Behind the first assault line, you always had a few men going around with large straw baskets bearing ammunition, particularly grenades, to replenish the troops’ supply. At this point, after a day and half a night of constant skirmishing, the bastion yard was almost overflowing with dead bodies and scattered gunpowder. The place reeked of those two things.
Now, I was told, a number of the basket carriers sheltered behind the munitions cabin, and a spark fell from somewhere, setting fire to some gunpowder on the ground. The flame ran along a trail of gunpowder and came to two of the large baskets, which had been put down against the side of the cabin, both containing grenades. You can guess the next part.
I believe this to have been the second largest explosion I’ve witnessed in all my days. Costa and I were nowhere near Saint Clara and found our discussion interrupted as the shock waves threw us to the ground. Over six hundred feet away, we were. The eruption was red and bloomed upward like a flower. It was followed by an extended rumbling. Up went the flames, and up went the explosions, with half the city bathed in shards and fragments and rubble.
In a daze, I got to my knees. I looked over at Costa; his words came to me as though my head were underwater. I got up and set off for the bastion gullet, stumbling along in zigzags like a drunk.
Le Mystère, I’ll give it this much, does at least apportion its humor equally: Both sides suffered roughly the same losses. A little over seventy Coronela men were blown up along with the cabin, and while fewer Bourbons died, the damage was greater to them: Word quickly spread that the explosion had been a rebel mine.
Mines provoke almost uncontrollable terror. An assassin hidden under our feet could at any moment activate many thousands of pounds of explosives, as many as the mind can conceive. Yes, it was a simple accident, the kind that abounds in war, but the Bourbons fell back in droves. How ironic that the two sides, having fought tooth and nail for control of the Saint Clara yard, now abandoned their positions at the same time, as though an agreement had been struck.
The gullet — the entrance to the bastion on the city side — was very narrow precisely to prevent men ever fleeing en masse. There was a captain there, named Jaume Timor, and with his saber drawn, he was stopping anyone who could bear arms. “Quit Saint Clara and the city will be lost!” he roared.
Whole families fought side by side on Saint Clara. As great Herodotus said: “In peace, children bury their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to bury their children.” The siege of Barcelona went further, with some burying not only sons but also grandsons. I saw a neighbor of mine named Dídac Pallarès coming along the gullet and Timor standing aside. He had good reason — three good reasons, to be precise: Pallarès was carrying his three sons, all of them injured, in his arms. The skin on their faces was in red and black tatters; I remember one of them in particular, one whom Peret always owed a few sueldos. His were the worst injuries; the flesh on his jaw had come away completely, exposing the bone. It was still raining debris, and Don Antonio was in the vicinity, uttering consoling and encouraging words to the survivors. He and a number of officers tried to reinstate a modicum of order. Well, on this occasion, they didn’t manage it.
I was so dazed that I felt like I was seeing with my ears and hearing through my eyes. There were shreds of meat everywhere, remains similar to the formless gobbets you tend to see on the floor of an abattoir. I lifted my gaze. From the top of the bastions, the burning, howling bodies of Coronela men were falling after they leaped off the edge, as if the bastion were a burning ship. I saw all these things and then said to myself: “Ladies and gentlemen, enough. This is more than good old Zuvi can bear. To the hell with the city, the home country, and the constitution.” I turned on my heel and ran like a rabbit.
“Fear will rise up into your eyes,” I was told in Bazoches, “and do the looking on your behalf. Don’t let it.” Not bad in the context of a classroom. But when a power comes to bear that can make a bastion lurch and teeter like a paper boat, not even the memory of Bazoches could quash an individual’s self-preserving instinct. I wasn’t the only one who ran. Dozens of men had been pushed beyond their limits and were fleeing in all directions. I crossed the cutting and entered the city streets before being confronted by a huge crowd.
Women, in droves. They were holding their skirts clear as they ran — but in the opposite direction: toward the walls. Amelis was among them. “What’s happening, Martí, what’s happening?” she asked, but didn’t stop. They’d been drawn by the explosion, and the prevailing chaos had meant there was no one to stop them from reaching the front line. Those of us who had succumbed to panic and fled, now hesitated.
In my view, Barcelona’s rescue that night owed more to its women than Timor’s saber. We fugitives were deemed cowards, picaroons, eunuchs. Amelis halted and called back at me: “You mean you’re going to let the enemy enter?”
Allow me a moment’s reflection in place of memories: What ideal was it that motivated the people of Barcelona to keep on going throughout a yearlong siege? Their liberties and constitutions? No, what kept them there was that bond — heavenly or demonic, it matters not — that prevents a man from abandoning the spot he’s fighting on. Raw civilians, fourteen-year-old boys, sixty-year-old grandfathers, clung like limpets to the bastions. And why? I’ll suggest an answer: because of the overwhelming, unshakable force of the question: “What will people think?” When your whole city’s watching, it takes a lot of courage to be a coward.
Thus, even a prissy rat like Longlegs Zuvi went back to his post. And that whole night we resisted an irresistible force, and through the next morning, and come midday next, good old Zuvi’s nerves were utterly shredded, as was the case with the rest of the Coronela.
The center of Saint Clara was now a crater, a solemn gap clung to by what was left of the bastion’s five walls. The unutterably mad struggle was for possession of this gap. The hail of rifle volleys was unceasing. And still no offensive from Don Antonio. Throughout this period, Jimmy continued to smugly accumulate men on the first barricade. Time was on his side. He thought (as I did at the time) that Don Antonio had taken leave of his senses — or even his valor — and was relinquishing the defensive positions. Once enough Bourbon battalions had gathered behind the first barricade, there would be no way of stopping an onslaught from them. And there we were, doing nothing but holding the second barricade and firing from Portal Nou and the adjacent sections of the ramparts. A lot of noise but little else came of it: rounds upon rounds of bullets spent while the Bourbons kept their heads down behind the first barricade and in the trench, or came along the cut, digging in deeper and building their parapets higher with every hour that passed.
It had been hell maneuvering the three cannons up to the bastion. And rather than firing those cannons, the Mallorcans wouldn’t so much as peek out of the embrasures. As ever, it was as though they were fighting a separate battle from everyone else. They sat around on the bases of the cannons, drinking an abominable liquor from the Balearics — sharing it with none but themselves — and seeming removed from the bedlam surrounding them.
“For the love of God,” I said, “fire these cannons, blow up the barricade they’re holding! What are you waiting for?”