Now I understood why I’d been sent! No one was brave enough to go and tell the general he was being relieved, so to avoid a scene, they’d sent the most insignificant creature in the army.
“How did it go?” I said, infuriated. “Where did you get that Spanish general?”
“Mm, yes. .,” the Frenchman said apologetically. “General Antonio de Villarroel does have quite the temper.”
Yes, dear readers, that’s right: This was my first encounter with Don Antonio. It was he who, years later, would go on to drag good old Zuvi out of the most pernicious existence to the highest heights; the same man who, though of Castilian origin, in 1713 would lead the defense of the Catalan capital, Barcelona, and make the ultimate sacrifice for us.
Dear vile Waltraud, weighing heavier on me than an anchor, constantly interrupts. She’s finding it hard to understand how, if Villarroel was serving a Bourbon king in the summer of 1708, we’ll find him fighting on the Austrian side in 1713.
Let’s see, my most horrendous Waltraud: I already know you to be dimmer than a glowworm’s fetus, but even so, has it not occurred to you that, in order to be understood, this book must be read in order, all the chapters, and to the very end?
What a tonic a kick up the backside can be! I should really have thanked that mad general.
What on earth was I doing there? Since failing Vauban’s test, I had been floundering in inertia. Fine, well, now I had a siege under my belt, and what else? Had I discovered The Word? I had not.
That kick up the backside was going to send me straight home. I would go and apologize to my father, on my knees if I had to. I’d come clean. And he would forgive me — bad-tempered as he was, I was still his only son. I said to myself that however bad a father might be, he could never trump a siege. To hell with warfare, and generals ready to kick you about, and all the Monsieur Forgottens in this world!
I hurried back to my tent. I was ready to cut my losses, grab the few things I really needed, and head to Barcelona.
The whole army was waiting for the terms of the surrender to be agreed, so I wouldn’t find a better moment to make myself scarce.
Given the engineers’ elite specialism, their tents were surrounded by a makeshift stake fence that separated them from the common troops. Monsieur Forgotten’s tent, with its bulbous roof, was in the middle of our precinct. Around that, individual officers’ tents, and next, the lower engineers, where aides-de-camp like me slept. There were usually three pairs of soldiers on guard, but that morning, with the conclusion of the siege imminent, there was just one soldier, a youth. He was walking up and down, rifle at his shoulder, and greeted me as I came past. Ignoring him, I went into my tent.
Someone had been through my things, I was surprised to find. All my money, everything I’d saved from Bazoches, plus my wages since I’d joined the French army, all gone! Understandably enough, I shot out of there in a rage, angry even at the fact that anyone had entered the tent, which was bad enough in itself.
“Soldier!” I shouted at the unfortunate sentry. “Are you blind? I’ve been robbed!”
“Sir, I’m very sorry,” he said. “It must have been that pair.”
“Pair? What pair?”
“A dwarf wearing a funnel for a hat and a boy with dirty pigtails.”
I let out a howl. “So if you saw them, what came over you that you let them enter? Didn’t you think they looked suspicious?”
“They showed me a pass, sir, I had to let them through!” said the soldier, excusing himself. “I can’t read, but an officer who was passing by helped me. It was fine, according to him. The pass had their names on it, and it was signed by you.”
I kicked a fencepost with my sapper boots. Childhood! That time of the soul’s innocence! My good friend Rousseau ought to have met this miniature monster Anfán before writing his essays on pedagogy!
They’d employed a brilliant strategy, waiting until the last day of the siege to use my pass, when all eyes were on Tortosa and camp was practically empty. This prompted a thought in me. I ceased my attack on the post and asked the sentry: “Was it long ago they were here?”
“Not at all. They just left. I think I saw them a few minutes ago.” He pointed toward the outskirts of camp. “They went that way.”
I trotted in the direction indicated. I traversed the camp, coming to the last tents. Beyond these stretched parched fields, only one or two bushes here and there. I spotted the pair. Nearly half a mile away, cutting across the fields at a run, and weighed down with more booty than ants in the Yucatán.
There were thousands of nooks and crannies in the trenches for them to hide in, but in open country, they didn’t have a chance against Longlegs Zuvi. I ran after them, accelerating, eating up the distance.
Seeing me coming, they also picked up the pace, though each was weighed down with a sack larger than his own body. They reached the top of a rise and disappeared down the other side.
It was a couple of minutes before I reached that point, and once there, I couldn’t see them anymore. Damn it, where had they gotten to? I paused for a moment to catch my breath.
I scanned around, thinking maybe they’d hidden in some hole in the ground. But no, there weren’t any. “Come on, Zuvi,” I said to myself, “think! Wasn’t it the lord of Bazoches himself who taught you to use your eyes?”
A couple of hundred feet to my right: a small construction, abandoned. One of these stone huts where peasants keep tools and suchlike. There was nowhere else they could be.
I circled the place before going in, checking for any escape route. No, the windows were too small even for them. Only then did I approach the door and shout: “Come on, out with you! I know you’re in there!”
To my surprise, the door opened immediately. It wasn’t either of them, though, but a French soldier.
He was the paradigm of soldiery at its most depraved. His belt was loose, and his uniform was so dirty that its whiteness was a mere memory. He peered out of drunken, sleepy eyes. Leaning lazily against the doorframe, picking at his teeth with a knife, he asked what I wanted. What was going on there? I pushed him to one side and took a step forward into the hut. Once my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, I was dumbstruck.
The dwarf was in there, tied to a beam, his mouth gagged with straw and a rag tied around him. Anfán was seated on an old chair, bound tight at his ankles and wrists. Gagged, too, and with a black hood that came down over half his body. The French soldier had an accomplice, and he was kneeling down finishing tying Anfán’s binds. Even the flies had fled that place. Nan looked at me in utter terror. They’d stumbled into an atrocious situation, one of these small hells you’ll always find in or near a war, just as cobwebs always inhabit corners.
My first thought was to recover my belongings and get out of there. This perverted pair of maniacs disgusted me, of course. But we were in a time of widespread indiscriminate killing. The sooner I could get away, the better.
There was a small detail, though, something otherwise quite minor, that made me more upset than I ordinarily might have been. Want to know what this trivial thing was? A bead, a bead of sweat, running down the cheek of one of those swine. This little drop betrayed foul desires, a soul gone rancid. His mouth hung half open, and he was staring intently at Anfán, who was desperately trying to free himself on the chair. Like all scavengers, he had large gaps between his teeth, which made him all the more repulsive. Sometimes it’s trivial details that spur us into action. It had been a bad day, and someone was going to have to pay for it.
There was a thick, rusty chain hanging from the ceiling. I picked a large stone up off the floor and, stowing this under one arm, reached up and took down the chain with my free hand. I took a step toward the soldier at the door. “Mind holding this stone for a moment?”