The deputy, always indulgent with his own, went easy on them. Not me. “Given that they were the first to go on the attack,” I said, “that ought to make them the last to quit the defenses.”
Ordered to hold my tongue, I obeyed. It was pointless anyway. We still weren’t to know at that point, but it was the most futile of discussions. During the meeting, we later learned, Vic’s representatives had sent some namby-pamby local official, one Josep Pou, to ask for clemency from Little Philip’s army. Fabulous! The ones who had struck the match, accusing us of arson.
In the end, it became as though all our to-ing and fro-ing was merely to keep Deputy Berenguer from falling into Bourbon hands. Coordinating ourselves with the other columns — which were moving around as constantly as we were — and with Barcelona, too, was no easy task. A large number of our messengers never came back. Each time one galloped away, I found it hard to hold back the tears. If they were caught, they’d be tortured to death — itself a useless act, as the messages were written in a code that only Berenguer knew. The one thing he could be praised for, the clod.
It was a most ingenious code, with numbers standing in for letters or symbols. So, A was 11, M was 40, and E was 30. Other numbers stood in for whole things—70, for example, meant Barcelona; 100, bombs; 81, Philip V; 53, grenades; 54, Pópuli; and 87, Miquelets.
A rumor went around among the men that Deputy Berenguer kept the message hidden deep inside. The Bourbons would never decipher the code, because the numbers and letters were all nothing but a ruse. In fact, Deputy Berenguer would fart holding a cylinder to his behind. The implement didn’t, in reality, decipher written signs but, rather, the whistling sounds made when the cylinder’s top lifted.
Well, mob humor never has been that refined.
One day, early in the morning, the sentries sounded the alarm. Everyone scrabbled to arm himself, thinking it was a dawn attack by the Bourbons. No. To our relief, it turned out to be compatriots of ours — Ballester and his men, to be precise.
The sight of Ballester returning to us was one of the few happy ones during the whole expedition. I ran over and embraced him. I’m sure now that Ballester did appreciate my effusiveness, even though he couldn’t show it at the time. I put my arms around him; his stayed pinned to his sides. I didn’t mind. I could tell by his bewildered expression that he was having feelings he had no way to express.
Looking him in the eye, taking him by the shoulders, I said: “I knew you wouldn’t abandon us. I knew it.”
He pushed me away. “You were the ones who abandoned us. Don’t you remember?”
Looking around, I saw that only seven of his nine men were with him. “What about Jacint and Indaleci?” I asked.
“What do you think?”
We both fell silent for a moment. I was the next to speak. “And in spite of everything, you’ve come back?”
“It’s you who have come back,” he said, pointing behind him. The Miquelets had been scouting ahead of a far larger body of men: Dalmau’s whole troop. Plus three thousand men newly joined! Dalmau had recruited them himself, addressing the matter very differently to Deputy Berenguer. Not so strange, if you think about it. They were two poles: Deputy Berenguer’s apathetic moralizing and Dalmau’s levelheaded enthusiasm couldn’t have been more different. For Deputy Berenguer, the homeland meant the past, and protocols; for Dalmau, the future, and people’s rights.
A war council was held. Dalmau wanted to put forward some ideas he’d formed while expeditioning alone.
All told we could bring together five thousand men now. He wanted to proceed in line with the original plan: Attack the Bourbon cordon at Barcelona and raise the blockade. The disparity in numbers meant outright victory would be impossible. To start with, we were surrounded by thousands of Bourbons who had been deployed throughout the area. If they realized where we were marching, they would simply form a wall between us and Barcelona.
“But if we were to evade them,” suggested Dalmau, “we’d be in a position to attack the cordon’s right wing.” He spread a map out on the table. Everyone present came closer in.
“The Bourbons have divided the cordon into three sectors,” Dalmau explained. “The right wing is made up of Spanish troops, and the area they’re positioned on is swampland. We’d be at an advantage attacking there. Spanish troops are less well trained than the French. And on such uneven terrain, our Miquelets would move around far better than regiments accustomed to fighting in formation.” He rubbed his eyes. “Coordinating the attack with the troops inside the city will be no easy task. Particularly if we decide to strike at night, which we’d need to do to compensate for our lack of numbers — use the element of surprise. But if we do our part and Villarroel does his — no doubt he will — I don’t see why we shouldn’t succeed.”
Well, this was the point of the expedition, to free Barcelona from the Bourbon siege. Everyone agreed that it was risky but not impossible. There was still the issue of the deputy: an attack by night, among five thousand men in swampy terrain, would be too much for old Berenguer. It would be fraught with danger. In the tumult of battle, and in the dark, anything might happen. That Deputy Berenguer was a good-for-nothing blackguard didn’t make him any less important a personage. He’d be quite a prize for the Bourbons, and it would be a heavy blow to the Catalans to lose him. No, he wouldn’t be killed. But they’d be in a position to mount him on a donkey and ride him around with a cylinder on his head.
Berenguer put his hands to his face and, in a pitiful performance, said the last thing he wanted was to be an obstacle for the fatherland. Finally, he had realized that’s what he was. The attempt must be made, he said. All he required was four trustworthy soldiers to be his bodyguards. If the situation became ugly, these four would have the blessed job of slitting his throat before the enemy kidnapped him.
The cheek of the man! For the duration of the expedition he’d been cowering, and now he wanted to make himself out as the hero. It was the height of imposture, and that in an era when heroism was the commonest currency. Men like Villarroel and Dalmau, warriors like Ballester and Busquets, would never make proclamations about their willingness to lay down their lives: They took it for granted, and would do it without a second’s hesitation. And there we had Deputy Berenguer, measuring his every word for its epic qualities, for how it would sound in the annals.
I stepped forward. “Oh, don’t worry about four men to slit your throat, Your Excellence. One would be sufficient. Me.”
“Zuviría!” he cried. “I’ve had enough of your insolence. Think you’re the army joker, don’t you? When we get back, the first thing I’m going to do is have you thrown in the Pi dungeons!”
Next, one of Berenguer’s oafs made a proposaclass="underline" Try and reach the coast, and from there send the deputy off in a ship somewhere, before tackling the cordon. Everyone was happy — Dalmau because it meant being free from Berenguer, and Berenguer because it meant he’d be out of harm’s way.
Ballester and his light cavalry were sent ahead as an advance party, as usual, to be sure the nearby paths and trails were clear of Bourbons, and that the deputy could therefore be evacuated. I went with them. We reached a place called Alella by nightfall; to avoid unpleasant surprises, we chose to camp on the beach rather than trying at a house in the town.
During the ride, Ballester had seemed more on guard than usual. I put my sleeping mat next to his, the sand for a mattress. We bedded down a stone’s throw from the sea. The day had been clear, and the stars shone in the sky above. Like that poetic detail, my dear Waltraud? Pish, I say! If it was night, and there weren’t any clouds, why on earth wouldn’t the stars be shining? Anyway, you can keep it in — it will help give an idea of our melancholy mood that night. We were engaged in a cruel war, but the gentle cadence of the waves and the sound of the crickets cradled us for one peaceful moment: a feeling that moved me to speak.