Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

He looked down at Amelis. The only light was a nearly spent, guttering candle. I’d say, though, that a paltry flame such as that one is capable of feeling emotions.

My Lord, how beautiful a beloved person can seem in her weakness. If it weren’t for her, the four of us never would have come together. Our life would have been quite different, and doubtless very much the poorer.

Anfán took a deep breath, and for the first time, I heard the man in him speak: “As you wish, jefe . I’ll protect her. Whatever should pass, none of us will leave the beach. You have my word.”

Chin up, Martí Zuviría, never mind! Never? No, not never.

And so, after more than a year under siege, September 11, 1714, finally came around. It began with a forbidding artillery barrage at half past four in the morning, immediately followed by ten thousand men charging at the breaches. Dozens of company banners, officers with their sabers held aloft, the sergeants hefting halberds to show the troops the way. I don’t believe there can have been more than five or six hundred haggard militiamen opposing them in the first line.

I find it impossible to recount that September 11 in any kind of coherent order. I myself am unable to comprehend it: Fleeting images are all that remain from that longest of days, not so much a sequence of events as a heap of dismembered images. I left our tent on the beach and made my way back into the city. The church bells were frantically ringing out, all of them. Sheer chaos. What else could it have been, with the Virgin Mary elected commander in chief? Meanwhile, the Bourbons surging up and over ramparts that a child could have kicked aside.

As the sky began growing light, I climbed up onto the terrace of Casa Montserrat, the mansion of a departed botiflero , and a vantage point over the area under attack between Saint Clara and Portal Nou. And I saw what, for an engineer, was the most exasperating sight of all: the stretch we’d defended for thirteen long months, overrun by that horde of mindless slaves. A blanket of white uniforms charging in formation across the breaches: En avant, en avant! Their numbers were so great that the few being picked off by snipers up on the ramparts didn’t make any difference. Was this my fate? Was this what I’d had my senses honed to do? To suffer all the more intensely the fall of Barcelona and the extinction of a people? So that on this, our last day of freedom, I’d hear even more acutely the howls of anguish, cry more tears, and my hands would flail and grasp all the more desperately at the sinking ship?

One of the sights from that day: sections of the ramparts separated from one another by the gigantic breaches, towering up into the sky. Through the telescope, I see a particularly thin stretch of the rampart, either side of which, far below, thousands of enemies are streaming into the city. Just two soldiers are left up there, an old man and a youngster. The old man is loading rifles and handing them to the youngster to fire into the white flood of troops below. The old man isn’t quick enough with his reloading. The youngster, impotent and raging, ends up hurling the rifles themselves, the bayonets making primitive spears of them. Another fleeting image, which again comes back to me in the circular telescope sight, is of the second Bourbon wave now having taken this redoubt, and the duo having surrendered, each badly wounded. Up on the battlement, the soldiers force them to their knees before the abyss. Then each of them is kicked over the edge.

A whirl of images. Children pulling the triggers of our “organ” contraptions, point-blank, mowing down whole ranks of grenadiers. Coronela soldiers flinging grenades until the enemy overruns them, and using the last ones to blow themselves up.

A great stack of images, yes, but above and beyond any of them, prevailing in the tragedy, an appearance that enshrined that man in the memory of the righteous: Don Antonio de Villarroel Peláez. Don Antonio! What was he still doing in Barcelona? He was supposed to be miles away, out across the ocean, when he suddenly burst into a meeting between members of the high command. His booming voice.

He was supposed to be in Vienna, safe, covered in praise, and forging a future for himself at Charles’s court. But he was here. These are the facts: He had waited until the last possible moment for the government to come to their senses and restore him. But that moment didn’t come, and as he walked down to the beach of his salvation, he halted, turned around, and simply returned to the ramparts. He knew very well he was signing his own death warrant. “I wish I could die shoulder to shoulder with these men, like any other soldier,” he’d said. Why are there such men as Don Antonio in the world? I don’t know the reason why. I only know that, when they appear, it is impossible not to love them.

For a very brief moment, he and I were alone in his study. I didn’t know what to say or do. It still pains me that I failed to find the words to tell him what it meant to me that he’d come back. I suppose it doesn’t matter. Throughout the rest of the defense, Don Antonio never made a single mention of what he’d given up. Only in that moment, with no one to see or hear, did he let his gaze become abstracted and, smoothing down his uniform, say: “To hell with sailing away.”

On that September 11, the head of the government, Rafael Casanova, also played his part, though without attaining the heights of Don Antonio’s greatness. Were I an indulgent person, I’d say that Casanova was more of a tragic character than a deplorable one, trapped between his own reasoning, the reasoning of the state, and the people’s willingness to go on fighting. But I don’t happen to be an indulgent person: If you want to be beloved by your country, you have to be prepared to sacrifice yourself for it. Don Antonio, not even a Catalan, come the final hour, understood this far more clearly than all the Casanovas in the world.

Don Antonio ordered two concentric attacks. He’d lead one and Casanova would lead the other, carrying the Saint Eulalia flag at the head of the troops. Tradition states that that sacred banner should be brought out only if the city is in grave danger. Could there ever be a more grave danger? Don Antonio knew what it would do for the élan of the soldiers to see the Eulalia flying high among them.

The problem was, protocol also demanded that any attack with the sacred ensign had to be led by the city’s highest-ranking political representative. The coward Casanova, in other words. I wasn’t at the meeting, no, but it most likely took some enraged officer to point a gun at him for Casanova to put on his colonel’s uniform. Soldiering and politics don’t, or at least shouldn’t, mix. But because Casanova was, at least in name, the leader of the Coronela, that meant he really had no choice but to put on that jacket with its golden braids, mount a tired old nag, and head up the attack. His demeanor, it struck me, was like that of an actor being made to play a role he disliked: resigned but at the same time wrapped up in the new part, brandishing his sword above his tricorn, simulating passions he didn’t at all feel.

The troop left the Saint Jordi Hall. The roar from the people announced the fact. Desperate, filthy citizens tacked on to the party as it came past. People appeared at balconies and windows, blowing kisses to the violet saint. The same color, as it happened, as the jackets worn by the Sixth Battalion, which was made up of tailors, tavern owners, and tinkers, and which was in the vanguard in front of the banner.

I also remember one of the Red Pelts, still dressed in those claret robes, who rode to one side of the banner. He went along shouting up at the women in the balconies to save their prayers and come and join the sacrifice. I remember the women, who were so weak they could barely stand, propping themselves up on the balcony railings and shouting: “Doneu-nos pa i hi anirem!” Give us bread, and we’ll come.