Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

To recap: Good old Zuvi behind the Bourbon cordon, locked in a room empty except for the dust, my design for the Attack Trench complete. Cannon fire resounding without, monotone and impersonal, as though it were le Mystère itself being racked with laughter. Since I had completed my task, the following dawn was surely to be my last. Verboom consulted me on a last few details, shamelessly scribbling down all my answers. Rubbing his tired eyes, he stowed the notes in a file and then let out a little cry in Dutch.

In came two heavies broader across their backs than I am long of leg. The Antwerp butcher stuffed the sheets of paper into the folder. And as he did so, he coolly leaned his head closer to me.

This small gesture said it all. They were going to kill me there and then. Doubtless they were mercenaries, private thugs hired by Verboom. Four massive hands lifted me up under my arms.

“Wait a moment!” I screeched.

Never has my mind whirred into action so quickly. I elbowed my way out of their grips and forced myself back into my seat. Then, extending a hand across the map, I said in a miserable, pleading tone: “Monseigneur! Et les moulins?”

“What mills?”

“We still haven’t finished planning the attack on Section L here. The rebels will turn these mills into redoubts.”

Verboom blinked. “Ah, yes,” he said, “the mills in Section L. We were going to come back to them and forgot. Well, they aren’t especially important. The attack won’t go very near them.”

Though what I heard him saying was: “No, we won’t defer your execution.” The two mercenaries stood there like hunting dogs straining at their chains. They lifted me out of my seat again. Then I came up with a tall story about the mills: An anonymous genius had come up with a curious system for concealing artillery, I said. The windows in the mills were going to be made into gunwales, and medium-caliber cannons placed inside — inconspicuously, the barrels not sticking out. They weren’t windmills, but the idea was to put sails on them like a windmill, and these, turning in the wind in time with the cannon fire, would serve to disperse the gunpowder smoke. The enemy would take a good long while working out where the deadly shots were coming from.

“How original!” exclaimed Verboom, obviously planning to use the idea himself one day. He made a few notes and, thinking out loud, asked: “Do you know the mad genius who had the idea? Perhaps, when we take the city, I’ll have him spared and offer him the chance to serve under me.” Verboom wasn’t the most intelligent of men. But then, swiveling his big head all of a sudden, he looked on me with renewed spite. His own words had led him to the answer. “It was you, of course,” he said.

That was the last straw. Well, you can’t survive forever, hopping from frying pan to frying pan. Verboom gave the order for me to be taken out, and this time the two giants got a good hold of me.

I had no way of knowing, but my fate had been decided several days earlier. A number of spies who had been caught in Barcelona had been hanged outside the walls as an example. The Bourbons decided to carry out reprisals by hanging prisoners along the cordon. Verboom had my name included in the list. In fact, when I arrived, there was only one noose left, on a fifteen-foot L-shaped stage just behind the edge of the cordon.

There was an uproariousness to this mass execution that didn’t seem much suited to the meting out of justice. The sight of the hanged men on the city walls had stirred the troops, and the officers were having trouble containing them. I was jostled and shoved through a sea of arms; if not for my thug escorts, I wouldn’t have made it as far as the scaffold. My hands were tied behind my back, the noose was dropped down over my head, and the rope was attached to a wooden contraption designed for hoisting infantry out of the trench.

I could see everything from up there. Everything. A westerly wind was blowing the smoke out to sea. My eyes, free from the dust haze of the previous days, scanned the front.

The cordon, the Bourbon cannons. On that day, their gunners seemed subdued in their work, as though Pópuli’s imminent departure had somehow lulled them. Men scurried antlike along the channels that ran from the cordon to the Capuchin convent, arms full of munitions. From the city, Costa’s missiles came in a measure rather than a torrential fashion.

The Two Crowns’ positions were visible, too, and ours I knew from memory. I was certain that the men of the Coronela were behind every rampart face and manning every bastion. In each of the bell towers nearest to the ramparts, pairs of observers. Repair brigades would be emptying detritus from the moat, shielded by welded-together doors.

The land between the two sides, apparently unpeopled, seethed with secret armies. All the ruined houses, fought over a thousand times, had patrols from both armies hiding inside. I could sense our snipers nestled in rifts and crevices. Thus, at once I saw the hunter and the prey, the reckless foragers and the snipers stalking them. Beyond the palisade, the battered city walls, and beyond them the outline of the city, with dozens of bell towers pointing upward like needles. And beneath it all, our Mediterranean, ever indifferent to the agonies of men. The city put me in mind of a moribund body, which, though going into its death pangs, continually formed new patches of scar tissue.

There is something irremissable about the contact of a noose against one’s neck. My final thoughts, little as I like to admit it, were empty, emotionless technicalities. Costa needs to alter his range, I thought. A number of soldiers heaved on the wooden contraption. I felt my feet lift off the platform.

The beauty of this world is hidden from us until the moment we feel disconnected from it. In my final vision of things, all was well, beauteous, in order. There was even orderliness to the destruction of the ramparts, the breaches perfect, like silk cocoons. Infinity resides in every instant, every instant is in itself abundant. How wrong ever to think otherwise! My final thought was: How lovely a siege is. Then, as I was deprived of air, delirium overcame me.

I heard a noise. This: “Wake up. That’s an order.”

I opened my eyes.

It was Jimmy. He peered at me from very close up. I could even smell the perfume on his wig.

There before me, the Jimmy I knew: he and his conceited self-satisfaction, his little courtier laugh, proud as a peacock. He had a small retinue. Seeing me wake, he turned to them in triumph, twirling his hand affectedly, as if to say: See? I did it. He’s back to life .

Forgive the digression. I was in a hospital tent for Bourbon officers. Thick bandages swaddled my neck. Most of the beds were empty, but we weren’t alone. At the far end, on a rickety field bed, there was a Spanish captain going through death pangs, his wounds too atrocious to be hidden with bandages. He exhaled a musical-sounding death rattle. Jimmy paid him not the slightest attention. He ordered his retinue to leave.

“You’re a lucky bird,” he said when it was just the two of us and the dying man. “I show up, come to inspect the position, and there I see you, dangling from the scaffold with your cock erect. Another second and even I wouldn’t have been able to save you. Can you speak?”

I shook my head.

“Little wonder. Much longer and the noose would have pulled your head clean off your body. Was it Verboom’s doing?”

I nodded. Removing his gloves and placing them on the table next to us, Jimmy shook his head in mock astonishment. “Well, well. You two been getting on that well?”

I responded with a bras d’honneur , though a not very energetic one, given my state. Jimmy’s face clouded over in thought. He sat down beside me on the bed. A few breaths. Then he patted the inside of my calf. “I’ve got a lot of work to do. While you recover, I’ll decide whether I ought to enlist you or put you back up on that scaffold. Now sleep.”