Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

Overhearing us, a corporal came over. “You speak Catalan?” he said. “Because we need a translator.”

I got down from the carriage and let him lead me to the sole prisoner. He was the group’s leader, a man by the name of Ballester. Before they hanged him, they wanted to extract whatever information they could. His eyebrow was split and had bled profusely. But his broad face had a beauty out of keeping with the situation, and seemed to scorn any pain he might have been in. The ropes binding his wrists were soaked dark red. He had been captured moments earlier, and the blood he’d shed was already dry, as though, the thought struck me, he had been born with old veins.

And he was astonishingly young. Leading a squad of irregulars, and yet he couldn’t have been any older than sixteen or seventeen — a boy, like me. He must have had quite the temperament, to be respected as a leader. His features melded nobility and sadness — not so strange, given the situation. But something also said to me that, even in better times, he’d be the distant kind. As for Ballester’s gaze? It put me in mind of waves crashing against rocks; sooner or later, they’d overwhelm you. We came from such opposed worlds that I felt uncomfortable having to address him. I told him what his captors wanted. His attitude to me was that of a man listening to rabbits chew grass. He tilted his head and spat blood, and all he said in answer was: “I’m going to die, and that’s all.”

He didn’t lament death, as though, more than an inevitable risk in the militia, it might mean martyrdom. Human instinct leads us to sympathize with the captive rather than the captor, and though Ballester’s fate mattered nothing to me, I found myself saying, “Don’t be a fool. If you promise them information, they’ll keep you alive. Tell them something they’ll need to wait to check the veracity of. Meantime, anything could happen. Who knows? Maybe peace will break out.”

He raised his hands, bold youth, and looked me in the eye. The words seemed to scrape out from between his teeth. “If it weren’t for these binds, I’d rip out your tongue, shitty botiflero .”

Botiflero is the worst insult one can ever give a Catalan. It means anyone who supports Philip V, Castile, and the Bourbon dynasty. A traitor, a colluder, that is. The — iflero part of the word relates to a Catalan (and Spanish) word for fat —anyone, that is, all puffed up in his finery. I imagine it comes from the fact that the vast majority of supporters of the Austrian king, Charles, were from the lower classes, and those few Catalans behind Little Philip tended to be aristocracy and clergy.

Anyway, what does it matter where the word comes from? The point is that Ballester had insulted me, and I responded accordingly. “I try to help you, and you insult me!” I shouted. “I’d like to know what my place as an upstanding engineer has to do with the lowly kind of warfare you are engaged in.”

A few more insults went back and forth. The only thing to note being how clear was the irremediable distance separating us. For me, war was what I’d been taught at Bazoches: a technical exercise free of ill will, tempered by the nobility of the opposing spirits. War, in this account, could (and ought to) be undertaken without emotions, which can only cloud the rational landscape of engineering; battle was a rational sphere, closer to chess than flying bits of lead. If a soldier had ever said to Vauban that he hated the enemy, no question, Vauban would have answered: “And what has he ever done to you?” Whereas for individuals like Ballester, war was a matter of life and death. Or not — it was more, much more than that — according to what he believed, this war was being conducted according to principles far higher than the brief transition that is life. From my point of view, of course, this was deluded: A military engineer was as far removed from mysticism as a clockmaker.

Yes, I had seen hundreds of people hanged, their feet swaying in the pines. I’d seen the Játiva hecatomb, and the dog and the girl at the woman’s feet. But my education was made of stuff too solid to be rocked by a few sad sights. I stopped arguing with Ballester; it wasn’t worth the trouble. He seemed to me the perfect mix of bandit and fanatic.

“Very well,” I said, “don’t tell them anything. You’re the first person I’ve ever met who’d prefer a shorter to a longer life.”

The Spanish captain who had sent for a translator was becoming annoyed, not being able to understand the insults. Curtly, he demanded to know what had been said.

“The Miquelets in this area are under orders of General Jones, the English commander in Tortosa,” I lied. “Their mission is to take this godforsaken place and then await orders. A courier will be arriving tomorrow, first thing. To speak to this nincompoop, specifically.”

As I’d thought, rather than stringing him up there and then, they decided to use him as bait.

“You’ve got another night to live,” I said to him. “Put your house in order.”

I had made it all up. No courier would be arriving the next morning, but I was in no danger. The Miquelets had decided against it, was all anyone would think, or they’d worked out it was a trap. Why did I do it? I don’t know; perhaps Jimmy’s royal generosity — not at all the same thing as generosity — had rubbed off on me. Or because of being a student of Vauban, whose punishment of vanquished foes was always benevolent. I do not believe it was purely out of goodness, as my next piece of conduct demonstrated very well the so-and-so I was becoming: I went after one of our Mediterranean beauties, a young girl, my and Ballester’s age, who sparkled even from afar, even with a dirty rag for a head wrap. I saw her passing in front of a squat building, an open-door stable now holding twenty or thirty military horses. She was inside, feeding them hay. When she saw me, she looked away.

Look, I have lain down beside women from a great many latitudes, some of them of the strangest tints and hues. And in the eternal debate over which are most beautiful, I hold with the French. It must be one of the few commonplaces that are actually true. Still, it is a general truth; individually, when a Mediterranean woman is beautiful, she is without peer. And this young girl was bewitching. Her curly locks escaped from under the edges of the head wrap and fell down about her shoulders. The darkest black hair.

A passing sergeant warned me off: “Don’t go near that one, she’s sick with something. She’ll even ward off horse rustlers.”

It must be a question of character: If you say to certain people “Don’t go,” the very first thing they’ll do is go. I entered the large stable, stopping a few feet from her with my elbow propped on the back of a horse. Chewing a piece of straw, I looked directly at her. She didn’t stop working, piling straw in the mangers, pretending not to notice me.

“Come over here,” I ordered.

From closer up, I could observe her in more detail. Sure enough, she was very young. Her nose had a pronounced, graceful curve to it. Slowly, I lifted a finger to her cheek. She turned her face away, but I had her cornered. I brushed her cheek with my fingertip, coming away with one of the ugly black grains. Well, perhaps she was contagious, but not to a student from Bazoches, who notices even the tiniest details. I pressed on the eruption, then put my finger in my mouth and sucked.

Raspberry jam. How clever! Not only had her pretend illness gotten her a job; it acted as a brilliant shield against the possibility of being raped. She knew she’d been found out, and the uncovered areas of her pale skin flushed an irate red.

Don’t for a second think I’m going to launch into some discourse about military abuses. I’ve had dealings with too many soldiers, from all across the world, not to see their side. The common soldier is born a pauper and will die one. And things become available to an armed man that he’d never have the benefit of without a rifle at his shoulder. Spoils, and victims, become defenseless objects; it is then up to the morality of the would-be pillager to protect them. I agree that violating defenseless women is not a nice thing. My point is merely that to condemn the pillagers is easy — as easy as pillaging is difficult to defend.