Sheer pandemonium. The attack came at all points of the trench, right, left, and center. The cavalry came in support, attacking down the wings. Both armies’ artillery fired ceaselessly, and there was so much commotion, smoke, and gunpowder that you didn’t know who was killing whom. My initial idea was to hide in some rift in the ground, wait for the wave of attackers to come past my position, identify myself, and go back to the city with them. Good plan, wouldn’t you say? Unfortunately, it didn’t take into account my proverbial cowardice. Hundreds of men charged in my direction, drunk and screaming like stuck pigs. I thought I recognized them as a unit that had been set up recently, grenadiers under the orders of Captain Castellarnau.
My God, I thought, they seem rather angry. Three Normandy battalions went out to engage them. Castellarnau’s men rushed forward like demons, bayoneting the Normans to pieces and moving on. A little closer and I could see their wine-reddened eyes. Terrified, I said to myself: “Martí, they aren’t messing around.” They advanced, letting out drunken cries, calling Saint Eulalia’s name, and bayoneting any fallen men as they came past. The Normans dispatched, there was nothing now between them and the first parallel.
A troop attacking like that will recognize no one. No one! They in a frenzy, me in a white uniform. I then had one of the most bizarre thoughts of my long military life: Mother of God, my allies are nearly upon us. Mercy!
“Run, run!” I bellowed at the workers around me. “Let’s go or the rebels will cut us to shreds!”
The men near me were all workers and, seeing me flee, wavered. Castellarnau’s drunk grenadiers were nearly upon us, and all the while, the cannonballs continued to fall with devilish precision. If even the officers are fleeing, why would lowly workers, who have no military training, stay?
The entire brigade followed me. (Truly, it was a good thing for them, because as I later found out, the few who did stay were massacred.) Most flung their picks and shovels to the ground, carts and half-full fajinas, and sprinted astonishingly quickly—some were so frightened they even overtook me!
The attack fizzled out without any great effect. A spark rather than a full-blown fire, remarkable only for the numbers of dead. And who cares about the dead? The men in the sortie occupied the trench, yes, did as much damage as they could, yes, but the minute they were gone, another four thousand soldiers, workers, and sappers stepped in and renewed the digging effort.
I was handed a report on the day’s activity to take to Jimmy. On my way to Mas Guinardó I read it—a punishable offense. Six hundred and forty-eight dead and wounded on a single night and day of trench work. The note came from Verboom himself, and good old Zuvi (what irony!) was the one charged with taking it to Jimmy.
As I entered Mas Guinardó carrying the account, my thoughts were on how many more would have suffered had things gone well. Jimmy was standing in his study, looking out of the window. The carnage that had just taken place was clearly the last thing on his mind. He was lost in thought, gnawing a fist. He turned and looked at me and immediately returned his gaze to the window. His only words were a quiet groaning as he repeated obsessively: “She dies, she dies . . . ”
“Who?” I asked.
“The queen, the queen . . . ”
I stared in astonishment. “The queen of England! Dying?” I punched the air. “But Jimmy, what marvelous news!”
My God, what a coincidence, and what a disastrous one. Though for diametrically opposed reasons, both Jimmy and I were set to benefit from the news.
The balance of power in England is a very delicate thing, swinging between Tories and Whigs, who alternate in power. With Queen Anne dead, a change of government was inevitable, and with it, a reversal of the policy of conciliating the Beast, of which she had been the principal supporter. And if London turned against Paris, an alliance with Barcelona was also inevitable.
They honor a certain power in England, something unfamiliar in autocracies: that of public opinion. Catcalling critiques of foreign policy are constantly being published in the London gazettes. The “Catalan case” being a glaring example. There were debates about it in their Parliament.
Let’s not fool ourselves. Pericles’s Greece sent an expedition to Sicily, but not due merely to the goading of the demagogues. England was never altruistic, quite the opposite; public opinion and private interests spurred it on. But if there was a chance that they might come to our aid, what did it matter to us why? England had the strongest navy, and the French blockade would be broken. And as had happened at the first Bourbon siege, in 1706, when the English fleet came into port, they’d inject reinforcements and supplies and do wonders for morale. The besieging of a port that is not blockaded is, by nature, unpracticable: dixit Vauban.
