Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

“I’m not sure, Don Antonio.”

He squeezed me a little tighter, jostling me like a wisp of straw. He waved a fist under my nose. “The good Lord has placed a barrier between each man and his destiny. Our mission in this life is to get past it, to go beyond it, to have the courage to learn what there is on the other side.” He stopped, pensive. “Whatever that may be.”

“But Don Antonio,” I replied, shriveling up, “that does sound rather dangerous.”

I shouldn’t have said that. He stared at me with his drunken pop eyes and, with his booming Castilian voice, let out some words that I can remember down to the last drop of saliva: “So what the fuck did that French engineer teach you, then?”

“How to fortify, storm, and defend fortresses, Don Antonio.”

“And what else?”

I hesitated. “What else, Don Antonio?”

He shook me. “Yes, yes! What else?”

I must have been brought low by the carnage, by being far from home. By that night, one more night camped out in the cold. The wind howling like a pack of wild hounds. The post-battle melancholy had struck me, too.

“Don Antonio,” I confessed, “I’ve lied to you. I’m not an engineer. The French marquis never approved the fifth Point that was to make me an engineer.”

He didn’t hear me, or if he did, he didn’t care. “Damn battle,” he whispered. “Damn it. . The world is a thousand souls lighter. And what for? Nothing has changed.”

The wine had gone to his head much more than I had realized. He curled up his knees like an old man, arms folded, and lay down on the camp bed. I stayed where I was for a few minutes, watching the great man sleeping after his victory. In Bazoches, I had been taught to look at objects that hung from invisible threads, to decode them and understand them in their vast humility. How could my eyes not be drawn to the human enormity of Don Antonio?

I felt a rush of pity toward him. That night, as the man snored, sleeping like a fetus, I would have given my life to protect his rest. His whole life was service, discipline, a just measure of rigor. I saw each of the pores on his mature cheeks, everything I knew about him, and told myself that this cavalry general had chosen his own path to le Mystère . Then I understood his most deeply hidden secret, perhaps better than he understood it himself: that ever since he had started, he had sought to die in a heroic cavalry charge, so beautiful in its despair.

It wasn’t a simple, senseless death wish. For somebody so self-denying, so possessed by the spirit of chivalry, to fall before his men did not signify the end of an existence but the perfecting of one. At Brihuega, he had spent the entire battle right at the front of every single Allied charge and countercharge. But death had eluded him, stubbornly, mockingly. As for me, I found myself at the opposite end of the moral arc. And yes, thanks to the senses I had developed at Bazoches, I understood, or at least respected, his code of intransigent rectitude. For this very reason, what a tragic irony in his life! In 1705 he had begun the war on the Bourbon side and, in 1710, had moved over to the pro-Austrian side. A path on which the view of the enemy had changed places and faded away, stripped of any meaning. To protect today’s friends, he would kill yesterday’s. Sad, sad, sad. It might be that le Mystère was keeping him for that apex of all dramas that was Barcelona on September 11, 1714. Like it was keeping me.

It was the coldest night of the whole Retreat. A pitiless wind whipped at the thin canvas of the tent. I took off his boots and covered his body with the only blanket there was in the tent. I went out, stole a couple more blankets, and came back to wrap him more warmly. He was snoring. Before I left, I kissed his cheek. Just as well he was sleeping deeply. If he had realized, he would have struck me on the head for being a pansy. Then I went and got myself drunk on what was left in the bottle.

Don Antonio. My battle-running general, my good Don Antonio de Villarroel Peláez, the most anonymous hero of our century. Things ended badly, very badly. Not many great men came out well from that war of ours. That leech In-a-Trice Stanhope was certainly one of the lucky ones.

Owing to his high rank, the Bourbons treated him with kid gloves, and four days later, he returned to London like a greenhorn coming home from an outing. Without glory, but without dishonor, either. Instead of hanging him, the English exalted him, perhaps as a way of disguising the failure of their continental strategy. He married the daughter of the governor of Madras and thrived in politics. Some men are born covered in a patina of moral oil: Misfortune slips off them like water. But those same men stain everything they touch. A decade later, his government was foolish enough to give him the reins to the faltering English economy. I’ll wager anything you like that, as he took on the post, he exclaimed, “I’ll sort this out in a trice!”

As we already know, England’s finances ended up the same way as their expeditionary forces: destroyed in a trice. It took him only two years to devastate trade with America and the savings of a million shareholders, and to bring half the country’s industries, banks, businesses, and warehouses to the point of bankruptcy in what has come to be known as the South Sea Bubble. From my own exile in England, I recall some delightful heads, such as Swift or Newton, a wise astronomer who looked like a libertine priest. Newton always had one eye on the heavens and another on his purse. During the crisis, he lost thousands of pounds in shares, and measured though he surely was, even he wanted to strangle Stanhope. I can still see him now, shouting, “It’s infinitely easier to predict the motion of a heavenly body than the lunacies of these secretaries of finance!”

As for Marshal Vendôme, our enemy at Brihuega, in those last days of 1710, Little Philip named him governor-general of Catalonia. A premature title, you will agree, since at that point, most of Catalonia remained in the hands of the Generalitat. The truth was, he never got the chance to enjoy the post. In 1712, as he was travelling through one of our towns to the south, Vinaroz, he stopped — to everyone’s horror — to have dinner. To make him happy, they served him the local delicacy, fried prawns.

“How good these prawns are!” Vendôme crowed.

The people of Vinaroz were scared to death, naturally, so they just kept serving him trays and more trays of prawns. The glutton wolfed down sixty-four prawns. No one dared to tell him that they were served in their shell but that you eat them without. Vendôme was such an exalted aristocrat that it never would have occurred to him that a servant would bring him in a shell something that was eaten peeled, and that his noble little fingers were being smeared with grease from the sea.

That very night he died of indigestion.

In the days that followed Brihuega, we became intoxicated by a false sense of security. Since we’d left Toledo, the cry that had united the army had been “Return to Barcelona or die!” After the failure of the great Bourbon attempt to annihilate us, everybody let go a little.

We were already on Aragon land, barren like the Castilian but at least an Allied kingdom. Don Antonio was in command of a motley troop made up of a few hundred Dutch, Portuguese, Palatines, Hessians, a real ragtag bunch. (Italian mercenaries, too! They were everywhere!) Most were ill or bore wounds from Brihuega, and we carried them in wagons that were full up and groaning heavily. So as not to be a burden on the march of the army, we took a parallel route.

Although I didn’t like the idea at all, I went with Don Antonio. From the very first, I knew that looking after this little troop of invalids, riding apart from the main army, was a bad idea. I was anxious as I rode alongside my great general, asking myself what good old Zuvi was doing there. The answer, as you can imagine, is that I had grown to feel a loyalty for this man very similar to that which had bonded me to Vauban. The marquis taught me what I needed to do; Don Antonio went further, filling the work with moral meaning. That same day he would be practicing what he preached.