Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

“I stole it from those Bourbon scum!” I said, trying to turn their glee to my advantage. “I’m a patriot, utterly committed. The only thing I want is to topple Little Philip and his grandfather!”

While they rejoiced in the ill-begotten fortune, I came up with a convoluted tale. I was a spy working for the Generalitat, I went around sabotaging the evil Bourbons, my allegiance was with Austria. Attacking me was a mistake, and a crime, too. My mission, secret, meant traveling to Barcelona with the cargo; ministers from the Generalitat were awaiting my arrival. I even asked if they would like to escort me, and said they’d be paid handsomely if they did a good job. Ballester punched me to the ground. “String him up,” he said.

I whimpered and wept and begged for my life. I pushed the men off me and knelt down in front of Ballester. My family was dead, I told him, I was my blessed father’s only remaining son. A poor, peaceful, upstanding patriot.

Begging mercy from your executioners seems the most pointless pursuit. But in that case, why do men always subject themselves to such humiliation? I’ll tell you why: because it works.

“Sir,” I implored. “Have you forgotten who saved you from hanging in Beceite? The few hours of grace afforded you by my lenient words gave your men time to come back for you! And this is how you repay me! The one who saved your life, you sentence to death!”

Ballester spat by my nose, which was down on the ground. “It’s all right, your chest has brightened up my day,” he said. “Get out of here. I won’t lower myself to dirty my hands with you.”

I can still hear his rasping, stony voice and the words he said: “Fot el camp, gos.” (Away with you, dog.)

They stripped me, though my clothes were worth nothing. It must have been a symbol to the Miquelets when releasing prisoners. They even took my undergarments, stained though they were with mud and shit from twenty days in the trenches. I instinctively covered up my genitals with my hands. Turning on my heel, I fled, my rear end bare and the men pursuing me with their laughter.

“Hey!” Ballester shouted once there was a little distance between us. “Do you know how to write?” He had shifted to addressing me in the usted form, usually reserved for superiors.

I stopped and turned, with my hands still in front of my crotch, and stammered an answer: “Yes, well, of course. In several languages.”

He waved to me to come back. I obeyed, what else. He ordered his men to pull a plank from the carriage. He handed it to me, along with a piece of iron with a sharp point. “Write ‘I am a botiflero dog’ on it. In French and Spanish.”

“May I ask,” I whispered haltingly, clearing my throat, “what the inscription’s for?”

“Oh, I’ve changed my mind,” he said in the most amiable of voices. “Seeing as you know how to write, I’m going to string you up, and the whole world will know why. We’ll hang the plank around your neck.”

The iron and the plank dropped from my hands. Down on my knees again, I implored him, I whimpered, I cried whole seas. He looked up at the sky, sighing as though reconsidering. I thought he might have softened again, but what he said was: “Know Latin, too? Put it in Latin as well.”

I scratched out the letters on the plank, moaning and begging all the while. Ballester’s men found the whole thing hilarious.

“On your feet, boy!” they said, their voices upbeat, once I had finished. They tied my hands behind my back and picked me up at the armpits. The tallest tree in the vicinity was a fig tree. Someone put the plank around my neck. The old lunatic began shouting from the hole he was still digging: “So many big men, all in one place, and none of you comes to help an old man!”

One of the Miquelets tried to get the rope over one of the top branches but was so drunk that he stumbled and fell flat on his face. More laughter.

“Don’t you know how deep a hole has to be to fit a mule in?” continued the old man. “And me, toiling in the sun, in this heat. What a life!”

You only get one death, and mine had fallen into the hands of some drunk, bungling executioners. They finally managed to get the rope over the topmost branch. My head was introduced into the noose, and without any further ado, a couple of the brutes pulled down on the other end of the rope.

“I know you’re all good lads! You pay well, and anyone who fetches up without any money, you escort them for free. But I’m poor, too, and old, and tired! And this mule is enormous!”

I was lifted ten feet into the air. The yank on the noose caused my tongue to stick out. You never know how long your tongue is until you get hanged. The rope makes the blood in your head collect; you go bright red. My urine made an arc when I pissed myself. Some of the Miquelets fell down laughing.

They were too drunk to remember the well-reputed untrustworthiness of fig trees. The branches have a tendency to break, and, when I had been raised a little higher, the one bearing me indeed snapped. There was a great noise as I fell to the ground: bones, wood, and bushy leaves all in a heap.

Their guffaws were probably heard in Tortosa. Then, quite simply, they turned around and went off. That’s how Miquelets are.

“ Figa tova! Figa tova! ” they called out mockingly as they rode away, taking my carriage and the chest, of course, with them.

( Figa tova is untranslatable. Figa in Catalan means “fig,” and tova means “soft”; put together, they mean a whining know-it-all. Like Waltraud here, for instance.)

“Ho, you layabout!” cried the old halfwit. “Instead of lying there, you could at least give me a hand.”

Very well, then, we can agree that my return home was rather less glorious than that of Ulysses. The only attire I was able to procure for myself was a pile of beggar’s rags. And thus it was that I returned to Barcelona after four long years away. Defeated by the war, baffled in my wretchedness. And the worst thing of all: with a fifth Point on my forearm that I had done nothing to deserve.

But let us forget about the tragedy of Longlegs Zuvi for just a moment. I was returning to the city of my birth, to old Barcelona. To her noises, her smells, her alleyways. Her harbor, her excesses. The city felt like an invention of my memories, more distant than my mother. All I had retained in my head were a child’s recollections — do not forget, I left my home when I was but a child — and I was returning to Barcelona equipped with senses that were far from ordinary, which Bazoches had honed. Everything was new, after a fashion, for my perceptions and the passage of time meant I was experiencing the place as a foreigner would.

At this point I ought to ramble off into a description of Barcelona in the early years of the century. Which would be a very dull thing. Since I have a map from the period, I shall simply attach it and leave it at that.

The city walls are not shown on this plate. Very fitting, bearing in mind my mood at that moment, because the last thing I wanted was to go back to thinking as an engineer. Or about Bazoches, or Jeanne, or Vauban’s “You are not fit.” Or The Word.

As you can see, the city was bisected by a broad avenue, Las Ramblas. The urban sprawl was much denser to its right, and on its left, vegetable gardens in abundance, something very useful to have in the case of a siege. .

I had left Barcelona a boy, and I was returning a man. A failure, but a man. I can assure you, this voice speaking to you now has never known a more frivolous port or a city, nor one that was home to more foreigners. Not even in America! They came, they settled, and their origins melted into the crowd. The day they decided to stay, they’d Catalanize their family names as a disguise, so nobody might know whether their birthplace had been in Italy, France, Castile, or somewhere more exotic still. As for the rest, and in contrast to the Castilian obsession with keeping the blood pure of Moors or Jews, the Catalans didn’t care a fig for their neighbors’ origins. If they had money to spend, if they were pleasant enough, and if they didn’t try and impose religious ideas, new arrivals were left to get on with it. This atmosphere, so passive and receptive, meant that the people would be transformed in less than a generation. So it was with my father.