Between us, Amelis and I had given them a roof, clothes, food, and even affection. With the best will in the world, we’d tried hard to make sure they had something like a family. So they were no longer exposed to shrapnel or to the rigors of the elements, but you got the sense that all the pain from before, rather than being driven away, had filtered beneath their skin. During the siege of Tortosa, I had never seen them sad. On the contrary. They mocked death every bit as mercilessly as they mocked me. And they always came out on top. Nowadays, Anfán was no longer stealing, no longer interrupting us in bed to throw his arms around our necks, purring. Now, during his long afternoon tea, he would just sit on the rear balcony, his legs hanging through the bars, on his own, with the low, languid appearance of a savage who has been ripped out of the jungle. Eating a hunk of fried bread soaked in oil, he would watch the people on the street and beyond, in the Saint Clara bastion, and farther beyond still, in the outside world. We were tormented by the same question: Wouldn’t it have been better if they had never left the Tortosa trenches?
In order to temper the hours we spent in lessons, I increased the frequency of our walks. The truth was it made scarcely any difference whether I taught them at home or on foot, and Anfán was a little creature who needed fresh air. Something happened during one of those walks that demonstrates how an excess of civilization transforms upright people into simpletons.
As I was saying, I had taken Nan and Anfán out for a walk, this time into the outskirts of the city. Anfán was exceptionally interested in my military adventures. I was always reticent when it came to recounting that collection of carnage, mud, and bayonets, but my resistance only intensified the boy’s interest. We were already outside the city walls, on a small path flanked by scattered houses and kitchen gardens, when he asked me about the generals I had known.
“If you’re talking to a French general, you have to stand up really straight. Like this,” I said, standing to attention, arms parallel to my body and my chin up, “as though you’ve swallowed a broom. And whatever nonsense they say, you have to click your heels—like this!—and reply with a shout: ‘Mes devoirs, mon général!’ Then they order you to attack a given position. You reply, even louder: ‘À vos ordres, mon général!’ and in the middle of the commotion, you race off in any direction other than the one they sent you in.”
“And is that the same with Spanish generals?”
“Oh no, with the Spanish ones, it’s completely different!” I exclaimed. “With them, you have to cry ‘A su servicio, mi general!’ and run off in exactly the opposite direction than the one they’ve told you to go in.”
They must have been growing up, because they took this as a joke, while I was being entirely serious.
“Well,” I said, acknowledging the truth, “I did serve under the command of two great men whom I would have obeyed blindly, whatever madness they ordered me to do. Not because they were great generals but because they were great teachers.”
“And of those two great men,” asked the dwarf, “which was the greater?”
To Anfán, the greater was the one who had taught me to survive, because if you’re dead, you can’t learn any more secrets. To the dwarf, who had great lucidity in that little frame of his, the greater was the one who had taught me secrets, “because if you don’t know the secrets of life, you can’t survive,” he said.
We walked on, and Anfán climbed a fence that was surrounding a small cottage and a kitchen garden. All he wanted was to examine the cedar that rose up at one end of the fence. I had been talking to them about the qualities of different kinds of wood, and the fact that cedar is one of the most valued by various kinds of artisan. Anfán wanted to see what it felt like and climbed up the trunk like a monkey.
“The same tree is used to make both fiddles and rifle butts,” I said. “Strange, isn’t it? At this moment, inside there, you can find both a fiddle and a rifle. If it were up to you, which of the two would—”
I was interrupted by a yell from the gardener’s cottage, and it sounded furious with Anfán: “Oi, you! You bunch of petty thieves! Scram, or you’ll see what’s what!”
“I haven’t stolen anything!” said Anfán, defending himself with uncommon vehemence because just this once it happened to be true.
But the young man—who was brandishing a stick—came over the fence accompanied by a little dog, which hurled itself at the dwarf. I let the four of them battle it out for a bit. Then I stepped in. “All right, all right, that’s enough now.”
