I ran all the way to Berenguer’s home and arrived panting and just in time. Ballester and his men were coming around the corner of a thin street alongside the residence, and they had knives in their belts and sacks covering their heads. I stood between them and Berenguer’s home — the side street so thin, my body was enough to block the way.
“You don’t salute a superior?” I said to Ballester.
“Out of my way.”
Well, he did always make a virtue of concision.
“Think about what will happen if you knock down this door and go and kill Berenguer,” I said. “Think. He’ll be dead, and you’ll be hanged. The deputy of the military estate, and one of the city’s own heroes, killed by our own side. Just think of what it would do to morale — and how that plays into the enemy’s hands. They’ll say we’re devouring ourselves likes rats in a sack.”
Ballester tore his hood off in disgust. “Think I want to kill Berenguer? Do you really think that? No, I didn’t want to come back, I’m not one for risking life and limb to squash a cockroach.” He jabbed a thumb in the direction of his men behind him. “But they did! I set out with nine men and came back with six. Want them just to forget? Fine, you tell them so!”
Men with blunt characters don’t know how to ask for help; pride prevents them. But, weighing Ballester’s words, I could see he was asking me to intercede.
I reminded them of all the sleepless nights, the marches and the skirmishes I’d been alongside them on, which was most of them. I made light of the day I enjoined them to leave Barcelona. A lot had happened since.
“Berenguer is a very old man,” I said. “He hasn’t got long left to live. To make that life slightly shorter, the price is your lives, plus putting the city in danger. Is that really what you want?”
I myself don’t know how I managed to get them to accompany me to a tavern. We found one of the few still open in the city. The alcohol cheered them up considerably, as though they’d never really wanted to kill. They laughed, sang songs, and drank until passing out — all except Ballester and me. From far ends of the table, we exchanged glances, sharing something beyond sadness or bitterness.
“You still haven’t suffered enough,” Don Antonio had said to me. And I swear I had set out on the expedition prepared to face whatever came, in order to strip away my soul’s resentment. But what I didn’t know was that pain always comes for us when least we expect it. I believed the expedition would be a chance to put my learning into action, and what really happened was that my ideas about the world came tumbling down. The worst thing was, in spite of that, in spite of the downheartedness that came with seeing that the rules governing us are feigning and false, I was no nearer to learning The Word. “You still haven’t suffered enough.” In that tavern I saw a look different from those on all the other fearful faces I’d seen. For if all the misfortunes, all the terrible sights during the expedition, hadn’t changed me sufficiently, what was I going to have to sacrifice in order to see my light?
That night, through jug after jug of wine, conversing silently with Ballester, I didn’t yet know the truly terrible, and at the same time unforeseen, thing: that the sky was just about to come crashing down on our heads.
5
Now, all these years later, I look back on Christmas 1713 with more affection than it merits. Being on duty up on the ramparts was freezing work. Below us, the icebound palisade stakes, and beyond them, the enemy cordon. Wind, rain, and, up above, a leaden sky, grayer than a mule’s belly. But when we were on guard on the bastions, high on their prowlike edges, there was always one thing we could do to lift our spirits, and that was to look back across the city we were defending.
Throughout the siege, the Red Pelts were consumed with the idea of maintaining calm among the populace. They’d ordered Barcelonans to fill balconies and windows with lamps and candles at nightfall, so the streets wouldn’t be as dark. Turning around, you’d be presented with a lit-up Barcelona. During those Christmas nights, there were more lamps than ever, and the shades were made of red, yellow, and green glass, making the city streets wink and glitter like a nocturnal rainbow.
1714 arrived, and everything carried on as it had been. Three, four, five more months passed, and still the same. Spring burst upon us, and everyone, including me, was becoming fed up with the siege. There was nothing to contend with, only the tedium, the occasional skirmish, and the fatigue that affected the free citizens-turned-soldiers. In Bazoches terms, any siege lasting so long would be considered a failure. More than that: an outright aberration, a complete departure from the very definition of a siege. Pópuli would have needed to sweep us aside within a week, yet there we were, and not an Attack Trench in sight.
Anyway, what I mean is that, in the spring of 1714, I’d had nearly all I could take. Everyone had, save one man: Don Antonio de Villarroel. Among my many tasks, one of the most demanding was accompanying him when he was inspecting positions. One bastion, another, the curtain walls covering the stretches between the bastions; Don Antonio was never satisfied. More soldiers were needed here, more cannons there; and over there, that old breach hadn’t been closed up entirely. On May 19 that year, I was taking the brunt of one of his tirades when we were interrupted by a heavier than usual artillery bombardment.
Silent explosions could be seen coming from the enemy cannons. Then you’d hear a faint whistling sound, followed, with a sonorous crrrack, by the impact of cannonball on ramparts. But it was different on this occasion. They were aiming high, and the cannonballs sailed over the walls and came down inside the city, on the roofs or west faces of civilian buildings.
“Lunatics!” I shouted. “Here, we’re here! Are you using your rectal holes to aim with?”
The cannonade continued, more and more off-target shots. I was raging. Don Antonio made me be quiet — he’d understood what was happening long before I had. “They know precisely what they’re about,” he said.
“But Don Antonio,” I protested, “they’re missing us by miles.”
He turned and went over to the command post. I followed behind. The light finally turned on in my head: They were shelling the city itself!
Years studying in Bazoches to learn how to storm a stronghold with minimal casualties, and here was Pópuli, the butcher, aiming his cannons at civilian houses rather than at the ramparts! It was a feat so unusual, such a departure from the Bazoches precepts, and from the slightest glimmer of human civility, and so flagrant, sordid, and brutal, that I didn’t want to believe it was happening. As we ran through the streets, an enormous cannonball landed on a four-story building. The facade crumbled, and as the stones and beams came crashing down, I heard amid the noise the wailing of a child. The sound of a child in pain will always stir up all-consuming hatred. I briefly went back up to the top of the bastion. I remember taking out a telescope and scanning the Bourbon positions. Casting around the fajina parapets, among which their cannons were concealed, my lens came to rest on a man standing still between all the smoke and the to-ing and fro-ing of the gunners. He, too, was looking through a telescope. We were looking at each other. He raised an arm in greeting — mockingly, mocking our agony. And then I recognized him: It was Verboom, that utter swine.
The high command, including Costa, were immediately called together in an emergency meeting. Everyone aside from Costa was unsettled; chewing a sprig of parsley and speaking in his usual dispassionate monotone, he seemed almost not to care: “They’re using long-range cannons. But even with them, they can’t reach all the neighborhoods, only the one nearest the walls, the Ribera barrio. It’s only a three-gun battery.”