Wandering around inside the Bourbon camp was risky. Finally, I simply had to choose one. There were a number of guards posted there to fend off any sortie from the Barcelonans.
Well, one of the advantages of fleeing from the army headquarters is knowing the password. “Loyalty!” I said.
I didn’t break stride, flourishing my hand majestically for them to open the gate. They obeyed. After all, they were there to stop rebels from coming in, not to stop a French captain from leaving to carry out some what secret mission.
Once outside, I could feel the guards’ eyes tracking me as I advanced into no-man’s-land. (Those white Bourbon uniforms, however shabby and covered in mud they became, always put them at a disadvantage when fighting at night. It made them very fearful of leaving the safety of their little cordon.) I strolled around for a few minutes as if examining the defenses from outside — how deep the ditch around the cordon was, and the piles of firewood piled up at thirty-meter intervals, ready to be set alight to both illuminate and blind any approaching attackers. Once I was a little way away, half enveloped by the predawn darkness, I broke into a run. Use your legs, Zuvi!
No shots rang out. Either they couldn’t see me, or they preferred to turn a blind eye. Soldiers, as a rule, know that getting involved with officers only wins you trouble. Which suited me. It would take Jimmy and the others a while longer to find out I’d fled.
Once I was closer to the city, I got down and began crawling; the terrain was a constant up and down, as though you were advancing through a sea swell. I was a way from reaching the city walls when I ran into a soldier dragging himself through no-man’s-land, though in the opposite direction. The choppy, broken-up terrain, full of craters from misdirected artillery fire, meant we didn’t see each other until the last moment. Down on our bellies like earthworms, we looked at each other, neither of us knowing very well what was supposed to happen next. When work had begun on the trench, the faint hearted and the mercenaries had begun slipping away from the city and making for the cordon. Hardly surprising, given that the city was condemned.
Now, here was a good one for the philosophers of military law: Two deserters meet on a piece of disputed land; is their duty still to kill? We decided not. We pretended not to have seen each other. There were other men, perhaps a dozen, following him, wriggling along like worms. When they came past, they looked at me, not antagonistically, but like I was insane. By this late stage in the siege, almost all the professional soldiers had deserted. The remaining force was an army made up of friends and neighbors.
Our poor bastions and ramparts came into sight, rising up like rotted molar teeth. My senseless return had a lot of Don Antonio about it. Really, the siege of Barcelona was a dispute between two antithetical authorities: Jimmy, subtle, corrupt, a denizen of the higher echelons, the self-interests of Versailles; and Don Antonio, that adorable Castilian maniac, absurdly self-sacrificing, stubborn as a mule, and with the manners of a commoner.
And what of my son, the son I was leaving behind, possibly forever? Returning to the city, I was bidding him, and our chances of ever embracing, farewell. And yet my decision was based on a principle common among the Coronela: Blood ties would always be trumped by the bond between those who spill blood and tears side by side. Am I making myself clear — that conflicts also raged within every combatant? Evil might offer us silks, honors, pleasure, and le Mystère might promise a way out of those bribes in exchange for nothing — or in exchange for a Word. But those internal conflicts were what really urged men on.
They were going to kill me. No, worse. On elbows and knees, I made my way to a darkness more wretched than death. And all for the sake of a crookbacked old man, a deformed dwarf, a savage of a child, and a dark-haired whore. The poets don’t dare say it, so I wilclass="underline"
Love’s a piece of shit.
10
The moment I arrived back in Barcelona, it was clear how much things had gone downhill during my long absence.
With Jimmy’s arrival, the French fleet had been given a boost. Now only the occasional very small ships were managing to make it past the blockade. They had to be small and swift, which meant they could bear only insignificant amounts of cargo. And with the sea supply line definitively strangled, the warehouses in the city were quickly emptied.
Though at exorbitant prices, the Barcelonans had still been able to buy food until that moment. To be clear, a Catalan peso was divided into twenty sueldos, and a typical worker’s daily wage was two sueldos. Since January 1714, one liter of wine had cost eight sueldos, and the same amount of liquor, fifteen. A couple of hen eggs (people kept coops on their disintegrating balconies), three sueldos. All meat, from the moment the siege began, had been prohibitively expensive: A couple of hens would set you back two pesos; half a pound of meat, one Catalan peso. A Catalan peso would get you ten pounds of barley or fifteen of corn. To bake a loaf of bread had become a serious challenge.
The first goods to disappear during a siege would be combustibles: firewood and coal. The winter of 1713–1714 had been a cold one, and the reserves had been depleted. People had resorted to burning furniture. As if that weren’t enough, rampart defenses also required wood, just as much as they did stone. Things got so dire that we had to dismantle the bridges, or recs, that crossed the city canals. Two hundred and five trees once lined the Ramblas, and even they were victim to the voracious efforts of the engineers. The dear Ramblas, that lovely avenue: new trees planted along it after every siege, only to be felled again at the beginning of the next. While I’d been in the Bourbon encampment, the famine had spread. I came back into the city at the beginning of August, when the blockade was at its peak, and at that point even paying astronomical prices wouldn’t get you any of the now nonexistent stuffs. What little there was got apportioned to those fighting — so what did the people eat?
In the summer of 1714, the only thing available was a kind of torta baked with the husks of beans. The dregs from the storehouse floors, so putrid and foul-smelling that it’s hard to believe we managed to swallow that soggy, fetid wheat paste. In Jimmy’s company, I’d eaten fillet steaks three times a day. The change of diet was so abrupt that it took me three days to resign myself to it — though, in the end, there being no other option, I did exactly that. The stomach is master to all. Francesc Castellví, our Valencian captain, recounted an experiment he’d carried out using a crust of this husk torta: He broke off a little and tried feeding it to one of the few dogs left in the city, only for the dog to run away in disgust.
My thoughts were all of Amelis and Anfán once I entered the city. They’d felt so far away, and it had seemed so unlikely I’d ever see them again, that it had felt like achieving the impossible when I managed to think of anything else. And now, knowing they were close by, I was overcome by the need to take them in my arms. Such are the emotions surrounding a reunion: The closer our loved ones become, the more we fear we’re going to lose them.
I found them in the rearguard immediately inside the ramparts, helping with the defense works. Instead of running and embracing them, I watched them from the corner for a few moments. In such abject conditions, you’re only too aware of how brief and scarce the good moments are, and it tends to make you content with far less. We were in the midst of the century’s most devastating war; we were on the receiving end of it, trapped inside a condemned city. But we were still alive. Our very existence defied the powers that were prevailing, and simply seeing Amelis and Anfán again, I almost broke down and wept.