I ran into Ballester behind one of these barricades. He came as backup for the one I was helping erect. Ballester, yes, another image from that September 11, a day that would be his last. He was well aware of the fact, and know what? He seemed almost happy, loading and firing his rifle in unending succession. A kind of festive cheer had come over him, like that of someone who has sworn not to finish the night sober.
Clouds of gunpowder made it impossible to see very far. But just then, Ballester did see something, dropping his ramrod and shoving me. “Your child! And the dwarf! They’re between the lines! Look, look!”
Looking up, I could make out the two little monsters scurrying across the open ground between the Bourbon-controlled bastions and the mouth of the street we were on. Thousands of bullets flying, and a voice in my mind screaming: “What are you two doing here?” Only a few hours had passed since Anfán had made a sacred oath to me, and already it was broken. They were running, apparently without a destination, which was unusual; normally, they moved like a pair of hyenas, fixed on their goal as if they had compasses mounted to their noses. Then they went down. Amid flashes of gunfire and gunpowder vapor, I saw them fall. First Nan. Anfán stopped, began to go back for the dwarf, and then was hit himself, letting out a small cry, one more of surprise than of pain. The Bourbon volleys were coming so thick, such a lead hailstorm, that I was able to glance over the barricade for only a moment. Nan and Anfán had disappeared.
I tugged Ballester’s sleeve. “Did they get them?” I asked, sobbing. “Did you see it, are you sure?”
Ballester looked me in the eye; his silence said it all. Then a wailing sound reached our ears. Above the sound of the gunfire, the diminishing sound of a death rattle, and the words: “Father, Father, Father.” With his dying breath, Anfán had become a child once more. He’d fallen down into a rut, out of my field of vision. When Ballester spoke, it only exacerbated the torture; in a small, meek voice, he said: “He’s calling for you.”
It was all over. The end of the world was no longer only nigh: Your son calling you “Father” for the first time, and it also being the very instant before he passes away. That nameless tension that keeps us all alive then slackened in me. I inhabited an empty body for a time. I don’t know how long I was there, down on my knees, feeling that pain. The next thing I remember is Ballester’s face in front of mine: “You have to come with me,” he said.
All around, the uproar of battle continued, but the bloodbath seemed far away from me, signifying nothing. An obscene, incongruous apathy gripped me. I even burst out laughing. I mocked Ballester as he dragged me away, I mocked everything.
We made for the rearguard. Peret came into view. His very demeanor spoke, and I didn’t want to listen. My state was akin to that of a fever dream, when all we see and all we know is turned upside down. I said or perhaps thought: “I told that woman not to leave the beach.” Peret spoke, seemingly in unison with a group of people gathered around him like an assembly of ghosts: “We are at the beach, Martí.” I looked down at my feet and fell to my knees, which indeed sank into dirty sand. Out of nowhere, a question formed in my mind, one that I should have come up with a long while before: What did Anfán want to say to me? What could have forced him to come in search of me, though it had been emphatically forbidden? Lying in front of me, the body of Amelis.
“A stray bullet,” said an old voice, perhaps Peret’s.
I didn’t try to deny it; we’d seen too many dead bodies. The greenish hue under her fingernails was a clear sign. Even Ballester bit his fist, gasping. We suffered so much that September 11, the pain had to form a line.
I rubbed my cheek against hers, which had begun to turn chill. Yes: Death is a cold nowhere. And no, a cold cadaver does not come back to life. Yet just then she did: She suddenly sat up, like a tail thrashing.
Everyone in the gathering took a step back. I saw Amelis’s eyes, which had burst open, and our whole universe, everything, was collected in that look. She grabbed my chest, tried to speak. I knew she was dead, that she had come back to say something to me, only to sink forevermore. And so she did: Though it was only a moment, she came back.
As I remember it, there was a lull in the battle. All the noise was suspended in anticipation of Amelis’s words. This, of course, was not what happened. I thought all possible cruelties had occurred. But we still had one coming: the four most terrible words any father could hope to hear.
“Martí,” she said imploringly, “tingues cura d’Anfán.” Take care of Anfán.
And she was gone, a loosening of her soul more than her muscles.
How to face the impossibility of her request, the fact it had come too late? Or that her wish made a connection between me and the world, one of unbearable pain? Amelis couldn’t have known that Anfán was dead, that he had died specifically in an attempt to save her, in trying to bring me to help. Even Ballester was moved. His cheeks contracted beneath his beard, and he turned his head away so that I wouldn’t see.
Fleeting images: The next finds me at the Fossar de les Moreres, the mass burial ditch. The battle continued to rage, but the only thing concerning me was the bundle I was carrying: Amelis’s body covered in a shawl. Ballester was at my side. One of the gravediggers asked me the customary question: “One of ours?” The government had made a decree by which no Bourbon bodies were to be buried. I didn’t even bother to answer. Ballester shook his fist at the digger, who fled.
I went down to the ditch. It was a great crater in which bodies were deposited. Wisely, the Red Pelts had ordered it to be built five storeys deep. But at this point in the siege, the pile of bodies was almost up to ground level. I buried Amelis to the sound of cannons thundering. While I knelt down to deposit her body as delicately as I could, Ballester kept an eye out.
A stray bullet. After having made it through a life full of danger, rapes, and destitution, Amelis had been taken by something as ridiculous as a stray bullet. I couldn’t prevent the thought: That stray bullet was me.
I fell to my knees and, sobbing uncontrollably, said: “I killed them. Amelis. Anfán. The dwarf. All of them.”
Squinting, Ballester asked: “Mind telling me what you’re going on about?”
I spoke through gurgles, my face bathed in tears. “I designed the Bourbon trench. While I was over there, on the other side of the cordon. I thought it would be the lesser evil for the city, but I was only fooling myself.”
I wished, truly I did, that he would take out a knife and slit my throat, as he should have done in Beceite. The seven intervening years — I saw very clearly now — had all been a dream. But instead of putting an end to me, he reacted with irate skepticism.
“What are you saying?” he shouted. “Who cares about your damned calculations, all those tables and compasses? Get your head out of your books and let’s go and fight!”
“I did my best,” I said. “And not for the sake of the city, nor for my family, but for engineering. Any Maganon would have dreamed of such a trench. Faced with a recalcitrant city, and provided all the means to create the perfect trench. For all the tricks I included, all I really wanted was to better my teachers, beat Vauban’s cousin himself. I let myself be tempted, then hid that fact from myself. There was only one way to erase such a stain, which was coming back to the stronghold I’d condemned, letting the work of my hand lead to my own demise.”
Ballester tried to wrestle me to my feet, to urge me back to the front, but I held him off.
“Want to know the worst of it?” I looked for my judgment in Ballester’s eyes. Or, rather, that he would execute that judgment. To that end, I concluded: “If I had truly loved my family more than I loved engineering, if I had loved love and not vanity, I’d never have designed any trench. Neither a good one nor a bad one. An honest man serves not the devil — for good or for ill.”