I wanted to throw some punches, to take it out on the walls. Naturally, I asked what he was referring to.
“Our last conversation, in Illueca,” he said. “I offered you the chance to leave, and you left.”
“That’s right, Don Antonio,” I replied, offended. “But it was you, as I recall, who offered me the chance to run away.”
“Indeed. And so you fled with no dishonor. But that’s just it. If you had stayed, your captivity would have been glorious.”
I saw red. “Oh, for the love of God, Don Antonio! What use would it have been if they’d captured me? I still think it was a mistake for you to allow yourself to be taken prisoner, thereby depriving the army of your skills as a commander.”
He smiled. “Come now, Zuviría, be honest with yourself. Your flight wasn’t motivated by rationality but selfishness. You weren’t driven by your love for life but your fear of death.”
“They were just a little band of cripples!” I protested. “And do you want to know something sad, Don Antonio? When I got back to Barcelona I went for help. Well, nobody wanted to listen to me, no one in the army even remembered the wagons that you and I had been escorting. The worst thing of all is that they might have been right: Four wagons of invalids were not going to win the war.”
“You see,” he interrupted me. “You served under my command, but you understood nothing, nothing at all.”
I was so hurt that I didn’t say a word. I got up and walked toward the door.
Looking back now, from so many years later, I think Don Antonio had set up the whole scene. Because when I already had my hand on the doorknob, he said: “One word. If you’d said just one word in Illueca, I would consider you an engineer.”
I stopped. One word. Perhaps on some binge, drunk on cheap booze, I had confessed my tragedy to Don Antonio. One word! In any case, that phrase set my insides on fire. I turned—furious—and banged my fists down on his oak table.
“Everyone in this city has gone mad!” I cried. “Everyone! Every person from the council down to the last beggar is supporting a defense that is idiotic! I’ve fought against the opinions of my family, of my friends, of my neighbors. And now that they’ve finally persuaded me to take part in this preposterous defense, here you are—you of all people—refusing to enlist me. No! You have no right to do this! This is my city, it’s my home, and you are going to let me into your fucking army whether you like it or not!”
He allowed me to vent for a while, and when I was out of breath from all those words, he said: “That’s already an improvement. At least it’s some progress.” After a pause, he added: “I told you in Illueca, son. The war is not yet over, and nor are your tribulations.”
That night, at home, we had a goodbye dinner to bid farewell to peace. At least to the fake peace the city had been living through over the past few years. When we reached dessert, I called for a minute of everyone’s attention.
“After some tough negotiating with Don Antonio, he has bestowed the rank of lieutenant colonel upon me. Did you hear that? You’re talking to a lieutenant colonel, so from now on, I’ll expect you to address me with appropriate respect! The youngest lieutenant colonel in the army! And that’s not all. My pay will increase by ten percent, because in addition, he has hired me as his own private aide-de-camp.” I couldn’t help a smile of triumph. “What do you think?”
“A lieutenant colonel!” cried Amelis. Though she then asked: “So what’s one of those?”
“You see, my love,” I explained between puffs on the cigar I was smoking, “in an army, the rank immediately below a general is a colonel, who leads a regiment. A lieutenant colonel is an officer pending the assignment of his own regiment. Do you understand?”
“So you don’t have your own regiment yet?”
“Well, no,” I confessed. “But what does that matter?”
Anfán was sitting beside me. He tugged on my sleeve and asked: “Jefe, how many soldiers do you command?”
“None in particular,” I replied. “I will be taking charge of higher matters. The reality is that I will be working as an engineer. But Don Antonio, valuing me so highly, believed I ought to have a rank fitting with my authority, to carry more weight among the soldiery.”
“Well, I think it’s a pretty shitty rank if you aren’t commanding any soldiers, jefe,” Anfán concluded.
“I’ll be earning twenty-six pesos a month!” I announced very proudly. “That’s without counting the extra ten percent as aide-de-camp.”
