When they saw me, they started to run, but she gave a shepherd’s whistle and they stopped. We approached them, and Amelis rummaged through Anfán’s clothes till she had turned out my leather purse. She handed it over to me as if to say: “Now we’re even.”
They had planned the whole set piece. While gallant young men carried the heavy pitchers full of water, their arms raised, spellbound by the vision of this dark Helen of Troy, Nan and Anfán would relieve them of the contents of their pockets. If anything went awry, Amelis would intercede. Everyone surrendered to the entreaties of an eighteen-year-old angel as beautiful as she was: everyone except unscrupulous types like me. Those she’d take to the room in La Ribera. While they fucked, Nan would keep watch as Anfán crept into the room, silent as a lizard, to swipe the purse. You’ll recall that she placed my clothes on a stool beside the door, very easy to reach. I am sure that the loudest of her amorous wailing coincided with, and provided cover for, Anfán’s entrance. After, she could then maintain her blessed innocence, since the booty had gone and no trace of the crime could possibly be found. A fine trio.
The boy, the dwarf, and Amelis stayed in the half-basement in El Raval. They couldn’t be seen around La Ribera, at least until the death of the one-eyed ogre had been forgotten. As we learned subsequently, he was neither a procurer nor a criminal from the underworld but a depraved patrician who would occasionally carry Amelis’s pitcher and had gone mad with passion for her. Eventually, fed up with his pockets being picked, he’d come straight over to kill her.
They had nothing but the clothes on their backs, except for Amelis, who was carrying her one earthly possession in her arms: that strange box that played a tune, to which she was so attached. It was clear that she used her carillon à musique as a shield to protect herself against the sorrows of life. When she appeared, she had that sacred little box swaddled as though it were the baby Jesus Himself.
At first the whole thing was a real nuisance. Peret and I were already finding it a squeeze in that half-basement, and now we had to find room for another three bodies. Amelis and I shared the only bedroom. Peret and that other pair lay on straw mattresses in the room that served as kitchen and dining room. Peret could not abide them. He made my head throb with all his complaints, lamentations, and recriminations.
The dwarf, for example, had very queer ideas about domestic life. When he didn’t get his way, he’d express his frustration by shrieking like a speared boar, high-pitched and frantic enough to wake the dead. If he was ignored, he’d use his own head as a battering ram, butting doors and walls, racing around the house like a spinning top.
If the dwarf seemed eccentric, Anfán’s behavior was positively indescribable. The word “thief” is inadequate to describe that lad. He was compulsive, a larceny fanatic. Any time of the day or night, you might find his little fingers in your pockets. Thanks to what I had learned in the Spherical Room, I could see him coming a mile off, and shooed him as though swatting a fly, but poor Peret was robbed as many as five times a day. One morning he awoke early with a candle stuck in his nose and completely naked. Before breakfast, Anfán and Nan had already sold his clothes on the streets.
I tried to reason with the boy. “Don’t you understand that while you are here, what’s ours is yours?”
“No.”
At least he was honest.
Peret, entirely logically, wanted to beat them to death. As usual, Amelis protected them, shouting, hiding them behind her skirts. Peret’s opinion could not have been clearer: “Since you live with her, you have the right to treat her as your wife. Put her in her place and give her a good hiding every once in a while!”
Our half-basement was a nest of disagreement. On the other hand, I was in no hurry for Amelis to leave. She soon recovered from the beating she had received. She was infinitely more beautiful than the first day I saw her in the stable of a godforsaken little town. And in short, let me just say that, in bed, she was very obliging. We slept together, and this started to change into a routine that began, bit by bit, to develop beyond mere pleasure into a happy, daily amazement. Love? I do not know. Nobody ever asks whether he loves the air that he breathes, and yet he cannot live without it. It was a little like that. Her thoughts at the time were a mystery. Did she approve of her new condition, or did she go along with it in order to keep a roof over her head—or for the sake of that pair, with whom her relationship was more that of an older sister than a mother? All I can tell you is that one night, before making love, she did not open the carillon à musique. And from that night on, while we were still together, she never opened it again.
