Victus

by Albert Sanchez Pinol

  “After you found those muskets, I told you to stay with Amelis,” I said, glaring at him across the table. “And you disobeyed me.”

  He responded like a wild beast with rational faculties. His innate instincts and his sense of justice joined forces to proclaim in a single voice: “But the bandits were thieves!” He stood up on his chair, defensive and indignant at the same time. “Why can’t I steal from thieves?” he added, his eyes wide. “They were thieves!”

  Peret shouted: “Stupid boy! When are you going to learn that’s the worst insult you can make against anybody? If it weren’t for Martí, the Miquelets would be roasting you alive right now. Stupid boy!”

  Something snapped when Nan, who was sitting on his chair, swinging his legs and looking down at the floor, repeated Peret’s words: “Stupid boy.”

  “Time for you to be punished,” I announced.

  I went to my room, returning with Ballester’s riding whip. I sat down and said, “Come over here.”

  It is a very particular expression, the expression on the face of a human being who discovers that he has been betrayed. After a year under the same roof, after so long sleeping in the same bed, I was going to use violence on him. The boy approached, feigning indifference. By the time he had taken those four steps, his expression had changed to that of someone who never wanted to see me again.

  I placed the whip in his hand and held out my open palm. “Hit me.”

  At first he didn’t understand.

  “Hit me!” I said again.

  He did, gently.

  “Harder!”

  He turned away to consult the others, bewildered, but I put a finger on his chin and forced him to look at me.

  The whip cracked against my hand.

  “Is that the best you can do? Harder!”

  He hit me harder, drawing blood. When he saw it, he took a step back in alarm.

  “We’re not done yet. Again.”

  I offered him my bleeding palm one more time. He hit me. The whip had gone deeper into the wound, and this time I couldn’t help a grimace of pain.

  “That’s enough,” Amelis pleaded.

  “Quiet!” I shouted, and looking straight at Anfán, I said firmly: “Keep going, or get out of here and never come back!”

  He raised the whip. I showed my wounded hand, the open groove streaming with blood. “The whip. Use it!”

  He burst out crying. He had never cried like this before. In the hands of the Miquelets, he had been afraid, but with this torrent of tears, he was purging himself of all the ills of the world, all the bile that our age had corrupted him with. Amelis put her arms around him.

  “Do you understand?” I whispered in his ear. “Now do you understand?”

  Anfán learned that night that his pain was ours, and ours his. His learning that lesson meant I learned another: that four human beings can be not merely the sum of a few individuals but an entity conjoined by fondness for one another. That night our full bed seemed to me quite changed. I no longer saw that elbow, that funnel, that mane of hair belonging to another, a nuisance that fell in our eyes as we slept. They were a whole now, like the Spherical Room had been, beyond just the objects that inhabited it. I looked at them, I tell you, with the alertness of Bazoches, undisturbed by feelings, which are nothing more than clouds obscuring the landscape of reason. And yet I never cease to be amazed how methodical observation can turn into tenderness. I heard Anfán’s gentle snoring, watched Nan’s grimaces as he dreamed, Amelis’s closed eyelids, and said to myself that the bed, that tiny rectangle, was surely the most valuable star in our whole universe.

  4

  So there it was, the strange home that, in mid-1710, I was forced to leave for a long time. And why did I leave? I should say a little about the military situation in those days.

  Despite the frivolity of the Barcelonans, whose lives carried on as though the war were being fought on the banks of the Rhine alone, the truth was that it was coming closer and closer. One might say that by 1710 it was already all around us. The only territory controlled by Charles was the little triangle that was Catalonia, with Barcelona at its center. In 1710 almost all of Spain was in the hands of Little Philip, the Two Crowns’ strategy was fiendishly systematic, and our Allies, meanwhile, operated by means of momentary thrusts, followed by long stretches of indolence.

