“What are you going on about?” I said, trying to cut him off. “Enough of the sermons!”
He paid me no mind. He was possessed by culture in the same way the preachers are filled by the Holy Spirit. “But then a day came,” he said, undaunted by the cascades of bullets flying by, “and they saw a rich country spread out beneath them, a prosperous place for anyone who knew how to work the land, valleys and plains perfect for human civilization. Our ancestors repelled the Moors — that foul-smelling bunch! And it took them generations to do it, establishing their laws, religion, and customs in a new land they named Catalonia.”
What nonsense was this? Plus the fact that his rapt students had slowed their firing in order to listen to him. Jumping to my feet, I barked out the order: “Maintain fire! Shoot, load, and shoot!” They didn’t listen; my authority was nothing next to that of Marià Bassons, their beloved professor.
Bassons the buffoon carried on with his discoursing: “They created a new order, settling Catalonia and going on to liberate Valencia and Mallorca, populating the lands with our people. And they did not suppress the natives, as is usual in conquered territories, and as is Castile’s approach. Rather, they established sibling kingdoms, which, as such, were forever to be our equals and beloved by us. A shared religion, a shared tongue, a shared common law, and each with its own parliament. And what was that law, supreme, absolutely free, and unshakable? Always to serve the king who serves his people.” He suddenly became excited, shaking a fist in the air. “And now some French pretender to the Spanish throne wants to trample a thousand years of Catalan liberty because of what some Castilian wrote in his will! Are we going to let them? Oi que no, nois?” Not a chance, right, lads?
I remember the way he shouted while shaking his fist, as though rattling a tambourine. I had to bellow to make myself heard over the din: “Dr. Bassons, would you mind getting down?”
I’ll never know whether the buffoon heard. He was near enough that I was able to grab him by the tails of his jacket to force him to take cover. But too late. In that instant I saw a white line score the sky, a little comet’s tail of smoke behind it. A concave slice of metal, the size of a serving tray, flew toward us and into the side of Bassons’s head, embedding in it as though his cranium were soft cheese.
Where had this projectile issued from? No one will ever know. Most likely, it was the remains of a cannonball that had shattered upon impact with the Saint Joan tower behind us to the right. The fragments had flown off in all directions, and the largest nestled in Bassons’s head.
He toppled onto me, his head a bloody mess. His body spasmed briefly and then was still. His dead hands were clenched, pawlike. My face was splashed with so much blood, it must have looked like I had measles. I pushed Bassons off me, and before his body hit the ground, almost all of his hundred students, it seemed, had come and crowded around. “Dr. Bassons!”
Panting, I wiped the blood from my face and tried to recover from that sudden death. As I puffed and gasped, they congregated around their professor and me. A collective sobbing started up.
“This is war,” I said, trying to console them. “Return to your positions.”
The students loved Bassons with that especial, fanatical love that exists between student and teacher. In their shock, they were close to insubordination.
“To your positions,” I ordered them, shoving them back, “spread out along the barricade, and fire, damn it, maintain fire! If you let up, they’ll gather and charge!”
Now, look, I’ve never been one to glorify military actions — partly because I’ve seen so few that have been glorious. Most great military feats are little more than rats being corralled, blind panic. When it comes to battle, men kill to avoid being killed, and that is all. Then a poet shows up, or a historian, or a historian of a poetic bent, and takes that thrusting, thrashing frenzy and puffs it up, imbues it with ideas of valor, calls it glory. And yet, and yet: What happened that day belied my whole logic.
Grief became hate, a repeated cry of “You bastards!” starting up as they fired, loaded, and fired. But to load a rifle, you need a calm head, and their blood was boiling. One among them, the most upset, lost patience; his hands trembled in rage, and the powder poured everywhere apart from down the barrel of his rifle. He let out a strange, female-sounding cry and was suddenly mounting his bayonet and vaulting over the barricade.
I had time only to shout after him: “Eh? Where are you going? Get back here!”
But he wasn’t listening. Maddened, he went screaming toward the Bourbon barricade, bayonet at the ready.
“That’s it, at them!” some imbecile shouted, encouraged by the mad student’s example. “Avenge Don Marià!”
And after him they went! The whole hundred or so of them, following in their comrade’s footsteps. Naturally, I tried to hold them back: “Don’t, don’t! You’ll be slaughtered, the lot of you!”
It wasn’t just compassion that made me try to stop them. I would have to be the one to tell Don Antonio, our good shepherd of soldiers, that I’d lost the sheep in my care, that they’d gone wandering into a mass suicide. Insults, threats, physically trying to hold them back, all useless. They went over the top, every last one of them. Not me, clearly. I stood with my back against the battlement for a few moments, head in my hands. The only person left was me, me and the body of Bassons the buffoon. Mon Dieu, quelle catastrophe!
I turned to watch the massacre through a chink in the barricade. And to this day, I cannot believe the sights I saw.
Spurred on by a very intimate rage, the students covered the distance in the blink of an eye. The Bourbons didn’t even have time to unleash an organized volley. There was a scattering of shots, and three or four of the students went down. When they were halfway across, one shouted out the old Barcelonan students’ harangue: “Stone them! Stone them!” And that same student stopped in his tracks, striking a flint and putting it to the fuse of a sack full of grenades, before launching it over the top of the enemy barricade. And there we have it: The more loutish a civic tradition, the more use it is to a patriot.
The grenades sent up a cluster of bodies on the other side of the ramparts. The mad youth leading the charge hadn’t even stopped to light his grenade but ran on, hoarse from yelling, bayonet out in front. The others followed him, and when they reached the barricade’s first wall, they scaled it and began firing and thrusting their rifles into the bodies of the men they found below them.
Beyond, hundreds of Bourbon soldiers were awaiting the order to begin the assault. An attack from the defenders — that was the last thing they were expecting. They were so tightly crammed together that the majority couldn’t free their arms to bring out their rifles and fire back. Over the students went, sinking their bayonets into the heads, chests, and backs of their enemies. They were so crazed, and the Bourbons so vulnerable, that the latter panicked and fled. They plunged pell-mell into the moat and back in the direction of the cordon, with the demented, braying students hard on their heels.
Once this impossible victory had become reality, I, too, followed after them, crouching low. In the stretch of the bastion between the barricades, my feet crunched over dead and wounded bodies; you couldn’t move for them. As I say: To this day, I fail to understand how a handful of scholars could make a thousand or so French grenadiers turn and flee.
I managed, thank heavens, to stop the students from continuing and trying to take on the whole Bourbon encampment. I was helped by the exhaustion that took hold of them, the plumbing of the depths of body and spirit that follows a life-or-death charge. The sound of orders from an officer brought them to their senses again. The first barricade had been taken, and now they needed to man it, reestablishing the situation as it had been before the Bourbon attack. They came meekly back up. Perhaps, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, because he who returns from a place of madness is more surprised than any by the aberration committed.