Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

At this point, my dear vile Waltraud gets annoyed, protests, and starts to squirm, calling me a bad husband, depraved, and a libertine. Of course, this is the female view and could never be a man’s. Whatever can you be thinking, my little wood louse, do you really believe Amelis was waiting for me, quietly spinning like a Penelope? In spite of everything, we loved each other, which is something that your blond pigeon brain will never understand.

On September 28, Charles finally made his entrance into Madrid. The plan was that the king should attend mass at the Atocha sanctuary and subsequently make his triumphal entrance into Madrid. Some triumph! Ha! And ha again! Here, write down a good deal of mocking things, write laughter and jeers, a thousandfold!

Charles came in on a white horse, wearing an extremely elegant black suit. You should have seen the look on his face. Because out on the streets, there was nobody to be seen, absolutely nobody, apart from good old Zuvi and a one-legged man who hadn’t had time to hide.

He wasn’t their king. The Madrileños hated Charles just as much as the Catalans hated Little Philip. The previous day, an order had gone around that the people should wash the route clean of the usual city filth, and deck the balconies with garlands. Naturally, they did no such thing. The streets were as thick with dung as ever, if not more so. He found the balconies empty and shut. The bells seemed to be tolling rather than chiming. When he was still only on Alcalá Street, he turned back without reaching the palace and supposedly uttered the words: “Madrid is a desert!”

I cannot confirm this, because by that point in the procession, I had already gone off with some dire prostitute or another, so you will understand that Charles’s tantrums were of no interest to me. But right behind Charles, on another white horse, rode In-a-Trice Stanhope, and his face spoke volumes, even more eloquently than that of the king.

They’re all the same, these foreign generals, they never get it. They didn’t want to acknowledge that Castile and Catalonia were at war in just the same way as France and England; that Spain was a name that hid a reality more powerful than politics, trade, and even, if I may say so, common sense. A pitched battle between two opposing ways of understanding the world, life, everything. I tell you, I was watching the look on Stanhope’s face very closely; at last the man had understood what a fine mess he’d gotten himself into. Never had a commander failed so roundly after having completed his mission so perfectly. He had conquered Madrid, but doing so as an invader had lost Castile; he had crowned Charles, but Charles was an interloper on the throne and, as such, apt to change.

The English might come to accept a French dynasty reigning in London, or the French an English dynasty in Paris. The Madrileños would never put up with Charles as their king, never, and not because he was Austrian but because he was king of the Catalans. And Stanhope thought a couple of cavalry charges would fix the whole business. Don’t make me laugh! Yes indeed, my dear vile Waltraud: As you people would say, schöne Schweinerei , a fine old mess.

For the whole war, the Bourbons had been strategically superior. The Allies had conquered Madrid with a madcap kind of medieval cavalcade. The Bourbons always behaved according to the most methodical rules, like a slow, detailed snare. The Allies were in Madrid, but the French and Spanish were firmly anchored in Tortosa, in Lérida and Gerona. I’ll sort this out in a trice! I would laugh if it weren’t for the fact that the Allies’ tragedy would end up becoming ours, too.

Over the next few days, Charles attempted to appeal to the Madrileños, a thousand persuasions and flatteries. Free bullfights, gifts, and perks for the city. Nothing doing. He paid for three days of illuminations to which nobody showed up; until that time, I had never known how depressing a fireworks display without spectators could be. A people’s dignity cannot be bought, as monarchs are always forgetting.

He even went so far as to hand out money, in the manner of the Caesars. Several horsemen rode around the city with bags filled with coins that they would toss up into the air. The Madrileños did bend down to pick them up, naturally, because it’s one thing not being pro-Austrian and quite another being a fool. They did so, but did not forgo their most caustic sense of humor. Charles had proclaimed himself Carlos III of Spain. They would kiss the coins and proclaim sarcastically: “Long live Carlos the Third, while the money keeps coming!”

So as you can see, the conquest and occupation of Madrid was not as epic as the phrase suggests. And since Vauban’s question had been about the optimum defense, this was hardly the optimum setting for finding myself a teacher, nor for learning The Word. Meanwhile, the clamor against Charles was starting to grow. Not that people were plotting an uprising. It wasn’t that. The vast majority of Madrileños have one thing in common with the vast majority of Barcelonans: As long as their life continued unaltered, they were as little inclined to fight for Philip V as they were to fight against Carlos III. The Allied soldiers stayed shut away in barracks and had little contact with the people, so there was not too much provocation. And the Civil Guard was made up of Catalans, whose reputation for heavy-handedness struck dread into people. In any case, one might say that they had reached a state of perfect balance. When they caught a miscreant, they would give him a thrashing, force him to cry “Long live Carlos III!” and take him to a dungeon. And when they caught an innocent passerby, just the same: If they didn’t like the look of him, they’d give him a thrashing, force him to cry “Long live Carlos III!” and he would be taken in, too.

It was the stealthy emboscado Bourbons and the fanatical priests who were having the most trouble. As far as I could make out, they were squandering their labors. On the one hand, they had no need to bribe the people of Madrid for their loyalty, for they had it already. And on the other, however much they might be induced, the Madrileños were prudent enough, or responsible enough, not to be so crazy as to rise up against an army. (Furthermore, why would they want to mutiny as long as there were bags of money raining down?) As for the Spanish priests, they are the very worst of all Catholics. Their interests are always allied with the interests of human stupidity, each of which they foment with every sermon, and neither a sense of the ridiculous nor the power of reason is enough to stop them.

One day I was sitting in some tavern when a beggar came in. Instead of asking for alms, he began to hand out leaflets. He left a couple on each table, including mine. Having nothing better to do, I read it. By the third line, I was unable to contain my laughter.

Some sly agent of Philip’s must have employed the beggar to hand out those scraps of paper, which gave a clear picture of the Bourbon mentality. The pamphlet did not attack the English, the Portuguese, or the Austrians. Not at all. Their entire rhetorical charge was aimed against the “rebels,” which is to say the Catalans. According to their author, the blame for the enemy having occupied Madrid did not lie with the Allied forces or in Bourbon incompetence but with the Catalans and their plotting. Even I ended up convinced that in their free time, the Catalans had invented crab lice, bunions, and piles. That the Catalans also suffered from these evils was no excuse, just as the Jews were damned, however much of a Jew Christ Himself may have been.

I don’t remember precisely the points made in the pamphlet, and perhaps it’s better that way. All I have retained are the main charges against us. When the war ended, we would rape all the women in Castile and murder their husbands or send them off to the galleys. According to this pamphlet, the Catalans were behind a plot to take power and monopolize the trade with America (from which Catalonia had always been strictly excluded, being from a separate kingdom). Taxes on the Castilians would be not merely extortionate but would make slaves of them, with all the money ending up in Barcelona’s coffers for the rebels to enjoy. Natives of Catalonia would supplant the whole of the army’s high command, and all Castile’s judges and jurists. To be certain of maintaining a hold over Madrid, a fortress would be erected, which would keep its inhabitants enchained until the end of time.