Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

He looked at me with a frown, his mouth open. “Word? What damn word?”

He went on asking me questions. But in my condition, I was beyond any authority. I said: “It’s a load of shit, all of it.”

My head sagged as though I were a rag doll. My forehead was dropping onto the table like a neck under the executioner’s ax.

Some hours later, I was awakened. I’d been left on my own, and the place was closing. My right cheek was glued to the table, stuck there with dried wine. I left reeling. A patrol that was going past saw me having trouble.

“Hey, lads,” they said to each other in Catalan, “let’s have a bit of a laugh with that drunken sot.” They surrounded me and pressed me to shout the much repeated “Long live Carlos III!”

“Long live Madrileño stew!” I shouted.

“Huh? Show a bit more respect for your king!”

“Respect? Kings are all the same! Self-centered child-snatchers! And now that I think of it, how have you managed to get yourself lost in Madrid? Go home and stop fucking with good drinkers.”

I think it was the most comprehensive thrashing I have ever received. I was so flattened that when they were done, there was little difference between good old Zuvi and a Ceuta rug. Once they were done, they also stole my boots.

At first light, I was rescued by the patriotic innkeeper. He was walking past on his way to open up the tavern. He saw me stretched out in the road and carried me, one of my arms over his shoulder.

“But for God’s sake, man, I did warn you!” he scolded me. “Whatever made you get mixed up with those Catalans?”

Iwas so shattered that even two days later, I still couldn’t get up from my straw mattress. My only joy was to see that Zúñiga had left the attic. Many years later, we would meet again, and he would spend decades pursuing me across three continents. He never stopped hating me. But that’s another story.

I got to my feet, all my bones aching, and dressed. In an inside pocket, I found a passport that must have been put there on the general’s behalf by his men:

Please go to Toledo and report at once to General Don Antonio de Villarroel.

As soon as I had read it, I understood a number of things. No wonder they laughed at me when I threatened to turn them in to the Guard! Despite Little Philip’s threats and coercion, some Castilians had taken advantage of the 1710 occupation to switch sides. This General Villarroel was evidently one of them. Those men around him must have been his staff officers. Most likely, they were in the tavern to celebrate Charles having allowed them into the pro-Austrian army with full pay and rank.

And so I headed for Toledo. To be honest, I wasn’t sure why my legs were taking me there. To be interviewed by that general? The same one who, back in Tortosa, had sent me rolling down the glacis with a kick in the behind? Anyone could see that the fellow had the nature of a resentful mule, that he was clearly one of those military types who swallows hammers and shits out nails. What business could good old Zuvi have with someone like him? Well, shall I tell you something? I did go to Toledo, and I went more directly than the flight of an Indian’s arrow.

I found Villarroel in the Toledo citadel, in an extremely somber-looking study. He got right down to business. He was indeed serving as a general in the pro-Austrian army, and he wanted to have an expert in siege warfare among his staff officers. He was no fool: He’d picked up on my comments about Vauban and knew at once that this kid was much more than a hopeless drunk. We started to haggle over the terms of my recruitment, though the money was the least of my interests.

Call it intuition, call it le Mystère , call it what you like. As we negotiated, I took advantage of the opportunity to examine that man’s inner recesses, bringing all my Bazoches faculties to bear.

There was something about him, though I could not have told you what exactly that something was. “If you need a teacher, you will find him, whether he is a Points Bearer or not.” Still, would he be the man to continue the teachings of Vauban? Not an engineer but a military man, and a Castilian to boot, while I was a Catalan? “Well, and why not?” I said to myself. “Did the Marquis de Vauban not take me in despite the French hatred for the Catalans?”

I resolved the conflict between my head and my heart by means of a compromise: I would give the general a chance. If he showed himself worthy of Vauban, I would follow him. If he let me down, I would desert him at the earliest possible opportunity.

As usual, my dear, extremely vile Waltraud stops the narrative with an ignorant inquiry. First she asks whether my plan to desert at the earliest opportunity wasn’t dangerous. I answer yes, it was, but much less than it might seem. In my day, such a large proportion of men deserted, and from every army, that one might rather ask the opposite question: Why were there any men who didn’t? Some clever-clogs soldiers used it as a way to make a living, the fraudulent practice of enlisting in those armies that paid best and then deserting. The result was such a bloodletting that recently formed armies would sometimes reach the front reduced to half their number. That’s as far as the troops were concerned. As for the generals, my fat Waltraud is surprised that Villarroel had begun the war on one side only to switch halfway through. Well, we should make it clear there was nothing unusual about that. Times change. Nowadays the French army is made up of Frenchmen, and the English army of Englishmen. It wasn’t like that in my day. A career soldier was a qualified professional not much different from, say, a medical specialist. A French doctor could be employed by an English king, and no Frenchman in his right mind would criticize him for treating a foreigner. And so any sovereign might hire soldiers of any origin, and what gave a soldier his distinction was meeting the terms of the contract, not whose contract it was. In 1710 Villarroel rescinded the contract that bound him to Little Philip, leaving him perfectly free to serve any other sovereign who might make him a good offer. Is that clear now, my blond walrus? Let’s go on, then.

In the early days, what a terrifying man commander Villarroel seemed to me, a veritable tyrant on horseback. Cavalry was his great strength; he would take his squadrons out to the outskirts of Toledo, and “Off we go, lads!” riding more often, and better, than the Macedonian royal guard. As an engineer, I managed to avoid most of the exercises, though not all. Hup-hup! Up and down, down and up, till your rump was square-shaped from the saddle. He was more like a sheepdog than a general. Whenever a rider strayed, there the general was, woof woof! , barking and bothering the dimwit who had gotten out of formation. And as the dimwit in question tended to be good old Zuvi, I did get some tremendous tellings-off.

“I’ve got a contract as an engineer, not a dragoon!” I protested one day, wobbling about on my saddle.

“And what do you expect me to say to that?” he shouted. “Accept it! God made you for a monk rather than for a soldier, just give thanks you haven’t been promoted any higher!”

Don Antonio drank only one little glass of wine at lunchtime. He was satisfied with a dish of half-cooked pap and wasn’t interested in any women but his own wife. On the nights when he didn’t sleep in his marital bed, which were about three hundred and sixty-four nights a year, he preferred a wooden board to a mattress. How could good old Zuvi possibly get on with such a man?

Engineers have never felt comfortable in the structures designed for military types. Those martial salutes, that respect for hierarchical superiors, I never took to any of this myself. I sneaked away from the pack whenever I could. Toledo was so dull that when I got drunk there, it was no longer to satisfy my vice but because I had nothing better to do. Once I was called to a meeting of the general’s staff officers, to which I reported late and jollier than usual. Don Antonio gave me one of his looks, silent and incredibly fierce.