“Very good,” said Armand. “Five hundred feet straight behind you, what else is there?”
I answered immediately. “A woman. Strolling, carrying flowers. She has a bunch with red and yellow buds in one hand — forty-three flowers, I think. At the speed she was going, I believe by now she’ll have picked forty-five.” Sighing, I whispered: “She has red hair.”
A natural thoroughfare in the woods led to the clearing we found ourselves in. A few hundred feet beyond this, the trees opened out onto a green field in which, half a minute earlier, I had seen Jeanne walking.
“Do you see?” said Armand. “When we want to, we can pay attention. Your problem is that, had it been a lame old woman with a hunchback and no teeth, you wouldn’t have noticed her. But, and I’m sure you’ll agree, each is just as visible. And for carrying messages between enemy lines, the enemy will always choose the hunchbacks over the redheads. Precisely because no one notices them.”
The Ducroix brothers had realized my feelings toward Jeanne from day one, of course. Armand sighed and clapped me on the cheek twice, though I didn’t know if this was meant as consolation or recrimination.
“If you want to become an engineer,” he said, “you have to be constantly paying attention, and for that, what you need to fall in love with is reality, the world around you.”
That night I went down to Jeanne’s room. I knocked twice, lightly. She did not open the door. I went back the following night. I knocked three times. She did not open. Another night: I knocked three times and then, leaving an interval, a fourth. She did not open. I didn’t go back the next night. But the following night, I gave five little knocks.
Now is when I describe how Jeanne and I fell into each other’s arms. How I seduced her, or she seduced me, or how I believed I’d seduced her when in truth it was the other way around, or vice versa, or how it all happened at once. You know, love, all that. The thing is, I’ve never felt comfortable with love poetry, and I have no notion of how to tell it prettily.
All right, listen: Between the practice field and the castle, there stood a hayloft. Picture Zuvi and Jeanne up in the top, on a bed of dry straw, nude and one mounting the other, and vice versa.
So there you have it.
The Vauban family rarely gathered at Bazoches all together. When they did, curiously, those were the days when I was afforded most time with the marquis. And, using the excuse that he was giving me some practical guidance, he was able to free himself from his dull relations, of whom the only one he could bear was his cousin Dupuy-Vauban. Sometimes they allowed me to accompany them on long walks through the countryside.
Dupuy-Vauban, whom I will henceforth call “Dupuy” so as not to confuse my imbecile of a transcriber, was one of the five greatest engineers of the century. If anything can explain the fact he has, unjustly, not gone down in history, it’s his close kinship with the marquis, who inevitably eclipsed him. He was an exceptional, loyal, modest, and unassuming man, virtues of no use in gaining earthly glory. At the end of his military career he had sixteen wounds upon his body.
I always liked seeing him. Dupuy was to me an example and an inspiration, as well as a link between Martí the student and the great marquis. Though far the younger of the two, the marquis treated Dupuy as an equal. I felt like a child in their company — a child growing up amongst geniuses. Just as newborns understand nothing of their parents’ speech, to begin with the idiom of engineering was gibberish to me. But as my studies progressed, I began to join in the discussions. One of my most satisfying moments at Bazoches was afforded me by Dupuy, during one of these country walks. Halting, he said to the marquis: “My God, Sébastien! I do hope you inserted the clause into this young snip’s study contract!”
“The clause?” I said. “What clause?”
“The one prohibiting him from taking part in any siege in which Dupuy is on the other side!”
They both laughed. As did I. How could I ever possibly take aim at men such as these?
On one occasion, Dupuy was unable to attend one of the family reunions; he was taking part in a siege, in Germany. Vauban must have thought I was sufficiently advanced to accompany him, for the two of us strolled out together, alone.
“Well then?” he said to me. “Do you find your studies to be coming along adequately, cadet Zuviría?”
“Fabulously well, monsieur,” I replied — and meant it. “The Ducroix brothers are exceptional teachers. I have learned more in these few months than my whole life.”
“I can sense a ‘but’. .” prompted Vauban.
“I’m not complaining,” I replied, again sincerely. “Only, I don’t see how Latin, German, and English apply. And even Physics and Surveying strike me as having hardly anything to do with engineering. Monsieur! I spend hours with a bandage across my eyes trying to guess, just by the texture, the kind of sand or stones they place in my hands. Though I have almost grown eyes in my fingers, I fail to see the use to my learning as a whole. . ”
“The whole is you,” he interrupted. “Let us walk.”
In Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban’s view, all of military history can be summarized as an eternal dispute between attacker and defender. The invention of the cudgel was followed by that of the breastplate; that of the sword, the shield; the lance, armor. The more powerful the projectiles, the more stalwart became the means for defending against them.
If there’s one thing men have sought to protect more avidly than their bodies, it is their homes. If we look carefully, the great battles have all been attempts to keep combat at a distance from the hearth. Cain mashed Abel’s head with a lump of stone, this is true, but what the Bible omits to mention is that the following day Cain attacked his brother’s home, stole his pigs, violated his wife, and put his children into bondage.
Fire versus caves. Ladders versus wooden stockades. Siege towers versus ramparts made of stone. However, one day this unsteady equilibrium was thrown out of kilter.
A moment came when defense turned into a form of attack. Fortification techniques had outstripped those available to the attacker. However large the rocks hurled by catapults, onagers, and trebuchets, any city — if its engineers had the resources to erect sufficiently stout ramparts — would be invulnerable. That city existed, and its name was Constantinople: the last, splendorous stronghold of the Eastern Roman Empire. Over centuries, each emperor would pass on to his successor a widening of the ramparts.
From the point of view of a military engineer such as Vauban, classical Constantinople was ancient civilization’s crowning achievement. Its megalithic stone ramparts stood three hundred feet high, and towers and storehouses studded the inside edges.
Decadent Byzantium was invaded on many occasions, but those Herculean ramparts were never breached. All peoples, from East and from West, attempted it, and all were unsuccessful. Over the centuries it resisted twenty-five sieges! Germans, Huns, Avars, Russians — even the Catalans tried in medieval times, lest we forget. But in 1453 something happened that changed the course of engineering, war, history, and, therefore, all humanity.
In Turkey, or thereabouts, there lived a sheikh who got it in his mind to take Constantinople. Vauban had a portrait of the man on a wall at Bazoches. He said this was so as never to forget that one must always respect one’s enemy, little as he may merit it, and, should he indeed merit it, one must go so far as to admire him. In the portrait, the Suleiman in question wore a turban on his head and was smelling a flower. He had a cruel, spine-crumbling gaze.