With Anne’s death, it would make sense to defer the sentence. Even two or three days could change everything. And my trench was the deferral.
And Jimmy? That royal death made sense of everything that had happened so far in his life. England in turmoil, the succession to be decided. Jimmy was born to be king, and now that the opportunity had arisen, where was he? Pinned down thousands of miles south by a cause that was anything but close to his heart. Managing a full-blown siege in the south and a dynastic rebellion in the north at the same time—not possible. He would have to choose.
As cosmopolitan as Jimmy seemed, he was also a dyed-in-the-wool Englishman. When his father, the last Catholic king of England, was exiled, Jimmy was raised at the French court. The Beast’s ministers were good to him and let his talents develop, in spite of his being a bastard. But as a mercenary in France’s pay, he could aspire only to a secondary role, and by 1714 he had all the credentials needed to put himself forward in London. He’d been on the winning side in countless battles, he was a marshal, and he’d seen a few things. He was tolerant of different religious beliefs (he had none), conciliatory to factions (he didn’t believe particularly in any one), and would apply himself in the name of any cause that would reflect well on him (he had served, and would be served by, all kinds). Vauban, as politically naive as Cicero, believed in a republic made up of virtuous males. Jimmy didn’t believe in any regime that he (along with one or two vicious males) wasn’t ruling. His continuing service under the Beast, however, had brought him to Spain. To abandon the siege of Barcelona, just after replacing Pópuli, was unthinkable. Anne’s death forced him to decide between obligations he’d accrued in France since childhood, and his destiny.
He had plenty of reason to hate us. The war that had raged across the world for fourteen years was over, to all intents and purposes, but those blind Barcelonans, by refusing to face the truth, were going to hamstring his royal aspirations. Many were the days I spent at his side; I could have tried to understand what made him so fanatical. But I never did. Jimmy began and ended the sieges not bothering to find out who his enemies were or what cause they were fighting for. I believe that he didn’t hate us, because he didn’t have strong feelings about good and evil. We were an obstacle to him, more than an object of loathing.
And then he fell ill. The doctors failed to see the blindingly obvious: It wasn’t so much a bodily sickness as the core of his soul being fractured. He could stay loyal to the Beast and bring the siege to an end. Or he could betray him and go and pursue his destiny in England as a contender for the throne. Finally be a ruler himself, or via one of his mad half brothers. Carry on as a lackey with no future, or try for the ultimate prize.
The tension manifested in a virulent fever, which his military zeal only succeeded in aggravating. He spent his days buzzing around, supervising everything, especially the arrival of the matériel needed for the trench to progress. He’d get back to Mas Guinardó too tired to take off his armor—I had to undo the cinches and straps for him. The sweats had made his chest guard swell and harden, and it was like prising off a tortoise’s shell. As I took off his clothes, feeling full of hate for him, he turned and begged me: “You’ll never betray me, isn’t that right?”
Jimmy’s bottomless
, insatiable egoism; his despot nature. His whispered fever ravings—Trench! . . . Go!—put me on edge.
One morning he couldn’t get out of bed. He spent the day there, soaking several changes of sheets. Come nightfall, the officer of the watch arrived to ask for that night’s password. He was none other than Bardonenche.
He struck me that day as more committed to service than ever, kindness in his eyes, a total lack of prejudice. When he came in, I was helping the marshal sit up in the bed, my hands bathed in his sweat, our odors intermixed. But not a peep from Bardonenche, no judgment. He took a couple of tentative steps closer, arching his eyebrows, looking at the shivering Jimmy. The only words he had were ones of compassion: “Dear, dear sir,” he whispered.
Feeling a sense of urgency, I slapped Jimmy a little. “Jimmy, Jimmy. The army needs the password.”
Still writhing, as though possessed, his eyes rolling upward, he half whispered, half gurgled: “Loyalty.”
