Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

“Go on, let them go,” said Amelis. “They’re only kids.”

“Ha!” I laughed. “You have no idea what these two are capable of. I intend to hand them over to the first patrol I find.”

“You can’t do that,” my dark beauty said in their defense, “they will get twenty lashes, and with those tender bones, it will surely kill them.”

I shrugged. “It’s not I who make the laws, I merely carry them out.” The lawsuit against the Italians over my father’s apartment was very much in my mind as I said that. “And if an honorable man like myself is being given such a hard time, I don’t see why I ought to be indulgent toward incorrigible thieves.”

Anfán clung to my ankles, weeping and begging. When he saw that the girl was defending him, the weeping became louder. Since I am the greatest fraud of the century, I can recognize my own kind in an instant. And I must concede, the lad was wonderfully good at it. But he did not convince me.

“Off we go, trench pig!”

Amelis grabbed hold of my elbow. “You can’t treat these two little ones so!”

It is all very well for women to be compassionate creatures, but this one was starting to sound like Our Lady of the Poor and Defenseless.

“Please!”

I merely said, “I’m sorry, sweetie,” freed myself from her grip, and walked on, a pickpocket in each hand, dangling like a couple of trout. What I did not expect was that she would come and stand directly in front of me, blocking my path. She stood with her arms crossed.

“Let them go,” she said, then added bluntly: “Very well, what is it you want?”

Truly, this was unsettling. I understood what she was suggesting, but that did not make it any more comprehensible. I stared at her even harder.

Her features had something irremediably sad about them. But nobody can be that generous, so why did she volunteer? Well, it was all the same to me. She was too beautiful, and I was too much of a swine, for me possibly to refuse. I let them go.

“Next time I’ll see you hanged!” I shouted. “Your necks will be longer than a goose’s, understand?”

Before I had finished telling them off, they had already gone around three corners and were nowhere to be seen. I turned to her: “Where to?”

She took me to La Ribera, one of the most insalubrious and overpopulated neighborhoods in all Barcelona, which is saying something. Solid gray buildings, three, four, even five storeys high, and narrow little alleyways that stopped the sunlight from reaching ground level. It was unbelievably full of people and animals. Stray dogs, chickens living on balconies, milking goats tied to rings in the walls, meeeehhh . . Some of the people living there seemed quite content; they smoked and played dice in the doorways, using a barrel as a table. Others were like the living dead. I watched one man who looked like Saint Simeon the Stylite, the difference being that Simeon spent thirty years on top of a pillar and this man seemed to have been through at least double that, and living on a diet of sparrow shit. To make passersby pity him, he would open his shirt and show his ribs, which stood out like crab claws. He held a beggar’s hand out to me. “ Per l’amor de Déu, per l’amor de Déu. ”

Most of the buildings must already have been old when the Emperor Augustus was here. We went into one, I don’t know which, but it was even more squalid, possibly, than all the others. We climbed some stairs, up to a door on the third storey.

We walked in. I looked around us. A single shrunken room, a single window. The street was so narrow that if you stretched out your hand, you could almost touch the building opposite. At the back of the room, a straw mattress with no bed frame. Beside it, a little mountain of melted wax topped by a few candles. I imagined that at first the candles had been put on the floor, and that as they’d burned down, the same mass of melted wax had come to form the base for the ensuing ones. The rest of the furniture was comprised of a stool near the door and a basin of water, over which Amelis squatted down to wash. And that was it.

“This is where you live?” I asked as she undressed.

“I live nowhere.”

The presence at the back of the room of a little wooden box — made of what seemed to be fine wood — was all the more noticeable in the midst of that destitution; Intrigued by that solitary object, no larger than a shoe box, I walked toward it and, since Zuvi is an impertinent sort of cove, lifted the lid. The moment the box opened, a tune came out, jolly but also mechanical, filling the room. I jumped a little, like a scalded cat. I felt like one of those ignorant savages, as this was the first time I had seen a carillon à musique .

“What are you doing?” Amelis snapped in protest.

She had been busy taking off her clothes, and when she noticed my intrusion, she seized the music box. She stood there naked, protecting it with her body, keeping it away from me. I do not believe even she was aware of the beauty of that picture: a woman this lovely, protecting that musical repository.

She closed the lid, and the music died away.

“I’ve never seen such a thing,” I said.

She opened the lid again, and as that mechanical tune filled the air, she said: “Hurry. You have until it finishes.”

Well, then, best get to it. I had gone there to do her, and I did. She seemed much more offended that I should have laid hands on her music box than on her body. There was only one moment when she showed any sort of kindness toward me. It was when she said: “Wait.”

She picked up the tangle of my clothes that had fallen down and put them on the stool, in order that they should not get dirty on that filthy floor. We went straight back to it, and I soon had her shrieking like a witch on the bonfire.

When it comes to women, I have always followed the same strategy that Vauban used with cities: Assail them, but be not overly hasty. And you can take my word for it — with such spoils in my sights, it was difficult to ease off on the barrage. But then the little tune came to an end, and she pushed me from her body.

“I’ve done what I said, you’re satisfied, and the children got to keep their lives,” she said, staring up at the ceiling. “Out.”

There was nothing more to be said. I picked up my clothes and hat from the stool, dressed, and walked down the stairs without saying goodbye. Once I was out on the street, I passed the half-dead prophet again. He was still holding out his hand, with the same refrain: “ Per l’amor de Déu, per l’amor de Déu. ”

Everyone is in a decent mood after a good fuck, so I stopped to give him a couple of coins. I rummaged in my pockets. But just imagine — my purse had disappeared.

That whore!

I raced back up the stairs like a wild thing. How could I have allowed myself to be beguiled so grossly, so utterly predictably? Me! Who, just moments earlier, had been feeling odious and guilty for taking her to bed! I was more annoyed at the deception than at the loss. What would the Ducroix brothers have said? But when I entered the room, I stopped dead.

On top of the girl, on the straw mattress, there was an enormous brute of a man, and he was giving her a thrashing, right and left. And what a thrashing. He had her held between his legs; she was screaming, with no way to escape. It wasn’t that the man was especially broad at the shoulders, but his woodcutter’s arms looked like hammers. At this rate, he would kill her in no time. He wasn’t a customer, as I could tell by the fact that the music box was closed.

“Oi, look here!” I cried, as a reflex. “What’s this?”

The big fellow, whose back was to the door, turned and looked at me. An ogre, a one-eyed ogre. Until that moment I had thought the Cyclops lived on islands in the Aegean.