His steed was knocked onto its right flank, its huge frame crushing Don Antonio underneath. His knee ended up trapped between the saddle and the Plaza Born cobblestones, his bones snapping like twigs.
The horse thrashed about as though it had been placed over a campfire. It contorted its neck and let out a stream of dung. Goodness knows why, but its whinnying and its shitting remain firmly fixed in my memory. I was the first to go and kneel down next to Don Antonio. I grabbed him under his arms and heaved him out from under the beast. It took me a few moments to notice the look that was in his eye.
It was as though Don Antonio didn’t want to be rescued. He just lay there on the ground, half his body trapped beneath the horse. Then I felt one of his large hands grab me by the lapel of my uniform. He gave a violent tug, bringing my face close to his, and then spoke the closest thing to The Word that I would ever hear. And it was spoken not by an emperor in his most august hour but by a general defeated, fallen; I did not hear The Word from the mouth of my own captain but from a man who had crossed over from enemy latitudes, a man who had left everything to join the ranks of the weak and shelterless, the accursed few, and to lay down his life for them.
Don Antonio whispered into my ear: “You must give your whole self.”
My head was so empty, my body so detached from my being, that to be quite honest, my memory is a jumble now. I’ve gone back over this particular moment — everyone galloping forward in the pendulum of death, Don Antonio down on the Plaza Born cobblestones, his steed shitting in death, thousands of bullets zinging past our ears — and perhaps, only perhaps, memory alters what it was that Don Antonio said.
Because sometimes, when I am strolling through autumn fields, I find myself overcome by a burst of memories that are not so bitter. And then I see Don Antonio’s large hand on my lapel and hear him speaking incredibly kindly: “Give yourself, fiyé.” At other times, when I can afford to buy myself a little of that syrupy schnapps, the words I read on Don Antonio’s lips are more martiaclass="underline" “Always give yourself, Zuviría, always; that’s what matters.” At other times, when I am desensitized by foul-smelling liquor, very drunk indeed, the face I see down on the ground of the Plaza Born is not Don Antonio’s at all but Vauban’s. And it is the marquis who pulls me close, and he says: “Cadet, you have passed.”
Yes, I no longer have any sense of who said what or how. All these decades and decades that have gone by, all those many turns around the sun. But what difference does it make, ultimately? Vauban said, “You must know”; Don Antonio said, “Give yourself.” And there, in that city square, the detritus of war all around, The Word crumbled under the weight of its own paradox: “You cannot know until you give yourself, and you cannot give yourself until you know.”
A number of officers came over to try and help the maimed commander. Don Antonio did finally get up, his splintered leg bone protruding through his breeches, and he started pushing everyone away.
“Don’t stop the charge!” he bellowed in his resounding Castilian voice. “Don’t stop! No falling back, not as long as I still draw breath. You sons of bitches — no one!”
Dear Don Antonio. How fate scorned him. Even when it came to that September 11, the glorious death he’d hoped for was denied him. Knocked from his horse and severely wounded, he was dragged off to the hospital by his aides. I can still see him struggling to shake off the men who were helping him, as though they were his enemies. Those of us who remained resumed the charge.
During life’s worst moments, it is incredible how calm one’s thoughts can be. Rightly, perhaps, because once you find yourself on the summit, the mountainsides no longer matter — you’ll never be going down them again. As I charged, all I thought was: Very well, at least that Fifth Point is mine now.
Thousands of white beetles raised their rifles in unison, training their sights upon us. We rushed headlong at them. We were no more than fifty in number now, a mix of old men, widows, cavalrymen without horses, horses without riders: my ragged fellow Barcelonans. The Bourbons had brought five cannons and made a battery on a mound of rubble, above and behind the infantry. Grapeshot, was my thought as I continued to hurtle forward, they’ve loaded them with grapeshot. My other thought being: They’ll fire the instant after a volley from these white beetles. I saw one of those round cannon barrels staring me down. I saw a flash of white and yellow.
I was blown backward twenty or thirty feet. All I knew was that something had happened to my face. At first, curiously, it seemed more associated with a feeling of nakedness than death. I was beyond now. And I discovered that Amelis had been right, yes, she had: Anyone who wants to hear a piece of music, hears it. Destroyed, monstrous from that moment forth, I heard that music over the noise of wailing and explosions. “Give yourself, Zuviría, your whole self.”
I ought to have understood far sooner — when they put a noose around my neck in the Bourbon camp, or even when I sat beside Vauban on his deathbed. “Summarize the optimum defense.” It was this and no more — this was all. We are fallen leaves that linger on. Stars that burst forth in light, fables squandered. Truths whose only reward is lucidity itself. The smell of warm shit running down the legs of ranks of men. Blind telescopes, inane periscopes, lamentations. Funnels imbued with affection, that boy on our prow laughing, like dolphin laughter. The far side of the river. Admitting that we’ll always be looking out at the landscape through the keyhole of the dungeon, knowing that ears of corn fall but do not complain. My shredded spirits, my broken calculations. Give yourself, Zuviría, give.
And discovering — beyond the utmost extreme, beyond the Euphrates and the Rubicon, where there are no longer any tears, oh, the greatness and the consolation of the few and the poor, of the weak and forlorn — that the darker our twilight hours, the more blessed will be the dawn of those who will come after us.
A Historical Note
A few people who read this book in draft form have asked me about the historical basis of the facts that appear in it. I can only answer that I have worked according to the usual conventions of the historical novel, which require that you confine yourself to established pieces of data while at the same time tolerating fiction in the private realm. For all the dates and events relating to historical characters, or to political or military events, I have restricted myself to the facts. Fortunately, the chronicles that cover the Spanish War of Succession and the 1713–1714 Siege of Barcelona are generous enough to make it possible to go into some detail. The parliamentary debates that took place in Barcelona in 1713 have been extracted directly from documents of the period. Even where secondary characters are concerned, I have chosen to follow historical sources: the obsession that seizes Jeanne Vauban’s husband over the philosopher’s stone, the skirmish in Beceite in which Zuviría meets Ballester, as well as the death of Dr. Bassons and the charge of the law students in the battle of August 1714, or the events relating to the expedition of the military delegate, to cite just a few examples, are all fully evidenced. The words spoken by Berwick, infuriated at the Barcelonans’ resistance, with his staff officers, can be pursued in the chronicles and in his own autobiography. A good proportion of the insults aimed by Villarroel at Zuviría are also drawn from a range of documents, though in such cases we know only that they were directed at “a certain officer.” As for Zuviría himself, historical chronicles make only a very few elusive references to him, describing him as General Villarroel’s aide-de-camp, a translator, a member of a number of different commissions, and even a coordinator of the activities that took place outside the city walls during the course of the siege. In any case, he was one of the few senior officers on the pro-Austrian side who, following his participation in the 1713–1714 siege, managed to get to Vienna and thereby avoid the repression of the Bourbon regime.