Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

I did not kneel. Not through lack of piety but because that violet-colored young lady reminded me of the one in the dream that le Mystère had provoked in me. The flag progressed, flanked by drums beating out a dirge for the fall of Tortosa, and when it passed, those saintly eyes seemed to be asking me something.

Martí Zuviría did not talk to flags, of course, but the sensation of an encounter with a creature from another world, albeit as real as an old friend, was so vivid that I simply stood there, agog. And, well, I suppose you must now be asking the same question as my heavy, vile Waltraud: “So what did the violet girl ask you?” I’ll tell you, then: She didn’t use words; a damsel, when asking your protection, has no need of words.

Since all those around me were on their knees and I remained standing, it was not hard to spot me from a distance. Somebody called out my name — it was Peret. I believe I have already mentioned old Peret, that human relic who had taken care of me in the absence of a mother. He had recognized me, and when Saint Eulalia had gone by, he threw himself upon me. He was still a sentimental old graybeard, and when I asked him to stop crying, his response stunned me: “It’s you I’m crying for. Or did you not receive my most recent letters?”

No, I had not received them. My life had been so busy, and any letters had been lost in the limbo of the roads. Peret could not stop himself from blurting out the news: “Your blessed father is dead.”

To my disbelief, to my despair, he also told me that I was a changed man. I was not moderately wealthy but poor. I did not live in my house, as I believed, but nowhere at all. Because I was not the son of a Barcelona trader: I was an orphan. My father had died suddenly. Shortly before, he had married a Neapolitan widow whom he had doubtless met on one of his mercantile voyages. Once he was dead, she and her children had no qualms in setting themselves up in my house. Or, rather, her house, which was what it was now.

Over the course of the following days, my stupefaction gave way to indignation. I threatened the usurpers with legal action to hound them to the end of time. And that was more or less what did happen: Over the ensuing years, I spent everything I earned on the best lawyer in the city, one Rafael Casanova. Oh yes, a splendid fellow for arguing a case in a courtroom. Eighty years have passed, and still I am awaiting justice.

If cavalry charges moved at such a pace, this world would be sorely overpopulated.

Peret, who had been my father’s old servant, took me into his little den, close to the harbor. Once you were through the door, you had to go down three steps, and at that depth, the rats believed themselves to have the right to challenge us for possession of the territory. The place was something between a ground floor and a basement, and the only windows were slits at street level, small rectangular openings through which we could see the feet of passersby. We had two rooms: One served as a bedroom and the other a dining room, kitchen, toilet, and whatever else we might happen to need. The damp stains came halfway up the wall in grotesque shapes.

Peret took pity on me. Even in his own state of wretchedness, he gave me a little money, just enough for me to get drunk on the cheapest booze and in the most putrid of hovels. I was the unhappiest engineer in all the world.

Once you have acquired the rationality of Bazoches, from then on, that steers your thoughts exclusively, sleeping as well as waking. I very often wanted to free myself from the tyranny known as reality. Rather than having to listen all the way through as atrocious violinists stood on tables chanting bawdy songs. The caterwauling of soldiers of many nations. That laughter, which we could tell, without a word being spoken, whether it came from Germans, Englishmen, Portuguese, or Catalans. The yelling of the drunks, the smoke from the pipes and cigarettes that blackened the vaulted ceilings. I would have preferred never to see the light of the tavern’s five hundred candles dripping light into the dark. People laughing, drinking, dancing. The din of humans entertaining themselves, which, to my great regret, kept me at arm’s length from this same human condition.

Yes, it was pain, that class of pain. My final meeting with Vauban was torturing me. “The answer is comprised of just one word,” the marquis had said. One word, my whole youth ruined by this Word. But which word, which? Night after night I gave in to despair. At lonely corner tables, I downed whole tankards, one after another. The Word, which word? I thought back over them all, from amor right down to zapador . No, that was not it. I got myself so drunk that the spirals that rose up from the smokers, meandering toward the ceiling, made me feel as though I were doing circuits around an Attack Trench. Very often, drunk, I made my way toward those smokers and set upon them, head-butting their jumbled teeth. I received countless cudgelings, all of them heartily deserved. Thrown out of nameless squalid little hovels, I lay there in the dirty, narrow streets of Barcelona, this modern Babylon.

Drinking to flee the world, drinking to escape your very body. Let us drink, all of us, we insects in the trifling circumference of this universe of ours! Let us drink until our vomiting repeats, returning to us as faithfully as dogs! All in all, how was I to be rid of my Points? At my worst moments, I would bare my right arm and, gazing on those delicate geometrical shapes, I would weep. My misfortune was etched into my very skin.

What might Jeanne be doing? Anything but thinking of Martí Zuviría. I could hardly blame her. I should have said to her, “I love you more than engineering.” But I did not, and so lost them both.

One day I was wandering the streets, swigging from a bottle. I had stopped to buy a cabbage leaf filled with fried meat from a street vendor, and as I was haggling, I saw an unforgettable face. She was last in a line of women standing at a water fountain.

The public fountain is one of the great inventions of civilization. A place where women can exhibit themselves while they stand in line, and the young fellows can get to know them with the gallant excuse of carrying their water for them. And guess who was waiting her turn to fill a good-sized pitcher? Right, it was my old friend Amelis.

She threw me a quick look like a little cornered bird. Only fleeting, but strike me down if it didn’t suggest a certain interest in the well-groomed Martí Zuviría. Better not to mention the Beceite episode. I offered to carry her pitcher, and in truth, she did not turn me down. A bit of gallantry and a perfect excuse to make conversation. Or to pick up on what we’d been up to in the pine forest before she vanished into the night. We hadn’t taken ten steps when I noticed someone lifting the tails of my coat in search of my purse.

I might attribute my particular sensitivity to the acute perceptiveness instilled in me in Bazoches, but the truth was, I did not need to resort to that. A while earlier, I’d detected the presence of another pair of old acquaintances in the area: Nan and Anfán.

They had managed to make it to Barcelona after all. The boy, still with the same indescribably dirty mane; the dwarf with the funnel pulled down onto his head. The two of them were busy watching the passersby like miniature vultures. Noticing them, I handed Amelis the pitcher and grabbed them by the collar. It really felt as though no time had passed, as though we were back in a winding trench, with them running away from me around the bends.

“That’s it!” I said. “I’ve got you this time.”

They started to whine and bawl as though I were the aggressor and they the victims.