The Marquis of Bolibar
Page 19
One of the grenadiers, who reminded me that we had been schoolfellows years ago, begged a pinch of snuff. Another, too footsore to run any further, pulled his boots off. I myself was dropping with fatigue.
Then they came a second time.
A bullet whistled past my ear and something crashed to the ground behind me. Curses and shouts rent the air, two hands gripped my throat, and I was hurled to the floor.
"Make way!" a voice called from the door as I fell. Poised above me was an upraised sword. It hovered there for an eternity - hovered but did not descend.
"Stand aside, I say!" It was the same voice. Someone shone a lantern on my face, dazzling me. The sword disappeared, and in its place I saw a white panache and a scarlet cloak.
The hands slowly detached themselves from my throat. My head fell back and struck the edge of a crate.
"What madness to remain in that disguise," said the voice in my ear, then: "Pick him up! Carry him downstairs!"
I felt myself hoisted into the air.
"I warned you, did I not?" I heard. "There was always a danger that my men would fail to recognize you."
I tried to open my eyes, but it was no use. The wind struck cold and damp on my cheeks. Someone spread a cloak over me. I felt a rocking, swaying motion, and it seemed to me that I was on the river again, sitting in the skiff with Monjita while the current sent ice-floes bumping along the sides and willow trees rustled on the bank.
Then all was still. The rocking sensation ceased, and I was bedded down on something soft.
"Who the devil is that, Captain?" asked a gruff, surly voice.
"The Marquis of Bolibar," came the reply.
Another beam of light on my face, whispers, muffled footsteps. The footsteps grew fainter and a door closed.
I fell asleep.
THE MARQUIS OF BOLIBAR
It was late in the day when I awoke.
Still dazed with sleep and unable to open my eyes,- I had a vague feeling that the room where I lay was thronged with people standing shoulder to shoulder and watching me in silence. By the time I was fully awake, the last three were tiptoeing out, each gesturing to the others to tread softly and steal away without a sound.
Only two men remained: the captain in the Northumberland Fusiliers, who stood over my bed in his scarlet cloak, arms folded, and, seated beside the fire, Colonel Saracho.
As soon as I saw the latter, the events of the previous day, which sleep had suffered me to forget, came flooding back: the guerrillas' onslaught, the deaths of the colonel and Donop and Castel-Borckenstein, the annihilation of both regiments. Boundless amazement overcame me that I should still be alive, followed at once by a numbing pang of terror that one of the men confronting me should be my mortal foe, the Tanner's Tub. An instant later, however, my fear was displaced by a profoundly soothing thought: as the last survivor of the regiment I had no right to go on living, and what better fate could I wish for than to join my comrades in the grave?
"He's awake," I heard the British officer say.
Saracho gave a hoarse exclamation that sounded like a groan. Clearly visible in the firelight, his legs were stretched out on a chair and thickly swathed in rags on account of the podagra from which he had suffered for years. His left arm was bandaged from elbow to shoulder.
"My respects, Señor Marques," he grunted as he scratched one gouty ankle. "How is Your Excellency feeling?"
I stared at him, convinced that he was making mock of me.
"Finding you was no easy matter," the British captain reported. "It was only pure chance, My Lord Marquis, that granted me the honour of escorting you to safety."
I sprang to my feet. Destiny had chosen the strangest way of saving my life, I saw that now. A shiver ran down my spine at the thought that I should have been cast in the role of one whom I had helped to murder, and I resolved to end the grisly masquerade at once.
"I am not the man you take me for," I told the captain, forcing myself to look him in the eye. "The Marquis of Bolibar is long dead. I am a German officer in the service of the Confederation of the Rhine."
Having made this avowal, I awaited my fate with an easy mind.
The Britisher looked first at Saracho and then at me.
"Ah yes," he said with a smile, "I know: the same German officer who presented himself at Your Lordship's country seat some days ago, just half an hour after you disappeared - a strange coincidence of which I was apprised by your steward, Fabricio. He came here this morning while you slept."