At this point Peret intervened: “So tell us, Martí, this aide-de-camp thing, what exactly does it mean?”
“I’ve told you, it means I’ll be completely available to Don Antonio for any crisis or anything that happens to come up. He values me very highly!”
“So you mean you’ll be Villarroel’s errand boy.” He burst out laughing. “You’ve allowed yourself to be duped. Your working day is going to be twice as long, if not more.”
“In exchange for which you’ve only got another ten percent,” Amelis pointed out. “Some negotiator you are!”
They had succeeded in casting gloom over my mood. “You’re right, maybe I’m not the best businessman in the world!” Like anyone who finds himself at a loss for an argument, I resorted to patriotism. “But when the enemy is approaching, we shouldn’t lower ourselves to pecuniary baseness.”
“What color will your uniform be?” asked Amelis.
“None. I won’t have one. In practice, as I said, I’ll be working as an engineer. And the engineer corps are not required to be in uniform.”
“Not required to be in uniform!” exclaimed Peret, laughing. “Have you ever heard of a general who is—as you put it—not required to wear a uniform? You haven’t even gotten them to pay for one of those for you!”
They were ruining my party, the lot of them. This wasn’t the triumphal march I had been expecting.
Peret asked: “And your name will be signed up to the lists of which regiment?”
“Signed up?”
“Yes, man, on the payroll of which regiment?”
I gave a dismissive wave of the hand holding my cigar and said: “Oh, I don’t need to be troubling myself with those little details. Don Antonio is the most honest man in the city. It’s inconceivable that he would not make sure I appear on somebody’s payroll.”
“Very well,” Peret insisted, “but in which regiment?”
“I don’t know!” I gave up, cornered and deep down rather annoyed at myself for not being able to give a different answer. “When I was in France, I learned to build, defend, and attack bastions. Nobody taught me what kind of bureaucratic paperwork is required by rearguard secretaries!”
“Fantastic!” They all roared with laughter, including the dwarf. “They aren’t buying you a uniform, and you’ll be spending your days racing this way and that. You’re a lieutenant colonel, which is a provisional rank; you have no provisional regiment, and you don’t know which one you might have.”
“Very well!” I said, defending myself. “I think I remember Villarroel saying something about an imperial regiment. He has already sent letters to Vienna asking for confirmation of his own position and, while he was at it, doubtless asking for me to be enlisted in one of Charles’s units. We can take that for granted. Do you think the emperor isn’t going to listen to the request of his only general in Spain?”
This time the laughter was so thunderous that the neighbors banged on the walls in complaint.
“But how very stupid you are, Martí! That’s not how things work. If they sign you up to an Austrian regiment, it’ll be months before you get your rank recognized. And now you’re being paid out of Vienna, not Barcelona. Until the imperial funds arrive, you won’t get a salary. The French fleet is blockading the port, so it’s quite possible you’ll get nothing.”
They had spoiled my dinner. Worst of all, they were right.
“Fine!” I said, addressing Peret. “Maybe I’m not going to get rich, but you’ve enlisted a
s a private, and the salary for privates is nothing to write home about.”
“And who says it’s the Generalitat who’s going to be paying me?” he replied, laughing at my bewildered expression. “Martí, you know what the Barcelona rich are like. You think people like that are going to be prepared to join battalions, climb bastions, or stand guard night and day, to risk getting shot at or bombarded? Of course they aren’t. It’s one thing being in favor of constitutions and liberties, it’s quite another gambling their own skin for them. And so I showed up at the home of some of the particularly reluctant ones.”
“A commercial visit,” said Amelis, understanding at once.
“Precisely,” said Peret. “The government wants complete units, but they don’t give a damn about the identity of the people who make them up. So I have offered myself to fill the place of the biggest shirkers. In exchange for a small gratuity, naturally.”
“You’ve taken the place of a rich person who doesn’t want to fight!” I cried, outraged.
