“A lieutenant colonel!” cried Amelis. Though she then asked: “So what’s one of those?”
“You see, my love,” I explained between puffs on the cigar I was smoking, “in an army, the rank immediately below a general is a colonel, who leads a regiment. A lieutenant colonel is an officer pending the assignment of his own regiment. Do you understand?”
“So you don’t have your own regiment yet?”
“Well, no,” I confessed. “But what does that matter?”
Anfán was sitting beside me. He tugged on my sleeve and asked: “Jefe, how many soldiers do you command?”
“None in particular,” I replied. “I will be taking charge of higher matters. The reality is that I will be working as an engineer. But Don Antonio, valuing me so highly, believed I ought to have a rank fitting with my authority, to carry more weight among the soldiery.”
“Well, I think it’s a pretty shitty rank if you aren’t commanding any soldiers, jefe,” Anfán concluded.
“I’ll be earning twenty-six pesos a month!” I announced very proudly. “That’s without counting the extra ten percent as aide-de-camp.”
At this point Peret intervened: “So tell us, Martí, this aide-de-camp thing, what exactly does it mean?”
“I’ve told you, it means I’ll be completely available to Don Antonio for any crisis or anything that happens to come up. He values me very highly!”
“So you mean you’ll be Villarroel’s errand boy.” He burst out laughing. “You’ve allowed yourself to be duped. Your working day is going to be twice as long, if not more.”
“In exchange for which you’ve only got another ten percent,” Amelis pointed out. “Some negotiator you are!”
They had succeeded in casting gloom over my mood. “You’re right, maybe I’m not the best businessman in the world!” Like anyone who finds himself at a loss for an argument, I resorted to patriotism. “But when the enemy is approaching, we shouldn’t lower ourselves to pecuniary baseness.”
“What color will your uniform be?” asked Amelis.
“None. I won’t have one. In practice, as I said, I’ll be working as an engineer. And the engineer corps are not required to be in uniform.”
“Not required to be in uniform!” exclaimed Peret, laughing. “Have you ever heard of a general who is — as you put it—not required to wear a uniform? You haven’t even gotten them to pay for one of those for you!”
They were ruining my party, the lot of them. This wasn’t the triumphal march I had been expecting.
Peret asked: “And your name will be signed up to the lists of which regiment?”
“Signed up?”
“Yes, man, on the payroll of which regiment?”
I gave a dismissive wave of the hand holding my cigar and said: “Oh, I don’t need to be troubling myself with those little details. Don Antonio is the most honest man in the city. It’s inconceivable that he would not make sure I appear on somebody’s payroll.”
“Very well,” Peret insisted, “but in which regiment?”
“I don’t know!” I gave up, cornered and deep down rather annoyed at myself for not being able to give a different answer. “When I was in France, I learned to build, defend, and attack bastions. Nobody taught me what kind of bureaucratic paperwork is required by rearguard secretaries!”
“Fantastic!” They all roared with laughter, including the dwarf. “They aren’t buying you a uniform, and you’ll be spending your days racing this way and that. You’re a lieutenant colonel, which is a provisional rank; you have no provisional regiment, and you don’t know which one you might have.”
“Very well!” I said, defending myself. “I think I remember Villarroel saying something about an imperial regiment. He has already sent letters to Vienna asking for confirmation of his own position and, while he was at it, doubtless asking for me to be enlisted in one of Charles’s units. We can take that for granted. Do you think the emperor isn’t going to listen to the request of his only general in Spain?”
This time the laughter was so thunderous that the neighbors banged on the walls in complaint.
“But how very stupid you are, Martí! That’s not how things work. If they sign you up to an Austrian regiment, it’ll be months before you get your rank recognized. And now you’re being paid out of Vienna, not Barcelona. Until the imperial funds arrive, you won’t get a salary. The French fleet is blockading the port, so it’s quite possible you’ll get nothing.”
They had spoiled my dinner. Worst of all, they were right.
“Fine!” I said, addressing Peret. “Maybe I’m not going to get rich, but you’ve enlisted as a private, and the salary for privates is nothing to write home about.”
“And who says it’s the Generalitat who’s going to be paying me?” he replied, laughing at my bewildered expression. “Martí, you know what the Barcelona rich are like. You think people like that are going to be prepared to join battalions, climb bastions, or stand guard night and day, to risk getting shot at or bombarded? Of course they aren’t. It’s one thing being in favor of constitutions and liberties, it’s quite another gambling their own skin for them. And so I showed up at the home of some of the particularly reluctant ones.”
“A commercial visit,” said Amelis, understanding at once.
“Precisely,” said Peret. “The government wants complete units, but they don’t give a damn about the identity of the people who make them up. So I have offered myself to fill the place of the biggest shirkers. In exchange for a small gratuity, naturally.”
“You’ve taken the place of a rich person who doesn’t want to fight!” I cried, outraged.
“Only after a strict auction,” said Peret.
They spent the rest of the night mocking good old Zuvi and his poor commercial sense. By the end of it, I was so dejected I couldn’t even finish my cigar. Of all the sieges I’ve taken part in over the last seventy years, the one government by whom I wasn’t paid a cent was that of my own country. Still. . I didn’t know it at the time, but that was actually our last night together and happy. Why does it cost so much to see how happy you are, when you are?
I can remember Peret laughing at my naïveté; I remember his wish to fight, at his age, and I think how fortunate we human beings are that our destinies are hidden from us. My friend Peret was killed after it was all over.
By the end of the siege, the only healthy Barcelonans were the cannibals. You could recognize them because their skin was an unnatural pinkish color, their pupils shone repulsively like the eyes on a fresh fish, and their lips were frozen in a perpetual smile. The rest of the city’s inhabitants were a beggarly mass, dusty bodies, as though they had been shut away in some dark attic. For weeks, months, after the siege, the Barcelonans who traveled outside the city could be recognized by their deathly complexion and their crestfallen gait. One day Peret went out to get some food. Perhaps simply because he was Barcelonan, some spiteful soldier shot him. But it’s more likely that they cried halt at some roadblock. He didn’t hear their voices and they fired.
What is a fortress? Bring together a handful of people ready to fight, an enclosed space, and a standard, and there you have a fortress. In the summer of 1713, the military situation was as I am about to describe it to you, and I will begin with the good part.
As we know, the Red Pelts had named Don Antonio commander in chief of the army. A huge task was expected of Don Antonio, if not an impossible one: to organize, drill, and lead an army that did not exist, with the mission to defend a city that was indefensible.
Besides the staff officers, the most outstanding thing we had was our artillery. This was under the command of Costa, Francesc Costa. Quite a fellow. The best artilleryman of the century. To give you an idea of his skill, I shall set down just one piece of information: When the Bourbons entered, Costa was the only senior officer they did not detain. (Well, Costa and good old Zuvi, to be precise.) Jimmy, being of a rationality that was as superb as it was entirely without scruples, knew what he was dealing with and offered him various perks and an extremely well-remunerated position, four doubloons a day, if he joined the French army. Costa did not hesitate for a second. He said yes, that he would be very honored to make a career in the army of Louis XIV. That same night he disappeared.