The thing was, Anfán’s thieving habits had to stop. Either the boy changed, or we would all be driven quite mad. I did not even consider beating them, as I was sure that technique would be no use. From what little I knew of his biography, the lad had experienced such treatment wherever he went. The results were plain to see.
The big changes started on the outside. Vauban had been such a stickler for cleanliness that he bathed every week. I am no admirer of such excesses, but Anfán and Nan had never been closer to water than a pair of desert rocks.
The worst was when we wanted to cut the hair of one of them and remove the funnel from the head of the other. The moment they saw the scissors and the clippers (could we have used anything less to yank off that funnel?), they fled and did not show their faces in the house for two days after.
Finally, we reached a compromise with Anfán. We had nothing against his braids, but we gave him to understand that those twisted shapes were made of pure filth. If he washed them, Amelis promised, she would weave his fair hair into natural braids, dozens of blond braids; we promised she would. Much more attractive, too.
Clean, decently dressed in a white shirt and a pair of pants without holes in them, with braids that glowed yellow instead of greasy rags, he even looked like a child and not the cabin boy from a pirate ship.
With the dwarf, we agreed to burn his circus clothes and that he should remove his funnel once a month. We had to swear that, while we washed his hair, he would be allowed to hold on to the funnel with both hands. I refuse to describe all the bugs and pus-covered gack we found in there that first time. Yeuch!
Amelis, Nan, and Anfán were a tight, inseparable trio. It was not quite clear who had adopted whom. However much I asked Anfán about his past, it was as though he had a crater in his memory. Whenever he was abandoned, or whenever his parents were killed, it must have been when he was very small, as he had no memory of them. It was better, perhaps, that he didn’t remember. He was aware of no other life than this one, as a piece of floating detritus, ever at the mercy of the tides of invasions that followed one another through that natural corridor of the Mediterranean called Catalonia. His very name, his barracks talk, a mixture of French, Catalan, and Spanish, said it all.
Boys will always be boys. Including that little beast Anfán. Deprived as he was of paternal love, he filled its absence by projecting it onto the dwarf. Deep down, Anfán gave Nan the very thing he himself was crying out for. I began to feel a soft spot for the boy when I understood that.
As far as I knew, not long after the siege of Tortosa came to an end, the pair had run into Amelis (the roads from Beceite and Tortosa met on the way to Barcelona). If a place has a roof, it’s possible to call it home; under that roof is the shared hearth, and in the absence of a fire, an embrace, simple and basic, will do. They were her home. The proof being, Nan and Anfán never got used to sleeping far away from Amelis. At any moment of the night, they might leave the straw where they lay and come in to us. That I might have been busy with her made no difference at all to them. They crowded in with us and slept like kittens. To begin with, I protested: “Can’t they at least stay outside till we’ve finished?”
Amelis answered quite simply: “What difference does it make?”
The three of them were shocked by my civilized rules. To them it was much more normal for all of us to sleep together in a tangle of elbows
and knees, one person’s feet in another’s face, or someone’s cheeks on someone else’s belly. One false move, and the end of that damned funnel could stab you anywhere. And I mean anywhere!
Look, I know it is not really right to be making love and sleeping when you have a kid, a dwarf, and a funnel sharing your bed.
But honestly, what can I tell you?
3
Around that time we received the most unexpected of visits: four porters with three heavily armed escorts, who said that they had come from beyond the northern border and were delivering a letter and a trunk in my name.
The letter was from Don Bardonenche, who begged my forgiveness for not being able to deliver the trunk in person. The Vauban family had entrusted him with the mission of getting it to me. Unfortunately, once he had reached the border, the Allied army had blocked his passage, however strongly good Bardonenche had insisted that he was driven only by personal motives to visit beautiful Barcelona. “This world is going to the dogs,” wrote Bardonenche sadly, “as can be seen from the fact that nowadays, men don’t even trust their enemies.” My dear vile Waltraud is surprised by this, but I can assure you that in my day, at least among career soldiers, such courtesies were not in the least unusual.