  The military situation was going from bad to worse, so the Allied leaders decided that something had to be done. And each time war ground to a halt in the Spanish theater, the Allies made the same choice: to send a new general to Spain to get things moving again. At that time, the latest import was the Englishman James Stanhope. If only we’d had a different Jimmy on our side, James Berwick rather than the boy Stanhope. As bigheaded as he was impulsive, Stanhope was the embodiment of the attitude “I’ll sort this out in a trice!” How is it possible that a man who thinks he knows it all should learn absolutely nothing? General In-a-Trice! That’s how history should have remembered him!

  He arrived in Barcelona well briefed by his government. England had had enough of the war, and his mission would be to put an end to it once and for all. And this was the final effort London was prepared to make to bring about a victorious conclusion. New military contingents arrived with Stanhope, too: Dutch and Austrian infantry, along with the powerful English cavalry corps, with Stanhope himself at its head. These reinforcements, combined with the Allied troops that had remained in Catalonia, were bound to be enough for a great offensive, avenging Almansa and crowning Charles in Madrid as the king of all Spain. And all in a trice!

  The offensive raised uncommon expectations among those of us in Barcelona. History books tend to forget the huge numbers of people who travel with an army on campaign. And since the number of civilians following an army convoy often exceeds the number of actual soldiers, it is, you will agree, a rather sizable thing to forget. On the one hand, there are the people providing services, from barbers to cobblers, indispensable functions for such a great contingent of humanity. But there was also the fact that the 1710 offensive was to be the decisive attack. Hundreds, thousands, of pro-Austrian Spaniards in exile in Catalonia joined the military columns, and they did so with the enthusiasm of people who finally see an opportunity to return home, galloping to victory. Matters didn’t end there, because in addition to the merchants and expatriates, there came a whole trail of opportunists. After all, Catalonia was the land that had been most faithful to Charles’s cause. It would make sense that, upon ascending the throne in Madrid, he would recompense his compatriots with perks and positions. And can you guess who was to be found among the worst of that pack of hustlers? Yes indeed, good old Zuvi. I told Amelis that this was an opportunity unlike any other, that with luck, I might be able to land myself a tidy sum we could use to pay off our debts.

  And yet money wasn’t the true reason I added my name to the convoy of army followers. I never told Amelis that, of course. She never would have understood that I was risking my skin for a Word.

  The trunk from Vauban had been a message from beyond the grave. It was as though the marquis were saying: “Is this the life your teacher prepared you for?” I told myself I could not accept the marquis’s fortune, not without making one final attempt to learn a word—The Word.

  “Summarize the optimum defense”: That was what Vauban had asked of me. Half of Europe’s armies were attacking the heart of the Spanish empire. If they wanted to crown Charles, they would need to take the capital, Madrid. Spain and France would do their utmost to oppose this. The greatest leaders would clash on the bare wastelands of Castile; the whole struggle would hinge on Madrid’s defense. It promised to be a spectacle both tragic and grand, a clash of cosmic proportions. And within this theater, perhaps I might find a teacher to continue the marquis’s work. With his help, maybe The Word would be revealed to me. The recriminations I heard from Amelis made me happy, because there could be only one possible reason for her opposing my departure: love. But I had a debt to another love, and i
t was every bit as great.

  I owed it to Vauban.

  I needed to figure out some way to follow the army, so I came to an arrangement with a merchant who was planning to follow the troops with a two-horse covered wagon laden with barrels of stomach-churning liquor. He was calculating that when the army crossed the dry, uninhabited parts of Castile, where it would be impossible to procure any wine, the price of alcohol would soar.

  We came to a mutually beneficial agreement. I needed transportation, and his wagon was covered with a bit of sackcloth that would serve as a roof over our heads at night. The merchant was accompanied by his son, a troubled lad whose wits were barely sharper than a dog’s. At night the merchant and his lad would sleep in the front section of the wagon, right behind the driver’s seat. Another passenger and I would be at the back, defending the rear.

