Don Antonio crying! I thought oak trees would dance before it came to that! Noticing that I’d seen his tears, he tried to justify himself: “My one desire is to stay with them, but honor prevents me. I cannot act as commander to a defense that has moved out of the realms of bravery and become sheer recklessness. Nor could I ever forgive myself for putting so many innocent lives at risk.”
We left the ramparts behind. The rain continued to fall. Calming his horse with unhappy caresses, Don Antonio whispered to himself, seemingly unaware of me: “I hope those ships never come,” he said. “That way I might die shoulder to shoulder with these men, like any other soldier.”
Don Antonio bade his men farewell on the eighth, and between then and the eleventh, that dismal September eleventh, the rain fell nonstop, all day and all night.
What a contrast from the inferno that August had been. To begin with, it was a balm, refreshing and relieving us, bringing life where before there had been only the stifling heat. All exposed gunpowder dampened, the Bourbon shelling was briefly suspended. But the downpour also transformed our environment into one of mud and darkness, making the place all the more inhospitable.
The breaches in the walls were a sight to behold. There were five of them, each between a hundred and two hundred feet wide. As many as 687 men would be able to pass through them shoulder to shoulder (don’t be surprised at the exactitude of the 687, a Bazoches calculation); that is, roughly two regiments in battle formation.
And there was no way of plugging such gaps. We threw hundreds of spiked wooden bats down into them, spiked with six-inch nails. The workers threw them as far as they could, to try not to expose themselves to enemy fire, even if that meant the placing was not very exact. Thus we made spike-fields of the ground in the gaps.
Dripping wet, beneath dark skies, I continued giving instructions to the living dead manning the defenses. Everyone was worn out, which made it deeply unpleasant having to force them to carry on plugging the gaps. On the city side of each, we dug a ditch and stacked fajinas along it, and behind, another ditch, another fajina parapet, and another. We made a good number of these, all equally fragile. At certain chosen positions, we placed “organs,” which was the name for the invention of a certain local Archimedes.
Essentially, “organs” were wooden platforms with ten or fifteen loaded rifles lined up along them. A thin piece of string ran along all the triggers. A single yank — anyone could do it, even an ancient like Peret — and a synchronous volley would be fired into the invaded area. It was never likely to be very effective, but at that late stage, we had far more weapons remaining than we did men.
There was one final feat. With Don Antonio gone, I felt free to fight on my own account. I’d learned that, in the desperate defense of a city, everything, rocks, flesh, and even blood are brought to bear. Why not the very elements?
I took aside the workers who were in the best condition. We used the last reserves of wood to create a long canal, paving it with overlapping timbers. The rain meant well water didn’t have to be saved, and this aqueduct of ours ran from one of the largest municipal reservoirs out as far as the ramparts. We opened the sluices one night, and a torrent of water inundated the enemy’s forward positions. Water gushed over the “gentlemen,” and into the cuts, and then the trenches, taking people, fajina baskets, and armatures with it. A flood during the night is all the more fearsome. The Bourbons couldn’t have known what was going on; besides, what purpose could it possibly serve to shoot at a torrent of water?
The forward part of the trenches became a sewer. At points, the water was chest-deep. A whole day was spent by the enemy bailing out that putrid water. One day, which for us meant one more day in the world of the living. A victory, however brief. Though inside the city, we were so weary, we didn’t even have the energy to celebrate it.
While the Bourbons wallowed in the mud, I went and found Costa. I’d never seen him looking so downcast. Francesc Costa, a man who needed nothing but his sprig of parsley to be content.
“Come, Costa,” I said, trying to cheer him up. “We’ve come too far to give up. Prepare guns and munitions.”
But he was sitting down, letting the rain fall on his uncovered head, soaked through and hugging himself as though he had a fever. “Munitions. Munitions, you say?” he spat sarcastically. “I haven’t even got parsley left to chew. That trench was it for us.”
This reference to my handiwork pained me. “The cannons!” I suddenly shouted, and leaving aside all formalities, I went on: “Place them behind the breaches and forget everything else!”
When things become desperate, rumors have the power to displace hope. Dreams. People began saying that an English fleet was on the way and that Charles had sent a German legion. All lies. The anguished multitudes rushed to Plaza del Born, at the center of the city, praying for Barcelona to be saved. Inanities. Deep down, those of us manning the breaches didn’t believe in anything, we just fought.
And a good thing that Jimmy’s artillery volcano had been extinguished. As I’ve said, the damp gunpowder prevented them from shelling us for a short time. In place of projectiles, they hurled taunts and threats our way. They were positioned at the crown of the ditch, and their shouts carried across that short distance. They could not have been more than a hundred feet from what remained of the ramparts.
The boldest among them peeked their heads over the tops of the “gentlemen,” at the trench’s most forward point, and made throat-slitting gestures or waved their fists. And said to us, in grimmest tones: “Ça va être votre fête!”
On the night of September 10, I did not sleep. Could not. You didn’t need great powers of intuition to guess the final assault would begin at any moment. One of the things we’d done in anticipation was to pull back a number of the most exposed positions. It would be suicide to have groups of men so close to the Bourbon “gentlemen.” In the most devastated areas, we chose to create a retreat space for the men who would be receiving the first wave. So that night there was a kind of dead space between our lines and Jimmy’s.
I’ve seen a large number of bombarded landscapes in my time, and the exceptional thing about this one was the outline of the ruins. Even the heaviest artillery usually only pierces rooftops and smashes ramparts, leaving sharp and pointed silhouettes. But when a barrage is so intense and has been carried out over such a long time, the edges take on an undulating bluntness, as though eroded over thousands of years. A very fine drizzle continued to fall over that labyrinth of ruins. The night was black, the moon hidden behind the weeping clouds. My feet slipped among smashed gun carriages, broken rifles, half-buried fajina baskets, their wicker mouths gawping ominously from the earth like the faces of drowned people. And thousands of our spiked bats, scattered everywhere. This was a place of such silence, sadness, and ghostliness that even my science was dispelled by its powers.
And then, for no apparent reason, I was overcome by a desire to go back to our tent on the beach.
Amelis was sleeping, unclothed. I awoke her. “Where’s Anfán?”
She was subsumed in a drowsiness that was more hunger and exhaustion than sleep. She opened her eyes, those enormous black eyes. I remember being there, in the dark of night, in that meager tent on the beach. Her on the mattress, naked, covered in sweat, while I knelt down and embraced her, less out of love than an urge to protect. She was feverish. I’d woken her from a nightmare. Feeling my hand reaching around her back, she smiled, as though this were some long-awaited reunion. “Martí,” she whispered, “you’re here.”