“I struck you,” he said, skipping past any formalities. “I was wrong to do that.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond.
“My apologizing has nothing to do with your foolishness,” he went on, “only with your uniform, however provisional it may be. You don’t strike an officer. It’s ugly, degrading to the rank.”
“Yes, Don Antonio.”
“General, damn it! Address my person by the rank I hold.”
He looked up, and I saw he was half-drunk. “Yes, General.”
“As for the rest, I have signed up a man who is mean and selfish. All armies have blisters popping out all over their ass, and you are the fattest, most pus-filled in the entire Allied coalition.”
That is an “apology” as understood by Don Antonio de Villarroeclass="underline" He summons me to ask for forgiveness and ends up calling me a purulent blister. He pointed at me with the mouth of the bottle and added: “I ought to hang you.”
“You’re right, Don Antonio.”
“But as an engineer, you do have a certain competence. I’ve seen you carry out maneuvers that might lack grace, though they are amusing.” He sighed deeply. “It’s my fault; engineers are no use on horseback. No. Your skill is hiding away between chunks of stone.”
“Yes, Don Antonio. I mean, no, Don Antonio. Whatever you say.”
He looked at me a moment, his eyes glassy with wine. He patted the mattress a couple of times. “Sit here!”
I obeyed, and he put an arm around my shoulders. He smelled of sour wine. And then, to my surprise, he showed an affection toward me that I had known nothing of. “You needn’t worry, son. You’re a coward, I know that, but few men are born brave. Bravery is something you learn, just like a child learning to speak. Do you understand?”
“I’m not sure, Don Antonio.”
He squeezed me a little tighter, jostling me like a wisp of straw. He waved a fist under my nose. “The good Lord has placed a barrier between each man and his destiny. Our mission in this life is to get past it, to go beyond it, to have the courage to learn what there is on the other side.” He stopped, pensive. “Whatever that may be.”
“But Don Antonio,” I replied, shriveling up, “that does sound rather dangerous.”
I shouldn’t have said that. He stared at me with his drunken pop eyes and, with his booming Castilian voice, let out some words that I can remember down to the last drop of saliva: “So what the fuck did that French engineer teach you, then?”
“How to fortify, storm, and defend fortresses, Don Antonio.”
“And what else?”
I hesitated. “What else, Don Antonio?”
He shook me. “Yes, yes! What else?”
I must have been brought low by the carnage, by being far from home. By that night, one more night camped out in the cold. The wind howling like a pack of wild hounds. The post-battle melancholy had struck me, too.
“Don Antonio,” I confessed, “I’ve lied to you. I’m not an engineer. The French marquis never approved the fifth Point that was to make me an engineer.”
He didn’t hear me, or if he did, he didn’t care. “Damn battle,” he whispered. “Damn it. . The world is a thousand souls lighter. And what for? Nothing has changed.”
The wine had gone to his head much more than I had realized. He curled up his knees like an old man, arms folded, and lay down on the camp bed. I stayed where I was for a few minutes, watching the great man sleeping after his victory. In Bazoches, I had been taught to look at objects that hung from invisible threads, to decode them and understand them in their vast humility. How could my eyes not be drawn to the human enormity of Don Antonio?
I felt a rush of pity toward him. That night, as the man snored, sleeping like a fetus, I would have given my life to protect his rest. His whole life was service, discipline, a just measure of rigor. I saw each of the pores on his mature cheeks, everything I knew about him, and told myself that this cavalry general had chosen his own path to le Mystère. Then I understood his most deeply hidden secret, perhaps better than he understood it himself: that ever since he had started, he had sought to die in a heroic cavalry charge, so beautiful in its despair.
It wasn’t a simple, senseless death wish. For somebody so self-denying, so possessed by the spirit of chivalry, to fall before his men did not signify the end of an existence but the perfecting of one. At Brihuega, he had spent the entire battle right at the front of every single Allied charge and countercharge. But death had eluded him, stubbornly, mockingly. As for me, I found myself at the opposite end of the moral arc. And yes, thanks to the senses I had developed at Bazoches, I understood, or at least respected, his code of intransigent rectitude. For this very reason, what a tragic irony in his life! In 1705 he had begun the war on the Bourbon side and, in 1710, had moved over to the pro-Austrian side. A path on which the view of the enemy had changed places and faded away, stripped of any meaning. To protect today’s friends, he would kill yesterday’s. Sad, sad, sad. It might be that le Mystère was keeping him for that apex of all dramas that was Barcelona on September 11, 1714. Like it was keeping me.
It was the coldest night of the whole Retreat. A pitiless wind whipped at the thin canvas of the tent. I took off his boots and covered his body with the only blanket there was in the tent. I went out, stole a couple more blankets, and came back to wrap him more warmly. He was snoring. Before I left, I kissed his cheek. Just as well he was sleeping deeply. If he had realized, he would have struck me on the head for being a pansy. Then I went and got myself drunk on what was left in the bottle.
Don Antonio. My battle-running general, my good Don Antonio de Villarroel Peláez, the most anonymous hero of our century. Things ended badly, very badly. Not many great men came out well from that war of ours. That leech In-a-Trice Stanhope was certainly one of the lucky ones.
Owing to his high rank, the Bourbons treated him with kid gloves, and four days later, he returned to London like a greenhorn coming home from an outing. Without glory, but without dishonor, either. Instead of hanging him, the English exalted him, perhaps as a way of disguising the failure of their continental strategy. He married the daughter of the governor of Madras and thrived in politics. Some men are born covered in a patina of moral oiclass="underline" Misfortune slips off them like water. But those same men stain everything they touch. A decade later, his government was foolish enough to give him the reins to the faltering English economy. I’ll wager anything you like that, as he took on the post, he exclaimed, “I’ll sort this out in a trice!”
As we already know, England’s finances ended up the same way as their expeditionary forces: destroyed in a trice. It took him only two years to devastate trade with America and the savings of a million shareholders, and to bring half the country’s industries, banks, businesses, and warehouses to the point of bankruptcy in what has come to be known as the South Sea Bubble. From my own exile in England, I recall some delightful heads, such as Swift or Newton, a wise astronomer who looked like a libertine priest. Newton always had one eye on the heavens and another on his purse. During the crisis, he lost thousands of pounds in shares, and measured though he surely was, even he wanted to strangle Stanhope. I can still see him now, shouting, “It’s infinitely easier to predict the motion of a heavenly body than the lunacies of these secretaries of finance!”
As for Marshal Vendôme, our enemy at Brihuega, in those last days of 1710, Little Philip named him governor-general of Catalonia. A premature title, you will agree, since at that point, most of Catalonia remained in the hands of the Generalitat. The truth was, he never got the chance to enjoy the post. In 1712, as he was travelling through one of our towns to the south, Vinaroz, he stopped — to everyone’s horror — to have dinner. To make him happy, they served him the local delicacy, fried prawns.