“Only after a strict auction,” said Peret.
They spent the rest of the night mocking good old Zuvi and his poor commercial sense. By the end of it, I was so dejected I couldn’t even finish my cigar. Of all the sieges I’ve taken part in over the last seventy years, the one government by whom I wasn’t paid a cent was that of my own country. Still . . . I didn’t know it at the time, but that was actually our last night together and happy. Why does it cost so much to see how happy you are, when you are?
I can remember Peret laughing at my naïveté; I remember his wish to fight, at his age, and I think how fortunate we human beings are that our destinies are hidden from us. My friend Peret was killed after it was all over.
By the end of the siege, the only healthy Barcelonans were the cannibals. You could recognize them because their skin was an unnatural pinkish color, their pupils shone repulsively like the eyes on a fresh fish, and their lips were frozen in a perpetual smile. The rest of the city’s inhabitants were a beggarly mass, dusty bodies, as though they had been shut away in some dark attic. For weeks, months, after the siege, the Barcelonans who traveled outside the city could be recognized by their deathly complexion and their crestfallen gait. One day Peret went out to get some food. Perhaps simply because he was Barcelonan, some spiteful soldier shot him. But it’s more likely that they cried halt at some roadblock. He didn’t hear their voices and they fired.
What is a fortress? Bring together a handful of people ready to fight, an enclosed space, and a standard, and there you have a fortress. In the summer of 1713, the military situation was as I am about to describe it to you, and I will begin with the good part.
As we know, the Red Pelts had named Don Antonio commander in chief of the army. A huge task was expected of Don Antonio, if not an impossible one: to organize, drill, and lead an army that did not exist, with the mission to defend a city that was indefensible.
Besides the staff officers, the most outstanding thing we had was our artillery. This was under the command of Costa, Francesc Costa. Quite a fellow. The best artilleryman of the century. To give you an idea of his skill, I shall set down just one piece of information: When the Bourbons entered, Costa was the only senior officer they did not detain. (Well, Costa and good old Zuvi, to be precise.) Jimmy, being of a rationality that was as superb as it was entirely without scruples, knew what he was dealing with and offered him various perks and an extremely well-remunerated position, four doubloons a day, if he joined the French army. Costa did not hesitate for a second. He said yes, that he would be very honored to make a career in the army of Louis XIV. That same night he disappeared.
Costa’s best artillerymen were from Mallorca. When it came to Costa’s lightning flight after September 11, I would bet anything that it was his Mallorcans who had met him to set sail for the Balearics.
Costa was a small, quiet fellow. He didn’t walk; rather, he slid along, head down and hidden between his shoulders, eyebrows raised as though he was always astonished or apologizing. He never spoke unless spoken to. It was most wearing having to deal with him; the fact is, people who are so shy unnerve any interlocutor. His favorite words were “yes” and “no,” and while concision is highly desirable among technicians, Costa’s excess of reserve was out of all bounds. Let us forgive him. Let us admire him. If anyone could understand him, it would be me. We had parallels that connected us: On paper, command of the artillery fell to General Basset, just as that of the engineers fell to Santa Cruz the elder. In practice, I led on the engineering, and Costa on the cannons. These functions above our rank wove a complicity between us. To people like Costa, reality was no more than the angle and distance at which a bomb fell.
His shyness was innate, and he concealed it by chewing on parsley all day long. By the end of the siege, everybody was chewing on weeds so as to deceive their hunger, no choice in the matter, but for Costa it was a natural impulse. As for the possibility of making conversation with him, as I said, you had to drag every word out of him. I remember the first time we met. I asked him how many artillery pieces we had at our disposal.
“Ninety-two.”
I had expected some complaint or request. But nothing. “Have you set out the pieces according to Don Antonio’s orders?”
“Yes, with a few adjustments.”
“Do you think we’ll have enough?” I asked, still faced with this parsimony of his.
