He was a man who had always worn tragedy engraved on his brow. I believe he took on the new charge for the simple reason that there was nothing else he could do. He was a career soldier; the army was his life. Why had he spurned the last, generous offer he had received from Philip V? Pride, perhaps. Don Antonio was a very Spanish man. You know how it is, that lofty idea of pride, so very Castilian, constantly at the crossroads between utter heroism and the most sublime stupidity.
10
Meanwhile, there were things happening far beyond our horizons that would overturn the war entirely, bring fate into our lives, and place me — contrary to all my predictions — face-to-face with The Word itself.
In 1711 a scrawny young lad by the name of Pepito died. A devastating attack of smallpox, and straight off to the grave with him. His death caused the war to take a dramatic turn and condemned all Catalans to perpetual slavery. You’ll be wondering how it’s possible that such a banal event, a simple death from smallpox, could have had such decisive effects. Well, due to the fact that this particular sickly lad, this Pepito, was Joseph I, the young emperor of Austria and brother to King Charles. With Pepito dead, the Austrian throne came into Charles’s hands; he still had aspirations to reign over all Spain and was now the emperor of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. As you will recall, the war had started because England was against the dynastic union between France and the Spanish empire. London would never countenance the creation of such a strong continental power; hence their support for Charles as an alternative to Little Philip. But the solution they had imagined created a new problem, with Charles uniting Spain and Austria under a single scepter, thereby threatening to create a kingdom that was every bit as powerful as anything they’d feared. In other words, the situation that had triggered the conflict in the first place was simply shifting position.
Pepito’s death sealed our condemnation. On that very day, England’s diplomats began to look for a negotiated solution to the situation. And — just look how things turn out — this time they really did find their solution in a trice: Charles was to renounce the Spanish throne and remain in Vienna forever; Little Philip, in turn, should renounce his claims to the French succession (in the event of the Beast’s death) and stay in Madrid forever. War over. Move along, please, nothing to see here.
France dragged its heels, but it was exhausted; Charles objected, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Without military support from England, and especially without her financial backing, he wouldn’t be in a position to keep fighting for long, not as much as three months. So everybody accepted the English proposal, more or less. From then on, it was only a matter of haggling and pinning down the minor details.
And the Catalans? Surely you’re joking! Neither Charles nor the English deigned to inform the authorities in Barcelona. As you can imagine, even the Red Pelts would have expressed some outrage! And so our Miquelets went on dying in the mountains, our citizens went on paying exorbitant taxes to support a war they could never conclude, and all the while our own king was digging our grave. Diplomatic negotiations move slowly, all the more so when you’ve got a world war involved, and between 1711 and 1713, the Catalans kept on fighting, like dumb pawns, for a king who had already sold them out to their executioner.
I can’t help a brief digression here. The chroniclers have written that Pepito died from smallpox, a story I’ve always thought sounded rather fishy. There’s no such thing as a single victim of smallpox; either you’ve got an epidemic or there’s no smallpox. Imagine the coincidence that it should be Pepito, of all the people in Vienna, who was the only person to contract the illness.
Relations between the two brothers had been sour for some time. Out of fraternal solidarity, Pepito had been spending vast sums on a distant war, and he was as fed up with the conflict as all the other chanceries in Europe. According to what I heard from an old Viennese courtier, the final letters that Pepito sent Charles took this tone: “My dear brother Karl, enough of this endless war! So the Catalans love you and the Castilians hate you? Well, how would this be for a solution — how about Philip as king of the Castilians and you as king of the Catalans?”
The fact that this option was not merely a comment between brothers but an official policy was demonstrated by the fact that all the Austrian newspapers published the proposal as a definitive solution. Charles didn’t think the idea was the least bit funny, and he sent the next letter to his brother via an agent who put arsenic under his fingernails. Smallpox! What do you think, my dear vile Waltraud? Did he kill him like Cain killed Abel? Well, shut up, then, your opinion isn’t worth a damn anyway.
Where were we? Oh yes, Charles being named the new emperor of Austria. He packed his bags and raced over to Vienna for the coronation ceremony. He left his little queen — now also the empress of Austria — back in Barcelona as a pledge of eternal fidelity to the Catalans.
I say it again: An excess of civilization transforms upright people into simpletons. Because it was quite clear that Charles was never coming back and that the queen — who, to tell the truth, had been left as a political token — would use the first opportunity she got to follow him. She spent a year in Barcelona, yawning her way through the opera. And then, when the time looked right, a very goodbye to you! What still gives me shivers, and riles me no end, is the reason that the old tart gave for leaving. In her own words, she needed to go, owing to “the great matter of the hoped-for succession.” In other words, that great matter was urging her to open her legs to her Charles, which was much more important than the destiny of an entire nation.
Now, would you like to guess what the Red Pelts did when Charles’s little queen announced her noble reasons for leaving us in the lurch?
They let her go without a word of complaint! Those very men, the Red Pelts, the gents of the noble ruling class! The only card that a nation without a king might be able to play; the final guarantee that an entire country would not be disemboweled alive. And they waved it goodbye with full honors! The entire government went off to the docks, and the only thing they cared about was getting a place near the queen so as to be seen during the farewell.
Let me tell you what they should have done! They should have sent a sealed letter to Vienna swearing that we were going to put Her Majesty in the room with all the rats, and that she wouldn’t change her petticoat until Charles had worked European diplomacy to achieve every political, diplomatic, and military guarantee that Catalonia would remain free and safe. But that was not how it happened; the Red Pelts were too civilized for that. The world was going to slit our throats, and they were busy fretting about powdering their wigs!
With his hands free now, Charles signed the ominous Treaty of Evacuation with the Bourbons. According to its terms, the Allies were to withdraw all the troops they still had on the peninsula, that is, in Catalonia, which was the only territory under their control. From then on, things happened fast. When the queen fled to Vienna, the post of viceroy of Catalonia was filled by an Austrian soldier, Marshal Starhemberg.
It was on Starhemberg’s shoulders that the burden fell of carrying out the most heinous and monumental mass execution in recent times. Early in 1713, the drama was ready to come to a head, all the cogs in the machine set for the sky to fall in. All that was needed was for the lever to be activated. And Starhemberg was that lever.