  This other passenger said his name was Zúñiga, Diego de Zúñiga. Eight decades have passed, and I still remember him as an altogether remarkable man. What set Zúñiga apart? Well, strange though it may sound, it was the fact that there was nothing about him that stood out, absolutely nothing at all. He wasn’t very talkative or very withdrawn; he wasn’t miserly or profligate; neither tall nor short; neither merry nor sad. Every man has his own distinctive manner, a certain way of clicking his fingers, an unusual laugh or a particular way of tilting his head when he spits. Zúñiga did not spit, his laughter was always buried away within the laughter of others, and he tended to keep his fingers hidden. A ghost would have seemed much more tangible beside him. He was one of those fellows you tend to forget the moment they have left your field of vision. As a matter of fact, as I try to reconstruct Zúñiga’s face now, I find it hard to gain purchase on it in my memory.

  According to what he told me, he was the son of a moderately affluent family brought low by the war. Since his father was one of the few Castilians to have taken Charles’s part, the Bourbons and their supporters had expropriated the family’s possessions. By then an old man, he hadn’t survived the shock of it all. Zúñiga was a native of Madrid.

  The two of us got on well, if only because we had a lot in common. For a start, our families were of a similar social standing, neither rich nor very poor, and life had brought us down several rungs on the ladder. We were the same sort of age, added to which was the similarity between our family names. We slept curled up next to each other. From the first day, it seemed quite natural that we should share our bread and wine. A shame he was not a more garrulous sort.

  Shortly before arriving at Lérida, we caught up with the giant serpent that was the Allied army, a motley troop of Englishmen, Dutchmen, Portuguese, and even a regiment of Catalans (a gang of diehard loons, I must say), led by a high command every bit as diverse. We approached the main column by a little path that met it at right angles, and we had to wait hours for all the troops to pass, with their baggage, artillery, gun carriages, and provisions. Then came our kind: thousands of people who followed the army like seagulls the stern of a fishing boat.

  Knowing that we were in for a long journey, and that there were gaps in my Spanish, I had brought with me the thickest book I could find. I would read it before turning in for the night, by the light of the fire, or even in the wagon. Between one jolt and the next, I’d be taken by fits of laughter, because it was a most brilliant piece of work and a delight to the spirit. What follows is a seemingly insignificant episode, but for some reason, one that has remained in my memory.

  We had stopped at some spot or other. It was one of those plains that stretch out beyond Balaguer, a foretaste of Spain’s vast empty stretches, and to kill time, I began to read that book. Soon I was laughing. On every page, there were five things to make me chuckle. These outpourings attracted the attention of Zúñiga.

  “May I ask what you’re reading?” He looked at words on the binding and said, with a mixture of distaste and disappointment, “Oh, that.”

  Unable to understand his qualms, I exclaimed, ever so amused: “It has been some time since I’ve laughed so heartily!”

  “Irony may be divine, but sarcasm is of the devil,” said Zúñiga. “And you will agree with me that this is a book abounding in sarcasm.”

  “If a writer is able to make me laugh,” retorted cynical Zuvi, “I don’t much care how he does it.”

  “The worst part is,” he went on, “that the writer reduces heroic feats to their basest, most wretched parts. And if we want to win this war, we need to extol the epic, not mock it.”

  “I can’t see how you can dislike such an engaging, humorous story. I’ve just been reading a chapter in which the protagonist frees a chain of prisoners. His reasoning is very enlightened: Man is born free; it is therefore intolerable that any man should be chained up by other men, and as a result, any noble soul has an obligation to oppose such a thing. Once they have been freed, of course, the villains express their thanks by stoning him.” I burst out laughing. “Sad, amusing, superb!”

  Zúñiga didn’t laugh, not even a little. “Rather than refuting my argument, you strengthen it. Because the reason for being a man of letters is to convey lofty thoughts, and to do so in a style that elevates the language. What you have there is something quite different: pages filled with cudgelings and frivolity. Is that what the writers’ art should be devoted to?”

  “Literature can, and indeed should, teach us lessons that, in its majesty, only it is capable of imparting. If someone says, ‘There is clarity in madness!,’ well, wise words, but also no more than baseless opinion. But when this idea is presented to us plotted out within a dramatic framework, I have no choice but to agree.” I shook the thick volume with both hands. “Yes, that’s the great truth within this story: that reason is to be found in the irrational.”