“It depends.”
I waited for some further comment. None came. “And what does it depend on, in your opinion?”
He looked at me wide-eyed, as though only my judgment mattered and not his. “On the ones the enemy’s got.”
“To the best of our knowledge at the moment, bearing in mind that our spies have been giving us reports that don’t all match up,” I said, “their convoy is made up of a hundred and fifteen. We can assume that there will be reinforcements coming in future.”
“Well, then,” he said.
“Well, then?”
“Yes.”
His terseness was irritating me; he must have noticed, and he added, raising his eyebrows higher still and chewing his parsley: “My Mallorcans will keep them at bay as long as they do not outnumber us by a ratio of more than five to three. Beyond that, I cannot give any assurances.” He took more sprigs of parsley from his pocket and began to chew on them like a bored rabbit.
As to the general situation, the good part ends here, and there wasn’t much to it. And so begins the bad bit.
A fortress without troops to defend it is as useless as a garrison in a stronghold without walls. Even you, my dear vile Waltraud, can understand that. Well, we had neither one nor the other. Neither an army nor walls.
The first time I went over the rolls of the army, my soul plummeted into my feet. Villarroel wanted a precise calculation of the resources and forces at his disposal. One day he came through the door while I was discussing matters with Costa. He interrupted us as brusquely as usual. He wanted to know why he hadn’t seen the list of all the units.
“I’m sorry, Don Antonio,” I said, “I haven’t been able to calculate the totals because of a mistake.” I couldn’t help laughing while I showed him some papers. “Some idiot in the government has sent us this. I ask them for the army rolls, and they send us the plans for a proposed new market.”
As Villarroel was reading the papers, I laughed again. “They must have muddled the documents,” I added. “What you’ve got there must be the layout for positions for sellers, suppliers, and traders. As you know, they’re saying that, after the war, they want to restructure the market in Plaza del Born. I’ll go myself to the Generalitat in person today and demand the correct rolls.”
But Villarroel was looking at me with those frowning eyes, saying nothing.
“That can’t be.” I swallowed. “Tell me you’re joking.”
Until that day, I had thought we would be making war like any other European kingdom (albeit with no king). The government would hire professional forces where
ver they could be found, or would bring them in from elsewhere by making them a reasonable offer. The local militia would be there for support and supplies. What else could you expect from civilians who were barely more skilled than old Peret?
The only professional troops the city had were remnants of the Allied army, the odd individual who, for one reason or another, had decided not to go when his fellows were evacuated. The best little group were the hundred Germans. They were together in a unit of their own, led by eleven officers of the same origin. And such compact ranks! I had to bring them countless messages, which they obeyed with a watchmaker’s precision. Professional soldiers will always have a bit of the adventurer about them. I say this because Waltraud, who has less imagination than an ant, couldn’t understand what some of her compatriots were doing in Barcelona between 1713 and 1714. In those days, it was hardly the most pleasant place in the world to be, though an adventurer isn’t looking for what’s safe but what’s exciting. Many of them had reasons for not returning home, and the Generalitat paid reasonably well; others, in short, had good reasons for staying.
You must understand, my dear vile Waltraud, that in this world, there is such a thing as mutual attraction between male and female genitals, also known as love. Barcelona was full of beautiful women, either single or married to seamen who were practically never home, and . . . Well, need I go on? As for the other enlisted foreigners, there were so few, they’re not even worth counting. Yes, we did have a bit of everything, from Hungarians to Irishmen (even Neapolitans, who were still everywhere). I met one who was from the Papal States.
But as I say, the bulk of our army was made up of simple civilians. I had left my city when I was very young, and was only vaguely aware of what was considered the traditional way of defending it. It was based on the Coronela, the local militia. Each trade was assigned its own unit as well as one of the city gates. This was all very well by the military standards of the thirteenth century, but this was five hundred years later, and we were living in Vauban’s technical age.
Victus Page 34
