Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

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.

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.