Amelis’s place in the line was taken immediately by the unscrupulous woman behind her. When Amelis saw she’d lost her place, her legs gave way. She fell to her knees on the sand and wept, her skirts spread out around her like the petals of an open flower.
“Anfán!” I cried. “How could you have let him enlist?”
“Déu meu, Déu meu,” she sobbed.
“He’s joined up!” I went on. “He’ll be killed down in those mines!”
She looked up at me, her face wet with tears. “Want to know how long I’ve been in line? Since midday yesterday!”
“We took him away from war, from being a trench rat!” I replied. “And all for him to end up dead from an explosion or from a bullet in the head. The French sappers aren’t playing games down there!”
She threw her metal bowl in my face. “I was here all yesterday, all last night, and all this morning. And you come and yank me out of the line! What are we supposed to eat? Tell me that!”
It was pointless trying to reason with her — it was the hunger speaking, not Amelis. She barely had the energy to argue. She hung her head like a small dying animal.
Half of the soup rations was apportioned to the wounded and sick in the hospital. It was becoming more watered down daily, and they were using fresh water from the last irrigation canal still coming into the city. The Bourbons had dammed all but one, and that they’d been polluting by placing dead bodies upstream. But the poor gulped it down like nectar — anything to avoid the husk torta.
While we’d been arguing, the crowds of people had ebbed away. The woman who had taken Amelis’s place in line was the last to be given soup. The people behind her were all protesting. There was uproar, but only in a minor way: The people were so depleted that a couple of blows from the guards dispersed them. Amelis’s sobbing gave way to a torrent of tears.
I’d have to take it up with Anfán himself. I ought to point out how much time had passed since I’d encountered him at Tortosa: That was in 1708, and it was now 1714. I roughly estimated that he’d been born at the turn of the century, and that the eight-year-old was now fourteen. He wasn’t a child any longer.
When Anfán appeared out of the mineshaft, I begged the leader of the Cucs to discharge him. I could hardly blame him for his response, which was one of surprise: “We’re so short on troops, why would we turn away anyone of military age?”
Fourteen was the age when a Catalan could legally bear arms. After the years he’d spent under our roof, when we’d taken good care of him and taught him manners, Anfán had turned into quite an impressive young man. I kick myself for not having noticed sooner. If you stare at the grass day after day, you’ll miss the fact it’s growing. After all, parents always see their children as the babies they once were.
A frontal assault would have been pointless, so I came at him another way, with conversation and affection. We had a long discussion about the mining operation. Anfán filled me in at length: Los Cucs had been saving time by creating diminutive tunnels on either side of the main mines and sending Nan and Anfán down them. Whenever they found one of the Bourbon galleries, they’d drill through to it, starting overhead and angling the fist-width cavity downward, and then roll two or three grenades in with the fuses lit, before crawling quickly back the way they’d come.
The story made me smile but also shudder. In mine warfare, the combatants, though faceless, soon got to know their opponents by the techniques they used. I felt sure that the Bourbons would have put a price on the heads of these two rats by now.
“So you don’t care about Nan, is that right?” I asked, smiling coldly. “At this very moment, there must be dozens of enemy miners thinking of ways to kill the both of you.”
Anfán threw his arms wide, ready to take me on. “Dozens? I thought it would be thousands. Casanova’s son is fourteen, and he was made drummer of a regiment.”
I couldn’t contain myself: “And Casanova went and saw him off in person! He pulled some strings so they’d be sent away from the city! They’re now garrisoning a place called Cardona!”
And I wasn’t lying, either. The Red Pelts loved demonstrating their Homeric virtues: Sending troops out into other parts of Catalonia was like saying to Jimmy that the people of Barcelona had more than enough courage, constancy, and resolve to overcome anything he cared to throw at them. (You can imagine what Don Antonio thought about our own leaders giving men leave.) The fact was, at Cardona, one of the few places the Generalitat still controlled, no fighting was taking place. The Bourbons knew as well as we did that if Barcelona fell, the rest of Catalonia would subside with it, and therefore they dedicated no resources to the outgrowths of “rebellion” elsewhere.
I grabbed Anfán by the arms. “Am I the jefe? Say it. Am I or not?”
Truly, he had grown older. He answered me gravely. “Yes, jefe, you absolutely are. All right, I won’t go back down the mine.” He made the sign of the cross. “I swear.”
I didn’t believe a word of it.
The next day, a small troop of Cucs, just four men, finally identified the whereabouts of the primary enemy mine, or Royal Mine, a gallery containing a hundred barrels of gunpowder covered in soaked hide. Los Cucs managed to slit the guards’ throats and, having set a charge to collapse the ceiling, ghosted the barrels away. Mine found, mine destroyed.
This was the last thing to cheer about. Church bells throughout the city chimed the victory. The Cucs heroes’ names were Francisco Diago, one of our Aragonese; Josep Mateu, a native of Barcelona; and the man who had led them, the leader of the Cucs—what was his name? What a shame not to be able to remember such a sublime warrior!. . And the fourth of the crew, naturally, was Anfán. Having crawled along one of the small antechambers, he had been the one to hit upon the Royal Mine. How would you have reacted? Would you have told him off or applauded? I chose to do neither.
For the thousandth time, dear vile Waltraud makes me stop. Am I not allowed even a brief moment to enjoy the memory of that rare victory?
What’s that you say? How strange that I remember the names of the lower-ranking Cucs but not that of the leader? That it’s suspicious for a memory as prodigious as mine not to have retained that hero’s name, the man who won the city a stay of execution? That maybe I’m pretending and not saying his name because I didn’t like the man?
All right, all right!
You are quite right. I set myself to be sincere, fully, and I will be.
The Cucs hero was Francesc Molina, and he was the son of a couple who had married in Barcelona but moved back to their native country. They identified so strongly with the city that their son, as did so many other foreigners, had come to fight there, even engaging in mine warfare for the sake of the Catalan capital. He’d fought tooth and nail, day after day, night after night, and finally managed to locate that lethal mound of explosives.
What’s that? Where were the Molinas from?
I see, I see, you want me humiliated fully and utterly.
I give in.