“So I see,” said Spínola. “And in those hedgerows of Fleurus, don Gonzalo de Córdoba told me that you fought like men of honor.”
“Don Gonzalo spoke the truth when he used the word honor, for honors were due. Nearly all my comrades stayed there.”
Spínola scratched his goatee, as if he had just remembered something.
“Did I not promote you to sergeant at that time?”
Alatriste slowly shook his head. “No, Excellency. The ‘sergeant’ came about in ’18, because Your Excellency remembered me from Sluys.”
“Then how is it that you are a foot soldier once again?”
“I lost my rank a year later, because of a duel.”
“Something serious?”
“A lieutenant.”
“Dead?”
“As a doornail.”
The general considered Alatriste’s words and then exchanged a look with the officers surrounding him. He frowned and made a move to walk on.
“As God is my witness,” he said, “I am surprised they didn’t hang you.”
“It was during the Maastrique mutiny, Excellency.”
Alatriste had spoken without a shred of emotion. The general stopped, thinking back.
“Ah, yes, I remember now.” The frown had disappeared, and he was smiling again. “The Germans and the colonel whose life you saved. And for that did I not grant you a warrant of eight escudos?”
Again Alatriste shook his head.
“No, Excellency. That was for White Mountain. When, with Captain Bragado, who is standing over there today, we climbed behind Bucquoi up to the forts above. As for the escudos, they were cut back to four.”
At that, don Ambrosio’s smile slipped from his face. He looked around with a distracted air.
“Well,” he concluded. “At any rate, I am pleased to have seen you again. Is there anything I can do for you?”
Alatriste smiled, though his face changed very little; a barely perceptible light glinted among the wrinkles about his eyes.
“I think not, Excellency. Today I am collecting six months of back pay, and I have no complaint.”
“Good. And this meeting between two old veterans has been pleasant, don’t you agree?” He had put out a hand as if to give Alatriste a friendly pat on the shoulder, but the captain’s steady and sardonic gaze appeared to dissuade him. “I am referring to you and me, of course.”
“Naturally, Excellency.”
“Soldier and, ahem, soldier.”
“Of course.”
Don Ambrosio again cleared his throat, smiled one last time, and looked ahead to the next group. In his mind he had already moved on.
“Good luck, Captain Alatriste.”
“Good luck, Excellency.”
The Marqués de los Balbases, Captain-General of Flanders, continued on. The path to glory and posterity lay before him—though he did not know it, and we were the ones who would do all the hard work—through the magnum opus of Diego Velázquez, but it was also to be the pathway toward calumny and injustice dealt him by the adoptive country he had served so generously. Because while Spínola reaped victories for the king, who was ungrateful like all the kings the world has ever seen, enemies were cutting the ground from beneath his feet at court, far from the fields of battle, discrediting him before the monarch of languid gestures and pallid soul, who, good-natured but weak, always managed to find himself far from where honorable wounds were being received. Instead of adorning himself in the appurtenances of war, this king dressed for palace balls, even the country dances Juan de Esquivel taught in his academy. Only five years after the time we are speaking of, the man who stormed Breda, the intelligent and expert military strategist, the man of courage who loved Spain to the point of sacrifice, was to die ill and disillusioned. Don Francisco de Quevedo would write a poem expressing Spain’s loss.
You subjected the Palatinate,To benefit the Spanish monarchy.Your ideals countering their heresy.In Flanders we badly missed your gallantry,E’en more in Italy…and now this eulogy,amid sorrow we dare not contemplate.
As reward for his noble endeavors he received the standard wages our land of Cains—more stepmother than mother, ever base and miserly—holds for those who love her and serve her welclass="underline" oblivion, the poison engendered by envy, ingratitude, and dishonor. And the greatest irony was that poor don Ambrosio would die with only an enemy to console him, Julio Mazarino, who, like him, was an Italian by birth, a future cardinal and minister of France, and the only person to comfort him on his deathbed. It was to him that our poor general would confess, with senile delirium: “I die with neither honor nor reputation…They have taken everything from me, money, and honor…I was a decent man…This is not the payment forty years of service deserves.”
It was a few days after the mutiny had calmed that I became embroiled in a singular altercation. It happened the same day the pay was distributed, a day of leave granted our tercio before we returned to the Ooster canal. All Oudkerk was one great Spanish fiesta. Even the faces of the surly Flemish, whom only months before we had slashed and gored, cleared before the rain of gold that showered over the town. The presence of soldiers with full purses had the effect of producing, as if by magic, victuals that had previously been swallowed up by the earth. Beer and wine—the latter more appreciated by our troops, who, like the great Lope de Vega before them, called the former “ass piss”—flowed like water, and even the sun, warm overhead, helped brighten the party and shed its rays upon dancing in the streets, music, and card games. Houses with a sign on the front displaying swans or calabashes—I am referring to brothels and taverns, of course; in Spain we used branches of laurel or pine—were, as the old saying goes, making hay while the sun shines. Blonde, pale-skinned women recovered their hospitable smiles, and that day no few husbands, fathers, and brothers looked, more or less willingly, the other way while their women starched the tail of your shirt. There is no stone so hard that it cannot be softened by the timely clink of that pimp and procuress gold. In addition, the Flemish women, liberal in their behavior and conversation, were not at all like our sanctimonious Spanish women. They willingly allowed you to take their hands and kiss them on the face, and it was not too great a challenge to strike up a friendship with one who claimed to be Catholic, evidenced by the fact that more than a few accompanied our soldiers on their return to Italy or Spain. Nevertheless, none was as perfect as Flora, the heroine of El sitio de Bredá, The Siege of Breda, whom the author, don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, undoubtedly exaggerating a little, endowed with laudable virtues: a Spanish sense of honor and a love for Spaniards that I never came across in any Flemish woman. Nor, I suspect, did Calderón.
But back to my story. I was telling Your Mercies that there in Oudkerk, the usual entourage of troops on campaign—soldiers’ wives, whores, sutlers, gamblers, and people of every ilk—had set up their stalls outside of town, and soldiers were coming and going between these attractions and the town, dressing up threadbare duds with new trifles, plumes on hats, and other fripperies—as the sacristan knows, easy come, easy go. There was wanton disregard of the Ten Commandments, and few theological or cardinal virtues were left inviolate. It was, in short, what the Flemish call kermesse and we Spaniards jolgorio, a rowdy celebration. Or as the veterans put it, we could have been in Italy.