Well, when we opened the trunk, our surprise provoked—in this order—stammering, shouting, and fainting, because it contained no more nor less than one thousand two hundred francs. The marquis had bequeathed the sum to me in his will. I won’t pretend I wasn’t moved: Even from beyond the grave, I remained in Vauban’s thoughts. Why had it taken so long? The distance between Paris and Barcelona is not inconsiderable even when there is no war on, and the conflict had increased the number of legal obstacles for such a large sum of money to reach me.
To celebrate my newfound fortune, I went on a binge so monumental that I suffered a hangover for two days. The problem was, that gang took advantage of my lying down a little to squander my treasure: They spent every last coin buying an apartment, a fifth-storey abode in the busy La Ribera neighborhood. Amelis needed a man’s signature, so Peret obliged. You will better understand my desire to throttle them when I tell you that the contents of the trunk were insufficient, which meant that, to complete the purchase, it was necessary to secure a loan. Naturally, they arranged to take it out in my name. As for the rest, how could a man trained to put up or knock down city ramparts ever love partition walls? I don’t know how I bore it when Amelis showed me our new nest.
It was a common house with just a few pretensions: cheap painting on the ceiling, geometric patterns on the plastered walls, three bedrooms, and a kitchen. It smelled of new plaster. As usual, the fifth storey was the cheapest, since getting there required climbing numerous flights of stairs. At least the height meant there was sunlight in the bedrooms. We had one to ourselves, another for Nan and Anfán, and a third for that parasite Peret (his charge for helping with the swindle by pretending to be me with the creditors). The rear balcony looked out over the bastion of Saint Clara. The fortified pentagon stretched all the way out as far as the foot of the balcony. We could look down and see the bastion yard, the changing of the guard, the whole thing. In our room, Amelis showed me a skylight that opened immediately above the bed. Through the glass, there was a view of the sky, bluer than the Mediterranean itself.
As a matter of fact, the house became a real home the day Amelis installed her carillon à musique in our bedroom. Through the skylight, the rays of the sun poured down onto the white sheets, and she would often sit in the middle of the bed, naked, brushing her long black hair, her lips moving in time to that sad melody. The beauty of the sight was enough to turn you to stone. In such moments it was best not to interrupt her self-absorbed nakedness.
God, how the life we shared had changed! In the past, Amelis had made use of the music box in order to escape during the torments life had subjected her to. Now it served a different function: as though that music—so unusual, so artificial, and yet so sweet—were transporting her back to her most distant memories. No, it was more than that, the music box itself comprised the memories, the way a desert has no borders: The desert is itself the border.
And so, well, we were now the brand-new owners of a home. A problem arose from the fact that the trunk from Vauban had contained one thousand two hundred francs, while the apartment had cost one thousand, six hundred, and twelve. In other words, in less time than it takes to sleep off a hangover, we had exchanged our state from happily well-off paupers to that of happily poor property owners. And indebted ones, at that. We had to pay off the debt, and during wartime all business gets drawn into war, too.
It’s about time I recounted my little adventure in Castilian lands. How I was dragged into the 1710 campaign, how I came to witness the rise of Archduke Charles to the Madrid throne, and the fall that followed. Ah, yes, and also how I found—altogether unbelievably—a teacher who would replace Vauban, and that the last individual in the world I ever would have supposed capable of exercising any kind of preeminence in anything.
For this reason, if you will allow me, I will first permit myself a brief digression. My dear vile Waltraud is against it; she thinks I ought to get on. Well, pity for her.
In order to tear me away from the taverns, Amelis insisted that we leave the city, even if for a day, on the pretext of a chocolatada. For a reasonable price, it was possible to hire a carriage to take you six or seven miles outside Barcelona. There you would find green expanses, meadows, and beautiful views, and at the end of the day, the carts would return to collect the day-trippers and bring them home. Let me tell you a little about the chocolatadas.