I talked to the young man courteously. I admired his fruit trees and how well kept the garden was. His attitude changed. His father appeared. We chatted, and he ended up giving us a string of garlic and a few ripe tomatoes.
“You see how being honorable can do you good?” I said to Anfán as we walked home, arms full.
“Good?” he protested, rubbing his face, which was still red from the blows he had received. “I don’t see any good in it at all! The one time I’m not stealing, and I get attacked by a great beanpole like that. So much for being honorable!”
“Then you’re quite wrong,” I replied. “What’s the first thing you do after you’ve stolen something?”
“What do you think? Race off like a cannonball!”
“Exactly. Meanwhile, today you were attacked by a fellow five years older than you, armed with a stick and a dog, and instead of running away, you defended yourself.”
My rhetorical flourish must have had some impact on him, because he was listening closely.
“Honesty lubricates the muscles of your soul,” I went on. “It protects us in the face of injustice and strengthens our will to fight. You were the weaker party, and you were unarmed. But you were right, and you knew it. That was why you stood your ground.
“On the other hand, righteous souls are complemented by calm speech. Look at this garlic and these tomatoes I’m carrying. Free and obtained in simple good faith, which is hard to find nowadays. And why? I didn’t steal them; I didn’t even have to lie. When I was admiring this good man’s vegetable garden, I was telling him a great truth: that his noble work transforms the world, and that puts food on his table. And he, to repay me for this precise flattery, wanted to share his food with some total strangers. Why settle for an exchange of bad things when you can exchange good ones? He’s given us much more than we would have been able to get ourselves by stealing!”
A good speech, don’t you think? As a teacher, I was never much of a Rousseau, but not bad for an amateur.
As we approached the city gates, I saw a strange group of people. Five men, four of them armed with rifles over their shoulders. And the fifth was him—it was him! The Antwerp butcher!
Joris Prosperus van Verboom. Under escort, happily walking about outside the city, making his way around the foot of the city walls. I knew he was a prisoner of the government (I’d captured him myself, remember?), but I hadn’t realized he was here in Barcelona. I left Nan and Anfán, made straight for him, got my hands around his neck, and tried to strangle him. The guard intervened and parted us.
“Hey there, just take it easy,” said the captain understandingly. “I can tell you don’t like the big fish of the Bourbons, but we’ve all got to be civilized about it. We have to treat our enemies nobly until it’s time for them to be exchanged.”
“Exchanged?” I screamed. “What are you talking about? This scum can’t be exchanged! And now you’ve been stupid enough to let him go for a walk! He mustn’t be allowed out of the city again till the war is over! Leave him to me.”
Most men get to their deathbeds without ever understanding that war is not a matter of brute force. That the outcome of a conflict is settled in a higher sphere made up of ink and volumes and calculations. Verboom was a Points Bearer. No doubt he’d suggested the walk in order to examine our defenses, our precious bastions. It was quite clear that Verboom would be calculating information that would be worth a score of regiments. I at least had to rebel against the idiocy of the government
and its good manners.
There he was, not even in chains, measuring out the distances between the walls, their thickness and height and the depth of the moat. The best place for a huge, threatening Attack Trench. Verboom was the spy who took the fewest risks in all of history—they couldn’t arrest him because he was arrested already; he was living as his enemies’ guest, and they were blithely showing him whatever he wanted to see. We were right at the foot of the Saint Clara bastion. Only a few dozen meters away was my home, the home I shared with the kids, with Amelis.
I hurled myself against the Antwerp butcher one more time. This time I was restrained less subtly. I was so furious that I smashed in two or three noses. Eventually, they knocked me down with their rifle butts, to the laughter of Verboom, who spoke in French so that the guards should not understand him: “L’homme avisé est toujours sur ses gardes même quand il se trouve emprisonné.” A watchful man is on his guard even when he is a prisoner.