"Damnation," Saracho interjected, "I've a nail-maker's smithy in these legs of mine - no one would believe how they prick and twinge."
"You're mistaken, Captain," I exclaimed. "I am Lieutenant Jochberg of the Nassau Regiment."
"Late of the Nassau Regiment, yes, My Lord Marquis, and the strangest by far of all the soldiers in the Emperor's service. "
"Soldiers, you call them?" Saracho cried angrily. He made to rise, only to sink back in his chair with an anguished groan. "Soldiers, did you say? Libertines, more like — lechers and braggarts, gamblers and drunkards, liars and gluttons, despoilers of churches. God is just and his retribution well- merited!"
I was overcome with grief and rage when I heard my dead comrades reviled in this way. I started toward Saracho, intending to throttle him with my bare hands, but the British officer barred my path.
"So you take me for the Marquis of Bolibar," I said, when I had regained my composure. "Why? The Marquis was an elderly man, whereas I am only eighteen years old."
Saracho gave a bleating laugh.
"Eighteen, eh? A fine age, to be sure. The candle-maker across the way from the church — you knew him, Señor Marques, he was so thin he might have been sired by a ramrod — well, that man was fifty years old when he took his third wife, and for the wedding he dyed his hair as handsome a brown as yours was yesterday. He looked eighteen too, but not for long. A pity you wasted all that goat's grease, pomade and beeswax, Señor Marques. It hasn't lasted longer than a night. "
He laughed again and pointed to a broken mirror on the wall. I caught sight of my reflection and blenched, unable to believe my eyes: the terrible events of the previous night had turned my hair white — snow-white, like that of an old man.
"You do wrong, My Lord Marquis," said the captain's voice in my ear. "You do wrong to try to flee the world in that disguise. You played your part in a great and noble venture. Heaven was with you, so it succeeded. You should not belittle that glorious deed. You should not disdain the gratitude owed you by us all — by your native land and the cause of freedom."
I do not know how it came about, that mysterious phenomenon, but I no longer saw myself as I stood gazing into the mirror: I saw a strange old man with white hair. And then, in some weird and inexplicable way, I felt his thoughts awaken within me. His prowess, his determination, his resolve came alive and took possession of me. I experienced a fierce thrill of elation. It was as if the soul of the murdered man had got to grips with my own, the soul of his murderer, and was striving to oust it. The Marquis of Bolibar, great and terrible man that he was, had invaded my body. I tried to fight him off, tried to repossess myself, tried to conjure up the faces of my dead comrades, forced myself to think of them — of Donop, Eglofstein and Brockendorf — but they refused to emerge from the darkness. I had forgotten the sound of their voices, and when my own inner voice tried to call their names aloud the words that rose to my lips were those of a stranger: Saracho's cruel words had become mine.
"Braggarts and gluttons, drunkards and despoilers of churches," cried the voice within me. "God is just and his retribution well-merited."
And I felt as if the regiments' destruction had been my own desire from the first — as if I had willed it on behalf of a great and noble cause. A tempest shook me, my heart pounded, my temples throbbed, and I swayed, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the moment.
Saracho expected me to speak, from the look on his face, but I remained silent.
"Let me tell you
something, Señor Marques," he began. "I know that you despise war and think little of the glory won in battle by a gallant soldier. The humble peasant who innocently tills his field is far more glorious than any general or marshal - wasn't that how you put it? Well, I pondered on all manner of things last night, being unable to sleep for pain. A shell splinter gashed my arm, and if gangrene sets in ..." He shrugged. "But that's by the by. My point is that we soldiers are martyrs quite as much as St James, or St Cyriac, or St Marcellinus — martyrs of God or the Devil, who knows? What do we fight for? What do we bleed for? For God's sake? Being blind, earth-bound moles, one and all, we cannot know God's true purpose. To fill our own pockets? Señor Marques, we soldiers are like Noah's carpenters, who built the Ark for all living things and were afterward drowned themselves. For the welfare of our country? This soil, Señor Marques, has drunk a deal of blood in the last thousand years, and who cares today about a battle fought a hundred years ago? So why all the fighting, the marching, the hardships, the hunger, the danger, the wounds? What remains of all those things? I'll tell you, Señor Marques: what remains is glory! I walk through the streets of a strange town and men whisper my name behind my back, mothers hold their children aloft, townsfolk run out of their houses and faces are pressed to windows. And one day, when I am old and weary and crawl on all fours into some monastery, the glory associated with my name will still endure. I'm one of the Devil's own, God help me!"