A chocolatada did not necessarily mean simply going and eating chocolate. Depending on the kind of people taking part, the most peculiar products might be added to the melted chocolate, aphrodisiacs in particular. The priests had declared war on chocolate and were constantly sermonizing against its consumption, which was very much the fashion.
As chocolate is black, nobody could ever be sure what had been added to a mug. The cook could slip his hand in and add a few intoxicants, which, consumed to excess, could cause death. It was just a risk you took. In fact, it was more the danger than anything that excited people about it, because the great majority of chocolatadas contained no more than that, some innocent cocoa boiled up with sugar. But since everybody went along with the suspicion, if not the absolute conviction, that some love drugs had been poured in, whenever you put your hand on your daughter-in-law’s lovely behind, you could always blame the chocolate. (Yes, yes, everything was always the chocolate’s fault, of course!)
Fantasy or not, after a second mug people suddenly felt a passionate urge to dance. They would hold hands in a circle, laughing and singing. And without the slightest decorum! Men and women jumbled in together, with no distinction between generations, status, or kindred! There were always a couple of fiddles to brighten up the party, and shortly afterward, couples of dancers would start disappearing. You can guess what they had gone off to do.
I didn’t care a fig what they had done to the chocolate, I was suffering only for my Amelis. The carriages left us on a beautiful green hillock. No sooner had we alit than I started feeling unwell, since I knew that in the dissolute atmosphere of a chocolatada, any clown would try to take advantage of her. I remember the exact moment when my jealousy attack struck: I was helping her down from the wagon, my arm around her waist, and as I deposited her on the ground, I felt as though I had lost something. “Oh, Déu meu, . . . ” I said to myself with something like sorrow. “So that’s what it is—I’m in love with her.”
There must have been thirty or forty of us sprawled on blankets. Presiding over the plain was an old ruined masía, a construction with no doors and half the roof caved in. The masías, traditional Catalan mountain houses, were miniature fortresses that took care—great care—of an area’s defenses. I wasn’t surprised that the former inhabitants of this one should have chosen such a setting: From there it was possible to control any approach, t
hree hundred and sixty degrees around, and from a great distance. Bazoches was certainly not the first place to study the ancient art of defending.
After breakfast came the chocolate, and the revelry began. The fiddles started to play jouncing tunes. People gathered around in circles. Amelis took my hand for us to dance, too. I could not. At that moment something unusual happened: Anfán came up behind me and threw his arms around my neck. It had taken nearly a year for him to get that close. Laugh if you like, but I felt moved. He rested his boyish cheek against mine and whispered: “Can I rob them, jefe? They’re all drunk.”
“No, no, you can’t. They are drunk, but they’re also good people.”
That line of argument had no impact on him whatsoever.
“All that booty, and I could even buy Nan a new funnel.”
“Has Nan asked you for a funnel? No. What you want is to have some fun. Well, go and dance, then. You’ll see how much you enjoy that, and no risk of a whipping, either.” In the tone Vauban used to employ with me, I added, “You won’t understand why, but you have to make sure nobody takes Nan off into the bushes.” And I shouted: “Allez!”
When it comes to little boys and soldiers, it’s always better to charge them with a mission than a punishment.
And you will allow me to become a little emotional now, for I discovered, suddenly, that this was happiness. The green grass, the jolly fiddles. Circles of people laughing and dancing like zanies. Crooked little Peret holding hands with a widow, whispering filth in her ear. Nan and Anfán dancing, Nan as inexpressive as ever but happy on the inside; Anfán, following my instructions, driving off with a kick any woman who approached the dwarf. And Amelis laughing, dancing, her black hair loose in the wind. I don’t know how long it lasted. Just a short time, I’m sure; happiness is always fleeting. All at once Peret and the widow came rushing out of a clump of bushes, Peret holding his pants around his calves and the woman running with her hair all disheveled. They must have seen something when they were right in the middle of things.
Victus Page 21
