Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

They were arguing about the situation as a whole, which was dark with storm clouds. While the Allies sat rotting in Toledo, Little Philip was gathering thousands of recruits for his army. As if that were not enough, the Beast had sent him French reinforcements under the command of the Duc de Vendôme. Villarroel shared his fears that Toledo was being transformed into a giant trap. He asked my opinion: Could the city survive a siege?

The wine laughed for me. “Ha ha ha! What a silly question, Don Antonio — I mean, General. Heh heh heh, if the Bourbons besiege Toledo, there won’t be any siege. Supplies getting cut off, the people taking against us, the city walls becoming so rotten that even the stones have maggots in them. Hee hee hee, bearing in mind that they are likely to exceed our number by three to one, it would be best to quit now while we still can, ho ho ho. . ”

I was locked up in the cells for a week, on bread and water. And not because he disagreed with my opinion but because I had said exactly what he thought, but said it rudely. I thought my dungeon would be so deep that they’d have to send my food by catapult. No. The truth was, the incarceration was not too tough — apart from the diet, which purged me.

During my brief incarceration, something of relevance also took place: Charles fled Toledo, and Castile, and made a discreet return to Barcelona. The fact that he had gone before the army tells you everything you need to know about his confidence in a military victory. He left before anybody else, to hell with us all. The road to Barcelona was riddled with Castilian irregulars ready to cut his balls off, which meant that he had to travel surrounded by an escort so strong that it weakened the army further. A heroic example!

As for the Castilians, he had only complaints and recriminations: “I found many people in Madrid who asked me for things, and nobody to serve me.”

What did he expect? Castile and Catalonia were at war; being king of the Catalans excluded him from reigning over the Castilians. He of all people should have known this. And he did, in fact.

While he was in Castile, he drank milk only from goats that had been transported from Barcelona. His bread was baked from Catalan wheat, and even the sugar in his confectionary had been brought over from Catalonia. All his supplies were watched over by the regiment of the Royal Catalan Guard, an elite corps made up entirely of staunchly pro-Austrian Catalans, fanatics so fanatical that you could hear a “Carlossssss” when they broke wind. I scarcely exaggerate.

When he crossed the border from Castile to Catalonia, he alit from the royal carriage, exclaiming, “I am back in my own kingdom at last.”

He was loved by as few people in Castile as Philip was in Catalonia. If he had faced facts, he might have negotiated an end to the conflict. An end to the war. And if things had gone that way, I would have had at least one country in which to bury my bones. But no, His Majesty King Karl, our meringue-faced Charles, needed to rule over an empire and couldn’t settle for less. He did get his empire in the end! Though not as we expected, and through a stroke of chance and at the expense of his Mediterranean subjects. I will tell you of that anon. Let me first explain what happened on the final day of the Allied occupation of Toledo and the retreat, the painful retreat, to the land of the Catalans.

Good old Zuvi got out of his cell. If you will allow me at this point to make a confession: The very mildness of the punishment made me reconsider the man who had imposed it upon me.

What little experience I had with Don Antonio told me he was a good general, firm but fair. He had done the right thing, locking me up, absolutely the right thing. Vauban would have treated me just the same, as he should. Thanks to that incarceration, I became aware of how dulled I had become since leaving Bazoches. Perhaps Don Antonio was a kind of walking Bazoches.

Once I was out of my dungeon, I reported to him. He noticed the change he had wrought in my spirit, and his behavior toward me softened a little.

The thing is, with Villarroel, you always ended up paying for your failings, one way or another. And the last one, the last sin of youth that I committed while under his command, very nearly cost me my life.

I wanted to celebrate my newfound liberty with whores, and the binge lasted so long that I awoke late, worse for the wear, and not in the barracks.

“The archduke’s army! They’re finally off!” cried the whore who woke me. “They left at night so they could slip away unnoticed. Long live King Philip!”

The whole fucking army was returning home, and me rubbing the sleep from my eyes! Even though, at Bazoches, I’d been taught to remain alert even in my sleep, the notification hadn’t reached me because I’d spent the night outside the barracks. I got dressed so quickly that at first I tried to put my shirt on over my legs.

The Allies were not exactly beloved in Toledo, and as soon as I was outside, I could see that the atmosphere was warming up. As the news spread and neighbors began to wake, their bitterness awoke, too. You could already see small groups shouting: “Long live King Philip! Viva!” and brandishing improvised weapons above their heads. God, anything could happen now.

I hastened toward the citadel. I thought there might be some reserve battalion left behind that I might join. What I found was a little band of drunkards, so drunk that even the most imperious orders hadn’t been able to get them out of their bunks. There was a bit of everything: some Englishmen, Portuguese, Dutch. . Alcohol makes no distinction between origins.

“What are you still doing here? They’ve all left for Barcelona!” I cried. “The Toledo mob is going to kill us!”

It was useless — they didn’t respond at all. I felt as though I were at the bottom of a monstrous Atlantic whirlpool, with the only ship that could save me, the Allied army, receding farther and farther into the distance. No sooner had I left the citadel than I began to hear shouting and gunshots. People were looking for the last stragglers, and there were plenty of them. At the end of the road, I saw an Englishman on his knees, being kicked and stabbed by a yelling crowd of men and women. It was as though people had lost their reason.

Toledo is a relatively small place. I ran through the streets, heading east. So as not to arouse suspicion by my haste, I gave the occasional enthusiastic cry: “Long live King Philip! We’re free at last! Viva, viva!”

And you — why are you making that face? What would you have liked me to have shouted? “Long live King Charles! I’m a fucking Catalan rebel, and I eat truffles and Castilian babies for dinner!”? Use your brain, my little cannonball-head.

The last street led to a few kitchen gardens beyond which scraggly vegetation stretched toward the horizon. I stopped a moment to look behind me. Over there, up at the top, the citadel was wreathed in smoke. A few desperate rifles appeared through the small windows, but it was obvious there was nothing to be done. Poor bastards. Before being quartered alive, they would do better to turn their final bullets on themselves.

Good old Zuvi has always had luck on his side, because as chance would have it, there was a priest arriving in the city. He was riding a decent-sized horse, Amazon-style, with both legs on the same side because of his cassock. I knocked him to the ground, climbed onto his saddle like a monkey onto a coconut palm, and tore off at a gallop, so fast it felt like the horse had eight legs. Toledo! You’re welcome to her.

The Allies had Don Antonio’s light cavalry as their rearguard. His horsemen acted as a protective screen for the rest of the army, who moved more slowly, as they fled Toledo for Barcelona. I met them at a crossroads from where they were scanning the horizon. Don Antonio, their leader, was sitting at the foot of a solitary tree, eating, surrounded by his staff officers.