Albert Sanchez Pinol - Victus - The Fall of Barcelona

“Fantastic!” They all roared with laughter, including the dwarf. “They aren’t buying you a uniform, and you’ll be spending your days racing this way and that. You’re a lieutenant colonel, which is a provisional rank; you have no provisional regiment, and you don’t know which one you might have.”

“Very well!” I said, defending myself. “I think I remember Villarroel saying something about an imperial regiment. He has already sent letters to Vienna asking for confirmation of his own position and, while he was at it, doubtless asking for me to be enlisted in one of Charles’s units. We can take that for granted. Do you think the emperor isn’t going to listen to the request of his only general in Spain?”

This time the laughter was so thunderous that the neighbors banged on the walls in complaint.

“But how very stupid you are, Martí! That’s not how things work. If they sign you up to an Austrian regiment, it’ll be months before you get your rank recognized. And now you’re being paid out of Vienna, not Barcelona. Until the imperial funds arrive, you won’t get a salary. The French fleet is blockading the port, so it’s quite possible you’ll get nothing.”

They had spoiled my dinner. Worst of all, they were right.

“Fine!” I said, addressing Peret. “Maybe I’m not going to get rich, but you’ve enlisted as a private, and the salary for privates is nothing to write home about.”

“And who says it’s the Generalitat who’s going to be paying me?” he replied, laughing at my bewildered expression. “Martí, you know what the Barcelona rich are like. You think people like that are going to be prepared to join battalions, climb bastions, or stand guard night and day, to risk getting shot at or bombarded? Of course they aren’t. It’s one thing being in favor of constitutions and liberties, it’s quite another gambling their own skin for them. And so I showed up at the home of some of the particularly reluctant ones.”

“A commercial visit,” said Amelis, understanding at once.

“Precisely,” said Peret. “The government wants complete units, but they don’t give a damn about the identity of the people who make them up. So I have offered myself to fill the place of the biggest shirkers. In exchange for a small gratuity, naturally.”

“You’ve taken the place of a rich person who doesn’t want to fight!” I cried, outraged.

“Only after a strict auction,” said Peret.

They spent the rest of the night mocking good old Zuvi and his poor commercial sense. By the end of it, I was so dejected I couldn’t even finish my cigar. Of all the sieges I’ve taken part in over the last seventy years, the one government by whom I wasn’t paid a cent was that of my own country. Still. . I didn’t know it at the time, but that was actually our last night together and happy. Why does it cost so much to see how happy you are, when you are?

I can remember Peret laughing at my naïveté; I remember his wish to fight, at his age, and I think how fortunate we human beings are that our destinies are hidden from us. My friend Peret was killed after it was all over.

By the end of the siege, the only healthy Barcelonans were the cannibals. You could recognize them because their skin was an unnatural pinkish color, their pupils shone repulsively like the eyes on a fresh fish, and their lips were frozen in a perpetual smile. The rest of the city’s inhabitants were a beggarly mass, dusty bodies, as though they had been shut away in some dark attic. For weeks, months, after the siege, the Barcelonans who traveled outside the city could be recognized by their deathly complexion and their crestfallen gait. One day Peret went out to get some food. Perhaps simply because he was Barcelonan, some spiteful soldier shot him. But it’s more likely that they cried halt at some roadblock. He didn’t hear their voices and they fired.

What is a fortress? Bring together a handful of people ready to fight, an enclosed space, and a standard, and there you have a fortress. In the summer of 1713, the military situation was as I am about to describe it to you, and I will begin with the good part.

As we know, the Red Pelts had named Don Antonio commander in chief of the army. A huge task was expected of Don Antonio, if not an impossible one: to organize, drill, and lead an army that did not exist, with the mission to defend a city that was indefensible.

Besides the staff officers, the most outstanding thing we had was our artillery. This was under the command of Costa, Francesc Costa. Quite a fellow. The best artilleryman of the century. To give you an idea of his skill, I shall set down just one piece of information: When the Bourbons entered, Costa was the only senior officer they did not detain. (Well, Costa and good old Zuvi, to be precise.) Jimmy, being of a rationality that was as superb as it was entirely without scruples, knew what he was dealing with and offered him various perks and an extremely well-remunerated position, four doubloons a day, if he joined the French army. Costa did not hesitate for a second. He said yes, that he would be very honored to make a career in the army of Louis XIV. That same night he disappeared.

Costa’s best artillerymen were from Mallorca. When it came to Costa’s lightning flight after September 11, I would bet anything that it was his Mallorcans who had met him to set sail for the Balearics.

Costa was a small, quiet fellow. He didn’t walk; rather, he slid along, head down and hidden between his shoulders, eyebrows raised as though he was always astonished or apologizing. He never spoke unless spoken to. It was most wearing having to deal with him; the fact is, people who are so shy unnerve any interlocutor. His favorite words were “yes” and “no,” and while concision is highly desirable among technicians, Costa’s excess of reserve was out of all bounds. Let us forgive him. Let us admire him. If anyone could understand him, it would be me. We had parallels that connected us: On paper, command of the artillery fell to General Basset, just as that of the engineers fell to Santa Cruz the elder. In practice, I led on the engineering, and Costa on the cannons. These functions above our rank wove a complicity between us. To people like Costa, reality was no more than the angle and distance at which a bomb fell.

His shyness was innate, and he concealed it by chewing on parsley all day long. By the end of the siege, everybody was chewing on weeds so as to deceive their hunger, no choice in the matter, but for Costa it was a natural impulse. As for the possibility of making conversation with him, as I said, you had to drag every word out of him. I remember the first time we met. I asked him how many artillery pieces we had at our disposal.

“Ninety-two.”

I had expected some complaint or request. But nothing. “Have you set out the pieces according to Don Antonio’s orders?”

“Yes, with a few adjustments.”

“Do you think we’ll have enough?” I asked, still faced with this parsimony of his.

“It depends.”

I waited for some further comment. None came. “And what does it depend on, in your opinion?”

He looked at me wide-eyed, as though only my judgment mattered and not his. “On the ones the enemy’s got.”

“To the best of our knowledge at the moment, bearing in mind that our spies have been giving us reports that don’t all match up,” I said, “their convoy is made up of a hundred and fifteen. We can assume that there will be reinforcements coming in future.”

“Well, then,” he said.

“Well, then?”

“Yes.”

His terseness was irritating me; he must have noticed, and he added, raising his eyebrows higher still and chewing his parsley: “My Mallorcans will keep them at bay as long as they do not outnumber us by a ratio of more than five to three. Beyond that, I cannot give any assurances.” He took more sprigs of parsley from his pocket and began to chew on them like a bored rabbit.