“If he dies,” said Bardonenche feelingly, “it will be a disaster. A siege can’t withstand three changes at the helm in such a short space of time.”
Jimmy’s poor state had an outside witness now. After that, it would have been very easy for me to kill him myself; no one would have been able to pin such an inevitable death on me.
But no, I didn’t kill him. I couldn’t. May my dead forgive me.
His shivers became more and more violent. He spent that final night clinging to me, and he held on so tightly that my ribs hurt for three days after.
“Tell me you’ll never leave me, not you,” he whispered as the fever took him over. “Trench . . . Go . . . King . . . Kingdom . . . ”
At around five in the morning, he went slack. I laid a hand against his forehead. The fever had passed. I was thankful and at the same time lamented it. I know that doesn’t add up. Put it in, though!
And as he slept, I dressed and left.
There was one thing covering my flight from Mas Guinardó: What castaway abandons ship to go back to the sinking bit of flotsam? No one would suspect a French officer, particularly one as good-looking as me in my new uniform, of wanting to cross the lines to flee to the moribund city.
The first light of dawn had begun to show on the horizon. I walked a long way along the inside edge of the cordon in search of the gate farthest from the trench to my left, which was lit up regularly by the flashes of fire from either side’s cannons. Thousands of men were working in the furrows, the bustle of battle concentrated in that one zone. The greater the distance between all that and me, then, the better.
Wandering around inside the Bourbon camp was risky. Finally, I simply had to choose one. There were a number of guards posted there to fend off any sortie from the Barcelonans.
Well, one of the advantages of fleeing from the army headquarters is knowing the password. “Loyalty!” I said.
I didn’t break stride, flourishing my hand majestically for them to open the gate. They obeyed. After all, they were there to stop rebels from coming in, not to stop a French captain from leaving to carry out some what secret mission.
Once outside, I could feel the guards’ eyes tracking me as I advanced into no-man’s-land. (Those white Bourbon uniforms, however shabby and covered in mud they became, always put them at a disadvantage when fighting at night. It made them very fearful of leaving the safety of their little cordon.) I strolled around for a few minutes as if examining the defenses from outside—how deep the ditch around the cordon was, and the piles of firewood piled up at thirty-meter intervals, ready to be set alight to both illuminate and blind any approaching attackers. Once I was a little way away, half enveloped by the predawn darkness, I broke into a run. Use your legs, Zuvi!
No shots rang out. Either they couldn’t see me, or they preferred to turn a blind eye. Soldiers, as a rule, know that getting involved with officers only wins you trouble. Which suited me. It would take Jimmy and the others a while longer to find out I’d fled.
Once I was closer to the city, I got down and began crawling; the terrain was a constant up and down, as though you were advancing through a sea swell. I was a way from reaching the city walls when I ran into a soldier dragging himself through no-man’s-land, though in the opposite direction. The choppy, broken-up terrain, full of craters from misdirected artillery fire, meant we didn’t see each other until the last moment. Down on our bellies like earthworms, we looked at each other, neither of us knowing very well what was supposed to happen next. When work had begun on the trench, the faint hearted and the mercenaries had begun slipping away from the city and making for the cordon. Hardly surprising, given that the city was condemned.
Now, here was a good one for the philosophers of military law: Two deserters meet on a piece of disputed land; is their duty still to kill? We decided not. We pretended not to have seen each other. There were other men, perhaps a dozen, following him, wriggling along like worms. When they came past, they looked at me, not antagonistically, but like I was insane. By this late stage in the siege, almost all the professional soldiers had deserted. The remaining force was an army made up of friends and neighbors.
Our poor bastions and ramparts came into sight, rising up like rotted molar teeth. My senseless return had a lot of Don Antonio about it. Really, the siege of Barcelona was a dispute between two antithetical authorities: Jimmy, subtle, corrupt, a denizen of the higher echelons, the self-interests of Versailles; and Don Antonio, that adorable Castilian maniac, absurdly self-sacrificing, stubborn as a mule, and with the manners of a commoner.