It was a line from Livy, I think, often cited in Bazoches, I’m sure, in which the word “asleep” had been changed to “a prisoner.” My own side was beating me, and he had the luxury of standing there laughing. Always the same, going around in spirals like a Venetian dream: Whenever I confronted the Dutch sausage-maker, there would be a screen of authority figures stepping between us who were entirely incapable of understanding why it was necessary to eradicate him from the world.
I spent the night in a dingy cell, partly underground, surrounded by whores, drunks, thieves, and other riffraff. Verboom spent two years as a captive in Barcelona. And there wasn’t one day or one night when he didn’t sleep in a bed that was fluffier than that of most Barcelonans, and when he didn’t eat better than we did, too. The Red Pelts suckled him with our blood, kept him in silk and cotton. Just as I was saying: We brought the serpent’s egg into our home and lulled it gently until the viper was born.
While I was being beaten and arrested, Nan and Anfán made their way calmly back to our home in La Ribera. My absence was not in the least bit strange, as I might have gone off to the tavern for a while, or anywhere. But at dinner, Amelis asked after me.
“The captain gave him a beating, and he’s in jail,” replied Anfán, eating his soup without a pause. “He gave us a speech about honesty, and the effect of speaking well, and the uselessness of violence when there is no just cause for it. Then he saw an unarmed gentleman who was a prisoner and went off and started punching him. When they dragged him away, he was screeching like an animal, cursing the virgin, the government, and the idiot King Karl. I’m sure they’ll hang him.”
Ah, the candor of a child.
Another subject that occupied me during those days was the liberation of Don Antonio. Rescuing him from the claws of the Bourbons had become an obsession for me. You might say that securing his freedom was the only thing that remained of my engineer’s spirit. Since I hadn’t been able to get to The Word, at least Vauban’s successor could be freed. That was my poor consolation. There were prisoner exchanges happening all the time, but there was little that a starveling like Martí Zuviría could do. I tried to take advantage of my tavern friendship with a Dutch agent who worked on exchange deals. He was always coming and going, crossing the lines, and anyone unaware of what he did never would have guessed that he was involved in such high-powered intrigues.
Prisoner exchanges were a kind of cross between a game of chess and a secret auction. A colonel was worth three captains; three colonels could get you a general; and you could round up by offering amounts in hard cash. Meanwhile, both sides had an interest in recovering their most valuable technicians (like the swine Verboom, whom I wouldn’t have given back until I’d ripped out his tongue and his eyes—it still makes me crazy to think of how foolish we were). The process of negotiation was a torturous one, because nobody wanted to acknowledge the real value of their best-loved pieces, nor reveal what they’d be prepared to pay for them.
In the middle of 1712, Don Antonio de Villarroel had been a prisoner for a year and a half. It was an outrage that a soldier of his caliber should be in enemy hands for so long. I bought the Dutchman all the drinks I could, to try to exert my influence, and to coax some information out of him. But the man was an artist in the ways of “mini-diplomacy,” as he called it. Whenever the subject of Don Antonio arose, he would give a little laugh. The only stories I could get out of him were contradictory ones.
“The problem with Villarroel,” he sometimes said, “is that he’s too good a general. There’s a rumor that they’ve been tempting him with the offer of a good position in Philip’s army. But Villarroel is resisting them. They say he has unhappy memories of the Bourbons and wants nothing more to do with them. To tell the truth, I don’t really understand. After all, he’s served the Two Crowns in the past. He could go back to the Bourbon side unblemished, since his enlisting in King Carlos’s army was entirely legal. As for the Bourbons themselves, they aren’t stupid: They don’t want to release him if it will restore his talents to the enemy.”
Other times, however, he would smack his lips and offer a quite different version. “Your poor general has an enemy back home. The government is not choosing to prioritize his exchange, so he will rot in captivity.”
