairs without saying goodbye. Once I was out on the street, I passed the half-dead prophet again. He was still holding out his hand, with the same refrain: “Per l’amor de Déu, per l’amor de Déu.”
Everyone is in a decent mood after a good fuck, so I stopped to give him a couple of coins. I rummaged in my pockets. But just imagine—my purse had disappeared.
That whore!
I raced back up the stairs like a wild thing. How could I have allowed myself to be beguiled so grossly, so utterly predictably? Me! Who, just moments earlier, had been feeling odious and guilty for taking her to bed! I was more annoyed at the deception than at the loss. What would the Ducroix brothers have said? But when I entered the room, I stopped dead.
On top of the girl, on the straw mattress, there was an enormous brute of a man, and he was giving her a thrashing, right and left. And what a thrashing. He had her held between his legs; she was screaming, with no way to escape. It wasn’t that the man was especially broad at the shoulders, but his woodcutter’s arms looked like hammers. At this rate, he would kill her in no time. He wasn’t a customer, as I could tell by the fact that the music box was closed.
“Oi, look here!” I cried, as a reflex. “What’s this?”
The big fellow, whose back was to the door, turned and looked at me. An ogre, a one-eyed ogre. Until that moment I had thought the Cyclops lived on islands in the Aegean.
“What’s it look like?” he barked, looking at me with his one eye. “I’m giving her a rosewater bath, right? Are you going to stand there waiting your turn? Get out of here, blockhead!”
Was I going to be intimidated by this ruffian, this one-eyed lowlife, however oversize he may have been? Of course I was. I forgot all about my purse and ran down the stairs. “What a piece of work is a man,” I muttered to myself.
What happened next is harder to understand. I was on the last run of stairs when a little old woman appeared. She was carrying a pitcher much like the one I had offered to carry for Amelis.
“Allow me, my good woman, allow me,” I said, impeccably friendly. “I’ll take it up.”
I came into the room carrying the pitcher, which did indeed weigh a ton. Don’t ask me why I went back, because I do not know. I am no knight errant, and this girl was nothing but a thieving whore.
The one-eyed ogre was still going for it. Nor is it true that I am especially compassionate, but if you had heard the girl screaming! Although she was writhing between the sheets, trying to scratch out his one remaining eye, she was only a few punches from getting herself killed.
So there I was, me, her, and the ogre. And the pitcher filled with water in my hands. And—worth pointing out—the ogre had his back to me. Raising the pitcher high above my head, I hurled it with all my strength at the back of his neck.
The ogre toppled to one side, water and blood everywhere. His body subsided; there was a rushing noise like a landslide. He rolled over on the floor, coming to lie faceup. Amelis was soaked in blood and water, too, a pitiful sight, her lips cut and her hands shaking.
What came next was the sweetest conversation of my life.
Me: “Got anything heavy to hand?”
Her, hugging her knees and furious, as though she were still struggling with the Cyclops: “Do I look like a dockworker to you?”
Me (sarcastic): “Your little friend is waking up, and if I don’t do something, he’s going to rip us to shreds like a couple of heads of cabbage.”
Her, pointing at the four candles: “That, you idiot!”
Me (still more indignant): “It’s just a pile of wax! What am I supposed to do, make him swallow it so the poor baby gets a tummyache?”
Her, still with her arms around her knees, rolling her eyes like someone obliged to deal with an inveterate imbecile: “Noooo . . . It’s not just wax—pick it up!”
The block of melted wax had a cannonball hidden inside it. God knows whether it was from the bombardment by the French fleet in 1691, the siege of 1697, the skirmishes that followed the landing of the Allies in 1705, or some other battle. Some person with a sense of humor had carried it up here and begun to use it for holding candles. The melted wax had wrapped itself around the ball like a solid shell, making it unrecognizable.
I picked up the iron projectile with both hands and approached the one-eyed ogre. His neck was twisted, his head in line with the wall.
Me: “Turn his neck! Don’t you see I can’t get a proper shot at this angle?”
“You can’t get what?”
“Turn his neck!”
Without leaving her mattress, Amelis grabbed the ogre by the hair and pulled. I stood astride the fallen body and raised the cannonball over my head. At exactly that moment, his one remaining eye opened.
“Wait!” cried Amelis.
Had she suddenly turned compassionate? She pointed at the bomb. “What if it explodes?”
Still half stunned, the ogre understood what was going on. He grabbed my ankle in one hand, his living eye wider than ever.
Well, his final sight of the world was to be a twenty-four-caliber projectile falling directly onto his face. That was too close. Whatever the strategists may tell you, the best tactic will always be a good heavy blow from behind.
I rubbed my hands to remove the wax. “Done. It was his head that did some good exploding, after all.”
From her bed, Amelis looked at the dead ogre, then at me, and said: “You aren’t planning on leaving me here with that, are you? If they find him, they’ll kill me!”
I save her life, and now she asks me to scrub the floor. Women!
“I didn’t come back to get friendly with your boyfriends,” I said. “My purse,” I added, holding out my hand for her to return what was mine.
She laughed and told me she had no purse. I could search as much as I wanted, she said, to prove her innocence, but I would not find it. On the whole, I do know when somebody is lying. And she was so sure of herself that I ruled out the possibility. What was more, in that barren room, there could be no little nooks or hiding places. If she was a thief, she was such a good one that she deserved my respect.
Sometimes you have to know when you’re beaten. I made as if to go. But when I was at the door, she said coldly: “Wait.”
She poured the water (which she’d been using to wash her cunt) out into the street. She wiped the blood off her face with a rag, got dressed, and the two of us left together. She went ahead of me without saying a word, surly as ever. And whom should we find but Nan and Anfán, sitting on the steps of the Pi church.
Victus Page 20