And what of my son, the son I was leaving behind, possibly forever? Returning to the city, I was bidding him, and our chances of ever embracing, farewell. And yet my decision was based on a principle common among the Coronela: Blood ties would always be trumped by the bond between those who spill blood and tears side by side. Am I making myself clear—that conflicts also raged within every combatant? Evil might offer us silks, honors, pleasure, and le Mystère might promise a way out of those bribes in exchange for nothing—or in exchange for a Word. But those internal conflicts were what really urged men on.
They were going to kill me. No, worse. On elbows and knees, I made my way to a darkness more wretched than death. And all for the sake of a crookbacked old man, a deformed dwarf, a savage of a child, and a dark-haired whore. The poets don’t dare say it, so I will:
Love’s a piece of shit.
10
The moment I arrived back in Barcelona, it was clear how much things had gone downhill during my long absence.
With Jimmy’s arrival, the French fleet had been given a boost. Now only the occasional very small ships were managing to make it past the blockade. They had to be small and swift, which meant they could bear only insignificant amounts of cargo. And with the sea supply line definitively strangled, the warehouses in the city were quickly emptied.
Though at exorbitant prices, the Barcelonans had still been able to buy food until that moment. To be clear, a Catalan peso was divided into twenty sueldos, and a typical worker’s daily wage was two sueldos. Since January 1714, one liter of wine had cost eight sueldos, and the same amount of liquor, fifteen. A couple of hen eggs (people kept coops on their disintegrating balconies), three sueldos. All meat, from the moment the siege began, had been prohibitively expensive: A couple of hens would set you back two pesos; half a pound of meat, one Catalan peso. A Catalan peso would get you ten pounds of barley or fifteen of corn. To bake a loaf of bread had become a serious challenge.
The first goods to disappear during a siege would be combustibles: firewood and coal. The winter of 1713–1714 had been a cold one, and the reserves had been depleted. People had resorted to burning furniture. As if that weren’t enough, rampart defenses also required wood, just as much as they did stone. Things got so dire that we had to dismantle the bridges, or recs, that crossed the city canals. Two hundred and five trees once lined the Ramblas, and even they were victim to the voracious efforts of the engineers. The dear Ramblas, that lovely avenue
: new trees planted along it after every siege, only to be felled again at the beginning of the next. While I’d been in the Bourbon encampment, the famine had spread. I came back into the city at the beginning of August, when the blockade was at its peak, and at that point even paying astronomical prices wouldn’t get you any of the now nonexistent stuffs. What little there was got apportioned to those fighting —so what did the people eat?
In the summer of 1714, the only thing available was a kind of torta baked with the husks of beans. The dregs from the storehouse floors, so putrid and foul-smelling that it’s hard to believe we managed to swallow that soggy, fetid wheat paste. In Jimmy’s company, I’d eaten fillet steaks three times a day. The change of diet was so abrupt that it took me three days to resign myself to it—though, in the end, there being no other option, I did exactly that. The stomach is master to all. Francesc Castellví, our Valencian captain, recounted an experiment he’d carried out using a crust of this husk torta: He broke off a little and tried feeding it to one of the few dogs left in the city, only for the dog to run away in disgust.
My thoughts were all of Amelis and Anfán once I entered the city. They’d felt so far away, and it had seemed so unlikely I’d ever see them again, that it had felt like achieving the impossible when I managed to think of anything else. And now, knowing they were close by, I was overcome by the need to take them in my arms. Such are the emotions surrounding a reunion: The closer our loved ones become, the more we fear we’re going to lose them.
I found them in the rearguard immediately inside the ramparts, helping with the defense works. Instead of running and embracing them, I watched them from the corner for a few moments. In such abject conditions, you’re only too aware of how brief and scarce the good moments are, and it tends to make you content with far less. We were in the midst of the century’s most devastating war; we were on the receiving end of it, trapped inside a condemned city. But we were still alive. Our very existence defied the powers that were prevailing, and simply seeing Amelis and Anfán again, I almost broke down and wept.
Victus Page 50