When I started to get worked up, the Dutchman would shrug. “Tell me,” he would say. “On this subject, King Carlos is very much led by his counselors. These things don’t get decided without the blessing of the Generalitat. And the government isn’t interested. They say Villarroel ‘isn’t one of us.’ ”
To what could they be referring? Well, no man is ever free of his past. In Barcelona, the fall of Tortosa had stung, and very badly, and they remembered that it was Don Antonio who had led the final assault that took the city by storm for the Bourbon forces. Besides, he wasn’t Catalan.
I was in such a bad mood in those days that my domestic relationship with Amelis was getting worse. We couldn’t have a meal in the same room without an argument breaking out. Or worse still, there would be a long, tense silence that hurt everybody. It moved me to see Anfán and Nan suffer. They looked at us with the expectant gaze of someone who doesn’t want a fight but cannot say so.
Until one night Amelis said to me, “You can stop growling, complaining, and sniffing the air as though everything smelled rotten. Your little general is free.”
I was flabbergasted. “How do you know?” I asked.
“What difference does it make?”
“Is it anything to do with his exchange?”
She replied with the cruelest, most mocking tone of voice she could, emphasizing every word: “Yes, ’course it is! Your fucking Mystère asked me for it.”
I couldn’t coax any more out of her.
However it had come about, at the end of 1712, Don Antonio was at last exchanged. The bad part was that Verboom got his freedom, too. The negotiations happened in secret, and I assumed that the Antwerp butcher had been included in the contingent that was exchanged. He left fatter than when he’d arrived, and his head filled with data. I don’t like to brag of my skills as a prophet, but facts are facts: The first thing he did when he got back to Madrid was to write a thorough account of the city’s defenses. As for Don Antonio, he naturally took the road in the opposite direction: from Madrid to Barcelona. He was offered a post as a cavalry general, which he finally accepted.
He was a man who had always worn tragedy engraved on his brow. I believe he took on the new charge for the simple reason that there was nothing else he could do. He was a career soldier; the army was his life. Why had he spurned the last, generous offer he had received from Philip V? Pride, perhaps. Don Antonio was a very Spanish man. You know how it is, that lofty idea of pride, so very Castilian, constantly at the crossroads between utter heroism and the most sublime stupidity.
10
Meanwhile, there were things happening far beyond our horizons that would overturn the war entirely, bring fate into our lives, and place me—contrary to all my predictions—face-to-face with The Word i
tself.
In 1711 a scrawny young lad by the name of Pepito died. A devastating attack of smallpox, and straight off to the grave with him. His death caused the war to take a dramatic turn and condemned all Catalans to perpetual slavery. You’ll be wondering how it’s possible that such a banal event, a simple death from smallpox, could have had such decisive effects. Well, due to the fact that this particular sickly lad, this Pepito, was Joseph I, the young emperor of Austria and brother to King Charles. With Pepito dead, the Austrian throne came into Charles’s hands; he still had aspirations to reign over all Spain and was now the emperor of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. As you will recall, the war had started because England was against the dynastic union between France and the Spanish empire. London would never countenance the creation of such a strong continental power; hence their support for Charles as an alternative to Little Philip. But the solution they had imagined created a new problem, with Charles uniting Spain and Austria under a single scepter, thereby threatening to create a kingdom that was every bit as powerful as anything they’d feared. In other words, the situation that had triggered the conflict in the first place was simply shifting position.
Pepito’s death sealed our condemnation. On that very day, England’s diplomats began to look for a negotiated solution to the situation. And—just look how things turn out—this time they really did find their solution in a trice: Charles was to renounce the Spanish throne and remain in Vienna forever; Little Philip, in turn, should renounce his claims to the French succession (in the event of the Beast’s death) and stay in Madrid forever. War over. Move along, please, nothing to see here.
France dragged its heels, but it was exhausted; Charles objected, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Without military support from England, and especially without her financial backing, he wouldn’t be in a position to keep fighting for long, not as much as three months. So everybody accepted the English proposal, more or less. From then on, it was only a matter of haggling and pinning down the minor details.
Victus Page 30