  The day after this literary debate, it was Stanhope and his cavalry ponies that took the role of protagonists in our current tale. We found ourselves on the outskirts of a little town called Almenar. Day was nearly done, and we were readying ourselves to spend the night on the outskirts of the village when word began to spread that the Allied army had met the forces of the Two Crowns. I suggested to Zúñiga that we go on ahead a bit to see what was happening. We left the civilian caravan behind. We came across the sick wagon in the rearguard, and when we asked them what news, they gestured eastward. “They say Stanhope’s surprised the Bourbons.”

  I told Zúñiga I thought we ought to climb a little nearby hill, to watch what was happening.

  It was a good walk. To tell the truth, we went because we had nothing else to do. And with the sun already setting, at this time of day, the climb would not be so wearying. It was an ocher-colored hillock, dappled with clumps of rosemary. The smell was wonderful.

  Our summit was modest in height, but the views from it were good. A rectangular plane stretched out at our feet, flanked by mountains to the left and a river to the right. On one of the shorter sides of the rectangle was In-a-Trice Stanhope with his horsemen. A single regiment, in battle formation, occupied a space of some two hundred feet. In-a-Trice had arrived in Spain with four thousand strapping lads, selected for their fearsomeness. When not drinking or riding, they were pissing away their “bir” (a drink they spell “beer”), so the Catalans ended up calling them pixabirs, which is to say, “piss-beers.” And on the opposite end of the rectangle was the Bourbon army. Their infantry had been hurriedly arranged in a line, and their bayonets were fixed. God, what a great spectacle it is, to see thousands of men in formation and poised for battle. And yet, schooled as I was in the arts of Bazoches, I could sense something more than flesh and uniform. Amid that whole human mass, arranged as it was by battalion, I could make out their souls, like the little flames of thousands of candles trembling before the breath of an approaching hurricane.

  I remember Zúñiga speaking the thought that was then running through his head: “Dear Lord, how is this going to end?”

  In my day, the theorists of cavalry were engaged in a debate that ran curiously in parallel to that between us
engineers. They, too, were divided between Vaubanians and Coehoornians, as it were, their Coehoorn being Marlborough. Yes, yes, the very same, Jimmy’s cousin: Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre, mironton, mironton, mirontaine.

  Up until that point, a cavalry had always followed the most prudent tactics. The riders would approach the enemy infantry, stop at the distance of a pistol’s range, and fire. Persistent gunfire could cause the infantry to lose its nerve and run. Then, and only then, would the cavalry draw their sabers to pursue the soldiers as they scattered in all directions.

  These formations, which were sly and always had the chance of getting away entirely unscathed, were changed by Marlborough. Essentially, what he proposed was to go back three hundred years in the art of military cavalry, saying: Wasn’t the horse itself a hugely powerful weapon? Marlborough took the cavalry back to the Middle Ages: the horse seen not as transportation but as a means of crushing whatever was in its path.

  The English cavalry was the first to take on this new tactic. When they came to within three hundred feet of the enemy line, they did not stop: They shifted up from a trot into a charge. They trampled anything that was in their way—problem solved! And—in a trice!

  Let’s see whether you can guess, my foul little German, which of the two theories In-a-Trice Stanhope subscribed to? Bravo, you guessed! How very clever you are!

  The sun was already sinking below the horizon, an orange semicircle surrounded by a violet halo. The great mystery is why the Spaniards did nothing. By the time Zúñiga and I reached the hill, the two sides had already been engaged for quite some time. The Spaniards had had hours to change formation or even withdraw from the field. But they did nothing, they did nothing of anything, at all. They just waited, melting under a summer sun. Perhaps the valley was too narrow for them to maneuver; perhaps they did not know of the tactics used by the English cavalry and thought that the riders would do no more than harass them a little with pistol and rifle. Or perhaps it was just the usual: The Spaniards were led by a pack of incompetents.