He fell silent. A hideous old hag had entered the room bearing a bowl of warm water and a piece of rag. The British captain took his plumed shako from the table and made off as soon as he saw her.
"You fool, you booby, you good-for-nothing!" she snarled as she proceeded to bathe Saracho's wounded arm. "Look at you sitting there, groaning! Other men go in quest of gold; two ounces of lead is all you ever bring home!"
"Gently, woman!" groaned the victim of her ministrations. "Leave me in peace — I've just won a famous victory."
"A famous victory?" the old woman squawked, brandishing her piece of rag. "To what purpose? None, save that the same king, and not some other, should levy fresh taxes on bread and dripping and cheese and eggs in the years to come!"
"Silence!" cried Saracho. "Wield your broom and stop meddling in my business! Don't you recognize His Excellency the Señor Marques?"
"Excellency and eminence and reverence and pestilence! Why must you always be in the thick of things? If the Turks set about the Tatars, you would insist on being there."
"Ah me," Saracho groaned, "I've had this millstone around my neck for seventeen long years. She grows worse every day. Her bile is only to be measured by the bucketful!"
"The whole town knows you for an idler," snapped the harridan. "You roam the countryside and think it would soil your hands to do some honest work for once."
"Lord," Saracho sighed, long and mournfully, "deliver me from all evil!"
I could still hear the guerrilla colonel's plaintive voice and his wife's vituperations when I left the room and made my way downstairs. Some rebel officers were sitting under a fig tree outside the house, devouring roast mutton. They silently rose to their feet as I passed.
The streets teemed with brisk, bustling figures. The townsfolk were eagerly going about their business, and there was no outward sign that the town had, only hours before, witnessed the death-throes of two regiments. Chestnut-sellers sat on their corkwood chairs, stall-keepers set out their wares, small carts laden with charcoal rattled through the streets, muleteers trotted their beasts to and fro for the benefit of would-be purchasers, barbers offered their services, a Carmelite friar distributed scapulars and holy pictures, and the cries of peasant women selling divers kinds of merchandise rang out on all sides:
"Milk! Goats' milk! Warm milk! Who'll buy?"
"Onions from Murcia! Nuts from Vizcaya! Garlic! Beans! Olives from Seville!"
"Wine! Red wine! Wine from Val de Penas!"
"Sausages of every kind. Salchichônes! Longanizas! Chorizos! Genuine sausages from Estremadura!"
And, wherever I went, the noise and bustle died away. Hurrying townsfolk paused and stood aside to let me pass before staring after me with awe, amazement and mute admiration writ large on their faces.
It was the Marquis of Bolibar who walked the streets of his town, not I. I caught a distant glimpse of vineyards and fields, and a triumphant voice within me cried, "My land, my native soil! It is for me that those fields turn green and those vines bear fruit. All that this sky encompasses is mine!" — I was a man transformed — I was heir to this alien land for the space of an hour. And so, with my heart aglow and my head filled with dreams, I made my way slowly out of La Bisbal.
A detachment of guerrillas was drawn up beside the town wall. One of them flung open the gates and saluted me with eyes downcast.
"Ave Maria purissima!" he cried, and the unfamiliar words that issued from my lips were uttered in a dead man's voice:
"Amen! She conceived without sin."