Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

I spent the night in a dingy cell, partly underground, surrounded by whores, drunks, thieves, and other riffraff. Verboom spent two years as a captive in Barcelona. And there wasn’t one day or one night when he didn’t sleep in a bed that was fluffier than that of most Barcelonans, and when he didn’t eat better than we did, too. The Red Pelts suckled him with our blood, kept him in silk and cotton. Just as I was saying: We brought the serpent’s egg into our home and lulled it gently until the viper was born.

While I was being beaten and arrested, Nan and Anfán made their way calmly back to our home in La Ribera. My absence was not in the least bit strange, as I might have gone off to the tavern for a while, or anywhere. But at dinner, Amelis asked after me.

“The captain gave him a beating, and he’s in jail,” replied Anfán, eating his soup without a pause. “He gave us a speech about honesty, and the effect of speaking well, and the uselessness of violence when there is no just cause for it. Then he saw an unarmed gentleman who was a prisoner and went off and started punching him. When they dragged him away, he was screeching like an animal, cursing the virgin, the government, and the idiot King Karl. I’m sure they’ll hang him.”

Ah, the candor of a child.

Another subject that occupied me during those days was the liberation of Don Antonio. Rescuing him from the claws of the Bourbons had become an obsession for me. You might say that securing his freedom was the only thing that remained of my engineer’s spirit. Since I hadn’t been able to get to The Word, at least Vauban’s successor could be freed. That was my poor consolation. There were prisoner exchanges happening all the time, but there was little that a starveling like Martí Zuviría could do. I tried to take advantage of my tavern friendship with a Dutch agent who worked on exchange deals. He was always coming and going, crossing the lines, and anyone unaware of what he did never would have guessed that he was involved in such high-powered intrigues.

Prisoner exchanges were a kind of cross between a game of chess and a secret auction. A colonel was worth three captains; three colonels could get you a general; and you could round up by offering amounts in hard cash. Meanwhile, both sides had an interest in recovering their most valuable technicians (like the swine Verboom, whom I wouldn’t have given back until I’d ripped out his tongue and his eyes — it still makes me crazy to think of how foolish we were). The process of negotiation was a torturous one, because nobody wanted to acknowledge the real value of their best-loved pieces, nor reveal what they’d be prepared to pay for them.

In the middle of 1712, Don Antonio de Villarroel had been a prisoner for a year and a half. It was an outrage that a soldier of his caliber should be in enemy hands for so long. I bought the Dutchman all the drinks I could, to try to exert my influence, and to coax some information out of him. But the man was an artist in the ways of “mini-diplomacy,” as he called it. Whenever the subject of Don Antonio arose, he would give a little laugh. The only stories I could get out of him were contradictory ones.

“The problem with Villarroel,” he sometimes said, “is that he’s too good a general. There’s a rumor that they’ve been tempting him with the offer of a good position in Philip’s army. But Villarroel is resisting them. They say he has unhappy memories of the Bourbons and wants nothing more to do with them. To tell the truth, I don’t really understand. After all, he’s served the Two Crowns in the past. He could go back to the Bourbon side unblemished, since his enlisting in King Carlos’s army was entirely legal. As for the Bourbons themselves, they aren’t stupid: They don’t want to release him if it will restore his talents to the enemy.”

Other times, however, he would smack his lips and offer a quite different version. “Your poor general has an enemy back home. The government is not choosing to prioritize his exchange, so he will rot in captivity.”

When I started to get worked up, the Dutchman would shrug. “Tell me,” he would say. “On this subject, King Carlos is very much led by his counselors. These things don’t get decided without the blessing of the Generalitat. And the government isn’t interested. They say Villarroel ‘isn’t one of us.’ ”

To what could they be referring? Well, no man is ever free of his past. In Barcelona, the fall of Tortosa had stung, and very badly, and they remembered that it was Don Antonio who had led the final assault that took the city by storm for the Bourbon forces. Besides, he wasn’t Catalan.

I was in such a bad mood in those days that my domestic relationship with Amelis was getting worse. We couldn’t have a meal in the same room without an argument breaking out. Or worse still, there would be a long, tense silence that hurt everybody. It moved me to see Anfán and Nan suffer. They looked at us with the expectant gaze of someone who doesn’t want a fight but cannot say so.

Until one night Amelis said to me, “You can stop growling, complaining, and sniffing the air as though everything smelled rotten. Your little general is free.”

I was flabbergasted. “How do you know?” I asked.

“What difference does it make?”

“Is it anything to do with his exchange?”

She replied with the cruelest, most mocking tone of voice she could, emphasizing every word: “Yes, ’course it is! Your fucking Mystère asked me for it.”

I couldn’t coax any more out of her.

However it had come about, at the end of 1712, Don Antonio was at last exchanged. The bad part was that Verboom got his freedom, too. The negotiations happened in secret, and I assumed that the Antwerp butcher had been included in the contingent that was exchanged. He left fatter than when he’d arrived, and his head filled with data. I don’t like to brag of my skills as a prophet, but facts are facts: The first thing he did when he got back to Madrid was to write a thorough account of the city’s defenses. As for Don Antonio, he naturally took the road in the opposite direction: from Madrid to Barcelona. He was offered a post as a cavalry general, which he finally accepted.

He was a man who had always worn tragedy engraved on his brow. I believe he took on the new charge for the simple reason that there was nothing else he could do. He was a career soldier; the army was his life. Why had he spurned the last, generous offer he had received from Philip V? Pride, perhaps. Don Antonio was a very Spanish man. You know how it is, that lofty idea of pride, so very Castilian, constantly at the crossroads between utter heroism and the most sublime stupidity.

Meanwhile, there were things happening far beyond our horizons that would overturn the war entirely, bring fate into our lives, and place me — contrary to all my predictions — face-to-face with The Word itself.

In 1711 a scrawny young lad by the name of Pepito died. A devastating attack of smallpox, and straight off to the grave with him. His death caused the war to take a dramatic turn and condemned all Catalans to perpetual slavery. You’ll be wondering how it’s possible that such a banal event, a simple death from smallpox, could have had such decisive effects. Well, due to the fact that this particular sickly lad, this Pepito, was Joseph I, the young emperor of Austria and brother to King Charles. With Pepito dead, the Austrian throne came into Charles’s hands; he still had aspirations to reign over all Spain and was now the emperor of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. As you will recall, the war had started because England was against the dynastic union between France and the Spanish empire. London would never countenance the creation of such a strong continental power; hence their support for Charles as an alternative to Little Philip. But the solution they had imagined created a new problem, with Charles uniting Spain and Austria under a single scepter, thereby threatening to create a kingdom that was every bit as powerful as anything they’d feared. In other words, the situation that had triggered the conflict in the first place was simply shifting position.