It was a subdued and queasy feeling of joy.
“For the love of God, Amelis! Where’s Anfán?”
If Nan and Anfán were killed, all would have been for absolutely nothing. They’d been part of my household for seven years now, seven. What truly joined us all together were not the transcendent acts but an accumulation of everyday things. There is nothing so significant as a million nothings all joined together.
We were interrupted by an outbreak of shelling, the reverberations of which shook the tent so hard I thought it might take to the air. That could mean only one thing: the general assault being declared. I put my tricorn on my head and made to leave the tent. As I started to duck under the flap, Amelis said something, I don’t remember what precisely. Something about Beceite. A very faraway Beceite, that small town in Aragon where we’d met, among rapist Bourbons and murderous Miquelets. Her hunger was making her delirious. Running her finger along her cheek, she begged me in a distant voice: “Martí, it’s only mashed raspberry. Don’t go, please. It’s only raspberry.”
She spread her arms wide to me. Duty called, but at the same time here was this woman who had never asked anyone for anything, saying, like a cat mewling the words, “Si us plau, si us plau.” I went to her.
I embraced her carefully, she was so thin. Otherwise, no exaggeration, I’d have snapped her ribs. Her face was bathed in sweat. The most distressing thing was being able to do nothing to ease her pain. She asked me to get the broken music box. I found it and handed it to her. When she opened it, of course no sound came out. But, smiling, she said: “Do you hear? My father invented this box, he put music in a box. And this was the song he chose. Isn’t it lovely?”
I’ve never liked the idea of lying to the sick. “We’ll get it fixed, you’ll see.”
“Martí!” she cried, her fever going up a notch. “Say you can hear it!”
No, I could not hear it. It was nothing but a broken box, one small scrap among countless objects consigned to oblivion by the enemy bombardment. I said nothing, just sighed. She knew; a high fever can sometimes bring about considerable lucidity. Those vast eyes of hers found mine.
“Shall I tell you something, Martí? The fact that you can’t hear the music is what makes you you. This is your great strong point and, at the same time, the thing that limits you. If you wanted to hear our music, you’d hear it. But you can’t, because you don’t believe in it. You don’t even try.” She added: “You’ve heard this music a thousand times. Why not now? The box is only a box — one day it was bound to break.”
I made her look me in the eye once more. “One thing, Amelis: You’re not to leave this beach. Whatever should come to pass, don’t go anywhere! If you find yourself walking on anything that isn’t sand, you’re to turn back.”
“Jefe, I’ll look after her.”
Anfán was behind me in the tent, with Nan beside him.
“Where have you been?” I cried. Anfán groaned, impish and reluctant. “For once in your life, pay attention!” I shouted. “Tonight and tomorrow, no one must leave this beach. Not you, not Nan, not Amelis. And it’s your job to make sure that’s what happens! Understood?” Screaming at Anfán was a waste of time. I changed tack. “Did you know your mother?”
“You know I didn’t.”
I gestured to Amelis, who was asleep again, or, rather, unconscious, consumed by the fever, delirious. “If you had all the mothers in the world to choose between, is there another you could possibly rather have?”
He looked down at Amelis. The only light was a nearly spent, guttering candle. I’d say, though, that a paltry flame such as that one is capable of feeling emotions.
My Lord, how beautiful a beloved person can seem in her weakness. If it weren’t for her, the four of us never would have come together. Our life would have been quite different, and doubtless very much the poorer.
Anfán took a deep breath, and for the first time, I heard the man in him speak: “As you wish, jefe. I’ll protect her. Whatever should pass, none of us will leave the beach. You have my word.”
Chin up, Martí Zuviría, never mind! Never? No, not never.
15
And so, after more than a year under siege, September 11, 1714, finally came around. It began with a forbidding artillery barrage at half past four in the morning, immediately followed by ten thousand men charging at the breaches. Dozens of company banners, officers with their sabers held aloft, the sergeants hefting halberds to show the troops the way. I don’t believe there can have been more than five or six hundred haggard militiamen opposing them in the first line.
I find it impossible to recount that September 11 in any kind of coherent order. I myself am unable to comprehend it: Fleeting images are all that remain from that longest of days, not so much a sequence of events as a heap of dismembered images. I left our tent on the beach and made my way back into the city. The church bells were frantically ringing out, all of them. Sheer chaos. What else could it have been, with the Virgin Mary elected commander in chief? Meanwhile, the Bourbons surging up and over ramparts that a child could have kicked aside.
As the sky began growing light, I climbed up onto the terrace of Casa Montserrat, the mansion of a departed botiflero, and a vantage point over the area under attack between Saint Clara and Portal Nou. And I saw what, for an engineer, was the most exasperating sight of alclass="underline" the stretch we’d defended for thirteen long months, overrun by that horde of mindless slaves. A blanket of white uniforms charging in formation across the breaches: En avant, en avant! Their numbers were so great that the few being picked off by snipers up on the ramparts didn’t make any difference. Was this my fate? Was this what I’d had my senses honed to do? To suffer all the more intensely the fall of Barcelona and the extinction of a people? So that on this, our last day of freedom, I’d hear even more acutely the howls of anguish, cry more tears, and my hands would flail and grasp all the more desperately at the sinking ship?
One of the sights from that day: sections of the ramparts separated from one another by the gigantic breaches, towering up into the sky. Through the telescope, I see a particularly thin stretch of the rampart, either side of which, far below, thousands of enemies are streaming into the city. Just two soldiers are left up there, an old man and a youngster. The old man is loading rifles and handing them to the youngster to fire into the white flood of troops below. The old man isn’t quick enough with his reloading. The youngster, impotent and raging, ends up hurling the rifles themselves, the bayonets making primitive spears of them. Another fleeting image, which again comes back to me in the circular telescope sight, is of the second Bourbon wave now having taken this redoubt, and the duo having surrendered, each badly wounded. Up on the battlement, the soldiers force them to their knees before the abyss. Then each of them is kicked over the edge.
A whirl of images. Children pulling the triggers of our “organ” contraptions, point-blank, mowing down whole ranks of grenadiers. Coronela soldiers flinging grenades until the enemy overruns them, and using the last ones to blow themselves up.