Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

If the dwarf seemed eccentric, Anfán’s behavior was positively indescribable. The word “thief” is inadequate to describe that lad. He was compulsive, a larceny fanatic. Any time of the day or night, you might find his little fingers in your pockets. Thanks to what I had learned in the Spherical Room, I could see him coming a mile off, and shooed him as though swatting a fly, but poor Peret was robbed as many as five times a day. One morning he awoke early with a candle stuck in his nose and completely naked. Before breakfast, Anfán and Nan had already sold his clothes on the streets.

I tried to reason with the boy. “Don’t you understand that while you are here, what’s ours is yours?”

“No.”

At least he was honest.

Peret, entirely logically, wanted to beat them to death. As usual, Amelis protected them, shouting, hiding them behind her skirts. Peret’s opinion could not have been clearer: “Since you live with her, you have the right to treat her as your wife. Put her in her place and give her a good hiding every once in a while!”

Our half-basement was a nest of disagreement. On the other hand, I was in no hurry for Amelis to leave. She soon recovered from the beating she had received. She was infinitely more beautiful than the first day I saw her in the stable of a godforsaken little town. And in short, let me just say that, in bed, she was very obliging. We slept together, and this started to change into a routine that began, bit by bit, to develop beyond mere pleasure into a happy, daily amazement. Love? I do not know. Nobody ever asks whether he loves the air that he breathes, and yet he cannot live without it. It was a little like that. Her thoughts at the time were a mystery. Did she approve of her new condition, or did she go along with it in order to keep a roof over her head — or for the sake of that pair, with whom her relationship was more that of an older sister than a mother? All I can tell you is that one night, before making love, she did not open the carillon à musique . And from that night on, while we were still together, she never opened it again.

The thing was, Anfán’s thieving habits had to stop. Either the boy changed, or we would all be driven quite mad. I did not even consider beating them, as I was sure that technique would be no use. From what little I knew of his biography, the lad had experienced such treatment wherever he went. The results were plain to see.

The big changes started on the outside. Vauban had been such a stickler for cleanliness that he bathed every week. I am no admirer of such excesses, but Anfán and Nan had never been closer to water than a pair of desert rocks.

The worst was when we wanted to cut the hair of one of them and remove the funnel from the head of the other. The moment they saw the scissors and the clippers (could we have used anything less to yank off that funnel?), they fled and did not show their faces in the house for two days after.

Finally, we reached a compromise with Anfán. We had nothing against his braids, but we gave him to understand that those twisted shapes were made of pure filth. If he washed them, Amelis promised, she would weave his fair hair into natural braids, dozens of blond braids; we promised she would. Much more attractive, too.

Clean, decently dressed in a white shirt and a pair of pants without holes in them, with braids that glowed yellow instead of greasy rags, he even looked like a child and not the cabin boy from a pirate ship.

With the dwarf, we agreed to burn his circus clothes and that he should remove his funnel once a month. We had to swear that, while we washed his hair, he would be allowed to hold on to the funnel with both hands. I refuse to describe all the bugs and pus-covered gack we found in there that first time. Yeuch!

Amelis, Nan, and Anfán were a tight, inseparable trio. It was not quite clear who had adopted whom. However much I asked Anfán about his past, it was as though he had a crater in his memory. Whenever he was abandoned, or whenever his parents were killed, it must have been when he was very small, as he had no memory of them. It was better, perhaps, that he didn’t remember. He was aware of no other life than this one, as a piece of floating detritus, ever at the mercy of the tides of invasions that followed one another through that natural corridor of the Mediterranean called Catalonia. His very name, his barracks talk, a mixture of French, Catalan, and Spanish, said it all.

Boys will always be boys. Including that little beast Anfán. Deprived as he was of paternal love, he filled its absence by projecting it onto the dwarf. Deep down, Anfán gave Nan the very thing he himself was crying out for. I began to feel a soft spot for the boy when I understood that.

As far as I knew, not long after the siege of Tortosa came to an end, the pair had run into Amelis (the roads from Beceite and Tortosa met on the way to Barcelona). If a place has a roof, it’s possible to call it home; under that roof is the shared hearth, and in the absence of a fire, an embrace, simple and basic, will do. They were her home. The proof being, Nan and Anfán never got used to sleeping far away from Amelis. At any moment of the night, they might leave the straw where they lay and come in to us. That I might have been busy with her made no difference at all to them. They crowded in with us and slept like kittens. To begin with, I protested: “Can’t they at least stay outside till we’ve finished?”

Amelis answered quite simply: “What difference does it make?”

The three of them were shocked by my civilized rules. To them it was much more normal for all of us to sleep together in a tangle of elbows and knees, one person’s feet in another’s face, or someone’s cheeks on someone else’s belly. One false move, and the end of that damned funnel could stab you anywhere. And I mean anywhere!

Look, I know it is not really right to be making love and sleeping when you have a kid, a dwarf, and a funnel sharing your bed.

But honestly, what can I tell you?

Around that time we received the most unexpected of visits: four porters with three heavily armed escorts, who said that they had come from beyond the northern border and were delivering a letter and a trunk in my name.

The letter was from Don Bardonenche, who begged my forgiveness for not being able to deliver the trunk in person. The Vauban family had entrusted him with the mission of getting it to me. Unfortunately, once he had reached the border, the Allied army had blocked his passage, however strongly good Bardonenche had insisted that he was driven only by personal motives to visit beautiful Barcelona. “This world is going to the dogs,” wrote Bardonenche sadly, “as can be seen from the fact that nowadays, men don’t even trust their enemies.” My dear vile Waltraud is surprised by this, but I can assure you that in my day, at least among career soldiers, such courtesies were not in the least unusual.

Well, when we opened the trunk, our surprise provoked — in this order — stammering, shouting, and fainting, because it contained no more nor less than one thousand two hundred francs. The marquis had bequeathed the sum to me in his will. I won’t pretend I wasn’t moved: Even from beyond the grave, I remained in Vauban’s thoughts. Why had it taken so long? The distance between Paris and Barcelona is not inconsiderable even when there is no war on, and the conflict had increased the number of legal obstacles for such a large sum of money to reach me.

To celebrate my newfound fortune, I went on a binge so monumental that I suffered a hangover for two days. The problem was, that gang took advantage of my lying down a little to squander my treasure: They spent every last coin buying an apartment, a fifth-storey abode in the busy La Ribera neighborhood. Amelis needed a man’s signature, so Peret obliged. You will better understand my desire to throttle them when I tell you that the contents of the trunk were insufficient, which meant that, to complete the purchase, it was necessary to secure a loan. Naturally, they arranged to take it out in my name. As for the rest, how could a man trained to put up or knock down city ramparts ever love partition walls? I don’t know how I bore it when Amelis showed me our new nest.