Botiflero is the worst insult one can ever give a Catalan. It means anyone who supports Philip V, Castile, and the Bourbon dynasty. A traitor, a colluder, that is. The — iflero part of the word relates to a Catalan (and Spanish) word for fat—anyone, that is, all puffed up in his finery. I imagine it comes from the fact that the vast majority of supporters of the Austrian king, Charles, were from the lower classes, and those few Catalans behind Little Philip tended to be aristocracy and clergy.
Anyway, what does it matter where the word comes from? The point is that Ballester had insulted me, and I responded accordingly. “I try to help you, and you insult me!” I shouted. “I’d like to know what my place as an upstanding engineer has to do with the lowly kind of warfare you are engaged in.”
A few more insults went back and forth. The only thing to note being how clear was the irremediable distance separating us. For me, war was what I’d been taught at Bazoches: a technical exercise free of ill will, tempered by the nobility of the opposing spirits. War, in this account, could (and ought to) be undertaken without emotions, which can only cloud the rational landscape of engineering; battle was a rational sphere, closer to chess than flying bits of lead. If a soldier had ever said to Vauban that he hated the enemy, no question, Vauban would have answered: “And what has he ever done to you?” Whereas for individuals like Ballester, war was a matter of life and death. Or not — it was more, much more than that — according to what he believed, this war was being conducted according to principles far higher than the brief transition that is life. From my point of view, of course, this was deluded: A military engineer was as far removed from mysticism as a clockmaker.
Yes, I had seen hundreds of people hanged, their feet swaying in the pines. I’d seen the Játiva hecatomb, and the dog and the girl at the woman’s feet. But my education was made of stuff too solid to be rocked by a few sad sights. I stopped arguing with Ballester; it wasn’t worth the trouble. He seemed to me the perfect mix of bandit and fanatic.
“Very well,” I said, “don’t tell them anything. You’re the first person I’ve ever met who’d prefer a shorter to a longer life.”
The Spanish captain who had sent for a translator was becoming annoyed, not being able to understand the insults. Curtly, he demanded to know what had been said.
“The Miquelets in this area are under orders of General Jones, the English commander in Tortosa,” I lied. “Their mission is to take this godforsaken place and then await orders. A courier will be arriving tomorrow, first thing. To speak to this nincompoop, specifically.”
As I’d thought, rather than stringing him up there and then, they decided to use him as bait.
“You’ve got another night to live,” I said to him. “Put your house in order.”
I had made it all up. No courier would be arriving the next morning, but I was in no danger. The Miquelets had decided against it, was all anyone would think, or they’d worked out it was a trap. Why did I do it? I don’t know; perhaps Jimmy’s royal generosity — not at all the same thing as generosity — had rubbed off on me. Or because of being a student of Vauban, whose punishment of vanquished foes was always benevolent. I do not believe it was purely out of goodness, as my next piece of conduct demonstrated very well the so-and-so I was becoming: I went after one of our Mediterranean beauties, a young girl, my and Ballester’s age, who sparkled even from afar, even with a dirty rag for a head wrap. I saw her passing in front of a squat building, an open-door stable now holding twenty or thirty military horses. She was inside, feeding them hay. When she saw me, she looked away.
Look, I have lain down beside women from a great many latitudes, some of them of the strangest tints and hues. And in the eternal debate over which are most beautiful, I hold with the French. It must be one of the few commonplaces that are actually true. Still, it is a general truth; individually, when a Mediterranean woman is beautiful, she is without peer. And this young girl was bewitching. Her curly locks escaped from under the edges of the head wrap and fell down about her shoulders. The darkest black hair.
A passing sergeant warned me off: “Don’t go near that one, she’s sick with something. She’ll even ward off horse rustlers.”
It must be a question of character: If you say to certain people “Don’t go,” the very first thing they’ll do is go. I entered the large stable, stopping a few feet from her with my elbow propped on the back of a horse. Chewing a piece of straw, I looked directly at her. She didn’t stop working, piling straw in the mangers, pretending not to notice me.
“Come over here,” I ordered.
From closer up, I could observe her in more detail. Sure enough, she was very young. Her nose had a pronounced, graceful curve to it. Slowly, I lifted a finger to her cheek. She turned her face away, but I had her cornered. I brushed her cheek with my fingertip, coming away with one of the ugly black grains. Well, perhaps she was contagious, but not to a student from Bazoches, who notices even the tiniest details. I pressed on the eruption, then put my finger in my mouth and sucked.
Raspberry jam. How clever! Not only had her pretend illness gotten her a job; it acted as a brilliant shield against the possibility of being raped. She knew she’d been found out, and the uncovered areas of her pale skin flushed an irate red.
Don’t for a second think I’m going to launch into some discourse about military abuses. I’ve had dealings with too many soldiers, from all across the world, not to see their side. The common soldier is born a pauper and will die one. And things become available to an armed man that he’d never have the benefit of without a rifle at his shoulder. Spoils, and victims, become defenseless objects; it is then up to the morality of the would-be pillager to protect them. I agree that violating defenseless women is not a nice thing. My point is merely that to condemn the pillagers is easy — as easy as pillaging is difficult to defend.
No, I did not violate her. Perhaps because, if you have been educated in Bazoches, you come to treat women à la Vauban, and not à la Coehoorn. But my case is an exception to what was happening all across occupied Catalonia: At that very moment hundreds, thousands, of soldiers were stepping inside barns such as that one, sword in one hand, woman under the other arm.
The country was too small to provide lodgings for so many soldiers. A number of years later, I met a man who had been the mayor of a town of no more than eight hundred souls, called Banyoles. Practically every single virgin had been deflowered, and seventy-three of them fell pregnant. When he went to the governing authorities to protest, they reacted in the typical Bourbon fashion: by throwing the mayor in jail. Not even the Dutch in the sixteenth century suffered such ignominy at the hands of the duke of Alba’s troops.
I asked her a few questions. Her name was Amelis. She did not hail from Beceite, the town where we were. So what was she doing there? She told me that she lived as a camp follower, taking whatever jobs she could find. I was about to push her harder, to try and elicit more information, when I heard shots outside.
It wasn’t uniform volleys, like the kind you’d expect from regular troops, but, rather, a scattering of shots, punctuated by inhuman wailing. If there is one thing I have always had in spades, it is the prudence usually associated with beetles; rather than running out of the stable, I went farther in, to the back, keeping Amelis close to me as hostage. We got inside a mound of straw, me with my hand fast over her mouth, and I myself kept very, very quiet. Whatever was happening, I’d be sure to find out later on, without trying to be a hero. Indeed, it didn’t take long before I found out what, and who, it was. A soldier burst in, terrified, trying to get away from something — he wasn’t given time to hide: A number of Miquelets followed immediately behind. They ended his life as if he were a dog, beating his head in, and then went out in search of more. During the execution, I moved my hand from Amelis’s mouth to cover her eyes. She was kind and prudent enough not to scream.