Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

Everyone in the gathering took a step back. I saw Amelis’s eyes, which had burst open, and our whole universe, everything, was collected in that look. She grabbed my chest, tried to speak. I knew she was dead, that she had come back to say something to me, only to sink forevermore. And so she did: Though it was only a moment, she came back.

As I remember it, there was a lull in the battle. All the noise was suspended in anticipation of Amelis’s words. This, of course, was not what happened. I thought all possible cruelties had occurred. But we still had one coming: the four most terrible words any father could hope to hear.

“Martí,” she said imploringly, “tingues cura d’Anfán.” Take care of Anfán.

And she was gone, a loosening of her soul more than her muscles.

How to face the impossibility of her request, the fact it had come too late? Or that her wish made a connection between me and the world, one of unbearable pain? Amelis couldn’t have known that Anfán was dead, that he had died specifically in an attempt to save her, in trying to bring me to help. Even Ballester was moved. His cheeks contracted beneath his beard, and he turned his head away so that I wouldn’t see.

Fleeting images: The next finds me at the Fossar de les Moreres, the mass burial ditch. The battle continued to rage, but the only thing concerning me was the bundle I was carrying: Amelis’s body covered in a shawl. Ballester was at my side. One of the gravediggers asked me the customary question: “One of ours?” The government had made a decree by which no Bourbon bodies were to be buried. I didn’t even bother to answer. Ballester shook his fist at the digger, who fled.

I went down to the ditch. It was a great crater in which bodies were deposited. Wisely, the Red Pelts had ordered it to be built five storeys deep. But at this point in the siege, the pile of bodies was almost up to ground level. I buried Amelis to the sound of cannons thundering. While I knelt down to deposit her body as delicately as I could, Ballester kept an eye out.

A stray bullet. After having made it through a life full of danger, rapes, and destitution, Amelis had been taken by something as ridiculous as a stray bullet. I couldn’t prevent the thought: That stray bullet was me.

I fell to my knees and, sobbing uncontrollably, said: “I killed them. Amelis. Anfán. The dwarf. All of them.”

Squinting, Ballester asked: “Mind telling me what you’re going on about?”

I spoke through gurgles, my face bathed in tears. “I designed the Bourbon trench. While I was over there, on the other side of the cordon. I thought it would be the lesser evil for the city, but I was only fooling myself.”

I wished, truly I did, that he would take out a knife and slit my throat, as he should have done in Beceite. The seven intervening years — I saw very clearly now — had all been a dream. But instead of putting an end to me, he reacted with irate skepticism.

“What are you saying?” he shouted. “Who cares about your damned calculations, all those tables and compasses? Get your head out of your books and let’s go and fight!”

“I did my best,” I said. “And not for the sake of the city, nor for my family, but for engineering. Any Maganon would have dreamed of such a trench. Faced with a recalcitrant city, and provided all the means to create the perfect trench. For all the tricks I included, all I really wanted was to better my teachers, beat Vauban’s cousin himself. I let myself be tempted, then hid that fact from myself. There was only one way to erase such a stain, which was coming back to the stronghold I’d condemned, letting the work of my hand lead to my own demise.”

Ballester tried to wrestle me to my feet, to urge me back to the front, but I held him off.

“Want to know the worst of it?” I looked for my judgment in Ballester’s eyes. Or, rather, that he would execute that judgment. To that end, I concluded: “If I had truly loved my family more than I loved engineering, if I had loved love and not vanity, I’d never have designed any trench. Neither a good one nor a bad one. An honest man serves not the devil — for good or for ill.”

“But your work hindered the devil,” he said in my defense. “Obstructing the trench, you won us a few more days in this city.”

“And for what? Look around you. If I do survive, it will always be hanging over me that I was the architect of its demise.” Ballester shook his head, but I refused to listen. “Where is truth, the authentic truth? In our deeds or in the feelings that guide them? I know I didn’t design this trench based on love or patriotism but out of vanity. Now the death of my family bears my signature.”

I cried so hard, I thought my eyes would drop from my head. Ballester knelt down beside me and, crushing my cheeks in his hands, gave me a hateful look. The world was sinking, and Ballester, I now understand, knew these would be the last words spoken between us.

“Know your problem?” he said. “That you only fight for the living. Between them, the French, the Spanish, and the Red Pelts killed my father, my mother, and my brothers. So many of my people are dead, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I won’t be able to avenge them all. Don’t fight for the living, and don’t fight for the dead, either. People in the future might speak ill of acts we’ve committed — because we got things wrong or because we failed. Fine. I’d rather be looked down on for the things I did do than the things I never did.”

I was still on my knees, shaken, weeping. He stood up. Ballester standing at his full height made me feel like a child. He added: “Do you truly think the world revolves around your damned trench? Know what I say to that? I hope it was the greatest work of your life. Because if not, what would have been the point in having taken on that bunch of braggarts dressed in white?”

Ballester then did the most loving thing one man can do for another: He lifted me to my feet.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” he entreated me. And we returned to the fray. I followed him, I think, because at that moment I hadn’t the slightest desire to outlive Amelis and Anfán. Or my trench.

A number of units from the Coronela, during their retreat, had taken up positions on the absurd unfinished cutting, the ditch inside the ramparts that had been intended to contain the Bourbon assault. Dozens of the militiamen, covered in mud after all the rain, had taken shelter in it and were leaning out and firing at floor height. The wave of Bourbon soldiers was crashing down on them — they’d end up trapped if they stayed down there. Ballester and I leaped down into the six-foot cutting and began shoving and urging them to get out. “Out of the cutting!” we cried. “Fall back!” Ballester and his men forced them up and out.

I went along shouting, pointing the way to the first line of streets behind us. “To the buildings! Occupy them and shoot from the windows!”

We carried on, forcing them out of the cutting. Before we knew it, the Bourbons were upon us. Dozens, hundreds, of white uniforms jumped down, brandishing their bayonets. They had come from the captured ramparts; it was at least a regiment. Down in the ditch and around it, Barcelonans and Frenchmen gored one another. I now tried to scrabble out myself, but as I was doing so, someone grabbed me by the neck and threw me to the ground. I remember, as I sank into the mud, thinking disparagingly: Why not just knife me in the back? The answer was that the person who had yanked me back down was no other than my good friend Don Antoine Bardonenche.

He’d been tasked with clearing the cutting; the Frenchmen around us wreaking havoc with their bayonets were his escort. It had turned out to be a devastating day even for him. His pristine white uniform was dirty for once, and his face smeared. There were blood spatters all over his chest.