Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

I thought it was me death had come for, not him. He made a tired gesture with his hand, which then fell back onto the bed.

“I have an audience now, one I cannot put off. Go.”

I left the room white as plaster. The Ducroix brothers immediately understood what was happening and drew me apart, keeping me from the assembled carrion. I could hardly speak. I rolled up my sleeve in despair. “The fifth Point!” I said, looking at my forearm. “I have it etched into me, but it isn’t mine. Who will validate it now? Who?”

As they brought me away, I whimpered like a small dog that had just received an unmerited beating. “But what word did the marquis want?” I said, sobbing. “What was the word?”

I had gone to Paris to take the test, the most important test of my life. I would leave having learned a bitter, useless lesson: When can you tell all is lost? When even those who hold you dear say nothing. For the Ducroix brothers let out afflicted sighs, and the only solace they could offer was to remove me from the sight of others, taking me to the room that was farthest from everything in that death-visited house.

Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban died on March 5, 1707. Of the rites and the funeral, all I am left with is an indistinct vertigo: “You are not fit.”

I was the last creation to come out of Bazoches and, if I may be so bold, the best wrought. A machine made perfect over the course of two years of rigor and discipline. Toward the end of my training, I felt I could do anything; Constantinople had been besieged twenty-five times, and I felt confident I could defend it from twenty-five armies at once. Or to storm it myself, if serving another master. Fifteen days would be all I’d ask, time to make three parallels. And now I was nothing — a nothing that condemned me to life in limbo. “One word, just one.” But which? By that judgment, I had been turned into a monster, a stillborn unicorn.

One of the endless numbers who attended the final farewell was Don Antoine Bardonenche, the infantry captain whose company Jeanne, her sister, and I had occasionally enjoyed, playing blind hen on the banks of streams or along the castle passageways at Bazoches. I was sitting on a bench with my hands forlornly folded in my lap, my mind empty except for the pain, when Bardonenche came over, svelte and sporting his white livery.

“You, my good friend, are melancholy,” he said, jovial as ever in spite of being in the midst of a funeral. “They tell me you are seeking gainful employment.”

I had not the energy to reply. Bardonenche continued: “Since engineering is your subject, you ought to put the knowledge you’ve acquired into practice. What would you say to joining a brigade of engineers as an adjutant? That way you’d gain practical experience. After a time be ratified as a member of the royal corps, I’m sure.”

With the marquis’s death, Bazoches had become something quite different. Jeanne would be taking the reins. There was no way I could stay. I gave an absentminded nod. Bardonenche cheerfully punched his left fist into his right palm. “ Rejoignez l’armée du roi! ”

Jeanne had been the anvil and Vauban the hammer. And I, a piece of brass crushed between the two. Nothing mattered. If a vacancy had opened in Anatolia, making fences for Turkish sheep, I would have said yes. As for Jeanne, my final conversation with her served only to further demolish my soul.

“You were the one who let me in to Bazoches,” I reminded her. “You lied to your father. You said I knew his work best, which wasn’t true. Maybe it was a mistake; maybe we should never have met. We’d all be far happier now.”

“But Martí,” she said, “I told him no lies. I related to him exactly the three candidates’ answers, yours included. ‘A stone flower’ was how you described his best fortress. To which my father said, ‘This one will be my student, it could be that this one has the heart of an engineer.’ ”

Vauban was buried at Bazoches. The heart, separate from the body, in an urn. A lover of order, he did not want to oppose the conventions of his time. But for any who knew how to look, it was all there: his body to the priests, his heart for le Mystère . For those believers among you, know that, of all the human beings who have ever lived, Vauban is the only one I would dare say with certainty made it to heaven. I’d wager anything — anything you like — that on seeing him approach, they opened the gates, opened them wide, not a word. Either that or Saint Peter would run the risk of him coming back with a regiment of sappers. Heaven — I’d bet he’d have taken it in seven days. Well, let us not be impious, even if only so as not to offend the One those gulls believe made this dung heap of a world; eight, let’s say.

Of the journey from France to the depths of Spain, all I can recall is my feet, so downcast was I the whole way. Nothing mattered to me anymore. My body was a limp piece of hide, untouched even by the abominable jolting of the carriages. Le Mystère had abandoned me. The day before Vauban died I had felt full with it; the next, it had evaporated. As many pages as I might dictate, I would never be able to explain the simultaneous horror and apathy this emptiness came with.

I am a human desert, I know it. Every day of my life, a grain of sand is added to the dunes. So much time has passed, so very much, that in my contemplation of the boy Martí Zuviría, it is as though I see another person. I am not indulgent with him, I swear it. But I am able to feel a certain amount of compassion for him. His future, his love, his hopes, those who guided and taught him. . It had all vanished, suddenly and at once. Who would have emerged unscathed from such a thing? And all for a word, The Word.

I am ninety-eight years old now, so in 1707 I would have been. . Help me out, oh, sweet swine. . Yes, sixteen. Bardonenche’s regiment crossed the border of Navarra as a column many miles long, on foot, and once in Spain made a hard southerly march for three days. I was allowed to ride in one of the many carriages that brought up the tail of the convoy, and not on foot, like the rugged infantry. We were to join the main body of the army, at which point I would be incorporated into the engineering staff.

If you ever had to partake in those endless marches, day after day, you would understand how fortunate I was in this. The soldiers advanced two abreast, and from sunup to sundown, with the carriages bringing up the rear. The marching pace of the French army was one of the swiftest in all of Europe, a pace taken every second: left, right, left, right. . En route, mauvaise troupe! A week after crossing the border, men began to fall by the wayside, exhausted. The sweeper carriages gathered them up. To pay for this, come the end of the day, they had to see to the tasks around camp. Since these were just as punishing and far more humiliating, only those who genuinely could not go on would allow themselves to drop.

Bardonenche went on a splendid horse, riding up and down, checking the formation of the line. I have already made mention of his pleasant nature. He frequently came alongside my carriage, which was toward the back, and directed a few spirited words at me beside the driver. Navarra was damp, and even when we came down into northern Castile, it was predominantly lush. But the moment we set foot on the southern steppes, it became dry and dusty, and the heat suffocating, though it was still only springtime.

Bardonenche was the most formidable swordsman. In fact, aside from his mania for swordplay, all there was in him was nonsense. As to sword philosophy, he declared: “What the devil is there to say? Strike before you are struck.” And he was profoundly disdainful when it came to any weapon propelled by gunpowder, sparks, and flint. “Bullets fly any which way, the tip of my sword at one target only: the enemy’s heart.”