Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

Ballester waved a finger at her threateningly, but his voice was more restrained. “ Mestressa , do not be mistaken. I have killed more Frenchmen and Castilians in this war than any of the king’s regiments.”

At this point I intervened, Anfán in my arms, his legs around my hips like a little monkey, and clinging so tightly to my neck that he was almost choking me. “If you’re so passionate about defending the country, why not join King Charles’s army?”

“Because both armies are the same, even if they’re wearing different uniforms; flames burn all the same, blue or red.”

I thought he was leaving, but he turned back toward us. He whispered in my ear: “I can swear, too. Now listen to me: If I see you again, I’m going to send you flying. Understand?”

Anfán leaned in toward Ballester’s face, puffed up his cheeks, pressed his lips together, and let rip with a huge raspberry blown in his ear. I think it was the first and last time I ever saw Ballester laugh healthily.

“And tell your little braided monkey here that if he doesn’t learn some manners, I shall come back and take him.” He opened his eyes wide, staring at Anfán without blinking, made his lips into an O, and went “ Boo! ”

Anfán clung even harder to my neck, squealing with fear, his back to Ballester, kicking against my hips. Ballester mounted his horse amid laughter from his men, and before leaving, he announced as he turned his mount, raising his hat in greeting: “Ladies! Gentlemen! You have had a good day today.” And he offered a polite gesture to the old woman who had accused him: “ Iaia, t’estimo .” Grandmother, my regards.

He spurred on his horse, and away they went.

Anfán spotted something on the ground. Ballester had dropped his riding whip. Anfán climbed down my body as if it were a tree and handed me the trophy.

I shall carry the happiness on that boy’s face with me till the day I die, his satisfaction at offering me Ballester’s whip. It was not a gift; it was something that cannot be expressed fully in words. He had been born a thief, and the fact he was now sharing his booty said it all.

I snatched the whip away. “You! I told you to stay by Amelis’s skirts and not to move!”

The day wasn’t over. Though you may find this hard to believe, the real heroism of the day was yet to come. After dinner, I confronted Anfán.

“After you found those muskets, I told you to stay with Amelis,” I said, glaring at him across the table. “And you disobeyed me.”

He responded like a wild beast with rational faculties. His innate instincts and his sense of justice joined forces to proclaim in a single voice: “But the bandits were thieves!” He stood up on his chair, defensive and indignant at the same time. “Why can’t I steal from thieves?” he added, his eyes wide. “They were thieves!”

Peret shouted: “Stupid boy! When are you going to learn that’s the worst insult you can make against anybody? If it weren’t for Martí, the Miquelets would be roasting you alive right now. Stupid boy!”

Something snapped when Nan, who was sitting on his chair, swinging his legs and looking down at the floor, repeated Peret’s words: “Stupid boy.”

“Time for you to be punished,” I announced.

I went to my room, returning with Ballester’s riding whip. I sat down and said, “Come over here.”

It is a very particular expression, the expression on the face of a human being who discovers that he has been betrayed. After a year under the same roof, after so long sleeping in the same bed, I was going to use violence on him. The boy approached, feigning indifference. By the time he had taken those four steps, his expression had changed to that of someone who never wanted to see me again.

I placed the whip in his hand and held out my open palm. “Hit me.”

At first he didn’t understand.

“Hit me!” I said again.

He did, gently.

“Harder!”

He turned away to consult the others, bewildered, but I put a finger on his chin and forced him to look at me.

The whip cracked against my hand.

“Is that the best you can do? Harder!”

He hit me harder, drawing blood. When he saw it, he took a step back in alarm.

“We’re not done yet. Again.”

I offered him my bleeding palm one more time. He hit me. The whip had gone deeper into the wound, and this time I couldn’t help a grimace of pain.

“That’s enough,” Amelis pleaded.

“Quiet!” I shouted, and looking straight at Anfán, I said firmly: “Keep going, or get out of here and never come back!”

He raised the whip. I showed my wounded hand, the open groove streaming with blood. “The whip. Use it!”

He burst out crying. He had never cried like this before. In the hands of the Miquelets, he had been afraid, but with this torrent of tears, he was purging himself of all the ills of the world, all the bile that our age had corrupted him with. Amelis put her arms around him.

“Do you understand?” I whispered in his ear. “Now do you understand?”

Anfán learned that night that his pain was ours, and ours his. His learning that lesson meant I learned another: that four human beings can be not merely the sum of a few individuals but an entity conjoined by fondness for one another. That night our full bed seemed to me quite changed. I no longer saw that elbow, that funnel, that mane of hair belonging to another, a nuisance that fell in our eyes as we slept. They were a whole now, like the Spherical Room had been, beyond just the objects that inhabited it. I looked at them, I tell you, with the alertness of Bazoches, undisturbed by feelings, which are nothing more than clouds obscuring the landscape of reason. And yet I never cease to be amazed how methodical observation can turn into tenderness. I heard Anfán’s gentle snoring, watched Nan’s grimaces as he dreamed, Amelis’s closed eyelids, and said to myself that the bed, that tiny rectangle, was surely the most valuable star in our whole universe.

So there it was, the strange home that, in mid-1710, I was forced to leave for a long time. And why did I leave? I should say a little about the military situation in those days.

Despite the frivolity of the Barcelonans, whose lives carried on as though the war were being fought on the banks of the Rhine alone, the truth was that it was coming closer and closer. One might say that by 1710 it was already all around us. The only territory controlled by Charles was the little triangle that was Catalonia, with Barcelona at its center. In 1710 almost all of Spain was in the hands of Little Philip, the Two Crowns’ strategy was fiendishly systematic, and our Allies, meanwhile, operated by means of momentary thrusts, followed by long stretches of indolence.

The military situation was going from bad to worse, so the Allied leaders decided that something had to be done. And each time war ground to a halt in the Spanish theater, the Allies made the same choice: to send a new general to Spain to get things moving again. At that time, the latest import was the Englishman James Stanhope. If only we’d had a different Jimmy on our side, James Berwick rather than the boy Stanhope. As bigheaded as he was impulsive, Stanhope was the embodiment of the attitude “I’ll sort this out in a trice!” How is it possible that a man who thinks he knows it all should learn absolutely nothing? General In-a-Trice! That’s how history should have remembered him!

He arrived in Barcelona well briefed by his government. England had had enough of the war, and his mission would be to put an end to it once and for all. And this was the final effort London was prepared to make to bring about a victorious conclusion. New military contingents arrived with Stanhope, too: Dutch and Austrian infantry, along with the powerful English cavalry corps, with Stanhope himself at its head. These reinforcements, combined with the Allied troops that had remained in Catalonia, were bound to be enough for a great offensive, avenging Almansa and crowning Charles in Madrid as the king of all Spain. And all in a trice!