Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

He pointed his sword at my nose and said: “ Mon ami, mon ennemi. Rendez-vous .”

“ Ah, non! ” I replied in the offended tone of someone asked to pay a debt he does not owe. “ Ça jamais! ”

That’s right: Longlegs Zuvi, the rat, refusing the very thing that had been in motion since the siege began. I didn’t even have Peret’s sword about my person, so, very nobly, I threw a handful of mud in Bardonenche’s eyes, turned, and ran. While his and Ballester’s men continued laying into one another with bayonets, Bardonenche wiped the mud from his eyes and raced after me. I tripped over a rut, landing face-to-face with a dead soldier. I grabbed the man’s rifle and, gasping, turned the bayonet on myself like a spear. Halting, Bardonenche sighed. “Don’t,” he said.

Pity for Bardonenche — pity for me — pity for all of us. His expression was more than merely downcast: It was commiseration itself. I, of course, felt like a rat cornered by a tiger. Imagine a zero the size of the moon: That was how likely I was to overcome Bardonenche, Europe’s finest swordsman.

I still think Martí Zuviría should, by rights, have died that September 11, in that waterlogged cutting. But just then Ballester leaped like a panther from the edge of the ditch, and he and Bardonenche set to tussling in the mud. I wasn’t stupid enough to let such a chance go begging, and flexing my long legs, I launched myself out of the cutting.

White uniforms were everywhere; the entire cutting was being overrun by hundreds of Frenchmen. The men accompanying Bardonenche tried to protect their captain, and the Miquelets theirs. Ballester’s men fired and thrust their blades in a frenzy, but the cascade of Bourbons intensified. The clamor of the battle was appalling: Across the city, more than forty thousand rifles were exchanging fire, so disorderly and at such a pace that it sounded like a constant drumroll. We had to fall back immediately.

For the second time, I addressed Ballester by his first name. “Esteve!” I howled, on all fours at the edge of the cutting. “Get out, for the love of God, get up here now! You don’t know who you’re dealing with! Surti! ”

Ballester had bargained on a French captain being more skilled in martial arts than he was, but by turning it into a brawl in the confines of the cutting, he’d hoped to level the field. Bardonenche’s long arms kept hitting up against the walls, preventing him from using his skills. They punched, bit, and scratched each other like wild animals.

Still, not even Ballester could withstand a swordsman like Bardonenche for long. The latter eventually managed to force some space between them and, with a lightning-fast thrust, ran Ballester through at stomach height. The blade entered up to the hilt. Ballester, with half the sword projecting from his lower back, turned his head, looked up, saw me, and said something that I’ll take to my grave: “Go! You’re more important than we are!”

His last words. Next came a deafening guttural cry that could be heard over and above the din of the battle. His fingers sank into the ground like grappling hooks, and he looked Bardonenche in the eye. Bardonenche threw back his head, but — and this was his error — didn’t move away. His most sensible option would have been to let his saber go and kick Ballester’s body clear. In Bardonenche’s world, I suppose, it was bad form to drop your weapon in such a fashion. Honor was the death of him.

Bardonenche cried out, his chin high, as Ballester, summoning what little strength remained in him, sank his teeth into the Frenchman’s neck. They both toppled into the mud. They writhed together, and Ballester’s hands came upon something Bardonenche was carrying. A small leather pouch containing used bullets: the pouch of Busquets, the old Miquelet from Mataró. Ballester took it and forced it into his enemy’s mouth, ramming it down his throat with bloodied fingers. Bardonenche, his body in spasms, struggled to get clear.

The rest of the Miquelets had fallen, and several Frenchmen came to their captain’s aid, bayoneting Ballester’s body. In the melee, and with the two bodies intertwined, they also managed to finish off Bardonenche by stabbing him a few times. By the end, the pair were a single mangled lump enveloped in thick mud. Two men with such different trajectories, so perfectly unalike one from the other, and in their demise, unified by death — as though their destiny had been to end up in each other’s arms.

I turned and I ran as never before. Corre , Zuvi! Run! Only when there was no breath left in me did I finally come to a halt. Wheezing, with no thought for where I was, I dropped to the ground. I couldn’t believe they were all dead. Amelis, Anfán, Nan. Ballester. And still the battle was raging. More images: brave men, the kind I never thought I’d see give in, fleeing home; and cowards, who had never shown their faces anywhere near the ramparts, taking on the enemy armed with hatchets. I’d need a whole page to list the nobles who, back in June 1713, had voted against resisting, and come September 11, 1714, died defending their city.

Questions abound. So many pointless sacrifices — why? Was it worth filling the world with so many tragic, extraordinary tales, all those brilliant, meteoric ends? We know what happened afterward. All officers put in chains, hauled to Castile, and Don Antonio first among them. The Saint Eulalia flag captured and transported to the Atocha shrine in Madrid. The entire country under a military regime for decades. And Barcelona in the hands of that mercenary murderer, the Antwerp butcher, Verboom.

My thoughts turn to another of the Miquelet captains, Josep Moragues. He was tied to the back of a cart and dragged the length and breadth of the city before being decapitated and his arms and legs cut off. They placed his head in a cage and had no qualms about hanging it from one of the city gates. There his bare skull stayed, as mockery of and a warning to the rebels, for twelve long years — twelve, as all the while his widow’s protests went unheard.

Could there be any greater ignominy than that of Moragues? Yes, perhaps that of a man named Manuel Desvalls. And not because his body was subjected to torments but because he didn’t die from his treatment. Desvalls had commanded troops outside Barcelona. When the victors exiled him, he couldn’t have had any idea what the rest of his days would hold. Remarkably, he lived to a hundred. Can you imagine? A larger proportion of his life spent outside his home than in it, his return never allowed. A hundred years — a century. And I’m headed the same way.

Or should I talk about the women, our women, all the women who sustained us and who spat when we said they couldn’t fight on the bastions? Or perhaps Castellví, Francesc Castellví, our starry-eyed captain of the Valencian company? When he was exiled, he chose the path of the writer or, more specifically, his own dead end. He stubbornly dedicated his life to chronicling our war, corresponding for decades with participants from either side, men from dozens of countries. He wrote a book five thousand pages long and more, an impartial testimony of all the great deeds. And do you know what happened? No publisher would touch it. He died without a single page making it into the public domain.

But above all, my thoughts turn to Don Antonio, Don Antonio de Villarroel Peláez, renouncing glory and honor, family and even life itself, and all for an allegiance that made no sense — to a group of nameless men. He, a son of Castile, embodying what was good about that harsh land, sacrificing himself for Barcelona, no less. And his reward? Infinite pain, eternal oblivion.

In my delirium, another of my tragedies occurred to me: With Anfán dead, I had a son remaining, one I’d never meet, and who would never learn that his father had fought and died defending the freedoms of a people he’d also never know about. But no, I thought, my pain wasn’t unusual: When we lost and all of us perished, all our children would be educated by the victors.